Conclusion
Efforts to improve the martial efficiency of Guard organizations in the late nineteenth century paralleled calls for increased efficiency in society in general and were in effect designed to make the “best” soldiers from the “best” citizens.47 Military academies, the growth of professionalism in sport and business, and the multiplication of expert professions all point to the increasing significance of technical expertise, both in the military and in Gilded Age civilian society.48 In short, bureaucratic techniques of organization, rationality, and advances in weaponry and logistics were applied to the making of war.
Indeed, as powerful as long-range weaponry was becoming, “it was the social technique of bureaucratically rationalized violence” that enabled Western nations to succeed in their colonial ambitions.49 Personal heroism seemingly had little to offer in the face of industrialized warfare. Yet, the imagery of masculine heroism, promoted through war commemoration and the martial displays of Guardsmen, had important cultural and organizational effects, in terms of preparing men for war and providing them with cohesion in battle.The patriotic response of citizen soldiers in 1898 to the war with Spain was not just a reaction to the immediate social conditions of the 1890s. It was the culmination of decades of war commemoration and a developing cultural identification of national progress with the manly cultivation of martial ideals during peacetime. Part of this process was the incubation of martial ideals in the National Guard and their propagation to the wider public through regular martial displays from the end of the Civil War. The image of the American citizen soldier as heroic warrior would be utilized in the coming century to raise armies and fight modern total wars. The promotion of martial manhood through commemoration and martial display was a powerful social force that incubated martial ideals of citizenship and national progress through warfare.
It promoted nationalist patriotism among noncombatants and was a significant factor in preparing the nation psychologically for both reunion between North and South and popular involvement in the Spanish-American War. The National Guard, therefore, played a key part in promoting the culture of war in Gilded Age United States and in reinforcing traditional ideas about men as warriors and soldiers.Notes
1. The Gilded Age is the period between the assassination of Abraham Lincoln in 1865 and 1901. It is associated with huge growth of wealth, leaps in industrial development, and westward expansion, as well as accompanying issues of governance and corruption. Sean Dennis Cashman, America in the Gilded Age from the Death of Lincoln to the Rise of Theodore Roosevelt. 3rd ed. New York, 1993.
2. Anne C. Rose, Victorian America and the Civil War. New York, 1992, pp. 245—247. Rose examines the relationship between Victorian culture and the Civil War, arguing that while war commemoration was influenced by and “strengthened a broader mood of cultural criticism that centered on similar attention to warfare and history,” it also offered Victorian Americans “avenues of emotional escape” from the effects of immigration, urbanization, and industrialization through a romanticized past. For an alternative view, see Charles Royster, The Destructive War: William Tecumseh Sherman, Stonewall Jackson and the Americans. New York, 1991.
3. Gaines M. Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause and the Emergence of the New South, 1865-1913. New York, 1987.
4. Jerry Cooper, The Militia and the National Guard Since Colonial Times: A Research Guide. Westport, CN, 1993, p. 2. The classic critique of the militia’s military effectiveness is Emory Upton, Military Policy of the United States. Washington, D.C., 1904. For a contemporaneous view in support of the citizen soldier, see Grand Army of the Republic commander John A. Logan, The Volunteer Soldier of America. Chicago, 1887.
Also see Russell F. Weigley, Towards and American Army: Military thought from Washington to Marshall. New York, 1962, pp. 137—161; Russell F. Weigley, History of the United States Army. Bloomington, IN, 1984; Allan Millett and Peter Maslowski, For the Common Defense: A Military History of the United States of America. New York, 1984; Jerry Cooper, The Rise of the National Guard: The Evolution of the American Militia, 1865-1920. Lincoln, NE, 1997; Jim Dan Hill, The Minute Man in Peace and War: A History of the National Guard. Harrisburg, PA, 1964; John K. Mahon, History of the Militia and the National Guard. New York, 1983. For state-specific studies, see Cooper, Rise of the National Guard; John K. Mahon, “Bibliographic Essay on Research into the History of the Militia and the National Guard,” Military Affairs. 48, April 1984, pp. 74—77.5. Cooper, Rise of the National Guard, p. 2.
