In 1890, the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) was at its peak membership and peak influence. Infuriated by President Grover Cleveland’s veto of the Dependent Pension Bill in 1887, the GAR strongly supported Benjamin Harrison in 1888 and helped him defeat Cleveland. After Harrison’s victory, Congress passed, and Harrison signed, the Dependent and Disability Pension Act. This transformative piece of legislation seemed to be the culmination of the GAR’s work. According to some scholars, the organization turned inward after 1890 and quickly declined. Jonathan D. Neu, however, argues for a reconsideration of the post-1890 GAR. The organization did not retreat into insularity after this point. Instead, GAR posts were important community fixtures and the GAR became “a decentralized civic association whose aging members worked locally and regionally to instill a commitment to community reform, participation in public life, engagement with pressing social issues, and a pride in the democracy that they defended as young men” (3). The year 1890 was more a turning point than an endpoint because veterans refocused their activism toward “cooperative, community-building objectives guided by rank-and-file members” (3). This activism entitles the GAR to a place among the many Progressive Era social reform groups. Neu’s book employs a different methodology than other studies of the GAR, as he reconsiders the organization. Rather than focusing on the GAR’s lobbying and influence at the national level, he foregrounds local GAR posts and members to study grassroots activism, which he argues was “longer lasting and more outwardly engaged than previous historians have acknowledged” (7–8).

Neu begins with a reinterpretation of GAR posts, which were also known as memorial halls. These posts, he asserts, were not guarded, insular spaces that rejected other members of the community. Instead, GAR members sought to make their posts into community spaces. Throw your doors open to the public, Albert C. Leonard counseled his fellow veterans. Many of them heeded his advice. GAR members emphasized their role as teachers, a theme that appears frequently throughout this book. Many posts made officer installation ceremonies public and held open meetings, which provided entertainment and instruction for nonveteran guests. Scholars have correctly noted the proliferation of monuments after the Civil War. Neu illustrates how some people, veterans as well as nonveterans, wanted memorial halls rather than monuments. Indeed, at the dedication of the Soldiers Memorial Building in Toledo, Ohio, J. Kent Hamilton exulted that citizens had, in the building, a worthy soldiers’ monument, not one of “useless marble or bronze” (34). Memorial halls often became civic centers. In addition to finding ways to educate nonveterans in memorial halls, GAR members often led efforts to advocate for a public library. In communities where veterans did not lead a public library movement, GAR members often created post libraries for members and for the broader community. Most GAR members did not benefit from institutions of higher education when they were young men. However, they understood the importance of education and became important advocates of colleges and universities. Readers will be particularly interested in Neu’s discussion of Memorial University in Iowa, “one of the most daring educational experiments in GAR memorialization” (71).

After the Civil War, veterans settled all across the country. Neu focuses on GAR members who established posts in three specific regions of the United States: the southern states, the Great Plains, and the Far West. Unsurprisingly, white GAR members in the southern states had an undistinguished legacy on race. Consequently, GAR posts in the southern states “largely failed to demonstrate the spirit of community reform and progressive activism that the bonds of GAR membership unleashed elsewhere” (88). That said, it is worth noting, as Neu does, that Black posts kept the emancipationist memory of the war alive. In the Great Plains, by contrast, GAR members shaped the landscape as well as the development of the region and “firmly fastened the settlers of the nation’s heartland to an allegiance to a restored and consolidated nation” (94). In the far West, the GAR fared better than the southern states but was nonetheless sometimes stymied by “the region’s confounding labor, immigration, and race issues” (103). GAR members also looked beyond the borders of the United States. Veterans advocated for imperial and commercial expansion abroad because they perceived the United States’ “increasingly assertive standing in the world as the consummation of their Union victory” (106). During the Spanish-Cuban-American War, when many people succumbed to sectional reconciliationism, GAR posts spent most of their time following the service of hometown heroes and locally raised units rather than engaging in the culture of reunion.

GAR activism remained important during the Civil War semicentennial and the First World War. Neu illustrates the GAR’s continuing importance during the final years of the Progressive Era. Veterans continued to fight on the nation’s behalf. They became fixtures in preparedness parades. They used their status as saviors of the Union to instruct a new generation of soldiers how to do the same. Through all these different activities, they proved to be “among the wartime nation’s most devoted home front contributors” (164). By the end of World War I, however, the GAR’s spirit of reform sputtered out. Great War veterans emulated Civil War veterans in designing a fraternal organization: the American Legion. Yet unlike the GAR, Neu concludes, the American Legion redirected GAR civic activism toward reactionary objectives.

GAR members, Neu argues, should be understood as Progressive Era reformers. Although scholars have not paid much attention to their activism, Neu makes a compelling case for the importance of understanding the work of local GAR posts and members during the decades following 1890. Veterans, applying lessons they learned during the Civil War, stood ready to educate nonveterans and guide the nation toward their vision of strength and harmony. Anyone interested in veterans, social reform, and the legacies of the Civil War should read this book.