Blight on corruption and Grant:
But is it enough to conclude that Grant just never got over his boundless susceptibility to con artists and Ponzi schemers like Ferdinand Ward, who eventually took the former president, his good name, and every penny he had for a disastrous ride off a cliff? Is Grant merely the victim, not to be blamed for the corruption of his son, a brother, and an assortment of cabinet officials and close aides? A certain charm emerges from this story when it is kept safely in the past. The 1870s, argues the historian Richard White in The Republic for Which It Stands, his new book on Reconstruction, was a time when “random corruption” became a “centralized operation,” when the “profit motive” became inextricably hitched to “public service.”
5 Grant by no means created such a world, but he sat haplessly at its reeking center.