Radical Nostalgia: : Spanish Civil War Commemoration in America

RADICAL NOSTALGIA

RADICAL NOSTALGIA SPANISH CIVIL WAR COMMEMORATION IN AMERICA

Peter Glazer

Copyright © 2005 Peter Glazer All rights reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation, no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without prior permission of the copyright owner. First published 2005 University of Rochester Press 668 Mt. Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA www.urpress.com and of Boydell & Brewer, Ltd. P.O. Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK www.boydellandbrewer.com ISBN 1–58046–186–7 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Glazer, Peter. Radical nostalgia: Spanish Civil War commemoration in America / Peter Glazer. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–58046–186–7 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Spain—History—Civil War, 1936–1939—Anniversaries, etc. 2. Memorials—United States—History—20th century. 3. Spain—History—Civil War, 1936–1939—Veterans. 4. Veterans—United States—History—20th century. 5. Spain—History—Civil War, 1936–1939—Songs and Music 6. Nostalgia. I. Title. DP269.8.M4G63 2005 946.081⬘6⬘0973–dc22 2005007246 With God on Our Side by Bob Dylan. Copyright © 1963 by Warner Bros. Inc. Copyright renewed 1991 by Special Rider Music. All rights reserved. International copyright secured. Reprinted by permission. Extract from Victor Jara of Chile by Adrian Mitchell. Reprinted by permission of PFD on behalf of Adrian Mitchell. © Adrian Mitchell 1997. Adrian Mitchell Educational Health Warning! Adrian Mitchell asks that none of his poems be used in connection with any examination whatsoever! A catalogue record for this item is available from the British Library

Disclaimer: This publication is printed on acid-free paper Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. Printed in the United States of America To view these images please refer to the printed version of this book.

To my mother, Miriam Reed Glazer, and her father, Ephraim Eisenberg, for their love, their love of learning, and their love of wonder.

Voici neuf ans que les hommes de ma génération ont l’Espagne sur la coeur. Neuf ans qu’ils la portent avec eux comme une mauvaise blessure. C’est par elle qu’ils ont connu pour la première fois le goût de la défaite, qu’ils ont découvert, avec une surprise dont ils sont à peine revenus, qu’on pouvait avoir raison et être vaincu, que la force pouvait se soumettre l’esprit et qu’il était des cas où le courage n’avait pas sa récompense. C’est cela sans doute qui explique que tant d’hommes dans le monde aient ressenti le drame espagnol comme une tragédie personnelle. Albert Camus, 1946 Preface to L’Espagne Libre

The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting. Milan Kundera The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Contents

List of Illustrations

viii

Acknowledgments

xi

1. Introduction: Fields of Action, Fields of Thought

1

2. Nostalgia and Commemoration

33

3. A Time to Remember: 1937–1962

57

4. The Legend Business: 1962–1996

131

5. Songs of the Lincoln Brigade: Music, Commemoration, and Appropriation

173

6. Breathing Memory

215

7. Epilogue: Patriot Acts

262

Notes

271

Bibliography

311

Index

321

List of Illustrations

Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view these images please refer to the printed version of this book.

1. Early Show of Support

101

2. Veterans Take the Stage at We Must Remember!

102

3. Pete Seeger, Arlo Guthrie, and Tao Rodriguez-Seeger Singing “Viva La Quince Brigada”

103

4. Memorial “To Our Fallen Comrades”

104

5. “1st Birthday Party”

105

6. “Stars for Spain” and “2nd Annual Stars for Spain”

106

7. “In Tribute to Captain Herman Bottcher”

107

8. Marching on May Day

108

9. “Lincoln Brigade Fights On”

109

10. The Volunteer for Liberty

110

11. “Lift the Embargo! All Aid to Spain!”

111

12. “Greetings to the Defenders of a Free Democratic Spain!”

112

13. Paying Tribute at the Eternal Light Monument

113

14. Backstage at the 1st Birthday Party

114

15. Packed House at “Night of Stars”

115

16. “Lincoln Vets Take Salute”

116

17. Laying a Wreath at Lincoln’s Feet

117

18. “Cab Calloway Xmas Eve Ball”

118

19. Invitation to Fourteenth Anniversary Dinner

119

List of Illustrations

ix

20. Milt Wolff Addresses the VALB’s International Convention

120

21. Paul Robeson at the Microphone

121

22. “25 Years Ago, a Time to Remember”

122

23. Twenty-fifth Anniversary

123

24. Vietnam Protest “No Pasaran”

124

25. “Commemorate the 50th Anniversary of the Spanish Civil War”

125

26. “The Old Jarama Valley”

126

27. Commemorative Theater

127

28. Veterans Take Applause in Oakland

128

29. Dedication of Madison Memorial

129

30. “Expose Reagan’s Lies” Again

130

Acknowledgments

This project has a long history. I first became intrigued by the Spanish Civil War forty years ago through its music. As a focus for scholarship, however, my work began at Northwestern University in the mid-1990s. The book has undergone substantial revision and restructuring in the last two years, but it began as a dissertation, and institutional support was essential. During my five years at Northwestern, I received both a Dissertation Research Grant and a Dissertation Year Fellowship from the Graduate School. I was also given valuable funding by Northwestern’s Center for Interdisciplinary Research in the Arts. Those grants, coupled with a University Fellowship and two university-funded assistantships, facilitated the initial research and writing. I began researching the Spanish Civil War as a playwright in the early 1990s. During early developmental work in San Francisco, I first came in contact with US veterans and the commemorative community that surrounded them. By the time I arrived at Northwestern in the fall of 1996, I was already absorbed by the story of the war and its commemorative legacy, but I had no idea it would become the center of my scholarship and the subject of this book. Inspiration long predated conception, and the support I received from friends and collaborators prior to my graduate work is well represented in these pages. I want to thank my dear friend Eric Bain Peltoniemi, the composer and co-lyricist of Heart of Spain: A Musical of the Spanish Civil War. Had he not responded so positively to the subject matter when I brought it to him in 1993, I never would have pursued this cultural history in the first place. Once I was

xii

Radical Nostalgia

immersed in my topic five years later, Heart of Spain received two productions at Northwestern, and Eric’s music, his understanding of the war and its times, his devotion to our piece, and his comradeship helped propel me into the much more solitary work of research and writing. His music for Heart of Spain remains a constant inspiration. I met veteran Milt Wolff in California during my early research, and, as nervous as I was, his willingness to talk candidly in response to my naive questions was very gratifying. Milt, then head of the Bay Area post of the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, encouraged me to contact historian Peter Carroll and the Associates of the post, who were involved in planning a commemorative event in Oakland. Eight of us shared the writing credit for Postscript to a War in February 1995, and it was one of the most productive, friendly, and gratifying creative committees in which I had ever participated. My experience with this group solidified my interest in the commemorative process and its progressive potential. Five of them are quoted extensively in these pages, but I want to thank all of them for bringing me into the fold: Bruce Barthol, Peter Carrol, Hannah Olson Creighton, Martha Olson Jarocki, David Laub, Judy Montell, and Roby Newman. Photographer Richard Bermack has also become a friend and collaborator on more recent projects. It has been a particular pleasure to work with composer and musical director Bruce Barthol on many performances since Postscript to a War. Sadly, Hannah died a few years ago, well before her time. She was our passionate and uncompromising leader, and her ideals and spirit are at the heart of this book. I recorded many hours of interviews for this project over a five-year period. Everyone with whom I spoke was open, informative, and gracious beyond measure. I thank them for their time, patience, and willingness to share their memories. Even those I was not able to quote here contributed significantly to my thinking and writing. The Spanish Civil War veterans, veterans’ wives, and veterans’ widows I interviewed were Hon Brown, Moe Fishman, Chuck and Bobby Hall, Aaron and Joyce Hilkevitch, Manny and Judith Hochberg, John Rossen, Dave

Acknowledgments

xiii

Smith, Bill Susman, Sylvia Thompson, and Milt Wolff. Chuck, Manny, John, and Bill have since died, but hopefully live on in work such as this and in the commemorative events that honor their memory. Other informants young and old included Bruce Barthol, Hannah Olson Creighton, Henry Foner, Ronnie Gilbert, Tom Glazer, Martha Olson Jarocki, Linda Lustig, Nancy Mikelsons, Judy Montell, Roby Newman, and Pete Seeger. I am deeply grateful to Peter Carroll, who has been a trusted source of information and advice, a mentor, and a friend. I met the Chicago veterans’ community soon after I arrived at Northwestern to begin my graduate studies. That same year, longtime friends and Chicago artists Michael Smith and Jamie O’Reilly created the musical revue Pasiones: Songs of the Spanish Civil War 1936–1939, which I was privileged to direct. Performances of Pasiones drew people from all corners of the city into its glow, and facilitated the remaking of a commemorative community in Chicago. Michael and Jamie’s investment in the music and its performance rooted my scholarly work in a real, loving, and impassioned place. The Chicago community of veterans deserves special mention. Jamie introduced me to the marvelous Chuck and Bobby Hall, who were my entrée into the local group. Through the Halls, I met the Hilkevitches, the Hochbergs, and John and Lupe Rossen. They invited me into their homes, shared stories and sustenance of other kinds, and all proved to be as kind and generous as they were inspiring. The level of intellectual and political dialogue in each case put my work in the academy into perspective. They gave this project its spark and much of its substance, and I am grateful to them all. Along with the other members of the Chicago Friends of the Lincoln Brigade, they proved to me again and again how the political and the personal are inseparable and interdependent. These people have lived and practiced their political beliefs every day of their lives. None of this wealth of information would have coalesced or developed into a theoretical study of any kind were it not for the Department of Performance Studies at Northwestern University. I cannot adequately express how fortunate I feel to have ended

xiv

Radical Nostalgia

up in its formidable ranks. Were it not for its strategic conflation of theory and practice and the high intellectual demands placed upon students, projects such as mine would be impossible to imagine, let alone complete. To my dissertation committee, I am forever beholden. Susan Manning’s expertise in American political performance of the twentieth century and her cheerful encouragement throughout the process were deeply appreciated. Margaret Thompson Drewal was the first member of the faculty to suggest that my interest in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade might lead to a viable dissertation topic, and that topic took shape around her seminar table. Many of the theories and writings central to my arguments were introduced to me by Professor Drewal. Before studying with Dwight Conquergood, I was completely unfamiliar with ethnographic practice. When I returned to his classroom with field notes from my first conversations with veteran John Rossen, his enthusiastic response and detailed comments gave me needed guidance and strength, and his enthusiasm never flagged. This project would never have gotten off the ground without the training I received from Professor Conquergood in ethnographic field methods and historical ethnography. His ethical standards for scholarship and his political activism are models for anyone pursuing ethnographic fieldwork, or for any politically engaged scholar. Dwight’s eyes lit up when John Rossen entered his classroom through my field notes. Sadly, Dwight died a few months ago, but I am still guided, moved, and challenged by that light. Regarding Tracy Davis, the chair of my committee, I am in danger of saying too much, so I will be brief. For her careful reading and sensitive, precise comments and critiques; for her unstinting encouragement, incredible patience, and willingness to hear and answer any question, no matter how anxious or bizarre; and for her totally unselfish guidance throughout the entire research and writing process of the dissertation, I will always be in her debt. Her uncompromising intelligence and unfailing support are alive in this book. To my fellow students and colleagues, I owe my health and sanity. From seminar rooms to somewhat more social contexts,

Acknowledgments

xv

they provided stimulation, solace, and support. One group in particular deserves special mention: Ruth Fletcher, Michael Giblin, Cindy Gold, Michael McKinnie, Dan Moser, Amy Partridge, Matthias Regan, and Margaret Werry. They were as solid and dependable as the ground under my feet, and I cherish the many hours we shared. I must also mention Anthea Kraut, who, in a casual conversation, led me to my title, whether she remembers it or not. Our department would not have functioned without the presence of poet Alan Shefsky, the Department Assistant in Performance Studies. Alan is all-seeing, all-knowing, always ready and willing to take on any problem, and a paragon of sanity and cheer. This book itself came into being thanks to the interest of Mark Klemens, Managing Director of Boydell & Brewer Inc. and the University of Rochester Press. Upon hearing of my manuscript two years ago, he asked if I would give him a first look, and here we are. He has been a generous and enthusiastic presence throughout. Editor Tim Madigan guided me through the early stages with a gentle hand, and his clear fondness for the material made a huge difference. Sarah Vitale also provided valuable editorial advice, and Suzanne E. Guiod brought the project to completion with great skill and sensitivity. I thank them all, along with the rest of the talented editorial staff at the press. The Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archive Collection at the Tamiment Library at New York University is a treasure for anyone interested in the Americans who fought in the Spanish Civil War, and it is supervised by a brilliant staff. I want to thank Director Michael Nash, Archivist Gail Malmgreen, and Erika Gottfried, Curator of Nonprint Collections, for making the last phase of research for this book so productive. When I began my work, the ALBA Collection was housed in Special Collections at Brandeis University, and I am most grateful to the staff, and especially Victor Berch, for their early assistance. Special mention must go to Mark Rosenzweig, Director and Chief Librarian at the Reference Center for Marxist Studies in New York City. This rare collection under his supervision offers an uncommon and essential perspective on American history.

xvi

Radical Nostalgia

Mark is engaged in the task of preserving and cataloguing a massive amount of material. He was uncommonly gracious and helpful during the hours I spent in the archive, and many of the photographs I found there became fulcrums for this work. The Reference Center needs and deserves support. Preparing this manuscript for publication was a massive task. Among the many blessings afforded by my position here at Berkeley has been the opportunity to work with our graduate student population, and I was fortunate to have the assistance of Katie Gough and Monica Stufft. I can say without hesitation that without their many hours of hard work, I would have gone quite mad, and this book would not be in your hands today. They took on any and every task, no matter how tedious, with grace and alacrity. Their pursuit of copyrights, many hundreds of citations, and wayward commas was dogged, and their comments on the writing always helpful. I can only wish them the same level of support when they are on deadline for their first books in what I have no doubt will be academic careers of great moment. I would also like to thank Alex Kort for his editorial advice and musical inspiration. “I’m too old to be a young talent,” Artie Shaughnessy whines in John Guare’s The House of Blue Leaves, and I knew exactly what he meant when I arrived in the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies at UC Berkeley as an assistant professor in my late forties. I was graying at the temples and wet behind the ears. I owe a huge debt of thanks to my colleagues, who welcomed me with such warmth, and especially to Chair W. B. Worthen. Bill led me through the sometimes twisted halls of academe with care, boundless goodwill, and sublime patience. His advice in bringing this book to publication has been everything I could have asked for and more. I feel unbelievably lucky to have begun my teaching career under his leadership. I first heard the songs of the Spanish Civil War as a child. Sung by my father, Tom Glazer, in a suburban living room during the war in Vietnam, I knew they were important long before I knew why. Even to my very young ears, the songs were magnificent. Tom’s death two years ago was a shock, but he had lived a

Acknowledgments

xvii

long and full life, and his voice—that rich, pure, glorious baritone—will outlive us all. My mother did much more than sing along. During her freshman year at Antioch College in 1939, Mimi “bared her ribs for Spain” every Friday, skipping meals and donating the money to Spanish relief organizations, and she went on to fight many good fights in the years to come. Through their art, their work, and their humanity, my parents helped me understand how the world works, and to care deeply about how things turn out. Finally, I want to thank K, for teaching me to see. Peter Glazer Berkeley, California March 2005

Chapter 1

Introduction: Fields of Action, Fields of Thought

Personal History The four insurgent generals, The four insurgent generals, The four insurgent generals, Mamita mía, They tried to betray us, They tried to betray us. from the song “Los Cuatro Generales,” popularized during the Spanish Civil War1

The Spanish Civil War was sung to me long before I had any idea what it was about. My father, folksinger Tom Glazer, along with Pete Seeger and fellow musicians Butch Hawes and Bess Lomax, had recorded an album on Asch Records called Songs of the Lincoln Brigade in 1943. Seeger had gathered this group of musicians together after the remarkable success in the United States of another album, Six Songs for Democracy, recorded in Spain during the war and sung by the noted tenor and German antifascist Ernst Busch and a chorus of German volunteers.2 “Los Cuatro Generales” appeared on the German album and has become one of the most popular and well recognized songs originating in the Spanish conflict. Like so many of the songs that came out of the Spanish Civil War, “The Four Insurgent Generals,” as it is known in English, became something of an

2

Radical Nostalgia

anthem for the American Left, as sympathizers with the cause of antifascism. I grew up during the 1960s and the era of the Vietnam War, the first significant resurgence of widespread left-wing, antigovernment sentiment since the 1930s. When my parents invited friends and relatives over for dinner parties during this period, my father would always take out his guitar. More often than not, someone would ask him to sing a Spanish Civil War song, and I distinctly remember the request: “Sing the one about the four generals.” When my father started strumming his guitar and singing these songs, a reverent hush would fall on the room. Eyes would close, feet would tap gently, and a soft humming could be heard, or some voices singing along. This beautiful music created an emotional atmosphere I could neither fathom nor ignore. Thirty years later, those songs led me into this work. I found out who the four generals were—Franco, Mola, Varela, and Queipo de Llano—the nature of their betrayal and why, a few verses later, the song called for their hanging on Christmas Eve.3 For my parents’ generation, the Spanish Civil War had a particular significance. Its memory was almost sacred. “It was a golden moment, in a sense, as I look at it,” filmmaker Judith Montell told me. “The dedication of people to causes that they felt were just and would improve the world was a golden moment that will never exist again.”4 Named “the good fight,” the war in Spain became an icon of radical activism. It symbolized doing the right thing for the right reasons against all odds at whatever risk. At about the same time my father recorded Songs of the Lincoln Brigade, my mother—though she and my father had yet to meet—was fasting one day a week in college and donating the money she saved to aid Spanish refugees. I do not remember my parents talking about the war in Spain when I was young, but the music and the atmosphere it created planted a seed. Many years later, as a director and playwright in my thirties, I was looking for material. I vividly recalled the dramatic songs of the Spanish Civil War. I knew embarrassingly little about the history, so I began to read: For Whom the Bell Tolls, Homage to Catalonia, Edwin Rolfe’s The Lincoln Battalion, Alvah Bessie’s Men

Introduction: Fields of Action, Fields of Thought

3

in Battle, John Tisa’s Recalling the Good Fight. I remembered those song nights during the Vietnam War, and became fascinated and confused by the inconsistencies. My parents had looked back longingly on a bold act of military intervention in Spain, while we were all against intervention in Vietnam. I called myself a pacifist, and yet the story of the American volunteers in Spain fascinated me because of its passions and contradictions. I came upon a book entitled From Spanish Trenches: Recent Letters from Spain, published in 1937. The book was divided by country, and when I read the letters from US soldiers and nurses, I was hooked. I knew the songs were powerful, even magical, in their ability to evoke a historical moment and produce an emotional response, and the texts of many of these letters were equally compelling. “It seems as if we had been here for months and New York is a faint and unreal dream,” nurse Fredericka Martin wrote, three weeks after she arrived in Spain: All our lives we seem to have been running back and forth along these cold corridors, all our lives we have hated white moonlight because it means the birds of death are busy nearby [. . .]. All our lives we have been hating as we have learned to hate here, when we see the ravages of dum dum bullets in the flesh and bones of the best youth of all the world. [. . .] If you have any voice on the committee, beg them to send us more nurses and doctors. Don’t let them forget us. They can never fill the need but they must never stop trying.5

Scenes began to take shape around passages like this one and from other books, and the scenes eventually came together in the first draft of the musical theater piece Heart of Spain, which went through extensive development and was later produced at Northwestern University in the spring of 2000. During my early research, I was living in El Cerrito, California. I discovered that Milt Wolff—the last commander of the Lincolns in Spain, a friend of Hemingway’s, and probably the most famous of the surviving veterans—lived in the same town. I gathered up my courage and called him. I had never interviewed

4

Radical Nostalgia

anyone in my life. I went over to his little apartment a few blocks from my own, and we sat for a couple of hours while I asked questions and he talked. Suddenly, I was no longer able to keep a safe, writerly distance from the war in Spain: it was sitting across from me. I ended up with some great material but had no idea what to do with it. Milt, on the other hand, knew what to do with me. The San Francisco Bay Area post of the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade was in the process of turning over the reins for their annual commemorative events to a group of their associate members, consisting of children of the veterans and also activists of the next generation. Milt encouraged me to call Peter Carroll, who was involved with the new program committee, to see if I could be of help. What began as a playwriting project turned into a new chapter in my life. Our group started discussing, developing, and then writing the performance component of the post’s upcoming reunion and dinner, attended by three to four hundred people each year. We decided early on that the script would include the words of Spanish Civil War veterans, a selection of the inevitable songs, and some narration. Everyone brought a different range of experience and expertise, and we worked well together. I had the strongest background in dramatic writing and adaptation, and I offered to draw up the earliest drafts for group consideration. In my own research, I had become enamored of the writings of Edwin Rolfe, an American volunteer in Spain and left-wing poet; I suggested we open with one of his poems and use its title as our own. The script began to come together. After going through rewrites and revision, it was sent to a few of the veterans for their approval, which it ultimately received. Postscript to a War: Voices of the Lincoln Brigade was performed February 26, 1995, in the ballroom of the Parc Oakland Hotel. Our committee of eight shared the writing credit, I directed, and Bruce Barthol of the San Francisco Mime Troupe was the musical director. The cast of five actor-singers sat on stools with their scripts on music stands and the five-piece band to one side. The company performed the letters, poems, and stories of the veterans and played and sang the songs I remembered from my living room, along with some other

Introduction: Fields of Action, Fields of Thought

5

antifascist anthems I had never heard before rehearsals began. The show was extremely well received, and established a structural model for many later commemorative projects. Our committee of writers delighted in our success. Our collaboration was productive and unusually enjoyable. I felt a kind of kinship with this group that was new to me. Through the veterans and in their name, together we had created something theatrically powerful and politically meaningful. Watching the performance, I felt a thrilling energy in the room. It was not only the kind of melancholy the songs had produced in my childhood home years before, but also a true sense of excitement and possibility. I was too close to analyze it at the time, but I believe this energy was produced by the interaction of Postscript to a War with an audience who shared some common beliefs about the way the world worked, and for whom the Spanish Civil War was a seminal and defining event. I found myself inside and outside that experience at the same time, a charged role I am still negotiating. Though I did not yet know the term, I had become a participant-observer in this community of activists. With the 1995 commemorative project, my new affiliation with the Bay Area post, and my work on Heart of Spain, the Spanish Civil War was taking up a large part of my life. At the time, I was considering a return to academia to pursue a graduate degree. By the fall of 1996, I was enrolled in the Department of Performance Studies at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. I returned to Oakland the following February to co-write and direct the next commemorative performance; I also collaborated with two Chicago musicians on a theatrical revue of Spanish Civil War music. Through my musician friends in Chicago, I met the small local community of Chicago-area veterans and began to work with them as well. As my interest in Spain and the American volunteers soon became the center of my academic life, it became clear that my intimate relationship with the veterans and their commemorative process could be the foundation for serious scholarly work. Not only had a sense of mutual trust and appreciation developed out of the collaborations in Oakland and Chicago, but the

6

Radical Nostalgia

relationship was mutually beneficial. I was pleased to be doing artistic work in a political context with people I respected, and the veterans and their community were grateful for the professional experience I brought to their events. My work with the Chicago veterans became integral to my research. Practice and scholarship were quickly inseparable, and as my project took shape, my friendships deepened. The charged insider/outsider status I had felt so keenly at the commemorative event in 1995 was now formalized by my academic location and scholarly intentions. I would be foolish to suggest that my relationship to the veterans’ community had not changed. As much as I was able to do for them, they had become subjects of scrutiny and analysis. And as much as they were able to do for me within the context of my academic work, they became more of a responsibility. But my horizons had expanded beyond any expectation. Just as I never would have sought out Milt Wolff had I not been trying to create a musical theater piece about Spain, I never would have met and interviewed and become friends with this remarkable and complicated generation of activists had my research not required it. My experience with many of the veterans as individuals and my research into their performance history has paralleled my artistic work on commemorative stages in Oakland, Chicago, and New York City. This scholarly project is, of course, its own kind of tribute; more intimate than the public performances, given the relationships this book fostered, and more distanced from the thrill of those live events, as academic analysis requires. What happened in Spain was not always as simple as some of its songs might suggest. Nonetheless, in the heat of the moment, when that music fills the room, I am no less in enthralled—and, at the same time, not quite so naive.

Radical Nostalgia We must remember cleanly why we fought, clearly why we left these inadequate shores and turned our eyes, hearts, Spainward. We must never

Introduction: Fields of Action, Fields of Thought

7

lie to ourselves again, deceive ourselves with dreams that make sleep sluggish. Our world is new now, clean and clear: our eyes can see the perfect bone and tissue now, remembering the flesh cut open, the gangrened limbs, the rot that almost, almost . . . but did not reach the heart. And if we find all known things changed now, after two years amidst fabulous truth. If we find dulled the once sharp edges of trivial loves; even if we find our truest loves indifferent, even false— we must remember cleanly why we went, clearly why we fought; and returning, see with truth’s unfilmed eyed what remains constant, the loyalties which endure, the loves that grow, the certainties men need, live for, die to build, the certainties that make all living tolerable. “Postscript to a War,” Edwin Rolfe 24 February 19396

There is a consensus among many scholars that nostalgia, as a force in culture and society, is reactionary in nature. Its sentimental and uncritical gaze into the past can tend to freeze the present and empower the status quo. “[I]n all its manifestations,” Susan Bennett states unequivocally, “nostalgia is, in its praxis, conservative.”7 Svetlana Boym, though more open to nostalgia’s progressive possibilities, still avers that “[t]he nostalgic desires to obliterate history and turn it into private and collective mythology.”8 I intend to test these claims. Through a study of nostalgia at play in the performance culture of the American Left, specifically in music-driven commemorations of the Spanish Civil War, I will examine nostalgia’s significant potential as a progressive force. In certain circumstances, the performance of radical nostalgia can serve valuable ends, reinfusing lost histories with credibility, substance, and emotional resonance. Conservative readings of nostalgia are numerous. It is, for Bennett, “an obsessive interest in the past as a figure for the desires of the present”—a craving, she later states, “for that authenticity which is not retrievable.”9 David Lowenthal calls it “the search for

8

Radical Nostalgia

a simple and stable past as a refuge from a turbulent and chaotic present.”10 In one of her more negative statements, Boym describes nostalgia as “an abdication of personal responsibility, a guilt-free homecoming, an ethical and aesthetic failure.”11 Nostalgia, then, is reductive: it oversimplifies, dehistoricizes, and deceives. Again quoting Bennett, nostalgia’s “representation of a seamless past has [. . .] been an important strategy in the politically regressive governments of the New Right,” exemplified by the policies of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.12 “Use and abuse of the past,” in Harvey Kaye’s opinion, were “central to their efforts to refashion capitalist hegemony.”13 Nostalgia is seen as a powerful tool, often deployed to serve reactionary ends. Boym, however, broadens her inquiry and, in distinguishing between restorative and reflective nostalgia, constructs a number of useful alternative readings. Noting that the word itself combines nostos, a return home, with algia, longing, she suggests that restorative nostalgia emphasizes nostos, proposing “to rebuild the lost home,” whereas its reflective form “dwells in algia, in longing and loss.”14 It is reflective nostalgia that opens itself to progressive possibilities. “Restorative nostalgia takes itself dead seriously. Reflective nostalgia [. . .] reveals that longing and critical thinking are not opposed to one another, as affective memories do not absolve one from compassion, judgment or critical reflection.”15 And yet, on the same page, she undercuts reflective nostalgia’s value by citing Susan Stewart: “it is ‘enamored of distance, not of the referent itself.’ This type of nostalgia narrative is ironic, inconclusive and fragmentary.”16 These seeming contradictions notwithstanding, Boym’s recent work on nostalgia offers invaluable insights into its mechanics and its operation. How, then, do theories that disparage nostalgia as conservative, ahistorical, and an “ethical and aesthetic failure” hold up in a radical performance context? Spanish Civil War veterans from the United States have been gathering with supporters in cities across the country for more than sixty years to recall and perform their history, sing the songs they learned during the war, and generate funds for causes they believe in. Seven hundred guests and twenty veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade gathered

Introduction: Fields of Action, Fields of Thought

9

in Oakland, California, for the Bay Area’s annual event in February 2000; two months later, 1,000 paid to attend the soldout performance in New York City with twenty-eight veterans present; and in the same year, 160 supporters and three veterans came to a benefit performance of Heart of Spain, the musical theater piece I co-wrote and staged at Northwestern University. Might commemorative gatherings such as these manage to carve a progressive space for nostalgia, or does their emotionally charged gaze back at “the good fight” remain socially and politically enervating? Can nostalgia serve the needs of a progressive community? What exactly is it in these particular cultural performances that might manage to overcome nostalgia’s usual reactionary pull? I intend to show that a radical, progressive nostalgia can become available and advantageous under specific social, historical, cultural, and performative circumstances. After summarizing the history of the war, I will describe in some detail the commemorative event held in New York City in 2000. Chapter 2 explores different definitions of nostalgia and commemoration, and how they are useful in understanding this particular performance process. Both consider historical subject matter, but, whereas nostalgia is an emotional response to culture about which different interpretations exist, commemoration is a social practice with various manifestations. The experience and impact of nostalgia may be interpreted in a variety of ways, and, although it may be pervasive, it is also ephemeral. Commemoration is practiced and performed, and it will be studied as an embodied process. It is in the embodied theatricality of these commemorative practices that radical nostalgia emerges and becomes almost palpable. To understand commemoration among Spanish Civil War veterans, begun before the war was even over, and to analyze the role nostalgia may play in this cultural practice, in chapters 3 and 4 I will detail a performance history, focusing on signature events. Study of archival evidence and newspaper accounts, along with my own conversations with members of this active commemorative community, have already produced a chronology of more than two hundred events nationwide since the war. At

10

Radical Nostalgia

present, annual performances are regularly staged in New York City and in the San Francisco Bay area, and have been without pause in both locales for more than twenty years. The process began in 1938, and this performance history will help demonstrate not only the veterans’ commemorative persistence but also the character of these events, their political and emotional content, and their engagement with the culture at large. Music from the Spanish Civil War has been a constant presence throughout this commemorative history. Chapter 5 will explore the songs brought home from Spain by the American volunteers and taken up by the burgeoning folk song movement in the 1940s. I will trace the history of the best known American contribution to the Spanish Civil War musical canon, “Jarama Valley”—originally an ironic parody written in the trenches that was quickly transformed into a reverential anthem—and will consider the implications of that transformation. In conclusion, in chapter 6 I will draw on a variety of theoretical texts, including works by Victor Turner, Raymond Williams, Smadar Lavie, John Bodnar, James Mayo, and Michael Kammen. Their research and writings will be used to deepen understanding of this unique commemorative process and to complicate existing constructions of nostalgia. Bringing this study up to date, the epilogue describes recent efforts to commemorate the actions of the veterans in performance and in a series of monuments. These include the unsuccessful attempt in February 2001 to place a plaque honoring Spanish Civil War veterans in the New Hampshire statehouse, vigorously opposed at the last minute by conservative constituencies. A history of Spanish Civil War commemoration in the United States is also a history of resistance to reactionary forces in American culture. Since Franco first set out to take over the Republic, the civil war in Spain has been an emotionally charged event for all parties involved. It instigated both remarkable unity and bitter contention. These were played out in passionate struggles between progressives and conservatives, or in internecine battles within the Left itself, among many who supported the Republic but might agree on little else.

Introduction: Fields of Action, Fields of Thought

11

The Good Fight Robert Cantwell has called the Spanish Civil War “an appallingly literal cause.”17 It inspired a generation of the Left. If Hamlet used “The Murder of Gonzago” to “catch the conscience of the King,” then the war in Spain—framed within what would soon come to be known as the European Theater—caught the conscience of “the people.” “I sit down to have my breakfast,” volunteer Peter Frye recalled of a morning in 1936, “open the paper . . . I don’t want to romanticize this, but I said ‘I can’t live in this world if I don’t fight against this kind of thing. I can’t accept it.’ ”18 When Franco staged his coup against the democratically elected Spanish government in July 1936, a series of forces converged to produce a dynamic reaction that, although it was in many ways inevitable, was still unexpected. It surprised no one more than Franco himself. How could he fail, he must have thought, with the Army of Africa he commanded, troops in Spain ready to join him, the support and collusion of generals Varela, Mola, and Queipo de Llano, a sympathetic population, and the assistance of Mussolini and Hitler? But Franco did not realize what passions his coup would unleash, nor did he anticipate the appallingly literal cause that defending the Republic would become for many thousands of Spaniards and the international community as well. Hundreds of books have been written about the Spanish Civil War and the historical events that set the stage for thirty-two months of vicious struggle.19 Spain was a monarchy for centuries, with the exception of the failed first Republic between 1873 and 1874. Power inevitably rested with the king, the army, the Catholic Church, and the wealthy landowners. In 1931, however, elections in Spain heavily favored Republican parties. Two days later, on April 14, the second Spanish Republic was proclaimed and the king abdicated. Suddenly, those who traditionally had held power were legally subject to the will of the people. The new government introduced reforms separating church and state, redistributing land, and demilitarizing the government with an antiwar policy. The traditional powers, seeing their well-being

12

Radical Nostalgia

and long-standing control threatened, resisted the changes, and parties of the right gained control of the government in the elections of 1933. Many on the Left were dissatisfied with the reforms as well. The anarchists were particularly unruly, and factions on both sides struggled for dominance. The Right, led by Gil Robles, dismantled many of the reforms begun in 1931, which led to a series of uprisings, the most significant in Asturia, where the miners struck and were brutally put down by troops under the command of Francisco Franco.20 Many thousands of union workers across Europe and in the United States took notice. The working people of Spain were under attack, and they were fighting back. At this time, fascist dictators were consolidating power and expanding their influence. In 1931, the same year the Second Spanish Republic was founded, Japan invaded Manchuria. Hitler became chancellor of Germany early in 1933. In 1934, Mussolini offered his support to the Spanish monarchists, were they to rebel. In October 1935, Italy invaded Abyssinia, now Ethiopia, with bombings said to be the first to purposely attack civilian populations from the air. In the United States, blacks in Harlem began to organize to defend Abyssinia, but the Italians took power too quickly. Hitler began legal persecution of the Jews with the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, and he occupied the Rhineland in 1936. That same year, the Spanish government changed hands again when the Popular Front, a coalition of left-wing, liberal, and centrist parties, won convincingly. Violence, unrest, and assassinations continued on both sides, but the Popular Front victory may have been the last straw for the forces of reaction, who were already plotting rebellion. Franco announced his war on the Republic from Morocco on July 17, 1936, and battles began throughout Spain. Franco and his army of Moorish conscripts and Foreign Legionnaires crossed the Mediterranean ten days later in transport planes provided by Hitler and Hermann Goering.21 Although many military units across Spain followed Franco’s lead to establish control of the country, some remained loyal to the Republic. The most significant response in Spain

Introduction: Fields of Action, Fields of Thought

13

came from the people themselves, who took to the streets in large numbers to challenge the military’s actions, and eventually gained control in cities such as Madrid, Barcelona, and Valencia. An easy march through Spain by Franco’s troops could no longer be assumed. In city after city, citizens resisted the insurrection. The civil war in Spain was international news. With Hitler in power, and threatening or annexing neighboring lands, democratic Spain was a powerful symbol. By responding in such numbers to put down Franco’s rebellion, the Republic proved that resistance to fascism was possible, that capitulation was not an assumption. When Franco staged his coup and it soon became clear that he had Hitler and Mussolini’s backing, the bravery of the Spanish people in holding off this fascist onslaught was all the more significant. “Madrid, qué bien resistes / mamita mía / los bombardeos,” goes another verse of “Los Cuatro Generales.” And then: “De las bombas se ríen / mamita mía, / los madrileños.”22 “Madrid,” it cheers, “how well you withstand the bombing. The people of Madrid laugh at the bombs.” In the words of one American volunteer, Spain represented “one glimmer of hope in a world rushing toward fascist domination.”23 When none of the Western democracies came to the aid of the Republic, the stakes were raised even higher. Only the Soviet Union and Mexico provided support. With the Communists in Spain a significant force in the Republican government, and the Soviet Union fearing the loss of one of the last holdouts against fascism, the Communist Party recruited volunteers through cells around the world for an International Brigade. This became a multinational army of antifascists who were organized to help defend Spain against Franco and his generals, Italian troops and hardware, and the German air force. Eventually, approximately 35,000 volunteers from what was judged to be more than fifty countries went to Spain as part of the International Brigades.24 Twenty-six hundred Americans took up arms, plus an additional 150 doctors, nurses, drivers, and technicians. “It was an army unprecedented in American history, based on ideology, motivated by principles,” Peter Carroll states in his definitive history of the

14

Radical Nostalgia

Abraham Lincoln Brigade, the name eventually taken on by the American volunteers.25 They were not the first to mobilize. In early November 1936, when fascist troops attempted to take Madrid, they were stopped by a combination of local militias, Republican forces, and the first antifascist volunteers from nearby France and Germany. As Judy Kutulas has claimed, “the very existence of a multinational army promised to fulfill the Marxist prophecy that one day the ‘workers of the world’ would unite against their common oppressors.”26 Factionalism on the Left was nonetheless intense, but—from the doctrinaire and well-organized Communists to the intractable anarchists, from liberals and pacifists to principled Socialists— almost everyone agreed that the loss of Spain to Franco and the fascists would be a disaster, and most believed the Republic could be saved.27 “History was going our way,” literary critic Alfred Kazin wrote of the 1930s. “Everything in the outside world seemed to be moving toward some final decision, for by now the Spanish Civil War had begun, and every day felt choked with struggle.”28 Kazin’s sense of both hope and struggle captures this historical moment for the Left. By July 31, just two weeks after the war began, the Communist paper The Daily Worker ran a photograph of a huge rally in New York City in support of the Republic (see figure 1). The Western democracies, however, were not similarly inclined. Less than two months after the war started, they formed the Non-Intervention Committee. Germany and Italy were members but supplied Franco with troops, arms, and planes nonetheless. The US government established an arms embargo on Spain on January 8, 1936, and three days later made it illegal for its citizens to travel there.29 That did not stop 2,750 American volunteers from participating in the struggle. The first group departed New York City on the day after Christmas, 1936, and volunteers continued to travel overseas for months, mostly through the efforts of the CPUSA, the US Communist Party. The Soviet Union had both the incentive and the necessary structures in place to organize the International Brigades. Peter

Introduction: Fields of Action, Fields of Thought

15

Carroll estimates that between two-thirds and three-quarters of the American volunteers self-identified as members of the Communist Party or an affiliated organization.30 Many participated as committed Communists, many in the name of democracy, not necessarily mutually exclusive. Given the times, “communism evoked a distinct idealism,” in Peter Carroll’s characterization. “It held a vision of social harmony—each according to his needs.”31 Whatever the specific motivations of the volunteers, Spain was the first country to hold off fascist military action, and a place where avowed antifascists could truly make a difference. “The resistance of the Spanish people and their allies to international fascism represented the last opportunity to avert the global calamity of World War II,” according to historian and American volunteer Arthur H. Landis.32 Despite the efforts of the Non-Intervention Committee, Spain became an international cause, the first true battleground for the most significant and deadly ideological conflict of the century. In the midst of expanding fascist power in Europe, Spain, desperately trying to hold out, was a model for Popular Fronters and their supporters in many countries—a source of hope amid a world gone awry. Ill equipped and, in the early going, ill trained, Americans fought in the battles of Jarama and Brunete, on the Aragon front in 1937, and at Teruel in 1938. They had many triumphs and gained the respect of hardened European antifascists, but history was not going their way. Most students of the war agree that Franco could not have won on his own; Hitler and Mussolini simply tipped the scales too far. As Franco and the fascists gradually took more of the country, the Lincolns were part of the “Great Retreats” and then participated in the Ebro offensive, the last major Republican advance before the Internationals were sent home late in 1938. Spanish Prime Minister Negrin ordered the International volunteers out of Spain in the vain hope that removing them might force the Non-Intervention Committee to address the illegal support Franco was receiving from Germany and Italy. But by March 1939, Franco had finally triumphed. Six months later, Hitler invaded Poland.

16

Radical Nostalgia

The International Brigades were formed to join a battle of international significance, but many joined up for reasons arising from personal political struggles. African American volunteer Oscar Hunter made a clear connection between local and global concerns: Why did I go? I was trying to organize cotton sharecroppers in a small town in Arkansas, and I was arrested. I started to mumble something about the American Constitution, but the sheriff yelled, “Constitution! I’m the Constitution around here!” I finally realized that the powers that be, the legal structure, and those who owned the land or the factories, the ownership structure, all worked together, hand in hand. I realized there was an “us” and a “them” in America, as well as anywhere else. So when I heard that “them” and “us” were at it with guns in Spain, in what I thought would be the final showdown, I decided to go.33

Spain became a stage for the practice of an ideology, a place where people could take on forces of evil no longer in any way abstract, where, in the words of W. H. Auden, “the menacing shapes of our fever / Are precise and alive.” “On that arid square,” he wrote, “[. . .] our thoughts have bodies,” a most eloquent evocation of activism.34 Of the 2,750 US volunteers in Spain, one-third lost their lives, but the thoughts that drove them survived in the bodies of the living. For many of those who returned, the struggle continued. “The war in Spain is over in the field of action,” Republican General Rojo said in 1939, “but not in the field of thought.”35 And this “field of thought,” so aptly credited by Rojo, produced its own kind of action on the home front. Among other things, it drove a vigorous commemorative process now nearly seventy years old.

To Sing This Story of Spain In April 2000, sixty years after Edwin Rolfe’s ringing call to memory’s arms was written in his “Postscript to a War,” a thousand people filled an auditorium in New York City to honor surviving members of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, who had traveled to

Introduction: Fields of Action, Fields of Thought

17

Spain to defend the Spanish Republic against Franco’s fascist coup. In what was effectively the first action of World War II, the Lincolns did their part. They were called heroes then and remained so for the many who now gathered in their name. In the nearly seventy-year history of commemorative performances in the United States looking back to the Spanish Civil War, the April 2000 commemoration was one of the more striking. Pete Seeger was there, the old warrior of the banjo, guitar, and broken tenor joined by his grandson Tao and Arlo Guthrie, singing songs from the Spanish Civil War and more recent anthems of struggle and resistance. The keynote speaker was Spanish magistrate Judge Baltasar Garzón, who had challenged the world to extradite Augusto Pinochet and bring him to justice for his crimes in Chile. Garzón’s speech was interrupted dozens of times by cheers and applause. Joyce Horman was in the audience out of gratitude to Judge Garzón. Her husband, Charles, a journalist, was killed in Chile in 1973 following the coup that brought Pinochet to power. The Hormans became the inspiration for the film Missing. Spain’s consul-general in New York City, Emilio Cassinello, was also present. Members of the San Francisco Mime Troupe and their band took the stage to perform a script I had written and compiled, inspired by Rolfe’s “Postscript to a War” and entitled We Must Remember! Blending prose, poetry, music, and photographs from and about the war, it worked to demonstrate the connection between the activism of the volunteers in the 1930s and present-day progressive movements. The longest ovation of the day, which brought the entire house to its feet, came early in the program, when 28 veterans of the Spanish Civil War were introduced by Moe Fishman, head of the New York post of the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade (VALB) (see figure 2). Within the larger context of memory, music, word, and image, the veterans were living history—but not as that term is often used, not as figures in a Disney diorama or a reenactment of the Battle of Gettysburg or a domestic scene re-created at Colonial Williamsburg. In the world of docudramas, the vets were the real thing. To turn the ultimate comment of postmodern ennui on its ear, they had been

18

Radical Nostalgia

there and done that. You could see it in their bent bodies and wrinkled faces, their raised fists, and their pride. With few exceptions, New York has held commemorative ceremonies honoring the veterans every single year since the first volunteers came home in 1937. History, memory, and presentday realities have converged on the living, breathing bodies of the veterans. For this audience they remain irrefutable icons of activism, true heroes of the Left. Their presence seemed to offer some of that “certainty” which Edwin Rolfe suggested could make “all living tolerable.” The veterans have become, again in Rolfe’s words, “what remains constant.”36 Their eventual passing will present a challenge to the commemorative community that surrounds them. At a similar event in Chicago in 1996, one of the six veterans present remarked on the “velocity” of the applause when they stood before the crowd of two hundred.37 That velocity is something to behold, linked to the emotion these events can generate. I have attended many such commemorative gatherings, and people wait for that moment when the veterans are introduced. The audience is primed, almost coiled and ready to leap to their feet. When the old men and women stand and face the crowd, we look history in the eye. “[A]nd when we look back,” to quote from Judge Garzón’s speech that day, referring to the Spanish Civil War, “we do so not to stop, but to gather strength to keep moving forward.”38 In those few words, he captured the essence of what I call radical nostalgia: we look back to keep moving forward. In this case, a progressive politic demands remembering, cleanly and clearly, why they left, and why they fought. For the last few years, the annual events have been produced by the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives (ALBA), an organization founded in the 1980s to preserve and disseminate the history of the Lincolns. At an ALBA meeting I attended to discuss the 2000 commemorations, according to my notes, a veteran said: “I don’t think we should get up on stage anymore. I’m tired of it. Nobody wants to see a bunch of old men up there anymore.” One of the younger generation at the meeting, a history professor and activist in his late forties, took immediate

Introduction: Fields of Action, Fields of Thought

19

exception: “You have to get up there. That’s always the most emotional part of the show for me. That’s why I come.” That is why we come—to look history in the eye, to gain inspiration and strength from the emotion that is almost inevitably produced. That event in April 2000 contained the essential elements of this commemorative process: history, music, present-day politics, the veterans themselves, and high emotion. With the future in mind and at stake, it looked backward in hopes of moving forward. Sitting in my office here at UC Berkeley, I just watched a rough video of We Must Remember! shot for archival purposes at the 2000 event in Oakland, and when it was over, I was in tears. Why? Is that emotion worth anything? Does it make any kind of difference? How was meaning constructed at this event, and what did it produce? How can this performance help us understand the stubborn persistence and longevity of Spanish Civil War commemoration in the United States? If we must remember, how does it happen? Why remember again and again, year after year? With the April 2000 performance as a starting point, these are some of the questions this book will explore. I was elected to the governing board of ALBA in 2001, but I had had contact with the Board beginning a few years earlier. In remarks I prepared for the meeting to plan the commemorative event that came to be known as We Must Remember!, I quoted Hayden White from The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. “The breakdown of narrativity in a culture, group or social class,” White wrote, “is a symptom of its having entered into a state of crisis. For with any weakening of narrativizing capacity, the group loses its power to locate itself in history, to come to grips with the Necessity that its past represents for it.”39 It was not that I thought anyone at the meeting would disagree with White’s comment, but I had found the quote affecting in the way it seemed to address the commemorative process in general, and our work in Spanish Civil War commemoration in particular. One significant purpose of the commemorative process, I took White to be saying, was to prevent this “breakdown of narrativity.” Although the surviving veterans of the Spanish Civil War would be able to locate themselves in

20

Radical Nostalgia

history, they were not the group in question, per se, though they were at its core. The group included their loose constituency, the people who might come to their events in a given year, people who sought or might learn to seek inspiration in their actions. The community of activists, artists, and politically minded people to which I belonged, the more official commemorators, knew the importance of this past. That is why we were involved with the veterans. As the next generation, we were taking responsibility for keeping their history alive—a task they had pursued with energy and focus for many decades—at a time when their age made it more and more difficult for them to do the job themselves. Hayden White, like Edwin Rolfe before him, was emphasizing the importance of history and memory, and the dangers inherent in their loss, but whereas Rolfe told us what to remember—“why we fought” and “why we left”—White was specifying a methodology. He insisted that the “narrativizing capacity” was essential. A group must not only know its own story, and always renew that knowledge, but also tell it, and, I might add, tell it well. The past needs to be available as a working narrative if it is going to serve any purpose, if the group is going to survive. Confidence in their own narrative allows the veterans and their descendants—offspring both familial and ideological—to retain a sense of identity. As an official commemorative body, however, we must not preach only to the choir. “An active transmission of memory requires fostering a process of identification that can produce a broadening of the ‘we’, the active subjects of reminiscing,” according to Elizabeth Jelin and Susana G. Kaufman, writing on issues of memory in Argentina.40 For the commemorative process to be productive beyond the confines of the choir, the “we” who must remember has to be broadened. More people must feel that urgency, that desire. More people need to be included in the narrativizing process. As the purveyors of the veterans’ story, in keeping with White, we, the commemorators, have “to come to grips with the Necessity that [their] past represents.” Yet to be true to the vets’ ideological mission as Leftists and activists, we also have to be able to convey that necessity to others—to people who

Introduction: Fields of Action, Fields of Thought

21

might not already know the story, who have yet to come under its unusual spell. A “broadening of the ‘we’ ” requires new attention to the group’s defining narrative itself if it is to become more inclusive: its construction, its arc, its detail.41 Three distinct performance components made up the 2000 commemorative event in New York City: Garzón’s speech, the trio’s concert, and the dramatic script. Each segment had a narrative and narrative structure of its own, and they combined to construct a larger story. ALBA was exceedingly fortunate to have Judge Garzón present at their affair. His efforts to extradite General Pinochet had been international news for months, and the parallels between Pinochet’s coup and Franco’s, and their subsequent dictatorships, were inescapable. That Garzón was a Spaniard made the connection even clearer. Garzón had been invited by ALBA to give the third annual Bill Susman lecture, named in honor of one of the then surviving veterans who had been integral in the formation of ALBA. At the Susman lecture, which Garzón had delivered two days earlier, “[t]he standing ovation thundered before he uttered a word,” as his audience demonstrated the appreciation they felt for his actions regarding Pinochet. He, in turn, felt a debt to the Lincolns for coming to the defense of his country.42 Once Judge Garzón agreed to come to New York for the lecture, involving him in the Sunday commemorative affair was relatively easy. Like most of the invited guests at the annual events, Garzón had an emotional and political investment in the veterans and their history. At the podium, he spoke of telling his son stories of the war “learned not in books but from the lips of those who, like my Uncle Gabriel, fought on the Republican side and suffered injustice for fighting for legality and liberty.”43 Standing backstage as the event got started, I was worried about his speech. Judge Garzón was going to be translated, line by line, by ALBA board member Tony Geist, a professor of Spanish. The presentation would double in length. From a theatrical standpoint, I was concerned that the constant back-and-forth between languages would dissipate whatever energy Garzón might generate with his thoughts, and tire a predominantly English-speaking audience. Geist had a copy of Garzón’s speech,

22

Radical Nostalgia

but he had to listen carefully and do much of his translating on the fly. Even with these obstacles, Garzón was impressive, at times riveting, and the audience was with him the whole way. A partisan crowd, they were predisposed toward him just as his audience at the Susman lecture had been; but it was ultimately his erudition, his passion, and the content of his speech that made it so successful. “Cowardice, with the very minor exception of a small number of fighters, has always been the norm throughout the world,” Garzón began, in Geist’s translation. The struggle for the freedom of the rest of humanity has always been the task of the very few who have put their lives at the service of others, to assure their future. The spirit of the pure man that Shakespeare referred to is incarnate in these men and women, which today and always they transmit to us and which gives us the strength to keep living, confident that we will create a better world.44

In his first words, Garzón had captured the essence of this commemorative process, its theoretical underpinnings—the idea that the activism of the vets in the 1930s and their commitment to a cause could be transmitted to a new audience, a new generation. Without prompting, the judge gave immediate credence to what we as commemorators were trying to do, and what we hoped the audience would experience. Given his actions on the international stage, Garzón’s perspective was not necessarily a surprise, but the specificity of his message was. Garzón told the audience that his son had once asked him the meaning of solidarity. “Solidarity is not a concept,” he answered, “it is a system of life; it is a generous offering of one’s life to others, to the community and to the world to make it better . . .” [I]t is the essence of the freedom of all men and women, and the way in which the most disadvantaged people can emerge from poverty. But our challenge is also to denounce injustice; it is a commitment, honesty; it is simultaneously utopia and

Introduction: Fields of Action, Fields of Thought

23

reality and, in the final analysis, it is the very breath of life that inspires us to keep fighting for these things [emphasis added].45

What better way to encapsulate the concept of an engaged progressive politic than as the attempt to integrate utopia and reality? In “Postscript to a War,” Rolfe wrote of a surviving heart, unreached by the rot of gangrene. Utopian visions arise from the heart, whereas gangrene, Rolfe’s metaphor for the loss in Spain, was the unassailable real. Without struggle, without the risk of unbearable rot, there can be no possibility of any sort of utopia. One cannot exist without the other. “The twentieth century has been the most violent period in human history,” Garzón said later in his speech. “[. . .] But it is also true that, following each disaster, piece by piece we have assembled a universal structure of ethical conscience that today opens the portal of hope for a better world.”46 Commemorations of the Spanish Civil War, I would argue, work to open that portal as well, or at least point the way. It is almost impossible to speak about the Spanish Civil War without quoting its poets. “From the first moment of [the International Brigades’] appearance, rivers of ink ran,” Garzón commented. He quoted two literary sources in his speech, Rafael Alberti’s famous honorific poem “To the International Brigades” and, even more significant in this context, the lyrics to the best known commemorative anthem written in English during the war, “Jarama Valley.” The history of this particular song will be discussed in detail in Chapter 5, but at that moment, standing backstage listening to Garzón’s indecipherable but passionate Spanish and Geist’s uninflected translation, I was nearly breathless when, without transition after the end of Alberti’s poem, Geist began to recite the familiar lyrics to “Jarama Valley” in a somewhat unfamiliar form. These were originally English lyrics, translated into Spanish, which Geist was now translating back into English. This source text was a commemorative icon—performed at literally hundreds of events in the United States since it was written in 1937, soon to be sung in We Must Remember!—now filtered back to an

24

Radical Nostalgia

American audience through the land and language of its inspiration. It was originally conceived from the perspective of an English-speaking volunteer; Garzón’s simple shift of pronouns in the second part of the lyric turned it around. “There’s a valley in Spain called Jarama. / It’s a place that we all know too well,” he said, matching the original version. The next line of the familiar commemorative verse went on: “It was there that we gave of our manhood / where so many of our brave comrades fell.”47 Garzón, with the twenty-eight veterans a few feet away in the front row, shifted the perspective: “for it’s there that you gave your youth and wagered all for the freedom of mankind.”48 A Spaniard was now honoring the surviving volunteers, instead of the volunteers honoring their own. Whether this transposition was Garzón’s own or whether he was working from a Spanish version of the song that incorporated this adjustment in the lyric is unclear and, in a sense, unimportant. In the moment of performance, he placed himself and his grateful country into a song and in so doing paid tribute to those who had originally intended only to honor themselves. In Garzón’s version, the Spanish people spoke directly to the veterans through the vehicle of their own familiar anthem. “We have left that valley of sorrow, but its memory shall always remain,” the Judge said a few lines later, bringing the recitation to a close, hewing fairly closely to the American version. This lyric could have described the experience of either a member of the Brigade or a Spaniard, but then, without warning, the position of the speaker shifted again, and Garzón spoke directly to the veterans: “Today, we face other problems and other sorrows, but your example gives us the strength to continue the struggle to conquer the future.”49 He could not have been clearer. “We face . . . problems,” he said, and “your example gives us . . . strength.” Just as he had at the beginning of his speech, he held up the veterans’ example as a model for future action. The “we” of the original song—the veterans themselves—had been broadened, as Jelin and Kaufman had suggested, to include Garzón, the people of Spain, and the entire audience. Garzón’s speech received a long ovation.

Introduction: Fields of Action, Fields of Thought

25

“This event bears many distinctions,” host Henry Foner said to introduce the next act, “and none greater than the three performers who will join us now.50 They represent three distinct generations but one overarching aspiration . . . the love of freedom and the brother and sisterhood of humanity.” This transgenerational component was an important signifier in the “broadening of the ‘we’.” Seeger, about to turn 81 and a longtime supporter of the vets; Guthrie, “who has brought the immortal heritage of his father, Woody Guthrie, to new heights of artistry”; and Rodriguez-Seeger, a talented performer in his own right, were a tripartite metonymic representation of the aging veterans, the commemorative practitioners surrounding them, and the younger generation of activists we were hoping to attract.51 They cut an impressive figure: the lanky, gray-bearded Seeger holding his famous banjo bearing the inscription “This machine kills fascists,” copied from Woody Guthrie’s guitar; Arlo, his long, wavy gray hair in a loose ponytail; and Tao, tall and youthful, standing between them, sharing a microphone with his grandfather. Seeger’s singing voice had been so ravaged by overuse of that exhortative tenor in sixty years of rallies, concerts, and singalongs that his grandson needed to sing with and for him. They began with Lead Belly’s “Midnight Special,” a rousing, up-tempo blues with no overt political content, except as an example of the adoption of black music by white performers, which the three acknowledged in a verse of tribute to the song’s composer. They followed with the well-known Spanish Civil War song “Si Me Quieres Escribir,” an ironic march, which opened with Seeger’s still miraculous banjo interpretation of the Spanish melody.52 Before they sang the last verse, Tao translated the song, interpreting the final line in a manner I had never heard before but which was unusually apt. The song speaks sarcastically of an inn at the Gandesa front in Spain where the food is cheap and good, and the waiter is one of the Moors in Franco’s army. “The first plate they serve is grenades,” Tao translated, “and the second plate they serve is machine gun fire to bring back the memories [emphasis mine].”53 It is hard to know exactly how to interpret this, but having a machine gun bring back memories

26

Radical Nostalgia

is either bitterly ironic, or conveys the sense that in this case the memories run counter to the dream of delicacies at the front— that what is remembered are the harsh realities of the conflict, its foundations, and its losses to date. If “we must remember” was the theme of the event, it must be assumed that memories are not always sweet ones but instead can sometimes constitute a return to a complex reality in constant interplay with the utopic. Arlo’s own moving song about the Chilean singer and poet Victor Jara, co-written with Adrian Mitchell, followed.54 Then Seeger, underscoring himself on the guitar as he spoke, again recounted Victor Jara’s story—how Jara was captured by the military during the coup, how his hands were beaten and broken before he was killed. Guthrie and Seeger told the same story, one in the heightened poetry of a song lyric, with its refrain, “His hands were gentle, his hands were strong,”55 and the other in journalistic prose describing the scene at the soccer stadium where the prisoners had been gathered: And with the stands full of people watching in horror, they brought a table out, and said “Put your hands on the table,” and they beat it, some say with . . . gun butts, some say with axes, whatever it was at the end of a few minutes, his hands were nothing but bloody pulps. And then they shouted, “Now sing for us!” He staggered, white faced, to, to face the stands. [Seeger’s voice breaks on the last four words. He pauses momentarily, swallows, and goes on.] He says, “Compañeros, let’s sing for El Comandante.” And he started singing the anthem of Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity Party. They couldn’t stand listening to it. They opened up with machine guns.56

“They” brought the table, “they” beat, “they” shouted, “they” couldn’t listen, and “they” opened fire. The “broadening of the ‘we’ ” can often be facilitated by naming an ever-present “they,” a clear and ubiquitous enemy. After his story, Seeger recited Jara’s final poem. “The blood of compañeros, Presidente,” part of it read, “is stronger than bombs, is stronger than machine guns.”57 The blood of the people now transcended the ultimate reality of the bombs and machine guns of “Si Me Quieres Escribir.”

Introduction: Fields of Action, Fields of Thought

27

The three followed with “Guantanamera” sung in Spanish, Seeger’s popular setting of Cuban revolutionary poet José Martí’s “Yo soy un hombre sincero.” The audience sang along on all the choruses. The veterans have long been supporters of lifting the US trade embargo on Cuba. In Moe Fishman’s opening remarks, mention of Cuba had drawn applause, so the song’s origins were consistent with the veterans’ interests and those of the audience. If some did not know Spanish—or found the song more popular than political, given its commercial success—Seeger placed it in a social and historical context by quoting Martí between verses. “ ‘With the poor people of this earth . . . I want to share my fate,’ ” Seeger said. “So wrote José Martí in 1891.” Many saw the efforts of the International Brigade volunteers in a similar light, sharing their fate with that of the Spanish people whose country was being stolen from them by the powerful and the wealthy. Giving the audience the opportunity to draw these parallels is an important aspect of this commemorative process. If the connections are made, it is much harder to dismiss the war and its cause, or treat it as an isolated incident. It comes to represent something much larger. Arlo Guthrie then sang and played another tune that resonated in unexpected ways, his 1989 protest song about the poor treatment of returning veterans, “When a Soldier Makes It Home.” It addressed both the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, just ending at the time the song was written, and the Vietnam War. It was a period piece, as Arlo acknowledged, but again, the connections and sparks across the years were numerous and provocative.

There won’t be any victory parades For those that’s coming back They’ll fly them in at midnight And unload the body sacks And the living will be walking down A long and lonely road Because nobody seems to care these days When a soldier makes it home.58

28

Radical Nostalgia

The American veterans of the Spanish Civil War were heroes at this event, as they have been at marches and other affairs, but they had been targets of persecution by government authorities from the moment they returned home. Many were blacklisted, or lost jobs, or—if they were considered to be too closely affiliated with the Communist Party—went underground for some years.59 The song placed members of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in a more complete historical context, and suggested, given the frame for the event, that veterans can struggle and suffer for different reasons. Arlo brought the historical marginalization of the Spanish Civil War veterans into relief. Henry Foner introduced the scripted piece that would close the affair, We Must Remember! It was written with a specific purpose in mind, arrived at after much discussion among members of the ALBA board. This idea was well articulated in Peter Carroll’s introduction of the same piece at the February commemorative event in Oakland: History and memory is what this performance is all about. It’s what our lives are now all about. The further we get away from those great events of the past—the Spanish Civil War, World War II, the fight against McCarthy, the Civil Rights struggle, the Vietnam protests, the causes of Nicaragua and black South Africa, and now, most recently, the World Trade Organization—they remain alive, they remain alive because they exist in our memory. They form what you call a “living history,” that binds all of us to the past, and also to the future. It is our obligation now. And from that history we draw inspiration and the healthiness of keeping these old social and political movements alive for the future. They remain alive because we understand the concepts and the principles and the beliefs that makes all this happen. So, today our obligation is not just to talk about history and memory like raindrops falling outside in the street but something that’s an integral part of our own lives, and that gives us responsibilities and obligations as well.60

Just as in Oakland in 1995, five performers sat on stools with music stands holding their scripts. The band, led again by my collaborator Bruce Barthol, was stage right, opposite the podium.

Introduction: Fields of Action, Fields of Thought

29

Upstage was a large rear projection screen, on which a series of still images accompanied the performance. In the script, I drew on the words of nine poets and writers, from Pablo Neruda and Stephen Spender to veterans Edwin Rolfe and Alvah Bessie, one of the Hollywood Ten. I also incorporated the words of fourteen veterans, drawn from interviews and speeches. The company sang seven songs, six of them from the period of the war itself, including “Jarama Valley,” now in its more familiar form, and one contemporary ballad, “Taste of Ashes,” written by Bruce Barthol for a San Francisco Mime Troupe show on the war in Spain. The narration provided basic historical information and constructed an argument, augmented by the preexisting prose and songs, about the significance of the war, the impact of the veterans’ ongoing activism, and the essential role of collective memory in preventing the Spanish Civil War from losing our attention like the returning soldiers in Arlo’s song. Very early in the piece, I quoted from Alvah Bessie’s 1952 poem “The Dead Past,” written while he was in prison for refusing to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC). After referring to the veterans’ protests in the 1950s against US ties to the Franco government, Bessie sets up his argument: and there are those who say Why live in the past? Why so much emphasis on what is dead and gone and lost and dry when the present is here, the future bursts the clock, so many things to do, so little time? Is it the past and is it dead and gone and was Spain lost or does the battle sound?61

Stating the poem’s origins after its performance gave “The Dead Past” specific political relevance, and drew further connections. A poem like this demonstrates that concern for the past has been important to the veterans for years. I repeated the final sentence later in the show as an introduction to a speech about the relationship between Vietnam-era protests and the war in Spain. Spain was lost, but the battles and struggles do still sound.

30

Radical Nostalgia

I also quoted veteran Clarence Kalin, who spearheaded the effort to have a memorial to the volunteers constructed on the lakefront in Madison, Wisconsin, one of only two outdoor monuments in the United States. “We’ll tell people they shouldn’t see this as a memorial to old soldiers. They should see it as a reminder that the struggle we joined in Spain, the struggle for economic and social justice, goes on. We’re still a part of it.”62 In this setting, Kalin’s “we,” one hopes, expands yet again, to bring the audience into the community of those who take part in the struggle. With quotes like Bessie’s and Kalin’s as examples, I did not feel that I was manufacturing an argument so much as calling collective attention to an existing, persistent discourse. The recent protests against the World Trade Organization in Seattle became another link in what we saw as a strengthening chain back to a living past. Protests against the WTO had taken place at the end of 1999, and a number of veterans and members of their community had participated. That protest actions such as this were still possible and eventful brought energy to the proceedings. Across the afternoon, the individual pieces added up. With Judge Garzón’s assumption that we look back in order to move forward, a concept referenced again and again throughout the event; with “Jarama Valley” cited twice, once in the Spanish tongue like a cherished artifact used to pay homage; with Arlo complicating the term “veteran” by reminding the audience that even an enemy soldier returning home can be unfairly ignored; with the three-generation trio acting as a metonym for our work as commemorators to engage successive generations; with Seeger going back to 1891 to point out that these struggles have a long, a seemingly endless history; and with Bessie implicating everyone by noting our own instincts to dismiss “the dead past” because there is “so much to do, so little time”—thanks to all these examples, and more, the event generated narrative and emotional momentum. If We Must Remember! was both a title and a call, the event itself, we hoped, might produce an answer by broadening the “we” and providing a compelling “why” as well. In his poem “Fall of a City,” Stephen Spender imagines walking the streets of a Spanish town after the war, with all the

Introduction: Fields of Action, Fields of Thought

31

posters and leaflets “mutilated, destroyed, or run in rain / Their words blotted out with tears.” We used portions of this poem in the show. In the penultimate stanza, cut from the performance in the interest of time, Spender claims that, when Franco takes over the country after the years of hope, the Spanish peasant “relapses,” is forced back to poverty and ignorance when denied the reforms of the Republic. “These only remember to forget,” he ends the stanza, as the past becomes dead again. “But,” Spender says in beginning his final verse, which we did retain: . . . somewhere some word presses In the high door of a skull, and in some corner Of an irrefrangible eye Some old man’s memory jumps to a child - Spark from the days of liberty. And the child hoards it like a bitter toy.63

“The spirit of the pure man . . . is incarnate in these men and women,” Garzón had said earlier, “which . . . they transmit to us and which gives us the strength to keep living, confident that we will create a better world.” What they can transmit, from an elder to the next generation, is Spender’s “spark from the days of liberty,” a historically inflected sense of hope and possibility. “What does your heart hear, / Poet, / What songs unfurl?” Langston Hughes wrote to Edwin Rolfe in 1937, the last poem in We Must Remember! It was shouted by one of the actors during an instrumental passage in the final song, “Viva La Quince Brigada,” for which the Seegers and Guthrie had returned to the stage (see figure 3): What does your heart hear, Poet, What songs unfurl? Bright banners Made of words . . . to fly Over the trenches, And over frontiers, And over all barriers of time

32

Radical Nostalgia Through the years To sing this story Of Spain On the ramparts of the world [. . .]64

More than sixty years ago, Hughes gave us our mission, manifest in Spanish Civil War commemoration since the 1930s: “To sing this story of Spain on the ramparts of the world.” Why? So that its memory—an essential if controversial piece of the past— might be hoarded, and held, and never forgotten, to give people the strength to keep living and create a better world. This is the theoretical and emotional foundation for a radical nostalgia.

