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

In a scholarly tome, McConnell, a history professor at Pitzer College in California, draws on an exhaustive synthesis of archival and published sources to challege the stereotype of the Grand Army of the Republic, the largest Union Army veterans' organization, as a flag-waving pressure group focussing on veterans' pensions and Republican politics. He depicts instead an organization that rapidly shed its partisan, quasi-military nature to develop along lines of typical Gilded Age fraternal orders. Loyal GAR lodges were centers of business as well as fellowship, while the national organization focused on ideals of self-sacrifice and comradeship as manifested in wartime service. Restricted to Union veterans, the membership held a preservationist vision of American identity and an increasingly sentimentalized view of the Civil War. The GAR enjoyed three decades of ``glorious contentment'' before being overtaken by the realities of the new century. Illustrated. (June)