Posted on 05/15/2004 6:10:15 PM PDT by Coleus
His name is Ulysses Grant Dietz.
He hasn't written anything like his famous ancestor's two-volume "Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant." His writings have been on such topics as "Desmond: A Novel of Love and the Modern Vampire," a twist on the Dracula legend.
But Dietz, who lives in Maplewood and is steeped in the art world as a curator of the Newark Museum, is not unlike the ancestor credited with helping to save the Union.
President Abraham Lincoln, frustrated with the slowness of certain Union commanders to challenge the rebels, once fended off calls that he dismiss the general who would. "I can't spare this man -- he fights," Lincoln said of Grant.
Dietz has been in a long battle of his own: a hard-fought campaign to get some respect for Grant's Tomb in New York City.
It was 10 years ago on April 27 -- the day Grant was born in 1822 -- that his great-great-grandson lent his name to a lawsuit against the National Park Service over what had become a blighted, graffiti-assaulted resting place for the nation's 18th president and his wife, Julia Dent Grant.
"They weren't fighting for their own," Dietz said of the park service, "and therefore they had to be dragged into it."
The legal campaign eventually was dropped, after the federal government was "shamed" into taking action, but it revealed something of Dietz's own stature as a strategist.
"To depend on public money for everything is a very dangerous way to plan for your future," Dietz said.
It's a philosophy he said he takes to heart as a museum curator and as someone still on a search for a deep-pocketed benefactor to create an endowment and a long-sought-after visitors center at the tomb in New York's Riverside Park.
"In this year of the Republican convention," Dietz said of this summer's national gathering of the Grand Old Party in New York, "someone should be willing to give this great Republican" an enduring tribute.
Dietz, of course, has his own political leanings.
"I'm the kind of Republican that Grant was, which is to say, 'I'm a Democrat,'" said a smiling Dietz, sitting in the main courtyard at the Newark Museum last week just hours before flying to Washington, D.C., for the annual meeting of the Ulysses S. Grant Association.
"The Grants actually stayed where we're sitting now," said Dietz, noting that the museum is on the one-time homestead of Marcus Ward, a New Jersey governor who had been a friend of the family.
Curiously, Dietz said, his boyhood did not include stories of the ancestor who accepted Gen. Robert E. Lee's surrender at Appomattox Courthouse on April 9, 1865. "My mother never talked about it. It was sort of the elephant in the parlor," he said.
In his own boyhood, he was always called Grant, thus not raising any suspicions. "When I started using Ulysses in high school, they thought my parents must be either Greek or history buffs, and they weren't."
Nor can he be pigeonholed today.
"I'm not a historian. I'm not a Civil War buff," Dietz said. "It's all those people outside who sort of drew us into this."
Perhaps the most prominent is Frank Scaturro.
Today, Scatturo is a 31-year-old attorney and president of the Grant Monument Association, of which Dietz is a vice president. But in the early 1990s, Scaturro was a National Park Service volunteer who pulled Dietz's name off a Rolodex.
That might be the starting point of Dietz's role as "unofficial family spokesman" and the man who brought name recognition to the lawsuit that helped force the government's hand.
"It's something that I'm really thankful for," Scaturro said. "Next of kin have a very important role to play."
But there are limits to Dietz's involvement.
"I get asked constantly to speak to VFW posts, and I say no," Dietz said. "I have a life."
That life is centered around his partner, Gary Berger, and their adopted children, Grace, an 8-year-old of Chinese descent, and Alexander, a 9-year-old of Guatemalan ancestry.
"She just did a report in school about U.S. Grant," he said of Grace, "and I actually wrote a genealogy for her. ... They're very into this."
Dietz insists he doesn't bear a resemblance to Grant.
"There's one cousin in Connecticut who's a dead ringer," beard and all, Dietz said.
He has lived in Maplewood for nearly a quarter-century, ever since getting out of graduate school at the University of Delaware. He's also in his first job, at the Newark Museum, which as a nonprofit organization is conscious of name value in those endless struggles for funding.
"The marketing department told me to use my full name," Dietz said. "It was funny because it was an executive decision."
In his spare time, he's the senior warden at St. George's Episcopal Church in Maplewood and a reader of 19th-century fiction. "It's like time travel," he said.
Besides art books he's written for the museum, he penned "Desmond," a work of fiction whose scenery makes it as much about decorative arts as about vampires. But while talking about his main character, Dietz comes to a realization.
"Desmond is his own ancestor. He has to keep inventing himself. I never thought of that. He's unencumbered by ancestors."
Besides a gold-headed walking stick and some presidential china, he has few mementos of his famed ancestor. No sabers. No portraits.
"The other burden of ancestors is they give away all the good stuff," Dietz said.
And his royalties are no match for the nearly $500,000 check Grant's widow collected from her late husband's hefty two-volume memoir. "It's something like $600, $700 a year," he said.
Come Tuesday, Grant's birthday, Dietz will be breaking with tradition. He won't be giving a speech at Grant's Tomb, whose visitor roster last year was nearly half of the 128,024 who came during the centennial of the tomb's dedication in 1997. But he's mindful of what adequate promotion and a visitors center would do.
"For God's sake, the notion is that if you build it, they will come," he said. "In the modern world, that just doesn't work."
very interesting
Forbid it! May Robert E. Lee's ghost rise up from the grave and strike the little poofter!
Who's buried there, anyhow?
Who's buried there, anyhow?>>
I don't know, it's been the question of the century.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.