The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade: Americans in the Spanish Civil War

This history of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade relates the story of the 2,800 young Americans who volunteered to defend the Spanish Republic against Franco's rebellion of 1936 - and what became of them after Spain. Although the central event of their lives was a war they lost, they are viewed less in the context of their military activities than in the political and cultural climate that defined their commitment. The book follows the lives of the volunteers who survived (about one-third died in Spain) through World War II, the Cold War, and Vietnam to today.

Carroll ( Keeping Time: Memory, Nostalgia, and the Art of History ) skillfully melds the simple brutality of the Spanish Civil War with the human complexity of the 2800 American volunteers who fought in it from 1937 to 1939. Known as the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, most of these Americans were Communists who saw themselves as liberators and antifascists. After portraying their diverse, Depression-era backgrounds, Carroll follows them into battle in Spain where one-third died and nearly all were wounded. Almost half had no previous military experience, and the oral accounts of 200 contemporary survivors tell heartbreaking stories of slaughter. Meanwhile, as the U.S. government stressed nonintervention, observers assessed the fight as a "laboratory for the weapons of the next war." Surviving Lincolns returned as outcasts, facing indictments by the House Un-American Activities Committee, and, only through persistent idealism, did the Lincolns sustain their fight and maintain the right to protest publicly. Not until 1965 was the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade removed from the list of subversive organizations, ending 25 years of harassment. The breadth, depth and humanity Carroll depicts set this engrossing work apart from other juiceless war reports.

Drawing on more than 100 oral histories, newly available Spanish civil war archives in Moscow, the major archival collections at Brandeis and Berkeley, and dozens of veterans' private collections, Carroll provides an overview of the experiences of some 2,800 U.S. volunteers during and after the 1930s struggle between Loyalists and Republicans in Spain. Odyssey combines political, military, and intellectual history: It traces the process through which U.S. volunteers were recruited to the cause; offers a vivid narrative of the bloody battles in which fully a third of the U.S. volunteers died; and then pursues the personal and political journeys of the survivors through World War II, McCarthyism, the civil rights and antiwar movements, and up to the present. Carroll analyzes the role of the U.S. Communist Party in organizing and leading the volunteers in Spain, as well as later divisions when some veterans rejected the party's positions. Dozens of portraits of individual veterans demonstrate clearly that the political consciousness and commitment that brought them to Spain in the thirties remained, for most of these men and women, an enduring source of strength and identity.

Peter N. Carroll
Paperback: 368 pages 1994