6. Other authors have used terms similar to “martial manhood” to discuss the social importance of late-nineteenth-century martial ideals: Cecilia O’Leary, To Die For: the Paradox of American Patriotism. Princeton, NJ, 1999, pp. 30—33; T. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Anti-Modernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920. New York, 1981, pp. 98—102; Mark Kann, On the Man Question: Gender and Civic Virtue in America. Philadelphia, PA, 1991, pp. 15—19; and E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era. New York, 1993, pp. 232—239.
7. Paul Buck, The Road to Reunion, 1865-1900. Boston, 1937, p. 257.
8. For a more detailed view of the 71st, see Mark Potter, “A Good Soldier, a Good Shot and a Good Fellow: The Seventy-First New York, Martial Manhood and the Shadows of Civil War, 1850—1898” PhD thesis, University of Melbourne, 2005. Also see Fred L. Israel, “New York’s Citizen Soldiers: The Militia and Their Armories,” New York History. 42, April 1961, pp. 145—156; John F. and Kathleen Smith Kutolowski, “Commissions and Canvasses: The Militia and Politics in Western New York, 1800—1845,” New York History 63, 1, 1982, pp.
4—38; Ronald Howard Kotlik, “Fixed Bayonets: The New York State National Guard during the Era of Industrial Unrest, 1877—1898” PhD thesis, State University of New York, 2005; and Russell S. Gilmore, “New York Target Companies: Informal Military Societies in a Nineteenth-Century Metropolis,” Military Collector and Historian. Summer 1983, pp. 60—66.9. David Greenberg, for example, writes that male effeminacy as a perceived collective phenomenon emerged in Britain around the same time (The Construction of Homosexuality. Chicago, 1988, pp. 383—393). Also see Robert Nye, ed., Sexuality. Oxford, 1999; George L. Mosse, The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity. Oxford, 1996, especially p. 15.
10. Cited in Greenberg, Construction of Homosexuality, p. 393.
11. Carl Sandburg, Always the Young Strangers. New York, 1952, p. 409. Also see Stuart McConnell, Glorious Contentment: The Grand Army of the Republic, 1865-1900. Chapel Hill, NC, 1992, p. xii; Rose, Victorian America and the Civil War, p. 245; Michael S. Sherry, In the Shadow of War: The United States Since the 1930’s. New Haven, CT, 1995, p. 1; Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America. New York, 1992, p. 89; and George M. Frederickson, The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union. New York, 1965.
12. Eugene S. Eunson to Augustus Francis, in Augustus Theodore Francis, History of the 71st Regiment, N.G.N.Y. New York, 1919, p. 851.
13. Francis, History of the 71st Regiment, N.G.N.Y, pp. 322—23.
14. McConnell, Glorious Contentment.
15. David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Cambridge, MA, 2001, pp. 1—5; Nina Silber, The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865-1900. Chapel Hill, NC, 1993, pp. 92—123; and Kirk Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America. Princeton, NJ, 1997, pp. 162—208.
16. “New York’s Military Memorials,” New York Times.
16 February 1881.17. “The 71st in New Orleans,” New York Times. 28 February 1881.
18. John F. Cowan, A New Invasion of the South: Being a Narrative of the Expedition of the Seventy-First Infantry, National Guard, through the Southern States, to New Orleans. New York, 1881, p. 41.
19. “The Seventy-First’s Trip: Honoring the Confederate Dead,” New York Times. 4 March 1881.
20. New Orleans Democrat. Cited in Cowan, New Invasion of the South. Appendices, p. 20.
21. Martha Derthick, The National Guard in Politics. Cambridge, MA, 1965, p. 16.
22. Adjutant General, Annual Reports of the Adjutant-General of the State of New York. Albany, 1874, p. 9.
23. “Encampments,” Army and Navy Journal. September 1870.
24. A. C. Sharpe, “Organization and Training of a National Reserve for Military Service,” Journal of the Military Services Institute. (JMSI) 10, 1889, p. 28. Also see Major Howard A. Giddings, “How to Improve the Condition and Efficiency of the National Guard,” JMSI 21, 1897.
25. McConnell, Glorious Contentment, pp. xii, 47.
26. O’Leary, To Die For, p. 197. O’Leary talks specifically of veterans reenactments in the early twentieth century, but her conclusions are equally valid here. Also see Greg Dening, Performances. Melbourne, 1996.
