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The Grand Army of the Republic, the largest of all Union Army veterans' organizations, was the most powerful single-issue political lobby of the late nineteenth century, securing massive pensions for veterans and helping to elect five postwar presidents from its own membership. To its members, it was also a secret fraternal order, a source of local charity, a provider of entertainment in small municipalities, and a patriotic organization. Using GAR convention proceedings, newspapers, songs, rule books, and local post records, Stuart McConnell examines this influential veterans' association during the years of its greatest strength. Beginning with a close look at the men who joined the GAR in three localities -- Philadelphia; Brockton, Massachusetts; and Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin - McConnell goes on to examine the Union veterans' attitudes towards their former Confederate enemies and toward a whole range of noncombatants whom the verterans called "civilians": stay-at-home townsfolk, Mugwump penion reformers, freedmen, women, and their own sons and daughters. In the GAR, McConnell sees a group of veterans trying to cope with questions concerning the extent of society's obligation to the poor and injured, the place of war memories in peacetime, and the meaning of the "nation" and the individual's relation to it. McConnell aruges that, by the 1890s, the GAR was clinging to a preservationist version of American nationalism that many white, middle-class Northerners found congenial in the face of the social upheavals of that decade. In effect, he concludes, the nineteenth-century career of the GAR is a study in the microcosm of a nation trying to hold fast to an older image of itself in the face of massive social change.
- Sales Rank: #2434375 in Books
- Brand: Brand: University of North Carolina Press Chapel Hill
- Published on: 1997-02-26
- Released on: 1997-02-26
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.21" h x .84" w x 6.06" l, 1.22 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 332 pages
- Used Book in Good Condition
From Publishers Weekly
In a scholarly tome, McConnell, a history professor at Pitzer College in California, draws on an exhaustive synthesis of archival and published sources to challege the stereotype of the Grand Army of the Republic, the largest Union Army veterans' organization, as a flag-waving pressure group focussing on veterans' pensions and Republican politics. He depicts instead an organization that rapidly shed its partisan, quasi-military nature to develop along lines of typical Gilded Age fraternal orders. Loyal GAR lodges were centers of business as well as fellowship, while the national organization focused on ideals of self-sacrifice and comradeship as manifested in wartime service. Restricted to Union veterans, the membership held a preservationist vision of American identity and an increasingly sentimentalized view of the Civil War. The GAR enjoyed three decades of "glorious contentment" before being overtaken by the realities of the new century. Illustrated.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Gilded Age America, argues this book, can best be understood as a postwar period. McConnell (history, Pitzer Coll.) uses the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) as a tool to illuminate what this meant in the industrializing North. Much more than a partisan Republican political club lobbying ceaselessly for higher pensions for Union veterans, the GAR introduced significantly new notions of charity to the country. In keeping alive their maudlin memories as well as the high ideals of the Civil War, the organization's veterans helped shape the outlook of the nation. Finally, the GAR offered a self-image of a simpler America that, although it had in fact disappeared in the smoke of the war and postwar industrialization, proved appealing to middle-class whites in the throes of immense social change. The applicability to our own postwar period is obvious. Provocative social history for specialists.
- Thomas E. Schott, Office of History, 17th Air Force, Sembach, Germany
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
Provocative social history.
"Library Journal"
Stuart McConnell's fine book is a welcome addition to this literature.
"Reviews in American History"
[E]xtremely well written and a worthwhile contribution to the historiography of Gilded Age politics and culture.
"Southern Historian"
[D]emonstrates that the most interesting part of a war may well be what happens long after the guns fall silent.
"Journal of American History"
"Thoughtful, gracefully written, and imbued with sly humor, this book tells us much about the Civil War.
Reid Mitchell, author of "Civil War Soldiers""
ÝE¨xtremely well written and a worthwhile contribution to the historiography of Gilded Age politics and culture.
"Southern Historian"
ÝD¨emonstrates that the most interesting part of a war may well be what happens long after the guns fall silent.
"Journal of American History"
Thoughtful, gracefully written, and imbued with sly humor, this book tells us much about the Civil War.
Reid Mitchell, author of "Civil War Soldiers"
Most helpful customer reviews
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful.
War is Never Over
By James W. Durney
The story of the Union veterans of the Civil War is a complex one containing many subplots and competing lines. Like the war, nothing is simple and easy answers will not suffice to the complex questions. These men, like the age they lived in, are very different in outlook, challenges and attitudes. The common threads of remembrance, place in history and compensation interest all veterans.
The Grand Army of the Republic was the first truly organized veteran organization in America. Comprised of men who served in the Union Army during the war, it had tremendous political power with one in ten voters being members. This book covers the years from the end of the war, 1865, to when age and death had reduced the member's power. The author chose 1900 as the end of the book. While these men would live for almost another 60 years, their political power had started to diminish and would shortly fail.
