Memorial Recalls America’s Conscientious Warriors

It was a simpler time, a cleaner war. Maybe it was easier to know what the right thing was. For whatever reason, when a little-known general moved against Spain’s democratically elected government in 1936, sparking the Spanish Civil War, it didn’t seem like somebody else’s fight.

In cities across America, people got mad. University students patrolled the New York subways, collecting donations for the forces of democracy in Spain. Carpenters, longshoremen, sailors, students, writers--a small army of volunteers, about 3,000 Americans--set sail for Spain, joining the fight against fascism.

Over these last 61 years, the volunteers of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and the 1,500 Americans who died in Spain have gone largely unnoticed, or even dismissed as “un-American.”

Perhaps that was why 83-year-old Abe Osheroff was wiping back tears Wednesday when he stood to accept the dedication of the nation’s first monument to the Spanish Civil War volunteers, why the cheering was so loud and so long for a dozen elderly veterans who stood blinking under the footlights of a university stage--a daguerreotype of the early American left, and an era when some of the fights were good fights.

“This is one of the happiest moments of my life,” said Osheroff, a Seattle carpenter who served in the Lincoln Brigade and led the effort to build the memorial with fellow veteran Bob Reed. “I have spent 25 years of my life trying to bring home to young people that which is important about the Spanish Civil War--which is not a story of battles, but what it means to be committed, what it means to act based on your ideals, and that this is a good way to live.”

Brass-and-Granite Monument

The dedication of the memorial, a brass plaque within a granite stone about 5 feet high with two benches nearby, at the University of Washington attracted what is believed to be the largest gathering ever of the generation of early activists--memorialized by writers like Ernest Hemingway and George Orwell--who left behind countries that had been reluctant to intervene against Hitler and Mussolini and took up arms against the forces of fascism.

It is likely to be the last such gathering. “We’re now just a little below 150 of us,” said Osheroff, who raised the private donations that paid for the memorial. “Each week, the answer changes. A lot of the guys are in their mid-80s, and the fact is in another two or three years, we will be history. And legend.”

While shrines to the International Brigades were erected all over Europe, this is the first memorial to the American volunteers in this country other than a small plaque in New York.

That it took so long to memorialize the veterans of another nation’s war is testimony to the decades America lived under the Cold War and the difficulty it still has in coming to terms with the activists of the ‘30s and ‘40s who forged the American labor movement and worked for adoption of Social Security, pensions and health plans for American workers.

It was many of those veterans of the American class wars who--reeling from the Depression and sympathetic to the defense force of workers, peasants, students and intellectuals mobilized to resist the military takeover led by Gen. Francisco Franco--joined 40,000 international volunteers from 53 countries to protect the democratically elected government of Spain.

Aided by a military airlift and bombing campaign from Nazi Germany and 47,000 ground troops from Italy, Franco’s forces ultimately prevailed, and Franco ruled Spain under a military dictatorship for nearly 40 years.

That the U.S. has had difficulty coming to terms with its own role in the war was apparent with former President Reagan, who in 1984 suggested that most Americans believed the civil war volunteers were “fighting on the wrong side.”

Yet for many, the parallels to today’s international conflicts and a popular mood of isolationism are all too apparent. In the case of the former Yugoslavia, they are striking: a democratically elected leadership (the Muslim-dominated government in Bosnia) under threat by genocidal forces (the Yugoslav army), an international arms embargo that prevents the afflicted government from defending itself, a reluctance to intervene by the governments of western Europe and the U.S.

A little over 60 years ago, thousands of citizens became angry enough that they boarded ships for France (their U.S. passports were not valid for travel to Spain), then traveled by boat or foot to Spain, and moved out onto the battlefields, carrying guns, driving ambulances, nursing the wounded.

“It was sort of the last war for any reason, for a cause. It fired up people’s imagination,” said Lou Gordon, 82, a retired union organizer from New York who served with the brigade. “The people who went were poets and painters and musicians, as well as students and seafarers. It never happened before, and it hasn’t happened since.”

‘The Best America Has to Offer’

“For me, they stood for the best America has to offer,” said University of Washington professor Anthony Geist, who spearheaded the move to have the memorial located there. “A burning belief in freedom, and the willingness to offer their lives for it; a commitment to international solidarity, unparalleled in history; the knowledge of how to act, when to act, and why they were acting.”

Gordon was a student at City University of New York, which has recognized its 80 students who volunteered with a brass plaque. He was active in protesting against Hitler and Mussolini and in organizing to keep the ROTC off campus. When the civil war broke out, he and about 15 friends began collecting money for medical supplies.

“One day, somebody came in and said he was going to Spain. We all went into shock, and then followed him, two or three at a time, till we all were there. Half of us got killed,” Gordon recalled.

“It seemed crazy, but it also seemed like the only way to stop what was going on. Hitler and Mussolini were pouring troops in. I saw pictures of people in the streets of Madrid armed with pitchforks and old World War I rifles. It just didn’t seem fair, that’s all.”

Gordon spent 19 months in Spain, wounded once with powder burns to the eye, then came home to a lifetime of union organizing.

Nate Thornton, an 82-year-old retired carpenter and shipping clerk from Hayward, Calif., joined his father on the Spanish battle lines, hoping both of them could get Spanish citizenship and find jobs in Europe after the war was over.

“I’m still glad that I went,” he says now. “It helped wake up the world to the fact that Franco and Mussolini needed fighting against.”

Millie Rosenstein of Santa Monica was active in a group of Los Angeles-area veterans that once numbered 100, including her husband, Herman. Now all of them are dead, she said. Rosenstein herself didn’t go to Spain, but collected donations for the war effort in a tin can on the subway in New York.

Osheroff had been an activist long before he thought anything about Spain. In the early years of the Depression, he organized groups of young men on behalf of families evicted because they couldn’t pay their rent, moving their furniture back in. He then went on to organize coal workers and steel workers into the newly emerging CIO, or Congress of Industrial Organizations.

After the war, Osheroff went on to volunteer in the civil rights campaign in Mississippi. In the 1980s, he took his two sons to Nicaragua and built a village for a group of poor peasants.

There are still activists, he says now, but the world is not so simple a place in which to act.

“The world I grew up in was a lot more of a black-and-white world,” he said. “The issues were clear-cut. The other thing is there was still a good deal of collective feeling, collective spirit. People looked out for themselves, but not only for themselves. . . .”