THE LEGACY OF SPAIN AND THE LINCOLN BRIGADE
Speech given at the 79th Annual Celebration of the
Abraham Lincoln Brigade
Berkeley, California 11/8/15
By David Bacon
The Stansbury Forum
The Volunteer
All my life I've known about Spain. I grew up singing Freiheit and Viva la Quince
Brigada and Los Cuatro Generales, and knew the names of some of the places in
Spain where the big battles were fought.
I owe a lot to my parents, and to the culture they helped create. They didn't go to Spain, but they were brave
people nonetheless. When Paul Robeson
went to sing in Peekskill, my dad was one of the union members from New York
City who lined the roads to protect people from the rocks thrown by the
fascists of upstate New York. In 1953,
the year the Rosenbergs were executed, they brought my brother and me here to
Oakland, where I grew up. That's why I'm
an Oakland boy, and not a Brooklyn boy.
When I think about the impact of Spain on my life, I
think about the people who went and fought there, and what they taught me. Some of them I knew personally, and some
taught me by example. They all taught me
about how to conduct a life dedicated, not just to opposing injustice, but to
fighting for a different world, for a vision of a just society, a socialist
society.
Today I work with California Rural Legal Assistance, as a
photographer and a journalist. Growing
up in Oakland, I didn't know much about life in rural California, or who farm
workers are and the work they do. But I
come from a union family, so when I got back from Cuba in the early 70s, full
of revolutionary enthusiasm, the place where I thought I could fight for real
change here was the farm workers union.
I went to work, learning from people like Eliseo Medina the nuts and
bolts of how to organize strikes, win union elections, go on the boycott - the
basic toolkit of working class struggle.
There I met Ralph Abascal, who had helped to organize
California Rural Legal Assistance. With
a nod and a wink, after the lawyers had gone home at the end of the day, our
crew of workers and organizers would come in and use the typewriters and xerox
machines all night to put together our legal cases against firings and grower
dirty tricks. That's what I loved about
CRLA and the way he ran it - it was a part of the workers movement, and its
resources were shared. He wanted the union
and the workers to fight and survive. It
was no surprise to me later to learn that Ralph's family came from Spain, and
that his uncles fought in the Civil War.
I'm not your average photographer. That's one reason why CRLA and I get along so
well, together with our partner in documenting the lives of farm workers, the
Frente Indigena de Organizaciones Binacionales.
The purpose of our work is to create photographs that are instruments or
tools for social change. We document
workers living in tents under trees and sleeping in their cars when the harvest
comes, in Arvin, Coachella, San Diego and Santa Rosa. But we do more than show abuses. Our photographs show workers acting to change
those conditions.
One of my favorite quotes is by Alexander Rodchenko, the
famous Soviet photographer of the 1920s and 30s. He said, "Art has no place in modern
life," and that we should "take photographs from every angle but the
navel." What he means, of course,
is not just that photographs should have a social purpose, but that the photographer
should be part of the movements for social change, for revolution.
One of the most important photographers who not only
shared this idea, but lived her life by it, was Tina Modotti. She had a deep connection with the defense of
the Spanish Republic. She was an Italian
immigrant, from Udine, but she grew up here, in San Francisco. Today they have festivals in her birth town
and a foundation in her name in Italy.
Here in the Bay Area, though, we hardly know or speak about her. She grew up in North Beach, wanted to become
an actress, and went to Los Angeles where she met Edward Weston. Together they went to Mexico just at the
height of the artistic ferment of the 1920s, when the revolution was going
strong.
She and Weston developed modernism in photography, but
she went a step further. She filled
their modernistic style with political and social content. And she did more. She joined the Mexican Communist Party, and
helped organise the Union of Painters and Sculptors. She took some of the first photographs of
huge political demonstrations, and tried to find a visual language that was
simple and could inspire people to act.
As her political commitment deepened, the Mexican
government deported her in 1930 to Germany, and from there she went to the
Soviet Union, where she went to work for the Comintern. During that time she stopped taking
photographs. That's one of the things I
admire most about her. She said, "I
cannot solve the problem of life by losing myself in the problem of
art." There are times when the need
to act politically is so important that art has to give way. That's the opposite of what we're taught in
the corporate culture of today, where "art is everything" - that you
can't let mere social justice get in the way.
