ABOUT THIS BOOK

Enlisting memory in a new fight for freedom

From the Gilded Age through the Progressive era, labor movements reinterpreted Abraham Lincoln as a liberator of working people while workers equated activism with their own service fighting for freedom during the war. Matthew E. Stanley explores the wide-ranging meanings and diverse imagery used by Civil War veterans within the sprawling radical politics of the time. As he shows, a rich world of rituals, songs, speeches, and newspapers emerged among the many strains of working class cultural politics within the labor movement. Yet tensions arose even among allies. Some people rooted Civil War commemoration in nationalism and reform, and in time, these conservative currents marginalized radical workers who tied their remembering to revolution, internationalism, and socialism.

An original consideration of meaning and memory, Grand Army of Labor reveals the complex ways workers drew on themes of emancipation and equality in the long battle for workers’ rights.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Matthew E. Stanley is an associate professor of history at Albany State University. He is the author of The Loyal West: Civil War and Reunion in Middle America.

REVIEWS

"This book is a must for those who would strive to replace marble men with stories of people who lived and died fighting against monopoly, white supremacy, inequality, militarism, convict labor, and a growing internal empire." --Journal of American History

"As Matthew Stanley shows, the foot-soldiers in Grand Army of Labor lost many of their initial electoral battles. Yet pioneering efforts ultimately succeeded in popularizing the idea that veterans’ benefits were a good working model for more expansive social welfare programs, benefiting all U.S. workers and their families." --Against the Current

"Stanley's outstanding study reminds us of the power of symbols--including popular images of antislavery leaders, such as Abraham Lincoln, and abolitionist martyrs, such as John Brown--as well as incomplete and skewed historical representations, such as the Lost Cause." --Journal of the Civil War Era

"Matthew Stanley’s capacious study gives many voices their due in this decades long struggle to harness the meaning of the Civil War into the fight for a more democratic America." --Civil War Monitor

"Grand Army of Labor: Workers, Veterans, and the Meaning of the Civil War shows how industrial workers, farmers, and radicals deployed an 'antislavery vernacular' in their struggles against Gilded Age and Progressive Era capitalism. They cast themselves as the natural torchbearers of the antebellum free labor ideal, which, they argued, targeted not only chattel slavery, but wage labor — heralding what Karl Marx envisioned as a 'new era of the emancipation of labor.'" --Jacobin

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Contents

Foreword

Acknowledgments

Introduction: A Second Great Emancipator

Chapter 1. King Labor: Workers Imagine Emancipation beyond Equality

Chapter 2. Southern Palm, Northern Pine: Greenbackers and the Reconciliation of Class

Chapter 3. Against Masters and Money Power: The Knights of Labor and Wage Slavery

Chapter 4. The Red Flag of Emancipation: Socialism and Revolutionary Memory

Chapter 5. The Blue-Gray Campaign: Populism and White Reunion

Chapter 6. Citadel of Labor: The American Federation of Labor and Reformist Memory

Chapter 7. The Blue and the Gray and the Red: The Rise and Repression of Proletarian Memory

Epilogue: Resurrecting John Brown’s Body

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Back cover