LINCOLN VETS TELL OF THEIR ANTI-FRANCO RECORD
Published 6/23/54 in the Daily Worker
“Is it Subversive to be Anti- Franco?” is the title of a new pamphlet published by the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, documenting their defense against McCarran Act prosecution for “subversive” activity. (Available from the VALB at 23 W. 26 St.) In vivid, moving language, this 20-page account brings to life again the cause that Americans took to their heart less than a generation ago. At the same time the pamphlet reveals the anti-fascist mettle of the American volunteers who offered their lives in this cause as representative of the best in America.
“Those who died and we who survive,” the author writes, “were volunteers, acting from no compulsion except clear understanding, spurred only by the demands of conscience, asking nothing except the right to defend freedom against reaction, world peace against the onslaught of war-the right to be actually and physically in the front lines against fascism.”
 Now under attack by our homegrown fascists of the McCarthy- McCarran variety, the few hundred Lincoln Veterans who survived Spain and World War II are showing the same mettle in fighting back today. Knowing that they face a lifetime in prison and fines running into six figures (the penalty multiplies with each day’s failure to register), the Veterans declare:
“Obviously when the key charge against us is that we are opposed to Franco, we cannot and have no desire to defend ourselves by saying we are not anti-Franco. We Veterans are as openly and as proudly anti-Franco as the Abolitionists of 100 years ago were anti-slavery. For us to deny our anti-Francoism would be to deny our very existence. We shall defend ourselves before the Subversive-Activities Control Board knowing that this is part of the long fight against reaction – and a defense of the interests of the majority of Americans.”