Grant

There's no need for viewers to take the time to watch the History Channel's dramatized documentary about Ulysses S. Grant.  This is unfortunate because Ulysses S. Grant is one of the most fascinating figures in American history and, certainly, praiseworthy in all respects.  I write this note on the day after a night of riots and looting triggered by the death of yet another African-American man at the hands of police -- this time a killing orchestrated by four officers in south Minneapolis.  These events remind us that the legacy of the Civil War haunts us now 160 years after Appomattox Courthouse and that, therefore, it behooves all Americans to know as much as possible about Grant, the man who defeated the South but, then, despite his best efforts lost the peace.  As Faulkner reminds us:  "The past is never dead; it's not even past " --  in fact, an ongoing and, often, lethal burden on the present.

Grant is based on a bestselling history of the same name by Ron Chernow, one of the many talking heads who provide response and characterization to what we see.  The show is six hours long, most of this screen-time is devoted to the the Civil War.  Grant's presidency, now much re-evaluated from the calumny heaped on him during the middle of the 20th century, is remarkably fascinating in its own right and tremendously consequential.  Only about a half-hour of the show addresses this period.  The heavy emphasis on Grant's leadership during the Civil War is more than a little bit redundant. First, the finest and most revealing history of Grant's actions before and during the War of the Rebellion was written by U. S. Grant himself.  Grant's autobiography is a classic of American literature -- cogent, understated and self-deprecatory, and written in pellucid prose that is as much a masterpiece of American discourse as Caesar's de Bello Gallico.  If you haven't sampled Grant's autobiography, I must recommend it to you without reservation -- and, further, will tell you that Grant's writing is often very funny.  Grant's clarity of expression is such that the book although praised by American writers as various as Mark Twain and Gertrude Stein was, essentially, disregarded for most of my lifetime.  People in the South were unwilling to accept his clear-sighted perspective on the War.  When I was growing up, Grant was regarded as a dullard, General Lee's idiot country cousin, a drunk and a corrupt President.  As Grant makes clear, these views were induced by the need for American history textbooks to be sold in the benighted South.  Southerners were unable to accept their loss in the War of the Rebellion and constructed a deceitful history alleging that the Civil War was fought over abstruse concepts of Federalism -- that is the proper relation of State and Federal government, sometimes encoded in the phrase "State's Rights."  This wasn't what Lincoln thought nor the view of General Grant -- or, in fact, the view of any major politician contemporary with the War.  The Civil War was waged over the South's detestable determination to preserve the "peculiar institution" of slavery.  Grant makes this clear time and time again in his great history:  at one point, he says that the South fought valiantly for their "cause, although that cause was the worst for which anyone has ever fought."  This is so apparent from Grant's autobiography -- a book that also denounces the American imperialism that led to the War with Mexico -- that the great fons et origo of all Civil War studies, Grant's own account of the War that he won, was (and remains) seriously neglected.  Therefore, instead of spending six hours watching this show, you would be better advised to spend twice that time, perhaps, simply reading Grant's long, but absorbing, book.  In large part, it's redundant to study the Civil War from any perspective other Grant' sown  eagle-eye view -- at least, all students should first master Grant's account before proceeding to other points of view; everything else, although perhaps, valuable, is secondary.

