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

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Here's Frank. 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, World Book Encyclopedia. I went through it from A to Z, and I got caught up in the P volume in the president's article. And over the years in grammar school, I devoured whatever I could about presidents as well as American historical topics. And between the ages of 12 and 13, I singled out Grant as an American who seemed uniquely misunderstood and underappreciated.

And on top of the misunderstanding, there was a sense, 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 recognized as being in the highest echelon of great Americans today. Well, Grant used to be in that highest echelon as well, but he wasn't because of certain historical trends that occurred during the 20th century. And as I was late grammar school reading all that I could on Grant's presidency, the 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 Sr. in 1948 and 1962, he was rated second to only rock bottom Warren Harding at the very bottom of the list.

And as late as 1982, when Robert Murray and Tim Blessing did a poll, well, once again, Grant landed second to rock bottom Warren Harding. This was something 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 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. Graffiti, spray paint marred the site all over.

The homeless used 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 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, without being 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 Santeria ritual that had occurred overnight. One day we 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 find human waste. And on top of all of that, there was the natural deterioration, the maintenance needs that every site needs.

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 blue stone immediately around Grant's tomb was deteriorating.

It posed all sorts of risks to 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 1930s, there were murals painted by Dean Fawcett, 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 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 discovered as I read the site's administrative history that in 1970, which was 11 years after the National Park Service took over Grant's tomb from 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 that they're 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 Grant was held in the late 19th century. But during the 20th century, his reputation was battered by historians. There was also, if you'll remember, starting in the 60s and 70s, 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 I had drawn more visitors than the Statue of Liberty, was now much less often visited, neglected, and 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 people were taking for granted during that period.

And I saw that state of affairs still prevail during the early 1990s when I was working 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 P volume. And that was presidents, 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 nation's 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 19th century, well, worn down by historians in the 20th to rankings as low 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 is, of course, in Morningside Heights in Manhattan. And Riverside Drive, only blocks away, is where Grant's mausoleum lies. 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 his 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 Scatoro and Grant's tomb here on Our American Story. Luckyland Casino, asking people what's the weirdest place you've gotten lucky? Lucky? In line at the deli, I guess?

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Yeah, exactly right. Listen to Untold Stories, Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. And we return to Our American Stories and Frank Scatoro'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.

Here again is Frank Scatoro. 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 a component of the Park Service had been acquired that consisted entirely of a mausoleum. The 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 from the 1950s actually included open discussion about maybe relocating the sarcophagi containing the remains of President and Mrs. Grant so that there could be more of a focus on what they called the interpretive element. Well, in 1970, the Park Service destroyed the Duncan trophy cases. They took the Civil War battle flags that were housed there and shipped them off to storage, and they painted over the Dean faucet 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 captioned even when they were legible, which was not the easiest things to read.

And then 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 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 were going on. Number one, Park Service officials were aware that there 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 tort claims, you know, personal injury claims could be expected to arise from these conditions if they were not corrected. And there was a written notation on this page to remove this page and renumber and 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, 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 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 can reach if you just put it in simple terms, if you can find someone in a position of power who cares enough to do something about these problems. But there was no response at all, not even modest baby steps in the right direction toward correcting the tomb's problems. The person who was listed as the immediate supervisor was in an office downtown at Federal Hall, was almost never to be seen at the site. And too many people who 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 be rocked by pretty strong, 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 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, 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. I said, OK, well then we'll think of other purposes to put up the donation box.

But there was no interest, no motivation even to come up with another purpose for it. There were simple, modest 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 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.

It 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 be people to authorize that, to have that restored, 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 the press about it or to talk to people high in 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 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 the summer, late summer, 1993, as I was starting my senior year at Columbia, as it happens, I went public with a whistleblowing report. And we've been listening to Frank Scataro share his story about Grant's tomb. And this is a story in the end about the power of one, the power of one person to make a difference. Because he was this young man, a student at Columbia University, doing his best to try and bring to attention from the National Park Service or 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 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 story about the power of one person to change things. I'm talking about Frank Scataro's power, the power he had within to help resuscitate and revive Grant's tomb. Frank Scataro's story continues.

The story of Grant's tomb continues here on Our American Story. I can't fix this. I can't cure this. And, you know, I'll take my treatment day by day. But I want to try to be engaged, be involved or be as helpful as I feel I can with the limitations I have of working full time to children. So I participate in like market research to provide information to hopefully benefit others, because it's a small margin of people that have the Mycenia. But then to get pregnant, it's an even more narrow margin. And you can never have too much information as an epidemiologist.

