In Grand Army of Labor, Matthew Stanley reimagines the deep and varied field of Civil War memory. Although the usual foci of such studies—race, sectionalism, and party politics—are never far from the surface of this fine new book, they run parallel to a different set of questions revolving around the relationship of labor to capital, the possibilities of establishing a just postbellum economic system, and perhaps most important, the meaning of freedom in the aftermath of a war that promised a “new birth of freedom.” Along the way, Stanley nods toward E. P. Thompson to show how “the material positions of workers” were “engendered through rituals, value systems, and stories,” specifically the speeches, rallies, and publications that promoted ways in which a Union victory and the emancipation of the enslaved would continue to expand freedom and opportunity to Americans (4–5). Moreover, Stanley provides a compelling argument for the importance of Civil War veterans—as symbols and as actual laboring men and activists—in the early histories of organized labor and the American Left.
Stanley looks at labor organizations such as the National Labor Union, Knights of Labor, and the American Federation of Labor, and rural workers’ organizations such as the Farmers Alliance and the People’s Party. As he does so, Stanley presents subtle explorations of the evolving ideologies and rhetoric surrounding human rights, slavery and freedom, land redistribution, and fair labor practices, all while examining the politicians, activists, and organizations that promoted them. The Grand Army of the Republic looms large at times, as leftists and labor organizers adapted their militant rhetoric and their fraternal assumptions. Veterans attached themselves to the massive fraternal organization by featuring it at celebrations and events, and by sponsoring their own “Blue and Gray” campaigns and reunions. Indeed, by the turn of the twentieth century, the new Labor Day holiday had become, after Labor Day, the second-most popular day for veterans’ reunions.
Although—perhaps not surprisingly—Confederate veterans and southerners more generally disappear from the story for extended periods of time, one of Stanley’s contributions is to include former Confederates in a historical narrative that typically focuses on the North. The ultimately unsuccessful efforts to incorporate southerners into a larger effort—aside from momentary successes such as Virginia’s Readjuster movement and the Populists—were largely overshadowed by veterans’ organizations, which followed an easier reconciliation process that would ignore hot-button topics such as racial equality and economic justice.
To the extent that it is possible, Stanley also presents a biracial history of leftist activism. Yet African Americans were largely only symbols for the white men who drive Stanley’s narrative. Rhetorical attacks on slavery were often somewhat detached from the actual experiences of the enslaved. Certain Black activists rose to some prominence during the Populists’ brief flirtation with color-blind economic and political cooperation, but, for the most part, organized labor was unable or unwilling to cast aside the overwhelming reluctance of white workers to champion the same rights for Black workers that they advocated for themselves. They were left to form their own meanings of the war in developing alternative—and often more radical—approaches, particularly in the twentieth century.
Stanley populates the book with well-known characters such as Ignatius L. Donelly, Eugene V. Debs, and Samuel Gompers, but one of the joys of his book is the appearance of lesser-known activists and Civil War survivors who tried to tap into the Gilded Age’s “cult of the veteran” (133). They include bookbinder and pamphleteer Dyer Daniel Lum; Richard Josiah Hinton, a newspaperman, abolitionist, and Freedman’s Bureau agent who wrote a heroic biography of John Brown; and various members of Chicago’s anarchist leadership.
Abraham Lincoln became the most fungible of the movements’ symbols and rhetorical devices, as he could be portrayed as a “common man,” the “great emancipator,” and a radical redistributor of wealth (even if he himself would have had a hard time recognizing himself in some of those characterizations). By the aftermath of the First World War, however, despite the heroic if quixotic efforts of Debs, who was often compared to Lincoln, the sixteenth president had become a vaguely liberal representative of a lily-white notion of freedom and fairness that undermined radical critiques of American industry, summed up nicely in the subtitle of Chapter 7: “The Blue and the Gray and the Red: The Rise and Repression of Proletarian Memory.” Another problem for radicals was the Republican Party itself. Although the GOP was obviously the party of Lincoln and had pushed through the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, by the end of Reconstruction it had become the party most identified with the industrialization and centralization that radicals fought against.
Despite “the sweeping variety of Civil War memory within Gilded Age and Progressive Era labor unions, among political radicals, and in third party movements,” Stanley employs a number of narrative threads that impose order on a rather sprawling topic (4). He examines, for instance, the power of the word “slavery” in inspiring a variety of different ideas, and explores the international radical community’s interest in Civil War memory. Deeply and creatively researched, the book reflects a disciplined approach that should influence not only future research on Civil War memory and veterans but also on the development of the radical Left in the half-century after the Civil War.
In his foreword, Stanley connects the fifty years of economic flux and activist angst covered in his book to the twenty-first century development of “a new and growing inequality regime” (vii). His suggestion that we can better understand our current developments by grappling with the past infuses Grand Army of Labor with a sense of relevance and urgency that only adds to the book’s overall effectiveness.
