How a College Student Sued the National Government and Saved Grant's Tomb

On this episode of Our American Stories, the National Park Service in New York City was not taking measures to protect and preserve the tomb of General Ulysses S. Grant. Fortunately, Frank Scattoro had the initiative and the intensity to change that, against all obstacles.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:10):
And we returned to our American stories. Up next a
story from Frank Scatorro. Frank is the president of the
Grant Monument Association, which he helped revive after years of
inactivity to protect the final resting place of General Ulysses S. Grant.
Let's get into the story. Here's Frank.

Speaker 2 (00:32):
I began my exploration of Grant's life and career actually
years before I started college. At age seven, my parents
bought an encyclopedia set, the World Book Encyclopedia. I went
through it from A to Z, and I got caught
up in the PA volume, in the President's article. And

(01:00):
over the years in grammar school, I devoured whatever I
could about presidents as well as American historical topics, and
between the ages of twelve and thirteen, I singled out
Grant as an American who seemed uniquely misunderstood and underappreciated.
And on top of the misunderstanding, there was a sense,

(01:24):
this real powerful sense that I had to have accomplished
what he accomplished in one lifetime, in one career, the
military aspect during the Civil War, where he was the
principal author of Union Victory, and then two terms in
the White House that the same person had done. Both
struck me as remarkable. That's one reason George Washington is

(01:47):
recognized as being in the highest echelon of great Americans today. Well,
Grant used to be in that highest echelant as well,
but he wasn't because of certain historical trends that occurred
during the twentieth century. And as I was late grammar
school reading all that I could on Grant's presidency, the

(02:08):
more that I read about it, the less I could
appreciate or understand how he would have gotten such a
low ranking in the eyes of historians. Keep in mind,
when historians began to rate the presidents in polls that
were pioneered by Arthur Schlesinger Senior in nineteen forty eight.

(02:28):
In nineteen sixty two, he was rated second to only
rock Bottom Warren Harding at the very bottom of the list.
And as late as nineteen eighty two, when Robert Murray
and Tim Blessing did a poll, well, once again Grant
landed second to rock bottom Warren Harding. This was something

(02:52):
that just stayed with me. I wanted to explore it further,
just as I wanted to understand the presidency more generally
and by coincidence, I went to college a few blocks
away from Grant's Tomb at Columbia. Just as soon as
I moved into the dormitory there as a freshman, I
walked over to the monument and offered my services to

(03:14):
volunteer at the site. I started working volunteering at Grant's Tomb,
anticipating a pretty benign stint as a tour guide. What
unfolded there wound up being a historic preservation story that
I did not anticipate. Grant's Tomb was in deplorable condition.

(03:39):
Graffiti spray paint marred the site all over. The homeless
use the site as a bathroom and shelter. When I
walked into the tomb every day, I would have to
hold my breath as I walked across the portico into
the front door, just to not have to smell the

(04:01):
urine stench. We found marijuana, dime bags, and crack vials
on a virtually daily basis. The tomb was a site
of at least apparent prostitution. I remember walking one night
seeing someone with what looked like the Hollywood stereotype of
a prostitute, and there was sometimes some evidence of being

(04:22):
too graphic of that sort of activity having taken place
at the tomb. There were, on more than one occasion,
although just a handful of occasions, a dead chicken, a
slaughtered chicken would be found in the morning, probably a
Santa Ria ritual that had occurred overnight. One day we

(04:43):
came to work and found the American flagpole had a
garbage pail hoisted up to the top. I remember finding
on one occasion there was dog waste on the steps
of the tomb, but that was a rare occurrence. It
was actually much more common to human waste. And on

(05:05):
top of all of that, there was the natural deterioration
the maintenance needs that every site need. Homeowners could think
of how often their houses need roof replacement every x
number of years. Basic maintenance issues were not being addressed.
There was water damage the front plaza and the bluestone

(05:28):
immediately around Grant's tomb was deteriorating. They posed all sorts
of risks to the people who use the site. There
were some other troubling discoveries. The tomb has to give
you just one example, two reliquary rooms. For years, starting
in the nineteen thirties, there were murals painted by Dean Fawcett,