Chapter 2

Nostalgia and Commemoration

Now we’re far from that valley of sorrow But its memory we ne’er will forget— So before we conclude this reunion Let us stand to our glorious dead. From the song “Jarama Valley” on the 1943 album Songs of the Lincoln Brigade

Memory of the Heart Suffused with emotion, commemorative events like those practiced by the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade are deeply sentimental. “People commemorate emotionally significant events from their public past,” wrote Nico Frijda. “These commemorations rest, to a large extent, on the emotions of those who suffered from the remembered events or who lost people in them. These emotions are still there, or wait for occasions to manifest themselves.”1 Commemorations of the Spanish Civil War have provided these occasions, and offer a theoretical foundation for General Rojo’s field of thought outliving the field of action. Paul Connerton, in How Societies Remember, reinforces this performative linking of past and present: “We preserve versions of the past by representing it to ourselves in words and images. Commemorative ceremonies are pre-eminent instances of this.”2 Memory and history are preserved through ritualized representation and re-representation. “[I]mages of the past and recollected knowledge of the past are conveyed and sustained by

34

Radical Nostalgia

(more or less) ritual performances.”3 The commemorations serve a particular purpose, citing and maintaining a chosen past. Many commemorative events recalling the Spanish Civil War have featured scripted dramatic programs, entirely original or adapted from letters, oral histories, news items, speeches, and prose writings, constructing a genre of commemorative theater. Whatever the form, political content has been a constant. Beginning with early fund raising for Spanish refugees by the VALB, advocacy on behalf of political prisoners in Spain, ongoing agitation against US ties to Franco, and their vigorous work on behalf of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, they have made a consistent effort to direct their antifascist activism toward new causes.4 Recent speakers at commemorative events have included the Cuban attaché to the African National Congress and the American spokesperson for the Zapatistas from Chiapas, Mexico.5, 6 When Judge Balthasar Garzón spoke at the New York City event in April 2000, he was continuing a long tradition. Of the cultural elements in these commemorative ceremonies—representational vehicles for history and memory—the group singing of songs made popular during the conflict has been perhaps the most consistent and cherished component. Paul Robeson sang for the troops in Spain during the war and at commemorative events thereafter, and Pete Seeger has performed at scores of events over the years. The album Songs of the Lincoln Brigade was played through loudspeakers for five hundred guests at the reunion in New York City that same year. As reported in the VALB newspaper, Volunteer for Liberty, “Even Gabby Klein’s strident voice was hushed when everyone listened spellbound to the new recordings of the songs we sang in Spain.”7 The forty-second anniversary event in 1979, honoring black veterans, featured another performance by Seeger, described as follows: Pete Seeger came to the microphone. To our pleasant surprise, he brought with him two of the group which first recorded Songs of the Lincoln Brigade, so many years ago.8 [. . .] Before long he had a great sing-along going. Nostalgia took hold, and in that short spell we could feel the beauty and passion of Spain’s epic struggle for freedom.9

Nostalgia and Commemoration

35

This description, with its innocent mention of nostalgia thirty-five years after the songs were recorded and forty years after the war, gives a sense of how those present engaged with the music, and of the role the songs played within the veterans’ commemorative culture. At a minimum, these two quotes tell us what this community thought the songs could accomplish, and what hearing and singing them made them feel—not only the beauty and the passion, but also the struggle, the feeling of struggle. As Connerton stated, “[w]e preserve versions of the past by representing it to ourselves in words and images,” a practice the veterans have pursued for more than sixty years. This past has been preserved not only through mimetic representations. For this intergenerational community, joined together in the singing of period songs, themselves artifacts of the war and its times, history has become embodied habit. “In habitual memory,” Connerton stated, “the past is, as it were, sedimented in the body.”10 The commemorative communities I have worked with and studied in New York, San Francisco, and Chicago share an emotional identification with the decade of the 1930s, when their radical politics had credibility and clout. Theirs is a longing evident in these commemorative events and self-described as nostalgia. Commemorative energy may be strongest when it has the most to work against. The 1930s and its politics can gain in their appeal when viewed from more conservative times. “The twentieth century began with a futuristic utopia,” Boym states, “and ended with nostalgia.”11 Nostalgia is a product of the present. “In counterpoint to our fascination with cyberspace and the virtual global village,” Boym wrote in 2001, “there is a no less global epidemic of nostalgia, an affective yearning for a community with a collective memory, a longing for continuity in a fragmented world.”12 Susan Stewart acknowledges that “[n]ostalgia [. . .] is always ideological.”13 The nostalgic condition was originally a medical diagnosis of soldiers suffering from crippling homesickness in the late eighteenth century.14 Nostalgia is now seen to derive from temporal displacements more than spatial ones, from a desire “to revisit time like space” [emphasis added].15 Still, it continues to embody

36

Radical Nostalgia

a sense of separation and loss. “[N]ostalgia is a sadness without an object,” Stewart states.16 The home those ailing eighteenthcentury soldiers craved was geographically distant, but, it could be argued, it was the emotional stability and comforting embrace of that inaccessible familiar/familial landscape they both lacked and desired. Veterans of the Spanish Civil War looking back on the 1930s crave the comradeship, shared effort, and sense of hope and purpose they had found in those years, and in Spain. “[N]ever was ‘some day comrade’ said with such longing,” volunteer James Neugass wrote in a poem during the war.17 These were their ideological and spiritual homelands, from which they are now separated, not only by time and space but also by dramatic changes in the ideological climate. Does this sadness completely lack an object, or might the emotional loss in Spain become affixed to new objects of longing and desire? In her study of nostalgia in Victorian culture, Ann Colley offers a helpful gloss on the original medical condition: Obviously, the nineteenth-century writers and painters discussed in this book would not have been considered clinically nostalgic by their contemporaries. In spite of this fact, though, they, in some way, mirror the case studies described by physicians, for they experience loss and at moments feel alienated from their homeland and their origins by virtue of distance, age, or alteration. All of them intermittently suffer from a desire for reunion, for some point of correspondence between their present and their past, their immediate surroundings and their home. [. . .] Often their texts offer them a form of hope, of promise, that they can, for a moment, place themselves in the track of their former selves and re-enter what is now irrevocably absent and seemingly unavailable. They can reclaim what was once themselves.18

The veterans and their followers have exhibited a similar “desire for reunion” and Boym’s “yearning for community.” They sought their own points of correspondence, manifest in sixty years of commemorative activity seeking to reclaim a similar satisfaction and sense of identity, and to preserve “hope” and “promise”

Nostalgia and Commemoration

37

through the sharing and embodying of their own performative texts. “It is the very pastness of the past,” Linda Hutcheon has said, “its inaccessibility, that likely accounts for a large part of nostalgia’s power—for both conservatives and radicals alike.” This need to connect present and past is reinforced in her citation of Bakhtinian “historical inversion” whereby “the ideal that is not being lived now is projected into the past.”19 This projection into the past recalls Colley’s concept of reentering a former self, though Colley takes it a step further, suggesting that something of the past can be “reclaimed.” The veterans’ commemorative performances create a historically and emotionally resonant space, in opposition to the mainstream culture at large, where their radical politics may be celebrated. In this context, the veterans and their supporters can look to the past for what they lack in the present, seize it, and perhaps carry it forward. Boym sees the backward gaze as ahistorical, but not unproductive: “Fantasies of the past determined by needs of the present have a direct impact on realities of the future.”20 I would question whether nostalgia necessarily relies on fantasy. Nonetheless, the effort to “reclaim” the past in order to address the future begins to hint at nostalgia’s potential for progressive motion. In 1937, the words “Our Victory Is Your Vengeance” were painted on a makeshift memorial plaque at a battlefield grave site in Spain, to honor the many Americans killed at Jarama21 (see Figure 4). This is a commemorative object, a performance without actors, a stage on which the actors are implicit in the textual performance of the memorial. The statement assumes congruent action. Honoring the dead here is essential but not isolated, not without performative resonance. To somehow avenge the loss in Spain by refusing to forget it—and, in that refusal, transmit hope and strength—still seems to drive and be incarnate in this commemorative process. The fact that the Spanish Civil War was lost gives the longing both its force and its edge. “The heritage of tragedy may well be more effective than that of triumph,” David Lowenthal states, and quotes Ernest Renan from 1882: “ ‘suffering in common

38

Radical Nostalgia

unifies more than joy does.’ ”22 Susan Stewart, citing Marx, notes that nostalgia constitutes a felt lack, a palpable sense of “if only.”23 The Oxford English Dictionary concurs, quoting a character from a 1928 Evelyn Waugh novel in one of its citations: “He pictures with a sense of nostalgia, too acute almost to be endured, all that marriage to Marian would have meant.”24 Waugh’s “he” can always lament the marriage that never was, but could have been. His life story, based on a missed opportunity, is forever left unfinished, with Marian the lost object of persistent longing. “The realization of re-union imagined by the nostalgic is a narrative utopia that works by virtue of its partiality, its lack of fixity and closure; nostalgia is the desire for desire.”25 To paraphrase Waugh, the veterans can forever lament “all that winning in Spain would have meant.” The “lack of fixity and closure” guaranteed by the never-to-be-achieved success in Spain is their unfulfilled “narrative utopia,” the site for their feelings of hope and promise. Like Bennett, though, Stewart tends to assume that these feelings get us nowhere. As cited earlier, “[t]he nostalgic is enamored of distance, not of the referent itself.”26 That the energy generated by this “desire for desire” could be put to use, and be politically useful in the present, is at the heart of this project. I want to suggest that it is counterproductive to generalize about nostalgia’s cultural possibilities, and thereby limit its progressive potential. That nostalgia has served the reactionary agendas of leaders such as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher is not in dispute, but these were conservative leaders in positions of power acting within the dominant culture. Similarly, some hard-line Stalinists sought to cast a heroic glow over the war in Spain without regard for the Soviet Union’s brutal treatment of the Trotskyites. As long as this obfuscation held sway, it exemplified Boym’s sense of nostalgia as producing a “collective mythology,” but among commemorators, this gloss on the war has been neither exclusive nor endemic. Nonetheless, to examine nostalgia within a subordinated community holding views far to the left of mainstream America, and struggling for identity and visibility, will, I hope, allow for the development of

Nostalgia and Commemoration

39

a more expansive definition of this unarguably powerful cultural force. Susan Bennett does not deny a productive potential for nostalgia. “While memory is relentlessly social and prone to the manipulation of a rhetoric conveyed by a dominant cultural practice, it is, too, always liable to alteration.”27 Citing Michel de Certeau, she notes that it is this potential for alteration that gives memory, and nostalgia, “interventionary force.”28 She uses Gus Van Sant’s “re-membering of Shakespeare’s Henry plays” in the film My Own Private Idaho as evidence. “Van Sant’s nostalgia is, of course, profoundly and determinedly queer,” she states, “a fracturing of History which generates contrary (oppositional and perverse) ways of seeing.” The film “stage[s] a trespass into the myth of a single and factitive History.”29 It is still unclear to me how Bennett reconciles Van Sant’s queer nostalgia—with its trespasses, fracturings, and interventions—with her claim that nostalgia is inevitably conservative. Later in the same chapter, she considers the role of “counter-histories” in the possible “disarticulation of the past”—histories that “seek their own radical performance which will shift other perspectives and other truths.”30 She sees these radical counter-histories as opposing the conservative forces of nostalgia. Depending on the relative power and location of those writing and rewriting history, though, nostalgia may be the fuel these counter-histories require to have any lasting effect. Jackson Lears offers a more encouraging reading of nostalgia than Bennett, particularly in its relation to history. Nostalgia, according to Lears, can serve “to recover something of value in the past, something missing in the present” and “could accompany a profound and nuanced sense of history.”31 Beginning in the late 1960s, Lears states, efforts to draw inspiration from the past were often used by “left wing intellectuals” to offer alternatives to the onslaught of unchecked industrial capitalism. “Social and cultural historians introduced a whole new cast of heroic figures: the leather-apron boys, artisans who subordinated entrepreneurship to communal solidarity; traditionalist textile workers keeping St. Monday, which drove their bosses crazy [. . .].”32

40

Radical Nostalgia

These new histories began to “redefine nostalgia.” “In a society where even conservatives were besotted by progress,” Lears states, “tradition could develop a critical edge.”33 He later expands on this idea: Most pointedly, the search for alternatives to capitalism led many historians to question the reflexive description of preindustrial life as a bog of hopeless poverty. [E. P.] Thompson, Raymond Williams, and others inspired by them found more than “the idiocy of rural life” in the English countryside, they found the sources of political radicalism. Their work showed how loving memories of the past could spark rebellion against the present in the service of future generations.34 [. . .] American historians of working-class culture celebrated similar struggles.35

American volunteers in the Spanish Civil War, though more often from urban than from rural settings, were drawn mostly from the working class, many of them immigrants whose families had fled Hitler and Mussolini.36 As a group, they represented one of the most concentrated sources of political radicalism in this country. They saw fascism as a clear threat to their well-being and “communal solidarity,” not to mention its danger to the free world at large, and as C/communists, S/socialists, and Leftists, they chose to try and do something about it. One could imagine them in Lears’s “new cast of heroic figures.” At a time when the industrial revolution had long since transformed daily life for the new proletariat and today’s global competition was still many decades away, the working classes of most countries in the 1930s felt a strong sense of common interest that went beyond national boundaries. For Lears, nostalgic desire could accompany and support a critical history. “Loving memories of the past” could even “spark rebellion.” Bertolt Brecht was famous both for his historical dramas and for his theory that traditional Aristotelian catharsis would purge an audience of any sense of social responsibility after a play was over, but even Brecht did not assume a complete

Nostalgia and Commemoration

41

excision of emotionality from his politically provocative epic theater:37 Apparently emotions accompanying social progress will long survive in the human mind as emotions linked with interests, and in the case of works of art will do so more strongly than might have been expected [. . .] given that in the meantime contrary interests will have made themselves felt. [. . .] Whenever works of art handed down to us allow us to share the emotions of other men, of men of a bygone period, different social classes, etc., we have to conclude that we are partaking in interests which really were universally human. These men now dead represented the interests of classes that gave a lead to progress.38

As Hutcheon notes, Fredric Jameson, in Postmodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, sees the danger of sentimental paralysis and prescribes “a history lesson” as “the best cure for nostalgic pathos.”39 Perhaps the historicized pathos of a radical nostalgia can successfully convey, and find inspiration in, “the interests of classes that gave a lead to progress.” Nostalgia could be a cure, instead of requiring one. I will demonstrate that the “structure of feeling” these commemorative performances recall and seek to re-perform, as defined by Raymond Williams, works to destabilize a hegemonic conservatism that threatens the veterans’ history and its subversive implications.40 These structures, to cite Williams’s now familiar construction, are “specifically affective elements of consciousness and relationships: not feeling against thought, but thought as felt and feeling as thought: practical consciousness of a present kind, in a living and inter-relating continuity.”41 Williams’s “structures of feeling” evoke Brecht’s “emotions linked with interests.” Feelings and thoughts, emotions and interests, inseparable in a practical, and therefore perhaps productive, communal consciousness. I would argue that structures of feeling are in play in Spanish Civil War commemorative performances; that radical nostalgia may depend upon Williams’s conflation of affect and consciousness, on his assumption that emotion does

42

Radical Nostalgia

not necessarily empty out meaning, or history. I will return to these claims in Chapter 6. In 1841, the French doctor Jean-Baptiste-Felix Descuret called nostalgia “memory of the heart.”42 Pierre-Urbain Briet, another doctor writing in the same period, thought that the 1830 revolution in France was motivated by political nostalgia. In Briet’s 1832 words, “the first person who was aware of what he had lost and who in his despair pronounced the word ‘tyrant,’ this man became nostalgic for freedom.”43 Michael Roth, who has researched eighteenth-century medical writing on nostalgia, comments that at that time, “[p]olitical nostalgia was an expression of the refusal to feel at home in an unjust political regime. Unlike more typical cases of the disease, this type of nostalgia could lead to action.”44 As performative attempts to re-remember the 1930s, when Leftist politics were prominent in American political discourse, nostalgic Spanish Civil War commemorations can actively work against forces that encourage both an oversimplification and a deradicalization of history. Instead of preserving the status quo, they can unsettle it by creating emotional bridges to times when the possibility for social change was a commonly held assumption—when, in Alfred Kazin’s words, “history was going our way.”

The Commemorative Urge Commemoration might be generally defined as a ritualized acknowledgment of a shared past, a communal act attributing circumscribed meaning to a chosen history. Inherent in the commemorative act is its particular relevance, or purported relevance, to a defined group. That group could be as small as a family, gathering to celebrate the life of a deceased relative, or as large as a nation, paying tribute to its founding. Commemorations can center on artifacts, landscapes, monuments, people, natural or man-made events, recent or distant occurrences, verifiable or mythologized histories. The commemorative act can be public or

Nostalgia and Commemoration

43

private, take place in a wide variety of contexts or locales, and be realized in a variety of forms. Remembering is part of the human condition. Most everyone remembers, whether they want to or not. The act of remembering, per se, is innocent. That does not mean that what we remember is innocent, or how we remember, but simply that we remember. Commemoration, driven by memory, is not innocent. Commemorations do not just happen, they are made to happen. Just as a monument must be constructed, the commemorative act requires effort, choice. And just as decisions must be made as to the design of a monument—its shape, engravings, and location—commemorations take on specific form and content. They are purposeful, selective, usually emotional either by effect or by intention, but rarely accidental.45 People, collectives, states, or nations commemorate because it satisfies a given need. Understanding the needs that inspire commemoration, the choices that result, and the contexts in which these needs and choices exist, is essential to understanding any commemorative action, and its repercussions. “Memory is never shaped in a vacuum,” as James E. Young notes, writing on Holocaust memorials; “the motives of memory are never pure.”46 Commemorations arise from a compelling interest to remember something particular, in a certain way, for specific reasons, in a social context. This compelling interest, this desire to call upon and represent the past, might be called the commemorative urge. Commemoration is driven by desire. Commemoration represents a chosen or remembered past in a specific present. Memory and remembering in and of themselves, enmeshed as they are in any commemorative process, are focused and pervasive, ubiquitous and unpredictable. Pierre Nora makes this clear in his now seminal article in memory studies, “Between Memory and History”: “Memory is life, always embodied in living societies and as such in permanent evolution, subject to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting, unconscious of the distortions to which it is subject, vulnerable in various ways to appropriation and manipulation, and capable of lying dormant for long periods only to be suddenly reawakened.”47

44

Radical Nostalgia

History is distinct and separate from memory, and often opposed to it, as Nora states, due to what he calls “the acceleration of history,” a modern phenomenon.48 “History [. . .] is the reconstruction, always problematic and incomplete, of what is no longer. Memory is always a phenomenon of the present [. . .], history is a representation of the past.”49 Commemoration, on its own terms, can encourage the reawakening of memory to which Nora refers, taking advantage of its vulnerability. Commemoration is a kind of history. It is an effort of targeted reawakening, reconstruction, and preservation. Commemorators can use the past to their own devices, depending both on the relative innocence and emotion of memory, and on the credibility and power provided by the textual weight of history. “Memory situates remembrance in a sacred context,” according to Nora. “History ferrets it out; it turns whatever it touches into prose.”50 Commemoration makes memory sacred, and wants to do the same with history. It depends on memory’s present and history’s past, on the intersection of the sacred and the prosaic. If history ferrets out memory and turns it into prose, commemoration conjures history and memory into performance. Geneviève Fabre has written on African American commemorations in the nineteenth century. These gatherings were driven by “a will to remember and the determination to construct an African-American memory.”51 As the century advanced, the historical event selected for commemorative attention changed, in a “search for new anniversaries.”52 The earliest events celebrated the end of the foreign slave trade. In 1827, African Americans selected the abolition of slavery in individual states for recognition, and, beginning in 1834, the British abolition of slavery in the West Indies was recognized. Each new date chosen for commemorative ceremonies helped “construct memory” of and preserve different pieces of a dynamic history. And it was not only the African American present but also hopes for the future that focused the commemorative gaze: The sense of betrayal and the enduring precariousness of their situation induced in African Americans a greater

Nostalgia and Commemoration

45

concern for the future. The commemorative spirit which permeated a wealth of celebrations was therefore oriented both toward the past and toward the future. Its mood was subjunctive, the ought and should prevailed over the was [emphasis in original]: with a feeling of urgency, of great impatience and renewed delay, African Americans invented a future no one dared consider and forced its image upon black and white minds and spirits.53

Among the Spanish Civil War commemorative community, a similar sense of betrayal and precariousness has existed for years. In their own commemorative practices, the volunteers— who, in 1936, imagined a future few dared consider—offer up their activist ethic and work to transmit it to a new generation. Fabre’s detailed historicization of the commemorative project, following one community’s ongoing “search for new anniversaries,” makes it clear that commemorators are located in a specific present, that they call on a specific past, and that they can seek a specific future. How we see ourselves, how we define ourselves as people living in the world, is often shaped by remembering as produced in the commemorative process through its willful, if potentially flawed, reconstruction of a chosen past. “Appropriating the past is thus an element in the construction of an individual’s identity,” according to Nico Frijda. “To the extent that it does, it shapes or activates the sense that this is the group to which one belongs, with those properties, this history, and this fate, with the potential it had and it may still have and show in the future.”54 In his introduction to the valuable 1994 collection Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity, John Gillis also examines the relationship between commemoration and identity: “The core meaning of any individual or group identity, namely, a sense of sameness over time and space, is sustained by remembering; and what is remembered is defined by the assumed identity.”55 Commemoration can help construct or bolster identity, and, at the same time, memory and the commemorative act can be shaped by identity’s exigencies. “The relationship between memory and identity is historical, and the record of that

46

Radical Nostalgia

relationship can be traced through various forms of commemoration.”56 Chapters 3 and 4 will examine a specific commemorative project over time—its content, constituency, motivations, and effects.57 Crucially, then, recalling Nora, memory is vulnerable. “When memory is no longer everywhere”—an effect of history’s acceleration and the innovations of twentieth-century culture— “it will not be anywhere unless one takes the responsibility to recapture it through individual means.”58 One means to that end is commemoration, the recapturing of memory and the “staging” of what has been recovered. By its constituents, as Nora states, it is felt to be a responsibility, almost an obligation. Taking Nora and Gillis together, identity can be seen as a filter, or lever, through which memory becomes usable history, and commemoration facilitates this process. The interest in constructing and maintaining identity can inspire the commemorative urge and shape the process it inspires. The commemorative act, in turn, can help provide and reinforce identity for its participants. The relationship between identity and commemoration is symbiotic and unstable. In Gillis’s words, “[w]e are constantly revising our memories to suit our current identities.”59 Shifting memories and identities may be played out on the commemorative stage. Identity, sought and embodied by individuals, is very often constructed within groups, supporting the communal nature of commemoration. In Frijda’s view, “the past” contributes to identity as “it shapes or activates the sense that this is the group to which one belongs,” with “this history.”60 To some extent, we become who we are, or who we present ourselves to be, by identifying ourselves with a group and its/our shared and presumed past. A group’s history, in turn, is largely defined by its collective memory of that past. Maurice Halbwachs’s work on collective memory examined this relationship between individual and group identity to the extent that they are mutually determined by recollections. “We appeal to witnesses to corroborate or invalidate as well as supplement what we somehow know already about an event that in many other details remains obscure,” Halbwachs states. “One witness we can always call on is ourself.

Nostalgia and Commemoration

47

[. . .] Our confidence increases, of course, if it can be supported by others’ remembrances also. It is as if the very same experience were relived by several persons instead of one.” 61 Halbwachs’ resonant “as if ” must be acknowledged. It assumes memory’s vulnerability—that is, that our individual memories are vulnerable to the influence of others as if we all relived “the very same experience.” As far as identity is concerned, there is often strength in numbers. In his use of the word witness, Halbwachs also indirectly draws a distinction between lived and received experience, both ultimately elements of collective memory and identity. A group identifies itself based not only on what a given individual remembers, but also on the collection of memories amassed by the group as a whole. “Everything that colors the history of the group may color an individual’s sense of identity,”62 wrote Frijda. Both collective memory and identity can coalesce in a commemorative context. When successful, this exemplifies Jelin and Kaufman’s “broadening of the ‘we’,” a clear priority for the veterans’ community. If commemoration is tied to identity, if it looks to a particular past, or if it helps define groups, then it must differentiate identities, exclude other pasts, and give the group in question defining characteristics that other groups do not share. As Nico Frijda argues, commemoration is selective:

Appropriation of the past, when it comes to the more moral levels, is part of the effort to define oneself, what is and is not part of oneself, what one wishes to make or retain as part of oneself, and what there is that one should blame on others, and possibly only retain as elements of one’s fate. These are active choices here, that individuals and societies in fact are continuously engaged in making. It is a heavy burden to feel that one’s fate is determined by the power of other people, and there is a need to perceive past events as results of one’s doing, or that of one’s ancestors. [. . .] One can negotiate with that burden or deal with that need by choosing what in one’s past one appropriates, with the neglect of that which one either does not wish to appropriate or that one cannot blame on others. Commemorations indeed are

48

Radical Nostalgia highly selective along these lines. They tend to have blind spots for one’s own war crimes.63

Both self-definition and commemoration involve “active choices” that “individuals and societies . . . are continuously engaged in making.” Also vital in Frijda’s framing of commemoration is his sensitivity to relative positions of power, of “the heavy burden to feel that one’s fate is determined by the power of other people.” This burden can create commemorators; it drives the commemorative urge. Boym, for whom nostalgia obliterates history in favor of mythology, would likely agree with Frijda’s allusion to “blind spots.” It is almost impossible to imagine that any American volunteers committed anything approaching war crimes in Spain, but the fact that many continued to express unquestioned loyalty to the Soviet Union during the Nazi–Soviet pact and long after World War II, some even after Khrushchev’s revelations, would at a minimum support Frijda’s argument and suggest that radical nostalgia is not always untainted.64 In addition, Frijda’s allusion to power is key. In the face of the state’s power exercised after the war, especially in the 1950s, a huge burden was placed on the shoulders of the volunteers. In response, “by choosing what in one’s past one appropriates,” one could argue that the veterans were trying to shape an identity more valid than the one being shaped for them, even if they were selective. For the United States as a nation, a “nuanced sense of history,” recalling Lears, requires inclusion of the Spanish Civil War even if the nostalgia that produces that nuance also has its blind spots. Those blind spots mark charged, socially determined choices. According to Gillis, “ ‘memory work’ is, like any other kind of physical or mental labor, embedded in complex class, gender and power relations that determine what is remembered (or forgotten) by whom, and for what end.”65 Commemoration, as performative memory work, is subject to similar power structures. It is always important to understand not only what is being selected and what excluded in commemoration, but also who is doing the selecting, from what position, and to what purpose.

Nostalgia and Commemoration

49

In Fabre’s example, African Americans chose to acknowledge the abolition of slavery in commemorative events on July Fifth, while most of the (white) nation was celebrating its (own) independence the day before. For the two groups, independence had very different meanings and historical significance. Blacks selected what was most important to their identity; they felt the need to separate themselves from the larger ceremonies in order to give their own events space and particularity. They celebrated their own version of Independence Day because they themselves felt excluded from the national holiday in its existing form. Claudia Koonz notes that in the German Democratic Republic after World War II, clear choices were made as to who to memorialize and who to ignore: In Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald, statues depict defiant male prisoners—often with raised fists—and staunch Soviet liberators. The predominance of men does not reflect historical reality. In the Buchenwald archives, hundreds of documents testify to the existence of thousands of women prisoners who labored in the satellite camps around Weimar. Official memory has forgotten them and immortalized, instead, the men who led the anti-fascist struggle and founded the GDR.66

The antifascist struggle was essential to East German identity, as defined by the state. The actual presence of women in the camps did not contribute to the official national story, in the eyes of those designing the site, so they were ignored. The selectivity of commemoration is invariably ideological. One might applaud African Americans for carving out their own commemorative space in a white culture celebrating only its own history in the United States, while simultaneously lamenting the writing out of women in the sculptural memory of Buchenwald. The Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade are striving to protect their radical history from decay, but they can gloss over errors of judgment and contradictory evidence in the process. They can offer a somewhat sanitized version of that history in the name of saving it. All three exemplify ideologically inflected

50

Radical Nostalgia

commemorative selectivity in the service of constructing identity. What tensions do these examples reveal? Koonz offers a key in her use of the term “official memory” at Buchenwald, as opposed to John Bodnar’s “vernacular memory.”67 The German government had control of the official story at the camps, and they constructed memory there as they saw fit, denying women a place in that history. African Americans, representatives of vernacular culture at that time, saw the need to acknowledge an alternative American history to the one officially celebrated on July Fourth. “Just as memory and identity support one another, they also sustain certain subjective positions, social boundaries, and, of course, power,” Gillis states.68 American involvement in the Spanish Civil War is not part of our “official” past. To understand commemorative selectivity and contestation, one must consider how power sustains and is sustained by the construction of both history and memory. By selecting one interpretation of the past over another, commemoration delimits and excludes. Whatever version it advocates, that version is advanced as a truth, and that truth is meant to resonate. “As in all communication, historical memorialization depends upon the interpretation of a signifier, a word or symbol that stands between the viewer and the event commemorated,” Koonz states. This reading of commemoration is most helpful: the commemorative event is seen to take up space between an audience and a history. We want to characterize the commemorative act as a point of access to the past, but it is also an obstacle emanating its own meaning. “[O]nce a powerful icon enters into circulation, its connotations are set in motion. Thus, historical revision inheres in the process of memorialization.”69 As a filtering lens through which the past is projected toward us, commemoration does wield a kind of power, both in the particular history it portrays and, as Koonz states, in the connotations it sets in motion. It renders history the way it wants history rendered. The heroic sculptures of male prisoners of the camps and their liberators, placed by the state, were both access and obstacle, standing prominently between the citizens and their collective past.

Nostalgia and Commemoration

51

We want to trust the commemorative image. It is presented earnestly, with the trappings of credibility and with sacred implications. “Memory situates remembrance in a sacred context,” Nora told us; commemoration sacralizes memory. Sculptural male figures inhabiting a mournful landscape, fists raised in antifascist defiance, represent the real bodies of a nation’s martyrs. It is exactly their emotional resonance in the harrowing atmosphere of the camps that gives them added power and steers us away from the thought of any omissions. They shape and intensify our sense of what went on there, hence the success of the revisions they facilitate. As signifiers of that history, they become it, and we are swept along in the connotations. Factions compete over differing interpretations of the past and over various commemorative strategies. They can vie for a limited number of commemorative stages with varying degrees of visibility, and for cultural legitimacy in general. The relative position of commemorative constituencies seeking credibility is important. States, or other sites of institutionalized power, have a clear advantage. “The Protestant leaders of early modern England developed a distinct view of English history,” David Cressy tells us, “and buttressed their position by the invocation and manipulation of memory.” Events such as the accession of Queen Elizabeth, the deliverance from the Gunpowder Plot, and the sinking of the Spanish Armada “became landmarks in the development of an English identity, and cumulative elements in the national memory.”70 This was only possible thanks to the monarchy’s access to numerous commemorative stages: Prayers and sermons, statutes and proclamations, almanacs and chronicles, set forth a pattern of providences that served as a reminder of the nation’s distinctiveness, of God’s mercies, and of England’s particular religious and dynastic good fortune. Taken together, they set forth a view of English identity [. . .] that transcended regional and local loyalties. [These activities] did instill a precocious sense of purpose and heritage that was unmatched in continental Europe.71

52

Radical Nostalgia

This reminds us of the ways commemoration often tries to work against historical instability. Relative positions of power often determine the ability of a commemorative icon to have impact, whatever its degree of accuracy. With so many commemorative stages at their disposal, the British Crown made the Gunpowder deliverance and the defeat of the Armada a part of British identity, “cumulative elements in the national memory” that persisted through mass exposure and repetition. By having control over the design of statues at Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald, the East German government was able to effect a similar projection and solidification of history as they saw it and wanted it seen, denying the families of the women who died there any commemorative relief. It is in recognition of this potential for competition between local and national interests that John Bodnar has drawn a distinction between official and vernacular memory, which can play out performatively in commemoration. Public memory, the collective memory of the culture at large, is produced when these two memory practices interact on the cultural stage: Public memory emerges from the intersection of official and vernacular cultural expressions. The former originates in the concerns of cultural leaders or authorities at all levels of society. Whether in positions of prominence in small towns, ethnic communities, or military bureaucracies, these leaders share a common interest in social unity, the continuity of existing institutions, and loyalty to the status quo. They attempt to advance these concerns by promoting interpretations of past and present reality that reduce the power of competing interests that threaten the attainment of their goals. Official culture relies on “dogmatic formalism” and the restatement of reality in ideal rather than complex or ambiguous terms. It presents the past on an abstract basis of timelessness and sacredness. [. . .] Vernacular culture, on the other hand, represents an array of specialized interests that are grounded in parts of the whole. They are diverse and changing and can be reformulated from time to time by the creation of new social units such as soldiers and their friends who share an experience in war or immigrants who settle a particular place.72

Nostalgia and Commemoration

53

Public memory is the product of the negotiation between these differing interests. What a given culture believes to be its past, and the sense of identity that emerges from those beliefs, are shaped by competing commemorative acts. It is important to recognize that Bodnar’s model draws a distinction between official and vernacular commemorative activity based not only on differences in location and power, but on intention and flexibility as well. Official culture and its commemorative practices exemplify a more monolithic project, with an abiding interest in “social unity,” “continuity,” and “loyalty to the status quo.” Vernacular practices are more flexible, more “diverse and changing,” perhaps more reactive. Commemorative practices in general may seek stability and permanence in and of themselves, but in their looser vernacular form may also pursue a destabilizing effect on the larger culture. As Bodnar points out, the continuity and status quo sought by official culture lacks complexity, and its monolithic, uninflected character can run roughshod over individual and local memory, “transcend[ing] regional and local loyalties,” recalling Cressy. African Americans in the nineteenth century chose July Fifth in a response to mass cultural demonstrations on July Fourth because they felt that their interests were not well represented in official celebrations. They “invented a future no one dared consider and forced its image upon black and white minds and spirits.” This has revolutionary connotations. In subsequent years, African Americans elevated different parts of their history as these became pertinent to their struggle for identity and recognition. Bodnar draws another distinction between the two forms: “[N]ormally vernacular expressions convey what social reality feels like rather than what it should be like.”73 The affect of the vernacular takes precedence over plans and strategies of the culture at large, but Fabre already stated that the commemorative “mood” among nineteenth-century African Americans “was subjunctive, the ought and should prevailed over the was,” clearly suggesting a desire for change among vernacular constituencies. These interpretations of the vernacular might seem to conflict,

54

Radical Nostalgia

though one must recognize a distinction between the needs of vernacular and official interests and their relative ability to realize those needs. Nonetheless, the subjunctive mood—Fabre’s “should”—was certainly based in feeling. “What, to the American slave, is the Fourth of July?” Frederick Douglass wrote in 1852, and stated that the standard celebrations were, to the slave, “mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy.”74 He was identifying a huge gulf between the official ideal being promoted by the nation and the real feelings of certain citizens on whom it was being imposed. The African American events, in response, enacted a kind of resistance, performing their own “ought” and their own “should.” As Bodnar states, “[the] very existence [of vernacular cultural actions] threatens the sacred and timeless nature of official expressions.”75 One could easily argue that the official, national narrative of the United States is threatened by the fact that left-wing radicals and Communists tried to defeat Hitler and Nazism while the United States stood by and did nothing. It is important to acknowledge that official and vernacular interests also have been in conflict for the veterans themselves, within their own ranks. Upon returning home, some chose to have nothing to do with the newly organized VALB, for any number of reasons, certainly including political differences. In the first decades after the war, the VALB held fast to the Communist Party line, to the consternation of some of its members. During the Nazi–Soviet pact, Peter Carroll reports, volunteer Morris Maken, a perennial thorn in the side of the political leadership while in Spain, attempted to form a “counter-organization” with two other disaffected veterans. He intended to call it the “Veterans of the International Brigades, Anti-Totalitarian.” He did not succeed, and was expelled from the VALB for his efforts.76 In this scenario, the VALB is the empowered, official body pursuing an ideal narrative and seeking to avoid any ambiguity. Hence, a vernacular culture can take on the attributes of an official culture when it exerts power over its own members, and/or its members feel unfairly treated. Maken represented interests that threatened the “official expressions” of the existing organization.77

Nostalgia and Commemoration

55

No matter how valid Maken’s point may have been, he lost out to the majority in power. Maken’s priorities challenged the VALB’s identity, just as their story was a threat to the national narrative. The vernacular and the official, on whatever scale, are always in contention. The commemorative process within a national framework is invariably in flux, wrestling over the national story. Vernacular and official interests tend to have different overall goals and different sources of inspiration. Any commemorative acts they each inspire are constructions, projecting the past each one desires, but Bodnar suggests that these constructions might serve two distinctly different agendas. In his model, the vernacular commemorative project rises up from individuals and constituencies; the official commemorative agenda flows down from locations of civil authority. The former tries to express what it “feels like” to live in a particular culture; the latter seeks to suggest what society “should be like” as far as its official agenda is concerned. But the people have desires as well, and hopes for the future. These conflicts over versions of the past and designs for the future may be played out on the commemorative stage. Standing between the real feelings of a vernacular culture wanting more, and larger institutional projects, commemorative subjects decide who they are. Morris Maken and his comrades went over the top at Jarama into blistering fire as ordered by the Communist leadership, a much maligned decision, and spent nine hours stranded and exposed in no-man’s-land.78 Back home, he was proud of his status as a veteran and an antifascist, but he couldn’t tolerate the VALB’s Communist affiliations, nor could they tolerate his rebellion at that time, and he found himself stuck in no-man’s-land once again. This time, the VALB’s own identity was at stake. Groups use commemoration as a means of self-definition, especially when the larger culture is presenting an alternative and more pervasive history. “Without a shared memory, as [Václav] Havel predicted, identity fades and unity dissolves.”79 In the face of dissolution, commemoration can help forge group identity by privileging and reinforcing common histories. This is certainly at work in commemorations of the Spanish Civil War, and intersects

56

Radical Nostalgia

with nostalgia through Boym, the “affective yearning for a community with a collective memory, a longing for continuity in a fragmented world.”80 Daniel Sherman builds on this: “[. . .] what we conventionally call ‘commemoration’ I take to be the practice of representation that enacts and gives social substance to the discourse of collective memory [emphasis in original].”81 For Sherman, commemoration substantiates collective memory through a representational social practice. Commemoration becomes collective memory performed. It is both a representation of collective memory and a force in its ongoing construction, and groups depend on these performances to advance their stories and to support and protect identity. Fabre takes this one step further: “African Americans were not simply performing culture, they were performing crucial social and political acts. [. . .] Freedom celebrations were freedom performed” [emphasis in original].82 Commemoration is collective memory in practice, memory’s performative manifestation. “Commemoration rituals, for a brief moment, dissolve the discontinuity between now and the past,” Frijda claims, “between one individual and others, between those who are there and who are not there anymore. [. . .] They enact the transformation of the past into the present.”83 In a sense, then, they produce what they remember.

Chapter 3

A Time to Remember: 1937–1962

Rituals of commemoration, I propose, may offer at least some small possibility of doing something about past events being stuck in our throats, or at least for a moment to relieve the pressure. They can do so by calling up the images and memories of the events, by providing occasions for emergence of feelings, at moments and in a context that is acceptable and, owing to the public or formal nature of the ritual, in a way that allows the link to the world and to others to be retained. Nico H. Frijda “Commemorating” Comrades of the International Brigade: Political reasons, reasons of State, the welfare of that same cause for which you offered your blood with boundless generosity, are sending you back, some of you to your own countries and others to forced exile. You can go proudly. You are history. You are legend . . . Dolores Ibárruri, “La Pasionaria” Farewell speech to International Brigades, Barcelona, 1938

The Evidence of History History is always innocently churning out its evidence: events large and small, births and deaths, disasters and triumphs. People take up these pieces of the past for a variety of reasons and shape commemorative acts around them. This decisive gathering of

58

Radical Nostalgia

evidence is driven by what I call the commemorative urge, a desire to repackage the past for use in the present and preservation for the future. Commemoration draws a circle around a given day, event, action, and/or actor. “I want to look at this,” the commemorator is saying. “I want to look at this now, here, today.” And unless the commemorative act is solitary, such as visiting the grave of a loved one to serve an individual need, the commemorator is drawing others into the commemorative circle, people who might or might not share an interest in this selection of evidence. “This is important,” is the claim being made. “Let’s look at this together.” Also, in some acts of commemoration, there is one more statement, and an important one, addressed to the population at large. “Look at us,” some public commemorators state. “Notice what we’re doing here. This is something we care about. You should care about this too.” Commemoration elevates social narratives. A history of Spanish Civil War commemoration began the first time anyone looked back at the war, named it worthy of attention, identified a specific act to acknowledge, and organized a means of formalizing that recognition. Before the Federal Office Building in Oklahoma City was bombed, that building had no particular national significance. In an instant, though, it was transformed into both a shrine and a symbol. It came to represent not only the site where so many innocent people lost their lives, but also the bitter fruits of American terrorism. Radical antigovernment sentiments that had ebbed and flowed in public visibility suddenly took on renewed importance. They emerged into public discourse as we tried to explain what happened, and they will be remembered along with the dead at every annual gathering, embodied by the wreckage and the memorial built on the site. Until a memorial is built to acknowledge the disaster of September 11, 2001, the gaping hole itself has become its own monument, a negative space eloquently speaking loss. Before Franco began his military rebellion against the Spanish government, the democratic efforts of the Spanish Republic and the threat posed by fascism were already part of widespread public dialogue. It was only decades later, after the

A Time to Remember: 1937–1962

59

narrative had lost cultural visibility, that it might have effectively disappeared in the United States were it not for commemorative attention. In 1936, Spain was celebrated as a holdout against fascism. In successive years, commemorations worked to recapture that vitality. The Great War of 1914–1918 and its 18 million dead sparked an antiwar movement centered on college campuses, the likes of which would not be seen again until the 1960s.1 Peace and antifascism, for many, became passionate common goals. Through the 1920s and 1930s, the fascist governments of Italy, Germany, and Japan demonstrated their interest in expansion by force. The United States, in part because of its aggressive rhetoric and the huge profits generated during World War I, was also deemed by many to be complicitous in its own way, yet another imperialist power. Mussolini’s bombing of Ethiopia, Japan’s advance into Manchuria, and Hitler’s actions in Europe seemed to define evil. On the European continent, signs of successful large-scale resistance to the fascist wave were hard to come by, but the abdication of the Spanish king under popular pressure in 1931, and the subsequent declaration of the Second Spanish Republic, offered a rare instance of democratic mobilization. Although violent contention was not absent from Spain in the early 1930s as different factions and ideologies struggled for dominance, democracy, though at risk and at times almost invisible, managed to survive. Well before Franco’s coup, Spain had gained the attention of many around the world who hoped this young republic could hold out against the forces of reaction. And the Communist Party, undoubtedly the largest and best organized antifascist force at that time, was well represented in Spanish politics. Antiwar and antifascist sentiment were present and visible in US culture before Franco’s rebellion against the elected government began. The facts that Spain did not immediately give in to Franco’s revolt and that large sections of the Spanish population quickly rose in defense of their Republic were cause for celebration. Here was an unfolding example of popular resistance, a chance for democracy under duress to succeed. Spain’s response

60

Radical Nostalgia

to Franco’s rebellion was a new kind of inspirational evidence available for commemorative recognition. People were looking for any kind of good news from Europe, for examples of antifascism in action. They found these in the Spanish Civil War. Members of the US government may have been concerned about the situation in Spain, but they did not act on their concerns. The Neutrality Act of 1935, passed by Congress during Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia, “made it illegal for American citizens to sell or transport arms to belligerents,” according to historian Hugh Thomas, assuming a state of war had been officially determined by the president. “Although this act was not meant to apply to civil wars, the American government behaved from the start of the Spanish conflict as if it did, although President Roosevelt had some sympathy for the Republic [. . .].”2 He was not alone. By 1938, a poll conducted in the United States calculated that 75 percent of the voting public sided with Republican Spain.3

The Creation of a Commemorative Tradition The first organized group of American volunteers to travel to Spain left New York City on the day after Christmas, 1936, five months after Franco’s revolt. The International Brigades were sent home in October and November 1938, and the war ended when Franco marched into Madrid in March 1939. By that time, a commemorative tradition and a series of practices were already in place. Dozens of gatherings specifically self-identified with the war—described as memorial meetings, wreath-layings, anniversaries, rallies, conventions, benefits, and the like—had already taken place even before the war ended in 1939. A brief overview of early commemorative activity will establish some of the defining characteristics of Spanish Civil War commemoration. On July 19, 1937, 22,000 people marked the first anniversary of the outbreak of the war with an antineutrality rally in support of the Spanish Republic at Madison Square Garden.4 Five months later, on December 18, 1937, the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln

A Time to Remember: 1937–1962

61

Brigade gathered for their first “organizational conference.”5 On Christmas Eve, the first anniversary of the earliest departure of United States volunteers was celebrated at the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem.6 This particular commemorative process began in earnest before the historical event in question was even half over, with a demonstration, a rally, a conference, and a party. The commemorative urge here was strong. Political battles in the United States gave antifascists and supporters of Republican Spain a reason and a desire to make themselves heard. Spain was a frame within which their beliefs and protests took on added meaning and strength. The energy with which returning veterans were able to begin the commemorative process in earnest, under their own control, was in no small way facilitated by the commemorative structures already in place. The Friends of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade (FALB), founded in the spring of 1937 by a wounded veteran, soon had chapters in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, and many other cities.7 The Madison Square Garden event in July 1937 was produced by the North American Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy. Through their cultural evenings and benefits during the war, the North American Committee, the FALB, and other organizations built up their own followings of sympathizers, who continued to attend later events produced by the VALB. The producing organizations changed, but the overarching cause of antifascism did not. Politics and ideology were essential and formative forces in the beginnings of this commemorative process, and have driven it throughout its history. Reverence for the dead has certainly been an understandable theme in six decades of commemoration. The Illinois Friends of the Lincoln Battalion advertised a “Memorial Meeting” on July 9, 1937, for Tom Trent, “Killed in Action Defending Spanish Democracy.”8 African American veteran Milton Herndon was similarly honored in New York City in November 1937. These events were opportunities for friends and family to gather in memory of slain comrades or loved ones, and to remind those attending or reading the newspaper reports afterwards of the heroism and sacrifice of these young radicals who had put their

62

Radical Nostalgia

lives on the line for a cause. Their deaths were placed in a political context, without denying the opportunity for mourning. “Where national memories are concerned,” Ernest Renan stated, “griefs are of more value than triumphs, for they impose duties, and require a common effort.”9 Grief can have a similar value within a smaller commemorative community in a specific ideological environment. After World War I, according to Jay Winter, “[t]raditional modes of seeing the war [. . .] provided a way of remembering which enabled the bereaved to live with their losses, and perhaps to leave them behind.”10 By contrast, events surrounding Spanish Civil War deaths seemed more preoccupied with remembering than forgetting. Individual family members may have used these affairs to put their losses behind them. For the community as a whole, in large part because of its political leanings, remembering individual sacrifices helped keep the war and its cause alive. The relationship between performing artists and left-wing causes was strong in the 1930s, and the Spanish Civil War was perhaps one of the most star-studded causes of the decade. At the “1st Birthday Party” celebrating the formation of the Friends of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in April 1938, the “Guests of Honor” were “100 Veterans of the Lincoln Brigade,” but the celebrities included Ed Wynn, the Group Theatre, Louis Prima, and Duke Ellington, “plus a host of stars from screen, radio, stage & night clubs”11 (see figure 5). Two fund-raising events dubbed “Stars for Spain” were held in New York City in 1937 and 1938 (see figure 6). The “2nd Annual Stars for Spain” benefit in 1938 featured a roster of stars that included John Garfield, Orson Welles, and Frances Farmer.12 Until the fiftieth anniversary in New York City, though, nothing really compared in star power to these events in the mid-1930s, when the war was still being fought, and it had yet to be tainted by widespread anti-Communist sentiments.13 The New York dance community was particularly active in the 1930s, and staged a series of “Dances for Spain” events to raise money for the Republican cause, co-produced by the American Dance Association and the American Committee to

A Time to Remember: 1937–1962

63

Aid Spanish Democracy. Well-known dancers and choreographers participated, including Martha Graham, Helen Tamiris, Doris Humphrey, and Anna Sokolow. Dances with titles such as Immediate Tragedy and We March for Spain were created as an antifascist response to the conflict.14 Music was a consistent element in Spanish Civil War commemoration as well, as I discuss in detail in Chapter 5. Dramatic readings were also common. Writers Ernest Hemingway, Genevieve Taggard, and Edwin Rolfe, a Lincoln veteran, contributed work to early gatherings. Norman Rosten, a playwright, poet, and radio dramatist, wrote a script called Road from Madrid for a 1945 commemorative event honoring a Spanish Civil War veteran who became a hero in World War II15 (see figure 7). In the absence of any physical monuments or tangible memorial landscapes associated with the Spanish Civil War, these literary, theatrical, and musical artifacts offered audiences a performative solidity that was otherwise lacking. Their shared beliefs found expression and communion through the interaction of texts and bodies. December 1937 also saw the founding of the VALB and its first business meeting. Private meetings of veterans were scheduled to coincide with public celebrations. Meetings, conventions, or conferences where business was conducted and policies discussed brought in members from other cities, as did the parties and dances often held in the same hotel. The elected officers and active members of the VALB shaped the veterans’ public political and commemorative agendas for six decades. After aiding wounded veterans, the earliest recipients of financial support were refugees from fascist Spain, who continued to receive funds for many years.16 As decades passed, in addition to supporting a variety of other groups and causes, the VALB evolved into an organization that was also preoccupied with protecting the story of the Spanish Civil War. The following is taken from the VALB’s original constitution, ratified at the 1937 parley and reported in the Daily Worker: The functions of the organization, according to its constitution, are “to continue and promote friendly and helpful

64

Radical Nostalgia relations between its members; to assist the Friends of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, in their work of providing the Americans in Spain with comforts and in their work of rehabilitation; to help rally the support of the democratic people of America to the democratic people of Spain, fighting for their independence against fascist invasion; to aid in every effective way possible the peace and anti-fascist movement, and cooperate with any and all organizations working for peace and democracy and against fascism; to affiliate and cooperate with organizations formed in other countries by veterans of the International Brigade.17

This is how the VALB saw itself, or wanted itself seen, at its inception, and how it promoted itself to its own community. Many of these constitutional tenets were adhered to for decades, but in 1957, the constitution was deemed in need of revision. New organizational priorities were discussed in the Volunteer, among them to “perpetuate our tradition and history.”18 Twenty years away from the war that inspired their formation, the veterans prioritized the role they must play in preserving their own history. Pierre Nora, concerned with “the end of a tradition of memory” in France after World War II, would likely name the VALB itself a lieu de mémoire: Lieux de mémoires are fundamentally vestiges, the ultimate embodiments of a commemorative consciousness that survives in a history which, having renounced memory, cries out for it. The notion has emerged because society has banished ritual. It is a notion produced, defined, established, constructed, decreed, and maintained by the artifice and desire of a society fundamentally absorbed by its own transformation and renewal. By its very nature that society values the new over the old, youth over age, the future over the past. Museums, archives, cemeteries, collections, festivals, anniversaries, treaties, depositions, monuments, sanctuaries, private associations—these are relics of another era, illusions of eternity. This is what makes these pious undertakings seem like exercises in nostalgia, sad and lifeless. They are the rituals of a ritual-less society; fleeting incursions of the sacred into a disenchanted world [. . .].19

A Time to Remember: 1937–1962

65

The VALB certainly embodies a commemorative consciousness. Although Nora denigrates nostalgia, he reinforces the ritual nature of commemoration and places the VALB and their commemorative practices in a larger and more nuanced context. Commemorations of the Spanish Civil War may, in fact, be exercises in nostalgia, but they are far from “sad and lifeless,” hence the potential for an active, progressive, radical nostalgia. There was a growing sense of political and social disenchantment at this time, especially among people of the Left, despondent at the seemingly insoluble depredations of the Great Depression. These commemorative events, which offered a kind of transcendence by providing feelings of unity and hopefulness, were therefore sacred to many of the participants. They remain so. “Sacredness,” in James Mayo’s words, referring to veterans’ reunions in general, “is expressed through the sharing of cherished values.” Within this context, “veterans act as though they are attending church.”20 Mayo’s comment on the sacred could not be more apt. Martha Olson Jarocki, daughter of veteran Leonard Olson, has attended commemorative events in the Bay Area for years, beginning in the late 1970s, and now helps run the programs there. In an interview, she spoke of the very successful fiftieth-anniversary affair in Berkeley. “I understood how important it was to everybody. I mean, I came to them because they were here [. . .], but then when I began to see that people came to them from other cities, you know, I understood of what value it was. And I think that’s about the time that Hannah and I started to call it church,” she said, laughing. Hannah was Martha’s older sister. Later, she noted that her family didn’t attend any church, “never had that kind of community outside of us except in the political community. [. . .] That was our community, our ethical community, our values community, just like the people in terms of church.”21 Roby Newman, the child of another veteran, Robert Colodny, expanded on the religious metaphor. “I think that socialism, I’d say Communism too, in some ways, has been in this country a kind of secular religion, at its best, I mean I think we’ve seen it at its worst.”22 If Communism served as a salve to the disenchanted of the 1930s, Newman’s suggestion does not seem so far-fetched. Though its rituals were doctrinaire,

66

Radical Nostalgia

that alone would not isolate it from organized religion, a more conventional site of the sacred. The VALB, in its role as official representative of Spanish Civil War veterans in the United States, shaped a ritual process and was its guardian. Fleeting though they may be, for Nora, the sacred aspects of commemoration—“rituals of a ritual-less society”—must be acknowledged in this otherwise rigorously secular context. If, as Mayo claimed, “sacredness is expressed through the sharing of cherished values” in veterans’ reunions, and if we acknowledge that in this context the values were largely political in nature, it is important to recognize that the sharing of these values was not only internal to the community itself but also outwardly directed. This was a church with a mission, and the veterans were committed to both private and public commemorative practices. Recalling the constitution, the VALB sought to “promote friendly and helpful relations between its members” but also “to help rally the support of the democratic people of America to the democratic people of Spain.” The fraternal agenda serves to maintain identity and security by acknowledging the one thing they all share. The public agenda, reaffirmed and reshaped in 1957, asks that the veterans engage the larger culture with both their story and their politics to, in their own words, “perpetuate our tradition and history,” which they claim to “owe to the American people.” Holding in their own bodies and minds a sacred story that might otherwise be lost, they have engaged in the vital life of both private and public events. In private, they are reminded of what separates them from the rest of their generation, but what they cherished and shared was activist in nature, and public commemoration has perpetuated their sacred tradition of activism. This organization—a memorial and lieu de mémoire on its own and as an agent of commemoration—was from the beginning self-defined as fraternal and political, social and socially active, humanitarian and antifascist. Twenty years on, it claimed added historical responsibilities as well. Their commemorative practices over the years demonstrate how these different priorities were manifest.

A Time to Remember: 1937–1962

67

Volunteers for Liberty Even in the 1930s, the Spanish Civil War became a stage on which official and vernacular interests came into conflict. The official national discourse of nonintervention supported by Roosevelt was loudly challenged by a wide range of vernacular constituencies. The first anniversary of Franco’s rebellion and the beginning of the Spanish Civil War was commemorated in the huge rally in Madison Square Garden on July 19, 1937, sponsored by the North American Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy and the Confederated Spanish Societies to Aid Spain.23 In addition to the twenty thousand attending, “nearly 2,000 more demonstrated briefly in the surrounding streets,” according to the New York Times. Volunteers were still departing for Spain and would continue to do so for months. The VALB had yet to be formed, but this rousing gathering effectively initiated an anniversary process that would last for decades, and clearly demonstrates Spain’s place in the political passions of the era. Madison Square Garden could not contain the rally. The Times mentions that one hundred policemen were needed to control the throngs in the street, who “attempted to hold overflow meetings” because they could not get into the hall. Their energy was matched inside. “It was a crowd that time after time interrupted the speakers for minutes,” the Times reported, “to cheer a mention of anti-fascism in Germany and Italy or to boo Hitler, Mussolini, Britain’s non-intervention policy and the embargo placed by the United States on the shipment of arms to Spain.” The stage platform was “draped in Spanish colors and decorated with a large portrait of General José Miaja, leader of the Madrid Armies.” There was a memorial service for those killed in Spain during the first year. Speakers at the affair included Norman Thomas and Earl Browder, leaders of the Socialist and Communist Parties in the United States, respectively. A member of the US House of Representatives “presided,” and numerous dignitaries and journalists from foreign countries also spoke. This was not the meeting of a marginalized, radical fringe, as the Left has often been characterized. The organizers and participants were contesting

68

Radical Nostalgia

official national interests and pushing against the grain of US policy, but they had visibility, popularity, and status.24 A few months later, volunteers began to return in some numbers, many of them wounded at the battles of Jarama and Brunete, and they changed the commemorative dynamic. The annual gatherings were also reunions, of and for the veterans, and once the veterans were back in this country in any numbers, they were the principal organizers of the events, and/or the featured guests. For more than fifty years, commemorative events were controlled almost exclusively by the veterans themselves. It is only since 1995 that they have begun to let go of the organizational reins and to allow the next generation to play a role in planning and running the annual commemorations. Nonetheless, the veterans are always present and visible. They give the events an immediate sense of credibility. In the late 1930s, with so many veterans now back home, the attempt to commemorate the war without any veterans present would be somehow inauthentic.25 As “volunteers for liberty,” the returning veterans were invaluable. “Democracy’s Vets Lead May Day Line,” read the headline in the Daily Worker, on May 2, 1938: “Feet that trod the bloody soil of Jarama, Belchite, Quinto” marched the streets of New York, “amid thunderous cheers of miles of spectators,” the Daily Worker crowed, “in one of the most thrilling sights this city has ever witnessed”26 (see figure 8). The inflated rhetoric notwithstanding, leading the May Day parade in the largest city in the country suggests the preeminent role the vets played in left-wing and working-class circles at that time. Better representatives of progressive political action were hard to find. “[B]ullet scarred [. . .] displaying martial-born discipline,” they were a revolutionary dream come true.27 Spanish Civil War veterans led May Day parades on many occasions over the years (see figure 9). Of course these antifascist war veterans who defended the poor working people of Spain would be celebrities on May Day, and lead the ranks of workers and other supporters. In other contexts, though, their status as veterans was still charged, and a site

A Time to Remember: 1937–1962

69

for contention. On Armistice Day, November 11, 1937, wounded veterans back from Spain placed two wreaths at the Eternal Light, a memorial to the American dead of World War I in Madison Square. This action, in itself, was a form of political advocacy. By affiliating those killed in Spain with losses from the Great War, the volunteers were seeking a parity that supposedly went beyond politics, highlighting sacrifice over ideology, but their action was highly provocative. As an incursion into one of the nation’s sacred spaces, the wreath-laying was protested by the conservative American Legion. Unlike those lost in the earlier conflict, members of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade had fought and died against the wishes of their government and in solidarity with a political agenda deemed antithetical to official US interests.28 This marking of the Eternal Light with two wreaths took on another life as well. By December 1937, enough veterans had returned home to organize and hold numerous meetings. Among other activities, they founded the Volunteer for Liberty, their publication and house organ, and the first issue was distributed at the First Organizational Conference on December 18.29 Held and read by most everyone present, it must have contributed to the general atmosphere at this first meeting. On the cover page, in ornate script, is the slogan “Our Victory Is Your Vengeance” and a black-bordered photograph of the battlefield memorial at Jarama, the first battle in which Americans participated in any number and the scene of heavy losses. Surrounding the photograph is a list of the 122 American volunteers lost there (see figure 10). The actual memorial captured in the photograph consists of a hand-painted sign, wedged into the crotch of a tree, bearing this same slogan, preceded by the words “To Our Fallen Comrades” (see figure 4). At the foot of the tree is a pile of stones and a single helmet. On the next page, the issue is dedicated to the dead. Also included in the first issue of the Volunteer is a photograph of another memorial—specifically, the wreathlaying at the Eternal Light on Armistice Day 1937, when the veterans from Spain were last able to affiliate themselves directly with the heroes of World War I honored at this site.30 The use of

70

Radical Nostalgia

resonant images plus all the names in the Volunteer created and put into circulation a commemorative object. In this issue, the connection to World War I was reinforced in a letter from Rabbi Lee J. Levinger, whose son Sam was killed in Spain. “I know as a veteran of the World War how much a veterans’ organization can mean, not only for the very important task of keeping together the men who have such deep common interests and experiences, but even more in lining them up for a common platform in the future.” Rabbi Levinger addressed the twin themes of fraternity and progressive political action. He signs his letter “Past National Chaplain, The American Legion.”31 The Legion’s protest against this Armistice Day wreath-laying in early November may have inspired Levinger’s decision to highlight both his participation in the World War and his past affiliation with the conservative group in the pages of the veterans’ Volunteer for Liberty, distributed in December. Those connections have both symbolic and practical significance. In this formative moment for the VALB, tensions were already evident between the traditional definitions of patriotism espoused by the American Legion, and the more progressive interpretation put forward by the newly returned antifascist volunteers. Fully aware of those tensions, the veterans wanted to carve out their own patriotic space in public discourse, while using Levinger as a bridge to more traditional expressions of Americanism. Perhaps the largest and most revealing reception the veterans received during this period took place in the busy month of December 1938, after the International Brigades had been sent home by the Republican government. By this time, rallies to support the Republic and lift the embargo had become quite common. The cause had many supporters, while at the same time the US government’s nonintervention policies had become even more entrenched. Nonetheless, Madison Square Garden filled to the rafters again on June 9, 1938, to “Lift the Embargo!” (see figure 11). By the end of the year, with a large audience already mobilized, the combination of the holiday season and the imminent return of hundreds of veterans inspired numerous parties, benefits, and commemorative events.

A Time to Remember: 1937–1962

71

Before this first significant wave of volunteers had reached US shores, the Daily Worker took advantage of their pending arrival. With a number of holiday fund raisers coming up, the Worker constructed a political motivation to attend these many parties and performances by setting up a contrast between the return of these veterans from Spain and the reception received by their more conventional military predecessors in 1918: Three hundred and twenty-six veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade are on their way home at long last. Before the month is out, five hundred vets in all will have arrived in New York harbor, bearing medals, citations, the love of the Spanish people—and unhealed wounds. If this had been a different kind of war, the kind immortalized in history books, our 500 vets would march up from the Battery through the financial districts and the warlords of Wall St. would shower down confetti and ticker tape on them. Grover Whelan would pose with Major Milton Wolff and Commissar Alvah Bessie would address the City Club. [. . .] But it is unlikely that either Major Wolff, Commissar Bessie or any of the other 498 heroes will ever be invited to break bread at the City club. If anybody feeds them or helps clothe them and house them and keep them warm, the job will fall to us—workers, trade unionists, anti-fascists.32

The Daily Worker article tries to attract an audience by reinforcing the subversive, counterculture appeal of these events, while still making it clear these are returning war heroes like any others and deserving of honor, sympathy, and aid. Attending these events would be a chance for the Worker’s readers to thumb their noses at “the warlords of Wall St.” who would deny these returning heroes their rightful reception. The article also anticipates the marginalization of this history before it has become history. Four days later, the once lamented march was announced by the Daily Worker. The parade may have been planned all along, with the aforementioned complaint purely a ploy, or it may have been organized in response to the article. It is hard to imagine that if such a parade had been in the works, the Daily Worker would not have known about it and promoted it in advance. In

72

Radical Nostalgia

either case, it was going to be a parade worthy of its ideological foundations, as the Daily Worker attempted to rouse its readers to action by telling them what would happen if they attended. The December 12 banner headline on page 2, and its secondary headlines, read: “Thousands to Greet Boys Returning from Spain Thursday. Unions Will Form Guard of Honor. Huge Parade Will Form as Ship Arrives with 150 Boys.” So the veterans of this “different kind of war” would get their due from their own constituents (see figure 12). “The greeting at the pier will be followed by a huge parade in which tens of thousands of trade unionists, members of civic, patriotic, peace, church and fraternal organizations from New York and vicinity will participate.” The parade may have been hastily organized. “A committee is at present negotiating with the Police Department about the precise routing of the parade which will terminate at the Eternal Light, Madison Square park,” the article states.33 The previously imagined march through Wall Street was not on the veterans’ home turf. This parade would send them through the more friendly and supportive streets of the garment district. The veterans’ arrival on December 15 and their enthusiastic greeting at the docks in New York City was reported in three front-page columns in the Daily Worker with four captioned photographs. “Crowds Roar Welcome to Lincoln Veterans” read the headline. “149 Boys of 23 States Vow Unending Fight for Democracy.” Joseph North, the Daily Worker’s Spanish Civil War correspondent, described their arrival with flair: No enemy marksmen sniped at them from the heights today; instead they were the targets of confetti tossed by thousands of New Yorkers hanging out of skyscrapers in the garment center along their route. The shock troops were back and it was a People’s Army that marched; mothers, fathers, entire families joined the procession [. . .]. Today they marched through the canyons of New York while their supporters showered them with home-made confetti, raised their fists, gave them a hearty welcome home.34

A Time to Remember: 1937–1962

73

They paraded through the working-class bastion of the garment center. Homemade paper shreds replaced ticker tape, the detritus of capitalism. The veterans were “targets of confetti” but victims of neither enemy snipers nor “the warlords of Wall Street.” And “entire families” joined in a “People’s Army” of their own, marching alongside the “shock troops” of antifascism. The veterans carried another wreath that day to honor volunteers who had died in Spain. Their destination was again the Eternal Light. “Mounted policemen and 188 on foot did not intimidate the thousands who came from a score of unions,” the Daily Worker stated, juxtaposing the city’s authoritarian police force against the righteous “People’s Army.”35 It remained important to configure this parade as a challenge to the powers that be, a challenge that became more pointed when the veterans and their followers arrived at the memorial itself. This is how North describes the scene: Taps were sounded at the railing about the Eternal Light. Police refused to allow the delegation to lay the wreathe [sic] at the monument, the wreathe which read “To the volunteers who died for democracy.” But the men did not let the police wet blanket the tribute. They lay the wreathe against the railing, carried through the tribute despite the blue-coat array. [. . .] The refusal to permit the veterans to lay the wreathe at the monument evoked much indignation from the marchers and from onlookers.36

The parade was one thing, perceived as one kind of provocation, but their designs on the monument were another. The city allowed the veterans to march, but refused them physical access to the Eternal Light. A photograph on page 1 of the Daily Worker captures the moment (see figure 13). Major Milton Wolff and African American volunteer J. H. Wideman stand in the foreground holding the large flowered wreath with its honorific message. Both have their fists raised in the antifascist salute. In the background is the monument itself, and between the returning volunteers and

74

Radical Nostalgia

the monument can be seen the head of a New York City policeman, who must have been protecting the Eternal Light from this incursion. All the elements are present: the returning antifascist heroes, the wreath of tribute, the salute of the Spanish cause, the monument the veterans intended to mark, and the authority blocking the way. Thirteen months earlier, on Armistice Day 1937, wounded veterans had placed two wreaths at the Eternal Light, an act protested but not prevented.37 In December 1938, however, the veterans were barred access. As time passed, and more veterans were returning from Spain, their status was becoming more problematic. Perhaps the conservative American Legion had learned its lesson on the nature of commemorative competition in 1937, and had alerted the appropriate city officials. What history, or ideology, would a revised memorial represent? “The monument is ‘To Our Heroes,’ ” North reported, describing the existing Eternal Light. “Its inscription, ‘Erected to commemorate the first homecoming of the victorious army and navy of the United States officially received by the City of New York on this site, Anno Domini MCMXVIII.’ ” He then quotes one of the young veterans: “ ‘There will be a time when the people of America will add a paragraph to that inscription,’ Captain Bradley said. ‘It will read something like this: “And to the brave men who died for democracy in Spain so that fascism should not come here.” ’ ”38 Whoever had decided to prevent the veterans from laying their wreath on this revered memorial was not open to any sort of reinscription, either engraved, which the veterans would not have expected, or performative, which presented its own kind of threat.

