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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, both the participants in the Brigade and the historians have not provided an accurate picture been able to fully tell the story of these men and women. This paper will explore the historiography surrounding 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 believed believes that he was 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 from 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. This paper will examine a select number <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 books from generation on the Abraham Lincoln Brigade: American in the Spanish Civil War]</i>, Stanford University Press, Stanford, California 1994, p. vii-x. </ref>
The members of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade have been the subject of a number of historical treatments, but until Carroll’s book few of these works could be classified as comprehensive and complete. There are numerous books that examine the Spanish Civil War, but most of these are general Spanish Civil War books which fail to examine the Lincoln Brigade in any detail. This is not surprising, because the Lincoln Brigade played a very small role in a complicated civil war and international conflict. While the Americans were recognized for their bravery, they were a small part of major military failure. They were part of small, poorly trained units which were severely depleted by casualties. The Lincoln Brigade did not shape the military campaigns in any dramatic fashion nor did it alter the outcome of the war. While Anthony Beevor mentions the American battalions in <i>[https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/014303765X/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=014303765X&linkCode=as2&tag=dailyh0c-20&linkId=532d4ab27591ac134752fae66650b9ac The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939]</i>, they are not a prominent part of his book. This type of mention is not unusual in more general books on the Spanish Civil War. Therefore, historians researching and writing about the Brigade are typically not military or Spanish historians. Instead, they are Modern United States historian and they have typically focused solely on the Lincoln Brigade.
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. This term will be used much in the same way throughout this paper.
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.
As first person memoirs, these works provided a glimpse into the lives of the veterans during the war, but they were very inconsistent. Often these historical accounts relied on memory instead of historical evidence. Carroll spent a great deal of time in his book attempting to iron out a number of differences between the veterans’ disparate stories.
In 1987, Alvah Bessie and Albert Pargo edited a collection of writings by veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade that gathered a number of these earlier writings and consolidated them into one volume. <ref> Bessie, Alvah and Albert Pargo, eds., <i>[https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0853457247/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0853457247&linkCode=as2&tag=dailyh0c-20&linkId=95a011af1ec117470282c71b4c0f440c Our Fight: Writings by Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Spain 1936 -1939]</i>, Monthly Review Press (New York) 1987.</ref> This volume demonstrates demonstrated the diversity of material written by the American veterans. The volume includes poems, interviews and excerpts from scholarly works. Pargo and Bessie have selected writings that try to walk the reader through various aspects of the Spanish Civil War. One of the highlights of the book is an interview conducted by Studs Terkel of Irving Goff. Goff was a guerilla warfare specialist in Spain. Terkel interviewed Goff about his experiences during World War II with OSS as guerrilla warfare specialist in Africa and Italy.
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.
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.
In Rosenstone’s discussion of the veteran’s political party affiliations, he stated that anywhere from 25 to 80 percent of the volunteers were Communist party members. He states that “no one really knows because no records of political affiliations were kept.” In fact, the Soviets in Moscow maintained complete records regarding the political affiliations of the volunteers. Those records indicated that almost 80 percent of the American volunteers were members of the Communist party or the Young Communist Party.
Partly because Rosenstone can only provide an estimate of the number of Communists in the Brigade, he deemphasizes the importance of the role that Communism played in their lives. He states, “[m]ost of them had joined the party because of its worldwide opposition to fascism, and many did so specifically because of its support for the Spanish Republic.” Rosenstone goes further and says that perhaps the Brigade members joined the Communist Party because they had the best parties and that their primary concern was defending the world from fascism. “Spain merely reflected the depth of their dedication; there the forces of the decade---simplified into fascism to the idea of democracy versus fascism.” Rosenstone softened the hard edges of the volunteers by deemphasizing their Communist affiliations, but in the process he watered down their beliefs and motivations for going to Spain.
Rosenstone faced just as many problems when he attempted to determine the ethnic makeup of the brigade. He estimated that Jews comprised approximately 25 percent of the brigade. Rosenstone deduced this number simply by looking at the surnames of the known volunteers. After reviewing the names he determined that approximately 20 percent “had obviously Jewish names.” He then simply rounded up to 25 percent. Rosenstone admitted that it would be difficult to accurately determine the percentage of Jewish Americans because a number of the volunteers adopted nom de guerres during the war. Just as Rosenstone estimated the number of Jews in the Brigade, he guessed that there were probably 50 African American volunteers. It is also clear from Rosenstone’s title that he is only concerned with the men of the Lincoln Brigade, ignored the 60 American women who volunteered in Spain.
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, The Abraham Lincoln Brigade 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.
