How a College Student Sued the National Government and Saved Grant’s Tomb

And we returned to our American stories. Up next, a story from Frank Scatorro. Frank is the president of the Grant Monument Association, which he helped revive after years of inactivity to protect the final resting place of General Ulysses S. Grant. Let’s get into the story. Here’s Frank.

I began my exploration of Grant’s life and career actually years before I started college. At age seven, my parents bought an encyclopedia set, the World Book Encyclopedia. I went through it from A to Z, and I got caught up in the PA volume, in the Presidents’ article. And over the years in grammar school, I devoured whatever I could about presidents as well as American historical topics, and between the ages of twelve and thirteen, I singled out Grant as an American who seemed uniquely misunderstood and underappreciated. And on top of the misunderstanding, there was a sense—this real, powerful sense—that to have accomplished what he accomplished in one lifetime, in one career: the military aspect during the Civil War, where he was the principal author of Union Victory, and then two terms in the White House; that the same person had done both struck me as remarkable. That’s one reason George Washington is recognized as being in the highest echelon of great Americans today. Well, Grant used to be in that highest echelant as well, but he wasn’t because of certain historical trends that occurred during the twentieth century. And as I was late grammar school reading all that I could on Grant’s presidency, the more that I read about it, the less I could appreciate or understand how he would have gotten such a low ranking in the eyes of historians. Keep in mind: when historians began to rate the presidents in polls that were pioneered by Arthur Schlesinger Senior in nineteen forty-eight, in nineteen sixty-two, he was rated second to only rock-bottom Warren Harding at the very bottom of the list. And as late as nineteen eighty-two, when Robert Murray and Tim Blessing did a poll, well, once again Grant landed second to rock-bottom Warren Harding. This was something that just stayed with me. I wanted to explore it further, just as I wanted to understand the presidency more generally, and by coincidence, I went to college a few blocks away from Grant’s Tomb at Columbia. Just as soon as I moved into the dormitory there as a freshman, I walked over to the monument and offered my services to volunteer at the site. I started working, volunteering at Grant’s Tomb, anticipating a pretty benign stint as a tour guide. What unfolded there wound up being a historic preservation story that I did not anticipate. Grant’s Tomb was in deplorable condition. Graffiti spray paint marred the site all over. The homeless use the site as a bathroom and shelter. When I walked into the tomb every day, I would have to hold my breath as I walked across the portico into the front door, just to not have to smell the urine stench. We found marijuana, dime bags, and crack vials on a virtually daily basis. The tomb was a site of at least apparent prostitution. I remember walking one night seeing someone with what looked like the Hollywood stereotype of a prostitute, and there was sometimes some evidence, of being too graphic, of that sort of activity having taken place at the tomb. There were, on more than one occasion, although just a handful of occasions, a dead chicken, a slaughtered chicken, would be found in the morning, probably a Santeria ritual that had occurred overnight. One day we came to work and found the American flagpole had a garbage pail hoisted up to the top. I remember finding on one occasion there was dog waste on the steps of the tomb, but that was a rare occurrence. It was actually much more common to human waste. And on top of all of that, there was the natural deterioration; the maintenance needs that every site need. Homeowners could think of how often their houses need roof replacement every x number of years. Basic maintenance issues were not being addressed. There was water damage; the front plaza and the bluestone immediately around Grant’s Tomb was deteriorating. They posed all sorts of risks to the people who use the site. There were some other troubling discoveries. The tomb has, to give you just one example, two reliquary rooms. For years, starting in the nineteen thirties, there were murals painted by Dean Fawcett, a mural artist that depicted the theater of the Civil War, with Civil War battles indicated by crossed sabers, and battles in which Grant took part further indicated with a star. And in the center of these reliquary rooms were even older bronze trophy cases that were believed to be designed by the architect of Grant’s Tomb himself, a man named John Duncan. These bronze trophy cases housed Civil War regimental battle flags. And I’ve discovered, as I read the site’s administrative history, that in nineteen seventy, which was eleven years after the National Park Service took over Grant’s Tomb from the Grant Monument Association, the group that originally built and administered the site, the Park Service, when they took on the site, really was clueless as to what to do with it. They took the Civil War battle flags that were housed there and shipped them off to storage, and they painted over the Dean Fawcett murals. And I think that there were a combination of a couple of factors that contributed to this. Architecturally, it’s the largest mausoleum in the Western Hemisphere. It was built for someone who had the stature of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. That’s the esteem in which Grant was held in the late nineteenth century, but during the twentieth century his reputation was battered by historians. There was also, if you’ll remember, starting the sixties and seventies, an increasing skepticism toward the American military, toward America in general. I think there was a decline in patriotism, and that, coupled with Grant’s declining reputation in history, contributed to this environment in which this celebrated tomb, which through World War I had drawn more visitors than the Statue of Liberty, was now much less often visited, neglected in people. When there was the occasional news report about the tomb being graffitied or what have you, there was almost an expectation, ‘Well, that’s part of the urban decay,’ that more and more people were taking for granted during that period, and I saw that state of affairs still prevailed during the early nineteen nineties when I was working.