(05:50):
a mural artist that depicted the theater of the Civil War,
with Civil War battles indicated by crossed sabers and battles
in which Grant took part further indicated with a star.
And in the center of these reliquary rooms were even
older bronze trophy cases that were believed to be designed

(06:10):
by the architect of Grant's Tomb himself, a man named
John Duncan. These bronze trophy cases housed Civil War regimental
battle flags. And I've discovered as I read the site's
administrative history that in nineteen seventy, which was eleven years
after the National Park Service took over Grant's Tomb from

(06:33):
the Grant Monument Association, the group that originally built and
administered the site, the Park Service when they took on
the site really was clueless as to what to do
with it. They took the Civil War battle flags that
were housed there and shipped them off to storage, and
they painted over the Dean Fawcett murals. And I think

(06:59):
that there were a combination of a couple of factors
that contributed to this Architecturally, it's the largest mausoleum in
the Western hemisphere. It was built for someone who had
the stature of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. That's the
esteem in which Brant was held in the late nineteenth century,
but during the twentieth century his reputation was battered by historians.

(07:23):
There was also, if you'll remember, starting the sixties and seventies,
an increasing skepticism toward the American military, toward America in general.
I think there was a decline in patriotism, and that,
coupled with Grant's declining reputation in history, contributed to this
environment in which this celebrated tomb, which through World War

(07:46):
One had drawn more visitors than the Statue of Liberty,
was now much less often visited neglected in people. When
there was the occasional news report about the tomb being
graffitied or what have you, there was almost an expectation, well,
that's part of the urban decay, that more and more

(08:07):
people were taking for granted during that period, and I
saw that state of affairs still prevailed during the early
nineteen nineties when I was working.

Speaker 1 (08:17):
There, and you're listening to one heck of a story
being told by Frank Scatoro, and what an interesting young man.
By the age of seven, he's ripping through the world
book Encyclopedia A to Z, but he got stuck and
caught up in the PA volume, and that was Presidents,

(08:37):
of course, and then he started digging in and by
the time he's in his early teens, he's developed this
fascination with one of our nations great men and great presidents,
and that's Ulysses S. Grant. And Grant's been sort of
torn down by the time he's a teenager, from being
one of the great men of the nineteenth century, well
worn down by historians in the twentieth to rankings as

(09:00):
slow as second to last, not once but through several decades.
And of course, then he finds himself going to, of
all colleges in America, the one closest to Grant's tomb,
and I'm talking just a few blocks from Grant's tomb,
and Columbia's, of course, in Morningside Heights in Manhattan and
Riverside Drive only blocks away is where Grant's mausoleum lies.

(09:25):
And by the time this young man got to Columbia,
Grant's tomb was in tatters. It used to be one
of the most frequently visited sites in New York more
than a statue of liberty, and now is a place
for the homeless for drug addicts. When we come back
more of the remarkable story of Frank Scattro and Grant's
Tomb here on our American story. And we returned to

(10:10):
our American stories and Frank Scatorro's story. When we last
left off, Frank was telling us about his early interest
in President Grant and when he went to college at Columbia,
he signed up as a volunteer tour guide at Grant's
monument for the National Park Service. There was only one problem.
Grant's tomb was in horrific disrepair. Let's return to the story.

(10:33):
Here again is Frank Skatoro.

Speaker 2 (10:36):
There's a widespread sense, I think that when a site
is taken over by the National Park Service, the preservation
story is done. Maybe that is usually the case. In fact,
I'd say it is usually the case, but not in
the story of Grant's tomb. It was the first time

(11:01):
a component of the Park Service had been acquired that
consisted entirely of a mausoleum, and Park Service traditionally doesn't
really do mausoleums. This was a bureau that was designed
for the large parks like Yellowstone and Yosemite that were
there to preserve natural resources. Some early Park Service documents

(11:25):
from the nineteen fifties actually included open discussion about maybe
relocating the sarcophag Guy containing the remains of President and
Missus Grant, so that there could be more of a
focus on what they called the interpretive element. While in
nineteen seventy the Park Service destroyed the Duncan trophy cases,

