By Ben Joravsky
The World War II generation is hot these days, the stuff of best-sellers and blockbuster movies. But what’s generally left out of the tales by the Spielbergs and the Brokaws–apparently being too controversial for mainstream consumption–are the leftist roots of that generation’s great struggles. “We don’t want history to be revised,” says Charles Hall. “We want the real story told.”
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By 1935 he had joined the Young Communist League, having been moved by their fiery speakers in Bughouse Square who denounced evictions and lynchings and called for a unified labor movement. “Fascism was on the rise in Europe and I was idealistic enough to want to fight it,” he says. In particular, Hall and his comrades were inspired by what was happening in Spain, where a democratically elected government came under siege by a military led by General Francisco Franco. By the fall of 1936 Franco’s troops, with arms from Hitler, stood on the edge of Madrid. An international army of volunteers formed to join the anti-Franco fight. Charles Hall joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, which came from America. “I went to Spain to fight fascism,” he says. “There was an underground organization, probably run by the Communist Party, that was signing people up. We wanted to make a stand against Hitler.”
Hall was held for 13 months in a POW camp, a converted monastery, with about 400 other prisoners. “On April 22 we were exchanged–they marched us across a bridge into France,” he says. “I came back by boat to America and was greeted by the FBI. Isn’t that something? We had fought the fascists and they were worried if we were communists.”
Eventually she went back to college and became a nutritionist. The Halls bought a house in Austin on the far west side, raised their family, and joined just about every civil rights and antiwar march of their time. In 1965 Yolanda Hall found herself at the forefront of a fight against the House Un-American Activities Committee. “I was working for the Department of Health, and HUAC subpoenaed me and Dr. Jeremiah Stamler, who was director of heart disease control, to testify,” she says. “Why did they call us? You ask them. They called all kinds of people. They didn’t have to have any reasons. Subpoenaing people employed by the city always made for good front-page publicity. I didn’t make any secret of my convictions. We were against the cold war. In Austin there was a guy who was fighting our movement for open housing. He wrote HUAC and named a number of people in the community, including me. He said we were communists, or something like that. I guess he didn’t like me. I didn’t care. I said we were fighting racism. He said we were radicals. He publicly boasted that he turned my name in.”
A story of the reunion ran on the front page of the New York Times. Soon interest in the surviving veterans (there are only six in Chicago) of the brigade began to grow. In the last few weeks Charles Hall has been invited to speak at Northeastern, Roosevelt, and Northwestern, which will sponsor a symposium on April 18 at 1 PM. (Call 847-491-7282.)
