In 1850 a young country doctor stopped in for a “fine mess of melons” at a Mississippi homestead belonging to a poor white family: “Here I beheld what I was astonished at,” the doctor later wrote in his diary. “All the little children were allowed a seat along with the adult company, each one (there were about seven) as dirty as the earth could make them and the smallest ones with their dressing tucked up behind, exposing their posteriors, [each] with a swarm of gnats after it.” Staring into a scrum of gnatty asses, the doctor wondered, ‘who are these people?’ “Thus live thousands,” he marveled, “and as happy as queens and Kings.” [1]

On July 4, 1876, the United States uneasily turned one hundred. At the end of the day, there were those who complained that it had been a gaudy, “overgrown and spread-eagle Fourth of July.” The cumulative effect of the Panic of 1873 and the emerging scandals of Grant’s administration had sharpened the knives of the journalists and soured the public mood. How could the country justify public expenditures on patriotic frippery when millions of Americans were jobless, homeless, or starving? Amid the revelations of presidential corruption and corporate predation, the centennial seemed just another “gigantic fraud,” a final embarrassment for Grant’s presidency. “Various administrations have closed in gloom and weakness,” claimed the great historian Allan Nevins, but “no other has closed in such paralysis and discredit as … did Grant’s.” [1]