Alvah's Books

[Editor's Note: Since the publication of Landis' book, another definitive history of the Lincolns was chronicled in 1994 by Peter Carroll's The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigades. In this book Carroll presents (with differences) an honest picture of the volunteers and their role in the war.]
At Last – The Definitive History of the Lincoln Brigade in Spain

THE ABRAHAM LINCOLN BRIGADE, by Arthur H. Landis.
New York, The Citadel Press.

Reviewed by Alvah Bessie in
The Worker, Sunday, July 31, 1966

“Since so many anti-human victories have been won in the name of a puerile anti-communism,” writes Arthur Landis, “this work will not seek to advance itself by either adopting that tactic, or its opposite . . . It should, in fact, be sufficient to honest inquiry that judgement be made on that which was, factually, and that which was done, literally. For all men in truth, should answer only to how they have lived within their milieu, and how they have shaped up to the social crises of their times.”

The men of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade “shaped up” to the social crises of their time in so integral and so passionate a manner that the time is not far off when their contribution to the preservation of American (and world) democracy will be honestly appraised.

*

This book by one of the veterans of that volunteer outfit in the Spanish war will not be published until September, but it is – on this 30th anniversary of the day Francisco Franco and his supporters rebelled against the democratic Spanish Republic – the definitive history of the Brigade, and the measure of Landis’ achievement lies in the patent fact that the job will never have to be done again.

For Landis has not only spent many years in research and study in preparation for this history, but he has so thoroughly examined, understood, digested and projected the very mood and temper of the times, and precisely what “was done literally,” that there is not one aspect of American participation in Spain that he has missed; not one facet of that crucial struggle that he has failed to evaluate – and evaluate on sound, historical grounds.

*

There had been one previous history of the Abraham Lincoln battalion, but it was written in 1939 in the months immediately following the “end” of the war, and Edwin Rolfe, its poet-author, and himself a veteran of Spain, accomplished a near-miracle that was of major assistance to the author of the present history.

Landis has corrected many of the errors Rolfe inadvertently made, just as he corrects the deliberate misinterpretations and scandalous distortions of history perpetrated by both honest – and frankly fascist -”interpreters” of the role the Americans played in the Spanish war.

He has done far more than this; he has examined the background of the volunteers and their subsequent history. He has re-created the temper of the 1930s (in America and the world), to explain why they volunteered to fight and die in a cause that “was not their own.” He has traced the open and the secret history of the diplomatic intrigue that spelled the death of the Spanish Republic -and he has laid the guilt where it belongs.

He has not missed a single action in which the American participated – from that hideous (and actually criminal) baptism of fire on the slopes of Pingarron Hill in the Jarama Vally of February 23 and 27, 1937, to the final holocaust that ended the great Ebro offensive in the Sierra Pandols and the Sierra Caballs of Catalonia in September, 1938.

Each of these actions is placed in perspective in the overall strategy and tactics of the war. Eye-witness accounts that recreate the very personalities of the men involved alternate with logistical studies made decades after the events they describe. Landis has plumbed the work of such fascist “historians” as Manuel Aznar, and such honest reporters as Herbert Matthews, Vincent Sheean and Ernest Hemingway, as well as endless books and newspaper accounts, in many languages, in order to present a balanced picture of the truth and the lie, the misinterpretation and the facts.

*

Veterans of the Brigade will cherish this book as the total expression of what they believed – and suffered – so many years ago. The generation that has grown up since 1939 will find in it what they will not find in any of their history books today – the true story of the Spanish conflict. The casual reader will not remain casual for he will find himself under the screaming shells and the white-hot sun, the freezing rain, the machine-gun, rifle and mortar fire that tortured the American volunteers in all those places whose names will live forever in the annals of man’s struggle against oppression and degradation: Jarama, Villaneuva del Pardillo, Quinto and Belcite, Brunete, Fuentes de Ebro, Teruel and that town called Atlas de Celedas that the Americans called “The North Pole,” Seguro de los Banos, Caspe, Alcaniz, Batea and Gandesa, Corbera and Villalba de los Arcos – all are here, all live again and rise to memory or are created for those who knew them only as newspaper headlines or never heard about them till today.

