The OTHER Person in Moe Fishman's File

As a possible idea for a topic, I decided to research someone unknown, someone without a finding aid, and organize and annotate their file to make it easier for later researchers. Court Bevensee, a vet who's papers are squished into Moe Fishman's collection because he and Moe were friends, fit the bill. His papers consist of tons of letters to and from his sister and brother in law describing the Depression at home, Court's injury and subsequent hospital stay, and his journey home from Spain as it became clear that he would not return to the battlefield. The photos of Court show a mysterious looking man, someone I would imagine in a spy movie: Tall with a shifty look in his eye and a big, round head; easy to pick out in a crowd. A socialist, his letters discuss the worker strikes of the day while his sister laments about their tight economic situation; in one letter, she describes how she and her husband leave for a two-week vacation but run low on money a few days into it and are forced to seriously cut down their spending and start to think about just giving up and heading home early. Throughout the letters, his sister constantly speaks of her plans for him to stay with her upon his return, but apologizes time and again for her small house and their failed attempts to move to a larger home. Court does end up coming back early, returning to New York in February or March of 1939 after spending almost a year and a half in the hospital suffering from severe leg injuries which involve metal lodged in his leg, the removal of bone, nerve paralysis, and a fracture or two. Unlike the letters we read in class, in which the veteran stops writing until he leaves the hospital so as not to worry his family with his sickness, Court complains about his boredom, his loneliness as one of the only English-speakers in the hospital, the one International Brigade woman who brings him a couple Daily Workers and some candy, and his neverending call for more reading material. His brother in law teases him about his love for reading, but Court is totally serious, being bored out of his mind having to lie in bed all day for months on end. He was injured on June 20th, 1937 in Brunete, after just arriving in Spain, but despite the severity of his injuries, he managed to live well into his 80s in Westchester County, New York. I have only looked at a fraction of the letters and some of his photographs, and would like to come back to research more. Do you think this could work for a research project and how do you suggest going about it?

Sadye's post on Alfred Amery

Sadye wrote about Alfred Amery, a volunteer in the Mac-Paps Canadian batallion. I was especially interested by her commentary about Amery's conversion to Communism in his memoir entitled "Something More". He joins the navy to find "something more"; returns in the midst of the Depression; and is finally convinced of the inherent flaws in capitalism by a Communist friend's analogy of competition between chicken farmers in which everyone comes out the loser. The friend describes how the farmer lowers prices to match his competitors, and lowers wages to keep his profit margin. The farmer eeks out a meager existence in which his survival depends on the exploitation of his workers. Amery is convinced that with the current US economic system, the Depression will never end and so he feels only an economic revolution will pull the country out of its dire situation. I think Roosevelt's New Deal reforms and later government changes have made the system feasible without the revolution Amery clamored for. Social security, Medicare and Medicaid, unemployment insurance, and welfare, to name a few programs, give citizens a safety net so that the Depression never occurs again. However, one only has to look at the current state of the market to see the flaws still present in the system. There is a long way to go, but I feel that the market will fluctuate no matter what system is put into place. There is no perfect economic system. The economy is like a roller coaster: It would be boring without some surprising lifts or drops (just kidding).

Ryan's blog

I read one of Ryan's entries in which he talks about a possible research projecting investigating US non-intervention politics during the war. The topic sounds very interesting, and a good base for a research paper. The politics are so complicated; the leaders appear untrustworthy and slippery - it would be a fascinating paper.

From peeking at later entries, it seems like Ryan altered his topic to focus on those in the US who advocated intervention; how they came to believe that the US should intervene; what actions they took to influence those in power; and what impact they had. This topic is less interesting to me. Everyone we have read about has been pro-intervention and yet the nation kept up the embargo and didn't aid the Republic. For some reason, the pleas of the interventionalists to the government went unheeded, even calls for action from prominent figures such as Langston Hughes, Albert Einstein, and Hemingway. Although the situations are vastly different, one recent political dilemma reminds me of Roosevelt's: President Clinton's decision to stay out of Rwanda during the 1994 genocide. Speaking in Kigali four years later, he expressed regret and basically told the Rwandans that he didn't understand the situation at the time - "All over the world there were people like me sitting in offices who did not fully appreciate the depth and speed with which you were being engulfed by this unimaginable terror." (The Nation) The facts suggest that Clinton knew full well the depth of the terror going on in Rwanda, but still failed to intervene. The Washington editor of The Nation thinks that the 1992-93 intervention in Somalia in which the US initially went in to combat a hunger epidemic and were drawn into battles among feuding warlords in which US soldiers died may have made Clinton hesitate from entering another African crisis.

