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The Abraham Lincoln Brigade: the Historiography of the American soldiers in the Spanish American War
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During the Spanish Civil War, approximately 2,800 American men and women answered the call from the Communist party to defend the Spanish republic from fascist aggression. These men and women served in the Fifteenth International Brigade and formed the Abraham Lincoln, Washington and MacKenzie-Papineau Battalions. These soldiers’ stories have been controversial, because 80 percent of these volunteers were Communists. Until recently, historians have not been able to fully tell the story of these men and women. This paper will explore , but access to new archives of the American soldiers and Soviet archives have provided a much fuller picture of the historiography surrounding story of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. ===Early Books on the Abraham Lincoln Brigade===
Peter N. Carroll, in his book <i>[https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0804722773/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0804722773&linkCode=as2&tag=dailyh0c-20&linkId=deb544037f6853d805f0f8cea67fedee The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade]</i>, stated that there had already been three generations of history written about the Lincoln Brigade by 1994. The first generation consisted of a number of first person accounts by the Brigade members. A second generation of books was written by scholars based on somewhat limited information. Carroll believes that he is part of the third generation of historians who were providing a more accurate depiction of the volunteers because he had access to a treasure trove of material from both the veterans and Soviet archives. As part of the third generation of scholars, Carroll not only tried to tell the story of veterans in Spain, he examined their broader roles in America over the past 50 years. Not surprisingly, this third generation of books has benefited greatly from the creation of archives by the Brigade veterans at Brandeis University and University of California, Berkley.<ref> Carroll, Peter N., <i>[https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0804722773/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0804722773&linkCode=as2&tag=dailyh0c-20&linkId=deb544037f6853d805f0f8cea67fedee The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade: American in the Spanish Civil War]</i>, Stanford University Press, Stanford, California 1994, p. vii-x.</ref>
While a number of the histories use the term the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, it should be clarified that there never was an Abraham Lincoln Brigade. There were several battalions (the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, the George Washington Battalion, the Regiment de Tren, the John Brown Artillery Battalion, and the MacKenzie-Papineau Battalion) that contained of American volunteers.<ref> Carroll p. 94.</ref> The Lincoln Battalion was the original American battalion and the first to see combat and was part of the Fifteenth Brigade. As the war progressed, these battalions’ ranks were ultimately filled with Spanish troops as the Americans were decimated.<ref>Carroll p. 95.</ref> The term Lincoln Brigade essentially has became used as a shorthand way to describe the Americans who fought in Spain regardless of their actual battalion affiliation.
===First Generation of Books===
The first generation of books on the Lincoln Brigade included a number of first person accounts and histories written by members of the Lincoln Brigade. In the 1940s and 1950s, Bessie Alvah, John Gates, Langston Hughes, Steve Nelson, Edwin Rolfe, Milt Felsen and others published first person accounts of their time in Spain. Robert Colodny and Arthur Landis both wrote scholarly treatments of the Spanish Civil War, even though both were veterans of the Lincoln Brigade. Another member of the Brigade, Albert Pargo, a labor professor, wrote extensively about the international volunteers during the Spanish Civil War. Even though Colodny, Landis and Pargo were veterans, some of their work fits better into the second generation of scholars rather than the first.
After the first person accounts of the Lincoln Brigade were published, a number of historians began writing books about the Lincoln Brigade and their role in Spanish Civil War. Oddly enough, perhaps the most comprehensive account of the Lincoln Brigade during this second generation of books was drafted by Arthur Landis, an American veteran of the Spanish Civil War, entitled The Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Unfortunately, these histories suffer from a number of problems. While Landis’ work is the most comprehensive, it is also potentially the most biased. The other books relied on incomplete information for their conclusions. Additionally, a number of the American veterans during 1950s and 1960s were also discouraged from talking openly about the experiences because they were concerned about being labeled communists.
===The Second Generation of Books====
Richard A. Rosenstone is good example of the second generation of historians who researched the Lincoln Brigade. In his 1967 article “The Men of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade” and his book <i>[https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0006C04TY/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=B0006C04TY&linkCode=as2&tag=dailyh0c-20&linkId=d3e58b9f0677289401ab71e67822450c Crusade of the Left: The Lincoln Battalion in the Spanish Civil War]</i>, which was published in 1969, Rosenstone attempted to developed a portrait of the men who fought in the Spanish Civil War. Unlike Landis and Colodny, he did not participate in the Spanish Civil War. In “The Men of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade” he tried to understand who was an “average member” of the Lincoln Brigade. Unfortunately, a number of his conclusions are speculative. Because he is attempting to provide an outline for an average member of the brigade his descriptions are ultimately inaccurate.
Rosenstone’s work suffers from a number of problems. First, Rosenstone did not have sufficient historical resources at his disposal to develop his themes. Second, Rosenstone clearly believes that the veterans were essentially noble. In order to make them sympathetic to an American audience he deemphasized the role the Communist party played in their participation in the Spanish Civil War. It is not clear whether or not this deception was intentional. Additionally, members of the Lincoln Brigade were less willing to talk or give their private materials to historians so soon after a number of them had been persecuted during the 1950s for their Communist affiliations.
Unlike Rosenstone, Arthur Landis’s mammoth book, <i>The Abraham Lincoln Brigade </i> is a comprehensive history of the American contingent in Spain. Robert F. Lucid both criticized and lauded Landis’s book by writing, “[t]hirty years after the war, Landis composes with a style and an enthusiasm which are ingenuous in their partisanship. It is impossible for anyone who is knowledgeable about the Spanish Civil War to be removed or unbiased…So one is likely to excuse Landis’ high regard for his comrades-in-arms although he will wish as I did, that the author had tempered his gusto.” Stanley Payne argued that while Landis’ work was reliable when he discussed the military affairs of the Lincoln Brigade, but he found that Landis was completely unreliable whenever he talked about politics. In addition to completely misunderstanding Spanish politics, Landis attempted to dismiss the idea that the Lincoln veterans were predominantly Communist. Payne assails Landis for failing to discuss the role played by the Soviet Communist party in the development of Spanish Communism.
Unlike Landis, Albert Pargo focuses on the role Jews played in the International Brigade. Pargo argued in his article “Jews in the International Brigade” that Jews viewed the Civil War in Spain as the “first organized resistance to European fascism” and anti-Semitism. He emphasized the Jewish character of not only the American contingent, but a number of the international volunteers. Pargo stated that approximately 900 to 1100 of the 2800 American volunteers were Jews. Pargo criticized Landis’s scholarly history of the Spanish Civil War because he completely ignored the Jewish participation in the Lincoln Bridgade. Pargo argued that the level of Jewish consciousness within the left was “minimal” and it did not occur to Landis that a number of American Jews were in Europe fighting anti-Semitism. Not surprisingly, Jews occupied important positions in the American veterans. Both the highest ranking and last commander of the Lincoln Battalions were Jews. More material was available for Pargo in his analysis than was available to Landis back in 1967.
