Eric Hobsbawm wrote in 2007 that the Spanish Civil War was a “war of intellectuals, poets, writers and artists” who flocked to the anti-fascist cause, only to be badly “let down by the workers and peasants of Europe,” who refused to respond to the appeal of the left.

Though the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, as the American volunteers for the International Brigades came to be called, were heavily represented by artists and intellectuals, including Brooklyn College English professor David McKelvy White, whose father was a former governor of Ohio, most of the Americans were so-called workers and peasants of European ancestry–including seamen, manual workers, longshoremen, truck drivers, and mechanics. Proletariats were far more common amongst the American volunteers than the more famous writers, painters, poets, and other educated volunteers who were admittedly far more self-consciously active in documenting their experiences in letters and memoirs than the workers tended to be.

More than seventy nationalities were represented in the ranks of the American battalions. Most American volunteers, whether workers, artists and/or intellectuals, were products of the fin de siècle immigrant generation–Irish, Jews, Italians, Slavs, and Greeks–whose parents had escaped persecution and poverty in European cities and hinterlands for the hope of better lives in the United States.

Unemployment, poverty, the interruption of education, careers, and relationships part and parcel of the Great Depression helped to make volunteers especially sympathetic and receptive to the socially progressive goals and policies of the Spanish Second Republic, which included taking land from the Catholic Church and distributing it to landless peasants. The glue that held the scholars, artists and workers in the American battalions together–despite their ethnic and socioeconomic differences–was the egregious affront to the values associated with the Enlightenment that Fascism represented during the 1930s.

In other words, a careful examination of American volunteers’ wartime correspondence, which can be located at New York University’s Bobst Library, helps demonstrate that despite the myriad socioeconomic and regional differences in their backgrounds, very many of them believed they were fighting for values especially central to Enlightenment era discourse – liberty, equality and fraternity.

Hitler, Mussolini and Franco, many of the American volunteers believed, represented feudalism, race hatred, abuse of power, class-based divisions of society, anti-progressivism, and ultimately the antithesis of liberty, equality and fraternity. Many volunteers, both educated and working-class alike, believed themselves to be part of a progressive force of idealists fighting against reactionary and regressive forces that aimed to enslave them.

Many American scholars, artists, and proletariats who volunteered to fight Fascism in Spain were especially cognizant of their emerging place in history, most notably the series of revolutions and counterrevolutions since the eighteenth century which many perceived Spain to be another chapter in. Perhaps none were more cognizant of and invested in the notion of defending the principles of the Enlightenment than the scholars who volunteered. American colleges, especially in New York City and the Ivy League, were particularly active hubs of sympathy for Spain. College students were the second largest group to volunteer, outnumbered only by seamen.

More than five hundred volunteers came from campuses across the country and from virtually all fields of study. Several of them had excellent academic records. Some were serious enough about school to be working on graduate degrees. One volunteer had his Phi Beta Kappa key delivered to him in a Spanish trench.

The University of California at Berkeley was also well represented and it especially “generated brainpower that scanned and probed the serious problems of the world,” Marion Merriman wrote in her memoir about her and her husband’s time in Spain. “At Berkeley,” she recalled, “Bob began to reach deeply into life itself, beyond himself, beyond the campus… Economics and its repercussions were natural preoccupations for Berkeley students, whose logic ran as cool as their passions ran hot.”

Jewish students were especially keen to fight Hitler’s insidious brand of Fascism and race hatred. At least nineteen of the twenty-two volunteers from NYU were Jewish, as were no fewer than seventy-five percent of the sixty students, faculty, and alumni from City College of New York, which was almost certainly the educational institution in the country with the largest number of volunteers represented in the ranks.

CCNY had free tuition and an eighty percent Jewish student body when the War began, many of whom were from the outer boroughs. Branded the “Little Red School House” by the popular press, CCNY was an especially active political hub during the Great Depression, when students and faculty often partnered in initiatives to protest the introduction of tuition fees, the student military training corps, and restrictions on freedom of speech imposed by the politically conservative college president, Frederick B. Robinson.

