In July 1936 military forces led by Franco began their uprising against Spain’s leftist Popular Front coalition government. Franco’s forces were quickly aided by Nazi Germany and fascist Italy, while the United States, Great Britain, and France remained neutral in the fight. Washington im-posed an arms embargo on both sides, which effectively disadvantaged Loy-alist Spain. Only the Soviet Union sent military assistance to the LoyLoy-alist government, although bitter rivalries between Spanish anarchists and Com-munists wracked the Loyalist forces.35 For all the internecine bloodshed on the Left, however, men and women in the IWO answered the call to defend Spain, enlisting in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and other contingents of the International Brigades fighting against fascism or contributing money and goods to aid the Loyalists despite America’s embargo.
The IWO’s Italian Section joined in an Italian Anti-Fascist Committee rally and “Mass Protest Meeting against Mussolini’s Invasion of Democratic Spain.” “First Ethiopia and Now Spain!” posters for the demonstration pro-claimed; to enrage antifascist attendees, the posters reproduced New York Times headlines reporting, “Italians Boastful of Malaga Victory” and “Press Hails Downfall of the Loyalist Port as New Fascist Achievement.” Attendees were promised a “Special Showing of the Dramatic Film Document, ‘Spain in Flames’” and urged to “Support the Garibaldi Battalion!” This military unit consisted of Italians and Italian Americans who traveled surreptitiously to Spain to fight. Evidently, IWO members were found in their ranks, for when a rally “to Support American Boys of the Lincoln Brigade in Spain”
was held at New York’s Stuyvesant High School, Marcantonio as well as the Italian Section secretary addressed the crowd. Flyers featured determined fighters from both the Lincoln and Garibaldi Battalions.36
Militants from many backgrounds were drawn to support the Loyalist cause. The most prominent Slavic American fighting in Spain was Steve Nel-son, Croatian immigrant, who a few years earlier had been recruiting miners into the IWO in eastern Pennsylvania. In 1937, too, Gizella Chomucky, a Slovak IWO member from Philadelphia, worked through another of her fra-ternal societies to raise funds for “the Spanish Loyalists” ($5 was sent in April 1937). Perhaps Chomucky and her peers were responding to appeals in the Robotnícky kalendár of the IWO’s SWS, which gave extensive coverage to the Spanish fight for democracy and the “workers’ militia men and women, leading the battle against fascism.” The Slovaks contrasted the Span-ish and their international working-class allies to domestic “fascists,” such as newspaper magnate Hearst, “Hitler’s friend.” The ease with which the IWO labeled its ideological enemies fascists, or even un-American, was a lamentable trait that later left the Order vulnerable when charges of anti-Americanism were leveled at it from the Right.37
While the CP declared, “unity the need of the hour!” regarding Spain, it nevertheless continued to denounce “the Trotskyites, whose fascist connec-tions have been proven in the Soviet Union and Spain, and whose under-world gangster alliances have been shown in Minneapolis, USA.” The allusion to the leading role that Farrell Dobbs and other members of the Socialist Workers Party took in the successful 1934 Teamsters strike indi-cates the long-standing enmity the CP expressed toward its domestic rivals, which would even result in Communists’ support for the prosecution of Dobbs and other Socialist Workers Party members under the Smith Act for alleged advocacy of violent revolution. Within Spain, too, calls for a united front clashed with defense of the violent suppression of anarchist or-ganizations such as Barcelona’s Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (POUM), which already in 1937 Communists were asserting was “an armed rebellion against the Peoples’ Front Government.” Bloody infighting among
competing leftists in Spain affected Lincoln Brigade combatants, too, as when Sam Baron, U.S. Socialist reporting in Spain for the Socialist newspa-per The Call, was arrested and “charged with the high crime of ‘Trotskyism.’”
The head of a committee charged with securing Baron’s release called the charges “ludicrous.” Such a characterization was likely to enflame Commu-nists, not rally them to Baron’s cause. The violence directed at anarchists and others was indicative of the fratricide of the Left in Spain and the United States, but the CP asserted that the suppression of POUM and other devia-tionists was necessary to defeat the fascists.38
Members of the IWO who later turned state’s witness provided evidence that the Order was deeply involved in the campaign to defend Spain. While he admitted under cross-examination that “there was a large body of Ameri-can opinion, outside of the Communist, who supported the democratically elected Government of Spain,” Powers testified in 1951 that campaigns on behalf of the Loyalists “were brought into the National Committee of the IWO by fraction members, they were approved in the National Committee, and then they were passed down through the various channels of the IWO.”
