Grand Army of Labor: Workers, Veterans, and the Meaning of the Civil War

Abstract

In 2011, I was teaching a post–Civil War US survey course focused on labor history called “Work and Community” (a title and orientation I had happily inherited) and assiduously trying to explain to a room full of somewhat baffled undergraduates why late nineteenth-century labor activists had described their industrial working conditions as “wage slavery” and what they had meant. For most students it was a peculiar phrase—wage and slave were not words they associated with one another—that felt consigned to a distant and strange past. A couple of weeks later I happened to travel up to New York for the weekend, visited Occupy Wall Street, and returned to teach the next week wearing a T-shirt that read, “Free the Wage Slaves.” Suddenly, and amid our shared laughter, this historical phrase seemed more immediately present.Ideas about historical memory and the uses of the past deeply inform Matthew E. Stanley's layered Grand Army of Labor: Workers, Veterans, and the Meaning of the Civil War. As part of a growing literature centered on the diverse efforts to shape Civil War memory in its near aftermath, Stanley explores both the meaning and the memory of that war in the fraught battles between labor and capital during the Long Gilded Age. The book focuses particularly on struggles, some more and some less successful, to extend the war's emancipationist promise to wage labor and the robust debates about how to understand the dichotomy between slave and free labor that infused labor activism during those years. In arguing for the relevance of historical memory as source material, Stanley explicitly roots culture in social conditions while also acknowledging its power to influence perception. Thus, he argues that “representations of the Civil War in particular were critical to the development of class consciousness in the United States” (4). This work to develop class consciousness took place in “union halls, third party campaigns, printing houses, and shop floors” (97). Through the presentation of varied Civil War memories, Stanley reveals how different groups of working people in the decades after 1865 viewed the past and how that, in turn, informed their view of their present.By delving into the specifics of how multiple groups—the Greenbackers, Knights of Labor, Populists, socialists, and AFL—both debated and connected their Civil War remembrances and commemorations to their respective ideological and strategic platforms, Stanley illustrates how those memories also shaped these organizing platforms. While the leaders and activists that populate Stanley's book appreciated the rhetorical power of contrasting slave and wage labor, they did not necessarily agree about how best to do that. Here Stanley identifies two main modes of thought—one that saw the Civil War as ushering in the liberation of all workers in a manner that went beyond “the idea that emancipation meant only the absence of bondage” (28) and another focused on preserving the Union and the place of white workingmen in it that took the form of “sectional reunion among white veterans” (35). Exploring such tensions both within and among these organizations amid significant external opposition from organized capital and entrenched political power allows Stanley to tease out a number of larger and interrelated themes: the significance of a usable past, the place of culture in social movements, why labor became increasingly conservative by the end of World War I, and, most importantly for Stanley, the relationship between class and racial oppression.Each of the central chapters focuses on a different group through which Stanley presents an inclusive view of labor that incorporates urban and rural workers, white and Black workers, and male and female workers. This inclusiveness also represented the radical prospect of extending abolitionist thought to liberate all workers. For Stanley, the Long Gilded Age marked a historical moment of lost possibility for working people, as labor's producerist and redistributive demands became increasingly narrowed to an acceptance of wage labor and a concern with achieving improvements within that system. Central to that lost opportunity was a failure of labor activists to adequately address the connection between racial and class oppression alongside the exploitation of racial and ethnic divisions by those committed to retaining power. Stanley argues that the inability of most labor organizations—from reform to radical—to effectively acknowledge the relationship between racial and class oppression in the name of sectional reconciliation too often resulted in a “softening of the Confederate cause” that failed to adequately promote biracial and class unity in favor of whiteness, a weakness exploited by those in power (57).The narrative arc of the book culminates in the ascendance of the AFL in the years after World War I, by which time the more radical promise of the Civil War legacy was gone and a more conservative orientation that favored reconciliation with the South along racial lines prevailed over the possibility of a multiracial labor movement. The Civil War was no longer seen as an “inclusive stage of impending proletariat revolution” but, instead, “as a nostalgic event of national trial, rejuvenation, and harmony” that was reflected in “balanced relations between labor and capital as well as between white workingmen” (179). For Stanley, this not only ended the radical possibilities that could have arisen from the Civil War but also, combined with the early twentieth-century federal subversion of radicalism, the patriotic demands of World War I, and the first Red Scare, ushered in a decades-long labor conservatism that dominated the remainder of the twentieth century.Deftly using varied and often competing Civil War memories, Stanley elucidates both the emancipatory possibilities of an inclusive and multiracial abolitionism for labor and the limitations of that promise in the years that followed. In doing so, he reminds us that disagreements about historical meaning are always political. As I tried to explain to my “Work and Community” students, and as Stanley so clearly explicates in his account, the end of chattel slavery lent itself to a deeper consideration of the place and meaning of wage labor amid the rhetorical power of abolitionist language and powerful memories of the Civil War experience.