The author judges the GAR by our standards and finds them wanting. He seems to have little respect for the organization, no sympathy for the men and damns them for holding the common views of race and religion for their time. The GAR was a white, Republican, anti-catholic organization but so was most of America from 1865 to 1900. The GAR is only a reflection of the society the men came from and were part of. This needs understanding and not judgment.
Another problem is sequencing of the story. The author cannot decide how to tell the story. Are we sequenced by year or do we cover a topic? The answer is both and the results can be difficult to follow. The reader is always trying to catch up with the switch from one style to the other.
I am still looking for a book on this subject; this is not a bad book but is not the book we need.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
Review Written for an American History Course, 1997
By ClioSmith
As I was preparing for a summer event relating to Civil War commemoration, I dug up a review I wrote on this book many years ago. Thinking back on this book,it was one of the more memorable ones of the many I reviewed while studying under Prof. Richard Beringer at the University of North Dakota. I give the book a "5" rating because as I think of it (which is every time I visit a cemetery and see the GAR symbol), I recall how nicely it relates local history to national history. Here's my original review:
"Be Gloriously content, the Union you preserved remains forever, and liberty, equal rights, and justice, is your heritage to your descendants even unto the judgment day" (Union Veteran leader John M. Thurston, 1898, cited on p. 234).
Glorious Contentment is a history of America's largest nineteenth-century veteran's organization, and it is much more. Stuart McConnell, who is himself not primarily a Civil War historian, has found in the Grand Army of the Republic a powerful link between the experience of the Civil War and the social background of the late nineteenth century. The Grand Army of the Republic (GAR for short) was founded in 1865, on the heels of a two-day military parade celebrating the victory of the Union over the Confederacy. It went out of existence in 1956, when the last Union veteran passed away. During the first half of those ninety-one years, it exerted a strong influence on American identity.
McConnell explains in the preface that he came upon his topic "through the back channel of community history." The GAR and its local chapters, he found, was a "microcosm" of the gilded age, a powerful reserve of patriotic and moral sentiment that held up an idealistic image of what the nation had been and ought to be. Local GAR posts were centers where veterans could maintain, through ritual and re-enactment, the memories they cherished. They offered, says McConnell, memories, communities of the imagination; communities that made up history as the members wished it had happened; communities, perhaps, as they wished the turbulent world they inhabited could be" (p. 104). While guarding the reminiscences of Union veterans, organizations like the GAR also exerted a significant influence on American self-identity. Commander-in-chief William Warren claimed in 1877 that his organization represented "the great conservative element of the nation" (p. 40).
Much of the research for Glorious Contentment was done in the archives of local GAR outfits. McConnell examined posts in Philadelphia, Massachusetts, and Wisconsin to build a composite picture of the membership and conduct of the national organization. His thorough acquaintance with advanced theories of ritual, belonging, and nationalism are apparent, particularly in the later chapters. The book is divided neatly into chapters corresponding to the GAR's initial founding (Parade); early methods of organization (Rank); membership patterns (Roster); local ritual activities (Post Room); local and national benevolence activities (Relief Fund); and nationalist ideology (Campfire and Flag).
Membership in the GAR, finds McConnell, tended strongly to cut across class boundaries: the bond of common soldierhood was stronger in most cases than that of economic class. GAR members were bound together by common ritual and a powerful overarching "cosmology" which, when fully developed by about 1880, placed the veterans and their experience at the center of what they saw as their nation's most significant historical event. Not surprisingly, the celebrations of that event took on quasi-religious aspects. The GAR, especially in its early years, utilized secret rituals resembling those of the Masons, the Odd Fellows, the Knights of Pythias, and other gilded age orders. Most interesting is the rite of induction, established in 1866, which required the enlistee to kneel blindfolded before a coffin while an armed guard acted out the sounds and motions of a firing squad. Just after the "ready, aim," command, the officer was to remove the blindfold and command the troops to "Hold! This is a soldier and a brother!" (p. 95). Within a few years, this ritual was softened or abandoned, and GAR rituals took on a more evangelical tone, with Bible reading and chaplains more prominent. In 1871, the same year the three-grade system (recruits, soldiers, and veterans) was abolished, references to Christ were added to official ceremonies. As the GAR became less of a secret society, its rituals de-emphasized militarism and hierarchy, and took on aspects of a church service (p. 102). What remained always was the reaffirmation that in the Civil War, Union Veterans had sacrificed themselves at the hour of America's ultimate need.
Paradoxically, the GAR's emphasis on manliness, self-sufficiency and sacrificial service coexisted with its increasing demands for more government support for veterans. GAR posts did admirable charity and relief work, but as the members aged the national organization began lobbying for increased government benefits for veterans. In an age dreadfully fearful of socialism, some critics accused the GAR of treason against the great Victorian virtues of self-reliance and individualism. To justify its demands for increased government pensions, leaders in the 1880s and 90s developed an effective argument to defend their entitlement: they argued that veterans were only claiming what was already theirs by right--since they as individuals had preserved the nation, it was the duty of government to support them, regardless of their need or lack of it (p. 157). After President Grover Cleveland vetoed a generous dependent pension measure in 1887, the GAR lobbied for an even more generous one, which Benjamin Harrison signed in 1890. Victorious lobbyists called it "The most liberal pension measure ever passed by any legislative body in the world. . ." (p. 153). Though McConnell points out that many GAR leaders were hesitant about or opposed to such measures, one cannot help but see their organization as the closest nineteenth-century equivalent of today's AARP.
