Visit 5

During my last archive visit, which was last night, I decided to look at the Archie Brown papers. Earlier I had looked through the database online at what photograph collections were available. I saw that Brown had his own photo collection and decided that before I requested it, I should request his personal papers. When I got the box, I started to take out the first folder, but then I changed my mind and looked for a folder full of letters written near the end of the period of American involvement in the International Brigades. I made this decision because the letters I've read from three different men were all written before and during the first months of combat. I couldn't have read their letters towards the end of the involvement because these men did not make it until that time. Therefore, I was curious to look at Brown's later letters.

I wasn't able to finish the folder I choose--I think it was eighteen--but still there were many interesting things in what I did read. The letters I read were written after Archie Brown found out that the American battalions were to be sent home. Throughout the course of those I read, Brown was never able to confirm the official date of departure.

From these letters I wanted to know why the Americans thought they were allowed to go home and whether they were demoralized or hopeful for Spain.

The first bit I came across that addressed this question was a section where Brown was talking about what places he and Ester, his correspondent, would see traveling. He named the U.S., then Mexico, "and perhaps France and the new Spain." This was curious to me. The context made me think that "new Spain" referred to a triumphant Republican Spain. The next line was, "Of course all these things are not in the cards but who can tell." I was unsure whether this referred to a victorious Republican Spain or to the possibility of their traveling. But then he wrote, "Perhaps the democracies will unite against the fascists--perhaps things will get better enough so that we can save enough to travel" and this mostly answered my question.

In the same letter Brown writes: "We were all depressed by the sell-out of Czechoslovakia. But we are becoming madder everyday. We feel that our added influence could lift the Embargo." What was interesting to me about this sentiment was that it was still hopeful. I remember reading in the Helen Graham book that once Britain and France sacrificed Czechoslovakia, the Republicans knew that Non-Intervention would never be lifted; that the cause was just about hopeless then. Therefore it is interesting to me that American Brown still has this persistent optimism: "By now it is pretty evident that the war will go on for another year, unless we end it sooner from our side ... if in the interim (before spring comes) the democracies will raise the embargo, Loyalist victory is assured. I hope Czechoslovakia has been a lesson." Here, Archie Brown's optimism is such that he hopes Czechoslovakia may be a lesson instead of what it was, and what the Spanish knew it was--a sign of doom.

In another later letter Archie Brown says, "The fact is that the Spanish Government and army is militarily strong enough to let us go." When reading, I immediately took this sentence as another example of unrelenting American optimism--until I read the second sentence: "The problem is not lack of men but lack of arms" and realized that Brown was not just uncompromisingly optimistic, but had an accurate analysis of the state of Republican standing in the war. I think these passages are important because they do reveal the American opinion--unless Archie Brown can not be taken as a representative of general opinion, in which case I'll have to read more--but they also show that the Americans had a good idea of the state of the war and understood the factors working against the Republicans.