(11:48):
they took the Civil War battle flags that were housed
there and shipped them off to storage, and they painted
over the Dean Fawcet murals. They replaced them with solid
reddish and bluish paint in the respective rooms and photo
exhibits that were kind of hard to follow, often inaccurately

(12:11):
captioned even when they were legible, which was they're not
the easiest things to read, and on Grant's presidency, they
had very little to say other than the summary condemnation
that had been prevalent in history books for so long.
Well the Park Service had done this in violation of

(12:32):
historic preservation law, let alone their own regulatory procedures, and
as I was doing research, and I did do research.
As I worked there into the site's administrative history, I
discovered that Park Service documents, well, a couple of things

(12:56):
were going on. Number one, Park Service officials were aware
that they were problems at the monument and they were
not doing anything about it. There was even a draft
report that mentioned the condition of the surrounding plaza and
how torte claims personal injury claims could be expected to
arise from these conditions if they were not corrected. And

(13:19):
there was a written notation on this page to remove
this page and renumber redo the report, basically to cover
it up. And as I discovered these things going on,
I issued memos up the chain of command to Park
Service officials. I don't think anything I had to say,

(13:43):
at least none of the major points came as much
of a surprise to those who worked in the Park Service,
but those who were then up the chain of command
really did not want to hear it. I basically butted
my head against a bureaucratic wall. My disposition generally is

(14:06):
to before assuming the adversarial posture and going to battle
with people I really believe in going all out, bending
over backwards to see if there's some accommodation you could reach,
if you just put it in a simple terms, if
you can find someone in a position of power who
cares enough to do something about these problems. But there

(14:29):
was no response at all, not even modest baby steps
in the right direction towards correcting the tomb's problems. The
person who was listed as the immediate supervisor was at
an office downtown at Federal Hall, was almost never to
be seen at the site, and too many people who

(14:50):
worked there in the Manhattan Sites unit of the Park
Service saw their jobs as just shuttling paperwork back and forth,
and they did not want the boat to rocked by
pretty strong and undeniable allegations that the tomb was not
being properly cared for. Now, the Park Service would say,
and they had a point here, that appropriations for the

(15:12):
site were inadequate to protect it. They did not have
in their budget enough money for security to prevent vandalism.
But there were also things to illustrate the bureaucratic lethargy.
There was a modest proposal that I had There was
a donation box in the tomb. Well, we're strapped for cash,

(15:33):
it would be nice to place a wreath periodically in
addition to the presidential wreath that was placed on Grant's birthday,
which happens for presidential gravesites. And the response was, well,
if we put the donation box out for that purpose,
we won't be able to put it up for other purposes. Okay,
then we'll think of other purposes to put up the
donation box. But there was no interest, no motivation even

(15:56):
to come up with another purpose for it. There were
simple bodice things too that could have been fixed that
were not. One example was a photo that was stolen
from one of the two reliquary rooms where the faucet
murals were painted over. Well for a long time we

(16:16):
had seen there was a white panel where the picture
had been stolen, and one day I found lodged in
an administrative office in the tomb the replacement picture had
been sitting there for any length of time. I brought
that to the attention of the site manager at the time,
and the response was, well, put it back. There will

(16:37):
be people to authorize that, to have that restore, to
have that put back in place, and it just never was.
To make things even more disturbing, those of us who
were working at the site on the front end were
told not to speak about what we were witnessing at
Grant's Tomb to other channels, certainly not to talk to

(16:58):
the press about it or talk to people high end government,
and we were warned that there would be reprisals if
we did so. My fellow volunteers and park rangers, I
think were sympathetic. They saw what was going on. I
think we were all in agreement that it wasn't right.
Of course, I was a volunteer. I did not rely

(17:20):
on this job for my livelihood, and it became clear
at a certain point that if nothing was done, if
nothing changed, and I just relied on continuing to remain
within the system and not talking to anyone outside these
bureaucratic channels, nothing was going to be done. So in

(17:42):
the summer, late summer nineteen ninety three, as I was
starting my senior year at Columbia, as it happens, I
went public with a whistleblowing report.

