# Ulysses S. Grant: The Curse of Loyal Friends

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/disturbing-history-7341005/ulysses-s-grant-the-curse-of-loyal-friends
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/disturbing-history-7341005/ulysses-s-grant-the-curse-of-loyal-friends.md
Podcast: [Disturbing History](https://stenobird.com/podcast/disturbing-history-7341005)
Published: 2026-06-14T14:40:02+00:00
Episode link: https://www.spreaker.com/episode/ulysses-s-grant-the-curse-of-loyal-friends--72523163
Audio file: https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/api.spreaker.com/download/episode/72523163/dhgrantfinal.mp3
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JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/disturbing-history-7341005/episodes/ulysses-s-grant-the-curse-of-loyal-friends
Duration seconds: 4676

## Resource

Ulysses S. Grant left the White House without a fortune, never took a bribe, and never sold an office, yet his administration produced more documented corruption than any presidency of the nineteenth century. This episode of Disturbing History continues our series on the dark history of presidential politics by walking straight into the Gilded Age and the Whiskey Ring, the federal liquor-tax fraud that siphoned millions of dollars out of the United States Treasury while a depression squeezed ordinary Americans, and traces how the trail of stolen tax money ran all the way to the desk of Grant's private secretary, General Orville Babcock, in the office adjoining the president's own. We open with the central question that runs through every scandal here. What happens when the honest man in the room is the reason the corruption survives? Drawing on sixteen years of law enforcement experience, your host lays out the pattern that connects Grant to crooked bosses and clean ones alike, the boss who stakes his spotless reputation on a guilty subordinate and makes that subordinate untouchable. Grant kept score on loyalty the way other men kept score on money, a habit forged during his years of failure before the Civil War, his binge drinking and resignation from the Army, the Hardscrabble farm, the firewood sold on St. Louis street corners, and the clerk's job in his brother's Galena leather store. Once a man was inside the wall of Grant's trust, almost nothing could throw him out, and the con men of the era learned to exploit that vulnerability like published exploit code.The episode follows that pattern through the Black Friday gold panic of September eighteen sixty-nine, where Jay Gould and Jim Fisk attempted to corner the New York gold market by buying access to Grant throug…

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## Transcript

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