“The flood of responses… demonstrated an abiding yearning among them for a revival of the martial spirit, for a sense of commitment to ideals, for meaning amid their anxieties and ambitions in the age of capital…

Rooted in this ideology of manliness and an antimodern scorn for commerce and materialism… as new generations of Americans came of age, as millions of immigrants flooded the country’s shores, and as racial hatred and violence reached unprecedented levels, the old veterans provided a mother lode of nostalgia to an age that needed escape from its cities, its boardrooms, its dangerous and confusing machines, and its economic panics.

… Holmes’s veterans offered an alternative, backward-glancing faith to the age in which worries about technology emerged, religion struggled with doubt, men’s and women’s roles were shifting irrevocably, the struggle between labor and capital threatened to overturn the social order year in and year out, and America’s racial and ethnic pluralism challenged white Protestant dominance…. In this church of fraternalism, the only enemies left, by and large, were in civilian society.”

- Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory by David W. Blight