[Marxism] The Last Lincoln Brigade Volunteer
POSTING RULES NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * NY Times Sunday Magazine, Mar. 15 2015 The Last Volunteer (Del Berg, 99, is the last known surviving veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, a contingent of nearly 3,000 Americans who fought to defend the democratically elected government during the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s.) It was 1937, and the Fascists had already revolted in Spain. I was walking down a street in Hollywood when I saw a sign — “Friends of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade” — written on the side of a building. I turned the corner, opened the door and went in. The people inside said, “What can we do for you?” I said, “I want to go to Spain.” They couldn’t legally send people to Spain, they told me, but did I want to help? I did. My life started with poverty and then came the Depression. I felt a certain responsibility to help the Spanish workers and farmers. They told me to go to an organization called the Medical Bureau to Aid Spanish Democracy. I was put to work there helping organize meetings and collecting clothes for the Republic. There was a younger guy working with me. One day he turned to me and said, “Do you want to go to Spain?” I said yes, I sure do. He said, “I’ll tell you whom to go see.” The next day, I opened one of the office doors at the bureau, and there was a guy sitting in a chair, expecting me. He had been in the First World War and lost part of his arm. He just kept looking at me and not saying much. Nobody could tell if I was there for a solid reason or if I was a stooge. Finally, I flatly told him I wanted to go to Spain. He said, O.K.: Go get your birth certificate. He sent me to a doctor for a physical examination, and then I got on a bus to New York. From there, four of us boarded the French ocean liner Champlain. That’s the first time in my life that I ever had fancy food. We had a chance to go around Paris a little bit, and I went up the Eiffel Tower. Then they put us on a bus across France and took us to a fortress with three- or four-feet-thick walls. We were given rooms there, but it wasn’t long before the French national police came and picked us up. They couldn’t do anything about us Americans because we had legal visas and passports to be in France. There were German volunteers with us, and I was worried that they would be sent back to be finished off by the Nazis, but the French Communist Party was very strong then and wouldn’t allow the police to send them back to Germany. We were all put on a raggedy bus, about 30 miles from the Spanish border. Along the way, the bus got a flat tire. We just sat there, in the middle of the night, waiting to cross the Pyrenees, while they fixed it. We were taken to an open valley along the mountains, and French smugglers guided us over the border on foot. I was a little scared we’d be discovered. Every time we went by a farmhouse, the dogs started barking, but the people inside ignored them and let us pass. It was a beautiful, sunny morning when we crossed into Spain and boarded buses that took us to a fortress near Barcelona. They put us on battalion communications, laying telephone lines from one battery to the other. As the Fascists began their drive to the Ebro River, we were sent to Valencia and set up in a monastery on the outskirts of town. We had our headquarters on the second floor of the monastery, where the monks went to discuss things. This is where I got hit. The bomb tore up that whole dormitory. One Italian guy was a little too old for the infantry, so they had sent him to our outfit. He was killed. I didn’t know I was hurt. There’s a lot of confusion with a bomb explosion; you’re kind of disoriented. We all started climbing down a pipe that led from the dormitory to the ground floor. I was the last one, and as I hung on that pipe, it put pressure on my chest. When I got down to the ground, I noticed that I had blood all over my front. The shrapnel had hit my liver, and I was bleeding heavily. By then Franco’s troops had already taken over most of the Republic. We could do nothing to influence the outcome, so we were sent home. I felt so strongly about the Spanish people’s struggle that when I got back to the United States, I wanted to do the same thing here, in my own way. I wanted to remain active in the working people’s movement. I became a switchboard operator in the Army during the Second World War and was part of the effort to defeat Fascism. After the war, I worked with the United Farm Workers, and later was elected vice president of the local chapter of the N.A.A.C.P. It bothers me a little that at 99 you’re going to die any minute, because I have a lot
