US JOURNALISMUS JOURNALISMDuring these days the Americans were visited by a dozen other people who brought them tidings of home and who in many different ways brightened their humdrum day-to-day routine. J.B.S. Haldane, the eminent British scientist, three of whose sons were fighting in the ranks with the English battalion, remained with them for four days, spending most of the time in the trenches with the men. Ralph Bates, the English novelist who at that time headed the Anglo-American commissariat in Madrid and edited the English newspaper of the brigades, The Volunteer for Liberty, was a frequent visitor. To this day the Americans attribute much of their knowledge of the early history and background of the Spanish war to his long, vividly detailed and fasinating talks.
Among the American visitors, the outstanding one, and the one best loved by the Lincoln boys was, with [Herbert] Matthews, Ernest Hemmingway. The presence of this huge, bull-shouldered man with the questioning eyes and the full-hearted interest in everything that Spain was fighting for instilled in the tired Americans some of his own strength and quiet unostentatious courage. They knew he was himself a veteran of one war, that he still carried in his own body the steel fragments of an old wound; and the fact that such a man, with so pre-eminent a position in the world, was devoting all of his time and effort to the Loyalist cause did much to inspirit those other Americans who were holding the first-line trenches.
Hemingway was not the only writer who came to the trenches. There was Joesphine Herbst, the novelist. . . There was Martha Gellhorn. . . Mr. And Mrs. George Seldes came on assignment for the New York Post, corroborating for themselves and for their readers the vivid truth of Matthews' early dispatches. Robert Minor, representing the Daily Worker, and James Hawthorne, of the New Masses, came on numerous occasions, once with the American Negro Communist leader, James W. Ford.
A new Matford roadster drove around the hill and stopped near us, and two men got out we recognized. One was tall, thin, dressed in brown corduroy, wearing horn-shelled glasses. He had a long, asscetic face, firm lips, a gloomy look about him. The other was taller, heavy, red-faced, one of the largest men you will ever see; he wore steel-rimmed glasses and a bushy mustache. These were Herbert Matthews of The New York Times and Ernest Hemingway, and they were just as relieved to see us as we were to see them. . .
All over the world popular sentiment, always for the Loyalists from the start, and despite floods of Catholic and fascist propaganda, was growing stronger with every defeat the Government had suffered. There were huge demonstrations in London, Paris, Prague, Moscow and New York; the decent people everywhere were putting pressure on their governments to come to the assistance of Spain, but what can the decent people do? They do not own the press, the radio, the news-reels. They do not own the governments they help elect . . .
Why had I come to Spain? To write for a colored press. I knew that Spain once belonged to the Moors, a colored people ranging from light dark to dark white. Now the Moors have come again to Spain with teh Fascist armies as cannon fodder for Franco. But, on the Loyalist side there are many colored people of various nationalities in the International Brigades. I want to write about both Moors and colored people. . .
A colored band, too, from the Paris Moulin Rouge had played in honor of the Second International Writers' Congress just returned to France from Madrid, having in attendance the French African writer, Rene Maran, the French West Indian poet, Leon Damas, and the Haitian poet, Jacques Roumain, as well as Nicolas Guillen and myself - five colored writers, each from a different part of the world.
Within the last year, colored people from many different countries have sent men money, and sympathy to Spain in her fight against the forces that have raped Ethipia, and that clearly hold no good for any poor and defenseless people anywhere. Not only artists and writers with well-known names, the Paul Robesons and Rene Marans of international fame, but ordinary colored people like those I met in the Cuban club in Barcelona, and like Carter, the ambulance driver, or the nurse from Harlem! These especially are the people I want to write about in Spain.
To help this People's Army, and to fight Fascism before it makes any further gains in the world, men came to Spain from all over the earth. They formed the International Brigades. In these brigades there are many colored people. To learn about them, I came to Spain.
The Afro-American Newspapers, October 30, 1937