How the "Lost Cause" poisoned our history books - War Room - Salon.com: Indeed, few major figures in American history have been so denigrated and disgraced as Grant. How did this happen? A big part of the answer can be found in the successful campaign by historians sympathetic to the Confederacy’s "Lost Cause." Led by William A. Dunning of Columbia University, they portrayed Grant wrongly as only a drunken butcher general and as an enfeebled president who pandered to Radical Republicans, presiding over, as Dunning contended, "the darkest page in the saga of American history." These distortions still thrive in countless history textbooks and classrooms, in movies and on television shows, as well as on popular websites.