President Ulysses S. Grant and the Des Moines Public School at Ninth and Mulberry streets, circa 1875.
By Dave Elbert
Ulysses S. Grant was the first sitting president to visit Des Moines 150 years ago on a trip that included a controversial speech about education that some would still find contentious today.
Des Moines was barely two decades old when he arrived on Sept. 29, 1875, but the city already had a population of more than 15,000, which would more than triple in 15 years.
Grant’s train pulled in two blocks south of Iowa’s temporary, three-story brick statehouse, where lawmakers met for the first time in 1858. That building was already sinking into the soft ground, and the president probably noticed activity on a nearby hill where work on a permanent Capitol had begun two years earlier.
Grant came to town for a reunion of the Union Army of Tennessee, which he led to victory at Vicksburg in 1863, and which included many Iowa soldiers.
The president was nearing the end of his second term, and although his administration was rife with corruption, Grant remained personally popular.
During the day, he met with 2,500 children at Moore’s Opera House and was given a tour of the city, which presumably included the new three-story public school at Ninth and Mulberry streets.
His guide was judge Chester Cole, a public education advocate, and the president asked to return early to the judge’s home so he could jot down some thoughts.
“In only forty minutes, scribbling in pencil, Grant drafted a speech on the backs of envelopes and stray scraps of paper,” biographer Ron Chernow wrote in his 2017 book “Grant.” (One of Chernow’s other biographies inspired the musical “Hamilton.”)
At the time, Chernow noted, “some Protestants wanted to Christianize the country, and some Catholics lobbied for state funding for parochial schools.”
Grant’s speech made “a historic plea for public education and the need to save the nation’s classrooms from religious interference,” Chernow wrote.
According to a published draft of the speech Grant said: “In a Republic like ours … it is important that (the people) should possess intelligence. The free school is the promoter of that intelligence.”
Grant said he wanted Congress to “encourage free schools and resolve that not one dollar of money (be) appropriated … to the support of any sectarian school. … Leave the matter of religion to the family altar, the church, and the private school, supported entirely by private contributions. Keep the Church and State forever separate.”
The speech sparked controversy that followed Grant, even after he left office.
After stepping down in 1877, Grant went on a world tour where he was received, for the most part, with great honors, except in Ireland where Catholic members of the Cork City Council, citing his Des Moines speech, voted to refuse to receive him as a guest of the city.
Later, when Grant arrived in Rome, Chernow wrote, Pope Leo XIII was kinder but also expressed concern that “Grant’s Des Moines speech on separating church and state had prevented Roman Catholic instruction in public schools.” The pope, however, added that he “admired the impartial way Grant applied his policy across all religious denominations.”
One footnote: Other presidents visited Iowa in its early days. Zachary Taylor and Abraham Lincoln both traveled here but did so before they were elected. Millard Fillmore visited Dubuque and Davenport in 1854, one year after he left office. Grant was the first sitting chief executive to visit Iowa and the first to set foot in Des Moines.
Dave Elbert has covered local history and Iowa business news for more than 40 years, first for the Des Moines Register and then the Business Record.
