The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Briagde: Americans in the Spanish Civil War
By Peter N Carroll
Stanford University Press 1994, 440 pp., $35.00 (pb)
Reviewed by Phil Shannon
http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/8380
When the Spanish Civil War began in 1936 with General Franco's uprising against the Spanish Republic, the reactions in the rest of the world were instructive. The capitalist West were scared by the workers' revolutions in Barcelona and Madrid and regarded Franco as the safer bet for their investment and trade. They hid their preference, however, behind a policy of "non-intervention" which meant starving the Spanish Republic of assistance as Spain stood alone against Franco and the planes and bombs of his fascist backers, Hitler and Mussolini.
On the other hand, as Carroll shows in his book, the working class rallied to Spanish democracy. From 52 countries came 40,000 volunteers to fight in the International Brigades to defend the Republic. Carroll looks at the 2,800 Americans who formed the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Around three quarters of the "Lincolns" were communists. They brought with them experience of struggle in the labour movement, and a personal courage that had been tested in beatings by police and employer goon squads. They also brought "an authentic commitment to racial equality" (80 blacks served with the Lincolns) to repudiate Nazi theories of a master race.
The terrifying ordeals of war tested their character. Fear was pervasive but their political commitment enabled most of them to transcend the fear. The terror they felt was matched by a "spontaneous spirit of self-sacrifice". Only about 100 Lincolns (mostly the less politically aware and the adventure-seekers) became deserters. This low rate (4%) of desertion in a volunteer army attests to their political commitment to the anti-fascist cause.
They also brought their class traditions into the army they joined. After the Lincolns' first engagement at the Jarama Front, they protested at the "organisational failure and military idiocy" of the military command which led to the ensuing massacre. They demanded their rights, and their voice, in a peoples' army.
Carroll, however, doesn't leave the story here in its most romantic light. He investigates the charge by Orwell, Hemingway and anti-communists that the International Brigades adopted a Stalinist reign of terror and carried out large-scale executions against their left political opponents (Trotskyists, anarcho-syndicalists, etc). He concludes that the Americans were innocent of the "war within the war". He can confirm only two executions for serious military offences, and none for political dissent, although one alleged Trotskyist may have been saved from assassination by a sudden snow-storm. Captured deserters were not punished and Carroll can find only one case of political persecution with the dismissal from the Brigades of a veteran anti-Marxist Wobbly.
It does seem that the International Brigades were once removed from the Stalinist repression that did occur by the Spanish Communist Party under the directives of Stalin and with the assistance of Stalin's political police. The Lincolns did, however, loyally share the political premise which underlay this repression — Stalin's desire not to antagonise the capitalist West by keeping the lid on the revolution.
Carroll is not overly concerned with the betrayal of the Spanish Revolution by Stalin or the related strategy of winning the war before winning the revolution. He is more concerned to humanise the Lincolns through presenting their biographies and showing their worthy motives in volunteering. This he does well. That the wrong people (Stalin) got mixed up with the right cause doesn't detract from the communist volunteers' bravery, courage or self-sacrifice (one third of the Lincolns were killed on the battlefields), though it does indicate the way a genuine commitment to the working class, to socialism and to defeating fascism, could be distorted.
Carroll's book is a useful antidote to misleading representations of the Lincolns, none more so than Hemingway's novel For Whom The Bell Tolls. Carroll picks his way through the prickly controversy that has surrounded this novel since its publication in 1940. Hemingway, who castigated the communist volunteers as the "ideology boys", has in turn been derided by the Lincolns for his attitude to the Civil War as mere "landscape for a novel" of apolitical individualist heroics. Carroll eventually endorses a more balanced assessment of one of the Lincolns that Hemingway "was on our side and his contribution to the anti-fascist struggle was considerable ... but his commitment was not as ours".
Most of the Lincolns have retained their commitment, and despite suffering the Cold War blacklist and government harassment, the 200 survivors have fought oppression to this day.
Although the International Brigades offered "more moral support than military" in Spain, their example of the internationalist commitment needed in the struggle against fascism, remains one of the beacons of working class history. They fought the good fight and, tragically, lost. As the French novelist Albert Camus, in his better days, said of the victory of Franco — it was "a reminder that one can be right and yet be vanquished, that force can subdue the spirit, that there are times when courage does not have its reward". Political factors contributed to this defeat (above all the stupidities and crimes of the Stalinists, but also the anarcho-syndicalists' disdain for taking power) and readers will have to look elsewhere for a treatment of this political dimension, but Carroll's book shows that the revolutionary will is there for a better shot at winning other good fights.