Lucy's Post on Sociedades Hispanas Confederadas

I read Lucy's post on the Sociedades Hispanas Confederadas. It was very interesting. Like Mr. Fernandez, I was intrigued by the unopened letter found in one of the folders, and I hope that it is only unopened because the archivists have not sorted through that box yet. I do not agree with the argument that since the letter arrived unopened the person who donated it must have wanted the letter to remain sealed. A letter holds so much more information than an envelope.

The Sociedades Hispanas Confederadas box contains letters and other materials in Spanish. I am envious and impressed that Lucy can tackle archival material in Spanish. It also sounds like the boxes are rarely researched, partly because of the language issue, so they are swiftly sorted or not sorted at all. A collection like this would be a good one to annotate as part of the term project.

At the beginnning of the blogpost, she describes looking through the files of Robert Steck, a veteran who spend months in a Franco prison. I have read some of these files myself, and love the prison community Steck describes in which inmates set up a makeshift university, write the "Jaily News" and even use their meagre soap rations as chess pieces. The actions of the prisoners represents an absolute refusal to bend to the unhumanity and depression of Franco Spain.

Emily's Post About Daily Worker Microfilm

I read Emily's posting about the Janaury 1st, 2nd and 3rd of 1936 issues of the Daily Worker. I have not looked at microfilm yet, and am impressed and inspired to check it out after reading this post.

The paper sounds like a strong piece of propaganda, which would make the articles pretty boring to me. I was interested in the article about Stalin's interest and knowledge about agriculture, however. Emily brings up the good question of how the US Communist party related the Soviet Union's emphasis on agriculture to a largely industrial following in the States. Agriculture seems to represent the roots of civilization; In Homer's The Oddesey, Oddyseus often defines barbarism as a state in which nature grows wild and independently of man. In H.G. Wells' The Time Machine, the main character looks out over the land from a hilltop, and, seeing no dividing line between farmers' fields, says one word: Communism. Wells seems to equate agriculture with the development of private property because one must keep ones crops to oneself in order to sell them and make money, and the only way to delineate between your crops and your neighbors' crops is to put up fences and stake out your territory. Stalin obviously holds a different view toward agriculture, perhaps seeing it as a good, simple labor for man to undertake.

I'm surprised the paper came out daily. For such a specific paper, I would have thought it would come out weekly or monthly. Today, it seems that a paper like the Daily Worker would not have enough readers or staff to make daily publication feasible. One of the filmmakers from the Good Fight spoke of reading a dozen papers a day to get all the different angles on the news, a possibility I cannot fathom. I try to read the free papers I find whenever I can. My family subscribed to the New York Times at home, but even then I did not take the time to read more than an article or two a day. The knowledge of world and local affairs during the time the volunteers decided to volunteer must have been so much more thorough than today. It helps me understand how young men and women can decide to risk their lives fighting against fascism across the Atlantic Ocean in Spain.

Carl Geiser on San Pedro de Cardenas

When looking through my past blog entries, I found the Al Tocar Diana record of songs from the San Pedro de Cardenas prison. The prison interests me because of the complex, sophisticated community that the captives formed in order to pass the time and raise their standards of living. Instead of submitting to depression under their dirty, oppressive conditions, they created a civilized community, albeit with rats and guards everywhere. They lectured each other on topics they knew about, taught each other to read and write, and formed a choir and other musical groups. Some even carved their meagre soap rations into chess pieces to entertain themselves, and give their brains some exercise. I am fascinated by how people maintain their sanity under extreme conditions like living in the San Pedro de Cardenas concentration camp, and the value the prisoners place in education.

