Ulysses S. Grant Finally Gets That Promotion
Good morning. It’s Thursday. Today we’ll find out about a recent promotion for Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, who died 139 years ago. We’ll also get details on the 45-year sentence for a man whose fentanyl stash at his wife’s day care center killed a 22-month-old boy.
Credit…Mathew B. Brady/Associated Press
Who is buried in Grant’s tomb? A general with the Army’s highest rank.
Ulysses S. Grant, who has been dead for 139 years, has finally received the promotion long sought by his admirers.
“This is the step we were really waiting for,” said one of them, Frank Scaturro, the president of the Grant Monument Association. “It’s a wonderful recognition of the monumental importance of the singular life and singular public career of one of the supreme commanders of American armies during one of the two wars of existential magnitude.”
“He and George Washington in the Civil War and the Revolutionary War — those are the two conflicts that the United States had to win,” Scaturro said.
Yes, Scaturro put Grant up there with Washington. The Army did not go quite that far.
In approving Grant’s promotion to general of the armies of the United States, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin III noted that Grant would be elevated “with the same rank and precedence” as the World War I hero John J. Pershing. He was named a general of the armies in 1919, a year after the Allies and Germany signed an armistice, and the war came to an end.
