I AIN'T MARCHING ANYMORE

The title comes from Phil Ochs, and it’s on the mark, since many of journalist Lombardi’s subjects marched, fought, bled—and then resisted. One case in point is Daniel Shays, who fought bravely during the Revolutionary War but then, underpaid and with a family to support, had to sell the sword given to him by the Marquis de Lafayette. “The inadequate pay made soldiers like Shays…suspect that those in power, from state legislators to General Washington, saw them as somehow disposable,” Lombardi writes. Thus Shays’ Rebellion and other actions by veterans demanding compensation, a theme that would be picked up 150 years later with the Bonus Army. Some of the author’s other subjects include Ethan Allen Hitchcock, who went against his superiors in objection to the terms of the “Indian removals” of the Jacksonian era; “after nearly a year of crossing the country and talking to tribal leaders,” writes Lombardi, Hitchcock wrote a detailed report showing that, as he put it, “every conceivable subterfuge was employed by designing white men on ignorant Indians.” That report was suppressed. The author also writes about the women who fought in disguise in the Civil War and Clara Barton, whose “gender-dissent lay in her creation of a formerly inconceivable all-female battlefield nursing corps.” The definition seems stretched to the point of breaking before returning to familiar ground with such figures as Vietnam War fighter–turned–anti-war activist–turned-politician John Kerry, who “was among the eight hundred veterans on the steps of the Capitol who threw back their medals, ribbons, war memorabilia.” The narrative often runs out of steam, and there’s not much of a thesis—there are those who go along and those who don’t—but Lombardi covers a lot of ground and chronicles events too little remembered today.