When the war came in Spain, she went with her lover,
Vittorio Vidali, or as he was known in Spain, Comandante Carlos. Modotti was the organizer for Workers Red
Aid, helping to free what prisoners they could, and sustain and keep alive
those they couldn't. She worked with Dr.
Norman Bethune. Vidali organized the
Fifth Regiment, and today when I hear the words to El Quinto Regimiento, that
in the "patio de un convento, el partido comunista (in Oscar Chavez'
version) or el pueblo madrileño (in Rolando Alarcon's version) formo el quinto
regimiento," I think about Vidali and Modotti.
At the end of the war, Modotti was in charge of helping
the streams of refugees that filled the roads along the coast, from Barcelona
to the French border, as they fled Franco's advancing troops. I think about her when I see the roads filled
with migrants fleeing the bombing in Syria and Iraq today, trying to find
refuge in Europe. If Modotti were alive,
she would be there. But she would be the
first to say that these desperate people can't use our pity any more than the
Spanish refugees could.
Just as we know that the advance of fascism was the root
cause of people fleeing Spain, we have to look at the root causes of the flight
of migrants today. We have to ask what,
or better still, who makes poverty and violence so unbearable that drowning in
the Mediterranean seems an acceptable or necessary risk. And of course, it's not just there. What is causing the poverty and displacement
in Honduras or Mexico, that makes migration a necessity for survival? And just as the internment in France that
greeted the Spanish refugees was a basic violation of their human rights, and a
demeaning humiliation, the Karnes and Hutto detention centers in Texas are a
crime against working people that we have to fight today.
After the war Modotti and Vidali separated. Vidali eventually returned to the Free
Territory of Trieste, and when it became part of Italy he was elected the
Communist deputy from Trieste for many years.
Modotti returned to Mexico when Lazaro Cardenas was president, but she
was so exhausted she got sick and died.
She was never allowed to return to San Francisco, and to her family.
So this lesson of Modotti and Spain is that photography
and social change are important and go together, but the most important thing
is the objective, which is to fight fascism and change the world.
Spain attracted photographers. We all know the Robert Capa photo of the
soldier shot just at the moment when he rises to charge the enemy. Capa made his reputation in Spain. The famous Magnum Photo Agency in New York
was organized by photographers who supported, and some who participated, in
this huge social upheaval. I did a
google search of the VALB archive database, and I found 26 photographers who
went to Spain, and that's not counting the other artists. They didn't go to take pictures or
paint. They went to fight. So Modotti was definitely not the only person
who thought this way. But she asked the
big question about our role as artists - how to make art serve the cause of
social justice, and how to make that the main question - not becoming a
celebrity or making lots of money.
When the vets came back from fighting in Spain and from
World War Two, California and the Bay Area were very different politically from
what they are today. Don Mulford was
firing teachers for not signing loyalty oaths.
The Knowland family ran Oakland.
Sam Yorty ran Los Angeles with Chief Parker running the LAPD, including
its notorious Red Squad. The growers in
the valley had all the power. They had
yet to be challenged by the farmworkers historic strike in 1965, the fiftieth
anniversary of which we're celebrating this year.
In my life as a union organizer, before I started work as
a photographer and journalist, I met other people who'd fought in Spain. They were part of the unions and movements
where I met them. Henry Giler was blacklisted in those bad old days, and became
an air conditioning mechanic, before he went back to law school. Then he became a civil rights lawyer, and
defended our strikers when I worked for the United Electrical Workers. We were organizing immigrants at the
beginning of the huge upsurge that has changed California's politics so
fundamentally.
I met Coleman Persily, because we were both friends of
Bert Corona, the founder of our modern immigrant rights movement. Coleman fought in Spain, and then in the 50s
he and Bert helped run the campaign for Edward Roybal, the first Chicano
elected to Congress from California since 1879.
That was a harbinger of the end of the Yorty years, of the hatred of Latinos
seen in the Zoot Suit riots and the Sleepy Lagoon prosecution, and of LA's
reputation as the home of the Open Shop.
As we know today, much bigger political changes were to come, and people
like Henry and Coleman helped set the stage.