Yeah, exactly right. Listen to Untold Stories. Life with a severe autoimmune condition on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Abusers in Hollywood are as old as the Hollywood sign itself. Underneath it lies a shroud of mystery. From Variety, Hollywood's number one entertainment news source and iHeart podcast, comes Variety Confidential. I'm your host, Tracy Patton. And in season one, we'll focus on the secret history of the casting couch. So join us as we navigate the tangled web of Hollywood's secret history of sex, money and murder.

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Here again is Frank Scatoro. 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 broadcast that came out was in November of 1993. It was by NBC's local affiliate Channel 4 New York. It was a show called Sunday Today in New York, where they showed the conditions, including briefly not only speaking to me about, you know, showing me showing what I was saying about the faucet murals that were painted over things that were done in violation of historic 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 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. They whitewashed this, get the media off our backs. Well, more media reports followed. The New York Times ran an editorial about this on January 2, 1994, which really helped snowball the media attention. Many named Ed Hochman 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 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 through the National Park Service, alleging the violation of historic preservation laws and saying government must restore this site. Ed also offered his assistance to get us to incorporate a new Grant Monument Association. The original Grant Monument Association that had built and originally administered the site dissolved during the 1960s. 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 Oren Root, we got a new Grant Monument Association together with virtually identical bylaws. Our board members actually included daughters and grandchildren of General Ulysses S. Grant III.

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 actually relocating the bodies of President and Mrs. 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 Park Service does not clean up Grant's tomb, we the state of Illinois will pay to have the entire tomb 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 for the National Park Service, such an embarrassing statement about its own dereliction of duty. Well, with several of these factors exerting pressure, well, they all helped motivate public officials to get together and a bipartisan coalition of members of Congress.

At that point, New York's senators, 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, guards would be there. The physical deterioration of the tomb was addressed by several congressional appropriations that totaled $2 million plus to restore the monument by the time of its 1997 centennial.

So the tomb would be cleaned from top to bottom. The plaza directly in front of Grant's tomb, south of Grant's tomb, was replaced and no longer posed the hazard that it did. Dean faucet 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 faucet murals and replica bronze trophy cases were reconstructed with the same design of the ones that were destroyed in 1970 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 moments during the this 1990s restoration is that Dean faucet the artist was there to see his work rededicated in 1995 that happens to be when they finished that particular leg of the restoration. He was in his 20s when he had originally painted the murals 1938 and so here he was an octogen Aryan able to see his work restored and he had been a really accomplished muralist whose work appears in the US Capitol, the Armed Services Committee room among them was the big restoration was noted at the 175th anniversary of grants birth which was also the 100th anniversary of the dedication of grants to on April 27 1997, there was something of a rededication ceremony, about 3000 people in attendance their parade on the East Side Drive, the visitation at grants tomb, which had dipped consistently below 100,000 starting in the mid 1960s now would surpass 100,000 not every year but but many years. And 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 and a letter to elected officials in 2019, but we've more and more been able to assume the status of the site as 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 wreath lanes and by educational programs in many cases, the birth and death anniversary of Julia grant Ulysses wife are now observed Ulysses death anniversary July 23 is now regularly observed, as our special anniversaries such as the 150th anniversary of the ratification of the 15th amendment of the Constitution, which barred discrimination and voting essentially enfranchised 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 grants, life and career that we have a much more collaborative relationship with the National Park Service.

A lot of Rangers who over the last decade to 15 years or so, have been doing more and more programs on site. We're on the same page as to grants historical importance while 50 years ago, those who are 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 grants, 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 the National Park Service, and a terrific job on the production and editing by our own Monty Montgomery and a special thanks to Frank Scatoro for sharing with us his epic journey to simply revive and restore what should have been preserved the entire time. This story is a story about one man's desire to fight a bureaucracy and restore not just grants tomb, but grants reputation, which, in the end has been restored is 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 Scatoro story about preserving grants tomb here on our American stories. Hollywood are as old as the Hollywood sign itself underneath it lies a shroud of mystery from variety Hollywood's number one entertainment news source and I heart podcast comes variety confidential. We focus on the secret history of the casting couch.

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