When I typed in San Pedro de Cardenas on the Search Finding Aids function of the ALBA website, I found out that veteran Carl Geiser had researched and written a book in the 1980s about international prisoners during the war. I researched the box relating to his book in the archives. Geiser must have been in his 70s or 80s when writing this book, which shows that Spain stayed close to his heart throughout his life. The fact that he wrote the book so late in his life is probably due to the fact that he couldn't safely get information about the prisons when Franco still lived and held power. Therefore, he had to wait until the 70s to really have a chance to research the war.

El Sid, the Spanish epic poet, is buried at San Pedro de Cardenas, which has been a monastary since 900 CE. The book "In Spain" gorgeously describes the tranquility of Cardenas, and does not mention its period as a prison, but rather speaks of a lonely, forgotten church. I think the book was written before the Spanish Civil War. It seems weird to me that Franco would choose the sacred sight of Cardenas as the location for his prison, but perhaps as the author of In Spain describes, the area was abandoned and forgotten by the time of the war.

650 international brigaders and thousands of Basques were held there, the site being 11 miles SE of Burgos. Geiser has accumulated the prison diary notes of many of the inmates describing the conditions and activities. He describes how two monks lectured the prisoners daily in an attempt to "reeducate" them. I can guess how effective that plan was... I wonder why Franco would bother trying to win over the minds of his prisoners, and why he would think that it would work.

In another interesting note, Geiser asks why a prisoner who committed suicide was buried at Burgos instead of at the Monastary like the other prisoners. He suspects that the priests refused to taint the hallowed ground with the sin of suicide.

Many soldiers describe the educational programs that took place in the camp. Reading and writing classes were held in many different languages, party so that men could learn how to send home letters to their families. This also matches up with the Republic's emphasis on education as a tool of warfare, and the philosophy that an educated person would support the Republic and have more power. In addition to language and literacy study, which even included the doomed super-language, Esperanto, many of the soldiers lectured each other on their own fields of expertise. The lecture topics varied greatly from "Zoos and Circuses" to "Painting" to "Hiking in the Adirondacks" to "Exploring for Chinchilla in the Andes." The whole school, called the San Pedro Institute of Higher Learning, played host to 285 students in 19 different classes. The men used their extra money to buy paper, pens, and books. Lectures began at 9:30 in the morning, and would often extend late into the evening. One homework assignment I particularly enjoyed was when the volunteers split into 20 different book groups to read and discuss Lawrence of Arabia. The sophistication and civilized nature by which the soldiers kept themselves busy amazes me.

I've only delved into half of one folder of the entire box of info about the prison so there is lots more to discover. Do you think I could make a research project about this prison?

Communist Manifesto: Bourgeois v. Proletarians

The stories of Lincoln Brigade veterans have inspired me, and I hope to live with a fraction of their courage. I envy their defense of civil, social and political rights. However, I have thus far been unable to grapple with the Communist idealogy so many of the volunteers believed in. Communism has negative, radical connotations to me despite the fact that I know little about the ideas behind the word. During my research, I pushed the Communist political views of the volunteers to the back of my mind; I tried my best to ignore them. However, Communism played such a major role in the lives of ALB veterans that I have decided to read the Communist Manifesto to gain insight as to what the ideology meant to them, why it seemed attractive at the time, and whether or not it merits consideration as a political philosophy.

Part 1: Bourgeois and Proletarians

This chapter outlined the basic flaws of capitalism: The exploitation of the worker and the inability of the worker to advance himself and escape poverty; the cutthroat attitude that pits neighbor against neighbor in a competition for financial survival; the exploitation of non-industrialized nations by industrialized ones. These problems all still exist in one form or another today. On a positive note, union action has greatly improved working conditions, raised the minimum wage, and made employers offer more comprehensive benefits such as health insurance and severance pay. On the other hand, now more than ever small, independent businesses struggle to survive amid the domination of chain stores that use their resources to lower prices and run their competition out of business. Also, US companies like Walmart and KFC exploit workers and resources from China, Africa and other parts of the world in order to make their products as cheap as possible. The concerns of Marx and Engels still apply to today's world.

I was struck by the military imagery that comes up time and time again in the text. Take for example the following paragraph:

"Masses of labourers, crowded into the factory, are organized like soldiers. As privates of the industrial army they are placed under the command of a perfect heirarchy of officers and sergeants."

I do not yet know why the authors chose such a militaristic tone.