Edwin
Rolfe, the son of Russian immigrants, was
born in Philadelphia in 1909. His father, a shoemaker, was an active
trade unionist and a member of the Socialist
Party of America.
His mother, a friend of Margaret
Sanger,
was an advocate of women's rights.
His name was originally
Solomon Fishman but he later changed it to Edwin Rolfe. As a teenager
Rolfe joined the American
Communist Party and
was soon contributing cartoons, poems and book reviews to the party
newspaper, the Daily
Worker. He also reported on the case
of Bartolomeo
Vanzetti and Nicola
Sacco
for the newspaper.
In 1929 Rolfe became a
student at the University of Wisconsin. He then moved the New
York and once again became active in politics. During this period
he became friendly with Michael
Gold
and Langston
Hughes.
He also published his first book of poems, To
My Contemporaries (1936).
In 1937 Rolfe joined the
Abraham Lincoln Battalion, a unit that
volunteered to fight for the Popular Front
government during the Spanish
Civil War.
After failing to take Madrid
by frontal assault General
Francisco
Franco gave orders
for the road that linked the city to the rest of Republican Spain
to be cut. A Nationalist force of 40,000 men, including men from the
Army of Africa, crossed the Jarama
River on 11th February, 1937.
General José
Miaja sent the
Abraham Lincoln Battalion to the Jarama Valley
to block the advance. Led by Robert Merriman,
the 373 members of the brigade moved into the trenches on 23rd February.
When the were ordered over the top they were backed by a pair of tanks
from the Soviet Union. On the first day
20 men were killed and nearly 60 were wounded.
On 27th February 1937,
Colonel Vladimir Copic, the Yugoslav commander
of the Fifteenth Brigade, ordered Merriman and his men to attack the
Nationalist forces at Jarama. As soon as he left the trenches Merrimen
was shot in the shoulder, cracking the bone in five places. Of the
263 men who went into action that day, only 150 survived. One soldier
remarked afterwards: "The battalion was named after Abraham Lincoln
because he, too, was assassinated."
Rolfe
survived but wrote: "When we were pulled out of the lines I felt
very tired and lonely and guilty. Lonely because half of the battalion
had been badly shot up. And guilty because I felt I didn't deserve
to be alive now, with Arnold and Nick and Paul dead."
Despite his protests, Rolfe
was removed from combat assignments and became editor of the brigade
newspaper Volunteer for Liberty.
In April 1938 the Nationalist
Army broke through
the Republican defences and reached the sea. General Francisco
Franco now moved
his troops towards Valencia with the
objective of encircling Madrid and the
central front.
Juan
Negrin, in an attempt to relieve the pressure on the Spanish capital,
ordered an attack across the fast-flowing Ebro
River. General Juan Modesto, a member
of the Communist Party (PCE), was placed
in charge of the offensive. Over 80,000 Republican troops, including
the 15th International Brigade and
the British Battalion, began crossing
the river in boats on 25th July. The men then moved forward towards
Corbera and Gandesa.
On 26th July the Republican
Army attempted
to capture Hill 481, a key position at Gandesa. Hill 481 was well
protected with barbed wire, trenches and bunkers. The Republicans
suffered heavy casualties and after six days was forced to retreat
to Hill 666 on the Sierra Pandols. It successfully defended the hill
from a Nationalist offensive on 23rd September but once again large
numbers were killed.
The following day,
Juan Negrin, head of the Republican government,
announced that the International Brigades
would be unilaterally withdrawn from Spain.
That night the 15th Brigade and the British
Battalion moved back across the River Ebro and began their journey
out of the country.
Rolfe arrived back in the
United States in January 1939. Later that year
he published a history of the Abraham Lincoln
Battalion: The Lincoln Battalion
(1939). He also worked for TASS, the Soviet news agency and as a film
scriptwriter.
In
1947 the House of Un-American Activities Committee
(HUAC), chaired by J. Parnell Thomas,
began an investigation into the Hollywood Motion Picture Industry.
The HUAC interviewed 41 people who were working in Hollywood. These
people attended voluntarily and became known as "friendly witnesses".
During their interviews they named nineteen people who they accused
of holding left-wing views.
One of those named, Bertolt Brecht, an
emigrant playwright, gave evidence and then left for East Germany.
Ten others: Herbert Biberman, Lester
Cole, Albert Maltz, Adrian
Scott, Samuel Ornitz,, Dalton
Trumbo, Edward Dmytryk, Ring
Lardner Jr., John Howard Lawson
and Alvah Bessie refused to answer any
questions.
Known as the Hollywood
Ten,
they claimed that the 1st Amendment of the United States Constitution
gave them the right to do this. The House
of Un-American Activities Committee
and the courts during appeals disagreed and all were found guilty
of contempt of congress and each was sentenced to between six and
twelve months in prison.
A
blacklist was now drawn up of writers,
directors and performers who had been members of the American
Communist Party.
This included Rolfe as well as Larry
Adler, Stella Adler, Leonard
Bernstein, Marc Blitzstein, Joseph
Bromberg,
Charlie
Chaplin,
Aaron Copland, Hanns
Eisler, Carl
Foreman, John
Garfield,
Howard
Da Silva,
Dashiell
Hammett, E.
Y. Harburg,
Lillian
Hellman,
Burl Ives, Arthur
Miller,
Dorothy Parker, Philip
Loeb, Joseph
Losey, Anne
Revere,
Pete Seeger,
Gale
Sondergaard,
Louis
Untermeyer,
Josh
White, Clifford
Odets, Michael Wilson, Paul
Jarrico, Jeff Corey, John
Randolph, Canada
Lee, Orson Welles,
Paul Green, Sidney
Kingsley, Paul
Robeson, Richard
Wright and Abraham Polonsky.
Rolfe became active in the struggle against McCarthyism
and wrote a series of anti-McCarthy poems. Edwin
Rolfe died of a heart attack in
1954.
(1)
Edwin Rolfe, The
Lincoln Battalion (1939)
Jarama
was a complete success, in a way which none of the Americans who took
part in it could then foresee. For the attack on February 27th impressed
the insurgents with one inescapable fact: that the Jarama front was
too heavily, too perfectly defended. From that day until the very
end of the war, the rebels never succeeded in advancing another meter
along the line which, they had hoped, would cut the Madrid-Valencia
highway, effect the encirclement and the capture of Madrid.
(2)
Edwin
Rolfe,
New
Masses (13th September, 1938)
The
war has ripped all illusions from even the youngest of the volunteers,
leaving only the reality. That reality is harder than anyone who has
never been under machine-gun fire and bombs and artillery fire can
ever know. Yet the men of the Lincoln brigade, knowing it well, chose
and continue to choose to fight for Spain's free existence. To be
true to themselves and their innermost convictions.
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