Jennifer Szalai in The New York Times:
As portents go, little could be more ominous than what took place on the evening of March 4, 1873, at the inaugural gala for President Ulysses S. Grant’s second term. A cavernous wooden structure had been built for the event. Hundreds of canaries had been brought in to serenade the guests, who were treated to a lavish spread of party food — partridges and oysters, boars’ heads and lobsters. But one crucial element had been bizarrely overlooked: The room wasn’t heated. The food started to freeze. By the time Grant and his entourage arrived, some of the canaries had keeled over, “falling like little lumps of frozen yellow fruit on the diners and dancers below.”
This dramatic image shows up in the last quarter of Fergus M. Bordewich’s “Klan War,” a vivid and sobering account of Grant’s efforts to crush the Klan in the South. The book traces an arc that seemed to bend toward justice before it got twisted again. After his first term, “the president could credibly claim he had broken the back of the Ku Klux Klan,” Bordewich writes. But the dead canaries, which punctuate a chapter titled “Grant Triumphant,” are a grim clue that the victory will not last. When Grant began his second term, the will and the money to fight white supremacist terror had already started to ebb.
More here.