American Beat: Dirty Dancing

Where to begin? First of all, no other presidential tomb is the set-up line to the most famous unfunny joke in the English language. The answer to "Who's buried in Grant's tomb?" is, indeed, Grant (and his wife, Julia Dent Grant). It was used as a consolation question on Groucho Marx's game show--a question so easy that not even the most idiotic contestants could screw up). Grant himself has not gotten fair treatment from the history books. It's amazing, when you consider that Grant was regarded in his own time as the equivalent of Washington or Lincoln. Here was the guy who won the Civil War, after all, and became the nation's first true civil rights leader, ordering the de-segregation of hotels, trains and other public accommodations (although the Supreme Court eventually overruled him). When the memorial was dedicated in 1897--a full 12 years after his death--a million people showed up to mourn. Until World War I, Grant's tomb was the most-visited tourist attraction in the nation--ahead of even the Statue of Liberty (which still, apparently, smelled a bit French). It remains the largest mausoleum in America (unless, of course, you count the governor's mansion in California). Yet if Americans remember him at all, Grant is remembered as a bungler and a drunk--both of which are myths.

"No one in American history did so much yet gets so little credit," says Scaturro. Scaturro had to deal with his own uprising when Chapman Foster Grant, a great-grandson of the former president, told The New York Daily News, "If the old guy were alive, he might have enjoyed it."

Not a chance, Grant experts say. "First of all, Grant despised music," says John Simon, editor of Grant's papers at Southern Illinois University. "He used to say, 'I recognize only two songs: One is "Yankee Doodle" and the other is not.'"

But certainly as a military man, hardened by combat, Grant must have appreciated the beauty of a fine woman like Beyonce? No, he would not have.

"Did you ever see a picture of his wife?" asks historian William McFeely. "This was not an attractive woman. But he was unbelievably faithful to her. His enemies tarred him with everything they could think of--corruption, drunkenness, what have you--but never adultery. He was a one-woman man."

Even if they shared little in the looks department, Julia Grant definitely had some of Beyonce's carnal sassiness, McFeely says. "In one letter to Grant, she told him that she'd named one of the four posts on her bed 'Grant.' You don't need to be a strict Freudian to know what she meant. She enjoyed sex."