Topic: Ulysses S. Grant

Grant’s presidency has traditionally been arguably the most misunderstood of any of the nation’s chief executives. Reconstruction is the biggest reason, but not the only reason, for a presidential reputation that historians once placed near the very bottom of the list, only to undergo a recent revival. Yet even with that revival, many distortions endure in both the popular and the scholarly imagination. Frank Scaturro published a reappraisal, entitled President Grant Reconsidered, in 1998. Several major studies of Grant’s life and public career followed. In 2023, Scaturro revisited Grant’s presidential standing in the quarter-century since his earlier study as part of a collection of essays he co-edited entitled Grant at 200. In his talk, he will explore why generations of built-up confirmation bias and double standards among historians stood in the way of doing justice to Grant's tenure in the White House; what more recent historians have gotten right and what they missed; and why Grant should be recognized in the pantheon of presidential greats.

Speaker: Frank Scaturro 

Mr. Scaturro is an attorney and writer. A graduate of Columbia University and Penn Law School, he served as Counsel for the Constitution for the Senate Judiciary Committee from 2005 to 2009, where he advised Republican senators on constitutional law issues and nominations. Afterwards, he taught courses as a visiting professor at Hofstra Law School on constitutional law and the legislative process. The founder and president of the Grant Monument Association, Frank fought a failed government bureaucracy and pushed for a $2+ million restoration of Grant’s Tomb. Frank has published a number of books and articles in the area of history and law, including President Grant Reconsidered (1998), a reassessment of Grant’s presidency; The Supreme Court’s Retreat from Reconstruction (2000), an exploration of a key chapter in the history of civil rights; Public Companies (2002), a book he co-authored on how to be a responsible public company in the wake of the corporate scandals of the 2000s; and Grant at 200 (2023), a collection of essays about Grant that he co-edited. He has served as an associate at Cadwalader, Wickersham, and Taft and a partner at FisherBroyles LLP. During the 114th Congress, he served as special counsel to the House Select Investigative Panel on Infant Lives. He currently serves as vice-president and senior counsel of JCN.