Stars for Spain During this period, a parallel series of events attracted attention and audiences. Six days before the first organizational conference of the VALB in mid-December 1937, the North American Committee and Medical Bureau to Aid Spanish Democracy produced the first “Stars for Spain” benefit at the Mecca Temple

A Time to Remember: 1937–1962

75

in New York City (see figure 6). It took advantage of the many celebrities of stage and screen whose political beliefs encouraged their appearance at public events on behalf of the Spanish cause. The relative or perceived innocence of the cause at that time, especially given the humanitarian work of the Medical Bureau, was perhaps demonstrated by the range of performers attending, as detailed in this puff piece in the Daily Worker printed three days before the December 12 event: The curtain on literally the biggest show on earth will rise on Sunday evening, December 12, at Mecca Temple, when more than 200 artists of the theatre, radio, dance and music worlds will participate in a benefit “Stars for Spain” program. This exhibition of solidarity with the Spanish people will bring together such outstanding artists as Benny Goodman, famous band leader; Constance Cummings, star of the current Theatere [sic] Guild production of “Madame Bovary”; Gertrude Lawrence of “Susan and God”; Alexander Kirkland of “Many Mansions”; Frances Farmer, Morris Carnovsky, Luther Adler and Phoebe Brand of the Group Theatre and Tamiris with her group. Col. Jay C. Flippen will be master of ceremonies. Leon Barzin will lead the Modern Symphony Orchestra, which gave its first concert in April for the Spanish Milk Fund. Frank Sheridan, well known American pianist, will be soloist with the orchestra in the Liszt piano concerto in E Flat Major.39

There was something for everyone. Later ads in the Daily Worker added the names of Dorothy Parker and Burgess Meredith to the roster. Parker, who had been to Spain, was slated to speak about her visit. Tickets were available at twenty locations in Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Newark.40 One year later, in 1938, the “2nd Annual Stars for Spain” was again held at the Mecca Temple on the same December weekend, with some of the same stars appearing, as well as new names including Raymond Massey, John Garfield, Marc Blitzstein, Robert Morley, Orson Welles, Luise Rainer, Clifford Odets, Walter Slezak, and Gypsy Rose Lee41 (see figure 6 ). In the 1930s, the Spanish Civil War, the plight of the

76

Radical Nostalgia

Spanish people in particular, and antifascism in general were all part of the fabric of popular performance culture in New York City, and other major urban centers as well. It is worth recognizing that although it was quite easy to express unequivocal support for the Spanish Republic and solidarity with the people of Spain—hence the popularity of events such as these—it is unlikely that all those attending a benefit sponsored by the Medical Bureau necessarily advocated military intervention or the lifting of the arms embargo.42 Many on the Left remained pacifists but were inspired by the Spanish cause nonetheless. According to Judy Kutulas, speaking of intellectuals on the Left, “The war in Spain revived progressive energies and gave larger meaning to their lives.”43 At the same time, sympathies may have been influenced by the CPUSA’s desire to portray the conflict as a simple, straightforward struggle between democracy and fascism.44 For many, that was the only thing that mattered. The most significant entertainment event in 1938 in which veterans themselves were directly involved was the 1st Birthday Party “Night of Stars” on April 23, 1938, at the Hippodrome in New York, which celebrated the first anniversary of the formation of the FALB (see figure 5). The FALB was then at the height of its activity and visibility, with many of the returning veterans in need of aid, and this event was a major fund raiser. A posed publicity photograph in the VALB archives from the night of the event shows two smiling veterans in signature berets flanking four FALB officers (see figure 14). The four are holding bags of money, identified on the back of the photograph as the evening’s receipts.45 Another shot of this “Night of Stars” captures a packed house of smiling faces46 (see figure 15). “100 Veterans of the Lincoln Brigade” were the “Guests of Honor.”47 A telling photograph from the “Night of Stars” shows a long section of a low side balcony that wrapped around the hall, the seating area for the 100 veterans (see figure 16). The camera is located about ten feet away on the floor of the Hippodrome, below and to the left of the veterans. Pinned to the facing of the balcony is an American flag adjacent to a Spanish Republican flag, and it appears that the two national flags may alternate

A Time to Remember: 1937–1962

77

around the rest of the balcony front. Next to the nearest Republican flag is a large banner bearing the words “The Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade” with their Liberty Bell logo. On the bell is written “For Liberty in Spain.”48 This may have been the first public appearance of the banner, as the VALB was only weeks old. It is still displayed at all gatherings of the New York veterans49 (see figure 1). In the photograph, standing at attention in front of the shallow balcony, is a row of ten veterans, the first of three such rows filling the balcony and stretching out of the frame. Most of them are in berets, and most are saluting in the American manner, fingers on their temples with a flat, down-turned palm. Three hold their right fists next to their temples in the antifascist salute so closely tied to the Spanish Republic. Above the whole group are more American and Spanish flags hanging from the ceiling. The fact that everyone is standing and saluting suggests either that the photograph was posed or that it was taken during a part of the program that required this formal, honorific position. Handwritten on the back of an original print in the archive at the Reference Center for Marxist Studies are the words “Hymno of Riego” [sic] and “natl anthem of Republican Spain” with no further explanation. “Himno de Riego” was the Republican anthem; if it was being played when the photo was taken, as the note suggests, it would certainly account for the volunteers’ pose. The mix of salutes, clearly unplanned, paralleled the alternating national flags. Upon hearing the anthem, with which the volunteers were all familiar, some instinctively saluted the Spanish flag as they would the American, while some others made a different but equally appropriate choice. The copy touting the event in the Daily Worker reads “To 3,200 Americans fighting for liberty in Spain,” incorporating the slogan from the Liberty Bell logo and effectively mixing Spanish Republicanism and American patriotism.50 The veterans of the war in Spain each had two salutes to choose from, two allegiances, and came up with two different responses, a group performance of their doubled loyalty. “Communism Is Twentieth Century Americanism” was the slogan of the Communist Party’s Popular Front movement in the

78

Radical Nostalgia

United States at the time.51 The Spanish Civil War was the perfect narrative structure within which the fight against fascism could be equated with the defense of liberty and matched to the United States’ own patriotic tradition. Although the volunteer effort in Spain had clear ties to the Communist Party, many non-Communists supported the Popular Front. This is one reason these events were so well attended. These men were the returning heroes of that antifascist struggle, and they gave leftwing Americans something to cheer about. In this context, the defense of Spain was affiliated with the United States’ own cherished democracy, and the veterans’ two different salutes were understandable. Both could be deemed patriotic, and either one would do in this specific commemorative context. In addition, their defense of Spain was seen not only as a defense of their own country against the building fascist wave. For many, their actions also supported the Soviet Union, which had more to fear from Hitler than the United States. The Communist Party’s recruitment of international volunteers had not been wholly altruistic. Had the band been asked to play a national anthem, they would have had not two choices, as with the salute, but three: “The StarSpangled Banner,” “Himno de Riego,” and “The Internationale,” the anthem of the Communist Party.

“The Yanks Are Not Coming” The Spanish Civil War ended in March 1939, when Franco marched into Madrid. In the United States, by the time the next benefit season arrived in December of that year, history had intervened in August with the signing of the Non-Intervention Pact between Hitler and Stalin. This had a huge impact on the collective Left, unified, if tenuously at times, by the Popular Front. Suddenly, followers of the Communist Party line could no longer remain loyal to the Soviet Union and espouse antifascism at the same time, since Stalin had now allied himself with Hitler. The Party faithful advocated peace and nonintervention to keep the United States from entering the war against Germany’s new

A Time to Remember: 1937–1962

79

Russian compatriots. Some left the Party in disgust and never returned. Many progressives who were sympathetic with the Popular Front but who were not Communists or supporters of the Party line were incensed by Stalin’s action and refused to affiliate themselves with the Party any longer. Until Hitler betrayed Stalin by invading the Soviet Union in June 1941, when the United States and Russia became allies against Nazi Germany, Communists who maintained their loyalty to Stalin were isolated from more moderate progressives. This altered the commemorative atmosphere and reduced the active commemorative community. Celebration was not quite so easy, and old slogans no longer applied. “The Yanks Are Not Coming” replaced “Communism Is Twentieth Century Americanism.”52 The commemorative focus narrowed to issues surrounding Spain itself.53 It was in this context that the VALB’s Third National Convention took place in New York City in late December 1939. It began with the annual Christmas dance on December 22, “commemorating the departure 3 years ago of the first American volunteers for Spain.”54 This was the first official gathering since the signing of the Nazi-Soviet pact, and it also marked the dissolution of the FALB, their work now done, and the VALB’s assumption of their responsibilities.55 The morning session on December 23 opened with the singing of the “StarSpangled Banner,” followed by Edwin Rolfe’s reading of his “Elegy for Our Dead,” accompanied by the presentation of wreaths and the blowing of taps.56 Rolfe was a writer and veteran who came to be known as the poet laureate of the Lincolns.57 Among other decisions, they agreed to fight the Dies Committee in Congress, which they claimed was being used by “American warmongers [. . .] to smash all progressive and militant organizations.”58, 59 Veteran David McKelvy White chaired the meeting. “As long as we live,” he stated in his report to the convention, “we shall set aside February 12, the birthday of the man whose name we bear. We shall meet on that day to honor the dead heroes of the Lincoln Brigade; and we shall remember who killed them,

80

Radical Nostalgia

and why.”60 White’s combative tone was consistent with the slogan “Our Victory Will Be Your Vengeance,” revised from its original present-tense version on the Jarama battlefield memorial and printed in the Convention Issue of the Volunteer for Liberty below Rolfe’s 1937 “Elegy for Our Dead.”61 With the war lost, the dead would have to be avenged in other ways. With Spain lost to Franco and Hitler already in Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Finland, a certain righteous indignation on the veterans’ part was in order in 1939, justifying David White’s anger. Hoping to avert a larger European war, they had taken on fascism before anyone else, and before Hitler’s expansions had begun in earnest. At the same time, the VALB officially chose to follow the Communist Party line, wanting the Western powers to stay out of Europe in light of the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact.62 The interventionists of 1936 became isolationists in 1939, and they focused organizational energies on caring for wounded veterans, Spanish refugees, and American prisoners still in Spain.63 Taking up the mantle of the peace movement in entirely new circumstances, they now equated the fascist military powers with the “imperialist democracies” that had refused to come to the aid of Republican Spain. “It is not our war,” states Milton Wolff, chairman of the Convention Committee, in the opening article of the January 1940 Convention Issue of the Volunteer for Liberty. “At their Convention the Veterans will discuss Spain,” David McKelvy White wrote, “not because they desire to luxuriate in past glories, but because they realize that Spain, as much today as when the war was in progress, is of vital importance to an understanding of the international situation. He who sees Spain clearly,” he continued, “[. . .] cannot be easily misled by the outrageous omissions, misrepresentations, and distortions which today fill the capitalist press.”64 The veterans were in an awkward position. By virtue of their ideological stance, they were no longer quite as easily heroic as they had been. White, who wanted their attention to Spain seen in the best possible light, used it as a means of clarifying the present situation, not escaping it. Still, remembering Spain, remembering and memorializing their dead, remembering “who killed them, and why,” and

A Time to Remember: 1937–1962

81

responding to White’s angry words and Rolfe’s beautiful “Elegy for Our Dead” was probably easier for the veterans than confronting the official compromise of their antifascism, a term by now mostly absent from their speeches and writings. In his tribute, Edwin Rolfe’s elegiac tone and commemorative agenda, so evident in this excerpt from the poem’s final stanza, must have offered some relief from the political tensions of the present moment when it was performed at the convention: Honor for them in this lies: that theirs is no special strange plot of alien earth. Men of all lands here lie side by side, at peace now after the crucial torture of combat, bullet and bayonet gone, fear conquered forever. Yes, knowing it well, they were willing despite it to clothe their vision with flesh.65

Writing in the present tense and thereby giving the dead a certain presence, Rolfe does not refer to the immediate present at all. His poem has no stated interest in the future, except, perhaps, by implying a model for action. As an elegy, it commemorates the dead and comforts the living. “There is a place where, wisdom won, right recorded, men move beautifully,” the poem opens, “striding across fields / whose wheat, wind-marceled, wanders unguarded / in unprotected places [. . .].” It paints a clearly sentimental picture of a pastoral Spain, darkened by tragedy, with its “graves / where lie, nurturing all these fields, my friends in death.”66 The only beauty available to the vets at this difficult moment in their history might have been in Rolfe’s words. Another poem was prominent at an anniversary gathering of veterans at the end of February 1941, a date chosen to recognize “the historic Jarama river battle of February 27, 1937,” as the Daily Worker stated, “where many of the first Americans who joined the Loyalist ranks were killed.” Genevieve Taggard’s tribute, “To the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade,” must have been written for the occasion. It has been reprinted many times in commemorative booklets, including the fiftieth-anniversary souvenir program, where it is dated 1941.67 The poem closes Alvah Bessie’s

82

Radical Nostalgia

1952 anthology of writings on the war, The Heart of Spain, and was performed in 1977 at the fortieth-anniversary celebration in New York.68 It was written and then first read at a public commemoration in 1941, when the reputation of Communists and organizations like the VALB were at a low point as a result of their refusal to reject Stalin’s alliance with Hitler. The poem captures the sentiment that allowed the veterans to remain heroes even in the most contentious of times. This excerpt begins toward the end of the first stanza: [. . .] Say They were young; The haggard in a trench, the dead on the olive slope All young. And the thin, the ill and the shattered, Sightless, in hospitals, all young. Say of them they were young, there was much they did not know, They were human. Say it all; it is true. Now say When the eminent, the great, the easy, the old, And the men on the make Were busy bickering and selling, Betraying, conniving, transacting, splitting hairs, Writing bad articles, signing bad papers, Passing bad bills, Bribing, blackmailing, Whimpering, meaching, garroting,—they Knew and acted understood and died.69

The war had ended less than two years before, yet by Taggard’s tone—“Say of them they were young”—it could have been much longer. The litany of crimes, the “betraying, conniving, transacting,” is all-encompassing, and again equates the actions of men like Franco and Hitler with those of corrupt imperialist financiers. Whatever bickering or whimpering was going on at the time, Taggard suggests, the veterans cut through it all and did what needed to be done—and, she implied, still do. If the crimes of 1936 were not clearly also the crimes of 1941, Taggard tied the

A Time to Remember: 1937–1962

83

past to the present and fulfilled the commemorative agenda in her final lines, which ran continuous with the above: Or if they did not die came home to peace That is not peace. Say of them They are no longer young, they never learned The arts, the stealth of peace, this peace, the tricks of fear; And what they knew, they know. And what they dared, they dare.70

Barely four years since the first departure, when “they knew and acted” by fighting in Spain, the veterans had been immortalized. They were not, however, only living in or for the past. In the poem’s final line, the past gives way to the present. They were young—and, also, they are. Speaking to this community through her words, and to the future, Taggard fulfilled one of the assumptions of this particular commemorative process—that the veterans still know and still dare. Their work is not done. Nor, by extension, is that of their audience or of the larger commemorative community. Over Memorial Day weekend 1941, with the German invasion of Russia only a few weeks away, VALB’s “National Emergency Convention” was held in Chicago. In his keynote speech, Milt Wolff excoriated “Franklin Demagogue Roosevelt” in a “Fighting Anti-War Plea.”71 “[W]e fight against the involvement of our country in the imperialist war from which the great majority of American people can derive only misery, suffering and death,” Wolff proclaimed. He called the Soviet Union “the only great power which today remains at peace in the midst of the brutal and senseless world carnage.”72 These are obviously chilling words, in light of the revelations to come about Stalin. The VALB was still unwilling or unable to advocate the kind of activist intervention overseas of which they were so proud in Spain. The Chicago conference also produced another wreath-laying, preserved in a photograph taken on Memorial Day itself, Tuesday, June 3, 1941 (see figure 17). A group of about thirty veterans are gathered near an imposing statue of Abraham Lincoln in Lincoln Park. They hold the veterans’ banner, brought from New York for

84

Radical Nostalgia

the occasion, and American and Spanish flags. Wounded volunteer Robert Raven, blinded in Spain, is placing a wreath at the foot of the statue.73 Staging their tribute at the feet of the Great Emancipator, their namesake, seemed to produce no interference from the authorities. Unlike the failed attempt to place a wreath at the Eternal Light, a war memorial, perhaps this act had fewer overt political overtones. Compared to the charged conference and the ideological struggles of the moment, this somber ritual as photographed seems almost serene. But the face of one veteran in particular complicates the reverent mood of the image. Whereas most of the group hold a sad or stoic gaze as Raven places the wreath, one African American veteran has his lips pursed, his chin up, and a look of grim determination on his face. In a ceremony clearly intended to honor the American volunteers who died in Spain, the distinctive, rebellious gaze of this one volunteer seems to carry in its intensity earlier statements of defiance. If “Our Victory Will Be Your Vengeance,” of what did victory now consist for the VALB, locked in a pact with the fascist enemy, the Spanish War over? In the photograph staged in solemn reverence, this volunteer seems to offer a reminder that there were still challenges ahead. Hitler invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, just three weeks after the convention closed. It was “the decisive date in the Second World War,” according to Eric Hobsbawm, because it committed Germany to fighting on two fronts.74 Marking a brutal end to the Nazi-Soviet pact, Hitler’s action also placed the veterans still loyal to the Soviet Union on the same side as the US government. Antifascism now united a broad spectrum of political factions. This moment of confluence, exemplifying a rare internationalism, was beautifully captured in graphic form by the invitation to the VALB’s 1941 Christmas Ball, designed by veteran Nils Borg. This event took place exactly two weeks after Pearl Harbor. A postcard-sized handbill printed on cardboard had as its logo a helmeted soldier’s head in profile. Worked into the red, white, and blue design were the flags of the United States, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, China, and Czechoslovakia. All these nations were under attack by the fascist axis (see figure 18).

A Time to Remember: 1937–1962

85

It would be hard to imagine a more concise rendering of this unique moment, or to think of a group with a better claim on its representation.

Medals, Music, and the Red Scare The VALB’s first national convention in five years was held in New York City in 1946, with Hitler now defeated and the Nazi horrors revealed.75 The combination of public and private commemorative gatherings continued. Years later, Edwin Rolfe pointed to a lyric from one of the veterans’ signature songs as exemplifying an almost xenophobic instinct among them. The speaker in the song asks that a message be sent to Brigade leadership from the trench soldiers awaiting orders: “You’ll never be happy with strangers / They would not understand you as we.”76 For Rolfe, this lyric captured a sense that even after the war there was a level of camaraderie and comfort the volunteers could achieve only with others who had fought in Spain.77 As McCarthyism began to take hold, with HUAC, the House Committee on Un-American Activities, continuing the work of the Dies Committee, private affairs became a survival tool, but the VALB’s public presence did not vanish completely. The kind of activist ideological commitment that led them to volunteer for the Spanish war did not cease when they returned. The March 1945 issue of the Volunteer for Liberty invited its readers to an April 11 event marking the fourteenth anniversary of the founding of the Spanish Republic (see figure 19). The organizers wanted its audience to be “as broad as possible” and hoped that “past differences” would not “stand in the way” of their “common objective.”78 This hope arose in response to infighting among various factions of veterans, also evident in the greater left-wing culture of this era. The Popular Front had been wrecked by the Nazi–Soviet pact, but the suffering of the Spanish people under Franco, his criminal collaboration with Hitler and Mussolini, and the crushing embargo that had strangled the Republic were all subjects that generated outrage among liberals,

86

Radical Nostalgia

Socialists, Communists, liberal anti-Communists, and others with less formal affiliations. Though the veterans did not bring everyone under their wing, the bravery of the Lincoln Brigade volunteers and their insistence on defending Spain against both fascist assaults and Western passivity made them heroes for many thousands of Americans who might agree on little else. Theirs was a cause that could offer unity to a fractured Left, and commemorative events were precious sites for the recognition and expression of this commonality. The April dinner in 1946 included Norman Rosten’s play Road from Madrid, a tribute to Captain Herman Bottcher, performed by actor Luther Adler of the Group Theater. Bottcher was a German American Spanish Civil War veteran who went on to become a much decorated hero in World War II and was later killed on Leyte Island in the Pacific. A brave and talented soldier, Bottcher also had undeniable propaganda value for the VALB, as an antifascist who had distinguished himself both in Spain, where he was wounded twice, and in the Pacific. An entire event in his honor was held one month later (see figure 7). The Public Relations office of the War Department sent a letter to the veterans praising Bottcher’s heroism: “The War Department has the highest opinion of Captain Bottcher’s Army record, and welcomes appreciation of the value of his services and those of other soldiers who have done more than their duty,” they quoted the letter as saying in a press release.79 The flier announcing the event shows Bottcher receiving one of his many medals.80 He was an unusual figure, who was able to unite, however briefly, the Spanish Civil War veterans and the US War Department. By 1945 at the latest, as Peter Carroll has argued, the Abraham Lincoln Brigade veterans had been officially dubbed “premature antifascists” by constituencies within the US government.81 This was a way to distinguish the Spanish Civil War volunteers from World War II antifascists. The latter were patriots, not enemies of the state, because they fought fascism when it was US policy, not before. The VALB’s national convention, held on September 21, 1946, was also called a tenth-anniversary affair. The next issue of

A Time to Remember: 1937–1962

87

the Volunteer for Liberty included written tributes from Helen Keller, Lillian Hellman, Gene Kelly, Edward G. Robinson, cellist Pablo Casals, and Harold Ickes, Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Interior.82 “I am glad to send the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade greetings on the occasion of their first post-war national convention,” Ickes wrote, “for they were among the first to see the menace of fascism and certainly among the first to offer their lives in an effort to halt this menace. In the last decade, they have been on the forefront of all the battles for democracy, and they deserve the best this country has to offer.”83 Like the letter from the War Department, this kind of official recognition was invaluable. But Ickes’s unqualified statement that the veterans “deserve the best the country has to offer” was not a universal sentiment. Within eighteen months, the VALB would be officially designated a subversive organization by the attorney general. A report on the 1946 VALB convention was published in the Volunteer for Liberty. Milt Felsen, commander of the New York post, presided. He laid out their principal task, which had not changed: “to . . . end fascism in Spain.” Seated behind him on the stage as honored guests were representatives of Czechoslovakia, Poland, Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, New York Councilman Ben Davis [. . .] and Paul Robeson. [. . .] In the background was the banner of the Brigade and flanking the guests were giant photographs of David McKelvy White and Herman Bottcher. Displayed on the walls of the hall were a collection of Spanish posters from the war days, posters which many of the delegates had last seen on the walls of Spanish towns and cities 7 years ago.84

A photograph of the meeting, showing Milt Wolff speaking at a podium draped with the Spanish Republican flag, demonstrates the rather formal theatrical frame within which this event was staged (see figure 20). The Polish representative was General Swierczewski, who had been divisional commander of the Lincolns in Spain. He awarded medals from the Polish International Brigade to veterans including Wolff, Alvah Bessie, Herman Bottcher

88

Radical Nostalgia

(posthumously), honorary veteran Paul Robeson, and two others. Between 1938 and 1941, after the war in Spain but before the United States entered World War II, the members of the VALB were the only American veterans of a recent military conflict, but they had fought in a war their country had not sanctioned on behalf of an ally the United States had refused to support. At that time, for patriotism to be legible to the general population, it could be performed only in the vocabulary of the Great War, with the laying of wreaths, parades, and the like. In addition, the commemorative urge was limited to the veterans and their supporters. But by 1946, the whole country had been at war. Hundreds of thousands of wreaths had been laid, and taps had been blown at many thousands of funerals. Evidence of bravery was everywhere, and the Spanish veterans were no longer so obviously unique. They were just American soldiers now, to the naked eye, like many others. The Lincolns now began to perform their patriotism in more recognizable ways, while maintaining their radical stance. Medals were pinned on their chests. Government officials, famous writers, and Hollywood celebrities wrote glowing testimonials. International dignitaries joined them on stage and spoke on their behalf. Their commitment to racial equality was also in evidence: a black soldier hosted their convention; a black minister from Harlem dedicated a wreath to their comrades.85 What distinguished them from other veterans now, as Ickes noted, was their foresight, inextricably entwined though it was with their radicalism. The VALB’s unpopular position during the period of the Nazi-Soviet pact was not quite ancient history, but it might not have been something of which all the veterans were particularly proud. The VALB certainly had no vested interest in calling it up. Their heroism and celebrity were more useful. Because they were “among the first to see the menace of fascism,” as Ickes put it, and “among the first to offer their lives in an effort to halt this menace”—and because of people like Bottcher—they now had a certain currency, and they put it to use. Their public advocacy on behalf of the Spanish Republic in exile, and against Franco, was relentless.86

A Time to Remember: 1937–1962

89

After General Swierczewski had awarded the medals and photographers had taken pictures, it was time for the evening’s climax, “and everybody settled down in a hurry and were very quiet because Burt was bringing Robeson to the stand” (see figure 21): Robeson sang for us and there was no separation between what he sang and what he said when he spoke. His songs were part of his speech. He sang about freedom and he spoke about the fight for freedom. He sang about the men who fought in Spain and he spoke about the men who fought today. He said he for one honored all anti-fascists and the more consistent they were in their anti-fascism the more he would speak up for them. He wasn’t going to knuckle down before red-baiting because he knew and we knew that the most consistent anti-fascists were the Communists and he was going to continue to say so at every opportunity.87

Robeson’s singular importance to the veterans is evident. He was an unapologetic leftist, a supporter of the Soviet Union, and one of the great talents of his generation. He had traveled to Spain for a week in January 1938 to sing for the troops, one of the only likeminded performers to actually make the trip. As a public figure in the United States, he embodied a heady conflation of art and politics, and performed it whenever he stood on a stage.88 As this article claimed, “there was no separation between what he sang and what he said when he spoke.” His performance from the podium was perceived to have made one consistent political statement, whatever its form or text. The only differences alluded to were between an abstraction and a reality, between the past and the present. Robeson “sang about freedom” as a concept, whereas “he spoke about the fight for freedom” as an ongoing action. “He sang about the men who fought in Spain” nine or ten years before, but “he spoke about the men who fought today.” Though the subject matter of song and speech were felt to be the same, with no “separation,” his music was more representational of abstract concepts of freedom and struggle, and his speaking more direct and immediate. Each worked off of the other. In this case, the atmosphere he created was likely embellished by the

90

Radical Nostalgia

graphic and colorful propaganda posters surrounding the space, “last seen on the walls of Spanish towns and cities.” Music, speech, and graphics created a rich and persuasive intertextual performance. As Robeson’s allusion to red-baiting makes clear, however, these were not easy years for the VALB and its members. The first veteran to be brought before HUAC had been subpoenaed nine months earlier, in January 1946.89 The VALB attempted to schedule a “huge meeting on Spain” called “Free Spain Now” in Madison Square Garden to coincide with their convention that same year. Many luminaries were invited, including Ernest Hemingway as a possible chair. They had a wish list of speakers for the event, grouped by affiliation: “Representatives from Labor,” both the CIO and the AFL; someone from the “U.S. Government” and “Republican Spain,” hopefully General Lister and/or Pablo Picasso; “Negro People,” a religious figure, and a politician from New York City; a representative of the International Brigade Association in Europe; military or political figures from Soviet Union, Poland, Yugoslavia; “and others.”90 The list, meant for internal use, gives a clear picture of the constituencies from whom the veterans usually sought, expected, or desired support. The affair, however, had to be canceled, which the veterans attributed to an overabundance of other political meetings the same month.91 Whatever the reasons, the cancellation remains a marker: the veterans may have set their sights too high at a time when they were under growing pressure. Given the tenor of the times, the momentum generated by the veterans’ bravery seven years earlier was no longer a guarantee of success. The year 1947 opened with a benefit at Broadway’s Belasco Theater in January, starring Zero Mostel and Dorothy Parker, followed a month later by the tenth-anniversary gathering, at which a taped greeting by Hemingway was played.92 The New York Times reported on the tenth-anniversary celebration in February 1947, noting the “long list of writers, artists and others [who] spoke briefly in praise of the contributions of the American volunteers to the cause of ‘world liberalism.’ ”93 The quotation marks around “world liberalism” suggest that this term was of

A Time to Remember: 1937–1962

91

particular interest to the reporter, perhaps given the radical leftwing context, where one might have assumed such words would be out of place. The red-baiting had begun, but “world liberalism” was a palatable goal, standing in stark contrast to the “Godless Communism” and political subversion of which so many of the veterans would soon stand accused. Dr. Edward Barsky, heroic as head of the American Medical Service in Spain, was subpoenaed before HUAC early in 1946, along with other executives of the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee. The House Committee demanded lists of all people who had donated to Barsky’s group and all those who had received funds. Barsky and his colleagues refused to comply and were eventually jailed.94 US Attorney General Tom Clark named the VALB a subversive organization in December 1947. Soon after, they were required to register as a foreign agent by the US Justice Department. “Of the hundred-odd veterans interviewed for this book,” Peter Carroll stated in his 1994 history of the Lincolns, “none had been exempted from an FBI inquiry, not even the a-political or anti-Communist [emphasis in original].”95 “Vowing to ‘resist all attempts to place the chains of fascism’ on the American people,” Peter Carroll reports, “a group of veterans hastily removed the VALB’s office records to a farmhouse in Connecticut.” Lists of members and donors were burned.96 The historical record has suffered as a result of this indirect but effective form of censorship. Archival materials from this period, and for some years thereafter, are relatively scarce. Though the veterans continued to support their usual causes with rallies, pamphlets, and protests, their community was destabilized as formal commemorative activity slowed. As a result of these governmental attacks, the VALB’s energies began to focus, understandably, on their own legal defense.

Repression/Revival The years from the tenth to the twenty-fifth anniversaries were difficult ones for the VALB. The McCarran Internal Security Act of

92

Radical Nostalgia

1950 required any groups on the Attorney General’s list to register with the government as agents of a foreign power. Refusal to register would lead to imprisonment and debilitating fines. “As a precaution against indictments, the VALB executive board resigned, leaving Milton Wolff, the national commander, and Moe Fishman, the executive secretary, as the only officers.”97 In the same year, veteran Steve Nelson, a regional officer in the Communist Party who had been the brigade commissar in Spain, was arrested for sedition. Whereas the March 1951 Volunteer for Liberty reported on a successful spring party, within a few months, its headlines announced instead all the new arrests. A “Committee to Defend Lincoln Veterans” was soon formed in response.98 For administrative, legal, and emotional reasons, this was not an environment particularly conducive to public commemorative celebration. Private events became more common, and more of a necessity. In addition, the US government was friendly with Franco’s Spain, to the utter dismay and consternation of the veterans. A pact signed by the two governments in 1953 put US military bases on Spanish soil.99 “No U.S. $$$ for Franco!” read the first line of a flier for an affair that same year celebrating the twentysecond anniversary of the founding of the Spanish Republic.100 Milton Wolff and author Howard Fast also headed up a Brooklyn event on Memorial Day 1954. “For the first time in years, our organization staged an open-air rally that with speeches, songs and leaflets broke through the wall of silence that conceals the attack against us.”101 On a date all Americans recognized, this gathering proclaimed the veterans’ resistance and reemergence on a public and patriotic stage. The VALB’s trial before the Subversive Activities Control Board (SACB) officially began in September 1954, though hearings had been underway for some time, and ended in 1956. The VALB was ruled to be a Communist front organization, theoretically taking their orders directly from Moscow and seeking the violent overthrow of the US government.102 The Joint AntiFascist Refugee Committee, their comrades and devoted co-sponsors, folded in the fall of 1955 after years of similar legal challenges and financial hardships engineered by the government.

A Time to Remember: 1937–1962

93

As a lieu de mémoire, “the embodiment of a commemorative consciousness,” the VALB was at risk of dissolution in 1956. In November, the sole article in the Volunteer for Liberty, written by Moe Fishman, was headlined “Speaking Frankly”: “Shall we continue an organization which was founded, among other reasons, to influence our fellow Americans—and can no longer do so?” Fishman asked. “Shall we continue an organization whose only present role is to defend itself against government attacks?” His conclusion was grave. “The obvious answer is to dissolve the VALB.” He asked for input, and the members did respond.103 “At a crowded meeting in New York in November 1956,” Peter Carroll reports, “man after man stood up to avow the importance of fulfilling promises made in Spain nearly two decades earlier.”104 Driven by their history, the membership refused to allow their commemorative body to collapse. The goal of a free Spain remained their common, overriding passion, and it saved the organization. The new VALB, however, claimed to be less concerned with politics. “[T]he VALB has long lost whatever political character it formerly possessed as an anti-Franco and anti-fascist center influencing many Americans,” the Volunteer for Liberty stated in January 1957, two months after Fishman’s plea. “What remains is the need for a medium whereby we can continue our fraternal and social relationships (like any group of veterans), and render mutual assistance when and where necessary, and perpetuate our tradition and history.”105 Ultimately, this change may have been more in name than in practice, but after years of legal struggle and infighting, prioritizing the fraternal and social may have been exactly what the organization needed. Perhaps aware that they depended on a healthy collective memory, the veterans reiterated the importance of their history. “We the veterans of the fight for democracy in Spain,” the Volunteer article concluded, “who, in effect, 20 years ago pledged the soul and heart of America to fight against Nazism and Francoism are a fact that no one and nothing can gainsay.”106 Their overt political agenda may have become “void in fact,” but the “fact” of the veterans—the hard truth of their actions in Spain—remained, they believed, unassailable. Without an ongoing performative

94

Radical Nostalgia

presence in the culture, however, that fact might soften into a deniable fiction quite easily gainsaid. A twentieth-anniversary gathering in March 1957 followed on the heels of the VALB’s 1956 resurrection. It was promoted as “aiming towards a wholly social affair with emphasis on ourselves, our closest friends and a heap of enjoyment.”107 They were more interested in reunion than rebellion. The March affair obviated the need for the usual gathering in July, but the month and day the Spanish Civil War began was instead tellingly marked by President Eisenhower. He sent official greetings to Franco in recognition of what had become a Spanish national holiday, “the twenty-first anniversary of the nationalist uprising that established the country’s present regime,” as the New York Times reported.108 Two days later, an editorial in the New York Times pointed out that “a military dictatorship of a fascist nature” ruled Spain, and that “one cannot help wondering why President Eisenhower should have gone out of his way” to wish Franco well, and thereby applaud his anti-democratic coup.109 Why indeed? Official US government actions such as this put a problematic spin on history, and infuriated the veterans and most people of the Left. Eisenhower’s action exemplifies the way shifts in historical meaning can be facilitated by those in power. The anniversary greeting associated Franco with one of the world’s great democracies, constructing innocence by association. Even with the VALB’s overall political agenda toned down, their insistence on a more critical and, some would say, more accurate portrayal of Generalissimo Franco served a larger historical purpose, by offering an alternative to Eisenhower’s blithe praise and acceptance of a dictatorial regime. The biggest events of this period, as might be expected, surrounded the twenty-fifth anniversary of the war, which was celebrated internationally. The German Democratic Republic held a reunion of the International Brigades in July 1961, and Italy did the same in December. VALB members were invited to both, and a group of fifty veterans and their family members attended the weeklong East German celebration, which benefited

A Time to Remember: 1937–1962

95

from state support. Delegates from thirteen countries attended. As Moe Fishman described the trip in the October 1961 Volunteer, the Americans were greeted by German volunteers who acted as their guides, given rooms in “a beautiful hotel,” taken to meetings with their counterparts in German trade unions, and interviewed and photographed for all the newspapers. “Many [reporters] pointed to the fact that this was a different kind of American than the imperialists they had so frequently written about.”110 After a mass rally held on the July 18 anniversary, at which delegates from each country spoke, they all attended a reception, described by Moe Fishman: It’s a strange feeling to be introduced to a General, so imposing with rows of medals and decorations, and find he fought at Brunete;111 to meet a Yugoslav General in a pale blue uniform, also much decorated, who held my rank in Spain—private; or drink a glass of wine with someone introduced as comrade Kramer, who kids and laughs with you over common experiences in Spain, and find he is Minister of Transport in the GDR [. . .]; to be picked up off the floor by a burly head of police and given a bear hug. So many of these men are legends in their own life-time.112

Volunteers considered national threats or criminals by their own government were treated as comrades and honored guests of state. For the American delegates, some still Communists and many others still believers to have made the trip at all, it could have been easy to romanticize their experiences in a socialist state. Any gathering of the veterans brought back memories, but in this particular country and this context, new thoughts were triggered. In a later paragraph, Fishman explored some of his own associations with the past: As we were leaving the reception hall, Albert mentioned casually that this used to be the Air Ministry of Goering. You could have knocked me over with a feather. Which reminds me. My room at the government guest house was directly opposite the unmarked grassy hill which is all that is left of the bunker in which Hitler killed himself.

96

Radical Nostalgia Each morning I would draw the curtains to let the light in and stare at the mound. Names and faces that I hadn’t thought of in years came to mind. The many wonderful comrades who had died fighting fascism in Spain and all over the world.113

American veterans had no literal, physical landscape at home to tie them to the Spanish Civil War. In contrast to the statesupported East German celebration, they had to commemorate their history in spite of their own government’s wishes. At home, they created commemorative spaces with each of their events, or appropriated national landmarks by placing wreaths on existing memorials such as the Eternal Light or the Lincoln statue. In East Germany, setting aside its Stalinist legacy for the moment, the American volunteers were fêted by generals and treated as heroes. For Fishman, staring at a grassy hill in East Germany brought unexpected memories to mind. Even in Germany, the connection to Spain was more visceral than it could be in the United States. The landscape had more immediacy, both geographically and ideologically, and stimulated new emotional associations with the past. Reunion trips to Europe made a significant impression on the veterans, reviving long lost friendships and images, revalidating their actions in the 1930s, and energizing their own activity on the home front. Trips back to Spain itself, in later years, would prove even more powerful. American celebrations of the twenty-fifth anniversary began in New York City in February 1962 and were soon followed by events in San Francisco and Chicago. The Chicago vets hosted a house party in June at which Moe Fishman spoke.114 The Bay Area post had first reorganized in 1952, “in answer to the attacks by the Truman administration against Lincoln Veterans,” and remained sporadically active for ten years.115 They now date the post’s founding, however, to the twenty-fifth-anniversary year.116 The New York City event was held at the Palm Gardens on February 25. Called by the Volunteer a “ ‘Fight Back’ Rally” against persisting McCarran Act requirements that the VALB members register as agents of a foreign power, it was probably their most successful commemoration since the war.117 Over a

A Time to Remember: 1937–1962

97

thousand people attended, and “scores” were turned away at the door.118 At this point in time, according to Peter Carroll’s research, “[o]f approximately one thousand surviving Lincolns, the VALB office knew the whereabouts of less than half, and many of them desired no relationship with their comrades.”119 Political differences, the Pact, and the varying needs of individual veterans had taken their toll.120 The event succeeded nonetheless. Advertisements had been placed in the New York Times, the National Guardian, the Daily Worker, and the Nation.121 The ad headline read “25 Years Ago, a Time to Remember” above an illustration of a running soldier. Page proofs of the New York Times advertisement remain in the ALBA Collection (see figure 22). The copy briefly describes the Lincolns’ history, their role in Spain, and their ongoing stand against Franco, then goes on to name the pressing causes of the moment: amnesty for the political prisoners still being held in Spain, and resistance to the McCarran Act. The proofs differ from the actual Times ad only in layout and in an adjustment of the number of volunteers who were killed in World War II. Much more interesting is a handwritten correction on one proof that was not changed in the final ad itself. Between two sections of text is a five-pointed star, which was the star of the Soviet Union. The handwritten correction circles this graphic and states in the margin “three pointed star,” the star of the International Brigades. It seems that someone in the New York office thought that the otherwise common five-pointed star might raise anti-Communist hackles, and that the star of the International Brigades would be more appropriate and less controversial. For whatever reason, the change was not made. Major anniversaries of numerical significance tend to mobilize commemorative communities. Energies generated by their recent organizational resurrection, building frustration over US ties to Franco, resistance to the McCarran Act, and the successful celebration in Germany came together and found expression and release in twenty-fifth anniversary events such as this one in New York City. Calling the gathering “emotional,” the New York Times gave it seven paragraphs. It was a time in the

98

Radical Nostalgia

United States when politics left of center were gaining in credibility. “With speeches and folk songs, the overflow crowd reminisced about the Americans who fought in the Brigade ‘with the purest motives’ and promised to fight the ‘fascism that has entered’ the United States. Speakers repeatedly called for the release of six thousand political prisoners reportedly held in Spanish prisons.”122 The Volunteer said the anniversary event “was marked by a vigorous re-dedication to the struggle that began for us at Jarama 25 years ago. The rally demonstrated the determination of the V.A.L.B. to again do battle for the right to be anti-fascist.”123 This construction and assumption—that a passionate commitment to the past can be redirected into present struggles—helped position these clearly emotional affairs as purveying more than conventional nostalgia. The Volunteer carried a photograph of the commemoration on its front page (see figure 23). Taken from the back of the hall, it shows a packed, animated house: The vets turned out in force. Many who hadn’t been to a meeting in years came to add their strength to the fight. With them, they brought their teen-age sons and daughters. Standing tall and proud, some of the youngsters were almost as old as their fathers were 25 years ago at Jarama and Brunete. [. . .] Responding to [Milt] Wolff’s appeal for funds to carry on the fight [against the McCarran Act], the audience contributed $2,500 on the spot, with pledges of additional support to come.124 Working their way through the crush jamming the main hall and balconies, children of the vets acted as ushers. In a lively parade, they brought the money collected to the stage.125

This solicitation for funds had a long history, dating back to the VALB’s work during the war to support the volunteers. In intervening years, dollars raised tended to go to outside causes, but now, with VALB under such peril as an organization, their own members’ needs took precedence. Funds donated in the name of volunteers killed in Spain helped support and protect the surviving veterans, their organization, and their political agenda.

A Time to Remember: 1937–1962

99

Having the veterans’ children move through the room in their “lively parade” to gather the cash gave the pitch for funds added emotional resonance. The long-standing theatrical and cultural tradition was also continued, with the eclectic mix of music, text, and image begun years before: Pete Seeger entertained with songs of the Brigade in which the audience joined enthusiastically. Other highlights of the afternoon were dramatic readings by a Broadway theater group. These included La Pasionaria’s poignant “Farewell to the International Brigades,” Ernest Hemingway’s memorable message to our 10th Anniversary meeting and a moving letter from Leoncio Pena, still imprisoned in Burgos.126 As background to the readings, enlarged black and white photographs of Spanish War scenes were flashed on a wide screen. Climaxing the program, Moe Fishman introduced a resolution addressed to President Kennedy asking him to press Franco for amnesty for Spain’s political prisoners. “On this anniversary day of a great fight for democracy,” the resolution stated, “your call for amnesty will bring honor to our country and advance the cause of freedom and democracy.” The resolution was passed unanimously.127

The New York Times noted that when Seeger’s “memory faltered” while singing the songs made popular during the war, the audience “helped him out on several occasions.”128 These songs, La Pasionaria’s speech to the Internationals from 1938, Hemingway’s recorded message, certain poems, and some of the projected photographs were becoming commemorative tropes, as ingrained for this community as more conventional expressions of patriotism. These were radical artifacts as familiar as the “StarSpangled Banner” and, to those present, at least as meaningful, if not more so. Peter Carroll called the twenty-fifth anniversary “an opportunity for a revival.”129 With a kind of inevitability, this carefully planned program kept bouncing not only from medium to medium and genre to genre, but also from past to present to future,

100

Radical Nostalgia

caroming around like a billiard ball: political speeches, Seeger’s songs, Hemingway’s message, Pena’s letter from prison, La Pasionaria’s farewell, and documentary images all “climaxing” in Fishman’s plea to President Kennedy. Nostalgic sentiment and political urgency were so intertwined as to be inseparable. The performative and political momentum produced by these interacting elements must have been formidable. Rising emotional and ideological energies, made manifest in donations and unanimous resolutions, were inspired by a unique group of people united through performance and defined by a history in which the power of a shared idea took precedence over personal safety. Their history and identity did not go unchallenged. Immediately outside the auditorium, the climate was not so sanguine. “Leaving the hall,” the Times reported in its final paragraph, “the group ignored fifteen pickets from the Nationalist Party, who bore signs reading ‘Down With Reds,’ ‘Red Animals Inside,’ and ‘Abe Lincoln Brigade Murders Nuns.’ ”130 Though the attendees far outnumbered the protestors, the Nationalists’ signs and taunts must have been a sobering punctuation mark to the day’s events. In 1962, the combination of anti-Communist and conservative Catholic discourses demonstrated that in certain circles, the volunteers for liberty were far from heroes, but murderous reds instead, and that their history was still in play. Their story was neither uncontested nor invulnerable. But within the commemorative frame, it held and gathered strength.

101

Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Figure 1. Early Show of Support. New York, New York, 31 July 1936. The caption attached to the original photograph reads in part: “Photo shows the crowd of sympathizers of the Spanish leftist government as they gathered in a mass meeting at Madison Square Garden to demonstrate their support of the resistance of the Leftist [sic] to the Fascist uprising.” Note the many right fists raised in the antifascist salute. AP/World Wide Photos.

102

Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Figure 2. Veterans Take the Stage at We Must Remember! New York, New York, 30 April 2000. American veterans of the Spanish Civil War stand before the audience to open the annual commemorative gathering. The original Abraham Lincoln Brigade banner, dating from the 1930s, hangs over the stage in the upper left, while a photograph of the same banner is projected on a screen over the performing space. Photograph © 2000 by Eric Levenson.

103

Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Figure 3. Pete Seeger, Arlo Guthrie, and Tao Rodriguez-Seeger Singing “Viva La Quince Brigada.” The finale of We Must Remember!, 30 April 2000. Arlo Guthrie (guitar), Tao Rodriguez-Seeger (hand drum), and Pete Seeger (banjo) stand center stage, backed by musicians and actors affiliated with the San Francisco Mime Troupe. The central projection shows veterans Charles Hall and Moe Fishman holding the veterans’ banner. Photograph by Richard Bermack.

104

Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Figure 4. Memorial “To Our Fallen Comrades.” A monument to the US volunteers killed at the battle of Jarama, constructed near the front lines. On the reverse side of the photograph are written the words: “Makeshift memorial . . . Rauschwald’s lettering.” Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives, New York University, Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Photograph Collection.

105

Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Figure 5. “1st Birthday Party.” An advertisement that appeared in the Daily Worker, 23 April 1938, announcing the “1st Birthday Party” for the Friends of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, with 100 veterans as “Guests of Honor.” The FALB was a home-front group devoted to supporting the volunteers. Note the list of stars who appeared at the celebration. Used with permission of the Reference Center for Marxist Studies/PWW.

106

Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Figure 6. “Stars for Spain” and “2nd Annual Stars for Spain.” Ads that appeared in the Daily Worker, 7 December 1937 and 9 December 1938, to promote benefits at the Mecca Temple in New York City. Used with permission of the Reference Center for Marxist Studies/PWW.

107

Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Figure 7. “In Tribute to Captain Herman Bottcher.” A 1945 flier advertising a special tribute to the much-decorated World War II hero and Lincoln Brigade volunteer, killed on Leyte Island in the Pacific. Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives, New York University, Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Collection.

108

Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Figure 8. Marching on May Day. New York, New York, 2 May 1938. The caption from the Daily Worker reads: “Heading New York City’s greatest united May Day parade Saturday when 200,000 marchers rolled down Fifth Avenue and Broadway to Union Square, were these veterans of the Washington-Lincoln Brigades who fought in Spain in defense of democracy.” Used with permission of the Reference Center for Marxist Studies/PWW.

109

Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Figure 9. “Lincoln Brigade Fights On.” May Day, 1946. “Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade stand under the banner of their organization before the defenders of Loyalist Spain swung into the parade,” according to the caption from the Daily Worker. Major battles of the Spanish Civil War are listed adjacent to battles from the war in the Pacific. Used with permission of the Reference Center for Marxist Studies/PWW.

110

Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Figure 10. The Volunteer for Liberty. The cover page of the first American issue of the Volunteer for Liberty, the VALB’s publication. This memorial issue was distributed at the First Organizational Conference of the VALB in New York, New York, 18 December 1937. Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives, New York University, Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Collection.

111

Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Figure 11. “Lift the Embargo! All Aid to Spain!” So exclaims the large banner hanging above the crowd at an anti-embargo rally in Madison Square Garden, 9 June 1938. Used with permission of the Reference Center for Marxist Studies/PWW.

112

Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Figure 12. “Greetings to the Defenders of a Free Democratic Spain!” In an undated photograph, likely from late 1938, a crowd has gathered to welcome home returning volunteers. The darker letters on the signs were touched up prior to publication in the Daily Worker. Used with permission of the Reference Center for Marxist Studies/PWW.

113

Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Figure 13. Paying Tribute at the Eternal Light Monument. 15 December 1938. Major Milton Wolff, left, last commander of the Lincolns in Spain, and volunteer J. H. Wideman stand at the gate to the World War I memorial in Madison Square the day they returned from Spain. They have been barred entry to the grounds. A police officer stands in the background. The banner on the wreath reads: “In Memory Of Those Who Died For Democracy.” Used with permission of the Reference Center for Marxist Studies/PWW.

114

Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Figure 14. Backstage at the 1st Birthday Party. The “Night of Stars,” Hippodrome, New York, New York, 23 April 1938. Two veterans, in signature berets, flank members of the FALB holding the evening’s receipts. Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives, New York University, Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Photograph Collection. Photograph by Albert Fenn.

115

Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Figure 15. Packed House at “Night of Stars.” New York, New York, Hippodrome, 23 April 1938. The happy crowd at the 1st Birthday Party. Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives, New York University, Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Photograph Collection. Photograph by Albert Fenn.

116

Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Figure 16. “Lincoln Vets Take Salute.” This title is handwritten on the reverse side of the photograph from the “Night of Stars” at the Hippodrome, New York, New York, 23 April 1938. Though most of the veterans are saluting with flat palms and fingers to their foreheads, two in the front row, just right of center, give the Spanish Republican salute, with closed fists. Used with permission of the Reference Center for Marxist Studies/PWW. Photograph by Albert Fenn.

117

Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Figure 17. Laying a Wreath at Lincoln’s Feet. In Lincoln Park, Chicago, Illinois, veterans pay tribute on Memorial Day, 3 June 1941. Robert Raven, blinded in Spain, holds the wreath. The volunteers were in Chicago for their national convention. Used with permission of the Reference Center for Marxist Studies/PWW.

118

Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Figure 18. “Cab Calloway Xmas Eve Ball.” Handbill for the VALB’s annual Xmas Eve Ball, 24 December 1941. The original handbill, designed by veteran Nils Borg, is in three colors: a blue field with white letters, diagonal red stripes across “Calloway,” and mixed colors through the international flags rendered in the helmet: American, British, Russian, Chinese, and Czech. Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives, New York University, Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Collection.

119

Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Figure 19. Invitation to Fourteenth Anniversary Dinner. The back cover of the invitation to an event recognizing the anniversary of the founding of the Spanish Republic, 11 April 1945. The stained text reads in part: “We believe that the people of Spain who are fighting Franco are fighting in our interest as well as their own. We must at least not hamper their fight by supporting their Falangist Fuehrer . . .” Note the many well-known writers and celebrities supporting the statement. Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives, New York University, Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Collection.

120

Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Figure 20. Milt Wolff Addresses the VALB’s International Convention. New York, New York, 21 September 1946. The photographs flanking the stage are of veteran David McKelvy White, the recently deceased secretary of the FALB, on the left, and Lincoln vet Herman Bottcher, a decorated hero in World War II, on the right. Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives, New York University, Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Photograph Collection.

121

Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Figure 21. Paul Robeson at the Microphone. Robeson is addressing the International Convention of the VALB, New York, New York, 21 September 1946. Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives, New York University, Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Photograph Collection.

122

Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Figure 22. “25 Years Ago, a Time to Remember.” Annotated page proof advertising the twenty-fifth anniversary commemoration. Note the handwritten suggestion in the margin that the five-pointed star, the star of the Soviet Union, be changed to a three-pointed star, the star of the International Brigade. When the ad appeared, the five-pointed star remained. Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives, New York University, Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Collection.

123

Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Figure 23. Twenty-fifth Anniversary. Twenty-fifth anniversary celebration at Palm Gardens, 2 February 1962. Two three-pointed International Brigade stars flank the stage, which is dominated by a projection screen to be used in the performance. The sign above the stage reads “Amnesty for Franco’s Political Prisoners.” Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives, New York University, Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Photograph Collection.

124

Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Figure 24. Vietnam Protest “No Pasaran” Spanish Civil War veterans carry banners in march on Washington protesting against the Vietnam War, 21 October 1967. Used with permission of the Reference Center for Marxist Studies/PWW. Photograph by Ted Reid.

125

Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Figure 25. “Commemorate the 50th Anniversary of the Spanish Civil War.” Flier advertising Avery Fisher Hall gala, 7 April 1986. Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives, New York University, Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Collection.

126

Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Figure 26. “The Old Jarama Valley.” Handwritten lyric sheet for a revision of the folk song “Red River Valley,” signed by “W.T.,” likely Wally Tapsell. The lyric, attributed to Alex McDade, is not his original version of the song. Comintern Archive, International Brigades Records, Center for the Preservation and Documentation of Contemporary History, Moscow; copy at Tamiment Library, New York University.

127

Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Figure 27. Commemorative Theater. The finale of We Must Remember! in Oakland, California, 28 February 2000. The company performs under the watchful eyes of the veterans from May Day, 1946. Performers, from left to right, are Claudia Paige, Henry Hung, Randy Craig (standing), Barrett Nelson, Bruce Barthol, and actors Arthur Holden, Velina Brown, Eduardo Robledo, Stephanie Brown (daughter of veteran Archie Brown), and Michael Sullivan. Standing at the far right are Dave Smith, head of Bay Area post of the VALB, and Peter Carroll, chair of ALBA board of governors. Photograph by Richard Bermack.

128

Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Figure 28. Veterans Take Applause in Oakland. This commemorative event on 25 February 2001 featured Pasiones, a theatrical revue of Spanish Civil War music. Standing, from right to left, are Dave Smith, Milt Wolff, Hilda Roberts, Nate Thornton, William Sennett, Ken Shaker, Abe Osheroff, Ted Veltfort, Ben Lane, Coleman Persily, Anthony Toney, and five veterans at the far end who cannot be identified. Photograph by Richard Bermack.

129

Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Figure 29. Dedication of Madison Memorial. Madison, Wisconsin, 31 October 1999. From left are veterans Moe Fishman (in beret), Clarence Kalin (with his hand on the monument), Clarence Forester (over Kalin’s left shoulder), Carl Geiser (in beret), Aaron Hilkevitch, Vern Bown, Dave Smith, Art Harrison, and Charles Hall. Photograph by Daniel Czitrom.

130

Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Figure 30. “Expose Reagan’s Lies” Again. Oakland, California, 29 February 2004. Barbara Dane, center, leads the company in singing “Hold On,” a protest song popularized in the 1940s and adapted for this commemorative event honoring the Internet-based activist group MoveOn.org. Behind the company is a projection of a protest march during the war in Nicaragua. Bruce Barthol, musical director, is singing at the far left, next to Eduardo Robledo. Arthur Holden and Stephanic Brown sing at the right. Photograph by Richard Bermack.

Chapter 4

The Legend Business: 1962–1996

. . . every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably. Walter Benjamin Illuminations

Glorious Losers Twenty-five years after Spain, the history of the Lincolns became of paramount concern. The 1950s had hurt the organization and many of the volunteers, but the era had also called their own past into question. Protecting what some have called “the last great cause” became a cause in itself. In 1964, the Volunteer announced that veteran Art Landis had agreed to write “a comprehensive history of the Brigade,” after encouragement by the LA vets. “Many of the facts which he needs exist only in the memories of all of us,” the article stated; then, in capital letters: “THERE JUST IS NO OTHER AREA OF SOURCE MATERIAL AVAILABLE.” Veterans’ memories of the war were directly solicited. “We urge veterans to sit down and make tapes themselves. Get a friend to record you if you cannot do it yourself. Write if you have no other way. If you have manuscripts or stories—send them in. [. . .] Even if you can describe only one event—it is important” [emphasis in original].1 Landis’s exhaustive, fascinating 1967 book, The Abraham

132

Radical Nostalgia

Lincoln Brigade, remains one of the most comprehensive military histories of the Americans in Spain. The 1967 veterans’ convention established three committees, among them the Historical Commission, “one of our most important activities,” whose work was reported on at length in a 1969 memo by VALB national secretary Maury Colow. “Together we can set the record on the American Volunteers straight,” Colow stated toward the end of his long memo, “so that the very meaning of why we went to Spain becomes enriched, recorded and left for its proper evaluation by history.”2 Twenty years earlier, this community had had to remove their files from the New York office for fear they would be confiscated by the US government. Now, newly rejuvenated, it is not surprising that their own compromised history, so much of which existed “only in the memories of all of us,” became such a priority. Saving it became a conscious, active, committed, politically motivated process. The veterans gradually began to display a new kind of commemorative urgency as they realized that before long, their story would be in the hands of people who did not remember the 1930s, let alone anyone who had participated in the war itself. Hayden White has cited Holocaust historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet, who marks “the poignant moment at which a people or group is forced, by the death of its members, to transfer an experience, existentially determinative of its own image of the nature of its existence as a historical entity, from the realm of memory to that of history.”3 The veterans and their community may have begun to feel that poignancy as the number of obituaries published in the Volunteer accelerated, but the “moment” to which White and Vidal-Naquet refer is not discrete. It might begin as soon as such a group begins to sense its own mortality, and extend until the last member has died. Nor can one assume the necessary transfer of experience to be a finite, circumscribed process. For the veterans, their history and experience have been transferred in performance over an extended period of time. Prior to the twenty-fifth-anniversary revival year of 1962, the VALB had struggled, and years passed before and after with

The Legend Business: 1962–1996

133

little or no commemorative activity at all. After the twenty-fifth anniversary in 1962, there were no strictly commemorative public events of any size until the thirtieth in 1967. By contrast, the fortieth-anniversary celebrations in 1976 and 1977 began a remarkably consistent series of events in New York and the San Francisco Bay area that have continued every year since for more than twenty-five years without pause. In addition to the awareness that memory for the veterans was becoming history, this dramatic shift can also be attributed to a variety of political and historical factors: the removal of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade from the attorney general’s list of subversive organizations in 1965, after years of legal battles; the Watergate scandal, which demonized Richard Nixon and, by extension, the McCarthyism with which he was affiliated;4 the death of Franco in 1975, which began the process of Spanish democratization the veterans had been championing for decades, allowing them to return in significant numbers to that beloved country; simple temporal distance from the Spanish Civil War, softening the focus and taking some of the edge off the VALB’s Communist history; and finally, but perhaps most significantly, the renewed popularity of Leftist politics and coalition building in the United States in response to the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War. That the cultural transformations of the 1960s opened a door onto the 1930s and the veterans’ own radical tradition should not come as a complete surprise. The pertinent ideologies that drove the two periods were not identical, but they remain the preeminent decades of the twentieth century when leftwing philosophies played a valued role in American political discourse. The civil rights movement became a magnet for the politics of the aging volunteers. In 1965, “twelve veterans [. . .] paraded through the streets of Harlem beneath the VALB banner to support the voting-rights march in Selma, Alabama.”5 These older white men on Harlem streets at that time in history must have made an impression, mirroring another march through the white-controlled streets of Selma, but with colors reversed. African American veterans of the Spanish Civil War participated in a

134

Radical Nostalgia

variety of protests across the country during this period. But some of the activists of the 1930s and their younger counterparts in the movement disagreed on tactics, drawing attention to the difference between the militant antifascism of the 1930s and the passive resistance popular in the 1960s. As Carroll quotes African American veteran Vaughn Love: “I’m not a passive person. I wished them well but I would not have turned the other cheek.”6 The pacifist trend, arising from reaction to the war in Vietnam and under the influence of leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr., harked back to the peace movement that preceded the Spanish Civil War. World War I and the Vietnam War inspired the two great antiwar movements of the twentieth century. Franco’s revolt in Spain and Hitler’s move through Europe radicalized many in the American peace movement of the 1920s and 1930s, and veterans like Love mistrusted the efficacy of peaceful protest in the 1960s and 1970s. As an activist group, though, the veterans managed to appeal to radicals and pacifists alike. For the most radical left-wing protestors, the veterans’ willingness to take up arms in the 1930s gave them immediate status. For the liberals and pacifists, the veterans were people who had risked their lives on the courage of their convictions, and who were not afraid to take on their own government to honor those convictions. It would not be rash to suggest that the commemorative resurgence that took hold during this period began in response to the radical revival of the 1960s, but until this time, the VALB had not taken any official political stances unrelated to Spain, and they were reluctant to do so. Mostly through the efforts of veterans like Maury Colow and historian Robert Colodny, the VALB came out against the Vietnam War, albeit much later than many. Although taking political stances unrelated to Spain had lost them members and attendance in the past, Colow believed they simply did not have a choice, given the gravity of the situation and the transgressions of the US government. In speeches and pamphlets, Colodny drew a direct connection between the United States’ military ties to Franco and US support for “the military junta in Saigon.” The VALB board finally voted to join

The Legend Business: 1962–1996

135

the huge antiwar protest at the Pentagon in October 1967, to unexpected and meaningful effect7 (see figure 24). As the veterans marched near the long parade toward the Lincoln Memorial, word spread through the throngs that the Lincoln Brigade was coming and, as Moe Fishman reported, “a path opened up through the crowd as if by magic. To the applause of many of the young people present, we made our way in single file. We got flowers and kisses. . . . You could spot many a tear.”8

In Carroll’s words, “[t]he antiwar movement of the 1960’s thus served as a vital connection between the Old Left and the New.”9 These old warriors had always been unapologetic about their radical politics. They became the elder statesmen of leftwing political protest, and their own history and commitment to those ideals took on new resonance. The veterans’ presence at the antiwar protests of the 1960s and 1970s built a bridge back to the 1930s, transcending the repressive 1950s. Suddenly, the history they had been performing through the years had a particular and immediate pertinence to those fighting modern battles, and the renewed interest of the young protestors in the veterans’ earlier activism gave energy back to the aging volunteers—and, I would argue, to the commemorative process in general. Less than two years after the march on Washington, the thirty-second anniversary dinner in 1969 featured Dr. Barsky, left-wing lawyer Leonard Boudin, Colodny and Colow, actor John Randolph, Spanish novelist Tana de Gamez, and the film To Die in Madrid. Pete Hamill covered the event for the Village Voice. “[T]hey gathered in this soulless ballroom, under three small chandeliers, and listened to people talk about Spain,” Hamill wrote.10 Novelist de Gamez “reminded everyone that Spain today is in a state of semi-martial law,” and implicated the US government as colluding in the oppression of the Spanish people. “Mussolini and Hitler had been replaced by the Americans,” he claimed. As for the volunteers who had died in Spain: “ ‘for the millionth time, thank you, thank you.’ ” Hamill

136

Radical Nostalgia

described “a brave, tough man,” perhaps himself, “crying, and so were a lot of others.”11 Hamill went on to describe another “emotional peak” of the gathering: Then two young Puerto Rican independentistas got up to sing. This boy and girl were young, and the Spanish War was before their time. They sang one song about black angels, and another about Vito Marcantonio12 [. . .], and then the place came suddenly alive, roaring and singing, voices loud and proud, the bitterness gone, as this lovely young girl broke into “Viva La Quince Brigada . . .,” the song of the Brigade.13

Hamill’s political heart was clearly on his sleeve. Nonetheless, he captured the performative rhythms of the event, its multivocality, eclectic textual content, shifting emotional energies, and intergenerational power. One can imagine the resonance of young Puerto Rican musicians identified with their country’s own independence juxtaposing songs of modern liberation with the veterans’ anthems from the Spanish Civil War. The “lovely young girl” Hamill described singing what he called “that sudden explosive song” must have enacted all their hopes for the future when she sang the past, and no matter how topical some of the other songs might have been, it was “Viva La Quince Brigada” that transformed the room. Its historical and emotional power could not be topped.14 After Franco’s death in November 1975, veterans began to travel to Spain in groups large and small. Far more intensely than the trips to Germany or Italy for the twenty-fifth anniversary, returning to Spain and the landscape of their activism seemed to light a fire inside the veterans. Spain’s freedom from dictatorship was only one of a number of components that encouraged the commemorative successes that began in the mid-1970s, but it was a vital one. “[F]or the Lincolns,” Peter Carroll claims, “the transformation of Spain would symbolize the rebirth of a dream.”15 The New York City post of the VALB, always a commemorative center for the veterans, produced events dependably,

The Legend Business: 1962–1996

137

continuing each February like clockwork, then shifting to warmer April in 1981, but keeping up a predictable rhythm. The San Francisco Bay Area post, with almost as many members as New York but, until then, only occasional annual public gatherings, began their own regular performance events in 1973, celebrating the thirty-sixth anniversary. The following year, writer and veteran Alvah Bessie, was fêted by the rejuvenated San Francisco post. “The audience was limited by the capacity of the hall,” the Volunteer reported. “Hundreds were turned away after the sale of tickets had been halted in mid-January.”16 Commemorative momentum began to build as veterans and their supporters became active in new cultural and political arenas and worked their way out of the oppressive climate of the 1950s and 1960s. The veterans took heart in their newfound fame and a free Spain. Re-energized by a new generation of radicals, they found cause after cause to champion, and began turning out one successful commemorative event after another, year after year. The crowds were growing, but even with this expanding popularity, the VALB was rife with internal struggles through the mid-1970s. Taking an official stance on the Vietnam War against the inclinations of old guard members of the Communist Party had helped release their hold on the VALB’s operations, but longstanding conflicts rose to the surface, which challenged the preservation of their history: The long-awaited collapse of the Franco dictatorship had created a crisis of identity. Without a common foe, Lincoln veterans no longer felt obliged to suppress the political antagonisms that had been festering within the VALB for years. Indeed, the membership quickly polarized into Communist party members and ex-Communists who distrusted their former comrades. The quarrels, reminiscent of the sectarian struggles of the 1930’s, threatened the organization’s survival.17

Lacking the great villain to work against, issues within the VALB itself became more prominent, among them control of

138

Radical Nostalgia

their own physical, artifactual records. “The Communists claimed sole possession [of the brigade’s military archives]; the VALB demanded the release of all historical material.”18 The Party’s interest in control of the veterans’ military archives was disconcerting, no matter how cautious or self-protective their motives may have been. Since the formation of the Historical Commission in 1967, documents, tapes, photographs, and memorabilia had been coming in from living veterans, as well as from the families of veterans who had died who wanted their papers in safekeeping. At the same time as individual veterans were eager to have their own histories preserved, the only organization appropriate to pursue this huge task was struggling to survive. Factional disagreements were not worked through organizationally until a national convention in 1979, but efforts to manage the historical record took shape nonetheless. Archival collections were begun at Brandeis University and at the University of California at Berkeley. The Volunteer of May 1976 reported on a “revitalized” Historical Commission, pursuing a “comprehensive” program of collecting, cataloguing, fund-raising, and oral history work.19 Exuberant fortieth-anniversary activities in 1976 and 1977 belied any ongoing dissension in the ranks. Chicago began the festivities in May of the bicentennial year with a weeklong series of events at the University of Chicago. In October 1976, Italy hosted a fortieth-anniversary reunion of the International Brigades in Florence, attended by a large group of American veterans. The San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles veterans held their fortieth-anniversary gatherings in 1977. Martha Olson Jarocki and her sister Hannah, daughters of a Veteran, attended the fortieth-anniversary affair in Italy. Martha was 30, Hannah 34. As with Moe Fishman’s experience in Germany, the sisters found the event deeply affecting, “a totally . . . life-changing experience,” in Martha’s words. “I had been active politically, I was in the Civil Rights movement. I was . . . I thought I had a really strong sense of what their radicalist, of what their radicalism was about, and how it affected my life [. . .] and, I still was totally shocked.”20

The Legend Business: 1962–1996

139

It was such a revelation to be in this community that saw my father as this incredible hero. I knew that he was a hero, and I felt that, but I didn’t realize how powerful the impact of my culture not seeing him as a hero but seeing him as some kind of outcast, or threat, or problem had been, until I could see other people calling him a hero, and just the feeling of that, the power of that, was just overwhelming. To see it—the whole town, the whole city of Florence. [. . .] Not only was he, and . . . by extension his family and his community . . . heroic people, but also that we were all connected. That we were part of this larger community which was about . . . political struggle, about self-determination, about people taking, making their own choices . . . and that they, we were considered part of that community. And his actions, and his community, put him at the center. It was a wonderful feeling, it was a great feeling.21

Hannah, with whom I had spoken a few years earlier, put it quite succinctly. What did they discover in Florence? “We’re not the lunatic fringe,” she told me. “America’s the lunatic fringe. We’re the regular people. [She’s laughing.] My God! We’d been living like . . . ‘Sorry, we’re Communists,’ you know . . . everyone’s a Communist, over there. It was totally liberating.”22 Hannah and Martha had grown up knowing their father was a hero. They understood their parents’ radicalism, and they were activists themselves. And yet the trip to Italy was “life-changing” because, unlike their experience in the United States, the entire culture surrounding them in Florence validated their belief system. In public spaces, the people of Florence performed Leonard Olson into the hero his daughters had always believed him to be, and it was “overwhelming.” In exuberant parades, on the streets, Martha saw “other people calling him a hero,” instead of the “outcast” or “threat” he became through the Left’s public demonization in the 1950s and the absence of any official recognition thereafter—the lingering, sometimes hidden but pervasive discourse of anti-Communism in a supposedly liberal society. In Florence, there was no legacy of subversion, or of restraint. The San Francisco–area post held their fortieth-anniversary banquet in San Leandro. The title was “Honoring the ‘Premature

140

Radical Nostalgia

Anti-fascist’ Women,” and Fredericka Martin was their special guest. Martin was now an author, historian, and “Chief Nurse with the First Medical Unit of the American Medical Bureau to Aid Spanish Democracy,” according to her bio in a beautifully designed and well-researched program booklet produced for the occasion. Twenty-seven biographies of other women volunteers were included, with photographs and tributes. Twenty of them attended the event. The final page reprinted the lyrics to four of the famous songs from the war to facilitate group singing, led by the Bay Area Progressive Music Association.23 “The women, wearing corsages the colors of the Republic, were introduced, accompanied by a rousing fanfare from the BAPMA 15-piece band, all Vets standing at attention (or an approximation thereof) as the assemblage of 750 roared their love and gratitude.”24 Women have played a leading role in the organization of the Bay Area post and its activities since its inception.25 As usual, New York had the biggest event that year, packing the Statler Hilton with 1,250 attendees on February 20. The centerpiece was a script entitled Spain 40!—“a dramatic multimedia production”—produced by veteran Bob Steck. Stars included actor Howard DaSilva, Fred Hellerman of the Weavers, Ring Lardner Jr., Paul Robeson Jr., and Fredericka Martin, fresh from the Bay Area. Posters from the war festooned the stage.26 A slide show, music, speeches, and recitations accompanied the program, of which a technical script survives.27 Moving between well-crafted, snappy prose and existing poems, letters, songs, prerecorded tapes, quotes from politicians and famous writers, and numerous slides, the piece demonstrates a significant amount of effort and care.28 The dramatic script itself was structured to integrate texts and speakers theatrically. It included the same letter by Fredericka Martin that had been an early inspiration for the musical Heart of Spain. Written home in 1937, the letter ends with the words “. . . beg them to send us more nurses and doctors. Don’t let them forget us. My best to you, Freddie.”29 Then: “So wrote Freddie in March, 1937,” the narrator continued after the letter. “Well, how say you now, Fredericka Martin?” he went on, as she came onto the stage to

The Legend Business: 1962–1996

141

answer the question herself. Paul Robeson Jr. was led on by an audiotape and slides of his famous father, who had died in 1976, and Ring Lardner Jr. was introduced by a tribute to his brother Jim, who had been killed in Spain. Past and present were intermingled with theatrical flair and an emotional charge. The writer, Carl Abrams, stated his theme for Spain 40! in the opening lines, spoken by one of the narrators: My dear Lincolns, You crazy Americans, What in hell drove you, Forty years ago, To do what you did? No . . . don’t give me the ready slogans, Give me the pulse, the heartbeat. Can you? I don’t know if I can, but tonight let’s just try our stethoscope and see what we pick up.30

