Forgive the absence, this was to be the year I started taking this blog Seriously Again. However, I find myself in an odd place — too many half-baked ideas, too few real accomplishments. I feel that of the books I read truly stand out; there are new albums that I’ve enjoyed but few have moved me to write. What I have been thinking about is an old half-finished essay that I’ve had knocking around my head since before I started this blog — the idea of a history without heroes. 

Recently I finished the sweeping The Right of the People by political journalist Osita Nwanevu. It argues forcefully in favor of democracy against a tide of elite skepticism and autocratic; but it also argues just as forcefully that we have never had democracy in this country.

The constitution, Nwanevu argues, was the product of an economic elite terrified of too much democracy. The system was created to defend wealth, power and privilege and has done a good job of exactly that. By taking the founders off the pedestal and treating them as historical actors responding to a historical moment, he says, we can imagine a better world for ourselves. Historic heroes stunt our imagination of what the future could hold. It is not a new or even particularly radical argument, but with the fast approaching 250th anniversary of the United States it feels like a useful one to reiterate. 

What has surprised me this year is the comfort that I find in history without heroes, which I noticed most prominently during a recent read of Ron Chenrow’s biography of Ulysses S. Grant. 

Chenrow paints a portrait of Grant as a brilliant tactician, a compassionate man and loving father and husband who struggled with alcohol, kept a close circle even when outside advice would be beneficial and was easily taken in by those he decided to trust. Physically courageous and unbending in his personal scruples, he also casually accepted major gifts from a grateful public as his right and lost what fortune he had accrued through terrible personal judgment. In a fit of pique he tried to expel all Jews from the territory under his control during the war; an egregiously antisemitic act that marred his legacy and which was promptly reversed by his superiors.

On the key issue of his time, Grant disliked slavery and apparently annoyed his slaveholding neighbors by hiring free Black people to work his farm before the war. When he was gifted an enslaved man Grant promptly freed him. But he married a woman who grew up on a plantation and held people in bondage until the Civil War. Grant was not an abolitionist.

During the war, however, Grant became a strong advocate of enlisting and using Black troops. When the Confederacy refused to exchange Black troops, Grant shut down prison exchanges completely — calculating in part that the North could afford to lose men to prison camps better than the South could, but also because he refused to treat any of his soldiers as expendable.

There is something comforting in reading about historical people with both their flaws and virtues. Grant, for all his many faults, made great strides against a treasonous, evil conspiracy built on systematic kidnapping, abuse, rape and murder. Whatever his personal beliefs on slavery, and his personal tolerance for enslavers, he flatly refused to treat the Black men in his army as disposable. He repented publicly of his anti-semitism and formed political alliances with Jewish Americans. He appointed a Native man as Commissioner of Indian Affairs. For a time during Reconstruction, he used the full force and might of the American military to defend the rights of freed Black citizens. 

Much of this was imperfect; Grant often fell short. But as a flawed resident of the 21st century I find more comfort, more to emulate, in the good that a man of imperfect ideals and personal character was able to achieve than in a hagiographic view of the past that refuses to admit the faults of those who shaped our world.