Changes

Since the creation of the archives at Brandeis University and UC Berkley, historians have had an opportunity to search a number of first person writings of members of the Lincoln Brigade. These archives have allowed historians to start writing a third generation of books and articles on the Lincoln Brigade.

Peter Carroll’s books The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, The Good Fight Continues: World War II Letters from the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and Danny Duncan Collum’s African Americans in the Spanish Civil War: “This Ain’t Ethiopia, But It’ll Do” represent what Carroll referred to as the third generation of books on the Lincoln Brigade. Unlike the previous generations of books, these works are utilizing the Lincoln Brigade and Soviet Spanish Civil War archives.

Carroll makes it clear that most of the volunteers went to Spain primarily for political reasons. The veterans were overwhelmingly Communists. Carroll never states that Landis attempted to hide the volunteers’ true political beliefs, but he makes it clear that Communism played a vital role in a number of the volunteer’s lives. Not surprisingly, Carroll starts his book with Moscow sending a secret communiqué to the American Communist party leadership in New York to start recruiting Communists to fight in Spain for the Popular Front government. Unlike Rosenstone, Carroll makes it clear that the men and women recruited by the Communist party were for the most part radicals who “nearly all accepted the leadership of the Communist party, at least for the war’s duration.” He asserts that most of the veterans had little interest specifically in the Spanish War. They were good Communists, who for various reasons decided that the fight in Spain against fascism justified their sacrifice.

Not only were the volunteers overwhelmingly Communists, they were much older than previously believed. The average age of Americans serving in the Brigade was twenty-seven years old. This supports Carroll’s contention that these people made an informed political decision to go to Spain. These men and women were not impressionable youths.

Carroll’s story does not end with Spanish Civil War; he follows the veterans through the last half of the twentieth century. Almost five hundred of the veterans fought again in World War II. It is clear that Carroll has an enormous amount of respect for the veterans who continued the fight against fascism. In fact, Carroll dedicated the Good Fight Continues to the twenty four Lincoln Brigade veterans who were killed in combat during World War Two. Carroll does an excellent job highlighting the problems that the “premature fascists” faced after the war in the United States and he does not hide his sympathy for several of these individuals.

One of the sharpest criticisms of Odyssey was made in the collection of essays entitled In Denial: Historians, Communism & Espionage. Two of the essays in the collection accused Carroll of scholarly malpractice for suggesting that the term “premature fascists” was used by the government to classify veterans of the Lincoln Brigade pejoratively. John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr instead argued that the term was adopted by veterans of the Lincoln Brigade as a badge of honor. Carroll fights back in the Lincoln Brigade newsletter stating that Congressional Representative John Coffee in 1945 indicated in a speech that people in Washington had referred to members of the Lincoln Brigade as “premature fascists.”

In addition to Carroll’s Odyssey, the Lincoln Brigade archives have spawned additional books. The Good Fight Continues and African Americans in the Spanish Civil War contain a number of primary sources from the Lincoln Brigade archives along with a number of interpretative articles. The Good Fight Continues is a collection of letters from Lincoln Brigade veterans during World War II. These letters express a number emotions and feelings. A number of the Brigade members’ were frustrated at being denied combat positions. Still, a number of the veterans did serve in combat and these letters share their experiences. Some of the letters address problems that Brigade members faced in the immediate post-World War II period.