The Abraham Lincoln Brigade is a monumental contribution to American history, for what the Lincolns did in Spain was American (as well as world) history, and the book will be mined for decades by historians, scholars and ordinary readers who want to know “that which was, factually, and that which was done, literally.”

This is the true and indispensable role of honest history, which to Napoleon may have been “a fable agreed upon.” Emerson was closer to the truth when he said, “There is properly no history, only biography.” In Landis’ hands, however, history is the unadulterated truth about how a specific body of men lived in their milieu and shaped up to the social crisis of their times.

[Editor's Note: As part of the tribute to Alvah Bessie, we are running several of his book reviews that he wrote for numerous publications. Below is the first one of the series. Special thanks goes to Dan Bessie for typing and forwarding these reviews]

A LOOK AT SPAIN BY MICHENER

IBERIA
by James Michener,
Random House, 313 Pages.

Reviewed by Alvah Bessie in the Marin Independent Journal,
Saturday June 1, 1968

James Michener is a professional tourist and every few years he comes up with an enormous book, either fiction or non-fiction, covering his most recent travels or continuing interest in foreign lands.

In this way he has made a considerable reputation out of lengthy accounts of Oceania, Japan, Hawaii and Israel, among others. Now he has “done” Spain, and the reader interested in this fascinating country will be able to pick up an enormous amount of undigested information – and enjoy a remarkable series of fine photographs made by a young man named Robert Vavra.

The photographs, unfortunately, are far more evocative of Iberia than the text. For while Michener presents himself as an authority on the history, language, religion and philosophy of the peninsula, its music and theater, dance, poetry and drama, painting, sculpture and architecture (both lay and ecclesiastic), its food and drink, amusement, literature and geography, flora and fauna, the most important resource of Spain is singularly skimped: its people. The aristocracy, the wealthy and “government officials” are quoted, but not the working people who constitute the majority.

Even stranger is his omission of any comprehensive analysis of the Spanish Civil War, the central fact of Spain’s recent history, or of the Spanish scene today, 30 years after the “victory” of Francisco Franco. These omissions are doubly strange, because Michener makes it plan that he was deeply grieved by the defeat of the Spanish Republic, for which he had contemplated fighting “in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade . . . Some of the men I respected most in American life were so serving, and when I thought of them doing the job that I should have been engaged in, I felt ashamed . . . ”
Why, then, didn’t Michener enlist? He gives three reasons:

1. “I was not invited.”

2. He was (correctly) convinced America would soon be at war, and “I was willing to wait until we made our entrance, satisfied that the Republic could hold out till then.” (It couldn’t.)

3. The people engaged in enlisting Americans for the Brigade were “Communists,” who he had never been able to trust.

It is scarcely worth laboring the point, but nobody was “invited” to fight in Spain; people volunteered and Michener “rarely volunteered for anything.” Less honest, however, if he was as well informed about the course of the war, as he wants the reader to believe, is his contention that in 1938 “The defense of a free democracy had been subordinated to the expanded goal of establishing a Communist government. . (Page 697). Such a “goal” never exited.

With such an interpretation of the conduct of the war it is scarcely surprising that on those few occasions when Michener refers to the war itself or details one of its more celebrated incidents (such as the siege of the Alcazar of Toledo, the fascist massacre at Badajoz, etc) he chooses to rely on accounts written by Franco apologists rather than the opposite. Example:

“Facts concerning the Alcazar are so confused and open to challenge that I have relied upon one principal source, The Siege of Alcazar, by Cecil B. Eby (1965), which is in the main pro-Franco.” (Page 140). Or, concerning the current “Bible” of the war, Hugh Thomas’ The Spanish Civil War, Michener says, “It seems to me that he writes the general truth concerning these sad events. . . ”

These “sad events” determined the subsequent history of Spain – and determine it today. Not a week passes that we do not read of mass demonstrations of workers and students, supported by priests, directed against the regime, demanding an expanded democracy and a decent standard of living (The minimum wage in Spain is 96 pesetas a day – currently worth $1.37.)

Such facts do not seem to trouble the professional tourist.