While other historians have illustrated how the military provided such critical elements to modern industrialization and organization as line and staff functions (see, for instance, Walter Licht. Working for the Railroad: The Organization of Work in the Nineteenth Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), Russell Johnson points to another notable military contribution. In his examination of Civil War–era Dubuque, Iowa and its soldiers, Johnson demonstrates how enlistees' everyday Union army experiences encompassed numerous characteristics of life in an urban industrial society.

Johnson depicts 1850s Dubuque as “pre-modern” in that it was not industrialized. Only after the town's economic decline following the Panic of 1857 did community leaders begin to build a manufacturing sector. Thus they set the community on its course of economic recovery and “modernization.”

The onset of the Civil War, however, precluded many of Dubuque's men from experiencing the consequences of industrialization and modernization at home. Despite strong war opposition among Dubuque's working class immigrant Democrats, the community filled its military quotas without ever resorting to the draft. In a densely written chapter, which would have benefited greatly from the incorporation of his related charts in Appendix B, Johnson demonstrates that those enlisting were “most likely sons living in low-nonmanual and artisan households and independent men among the city's artisans and unskilled workers” (p. 104). Because these were the people also suffering the greatest hardships as Dubuque struggled to restructure and rebuild its economy, they joined for both patriotic and economic reasons.

Once in the military, the Union army exposed Dubuque's sons to many of the “features that would become common in postwar industry, including specialization or functional differentiation, standardization of tasks to ensure uniformity, hierarchical organization, and a spirit of formality and impersonality between officials and underlings” (p. 147). Johnson's examples, such as the division of artillery tasks, the use of infantry manuals and formalized firing procedures, and the reliance on drum and bugle calls, readily demonstrate the military's role in preparing soldiers for factory life.

The Union army also immersed Dubuque's soldiers in critical characteristics of the urban environment. Johnson again skillfully exemplifies how soldiers gained first-hand experience with “population concentration, changes in mortality rates, the separation of home and work, widening social (class) distances, and the emergence of the neighborhoods as the most relevant socialization unit after the family” (p. 193).

Johnson does not ignore the home front or life after the Civil War. He examines how Dubuque responded to the charitable needs of the soldiers and their families and the postwar economic fortunes of its veterans. Johnson notes that initially town residents, particularly the women, attempted to provide aid to both the soldiers and their families. Yet because needs increased while resources and interest in offering assistance waned, aid focused solely on soldiers by early 1864. Just as many soldiers' families struggled during the war, the years after the conflict did not assure Dubuque's veterans of upward economic mobility. In another overly dense chapter that would have benefited from inclusion of the charts relegated to Appendix B, Johnson argues that Dubuque's veterans “persisted in the city at a higher rate than non-veterans but were little more occupationally stable and were less successful at accumulating property. The veterans' experience with a form of urban-industrial society in the military apparently helped them cope, though not necessarily excel, in postwar urban-industrial Dubuque” (p. 275).

Thus by the end of his narrative, Johnson leaves the reader with the sense that the Civil War was a watershed event, particularly in regard to socializing individuals for life in an industrialized society. Watershed is too strong a characterization. Rather than introducing them to industrial life, the Union army provided soldiers with experiences that expanded upon the industry-related working and living patterns that they had already encountered before the Civil War. Dubuque during the 1850s and early 1860s was not wholly deficient in the characteristics Johnson ascribes to life in an industrialized community. As he points out throughout his narrative, Dubuque's population was growing, its residential and social patterns were increasingly class-differentiated, and its residents had been exposed to the diseases that came with urban living, such as TB and cholera. Further, as illustrated in Sean Wilentz's Chants Democratic: New York and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850(New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), the absence of factories did not equate to a lack of exposure to industrial working conditions. Even Dubuque artisans prior to the Civil War could have experienced deskilling and the collapse of apprenticeship. Johnson provides no evidence to the contrary.

Depicting the Civil War as a watershed and overstating the role of the Union army in modernization does not, however, negate the importance of Johnson's arguments. Particularly his chapters dealing with soldiers' everyday army experiences amply demonstrate the vital role the military played in creating a modern urban industrial society.