The “pulse” and “heartbeat” were theoretically grasped, and the “ready slogans” circumvented, through the presence of the living placed in direct relation to the legends: Freddie Martin’s letter from the nostalgic past, read by an actor, followed by her own appearance and contemporary speech; the younger Robeson walking on stage accompanied by the commanding vocal presence and photographic image of the older; Ring Lardner Jr. demonstrating by his simple appearance how his brother Jim might have looked, forty years on, had he survived the war. Each pairing involved a different kind of transformation. The poetic, younger, more vulnerable representation of Martin was replaced by the prosaic, mature older woman; the larger-than-life singing star became his studious son; the idealistic volunteer Lardner was both mirrored and mourned by his sibling doppelgänger. The Volunteer described Martin, Robeson Jr., and Lardner Jr. as being “embodied in the program.”31 This terminology captures the resonant confusions of mimesis and reality Spain 40! productively engaged. These three were very much themselves, and ineluctably tied to their theatrically rendered namesakes of another time.32

142

Radical Nostalgia

The final coup de théâtre relied on the recorded voices of three living veterans who had been part of the first group to depart for Spain late in 1936. “I asked some of you to speak for yourselves,” the narrator said, referring to the veterans present. “What, I wondered, did they remember most about Spain?” Prerecorded tapes were then played, culled from interviews to serve the needs of the script. The next stage direction reads: “(Three tapes, answers which emphasized: the people.)” The interviews, heard in the disembodied voices of veterans actually sitting in the room, thus fed cleanly into the next line of narration. “The people?” the narrator asked, “[n]ot the fighting and the dead?”33 The taped and edited interviews provided effective rhetorical and theatrical fodder for the scripted program. Segues from Abrams’s own writing to preexisting texts followed. A subsequent question posed to the veterans by the narrator—“What can we say of you?”—must have led directly into the first lines of Genevieve Taggard’s 1941 poem: Say of them They knew no Spanish At first, and nothing of the arts of war At first [. . .]34

Then, after a short tape of Spanish Civil War songs was played, the script made its final charged oscillation between present and past. “Among you, here’s one from that original Christmas boatload,” the narrator said.35 The name “Aaron Harris” was then handwritten on a blank line in the script, adjacent to the typed instructions “(Spot them in audience.).” The theatrical realization of this particular sequence is described in the Volunteer: “Spotlights searched the darkened ballroom and one by one settled upon Sid Crotto, Paul Burns and Aaron Harris standing tall to the applause of 1,250 people.”36 These three were the only veterans present who had been among the very first group of Americans to ship out at the end of 1936. After appearances by the doubled Martin, Robeson, and Lardner, followed by the recorded voices of living veterans, a poem of praise and nostalgic

The Legend Business: 1962–1996

143

music, these three men discovered in the spotlights must have had a pressing vibrancy within a vividly theatrical frame. Like the celebrities, they were very real, but scripted to both embody and stand in for historical versions of themselves. The script then indicates the playing of Dolores Ibárruri’s famous speech that sent the Internationals home in 1938, and briefly narrates the events of Pearl Harbor and World War II. “All the things you knew and said would happen / if the fascists weren’t stopped in Spain, / happened,” the narrator states, moving the time line forward, aided by slides described in an adjacent column: And this time, Victory . . . in a war that may never have been, if only . . . [illegible] If only this, If only that, and if only, back there in Spain you weren’t such a bunch of losers. Big losers. Sprung from the loins of losers like Spartacus and Nat Turner . . . [illegible] Listen, you glorious losers . . . For what you did that brief day, To all of you, The living, And the dead alive in us, My dear Lincolns, My heart has just two words left, And they should have been spoken long ago, by every American alive: Thank You.38

Victory Headlines37

Communards Baudelaire

blank

As with de Gamez’s speech in 1969, Abrams closed with a grand “thank-you.” At this point, the rest of the veterans in the room of 1,250 must have stood. The Volunteer suggests that “the three [who had been standing] were joined by the rest of the vets present,

144

Radical Nostalgia

for a thunderous ovation.”39 With that kind of preparation, and at that moment in time, it would be hard to imagine another response, as the historical veterans from forty years before— “crazy Americans” and “glorious losers”—were replaced by the (super)real, the sane, and, in that moment, the triumphant, all qualities sorely missed in the lingering shadow of the Vietnam War and Watergate. The dinner raised $10,000 “for Spanish political prisoners and for other VALB activities,” the Volunteer reported. “Franco is gone,” Steve Nelson said in his opening remarks that night, “but the Spanish people’s fight for democracy goes on.”40

Spain and Vietnam: Postscript to Another War The Vietnam War and the protests surrounding it were a pivot point for this commemorative period, and led the veterans to take a political stand separate from the Spanish struggle for the first time, bringing them newfound fame and attention. The passions manifest in US political and social culture at that time cannot be undervalued, nor can they be separated from the revived commemorative energies detailed here, in which those passions must be implicated. In The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, Peter Carroll mentions a speech that veteran Robert Colodny made to a group of students in Pittsburgh on Tuesday, December 2, 1969, at a showing of the film To Die in Madrid. The evening was sponsored by the Pittsburgh Draft Resistance and the Pittsburgh Peace and Freedom Center.41 Colodny was then a professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. His speech was reprinted in a school newspaper two days later, and then in the spring 1970 issue of the Volunteer. It represents an impassioned, rhetorical, proactive kind of commemoration in its way of linking past to present. It meant to put the Spanish Civil War into perspective, to configure its essential components in order to see the Vietnam situation with more clarity. Colodny used Spain as a new lens on Vietnam, and as a fire to fuel the antiwar protests.42

The Legend Business: 1962–1996

145

This speech feels to me an essential link, a compelling encapsulation of the history of violence and reactionary militarism in the twentieth century captured in the rhetoric of the Left. I find Colodny’s work invaluable for any scholar of leftwing movements in the United States in the last century: as poetry, politics, and history.43 If you have tears to shed for the million dead of the Spanish Republic, save them. Shed them for the million dead of Vietnam. And if you feel moved to praise the courage of the defenders of Madrid, save that praise too. Save it for the young men of your own generation who share with you the agony of Vietnam and resist the war. [. . .] The task, the challenge, the menace, that faces you is much greater than that which faced the forty thousand young men you cheered an hour ago, who went to die at Madrid. That was easy—young men are always generous with their blood. It is much more difficult, without the clamor and melodrama of war, without flags flying and banners playing; it is much more difficult to mobilize in the streets of America, to rouse the villages with the power of your own reason, and the beauty of your own insights. The kind of army you must form will in the long run, if you are true to your own dreams, vindicate not only yourselves, but the Spanish Republic which you saw murdered. That was a terrible wound carved not only on the face of Spain, but on the flesh of humanity. It has never healed; it is raw, it bleeds. And they will not have won, those million dead, till you have won here.44

It is speeches such as this, placed in context, that can wreak their own kind of havoc with traditional theories of nostalgia. The filmic images of Spain from the 1930s were cheered by this audience, and their grainy, documentary feel and heroic tone might have inspired nostalgic longing for a time and a place when things seemed simpler, when causes seemed clearer and easier to engage. Colodny called his audience on that very fact. “That was easy,” he told them, but “it is much more difficult to mobilize in the streets of America.” In Colodny’s rhetorical turn, the Spanish Civil War, such a noble cause, so easy to remember and

146

Radical Nostalgia

sentimentalize, is not over yet, and that lack of closure suggests a certain instability. Spain, for Colodny, has yet to be vindicated, and that resolution will require struggle in the present. He is advocating an emotional substitution: save any tears inspired by To Die in Madrid for the Spanish dead of the 1930s and lament instead, now, “the million dead of Vietnam”; save your praise for the heroic defenders of Madrid, and recognize the heroism of draft resistance. Colodny is demanding that action rise from emotion. It is perhaps a perfect example of radical nostalgia. He refuses to allow ready emotions for the past to be unproductive in the present. In the penultimate paragraph, Colodny manages to resolve the seeming contradictions of military intervention by the International Brigades in the 1930s, as opposed to the antiwar movement of the 1960s and 1970s: If men fought in Spain for more than the Republic, they fought for peace. Now you must slightly invert: to fight for peace in the Americas of the Sixties and Seventies, is to protect your Republic, the Republic of the United States of America, to maintain fresh and alive its hopes, to create out of the agony of the ghettos and the disillusionment of the campuses a political movement which may march to the same tunes of the Spanish Republic.45

Colodny’s refusal to let the Spanish Civil War end, his insistence on historical unity and lack of closure, creates commemoration in context and tries to put nostalgia for the 1930s to a purpose. “When he had done,” the Volunteer reported on his speech, “his Vietnam age audience gave him a long standing ovation.”46 Did yet another ovation for the veterans arise from nostalgia for Colodny’s bravery in Spain, a living icon of the Old Left, or from a shared recognition of his vivid, impeccable, antisentimental targeting of the furious present with the emotional past? I suspect it was both, but clearly, and vitally, not pure nostalgia alone. For an audience of students susceptible to the Vietnam draft and

The Legend Business: 1962–1996

147

seeking direction, how could Colodny’s conflation of 1930s and 1960s activism not hit home? Politically and ideologically, Colodny’s rhetorical inversion is key. It is what ties the two decades together. He is paralleling two battles and two Republics. The inversion involves intervention. “If men fought in Spain for more than the [Spanish] Republic, they fought for peace,” he argues. Now, “to fight for peace in the Americas of the Sixties and Seventies, is to protect your Republic, the Republic of the United States of America.” If the inversion involves nonintervention versus intervention, the speech also defines the common ideological thread that runs from the 1930s into the 1960s. In both cases and both decades, expressions of Marxist ideology are not to be denigrated or challenged. In Colodny’s framing, US intervention in Vietnam and its hands-off policy in Spain were both manifestations of official, reactionary, pervasive, governmental anti-Communism. US military involvement in Southeast Asia, the isolation of the Spanish Republic in the 1930s, the decades of friendship with Franco, and the purges of the American Left were all of a piece. Were he speaking today, US interventions in Panama, Grenada, Afghanistan, and Iraq would undoubtedly be part of his speech. But Colodny’s argument is not simply about ideology. He was also deeply concerned with the US domestic situation; with civil, racial, and human rights at home; and with freedom of speech and protest: [D]o not deceive yourselves. It is not just to keep the war in Vietnam going, that the American right now mobilizes and threatens our ancestral liberties. [. . .] The continuation of this war, or its Vietnamization, will pave the way, not for a fascist coup, but for the undermining of the unity of our population, and under the guise of a form of patriotism, the imposition upon us, through popular ballot, manipulated, controlled through arousing all the fires of frustration and fear, you will see the United States, unless you intervene, swept back sixty years in its social development.47

148

Radical Nostalgia

This may be why he never considers the question of Communist aggression in Vietnam. His larger concerns are closer to home. In one sense, there is no inversion at all. Colodny is advocating intervention against an empowered right-wing in the United States, just as the veterans intervened against Franco in Spain. In Colodny’s construction, fighting for peace in the 1930s required a military defense of the Spanish Republic, a refusal to tolerate the US government’s hands-off policy. The peace movement of the 1960s enacted a similar rebellion against the US policy of military intervention in Vietnam. In the 1930s, the Left’s intervention was military; in the 1960s, it was predominantly, though not exclusively, nonviolent civil disobedience, and more concerned with peace than war.48 In both cases, an intervention from outside the national power structure was necessary. “Your generation now faces its Spain,” Colodny told his young audience, thereby placing them in an activist continuum. It was a model of the veterans’ commemorative agenda: always the past, always the present, always the cause, and always concern for the future.

Return and Reunion Between 1976 and 1996, with only one or two exceptions, annual commemorations in New York City and the Bay Area played to audiences of five hundred or more, and often to over a thousand people. Thirty-three hundred attended a fiftiethanniversary affair in San Francisco, and the VALB sold out Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center for their fiftieth-anniversary performance in New York City. Return journeys to Spain and reunion provide a frame, while the period’s most distinctive characteristics were commemorative consistency and popularity. The visits by American veterans to post-Franco Spain were almost unbearably emotional. Bill Susman returned early in 1977, on the eve of free elections. “For most Vets, returning to Spain after forty years, there is the inescapable moment of

The Legend Business: 1962–1996

149

nostalgia,” he wrote in the Volunteer after his trip. “For me it came the day last month when we arrived in Barcelona.” Susman went to the Plaza de Cataluña with his wife, Helene, “and on that cool evening the benches were deserted. Only people hurrying home or young lovers meeting were in the square. Only the Metro entrance where we had taken cover during air raids was full. We sat silently on the bench and I wept without knowing why, and still don’t.”49 Peter Carroll cites this and similar incidents. “[S]omething unexpected happened to many of the Lincolns,” he writes. “Alvah Bessie, flying over the Pyrenees, suddenly crumbled in tears; the irreverent, wisecracking Nick Pappas visited the olive groves where his brother had died forty years earlier and abruptly ‘cried like a baby.’ ”50 In the seventeenth century, many cures for nostalgia were offered by the Swiss doctor Johannes Hofer, who coined the term, “but nothing compared to the return to the motherland believed to be the best remedy.”51 These returns did not seem to be a cure. From the standpoint of modern scholarship, however, these emotional moments are not so surprising. If nostalgia is, as Susan Stewart has stated, “sadness without an object,” then the return after years of forced separation to the lost object of longing, so familiar and yet irrevocably different, had to be wrenching. The elusive “object” was not simply a landscape, of course, but also an ideal and a sense of comradeship and struggle elicited by the land and its people. “They grieved for all that might have been, would never be,” Peter Carroll has written.52 “For forty years Lincoln veterans had carried the burden of their failure.”53 Returning to Spain after Franco must have felt akin to seeing a ghost, or trying to reconcile the tangible immediacy of the landscape and its people with the ephemerality of the lost cause. Spain was finally free of Franco, but the long-ago war had still been lost. What might Susman’s “inescapable moment of nostalgia” produce? For Chicago veteran Milt Cohen, who went with a group later that year, “the most moving experience of all was meeting Spaniards who had fought against us during the war. When they welcomed us as brothers to a Democratic Spain, we fell into each other’s arms. It was overwhelming.” Cohen,

150

Radical Nostalgia

writing in a pamphlet the VALB published entitled “Spain Revisited,” went on to describe the bodily experience of reunion, not only with old enemies and comrades, but with the earth itself: We waded knee-deep once again into the Ebro of retreats and offensives. Together with a Spaniard who had fought against us in the Pandols, we drove up bitter, blood-stained Hill #666, where we fingered the ruined rock and felt once again the beating as of hearts entombed beneath the soil. When we were finished, we felt we had done something each of us had known for 40 years we would one day have to do. Now it was over, and now there was, somehow, a sense of completion, of fulfillment in us all.54

Cohen, an activist in Chicago, also knew it was not that simple. “And yet,” he continued, “it was not really a completion. A part of our lives has finally been rounded out—that part belonging to war and defeat and dedication. But another part is still in the process of coming about.” He was referring to the goal of “a secure and complete democracy” in Spain. It had been the veterans’ most passionate cause since the war, and had yet to be fully realized.55 Bill Susman suggested a similar sense of nearresolution at the end of his preelection article in the Volunteer: “One thing is clear. The road to democracy is rough but it will be followed—and our love for Spain requited.”56 But even Franco’s death and Spain’s ultimate revival did not offer complete closure. Returning to Spain was both sad and fulfilling, but, as Carroll said, these trips reminded the veterans of their failure, of “all that might have been, would never be,” the potential breeding ground for a passive sentimentality. Back in the United States, within a commemorative performance context always “still in the process of coming about,” they could feel the loss less acutely, and still have a sense of purpose. Franco—a hated enemy for forty years—was gone. Now, after walking through old battlefields, embracing the enemy, crying for no obvious reason, wading the rivers, and feeling a “beating as of hearts entombed beneath the soil,” they

The Legend Business: 1962–1996

151

carried this sense of vindication, confidence, and these embodied emotions back home and into the commemorative process, where battles could still be fought and won. Two headlines shared the front page of the same issue of the Volunteer that included Susman’s comment on requited love for Spain: “750 Jam S.F. 40th” and “N.Y. 40th a Gala Affair.”57 “The demand for closure in the historical story is a demand [. . .] for moral meaning,” Hayden White has written, “a demand that sequences of real events be assessed as to their significance as elements of a moral drama.”58 The energy the veterans reinvested in the commemorative process after these trips to Spain could be seen as the desire for moral closure. “The realization of re-union imagined by the nostalgic is a narrative utopia that works by virtue of its partiality, its lack of fixity and closure,” Susan Stewart claims.59 That partiality has produced a restlessness in the veterans. Their emotional returns may have provided a degree of resolution, but for some, the moral and political concerns that sent them to Spain in the first place remained at issue, and perhaps became even more pressing. “The nostalgic is enamored of distance, not of the referent itself.”60 The radical nostalgic may be saddened by “all that might have been” but is also driven by the desire for moral and ideological closure—a political referent— which feeds the commemorative urge. Peter Carroll has commented that many people “discovered” the veterans in the 1970s and 1980s.61 Left-wing activists and other “liberal dissenters” with a variety of political agendas could identify very specifically with the veterans and their values.62 Feminists found inspiration in the women who volunteered as nurses and truck drivers; African Americans and those fighting apartheid in South Africa celebrated the Brigade as the first US military unit integrated from top to bottom; anti-Reagan forces rallied around the veterans’ vigorous support of the Nicaraguan Sandinistas; and advocates of a nuclear freeze took heart in the veterans’ protests against US military expansion. These connections were not fabricated. A mutual, intergenerational politic worthy of recognition was being acknowledged and celebrated.

152

Radical Nostalgia

Commemorative titles from the period are a lesson in history and modern politics, as seen through the veterans’ left-focused eyes. They include: “Paying Homage to the Ex-Prisoners and Victims of Spanish Fascism” (Bay Area 1979); “Saga of the Black Volunteer” (Bay Area 1980);63 “Peace in the Eighties” (Bay Area 1981), “Support the democratic forces in Spain! Resist a return to McCarthyism!”(New York 1981); “For a Nuclear Freeze: Against U.S. Intervention in El Salvador!” (New York 1983); “End Apartheid in South Africa” (New York 1988); and “Black–Jewish Unity” (New York 1993). Speakers, guests, and musical acts were usually chosen to tie in with the theme.64 Left-wing and left-affiliated artists, writers, and politicians were well represented in the list of guest speakers: Richard Dreyfuss, Jessica Mitford, Kay Boyle, Harry Bridges, Linus Pauling, Gloria Steinem, Victor Navasky, Leonard Boudin, Studs Terkel, Tom Wicker, Alice Walker, William Sloane Coffin, Martin Sheen, Isabel Allende, Luis Valdez, Ronald Dellums, Susan Sarandon, Bernard Sanders, Ruby Dee, and Tony Randall all appeared at events during this period.65 The veterans’ events had become a significant site for left-wing political and cultural production, and a place for a wide range of constituencies to gather around individual causes, with Spanish Civil War commemoration as their staging ground.

We Are Not Eternal The commemorative surge at this time was manifest not only in the annual events, but also in the range of activities initiated by the VALB. They gave this period a broader focus that went well beyond the traditional commemorative stages. Numerous programs were either initiated or reinvigorated. In 1979, Congressman Ronald Dellums put a bill before the US House of Representatives to provide Spanish Civil War veterans with the same rights, benefits, and legal recognition as World War II veterans. This would have produced the kind of legislative commemoration Kirk Savage has identified in the constitutional

The Legend Business: 1962–1996

153

amendments of Reconstruction, turning the veterans into “legal” patriots.66 A lively but unsuccessful campaign was initiated on the bill’s behalf, incorporated into commemorative programs and speeches.67 The Spanish Civil War Historical Society helped initiate a campaign for a plaque to be installed at City College of New York to honor students and faculty from that institution who had died in Spain, and started a scholarship fund in their honor.68 The plaque was unveiled on April 13, 1980.69 The Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives was organized in 1978 and 1979 as a nonprofit organization affiliated with and supported by the VALB, and now responsible for maintaining the historical record of the American volunteers and producing the annual events. In 1957, the veterans first made it a priority to “perpetuate” their “tradition and history.”70 The organization of ALBA formalized that desire. In the absence of a well-maintained archive, both history and memory can soften and become vulnerable. Such an archive is not simply a resource, but also an anchor. In 1981, Dartmouth College hosted a three-day conference entitled “Art and Ideology of the Spanish Civil War.”71 The Seattle post of the VALB became active in the early 1980s.72 In 1985, the film The Good Fight came out, an acclaimed documentary about the Abraham Lincoln Brigade narrated by Studs Terkel.73 That same year, most notably, the veterans began fund raising for their ambulance campaign; eventually, in direct defiance of Reagan’s aid to the Contras, they would send twenty fully equipped ambulances to support the Sandinistas in Nicaragua.74 The magnitude of the commemorative revival depended on these and other public events, which expanded the veterans’ audience and visibility. In this manner, they built their community and disseminated their history outside the frame of their usual commemorative performances. With all this activity, severe disagreements again threatened the VALB. Public commemoration as cultural performance can work to present a unified front to its audience, and if one were to limit study to public commemorative affairs, the fractures underneath might be difficult to discern. Decontextualized and

154

Radical Nostalgia

ahistorical public commemoration could evoke the “seamless past” that Bennett identifies with conservatism.75 It is necessary, therefore, to place these events in institutional as well as historical contexts. If commemoration is in part a struggle for identity, then the VALB’s identity was in question and in flux. A “Call to National Conference” was sent out in advance of their 1979 convention. Consideration of a new Constitution and bylaws would be on the agenda. Attached to the invitation were four pages of comments by various veterans, described as a “pre-conference discussion bulletin.” Statements in the bulletin varied from the furious to the supportive. “The national leadership is too weak,” said one veteran. “I feel that the work that I have done is meaningless. [. . .] I do not believe that a constitution will correct the serious differences in our organization.” Another wrote: “It is my opinion that the major problem facing our organization is the posture of confrontation that exists between comrades of various ideologies.” He believed they had succeeded in the past by being able to achieve a consensus he no longer thought possible. Another suggested “that maybe less leadership would be more. [. . .] [W]e are out of time for the kind of one-sided divisive executive actions that destroy unity and develope [sic] dissension, only tarnishing our traditions.” This veteran went on to detail specific problems: “When the Los Angeles Lincoln Vets of different factions meet, they are torn by degrees of bitterness instead of support. There are ‘invite’ and ‘don’t invite’ lists and talk of dual organizations. Many vets and their friends have become alienated and aloof.”76 Another veteran expressed “doubts about the wisdom and practicality of the effort spent in the campaign for the Dellums Bill. [. . .] In a perfect world, we would long since have been entitled to Veteran’s benefits. But this is America, 1979. We haven’t the ghost of a chance, given the present political situation.” He continued: I consider the work of the Historical Commission the most important activity of VALB. In the future, when our internal squabbles are long forgotten, the record of the Lincoln

The Legend Business: 1962–1996

155

Brigade can only serve as an inspiration for new generations of Americans if we preserve and provide the material for future historians and researchers.77

This draws a distinction between different kinds of recognition, each important and each difficult to achieve: recognition as veterans by the government, and recognition as historical agents. This volunteer believed that historical recognition and visibility would be more readily achieved, and more worthy of their efforts. “We are not eternal,” yet another veteran argued, “we are not numerous, hence we cannot afford the destructive luxury of factionalism. We don’t have that kind of time. . . . The common enemy brought us together,” he went on, “the common enemy remains. We must close ranks once more and keep them closed so that we can remain a viable antifascist force. We must demonstrate that within our own ranks the democratic process is practiced—and not in the breach of expediency.”78 It seemed that their own organization, and nothing less than their own history, was at risk. When the VALB was in serious straits in 1956, the membership unified around their support of Spanish democracy to save the organization. That kind of bonding cause was no longer available, and this freewheeling, unfettered dialogue among the membership was anything but seamless. Steve Nelson, National Commander, ran the 1979 convention. He said that roughly one hundred veterans attended, or about one-quarter of the surviving members of the Lincoln Brigade, by Peter Carroll’s estimation.79 “While there were some sharp differences [. . .],” Nelson claimed in his report, “it can be stated that an acceptable agreement was reached by the great majority and that the gloom and doom some predicted did not materialize.” They reaffirmed their identity as an antifascist organization “but limited activity to those issues which the majority of our membership agreed on.” This would theoretically prevent the VALB leadership from acting unilaterally. Committees were designated to resolve particularly contentious issues, among them “VALB’s desire to obtain the archives which are in the

156

Radical Nostalgia

possession of the CPUSA.”80 The VALB deserved to have responsibility for its own historical record, a desire resisted for some time by the Communist Party faithful. If consensus ruled, though, an effort would be made to wrest the records from the CPUSA, to then be channeled into the VALB’s own archive. This was the ultimate result. In his report, Nelson referred to the larger historical project without acknowledging its relationship to conflicts with the CPUSA: “Much attention was given to our historical work and the formation of ALBA (Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives) to preserve our record,” he wrote.81 Peter Carroll, now chair of the ALBA board of governors, states that the VALB “thus became a major supporter” of ALBA, its archives now formally housed at the Tamiment Library at New York University, while smaller collections exist in libraries around the country.82 The convention resolved a number of contentious issues, and set a path that the VALB has pursued, with some consistency but not without conflict, to the present day. This was a complex and heated battle, and to generalize is risky, but I would suggest that two basic issues were in dispute: first, many veterans felt that the VALB leadership was too doctrinaire and autocratic, and made too many unilateral decisions serving their own ideological agendas—a charge, coincidentally or not, that had been leveled against the leadership of the Communist Party for years; second, the veterans were engaging in a more complicated negotiation of identity. Now that Spain was on the road to democracy, though still in need of the veterans’ attention, where should the VALB focus their remaining energies and resources? Who should receive their support, and how should those decisions be made? This was, in essence, the same kind of dispute that had erupted during the Vietnam War, when a cause emerged other than Spain that seemed to require their participation. Rallied by some of their members at the time, the VALB took a stand and gained newfound visibility as a result. Making an organizational statement on the Vietnam War and appearing at public protests reconfigured the VALB’s existing identity around a modern-day cause and gave the veterans

The Legend Business: 1962–1996

157

credibility with the younger generation on whom their future would, in large part, depend. Spain was just as important to the veterans and loomed just as large in their hearts, but it required less action—and this was a group defined by action. With the Vietnam War over, and democratic elections taking place in Spain, the question was: What acts should they now perform, on both the cultural and the commemorative stage?

A Roomful of Radicals Amassed energies—generated by the trips to Spain, the recognition and credibility, the aging population with time on their hands, the growing audience, the tradition of action, and, not insignificantly, the hatred so many liberals felt for Ronald Reagan—seemed to converge in the extended fiftieth-anniversary celebrations, acknowledged twice on both coasts in successive years, and in Chicago. The calendrical significance would have generated activity whatever the conditions, but the fiftieth came at a propitious time in the veterans’ history. That two separate golden-anniversary events were held in two US cities in the same year attests to an overflowing of commemorative vigor. The fiftieth-anniversary event at Lincoln Center on April 7, 1986, was by far the most significant in the veterans’ long history. “The anniversary reunion of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion is annually the social event of the year for New York’s ‘Old Left,’ ” Joe Doyle wrote in the Volunteer, and at Avery Fisher Hall, “everything was done on a very grand scale. The audience was three times larger than in past years,” he stated, and “guests included a Who’s Who of Left and Labor politics.” Doyle went on to describe the atmosphere: “It was not a typical Lincoln Center audience. A roomful of radicals, even when they are all dressed up, doesn’t look like a roomful of concert goers. Everyone in the house seemed to be in motion, running up and down the aisles greeting friends. The concert acoustics of the hall were fairly roaring with private conversations.” Doyle captures a tangible energy in the scrappy audience, particularly noticeable in

158

Radical Nostalgia

contrast to the “elegant hall [. . .] with gilt paint and crystal chandeliers.”83 They were happy to see each other again on this major anniversary, and ready to cheer a past they all either shared, or with which they identified. “Commemorate the 50th Anniversary of the Spanish Civil War,” the advertising flier had read, “A Multi-Media Living History” with “music by Pete Seeger, Ronnie Gilbert, Fred Hellerman (formerly The Weavers)”84 (see figure 25). This musical trio represented threequarters of the famous left-wing folk quartet, who had not performed together since their heralded reunion in 1980, not long before Lee Hays’s death. Their performance would be an event all on its own. An audio recording of the entire evening was made. It captures content, performance style, atmosphere, emotionality, and the show’s reception, line by line. The performance consisted of four sections: a scripted piece read by nine actors backed by slides and interspersed with songs; a mini-concert by the reunited Weavers; a brief talk and slide show by veteran Abe Osheroff on a housing construction project in Nicaragua, supported by the VALB, in which he had participated; and closing remarks by co-producer and veteran Bill Susman and VALB National Commander Steve Nelson. After wrapping things up by placing the evening in a political context, Nelson invited all the veterans up onto the stage, where each was handed a red rose. They greeted the cast, received their standing ovation, and joined in singing short reprises of “Jarama Valley” and “Freiheit,” two of the most famous songs from the war.85 The script, written and compiled by Ring Lardner Jr. and directed by Ossie Davis, who also narrated, was not unlike Spain 40! in its combined literary and narrative approach, but it was performed by a larger company, delved much deeper into the background and history of the war, and drew on many more sources. Its rich materials were chosen and juxtaposed to create a clear rhetorical argument for the partisan audience. It had a serious, weighty tone overall, set in part by Ossie Davis’s commanding bass voice. Ten years had passed since Spain 40! and Spain was now democratic, but Ronald Reagan was in his second

The Legend Business: 1962–1996

159

term as US president. Franco, the historical enemy, was long in his grave, but a living enemy and an immediate threat was now in the White House. Reagan provided the evening with an energizing foil. Along with his support of the right-wing Contras in Nicaragua, Reagan had stated in 1985 that the Lincoln Brigaders fought on the wrong side in Spain—thereby suggesting, of course, that Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco were on the right side. Reagan fit history to his own fashion even more blatantly than Eisenhower.86 When Ossie Davis referred to Reagan’s quote in the first half hour of the program, it was resoundingly booed. He then read extensively from an enraged editorial in the Boston Globe responding to Reagan’s comment.87 This performance was a “Living History” as the flier claimed, and the audience certainly came to remember the 1930s. As ever, though, present concerns were also alive in the room, a pressing context for audience and performers alike. Almost every time the name of an American veteran was spoken from the stage to introduce an actor’s recitation of their words, there was a round of applause. Often, the veteran was sitting a few rows away. This reinforced the performance as “Living History” and softened the fourth wall, the theoretical barrier that stands between the actor and the audience. As in 1976, Paul Robeson Jr.’s role as one of the readers recalled his father; his introduction and entrance, according to Joe Doyle, elicited “excited whispers.” Ring Lardner Jr. was present again as well, but this time he embodied his lost brother even more directly than in 1977: The show changed dramatically when Ring Lardner, Jr. read a letter from a volunteer, his brother Jim, to his mother, explaining why he decided to enlist. As the letter was read, everyone in the house was aware that Jim Lardner had died in Spain. Written entirely without literary affectation, the letter listed practical, personal reasons for joining the International Brigades. One was left with an understated sense of his ideals. [. . .] Ring Lardner read his brother’s letter simply. It stayed with the audience like a prose poem—a young man stating why there are ideals worth dying for.88

160

Radical Nostalgia

I performed Lardner’s letter as part of a solo recital of Spanish Civil War literature in 1997 at Northwestern University. Unaware that it had been used at this reunion, I chose it for similar reasons: its clarity and honesty, matter-of-fact quality, and complete lack of affectation. Of all the prose and poems I used, the letter received the most comment. Among the fifteen items on Jim Lardner’s 1938 list of explanations to his mother, recited by his brother forty-eight years later, were the following: “Because I believe fascism is wrong and must be exterminated, and that liberal democracy or more probably communism is right. [. . .] Because I shall come into contact with a lot of communists, who are very good company and from whom I expect to learn things. [. . .] Because in my ambitious quest for knowledge in all fields, I cannot afford in this age to overlook war,” and “[b]ecause I want to impress various people, including Bill.”89 During his reading of the letter, without obvious emotion, Ring Lardner Jr. explained that “Bill” was his own family nickname. He was one of the people his younger brother claimed to be trying to impress by volunteering to fight in Spain.90 Forty minutes into the program, this was one of the first recitations to receive applause. The power of such a moment arises from imperfect doubling, the haunting proximity of the two figures and the impossible distance between them, a layered example of Richard Schechner’s “restored behavior” complicated by issues of death, mourning, fraternity, guilt, and the performative persistence of the text.91 “Into the cavities created by loss through death or other forms of departure,” Joseph Roach has written, “survivors attempt to fit satisfactory alternates. Because collective memory works selectively, imaginatively, and often perversely, surrogation rarely if ever succeeds.” Surrogation may not succeed here, in the strictest sense, but it does seem to work in a way, thanks in part to the collective imagination. The audience, the community, is excited and moved, not disappointed. “Performance,” Roach goes on to say, “stands in for the elusive entity that it is not but that it must vainly aspire to both embody and to replace.”92 Ring Lardner Jr., in performance, has almost managed to do both.

The Legend Business: 1962–1996

161

Joe Doyle described Lardner’s reading in the Volunteer: “Sitting in Avery Fisher Hall, it was as if the temporizing climate of the 1980’s had been temporarily shut outside the doors.”93 Doyle’s word play on temporize and temporary makes an essential point: it was precisely the desire to seek an alternative to what many considered to be the immoral, unprincipled world of Ronald Reagan that attracted numerous people to this affair in hopes of recapturing—if only briefly, through the mechanics of radical nostalgia—an era when Jim Lardner’s prosaic idealism was possible, or even commonplace. When or where else might one hear “communists” innocently described as worthy mentors and “very good company” without it garnering even a snicker?94 Certainly not in the midst of Reagan’s right-wing revival, safely shut outside the doors for a time. The Lardner brothers—one killed in Spain, the other a victim of the blacklist—were almost inseparable in this moment, but the ways in which they were not identical provided the theatrical charge, and together they seductively constructed the temper of a lost time. If the Lardners’ segment captured what might be called the unpretentious idealism of the era, Dorothy Parker’s erudition, wit, and ire captured the passion with which certain beliefs were held. In a speech also singled out by Joe Doyle in the Volunteer, Lee Grant quoted Parker’s funny story of trying to get into Spain as a reporter in 1937, after US passports had been stamped “Not Valid for Travel in Spain.” Parker was asked by a young consular official in Paris, “Which side of this Spanish fuss do you want to go in on?” The Loyalist side, she answered. “Well, if that’s what you think you want,” the official told her, but added that she would “have much more fun on the Franco side.”95 Grant continued Parker’s story: I have not followed the further track of the young man of the embassy. I cannot tell you, heaven help me, what ever happened to him, but I can tell you what happened to me. I went to Spain, on that side of the fuss where there was less fun . . . and I became . . . a member of the human race. I met . . . the best people . . . anyone ever knew. I had never

162

Radical Nostalgia seen such people before, but I shall see their like again, and so shall all of us. If I did not believe that, I think I should stand up in front of my mirror and take a long, deep, swinging slash at my throat.96

Grant delivered the last, beautifully crafted sentence with a gentle momentum, as though it contained no commas after the first, and she closed with a soft downward inflection. She knew how well it was written, and she underplayed it beautifully, with a tinge of bitterness appropriate to the source. In a few moments of silence after its violent, deeply felt final image, spoken very quietly, Ossie Davis picked up the narration but was stopped by applause before he could say two words. From the tape, it sounds as though he had broken into an almost stunned silence that the audience had not wanted interrupted.97 They wanted to hold on to Parker’s words a little longer. Joe Doyle paraphrased Parker poorly, without mentioning the final sentence, and missed her furious optimism and unwillingness to accept any alternative, but he did grasp the impact of the speech. “The words had a wonderful effect on the audience,” he wrote, “because so many present did know such people, and they were sitting right in the first ten rows of the hall.”98 I am sure he was correct in that last observation. Ring Lardner Jr. surely chose the passage with its modern resonance in mind, knowing the context in which it would be read. To call its effect “wonderful,” though, denies the violence and passion of Parker’s statement, and the awe her words might have inspired. I believe the audience was taken aback by Parker’s unapologetic feelings about Spain and its role in her life, as delivered by Lee Grant. Spain and its defenders made her human, she said, and she required contact with them for her life to be worth living. This reminded the audience of a time when not only did things seem to matter that much, but people would not hesitate to say so. Young Jim Lardner’s politics, rendered by his brother, were plainspoken, touching, and discursive; Parker’s, intoned by a great actress, were direct, unblinking, and cut like a knife.

The Legend Business: 1962–1996

163

The Legend Business Heading into the 1990s, events on both coasts had achieved a kind of critical mass, with large audiences returning year after year. Fraternization, history, and politics intersected. By 1995, only forty-eight veterans attended New York’s fifty-eighth-anniversary dinner, but the commemorative momentum had not slowed. Theme events, tributes, and fund raisers continued. ALBA board member Cary Nelson developed a performance script from his recently published Madrid 1937: Letters of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade from the Spanish Civil War, co-edited with Jefferson Hendricks. It was performed at the end of April 1996 for a large crowd at the sixtieth-anniversary dinner in New York City. Entitled Madrid 1937: How Can We Forget, Nelson’s piece starred actors Ed Asner, Richard Masur, John Randolph, and the invaluable Ring Lardner Jr.99 When change came, it was with yet another infusion of energy. In November 1996, International Brigaders from around the world returned to Spain to become citizens, an honor awarded by the Spanish government. Sixty-eight American volunteers made the trip. They took their wives and husbands, their children and grandchildren. Across Spain, local groups organized parties, receptions, and huge concerts.100 I moved to Chicago in 1996 to begin graduate school, just as veterans from around the United States were returning to Spain for the sixtieth-anniversary festivities. My experience working with the veterans and their community in San Francisco had been gratifying, and I was interested in finding out what might be happening in Chicago. I was also hoping to do ethnographic work in the local community as part of my graduate research. I became close with the small contingent of veterans in Chicago and with the group of activists and artists that they attracted. Charles Hall had been a member of the Lincoln Brigade, and his wife, Bobby, a longtime activist in Chicago. The Halls traveled to Spain in November 1996 with International Brigade veterans from around the world who were to be granted Spanish citizenship, awarded in gratitude for their participation in the antifascist fight sixty years earlier. The trip had been an inspiration

164

Radical Nostalgia

for Chuck and Bobby. During our first conversation, in January, they were still elated by the experience. While in Spain, they had spent time with another Chicago vet and his wife, Aaron and Joyce Hilkevitch, and during their return flight, the four of them discussed the possibility of organizing a group around the surviving Chicago-area veterans of the Spanish Civil War. The last event of any significance in which Chicago veterans had participated had been a fiftieth-anniversary gathering in 1987. Deeply moved by the reception they had been given in Spain, the Halls and the Hilkevitches wanted to establish an organization of surviving veterans and their families, friends, and supporters in their hometown. The Chicago Friends of the Lincoln Brigade now have dozens of events to their credit. Though one of the smallest active groups in the United States, they are also one of the most persistent. Return and reunion were again at work, reinvigorating the commemorative process as the surviving veterans moved into their eighties. On May 10, five months after my initial meeting with the Halls, a commemorative gathering entitled Spain in the Heart 1936–1996 was held at Roosevelt University, honoring Chicagoarea vets and marking the sixtieth anniversary of the war. Two hundred people packed the Congress Lounge, far exceeding our expectations. I produced and hosted the event, and also chaired the planning committee. In addition to honoring the local veterans and celebrating their recent induction as Spanish citizens, Spain in the Heart launched a new organization—the Chicago Friends of the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives—Chicago Friends of VALB/ALBA for short.101 Thanks to the success of the Roosevelt event, Chicago Friends acquired a bank account, operating funds, a substantial mailing list, a core committee of volunteers, and good momentum for the future. To quote from the program notes for Spain in the Heart, on which I collaborated: Our goal is to keep alive the stories of the 150 volunteers from Chicago and Illinois for present and future generations so they may better understand the cause the Lincolns served

The Legend Business: 1962–1996

165

so passionately. We plan to organize cultural and educational events to document the history of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and to support the vital work of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives.102

Also included in the printed program were the names of 150 volunteers from Illinois who participated in the Spanish Civil War. Bobby and Chuck were more responsible than anyone else for the energy necessary to stage the May commemoration. By their own admission, they had not been very much involved with veterans’ activities in Chicago for some time. That changed after the trip to Madrid. Our event was less than two weeks away when I spoke to them about the commemorative process. “Too much was being made of being a veteran,” Chuck said later, according to my notes, in describing his earlier hesitation. “There were so many guys in World War II who had volunteered and given their lives, and it wasn’t such a unique thing. I’ve come to realize that it does have a pretty special significance. I don’t think I ever felt it so much as this last November in Spain.” Bobby answered: “Well, I think that’s what’s led us into this . . . whole big thing.”103 Over the course of my conversations with Chuck, Bobby, and other Chicago-area veterans, and certainly thanks to my involvement with the May 10 commemoration and the formation of the Chicago Friends of VALB/ALBA, I began to be interested in the veterans not only as private citizens but also in their role as public representatives of the Spanish Civil War. As living reminders of perhaps the most celebrated example of organized American left-wing political action in the twentieth century, with many continuing their political activity to this day, veterans of the war in Spain have taken on an iconic status. As at larger events over the years, it was the presence of the six area veterans at the May 10 commemoration that gave it so much emotional impact. They gave it its heart and soul, and rooted it in a real past. The veterans played another role as well, if one agrees with J. M. Coetzee, that “history is nothing but a certain kind of story

166

Radical Nostalgia

that people agree to tell each other.”104 Those of us who spoke and sang stories from the stage did so with the veterans as witnesses. Sitting in the first rows just a few feet from us, they presented a challenge to our integrity as storytellers and microhistorians. We had an unspoken agreement: we would tell a series of stories as responsibly as possible, and they would keep us honest by virtue of their presence. It is daunting to represent stories and incidents from the Spanish Civil War for even a small audience of veterans. This tension is integral to the modern commemorative process. It marks the space between memory, as it is experienced by the veterans, and history, rendered in performative reconstructions of their words and lives by commemorative “actors.” At the same time, the event was lifted by their status as icons, by what they represented to the group in the stories we “agree to tell each other” about the vets in particular and the Spanish Civil War in general. When the six veterans were named by a speaker as “new citizens of Spain” at the end of the May event, they stood and turned to face the crowd and receive a standing ovation. In that moment, the veterans were clearly both moral and political symbols, no longer simply witnesses. Their acts of resistance, their sacrifices, and the war’s outcome made their appearance bittersweet, and helped reinforce their status as icons of the struggle.105 At the May event in Chicago, the veterans were silent. This has not been true throughout their history. Nonetheless, it was their mere presence as elders of Chicago’s left-wing community and their status as fighters of “the good fight” that drove the event. It is in the provocative tension between their specific, individual actions in Spain—central to the event but mostly unspoken there—and the vets’ now legendary status as volunteers willing to risk their lives for democracy that this kind of commemoration finds its strength and definition. After meeting him at a few of our events, I asked Aaron Hilkevitch if I might come over to his home and talk about Spain, and he asked me if it was all right if he was cynical. His implication, immediately clear, was that I should not expect him to idealize the experience, and that if I was looking for some kind

The Legend Business: 1962–1996

167

of paean to the cause, I would be disappointed. I assured him that I did not care what he said when we met, that I just wanted him to be honest. In fact, his warning of a cynical attitude intrigued me. I wanted to know what form it would take. I knew he had been moved during the November visit to Spain for the citizenship celebrations. I knew he had been supportive of the May event, that he had not been a “public” veteran very often. Within the first minutes of our conversation, he clarified his cynicism further. Comparing himself to another member of the community, he said, “[X] is a romanticist, and I’m not.” He also mentioned the documentary film You Are History, You Are Legend, shown at the May commemoration, which was shot in Spain during the celebrations in November.106 “I like the title of the book, [I mean] of the movie,” he said. “There’s ‘legend’ there too? Well, people went to Spain for all kinds of reasons.”107 And off we went. Aaron was a few days short of 85 when we spoke, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, and a practicing psychiatrist. He went over as a surgeon when he was 25. He speaks with a fairly thick Russian accent, which occasionally makes him hard to understand. He has a somewhat forbidding, serious presence when you first meet him. This mien is tempered by a bone-dry sense of humor. In conversation, he is charming, funny, erudite, incisive, and brilliant, and he has a devilish laugh. Joyce is in her seventies and very active in cultural activities in Chicago, running a program that brings professional musicians and classical music into public schools. She has a round, jolly face. She speaks with a New York accent and has a sweetness and ease that tempers Aaron’s ironic edge. Sitting in their large, beautifully cluttered apartment in Hyde Park, Aaron and I began talking about his childhood, his reasons for going to Spain, and his experiences there. When Joyce came home, conversation shifted to our recent commemoration in Chicago and their November trip to the sixtiethanniversary citizenship celebrations in Spain. I wanted to know how Aaron felt about his role in the Chicago event. Though I did not realize it at the time, I was essentially asking him to

168

Radical Nostalgia

consider the legendary nature of the war from a personal perspective, from his own embodiment of the legend. What follows are excerpts from a verbatim transcript of our talk.108 I began by asking them about the May event in Chicago: Peter: I’m interested in . . . this was a whole event built around . . . something that you experienced, . . . Aaron: . . . yeah . . . Peter: . . . that only five other people in the room actually experienced. A lot of other people were outside of it [. . .]. You know you talk about legend and you talk about . . . the real stuff, and . . . some mixed feelings.109 How did it feel to be there and being the person, in a sense, that this was all about? Aaron: That’s a different thing, I felt like a prize wife.110 Joyce: [a small, appreciative, affectionate laugh] Aaron: I was there as part of the show. I was there my concerns w’r’on hold. But this I made peace with. It’s like, uh, I got to tell you an experience, which is interesting. We came from, about this, we came from Barcelona, from Madrid, to Seville, and Joyce decided to play the mother business? She called for a wheelchair to be brought from, ‘cause there’s a, looong, ramp, to the top. By the time the wheelchair came, all the international, all the volunteers had left, the crowd left [meaning the crowd of volunteers, not their audience]. So, if you can, visually, here I am, being pushed, the only one up the ramp, and the people are still there, on top cheering [the word is laughed out, chuckled out, and this laugh of wonderment continues for a few more seconds]. If you can imagine this . . . dramatic sequence. For a while it felt self-conscious. Here I am, alone . . . Remember that scene? [to Joyce] You were with me there too. Joyce: You enjoyed it too, you told me . . . Aaron: [starting to speak after her “too”] And I said “fuck it.” It’s uh . . . Forget it’s you you’re a symbol. And then we got to the top and the crowd, remember, all this? [to Joyce] and in order to protect usually there is [young] people used to protect’s from crowds, here I was in the midst of them [change of tone, lower,

The Legend Business: 1962–1996

169

doesn’t want to imply it was bad], not very, I mean, you know, . . . Joyce: They were loving it. Aaron: . . . they were loving it up. I had to do a kind of, uh . . . It wasn’t too hard, it uh, okay, so, I’m, I’m something to them, I’m not talking about legends, or myth . . . icons. I became, I learned that, I quit being self-conscious. Because it wasn’t . . . me as such.111

It is wonderful and a bit frightening when the subject of an interview puts into words so succinctly one of the major theoretical tensions of your research. “I was there as part of the show,” Aaron acknowledged, aware of his status and his role. But he also understood and marked the space between himself and what he represented. “Forget it’s you,” he said bluntly, “you’re a symbol.” Exactly what he had done in Spain, his own personal history, was irrelevant, but he was “something to them,” and that “something” was particular, because he had gone to Spain in the 1930s. So they were cheering him and also something larger that was rooted in stories that he carried in his body as a volunteer but that had little to do with his own specific achievements or lack thereof. As Aaron said, “it wasn’t . . . me as such.” Joyce also found her trip to Spain revelatory. She had not gone to Spain in the 1930s, but she spoke of her childhood during that era. “[S]ome of us, who were young, imagined . . . it was as if we were on the battlefront.” Joyce: We woke up and we found out that Guernica, that a civilian population had been bombed, and, we, we, we felt it, we really felt it. But when I came to Spain, and these people were applauding and cheering, I started to cry because I felt I haven’t done enough, I haven’t done enough. That was the feeling that I had and I think that when I talked to some other people they also . . . said that it brought tears to their eyes. [. . .] It’s aroused some very unusual feelings within me of wanting to help wanting to participate wanting to pick up the dream that we

170

Radical Nostalgia once had of making, making things work, socially, that really, you know, and across political lines didn’t, you know across partisan . . . lines [. . .]. I realize that, you know, I have been a little bit . . . I care about things. But I haven’t cared ee-nough. Aaron: That’s the mistake. That’s the trouble. You cared enough.112

Joyce, with a life experience very different from Aaron’s and a different way of processing it, spoke just as directly to the heart of this project. For her, going to Spain in 1996 “aroused some very unusual feelings [. . .] of wanting to help wanting to participate wanting to pick up the dream that we once had of making, making things work, socially.” Radical nostalgia, if nothing else, is “wanting to pick up the dream.” As a result of the sixtiethanniversary return to Spain and their experiences there, Joyce, Aaron, Bobby, and Chuck—each in their own way, but with comparable interactions of memory, emotion, and activism— carried their feelings back to the United States and started the Chicago Friends. Like Chuck, they all concluded that Spain had a “special significance,” and, upon their return, they did something about it. Something happened to the Halls and the Hilkevitches in Spain that November, and, as a result, the community of Chicago-area veterans of the Spanish Civil War and two hundred supporters celebrated their actions six decades before. Among the politically passionate there is always dissension, and yet a meeting was planned by a diverse group of veterans and their supporters. It succeeded, and, at the end, six very different men stood shoulder to shoulder, facing the crowd, and took their ovation. “I was surprised at the velocity of the applause,” Chuck Hall later told me about that moment. According to Bobby, Aaron Hilkevitch commented afterwards, “It was the first time I’d been to a meeting where I didn’t feel used.”113 Set against my archival research, my time with the veterans has been a journey into the heart of a story, into Dolores Ibárruri’s history and legend at the same time. As Victor Turner states in his foreword to Barbara Myerhoff’s Number Our Days: Culture and

The Legend Business: 1962–1996

171

Community Among Elderly Jews in an American Ghetto, “[a] pilgrimage may be as much temporal and interior as overland; it is a venture, history, biography, and autobiography.”114 I had been drawn to the Spanish Civil War, and to this remarkable group of people, in an effort to better understand the mechanics of political passion and the making of legends, two subjects inextricably linked. I envy and admire their passion, and have often been swayed by the power of the legend, from the first time I heard the songs of the Spanish Civil War when I was a child. The beliefs that took these people to Spain come across as obvious, inevitable, and uncompromising. This recalls James Lardner’s letter to his mother and what I called his prosaic idealism. It is as though politics in a particular time and place lifted a veil from all of their eyes, and once they could see clearly, they knew exactly what to do. Turner states that Myerhoff “characterizes our species as Homo narrans, humankind as storyteller, implying that culture in general—specific cultures, and the fabric of meaning that constitutes any single human existence—is the ‘story’ we tell about ourselves.”115 This seems to be consistent with Coetzee in his musing on the nature of history. The story we tell about Spain is seen in Dolores Ibárruri’s rousing speech, in Dorothy Parker’s anecdote, and in the words of the volunteers themselves, for it is both history and legend. Neither can be denied. As much as Aaron might resist the legend intellectually, he cannot help but acknowledge its substance—both what it is, and what it is not: To get back to Spain . . . I’m talking about the legend— there’s no question that there was a cause. Might have been [a] different . . . appearance of the cause for different people, but antifascism was a commonality. That’s not legend. Most people were very conscious of it, and, that was a good feeling, because of the commonality whatever differences we had.116

When the veterans stood in “commonality” at the end of the May commemoration in Chicago, as others have at decades of similar events, they did so as both representatives of history and purveyors of legend, and it is exactly that conflation that generated the

172

Radical Nostalgia

“velocity” of applause wondered at by Chuck Hall. They are the real thing and the symbol all at once. As such, they carry a combination of idealism, activism, and bravery to which the audience perhaps aspires. To quote Smadar Lavie, describing allegorical performances among the Mzeina Bedouin: “Each character, while still just a plain person, rose up and, by temporarily fusing him- or herself with his or her folkloric persona, became the interlocutor, in the folk genre, between the tribal collective memory of the past and its present circumstances.”117 As Aaron said of his experience at the recent celebrations in Spain, “it wasn’t . . . me as such.” It was both him and not him, the real Aaron and also a story of Aaron. “Where does the legend come from?” I asked Aaron toward the end of our talk. “Legends are pure,” he said. “There was the purity of the basic motive.”118

Chapter 5

Songs of the Lincoln Brigade: Music, Commemoration, and Appropriation

Remember the war against Franco? That’s the kind where each of us belongs Though he may have won all the battles We had all the good songs. “The Folk Song Army” by Tom Lehrer, from his 1965 album “That Was the Year That Was”

Canciones de las Brigadas Internacionales War memorials, sites of remembrance, are traditionally made of stone or steel. In the United States, the Spanish Civil War has been memorialized in rituals of song. American volunteers in Spain learned songs during the war against Franco and have sung them at annual meetings and ceremonies since they started to come home in 1937. Some songs are part of their specific memories of the war; they first learned them and sang them in Spain. Other songs associated with the conflict were learned back home, when the veterans began to gather and share stories and experiences. Over the years, the veterans were joined at their commemorative gatherings by their families, friends, and a younger generation of supporters, who became familiar with the songs from the veterans, either at the annual events themselves or through recordings. The songs have been passed to new

174

Radical Nostalgia

generations and are now an integral part of this commemorative performance culture. Period artifacts with emotional and lyrical content evoking specific associations with the war, its time, and its ideals, the songs have come to represent the conflict. Within the commemorative context, they can be primary triggers of radical nostalgia. At the annual events, songs are always a centerpiece; emotional touchstones. With mostly foreign lyrics reintoning historical signifiers set to irresistible melodies, the ritualized singing and re-singing of these songs invokes the Spanish Civil War and its historical moment through their own very particular language. The music helps create a sacred space, and because of each body’s thorough engagement in the physical act of singing, those present “learn” the war and are led into its time in a way they could not at more conventional memorial sites. They physically acquire these musical texts in much the same way as the volunteers did in Spain, mastering them through repetition, and carry them from then on as embodied artifacts. If the veterans want to pass on the political ideals that drew them to Spain, the songs bear some of that history. “Still in the clothes in which / we had left our jobs, singing the / same song in many languages we advance,” wrote the American ambulance driver James Neugass in his 1938 poem “Give Us This Day”; “let the memory of the songs / the volunteers sang never die from our throats.”1 “The International Brigades were full of music,” Pete Seeger has said. “They actually had a song book with I think about thirty or forty or fifty songs in there in many different languages. [. . .] Songs of a dozen nations were there, maybe more than a dozen nations.”2 The songbook was Canciones de las Brigadas Internacionales, published in Barcelona in June 1938, in the middle of the war. A small, densely packed red book, it contains about 130 pages of songs in thirteen languages. Many are included two or three times in versions specific to different countries and tongues. There are fourteen translations of “The Internationale,” the Communist anthem, printed on the final pages of the book. Seventy-five percent of the songs are in Spanish, Italian, French, English, or German, with the balance

Songs of the Lincoln Brigade

175

in languages ranging from Dutch and Danish to Japanese, Polish, and Yiddish. The songbook was edited by Ernst Busch, the renowned German tenor and the Street Singer in Brecht’s Threepenny Opera.3 As exemplified by “The Internationale,” “Connolly’s Rebelsong” from Ireland, and “The Marseillaise,” many of the songs Busch selected originated as revolutionary anthems or protest songs in different countries before the war, and were sung in Spain by the international volunteers in their familiar form. Other political songs were adapted specifically to serve the Spanish cause—for example, the American “Solidarity Forever,” a popular labor anthem set to the tune of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Established verses could be sung along with newly written ones suited to the immediate situation: As the fascist hordes of Franco threatened Spain’s democracy, We workers heard the warning from across the bounding sea. We raised the call throughout the States— Come workers join our ranks For Freedom, bread and peace! Solidarity forever, Solidarity forever, Solidarity forever, and the battle will be won.4

In the January 1944 issue of the Volunteer for Liberty, Morgan Havard, London chairman of the International Brigade Association, mentioned just this kind of adaptation, and the role the music played while he was imprisoned in Spain: It was [American volunteer Bob Steck] who, when we were getting fed up with the waiting and anxious to get to the front, thought up all sorts of things to fill up the time. All the old favorites were brought into use, only changed around a bit. “Hold the Fort” became “Hold Madrid” and “I.B. Men be Strong” suited us better than “Union Men be Strong.” “Solidarity Forever” also had several versions. The words usually related to the language difficulties, the food situation and of course the ever popular theme re Musso[lini] and Franco and what was coming to them.5

176

Radical Nostalgia

Three verses of “Hold the Fort” were included in Busch’s collection. Union solidarity and the international effort in Spain had enough in common that preexisting verses could serve both causes without adjustment. Bob Steck’s “I.B. Men be Strong” lyric did not make it into Busch’s rendition. One verse of “Hold the Fort” that Busch did print fit the Spanish situation perfectly, with the original chorus intact: Look, my Comrades, see the union Banners waving high. Reinforcements now appearing, Victory is nigh Hold the fort, for we are coming, Union men be strong! Side by side we battle onward, Victory will come!6

Intact or reshaped to serve the situation, songs like these were part of the soldiers’ discourse in Spain. Sung on the march, in the trenches, or in the tedious hours between actions, the songs affixed themselves to the physical and emotional experiences of ideologically motivated combat. Busch’s little red book, circulated widely among the troops, is a remarkable document, both comprehensive and practical. In the tradition of pocket-sized songbooks that could be used at rallies and meetings, it was designed with performance in mind. Songs now identified with the Spanish Civil War that are missing from Busch’s book may not have been written or popularized by the time it was published in June 1938, or perhaps they simply had not reached his ears, or had not met his standards. My particular interest here is in a set of songs that became important in the United States after the war, songs that are still being sung at commemorative events. Some of them, like “Viva la Quince Brigada” from the 2000 event, appear in the book in one form or another, but not all. I define this subset of enduring songs by focusing on two recordings released in the United States in the early 1940s. These 78 rpm albums, now quite rare and coveted, gave the American public access to a

Songs of the Lincoln Brigade

177

specific group of songs affiliated with the Spanish Civil War. The recorded tracks became the semi-official versions of these songs, and the albums remain an invaluable and influential reference. Six Songs for Democracy, the first American release of Spanish Civil War songs, was also the work of Ernst Busch. According to liner notes from a later re-release, this album “was originally recorded in Spain in June 1938 during an air-raid on Barcelona (one of the records bore a sticker reading: ‘The defective impression of this record is due to interruptions of electric current during an air raid’).”7 June 1938 was the same month and year that saw the publication of Busch’s book. Book and record were two manifestations of a single anthological mission, pursued at the same time by the same artist. Of the six songs on the album, five are of German origin; the sixth, sung by Busch in both Spanish and German, is “Los Cuatro Generales,” one of the most famous Spanish songs from the war, later recorded by Paul Robeson. All of the songs on this album are included in Busch’s book. Robeson, who sang for the troops in Spain during the war, contributed liner notes to the American release of Six Songs for Democracy on Keynote Records dated July 4, 1940. Richard Reuss, in American Folk Music and Left-Wing Politics, 1927–1957, described the album as “spirited and enormously successful.”8 Reuss compared these songs to others created in the United States in support of the cause: In the long run [. . .] the antifascist songs produced or arranged during the 1930s by Hanns Eisler and fellow German left-wing musicians had greater impact, such as “Song of the United Front,” “Peatbog Soldiers,” “Freiheit,” and “Hans Beimler.” For the most part they were written in German and in some cases antedated or did not mention the Spanish conflict, yet during the years of the Franco rebellion, they invariably were sung in the name of the Loyalist cause. Such songs were the real crux of the Spanish Civil War music popularized within the American Left prior to 1940.9

178

Radical Nostalgia

All the songs Reuss mentions are included on Six Songs for Democracy. Some of the German songs that predated the war in Spain were likely in the repertoires of choruses organized by groups such as the American Music League, with which Hanns Eisler was affiliated. The AML was populated predominantly by immigrants or the children of immigrants.10 Communist Party policies in the United States changed with the advent of the Popular Front in 1935, and this had an impact on music and art. “The party’s advocacy of a united stand against fascism brought with it a new attitude toward American culture. Rather than preaching mass revolution, the Popular Front urged Americans to embrace cultural diversity and to bond together in a common cause.”11 Hence Communism became twentieth-century Americanism. The melodies and political perspectives of songs already familiar within mostly foreign communities began to spread into wider circles of the Left.12 The Spanish Civil War suddenly gave this material context and immediacy, perhaps leading to the commercial success of Six Songs for Democracy. “And that’s when we first heard those songs,” Studs Terkel said at the April 2001 commemoration in New York; “they were in German. ‘The Moorsoldaten’ [Peat-Bog Soldiers], ‘Freiheit.’ ”13 By the time the German antifascist Thaelmann Column marched into Madrid to aid in its defense early in the Spanish Civil War, their political anthems were already well known. The 1940 German recording on Keynote was followed in 1943 by the first and most famous American recording, Songs of the Lincoln Brigade on Asch Records, performed by Pete Seeger, Tom Glazer, Bess Lomax, and Baldwin Hawes.14 None of the songs on this new recording had been on Busch’s album. Music that had been shared and learned orally and had been evolving over time was now preserved in a fixed form. Some of the Spanish material, in particular, was quite different from later recordings made in the country of origin.15 How was the material on Songs of the Lincoln Brigade chosen and arranged? My father remembered learning most of the material from Pete Seeger.16 I asked Seeger how he came in contact with the songs from Spain. As he recalls, Keynote Records was so pleased with the

Songs of the Lincoln Brigade

179

success of Six Songs for Democracy that in 1941 they wanted to follow it up with another record of Spanish Civil War material: [T]hey had a very good flamenco singer, guitar player, who’d left Spain when Franco took over and they had some singers, but they somehow weren’t able to get it all together, there was temperament here and misunderstandings there. However, I was present at some of the sessions when they were rehearsing [. . .]. And that’s where I first learned the songs [. . .]. These were Spaniards and quite well trained singers, and they tried to get the record together but it didn’t come out, and yet I knew the songs and I started to sing them.17

One can only wonder how these songs would sound now had the Keynote sessions with Spanish musicians been completed. In a 1981 lecture at New York University, Seeger described yet another contact point. “After the war was over,” he said, “I learned some of these songs from the returning Lincoln Vets.” I was 19, 20, 21 years old. And, I didn’t pronounce the Spanish right, but I was tremendously impressed by the heroism of the people that went to fight in Spain from different countries, the Internationalist spirit. And I even taught some of the songs to the other members of the Almanac singers, although they were dubious, even more dubious than I was, of being able to pronounce Spanish.18 Woody Guthrie used to call it “Viva La Kwincy Lada.”19 But we did, the Almanac singers in 1941 and ’42 used to sing some of the Spanish Brigade songs even though the war in Spain had been lost at least for the moment, but the fight against fascism was now world wide.20

In our 2000 interview, Seeger also remembered a volunteer named Bill Gresham, who had left the VALB because “he felt they were dominated by Communists.” “He dropped round to Almanac house [. . .] and told me stories about Spain, and it might be that [it was] Bill Gresham who actually gave me the feeling for some of the songs.”21 Seeger’s two basic sources, then, were returning American veterans and musicians who had fled

180

Radical Nostalgia

Franco.22 The unsuccessful Keynote sessions Seeger attended likely account for the Spanish inflections in the material the American musicians performed. “Well, World War II comes,” Seeger told me, “and I find out from Moses Asch that he feels that these songs should be recorded. [. . .] I had a weekend pass from the army, and I contacted Bess Hawes and Butch and your father, and they said ‘sure let’s try it.’ We rehearsed on a Saturday, and recorded that album on a Sunday, and we were immensely pleased when it came out as well as it did.”23 Ron Cohen and Dave Samuelson, in their book-length essay accompanying the ten-CD collection Songs for Political Action, say that a group of veterans first approached Seeger about making the album, and that Asch then agreed to produce.24 Either way, Seeger put together the group, took his weekend furlough, came to New York, and went into the studio. His fellow musicians had probably heard some of the songs before that Saturday rehearsal, and Seeger believes he had written them down by then as well. He remembered copying the material he heard in the flamenco sessions so he could sing them and teach them to the Almanac Singers. Seeger had another source as well: “When I found out Moe [Asch] was willing to record it,” he told me, “I probably wrote to the Lincoln vets and said, ‘Hey, send me all the words to these songs so I can do ’em.’ And they probably dug them out of the files.”25 Five of the songs on Songs of the Lincoln Brigade were based on American or British melodies and sung in English: “Jarama Valley,” “Old Soldiers Never Die,” “Cookhouse,” “The Young Man from Alcala,” and “Quartermaster Song.” Cohen and Samuelson call the last three “expurgated army songs.”26 None of these five appeared in Busch’s book. The three remaining songs were of Spanish origin: “Viva La Quince Brigada,” often referred to by its refrain, “Ay Mañuela” or “Ay Carmela”; “El Quinto Regimiento,” also known as “Venga Jaleo”; and “Si Me Quieres Escribir.”27 With the exception of “Viva La Quince Brigada,” these songs are printed in Busch’s book in one form or another, but none with the exact lyrics and melodies reproduced on the Asch recording. The versions Seeger learned—from the Spanish

Songs of the Lincoln Brigade

181

musicians, veteran Bill Gresham, and around New York—arose from similar sources as those in Busch’s collection. Sung by various battalions around Spain, with varying experiences and political perspectives, they had followed different paths and evolved in their own particular ways. Seeger was also responsible for selecting the songs for this record; had he chosen others, they would be as well known now. In addition, the songs he did record were necessarily filtered through the musicianship and sensibilities of Seeger and his collaborators. These were sophisticated interpreters of rural and vernacular forms. Just as they refashioned various American folk songs to suit their own skills and stylistic approaches, they marked the Spanish material as well. I spoke with veteran William Susman about the songs in December 1996. Bill fought in Spain and headed ALBA for a number of years. He was also co-producer of the fiftieth-anniversary event at Lincoln Center. He specifically remembers learning only two of the songs in Spain, “Viva La Quince Brigada” and “Venga Jaleo.” “Other songs I learned later on [in the States] as most of the vets did, but we sang them with such gusto and sang them so repeatedly that I think that everyone would take an oath on the Bible that they learned them in Spain.” This suggests how these songs—as a body of work, as treasured artifacts of the distant struggle—coalesced in the United States through the commemorative gatherings and especially as a result of the two recordings. Wherever they might have first heard them, these songs were rooted in Spain, and they took the veterans and others back there. Susman mentioned two other titles of significance to him, “Los Cuatro Generales” and “Si Me Quieres Escribir,” the former from the German recording, the latter from the American. In his lecture at NYU in 1981, Seeger expanded on his feelings about Songs of the Lincoln Brigade in words that come through on tape as emotional and sincere: “[A]s long as I live, I may never make such a good recording, because some of the things really worked out.”28 It is an impressive recording, and still holds up. “They were awful good songs,” Seeger told me.29 “The songs had something then, and they still do,” Ronnie Gilbert

182

Radical Nostalgia

said when we spoke about the material in 1996. “They are authentic, exotic, emotional, and ‘of the people.’ ”30 So, starting in the late 1930s, before any recordings were available, these songs from Spain were probably performed on the streets, at summer camps, in living rooms, at meetings and memorial services, and at rallies and protests. Activist Henry Foner, now in his eighties, remembers hearing political songs from Spain at “lift the embargo” rallies at Madison Square Garden.31 The material even made it into the edges of popular and youth culture at that time, as chronicled by Lawrence Lipton in his 1959 book The Holy Barbarians. Lipton describes the scene in the 1930s at commune-like houses in California shared by young people enamored of “free love” and the Left. “If there was any music it was likely to be a folk-sing,” Lipton reported. “Later in the decade the army songs of the Spanish Civil War, brought back by the young veterans of the Lincoln Brigade, were sung on such occasions. Any one who could sing ‘The Four Insurgent Generals’ in Spanish was sure to be the life of the party.”32 The songs had been “brought back” from Spain in the bodies and minds of the volunteers and emigré Spaniards, and then disseminated, body to body, voice to ear, throat to throat, transferred through singing, through an active, bodily engagement in melody and harmony. Then the two records were released to the public in 1940 and 1943 or 1944. With specific versions now formalized and reproduced in the mass market, the songs stabilized somewhat. As the Volunteer stated, referring to the Seeger/Asch album, “everyone listened spellbound to the new recordings of the songs we sang in Spain” at the VALB reunion in June 1944.33 Some singers and audience members retained their own sense of the material separate from the recordings, but with these 78 rpms readily available, established versions began to seep into more corners of the culture. The songs were easily romanticized, but they remained signifiers of the Spanish cause. After Spain was lost and before Pearl Harbor, they helped keep the antifascist struggle alive, witnessed in part by the commercial success of Six Songs for Democracy. During the time of the Nazi–Soviet pact, when the Left fractured

Songs of the Lincoln Brigade

183

and the VALB leadership continued to support Stalin, the songs still referenced the ongoing Spanish struggle, a common cause. They did not completely transcend divisive politics, but they did smooth the rough edges of factionalism. Even a disaffected veteran like Bill Gresham taught the songs to Pete Seeger. “I had read and internalized my Orwell,” Michael Harrington has written of Spain during the Popular Front era; “I knew the crimes committed by the GPU in the name of antifascism in Spain; and yet, I never cease to thrill at the songs of the International Brigade.”34 When Hitler invaded the Soviet Union and marched through Europe, the antifascist songs immediately took on a wider appeal. They became more acceptable and available to a broader public, marked by what many now saw as the foresight of the early antifascists. As times changed, the weight and meanings of the songs shifted with them, but through it all, they held onto their popular roots. Harrington refuted neither the crimes of the Communists nor the thrill of the songs. They carry a certain unassailable credibility, and retain their early aura of resistance as unapologetic anthems of an engaged antifascism well to the left of the US government’s anti-interventionist policies, to which their endurance can, in part, be attributed. Robbie Lieberman sees the People’s Song movement of the 1940s, where this music thrived, as mostly unsuccessful. People’s Songs, Inc., was founded by a group of musicians and union staffers in Pete Seeger’s apartment soon after the end of World War II, with the goal of “disseminating the songs of [the] people [which] truly express their lives, their struggles and their highest aspirations.”35 It saw perhaps its greatest degree of activity during Henry A. Wallace’s failed campaign for president in 1948, and folded early in 1949.36 “Despite the power of ‘Which Side Are You On?,’ ‘Strange Fruit,’ and the songs of the Spanish Civil War [. . .],” Lieberman states, “these songs failed to bring labor and the American people over to People’s Songs’ way of thinking.” Yet, she continues, “[t]hey did help hold the culture together,” not an insignificant accomplishment.37 Writing three years later, Lieberman seemed more optimistic: “The songs

184

Radical Nostalgia

survive within mass culture and within social movements stubbornly asserting their connection to earlier periods and meanings.”38 The commemorative urge among the veterans’ community, manifest in stagings rife with this music, has been similarly stubborn, asserting a connection to 1930s activism for over six decades. This desire for a connection to earlier “meanings” through music suggests why songs can be such an important vehicle for radical nostalgia. Iterations of this music continue. In their comprehensive musical revue Pasiones: The Songs of the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939, first performed in Chicago in 1997, Michael Smith, Jamie O’Reilly, and Katrina O’Reilly sang twenty songs in all, mostly collected from the 1961 Folkways re-releases.39 They also drew from a 1976 Spanish release recorded within a year of Franco’s death, España, 1936–1939: 25 Himnos y Canciones de la Guerra Civil Española, and a nonprofessional American album made by veteran Mike Parker, Al Tocar Diana.40 Created as a theater piece, for a time Pasiones became something of a staple in commemorative performances. Smith, O’Reilly, and O’Reilly performed at the initial meeting of the Chicago Friends of the Lincoln Brigade in 1997 at Roosevelt University, at the opening of the Spanish Civil War poster exhibit “Shouts from the Wall” at the Harold Washington Library in Chicago in 1999, and at the 2001 commemorative events on both coasts. Pasiones closed the 2001 commemoration in Oakland, California. The gathering, called “In Madrid and Mississippi,” celebrated the fortieth anniversary of the Freedom Rides during the civil rights movement, with a group of the Freedom Riders in the audience. When host Peter Carroll returned to the stage after Pasiones’ standing ovation, he reported to the audience that veteran Milt Wolff had come up to him backstage moments before “with the ultimate compliment,” that “there was a group of guys who sang these songs in Spain: Ernie Arion killed at Brunete, Harry Meloff killed at Belchite, Harry Abramofsky killed on the Ebro. [Wolff] said these guys are singing the same songs.”41 The music literally moved Wolff to the stage to share this story. The music brought the two distant times together for

Songs of the Lincoln Brigade

185

him, as sixty years suddenly dissolved. After Pasiones’ performance in New York City, veteran Len Levenson spoke to me. “They really understood what those songs meant to us,” he said. Pasiones’ performances and their CD recording have become yet another set of American citations of this enduring material, first sung by the likes of Arion, Meloff, and Abramofsky. After the forty-second anniversary celebration in New York, when Pete Seeger sang and “nostalgia took hold,” Bill Susman sent Seeger and his fellow performers a letter of thanks.42 “The artistry of your performance at our dinner was not only great in itself,” Susman wrote, “but recaptured for us all the enthusiasm and emotion of that period in our lives.”43 Linda Lustig, the daughter of a veteran, has been attending Bay Area commemorative events for years. She always brought her children because she wanted them to understand the World War II era. “I really respect people like you who are able to bring in the art and the music part,” she told me. “You can’t get the feeling without that.”44

“There’s a Valley in Spain . . .” To close the annual Bay Area commemorative event in February 2001, on the stage of the Calvin Simmons Theater in Oakland, California, the three-member cast of Pasiones sang the memorial ballad “Jarama Valley,” and the audience joined in. Set to the tune of the folk song “Red River Valley,” the song has a long history for the veterans, dating back to 1937, and has been an inevitable part of nearly every annual gathering for over five decades, in the United States and in Britain. In keeping with the oral folk tradition, “Jarama Valley” has evolved over time, and though the melody has remained fairly consistent, there are numerous versions of the lyric. In its various incarnations, “Jarama Valley” has been popular among English-speaking volunteers from the moment the traditional folk song was first adapted to the Spanish Civil War context just ten months into the conflict. Because the folk source, “Red River Valley,” has a simple, catchy melody, a standard sixteen-bar verse form, and an easy rhythm

186

Radical Nostalgia

and shape to its lyrics, the song lends itself to parody and revision. The Oakland version, however, was a far cry from the 1937 original. The song has had a double life. “Jarama Valley” is an artifact, but—unlike a yellowed copy of a letter written home by a volunteer, or a snapshot from the front, or a medal awarded for service during the war—it is a performative artifact. Physical mementos, as traces of the past, have a comforting substance. The writer of the letter held it in his or her hands; the photo captured a moment in time, a face, a landscape; the surface of the medal is worn down from so many pinnings and unpinnings. One cannot presume to know precisely what these objects once meant, what they were intended to do, or what they accomplished in their own times, but the moment of writing, and the opening of the lens, and the awarding of the medal are irrevocable. The letter, snapshot, and medal are what remain, unstable as they may be—at least we can hold them in our hands. “Jarama Valley,” as an object of performance, also had a moment of origin. It arose out of a specific set of circumstances, was created, sung, and written down. No one disputes its authorship. Unfortunately, the original lyric sheet is lost, but even if it remained, the song, as such, moved on. “Jarama Valley,” under many titles, has been performed thousands of times, and it has left its own emotional or narrative traces. You can stare into the eyes of the young comrade rendered in emulsion, or see the penmanship of someone writing home from the war, and you can study one of the many versions of “Jarama Valley” that have been noted down or recorded over the years, but you can never hold it in your hand. It is too slippery and evanescent, truly tangible only in the moment of performance. The lyric sheets and recordings that survive each reproduce one of its manifestations, each one of them yet another adaptation and appropriation. Sing it, and only then can you stare into its eyes. “Jarama Valley” is the best known English-language song in the United States to come out of the Spanish Civil War. Spanish and German songs like such as “Si Me Quieres Escribir” or “Freiheit” are more rousing and perhaps more popular, and

Songs of the Lincoln Brigade

187

performed in commemorative events at least as often. All the songs affiliated with the war have interesting stories, but because of its fairly unique status as an American anthem that has undergone such drastic changes, I want to trace the history of “Jarama Valley.” The song in its modern form, a substantive revision of the 1937 original, completely reconfigures the emotional and political valences of its creation. First written down by a foot soldier as a critique of Brigade leadership, “Jarama Valley” was very quickly revised into a commemorative anthem, an honorific tribute to the antifascist volunteers and their cause, and endured in that form. Its genealogy reveals the appropriative power of ideology, the persistence of melodic sentiment, and the needs of radical nostalgia. The battle of Jarama was a brutal one, the first combat in which the Fifteenth Brigade—a unit made up of American, British, Canadian, and Irish battalions—saw action. The Internationals suffered horrible casualties. Peter Carroll reports that the Lincolns at Jarama numbered 373 before they first went “over the top” on February 23, 1937. By the morning of the 27th, their commander counted 150 in the trenches, the rest dead or incapacitated. Volunteers from other countries did not fare any better. After the initial battle, bloodied and exhausted, the members of the Fifteenth Brigade were required to hold their positions in the trenches for months, and when they were finally relieved and made it back to an inviting village for much-needed rest, they were given new orders immediately and had to return to the lines.45 Jason Gurney, a British volunteer, was part of the contingent released from the front and then sent back a day later. He wrote of his experiences in 1974: [I]t was a very angry bunch of men that piled into the trucks that evening. Back in the trenches, things were even worse than before. [. . .] Nobody ever took the trouble to explain the crazy muddle that had taken us up to Alcala and back, all in twenty-four hours, and I never discovered any reason for it. But certainly it did nothing to build up confidence in the leadership.

