By Joan Waugh (The University of North Carolina Press, $30, 383 pages)
BY CARL HARTMAN
For The Associated Press
Anybody remember that gag question Groucho Marx used on his quiz show? Who's buried in Grant's tomb?
A dedicated ad-libber, Groucho could call the obvious answer right or wrong. A contestant might say "Grant" -- perhaps after a moment's hesitation, suspecting a trap. Groucho could accept it, get a little laugh. Or he could say "Wrong!" and point out that no one is buried there: President Ulysses S. Grant and his wife Julia are both entombed, at ground level.
In "U.S. Grant: American Hero, American Myth" biographer Joan Waugh finds an interesting range of answers to a simple question: Who was Grant? She titles her final chapter: "Who's (Really) Buried in Grant's Tomb?"
She comes down forcefully on the side of Grant's admirers, led by President Lincoln.
Southern writers like Confederate Lt. Gen. Jubal A. Early saw Grant as a butcher who won battles only with overwhelming forces. Extremists portrayed an alcoholic westerner who came to Appomattox, Va., in mud-spattered field gear. There he took the surrender of aristocratic Gen. Robert E. Lee, who had said he would rather "die a thousand deaths" than give up the "Lost Cause."
For the rest of the country, Grant was the victor in a war for two noble causes: the death of slavery and the survival of the United States. And he sought, as Lincoln had urged, to bind up the nation's wounds. A million and a half people watched his funeral.
Waugh carefully chronicles bewildering ups and downs in Grant's reputation. The scale of corruption during the "gilded age" of his presidency led some to give him a prominent place on lists of "worst presidents." The honesty and literary quality of his "Personal Memoir," a task that occupied him until his last days, raised his standing.
In the 1990s, neglect of his tomb and deterioration of the neighborhood made it what one observer called a "graffiti-scarred hangout for drug dealers and muggers."
Great-great grandson Ulysses S. Grant Dietz threatened to move the bodies to Illinois. Then the National Park Service did a $1.8 million restoration job in time for the centenary of its opening in 1997.
