The Legends Win in the End

On a rainy Saturday afternoon this past November, San Francisco said its final goodbye to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Or at least it said goodbye to the one veteran of the brigade who could make it – the hundred-year-old Hilda Roberts, one of about sixty American women who served the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War. Apparently, a couple of other vets had planned on being there but the weather kept them away, and there’s not a large pool to draw on – only about twenty-two or twenty-four of the veterans are thought to still be alive.

The San Francisco event was a commemoration of a much larger leave taking that took place seventy years earlier, almost to the day. For that farewell, remembered in Spain as the Despedida, the crowd numbered in the tens of thousands, as Spaniards filled the streets of Barcelona for a last look at the departing International Brigades, the 35,000 or so volunteers from 53 countries who had come to defend the Spanish Republic from General Francisco Franco’s military uprising two years earlier. Among the departing were about 2,800 Americans – less about 800 who died in Spain – who subsequently became known as the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.

At the time, Spain seemed a microcosm of all the world’s conflicting ideas on one peninsula in Europe. Within five years after the 1931 fall of the monarchy that ruled it almost continuously for centuries, Spain’s disparate points of view had crystallized into two opposing coalitions: The Popular Front of Socialists, Communists, and left-wing Republicans; and the National Front of Christian Democrats, fascists, and monarchists. Five months after the Popular Front’s electoral victory, the two sides would become transformed into the warring Republicans and Nationalists when army officers in the Spanish colony of Morocco began the uprising that would end democracy in the country for nearly four decades.

It is hard to convey today what Spain meant to the world in those days, but perhaps the title of Andre Malraux’s novel about the Civil War does it best: It is called Man’s Hope. And the fact the events, while certainly not clearly recalled or understood, have never entirely receded from popular memory came to the fore in the most recent presidential election when both Barack Obama and John McCain claimed Republican sympathizer Ernest Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War novel For Whom the Bell Tolls as one of their favorite books.

Just a few years ago, the Bay Area Veterans, while few in number themselves, were holding annual reunion events at the Oakland Hilton or the Kaiser Center that drew crowds in the high hundreds. Speakers like Ariel Dorfman and Molly Ivins talked of the relevance the Spanish war to the events of the day, and the whole audience joined members of the San Francisco Mime Troupe in singing “Viva la Quince Brigada!” and the other songs of the Spanish Republic. But seventy years is a mighty long time to keep an organization going when there’s no source of new members. A recent obituary for Jack Shafran noted that the 91 year old was “one of the youngest volunteers in the Lincoln Brigade.” So the decision was made to dissolve the Veterans, either upon the death of two of the group’s remaining activists, Moses Fishman and Abraham Sorodin or on the seventieth anniversary of the Despedida, whichever came first. The organization’s work would be continued by the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives.

By the time of the San Francisco event, both of those veterans had in fact died, so there no longer was an organization known as the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. The singing would be thin on the choruses of the old songs at the final event, and the 150 seat Delancey Street Theater was less than half full for a showing of a British newsreel on the Despedida apparently never before seen in the US. On the screen, Dolores Ibárruri Gómez, better known as La Pasionaria (or “the passion flower”), delivered her famous send off speech to thousands of the then young volunteers. As a rule, Ibárruri’s speeches included the Republican cry, “No pasaran!” – they shall not pass. But there were no such illusions on that day in Barcelona. Franco’s Nationalists had indeed passed and the Internationals were being sent home because the cause was lost. Instead, Ibárruri told them, “Sois la leyenda.” You are legend. And legends they would be, for the rest of their days. People used to cite the phrase “May you live in interesting times” as an ancient Chinese curse. It seems, however, that this widely cited bit of eastern wisdom may have originated in the east coast of the United States, for it appears to be neither ancient nor Chinese. In fact, the earliest date anyone can find evidence of its use is 1936, the year the Spanish Civil War began. And maybe that’s about right because the veterans of that war embodied this apparently modern curse as well as anyone ever has.

When the western democracies refused to aid Spain’s fight against the military uprising, the Internationals came without sanction of their governments. (The only significant foreign assistance the Republic received came from the Stalin-era Soviet Union.) Afterwards, some volunteers, like the Italians and the Germans who constituted the largest bloc, couldn’t go home. In Spain, they had fought against their own governments because, unlike France, the United Kingdom, or the United States, Mussolini and Hitler’s governments had not hesitated to assist their ally Franco – and take the opportunity to hone their military operations for the larger conflict on the horizon. Others like the Americans were able to return home but were now considered suspect as the times got ever more “interesting.” It seems they had been “premature anti-fascists.” They were anti-Hitler before being anti-Hitler was cool.

The interesting times continued. When US Attorney General Thomas Clark decided to warn the nation about the subversive organizations in its midst on 1947, he did so by releasing a list in alphabetical order, starting with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. And since a good number of the volunteers had, in fact been Communist Party members, they faced “are you now, or have you ever been” questioning for decades.

By the Vietnam War era, the Spanish Civil War was a largely forgotten event in the US. Most of the participants in the big antiwar demonstrations of the day would likely not have noticed the group of old men and a few women, marching behind a Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade banner. But they were always there, probably the most antiwar group of veterans you were ever going to meet. And an activist core continued on, and on, and on. When the Reagan Administration subverted the Sandinista government in Nicaragua in the 1980s, the Lincolns were well past the age of volunteering to fight the Contras, so they sent an ambulance down instead.

In her speech on that long ago afternoon in Barcelona, La Pasionaria went on to exhort the 13,000 Internationals who were there, “When the olive tree of peace puts forth its leaves entwined with the laurels of the Spanish Republic’s victory, come back.” Considering the Republic’s desperate military position at the time, this seemed like so much bravado. And, at the time, it was. But not in the long run. As the viewers of Saturday Night Live would be reminded week after week, in 1975 General Francisco Franco finally died. And more importantly, with him died his dictatorship. Two years later, La Pasionaria, returned form exile, was elected to represent Asturias in the first post-Franco government.

Still, Spain was reluctant to revisit its Civil War in those first post-Franco years, and it would be nearly another two decades before the volunteer veterans were invited back. But in November 1996, sixty years after the war’s start and three years after Ibárruri herself had died, 400 of them returned to finally see the olive trees of peace and receive a hero’s welcome at the “Homenaje,” the homecoming. Twelve years later, a mere twenty-three of them were on hand for the seventieth anniversary Despedida commemoration in Spain, their numbers having plunged worldwide just as they have in the Bay Area.

But things have continued to change in Spain, and the reluctance to confront the crimes of the Franco has declined with the passing of those personally involved. A recently passed law mandates the removal of symbols of the Franco era from various public buildings and funds the unearthing of Civil War-era mass graves. And it begins the real Homenaje: As of the end of 2008, all descendants of those Spaniards forced to leave the country from the beginning of the war through 1975 will be allowed to claim the Spanish citizenship denied them by Francisco Franco’s war and dictatorship. And although most did not live to see it and had to content themselves with being legends in their own time, this is the final victory of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.