Book Reviews

The Cleveland Grays: An Urban Military Company, 1837-1919. By George N. Vourlojianis. (Kent, Ohio: The Kent State University Press, 2002. x, 150 pp. Paper, $12.00, ISBN 0-87338-678-7.)

Within the military history genre, regimental and other small-unit studies retain a popularity perhaps second only to campaign volumes and "battle books." Interestingly, early regimental histories appeared en masse on the American scene while the Civil War still raged, providing veterans and home readers accounts of epic deeds performed on blood-stained fields from Manassas to Missionary Ridge and beyond. Over the next one hundred years, the basic format remained nearly unchanged: "Regimentals" (as they are widely known) recounted in painstaking detail the stories of camp and battle, with scant mention of the social, political, and cultural forces that called these men, often hailing from a single community, to duty in defense of their homes. In fine, such studies provided precious little context of the world from which the soldiers came, serving instead as quintessential "pot-boilers," accounts that stirred arguments among rival units and latter-day adherents rather than encourage meaningful understanding for subsequent generations of scholars, students, and enthusiasts.

The past thirty years, however, have witnessed the advent of truly integrated small-unit works, volumes that are as much community studies and social histories as they are military tomes. George N. Vourlojianis, assistant professor of history at Cleveland's John Carroll University, attempts to contribute to the "new military history" in producing The Cleveland Grays, a reworking of his own 1994 Ph.D. dissertation. This reviewer took encouragement from the book's first sentence, one that modestly decreed it a "work on a bit of Cleveland history" (ix) rather than a mere institutional or chronological narrative.

An independent militia company formed in 1837 during ongoing tensions between the United States and British Canada, the Grays was from its birth considered a special military and social organization. Its membership came almost exclusively from Cleveland's elite commercial and political class, whose considerable stake in society necessitated vigilance against real or perceived enemies, both at home and abroad. Its political culture was distinctly conservative; at first Whiggish, by the 1850s it had embraced a nascent nativism and finally fell under the aegis of the Republican Party. Throughout the nineteenth and into the early twentieth century, the Grays provided support for the city's leadership (to be sure, many city fathers were also members of the Grays), carrying out police functions against a growing labor movement that was seen as a threat its own hegemonic interests. The company too served, if somewhat sparingly, in nearly all of America's major military conflicts from the Civil War through World War One. One of its officers, Lieutenant Albert Baesel, was posthumously awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for his actions at Meuse-Argonne in September 1917.

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