Glorious Contentment: The Grand Army of the Republic, 1865-1900 (review)

book reviews283 Glorious Contentment: The Grand Army of the Republic, 1865-1000. By Stuart McConnell. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992. Pp. xvii, 312. $32.50.) This well-written work offers a social history of the largest CivU War veterans ' organization, the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR). McConnell sees the GAR as far more than a lobby group hell-bent on gaining pensions and keeping Republicans in office. Although originally organized as a political arm of the GOP in the late 1860s, the GAR shortly dropped its partisan activities to become first a fraternal organization resembling other all-male societies like the Masons and Odd Fellows, then a charitable society, an advocate for veterans' pensions, and, finally, an intensely patriotic group. According to McConnell, the GAR lay "virtually moribund" (xiv) in 1872, reviving by the early 1880s to serve as a social order and peaking in the early 1890s in the wake of its successful quest for pensions for all Union army veterans . The story ends in 1900, as death inevitably eroded the membership. McConnell seeks to assess GUded Age America as a postwar era, as a means of gauging the lasting effects of the CivU War on society. The GAR's history, he argues, "is a study in microcosm of a nation trying to hold fast to an older image of itself in the face of massive social change" (xv). He argues that the veterans represented the essence of Victorian values, espousing a concept of manliness that stressed self-control, self-denial, self-help, and rejection of materialism. These values conflicted starkly with the realities of an increasingly urban, heterogeneous, industrializing society. In virtually all that they did, GAR activists referred back to their selfless efforts during the Civil War to preserve the nation. Whether to justify their pensions, demand a proper interpretation of the war, or define American nationalism, McConnell contends, they exalted republican civic virtue as the hallmark of veteran service. Consequently, he sees the GAR as largely preservationist and backward-looking. Its vision of American history and its place in that experience was frozen in time, 1861-65, when good republican citizen soldiers took up arms to save the republic. The GAR cosmology had little room for immigrants, industrial workers, blacks, or women. These white, middleand lower-middle-class men sought to preserve a social and cultural system that no longer existed. This brief summary does not sufficiently capture the complexity and subtlety of this well-researched work. McConnell uses three markedly different GAR posts as case studies to buttress general research in national GAR records and relies on a broad number of secondary works from the newer social history to inform his interpretations. Two issues deserved greater attention . At its peak, the GAR failed to recruit much more than 40 percent of eligible Union veterans. Why that was so and how nonmembers saw their place in Gilded Age society, how they defined the veteran's "cosmology," remain unexplained. Secondly, although McConnell implies that GAR membership and its activities to shape the history of the Civil War and define 284CIVIL WAR HISTORY American nationalism expanded in the 1890s in response to major changes in society, he does not say so directly, leaving the reader not fully convinced. For all that, this challenging work offers new insight to the lasting consequences of the Civil War and the nature of Gilded Age society. Jerry Cooper University of Missouri-St. Louis Dubious Victory: The Reconstruction Debate in Ohio. By Robert D. Sawrey. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1992. Pp. 194. $30.00.) Dubious Victory examines the effect of public opinion on the political process —and vice versa—in one important Northern state, Ohio. Sawrey asks the key question: What was it that Northerners wanted in the way of Reconstruction ? His answers demonstrate that historians who lament the failure of Reconstruction to secure substantive constitutional rights, or to provide economic security in the form of land, are guilty of imposing their own values on an era where they simply do not fit. What the voters of Ohio wanted, Sawrey finds, in an analysis that closely follows the path established by C. Vann Woodward in "Seeds of Failure...