188

Radical Nostalgia After this pathetic piece of bungling, life returned to the pattern we had come to regard as normality [. . .]. Everybody was tired, dirty, bored and dispirited.46

In 1939, William Rust described the same events: The long expected rest came at end of April [. . .]. But before they had time to shake themselves down they were back in the line again, and stayed there until the middle of June. It was upon the return to the line that Alex MacDade [sic] of Glasgow wrote the following song (to the tune of “Red River Valley”), which, because of its humorous cynicism, became popular in all Battalions.47

Without attribution, Rust’s last phrase quotes The Book of the XV Brigade, published in Madrid early in 1938 by the International Brigade Commissariat. This was the first book to reproduce the lyric by Alec (or Alex) McDade to which Rust refers. “This song,” The Book of the XV Brigade states, “became popular with the XV Brigade in May 1937, the fourth month of their stay in the trenches on the Jarama front.” It then cites the lyric as follows: There’s a valley in Spain called Jarama, That’s a place that we all know so well, For ‘tis there that we wasted our manhood, And most of our old age as well. From this valley they tell us we’re leaving, But don’t hasten to bid us adieu, For e’en though we make our departure, We’ll be back in an hour or two.48 Oh, we’re proud of our British Battalion,49 And the marathon record it’s made, Please do us this little favour, And take this last word to Brigade: “You’ll never be happy with strangers, They would not understand you as we, So remember the Jarama Valley And the old men who wait patiently.”50

Songs of the Lincoln Brigade

189

Gurney reproduces this lyric almost verbatim, as does Rust. Both attribute it to McDade.51 Given the situation, it is a funny, stinging satire. The young soldiers have been in the trenches so long they have become “old men,” and have “wasted” both their “manhood” and their “old age.” The second verse has the best joke and most unexpected rhyme, and the last verse the most bitter irony—these “old men who wait patiently” were neither old nor patient. “The tragic part of the situation was that the vast majority of us still felt convinced of the justice of our cause and were anxious to fight for it, which only increased our sense of frustration.”52 McDade’s “humorous cynicism” was a response to that frustration, and, by addressing it, he attempted to relieve it. Valentine Cunningham devotes a number of pages to the song and its variations in the introduction to his 1980 The Penguin Book of Spanish Civil War Verse. He tells essentially the same story of its origins, and cites Gurney as his source for the original lyric. Cunningham reports that McDade’s song was a hit among the soldiers but was not very popular with commanders and commissars, though they tolerated it. Jason Gurney is more direct, claiming that the original version “was particularly favoured to bait Political Commissars.”53 Vincent Brome, writing in 1966, says that the song “became very popular in all international battalions.”54 The names of any number of units replaced the original “British Battalion” in verse 3, and the song as written could have been used to express a variety of complaints. McDade’s song captured the frustration of the volunteers at what Gurney called the “pathetic piece of bungling” that sent them to warm beds and showers after months in the mud only to pull them back before a day was up. McDade wrote it after their angry return, and it is no wonder it became popular and spread around the different battalions. Its satirical tone must have provided a valuable release from pent-up frustrations, and given the soldiers a nonthreatening way to chide their notoriously officious commissars. This may help explain the next version of the lyric to appear in the historical record. In the Moscow Archives of the

190

Radical Nostalgia

International Brigades appears an annotated handwritten lyric sheet for the song initialed twice by “W.T.” According to Peter Carroll and Brandeis archivist Victor Berch, “W.T.” was almost definitely Wally Tapsell, commissar of the British Battalion after Brunete, who also fought at Jarama.55 “W.T.” titles the song “The Old Jarama Valley” (see figure 26). In his comments, written above and below the lyric, Tapsell attributes the song to McDade and describes the details of its first appearance, but the lyrics he has written out so carefully are quite different from those reproduced in The Book of the XV Brigade. Tapsell’s one-page document reads as follows:56 THE OLD JARAMA VALLEY (TUNE OF RED RIVER VALLEY) THE WORDS OF THIS SONG WERE COMPOSED BY “ALEX McDADE” THEN POLIT’ COMMISSAR TO SECTION 4, NO 2 company of the British Batt. and placed on the TRENCH WALL NEWSPAPER on 29-5-37. ALEX was killed in the first day of action outside Villa Nueva de Canada his rank then was No 2 Company Political Commissar. W.T. (1) There’s a valley in Spain called Jarama. It’s a place that we all know so well. For its there that we gave of our manhood And where most of our dear Comrades fell (2) We are proud of our British Battalion And the stand for Madrid that we made [Fo]r we fought like true sons of the soil [As] part of the Fifteenth Brigade (3) With the rest of the International Column In the fight for the freedom of Spain We swore in that Valley of Jarama That fascism never would reign (4) We have left this dark Valley of sorrow And the memories we n'er shall forget So before we continue this re-unio[n] Let us stand to our glorious de[ad]

Songs of the Lincoln Brigade

191

I understand that this song has been adopted by the British Battalion as the Battalion Song and has [been] printed in leaflet form and sold in England [with] the proceeds to go to the Dependants of International Brigade Aid Fund. W.T.57

Tapsell’s lyric sheet is undated, though he was dead less than a year after McDade’s original was posted. The revisions aside for the moment, most of Tapsell’s annotations are consistent with the historical record. The incident that inspired the song—the exhausted volunteers’ unfortunate return to the trenches after less than a day of leave—took place at the end of April 1937, and they were finally relieved for good on June 17.58 Tapsell claims that the song was posted by McDade on May 29, in the middle of the period when it would have to have been conceived. McDade was then killed on July 1, as Tapsell states, on the first day of the battle of Brunete. If McDade was also a section commissar and therefore one of Tapsell’s subordinates, the irreverence of McDade’s original lyric might have been even more annoying to the leadership, and perhaps to Tapsell in particular. Obviously, Tapsell’s draft is significantly different from McDade’s ironic satire. According to Cunningham, “at some stage some anonymous political functionary cleaned up the song.”59 The irreverent lyric was politically sanitized. Now, no one “wasted” their manhood, but “gave of” it in combat. “Old men” did not risk death from old age, but “dear comrades fell” on the battlefield. Their “marathon record” of months in the trenches without relief became the heroic defense of Madrid. The revised lyric also lacks the sophistication of McDade’s. Many of the new lines are awkward and barely fit the melody. Whoever transformed the lyric turned a satirical song of complaint into a memorialization of the dead at Jarama and a celebration of the hard-fought battle defending Madrid. As the last verse makes clear, the song was rewritten to serve a different and particular purpose: it was transformed into a song of commemoration. If a political functionary was responsible for revising the lyric, as Cunningham claims, it could well have been Commissar

192

Radical Nostalgia

Tapsell, who signed the new lyric sheet and was McDade’s superior, unless McDade rewrote his own song, which seems highly unlikely. If Tapsell did not create the revision himself, he did approve of it and give it credibility with his initials. If Tapsell was responsible for the revision, when was it written? McDade penned it on or about May 29, 1937; Tapsell himself was killed at Calaciete ten months later, on March 31, 1938.60 Three months earlier, however, a version of the lyric almost identical to Tapsell’s appeared in the first American issue of the Volunteer for Liberty, handed out at the First Organizational Conference in New York City on December 18. Landis states that Tapsell returned to England sometime after the battle of Brunete, near the end of August 1937, and was back in Spain by Christmas.61 The Book of the XV Brigade is more specific, stating that Tapsell took “a brief visit to England during September” 1937.62 A possible time line emerges: McDade writes the cynical song and posts it on May 29, 1937. It becomes popular among the various Brigades in Spain. McDade dies on July 1. But at some point within four months of its writing, Tapsell, either in collaboration with others or on his own, drafts the new version and, in September 1937, takes it with him to London, where it begins to appear in pamphlets and at rallies. (The final two lines of Tapsell’s version—“So before we conclude this reunion / Let us stand to our glorious dead”—could only have been written for use at a memorial gathering, in Spain or elsewhere.) The new lyric then makes its way to the United States in time for inclusion in the Volunteer for Liberty three months later. By this time, McDade’s original song, less than seven months old, is probably still being sung in Spain with all the gusto front-line soldiers could muster. Concurrently, Tapsell’s reverent revision has spread through the commemorative community. The Volunteer for Liberty in which the song appears, dated January 1938, is dedicated “to the memory of our fellow Americans who gave up their lives in Spain.”63 The lyric to “Jarama River Valley” is printed on page 3, along with a poem of tribute to a dead volunteer and the photo of veterans laying a wreath at the Eternal Light. The words of the song are almost

Songs of the Lincoln Brigade

193

identical to Tapsell’s draft and are laid out on the page in exactly the same way, in two columns, though lacking any numbers to guide singers through the verse order. “In answer to many requests on the part of the Veterans,” it states above the lyrics, “we are printing the words to the: ‘Jarama River Valley.’ ” [Any changes from the Tapsell version are in italics. When the changes alter the meaning of the lyric, they appear in brackets.] There’s a valley in Spain called Jarama It’s a place that we all know too [so] well For (t’was [sic] there that we gave of our manhood And where most of our best Comrades fell. We are proud of our Lincoln Battalion And the stand for Madrid that it [we] made For we fought like true sons of the soil As a part of the 15th Brigade. With the rest of the International Column In the fight for the freedom of Spain We swore in that Valley of Jarama That fascism never would reign. We have left this dark Valley of sorrow And its memories we ne’er shall forget So before we continue this reunion Let us stand to our glorious dead.64

This draft is virtually the same as Tapsell’s handwritten version, which must have been its source. It is hard to know which version of the song the Volunteer for Liberty’s “many requests” were seeking. Some of the returnees reading the Volunteer might have been surprised to find the lyric they had sung in Spain transformed. With many hundreds dead and the war still going on, both reverence and irreverence had value, and each was being served. If, as Tapsell states, the lyric was made into a pamphlet and sold in England, that might have been facilitated during his visit to London in September 1937. The song continued to be

194

Radical Nostalgia

performed there. “At a wartime rally in London’s Cambridge Theatre organized by the International Brigade Association,” Valentine Cunningham reports, referring to World War II, “the printed programme supplied the audience with what had clearly become the more official version of the song.” The title was now “Jarama!”65 It is very close to Tapsell’s revision. “So before we continue this meeting / Let us stand for our glorious dead,” is how the song ended in the Cambridge program, using the word meeting, with its political connotations, in place of the more fraternal reunion. The Tapsell document, brought to England in August or September 1937, could easily have been the original source for the pamphlets, the commemorative Volunteer for Liberty, and the Cambridge Theatre performance a few years later. Another variation of the fabricated lyric appeared in the souvenir program sold at the Cambridge Theatre event, covered by the Worker and described further by Cunningham: “The Song”, the Worker goes on, “will be sung by the Brigade at the Memorial Meeting”, two days hence on Sunday 8 January [1939] in the Empress Hall. Reporting the Memorial Meeting on 9 January the Worker confirmed that the song “had echoed many times on the roads of Spain”; now, it claimed, the same song had echoed through the Empress Hall. The next day the Worker’s account had become even more embroidered: “In the trenches near Jarama . . . Alec McDade, of Glasgow, wrote the words of a song. Members of the Battalions took it as their own, and they sang it now, accompanied by the Clapham Accordion Band.” But it was not, as we’ve seen from the memorial Souvenir, McDade’s song that they sang.66

Nor is it that likely that the London commemorative version actually “echoed many times on the roads of Spain,” where it would have served little purpose. “In other words,” says Cunningham, “an ironic, extremely authentic-sounding trenchgrumble has been transformed by Party hacks into a slogan-laden celebration. But it’s still attributed to Alec McDade.”67

Songs of the Lincoln Brigade

195

Edwin Rolfe’s book The Lincoln Battalion, published by the VALB and completed in August 1939, includes McDade’s original lyric but does not mention any author.68 A 1996 book on Spanish Civil War memorials, published in England by the International Brigade Association, sets the record straight when describing the Fifteenth Brigade’s first battle: “It was here [in the trenches] that Alex McDade wrote his satirical song ‘There’s a valley in Spain called Jarama’. Today in a different form it is sung at all ceremonies of the British International Brigade when they honour their fallen comrades and remember their anti-fascist pledges.”69 Walter Tapsell joined the Communist Party at 16, according to his biography in The Book of the XV Brigade, and had been an organizer for the Young Communist League in Britain and a manager for the Daily Worker. “A good organiser, a cheery comrade, Tapsell throws all his energy into his work,” it goes on. “He has a reputation for devastating wit.”70 When he saw McDade’s subversive lyric posted on the wall newspaper near the front lines, Tapsell’s celebrated wit may have eluded him, superseded by his energetic loyalty to the Party. The moral transgression was not in revising McDade’s satire but in continuing to attribute it to him. Tapsell’s underlining of McDade’s responsibilities as a commissar is particularly disingenuous, suggesting that a trench soldier with political responsibilities wrote the cleansed lyric, when McDade’s obvious intention was to chide, not memorialize. Tapsell’s note attempts to authenticate a politically motivated fabrication. Crediting McDade for the revision of his satirical original lasted well beyond the time of the Tapsell document itself, though his initial misrepresentation might have been the source for future repetitions of the error. Quoting Cunningham: “A photo, in fact, of Peggy McDade appeared on the front page of the Worker (6 January 1939), where she’s described as the widow of Alec McDade, composer (in the trenches, it’s stressed) of the ‘Valley of Jarama’ which ‘will forever be the song of the Brigade.’ ”71 The next transition for “Jarama Valley” in the United States took place some time between its appearance in the Volunteer for

196

Radical Nostalgia

Liberty in 1938 and its recording by four American folk singers in 1943. With lyrics that had evolved for more than seven years, as both an oral and a printed artifact, the version that landed on the 78 rpm discs in the studios of Asch records became the best known and most commonly performed rendition of the song, at least in the United States.72 “Jarama Valley” may have been one of the songs Pete Seeger heard from Bill Gresham at Almanac House, or perhaps it was included in the lyrics Seeger may have requested from the VALB office when he knew he would be making the recording. The liner notes to the American album make no mention of McDade, though the origins of other songs are described in some detail.73 The Asch version is quite close to the draft from the Volunteer for Liberty. It lacks the awkward third verse, and some alliterative, rhythmic, and pronomial license has been taken, perhaps by the 1943 singers themselves. In the second verse, “sons of the people” replaces “sons of the soil,” a change already seen in one of its earlier London incarnations.74 There’s a valley in Spain called Jarama It’s a place that we all know so well It was there that we gave of our manhood Where so many of our brave comrades fell. We are proud of the Lincoln Battalion And the fight for Madrid that it made There we fought like true sons of the people As part of the Fifteenth Brigade. Now we’re far from that valley of sorrow But its memory we ne’er will forget— So before we conclude this reunion Let us stand to our glorious dead. There’s a valley in Spain called Jarama It’s a place that we all know so well It was there that we gave of our manhood Where so many of our brave comrades fell.75

Songs of the Lincoln Brigade

197

With the significant exception of the missing third verse, Tapsell’s commemorative lyric has simply been streamlined and made more musical. Version by version, line by line, one can see the evolution of a memorial anthem from McDade’s “ironic . . . trench-grumble.” The song Tom Glazer sang in 1943 was a far cry from McDade’s original, but it had come to serve an entirely different purpose. In addition, this “official version” has lasted and continues to be sung, whereas McDade’s wry satire unfortunately remains more of a scholarly footnote. On the front lines, in and on the ground, the soldiers needed an ironic release. McDade provided one, and one can imagine their pleasure in singing it. In the commemorative context, his irony was no longer practical. It did not fit the needs of the community. Tapsell, or whoever was responsible, should be blamed for pretending that the sanitized revision was written by McDade, thereby laying a patina of respectability over the taint of ideology. The song became a populist anthem, but what had once been authentically “of the people” was now of the Party. The same Party philosophy that likely led to Tapsell’s alteration would have been well represented in the leadership of the VALB, who would have wanted this version preserved. Away from the landscape of war itself, in London or New York City, the commemorative urge demanded reverence more than authenticity.

Origins and Legacies “People commemorate emotionally significant events from their public past,” Nico Frijda states. “These commemorations rest, to a large extent, on the emotions of those who suffered from the remembered events or who lost people in them.”76 In Spain, poorly treated after a bloody battle, demoralized after four months in the trenches, the volunteers needed a healthy dose of cynicism to laugh and bait their bosses. Back home among their own, the veterans needed to stand together and honor their dead. “Jarama Valley” got them on their feet.77

198

Radical Nostalgia

Finally, there’s the source itself. “Red River Valley” was a song of regret. It was a love song popular among British soldiers who were stationed in the Red River Valley of Manitoba in the 1870s to keep the peace and put down a rebellion by the Métis tribe. The song was written in the imagined voice of a Métis woman lamenting the departure of her soldier lover. One source describes it as “a song of military occupation.”78 “From this valley they say you are going,” the original second verse began, inspiring McDade’s; “I shall miss your blue eyes and sweet smile,” confirming it as a love song, and a vain one at that. This narcissistic line, written by the British, praises their own “blue eyes and sweet smile[s]” as seen through the darker eyes of their lyricized lovers. The third verse connected emotion to landscape with some lyrics that McDade also borrowed: So consider a while ere you leave me Do not hasten to bid me adieu But remember the Red River Valley And the half-breed that loved you so true.79

The fourth verse restated the sentimental theme in its opening line: “So remember the valley you’re leaving [. . .].” What persisted in all future versions of the song except McDade’s were both the feeling of loss and the familiar admonition to “remember”—the overarching nostalgic narratives of the folk song— which may have lingered in the melody and reemerged in the commemorative version.80 The British soldiers with whom the song originated in the 1860s created a nostalgic lament, and the pretty melody was wholly consistent with its lyrical sentiment. Much of the humor in McDade’s satire resided in the ironic contrast between this familiar melody’s nostalgic atmosphere and the actual situation he was describing—a place the volunteers would never get to leave, and for which they would always feel some contempt. “From this valley they tell us we’re leaving / But don’t hasten to bid us adieu,” he wrote, matching the folk song’s sentimental narrative and setting up his joke. But then he turned the expected

Songs of the Lincoln Brigade

199

emotion on its ear: “For e’en though we make our departure / We’ll be back in an hour or two.” McDade’s song was purposely antinostalgic. Its irony resided in the tension between the pervasive mood of the melody and its lyrical reconfiguration. He described a place it would be impossible to miss. He worked against the mood of sad remembrance set by the folk song, carried in its melody and the lyrical signatures he retained. When Tapsell, another “functionary,” or an avid commemorator revised the satire, ham-handed though much of it was, they were returning the song to its emotional origins in nineteenth-century Canada. It became, once again, a song of sad remembrance and a soldiers’ lament, though the Spanish Civil War veterans sang it from their own subject position, whereas the British in Canada distanced themselves by speaking through the voice of an indigenous subject. The underlying nostalgic desire was similar, but the veterans’ narrative was more direct. The original British version of “Red River Valley” may be a perfect example of what Renato Rosaldo has called “imperialist nostalgia,” when “agents of colonialism long for the very forms of life they intentionally destroyed [. . .] where people mourn the passing of what they themselves have transformed.”81 “Jarama Valley” in its commemorative form, though nostalgic, is at least more honest. It was their own dead the veterans left behind, not a native culture transformed. The “memory” the volunteers hope they “ne’er will forget” was the initial entry of Americans into the antifascist fight and the losses that resulted. If one widens the historical lens for a moment, the Lincoln Brigade’s first unsanctioned steps out of the trenches at Jarama in 1937 began American participation in a struggle that would soon be validated by the Allies and would end eight long years later at Hiroshima. Recalling and honoring “the glorious dead” of Jarama, though certainly sentimental, also captures the political, ideological, and physical essence—the fact—of US participation in the Spanish Civil War, when “premature antifascists” voluntarily gave their lives in the name of a progressive cause. The song is an artifact of intervention. McDade’s inspiration in the trenches was to replace the name of one three-syllable river valley with another in a familiar musical

200

Radical Nostalgia

lament, thereby subverting nostalgia to ironic effect. The political correction initiated within months put his titular substitution to a new purpose more consistent with the song’s original tone, but this second adaptation required the first. By bringing “Red River Valley” to Jarama in the first place, McDade unwittingly made it available for political reappropriation by Tapsell, whose action recalled the song’s folk origins. Just as the British soldiers in Manitoba masked themselves behind a Métis woman to voice their own desires, McDade’s name was taken by his superiors to authenticate an efficacious narrative in which he had no investment.82 McDade’s successful act of subversion was de-ironized by someone who hid behind the foot soldier’s credibility. When Tapsell’s honorific version of “Jarama Valley” reached London and America, where “Red River Valley” was already a familiar song of sad remembrance, it immediately served the needs of the moment, and McDade’s critique vanished. Consistent with the folk original in its narrative and melodic sentiment, Tapsell’s “Jarama Valley” was quickly absorbed into the commemorative process, where it has remained. Refined in its revised form over the years, this ironic battlefield artifact—McDade’s “authentic-sounding trench-grumble”—has been transformed into an icon of radical nostalgia. Not for everyone, though. “[T]hat music is in my mind all the time,” Peter Carroll told me, referring to Spanish Civil War songs. “I mean, sometimes I run to that music, I find myself . . . without even thinking about it. [But] it’s never ‘The Jarama Valley,’ it’s never that. [. . .] It’s the Spanish songs. It’s the driving beat.”83 “Jarama Valley” does not linger for him; it does not stick. It lacks any Spanish inflection and therefore has no emotional hook. Hannah Creighton, who listened to the 78 rpms throughout her childhood, had much stronger feelings about the song. “I don’t really like ‘Jarama,’ ” she told me when we spoke in 1996. I asked her why. “Well, because . . . ‘It’s there that we gave of our manhood,’ it’s the macho one, you know? Maybe the other ones are macho too, I always didn’t like ‘Jarama.’ ” I told her about the original McDade lyric, and that it was more satirical and ironic, which intrigued her: “And which is sort of the best of America, American humor [. . .], that kind of irreverent sarcastic thing, but

Songs of the Lincoln Brigade

201

that little sanctimonious, boy scout quality that ‘Jarama’ has really has always irritated me [she’s laughing here], and it’s what irritates me about Milt [Wolff].”84 Hannah’s response addresses numerous tensions. Women were very much a part of the Spanish Civil War and were well represented in the Bay Area post of the VALB as both members and officers, but they had no place in the macho “Jarama Valley.” The song wrote them out of the story, like the woman denied sculptural representation in Koonz’s study of the German camps. The other songs may have been macho as well, but they were safe from critique because she did not know the language, and their Spanish melodies gave them a kind of license. Her disaffection with the song went beyond its gender bias, though. She also found it “sanctimonious,” with a self-righteous “boy scout” quality. The Spanish songs tend to be more direct, sharper, and less sentimental in tone. Her complaint goes right back to the song’s original appropriation by Commissar Tapsell, or one of his colleagues, Party loyalists who preferred sanctimony to satire. Milt Wolff, the last commander of the Lincolns in Spain, was loyal to the Party as well, and he led the Bay Area post for years. Hannah’s parents, Leonard and Jeanne Olson, had been thrown out of the Party, while people like Milt remained. “I remember my parents feeling they weren’t involved in the vets because [the veterans active in the post] were the people that were still in the Party,” Hannah said. “[T]hey felt in one way irritated with them and in another way kind of snubbed by them.” Her critique recalls the internal Party struggles that plagued the VALB for decades, all personally represented for Hannah by the song “Jarama Valley.” Its nostalgic potential is individual. From its origin in Spanish trenches, “Jarama Valley” and the other songs recorded in the United States live on in Spain. Pete Seeger was invited by a Spanish protest singer to sing there in 1971. He was scheduled to perform at the University of Barcelona, but the concert was cancelled “on orders from Madrid.” Students gathered for the show anyway and were dispersed with fire hoses by the police. “I sang at a little restaurant for about fifty people,” Seeger said. “That was illegal [as well].

202

Radical Nostalgia

I was told that singing for more than twenty-five people in public you had to have police permit for that.” Someone in his small audience shouted out, “Sing ‘Viva La Quince Brigada,’ ” but he did not sing any of the banned songs from the war. That changed in 1979, four years later, after Franco’s death, when Seeger returned to Barcelona for “one of the most thrilling experiences.” When I came to sing “Los Cuatro Generales,” they all sang it along with me, and the verses in the same order that I knew them. I said “How do you know it exactly the way I know it?” because these songs, everybody sang slightly different verses. “Oh,” they said, “we heard your record.”85 You know, there were tapes, and tape recordings go from house to house. So, I have to confess, maybe technology can be used in different ways. Some technology is trying to kill us, maybe, ’cept some technology can help us survive.86

In 1976, one year after Franco’s death and between Seeger’s two visits, an album was released in Spain entitled España 1936–1939: 25 Himnos y Canciones de la Guerra Civil Española. Of the twenty-five songs on the album, two were in English, both learned directly from the American album that Seeger, Tom Glazer, and the others had recorded in 1943. They are sung phonetically with Spanish accents. Errors in the printed lyrics included in the album make it clear that its creators did not have a copy of the American liner notes, but transcribed the songs from the original recording by ear.87 As in Seeger’s experience with “Los Cuatro Generales,” the songs are reproduced note for note, just as they appeared on Songs of the Lincoln Brigade. However tainted “Jarama Valley” was for Hannah, it remained important for the Spanish who learned it by heart, and in whose earth the American defenders of Madrid were buried, along with many thousands of Spanish Republicans.

Music as Social Text John Blacking’s 1973 ethnomusicological text How Musical Is Man?, based on his research on Venda music in Africa, calls music

Songs of the Lincoln Brigade

203

“humanly organized sound.”88 Blacking states part of his mission early on: to erase the line musicologists before him have drawn between “folk” music and “art” music.89 “The Venda taught me that music can never be a thing in itself, and that all music is folk music, in the sense that music cannot be transmitted or have meaning without associations between people.”90 If musical meaning is made only in social settings, one can begin to see how the impact of Spanish Civil War songs is inseparable from their ideological, historical, and societal context. When people gather for these commemorative ceremonies, most of them have an understanding of the Spanish Civil War and are seeking a renewed connection with certain values the war has come to represent. When the events are planned, either by veterans themselves or under their watchful eyes, the songs are considered a necessary component. Nothing seems to evoke the war and its moment more effectively than this music, and no event would be considered complete without it. To be more precise, it is not that the music evokes the war itself, according to Blacking. Rather, it recalls and remakes an earlier social mind set in the listener: The motion of music alone seems to awaken in our bodies all kinds of responses. And yet people’s responses to music cannot be fully explained without some references to their experiences in the culture of which the notes are signs and symbols. If a piece of music moves a variety of listeners, it is probably not because of its outward form but because of what the form means to each listener in terms of human experience [. . .]. [U]nder certain conditions, the sound of music may recall a state of consciousness that has been acquired through processes of social experience [. . .]. [I]t is effective only because of associations between certain individual and cultural experiences.91

This “state of consciousness” gained through “social experience” might be seen in a number of prior social contexts: in the wartime experiences of the volunteers themselves, or in the camaraderie of the Popular Front and antifascism during the 1930s. Both are referenced through this music.

204

Radical Nostalgia

The responses Blacking identifies might be particularly applicable to the Civil War songs of Spanish origin. Whereas “Jarama Valley,” a melody familiar in the United States and Britain, is connected to the war only because of the new lyrics penned by Alec McDade and his “interpreters,” the “signs and symbols” of the specifically Spanish melodies may generate deeper associations. The melodies themselves, lyrics notwithstanding, signify Spain to an American audience. “I have no idea what they’re really talking about,” Hannah Olson Creighton said of “Venga Jaleo.” “It’s just such a passionate song.”92 Peter Carroll concurred: “it’s all the music, it’s total melody, all melodic.”93 Derived from different scales and using different harmonic structures, these foreign songs have an “otherness” that resonates, and that can signify the difficult journey, the distance from home, the risks taken, the values the volunteers were trying to protect, the ideologies behind their actions, or simply Spain itself. The Spanish melodies, within the commemorative context, can come to represent an entire sociopolitical milieu.94 The songs’ social references for those attending these commemorative events are perhaps their most important function. They evoke not only a time and place, but also the shared sense of common purpose and idealism that moment “means” now, which can transcend internal disputes. “Music can express social attitudes and cognitive processes,” according to Blacking, “but it is useful and effective only when it is heard by the prepared and receptive ears of people who have shared, or can share in some way, the cultural and individual experience of its creators.”95 In this case, the veterans take on the role of the music’s “creators.” It was through their experience of the music in a specific context that it was written into these commemorative events. Through these songs, the veterans share their emotional experience of the war and its aftermath with a community defined by its “prepared and receptive ears.” That “inescapable moment of nostalgia” that Bill Susman felt when he returned to Spain, and the exclusivity of the veterans’ experience that Edwin Rolfe heard in the words “You will never be happy with strangers / They would not understand you as we”—these examples of “cultural and individual

Songs of the Lincoln Brigade

205

experience” with strong emotional content are shared through the music in the commemorative process. The music also serves as a symbol. “The role of symbols in society is to ‘re-present’ the intangible, fluid and dynamic set of social relationships within which we live,” John Shepherd has written. “But because the utterance (or ‘outerance’) of a symbol involves articulation of the material universe (if it did not, the symbol would be imperceptible), any form of communication freezes and so dilutes the fluid complexity of social relationships.” The social becomes reified through symbolic systems, but music may have particular significance in this regard. “[B]ecause of its inherently fluid and dynamic nature,” Shepherd stated, “music is well suited to convey the dynamic power of social relationships as experienced in real time. It may be asserted that music objectifies social processes less than most other symbolic modes.”96 This may account for the immediate viability of these songs in the commemorative context. It is important to recognize the ways in which these socially produced symbols can construct reality: The meaning of symbols and sets of symbols are originally derived from specific and real situations. But there is another side of the coin. Once a symbol or set of symbols have been created in response to a new situation these symbols, in retrospect, colour that situation. When people look back at a series of events they do so by means of and through the symbols created to define it.97

We see the war, therefore, in and through its music. As Claudia Koonz has stated, “in all communication, historical memorialization depends upon the interpretation of a signifier, a word or symbol that stands between the viewer and the event commemorated.”98 This music, as a commemorative object, is no different. Symbolizing the war, it has, for many people, become it. If reality is socially constructed, many elements contribute to that construction. The songs of the Spanish Civil War are part of its presence for a modern audience. Individual songs may filter “in” a desired version of the war, with certain social and historical

206

Radical Nostalgia

traces intact and others potentially glossed over. Taken together, however—from the militaristic “El Quinto Regimiento” to the celebratory “Viva La Quince Brigada,” the bitterly humorous “Si Me Quieres Escribir,” and the honorific “Jarama Valley”—they render the event with more texture and detail.

Of the People “They stuck so tight,” Ronnie Gilbert said in our 1996 interview, commenting on her first experiences with the Spanish music from the war—“authentic, exotic, emotional, and ‘of the people.’ ”99 Simon Frith, in his 1996 Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music, rejects Frankfurt School separations of so-called “art” music of the high culture and “popular” music of the low. Frith’s project “is about taking popular discrimination seriously” based on two assumptions: “that the essence of popular cultural practice is making judgments and assessing differences” and “that there is no reason to believe a priori that such judgments work differently in different cultural spheres.”100 Frith is looking specifically at commercial music, as opposed to the comparatively obscure songs from the Spanish Civil War, but he goes on to speak of folk music in general, and he identifies its appeal to the political left: “The starting argument here is that the value of the music has to be understood in terms of cultural necessity—ideally, there is no separation of art and life. The appreciation of the music is therefore tied up with an appreciation of its social function.” Folk music in performance is also suffused with artifice, according to Frith: “the folk values of the natural, the spontaneous, and the immediate are, in fact, only realized through subterfuge . . . ‘an elaborate construction of informality,’ ” quoting Niall MacKinnon.101 The revised “Jarama Valley” and its reframing by Tapsell might be a perfect example of constructed informality realized through subterfuge. The original had nothing to hide. Frith acknowledges that “folk ideology” is “rhetorically very persuasive.”102 In the milieu of the folk festival, it “seeks to solve

Songs of the Lincoln Brigade

207

the problem of musical ‘authenticity’; it offers the experience of the folk ideal, the experience of collective, participatory music making, the chance to judge music by its direct contribution to sociability.”103 This expands on Shepherd. “Folk” and its “performing rituals” may organize the defining symbols through which Shepherd claims people view the past. In Frith’s analysis, folk music performs as integral and functional to the social world: it lacks class affectation, is framed as “authentic,” and connects audience and performer, art and life. “Robeson sang for us,” the Volunteer for Liberty reported in 1946, “and there was no separation between what he sang and what he said when he spoke. His songs were part of his speech.”104 In its calculations, folk becomes a perfect medium for politics. And in the context of commemoration, its claim to “truth” is even more compelling. Frith exposes the rhetoric inherent in the folk idiom itself, productively deployed in commemorations of the Spanish Civil War, and by virtue of a “cultural necessity” within this community, points to its political efficacy. The different languages, along with the recognizable names of people and places intoned in the lyrics all carry cultural signifiers. “If music is meaningful in emotional terms,” according to Frith, “it is [. . .] largely as an effect of cultural rather than psychological conditions.” Frith quotes Nöel Carroll, writing on film music: “music is expressive of ‘emotive qualities but ones that are inexplicit, ambiguous and broad.’ To become explicit emotion must refer to something, the broad feeling must be focused on the relevant object on the screen or in the narrative.”105 Meaning is made in that tension between the inherent but floating emotionality of the music and its “relevant object . . . in the narrative.” In the case of commemoration, that “relevant object” may be certain versions of the Spanish Civil War narrative itself, constitutive of a series of actions and beliefs: the act of volunteering, militant antifascism, the defense of democracy, resistance to governmental power, and so on. That narrative can be reinforced in commemorative theater, when the songs are juxtaposed with images, posters, poems, and other evocative and referential texts (see figure 27). The music’s “floating emotionality” would also

208

Radical Nostalgia

interact with the highly relevant “human” objects that are veterans themselves. Effectively authentic, standing on the stage or sitting in the sight of singers and audience, they become narrative anchors as well. Like the veterans, the songs were part of the struggle, and carry it in their rhythms, lyrics, and melodic turns. “If the significance of music is socially located,” John Shepherd states, “then it must be understood to form part of the socially constructed reality of the groups or societies responsible for producing and consuming the music in question.”106 Audience and performer, consumer and producer, Spaniard and American, and past and present all dynamically coalesce through these songs placed on the commemorative stage.

Deep Song The living presence of the body in vocal production is what Roland Barthes has called “the grain of the voice,” present and resonant in certain performances, songs, prayers, and stories. Barthes privileges the singing body over its soul, the mouth and glottis over the lungs. “Listen to a Russian bass,” Barthes insists: [S]omething is there, manifest and stubborn (one hears only that), beyond (or before) the meaning of words [. . .], something which is directly the cantor’s body, brought to your ears in one and the same movement from deep down in the cavities, the muscles, the membranes, the cartilages, from deep down in the Slavonic language, as though a single skin lines the inner flesh of the performer and the music he sings. [. . .] Above all, this voice bears along directly the symbolic, over the intelligible, the expressive. [. . .] The ‘grain’ is that: the materiality of the body speaking its mother tongue; perhaps the letter, almost certainly the significance.107

For Barthes, singing that lacks “grain” lacks “materiality.” Describing celebrated singer Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, “everything in the (semantic and lyrical) structure is respected and yet nothing seduces, nothing sways us to jouissance,” whereas the Russian bass would have that seductive influence.108 Barthes

Songs of the Lincoln Brigade

209

might have appreciated the singing of Woody Guthrie, interpreted by folk singer Arthur Stern: I’ve tried to describe what Woody’s voice did to me, just his voice, and it was . . . A knife is no good, as an image. A razor is better, but a razor is too broad and has too much surface . . . A stiletto that’s sharp all the way, went right in, pierced you through and through and made your hair stand on end. It was a scream, or a sneer, of extraordinary power.109

I do not mean to suggest that all American folk singers could match Guthrie’s “scream,” or capture the “materiality” of Spanish music in their renditions of these songs, as much as they might want to. But if a cantor vocalizes bodily materiality, traditional Spanish music in general, and flamenco in particular, has similar attributes. In his book Men in Battle, Alvah Bessie describes a scene in a restaurant suddenly blacked out during an air raid, when a Spanish woman began to sing: She had a deep and rich soprano, and she was singing flamenco, the variety of song most accurately described as canto hondo (deep song); a song rich in Moorish overtones, sung on a scale we do not know. [. . .] In it there was the hope and the sorrow and the exasperation of a nation, and it seemed exactly right in the dining room of invisible people, waiting patiently for possible death. It was, although its origins were deeper and far older, the quiet and perfect expression of this war, it was the voice of an entire people crying for freedom and for human dignity.110

What the veterans witnessed in Spanish singing, and Seeger heard in the early Keynote sessions with flamenco musicians, may have been a deep, crying, seductive jouissance to which they aspired. Their impassioned attempts at “en/grained” translations, flawed though they may have been, may be part of the reason the melodies “stuck so tight.” Experiencing these particular songs within the ideological context of commemoration has weight and produces meaning for this community, amateurs and professionals

210

Radical Nostalgia

alike. The songs are a key part of their heritage. For David Lowenthal, “heritage distills the past into icons of identity, bonding us with precursors and progenitors.”111 Hannah Creighton may have reacted negatively to “Jarama Valley,” but it remained a part of her heritage, and clarified her own distinct identity within the larger commemorative community. “[T]he voice is the sound of the body in a direct sense,” Simon Frith states (emphasis in original). Certain physical experiences, particularly extreme feelings, are given vocal sounds beyond our conscious control—the sounds of pain, lust, ecstasy, fear, what one might call inarticulate articulacy: the sounds, for example, of tears and laughter; the sounds made by soul singers around and between the notes, vocal noises that seem expressive of their deepest feelings because we hear them as if they’d escaped from a body that the mind—language—can no longer control.112

And how is this voice received? “Sound (and therefore music as text),” states John Shepherd, “is the only major channel of communication that actively vibrates inside the body. [. . .] Sound is thus felt in addition to being ‘heard’. [. . .] Sound [. . .] is in the body and enters the body.”113 Meaning, therefore, is made not only in the presence of attentive bodies, but in them as well. One not only witnesses sound, but participates in it. And Frith takes it one crucial step further: “ ‘listening’ itself is a performance: to understand how musical pleasure, meaning, and evaluation work, we have to understand how, as listeners, we perform the music for ourselves.”114 Pete Seeger has spoken of the unique place the march “Viva La Quince Brigada” has had in this body of work. It is the final rousing song in the revue Pasiones, before the encore “Jarama Valley,” and inspired a standing ovation at the 2001 commemorative events in Oakland and New York. It was also the rousing finale for We Must Remember! in 2000. In the 1960s, Seeger sang “Viva La Quince Brigada” by request for the German antifascist

Songs of the Lincoln Brigade

211

composer who wrote “Freiheit” before he was deported from the United States, and later for V. J. Jerome, head of the Communist Party’s cultural commission, when he was dying of cancer. Why did they want to hear this particular song? “It has militance,” Seeger said. I had asked him why he thought the Spanish Civil War songs have lasted so long, and he referred again to “Viva La Quince Brigada”: “It reminds pacifists that there are times when pacifism can’t do the job.”115 This is a profound suggestion: that this song is synecdochic for radical action. If a voice can have grain, perhaps certain songs like “Viva La Quince Brigada” can possess something similar. While singing or listening to this march, this martial anthem—a practiced rhythmic artifact of bodily camaraderie and militance—audiences may take in and perform some lingering physical trace of what it meant to go to Spain in the 1930s. People for whom armed combat might be personally anathema are reminded of a passionate time when there were causes worth dying for. If Frith is correct, they actually perform it internally. “It’s the Spanish songs. It’s the driving beat,” Peter Carroll said. “You can’t get the feeling without that,” in Linda Lustig’s words. The march vibrates in their bodies and perhaps brings them one rhythmic step closer to defiance.

The Felt Materiality of the World As an essential component of Spanish Civil War commemorations, music increases the potential for made meaning and engages the listener in an active/(act of) performance. “If human language is important to facilitating a clear distinction between thought and the world on which thought operates,” John Shepherd claims, “then other modes of communication, in making their materiality felt, remind us of our connectedness to the materiality of the world as signified. Music [. . .] is most notable among these other modes of communication.”116 Music, for Shepherd, is able to convey degrees of meaning inaccessible to the spoken word. The social is immanent in the musical.117

212

Radical Nostalgia

“[M]usic can reveal the nature of feelings with a detail and truth that language cannot approach,” in the words of Susan Langner.118 Music can carry Raymond Williams’s “structures of feeling,” a relationship hinted at throughout this chapter and to be developed further in my conclusion. Williams defines these “structures” from the past as “specifically affective elements of consciousness and relationships: not feeling against thought, but thought as felt and feeling as thought.”119 Recalling Robbie Lieberman, songs can be “stubbornly asserting their connection to earlier periods and meanings.”120 With their “articulation of social meanings” and revelation of feelings “with a detail and truth that language cannot approach,” songs such as these may be among the more productive vehicles for the “structures” Williams has identified. These songs originated in Spain, but they carry an American trace now and serve an American purpose. When the songs were first sung by American throats, when they first resonated in those chests in Spain, they took on a spin particular to American emotion, American musical tradition, and the American leftwing politic. As deeply as the Spanish cause was felt, when the songs came across the Atlantic and eventually into a recording studio, they were informed by yet a new set of sensibilities. Pete Seeger’s flamenco-style banjo opening of “Venga Jaleo” was not the only new interpretation of this quintessentially Spanish music. These songs have lasted not simply because they were good songs. Their endurance has had as much to do with American struggles as with Spanish ones. This music is not only a living, performed memorial to the Civil War in Spain and its American participants. As artifacts of the event itself, passed from body to body and generation to generation, the songs play an activist role as well and serve a local purpose. The event these songs represent, however, is not uncomplicated. The second commemorative performance I directed in Oakland in February 1995 starred Ronnie Gilbert. She has been singing these songs all her life and had recorded some of them with the Weavers. She performed for the veterans on many occasions, including the fiftieth anniversary at Lincoln Center.

Songs of the Lincoln Brigade

213

When Bruce Barthol and I asked her to participate in the Oakland event, she demurred at first, but ultimately agreed. Her singing was magnificent. When I interviewed her in December 1996, I asked her about her second thoughts the year before. Why had she hesitated to perform these songs? Just as Hannah’s strong feelings about “Jarama Valley” opened into a discussion of gender issues and Party politics, my question to Ronnie led one of the best known singer/activists in the United States to question her own music and her responsibilities as an artist: I haven’t stopped singing them but I’m very conflicted about it. One of the other things about these songs is that they’re . . . connected to the kind of settling of problems that I . . . devote my life to [laughs], you know, saying “No, this is not the way, because we’re killing; we’re killing ourselves, we’re killing our planet, we’re destroying everything,” and though I was on the side of the Spanish, obviously, the Spanish Republicans, and I treasure them in one way, and treasure the songs in a way, on the other hand I know that songs are . . . The songs of the First World War, the German marching songs were very instrumental in getting people revved up. So how long can we go on saying we’re against war, we don’t want to, we want to find, develop, another consciousness around the settling of problems, and still go on singing our favorite war songs?

I spoke of the way the physical act of singing can get a song “worked into our neurons,” and she picked up on that idea: Therein lies my conflict about them. We’d like to say and think, and I hope it’s true, that what’s getting worked into the neurons is a sense, an understanding and a sense of what the people who went to fight that war had in their hearts; that it was entirely, that it was strongly: “We’ve got to save our world from the worst kind of calamity.” I think that’s why they went, and yet, I don’t think they would have gone if they hadn’t been already imbued with a sense of militaristic possibility. [. . .]

214

Radical Nostalgia It goes back to the same old argument. I know I said to Bruce [Barthol] that I’ve thought over and over again, “Just stop singing these songs. You’re just adding to the burden of people who are saying . . . ‘Look at this world we’re in now,’ I don’t know how long it’ll last, you know, but ‘this is what that path leads to. That’s what it has led to.’ ” And can you say that had the Republicans won the war . . . how would it have affected life? We like to think that it would have made things better, yet we’ve had an example now of the Soviet Union, of China. So there’s more at work here than the intellectual and good hearts . . . there’s more at work here with the human race. I don’t know where to start, except to say: “Stop memorializing, stop glorifying war, even the ones you approve of.”121

Ronnie voiced many of my own hesitations about our collective, ongoing celebration of a militaristic moment, and of an organization with a Stalinist past. And yet with all her hesitations, she had still sung for the veterans, as I have, perhaps because of what we thought/hoped they had in their hearts, and what we felt in our own. Thriving within ceremonies of commemoration, the songs of the Spanish Civil War can perform the past without denying the present. They offer an audience the opportunity to recall and reengage one of the most important acts of resistance in the twentieth century. In the immediacy of these embodied performances, and in the political context of a present moment, the Spanish Civil War cannot be dismissed, nor can the pressing issues it calls up, however complicated they might be. Elements of its history are reinvigorated, the actions it inspired rehonored, and its significance renewed. “Thus we may say that our experiences of the present largely depend upon our knowledge of the past,” Paul Connerton has stated, “and that our images of the past commonly serve to legitimate a present social order.”122 And since our “experience of the present” determines our actions and attitudes towards the future, these musical performances of history can move us forward.

Chapter 6

Breathing Memory

I want to show how different the past was. I want to show that even when times were hard, people found ways to cope with what was happening and maybe resist it. I want people today to be able to connect with the past by looking at the tragedies and sufferings of the past, the cruelties and the hatefulness, the hope of the past, the love people had, and the beauty they had. They sought for power over each other, but they helped each other, too. They did things out of both love and fear— that’s my message. Especially, I want to show that it could be different, that it was different and there are alternatives. Natalie Zemon Davis Visions of History

Interpretive Communities/Communities of Memory When Moe Fishman traveled to East Germany in 1961, he went as a veteran of the Spanish Civil War. He was also a printer, a husband, a father, and an activist, but it was his identity as a Spanish Civil War veteran that brought him to the reunion and charged his experiences. When Bill Susman started to weep sitting on a bench in Spain in 1977, or when Nick Pappas cried as he was flying over a battlefield, it was their history as antifascist volunteers in Spain that brought on the emotion. In a similar way, the strong responses of Hannah and Martha Olson in Italy, or those of the individuals who attend commemorative events in the United States year after year, all

216

Radical Nostalgia

arise in relationship to a specific history, or specific interpretations of that history. The vast majority of those attending recent commemorative events were not volunteers, nor were most of them even alive during the Spanish Civil War, but their ability to assign value to that moment, for innumerable possible reasons, brings them into the room and shapes their responses. “We choose the history that we celebrate,” Peter Carroll told me. “There’s a lot of histories. We could be celebrating Roosevelt who didn’t intervene. [. . .] That’s a history. That’s a valid history for some people. It’s not our valid history because we’re radicals. We’re already out there.”1 Peter’s “we” was referring to those who have organized and staged the modern commemorative process, but it could as easily refer to the commemorative audience in general. We choose the history we celebrate. We choose it for a reason, and choosing it is a commitment. We also choose the histories we denigrate. Anti-Communists can be less passionate about celebrating the war in Spain because of the often unyielding leadership of the Party and the suppression of the Trotskyites, or the unforgivable Stalinist crimes that later came to light. This chosen past is not innocent of Frijda’s “blind spots.”2 But groups do not gather every year to celebrate the death of Stalin or Khrushchev’s revelations. They do gather to remember the antifascist fight in Spain because of its singularity, and the solid, moral, selfless intentions of the majority of its participants. They become the focus. The validation that Martha felt in Italy, seeing her father acknowledged as a hero by the city of Florence, depended completely on context. Moe Fishman told me his grandniece attended the commemorative performance of We Must Remember! in Oakland in 2000, and that most of it “went over her head.” She “adored her Uncle Moe,” he told me, and knew he had been a volunteer, but she lacked adequate supporting context.3 Countless times when I have been preparing commemorative scripts, or discussing an upcoming performance or poetry reading, the veterans have said: “Make sure you give the history of the war.” They know how unfamiliar it is, and they demand historicization. Without it, they feel, nothing will land.

Breathing Memory

217

Stanley Fish might describe the veterans and their families and audiences as an interpretive community. Though the term is used within the context of literary criticism, it can certainly be applied to performance contexts as well. Marvin Carlson has shown, citing Fish, that the relationship between a reader and a text parallels that of an audience and an object of performance, and reader-response and reception theory may be applied to theatrical contexts.4 When Stanley Fish asked the question, “Is the reader or the text the source of meaning?,” he privileged the role of the reader. Fish looked back on his own earlier work in the 1980 Is There a Text in This Class? [T]he activities of the reader were given a prominence and importance they did not have before: if meaning is embedded in the text, the reader’s responsibilities are limited to the job of getting it out; but if meaning develops, and if it develops in a dynamic relationship with the reader’s expectations, projections, conclusions, judgments, and assumptions, these activities (the things the reader does) are not merely instrumental, or mechanical, but essential.5

“Interpretive communities,” Fish later states, “are made up of those who share interpretive strategies not for reading (in the conventional sense) but for writing texts, for constituting their properties and assigning their intentions. In other words, these strategies exist prior to the act of reading and therefore determine the shape of what is read rather than, as is usually assumed, the other way around.”6 When communities surrounding International Brigaders gather in these reunions, or stage commemorative “texts,” there are a series of preexisting and “essential” assumptions in place about the history they have chosen. Audiences have what Blacking has called “prepared and receptive ears.”7 There are also, of course, numerous disagreements and discrepancies, but within the context of commemoration, it is these assumptions that determine, to a very great extent, how meaning is both made and received. To cite Fish again: “The very existence of the ‘marks’ [made by authors] is a function of an interpretive

218

Radical Nostalgia

community, for they will be recognized (that is, made) only by its members.”8 The presence of an interpretive community is an important valence in performance. It augments and enhances the communicative possibilities. Information is available to anyone present, but familiarity with a community’s past experiences and cultural practices allows for more intimate connections between performer and audience, and heightened access to the historical traces and threads. As Fish states, meaning “develops in a dynamic relationship.” It was already taking shape before pen touched paper for Norman Rosten’s 1945 Road from Madrid, or for Spain 40! or We Must Remember! Fish places the solitary reader, and author, within a community of interpretation. David Middleton and Derek Edwards have referred to the work of Robert Bellah and his colleagues on the way certain groups are shaped by the past. The commemorative community in question here was shaped by a history and an ideology of collective action. Bellah and his collaborators draw community and collectivity together along moral lines, setting up a tension with individual actions: [Bellah et al.] identify two “languages” of moral discourse. One is concerned with the language of the “self-reliant individual,” while the other articulates aspects of tradition and commitment in everyday life that are transcendent of an ahistorical individualism. That “second language,” as they call it, of moral discourse, is rooted in communities that are “in an important sense constituted by their past.” They argue that it is possible to speak of a “real community” as a “community of memory,” one that does not forget its past. In order not to forget its past, a community is involved in retelling its story, its “constitutive narrative.”9

Without question, this interpretive community surrounding Spanish Civil War veterans is a community of memory committed to “retelling . . . its constitutive narrative.” Others may dispute the content of this narrative, but this group is defined by the

Breathing Memory

219

story it chooses to tell. Its members include those who participated in the Spanish Civil War, and others for whom it is a chosen history.

Performative Memorialization: The Sacred Landscape The commemorative events under study were organized by localized communities within a larger nation and designed to bring those communities together to serve particular needs and interests that were often at odds with national agendas. Meaning is more easily made in circumscribed contexts. Early commemorative gatherings recognized volunteers within specific groups or neighborhoods—for example, an event to honor Jewish volunteers in November 1937 in New York City.10 Starting in 1982, the printed programs for the San Francisco Bay Area events listed the names of all area volunteers, living and dead, as did the program for the 1997 event in Chicago. Lists like these help define the local community of memory. The Chicago decision to name all the local volunteers was made after the widow of a recently deceased veteran expressed her concern that those veterans no longer alive were not receiving sufficient attention, reminding us that in our commemorative process the dead were no less worthy of recognition than the living.11 The souvenir program for the fiftieth-anniversary celebration at Avery Fisher Hall contained the first comprehensive list of all the American volunteers, a three-year effort. The ten-page spread of roughly 2,800 names, a printed litany in small, bold, black type over a gray background, evokes the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, except that this list includes both the living and the dead. Unlike the war in Vietnam, where participation was often not by choice, Spanish Civil War commemoration fifty years on honored presence over sacrifice.12 These were all volunteers. “The most obvious reason why ‘theater’ and modern war seem so compatible,” Paul Fussell has written, “is that modern wars are

220

Radical Nostalgia

fought by conscripted armies, whose members know they are only temporarily playing their ill-learned parts.”13 There were no literal conscripts in the International Brigades. For the volunteers, participating by choice, there was less distance between the actor and the role. If England’s “first conscript army” began “the modern world,” according to Fussell, then this international military force of volunteers fighting on behalf of another country might have its own epochal implications.14 As the first substantial, broad-based response against fascist aggression, the Spanish Civil War effectively initiated Allied participation in World War II, whatever its affiliation with Communist Party policies. Commemoration puts these histories into perspective, and radical nostalgia revises what Jay Winter has called a “traditional vocabulary of mourning” by insisting on a concomitant language of politics.15 It is the ritual and performative aspects of commemorative events that define them and allow them to serve the changing needs of the communities they inhabit. As Fish points out, the construction of meaning is “dynamic.” “Shrines and commemorative rituals are war memorials that emphasize sacredness but not utility,” James Mayo has written of physical memorials and the events that might be staged around them. “They commemorate those people who fought to preserve certain human values.” The veterans’ gatherings are committed to the preservation of values, but they would seem to challenge the lack of utility Mayo assumes, especially if there is a “temporal dimension,” recalling Fish, to the actualization of meaning. Describing events staged in outdoor spaces containing artifacts of war, such as a field of bomber remains or a battlefield site, Mayo could be speaking instead of Spanish Civil War commemorations, even though they take place indoors in a “found” landscape: War memory, whether sacred or nonsacred, becomes active in a landscape through rituals that enable people to use war as an ongoing event in their lives. Rituals transform a landscape and the memory associated with it, even if only briefly. These events may be enhanced and made more intricate to portray war history, or they may fade if the

Breathing Memory

221

events or war history itself is no longer considered important. All rituals depend on self-renewal among the players to validate the ritual scene, sacred or not. Through rituals people can focus on war memory, and their performances temporarily renew the importance of these memories in the landscape.16

The United States lacks any literal landscape that has relevance to the Spanish Civil War, but ritual scenes and sacred spaces may be constructed in other ways.17 “Sacredness,” in Mayo’s words, “is expressed through the sharing of sacred values.”18 Antifascism, activism, and progressive politics are sacred values within this community of memory. Mayo quotes Yi-Fu Tuan on how bodies construct spaces: “A ritual dance, while it lasts, converts a meadow into a sacred space, but as soon as the dance ends, the space reverts to a meadow.”19 Even the most prosaic spaces may be transformed by ritual. And, according to James Young, one does not have to be a member of a specific community to participate: “Insofar as I stand within the perimeter of these memorial spaces, I become part of the performance, whether I like it or not.”20 This is how a new generation can be brought into the veterans’ commemorative community, one way in which the “we” is broadened. A separate world is created, with its own rules and values, and it embraces its audience. Any efforts to commemorate war, according to Mayo, “unavoidably create a distinct political landscape.”21 “Sitting in Avery Fisher Hall,” Joe Doyle commented in the Volunteer in 1986, “it was as if the temporizing climate of the 1980s had been temporarily shut outside the doors.”22 Participation alone may not yield deep understanding and empathy, if Fish’s theory of “interpretive communities” holds, but it is within sacred spaces saturated with meaning that these commemorative performances take place and gather witnesses. This is why the songs, poems, and images from the war have become so important to the veterans and their interpretive communities of memory. The veterans of the war in Spain, their families, and the active communities that shared their belief systems have needed a way to come to terms emotionally with

222

Radical Nostalgia

the war and its outcome, and also to acknowledge and further the political goals it represented. Remembering, therefore, is a political act. The songs and other artifacts, conveying what Jay Winter has called the “aesthetics of direct experience,” gave memory substance and radical nostalgia its teeth.23 The retelling that defines this community of memory, that constructs and maintains it, is a ritual process, a series of repeated and repeating ceremonies of citation. The aesthetic artifacts are tools in the remembering Edwin Rolfe demanded in “Postscript to a War.” They are valued as traces of the war and serve to “renew the importance” of one’s memories. People attend the events to achieve the “self-renewal” Mayo describes and to “validate” not a particular physical “scene” as much as a world view, a politic, a set of beliefs. The artists and writers who have shaped these events make a political landscape with the songs, speeches, poems, and photographs that are worked into many of the performances. The music can create that landscape and transform it at the same time. The foreign words and melodies conjure Spain for both singers and witnesses. The songs reinforce ideals and belief systems by remaking, or re-performing, a particular time, a “golden moment,” when a combination of unusual circumstances and deep political commitment called on a group of people to stand up for their beliefs in a brave and eventful manner. Witnessing the songs in performance and participating in the singing connects audiences and performers to the moment and spirit of their creation, making it possible to “feel the beauty and passion of Spain’s epic struggle for freedom,” recalling the response to Pete Seeger’s 1979 performance.24 “Rituals reveal values at their deepest level,” Victor Turner states in The Ritual Process, quoting Monica Wilson. “[M]en express in ritual what moves them most [. . .]; it is the value of the group that is revealed.”25 Values and deep beliefs undergird these commemorative events, and are also always on display. Margaret Thompson Drewal states that “[i]t is the basic function of both theater and ritual to restore behavior.”26 The singing of songs identified with the Spanish Civil War and the manipulation and presentation of other aesthetic artifacts is a ritualized

Breathing Memory

223

restoration. For those who were present in Spain, the songs, images, and other texts recall the war. For those who were not, they represent the war; they cite it and carry it within the newly created sacred space of commemorative performance.