Speaker 1 (18:00):
And we've been listening to Frank's Katarro share his story
about Grant's Tune, and this is a story in the
end about the power of one the power of one
person to make a difference is here was this young man,
a student at Columbia University, doing his best to try
and bring to attention from the National Park Service or

(18:21):
whoever else would listen that this great man, this great monument,
deserved better, and no one was listening. All the bureaucracy,
all the red tape, there were no budgets, even a wreath,
as something as simple as a wreath, and there was
no response. And of course, in the end, Frank, who

(18:41):
tried his best to bring people together to solve this problem,
did everything he could to find some kind of interest
by anybody to do anything. Finally did what he had
to do, and of course that meant playing the role
of whistleblower. And when we come back, we're going to
have more of this remarkable story. And it's also a

(19:03):
story about the power of one person to change things.
And I'm talking about Frank Scataro's power, the power he
had within to help resuscitate and revive Grant's tomb. Frank
Skaturo's story continues, The story of Grant's Tomb continues here
on our American story, and we returned to our American

(19:40):
stories and the final portion of Frank Scaturo's story. When
we last left off, Frank was trying and butting heads
against the bureaucratic wall of the National Park Service to
repair General Grant's tomb in New York City. While he
worked in the system for a while, he'd eventually go
public with a whistleblowing report. Let's get back to the

(20:01):
story here again. Is Frank Scaturo.

Speaker 2 (20:12):
As I was starting my senior year at Columbia, I
went public with a whistleblowing report that documented the trends
that I've been summarizing for you. And it took some
time for media, and I did go to the media
with this. It took some time for them to take
an interest, but once they did. The very first TV

(20:35):
broadcast that came out was a November of nineteen ninety three.
It was by NBC's local affiliate Channel four New York,
a show called Sunday Today in New York, where they
showed the conditions, including briefly not only speaking to me
about showing what I was saying about the faucet murals

(20:56):
that were painted over, things that were done in violation
of his star preservation, but they even show the evidence
that the portico was being used as a bathroom, and
they had a clip from a maintenance worker who said
that this went on every day, well, even though it
was a Sunday. The normally lethargic and unresponsive Park Service

(21:20):
had an emergency meeting at which they decided, among other things,
that I was to be fired as a volunteer. They
went into damage control mode. How can we whitewash this,
get the media off our backs? Well more media reports followed.
The New York Times ran an editorial about this on

(21:41):
January second, nineteen ninety four, which really helped snowball the
media attention. An attorney named Ed Hawkman contacted me after
reading the New York Times editorial, and I am to
this day so grateful to him for doing so, because
at this point I was anticipating going into law school

(22:01):
the next school year. But I was certainly not a
lawyer and did not have any lawyers in my family
or among close friends. Ed offered his legal services to
do a couple of things. One was to file, on
a pro bono basis, a lawsuit against the entire chain
of command from the Secretary of the Interior on down

(22:23):
through the National Park Service, alleging the violation of historic
preservation laws and saying government must restore this site, and
also offered his assistance to get us to incorporate a
new Grant Monument Association. The original Grant Monument Association that

(22:47):
had built and originally administered the site dissolved during the
nineteen sixties. Well I had thought there needs to be
an outlet for citizen support, and with the blessing of
the last surviving member of that original organization, a man
named Urn Root, we got a new Grant Monument Association
together with virtually identical bylaws. Our board members actually included

(23:10):
daughters and grandchildren of General Ulysses S. Grant, the third
You know, the family members had indicated their own discouragement
with the Park Service and the condition of the tomb.
They had talked about how they were considering if the
Park Service doesn't clean up its act, they would consider

(23:31):
actually relocating the bodies of President and Missus Grant. We
went public with that point. We also got an unexpected
assist from the State of Illinois. The state legislature actually
pushed through a unanimous resolution that stated, if the National

(23:54):
Park Service does not clean up Grant's tomb, we the
state of Illinois will pay to have the entire moved
over here along with the bodies, where we'll take proper
care of everything. Now, that was a non binding resolution.
A state can't bind the federal government with respect to
a national park. But it was such a black eye

