If you’ve ever lived in or near the South you’ll notice that reverence for Robert E. Lee and disdain for Ulysses S. Grant is pervasive. Even in the rest of the country Grant has not been highly regarded. How on earth did it happen that the winning general of the Civil War has been remembered so poorly by Americans while the losing general has countless monuments and parks and annual memorial days?

Easy. Blame a man named William Archibald Dunning, an early 20th-century historian and educator at Columbia University. Dunning felt that Reconstruction was a social experiment foisted on the South by radical northern Republicans using Federal forces to prop up new state and local governments made up of “carpetbaggers, scalawags and freedmen.” He believed that black men were incapable of independent thought or action and were necessarily led by unscrupulous white men (carpetbaggers and scalawags). He taught countless PhD students to believe the same way, to the point where his views became known as the Dunning School of thought. Its “graduates” were responsible in large part for the Jim Crow system of laws which enforced unofficial segregation for the first half of the 20th century.

There ought to be a campaign to raise President Grant’s reputation. If it diminishes Bobby Lee’s it won’t break my heart.