Campus politics at CCNY dovetailed into broader issues at home and abroad, and particularly opposition to imperialism, fascism and racism. Tension at City College peaked in October 1934 when twenty-one students, including a future volunteer for the International Brigades, Wilfred Mendelson, were expelled for disrupting a meeting given by a delegation of Italian Young Fascists.

Many volunteers who were scholars expressed the belief that going to Spain was a logical extension of their classroom education. Ernest Amatniek, a scientist at CCNY, wrote to a friend that, “Our job is to learn and experiment in this science of killing the enemy before he kills us.” John Field, a track and cross-country star at the University of Rochester before graduating in 1935, wrote home from Spain to a friend that his wartime experience was providing him an education in “political economy, sociology, labor history, and philosophy.”

American creative writers–especially in New York and Hollywood–whether they accepted American neutrality, were overwhelmingly opposed to Franco, Hitler, and Mussolini’s forces. Blockade, which premiered in theaters in 1938, and featured a young Henry Fonda playing a Spanish peasant oppressed by Nationalists, for instance, explained to viewers that the rebellion was “not a war,” but “murder.” This was an unbridled attempt to win popular support for the Republic amongst movie-going Americans.

Art was an especially peculiar weapon used to fight fascism in Spain. The short-lived Spanish Second Republic provided public support for artists, writers, and intellectuals in an outburst of constructive energy that thrilled their own people as well as progressives throughout the world.

Anti-fascist art was especially prominent in American popular culture during the Great Depression and era of the Popular Front. Many of those same artists were particularly invested in fighting the threat of fascist expansion throughout the world via their art.

Two art shows in New York City especially addressed themes connected to the war in Spain. The first, titled “To Aid Democracy in Spain,” was held in October 1936. The second, “In Defense of World Democracy: Dedicated to the Peoples of Spain and China,” took place in December 1937.

After returning to his studies at the University of California at Los Angeles after serving the Republic of Spain as a medical professional, Hank Rubin arranged for an exhibit of contemporary (meaning wartime) Spanish art. The show featured paintings and ink sketches from the brush and pen of Sim (Rey Vila), a Catalonian artist, and José Bardasano, a Basque painter who depicted pictures of fascist cruelty and worker solidarity. The show was designed to raise funds to send back to those still fighting the Fascists in Spain.

Propaganda posters produced by artists such as Sim and Bardasano constituted one of the most poignant sources that survived the war in Spain because they provided an essential part of the visual landscape in which individuals living in the midst of that tragedy went about their daily business of survival. Robert Merriman, an American volunteer fighting in Spain, wrote from Barcelona in January of 1937, “Streets aflame with posters of all parties for all causes, some of them put out by combinations of parties.” Of course, no single work of art is more synonymous with the Spanish War than Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, which hung in New York’s museum of Modern Art for many years during Franco’s reign in Spain (1939 to 1975).

Paul Robeson also sang to wounded soldiers in the International Brigade hospital in Benicasim on the Mediterranean Sea. Errol Flynn also visited soldiers. Both Woodie Guthrie and Pete Seeger’s Almanac Singers made their New York debuts at fundraisers for Spanish refugee relief in 1940 and 1941; Lincoln Battalion ballads were recorded by Pete Seeger, Tom Glazer, and Bess and Baldwin Hawes in New York City in 1944. At the 1964 Newport Folk Festival, Phil Ochs joked that, “I wouldn’t be surprised to see an album called ‘Elvis Presley Sings Songs of the Spanish Civil War.’” Ochs wrote a song condemning American travelers for supporting Franco’s regime with tourist dollars. What Bob Dylan had by 1964 criticized as the “politics of ancient history,” were actually timelier than his lack of historical memory allowed him to perceive, considering the idealism and defiance associated with the American volunteers for Spain was “radical chic” by the end of the turbulent decade that helped fuel Dylan’s stardom.

