The Green Lantern Theory of politics is that if a President (or anyone, really) just exerts enough "will" then problems will be solved. This is linked to the Sorkin Principle whereby a President (or anyone, really) makes a damned fine, stirring speech and everyone agrees with him and their problems will be solved.
Jamelle Bouie - whom I like very much as a writer - commits a time travelling version of this fallacy. His target is Grant, and his argument is that Grant "allowed" Reconstruction to fail. Of course, he acknowledges that Grant made more efforts to make Reconstruction work than any other president, but - for some reason - the failure should be laid at his feet. This assumes that the failure of Reconstruction is a failure of Grant's "will" to create better race relations. Grant, like many people at the time, believed in the ideology of "free labor." He tried, within the limits of Presidential power in the late 19th century, to help African Americans, but ultimately he was thwarted by the will of the vast majority of Americans who simply did not care enough to provide the Freedmen with free land. Even if they had, the odds were very good that the white South would simply have doubled down on the campaign of violence against blacks that had already begun.
Reconstruction is one of the greatest American tragedies, but it is tragic because of what it says about America, not Grant.
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