Fighting Fascism in Europe: The World War II Letters of an American Veteran of the Spanish Civil War

Appendix H

APPENDIX H 1972 WBAI Radio Interview with Lawrence Cane1 February 12, 1972 Tony Elature: . . . My name is Tony Elature and I’m here with three members of the Lincoln Battalion who this Saturday February 12, . . . on Lincoln’s birthday will be celebrating their 35th anniversary, anniversary of their baptism by fire in Spain. Why don’t you introduce yourselves? Steve Nelson: My name’s Steve Nelson. Larry Cane: My name is Larry Cane. Sam Gonshak: My name is Sam Gonshak. TE: Larry, you were going to read a poem by . . . . LC: Yes, this is a poem that was dedicated to the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. It was written by Genevieve Taggard2 who was a well-known American poetess and it goes like this: [To the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade] Say of them They knew no Spanish, At first, and nothing of the arts of war At first, how to shoot, how to attack, how to retreat How to kill, how to meet killing At first. Say they kept the air blue 1 WBAI interview of February 12, 1972 is reproduced with permission of Valerie van Isler, general manager, WBAI, 99.5 FM, New York, New York. 2 American poet Genevieve Taggard (1894–1948) was a lifelong supporter of radical causes. Her social poetry dealt with the issues of war, race and class prejudice , and the problems of the working class. APPENDIXES 249 Grousing and griping. Arid words and harsh faces. Say They were young; The haggard in a trench, the dead on the olive slope All young. And the thin, the ill, and the shattered, Sightless, in hospitals, all young. Say of them they were young, there was much they did not know, They were human. Say it all; it is true. Now say When the eminent, the great, the easy, the old, And the men on the make Were busy bickering and selling, Betraying, conniving, transacting, splitting hairs, Writing bad articles, signing bad papers, Passing bad bills, Bribing, blackmailing, Whimpering, meeching, garroting,—they Knew and acted understood and died. Or if they did not die, came home to peace That is not peace. Say of them They are no longer young, they never learned The arts, the stealth of peace, this peace, the tricks of fear; And what they knew, they know. And what they dared, they dare. TE: Why don’t you talk about what it was like in this country before you went to Spain and what it was that prompted you to go to Spain in relation to this country and the situation in Spain. SN: Yes, I’d like to comment on that. It’s hard for the present generation to realize how ominous the picture seemed to us at the time, being that Hitler had just come to power in Europe and he was threatening the nations around him. He went and instituted the notorious raids against organizations and people who didn’t agree with him and he began to brand people because of their nationality and began to build the gas chambers. However, many Americans at that time did not believe that he 250 APPENDIXES was really a concern of ours. There were people in this country who thought that we could do business with Hitler. That was the general attitude. There were organizations who favored him, who thought that he was a good model for America. They even called upon a General of the United States Marines—fellow by the name of Smedley Butler—called on him to do the same thing as Hitler did in Germany as a way to meet the depression that we faced at the time in the Thirties when unemployed people were clamoring for bread and support and the Nazi solution was to put them in the army or compel them to do the things that the State wants them to do.3 And there were those who wanted to do the same thing in this country. Then came a day when Hitler began to move against other countries, move into Austria, move into the Rhineland, threaten France, and Mussolini moved into Ethiopia, and we saw this as not only as a menace to Europe, but a menace to us. It was just about at that time that the Spanish people held an election and they elected a . . . legitimate government which was overwhelmingly democratic, 487 deputies for what was known as...