But art was not just influencing volunteers’ sense of idealism. Some of the men in the International Brigades were also creating cultural productions that influenced people back in the U.S.

Among Spanish Republicans, especially great value was placed on poetry, letters, and essays. No International Brigader anguished, perhaps, more about the tensions between political responsibility and creative individualism than the poet Edwin Rolfe, a member of the Lincoln Battalion, who wrote a poem about his experience in the war with the lamentation, “You remain, Madrid, the conscience of our lives.”

Altogether, the volunteers were an incredibly eclectic cadre of communitarian minded individuals including Greenwich Village painters like Douglas Taylor and Deyo Jacobs; creative writers like Rolfe and Alvah Bessie; as well as students from City College, NYU, Columbia, Cal Berkeley, and dozens of other universities.

While many artists in the 1930s were content to permit their work to serve as a kind of weapon against fascism. Many artists went to war in Spain to fight. Although they were few, artists amongst the American volunteers were overrepresented in regard to society at large. Many were serious artists and painters who had exhibited their work, as well as composers, such as Ed Balchowsky, whose music had been performed, and writers, such as Rolfe, whose essays had been published and read widely.

By the time the Democratic Republic of Spain fell to Franco’s Fascists April 1, 1939, as many as thirty-five National Artist Union members had gone to Spain as fighters, translators, drivers and nurses, and more than half were killed. The AU members that stayed in the states actively raised funds to send two fully equipped ambulances, with its logo emblazoned on their sides, to the American base hospital outside Madrid. The AU also produced its own newspaper, Art Front, which published news, essays, and photos from the Spanish front, which became a significant source of information for artists who wanted to create projects that addressed the suffering and sacrifice part and parcel of the Spanish War, as well as Japan’s invasion of China.

Artists’ activism during the war was often generated, in part, by their recent successes in gaining Federal work relief through the establishment of the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project (WPA-FAP) in 1935, and in developing several militant organizations to demand fair treatment for these new federal workers and to promote democracy and artists’ rights throughout the U.S.

Many politically committed creative workers rejected the aesthetic of isolation that had characterized the “lost generation” of the 1920s. When the artist-volunteers went to Spain, it was to fulfill this ideal of camaraderie with the proverbial people. Rather than fleeing America and its discontents, many Depression-era intellectuals and artists affirmed their identity with the masses, which is evident in numerous WPA and AU projects, and especially in the high-percentage of artists who risked life, limb, and citizenship fighting fascism in Spain.

Usually individualistic (in theory anyway), many artists in the 1930s had become collective-minded during the Great Depression, banding together in various leagues. Their romanticism and idealism found outlets in the glorification of workers’ inherent struggles with employers. Many were inspired by the fateful purges of artists and intellectuals in Nazi Germany and had volunteered for service in Spain partly because they felt impotent in their normal roles, but also because they were dedicated to defending the human values upon which modern art depended, and which seemed especially threatened by the frighteningly rapid expansion of fascist ideology throughout the world.

That so many American intellectuals and artists supported the Spanish Republic underscored the ideological imperatives of the 1930s. Not only did left-wing artists and writers envision a society that would respect and encourage their artistic production; they also realized that inimical fascist doctrines threatened the essence of independent creativity.

Many American volunteers were therefore simultaneously idealists, anxious for a better world, and concomitantly realists, who understood acutely that their enemies aimed to set civilization back to the Dark Ages in terms of organizing society, i.e., feudal lords and peasants. For many of the volunteers, especially the artists and scholars, Spain represented a watershed moment in human history in which failure would inevitably result in social, political, and economic calamity for all humanity.

World War II, the most catastrophic event in human history, began a month after Franco’s fascists toppled the Spanish Republic. Fascist Spain, though backed by Hitler and Mussolini during his Civil War, dared not participate in any earnest degree in World War II. But many of the Americans who survived the Spanish War and avoided being tried for treason upon returning to the U.S., volunteered to fight for the Allies after their government finally, in 1941, declared war on the Axis Powers.