Now, Republicans, led by Rep. Patrick McHenry of North Carolina, want to take his portrait off the $50 bill and replace it with Ronald Reagan’s.
Republicans apparently handle a lot more fifties than I do, and they want to see Reagan’s face every time they slap one down at a West Hollywood club.
No disrespect to General and President Grant, these Republicans insist, just time to honor Reagan. Again. And they’re right, at one level. This isn’t really about Grant or his mug. It is part of a much larger Republican project of re-writing the history of their own party.
There have been 16 Republican presidents since Abraham Lincoln was elected in 1860, but like the relatives nobody wants at Thanksgiving, Republicans don’t talk about any of them much any more.
Of course, some of them we would all like to forget – like the disgraced Richard Nixon, and “Recalcitrant” Calvin Coolidge. But when was the last time you heard some Republican politician singing the praises of Dwight Eisenhower or even Teddy Roosevelt?
They don’t want to acknowledge that Eisenhower was perfectly content with most of FDR’s New Deal, or that Teddy Roosevelt was a champion of environmental conservation. They certainly don’t want to be reminded that Richard Nixon tried to create a national health care system.
No, the current Republican party wants to forget about its own past, and thus traces its origins exactly as far back as Ronald Reagan.
And over the last 20 years they have, in an almost papal fashion, mounted a campaign to have Reagan canonized as St. Ronald. They regard his presidency as nothing short of immaculate and miraculous. During a 2007 debate, Republican presidential candidates brought up Reagan 19 different times; they mentioned George W. Bush, the sitting Republican president, exactly once.
Still, this effort to replace Grant with Reagan on the fifty seems particularly perverse and particularly telling. As Lincoln’s general, Grant took what was a faltering Union military effort and turned it around. His work was grim and it was inexorable, and he was determined that the Union army would triumph over the rebellious Confederacy.
It does not exaggerate too much to say that without Grant there very well might not be a United States of America.
In the current political climate, however, this is the history that the Republican party wants to repudiate. Tea partiers fulminating about “state’s rights” and Republican politicians, like Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who talk casually these days about seceding from the Union, aren’t sure that the right side won the Civil War and certainly don’t want any part of Grant’s legacy.
Likewise, this effort to dump Grant off the fifty represents a symbolic piece of the Republican Party’s “southern strategy,” using race as a wedge issue to attract white voters.
As late as the 1930s Republicans campaigned proudly on their history as the party that ended slavery. In the 1950s, Eisenhower’s Justice Department helped move the civil rights agenda ahead.
Then the Republican Party decided to turn its back on racial progress and cast its future with the bigots and Confederate flag-wavers.
Nixon was the first Republican to capitalize on the southern strategy, but not the last. Reagan sneered at the “welfare queen” though it turned out she was fictitious; George Bush I used Willie Horton to strike terror in the hearts of white voters. And so it has gone.
The lily-white Republican party of 2010 wants nothing to do with the man who defeated the Confederacy, and who, as president, oversaw efforts to “reconstruct” a more equitable South, though in the end those efforts didn’t achieve much lasting success.
During the Cold War, experts who watched the Kremlin used to study photographs of official Soviet events to see which Communist Party members were visible and which had been “erased” because they had fallen out of favor. As the Republican Party, with its ideological purity tests and party purges, comes to resemble the Politburo more and more, they want to erase poor Ulysses S. Grant from our memory, along with the rest of their own history.
Steven Conn is a professor of history at Ohio State University and resides in Yellow Springs.