The Sacred in the Secular “[A]ntifascism was a commonality,” Aaron Hilkevitch said when we spoke. “That’s not legend. Most people were very conscious of it, and that was a good feeling . . . whatever differences we had.” This is an oft-repeated concept when people look back on the Spanish Civil War. Even in contentious, fractious times, it was a cause many different groups could support. It engendered good feeling that was common and conscious. When I spoke with Moe Fishman in the VALB office in July 2000 about the success of the commemorative events in general, he suggested that the commonality Aaron identified extended into the 1950s and contributed to the ongoing popularity of the annual gatherings, even when internal political conflicts were at their worst: You have to remember now something else that happens, that plays a big role, not in our wanting it, but in its success, and that is that in ’56 after the convention [of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union], the uh . . . what’s the name of the . . . the guy who was secretary after, uh, Stalin? [“Khrushchev?” I offered.] Khrushchev. After the Khrushchev revelations in ’56, a whole number of Party people had left, including a large number of vets, and when we ran the dinner, it’s interesting, they all showed up, even in ’57. We acted as an umbrella. And whereas this guy wouldn’t even talk to Joe Brandt,27 because he disagreed with him, but they’ve been buddies for God knows how long, and fought together in Spain, and that umbrella, they would talk to each other when they were at the event, so it played that kind of a role, and so from that time on we just built on this.28

224

Radical Nostalgia

Moe may be underplaying the frictions within the organization at that time, but many have referred to the Spanish Civil War as a common cause. Roby Newman described the veterans’ ability to unify within a context of deep disagreement even more graphically: “They can treat each other like dogs, but they will, they will band together like blood brothers in ways that is breathtaking, and that, fills my eyes with tears.”29 “I think everybody agreed with the . . . fight in the Spanish Civil War,” Linda Lustig said, commenting on attendance at events in the Bay Area. “[T]here wasn’t any disagreement as to whether it should have, that the vets should have gone or anything like that.” For her generation, though, factionalism from the 1960s was much fresher and harder to gloss over. “It’s almost because [Spain] was in the past, it was easier to agree [. . .], to celebrate something from the past.”30 For many, time allowed Spain to be a more ready subject for shared feelings; the 1960s were too recent. Independent of Moe’s description of the 1950s, Peter Carroll used similar language to describe the success of the commemorative gatherings in subsequent years: “It’s the idea these events become the umbrella in which many radical traditions are honored and perpetuated.”31 This strongly suggests a relationship between the veterans’ general unification around the Spanish Civil War, whatever other disagreements they may have had, and the success of the larger Left at doing the same. Linda Lustig was even more specific in describing the annual affairs in the Bay Area: They were wonderful places because you could see people who were active in all kinds of things that we related to . . . And it was a way people could put aside their political differences, they were all generally on the same side, but you know, people can splinter into different directions . . . it was a great feeling, that in this sense, we were all united, and we were doing some things now, but it brought us back to the past, so I found it incredibly moving.32

In those words from a committed activist, describing people united and active in the present and moved by the past, lies a key

Breathing Memory

225

to radical nostalgia. The past “might act and will act by inserting itself into a present situation from which it borrows the vitality,” in the words of Henri Bergson, as quoted by Boym.33 The past is emotionally compelling, in a positive sense, because of the present, not in spite of it. Dating back to the earliest dinners, Spanish Civil War commemorations became one of the few annual events where people of different factions on the Left could put aside their differences for an afternoon and gather in recognition of what they shared. As Martha said, describing her own experience of the affairs and expressing the lasting sense of common purpose, “you’re . . . part of this continuum, you’re part of a community [. . .] about the importance of people’s struggles, and the importance of people being able to come together and act together, and make a political statement, and all of that important ethic which was so much of a part of why people went to Spain.”34 Within the commemorative embrace, the real, undeniable barriers and battles became less important than the “commonalities.” The music from the Spanish Civil War and group singing perform this sense of unity. The songs seem to recapture the idealism and solidarity of their moment, and generate strong emotional responses. “[U]nder certain conditions,” Blacking stated, “the sound of music may recall a state of consciousness that has been acquired through processes of social experience. [. . .] [I]t is effective only because of associations between certain individual and cultural experiences.”35 The music from the war becomes an expression of the culture of antifascism. People singing together band together. The song “Jarama Valley,” with a commemorative history dating back at least to 1938, has been one of the most consistent commemorative artifacts, if not the most beloved. “There was singing,” Peter Carroll told me, describing his first contact with the commemorative process in the 1970s; “there was always . . . they would stand up and sing ‘Jarama,’ ‘The Valley of Jarama.’ ”36 In its original form, the word “we” used throughout McDade’s lyric was very specific; it referred to the volunteers themselves. “From this valley they tell us we’re leaving,” the

226

Radical Nostalgia

second verse began, “But don’t hasten to bid us adieu / For e’en though we make our departure / We’ll be back in an hour or two.” The song was written for the volunteers to describe, ironize, and elevate their own experience. It was directed towards their superiors, telling them—“You will never be happy with strangers”—and the soldiers imagined singing the song to them, or at them, but not with them. As soon as the song was shifted to a commemorative context, and from the ironic to the reverent, the song and the word “we” opened up to allow for the inclusion of participants and nonparticipants alike.37 The shifting context allowed for a shift in meaning, while the lyric could remain essentially the same. “We are proud of the Lincoln Battalion / And the fight for Madrid that it made,” my father sang in 1943, not as a volunteer, but representing the feelings of his fellow musicians and people of the Left in general. When Judge Garzón intoned that “we” in his speech, he spoke for the Spanish people. The song’s closing line as sung by International Brigade volunteers back in England in 1939—“Let us stand to our glorious dead”—referred to their own buried comrades. As years passed, anyone who cared to could sing those words and stand and honor their, or our, dead. The recurring “we” involved them all in the commemorative act. The inclusive “we” of the commemorative lyric that lasted for so many decades has connected the survivors to those who lost their lives, the memorializers to the memorialized, the audience to the volunteers. This verbal construction has sacred implications. In How Societies Remember, Paul Connerton examines the use of “we” in liturgical language: Prior to such pronomial utterance there exists an undifferentiated preparedness, expressed by the presence of all the participants in the place where the liturgy is to be celebrated. Through the utterance of the “we” a basic disposition is given definitive form, is constituted, among the members of the liturgical community. The community is initiated when pronouns of solidarity are repeatedly pronounced. In pronouncing the “we” the participants meet not only in an externally definable space but in a kind of ideal space determined by their speech acts. [. . .] [P]erformative utterances

Breathing Memory

227

are as it were the place in which the community is constituted and recalls to itself the fact of its constitution.38

Communities are “constituted” in “pronomial” and “performative utterances.” The first and second verses of “Jarama Valley” return to Spain, the instigating event, whereas the third acknowledges the reality of the commemorative reunion and brings the song right up to the present moment, reinforcing Connerton’s suggestion that a community can be constituted, or its identity reinforced, through its speech acts. The final line of the song is reflexive and directly performative, bringing the audience to its feet in a communal, embodied statement of solidarity and support. Both solidarity and support were necessary for the veterans’ survival after their return from Spain. By going in the first place, they were placing themselves at odds with their own government, their passports stamped “Not Valid for Travel in Spain” after March 4, 1937.39 The volunteers could not have foreseen McCarthy and HUAC, Roby Newman remarked in our discussion, but he thought they were “very aware” of “powerful strains in America that would brand them forever.”40 Whatever they may have anticipated, the “strains” were certainly evident, even virulent, before the first departures, and harassment began the moment they returned with passport seizures and legal challenges. In December 1938 they were the “shock troops” of “a People’s Army” for the Daily Worker, while barred from the Eternal Light, a traditional monument sacralized by the acceptably patriotic victims of the Great War. By the time of the VALB’S 1939 convention, the veterans were already confronting the Dies Committee.41 As a community, they were also defined by resistance. By the 1950s, of course, governmental suppression was at its worst. Roby Newman, never one to mince words, believes that much of the emotion people have felt for the veterans over the years has arisen not only from their actions in Spain, but also in response to their struggles after the war. “It’s completely enmeshed with the idea of sacrifice [. . .] and being a minority,

228

Radical Nostalgia

being hated.”42 Peter Carroll, a historian who “made a very conscious decision to do my history work in public,” defines his commemorative responsibilities clearly: “I believe I’m perpetuating the memory of people who stood up and fought against the system, this, this, wretched capitalist, you know, imperialist system, that we live under. They struggled against it.”43 As idealists, socialists, communists, volunteers, antifascists, trade unionists, protestors, fighters, organizers—in all those ways, most of the veterans worked against existing power structures, and found identity in those battles, which they celebrated and reaffirmed in their annual events. Communitas, as defined by Victor Turner, always exists in conflict with dominant cultural forces and is manifest in social liminality. “In closed or structured societies,” Turner wrote in The Ritual Process, “it is the marginal or ‘inferior’ person or the ‘outsider’ who often comes to symbolize what David Hume has called ‘the sentiment for humanity,’ which in turn relates to the model we have termed ‘communitas.’ ”44 Much of Turner’s research examined social subjects going through rituals of initiation, and I certainly do not mean to suggest that Turner’s model is a perfect fit. Nonetheless, the veterans, and others of their political stripe, were put on trial by American culture, literally and figuratively. Much like the Mukanda novices in Turner’s study, more than metaphorically, the veterans were “stripped” of their public identities and “leveled” when they were harassed, forced underground, denied work, or sent to prison for their political beliefs.45 To “those concerned with the maintenance of ‘structure,’ ” Turner states, “all sustained manifestations of communitas must appear as dangerous and anarchical, and have to be hedged around with prescriptions, prohibitions, and conditions.” Practices such as communitas that exist outside of conventional structures “are almost everywhere regarded as ‘polluting’ and ‘dangerous,’ ” he claims, citing Mary Douglas.46 No two words could better describe the United States’ official reading of Communism and left-wing radicalism in the late 1940s and 1950s as “polluting” and “dangerous.” Traditional, conservatively defined patriotic structures were the governing norm.

Breathing Memory

229

Radical movements were “un-American.” Communism was Godless. Turner distinguishes among three types of communitas: existential or spontaneous, normative, and ideological. “Spontaneous communitas has something ‘magical’ about it,” he wrote in The Ritual Process. “Subjectively there is in it the feeling of endless power.”47 He sees an “egalitarian model” in normative communitas, which advances toward “explicitly formulated views on how men may best live together in comradely harmony.”48 The “egalitarian model” calls up a distinctly socialist vision of the world, one that parallels the kind of social justice and equality Spain represented for many and its commemorative supporters still advocate. Turner, drawing on research sources “both religious and secular,” sees a “connection [. . .] between liminality, structural inferiority, lowermost status, and structural outsiderhood on the one hand” and “universal human values” including “peace and harmony between all men [. . .] universal justice, comradeship and brotherhood” on the other.49 This is the socialism of communitas. Turner reinforces this desire for equality by quoting Martin Buber. Buber, who uses the word “community” for “communitas,” speaks directly to the desire for a free and equal society, and describes the atmosphere the commemorative events can evoke: “Community is the being no longer side by side (and, one might add, above and below) but with one another of a multitude of persons. And this multitude, though it moves towards one goal, yet experiences everywhere a turning to, a dynamic facing of, the others, a flowing from I to Thou. Community is where community happens.”50 Turner also suggests that communitas, motivated by resistance to larger structures, can forge structures of its own: When even two people believe that they experience unity, all people are felt by those two, even if only for a flash, to be one. Feeling generalizes more readily than thought, it would seem! The great difficulty is to keep this intuition alive [. . .]. We thus encounter the paradox that the experience of communitas becomes the memory of communitas,

230

Radical Nostalgia with the result that the communitas itself in striving to replicate itself historically develops a social structure, in which initially free and innovative relationships between individuals are converted into norm-governed relationships between social personae (emphasis in original).51

The VALB’s ritualized and citational commemorative history would seem to exemplify the transition Turner describes: an organizational effort to maintain the feeling of unity the Left experienced in the 1930s within a “social structure,” thus “to keep the intuition alive” that led people to volunteer for the antifascist cause. Experience becomes memory becomes experience. “Communitas [. . .] is accompanied by experiences of unprecedented potency,” Turner states. “The processes of ‘leveling’ and ‘stripping,’ to which [Erving] Goffman has drawn our attention, often appear to flood their subjects with affect.”52 The liberating “flood” of “affect” has been experienced by numerous commemorative witnesses and participants: Milt Wolff pulled to the stage by the music of Pasiones; veterans feeling the passion of Spain’s struggle upon hearing Seeger sing, Pete Hamill’s “tough man” crying at the thirty-second anniversary and the explosive “Viva La Quince Brigada” as performed by the young independentista. The hope is that this flood of affect will generate useful energy, and will have a future. “Communitas has also an aspect of potentiality; it is often in the subjunctive mood.”53 Fabre found an identical mood in the “commemorative spirit” of nineteenthcentury African Americans. She also called it “subjunctive,” where “the ought and should prevailed over the was.”54 For Boym, “the past opens up a multitude of potentialities, non-teleological possibilities of historical development.”55 Commemorative communitas promotes a sense of the possible. The “felt lack” and “if only” Susan Stewart identified with nostalgia inhere, but the feelings of loss are coupled with Turner’s “potentiality.” Radical nostalgia, in this commemorative context, does not enervate as much as inspire. The sacred nature of the commemorative process, evident in Connerton’s references to liturgical language and Mayo’s equating

Breathing Memory

231

of military reunions with church, was also a recurring theme in my interviews with members of the Bay Area commemorative community. Roby Newman called socialism and Communism in the United States “a kind of secular religion.” Martha Olson Jarocki and her sister began to call commemorative events “church,” and named those attending “our ethical community, our values community.”56 If these events offered people other than Martha the inspirational sense of community she describes, otherwise lacking in their secular lives, it is not that hard to understand why they might return to their sacred church, year after year, to hear the sermons, honor the elders, sing the songs together, pass the hat, and do their good works. In this church, they are “with one another,” not just “side by side,” and perform the liturgical “we.” This is the “good feeling” in Aaron Hilkevitch’s “commonality,” and what Moe Fishman wanted to build on. Twice in the printed program for the Chicago commemoration in 1997, the audience was encouraged to sing along with “Jarama Valley,” the final song performed by Jamie O’Reilly and Michael Smith.57 They did sing, along with the six vets and their families, and “pronouns of solidarity” were “repeatedly pronounced.” In that performative moment, Mayo’s “political landscape” was created, “the importance of [. . .] memories in the landscape” were renewed, values were revealed and validated, and new recruits were drawn into the circle. The ritualized song itself, within this interpretive community, became a memorial in microcosm, and a politic performed.

Feeling as Thought Memory communities are shaped not only by moral discourses or by their identification with a particular history. “The major reason we want to commemorate is to make one’s past one’s own,” Nico Frijda states, “and one of the most pressing aspects of the desire to appropriate one’s past may well be to come to terms with its emotional significance.”58 Clearly, instances of emotional

232

Radical Nostalgia

identification with the period of the Spanish Civil War have recurred throughout this study. Almost every person with whom I spoke referred to the emotions of the 1930s, either as they experienced them, as they pictured them, or as they reexperienced them in reunions or commemorative events. It was a passionate time: 22,000 people gathered in Madison Square Garden to mark the first anniversary of the outbreak of the war. In December 1938, thousands met returning veterans and paraded with them to the Eternal Light. Chicago veteran John Rossen told me that he cried at the newsreels from Spain when he saw them as a young man,59 and said of his time there, “Emotionally, it was the most powerful experience of my life.”60 When Guernica was bombed, “we felt it, we really felt it,” Joyce Hilkevitch told me. And when she traveled to Spain in 1996, it called up emotions she had had when she was younger, and their sociopolitical context: “It’s roused some very unusual feelings within me of . . . wanting to pick up the dream that we once had of making, making things work, socially.” She came back to Chicago and helped form the CFLB. It was a shared dream in Joyce’s characterization, another “we,” evinced by the many thousands who supported the Republic during and after the war, and by the crowds who attended dances and commemorative gatherings, then and in the years to come. “You are history,” La Pasionaria told the International Brigades in her farewell address in 1938, “you are legend,” and though her grateful words were understandably emotional and purposefully grand and theatrical, they were also consistent with the feelings and attitudes of their particular moment for people of the Left. The 1930s held Joyce’s “dream that we once had,” and Judy Montell’s “golden moment.” For many Americans of that political persuasion, the veterans embodied the dream. “The story of the vets is a justification for our own lives,” Henry Foner told me when we spoke.61 Each of these examples has its own dynamics, but there does seem to be a certain emotional continuum as far as the Spanish Civil War and its era are concerned. The lived emotional content of the 1930s described in these various vignettes recalls

Breathing Memory

233

again the work of Raymond Williams, who was interested in the emotional and structural particularity of different periods, and in their expression and legibility. Examining the role of music in Spanish Civil War commemoration, and its ability to carry both meaning and emotional material, I referred to his oft-cited structures of feeling, “specifically affective elements of consciousness and relationships.”62 Williams’s theory requires more thorough attention to better understand the commemorative process, and the desire behind the commemorative urge. “We can learn a great deal of the life of other places and times,” Williams wrote in The Long Revolution in 1961, “but certain elements, it seems to me, will always be irrecoverable.” Even those that can be recovered are recovered in abstraction, and this is of crucial importance. We learn each element as a precipitate, but in the living experience of the time every element was in solution, an inseparable part of a complex whole. The most difficult thing to get hold of, in studying any past period, is this felt sense of the quality of life at a particular place and time: a sense of the ways in which particular activities combined into a way of thinking and living.63

Williams believed that one can be “most conscious of such contact in the arts” of a particular time. Changes in language from generation to generation, he believed, were the best cues to discerning shifts in the “felt sense” that he identified: In one sense, this structure of feeling is the culture of a period: it is the particular living result of all the elements in the general organization. And it is in this respect that the arts of a period, taking these to include characteristic approaches and tones in argument, are of major importance. For here, if anywhere, this characteristic is likely to be expressed; often not consciously, but by the fact that here, in the only examples we have of recorded communication that outlives it bearers, the actual living sense, the deep community that makes the communication possible, is naturally drawn upon.64

234

Radical Nostalgia

If the language and “the culture of a period” possess its particularity, examples of the living sense of one period will be recognizable in the next. In Marxism and Literature, Williams used Dickens’s “exposure” of poverty in “new semantic figures” as a “general condition” to exemplify that era’s structure of feeling, as opposed to the characterization of poverty as a “failure or deviation” in early Victorian writings.65 The 1930s are more recent, of course, and though “bearers” of that era’s “actual living sense” remain alive as witnesses and resources, their days are unfortunately numbered. For Williams, the living sense of those times would be equally “irrecoverable” but not invisible, and he remains devoted to finding the traces: Once the carriers of such a structure die, the nearest we can get to this vital element is in the documentary culture, from poems to buildings and dress-fashions, and it is in this relation that gives significance to the definition of culture in documentary terms. [. . .] The significance of documentary culture is that, more clearly than anything else, it expresses that life to us in direct terms, when the living witnesses are silent. At the same time [. . .] we shall not suppose that we can ever do more than make an approach, an approximation, using any channels.66

Williams describes the lived feeling of a given moment, its “sense of life,” as “a particular community of experience,” building on the “deep community” he considers necessary for communication at a given time. It is hard not to see the antifascist activism of the 1930s as practiced by a “deep community” and a “community of experience,” which lay the groundwork for the “communities of memory” and “interpretive communities” of Spanish Civil War commemoration already defined.67 As Aaron Hilkevitch stated, “antifascism was a commonality [. . .] whatever differences we had.” It helped bond the community together. Antifascism’s production of a commonality that crossed factional lines might be a central component of the era’s structure of feeling. It may have resided in literary artifacts such as James Lardner’s unaffected letter home or the poems of Edwin Rolfe, or been captured in

Breathing Memory

235

Dorothy Parker’s reflection, all of which have become performative tropes in this commemorative process. Though the structure of feeling can only be approached or approximated, Williams believed the effort was essential: “the fact of such a characteristic is neither trivial nor marginal; it feels quite central.”68 In Marxism and Literature, from 1971, he further refines his definition in a passage I have cited earlier and will now quote more fully: “[W]e are concerned with meanings and values as they are actively lived and felt,” Williams wrote, “and the relations between these and the formal or systematic beliefs are in practice variable.” We are talking about characteristic elements of impulse, restraint, and tone; specifically affective elements of consciousness and relationships: not feeling against thought but thought as felt and feeling as thought: practical consciousness of a present kind, in a living and interrelating continuity. We are then defining these elements as a “structure”: as a set, with specific internal relations, at once interlocking and in tension.69

Even if the “practical consciousness” of another time is irretrievable, I would propose that a sixty-year intergenerational process of commemorative performance looking back to the 1930s is enamored of recapturing, or at least making contact with, whatever it can of certain “meanings and values as they [were] actively lived and felt.” Feeling, nostalgic or otherwise, is essential. The commemorative urge is a collective desire to restore certain behaviors, the desire to recover meaning and values as they are/were actually lived and felt. “Nostalgic reconstructions are based on mimicry,” Boym claims; “the past is remade in the image of the present or a desired future, collective designs are made to resemble personal aspirations and vice versa.”70 If the commemorative urge is nostalgic, in this case, it is not solely “the desire for desire” but also the desire for meaning and values, lived and felt. Toward the end of my conversation with Martha Jarocki, she spoke of her continuing work on the annual commemorations. “These are my people,” she said, “these are my roots, and if they

236

Radical Nostalgia

need my help, I’ll do it.” I mentioned the fact that her generation, also mine, was having more and more responsibility for the events, and more say in the actual content. She agreed that this was inevitable, but wanted to qualify that concession. It was “an important ethic” for Martha that “for as long as possible” it should be “their gig.” She did not want to forget that history, the commemorative history itself, “because part of what made it so important and so good was it was their gig for so long. And there’s something very valuable for my generation to try to hold that and just help them when they need it . . . facilitate for them . . . because . . . there’s a deep, deep learning there that is still going on for me.”71 The veterans are carriers of the structure, to use Williams’s terminology, and Martha does not want to lose contact with that in the commemorative process, or take that process away from them too quickly. “I just, I get a lot of personal, kind of, happiness, out of trying to pay attention to what Hon [Brown] is thinking, you know what I mean?” Martha told me. “I feel like I’m learning something, I’m not sure what.” The “deep, deep learning that is still going on” for Martha may be contact with Williams’s elusive structure of feeling from that period, accessible through Hon and Milt Wolff and their comrades, through their language, but also in their documentary culture. It is political, an embodied ideology, “meanings and values as they are actively lived and felt . . . affective elements of consciousness and relationships.” Williams’s suggestion that these structures are often best understood through the arts and documentary culture is certainly consistent with the kind of commemorative theater these events have featured over the years, and with growing regularity in recent decades. As the veterans’ numbers decrease, commemoration becomes even more dependent upon aesthetic artifacts, though the surviving veterans’ presence cannot be undervalued. I asked Judy Montell what most moved her at the commemorative events, and she recalled a dramatic reading of Robert Colodny’s speech about Spain and Vietnam in our 1995 script Postscript to a War: Some of the performances, some of the actors’ performances of some of the stuff that they read, it brought it so much

Breathing Memory

237

alive, much better than [my] reading it. I remember the Colodny thing that Bob . . . Ernst did, the first time I heard it. It was just amazing. I was in tears during that, in performance, and I had certainly seen it in script form, I had seen it rehearsed, and whatever . . . he did that in performance, and it just blew me away. It blew him away too, as I recall.

I asked her what it was that made it so effective: It was content. It was the fact that this was a man [Colodny] who had gone to fight, and the sense of . . . [what] he was saying was sometimes it’s important not to fight, you have to invert. [. . .] The intelligence of making that, and the passion. I think it’s the passion that becomes the most thrilling to you because you feel the passion in these guys’ words, and in what they’re saying, and that’s what you respond to, as an audience.72

Colodny’s “intelligence” and his “inversion” colored by a particular “passion” exemplify Williams’s “characteristic approaches and tones in argument” typical of individual structures of feeling. Colodny’s language and rhetorical style stood out thirty years later. “The significance of documentary culture,” Williams stated, “is that, more clearly than anything else, it expresses that life to us in direct terms, when the living witnesses are silent.” The performance of documentary culture gives this community of memory contact with the Left’s 1930s structure of feeling. For Williams, a structure of feeling “does not seem to be, in any formal sense, learned. One generation may train its successor, with reasonable success, in the social character or the general cultural pattern, but the new generation will have its own structure of feeling, which will not appear to have come ‘from’ anywhere.”73 The conflation of intergenerational imbalance and continuity might best be exemplified by comparisons between radical political action in the 1960s and the 1930s, two decades when the Left was prominent. That the veterans began to achieve new attention in the 1960s was no coincidence, but the two decades’ structures were different. This kind of resonant discontinuity on the American Left was exactly that with which

238

Radical Nostalgia

Ronnie Gilbert was struggling. “I was on the side of the Spanish, obviously, the Spanish Republicans, and I treasure them in one way,” she said, but “on the other hand . . . we want to find, develop, another consciousness.” Vaughn Love believed deeply in the civil rights struggle, but he was not a pacifist and “would not have turned the other cheek.” Finding common political ground in Spain and Vietnam, Robert Colodny’s speech may have been so powerful because he managed, and only through “inversion,” to capture the continuities between the different structures of feeling of these two decades, and thereby offered audiences emotional access to both moments simultaneously. Similar to Ann Colley’s Victorian writers and artists, this community desired “some point of correspondence between their [true] present and their [ideological] past [. . .]; to re-enter what is now irrecoverably absent and seemingly unavailable.”74 For Judy Montell and anyone who remembered Vietnam, Colodny’s speech translated the political and emotional semantics of a distant decade into a more immediate, familiar, recognizable language. If nostalgia relies upon “the pastness of the past,” perhaps Colodny’s radical nostalgia worked with the past’s presence. The success of speeches such as his may challenge Williams’s theory that a structure of feeling cannot be learned or taught. One must at least give credit to the veterans for trying, and to the new generation of commemorators for being attentive to those efforts, for continuing to provide a cultural stage where these translations might be attempted. Intergenerational exchange is one of the key characteristics of modern-day commemorations of the Spanish Civil War, as though this community were trying to create every opportunity for continuity, to whatever extent the older structure is available. Roby Newman thought the modern commemorative process unique, “the fact that we’re working and acting in a context which in this culture is fairly unusual; that we have, we really have two if not three generations working together on issues which predate most of the actors, but is being interpreted over time by the younger generation, and that’s going to be happening more and more as the vets die off.”75 “I’ve gone almost

Breathing Memory

239

every year,” Linda Lustig said in our conversation about the annual gatherings. I asked her why: It’s part of my history, and it was very important to me for my kids to understand it, that was very important to me. So they’re all grown up now, but as they became teenagers, I really wanted them to understand what their grandparents did. [. . .] We didn’t talk about it a whole lot, because we also always moved forward, we were very involved in other movements and things, but they certainly got the atmosphere and the feel that it was a real movement. I think that’s the feeling similar to when you’re active, and let’s say involved in marches and that you get a group spirit.76

The commemorations gave Lustig’s children “the atmosphere . . . the feel that it was a real movement,” a feeling “similar” to the “group spirit” of marches and demonstrations, of being politically active. This suggests a kind of performative education. “Culture can seem like a substitute for politics, a way of posing only imaginary solutions to real problems,” according to George Lipsitz, “but under other circumstances culture can become a rehearsal for politics, trying out values and beliefs permissible in art but forbidden in social life.”77 That “rehearsal for politics” builds confidence, and can become the foundation for future performances in other environments that reach further out into the world. Using Turner’s terminology, these rehearsals might help “keep the intuition alive.” Going further, recalling Jackson Lears, perhaps this living intuition and “loving memories of the past” might “spark rebellion against the present in the service of future generations.”78 After We Must Remember! was performed in Oakland in February 2000, I ran into Gerry Jarocki, Martha’s husband, on the street outside the stage door. A quiet man, he became very animated when he saw me, and his eyes lit up. He had loved the program, Gerry told me, but his son Dmitri, then 13, “really got it for the first time.” Dmitri had been to Spain for the reunion in 1996, so the groundwork had been laid, but this year it worked for him. I told Martha of this encounter when we spoke a few

240

Radical Nostalgia

days later. “Dmitri is making all of his political connections now,” she said with pride.79 This may have had something to do with his age, but he had been well prepared. Perhaps “some old man’s memory jump[ed] to a child,” as Spender wrote, a “spark from the days of liberty.” There is an evident desire on both sides of the generational divide to make these associations and connections whenever possible. In New York City, in a program coordinated by Henry Foner, an affluent contributor to ALBA has purchased hundreds of tickets for a number of years for high school and college students to attend the annual commemorations and hear speeches such as Garzón’s. Before the events each year, Foner, Moe Fishman, and other area veterans go into classrooms and tell the story of the war so the students will have the necessary context. “The value of that is to keep alive the tradition,” Foner said, “because it is not in the lifetime. You see, for those people for whom Spain is in their lifetime, you don’t have to ring bells, but these are people to whom Spain is not . . . we’re getting now to a point where the Vietnam War is not in people’s lifetime [. . .]”80 Without the classroom preparations, without bringing students into the interpretive community, the bells won’t ring and sparks won’t fly. The Bay Area post organized the group of younger Associates in the 1980s, while the veterans were still active. The Associates eventually became directly involved in the commemorative process on the west coast, and they have now essentially taken it over, with the blessing of the veterans. I told Linda Lustig I thought the creation of the Associates showed remarkable foresight. “Part of it’s age, though,” she replied; “this doesn’t have to do with politics.” She said that she had seen her parents, who were “incredibly strong-willed people . . . pick [younger] people in whatever realms of their life [. . .] who they trust.” Her parents would “open themselves to their ideas,” even to their “direction.” So it was with the Associates. “I think that process occurs naturally.”81 It may occur naturally, but this exchange of information passing from one generation to another might facilitate a kind of energetic equilibrium between different structures of

Breathing Memory

241

feeling, as language and sensibilities flow back and forth across the divide.

Embodied Allegories Williams makes it clear that all structures of feeling must be historicized, or that they are, in fact, agents of historicization. They can mark the shifts between generations. He looks to the language and culture of a period to understand its structure of feeling because from the perspective of the present, any present, characteristic and idiosyncratic forms of aesthetic expression from other eras are fairly easy to discern, and, with appropriate analysis, can reveal the tenor of their individual times. Even though we may come to “learn each element in precipitate,” it leads us towards the “felt whole.” Spanish Civil War commemoration, I am proposing, is in part the effort of one political generation to maintain contact with the felt, dynamic, lived structures of its forebears. Without denying the generational changes, the vastly different social and political worlds, or the disagreements they may have with the veterans, the commemorative community surrounding the volunteers also refuses to deny the value of their histories. Their stories from the past are the meat of meaning in the present. Commemorators move the past forward through representational means. The intergenerational space—technological, philosophical, global, cultural—is unarguable, but so is the use value of this past, as far as the commemorators are concerned. The veterans have become allegorical figures for the Left in the United States. They were first named as legends by La Pasionaria in 1938 along with the rest of the departing Internationals, and immortalized very quickly by their own countrymen and women. “For our dead are part of the earth of Spain now,” Hemingway wrote in his famous eulogy in 1939 “and the earth of Spain can never die. [. . .] Those who have entered it honorably, and no men ever entered earth more honorably than those who died in Spain, already have achieved immortality.”82 Hemingway’s title was

242

Radical Nostalgia

“To the American Dead in Spain.” By 1941, as noted earlier, Genevieve Taggard celebrated the living in “To the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade”: When the eminent, the great, the easy, the old, And the men on the make Were busy bickering and selling Betraying, conniving, transacting, splitting hairs, ........................................ Whimpering, meaching, garroting,—they knew and acted understood and died.

Communist or anti-Communist, corrupt or innocent, it is hard to take issue with those last four verbs: knew, acted, understood, died. Taggard set the veterans apart from the rest of their generation because of what they did, not only because so many died in the process. Or if they did not die came home to peace That is not peace. Say of them they are no longer young, they never learned The arts, the stealth of peace, this peace, the tricks of fear; And what they knew, they know. And what they dared, they dare.83

The war aged them, but one could say their foresight aged them as well, turning them into sages for their own generation and their ideological peers. Sixty years after Taggard read her poem, the veterans are old well beyond any poetic construction, and have now grown into their legendary status. “Deep, deep learning is still going on” for Martha Olson Jarocki. The “story of the vets is a justification for our own lives,” according to Henry Foner. During the Reagan years, “[t]he appeal of the vets was such that it was relatively easy to get people to come [to the affairs] because there was an aura around the vets,” he stated later in our meeting.84 That aura is an expression of their allegorical status. “They’re like this presence in America,” Roby Newman told me, “you can’t ignore it.” Their stories persist.

Breathing Memory

243

“It was my feeling that these people had stories to tell and I was a historian,” Peter Carroll said during our talk. The first veteran he got to know personally and grew to love was Jack Lucid, who died within two years of their meeting. The loss of Jack was the first of many for Peter, who has attended events religiously for thirty years and watched the ranks steadily decrease. “[T]he true tragedy for me was that I hadn’t gotten the stuff from Jack down that I could have gotten.” I suspect that the true tragedy for Peter in relation to the veterans has been the loss of friends like Lucid.85 I asked Peter where the emotion came from for him, in the commemorative process. “At bottom I believe it comes from the fact that they’re dying out, that what we are witnessing is the end of the road [. . .], not an idea, but individual human beings.” But as a historian, he also lamented the loss of their stories, another kind of tragedy. I am not nostalgic for the Lincoln Brigade, quote, per se. In fact, I find the VALB organizationally, as something very unpleasant. [. . .] It was never ideology, per se. [. . .] But once I got into it; you see, I got into it out of an interest, a curiosity, I’m a historian, my business is to keep people alive, that’s what I do, I’m a resuscitator. I go, you know, and breathe memory into dead objects. That’s all I’ve always done.86

The emotion, Carroll is saying, even the nostalgia, is personal. But if “what we are witnessing is the end of the road” for “individual human beings,” Carroll’s “business” as an oral historian and the head of ALBA does attempt to keep people, and legends, alive. Ethnographer Smadar Lavie and volunteer Aaron Hilkevitch have both elucidated the veterans’ allegorical, legendary status. Allegory “is a didactic-political lamentation of the heroic past,” Lavie has written, “now almost disappeared but to be reincarnated at some point in the eternal future.”87 Among the Bedouin with whom Lavie lived, elders’ stories were told at times of crisis to provide hope and possibility. The community surrounding the veterans may want more immediate inspiration

244

Radical Nostalgia

and action from the volunteers’ history. The stories, nonetheless, are key, especially in times of inter-generational transition: [Allegory] is therefore a “symbolic representation of a moral and political kind” [. . .] “heal[ing] the gap between the present and the disappearing past, which without interpretation, would be otherwise irretrievable and foreclosed.” Allegory combines the parts to form a consistent whole. It salvages the ruins of the past by using “figural language” to fuse them artistically into a unified story.88

Through symbolic allegories, elements in precipitate coalesce back into solution. Allegories, with their “figural language,” work at “healing the gap” Raymond Williams identified between generations, “between the present and the disappearing past.” The gap is unavoidable; the healing involves choice and requires figural language and a cultural stage. Allegory is an interpretive act, a willful performance for a receptive audience. Williams believed that “documentary culture” was the best access to a structure of feeling, but that “certain elements [. . .] will always be irrecoverable.” Lavie recognizes the same inaccessibility, but suggests that “the gap between the present and the past [. . .] otherwise irretrievable and foreclosed” is bridgeable, healable, only through art, the interpretive art of allegory. Among the Mzeina, “plain person” and “folkloric persona” are fused, creating an “interlocutor [. . .] between the tribal collective memory of the past and its present circumstances.” The interlocutor becomes, in a sense, a performative purveyor of Williams’s documentary culture. Without the interpretive act of this artful persona, the gap is permanent, and collective memory and present circumstances are irreconcilable. “Fuck it,” Aaron said—remembering “the dramatic sequence” on the ramp in Seville and being “part of the show” for the “cheering crowds”—“Forget it’s you you’re a symbol.” This was quite an admission for a cynic, but he could not resist the crowd’s desire. In Spain, more than anywhere, healing was needed, and Aaron, person and persona, served an essential purpose. He was the allegory embodied, documentary culture in the flesh. Within the commemorative frame, as living symbols,

Breathing Memory

245

Aaron and his comrades help bridge the gap. They perform a reconciliation of collective memory and the present moment. Aaron knew he was more than a “plain person” for this audience. “I’m something to them,” he admitted, but needed to be clear. “I’m not talking about legends, or myth . . . icons. [. . .] I quit being self-conscious because it wasn’t me as such.” He felt, in himself, the distance between person and persona, and eventually found comfort there. Chuck Hall was reluctantly forced to recognize his status as well. “Too much was being made of being a veteran,” he had thought before 1996. “I’ve come to realize that it does have a pretty special significance.” Chuck became a public veteran again. He has been interviewed dozens of times, and spoken to scores of groups in schools, art galleries, museums, and private homes. This kind of status does not necessarily come easily. Roby Newman described his father’s negotiations with what Aaron called “the legend business”:89 I think the only vets’ event I ever attended with my father was the fiftieth-anniversary celebration at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center, where my father was extremely uncomfortable. I learned a lot of things about my father in the last dozen years of his life, one of which was, he was an extremely humble man. He was not particularly fond of trumpeting the fact that he had done this great thing of going to Spain and almost dying for it, that it embarrassed him to talk about it on a personal level. [. . .] [A]nd at the end, just like we do, they asked all the vets in the audience to go on stage. My father refused to. He simply refused to. Absolutely not. Absolutely not. I think he found it frankly for him distasteful. [. . .] He was very very private about Spain.90

If that was the case, I asked Roby why his father wanted to attend the event at all. “[H]e wanted to go I think more for me than for him. He wanted me . . . he wanted to share it with me, he wanted me to have that experience, just like he and my stepmother covered my cost of my flight to Spain in ’96. He wanted me to experience that, and on a lesser level, to be his proxy.”91

246

Radical Nostalgia

In this manner, as stand-ins, one generation takes over for another. After the opening of ALBA’s Spanish Civil War poster show “Shouts from the Wall” in Shreveport, Louisiana, Peter Carroll went out to a bar with a group of local people. Veteran Milt Wolff, who had come to Louisiana for the opening, did not join them. “I realized I was telling the stories. I was telling Milt’s stories, because Milt wasn’t there to tell his stories . . . I was very conscious of it . . . as I was doing it.”92 Robert Colodny, uncomfortable with “the legend business,” had refused to take the stage. Peter Carroll, in Milt Wolff’s absence, took his place.

Nostalgia and Patriotism By titling this book Radical Nostalgia, I intended to identify a tension between our sense of nostalgia as a sentimental search for comfort in the past, and the progressive, activist, unruly connotations of radicalism. Of course, radicalism is not limited to progressive social action. The radical Right in its various constituencies espouses reactionary stances with as much energy and commitment as its opponents on the Left. Nonetheless, the term “student radical” is more likely to conjure up images of SDS on college campuses in the 1960s than uniformed ROTC recruiters, and it is these more familiar images I call on in my title. At present, though, those who bicycle-lock themselves by the neck to the doors of abortion clinics remind us that radicalism is not owned by any one ideological persuasion. Similarly, when we hear the word nostalgia today, it calls up its own set of images. Oldies stations playing 1950s and 1960s rock ’n’ roll, retro or vintage clothing stores, and historical sites such as Colonial Williamsburg may begin to describe the familiar landscape of nostalgia in the United States, seeking what David Lowenthal calls “a spuriously seemly and comfortable past.”93 But just as radicalism is more than Vietnam-era antiwar protests, nostalgia is more complicated than so-called “Big Chill” radio programming designed for the baby boom audience.94

Breathing Memory

247

Definitions of nostalgia abound, going back to its coining by Swiss physician Johannes Hofer in 1688, referred to earlier by Michael Roth. Hofer’s definition is cited both by Fred Davis and Renato Rosaldo as “a familiar, if not especially frequent, condition of extreme homesickness among Swiss mercenaries fighting far from their native land in the legions of one or another European despot.”95 Our understanding of nostalgia has clearly evolved. The term has served a variety of purposes in the last three hundred years. Michael Kammen, in his 1991 The Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture, is interested in historicizing the United States’ own particular backward gaze and, by so doing, in demonstrating that though every generation and social group since the founding of this country has relied on particular versions of the American past, they have done so in different ways, for different reasons, and to different ends. The words of Johannes Hofer and David Lowenthal demonstrate that literal definitions of nostalgia have changed in three hundred years. Kammen’s critical history exposes not only the changing meaning of nostalgia and tradition but, more specifically, the United States’ evolving relationship with its own past. He locates these concepts and their social substance with, in his words, “a contextual discussion of the problematic relationships between myth and memory, tradition and history, in a culture that for most of two centuries has professed its commitment to a democratic ethos.”96 This “problematic relationship” resides in certain assumptions about what Harvey J. Kaye calls our “use and abuse of the past.”97 For Kammen, “critics adhering to diverse ideological persuasions have suggested that societies in fact reconstruct their pasts rather than faithfully record them, and that they do so with the needs of contemporary culture clearly in mind—manipulating the past in order to mold the present.”98 Susan Bennett cites James Walvin in a similar vein, suggesting, “[i]n its most restrictive forms, nostalgia performs as the representation of the past’s ‘imagined and mythic qualities’ so as to effect some corrective to the present,” giving passing consideration to the possibility that there might be

248

Radical Nostalgia

something of value to be recovered, or that at a given moment in time, its representation might serve a progressive purpose.99 “[O]nce a powerful icon enters into circulation,” Koonz stated, “its connotations are set in motion,” which certainly evokes the atmosphere at the veterans’ events. But, as she continued, “[t]hus historical revision inheres in the process of memorialization.”100 The extent and nature of that revision, and its consequences, must be accounted for. Bennett, Kammen, and Koonz take this kind of mythologizing for granted, and if societies in general use and abuse the past to serve the present, these inquiries help interrogate the American Left’s complicity in this process. “To forget—and I would venture to say—to get one’s history wrong, are essential factors in the making of a nation,” in the words of Ernest Renan. Writ large, this could certainly account for the near invisibility of the Spanish Civil War in most American historical narratives, anticipated by the Daily Worker in 1938, when they noted it was not the kind of war “immortalized in history books.” On a smaller scale, it could partially contextualize some of the VALB’s own manipulations and blind spots. “[T]hus,” Renan continues, “the advance of historical study is a danger to nationality.”101 That the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives—an organization devoted to protecting and making available any and all histories of the volunteers—is now effectively running the commemorative process might suggest that the veterans and their community are not as frightened of their history as the United States is of its own. This is particularly pertinent given Kammen’s additional interest in American patriotism, in his view “a curiously neglected subject.” Unexamined as patriotism may be, no US president or elected official would deny being a patriot, though under scrutiny many would disagree on the details of its practice: We assume that loyal opposition is not merely tolerated but valued in this country. Yet the precarious situation of Copperheads during the Civil War, or German- and IrishAmericans during World War I, and of conscientious objectors during the Vietnam years raises interesting questions about the limits of opposition in American political culture

Breathing Memory

249

and the selective nature of memory where patriotism and nationalism are presumed to coincide with Americanism.102

Kammen calls these presumed connections “problematic.” Spanish Civil War veterans should be added to Kammen’s list of “precarious” communities subject to “the selective nature of memory” who also tested “the limits of opposition.” When 2,750 Americans went to Spain to fight fascism, were they being patriotic? Were they defending world democracy against the fascist menace, one extreme, or violating US law and subverting the United States government by allying themselves with forces seeking the overthrow of capitalism? How have varying definitions of patriotism affected the place of the Spanish Civil War and its volunteers in American memory? One cannot consider memory and tradition in the United States, or the actions and legacy of the Spanish Civil War volunteers, without confronting varying interpretations of a past theoretically guided by the “democratic ethos.” Memories and myths of the Spanish Civil War were first shaped between the world wars, and reworked thereafter. Between the wars, according to Kammen, “commercialization of the past became a by-product of [a] general attraction to the candle of the quaint,” a candle lit by museums and rich collectors of Americana. “[T]he interwar years gave Americans splendid memories and star-spangled amnesia.”103 It was into the atmosphere of “star-spangled amnesia” that the radical volunteers returned. After America emerged from World War II, Kammen states, “[i]t should come as no surprise that the wartime frame of mind helped to enhance an almost reverential regard for the history of the United States.” In fact, “the nation emerged from the war its myths not merely intact but fairly sanctified.”104 The end of World War II and the defeat of Hitler also saw the end of our alliance with the Soviet Union, the expansion of American antiCommunism, and the recharacterization of antifascism. The sanctification of myth led to a selective recall of the American past. An event outside the mythological frame can begin to lose its presence as years pass. By the 1950s, Communism was the

250

Radical Nostalgia

enemy, Franco was an ally, and 1930s antifascism had no place in the myth at all. It only got in the way. The veterans’ antifascism was judged and labeled premature. How the United States chose to recall or forget its radical past fueled the veterans’ desire to represent the war within the commemorative context. That they may have perpetrated some of their own myths is at least cast in a different light when set against the sanctified myths of the nation. Kammen uses the Haymarket martyrs of 1886 to exemplify characters lost to America’s selective memory. He compares America’s engagement with their story to Japanese cultural recall of peasant martyrs. In Japan, the martyrs’ actions became a “statist myth” that “helped to provide an energizing focus for a sense of collective identity among powerless social groups.” In the United States, by contrast, “one of the first in a series of American working-class instances of martyrdom [has been] readily blocked from the memories of that disparate class.”105 The same might be said of Spain. Judy Montell felt strongly that the veterans’ version of history, biased though it may have been at times, deserved a hearing, and expressed her own view of historiography: “I always feel that historians have a point of view, that none of them sit on a fence, where none of them are impartial viewers; it all depends on who’s writing it, from what viewpoint the history book is written each time. And so I think it’s time for it to be written from this side, [. . .] as a balance. [. . .] We’re helping to balance the history, the story.”106 Radical nostalgia could create balance against star-spangled amnesia. Just how the memory of an event like the Haymarket riot fades from public memory is more thoroughly investigated by John Bodnar in Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century. He draws the valuable distinction between vernacular culture and official culture, and shows how the location of power in competing ideologies can determine what a culture remembers and what is lost. Commemoration often stages intracultural competitions. “The shaping of a past worthy of public commemoration in the present is contested, and involves a struggle for supremacy between advocates of various political ideas

Breathing Memory

251

and sentiments.”107 This struggle plays out in the interactions of vernacular and official culture, out of which “public memory” emerges. Official culture puts forth “interpretations of the past and present reality” that “reduce the power of competing interests and threaten the attainment of their goals.” Vernacular cultural practitioners are “intent on protecting values [. . .] derived from firsthand experience in small-scale communities rather than the ‘imagined’ communities of a large nation.”108 Oppositional vernacular culture may put forward Bennett’s “counter-histories” to attempt “disarticulation” of the official past.109 The Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade are certainly a vernacular and experiential political culture within “official” America. From their celebration of decorated war hero and antifascist Herman Bottcher to their attempts to gain recognition as military veterans in 1979, they have staked their claim to a left-wing radical patriotism. John Rossen published a newspaper called the New Patriot. “In modern America,” Bodnar states, “no cultural expression contains the multivocal quality of public commemorations better than the idea of the nation-state and the language of patriotism.”110 Bodnar points to the problems of all institutionalized public commemorations. They “almost always stress the desirability of maintaining the social order and existing institutions, the need to avoid disorder or dramatic changes, and the dominance of citizen duties over citizen rights.” This would explain early resistance to the veterans’ attempts to put themselves on a par with veterans of World War I. “Dramatic episodes of citizens exerting their rights, with the exception of the colonists of 1776, are almost never commemorated,” which places the celebratory VALB events and the veterans’ activism in high relief.111 Though Bodnar deals more with public acts of commemoration than with private, he might label their celebrations as unique. The rarity of such commemorations in the United States and the culture that keeps them in check helps explain the joy American radicals have felt when attending Spanish Civil War commemorative events overseas, where the same unstated rules and restrictions prevalent in the United States did not apply. “The point is that though public memory is constructed from discourse the

252

Radical Nostalgia

sources of cultural and political power are not simply diffuse,” Bodnar states. “They are also unequal.” Public memory came to be what it was in the United States because some interests exerted more power than others in the discussion and actually distorted public communication to an inordinate extent. Thus, distortion took place not through simple coercion but through a more subtle process of communication which Leslie Good suggests involves the “prevention” of certain statements being made in public in a meaningful way.112

Though the purveyors of McCarthyism did not shrink from simple coercion, there are few better examples of such “prevention” than those official attempts to deny left-wing discourses a meaningful public forum in the 1950s. As Bodnar states without comment, but with significant repercussions to this inquiry, “the sources of cultural and political power” are neither “diffuse” nor equal. If the population of Spanish Civil War veterans is considered a vernacular culture within larger US officialdom, they are also a diverse and contentious population on their own. The Communist, non-Communist, ex-Communist, and antiCommunist elements have engaged in struggles from the very beginning, so fierce at times as to threaten the very existence of the VALB. Communist Party officials could easily be charged with what Bodnar called the “dogmatic formalism” of official culture. Unyielding and overbearing attempts to control and discipline their cadres, as well as the denial of individual liberty for Party members, were common complaints. Party members within the VALB’s own ranks resisted yielding control of the Lincoln Brigade’s military archives, hard to reconcile with efforts to render history responsibly. I am not attempting to deny those conflicts or essentialize the veterans as a group. At the same time, many people who believed in and supported the Spanish Republic did stand under Moe Fishman’s political umbrella, and at a minimum shared certain beliefs that put them at odds with what became the American status quo.

Breathing Memory

253

For many decades, the veterans have attracted commemorative audiences more comfortable with a progressive politic than any official, pervasive, and inherently conservative definition of nationalistic patriotism. Just as the term independence had very different connotations to blacks and whites in the United States during the nineteenth century, resulting in a separate African American celebration of Independence Day on July Fifth, the veterans and their commemorative community differed with the official culture over just what it meant to be “American” and “Un-American,” or whether their antifascism was premature, and continuously supported their own separate commemorative tradition. They chose to look at history differently than did many if not most of their fellow citizens. Official and vernacular forms evolve based on relative differences in power. Victor Turner describes his concept of the social drama as “our native way of representing ourselves to ourselves and, of declaring where power and meaning lie and how they are distributed.”113 He examines the 1810 Mexican Revolution of Independence, which some call the Hidalgo Insurrection after priest Miguel Hidalgo. “This was an abortive revolution,” in Turner’s words, but one that nonetheless left a “symbolic deposit in actual historical time,” which “had potent effects on subsequent dramas and revolutionary processes” in the region. It was “a success in establishing a new set of paradigms, goals, and incentives for Mexican struggle.”114 Social dramas may leave traces that can inspire or incite later cultures. For Raymond Williams, these traces may linger in structures of feeling. Smadar Lavie might argue that allegorical figures and their stories construct bridges to these moments of inspiration. Bodnar pointed out that commemoration rarely encompasses “dramatic episodes of citizens asserting their rights,” though that has been at the core of Spanish Civil War commemoration in the United States. With the move to the center in US politics and the acknowledged disenfranchisement of left-wing constituencies as compared, say, to their vitality in the 1960s—or, for that matter, the 1930s—perhaps the veterans and their stories are offering a “new set of paradigms, goals, and incentives”

254

Radical Nostalgia

for an enfranchised and reintegrated Left of the future. Referring back to Kammen and Bodnar, if a Turnerian social drama is taking place, it may be an ongoing debate on the nature of American patriotism. Martha Olson Jarocki puts Turner’s model into practical terms: I remember . . . my mother, I mean one of her mantras was: “the ebb and the flow, darling, the ebb and the flow” [She laughs out loud here.] . . . “Marx says there’s the ebb and the flow.” [. . .] Okay, you’re frustrated because there’s not the kind of political activity happening now that you wish would happen, but, it will come back again.

I pressed her to explain what role Spanish Civil War commemorations might play in that process—what feelings they aroused, and why those feelings seemed so important: I think it’s about that longing for community but it’s more than community and self . . . determination . . . [“You mean in that context?” I asked.] Yeah, within the context of feeling like you can be part of a group of ordinary people who can step forward for something that’s right . . . that you feel is important, and have a voice . . . That’s a very powerful thing, that’s an incredible . . . We see that in every country that you ever look at, you see that development, and that exponential growth when people feel like they have a community and they can step up there and take their stand, it just takes off. [. . .] And I guess that’s part of what that feeling is renewing, that memory is renewing. It’s reminding us—we have this efficacy in us, you know, we’ve done it. [“That it’s possible . . .”] It’s possible, we’re here, we’ll do it again, maybe not this moment, you know, we’ll do it today in a, symbolic way, but it’s coming, you know.115

If Martha is right, then the Spanish Civil War has left what Turner called a “symbolic deposit in actual historical time,” a structure of feeling based on “efficacy” that is “in us.” In commemorative theater, “that’s part of what that feeling is renewing, that memory is renewing,” and it may yet have “potent effects on subsequent dramas and revolutionary processes.” This is the

Breathing Memory

255

“potentiality” of spontaneous communitas, its “feeling of endless power”—the “exponential growth when people feel like they have a community [. . .] it just takes off.” This is its “subjunctive mood,” the sense of real possibility communitas can foster. “We’ll do it today in a symbolic way,” Martha said, “but it’s coming.”

An Impulse Toward Struggle Finally, if I want to propose that nostalgic veterans’ commemorations of the war have the potential to preserve and transmit a radical history and its tenets, it is important to recognize larger forces these commemorations themselves might be working against. The veterans’ politics have been marginalized for years, but so has their interest in exploring this past. Spanish Civil War commemorations themselves, as a simple sociohistorical practice, may be viewed as an ideological battleground. In 1991, Harvey J. Kaye addressed what he considered to be a specific crisis, “the apparent devaluation and decline of history in schooling and the broader culture since the mid-1970s.”116 Soon, the problem had expanded: [B]y the early 1980s [. . .] the crisis was to be placed directly in the political agendas in both the United States and Britain [. . .]. New Right and neo-conservative forces [. . .] were themselves advancing renditions of “the past” and its relation to the present and, also, a conception of the value of historical study and thought which looked not towards their making critical contributions to the further development of liberty, equality and democratic community but, rather, to their serving the powers that be and supporting, at best, the status quo.117

The 1989 celebrations of the bicentennial of the French Revolution in Paris were, in Kaye’s words, “a made-for-TV spectacle completely ahistorical in conception and design,” that “would serve less as an occasion for celebration and commemoration of the ideas of ‘liberty, equality and fraternity’ than an opportunity to entomb the Revolution.”118 “Cold War anti-communism” Kaye

256

Radical Nostalgia

continues, has been “expressed in the constant reference to the clearly oppressive, if not totalitarian, regimes of the Soviet bloc as providing absolute proof of the political darkness and economic bleakness which is ‘socialism.’ ”119 “Western leaders, with the assistance of an all-too-often a-critical media, took up the cries of ‘the death of socialism’ and ‘the triumph of capitalism’ [. . .] attesting to the ultimate futility of revolutionary and radical struggles.”120 Kaye suggests that critical and hopeful renderings of the past can be necessary correctives, and, I would argue, they are exemplified by these commemorative performances. His argument again recalls Jackson Lears, who proposed that nostalgia could “recover” the past and “could accompany a profound and nuanced sense of history.” Retellings of the war in Spain can lack nuance, but certain issues are not in dispute, whereas an American history that overlooks the Haymarket martyrs or the Spanish Civil War turns a lack of nuance into grand pretense. Kaye is also suggesting that the “devaluation” of history is specifically targeted and ideologically motivated: “it is a matter of confronting the sense of impotence and the belief that action, especially political action, is futile [. . .].”121 Edwin Rolfe’s radical poetry and Kaye’s writings on history would seem to be consistent. “We must remember cleanly why we fought,” Rolfe wrote in 1939, “clearly why we left these inadequate shores / and turned our eyes, hearts, Spainward.”122 Over fifty years later, Kaye concurred: “[T]he task of the critical historian,” he wrote, “becomes that of ‘breaking the tyranny of the present’ through anamnesis.”123 In the 1940s and 1950s, the US government went to great efforts to undercut the role of leftist radicalism in the United States by harassing, jailing, and blacklisting many members of the VALB and their political compatriots, curtailing public commemorative activity for a time and sending many veterans and their archive underground. “Even at their most secure,” according to Jean and John Comaroff, “ruling regimes strive to do more than just convince people of their ideological message. [. . .] They seek to limit ambiguities of meaning and proliferations of power, to naturalize their world views in the commonplace.”124

Breathing Memory

257

Given this kind of pressure from above, the veterans would be natural targets. “Public memory” took shape, Bodnar stated, “because some interests exerted more power than others in the discussion and actually distorted public communication to an inordinate extent.”125 Performing this radical history, even exaggerating it, could exert what Michel de Certeau called “interventionary force.”126 When active groups within a society feel their history and identity threatened, they react. “July 4 was not celebrated nationally until the 1820s,” Gillis states, citing Bodnar, “at a point when Americans had begun to feel that history was accelerating and the heroic past was slipping away from them.”127 From that perspective, one might say that history has always been slipping away from the veterans, from the moment they first returned from Spain, or perhaps from the moment the first volunteers left US soil against the wishes of their government. The commemorative process began almost immediately. Their history, certainly rooted in an ideological predisposition, was always already at risk, which might account in part for their immediate, ongoing, and long-lasting commemorative fervor. In this manner, recalling an emotional past through nostalgic performances can be a needed act of recovery. Recalling Lowenthal, nostalgia is “the search for a simple and stable past as a refuge from a turbulent and chaotic present.”128 For this commemorative community—up against “the tyranny of the present” and efforts to “naturalize” their history with an antiprogressive hegemonic conservatism—citing and re-citing their radical past can be an invaluable search for stability, not avoidance. Gillis characterized commemoration as “reconnecting memory and identity in time and place.”129 Maurice Halbwachs believed that “the permanence and interior appearance of a home impose on a group a comforting image of its own continuity,” and “the reason members of a group remain united, even after scattering [. . .] is that they think of the old home and its layout.130 The “layout” of this commemorative community’s “old home” may be more a structure of feeling than the built structure of the abbey from which priests and nuns were separated in Halbwach’s The Collective

258

Radical Nostalgia

Memory.131 It is the radicalism of the veterans’ past and its progressive potential from which they risk being expelled. Spanish Civil War commemoration continues to be an effort to locate, celebrate, and perpetuate identity and meaning in the actions of the veterans and disseminate their history. The definitions of America espoused in these commemorative events would be met with consternation or even hostility if promoted at a July Fourth parade or VFW meeting. They run counter to more readily available, received, public forms of patriotism, but the veterans do not always have to confront them directly in the public arena to serve a purpose, though public protests and confrontations do occur. The preservation of this community and its history and philosophy may be as important as attempts to more directly subvert the status quo. These events are both commemorations and reunions, but do they not retain a subversive, confrontational energy nonetheless? By maintaining this community and this ethic and this history through regular commemorative performances, the VALB and ALBA are keeping something living and breathing that might otherwise perish. The culture at large might, if left to its own devices, allow this history to fade, either as a result of simple distraction or for more pernicious reasons. The history of radical action and internationalism sparked by Communists and their kin is not something the dominant culture would necessarily want remembered, let alone celebrated. “When memory is no longer everywhere it will not be anywhere unless one takes the responsibility to recapture it through individual means.”132 Its protection, its nurturing effectively defeat forces of benign or malignant neglect. “The nostalgic desires to obliterate history and turn it into private and collective mythology,” Boym stated.133 But what if that history is already at risk? These radical nostalgics require a collective mythos to retain their identity and prevent the obliteration of their past. For filmmaker Judy Montell, consistent with Kaye’s concerns, it is a question of achieving balance; “it’s time for [history] to be written from this side.”134 Doing justice to their history is essential, but it is not enough. I asked Linda Lustig, now treasurer of the Bay Area post

Breathing Memory

259

and a member of the ALBA board, what she thought the future might hold for the commemorative process after the veterans were gone. First, she felt, we had to build the constituency, to “get a much broader group,” of both organizers and attendees, people “who are very committed either because of family or for any reason [. . .] ’cause of what it means historically”: If they can agree on, over the next several years while there are still some vets alive, on how to focus it, I think you could do it. I think if you just do memory and commemoration I don’t know if it would happen. [. . .] And then I’m not sure it should, to be honest. I’m not convinced it should. So, I can’t say. So for me [it] is—if you’re using the past to work toward what you can do in the future, yes we should do it.135

If the events only “do memory and commemoration,” Lustig is saying, or if they are only nostalgic in the traditional sense, then they are not doing enough. But if radical nostalgia is in play, “if you’re using the past to work toward what you can do in the future,” then there is a real purpose and real possibilities for change. At the fortieth-anniversary celebrations in Florence, Italy, in 1976, attended by 1,000 International Brigade veterans, including 68 Americans, Luigi Longo gave the opening address to a huge, packed auditorium. Longo was commissar-general of the International Brigades and a leader of the Italian antifascists. This was only months after Franco’s death. Alvah Bessie reported on his speech in the Volunteer: “This gathering,” [Longo] said, “must be a precise political act and at the same time, an impulse toward struggle. A political act because we intend to express our renewed solidarity with the Spanish people, who are beginning today to gather the fruit of a long, tenacious resistance . . . and once fascism is ended, to establish the foundations and consolidation of democracy. . . .” It was an impulse to struggle, he said, because the example of solidarity, heroism and selfsacrifice of the International Brigades will stimulate the

260

Radical Nostalgia young generation (of Spanish people) in their construction of a new society that will be more free and more just.136

Though Longo’s focus was specifically on the democratization of Spain after almost forty years under Franco, he constructed a commemorative model by demanding that the anniversary gathering be both “a precise political act” and “an impulse toward struggle.” He made a direct challenge to traditional nostalgic sentimentality, and described a formidable standard to uphold, but one with which Linda Lustig would likely agree. “The commemorative spirit that permeated a wealth of celebrations” in nineteenth-century African American communities “was therefore oriented both toward the past and toward the future,” Fabre noted.137 This oscillating temporal focus for the commemorative gaze is essential. “In order not to forget its past, a community is involved in retelling its story, its ‘constitutive narrative,’ ” Middleton and Edwards stated. But “[s]uch ‘communities of memory’ are no mere celebration of the past. The argument is that ‘they carry a context of meaning’ that ‘turns us towards the future’ ”138 “[W]e look back,” Judge Garzón said, “to gather strength to keep moving forward.” Martha Olson Jarocki advocated a “continuity in memory” so that “what they’ve given us is gonna be . . . not the same, but close, close enough to still function” in the present day, with its own struggles.139 She thought the veterans could act as “a memory agent” to make vital connections with other pressing causes. In the eyes of Linda, Martha, and other members of this commemorative community, only an informed turn toward the future potentially fueled by radical nostalgia could save their chosen past. In performance, there are nearly endless possibilities. “There is nothing in this world more invisible than a monument,” Robert Musil has said, quoted by James Young. “[T]hey are impregnated with something that repels attention.” That “something,” Young states, “is the essential stiffness monuments share with all other images: as a likeness necessarily vitrifies its otherwise dynamic referent, a monument turns otherwise pliant memory to stone.”140 In commemorations of the Spanish Civil War, the referent is

Breathing Memory

261

dynamic, but so is its representation. Year on year, cause on cause, “there’s the ebb and the flow.” Radical nostalgia’s desire to find meaning in the past must be contextualized. If the specific histories celebrated by commemorative nostalgia have been stigmatized and undercut by dominant cultural forces; if anti-Communist crusades such as McCarthyism and Reaganism have denied credence to the United States’ radical, humanist past and have often revised US history to serve ideological ends; and if the Spanish Civil War itself has been written over and undercut, then its reconstruction in historicized commemorative ceremonies could be necessary and liberatory. The war and its historical moment represent a structure of feeling perhaps essential, even foundational, to the American ethos. By moving this particular history into a particular present through the medium of theatrically eclectic, emotionally rich, multivocal performance, radical nostalgia can support a revived definition of patriotism that is more in keeping with the United States’ own undeniably revolutionary past.

Chapter 7

Epilogue: Patriot Acts

The I.B.’s were the most ragged filthy hungry red eyed bastards that ever went under the name of troops, but they could fight and they fought. They cursed their officers, groused and squawked, but they held their lines and the lines held. Every man was his own general but they could obey; the Internationals never broke. Never was “some day comrade” said with such longing. Some day: no soldier has ever oiled or used or hated his rifle so well. No troops ever loved peace like them. Volunteer James Neugass, from “Give Us This Day” 19381

2001: Without a Parachute I ended my commemorative chronicle with the sixtieth anniversary in 1996, but the process goes on. At the performance of Pasiones in Oakland in 2001, over a dozen veterans took the stage (see Figure 28). Four times a year, the Volunteer reports on activities around the country. Memorial monuments have been dedicated in Madison, Wisconsin, and Seattle, Washington (see Figure 29). The San Francisco post has secured a plot of land on the Embarcadero for a substantial monument that will be of national significance. It is being designed by Walter Hood, a UC Berkeley professor of landscape architecture, and artist Ann Chamberlain. The Post has raised approximately $150,000 toward the monument, and they are now seeking approval at the community level,

Epilogue: Patriot Acts

263

which is proving difficult to obtain. Commemorative events continue annually in New York, Oakland, and other cities. The struggle for recognition goes on as well. On Lincoln’s Birthday, February 12, 2001, a plaque almost identical to those placed on the memorials in Madison and Seattle was to be installed in the New Hampshire statehouse. State Senator Burton Cohen, a member of the ALBA board of governors, had received the approval of the House Facilities Committee, and the bronze plaque had been struck. Peter Carroll, veteran Lou Gordon and his wife, and the family of a New Hampshire veteran had all traveled to Concord to attend the unveiling. They were disappointed: The harmony in New Hampshire disappeared three days before the ceremony was to take place, when the state’s conservative newspaper, the Manchester Union Leader, ran a front page story challenging the decision to honor Americans “who defied the State Department and traveled to Spain” in order to “fight alongside communists.” The Union Leader published an editorial on the morning of the event that accused Senator Cohen of celebrating communism and questioned his patriotism. Subsequently, just hours before the ceremony was to take place, the event was cancelled by wary state officials—including some who had voted to install the plaque just a few months before.2

The plaque had actually been installed prior to the unveiling, but was then taken down. The controversy remains unresolved. As Cohen said to the commemorative audience in New York on April 29, 2001, “New Hampshire is still being protected from the bronze plaque,” which rests in a locked vault in the statehouse.3 At an ALBA board meeting I attended on April 28, 2001, Cohen said that some of the most heated complaints surrounded the five-pointed star on the plaque, reminiscent of the Soviet star, and the sculpted image of a clenched fist, meant to represent the Republican antifascist salute but perhaps a signifier to some of the Black Power movement of the 1960s. As reported in the Volunteer, one state representative who was a Korean War veteran stated that “Cohen and his plaque should be flown over Russia and dropped from 20,000 feet without a parachute.”4

264

Radical Nostalgia

Forty years earlier, someone in the VALB office had suggested changing the five-pointed star to a three-pointed star in an ad for the twenty-fifth-anniversary gathering, but it remained. Though the star was likely not the cause, protestors met the audience leaving the event with their signs: “Red Animals Inside” and “Abe Lincoln Brigade Murders Nuns.” The New Hampshire state representative had his own forebears, just as red-baiting and McCarthyism had their own structure of feeling. Memory is always a phenomenon of the present, as Pierre Nora claims, and also a phenomenon of context and location. “Patriotism becomes authentic by its physical manifestation in sacred memorials and by the intimate experience of these memorials,” James Mayo has said. “Loyalty becomes more than word or feeling; it has local place.”5 Certain citizens of New Hampshire were not ready for this plaque. Madison, Wisconsin, has a long Socialist tradition, and San Francisco is one of the most leftleaning major cities in the country. The University of Washington, where the Seattle monument is located, has an ALBA governing board member on its faculty, and sent eleven students to Spain in the 1930s. Tampa, a likely site of a new memorial, was the home of twenty volunteers. It has an active Spanish community and a radical union among the cigar workers. When the veterans marched with their wreath to the Eternal Light in Madison Square in 1938, two political cultures met at the gate. One of them did not make it inside. They met again at the statehouse in New Hampshire in 2001. Both wreath and plaque, representing vernacular interests, were kept off the official culture’s sacred ground. Structures of feeling change from generation to generation, but certain melodies linger on.

2004: Patriot Acts Perhaps because of my background in Performance Studies, perhaps because of a lifelong fondness for words and their potential for hidden messages, I was amazed that our government would create a document with as innocently revealing a title as “The

Epilogue: Patriot Acts

265

Patriot Act.” I was immediately struck by its double meaning: one could accept the word act as it was intended, as a synonym for “proclamation” or “law”—or, for those of us more cynical, or critical of our government’s behavior under the leadership of George W. Bush, there is the equally available interpretation of the word act as “pretense” or “performance.” This new law was part of the war on terrorism after 9/11, and like it or not, it severely curtailed civil liberties in the name of patriotism, a challenging construction whatever one’s political leanings. When the same President George W. Bush—who had never participated in any form of combat and whose record in the Air National Guard stateside had even been called into question— landed on an aircraft carrier wearing a beautiful flight suit on May 3, 2003, to declare that hostilities in Iraq had ended, it seemed he was performing the Patriot Act in high style. (The carrier, it must be mentioned, was the USS Abraham Lincoln.)6 I did not know at the time that the USA Patriot Act had other hidden meanings as well. The title is an acronym. Each letter has a word behind it, and the words produce a sentence. The following is copied verbatim from the first lines of the document, H.R. 3162, as it appears on the Electronic Privacy Information Center Web site, with italics added: “Title.—This Act may be cited as the ‘Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (USA Patriot Act) Act of 2001.’ ”7 Not only are we given the opportunity to consider patriotism as a performance, but a talented government functionary created a piece of performative writing whereby the title, seen in its entirety, spells out in perfect governmental doublespeak what this patriot act will involve: it will unite and strengthen by providing appropriate tools. What is “appropriate”? Well, for those with infinite patience, 140 pages of government writing will tell you—or a visit to the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. In discussions with the Bay Area committee with whom I would be writing the 2004 commemorative events in Oakland and New York, I could not get this title and its various readings out of my head. At the time, with US soldiers coming home in body bags months after Bush landed his plane and declared that

266

Radical Nostalgia

“major combat operations in Iraq [had] ended,” we were deeply frustrated and saddened by the way the war in Iraq had been “enacted.” I wanted to call the piece “Patriot Acts” as a way to highlight the vastly different understandings of patriotism at play in our culture at the time. Various titles were circulated by e-mail until ALBA executive committee member Fraser Ottanelli took it one step further and put a fine (exclamation) point in it. He suggested changing the word act from a noun to a verb, thereby transforming my ironic title to a declaration and exclamation: Patriots Act! At a time when political protest, peace advocacy, and antigovernment statements in general were deemed unpatriotic, Fraser’s transformation and rhetorical turn seemed inspired. The Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade had always been celebrated for taking action, and commemorators over the years looked back on their sacrifice as significantly more patriotic than the actions of the Non-Intervention Committee. Fraser’s title suggested that patriots act, they do not perform.8 “What is it to be a patriot?” I asked in the script, with Bush’s aircraft carrier photo op fresh in my mind and weapons of mass destruction still undiscovered. “To lie to your country, or lay your body on the line? To wrap yourself in the flag, or fight for what it really represents? To trample on democratic rights, or defend them?”9 I was angry; my fellow writers were angry, and we did not apologize for it. As these lines were spoken on stage, a photograph of George W. Bush in front of a huge American flag flashed on the screen. The audience hissed. Images from the aircraft carrier followed, while the cast intoned some of Bush’s more remarkable statements, including, in paraphrase, “God wanted me to run for President. He did.”10 It was an election year, and we were not fooling around. We wanted to make it clear that political protest was patriotic; that the veterans had remained active for decades; that the USA Patriot Act might serve some purpose, but that it was neither democratic nor, given core American values, necessarily patriotic either. And that God’s choice was perhaps misguided. In addition to some of the standard songs from the war, we included Bob Dylan’s stinging Vietnam-era ballad “With God on Our Side,” positioned as a response to Bush’s statement about his

Epilogue: Patriot Acts

267

heavenly advocate. After a series of verses chronicling wars and acts of violence perpetrated by the US government for which the title line becomes an excuse, a justification for centuries of crimes, Dylan ends with the following verse: So now as I’m leavin’ I’m weary as Hell The confusion I’m feelin’ ain’t no tongue can tell The words fill my head And fall to the floor If God’s on our side He’ll stop the next war.”11

Dylan’s song was sung powerfully by Barbara Dane, longtime leftwing folk singer (see Figure 30). She also sang Jim Garland’s harrowing “The Murder of Harry Simms,” the true story of a young union man killed by “dirty coal operator gun thugs” during the Brush Creek mine strike in 1932.12 Dane sang the final verse as follows: Comrades we must vow today, this one thing we must do. Must teach ourselves to organize and see the struggle through Blood flowed upon the land today, we’ll know its color well ’Til we sink this murderous system in the darkest pits of Hell.13

Again, double meanings served us well. This song was written around 1947, but for anyone of our political stripe, it could not have been more timely. Its fury did not feel out of place. Commemoration, as it calls on a chosen past for recognition, inevitably involves acts of citation. From the earliest commemorative events, names, places, battles, letters, poems, songs, and images have been presented and cited to bring the past into the present. Some texts emerged that become useful year after year—commemorative tropes like the letters from Jim Lardner and Fredericka Martin, the poetry of Edwin Rolfe, the songs collected and performed by Ernst Busch and Pete Seeger, images like the grave marker at Jarama. Other citations resonate in particular times for particular reasons: “The Death of Harry Simms” or “With God on Our Side;” images of a president costumed as a soldier.

