Twentieth-Century Communism and Anticommunism: the View After the Cold War

As Joel Kovel notes, anticommunism is a surprisingly little-studied area of modern U.S. history considering how powerful its influence has been. ¹ The anticommunism of the McCarthy era has received the most attention, although relatively little effort has been made to explore the ideological underpinnings of the crusade. And our understanding of the sociopolitical impact of the ideology tends to stop with the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities’ (HUAC) immediate victims and the decimated organized Left. In this respect, these two studies deepen and strengthen existing emphases in scholarship, but in new ways.

Peter Carroll has assembled a mountain of published, archival and oral evidence in what is the most comprehensive study yet of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, the 2,800 American volunteers who fought in Spain in 193738 to resist Franco’s ultimately victorious fascist uprising. His use of dozens of interviews with veterans, as well as large quantities of previously unavailable material, make this easily the finest-grained, most human and most masterly study of the Brigade to date. Carroll offers dozens of new insights into the composition, motivation, and daily experience of the Lincolns, not only in Spain but beyond, on into the 1980s. The Brigade (or battalion, strictly speaking, although the term usually refers collectively to all American units including the Washington battalion and others) was first recruited in winter 1936–37. The men who volunteered to fight (women also went as nurses) were mostly in their twenties, disproportionately from the New York area, and predominantly (at least 72 percent) committed Communists. Although a sizeable minority were nonaligned leftists, and while Carroll is repeatedly at pains to emphasize a range of motives driving individual volunteers, “nearly all accepted the leadership of the Communist Party, at least for the war’s duration” (p. 3). In Spain, the Brigade fought in almost every important engagement of the war between their arrival in January 1937 and their heroes’ send-off from Barcelona in October 1938. Their casualties were very high: about a third never returned to America. But while mostly lacking the military experience of many western European international volunteers, the Lincolns quickly hardened into an effective fighting force despite extreme hardship in trench warfare, poor equipment and training, and often bumbling International Brigades generalship.

Carroll manages to tell the story succinctly while cramming in a lot of local detail and moving first-hand accounts. But perhaps because his eye is so focussed on the Lincolns, we tend to lose sight of the rest of the war. A little more background detail would have been helpful. One never gets a sense from Carroll of the sheer scale — or centrality — of the offensives into which the Lincolns were thrown. The July 1937 Brunete offensive, for instance, the last west of Madrid, involved a whole army corps, or about 50,000 men. The Americans who fell at Teruel in the bitter cold of January 1938 were among 60,000 Republican casualties. Such a perspective would also, however, drag the troubled politics of the war more centrally into view. The wider political context might have begged broader and more difficult questions on what the Lincolns and their party managers thought of the increasing grip of the Communists over the Republican government, or of the revolutionary Marxist Partido Obrero de Unificacion Marxista (POUM), or of the strategy of the Russians in supporting the war. It is not that Carroll avoids the question of communist control over the brigades, or of the accusations of political repression and even executions against dissident volunteers so crucial to the later anticommunist witchhunt against veterans. On the contrary, he gives the fullest examination to date of the various documented cases of political repression, concluding convincingly that only...