The IWO contributed to Loyalist Spain by “distributing literature, soliciting funds from the lodges, purchasing of ambulances and recruiting men to fight against Franco.” Powers said he handed the names of other IWO leaders to the CP to facilitate the recruitment of IWO members to go fight against Franco.39
The IWO was unapologetic about recruitment of its members to fight in Spain. In 1938 the general secretary proudly reported on the Order’s rapid response to “the needs of the Spanish people in their life and death struggle against fascism,” noting many members, including “a member of our Na-tional Executive Committee, Brother Tom Goodwin,” went overseas to fight.
In addition nearly $50,000 was donated by members to send ambulances, food, medicine, and five thousand sweaters to aid the Loyalist cause. The Polish Section, too, remembered its contribution to Madrid’s defense as one of its proudest moments in the fight “to halt German-Italian-Japanese ag-gression.” At the end of World War II, the Poles hailed “members volunteer-ing for service in the International Brigades which fought fascism on the Spanish soil” as its most outstanding contribution. Junior Section leader Jerry Trauber stressed the Order’s commitment to the Spanish cause, too, listing “the Abraham Lincoln Battalions of the Loyalist Armies in Spain” as well as Left-patriotic icons Frederick Douglass and Tom Paine as the kind of
“real Americanism” the IWO was teaching its children.40
Even those who did not fight for Spain contributed to the cause. In 1937 Thompson traveled to Spain with other African Americans, ostensibly as a press correspondent covering the Loyalist cause, touring relief hospitals and battlefields. Before arriving in Spain, Thompson had attended an antiracism conference in Paris as a delegate of the IWO and the NNC, suggesting the
linkages the American Left made between antiracist activism at home and the fight to dismantle colonialism abroad. Although Robert Reid-Pharr ar-gues that African Americans fighting in Spain were required to perform constricting, masculinist roles as brave leftist global freedom fighters, gender norms that bled the complexity of their Republican service from the saga, Thompson complicates this narrative.41 She championed black men fighting for the Loyalists and freedom but also brought “nurturing” gifts of ambu-lances and medicine to Madrid, combining the templates of both Florence Nightingale and Ida B. Wells. Once in Madrid, Thompson joined poet Langston Hughes, Lincoln Brigade soldier Walter Garland, and Communist Harry Haywood in delivering radio addresses on what the Loyalist fight meant to antiracist, anti-imperialist blacks in America. These speeches were rebroadcast to the United States. Thompson said she felt a kinship with the Spanish people fighting fascists because
they are fighting oppression, and I come from a people whose op-pression is centuries old. I am a part of their feeling against the Ital-ian fascism which has participated in the devastation of their country, because we in America felt keenly the devastation of Ethio-pia by the same forces. I sense their determination to maintain de-mocracy in Spain, because in America we Negroes have been striving for democratic rights since the days of slavery.42
The African Americans fighting fascism were welcomed in Spain, she added, and “one encounters none of the racial prejudice so characteristic of one’s own country. . . . The conclusion can only be, therefore, that all of us who as minority peoples are victimized by fascism, all of us who believe in the prin-ciples of democracy, have the duty of supporting this fight of the Spanish people with all that we have. It is our common struggle.”43
On her return to the United States, Thompson and other participants made a speaking tour for the IWO to raise funds for the Loyalists. She spoke to both black and white groups of the “many, many black soldiers” fighting for the Spanish Republic. Thompson spoke in Harlem at her home lodge as well as at a reception at the University of Chicago. IWO lodges in smaller cities such as Cleveland and Grand Rapids also hosted fund-raising talks by Thompson. Moved by her accounts of the interracial International Brigades’
heroic defense of the Republic, IWO members contributed funds to purchase ambulances “in the name of black Americans” as well as to contribute
“money, milk and food” for the refugees from Malaga and other cities cap-tured by the fascists. During one IWO-sponsored appearance in New York, she optimistically declared, “A courageous, determined Spanish people—
behind their unified government and army, supported by the liberty-loving anti-fascist forces of the world, no Franco, no Hitler, no Mussolini can
conquer.” She recollected that she had made so many addresses for the IWO that she felt “it’s coming out of my ears,” although she regarded the three weeks touring Spain as one of the transformative events of her life. As Thompson later recalled of the ferment around Spain, “People began taking sides.”44
The urgency of the crisis caused the IWO to set aside ideological differ-ences and work with non-Communists on behalf of Spain. Thompson participated in a Lift the Embargo conference in Washington with non-Communists of the NNC such as A. Philip Randolph and Yergan, although CP figures such as Robert Minor and Daily Worker editor Clarence Hatha-way attended as well. The German-American Committee for Spanish Relief wrote Bedacht in February 1938 thanking him for the IWO’s financial con-tribution to its relief campaign. The committee, on whose board sat Albert Einstein as well as the widow of Socialist congressman Victor Berger, hoped it could count on the IWO’s continued financial support for its relief work, since as of January 1938 it had only $900 on hand for direct Spanish relief.