268

Radical Nostalgia

Research on this book itself led to the narrative frame for Patriots Act! I chose excerpts from the 1976 script Spain 40!, which I had unearthed in the ALBA collection, to open and close the show. Abrams’s language and rhetorical style were different from what we had written and heard for some years, and they set a good tone for the piece. That difference in the language, perhaps marking the “characteristic approaches and tones in argument” of a specific period, as noted by Williams, brought energy to the show.14 A section of Abrams’s closing speech was our closing as well, the final prose piece before the now ritualized singing of “Viva La Quince Brigada.” At the end of Spain 40!, Abrams speaks of World War II as “a war that may never have been” had Spain not fallen to Franco, “if only . . .” he wrote, “if only this, if only that . . .” I took the remainder of his words and quoted them verbatim: and if only, back there in Spain, you weren’t such a bunch of losers. Big losers. Sprung from the loins of losers like Spartacus, and Nat Turner . . . Listen, you glorious losers . . . For what you did that brief day, To all of you, The living, And the dead alive in us, My dear Lincolns, My heart has just two words left, And they should have been spoken long ago, by every American alive: Thank you.15

Grand statements, grand sentiment, and a wide historical net citing a history of righteous rebellion. Standing alone, the litany of “if only” can be seen as nostalgia, pure and simple. If “if only” is all we have, all we say, then we are frozen, gazing with longing into the past, but “if only” can also bear with it a desire for

Epilogue: Patriot Acts

269

change, a desire with a long history: “[T]he first person who was aware of what he had lost and who in his despair pronounced the word ‘tyrant,’ ” wrote Pierre-Urbain Briet in 1832, “this man became nostalgic for freedom.”16 In times of tyranny, what could be more important than freedom in mind?

Everybody’s Spain At one point in our conversation in March 2000, Martha Olson Jarocki alluded to an ongoing disagreement she had with some other members of the Associates in the Bay Area, people who felt that the Spanish Civil War was unique, that it was somehow different from the struggles of other progressive groups and organizations. “I’m against isolating it,” she told me. Certain Associates were “always saying, ‘But, you see, why recognize these groups, they didn’t do anything as hard as stand in front of the bullets in Spain; it wasn’t the same; nobody could come up to Spain, nobody could . . .’ ” And I’m always trying to say: No. Everybody’s Spain, [She laughs.], you know? [She raises her voice to a high pitch, almost singing, playful and passionate at the same time.] Everybody’s Spain! And probably that maybe is from being in the civil rights movement. I mean people say “Oh God you went South?” “Wow, you were in Mississippi for a year and a half?” “Oh my goodness!” [Sound of exclamation.] “Did people shoot at you!?” [Another exclamation.] You know. You did it because it was there.17

“What it is is that we are passionate about what we believe in,” Peter Carroll told me, describing the generation after the veterans

270

Radical Nostalgia

who are still trying to carry on their story, people like Burton Cohen. “We are passionate people. We are not indifferent to the world. Right? And we have identified the Lincoln Brigade as being passionate in a parallel way, in a similar way, in an analogous way. That . . . we share their passion. We start out with that passion. History matters to us. You know . . . that’s why we get emotional.”18 It gets no less emotional as fewer and fewer veterans move to the stage to receive their ovation at the beginning of each annual event. Still, their presence is sustaining. Raymond Williams would say the feeling between generations might be parallel though not identical, but Carroll is trying to identify something we do all share, a thread that works its way back through the years to 1936; a specific emotion for history and a lack of indifference to the world, the formula for radical nostalgia: We start out passionate. We . . . The Lincoln Brigade is a vehicle. We, we’re . . . We exploit the Lincoln Brigade. They. Serve. Us. They give us validity.19

And so we keep at it.

Notes

Translation of Epigraph For nine years Spain has embittered the men of my generation. For nine years they have carried Spain with them like a bad wound. Through Spain, they tasted defeat for the first time. They discovered with surprise—from which they have barely recovered—that one could be right and yet be beaten, that might could subdue the spirit and that there were cases where courage reaped no rewards. This is undoubtedly the reason why so many men around the world perceive the drama of Spain as a personal tragedy.

Chapter 1 1. “The Four Insurgent Generals,” or “Los Cuatro Generales,” may have been collected by Garcia Lorca, but the author of the lyric is unknown. The melody is traditional. “Mamita mía,” an idiomatic expression in Spanish, can be literally translated as “My little mother.” 2. Recording from Pete Seeger and Ernst Busch, Songs of the Spanish Civil War, Vol. 1, Folkways Records, 1961. Busch often collaborated with Bertolt Brecht, as a composer and a musician. He played the Street Singer in The Threepenny Opera, both on stage and in G. W. Pabst’s film. 3. “Para la nochebuena, / mamita mía, / serán ahorcados.” This line is translated in the liner notes as “At Christmas, holy evening / Mamita mía / They’ll all be hanging.” Seeger and Busch, Songs of the Spanish Civil War, 6. 4. Judith Montell, interview by the author, tape recording, Berkeley, California, 2 March 2000. 5. Marcel Acier, ed., From Spanish Trenches, reprint (New York: Modern Age, 1937), 20. 6. From Edwin Rolfe: Collected Poems. Copyright 1993 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Used with permission of the University of Illinois Press. 7. Susan Bennett, Performing Nostalgia: Shifting Shakespeare and the Contemporary Past (London: Routledge, 1996), 5.

272

Radical Nostalgia

8. Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), xv. 9. Bennett, Performing Nostalgia, 3, 5. 10. David Lowenthal, “Nostalgia Tells It Like It Wasn’t,” in The Imagined Past: History and Nostalgia, eds. Malcolm Chase and Christopher Shaw (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), 21. 11. Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, xiv. 12. Bennett, Performing Nostalgia, 4. 13. Harvey J. Kaye, The Powers of the Past: Reflections on the Crisis and the Promise of History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 7. Copyright 1991 by Harvey J. Kaye. 14. Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, 41. 15. Ibid., 49–50. 16. Ibid., 50. 17. Robert Cantwell, When We Were Good: The Folk Revival (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 201. 18. The Good Fight: The Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War. Dirs. Noel Buchner, Mary Dore, and Sam Sills. Prod. First Run Features, 1983, videocassette. 19. See, for example, Peter N. Carroll, The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade: Americans in the Spanish Civil War (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994); Gabriel Jackson, The Spanish Republic and the Civil War, 1931–1939 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965); Arthur H. Landis, The Abraham Lincoln Brigade (New York: Citadel Press, 1967); Hugh Thomas, The Spanish Civil War (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977). Many memoirs have been written by US volunteers about their experiences in Spain, among them Alvah Bessie’s Men in Battle: A Story of Americans in Spain (New York: Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, 1954); Milt Felsen’s The Anti-Warrior (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1989); Harry Fischer’s Comrades: Tales of a Brigadista in the Spanish Civil War (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998); and Milton Wolff’s Another Hill: An Autobiographical Novel (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994). Wolff’s book has an introduction and afterword by Cary Nelson. 20. Franco, whose views were well known and who was deemed a threat before the insurrection, had been posted by the government to Morocco to lead the conscripted Army of Africa, in the hope that his relative isolation from Spain would make him less of a danger. 21. Jackson, The Spanish Republic and the Civil War, 1931–1939, 248–49. 22. Seeger and Busch, Songs of the Spanish Civil War, 6. 23. Carroll, The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, 10. Excerpts from Peter N. Carroll, The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, Copyright © 1994 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Jr. University.

Notes

273

24. Thomas, The Spanish Civil War, 982–83. In Carroll, Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, 9, Carroll states that the first recruiting in America began in November 1936. 25. Carroll, Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, 14. 26. Judy Kutulas, The Long War: The Intellectual People’s Front and AntiStalinism, 1930–1940 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 12. 27. In Spain, the revolutionary agenda of radicals on the far left was inconsistent with the goals of the Loyalists. Although defeating Franco was a common desire, Trotskyite militias were at risk of suppression by the Communists, as chronicled by George Orwell in Homage to Catalonia. 28. Alfred Kazin, quoted in Carroll, Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, 14. 29. Thomas, The Spanish Civil War, 574–75. 30. Carroll, Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, 19. 31. Ibid., 13. 32. Arthur H. Landis, Death in the Olive Groves: American Volunteers in the Spanish Civil War 1936–1939 (New York: Paragon House, 1989), xv. 33. John Gerassi, The Premature Antifascists: North American Volunteers in the Spanish Civil War 1936–39: An Oral History (New York: Praeger, 1986), 207. 34. W. H. Auden, “Spain,” in The Penguin Book of Spanish Civil War Verse, ed. Valentine Cunningham (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), 99. “Spain 1937,” copyright 1940 and renewed 1968 by W. H. Auden, from Collected Poems by W. H. Auden. Used by permission of Random House, Inc. 35. Quoted in Landis, The Abraham Lincoln Brigade, xv. 36. Edwin Rolfe, “Postscript to a War,” in Collected Poems, eds. Cary Nelson and Jefferson Hendricks (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 160. 37. This was said by Charles Hall in conversation with the author. 38. Baltasar Garzón, “The International Brigade,” Volunteer 22.3 (Summer 2000): 8, 10. 39. Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 149. 40. Elizabeth Jelin and Susana G. Kaufman, “Layers of Memories: Twenty Years After in Argentina,” in The Politics of War Memory and Commemoration, eds. T. G. Ashplant, Graham Dawson, and Michael Roper (London: Routledge, 2000), 106. 41. The history of the Lincoln Brigade is not without contention. Among other questions, the degree to which they were under the direct supervision of the CPUSA—and, by extension, of Stalin’s Soviet Union—during and after the war has been much debated. Some of these issues will be addressed. Nonetheless, this project is more a history of commemoration than of the Spanish Civil War itself, and is therefore more concerned with how the

274

Radical Nostalgia

veterans active in the commemorative process chose to perform their past than with making an exhaustive inquiry into that history. 42. Tony Geist, “Judge Baltasar Garzón Presents Third ALBA–Bill Susman Lecture,” Volunteer 22.3 (Summer 2000): 6. 43. Garzón, “The International Brigade,” 8. 44. Ibid. 45. Ibid. 46. Ibid. 47. Line taken from liner notes of 1943 US recording of this song. Pete Seeger and Ernst Busch, Songs of the Spanish Civil War, Vol. 1, Folkways Records, 1961. 48. Garzón, “The International Brigade,” 10. 49. Ibid. In the Summer 2000 Volunteer, this last sentence is printed in italics as part of the song, but it may have been Garzón’s own comment and not a retranslation of the lyric. 50. Henry Foner has been working with the veterans since the 1930s. He headed the Furriers Union in New York City for many years and has hosted dozens of annual events. 51. Sixty-third Annual Reunion of the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade’s arrival in Spain, Proceedings commenced at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, New York, New York, 30 April 2000; unreleased audio recording. 52. Seeger’s innovative flamenco-influenced banjo playing, heard on the album Songs of the Lincoln Brigade, is one of its more impressive characteristics (see Chapter 5). In an interview, Seeger recalled paying close attention to a Spanish guitarist at a recording session he attended and then translating his techniques to the banjo. He called the style “hillbilly flamenco.” Pete Seeger, interview by the author, telephone interview, Beacon, New York, 26 June 2000. 53. The translation from the liner notes of the original American album reads: “Followed by a burst of shrapnel / Makes a meal you’ll all remember.” Seeger and Busch, Songs of the Spanish Civil War, 6. 54. Adrian Mitchell and Arlo Guthrie, “Victor Jara,” The Official Arlo Guthrie Website, Lyrics Connection, “Victor Jara,” www.arlo.net. Words by Adrian Mitchell, Music by Arlo Guthrie. 55. Mitchell and Guthrie, “Victor Jara.” www.arlo.net. 56. Sixty-third Annual Reunion of the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade’s arrival in Spain, 30 April 2000, unreleased audio recording. 57. Ibid. 58. Arlo Guthrie, “When a Soldier Makes It Home,” The Official Arlo Guthrie Website, Lyrics Connection, www.arlo.net. Copyright © 1994 Arloco Music. 59. Carroll, The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, 279–94.

Notes

275

60. Bay Area 2001 Commemorative Event. Performed at Calvin Simmons Theater, Oakland, California, 25 February 2001, unreleased audio recording. 61. Alvah Bessie, “The Dead Past,” in The Wound and the Dream: Sixty Years of American Poems About the Spanish Civil War, ed. Cary Nelson (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 200. © Alvah Bessie, 1952. 62. Volunteer 21.4 (Fall 1999): 15. 63. Cunningham, The Penguin Book of Spanish Civil War Verse, 351. Copyright © 1986 by Stephen Spender. 64. Langston Hughes, “To a Poet on His Birthday: Edwin Rolfe. Madrid, September 1937,” in Edwin Rolfe: Collected Poems, eds. Cary Nelson and Jefferson Hendricks (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 160. Excerpt from “To a Poet on His Birthday: Edwin Rolfe. Madrid, September 1937,” reprinted by permission of Harold Ober Associates. First published in Edwin Rolfe: Collected Poems. Copyright © 1993 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. These two passages are from the first stanza of Hughes’s poem. Their order was transposed for the purposes of the performance. Cary Nelson deserves great credit for discovering this poem by Hughes in Rolfe’s papers. It doesn’t appear in any existing anthology of Langston Hughes’s poetry.

Chapter 2 1. Nico Frijda, “Commemorating,” in Collective Memory of Political Events: Social Psychological Perspectives, eds. James W. Pennebaker, Dario Paez, and Bernard Rimé (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1997), 103. Reprinted by permission, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates and Nico H. Frijda. Copyright © Nico H. Frijda, 1997. 2. Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 72. 3. Connerton, How Societies Remember, 40. 4. “Building coalitions with other organizations, the Lincolns launched a national fund-raising drive to send ambulances to Nicaragua. By 1984, they had raised enough for two ambulances (at $17,000 each). [B]y the end of the decade, the VALB had sent twenty ambulances.” Peter N. Carroll, The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade: Americans in the Spanish Civil War (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 373–74. 5. Fifty-ninth Anniversary Banquet, Printed Program (Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, Bay Area post), 25 February 1996, collection of the author. 6. Fifty-seventh Annual Banquet, Printed Program (Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, Bay Area post), 27 February 1994, collection of the author. 7. “Vets Reunion,” Volunteer for Liberty 6.3 (July 1944): 3.

276

Radical Nostalgia

8. This is inaccurate. The original Asch recording from 1943, the first by American artists, featured Pete Seeger, Tom Glazer, Bess Lomax, and Butch Hawes. Seeger’s fellow performers at the 1979 event were Ronnie Gilbert and Fred Hellerman, who, as members of the Weavers with Seeger and Lee Hays, recorded some of the Spanish Civil War songs much later. 9. “Forty-second Anniversary Honors Black Vets,” Volunteer 2.1 (1979): 5. 10. Connerton, How Societies Remember, 88. 11. Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), xiv. 12. Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, xiv. 13. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 23. 14. Michael S. Roth, “Dying of the Past: Medical Studies of Nostalgia in Nineteenth Century France,” History and Memory: Studies in Representations of the Past 3.1 (Spring 1991): 5–29. 15. Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, xv. 16. Stewart, On Longing, 23. 17. James Neugass, “Give Us This Day,” in Our Fight: Writings by Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, Spain 1936–1939, eds. Alvah Bessie and Albert Prago (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1987), 172. Used by permission of Paul Neugass. 18. Ann C. Colley, Nostalgia and Recollection in Victorian Culture (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 3–4. 19. Linda Hutcheon, “Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern,” in University of Toronto English Library (19 January 1998) [UTEL Criticism and Theory Resources] (Toronto, Canada, 1998 [cited on 3 March 2000]); available from www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/criticism/hutchinp.html. 20. Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, xvi. As quoted earlier, Boym asserts that “the nostalgic desires to obliterate history and turn it into private or collective mythology,” and though I take exception to the assumption that history is obliterated, our interests are not always at odds. “The future of nostalgic longing and progressive thinking is at the center of this inquiry,” she states in her introduction. In this commemorative context, I believe that longing and progress are interdependent and inseparable. Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, xv. 21. “Our Victory Is Your Vengeance,” Volunteer for Liberty (January 1938): 1. 22. Ernest Renan, quoted in David Lowenthal, “Identity, Heritage and History,” in Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity, ed. John R. Gillis (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 50. 23. Stewart, On Longing, 23. 24. Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd online ed., s.v. “nostalgia.” 25. Stewart, On Longing, 23. 26. Ibid., 145.

Notes

277

27. Susan Bennett, Performing Nostalgia: Shifting Shakespeare and the Contemporary Past (London: Routledge, 1996), 9. 28. Bennett, Performing Nostalgia, 9. 29. Ibid., 10. 30. Ibid., 38. 31. Jackson Lears, “In Defense of Nostalgia,” Lingua Franca (December 1997/January 1998): 60, 62. 32. Lears, “In Defense of Nostalgia,” 60. 33. Ibid. 34. Lear’s concept and wording recalls Stephen Spender’s “Fall of a City” from Chapter 1: “Some old man’s memory jumps to a child / —Spark from the days of liberty.” 35. Lears, “In Defense of Nostalgia,” 61. 36. According to research referenced by Peter Carroll, one-third of the volunteers were born in Europe, and “eighty percent had a parent who was born abroad.” Carroll, The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, 16. 37. Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964), 57, 78. 38. Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, 146. 39. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 156. 40. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 128–35. 41. Williams, Marxism and Literature, 132. 42. Jean-Baptiste-Felix Descuret, quoted in Michael S. Roth, “Dying of the Past: Medical Studies of Nostalgia in Nineteenth Century France,” History and Memory: Studies in Representations of the Past 3.1 (Spring 1991): 7. 43. Pierre-Urbain Briet, quoted in Roth, “Dying of the Past,” 15. 44. Roth, “Dying of the Past,” 15. 45. Jo Stanley has suggested that posttraumatic stress disorder is a form of involuntary commemoration. See Jo Stanley, “Involuntary Commemorations: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and Its Relationship to War Commemoration,” in The Politics of War Memory and Commemoration, eds. T. G. Ashplant, Graham Dawson, and Michael Roper (London: Routledge, 2000), 240–59. 46. James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 2. 47. Pierre Nora, “General Introduction: Between Memory and History,” in Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past/Under the Direction of Pierre Nora, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 3. 48. Nora, Realms of Memory, 2. 49. Ibid., 3. 50. Ibid.

278

Radical Nostalgia

51. Geneviève Fabre, “African-American Commemorative Celebrations in the Nineteenth Century,” in History and Memory in African-American Culture, eds. Geneviève Fabre and Robert O’Meally (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 72. 52. Fabre, “African-American Commemorative Celebrations,” 80. 53. Ibid., 72. 54. Nico Frijda, “Commemorating,” 109. 55. John R. Gillis, “Memory and Identity: The History of a Relationship,” in Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity, ed. John R. Gillis (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 3. 56. Gillis, Commemorations, 5. 57. If memories are revised to suit current identities, as Gillis claims, then the evolution of commemorative activity within a given group over time could parallel the needs of shifting identities. 58. Nora, quoted in Gillis, Commemorations, 14. 59. Gillis, Commemorations, 3. 60. Frijda, Collective Memory of Political Events, 109. 61. Maurice Halbwachs, The Collective Memory, trans. Frances J. Ditter Jr. and Vida Yazdi Ditter (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1980), 22. 62. Frijda, Collective Memory of Political Events, 109. 63. Ibid., 108–9. 64. One disturbing incident in the historical record involves the killing of American volunteer Bernard Abramofsky. According to Peter Carroll, he had deserted three times and “was viewed as a threat to the already shaky morale of the troops.” After Commissar John Gates “mutter[ed] that Abramofsky ought to be shot [. . .] one of the officers took Gates at his word.” He was taken for a walk, and killed with a bullet to the head. Another volunteer, Paul White, was executed for desertion after an official military tribunal. In Carroll’s words, these “emerge as exceptional cases.” For a detailed account of these events and their implications, see Carroll, The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, 181–88. 65. Gillis, Commemorations, 3. 66. Claudia Koonz, “Between Memory and Oblivion: Concentration Camps in German Memory,” in Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity, ed. John R. Gillis (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 267. 67. John Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 13–20. Bodnar, John; Remaking America. Copyright © 1992 Princeton University Press. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press. 68. Gillis, Commemorations, 4. 69. Koonz, “Between Memory and Oblivion,” 260. 70. David Cressy, “National Memory in Early Modern England,” in Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity, ed. John R. Gillis (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 62.

Notes

279

71. Ibid. 72. Bodnar, Remaking America, 13–14. 73. Ibid., 14. 74. Douglass, quoted in Fabre, “African-American Commemorative Celebrations,” 76. 75. Bodnar, Remaking America, 14. 76. Carroll, The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, 229. 77. “The counter-organization died unborn. But even its aborted existence indicated significant discontent with the party line.” Carroll, The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, 230. 78. Carroll, The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, 112. 79. Koonz, “Between Memory and Oblivion,” 269. 80. Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, xiv. 81. Daniel J. Sherman, “Art, Commerce, and the Production of Memory in France after World War I,” in Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity, ed. John R. Gillis (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 186. 82. Fabre, “African-American Commemorative Celebrations,” 73, 75. 83. Frijda, Collective Memory of Political Events, 108, 111–12.

Chapter 3 1. For detailed studies of the student antiwar movement of the 1920s and 1930s, see Robby Cohen’s When the Old Left Was Young: Student Radicals and America’s First Mass Student Movement, 1929–1941 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), and Eileen Eagan’s Class, Culture, and the Classroom: The Student Peace Movement of the 1930s (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981). 2. Hugh Thomas, The Spanish Civil War (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), 362. 3. The Good Fight: The Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War. Dir. Noel Buchner, Mary Dore, and Sam Sills. Prod. First Run Features, 1983, videocassette. 4. “22,000 Here Mark Spanish War Date.” New York Times, 20 July 1937: 12. 5. “Lincoln Vets Organize at Parley,” Daily Worker, 20 December 1937: 3. 6. “Celebrating the First Anniversary,” Daily Worker, 15 December 1937: 8. 7. David McKelvy White, “32 Months of the ‘Friends,’ ” Volunteer for Liberty: Convention Issue 2.1 (January 1940): 4–6. 8. Memoriam, Tom Trent, 1907–1937, handbill, July 1937, collection of the author. 9. Ernest Renan, quoted in David Lowenthal, “Identity, Heritage, and History,” in Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity, ed. John R. Gillis (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 50.

280

Radical Nostalgia

10. Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 5. 11. “Tonight 1st Birthday Party,” advertisement, Daily Worker, 23 April 1938: 7. 12. “2nd Annual Stars for Spain,” advertisement, Daily Worker, 9 December 1938: 7. 13. The veterans were not all Communists, as noted earlier, but the Party had recruited most of the volunteers and antifascism was certainly a cause of the Left. Before the Nazi–Soviet pact, right-wing anti-Communism arose from a variety of sources, prime among them reaction against the Russian Revolution and fears that the working classes would rise up as they had in 1917. For many Leftists in the United States, Communism and Socialism represented the struggle for social, racial, and economic justice. Others saw all people of the Left, suspected Communists in particular, as seeking the violent overthrow of the US government. 14. Ellen Graff, Stepping Left: Dance and Politics in New York City, 1928–1942 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 120–21. 15. Tribute to Captain Herman Bottcher, press release, typescript, 1 May 1945, Box 5A, Folder 19, VALB Papers, Activities and Meetings, Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives Collection, Tamiment Library, New York University. 16. Peter N. Carroll, The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade: Americans in the Spanish Civil War (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press), 234. “During the fall of 1940, the VALB joined with other Spanish relief agencies in raising $300,000 to send an American ship to bring the exiles from French Morocco to Vera Cruz, Mexico.” 17. “Lincoln Vets Organize at Parley,” Daily Worker, 20 December 1937: 3. 18. “We Are Going On!” Volunteer for Liberty 19.1 (January 1957): 1. 19. Pierre Nora, “General Introduction: Between Memory and History,” in Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past/Under the Direction of Pierre Nora, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 6–7. 20. James M. Mayo, War Memorials as Political Landscape: The American Experience and Beyond (New York: Praeger, 1988), 50, 54. 21. Martha Olson Jarocki, interview by the author, tape recording, San Francisco, California, 2 March 2000. 22. Roby Newman, interview by the author, tape recording, San Francisco, California, 2 March 2000. 23. “22,000 Here Mark Spanish War Date,” 12. 24. Ibid. 25. It is, in part, the dwindling population of veterans, coupled with their integral role in the commemorative process over the years, that has inspired this project. What these commemorative events will become after all the veterans are gone, if they continue at all, is a pressing question on the minds of

Notes

281

both the veterans and the younger generation of activists and commemorative organizers, including myself, who surround them. 26. John Meldon, “Democracy’s Vets Lead May Day Line,” Daily Worker, 1 May 1938: 3. 27. Ibid. 28. “Spanish Vets Put Wreath on Eternal Light.” Daily Worker, 11 November 1937: 2, 1. 29. The Volunteer for Liberty was the name of the International Brigades’ newspaper published in Spain and England during and after the war. The first US issue, using the same title, was published before the VALB had officially formed. Lacking any volume or issue numbers, its masthead read “Organ of the Veterans of the International Brigade (American Chapter).” Mastheads on subsequent issues, for many years, read “Organ of the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.” 30. Volunteer for Liberty (January 1938). 31. Lee J. Levinger, “Two Greetings to the Conference,” Volunteer for Liberty (January 1938): [4]. 32. Manngreen, “Fiesta to Aid 500 Veterans Soon to Arrive from Spain,” Daily Worker, 9 December 1938: 3. 33. “Thousands to Greet Boys Returning from Spain Thursday,” Daily Worker, 12 December 1938: 2. 34. “Overflow Crowd Honors V.A.L.B.,” Volunteer (March 1962): 1. 35. Joseph North, “Crowds Roar Welcome to Lincoln Veterans,” Daily Worker, 16 December 1938: 1. 36. Ibid. 37. “Spanish Vets Put Wreath on Eternal Light.” Daily Worker, 11 November 1937: 2, 1. 38. “Overflow Crowd Honors V.A.L.B.,” 1. 39. “ ‘Stars for Spain’ To Be Gala Event,” Daily Worker, 9 December 1937: 7. 40. Stars for Spain. Advertisement, Daily Worker, 12 December 1937: 8. 41. 2nd Annual Stars for Spain, 7. 42. According to Judy Kutulas: “The liberal position vis-à-vis Spain was awkward because it was simultaneously antiwar, antifascist, and pro-democratic.” Judy Kutulas, The Long War: The Intellectual People’s Front and Anti-Stalinism, 1930–1940 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 98. 43. Kutulas, The Long War, 100. 44. Ibid., 99. 45. FALB officers holding receipts. Photograph, 23 April 1938, photograph collection: p-461. Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives, New York University, and Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Photograph Collection. 46. Night of Stars. Photograph, 23 April 1938, photograph collection: p-534. Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives, New York University, and Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Photograph Collection.

282

Radical Nostalgia

47. “Tonight 1st Birthday Party,” 7. 48. Members of the FALB were given gold-colored Liberty Bell pins with this slogan in exchange for their donations, some of which have been saved in the VALB archive. 49. I nervously carried this same banner from the VALB office to the 2001 New York commemoration in a plastic bag, and saw it hung on stage and lit with a spotlight. After the event, I returned it into the hands of Moe Fishman, head of the New York post. Moe likes to say that the holes in it are from bullets. 50. “Tonight 1st Birthday Party,” 7. For many years, 3,200 American volunteers were estimated to have traveled to Spain to participate in the Spanish Civil War. Later research brought the number down to approximately 2,750. See Carroll, The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, 14. 51. Bernard K. Johnpoll, ed., A Documentary History of the Communist Party of the United States, vol. 5, Twentieth Century Americanism, 1937–1939 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994), 295. 52. The minutes of the VALB’s 1939 convention closed as follows: “Let our slogan be: KEEP AMERICA OUT OF THIS IMPERIALIST WAR! THE YANKS ARE NOT COMING!” “The Yanks Are Not Coming” was the title of a pamphlet written in September 1939 and put out by the Communistaffiliated Maritime Federation of the Pacific. Johnpoll, A Documentary History of the Communist Party of the United States, vol. 6, The Yanks Are Not Coming, 1939–1941, 278, 292. 53. For an examination of the shifting political winds on the Left during this period, see Kutulas, The Long War: The Intellectual People’s Front and AntiStalinism, 1930–1940 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995). 54. 3rd Annual Convention Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, article typescript, December 1939, Box 5 of 20, Folder 2. VALB Papers, Activities and Meetings, Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives Collection, Tamiment Library, New York University. 55. “Friends Go Out!” Daily Worker, 23 December 1939: 3. 56. Minutes of 1939 Convention, December 1939, Box 5 of 20, Folder 1, VALB Papers, Activities and Meetings. Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives Collection, Tamiment Library, New York University. 57. For an excellent examination of Rolfe’s poetry and career, and an anthology of his work, see Cary Nelson and Jefferson Hendricks’ Edwin Rolfe Collected Poems (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993). 58. 3rd Annual Convention Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, article typescript, December 1939, Box 5 of 20, Folder 2. VALB Papers, Activities and Meetings, Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives Collection, Tamiment Library, New York University. 59. Martin Dies, a congressman from Texas, chaired the Special Committee on Un-American Activities, a precursor to HUAC, from 1938 to 1944. Victor N. Navasky, Naming Names (New York: Viking Press, 1980), 21.

Notes

283

60. 3rd Annual Convention Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, article typescript, December 1939, Box 5 of 20, Folder 2. VALB Papers, Activities and Meetings, Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives Collection, Tamiment Library, New York University. 61. Volunteer for Liberty: Convention Issue, 2:1 (January 1940). Cary Nelson dates the poem from September 20, 1937 in his new edited volume of Spanish Civil War verse, The Wound and the Dream: Sixty Years of American Poems about the Spanish Civil War (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 76. 62. Carroll, The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, 226–27. 63. 3rd Annual Convention Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, VALB Papers, Activities and Meetings, Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives Collection, Tamiment Library, New York University. 64. 3rd Annual Convention Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, VALB Papers, Activities and Meetings, Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives Collection, Tamiment Library, New York University. 65. Edwin Rolfe, “Elegy for Our Dead,” Volunteer for Liberty 2.1 (January 1940): 2. From Collected Poems. Copyright 1993 Board of Trustees University of Illinois. Used with permission University of Illinois Press. This image, to “clothe their vision with flesh” is distinctly reminiscent of the phrase in W. H. Auden’s “Spain,” written in 1937: “On that arid square, that fragment nipped off from hot / Africa, soldered so crudely to inventive Europe / [. . .] Our thoughts have bodies; the menacing shapes of our fever / Are precise and alive.” In W. H. Auden’s “Spain,” in The Penguin Book of Spanish Civil War Verse, ed. Valentine Cunningham (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), 99. 66. Rolfe, “Elegy for Our Dead,” 2. In Cary Nelson and Jefferson Hendricks’ volume of Rolfe’s collected works, a reproduction of a handwritten draft of this poem dated September 1937 replaces “wind-marceled” with the phrase “marcelled with wind,” correcting the misspelling in the Volunteer. In the typeset version of the poem, based on its later publication by Rolfe, the phrase becomes “wind-marshalled.” Cary Nelson and Jefferson Hendricks, Edwin Rolfe Collected Poems (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 22, 143. 67. Genevieve Taggart [sic], “To the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade,” ¡No Pasaran! The 50th Anniversary of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, program book (New York: Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives, 1986), 19. Taggard included the same poem in her 1942 anthology Long View, where it is also dated 1941. Genevieve Taggard, Long View (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1942), 39–40. Reprinted by permission of Judith Benét Richardson. 68. Spain 40! Play script by Carl Abrams, typescript, Part 1, documents, Robert Steck Collection, Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives Collection, Tamiment Library, New York University. The poem first appeared in the March 1941 Volunteer. In an e-mail regarding the poem’s appearance in the Volunteer, Cary Nelson stated, “It was willingly published by Taggard without copyright.”

284

Radical Nostalgia

69. Genevieve Taggard, “To the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade,” Long View (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1942), 39–40. Reprinted by permission of Judith Benét Richardson. 70. Taggard, “To the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade,” 39–40. 71. The speech was written by David McKelvy White; see Carroll, The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, 247. 72. “Wolff Stirs Vet Parley in Fighting Anti-War Plea,” Daily Worker, 1 June 1941: 5. 73. Information about the photograph is taken from an attached caption. 74. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914–1991 (New York: Vintage, 1996), 39. 75. “Convention Report and Discussion,” Volunteer for Liberty 8.1 (November 1946): 7. 76. Frank Ryan, ed., The Book of the XV Brigade (Madrid and London: Commissariat of War XV Brigade and Frank Graham, 1975), 97. 77. This story was related by Peter Carroll, based on a conversation with Rolfe’s widow Mary. The lyric is from the original version of the song “Jarama Valley” (see Chapter 5). 78. “[Invitation to 14th Anniversary],” Volunteer for Liberty 6.7 (March 1945): 2. 79. Tribute to Captain Herman Bottcher, VALB Papers, Activities and Meetings, Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives Collection, Tamiment Library, New York University. 80. Bottcher was granted a battlefield commission and awarded “the Distinguished Service Cross and Oak Leaf Cluster, the Silver Star, the Legion of Merit, and the Purple Heart with two Oak Leaf Clusters,” according to a letter sent to the veterans by the War Department. Tribute to Captain Herman Bottcher, VALB Papers, Activities and Meetings, Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives Collection, Tamiment Library, New York University. 81. Peter Carroll with Daniel Bertwell, “Premature Anti-Fascists, Again,” Volunteer 25.4 (December 2003): 4. 82. Volunteer for Liberty 8.1 (November 1946): 9, 11. 83. “Ickes Greets Lincoln Brigade,” Volunteer for Liberty 8.1 (November 1946): 3. 84. “Convention Report and Discussion,” 7. 85. Ibid. 86. Carroll, The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, 282–83. 87. “Convention Report and Discussion,” 7. 88. Robeson later called the 1938 trip to Spain “ ‘a major turning point in my life’—in the sense of intensifying his already well-developed political sympathies,” Martin Duberman wrote in his biography of the singer. He quoted Robeson further on the subject: “I have never met such courage in a people [. . .]. We must know that Spain is our Front Line. . . . We are certainly not

Notes

285

doing anywhere nearly enough. We don’t feel deeply enough.” Martin Bauml Duberman, Paul Robeson (New York: Ballantine Books, 1989), 220. 89. Carroll, The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, 285. 90. “Free Spain Now,” VALB Papers, Activities and Meetings, Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives Collection, Tamiment Library, New York University. Lister was one of the Spanish Republican generals. “General Walter,” their choice from Poland, was General Swierczewski’s nom de guerre. 91. “Free Spain Now,” notes for upcoming meeting, typescript, Box 5A, Folder 20 VALB Papers, Activities and Meetings, Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives Collection, Tamiment Library, New York University. 92. “Stars Entertain for Republican Spain,” Volunteer for Liberty 8.2 (2 January 1947): 5; “Lincoln Brigade Dines.” New York Times, 13 February 1947: 3. 93. “Lincoln Brigade Dines.” New York Times, 13 February 1947: 3. 94. Carroll, The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, 285–86. 95. Ibid., 289. 96. Ibid., 287–88. 97. Ibid., 293. Wolff led the Bay Area post for many years, resigning in 1999. Moe Fishman still runs the New York office of the VALB. 98. “Five More Vets Have Been Arrested,” Volunteer for Liberty 12.10 (26 October 1951): 1. Sample headlines: 12 April 1951: “Nelson Defense Pledged at New York Rally.” 7 September 1951: “Two More Lincoln Vets Arrested Under Smith Act.” 3 October 1951: “Bail Won for Steve Nelson and Irv Weissman.” 26 October 1951: “Five More Vets Have Been Arrested—Let’s Stop It Now!” 99. Carroll, The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, 310. 100. “No U.S. $$$,” flier announcing 22nd anniversary, 1953, Box 5A, Folder 24. VALB Papers, Activities and Meetings, Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives Collection, Tamiment Library, New York University. In difficult times, commemorative celebrations may have to wait for years of numerical significance to garner enough support to succeed; when times are good, or there are pressing causes around which people will rally, any anniversary will do. 101. “Decoration Day Commemoration,” Volunteer for Liberty 15.4 (June 1954): 3. This “wall of silence” that “speeches, songs and leaflets” were seen to breach is reminiscent of Hayden White’s claim, in The Content of the Form, that “opposition” to dominant histories “can be carried forward only on the basis of the conception of the historical record as being not a window through which the past ‘as it really was’ can be apprehended, but rather a wall that must be broken through if the ‘terror of history’ is to be directly confronted and the fear it induces dispelled.” The veterans’ long-standing defiance against conventional and received wisdom about the state of the world, beginning with their decision to go to Spain and even their stubborn acceptance of the Nazi–Soviet pact, would now seem an invaluable weapon in the fight to break down White’s wall

286

Radical Nostalgia

of history. Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1987), 78. 102. “Memo from Office,” Volunteer for Liberty (4 September 1953): 1–4. It took until 1972 for the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade to be removed from the list of subversive organizations after a unanimous ruling by the US Court of Appeals. The Abraham Lincoln Brigade was removed in 1965. “No criminal charges were ever lodged against the VALB nor was it ever accused of violating any law,” the Volunteer reported in 1972. “By the mere stroke of a pen [in 1955] the Attorney General dubbed VALB a subversive organization.” See “Court of Appeals rule in favor of VALB,” Volunteer (November 1972): [7]. 103. “Speaking Frankly,” Volunteer for Liberty 17.5 (November 1956): 1. 104. Carroll, The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, 311–12. 105. “We Are Going On!” Volunteer for Liberty 19.1 (January 1957): 1. 106. Ibid. 107. Letter to veterans, 18 January 1957, Box 5 of 20, Folder 8, VALB Papers, Activities and Meetings, Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives Collection, Tamiment Library, New York University. 108. “President Eisenhower.” New York Times, 19 July 1957: 4. 109. “The Spanish Monarchy.” New York Times, 21 July 1957: IV 6. 110. Moe Fishman, “Delegation of Vets Visit the German Democratic Republic,” Volunteer (October 1961): 1. 111. Brunete was the second major Republican offensive involving the American volunteers, after the battle of Jarama. Carroll, Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, 140–53. 112. Fishman, “Delegation of Vets Visit the German Democratic Republic,” 1. 113. Ibid., 2. 114. Invitation to House Party for Moe Fishman, 30 June 1962, Box 5, Folder 11, VALB Office, Activities and Meetings, Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives Collection, Tamiment Library, New York University. 115. “West Coast in Action!” Volunteer for Liberty 13.1 (8 February 1952): 1. 116. For many years, the back cover of programs for events in the Bay Area listed all the members of the post, living and dead, with the header: “Founded in 1962 with Don Thayer as Commander and Sana Goldblatt as Treasurer.” Thayer, a veteran, waterfront worker, and member of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), moved to San Francisco after World War II. His 1973 obituary in the Volunteer states: “Don attended the 25th anniversary of the Spanish War in the German Democratic Republic in 1961. With the help of a few friends he activated the local post and was elected post commander.” Sana Goldblatt was the youngest American nurse in Spain. She was jailed upon her return for carrying a fascist pamphlet as a souvenir. She became an occupational

Notes

287

therapist. “In Memoriam: Donald A. Thayer,” Volunteer (April 1973): [2]; The “Premature Anti-Fascist” Women, “Program Booklet for 40th Anniversary Banquet, S.F. Bay Area,” (Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, 6 February 1977, mimeographed), collection of the author. 117. “Overflow Crowd Honors V.A.L.B.,” 1. 118. “25th Year Marked by Lincoln Brigade.” New York Times, 26 February 1962: 19. The New York Times stated that “more than 1,100” were present; the Volunteer claimed 1,500 attendees. 119. Carroll, The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, 359. 120. One veteran Peter Carroll knew of wanted nothing to do with vets or politics after Spain. “Eighteen months service at the age of 25 proved to be the exception to an utterly apolitical life.” Carroll, The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, 217. 121. Letter to veterans, 7 March 1962, Box 5, Folder 11, VALB Office, Activities and Meetings, Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives Collection, Tamiment Library, New York University. 122. “25th Year Marked By Lincoln Brigade,” 19. 123. “Overflow Crowd Honors V.A.L.B.,” 1. 124. The New York Times reported the take as $2,200, differing with the Volunteer by 400 attendees and $300. 125. “Overflow Crowd Honors V.A.L.B.,” 1. 126. Pena was a Spanish antifascist who had spent time living in New York City after the war, and been active with the VALB. He disappeared; ten years later, in 1958, he wrote the veterans from a prison in Spain seeking their assistance. Carroll, The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, 360. 127. “Overflow Crowd Honors V.A.L.B.,” 1. 128. “25th Year Marked by Lincoln Brigade,” 19. 129. Carroll, The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, 362. 130. “25th Year Marked by Lincoln Brigade,” 19.

Chapter 4 1. “Comprehensive History of Lincoln Brigade Being Written,” Volunteer (July 1964): 3. 2. Maury Colow, report to the 1969 VALB Conference, 1969, Box 5 of 20, Folder 13, VALB Papers, Activities and Meetings, Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives Collection, Tamiment Library, New York University. 3. Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1987), 78. 4. I would like to thank Peter Carroll for drawing this connection. 5. Peter N. Carroll, The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade: Americans in the Spanish Civil War (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 355.

288

Radical Nostalgia

6. Carroll, The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, 356. 7. Ibid., 357–58. 8. Ibid., 358. 9. Ibid. 10. Pete Hamill, “For Some Old Soldiers, There Are No Monuments,” Village Voice, 20 February 1969, 37. 11. Hamill, “For Some Old Soldiers, There Are No Monuments,” 37–38. 12. For fourteen years, Marcantonio was a radical member of the US congressional district that included Harlem, and a champion of left-wing, Italian American, and Puerto Rican causes in the New York area. He died suddenly of a heart attack in 1954. He was unapologetic about his affiliations with the Communist Party, and also led the American Labor Party. “Vito Marcantonio: His Life and Milieu,” 1998, http://users.rcn.com/redpost/life.html (accessed 9 August 2004). 13. Hamill, “For Some Old Soldiers, There Are No Monuments,” 38. 14. Ibid. 15. Carroll, The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, 367. 16. Overflow Crowd at S.F. Bay Area Anniversary. Report on the 39th anniversary dinner in the Bay Area. 1976, Box 3, U.S. Committee for Democratic Spain, etc., Folder—Updates from the 39th Anniversary Dinner. Syd Harris Collection, Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives Collection, Tamiment Library, New York University. 17. Carroll, The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, 370. 18. Ibid. 19. “N.Y. Post Spurs Historical Work,” Volunteer (May 1976): [6]. 20. In transcribing interviews, I have tried to render voices as accurately as possible—their delivery, stresses, pauses, and hesitations. 21. Martha Olson Jarocki, interview by the author, tape recording, San Francisco, California, 2 March 2000. Edited slightly for word repetition and syntax. 22. Hannah Olson Creighton, interview by the author, tape recording, Greenbrae, California, 19 December 1996. 23. The “Premature Anti-Fascist” Women, “Program Booklet for 40th Anniversary Banquet, S.F. Bay Area” (Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, 6 February 1977, mimeographed), collection of the author. 24. Milt Wolff, “750 Jam S.F. 40th,” Volunteer (March 1977): 1, 4. 25. Sana Goldblatt was the Bay Area post’s first treasurer; volunteers Ruth Davidow, Hilda Bell Roberts, and Marion Merriman Wachtel were all active in the post; Freida Wolff, Hon Brown, and Corinne Thornton, wives of veterans, have been central figures as well over the years. Martha Olson Jarocki and Linda Lustig, the daughters of veterans, are very active in the post’s activities. 26. Gerald Cook, “N.Y. 40th a Gala Affair,” Volunteer (March 1977): 1, 2.

Notes

289

27. Spain 40! Play script by Carl Abrams, typescript, Part 1, documents, Robert Steck Collection, Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives Collection, Tamiment Library, New York University. 28. Readings of poems by Edwin Rolfe and Genevieve Taggard are indicated in the script, though the specific titles used may only be inferred. 29. This particular letter was first reprinted in the book From Spanish Trenches, edited by Marcel Acier and published in 1937. I discovered that version of the letter in 1992, when I began to adapt my own stage piece about the war, Heart of Spain. Of hundreds of selections in the book, it was one of about a dozen that caught my eye. I later recommended its inclusion in a commemorative script produced in San Francisco in 1996. It was not until I was conducting research for this dissertation in the summer of 2000 that I discovered it in the script for Spain 40! Certain pieces of period writing seem to capture the experience of an event and a time in such a way that they almost force themselves into visibility, and are then cited and re-cited as a result. Like some of Rolfe’s poems, they become signature artifacts. They serve the needs of later generations to evoke this particular moment in the ways in which they want it remembered. Marcel Acier, ed., From Spanish Trenches, reprint (New York: Modern Age, 1937), 17–20. 30. Spain 40! Robert Steck Collection, Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives Collection, Tamiment Library, New York University. 31. Cook, “N.Y. 40th a Gala Affair,” 1, 2. 32. Of the three figures evoked from the past, only Jim Lardner was lost in the war. The politicization of his death within the commemorative context was essentially sanctioned by his brother’s presence and participation in the affair. They were the sons of writer Ring Lardner, but Ring Lardner Jr. was famous in his own right as a member of the Hollywood Ten, along with veteran Alvah Bessie. 33. Spain 40! Robert Steck Collection, Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives Collection, Tamiment Library, New York University. 34. The script indicates a Taggard poem in this spot, but not which one. Given the setup—“What can we say of you?”—it could not have been any other than “To the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade,” written for the fourth anniversary of the battle of Jarama in 1941. 35. This refers to the first ship to leave for Spain carrying American volunteers, on December 26, 1936. 36. Cook, “N.Y. 40th a Gala Affair,” 2. 37. Slide cues are handwritten into the Spain 40! script adjacent to certain lines of dialogue. These bracketed details indicate the images described, as best as I can read the handwriting. “Blank” indicates a blank screen. 38. Spain 40! Robert Steck Collection, Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives Collection, Tamiment Library, New York University. 39. Cook, “N.Y. 40th a Gala Affair,” 2.

290

Radical Nostalgia

40. Ibid. Having come across Abrams’s script in my research, I drew on certain sections of it for the 2004 commemorative events in New York and Oakland. 41. Carroll, The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, 358. 42. Colodny also wrote a pamphlet entitled Spain and Vietnam: The Fight for Freedom, drawing political connections between the two conflicts, which the VALB published in 1967. It was based on a speech he had given before the VALB’s Historical Commission. 43. As a co-creator of commemorative events in 1996 and 2000, I used sections of this speech as part of the scripted performance. I had first become aware of it through Colodny’s son Roby Newman, a member of the Bay Area post. 44. Robert Colodny, “From Spain to Vietnam,” Volunteer (Spring 1970): 1–2. 45. Colodny, “From Spain to Vietnam,” 2. 46. Ibid., 1. 47. Ibid., 2. It is impossible to read this passage without immediate associations to the USA Patriot Act, installed by the Bush administration after September 11 in the name of fighting terrorism, severely reducing civil liberties in the process. 48. Vaughn Love’s support of the civil rights movement but his refusal to “turn the other cheek” is a reminder that the so-called “peace movement” was not always peaceful. The radical Left of the 1960s, represented by groups like the Weather Underground and the Black Panthers, were willing to use different forms of violence to achieve their goals. I do not think Colodny was advocating violence as much as an “army” of resistance. 49. Bill Susman, “Spain Revisited: Some Impressions.” Volunteer (March 1977): 5. 50. Carroll, The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, 366. 51. Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 4. 52. Carroll’s comment mimics the example used by the OED in its definition of nostalgia: “He pictures with a sense of nostalgia, too acute almost to be endured, all that marriage to Marian would have meant.” See Chapter 2, note 24. 53. Carroll, The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, 366. 54. Milt Cohen, Spain Revisited (New York: Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, 1977), 3. 55. Cohen, Spain Revisited, 3. 56. Susman, “Spain Revisited: Some Impressions,” 5. 57. Volunteer (March 1977): 1. 58. White, The Content of the Form, 21. 59. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 23.

Notes

291

60. Stewart, On Longing, 145. 61. Peter N. Carroll, interview by the author, tape recording, Belmont, California, 7 February 2001. 62. Carroll, The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, 369–70. 63. As reported in the Volunteer: “This was by far the largest event in the history of the VALB in the Bay Area. The audience was representative of all sections of the people in our area. There were Blacks, Chicanos and Asians young and old. There were present members and leaders of trade unions, secretary-treasurer of ILWU International [. . .]. Represented were Women for Peace, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, Gus Newport, Mayor of Berkeley [. . .]. Also a group of Spanish Republicans from San Francisco were present. [. . .] There was a festive mood in the hall. The audience cheered when the children and grandchildren of the Vets were asked to rise and there were many of them. [. . .] There were 50 Bay Area vets and their families. Twenty vets and families came from Los Angeles, Seattle and as far East as Chicago and Minneapolis. We thank them for honoring us with their presence.” Ed Bender, “Frisco Honors Black Veterans,” Volunteer 3.1 (1980): 1. 64. These titles have been collected from the appropriate copies of the Volunteer and the author’s private collection of programs. 65. Navasky and Terkel both spoke at the New York commemoration in April 2001, and Victor Navasky was the featured speaker at the May 2004 event in New York City. 66. Kirk Savage, “The Politics of Memory: Black Emancipation and the Civil War Monument,” in Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity, ed. John R. Gillis (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 127. 67. A Bill: H.R. 259 in the House of Representatives. Program for 43rd anniversary, Bay Area VALB, 2 February 1980. Syd Harris Collection, Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives Collection, Tamiment Library, New York University. 68. “Historical News Notes,” Volunteer 2.2 (1979): 11. 69. The plaque read: “In memory of the City College alumni, students and teachers, who were among the 1,600 American volunteers who died fighting fascism in Spain 1936–1939.” A detail of Picasso’s Guernica was engraved on the plaque, and the names of the City College volunteers were listed. “Memorial Plaque in City College,” Volunteer 3.1 (1980): 12. 70. “We Are Going On!” Volunteer for Liberty 19.1 (January 1957): 1. 71. Leonard Lamb and Bill Susman, “Dartmouth Remembers Spain and Honors Vets,” Volunteer 3.5 (1981): 1. 72. “Seattle Post,” Volunteer 3.5 (1981): 6. 73. The Good Fight: The Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War, videocassette. 74. Help Send an Ambulance. Advertisement. Program for 48th anniversary, Bay area VALB. 24 February 1985. Collection of the author.

292

Radical Nostalgia

75. Susan Bennett, Performing Nostalgia: Shifting Shakespeare and the Contemporary Past (London: Routledge, 1996), 4. 76. “Call to National Conference,” Letter of invitation and preconference bulletin, 28–29 April 1979, Folder 59, Bill Susman Collection, Correspondence, Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives Collection, Tamiment Library, New York University. 77. “Call to National Conference,” Bill Susman Collection, Correspondence, Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives Collection, Tamiment Library, New York University. 78. Ibid. 79. Carroll, The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, 371. 80. Steve Nelson, “Our National Conference,” Volunteer 2.2 (1979): 2. 81. Ibid. 82. Carroll, The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, 371. 83. Joe Doyle, “April 7th in New York,” Volunteer 8.2 (October 1986): 1. 84. Commemorate the 50th Anniversary, Promotional flier for mailing, 1986, Box 5, Folder 24, VALB Office, Activities and Meetings, Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives Collection, Tamiment Library, New York University. The event was co-produced by veteran Bill Susman and Harold Leventhal. Leventhal was a successful theatrical producer, who also managed the Weavers and Pete Seeger, and was instrumental in the New York career of Woody Guthrie. 85. Ring Lardner Jr. et al., The Abraham Lincoln Brigade 50th Anniversary. Performed at Avery Fisher Hall, New York, New York, 7 April 1986, unreleased audio recording. 86. “Remark by Reagan on Lincoln Brigade Prompts Ire in Spain.” New York Times, 10 May 1985: A11. 87. Lardner Jr. et al., The Abraham Lincoln Brigade 50th Anniversary, unreleased audio recording. 88. Joe Doyle, “April 7th in New York,” 1, 3–4. 89. James Lardner, “[Barcelona, May 3, 1938],” in Madrid 1937: Letters of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade from the Spanish Civil War, eds. Cary Nelson and Jefferson Hendricks (New York: Routledge, 1996), 44. 90. Lardner Jr. et al., The Abraham Lincoln Brigade 50th Anniversary, unreleased audio recording. 91. Richard Schechner, The End of Humanism: Writings on Performance (New York: Performing Arts Journal, 1982), 110–11. 92. Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 2, 3. 93. Doyle, “April 7th in New York,” 3. 94. Early in the program, one of the actors detailing the history of the Spanish Civil War mentioned that Russian support and equipment “came in

Notes

293

enough quantity to considerably bolster the Loyalist resistance.” The partisan audience responded with spontaneous and enthusiastic applause. Lardner Jr. et al., The Abraham Lincoln Brigade 50th Anniversary, unreleased audio recording. 95. This is transcribed directly from the performance tape. I have tried to render Lee Grant’s phrasing and emphases. 96. Lardner Jr. et al., The Abraham Lincoln Brigade 50th Anniversary, unreleased audio recording. Parker’s story appeared in its entirety as the introduction to The Heart of Spain: Anthology of Fiction, Non-fiction and Poetry, a collection of writing about the war in Spain published in 1952 and edited by Alvah Bessie. Parker’s story is located on pages i–iv. Although it recounts her time in Spain, the piece was written in the heat of McCarthyism. 97. This moment was characteristic of certain times during a performance when an audience is so caught up in something striking that has taken place on the stage that they only acknowledge its significance when the opportunity to do so is about to be taken away. 98. Doyle, “April 7th in New York,” 3. 99. “Cary Nelson: Curriculum Vitae,” 2000, http://www.english.uiuc.edu/ facpages/nelson.htm (accessed 1 December 2004); “East Coast,” Volunteer 18.2 (Fall 1996): 3, 6. 100. “Spain Welcomes the Brigadistas,” Volunteer 19.1 (Winter 1996–97): 1, 6–7, 22. 101. The name was later simplified to the Chicago Friends of the Lincoln Brigade. 102. “Spain in the Heart: 1936–1996” (Chicago Friends of VALB/ALBA, 1997, printed program), collection of the author. 103. Charles and Yolanda Hall, interview by the author, tape recording, Chicago, Illinois, 29 April 1997. 104. J. M. Coetzee, quoted in Susan V. Gallagher, A Story of South Africa: J. M. Coetzee’s Fiction in Context (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 24. 105. Theirs was, in fact, a double resistance, both against fascism and against the US government, which refused to support the Spanish Republic. Travel to Spain was illegal for US citizens throughout most of the war. 106. The film was made by Judith Montell. For the source of its title, see the second epigraph to this chapter. 107. Aaron and Joyce Hilkevitch, interview by the author, tape recording, Chicago, Illinois, 21 May 1997. 108. Thanks in part to his accent, Aaron has a very distinctive way of speaking. I have rendered it as accurately as possible to do justice to his rhythms and inflections. In a very few places where I could not identify a particular word for certain, I have given my best guess, based on sound and context. I have also edited out some hesitations and repetitions.

294

Radical Nostalgia

109. This line of questioning was stimulated by Aaron’s earlier mention of “the legend business.” I am grateful to him for coining this resonant term. Aaron brought the title of the documentary You Are History, You Are Legend into our conversation in the first place. I had heard and seen the last lines of Dolores Ibárruri’s speech many times, but Aaron called my attention to their value as an analytic trigger. 110. I believe Aaron is proposing that so much attention would usually be lavished on a beautiful female spouse, not on an old man. 111. Aaron and Joyce Hilkevitch, interview by the author, tape recording, Chicago, Illinois, 21 May 1997. It took me days before I could discern the word “icons” through Aaron’s accent. He pronounced it as “likens,” without the first letter. 112. Aaron and Joyce Hilkevitch, interview by the author, tape recording, Chicago, Illinois, 21 May 1997. 113. Personal communication with the Halls. 114. Victor Turner, “Foreword,” in Barbara Myerhoff, Number Our Days: Culture and Community Among Elderly Jews in an American Ghetto (New York: Meridian, 1994), x. 115. Turner, “Foreword,” xi. 116. Aaron and Joyce Hilkevitch, interview by the author, tape recording, Chicago, Illinois, 21 May 1997. 117. Smadar Lavie, The Poetics of Military Occupation: Mzeina Allegories of Bedouin Identity Under Israeli and Egyptian Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 330. 118. Aaron and Joyce Hilkevitch, interview by the author, tape recording, Chicago, Illinois, 21 May 1997.

Chapter 5 1. James Neugass, “Give Us This Day,” in Our Fight: Writings by Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, Spain 1936–1939, eds. Alvah Bessie and Albert Prago (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1987), 172–74. Used by permission of Paul Neugass. 2. Lecture by Pete Seeger on the Music of the Spanish Civil War, audio cassette of one lecture in series, 1 December 1981, Albert Prago Class at New School for Social Research, session 7, tape 1, Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives Collection, Tamiment Library, New York University. 3. Ernst Busch, ed., Canciones de las Brigadas Internacionales (Barcelona: Brigada Internacional, 1938). 4. Busch, Canciones de las Brigadas Internacionales, 51. 5. Morgan Havard, “Cultural Life in a Concentration Camp,” Volunteer for Liberty 5.1 (January 1944): 7.

Notes

295

6. Busch, Canciones de las Brigadas Internacionales, 48. 7. Pete Seeger and Ernst Busch, Songs of the Spanish Civil War, Vol. 1, Folkways Records, 1961. 8. Richard A. Reuss with JoAnne C. Reuss, American Folk Music and LeftWing Politics, 1927–1957 (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2000), 119. 9. Ibid. 10. Reuss, American Folk Music and Left-Wing Politics, 117. 11. Benjamin Filene, Romancing the Folk: Public Memory & American Roots Music (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 70. 12. In our 1996 interview, folk singer Ronnie Gilbert remembered that she first sang Spanish Civil War songs the songs at Camp Wo-chi-ca in New Jersey around 1939, when she was 14 years old. Wo-chi-ca was an Indiansounding word that actually stood for Workers Children’s Camp, run by the left-wing IWO, the International Workers Order. 13. The official title of “Freiheit,” according to most sources, is “Die Thaelmann-Kolonne,” or “The Thaelmann Column.” Freiheit is German for “freedom,” and the word is sung/shouted at the end of each chorus. “Die Moorsoldaten” or “The Peat-Bog Soldiers” originated in a Nazi concentration camp. I noted Terkel’s words during his keynote speech, April 29, 2001, at Borough of Manhattan Community College, New York City. Seeger and Busch, Songs of the Spanish Civil War, Vol. 1, 3. 14. Ronald Cohen and David Samuelson state unequivocally that this material was recorded in 1943. When it was re-released by Folkways records in 1961 along with the German album, the liner notes claimed that it had been recorded in 1942. In the lecture cited here, Pete Seeger said that the year had to have been 1943 or, more likely, 1944, when he was on furlough. The Volunteer for Liberty reports the album being played for the veterans at a reunion in June 1944, and that it would be available one month later. Ronald D. Cohen and Dave Samuelson, Songs for Political Action: Folkmusic, Topical Songs and the American Left, 1926–1953 (Bear Family Records, BCD15720 JL, 1996), 99; Seeger and Busch, Songs of the Spanish Civil War, Vol. 1, 2; Lecture by Pete Seeger on the Music of the Spanish Civil War, Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives Collection, Tamiment Library, New York University; “Vets Reunion,” Volunteer for Liberty 6.3 (July 1944): 3. 15. Among these was an album released in Spain soon after Franco’s death: España 1936–1939: 25 Himnos y Canciones de la Guerra Civil Española, under the direction of Maestro Casas-Augé and Maestro Antoni Coll i Cruelis. 16. Tom Glazer, interview by the author, tape recording, New York, New York, 27 April 1997. 17. Pete Seeger, interview by the author, telephone interview, Beacon, New York, 26 June 2000.

296

Radical Nostalgia

18. My father performed Spanish Civil War songs at the fortieth-anniversary event in Chicago. He told me that he was immediately uncomfortable when he realized there would be Spaniards in the audience. He has a good ear and a good accent, but he felt awkward singing in a foreign language to people for whom these songs were indigenous. Tom Glazer, interview by the author, tape recording, New York, New York, 27 April 1997. 19. He is referring to “Viva La Quince Brigada.” 20. Lecture by Pete Seeger on the Music of the Spanish Civil War, Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives Collection, Tamiment Library, New York University. 21. Pete Seeger, interview by the author, telephone interview, Beacon, New York, 26 June 2000. 22. In addition to the flamenco musicians, Seeger also mentioned Bart Van Der Schelling in particular. 23. Pete Seeger, interview by the author, telephone interview, Beacon, New York, 26 June 2000. 24. Cohen and Samuelson, Songs for Political Action, 99. 25. Pete Seeger, interview by the author, telephone interview, Beacon, New York, 26 June 2000. 26. Cohen and Samuelson, Songs for Political Action. 100. 27. Seeger and Busch, Songs of the Spanish Civil War, Vol. 1. In the liner notes for the album, the titles are translated as follows: “Viva La Quince Brigada” as “Long Live the Fifteenth Brigade” (it was the Fifteenth Brigade that included the American volunteers); “El Quinto Regimiento” as “The Fifth Regiment” (a famous Republican militia formed in immediate response to Franco’s rebellion, and involved in the early defense of Madrid); and “Si Me Quieres Escribir” as “If You Want to Write to Me.” 28. Lecture by Pete Seeger on the Music of the Spanish Civil War, Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives Collection, Tamiment Library, New York University. 29. Pete Seeger, interview by the author, telephone interview, Beacon, New York, 26 June 2000. 30. Ronnie Gilbert, interview by the author, tape recording, Berkeley, California, 20 December 1996. 31. Henry Foner, interview by the author, tape recording, New York, New York, 15 September 2000. 32. Lawrence Lipton, The Holy Barbarians (New York: Julian Messner, 1959), 290. 33. “Vets Reunion,” Volunteer for Liberty 6.3 (July 1944): 3. 34. Michael Harrington, The Vast Majority (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1977), 175. The GPU were Stalin’s KGB, who perpetrated some of his more heinous crimes. Harrington is referring to George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, in which the author is a member of a Trotskyite militia passionate

Notes

297

to defeat Franco but under attack themselves by forces under the command of the Communist Party. 35. From the Preamble to the People’s Songs International Constitution, as quoted in Reuss, American Folk Music and Left-Wing Politics, 180. 36. Reuss, American Folk Music and Left-Wing Politics, 185–206. 37. Robbie Lieberman, “People’s Songs: American Communism and the Politics of Culture,” Radical History Review 36 (1986), 72. 38. Robbie Lieberman, My Song Is My Weapon: People’s Songs, American Communism, and the Politics of Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 162. 39. Michael Smith and Jamie O’Reilly, Pasiones: Songs of the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939, Bird Avenue, 1997. 40. Maestro Casas-Augé and Maestro Antoni Coll i Cruelis, dir. España 1936–1939: 25 Himnos y Canciones de la Guerra Civil Española, Dial Discos, 1979. 41. Bay Area 2001 Commemorative Event. Performed at Calvin Simmons Theater, Oakland, California, 25 February 2001, unreleased audio recording. 42. “42nd Anniversary Honors Black Vets,” Volunteer 2.1 (1979): 5. 43. Letter to Pete Seeger from Bill Susman, 23 March 1979, Box 5, Folder 21, VALB Papers, Activities and Meetings, Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives Collection, Tamiment Library, New York University. 44. Linda Lustig, interview by the author, tape recording, Berkeley, California, 3 March 2000. 45. Peter N. Carroll, The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade: Americans in the Spanish Civil War (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 98–102. 46. Jason Gurney, Crusade in Spain (London: Faber and Faber, 1974), 149–50. 47. William Rust, Britons in Spain: The History of the British Battalion of the XVth International Brigade (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1939), 59. 48. The editors asterisk this line, with the note: “Referring to the brief leave at Alcala de Henares at the beginning of May.” 49. A double asterisk notes the following: “Lincoln Battalion or Dmitrov Battalion.” 50. Frank Ryan, ed., The Book of the XV Brigade (Madrid and London: Commissariat of War XV Brigade and Frank Graham, 1975), 97. 51. Gurney replaces “British Battalion” with “Lincoln Battalion.” 52. Gurney, Crusade in Spain, 151. 53. Ibid. 54. Vincent Brome, The International Brigades: Spain 1936–1939 (New York: William Morrow, 1966), 182. 55. For further information see Arthur H. Landis, The Abraham Lincoln Brigade (New York: Citadel Press, 1967), 232; Ryan, The Book of the XV

298

Radical Nostalgia

Brigade, 240. They base this on the proximity of this particular document in the Moscow archive to others attributed to Tapsell, and to the text of the document itself. In Landis only, his name is spelled “Tapsall.” I want to thank Peter Carroll for informing me of the existence of this document. 56. I have re-created the document’s punctuation and use of upper and lower case letters. Brackets indicate words or letters missing from the torn edges of the document; I have made suggestions where appropriate. I want to thank Peter Carroll for alerting me to the existence of this document. 57. W.T. “The Old Jarama Valley,” microform copies, 1937, International Brigade records, Center for the Preservation and Documentation of Contemporary History, Moscow; Opus 3, File 473, Document #98, Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives Collection, Tamiment Library, New York University. 58. Landis, The Abraham Lincoln Brigade, 134–69. Rust also dates McDade’s death as July at the battle of Brunete (Rust 195). 59. Valentine Cunningham, “Introduction,” in The Penguin Book of Spanish Civil War Verse, ed. Valentine Cunningham (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1980), 76. Extract from the introduction to The Penguin Book of Spanish Civil War Verse by VALENTINE CUNNINGHAM. Reprinted by permission of PFD on behalf of Valentine Cunningham. Copyright © Valentine Cunningham, 1980. All rights reserved. 60. Landis, The Abraham Lincoln Brigade, 450. 61. Ibid., 246–47, 343. 62. Ryan, The Book of the XV Brigade, 240. 63. “We dedicate this first issue,” Volunteer for Liberty [1].[1] (January 1938): [2]. 64 “Jarama River Valley,” Volunteer for Liberty (January 1938): [3]. 65. Cunningham, “Introduction,” The Penguin Book of Spanish Civil War Verse, 77. 66. Ibid. 67. Ibid. 68. Edwin Rolfe, The Lincoln Battalion: The Story of the Americans Who Fought in Spain in the International Brigades (New York: Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, 1939), 71–72. 69. Colin Williams et al., Memorials of the Spanish Civil War: The Official Publication of the International Brigade Association (Phoenix Mill: Alan Sutton, 1996), 138. 70. Ryan, The Book of the XV Brigade, 240. 71. Cunningham, “Introduction,” The Penguin Book of Spanish Civil War Verse, 77. 72. Woody Guthrie wrote his own idiosyncratic lyric for the song, released on Folkways Records’ Songs of the Spanish Civil War, Volume II, in 1962. It had four verses and a repeating chorus. What the lyric may lack in

Notes

299

musical grace it makes up for in humanity and historical detail. Its date of authorship is unknown. 73. Seeger and Busch, Songs of the Spanish Civil War, Vol. 1. 74. Cunningham, “Introduction,” The Penguin Book of Spanish Civil War Verse, 76. 75. Seeger and Busch, Songs of the Spanish Civil War, Vol. 1. The 1944 recorded lyrics are nearly identical to those sung at the February 2001 event by the three Chicago performers, who learned it from this record. 76. Nico Frijda, “Commemorating,” in Collective Memory of Political Events: Social Psychological Perspectives, eds. James W. Pennebaker, Dario Paez, and Bernard Rimé (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1997), 103. 77. Bruce Barthol, one of my collaborators on commemorative events in the past, has always been uncomfortable with the last line of “Jarama Valley” when the song is used within a larger program; he is afraid that audiences will do as they are told and stand up. With that in mind, I have often suggested changing the last line from “Let us stand to our glorious dead” to “Let us honor our glorious dead.” That is how it was sung by the cast of Pasiones in Oakland in February 2001, in New York in April, and at other events I have directed. I also take some responsibility for the song’s evolution. 78. “Red River Valley History,” 2001, www.plainsfolk.com/songs/song4.htm (accessed 20 March 2001). It, too, had many versions, including one referencing the Red River Valley in Texas. 79. Ibid. 80. The ethnographer Dwight Conquergood remembered the song “Red River Valley” from his childhood: “My father grew up around Macauley and Elk Horn Manitoba. This was his favorite song. He sang it all the time, and as a kid I always thought it was his personal song of exile and emigration from Canada.” Dwight Conquergood, e-mail message to author, 21 March 2001. 81. Renato Rosaldo, Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), 69. 82. This is not dissimilar to the appropriation and revision of comparably authentic lyrics by rural American folk artists by the white liberal establishment. Pete Seeger and the Weavers recorded a hit version of Lead Belly’s “Goodnight Irene” after his death. They “eliminated from the song a verse about taking morphine” and “changed the ominous-sounding ‘I’ll get you in my dreams,’ to ‘I’ll see you in my dreams.’ ” Like McDade, Lead Belly retained the writing credit. Filene, Romancing the Folk, 74. 83. Peter N. Carroll, interview by the author, tape recording, Belmont, California, 1 March 2000. 84. Hannah Olson Creighton, interview by the author, tape recording, Greenbrae, California. 19 December 1996. Some repetitions and hesitations have been edited from this interview.

