Scandals During Grant's Presidency Ulysses S. Grant, Essay

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Scandals During Grant's Presidency

Ulysses S. Grant, the 18th President of the United States, had a reputation as a very honest man, but one who exercised poor judgment in his choice of companions. Evidence of Grant's poor judgment can be found in the sheer number of scandals that occurred during his presidency. One notable scandal during Grant's tenure as president was the Black Friday Gold Panic of 1869. Another scandal during his presidency was the Whisky Ring. Examining both these scandals reveals that Grant did not personally profit from the scandals, but was willing to use his position as President to help out his less scrupulous acquaintances. Unfortunately, the willingness to use his power and influence to help out less scrupulous friends, though it did not provide any personal benefit to Grant, tainted his presidency as much as if he had personally profited from those scandals.

The Black Friday Gold Panic of 1869 began as an attempt by Jay Gould and Jim Fisk, two notoriously crooked financiers, to influence Grant's monetary policy. Grant's fiscal position had been that he would try to improve the economy by using gold to buy dollars from citizens and replacing them with currency backed with gold (WGBH Educational Foundation, 2010).

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Gould and Fisk did not want the government to buy gold because they wanted to speculate in gold futures, watch the value of gold rise, and then sell their personal gold at tremendous profit. If Grant engaged in his proposed greenback buy-back program, the price of gold would not rise sufficiently for them to make a significant profit. The two men enlisted the aid of Grant's brother-in-law, Abel Rathbone Corbin, to try to influence Grant's monetary policy. However, Grant uncovered the scheme and ordered the sale of $4,000,000 in government gold (WGBH Educational Foundation, 2010). This massive unloading of government gold caused a plummet in gold prices, with investors trying to unload their gold.

The Whisky Ring scandal involved a group of whisky dealers who conspired to defraud the government by keeping the liquor taxes for themselves (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2013). Although the scheme was relatively well-known, because of the connections and power of the various people involved, it was….....

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