There. And you’re listening to one heck of a story being told by Frank Scatorro, and what an interesting young man! By the age of seven, he’s ripping through the World Book Encyclopedia A to Z, but he got stuck and caught up in the PA volume, and that was Presidents, of course. And then he started digging in, and by the time he’s in his early teens, he’s developed this fascination with one of our nation’s great men and great presidents, and that’s Ulysses S. Grant. And Grant’s been sort of torn down by the time he’s a teenager, from being one of the great men of the nineteenth century, well-worn down by historians in the twentieth, to rankings as low as second to last, not once but through several decades. And of course, then he finds himself going to, of all colleges in America, the one closest to Grant’s Tomb, and I’m talking just a few blocks from Grant’s Tomb. And Columbia’s, of course, in Morningside Heights in Manhattan, and Riverside Drive only blocks away is where Grant’s mausoleum lies. And by the time this young man got to Columbia, Grant’s Tomb was in tatters. It used to be one of the most frequently visited sites in New York, more than the Statue of Liberty, and now is a place for the homeless, for drug addicts. When we come back, more of the remarkable story of Frank Scatorro and Grant’s Tomb here on Our American Story. And we returned to Our American Stories and Frank Scatorro’s story. When we last left off, Frank was telling us about his early interest in President Grant, and when he went to college at Columbia, he signed up as a volunteer tour guide at Grant’s Monument for the National Park Service. There was only one problem. Grant’s Tomb was in horrific disrepair. Let’s return to the story. Here again is Frank Scatorro.

As I was starting my senior year at Columbia, I went public with a whistleblowing report that documented the trends that I’ve been summarizing for you. And it took some time for media—and I did go to the media with this. It took some time for them to take an interest, but once they did. The very first TV broadcast that came out was a November of nineteen ninety-three. It was by NBC’s local affiliate Channel four New York, a show called Sunday Today in New York, where they showed the conditions, including briefly not only speaking to me about showing what I was saying about the Fawcett murals that were painted over, things that were done in violation of historic preservation, but they even show the evidence that the portico was being used as a bathroom, and they had a clip from a maintenance worker who said that this went on every day, well, even though it was a Sunday. The normally lethargic and unresponsive Park Service had an emergency meeting at which they decided, among other things, that I was to be fired as a volunteer. They went into damage control mode. How can we whitewash this, get the media off our backs? Well, more media reports followed. The New York Times ran an editorial about this on January second, nineteen ninety-four, which really helped snowball the media attention. An attorney named Ed Hawkman contacted me after reading The New York Times editorial, and I am to this day so grateful to him for doing so, because at this point I was anticipating going into law school the next school year. But I was certainly not a lawyer and did not have any lawyers in my family or among close friends. Ed offered his legal services to do a couple of things. One was to file, on a pro bono basis, a lawsuit against the entire chain of command from the Secretary of the Interior on down through the National Park Service, alleging the violation of historic preservation laws and saying government must restore this site, and also offered his assistance to get us to incorporate a new Grant Monument Association. The original Grant Monument Association that had built and originally ad…