Edmund Rosenkrantz writes, “The views of Grant [Vita, January-February, page 42] brought to mind a description I recall from years ago, that to me fully captured him: ‘The man with the sad eyes and the iron mouth.’ Anyone know the author and the publication?” Vita author Elizabeth Samet did not recognize that phrase, but wrote: “Nineteenth-century biographer Hamlin Garland several times uses the phrase ‘man of iron’ in quotation marks, ventriloquizing contemporaries. Not always a term of praise. Twentieth-century biographer Jean Edward Smith notes that in 1878, when news circulated that Grant might run for a third presidential term, The St. Louis Globe-Democrat proclaimed Grant ‘A man of iron’ in preference to Rutherford B. Hayes, ‘a man of straw’ (Smith, Grant, 614).” Can any reader provide a precise citation?
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