War and the Musical Grotesque in Crumb’s “When Johnny Comes Marching Home”

This analysis interprets Crumb’s setting of “When Johnny Comes Marching Home” as a musical memorial. I situate this song within larger memorial culture, Civil War memory, and musical memorials to show how it commemorates and criticizes official narratives of the Civil War. While the first three verses present an earnest version of the song that celebrates military power, the fourth quotes Mahler to transform the song into an ironic funeral march. I draw on scholarship on the musical grotesque to show how this grotesque funeral march critiques conventional perceptions of the Civil War, and how Crumb extends this critique to more recent American wars.

Conclusion

This conclusion offers an account of the main similarities between the experiences of early modern England and those of modern post-civil war states. It argues that many of the challenges that the republican governments faced have continued to confront states into the twenty-first century, and that, though the shape of a particular post-war settlement is historically contingent, the central issues with which its instigators must wrestle are not as temporally or geographically specific as we might expect. Further, it suggests that this is also true of many of the responses, from the use of amnesties and pardons to martyr narratives and the ‘othering’ of opponents. It provides one of the first transtemporal and transnational comparisons of Civil War memory and, in so doing, attempts to initiate further conversation between scholars of civil war memory across time and space.

The Red Flag of Emancipation

This chapter considers the production of Civil War memory among Gilded Age socialists and anarchists. These radicals and revolutionaries built on the redistributionist claims of abolitionists and freedpeople, and exceeded those of trade unionists, by challenging not only the legitimacy of slave property or plantations but also the mechanisms of production and property rights. Late nineteenth-century socialists came to see themselves as a postscript to abolitionism, and their “red memory” operated through anarchist networks, militias, and workers’ parties. Most sought an end to partisan debates over loyalty and section, which hindered working-class organization, and used Civil War memory to espouse internationalism, prefiguring the Socialist Party of America and the Industrial Workers of the World.

Epilogue

The epilogue appraises the state of radical labor and Civil War memory surrounding the war’s semisesquicentennial. What Eric Hobsbawm terms “the patriotism of the Left,” including the cultural symbols of the Civil War era, was critical to political fights against right-wing nationalism and anti-liberalism. Emancipationist memory was especially central to the political culture of the Communist Party USA, as well as to the broader “Americanization” movement within the Popular Front. However, the “Good War” against fascism provided powerful nationalist mythologies surrounding “Victory Culture” that were less bound by class. Further, the Cold War--and a mass culture of domestic anti-communism--scuttled the revolutionary memory of the Civil War as a precursor to broader class emancipation.

Introduction

The introduction outlines the book’s major arguments and argues for the importance of collective memory. The late nineteenth-century US labor movement was “abolitionized,” as land reformers, socialists, anarchists, labor agitators, social democrats, and populists all elicited the Civil War veteran. The labor movement’s wielding of Civil War memory achieved at least five often overlapping principal functions: ideology, recruitment, nostalgia, assimilation, and nationalism. Palpable tensions between modes of commemoration rooted in nationalism and reform and revolutionary memories centered more on internationalism and socialism revealed and influenced broader political currents between the Civil War and the first decades of the twentieth century.

The Blue-Gray Campaign

This chapter investigates how Civil War memory informed the currents and contradictions of Populist thought. Populists painted themselves as neo-abolitionists fighting economic enslavement and combined antislavery vernacular with conceptions of modernity. Populism largely repudiated the Lost Cause. At the same time, the movement was profoundly shaped by the popular reconciliatory trends. This was especially true of the party’s 1892 blue-gray presidential campaign. While Populists attempted to circumvent North-South issues through class or vocational solidarity, regional and racial divisions proved ruinous. Though an effective and permanent coalition required the complete partnership of fully equal nonwhite laborers, Populist-style reconciliation often reinforced the color line even as it defied the Solid South and created new possibilities for Black political engagement.

Against Masters and Money Power

This chapter illustrates how the Knights of Labor used Civil War memory to construct organizational culture and promote specific workplace campaigns. Believing the issue of “slavery” (economic domination) unsettled, Knights saw themselves as the rightful heirs of the abolitionists and Radical Republicans. They established affiliate groups for worker-veterans, including the Blue and Gray Association of the Knights of Labor, and expanded the use of antislavery metaphors. Yet the order’s labor republicanism, and the turn by some members toward radicalism, alienated veteran-labor auxiliaries from mainstream veterans’ organizations, notably the Grand Army of the Republic.

Grand Army of Labor

The politics and culture of organized labor during the age of industrial capitalism in the United States was refracted through the semantics, ideas, and personalities of sectional conflict. The experience of war helped forge class consciousness, and the notion of a continued antislavery struggle was central to the identities of newly radicalized workers. This book explores the sweeping variety of Civil War memory within Gilded Age and Progressive Era labor unions, among political radicals, and in third-party movements. That memory evinced revolution and reform, as competing and sometimes coinciding narratives emerged between Reconstruction and World War I. The first worked largely in the service of industrial unionism and depicted the Civil War’s legacy as a precursor to a thorough--even global--liberation of all workers. The second emphasized the preservation of the Union, the imperatives of legalism and social order, and the fundamental loyalty of white workingmen to the reconstituted nation-state, tending to further conciliatory labor strategies, as well as the leadership prerogatives of exclusionary craft unions. The preeminence of reformist memory, which was predicated on compromise with capital and the sanctity of the state, came ultimately to supplement trade union bureaucratization, labor nationalism, and the propagation of antiradicalism on the American scene during and after the Great War.

Citadel of Labor

This chapter surveys the role of Civil War memory in the construction of labor patriotism in the American Federation of Labor. Mirroring its anti-revolutionary leadership, notably Samuel Gompers, the AFL moved increasingly away from labor militancy and electoral strategy. The rise of national blue-gray reconciliation paralleled the Federation’s maturation, as well as the establishment of Jim Crow unionism. Labor Day, Decoration Day, and Fourth of July marches were incubators of nationalist pageantry in which white workingmen venerated the veteran alongside the industrial soldier and the union label alongside the American flag. By World War I, the Federation had used Civil War memory to embrace class conciliation and nationalism as leaders, and “respectable” workers complied with government repression of the labor left.