(24:15):
for the National Park Service, such an embarrassing statement about
its own dereliction of duty. Well, with several of these
factors exerting pressure, while they all helped motivate public officials
to get together and a bipartisan coalition of members of Congress,

(24:37):
and at that point the New York's senators we had
a Democrat and a Republican came together. They pushed for
increased funding for Grant's tomb. They multiplied its operational budget
so that nighttime security would be installed. Now, once the
tomb closed down for the day, barricades would be put up,

(24:59):
guards would be there. The physical deterioration of the tomb
was addressed by several congressional appropriations that totaled two million
dollars plus to restore the monument by the time of
its nineteen ninety seven centennials. So the tomb would be
cleaned from top to bottom. The plaza directly in front

(25:21):
of Grant's Tomb. South of Grant's Tomb was replaced and
no longer posed the hazard that it did. Dean Fawcet
murals that had been painted over were painstakingly recovered by
National Park Service preservation experts. They actually were able to
remove that layer of paint that covered over the Fawcet murals,

(25:43):
and replica bronze trophy cases were reconstructed with the same
design of the ones that were destroyed in nineteen seventy
and replica Civil War battle flags were put in those
trophy cases because at that point it was just not
viable as a preservation matter to have original Civil War
regimental flags in these trophy cases. One of the moving

(26:08):
moments during this nineteen nineties restoration is that Dean Fawcett,
the artist, was there to see his work rededicated in
nineteen ninety five. That happens to be when they finished
that particular leg of the restoration. He was in his
twenties when he had originally painted the murals nineteen thirty eight,

(26:29):
and so here he was an octogenarian able to see
his work restored. And he had been a really accomplished
muralist whose work appears in the US Capital, the Armed
Services Committee Room, among other places. The big restoration was
noted at the one hundred and seventy fifth anniversary of

(26:50):
Grant's birth, which was also the one hundredth anniversary of
the dedication of Grant's tomb. On April twenty seventh, nineteen
ninety seven. There was something of a rededication ceremony, about
three thousand people in attendance. There parade up Riverside Drive.
The visitation at Grant's tomb, which had dipped consistently below

(27:13):
one hundred thousand starting in the mid nineteen sixties, now
would surpass one hundred thousand, not every year, but many years.
Although we're always we always consider ourselves a watchdog group
who will point out when things are going wrong and
things need to be corrected, and we did so again
in a letter to elected officials in twenty nineteen. But

(27:36):
we've more and more been able to assume the status
of a partner with the National Park Service. There are
anniversaries that for many years just were not really observed
or recognized at the site, that are commemorated by reflayings
and by educational programs. In many cases, the birth and
death anniversaries of Julia Grant Ulysses wife are now observed.

(28:01):
Ulysses death anniversary, July twenty third is now regularly observed,
as are special anniversaries such as the one hundred and
fiftieth anniversary of the ratification of the fifteenth Amendment of
the Constitution, which barred racial discrimination in voting, essentially enfranchised

(28:21):
black men, a major milestone in American history, and of course,
one that would become embattled and tragically a generation after Grant,
reversed by many who came after him. It's really nice
now that we're able to commemorate these aspects of Grant's

(28:42):
life and career, that we have a much more collaborative
relationship with the National Park Service. We have rangers who
over the last decade to fifteen years or so, have
been doing more and more programs on site. We're on
the page as to Grant's historical importance, while fifty years

(29:03):
ago those who were administering the site did not seem
to have a clue as to how to make it
relevant or what even the basic lessons were of Grant's
public career. So we do see a real difference in
several aspects of the site and the way it's administered,
and certainly the relationship between the Grant Monument Association and

(29:25):
the National Park Service.

Speaker 1 (29:31):
And a terrific job on the production and editing by
our own Monte Montgomery. And a special thanks to Frank
Scaturo for sharing with us his epic journey to simply
revive and restore which should have been preserved the entire time.
Frank's story is a story about one man's desire to
fight a bureaucracy and restore not just Grant's tomb, but

(29:53):
Grant's reputation, which in the end has been restored. He's
no longer second from the bottom on any list, one
of the great generals of all time, one of the
great presidents, and what a story we just heard Frank
Scataro's story about preserving Grant's tomb here on our American
Stories