To Die For: the Paradox of American Patriotism.

By Cecilia Elizabeth O'Leary. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, c. 1999. Pp. [xiv], 365. Paper, $17.95, ISBN 0-691-07052-0; cloth, $49.50, ISBN 0-691-01686-0.)

Southern historians usually take for granted that the Civil War never really ended, especially when it comes to such matters as race and region. Cecilia O'Leary's new book should spread this notion more broadly and convince all American historians to consider the late nineteenth century as a distinctly postwar era.

To Die For is not framed primarily as a study of postwar sensibilities. Instead, patriotism is its main theme, especially the contested nature of patriotic organization and activity between the Civil War and World War I. These are the years, the book tells us, when Americans built monuments in huge numbers, established new national holidays like Memorial Day, codified such flag-related devotionals as the Pledge of Allegiance and the raising of "Old Glory" in schools, and pioneered legislation protecting the American flag from "desecration."

In the North, the driving force behind such wide-ranging efforts were two groups of former Unionists. O'Leary surveys the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), a veterans' group that has drawn attention from a number of other scholars, and helpfully introduces its less-familiar female counterpart, the Woman's Relief Corps (WRC). Over the course of four chapters, she carefully shows how both the GAR and the WRC wrestled with internal disputes over their memberships, while they engaged in a coordinated "nation-building movement" that would be transmitted to a new generation that had to be taught the true meaning of the war for the Union (p. 111).

The book's treatment of the patriotic activities of the southern "Lost Cause" is less detailed and provides little that cannot be found in Gaines M. Foster's Ghosts of the Confederacy (New York, 1987). But O'Leary does offer a useful account of how these Confederate heritage groups negotiated their membership in the nation with their white northern counterparts in the GAR and the WRC. She persuasively argues that an emphasis on martial honor led to the "racialization of patriotism" (chap. 8), and, at least by Woodrow Wilson's presidency, whites had all but forgotten African American participation in the Civil War and the radical Union goal of emancipation and equal rights.

The cultural imperative of what might be called the "Victorious Cause" (not the "Lost" one) is what matters most to O'Leary. The men and women who had saved the country from southern rebels faced new challenges at century's end, and they did so with the confidence of winners looking for new threats, not dwelling on old ones. The challenges to republican cohesion that most worried these patriots in the 1890s came from immigrants and political radicals. Educators like George T. Balch focused their attention on America's polyglot youth to assure the nation's future, making the schoolroom rather than the battlefield the place where loyalties to the United States would be inculcated.

The book ends by emphasizing the role of the state in enforcing loyalty during World War I. The conservatism of flag rituals comes to the fore here, especially in the techniques used to isolate antiwar protesters and socialists. Ending the story in 1920 leads O'Leary to conclude that government efforts to craft national meaning were by definition a narrowing force. Such a judgment would likely have been more complicated had she stretched her narrative ever so slightly to include the New Deal years, when the federal government facilitated a more populist variation of American purpose than had been enunciated for most of the period that her fresh and provocative book surveys.

ROBERT E. BONNER
Michigan State University