Re: [Marxism] The Last Lincoln Brigade Volunteer
POSTING RULES NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * On Mar 15, 2015, at 8:05 AM, Louis Proyect via Marxism marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu wrote: NY Times Sunday Magazine, Mar. 15 2015 The Last Volunteer (Del Berg, 99, is the last known surviving veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, a contingent of nearly 3,000 Americans who fought to defend the democratically elected government during the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s.) * * * (Bill was my dad’s cousin. I used to periodically visit NYC and spend time with Biil when I was a student in the late 60’s and early 70’s. He was loyal CP’er and a colourful character, as you can see below. The intervention against Sandino radicalized him. Before he went to Spain, he helped organize the city’s cabdrivers. Though we tried to skirt around them, political differences gradually drew us apart.) Column One Life and Death of an Activist STEPHEN BRAUN, TIMES STAFF WRITER Los Angeles Times April 13, 1991 'Wild' Bill Gandall wanted his passing used to rally the faithful. It also offers an elegy for the dedicated political adventurers of a faded era. The crowning moment of Wild Bill Gandall's final campaign found him on his hands and knees, crawling up the steps of the Federal Building in downtown Los Angeles in protest against the Persian Gulf War. All around was chaos, the kind of confusion the 82-year-old had survived as a Marine in the Nicaraguan bush and a recruit in the Spanish Civil War. Knocked to the ground as demonstrators surged toward the building's doors, Gandall dragged himself past nightstick-wielding federal police. At the top of the steps, the old man steadied himself with his cane and spoke briefly to reporters before he was hustled away and handcuffed. You only die once, he said. Two months later, William P. Gandall was found dead in his wheelchair in a sunlit Long Beach hospital dining commons. Once a museum piece of an anti-war movement weakened by solid American support for the Gulf conflict, Gandall is now being offered up as a movement martyr. Relatives and activists accuse the U.S. Federal Protective Service of hastening Gandall's death by roughing him up and failing to provide proper medical attention during the Jan. 16 demonstration--claims police deny and a coroner's autopsy contradicts. The brutality alleged is a far cry from the Rodney G. King beating, which has brought national attention to such law enforcement behavior. Instead, protesters say, it amounts to the failure to treat an old man with the care his age required. Even as Gandall's death rallies peace activists desperate to reinvigorate their cause, it also serves as an elegy for a fading American archetype. Gandall was a real-life counterpart of the tough, committed characters found in the novels of John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway, political adventurers who reached their prime in the troubled decade before World War II. He lived life full-bore, fighting with the Marines in Nicaragua in 1926 and against Fascists in Spain in 1936, enduring the demoralization of the Hollywood blacklist in the 1950s--quarreling and rabble-rousing all the while. If Gandall's last act of protest seemed almost a suicidal risk for an elderly man with a heart pacemaker, it becomes clearer in the context of his past. He came of age in an era with little moral or political ambiguity, a foot soldier in a movement whose leftist idols had yet to be tarnished and whose enemies came without redeeming human shades of gray. Compared to the educated, issue-oriented activists who have dominated national protest since the Vietnam War, Gandall and his generation were blue-collar internationalists who mapped their lives by activism. I don't think we will see their kind again, said Harvey Klehr, an Emory University political scientist and historian of the American left. In the 1930s and the 1940s, the left had the power to elicit tremendous commitment. These people marched off to war and lost their lives, all in the name of anti-fascism. It's hard to imagine that kind of fervor again. On his Long Beach hospital bed, Gandall asked his daughter, Kate, a New York film student, to carry on. He told me to make the most out of his death, she said. So Kate Gandall has begun laying groundwork for a lawsuit against federal police. Anti-war organizers put out calls in leftist circles for witnesses. Last Sunday, a day after the old soldier was buried in a Riverside veterans cemetery, 100 people--former Spanish Civil War soldiers, unionists, communists and war resisters--sprawled out in the vaulted chapel of a Unitarian church near MacArthur Park. They were there for Gandall's memorial