300

Radical Nostalgia

85. This song appeared originally on the German album Six Songs for Democracy, but Seeger later recorded it himself. It was his version they mimicked. 86. Pete Seeger, interview by the author, telephone interview, Beacon, New York, 26 June 2000. 87. Maestro Casas-Augé and Maestro Antoni Coll i Cruelis, dir., España 1936–1939: 25 Himnos y Canciones de la Guerra Civil Española, Dial Discos, 1979. In “Jarama Valley,” for example, the line “It was there that we gave of our manhood” became “It was there that we gave out our manhood,” and “where we fought like true sons of the people” was sung and written as “there we fall like you, sons of the people.” In “The Quartermaster Song,” a humorous song about the horrendous food in Spain, the line “There are rats, rats, in bowler hats and spats, in the store” became “There are rats, rats, in Wolwerhampton paths, in the store.” I am sure the singers listened to the American tape over and over to try to make sense of that idiosyncratic lyric. 88. John Blacking, How Musical Is Man? (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1973), 3. Reprinted by permission of the University of Washington Press. 89. Blacking, How Musical Is Man?, 3–7. 90. Ibid., x. 91. Ibid., 52–53. 92. Hannah Olson Creighton, interview by the author, tape recording, Greenbrae, California, 19 December 1996. 93. Peter N. Carroll, interview by the author, tape recording, Belmont, California, 1 March 2000. 94. I asked Pete Seeger why these particular melodies had endured: “I often point out to people that Spanish music is a combination of Africa, and Arabia and Spain, and Spain has a long history including Gaelic people in the northwest, Basques in the north, Catalans in the northeast, and Moors in the south, and over the centuries, these traditions produced some fantastic music, just like in North America, African, and Irish traditions have produced some extraordinary music. [. . .] Hybrids are often stronger than their parents.” Pete Seeger, interview by the author, telephone interview, Beacon, New York, 26 June 2000. 95. Blacking, How Musical Is Man?, 54. 96. John Shepherd, Music as Social Text (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 81. 97. Shepherd, Music as Social Text, 14–15. 98. Claudia Koonz, “Between Memory and Oblivion: Concentration Camps in German Memory,” in Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity, ed. John R. Gillis (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 260. 99. Ronnie Gilbert, interview by the author, tape recording, Berkeley, California, 20 December 1996. 100. Simon Frith, Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 13, 16–17. Reprinted by

Notes

301

permission of the publisher from Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music, by Simon Frith, pp. 13, 16–17, 40–41, 112, 192, 203–4, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Copyright © 1996 by Simon Frith. All rights reserved. 101. Frith, Performing Rites, 40. 102. Ibid. 103. Ibid., 41. 104. I have found no report of what Robeson sang at this particular concert. While in Spain on January 26, 1938, in a packed church near the front, he sang “Water Boy,” “Old Man River,” “Lonesome Road,” and “Fatherland,” among other songs, as detailed in his wife’s diary of their trip. He later learned and recorded “Los Cuatro Generales,” Die Moorsoldaten,” and “Freiheit,” which he undoubtedly sang for the veterans in 1946. Eslanda Goode Robeson, “Journey into Spain,” in The Heart of Spain: Anthology of Fiction, Non-Fiction and Poetry, ed. Alvah Bessie (New York: Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, 1952), 247. 105. Frith, Performing Rites, 112. 106. Shepherd, Music as Social Text, 57. 107. Roland Barthes, “The Grain of the Voice,” Image—Music—Text, Noonday Press edition (New York: Hill and Wang, 1988), 181–82. 108. Barthes, “The Grain of the Voice,” 183. 109. Biography: Woody Guthrie, dir. Paul Lee, prod. A&E and Arena/BBC, 1980, videocassette. 110. Alvah Bessie, Men in Battle: A Story of Americans in Spain, rev. ed. (New York: Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, 1954), 329. 111. David Lowenthal, “Identity, Heritage, and History,” in Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity, ed. John R. Gillis (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 43. 112. Frith, Performing Rites, 192. 113. Shepherd, Music as Social Text, 179. 114. Frith, Performing Rites, 203–4. 115. Pete Seeger, interview by the author, telephone interview, Beacon, New York. 26 June 2000. 116. Shepherd, Music as Social Text, 6. 117. Ibid., 83. 118. Susan Langner, quoted in Blacking, How Musical Is Man?, 62. 119. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 132. 120. Lieberman, My Song Is My Weapon, 162. 121. Ronnie Gilbert, interview by the author, tape recording, Berkeley, California. 20 December 1996. These passages were later edited slightly for clarity at the request of Ms. Gilbert, removing some hesitations and syntactical errors. Content and meaning were not altered.

302

Radical Nostalgia

122. Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 3.

Chapter 6 1. Peter N. Carroll, interview by the author, tape recording, Belmont, California, 1 March 2000. 2. Nico Frijda, “Commemorating,” in Collective Memory of Political Events: Social Psychological Perspectives, eds. James W. Pennebaker, Dario Paez, and Bernard Rimé (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1997), 109. 3. Moe Fishman, interview by the author, tape recording, New York, New York, 18 July 2000. 4. Marvin Carlson, “Theatre Audiences and the Reading of Performance,” in Interpreting the Theatrical Past: Essays in the Historiography of Performance, eds. Thomas Postlewait and Bruce A. McConachie (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1989), 82–97. 5. Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 2–3. Reprinted by permission of the publisher from Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities, by Stanley Fish, pp. 2, 3, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1980 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved. 6. Fish, Is There a Text in This Class?, 171. 7. John Blacking, How Musical Is Man? (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1973), 54. 8. Fish, Is There a Text in This Class?, 173. 9. David Middleton et al., “Introduction,” in Collective Remembering, eds. David Middleton and Derek Edwards (London: Sage, 1990), 5. 10. “Rally to Honor Jewish Vets of Spain,” Daily Worker, 25 November 1937: 3. 11. Personal communication with Mimi Harris, widow of veteran Syd Harris. 12. Roll Call: American Volunteers in the Spanish Civil War, “¡No Pasaran! The 50th Anniversary of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade” (Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives, 1986, printed program), collection of the author. 13. Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (London: Oxford University Press, 1977), 191. 14. Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, 11. 15. Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 223.

Notes

303

16. James M. Mayo, “War Memorials as Political Memory,” The Geographical Review 78.1 (January 1988): 71. 17. Two physical memorials to the Spanish Civil War have been installed on US soil in the last eight years: on the campus of the University of Washington in Seattle in 1998 and on the lakefront in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1999. Money has been raised and plans drawn up for a large memorial in San Francisco, still in the planning stages (Figure 29). 18. James M. Mayo, War Memorials as Political Landscape: The American Experience and Beyond (New York: Praeger, 1988), 50. 19. Quoted in Mayo, War Memorials as Political Landscape, 50. 20. James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), xii. 21. Mayo, “War Memorials as Political Memory,” 62. 22. Doyle, “April 7th in New York,” Volunteer 8.2 (October 1986): 1, 3–4. 23. Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History, 2. 24. “42nd Anniversary Honors Black Vets,” Volunteer 2.1 (1979): 5. 25. Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Chicago: Aldine, 1969), 6. Copyright © 1969 by Aldine Publishers. Reprinted by permission of Aldine Transaction, a division of Transaction Publishers. 26. Margaret Thompson Drewal, “The State of Research on Performance in Africa,” African Studies Review 34.3 (December 1991): 18. 27. Joe Brandt, who was Communist Party secretary in the United States, was sent to Spain as a Party representative. Like many in the official Party leadership, he was not particularly popular among rank-and-file members, not to mention the non-Party volunteers. Peter N. Carroll, The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade: Americans in the Spanish Civil War (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 195. 28. Moe Fishman, interview by the author, tape recording, New York, New York, 18 July 2000. 29. Roby Newman, interview by the author, tape recording, San Francisco, California, 2 March 2000. 30. Linda Lustig, interview by the author, tape recording, Berkeley, California, 3 March 2000. 31. Peter N. Carroll, interview by the author, tape recording, Belmont, California, 1 March 2000. 32. Linda Lustig, interview by the author, tape recording, Berkeley, California, 3 March 2000. Edited for repetitions. 33. Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 50. 34. Martha Olson Jarocki, interview by the author, tape recording, San Francisco, California, 2 March 2000. 35. Blacking, How Musical Is Man?, 53.

304

Radical Nostalgia

36. Peter N. Carroll, interview by the author, tape recording, Belmont, California, 1 March 2000. 37. Hannah Creighton did find the song sanctimonious, and she disapproved of the lyric’s gender specificity and “macho” tone, but her pride in the efforts of the Battalion was not in question. 38. Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 58–59. 39. Arthur H. Landis, The Abraham Lincoln Brigade (New York: Citadel Press, 1967), 15. Landis suggests that this was the first time in American history that US citizens had been legally barred from traveling to another country by governmental edict. “It is important to remember, too, that this was done at a time when sympathy for the cause of the Spanish Republic had reached an all time high in America.” 40. Roby Newman, interview by the author, tape recording, San Francisco, California, 2 March 2000. 41. Minutes of 1939 Convention, December 1939, Box 5 of 20, Folder 1, VALB Papers, Activities and Meetings. Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives Collection, Tamiment Library, New York University. 42. Roby Newman, interview by the author, tape recording, San Francisco, California, 2 March 2000. 43. Peter N. Carroll, interview by the author, tape recording, Belmont, California, 1 March 2000. 44. Turner, The Ritual Process, 111. 45. Ibid., 108. 46. Ibid., 109. 47. Ibid., 139. 48. Ibid., 134. 49. Ibid. 50. Quoted in Turner, The Ritual Process, 126–27. 51. Victor Turner, “Social Dramas and Stories About Them,” in From Ritual to Theatre, ed. Victor Turner (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982), 47. The parallels with Raymond Williams’s “structures of feeling” are unavoidable. Both Turner and Williams are concerned with the interactions of feeling and thought and the relationship between past and present as manifest in social or cultural structures. 52. Turner, The Ritual Process, 128. 53. Ibid., 127–28. 54. Geneviève Fabre, “African-American Commemorative Celebrations in the Nineteenth Century,” in History and Memory in African-American Culture, eds. Geneviève Fabre and Robert O’Meally (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 72. 55. Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 50.

Notes

305

56. Martha Olson Jarocki, interview by the author, tape recording, San Francisco, California, 2 March 2000. 57. “Spain in the Heart: 1936–1996” (Chicago Friends of VALB/ALBA, 1997, printed program), collection of the author. 58. Frijda, “Commemorating,” 116. 59. This comment was made in casual conversation. 60. Robert H. Bradford, “A War to Remember,” Chicago Sun Times’ Midwest Magazine, 13 June 1976, 20. 61. Henry Foner, interview by the author, tape recording, New York, New York, 15 September 2000. 62. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 132. 63. Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), 47. Extract from The Long Revolution by Raymond Williams published by Chatto & Windus. Used by permission of The Random House Group Limited. 64. Williams, The Long Revolution, 47–48. 65. Williams, Marxism and Literature, 134. 66. Williams, The Long Revolution, 49. 67. Ibid., 47–48. 68. Ibid., 48. 69. Williams, Marxism and Literature, 132. 70. Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, 354. 71. Martha Olson Jarocki, interview by the author, tape recording, San Francisco, California, 2 March 2000. Slightly edited for word repetition. 72. Judith Montell, interview by the author, tape recording, Berkeley, California, 2 March 2000. 73. Williams, The Long Revolution, 48–49. 74. Ann C. Colley, Nostalgia and Recollection in Victorian Culture (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 3. 75. Roby Newman, interview by the author, tape recording, San Francisco, California, 2 March 2000. 76. Linda Lustig, interview by the author, tape recording, Berkeley, California, 3 March 2000. 77. George Lipsitz, Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 16. 78. Jackson Lears, “In Defense of Nostalgia,” Lingua Franca (December 1997/January 1998): 61. 79. Martha Olson Jarocki, interview by the author, tape recording, San Francisco, California, 2 March 2000. 80. Henry Foner, interview by the author, tape recording, New York, New York, 15 September 2000.

306

Radical Nostalgia

81. Linda Lustig, interview by the author, tape recording, Berkeley, California, 3 March 2000. 82. Ernest Hemingway, “On the American Dead In Spain,” in Our Fight: Writings by Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, Spain 1936–1939, eds. Alvah Bessie and Albert Prago (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1987), 23–24. 83. Genevieve Taggard, “To the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade,” Long View (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1942), 39–40. Reprinted by permission of Judith Benét Richardson. 84. Henry Foner, interview by the author, tape recording, New York, New York, 15 September 2000. 85. “The memory of Jack was a sacred memory to me. I knew Jack, I loved Jack, and Jack was dead. I shifted to people like [Don] McLeod, or Alvah Bessie, you know, now they’re dead, or Marion Wachtel, okay, or Archie Brown, or, right? I mean, just take a list of the names. Everybody’s fucking dead. They’re dying one by one by one.” Peter N. Carroll, interview by the author, tape recording, Belmont, California, 1 March 2000. 86. Peter N. Carroll, interview by the author, tape recording, Belmont, California, 1 March 2000. 87. Smadar Lavie, The Poetics of Military Occupation: Mzeina Allegories of Bedouin Identity Under Israeli and Egyptian Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 29. 88. Lavie, The Poetics of Military Occupation, 29–30. 89. When I interviewed Aaron, he recounted a story from the fiftiethanniversary gathering in Chicago. A black South African approached him during the festivities and said “We feel that we’re carrying on your tradition in our fight.” “That’s the legend business,” Aaron told me, citing the title of Judy Montell’s documentary, You Are History, You Are Legend. 90. Roby Newman, interview by the author, tape recording, San Francisco, California, 2 March 2000. 91. Ibid. 92. Milt Wolff, interview by the author, tape recording, El Cerrito, California, 3 March 2000. 93. David Lowenthal, “Nostalgia Tells It Like It Wasn’t,” in The Imagined Past: History and Nostalgia, eds. Malcolm Chase and Christopher Shaw (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), 25. 94. Lipsitz, Time Passages, 265. 95. Fred Davis, Yearning for Yesterday: A Sociology of Nostalgia (New York: Free Press, 1979), 1; Renato Rosaldo, Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), 71. 96. Michael Kammen, The Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1991), 17. From Mystic

Notes

307

Chords of Memory by Michael Kammen, copyright © 1991 by Michael Kammen. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. 97. Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory, 7. 98. Ibid., 3. 99. Susan Bennett, Performing Nostalgia: Shifting Shakespeare and the Contemporary Past (London: Routledge, 1996), 5. 100. Claudia Koonz, “Between Memory and Oblivion: Concentration Camps in German Memory,” in Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity, ed. John R. Gillis (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 260. 101. Quoted in Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, 15. 102. Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory, 5. 103. Ibid., 343. 104. Ibid., 532. 105. Ibid., 517. 106. Judith Montell, interview by the author, tape recording, Berkeley, California, 2 March 2000. 107. John Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 13. 108. Bodnar, Remaking America, 13–14. 109. Bennett, Performing Nostalgia, 38. 110. Bodnar, Remaking America, 16. 111. Ibid., 19. 112. Ibid., 19–20. 113. Victor Turner, “Social Dramas and Stories About Them,” 78. 114. Victor Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974), 102. 115. Martha Olson Jarocki. interview by the author, tape recording, San Francisco, California, 2 March 2000. 116. Harvey J. Kaye, The Powers of the Past: Reflections on the Crisis and the Promise of History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 5. Copyright 1991 by Harvey J. Kaye. 117. Kaye, The Powers of the Past: Reflections on the Crisis and the Promise of History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 5. Copyright 1991 by Harvey J. Kaye. 118. Kaye, The Powers of the Past: Reflections on the Crisis and the Promise of History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 135–36. Copyright 1991 by Harvey J. Kaye. 119. Kaye, The Powers of the Past: Reflections on the Crisis and the Promise of History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 136. Copyright 1991 by Harvey J. Kaye.

308

Radical Nostalgia

120. Kaye, The Powers of the Past: Reflections on the Crisis and the Promise of History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 137. Copyright 1991 by Harvey J. Kaye. 121. Kaye, The Powers of the Past: Reflections on the Crisis and the Promise of History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 149. Copyright 1991 by Harvey J. Kaye. 122. Edwin Rolfe, “Postscript to a War,” in Collected Poems, eds. Cary Nelson and Jefferson Hendricks (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 160. 123. Kaye, The Powers of the Past, 156. Copyright 1991 by Harvey J. Kaye. Under this collective influence, and hopefully consistent with a larger commemorative tradition, I titled the 2000 events in Oakland and New York City We Must Remember! Though I had yet to come in contact with Spain 40!, I am glad there was also a tradition of exclamation points. 124. Jean and John Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution: Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa, vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 314. 125. Bodnar, Remaking America, 19. 126. Quoted in Bennett, Performing Nostalgia, 9. “[M]emory derives its interventionary force from its very capacity to be altered—unmoored, mobile, lacking any fixed position. [. . .] Far from being the reliquary or trash can of the past, it sustains itself by believing in the existence of possibilities and by vigilantly awaiting them, constantly on the watch for their appearance.” Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 86–87. 127. John R. Gillis, “Memory and Identity: The History of a Relationship,” in Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity, ed. John R. Gillis (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 8. 128. Lowenthal, “Nostalgia Tells It Like It Wasn’t,” 21. 129. Gillis, “Memory and Identity,” 3. 130. Maurice Halbwachs, The Collective Memory, trans. Frances J. Ditter Jr. and Vida Yazdi Ditter (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1980), 130. 131. Halbwachs, The Collective Memory, 130. 132. Nora, quoted in Gillis, “Memory and Identity,” 14. 133. Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, xv. 134. Judith Montell, interview by the author, tape recording, Berkeley, California, 2 March 2000. 135. Linda Lustig, interview by the author, tape recording, Berkeley, California, 3 March 2000. 136. Bessie, “Reunion in Florence,” Volunteer (December 1976), 4. 137. Fabre, “African-American Commemorative Celebrations in the Nineteenth Century,” 72. 138. Middleton et al., “Introduction,” 5.

Notes

309

139. Martha Olson Jarocki, interview by the author, tape recording, San Francisco, California, 2 March 2000. 140. Young, The Texture of Memory, 13.

Chapter 7 1. “Give Us This Day” used by permission of Paul Neugass. 2. Joshua Chamberlain and Alan Jay Rom, “Plaque Stirs Political Fight in New Hampshire,” Volunteer 23.2 (March 2001): 2, 4. 3. From personal notes I made during Cohen’s speech, April 29, 2001, Borough of Manhattan Community College, New York City. 4. Chamberlain and Rom, “Plaque Stirs Political Fight in New Hampshire,” 4. 5. James M. Mayo, “War Memorials as Political Memory,” The Geographical Review 78.1 (January 1988), 70. 6. “Bush Says Major Combat in Iraq Over,” www.foxnews.com/story/ 0,2933,85777,00.html, 20 July 2004. 7. “H.R. 3162 In the Senate of the United States,” www.epic.org/ privacy/terrorism/hr3162.html, 20 July 2004. 8. For clarification, the difference Ottanelli highlights between act and perform does not reflect the generally accepted usage of those terms in the field of Performance Studies. Performativity suggests efficacious language, words that do what they say, whereas acting is considered to be in some way false, an “act.” Conversely, in the colloquial language of politics and in popular usage, action or direct action can suggest the focused pursuit of a political goal, while a performance is more of a representation. 9. Patriots Act! written, compiled, and directed by Peter Glazer and Bruce Barthol, unpublished play script, performed in Oakland, California, 29 February 2004, and New York, New York, 2 May 2004. 10. In his book The Faith of George W. Bush, Christian author Stephen Mansfield reports that Bush made the following statement to evangelist James Robinson. “I feel like God wants me to run for President. I can’t explain it, but I sense my country is going to need me. Something is going to happen. . . . I know it won’t be easy on me or my family, but God wants me to do it.” This was reported in an article by Paul Harris in The Observer, 2 November 2003 (www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,4787853-110878,00.html). 11. Bob Dylan, “With God on Our Side,” bobdylan.com, “Lyrics,” “With God on Our Side,” http://bobdylan.com/songs/withgod.html (accessed 10 July 2004). 12. Digital Tradition Mirror, “The Death of Harry Simms,” http://sniff.numachi.com/⬃rickheit/dtrad/pages/tiHARRYSIM;ttHARRYSI M.html.

310

Radical Nostalgia

13. This was Barbara Dane’s rendering of the last verse of Garland’s song. The third line has likely been adapted from another song, whereas the others may be found in most versions of “Harry Simms.” 14. Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), 48. 15. Spain 40! Play script by Carl Abrams, typescript, Part 1, documents, Robert Steck Collection, Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives Collection, Tamiment Library, New York University. 16. Quoted in Michael S. Roth, “Dying of the Past: Medical Studies of Nostalgia in Nineteenth Century France,” History and Memory: Studies in Representations of the Past 3.1 (Spring 1991): 15. 17. Martha Olson Jarocki, interview by the author, tape recording, San Francisco, California, 2 March 2000. 18. Peter N. Carroll, interview by the author, tape recording, Belmont, California, 1 March 2000. 19. Ibid.

Bibliography

(Note on Bibliography: The initial archival research for this book was carried out in July and September 2000 in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives Collection, then located in the Brandeis University Libraries Special Collections Department, Waltham, Massachusetts. In the fall of 2001, the collection was transferred to the Tamiment Library at New York University, where it now resides. Some of the citations from the ALBA Collection used in this book carry the traces of their cataloguing at Brandeis; most have been updated based on a new cataloguing system at Tamiment. Anyone interested in pursuing this subject further will be able to do so with the assistance of the librarians and archivists at the Tamiment Library. The Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives Collection at the Tamiment also contains a complete set of issues of the Volunteer for Liberty. Many issues of the Volunteer are also available online at www.alba-valb.org.)

Collections in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives Collection, Tamiment Library, New York University. Bill Susman Collection. Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives Collection, Tamiment Library, New York University. Randall B. Smith Collection. Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives Collection, Tamiment Library, New York University. Robert Steck Collection. Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives Collection, Tamiment Library, New York University. Syd Harris Collection. Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives Collection, Tamiment Library, New York University. VALB Office, Activities and Meetings. Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives Collection, Tamiment Library, New York University. VALB Papers, Activities and Meetings. Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives Collection, Tamiment Library, New York University.

312

Radical Nostalgia

VALB Photograph Collection, Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives Collection, Tamiment Library, New York University.

Other Sources Acier, Marcel, ed. From Spanish Trenches. Reprint, New York: Modern Age, 1937. Auden, W. H. “Spain.” In The Penguin Book of Spanish Civil War Verse, edited by Valentine Cunningham. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980. Barthes, Roland. “The Grain of the Voice.” In Image—Music—Text. New York: Hill and Wang, 1988. Bay Area 2001 Commemorative Event, performed at Calvin Simmons Theater, Oakland, California, 25 February 2001. Unreleased audio recording of the performance. Bender, Ed. “Frisco Honors Black Veterans.” Volunteer 3.1 (1980): 1. Bennett, Susan. Performing Nostalgia: Shifting Shakespeare and the Contemporary Past. London: Routledge, 1996. Bessie, Alvah. Men in Battle: A Story of Americans in Spain. New York: Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, 1954. ———. “Reunion in Florence.” Volunteer (December 1976): 1, 4. Biography: Woody Guthrie. Directed by Paul Lee and produced by A&E and Arena/BBC. 1988. Videocassette. Blacking, John. How Musical Is Man? Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1973. Bodnar, John. Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century, rev. ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994. Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books, 2001. Bradford, Robert H. “A War to Remember.” Chicago Sun Times’ Midwest Magazine, 13 June 1976. Brecht, Bertolt. Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic. Translated and edited by John Willett. New York: Hill and Wang, 1964. Brome, Vincent. The International Brigades: Spain 1936–1939. New York: William Morrow, 1966. Busch, Ernst, ed. Canciones de las Brigadas Internacionales. Barcelona: Brigada Internacional, 1938. Camus, Albert. “Preface.” L’Espagne libre, edited by George Bataille. Paris: Calman-Lévy, 1946. Cantwell, Robert. When We Were Good: The Folk Revival. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Carlson, Marvin. “Theatre Audiences and the Reading of Performance.” In Interpreting the Theatrical Past: Essays in the Historiography of Performance,

Bibliography

313

edited by Thomas Postlewait and Bruce A. McConachie. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1989. 82–98. Carroll, Peter N., The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade: Americans in the Spanish Civil War. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994. Carroll, Peter N., with Daniel Bertwell. “Premature Anti-Fascists, Again.” Volunteer 25.4 (December 2003): 4. “Cary Nelson: Curriculum Vitae.” http://www.english.uiuc.edu/facpages/nelson.htm, 16 July 2004. Casas-Augé, Maestro, and Maestro Antoni Coll i Cruelis. Dirección. España 1936–1939: 25 Himnos y Canciones de la Guerra Civil Española. Dial Discos, 1976. Chamberlain, Joshua, and Alan Jay Rom. “Plaque Stirs Political Fight in New Hampshire.” Volunteer 23.2 (March 2001): 2, 4, 6–7. Cohen, Milt. Spain Revisited. New York: Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, 1977. Cohen, Ronald D., and Dave Samuelson. Songs for Political Action: Folkmusic, Topical Songs and the American Left 1926–1953. Bear Family Records, BCD15720 JL, 1996. Colley, Ann C. Nostalgia and Recollection in Victorian Culture. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. Colodny, Robert. “From Spain to Vietnam.” Volunteer (Spring 1970): 1–2. Comaroff, Jean, and John Comaroff. Of Revelation and Revolution: Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa, vol. 1. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. “Comprehensive History of Lincoln Brigade Being Written.” Volunteer (July 1964): 3. Connerton, Paul. How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. “Convention Report and Discussion.” Volunteer for Liberty 8.1 (November 1946): 7. Cook, Gerald. “N.Y. 40th a Gala Affair.” Volunteer (March 1977): 1, 2. Cressy, David. “National Memory in Early Modern England.” In Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity, edited by John R. Gillis. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994. 61–73. Cunningham, Valentine, ed. The Penguin Book of Spanish Civil War Verse. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1980. ———. “Introduction.” In The Penguin Book of Spanish Civil War Verse, edited by Valentine Cunningham. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1980. 25–94. Davis, Fred. Yearning for Yesterday: A Sociology of Nostalgia. New York: Free Press, 1979. Davis, Natalic Zemon. “Interview.” In Visions of History, edited by M.A.R.H.O. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983.

314

Radical Nostalgia

de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendell. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. “Decoration Day Commemoration.” Volunteer for Liberty 15.4 (June 1954): 3. Doyle, Joe. “April 7th in New York.” Volunteer 8.2 (October 1986): 1, 3–4. Drewal, Margaret Thompson. “The State of Research on Performance in Africa.” African Studies Review 34.3 (December 1991): 1–64. Duberman, Martin Bauml. Paul Robeson. New York: Ballantine Books, 1989. Dylan, Bob. “With God on Our Side.” bobdylan.com. Lyrics. http:// bobdylan.com/songs/withgod.html. Fabre, Geneviève. “African-American Commemorative Celebrations in the Nineteenth Century.” In History and Memory in African-American Culture, edited by Geneviève Fabre and Robert O’Meally. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. 72–91. Filene, Benjamin. Romancing the Folk: Public Memory & American Roots Music. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Fish, Stanley. Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980. Fishman, Moe. “Delegation of Vets Visit the German Democratic Republic.” Volunteer (October 1961): 1–2. “Five More Vets Have Been Arrested.” Volunteer for Liberty 12.10 (26 October 1951): 1. “42nd Anniversary Honors Black Vets.” Volunteer 2.1 (1979): 5. Frijda, Nico. “Commemorating.” In Collective Memory of Political Events: Social Psychological Perspectives, edited by James W. Pennebaker, Dario Paez, and Bernard Rimé. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1997. 103–27. Frith, Simon. Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996. Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. London: Oxford University Press, 1977. Gallagher, Susan V. A Story of South Africa: J. M. Coetzee’s Fiction in Context. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. Garzón, Baltasar. “The International Brigade.” Volunteer 22.3 (Summer 2000): 8, 10. Geist, Tony. “Judge Baltasar Garzón Presents Third ALBA-Bill Susman Lecture.” Volunteer 22.3 (Summer 2000): 6, 9. Gerassi, John. The Premature Antifascists: North American Volunteers in the Spanish Civil War 1936–39: An Oral History. New York: Praeger, 1986. Gillis, John R. “Memory and Identity: The History of a Relationship.” In Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity, edited by John R. Gillis. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994. 3–24. The Good Fight: The Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War. Directed by Noel Buchner, Mary Dore, and Sam Sills, produced by First Run Features, 1983. Videocassette.

Bibliography

315

Graff, Ellen. Stepping Left: Dance and Politics in New York City, 1928–1942. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997. Gurney, Jason. Crusade in Spain. London: Faber and Faber, 1974. Guthrie, Arlo. “When a Soldier Makes it Home.” The Official Arlo Guthrie Website, Lyrics Connection. www.arlo.net/. Halbwachs, Maurice. The Collective Memory. Translated by Frances J. Ditter Jr. and Vida Yazdi Ditter. New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1980. Hamill, Pete. “For Some Old Soldiers, There Are No Monuments.” Village Voice, 20 February 1969: 1, 37–39. Harrington, Michael. The Vast Majority. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1977. Havard, Morgan. “Cultural Life in a Concentration Camp.” Volunteer for Liberty 5.1 (January 1944): 7. Hemingway, Ernest. “On the American Dead In Spain.” In Our Fight: Writings by Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, Spain 1936–1939, edited by Alvah Bessie and Albert Prago. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1987, 23–24. “Historical News Notes.” Volunteer 2.2 (1979): 11. Hobsbawm, Eric. The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914–1991. New York: Vintage, 1996. Hughes, Langston. “To a Poet on His Birthday: Edwin Rolfe. Madrid, September 1937.” In Edwin Rolfe: Collected Poems, edited by Cary Nelson and Jefferson Hendricks. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993. 52. Hutcheon, Linda. “Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern.” In University of Toronto English Library (19 January 1998) [UTEL Criticism and Theory Resources]. Toronto, Canada, 1998 [cited on 3 March 2000]. Available from www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/criticism/hutchinp.html; INTERNET. Ibárruri, Dolores. “Goodbye, Brothers, Till our Speedy Reunion.” In The Heart of Spain: Anthology of Fiction non-Fiction and Poetry, edited by Alvah Bessie. New York: Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, 1952. 345–347. “Ickes Greets Lincoln Brigade.” Volunteer for Liberty 8.1 (November 1946): 3. “In Memoriam: Donald A. Thayer.” Volunteer (April 1973): [2]. “[Invitation to 14th Anniversary].” Volunteer for Liberty 6.7 (March 1945): 2. Jackson, Gabriel. The Spanish Republic and the Civil War, 1931–1939. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965. Jameson, Frederic. Postmodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991. “Jarama River Valley.” Volunteer for Liberty (January 1938): [3]. Jelin, Elizabeth and Susana G. Kaufman. “Layers of Memories: Twenty Years After in Argentina.” In The Politics of War Memory and Commemoration,

316

Radical Nostalgia

edited by T. G. Ashplant, Graham Dawson, and Michael Roper. London: Routledge, 2000. 89–110. Johnpoll, Bernard K., ed. A Documentary History of the Communist Party of the United States, vols. 5 and 6. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994. Kammen, Michael. The Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture. New York: Knopf, 1991. Kaye, Harvey J. The Powers of the Past: Reflections on the Crisis and the Promise of History. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991. Koonz, Claudia. “Between Memory and Oblivion: Concentration Camps in German Memory.” In Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity, edited by John R. Gillis. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994. 258–80. Kundera, Milan. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. New York: Harper Perennial, 1996. Kutulas, Judy. The Long War: The Intellectual People’s Front and Anti-Stalinism, 1930–1940. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995. Lamb, Leonard, and Bill Susman. “Dartmouth Remembers Spain and Honors Vets.” Volunteer 3.5 (1981): 1. Landis, Arthur H. The Abraham Lincoln Brigade. New York: Citadel Press, 1967. ———. Death in the Olive Groves: American Volunteers in the Spanish Civil War 1936–1939. New York: Paragon House, 1989. Lardner, James. “[Barcelona, May 3, 1938].” In Madrid 1937: Letters of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade from the Spanish Civil War, edited by Cary Nelson and Jefferson Hendricks. New York: Routledge, 1996, 44–47. Lardner, Ring Jr., et al. The Abraham Lincoln Brigade 50th Anniversary. Performed at Avery Fisher Hall, New York, New York, 7 April 1986. Unreleased audio recording of the event. Lavie, Smadar. The Poetics of Military Occupation: Mzeina Allegories of Bedouin Identity Under Israeli and Egyptian Rule. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Lears, Jackson. “In Defense of Nostalgia.” Lingua Franca (December 1997/January 1998): 59–66. Levinger, Lee J. “Two Greetings to the Conference.” Volunteer for Liberty (January 1938): [4]. Lieberman, Robbie. My Song Is My Weapon: People’s Songs, American Communism, and the Politics of Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989. ———. “People’s Songs: American Communism and the Politics of Culture.” Radical History Review 36 (1986): 63–78. Lipsitz, George. Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990. Lipton, Lawrence. The Holy Barbarians. New York: Julian Messner, 1959.

Bibliography

317

Lowenthal, David. “Identity, Heritage, and History.” In Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity, edited by John R. Gillis. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994. 41–57. ———. “Nostalgia Tells It Like It Wasn’t.” In The Imagined Past: History and Nostalgia, edited by Malcolm Chase and Christopher Shaw. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989. 18–32. Mayo, James M. War Memorials as Political Landscape: The American Experience and Beyond. New York: Praeger, 1988. ———. “War Memorials as Political Memory.” The Geographical Review 78.1 (January 1988): 62–75. “Memo from Office.” Volunteer for Liberty (4 September 1953): 1–4. “Memorial Plaque in City College.” Volunteer 3.1 (1980): 12. Middleton, David, and Derek Edwards. “Introduction.” In Collective Remembering, edited by David Middleton and Derek Edwards. London: Sage, 1990. 1–22. Mitchell, Adrian, and Arlo Guthrie. “Victor Jara.” The Official Arlo Guthrie Website, Lyrics Connection. www.arlo.net/ lyrics/victor-jara.shtml. Navasky, Victor S. Naming Names. New York: Viking Press, 1980. Nelson, Cary, ed. The Wound and the Dream: Sixty Years of American Poems About the Spanish Civil War. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002. Nelson, Cary, and Jefferson Hendricks, eds. Madrid 1937: Letters of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade from the Spanish Civil War. New York: Routledge, 1996. Nelson, Steve. “Our National Conference.” Volunteer 2.2 (1979): 2. Neugass, James. “Give Us This Day.” In Our Fight: Writings by Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, Spain 1936–1939, edited by Alvah Bessie and Albert Prago. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1987, 169–74. Nora, Pierre. “General Introduction: Between Memory and History.” In Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past / Under the Direction of Pierre Nora, edited with a foreword by Lawrence D. Kritzman and translated by Arthur Goldhammer. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. 1–20. “N. Y. Post Spurs Historical Work.” Volunteer (May 1976): [6]. “Our Victory Is Your Vengeance.” Volunteer for Liberty (January 1938): 1. “Overflow Crowd Honors V.A.L.B.” Volunteer (March 1962): 1. Patriots Act! Written, compiled and directed by Peter Glazer and Bruce Barthol. Performed in Oakland, California, 29 February 2004, and in New York, New York, 2 May 2004. Unpublished manuscript. “Red River Valley.” www.plainsfolk.com/songs/song4.htm, 16 July 2004. Reuss, Richard A., with JoAnne C. Reuss. American Folk Music and Left-Wing Politics 1927–1957. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2000. Roach, Joseph. Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996.

318

Radical Nostalgia

Robeson, Eslanda Goode. “Journey Into Spain.” In The Heart of Spain: Anthology of Fiction, Non-Fiction and Poetry, edited by Alvah Bessie. New York: Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, 1952. 245–48. Rolfe, Edwin. “Elegy for Our Dead.” Volunteer for Liberty 2.1 (January 1940): 2. ———. The Lincoln Battalion: The Story of the Americans Who Fought in Spain in the International Brigades. New York: Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, 1939. ———. “Postscript to a War.” In Edwin Rolfe: Collected Poems, edited by Cary Nelson and Jefferson Hendricks. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993. Rosaldo, Renato. Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis. Boston: Beacon Press, 1993. Roth, Michael S. “Dying of the Past: Medical Studies of Nostalgia in Nineteenth Century France.” In History and Memory: Studies in Representations of the Past 3.1 (Spring 1991): 5–29. Rust, William. Britons in Spain: The History of the British Battalion of the XVth International Brigade. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1939. Ryan, Frank, ed. The Book of the XV Brigade. Madrid and London: Commissariat of War XV Brigade and Frank Graham, 1975. Savage, Kirk. “The Politics of Memory: Black Emancipation and the Civil War Monument.” In Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity, edited by John R. Gillis. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994. 127–49. Schechner, Richard. The End of Humanism: Writings on Performance. New York: Performing Arts Journal, 1982. “Seattle Post.” Volunteer 3.5 (1981): 6. Seeger, Pete, and Ernst Busch. Songs of the Spanish Civil War, Vol. 1. Folkways Records, 1961. Shepherd, John. Music as Social Text. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991. Sherman, Daniel J. “Art, Commerce, and the Production of Memory in France After World War I.” In Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity, edited by John R. Gillis. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994. 186–211. Sixty-third Annual Reunion of the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade’s arrival in Spain. Proceedings commenced at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, New York, New York, 30 April 2000. Unreleased audio recording. Smith, Michael, and Jamie O’Reilly. Pasiones: Songs of the Spanish Civil War 1936–1939. Bird Avenue, 1997. “Spain Welcomes the Brigadistas.” Volunteer 19.1 (Winter 1996–1997): 1, 6–7, 22. “Speaking Frankly.” Volunteer for Liberty 17.5 (November 1956): 1. Stanley, Jo. “Involuntary Commemorations: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and its Relationship to War Commemoration.” In The Politics of War

Bibliography

319

Memory and Commemoration, edited by T. G. Ashplant, Graham Dawson, and Michael Roper. London: Routledge, 2000. 240–59. “Stars Entertain for Republican Spain.” Volunteer for Liberty 8.2 (2 January 1947): 5. Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993. Susman, Bill. “At Last: U.S. Memorials for the VALB.” Volunteer 19.3 (Fall 1997): 1, 7. ———. “Spain Revisited: Some Impressions.” Volunteer (March 1977): [5]. Taggard, Genevieve. Long View. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1942. Taggard, Genevieve. “To the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.” In The Heart of Spain: Anthology of Fiction, Non-Fiction and Poetry, edited by Alvah Bessie. New York: Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, 1952. 484. Taggart [sic], Genevieve. “To the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.” In ¡No Pasaran! The 50th Anniversary of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Program book. New York: The Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives, 1986. Thomas, Hugh. The Spanish Civil War. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977. Turner, Victor. Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974. ———. “Foreword.” In Number Our Days: Culture and Community Among Elderly Jews in an American Ghetto, by Barbara Myerhoff. New York: Meridian, 1994. ix–xiii. ———. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Chicago: Aldine, 1969. ———. “Social Dramas and Stories About Them.” In From Ritual to Theatre, edited by Victor Turner. New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982. 61–88. “Vets Reunion.” Volunteer for Liberty 6.3 (July 1944): 3. “Vito Marcantonio: His Life and Milieu.” http://users.rcn.com/redpost/life.html. Volunteer for Liberty (January 1938). Volunteer for Liberty: Convention Issue 2.1 (January 1940). “We Are Going On!” Volunteer for Liberty 19.1 (January 1957): 1. “We dedicate this first issue.” Volunteer for Liberty [1].[1] (January 1938): [2]. “West Coast in Action!” Volunteer for Liberty 13.1 (8 February 1952): 1. White, David McKelvy. “32 Months of the ‘Friends.’ ” Volunteer for Liberty: Convention Issue 2.1 (January 1940): 4–6. White, Hayden. The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1987. Williams, Colin, Bill Alexander, and John Gorman. Memorials of the Spanish Civil War: The Official Publication of the International Brigade Association. Phoenix Mill: Alan Sutton, 1996.

320

Radical Nostalgia

Williams, Raymond. The Long Revolution. New York: Columbia University Press, 1961. ———. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. Winter, Jay. Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Wolff, Milt. “750 Jam S. F. 40th.” Volunteer (March 1977): 1, 4. Young, James E. The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993.

Index

Abraham Lincoln Brigade, 131–32; creation of, 13–14, 60–61; Friends of, 61–63, 76, 105, 114–16; songs of, 1–2, 33–35, 178–83, 202. See also Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives (ALBA), 18, 21, 138, 240, 248; Peter Carroll on, 155–56; collections in, 311–12. See also Chicago Friends of VALB/ALBA Abramofsky, Bernard, 184, 278n64 Abrams, Carl, 140–43, 158, 218, 268 Abyssinia. See Ethiopia Acier, Marcel, 289n29 Adler, Luther, 75 Afghanistan, 27 African Americans, 16, 44–45, 49, 53–56, 151; and civil rights movement, 28, 133–34, 138 ALBA. See Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives Alberti, Rafael, 23 allegories, 241–46, 253 Allende, Isabel, 152 Allende, Salvador, 26 Almanac House, 196 Almanac Singers, 180 American Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy, 62–63 American Dance Association, 62–63 American Legion, 70, 74

American Music League (AML), 178 anti-Communism, 62, 139, 249–50, 261; Kaye on, 255; and Spanish Civil War celebration, 216; and VALB’s twenty-fifth anniversary, 97, 100, 113; and Vietnam War, 147. See also McCarthyism apartheid, 28, 151, 152 Argentina, 20 Arion, Ernie, 184 Armada, Spanish, 51–52 “Art and Ideology of the Spanish Civil War” (conference), 153 Asch, Moses, 180, 182, 196 Asner, Ed, 163 Auden, W. H., 16, 283n65 “Ay Mañuela” (song). See “Viva La Quince Brigada” Bakhtin, Mikhail, 37 Barsky, Edward, 91, 135 Barthes, Roland, 208–9 Barthol, Bruce, xi–xii, 4, 29, 130, 213, 217 Barzin, Leon, 75 “Battle Hymn of the Republic” (song), 175 Bay Area Progressive Music Association (BAPMA), 140 Bay Area VALB, 4, 9, 35, 65, 96, 139–40, 262–64, 269 Belchite, battle of, 68

322

Index

Bellah, Robert, 218 Benjamin, Walter, 131 Bennett, Susan, 7–8, 39, 247–48 Bergson, Henri, 225 Bermack, Richard, xi Bessie, Alvah, 2–3, 71, 87, 137, 259; “The Dead Past,” 29, 30; Heart of Spain, 81–82; Men in Battle, 209; on post-Franco Spain, 149 Blacking, John, 202–4, 217 Blitzstein, Marc, 75 Bodnar, John, 10, 50, 52–54, 250–54, 257 Borg, Nils, 84, 118 Bottcher, Herman, 86–88, 107, 120, 251 Boudin, Leonard, 135, 152 Bown, Vern, 129 Boyle, Kay, 152 Boym, Svetlana, 7–8, 35, 36, 48, 56, 225, 230, 235, 258 Bradley, Captain, 74 Brand, Phoebe, 75 Brandt, Joe, 223 Brecht, Bertolt, 40–41 Bridges, Harry, 152 Briet, Pierre-Urbain, 42, 269 British International Brigade, 195 Brome, Vincent, 189 Browder, Earl, 67 Brown, Hon, 236 Brown, Stephanie, 130 Brunete, battle at, 15, 68, 95, 191 Buber, Martin, 229 Burns, Paul, 142 Busch, Ernst, 175–78, 182–83, 267 Bush, George W., 265–67 Calloway, Cab, 118 Canciones de las Brigadas Internacionales, 174–76 Cantwell, Robert, 11 Carlson, Marvin, 217

Carnovsky, Morris, 75 Carroll, Nöel, 207 Carroll, Peter, xi–xii, 4, 13–15, 86, 216, 243, 269–70; on battle of Jarama, 187; and New Hampshire monument, 263; on Pasiones, 184–85; on post-Franco Spain, 136, 149; on Spanish Civil War songs, 200, 204, 211, 225; on VALB’s twenty-fifth anniversary, 97, 99; and Vietnam War, 144; on We Must Remember!, 28 Casals, Pablo, 87 Cassinello, Emilio, 17 Certeau, Michel de, 39, 257 Chamberlain, Ann, 262 Chiapas, 34 Chicago Friends of VALB/ALBA, xii, 35, 96, 117, 164–72, 184, 219, 232 Chile, 17, 21, 26 citizenship, Spanish, 163–64 City College of New York, 153 civil rights movement, 28, 133–34, 138 Clark, Tom, 91 Coetzee, J. M., 165–66, 171 Coffin, William Sloane, 152 Cohen, Burton, 263, 270 Cohen, Milt, 149–50 Cohen, Ron, 180 Colley, Ann, 36, 37, 238 Colodny, Robert, 65, 134, 135; and Postscript to a War, 236–38; and Vietnam War, 144–48 Colow, Maury, 132, 134, 135 Comaroff, Jean and John, 256 commemoration, 17–18, 42–58, 163–72, 267; Carroll on, 228; Fishman on, 223–24, 231; Frijda on, 33, 45–48, 56, 57, 197; and identity, 35–37, 45–48, 205–7, 210; Jarocki on, 225, 231,

Index 235–36, 239–40; rituals of, 57, 207–8; theater of, 127, 140–44, 207–8. See also nostalgia Communist Party of USA (CPUSA), 14–15, 28, 252, 273n41, 280n13; and Popular Front, 78–79, 178; and VALB, 92, 156, 201, 223 Confederated Spanish Societies to Aid Spain, 67 Connerton, Paul, 33, 35, 226–27, 230 “Cookhouse” (song), 180 Creighton, Hannah Olson, xi–xii, 138–39, 215–16; on “Jarama Valley,” 200–202, 210, 213; on “Venga Jaleo,” 204 Cressy, David, 51, 53 Crotto, Sid, 142 Cuba, 27, 34, 265 Cummings, Constance, 75 Cunningham, Valentine, 189, 191–95 Czechoslovakia, 80, 84, 87 “Dances for Spain,” 62–63 Dane, Barbara, 130, 267 Dartmouth College, 153 DaSilva, Howard, 140 Davis, Ben, 87 Davis, Natalie Zemon, 215 Davis, Ossie, 158–59, 162 “The Dead Past” (Bessie), 29, 30 Dee, Ruby, 152 Dellums, Ronald, 152, 154 Descuret, Jean-Baptiste-Felix, 42 deserters, 278n64 Dickens, Charles, 234 Dies Congressional Committee, 79, 85, 227, 282n59 Douglas, Mary, 228 Douglass, Frederick, 54 Doyle, Joe, 157–59, 161, 162, 221 Drewal, Margaret Thompson, 222

323

Dreyfuss, Richard, 152 Dylan, Bob, 266–67 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 92, 94, 159 Eisler, Hanns, 177, 178 “Elegy for Our Dead” (Rolfe), 79–81 Elizabeth I (queen of England), 51–52 Ellington, Duke, 62, 105 “El Quinto Regimiento.” See “Venga Jaleo” El Salvador, 152 España, 1936–1939 (album), 184, 202, 300n87 Eternal Light monument, 69–74, 84, 96, 113, 192–93, 227, 264 Ethiopia, 12, 59, 60 Fabre, Geneviève, 44–45, 49, 53–54, 56, 230, 260 “Fall of a City” (Spender), 30–31, 240, 277n34 Farmer, Frances, 62, 75, 106 Fast, Howard, 92 Felsen, Milt, 87 Fischer-Dieskau, Dietrich, 208 Fish, Stanley, 217–18, 220, 221 Fishman, Moe, 27, 129, 135, 240, 252; on commemorative events, 223–24, 231; on Franco’s political prisoners, 99–100; and GDR reunion, 95–96, 215; as VALB’s executive secretary, 92–93; on We Must Remember!, 216 flamenco music, 180, 209, 212, 274n52, 300n94 Flippen, Jay C., 75 Florence, 138–39, 216, 259–60 “Folk Song Army” (Lehrer), 173 Foner, Henry, xii, 25, 182, 232, 240, 242 Forester, Clarence, 129

324

Index

“Four Insurgent Generals.” See “Los Cuatro Generales” Franco Bahamonde, Francisco, 2, 10–17, 58–60, 88, 250; death of, 133, 136, 259–60; Eisenhower and, 92, 94; political prisoners of, 99, 123; VALB and, 34, 67 Frankfurt School, 206 “Freiheit” (song), 158, 177, 178, 186–87, 211, 295n13 Friends of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade (FALB), 61–63; “Night of Stars” of, 62, 76, 105, 114–16. See also Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Frijda, Nico, 33, 45–48, 56, 57, 197, 231 Frith, Simon, 206–7, 210, 211 Frye, Peter, 11 Fussell, Paul, 219–20 Gamez, Tana de, 135, 143 Garfield, John, 62, 75, 106 Garland, Jim, 267 Garzón, Baltasar, 17, 18, 21–24, 30, 31, 34, 226, 240, 260 Gates, John, 278n64 Geiser, Carl, 129 Geist, Tony, 21–23 German Democratic Republic (GDR), 49, 52, 94–95, 215 Gilbert, Ronnie, xii, 158, 181–82, 206, 212–14, 238, 295n12 Gillis, John, 45–46, 48, 50, 257 Glazer, Tom, xv–xvi, 1, 178, 197, 202, 226, 296n18 Goering, Hermann, 12 Goffman, Erving, 230 Goldblatt, Sana, 286n116 Good, Leslie, 252 The Good Fight (film), 153 Goodman, Benny, 75, 106 Gordon, Lou, 263

Graham, Martha, 63 Grant, Lee, 161–62 Gresham, Bill, 179–81, 183, 196 Guernica, 169, 232 Gunpowder Plot, 51–52 Gurney, Jason, 187–89 Guthrie, Arlo, 17, 25–27, 29–32, 103 Guthrie, Woody, 25, 179, 209, 298n72 Halbwachs, Maurice, 46–47, 257–58 Hall, Charles, 129, 163–65, 170, 172, 245 Hamill, Pete, 135–36 Harrington, Michael, 183 Harris, Aaron, 142 Harris, Mimi, 302n11 Harrison, Art, 129 Havard, Morgan, 175 Havel, Václav, 55 Hawes, Baldwin, 1, 178, 180 Haymarket riot, 250, 256 Hays, Lee, 158 Heart of Spain (anthology), 81–82 Heart of Spain (musical), 3–5, 9, 140 Hellerman, Fred, 140, 158 Hellman, Lillian, 87 Hemingway, Ernest, 2, 63, 90, 99–100, 241–42 Hendricks, Jefferson, 163 Herndon, Milton, 61 Hidalgo, Miguel, 253 Hilkevitch, Aaron, 129, 164, 166–72, 223, 231, 234, 243–45 Hilkevitch, Joyce, 164, 166–70, 232 “Himno de Riego” (anthem), 77–78 Hitler, Adolf, 11–15, 54, 59, 78–80, 84 Hobsbawm, Eric, 84 Hofer, Johannes, 149, 247 Holden, Arthur, 130 “Hold the Fort” (song), 175–76

Index Hollywood Ten, 29, 289n32 Holocaust, 12, 43, 49–50, 52 Homage to Catalonia (Orwell), 2, 273n27 Hood, Walter, 262 Horman, Joyce, 17 House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), 29, 85, 90, 227; forerunner to, 282n59; and “world liberalism,” 90–91. See also anti-Communism; McCarthyism Hughes, Langston, 31 Hume, David, 228 Humphrey, Doris, 63 Hutcheon, Linda, 37, 41 “I.B. Men be Strong” (song), 175–76 Ibárruri, Dolores, 57, 99–100, 143, 170–71, 232 Ickes, Harold, 87, 88 identity: and commemoration, 35–37, 45–48, 205–7, 210; Václav Havel on, 55; and inclusion, 20–21 International Brigade Association, 175, 195 International Brigades, 13–16, 23; and anniversary in Florence, 138–39, 216, 259–60; and anniversary in GDR, 94–95, 215; Ibárruri’s farewell speech to, 57, 99, 143, 170–71, 232; Moscow Archives of, 189–90; Neugass on, 262; Spanish citizenship for, 163–64 “The Internationale” (anthem), 78, 174–75 interpretive communities, 217–19, 221 Iraq War, 265–66 Jameson, Fredric, 41 Japan, in Manchuria, 12, 59 Jara, Victor, 26

325

Jarama Valley: battle of, 15, 55, 68, 80, 187–88; monument at, 37, 69, 80, 104, 110, 267 “Jarama Valley” (song), 23–24, 29, 30, 33, 126, 180, 185–206; at commemorative events, 10, 158, 225–27, 231; and Hannah Creighton, 200–202, 210, 213; and Tom Glazer, 197, 226; source of, 185–86, 198–200 Jarocki, Gerry, 239 Jarocki, Martha Olson, xi–xii, 65, 242, 254, 269; on commemoration, 225, 231, 235–36, 239–40; at fortieth anniversary, 138–39, 215–16 Jelin, Elizabeth, 20, 24 Jerome, V. J., 211 Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee, 92 Kalin, Clarence, 30, 129 Kammen, Michael, 10, 247–50, 254 Kaufman, Susana G., 20, 24 Kaye, Harvey, 8, 247, 255–56, 258 Kazin, Alfred, 14, 42 Keller, Helen, 87 Kelly, Gene, 87 Kennedy, John F., 99–100 Khrushchev, Nikita, 48, 216, 223 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 134 Kirkland, Alexander, 75 Klein, Gabby, 34 Koonz, Claudia, 49–50, 201, 205, 248 Kutulas, Judy, 14, 76 Landis, Arthur H., 15, 131–32, 192 Lane, Ben, 128 Langner, Susan, 212 Lardner, James, 141, 159–62, 171, 234, 267 Lardner, Ring, Jr., 125, 140–42, 158–63, 289n32

326

Index

Lavie, Smadar, 10, 172, 243–44, 253 Lawrence, Gertrude, 75 Lead Belly (singer), 25 Lears, Jackson, 39–40, 239, 256 Lee, Gypsy Rose, 75, 106 Lehrer, Tom, 173 Levenson, Len, 185 Leventhal, Harold, 292n84 Levinger, Lee J., 70 “liberalism, world,” 90–91 liberty, volunteers for, 67–74 Lieberman, Robbie, 183–84, 212 lieux de mémoires, 64–66, 93 “Lift the Embargo!” rally, 70, 111, 182 Lipsitz, George, 239 Lipton, Lawrence, 182 Lister, Enrique, 90 Lomax, Bess, 1, 178 Longo, Luigi, 259–60 “Los Cuatro Generales” (song), 1–2, 13, 177, 181, 202 Love, Vaughn, 134, 238 Lowenthal, David, 7–8, 37–38, 210, 246–47, 257 Lucid, Jack, 243 Lustig, Linda, xii, 185, 211, 224, 239, 258–60 MacKinnon, Niall, 206 Madison (Wisc.) monument, 30, 129, 262–64, 303n17 Madrid 1937 (Nelson and Hendricks), 163 Maken, Morris, 54–55 Manchuria, 12, 59 Marcantonio, Vito, 136 Martí, José, 27 Martin, Fredericka, 3, 140–42, 267 Marx, Karl, 14, 38, 254 Masur, Richard, 163 Mayo, James, 10, 65, 220–22, 230–31, 264

McCarran Internal Security Act, 91–92, 96–98 McCarthyism, 28, 29, 85, 133, 227, 252, 261, 264. See also House Committee on Un-American Activities McDade, Alec, 126, 188–91, 194–200, 204, 225–26 McDade, Peggy, 195 Meloff, Harry, 184 Men in Battle (Bessie), 209 Meredith, Burgess, 75, 106 Mexico, 13, 34, 253 Miaja, José, 67 Middleton, David, 218, 260 “Midnight Special” (song), 25 Mikelsons, Nancy, xii Missing (film), 17 Mitchell, Adrian, 26 Mitford, Jessica, 152 Mola, Emilio, 2, 11 Montell, Judy, xi–xii, 1, 232, 236–37, 250, 258 Morley, Robert, 75 Morocco, 12 Moscow Archives of the International Brigades, 189–90 Mostel, Zero, 90 Musil, Robert, 260 Mussolini, Benito, 11–13, 15, 59, 60 Myerhoff, Barbara, 170–71 My Own Private Idaho (film), 39 Navasky, Victor, 152 Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, 78–79; Hitler’s violation of, 84; and impact on VALB, 54, 79, 88, 97; and loyalty to Soviet Union, 48; and Spanish War songs, 182–83 Negrín, Juan, 15 Nelson, Cary, 163, 275n64

Index Nelson, Steve, 92, 144, 155–56, 158 Neruda, Pablo, 29 Neugass, James, 36, 174, 262 Neutrality Act, 60 New Hampshire monument, 10, 263–64 Newman, Roby, xi–xii, 65, 224, 227–28, 231, 238, 242, 245, 290n43 Nicaragua, 28, 158; and Reagan, 130, 151, 153, 159; and VALB, 34, 275n4 “Night of Stars,” 62, 76–78, 105, 114–16 Nixon, Richard, 133 Nora, Pierre, 43–44, 46, 51, 264; on lieux de mémoires, 64–66, 93; on nostalgia, 65 North, Joseph, 72–74 North American Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy, 61, 67, 74–76 nostalgia, 6–10, 33–42, 230–41; Bennett on, 7–8, 39, 247–48; Boym on, 7–8, 35, 36, 48, 56, 225, 258; defined, 149, 246–47, 257; Hutcheon on, 37; “imperialist,” 199; Lears on, 39–40, 239, 256; as medical condition, 35–36, 42, 149; Nora on, 65; and patriotism, 62, 246–55; queer, 39; Stewart on, 8, 35–36, 38, 149, 151. See also commemoration nuclear weapons, 151–52 Odets, Clifford, 75 Oklahoma City bombing, 58 “Old Soldiers Never Die” (song), 180 Olson, Leonard, 65, 139, 201 O’Reilly, Jamie, xii, 184, 231 O’Reilly, Katrina, 184 Orwell, George, 2, 183, 273n27

327

Osheroff, Abe, 128, 158 Ottanelli, Fraser, 266 Pappas, Nick, 149, 215 Parker, Dorothy, 75, 90, 161–62, 171, 235 Parker, Mike, 184 “La Pasionaria.” See Ibárruri, Dolores Pasiones: Songs of the Spanish Civil War (musical), xii, 128, 184–85, 210, 231, 262 Patriot Act of 2001, 264–69, 290n47 Patriots Act! (Glazer), 268 Pauling, Linus, 152 Peltoniemi, Eric Bain, x–xi Pena, Leoncio, 99–110 People’s Songs, Inc., 183–84 Persily, Coleman, 128 Picasso, Pablo, 90 Pinochet, Augusto, 17, 21, 26 Pittsburgh Peace and Freedom Center, 144 Poland, 15, 80, 87, 90 Polish International Brigade, 87–88 Popular Front, 12–13, 78–79, 178, 183, 203 Postscript to a War (script), 4–5, 236–37 “Postscript to a War” (Rolfe), 6–7, 16–18, 23, 222, 256 posttraumatic stress disorder, 277n45 “Premature Anti-Fascist Women” (anniversary banquet), 139–40 Prima, Louis, 62, 105 “Quartermaster Song,” 180, 300n87 queer nostalgia, 39 Queipo de Llano, Gonzalo, 2, 11 Rainer, Luise, 75 Randall, Tony, 152 Randolph, John, 135, 163 Raven, Robert, 84, 117

328

Index

reader-response theory, 217 Reagan, Ronald, 8, 38, 157–58, 161, 261; and Nicaragua, 130, 151, 153, 159 “Red River Valley,” 185–86, 198–200, 299n80. See also “Jarama Valley” Renan, Ernest, 37–38, 62, 248 Reuss, Richard, 177–78 Roach, Joseph, 160 Road from Madrid (Rosten), 63, 86, 107, 218 Roberts, Hilda, 128, 288n25 Robeson, Paul, 34, 87–90, 121, 284n88; “Los Cuatro Generales,” 177; Volunteer for Liberty on, 207 Robeson, Paul, Jr., 140–42, 159 Robinson, Edward G., 87 Robledo, Eduardo, 130 Robles, Gil, 12 Rodriguez-Seeger, Tao, 17, 25–26, 30–32, 103 Rojo, Vincente, 16, 33 Rolfe, Edwin, 2, 4, 29, 63, 85, 204, 234, 267; “Elegy for Our Dead,” 79–81; and Langston Hughes, 31; Lincoln Battalion, 195; “Postscript to a War,” 6–7, 16–18, 23, 222, 256 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 60, 83, 216 Roosevelt University, 164, 184 Rosaldo, Renato, 199 Rossen, John, 232, 251 Rosten, Norman, 63, 86, 107, 218 Roth, Michael, 42, 247 Rust, William, 188–89 sacredness, 65, 221, 223–31 Samuelson, Dave, 180 Sanders, Bernard, 152 San Francisco Bay Area VALB, 4, 9, 35, 65, 96, 139–40, 262–64, 269 San Francisco Mime Troupe, 17, 29, 103

San Francisco monument, 262–64 Sarandon, Susan, 152 Savage, Kirk, 152–53 Schechner, Richard, 160 Seattle, 30, 262–64, 303n17 Seeger, Pete, xii, 1, 17, 25–26, 30, 196, 267; in Barcelona, 201–2; on Canciones de las Brigadas Internacionales, 174; and flamenco music, 180, 209, 212, 274n52, 300n94; Songs of the Lincoln Brigade, 178–83, 202; at VALB’s anniversaries, 34, 99–100, 158, 185, 222; and “Venga Jaleo,” 212; and “Viva La Quince Brigada,” 210–11; at We Must Remember!, 31–32, 103 Sennett, William, 128 Shaker, Ken, 128 Shakespeare, William, 11, 22, 39 Sheen, Martin, 152 Shepherd, John, 205, 207, 210, 211 Sheridan, Frank, 75, 106 Sherman, Daniel, 56 “Shouts from the Wall” (poster exhibit), 184, 246 “Si Me Quieres Escribir” (song), 25–26, 180, 181, 186–87, 206 Six Songs for Democracy (album), 1, 177–78, 182–83 Slezak, Walter, 75 Smith, Dave, 128, 129 Smith, Michael, xii, 184, 231 Sokolow, Anna, 63 “Solidarity Forever” (song), 175 Songs for Political Action (CDs), 180 Songs of the Lincoln Brigade, 1–2, 33–35, 178–83, 202 South Africa, 28, 34, 151, 152 Soviet Union. See Union of Soviet Socialist Republics “Spain” (Auden), 16, 283n65

Index Spain 40! (Abrams), 140–43, 158, 218, 268 Spain in the Heart, 164 Spanish Armada, 51–52 Spanish Civil War Historical Society, 153 Spender, Stephen, 29, 30–31, 240, 276n34 Stalin, Joseph, 38, 48; and Hitler, 78–80, 84; and Khrushchev, 216, 223; and VALB, 183 Stanley, Jo, 277n45 “Stars for Spain,” 62, 74–78, 106 Steck, Bob, 140, 175–76 Steinem, Gloria, 152 Stern, Arthur, 209 Stewart, Susan, 8, 35–38, 149, 151, 230 Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), 246 Subversive Activities Control Board (SACB), 92 Susman, William, 215; on folk songs, 181, 185; on post-Franco Spain, 148–51, 204 Susman lecture, 21–22 Taggard, Genevieve, 63, 81–83, 142, 242 Tamiment Library, 156 Tamiris, Helen, 63 Tampa VALB, 264 Tapsell, Walter, 126, 190–95, 197, 199–201 “Taste of Ashes” (song), 29 Terkel, Studs, 152, 153, 178 Teruel, battle of, 15 Thaelmann Column, 178 Thatcher, Margaret, 8, 38 Thayer, Don, 286n116 Thomas, Hugh, 60 Thomas, Norman, 67 Thompson, E. P., 40

329

Thornton, Nate, 128 Tisa, John, 3 To Die in Madrid (film), 135, 144, 146 Toney, Anthony, 128 “To the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade” (Taggard), 81–83, 142, 242 Trent, Tom, 61 Trotsky, Leon, 38 Truman, Harry S., 96 Tuan, Yi-Fu, 221 Turner, Victor, 10, 239, 253–54; on communitas, 228–30; on pilgrimage, 170–71; on rituals, 222 “Union Men Be Strong” (song), 175–76 Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), 13, 38, 214, 256; and International Brigades, 14; U.S. support for, 78, 84. See also antiCommunism USA Patriot Act, 264–69, 290n47 utopianism, 22–23, 38, 151 VALB. See Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Valdez, Luis, 152 Van Der Schelling, Bart, 296n22 Van Sant, Gus, 39 Varela, José Enrique, 2, 11 Veltfort, Ted, 128 Venda music, 202–3 “Venga Jaleo” (song), 180, 181, 204, 206, 212 Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade (VALB), 97, 227, 251; and American Legion, 70, 74; anniversaries of, 9, 61, 97–100, 123, 128, 158, 185, 219–22, 262; Bay Area post of, 4, 9, 35, 65, 96, 139–40, 262–64, 269; Chicago Friends of, xii, 35, 96, 117, 164–72,

330

Index

Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade (continued) 184, 219, 232; and Eternal Light monument, 69–74, 84, 96, 113, 164, 192–93, 227; founding of, 63–64, 74; government attacks on, 90–100, 256–57; government benefits for, 152, 154; logo of, 77, 116; Madison (Wisc.) monument to, 30, 129, 262–64; and Morris Maken, 54–55; May Day parades of, 68, 108, 109; New Hampshire monument to, 10, 263–64; San Francisco monument to, 262–63; and Spanish political prisoners, 34; and Subversive Activities Control Board, 92; Tampa post of, 264; at We Must Remember!, 17–18, 102 “Veterans of the International Brigades, Anti-Totalitarian,” 54–55 Vidal-Naquet, Pierre, 132 Vietnam War, 2–3, 28, 59, 124, 134–37, 144–48, 236–38, 240 “Viva La Quince Brigada” (song), 31–32, 103, 136, 176, 179–81, 202, 206, 210–11, 268 volunteers for liberty, 67–74 Walker, Alice, 152 Wallace, Henry A., 183 Walvin, James, 247 Waugh, Evelyn, 38 Weavers, 140, 158, 212 Welles, Orson, 62, 75, 106 We Must Remember! (musical), 17, 19, 28–32, 102, 103, 218; Peter Carroll on, 28; as commemorative theater, 127, 207–8; Moe Fishman on, 216; and “Jarama

Valley,” 23–24; Jarockis on, 239–40; and “Viva La Quince Brigada,” 31–32, 103, 210 Whelan, Grover, 71 “When a Soldier Makes It Home” (song), 27 “Which Side Are You On?” (song), 183 White, David McKelvy, 79–81, 87, 120 White, Hayden, 19–20, 132, 151, 285n101 White, Paul, 278n64 Wicker, Tom, 152 Wideman, J. H., 73–74, 113 Williams, Raymond, 10, 40–42, 212, 232–38, 241, 244, 253, 268, 270 Wilson, Monica, 222 Winter, Jay, 62, 222 Wisconsin monument, 30, 129, 262–64 Wolff, Milton, xi, 3–4, 6, 71, 80, 87, 120, 128, 236; and Creighton, 201; at Eternal Light monument, 73–74, 113; as national commander, 92, 98; on Pasiones, 184; on Roosevelt, 83 “world liberalism,” 90–91 World Trade Organization (WTO), 28, 30 Wynn, Ed, 62, 105 “Yanks Are Not Coming,” 78–79, 282n52 You Are History, You Are Legend (film), 167, 306n89 Young, James E., 43, 221 “Young Man from Alcala” (song), 180 Zapatistas, 34