Coleman went on to help organize the Canal Street Alliance, which today
is Marin County's main immigrant rights organization.
Through organizing immigrant farm and factory workers, I
became an immigrant rights activist and organizer, like them. In those days, it didn't make you popular, in
the labor movement especially, to insist that undocumented workers had rights,
and that our unions had to include and fight for them.
Both Henry and Coleman had a vision of justice and
equality, which took them to fight in Spain, and which they brought back into
the movements here at home. They also
brought back a love of the Spanish language and culture, which then became a
love for the Mexican people. It's
remarkable how many people came back from Spain and wound up in Mexico itself. Some were like Linni De Vries. She went to Mexico because she was hounded by
the FBI, but then loved it so much she become a citizen in 1962. The U.S. government took away her U.S.
citizenship a year later.
And then there's Archie Brown. When I was trying to figure out what it meant
to be committed to socialism, and to be a union organizer at the same time,
Archie was the person who helped me.
When my youngest daughter was little, her favorite movie
was "Newsies" - the musical about the newsboy strike against Pulitzer
in New York in 1899. Only later did I
learn that Archie too had been a newsie, and helped organize a newsie strike
here in Oakland in 1928. Archie became a
Red very young, as did many people who went to Spain. He was so visible that the State Department
wouldn't give him a passport, and he had to cross the Atlantic as a stowaway.
When I was just becoming politically aware, at 12, Archie
got called by the House Unamerican Activities Committee. As he started to speak, refusing to name
names, demonstrators, many from the UC campus here, burst into the hearing room
and disrupted it. Archie was thrown
out. It was the opening of the civil
disobedience offensive that eventually led to the students being washed down
the marble staircase of San Francisco City Hall. That was the beginning of the end for HUAC.
Archie spent his working and political life in Local 10
of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union. In Archie's book, the most important
political work you could do in a union was to educate rank and file workers,
and help them become activists for change, in the union, at work, and in the
community around them. When he ran for
union office as a Communist, his point was first, to get workers to think about
more radical ideas, and second, to challenge the Federal government's
prohibition on electing Communists to union office.
He was successful on both counts, I think. The government indicted him, but the Supreme
Court overturned the prohibition. This
is important for us to think about. His
attitude was that laws that violate the political and labor rights of working
people have to be challenged directly, legally in court, and politically out in
the world. Today the Supreme Court is
about to strike down the laws protecting union membership in contracts for
public workers. Archie, running for office deliberately to defy the law, is
saying to us, we have to fight.
His other objective was as important. One of the most important reasons why the Bay
Area, and the cities of the Pacific Coast, have a radical political tradition
is because of the ILWU. But it's not
just the union as an institution. It's
the fact that the union brought together and educated a body of workers who
then worked in political campaigns, civil rights demonstrations, school and
workplace integration, and a myriad of other social struggles. And creating and maintaining that active
membership was the job of the leftwingers in the union.
That's what Archie believed. Power and leftwing politics in the labor
movement come from the bottom up, not the top down, and only if there is an
organized left fighting for them. In my
own work as an organizer, I tried to use every strike, every plant that closed
throwing workers onto the sidewalk, as an opportunity for us to learn about the
nature of the society we live in.
Today in our labor movement we have a crisis, in part
because we represent a falling percentage of the workforce. We face a political structure, Republican and
even Democratic, that is more hostile towards us than any we've seen since the
1920s. But the crisis is also a result
of our unions' failure to propose much more radical measures to advance our
interests, and to educate our members so they understand why that's necessary.
I don't think Archie learned his way of being a working
class activist and organizer in Spain.
But I think he shared it with many other people who went to Spain from
the surging working class movement of the mid-1930s. This was their style of work, what made them
so effective. After all, they left for
Spain within just a year or two of the San Francisco General Strike, the
greatest labor upsurge we've ever had here.
They made the same choice that Tina Modotti did. Defeating fascism in Spain was the
overarching need of the working class movement all over the world, more
important even than the union itself.
The Abraham Lincoln Brigade is the product of that idea - what made
international solidarity such a force that we celebrate it today, eighty years
later.
And what they all have in common - Tina, Henry, Coleman,
Archie, Vittorio Vidali - and I think everyone here - is that we fight for a
more just world, not merely against the injustice of this one. This is why the living memory of the Lincoln
Brigade is so important.
