MEMORIAL TO SPAIN
Lash, Joseph P.
On April /3. 1980, a meeting was held at the College of the City of New York at which a plaque was unveiled to honor the students of CCNY who died fighting fascism in Spain. Among the speakers was...
...We thirsted to have a hand in the shaping of history, to be part of the actions and passions of mankind...
...It included a defecting German pilot, two nurses from Finland, as well as Dave Doran who was being sent by the national committee of the Young Communist League to serve as the political director of the many young American Communists who fought in the Brigade...
...If Roosevelt had permitted the Republican government to purchase arms and munitions here, would that cause have been lost...
...We have a more realistic sense of the hazards, the disappointments, the heartaches that confront any effort to organize people on behalf of a cause, of a different way of life...
...What they consecrated with their blood, it is our duty to vindicate by our work and thought...
...The battle of Republican Spain was lost—at least for the time being...
...The death of these men, the Brigade, the resistance of the Spanish Republic were all part of that slow awakening in the West that was the prerequisite to the building of the wartime coalition...
...That was their strength...
...That we can say too of these men and the Brigade they represented...
...But that was only part of the picture...
...We were young then...
...I would go by the statue of General Webb, once president of this college, and before that the leader of the troops at Gettysburg...
...When, in the'20s, I walked daily along St...
...What holocausts might the world have been spared...
...Better to have loved, the philosopher has said, even if the love betrays, than not to have loved at all...
...Mrs...
...Had the men whom we commemorate here had tanks and planes, would they have thrown back the tanks and planes that Hitler and Mussolini sent to their Fascist divisions...
...Among the speakers was Joseph P. Lash, class of 1931...
...With their lives they are vindicating in Spain the United States of the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights...
...The New York Times recently noted in support of a boycott of the Moscow Olympics what a mistake it had been for the democracies to take part in Hitler's Olympics...
...How disparate was the group with which I was sent to Spain...
...That was said on the Fourth of July, 1937...
...What a miracle of organization it was to summon these men and women, most of them young, from all corners of the earth, to outfit them, to train them, and to send them into battle in front of Madrid...
...Roosevelt said in 1939 of projects like the WPA, the NYA, the CCC that they had not basically solved the problems of poverty and inequality, but with them we had bought ourselves time to think...
...One person with a belief," wrote John Stuart Mill, "is a social power equal to ninety nine who have only interests...
...As one thinks back to the 1930s and to these men who were our classmates, some perhaps would wish to argue the justice of this faction, the cruelty of that, but somehow on this solemn occasion ideology seems to be hollow and one stands before this profound memory of young men in the prime of their manhood silently disappearign from the haunts of classroom and alcove to make their way along that underground railway that led through France, always on the run from the police, over the Pyrenees into Republican Spain to their final encounter with the enemy—and they knew who the enemy was...
...his success then was one of the factors that enabled him to push forward with his monstrous program of aggression...
...It is true today...
...They had a rare sense of purpose and dedication...
...Or was it lost...
...With them the democracies, especially the American, which could have pursued another, more isolationist course, bought itself time to think about the policies and sympathies that eventually brought it into the wartime coalition that overthrew Hitler and Mussolini...
...It was that vision that enabled the Brigade to take shape beneath the guns of the Fascists, that enabled men like John Gates, who should be the speaker here, not I, and George Watt, their Brigade shattered by the superior firepower of the enemy's tanks and artillery, to pick their way through the enemy's line, throw off their clothes and swim the icy Ebro nude, only to re-form, as John Gates did, the remnants into a fighting unit and to fight on...
...We are always fascinated by the great "ifs" of history...
...But it was not betrayal...
...Little did I think that 50 years later I would help unveil a plaque to men equally illustrious in battle, but here we are...
...Those of us who came back now are some 45 years older...
...They poured out their lives on behalf of a cause that was doomed, as much one sorrows to say, because of some who presumed to be friends as because of those who were avowed enemies...
...We learn now why this was done, and why that, and some of it is not pleasant, but still the miracle remains and we are here to testify to the valor of these college classmates who were part of its validity...
...But let us put that "if' aside and deal with the grim events as they unrolled in turn: the investment of Czechoslovakia, the destruction of Poland, the collapse of France...
...And would such a repulse not have emboldened the democracies and Russia to stand up to Hitler sooner...
...That social vision of a warless world, based on equality, respect, tolerance, was and is true...
...Nicholas Terrace on the way to the Great Hall...
...Once, over Madrid's short-wave station, I said: We to whom democracy, equality, freedom are more than catchwords, but realities of human relations, to whom the Fourth of July represents a day of significant progress for human society, are eternally indebted to these youthful compatriots...
Vol. 27 • September 1980 • No. 4
