William Marvel: Wars of the First Amendment

A visitor to the peaceful village of Hiram, Maine, might well wonder why a Spanish American War monument overlooks the principal intersection. Only a handful of local residents served in any military capacity during that conflict, while 110 men and boys went from Hiram to fight in the Union army between 1861 and 1865, and 42 of them never returned. Another 27 served during World War I, from that town of something over 1,000 citizens. Yet Hiram has no specific monument to veterans of the Civil War, which is our most memorialized war, or to those of the First World War.

The generation that donned uniforms in 1898 had grown up in the shadow of the Union veterans, who were regarded with an admiration approaching awe during the late 19th century. Through the Grand Army of the Republic, the veterans relentlessly propagated the example of their own selfless and heroic service to their country, and young men inevitably envied the reverence those old soldiers attracted. Not since 1861 had the United States faced a crisis that demanded an effusive patriotic response, and as the century came to a close the population seemed primed for an opportunity to show that the national spirit still flourished.