The following month the Medical Bureau and North American Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy wrote to Bedacht relaying the multiple cable-grams it was receiving daily on the bombing of Loyalist ambulances and mobile hospital units. The emergency spurred the committee to call “a meet-ing of all groups backmeet-ing the Spanish Loyalist cause in this country, irrespec-tive of any particular viewpoint.” Bedacht as well as CP leader Browder, Socialist Party chairman Norman Thomas, and anti-Communist ILGWU official Charles Zimmerman were invited to devise “emergency measures” to ensure medical aid reached the battlefront. While in different contexts Be-dacht and other Communists had denigrated the contributions of “social fascists” such as Thomas, by 1938 the crisis in Spain led the general secretary to work with Socialists and other leftists to deliver medical assistance.45
The IWO had to tread carefully in its support of the Loyalist cause, for not only was the Republic unpopular with more conservative Americans, direct aid to Madrid violated America’s Neutrality Acts, which embargoed aid to either side in the conflict. IWO official and congressman Marcantonio, whose East Harlem district contained many Hispanic constituents sympa-thetic to the Madrid government, introduced bills seeking to lift the em-bargo to no avail. The Order’s activities caught the attention of the FBI, and also the Massachusetts Department of Insurance, which in 1938 attempted to revoke its insurance license because of alleged improper use of corporate funds to support the Loyalist cause. General Counsel Brodsky proved in court, however, that the IWO had used none of its corporate funds to sup-port the Spanish government; funds were raised through voluntary contributions of individual members. The IWO dodged a bullet when Mas-sachusetts courts determined the Order had not violated the terms of its insurance license.46
As the military situation in Spain grew more desperate, the IWO turned its attention toward helping refugees from Franco’s assaults. In New York the IWO’s Spanish Society as well as Marcantonio participated in fiestas for the children of Loyalist Spain and “for the benefit of the embattled people of Spain who are fighting against terrific odds to preserve those same civil rights that every American enjoys.” In June 1939 IWO members receiving the Order’s monthly magazine, Fraternal Outlook, found a full-page back-cover ad urging readers in English, Yiddish, Italian, and Russian to donate to the Spanish Refugee Relief Campaign. Donors could contribute $1.50 or
$3 to provide a basic-needs package to refugees, or send $50 to support ten refugees for a month. Those IWO members able to aid the cause more broad-ly were asked to donate $75 “to bring 1 refugee to a new life in Latin Ameri-ca” or send in $800 (almost certainly the commitment of a lodge, not a single individual) to provide “monthly upkeep of American Mobile Dispensary for supplying medical treatment to refugees.” The following month Fraternal Outlook published a story by Dorothy Parker on “Spain’s Refugees in France”
documenting the 440,000 victims of “starvation and betrayal” who had fled the victorious fascists.47
Although a lingering commitment to the defeated Spanish Republic re-mained, after the summer of 1939, the Spanish Loyalist cause was given less of a hearing. Facing the immediate dilemma of the long-feared world war against fascism, members of the Order confronted another challenge. With the Soviet Union’s dramatic announcement of a nonaggression pact with the recently despised Nazi enemy, the European war was suddenly redefined as an inter-imperialist war that was none of the United States’ concern. As in other Communist-affiliated groups, this policy reversal caused turmoil in the IWO.