Grant is about one-third reconstruction of historical events staged like a low-budget, if earnest, made-for-TV movie.  One-third of the show is interviews with talking heads who comment on the action.  About another third of the show is Ken Burns' style archival images, maps, and various portraits of Grant and his generals (and adversaries).  Many of the images of Grant are colorized -- this allows the program to use as two images what is  actually a single photograph.  The colorized pictures are a bit jarring at first, particularly the famous images of Lincoln that all Americans have seen since early childhood.  Currier & Ives engravings and political cartoons are sometimes shot in three-dimensions -- that is, parts of the picture plane are manipulated to be either in the foreground or background.  This is an interesting gimmick but it doesn't materially add to the pictorial aspects of this material.  The "usual suspects", that is, archival pictures of corpses, battlefields, and generals standing in front of taut-linen  tents or ranks of horses are tirelessly rounded-up and, then, recycled.  The pundits are generally informative, enthusiastic, and well-informed:  Chernow appears as does retired General Petraeus, a jolly guy from Princeton named Allen Guelzo, the renowned Ta-Nehisi Coates, and various other museum curators and battlefield site supervisors.  One commentator named Gregory Hospodor appears wearing a natty bow-tie seemingly styled from the stars and bars of the Confederate flag.  The dramatic reenactments are best when they are low-key and don't attempt to capture the experience of Civil War combat.  The man playing Grant is particularly good -- he scowls fiercely and, when he's drunk,there's a brutal quality to his silent brooding; he resists the impulse to show Grant as avuncular or with a common touch and there's certainly no sense of any kind of concealed "heart of gold."  Grant is the frosty, grim embodiment of Mars, the God of War -- people remarked upon his grey ice-cold eyes.  The actress playing Julia Dent Grant, the General's wife, is a handsome woman -- she's a poor fit for the ugly Julia, generally photographed (in period images) in profile to conceal her odd-looking squint eye; some period pictures show her to be cross-eyed as well.  When the camera records her profile, we see that she's a dumpy little woman with a heavy double-chin.  She must have had good qualities because Grant, who was a handsome man, was fanatically devoted to her.  The commentators heap praise upon  Grant who was, in fact, an exemplary man in many ways -- when he was poor, other planters derided him for working in the fields side-by-side with his slaves; later, Grant liberated his only slave, granting freedom to his only real income-producing asset -- this scene is depicted with austere dignity in the show:  the slave accepts his freedom as his natural right and doesn't fawn over Grant or, even, particularly praise Grant's virtue and Grant doesn't seem to expect any of these reactions:  no one should enslave anyone else and Grant treats his liberation of the man with matter-of-fact indifference -- as far as he is concerned, the man was already free in all but name and legal status.  It's fortunate that the scenes portraying Grant are low-key and without much to cause us to warm to the chilly protagonist -- the pundits are supposed to tell us how great Grant was; the re-enactments, accordingly, cut against the grain of the laudatory narrative provided by the talking heads.  The battle scenes are mostly embarrassments  -- they are often ingeniously shot to conceal the fact that the Shiloh or the Battle of the Crater are staged with extras numbering no more than fifty to sixty men.  To hide this paucity of means, the camera stays close to the soldiers, stages many scenes in dense fog or mist, never shows anything like the panorama of a battlefield and, often, shoots Grant from low-angles to conceal the fact that he is, more or less, alone.  To make up for the absence of spectacle, the show distracts viewers with gore -- people's heads explode and jets of blood shoot from wounds.  But the budget is so low that the film-makers couldn't  really afford to show any artillery in action.  We see battlefields today with ranks of cannons and old pictures, but artillery, the branch of the military that Napoleon called "the god of War", is never displayed in action -- this is a distortion, of course, because Civil War battles were notable for their artillery duels and enormous cannon barrages. This low-budget approach to combat works well in the third episode in which there are a number of massacre scenes -- sequences in which 15 men kill another eight or nine guys work well in this format.  And when the Ku Klux Klan starts killing Freedmen, the film perks up a little.  These scenes are shot from a steep overhead POV that is claustrophobic and, also, disguises the fact that there's nothing but a sound crew and technicians on all sides of the tight melee.     

A program of this kind is almost unwatchable due to the commercial interruptions. By the end of each two-hour session, commercials are interpolated into the film at a rate of a two minute commercial every ten minutes.  Furthermore, the commercials are repeated interminably -- we see the same pitches, most of which are witless, again and again and again:  insurers pat themselves-on-the back for refunding premiums (since no one is driving); fast food places tout their wares, and on-line correspondence schools with sinister reputations praise the fortitude of their students who are buying useless degrees.  It's all profoundly depressing.