National Review has the first of a series of articles revisiting U.S. Grant. I plead guilty to the charge of the laziness in what I have believed about him. My mental summary of Grant has been that he was elected because he was a war hero, but had a corrupt administration and wasn't all that smart. I really should know better by now than to trust what I have just picked up "in the air" about history. It is the shortcut that bright people use and in some ways is useful at perpetuating a culture. Everyone does not have to research every topic. You can rely on the clever ones to pick up the main points and pass it on in the general intellectual patrimony*. The problem is, that system can be bent, swayed, and even hacked, as C S. Lewis pointed out years ago.
“Why you fool, it’s the educated reader who can be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they’re propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats. He is our problem. We don’t have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the highbrow weeklies, don’t need reconditioning. They’re all right already. They’ll believe anything.” – fictional character Miss Hardcastle, from That Hideous Strength*Sexist term, but "matrimony" would lead us even farther astray in its current meaning.
1 comment:
Grant was a good writer. His battlefield commands were, as one of my profs would have said,"brief, concise, and to the point." Ditto his autobiography.He wrote his autobiography under what could be termed battlefield conditions- while dying of cancer. He finished it several days before he died. Years ago I started, but have not finished, his autobiography.
The CS Lewis quote reminds me of an Orwell quote: "There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them."
The NR article brought forth a point I hadn't thought of: Grant's time in office was the beginning of a long term of Ohio leadership in the Republican Party. That made Grant a target for decades after his death.
Speaking of political dynasties, the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taft_family>Taft family</a> has been around for a long time, and not just in Ohio. Massachusetts, too.
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