Grand Army of Labor: Workers, Veterans, and the Meaning of the Civil War by Matthew E. Stanley

Abstract

Reviewed by: Grand Army of Labor: Workers, Veterans, and the Meaning of the Civil War by Matthew E. Stanley Jillian Marie Jacklin (bio) Grand Army of Labor: Workers, Veterans, and the Meaning of the Civil War. By Matthew E. Stanley. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2021. Pp. 297. Cloth, $110.00; paper, $30.00.) More than twenty years have passed since the publication of David Blight's important monograph Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (2001). Yet collective understandings of the sectional quarrel remain contested in the popular imagination, as heated debates over how the U.S. public should remember the war and its aftermath continue to fuel ongoing divisions between North and South, as well as heightened polarity in both the local and nationwide electorate. Meanwhile, Matthew E. Stanley's Grand Army of Labor sheds significant light on the working-class origins of the complicated disagreements over the "official" history of the military conflict and its outcomes. Through his deep and thorough investigation of a broad and diverse set of primary texts and artifacts, Stanley effectively convinces his readers that the story of laborers and their daily struggles provides essential context for comprehending the distinct but always overlapping layers of the post–Civil War political landscape. Indeed, he compellingly argues that "memory was … an enrollment tool" (7), which defined the parameters of freedom in the United States, and, as his analysis suggests, historical representations continue to influence the complex cultural atmosphere that exists within the contemporary nation-state. Stanley's sweeping and timely work provides a lesson on [End Page 401] the need to recognize how the practice of celebrating a collective military identity rooted in white patriarchy gained momentum during the postwar era, as well as how it endures in ways that continue to restrict access to American citizenship today. An ambitious endeavor, Stanley's project commences in the antebellum period, in which he begins his discussion of the antislavery movement and the emerging language of emancipation that coincided with efforts to promote Black liberation from chattel bondage. He then traces the role of these developments in shaping working-class cultural politics and labor organizing from the Civil War to the Progressive Era. Marching through an analysis of the platforms of the Free Soil Party, the Readjusters, the Knights of Labor, the Populists, the Industrial Workers of the World, and the American Federation of Labor, among others, Stanley claims that, at times, each of these political parties and worker associations equated the status of wage workers to that of enslaved African Americans in the antebellum South. Drawing on the speeches of partisan leaders and the literature that left-wing activists produced to promote worker solidarity and justice, Grand Army of Labor highlights the complex aspirations that these groups had—which existed along a cultural spectrum—and demonstrates the radical possibilities of electoral campaigning as well as the social ideologies that accompanied these organizing activities. Likewise, through this extensive exploration, Stanley references the conservative philosophies and discriminatory elements that undermined success during these opportune moments, when there were evident possibilities for destroying the untrammeled dominance of the two-party system in the United States. He also highlights the international aspects of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century labor movement, which ardent political repression had erased and continues to overshadow. Ultimately, as he persuasively indicates, an investment in white male supremacy and patriarchy, alongside the heightened nationalism rooted in military service, devastated more liberatory elements embedded in working-class activism. Thus Grand Army of Labor is a testament to the broad-based, though also exclusionary, terrain of struggle that participation in the Civil War created for veterans and their communities. Having a shared past in their physical efforts to eradicate slavery, former soldiers linked Black freedom and abolitionism to a language of emancipation for all people, regardless of faith, trade, gender, or race, which would support the needs and realities of everyday workers (though in most cases these were white male workers of western and northern Euro-American descent, especially those who had [End Page 402] direct links to Anglo-Saxonism). As Stanley's study highlights, antislavery did not equate to an erasure of racism, and...