27. “New York’s Parade Ground,” Army and Navy Journal. November 1887, p. 349.
28. “Pennsylvania National Guard,” Pennsylvania Times. Cited in Army and Navy Journal. October 1887, p. 251.
29. Army and Navy Journal. October 1887, p. 251.
30. Arthur M. Schlesinger, “Biography of a Nation of Joiners,” American Historical Review. October 1944. pp. 1—25.
31. “Value of Military Display,” Army and Navy Journal. September 1888, p. 15.
32. “Seventy-first New York,” Army and Navy Journal. March 1881.
33. Mona Do mosh, “Those ‘Gorgeous Incongruities’: Polite Politics and Public Space on the Streets of Nineteenth-Century New York City,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers. 88, 2, June 1998, pp.
209—226.34. Susan G. Davis, Parades and Power: Street Theatre in Nineteenth Century Philadelphia. Philadelphia, 1986; Mary P Ryan, Civic Wars: Democracy and Public Life in the American City during the Nineteenth Century. Berkeley, 1997. For a discussion of festivals as “arenas where factions struggled to define national identity and set the limits of citizenship,” see Clifton Hood, “An Unusable Past: Urban Elites, New York City’s Evacuation Day, and the Transformations of Memory Culture,” Journal of Social History. 37, 4, 2004, pp. 883—913. Also see David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776—1820. Chapel Hill, NC, 1997; Simon P. Newman, Parades and the Politics of the Street: Festive Culture in the Early American Republic. Philadelphia, 1997.
35. Army and Navy Journal. 1 April 1871.
36. Nathan Joseph, Uniforms and Nonuniforms: Communication through Clothing. New York, 1986, pp. 102-111.
37. Cincinnati Commercial. Cited in Cowan, Appendices, p. 17. On the sexual allure of uniforms, see Valerie Steele, Fetish: Fashion, Sex and Power. New York, 1996, pp. 180-182; Tim Newark, Brasseys Book of Uniforms. London, 1998, p. 42.
38. Scott Hughes Myerly, British Military Spectacle: From the Napoleonic Wars through the Crimea. Cambridge, MA, 1996, pp. 58-59; Ruth P. Rubenstein, Dress Codes: Meanings and Messages in American Culture. Boulder, CO, 1995, p. 3.
39. Davis, Parades and Power, p. 71. For the British context, see Myerly, British Military Spectacle. For the use of military spectacle as a force of social control, see Karl Liebknecht, Militarism and Anti-Militarism. New York, 1972.
40. Thomas C. Leonard, Above the Battle: War-Making in America from Appomattox to Versailles. New York, 1978.
41. The games described were part of a display called “Mimic War” at the New York Historical Society, 2002. Games included “Game of Napoleon: The Little Corporal” (Parker Brothers, 1895), “Rough Rider Ten Pins” (R. Bliss Manufacturing Company, 1898), “Roosevelt at San Juan” (Chaffee & Seldon, 1899), “The Great Game: Uncle Sam at War with Spain” (Rhode Island Game Company, 1898), and “Game of the Little Volunteer” (McLoughlin Brothers, 1898). I have used the accompanying commentary as a source for this perspective.
42. Sandburg, Always the Young Strangers, p. 115.
43. “The Drift Towards War,” The Bookman: A Literary Journal. April 1896, p. 154.
44. Vaughan Kester, “Transformation of Citizen into Soldier,” Cosmopolitan. June 1898, p. 150-151. Also see Gerald Linderman, The Mirror of War: American Society and the Spanish-American War. Ann Arbor, MI, 1974.
45. Charles Johnson Post, The Little War of Private Post. Boston, 1960, p. 35.
46. A. Maurice Low, “Amateurs in War,” The Forum 26, October 1898, pp. 157-166.
47. Linderman, Mirror of War, pp. 90-100.
48. The increasing number of military periodicals in this period is a good example of this process. Also see John P Mallan, “The Warrior Critique of the Business Civilisation,” American Quarterly. Fall 1956, pp. 216-230; Terry Mulcaire, “Progressive Visions of War in the Red Badge of Courage and the Principles of Scientific Management,” American Quarterly. 43, 1, 1991, pp. 46-72.
49. R.W. Connell, Masculinities. Berkeley, CA, 1995, p. 192.