Gabriel Winant: Goodbye, Ulysses. Hello, Ronnie!
[Gabriel Winant is a freelance writer and graduate student, currently living in the United Kingdom.]
The GOP needs an icon and, ever since his popularity crashed to unrecoverable depths in his second term, George W. Bush hasn't been available. Not that the right will admit that they ever saw W. as an icon: When his numbers went south, conservatives rushed to proclaim that he'd never really been one of them....
This is no news to anyone who’s heard a Republican speak in the past, say, four years. And now, with the party newly emboldened by President Obama's struggles, the effort to canonize Reagan is still on its agenda. Hence the news that Rep. Patrick McHenry, R-N.C., has introduced a bill to swap out Ulysses S. Grant's face on the $50 bill for the Gipper's.
"Every generation needs its own heroes," McHenry explains. "President Reagan is indisputably one of the most transformative presidents of the 20th century. Like President Roosevelt on the dime and President Kennedy on the half dollar, President Reagan deserves a place of honor on our nation's currency."...
And so long as we’re trying to remember history here, it doesn’t look great for the GOP to be picking on Ulysses S. Grant. The hero of the Civil War now gets a bad rap, despite his massive popularity in his own time. Although his administration had some major blemishes, our collective memory has been heavily tarnished by longstanding nostalgia for the Confederacy embedded in high-school history teaching.
It’s true, certainly, that Grant had some serious ethical scandals on his watch, though he was apparently not complicit himself in any of them. But much of the modern electorate grew up hearing stories of the Grant years -- 1869 to 1877 -- as the reign of terror of the "carpetbaggers" and "scalawags," when government, especially in the South, was dysfunctional and systemically corrupt. I went to a liberal Quaker high school in the North quite recently, and even I encountered this. It is, quite simply, the white supremacist argument against Grant. "Carpetbaggers" and "scalawags" are just pro-Confederate slurs against a government that, under Grant and the Republicans, was interested in the project of racial equality in the South. The end of Grant’s term coincided with the abandonment of that project, and the destruction of his reputation was very much a purposeful strategy of advocates of the southern "Lost Cause."
This isn’t to say that McHenry is secretly longing to break apart the Union and refight the battle of Gettysburg. Most likely, the guy just doesn’t know anything about the recent or distant past. This is exactly the kind of crowd-pleasing ignorance he's peddled through his whole career, and it’ll be neatly symbolic of the state of the GOP if it catches on. (He's not the first: Rep. Mark Souder, R-Ind., tried a few years ago to put Reagan on the dime, and had to be told off by Nancy Reagan.)...
Read entire article at Salon.com
The GOP needs an icon and, ever since his popularity crashed to unrecoverable depths in his second term, George W. Bush hasn't been available. Not that the right will admit that they ever saw W. as an icon: When his numbers went south, conservatives rushed to proclaim that he'd never really been one of them....
This is no news to anyone who’s heard a Republican speak in the past, say, four years. And now, with the party newly emboldened by President Obama's struggles, the effort to canonize Reagan is still on its agenda. Hence the news that Rep. Patrick McHenry, R-N.C., has introduced a bill to swap out Ulysses S. Grant's face on the $50 bill for the Gipper's.
"Every generation needs its own heroes," McHenry explains. "President Reagan is indisputably one of the most transformative presidents of the 20th century. Like President Roosevelt on the dime and President Kennedy on the half dollar, President Reagan deserves a place of honor on our nation's currency."...
And so long as we’re trying to remember history here, it doesn’t look great for the GOP to be picking on Ulysses S. Grant. The hero of the Civil War now gets a bad rap, despite his massive popularity in his own time. Although his administration had some major blemishes, our collective memory has been heavily tarnished by longstanding nostalgia for the Confederacy embedded in high-school history teaching.
It’s true, certainly, that Grant had some serious ethical scandals on his watch, though he was apparently not complicit himself in any of them. But much of the modern electorate grew up hearing stories of the Grant years -- 1869 to 1877 -- as the reign of terror of the "carpetbaggers" and "scalawags," when government, especially in the South, was dysfunctional and systemically corrupt. I went to a liberal Quaker high school in the North quite recently, and even I encountered this. It is, quite simply, the white supremacist argument against Grant. "Carpetbaggers" and "scalawags" are just pro-Confederate slurs against a government that, under Grant and the Republicans, was interested in the project of racial equality in the South. The end of Grant’s term coincided with the abandonment of that project, and the destruction of his reputation was very much a purposeful strategy of advocates of the southern "Lost Cause."
This isn’t to say that McHenry is secretly longing to break apart the Union and refight the battle of Gettysburg. Most likely, the guy just doesn’t know anything about the recent or distant past. This is exactly the kind of crowd-pleasing ignorance he's peddled through his whole career, and it’ll be neatly symbolic of the state of the GOP if it catches on. (He's not the first: Rep. Mark Souder, R-Ind., tried a few years ago to put Reagan on the dime, and had to be told off by Nancy Reagan.)...