While the "manhood versus money" issue was argued, even among veterans, the GAR was busy trying to ensure that its conservative view of nation and history was not abandoned in the schools. When school textbooks appeared that failed to communicate adequately the "treason" of the Confederacy in the late war, veterans lobbied legislatures and threatened publishers. To ensure a sufficient degree of patriotism, they enacted local and state laws requiring the daily pledge of allegiance, and required public schools to fly the flag. McConnell mentions that in 1890 legislatures in both North Dakota and New Jersey passed laws requiring school flags. Civil War veterans, who constituted a powerful political elite, were ever on the lookout for ways to remind the nation of its glorious preservation in 1865.
Perhaps the most far-reaching contribution of the GAR was the conservative view of American history it helped to create and maintain. McConnell notes that while pre-1865 ideology was often radical, looking to the war as a means of clearing away the dead thickets of tradition, postwar ideology interpreted the conflict as a battle for preservation, not liberation. The war had rescued not only the Union, but whatever was presumed to represent good old American tradition. Integral to this view, which McConnell links to English Whig history, was the notion that the Civil War had a changeless moral quality. As a GAR commander said in 1884, "we [fighters for the Union] were eternally right, and they [the Confederates] were eternally wrong" (p. 190). The conflict had been grand and cosmic, an exceptional event the likes of which had never been seen before and would not be again.
The historiography of Union veterans was moralistic, and it also hid the truth about the cruel nature of the war. McConnell finds that the recollections of both officers and rank and file soldiers were sentimental and highly selective, stressing the large themes of providence, sacrifice, brotherhood and glory, while ignoring or downplaying violence and death. Realistic accounts such as Ambrose Bierce's recollection In the Midst of Life and Stephen Crane's novel The Red Badge of Courage did not appear until the 1890s. McConnell suggests that sentimentalism about war had some unhappy practical consequences: in the 1898 war with Spain, American soldiers neglected many basic sanitary and safety precautions because they had learned from the veterans of the last conflict to look for the glories of war instead of its dangers.
Glorious Contentment is a very worthwhile piece of historical scholarship. Except for the third chapter, which tediously examines membership patterns in various local posts, it is very engaging. The great value of the book lies in the way it connects the experience of the Civil War with the way experience was shaped in the postwar era. McConnell suggests in the preface that the habit of periodization has frequently prevented historians and their students from appreciating the long-term effects of powerful events. Likewise, it is not often that we are challenged to go beyond surface manifestations of nationalism and asked to critically consider the nature of the experiences and rituals that make up our sense of identity as Americans. If it is true that the second half of the nineteenth century was the era that laid the most important foundation for the following century (and I believe it was), then Glorious Contentment is quite an important work for helping us understand who we are.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
Not so glorious contentment?
By Douglas E. Libert
An excellent critical book on the Grand Army of the Republic. It makes one wonder from reading it how many interpretations of Civil War events were deleted by the Grand Army's "politically correct" philosophy. Abe Lincoln might not have been the great military genius as he is represented in so many other books,in fact he might have been not much more than an Illinois railroad lawyer that was used by a powerful railroad lobby to push their interests.
The Grand Army however was a very influential middle class lobby that was able to influence what was printed into the history books. Apparently there were a lot of critics in the north,including many in "high places", who may have supported the war yet were critical of some of Lincoln's policies for various reasons. These critics which included some influential Union officers and opposition party members, were hushed during the war from presenting their ideas. When the war was over,the GAR helped keep Lincoln's presidency "smelling like a rose"(this all despite the Lincoln administration's unpopular draft,some rioting,protests,suspension of Habeus Corpus,I could go on and on. The GAR also decided which Union Generals would be seen as "saviors" of the Union and which ones would be seen as somewhat less than patriotic.
In regard to the Veterans Pensions handed out later to Union Veterans, the determination of who received them and how much was also a political function of the GAR. I get the feeling from my read of the book, that a lot of qualified Union veterans were most probably denied their pensions,and others less qualified were rubber stamped due to political connections with the GAR. Once again the author stressed the GAR was definitely a "bourgoisie" outfit and had a political agenda and the veteran seemed subservient to GAR policy. (Membership in the GAR did cut across class lines somewhat but the lodges seemed to be controlled by the more educated middle classes.)The GAR was able to control US elections as high as the US President. Most of the early officials of the GAR were former Union officers with a desire to see the south punished and GAR political agendas firmly and permanently established.(At least this is how I read the book.)This book presents the GAR as a powerful post Civil War lobby which faded into obscurity by the late 1890's. To that generation the Civil War was an all defining presence never to be forgotten even for a second.
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