Sergio Sosa, a Guatemalan migrant who now directs Omaha's
Heartland Workers' Center, says: "People from Europe and the U.S. crossed
our borders to come to Guatemala, and took over our land and economy. Migration
is a form of fighting back. Now it's our turn to cross borders."
The experiences of workers migrating from country to
country for jobs, or fleeing warfare and repression, testify to the impact of
free-market economics and the wars they bring about. But at the same time, these migrants are changing
profoundly the culture and social movements of the wealthy countries of the
global north. They are one reason why we
have a greater opportunity to talk about a vision of a society free from
exploitation, a socialist society, than we've had for twenty years. Now we
celebrate May Day, thanks to the ourpouring of immigrants, especially from
countries where it's always been celebrated as the workers' holiday.
The economic inequality and social cost of capitalism
haven't changed - if anything, they've become even more exaggerated. The class conflict at the root hasn't been
eliminated by globalization. In fact,
it's been extended and deepened in country after country.
Many people in our movement, at least in the US, see the
cost of this system to our people and hate it.
We recognize the common interest of many sections of our society in
opposing it. Hating capitalism, even by
name, has become popular. In my youth,
just using the word capitalism was enough to get redbaited and ostrasized.
But what is the alternative? Can society be managed on the basis of
equality? Can economic development
provide a full life for all people, not just more efficient commodity
production? What is the vision of the
future that can bind together a movement of millions of people, which can
produce an alternative culture that can last from one generation to the next?
A radical vision runs counter to the prevailing wisdom of
our times, which holds the profit motive sacred, and believes that market
forces solve all social problems. If we
challenge that wisdom, we won't get invited for coffee with the President. At the beginning of the cold war, the AFL-CIO
built its headquarters right down the street from the White House. Maybe it's time now to move.
For working people to organize by the millions, which is
what we have to do, we have to make hard decisions. People must put their jobs on the line for
the sake of their future. But the unions
of past decades, the activists and organizers who went to Spain, won the loyalty
of working people when joining was even more dangerous and illegal than it is
today. The left then proposed an
alternative social vision - that society could be organized to ensure social
and economic justice for all people.
We were united by the idea that we could gain enough
political power to end poverty, unemployment, racism, and discrimination. The radical vision of those who fought in
Spain made the movement here stronger.
When our movement lost that vision in the red scares of the 1950s, we
lost our ability to inspire. It's no
accident that the years of McCarthyism marked the point when the percentage of
organized workers began to decline.
Today we have to have a much clearer sense that
large-scale social change is possible.
Our biggest problem is finding ways to affect consciousness -- the way
people think -- like those used by the people who went to Spain, and who
organized the great social movements of their time.
Radical ideas have a transformative power - especially
the idea that while you might not live to see a new world, your children might,
if you fight for it. In the 1930s and
40s, these ideas were propagated within unions by leftwing political
organizations. A general radical culture
reinforced them. Today we need a core of
activists unafraid of radical ideas of social justice, and who can link them to
immediate economic bread-and-butter issues.
And since good ideas are worthless unless they reach people, we have to
be able to communicate that vision to working people as broadly as we can.
We are not at the end of history. We have to reclaim our history, not discard
or forget it. Working people have
proposed alternatives to capitalism for over a hundred years - socialism,
communism, nationalist economic development, and more. Those who went to Spain were fighting for
this vision, as much as they were fighting against Franco.
We are told today we must allow millions of people to
become casualties of the free market, whether as the unemployed, the hungry and
powerless, or the victims of war and oppression. It is up to those who say there is an
alternative, not only to proclaim it and advocate for it, but to organize the
majority of our people to fight for it.
This is the most important legacy of Spain. If there is to be any alternative, it will
only exist because those who don't benefit from the current system fight to
bring a new one into being.
David Bacon at 16 - the skinny kid in the middle with glasses in the
back - singing inside Sproul Hall on the University of California campus in
Berkeley, during the Free Speech Movement sit-in. After midnight that night, 800 students were
arrested and dragged out, for defending the right to recruit people on the
campus for civil rights demonstrations, especially against racist hiring
practices at Bill Knowland's Oakland Tribune.