Book Review: Our Onward March: The Grand Army of the Republic in the Progressive Era
Our Onward March: The Grand Army of the Republic in the Progressive Era. By Jonathan D. Neu. New York, Fordham University Press, 2025. Softcover, 288 pp. $35.00.
Reviewed by Jon Tracey
While there has been an increasing amount of scholarship on U.S. veterans and their postwar lives, there has not been nearly the growth in scholarship about the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR). In Our Onward March: The Grand Army of the Republic in the Progressive Era, Jonathan D. Neu sets out to examine the Union veterans’ group in the period between 1890 and 1920. As Neu notes, most past examinations of the GAR focus on the organization’s robust pension lobbying and original ties to the Republican Party, seeing 1890 as the end of power and relevance. Rather than looking at the GAR purely through the lens of national politics that those previous works used, Neu’s study examines the GAR’s posts as primarily a local community organization and an active one at that.
Each of the five chapters explores a different facet of community civic engagement. The first is an expansion of Neu’s previous work on GAR halls as both community center and active memorial; readers who live in towns that still have standing structures built as post memorial halls will find this especially interesting. Chapter 2 follows with the organization’s focus on influencing education to share their values of patriotism, unionism, occasionally racial equality, and the lessons of the Civil War. Shifting the geographic focus to areas not generally associated with Union veterans, Chapter 3 describes posts established in the South and West, exploring both the small communities of veterans initially from those areas and their bolstered growth by white and Black veterans that went on their own exodus to those regions following the war.
Chapters 4 and 5 are closely paired topically, as the chronological period moves ever forward. These later chapters explore the roles played by the GAR and its auxiliaries (organizations formed either for their sons or women) in the nation’s response to American imperialism, the Spanish-American War, and World War I. This is especially valuable, providing context to the famous images of multi-generational veterans seated beside each other that juxtapose contemporary military uniforms with GAR veteran coats and moving beyond the rare example of aged generals serving abroad who had fought in the Civil War.
Even as it might be easy to depict aged GAR veterans as relics of the past, more as oddities and nostalgia than active participants in the World War era, Neu provides evidence that they “engaged tirelessly in wartime defense activities and became useful contributors on the US home front.” (139) It is a poignant reminder to modern readers that though historic periods may appear distinct and separate from the vantage point of today, they overlapped within individual lifetimes.
As the book draws to a close, Neu illustrates the GAR’s debates about opening membership to other veterans before ultimately deciding that 1865 was the end of eligibility, thus dooming the organization to an inevitable future end. He then draws a stark contrast between the often-progressive political and racial views of the GAR against the more reactionary stances of their largest successor, the American Legion, in the interwar period.
This is a valuable study that adds to our understanding of U.S. veterans after the war and how they viewed their local and national service as continuing long past 1865. Even as they placed their muskets in a closet or above a mantle, they continued to don their veteran jackets and be outspoken advocates for community action that spread upward into national change. Never quite a monolithic group, Neu still provides ample evidence that both white and Black GAR posts never fully slipped into quiet acceptance of reconciliation. They saw the Civil War as one for both Union and Emancipation, and thought these truths, along with the lessons of consequences of being unprepared for war, or not being dedicated to national unity, were ones that needed to be constantly shouted from the rooftops.
