Madison Veterans for Peace

Clarence Kailin Chapter 25

Clarence Kailin - A Veteran for Peace John Nichols' Homage to a Honest Man (reprinted from The Capital Times)

photo by Paul McMahon

Clarence Kailin, a son of Madison whose lifelong commitment to social and economic justice led him to become one of the first Americans to take up arms against the fascist forces that swept across Europe in the years before World War II, has died at age 95.

Kailin was one of the last of the 2,800 American volunteers who fought from 1936 to 1939 as the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in defense of the elected Spanish government against a coup engineered by Generalissimo Francisco Franco with the backing of Germany's Adolf Hitler and Italy's Benito Mussolini.

For Kailin, "There wasn't any choice. If you were against totalitarianism, if you were against injustice, you had to care about what happened in Spain. Spain was where the fight against fascism was focused in 1936. So Spain was where I knew I needed to be."

But Kailin never wanted to be an old soldier telling stories of distant battles. He remained politically active to the last days before his death on Sunday, one day after he suffered a stroke.

Quick-witted and passionate to the last, Kailin laughed with his friend and comrade Bob Kimbrough -- as only old socialists could -- at the notion that a centrist Democrat from Chicago named Barack Obama was somehow turning the United States hard to the left. "If only Obama was a socialist!" Kailin mused. "But, you know, real change never comes from the top. It comes when people get organized and decide that they're going to make the change happen -- no matter who the leaders are."

Kailin lived his politics. As soon as he returned from the fight in Spain, Kailin got busy organizing workers into union locals, marching to integrate schools and housing and pressuring the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction to add African-American historical and cultural texts to the curriculum. Active for many years with the American Communist Party and then with the Socialist Party -- he founded Madison's monthly "Socialist Potluck" -- Kailin was a classic homegrown radical who demanded that the United States make real promise of "liberty and justice for all." As his daughter Julie recalled in her 2002 book Antiracist Education, "My father, Clarence Kailin, has always been devoted to antiracist causes. He fought as an antifascist in the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, one of the international brigades of the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), a 'premature antifascist' as F.B.I. director J. Edgar Hoover was said to have put it. After returning from Spain, my father, like other veterans of that war, was considered 'persona non grata' by the U.S. government. He was harassed by the F.B.I.; his employers, friends and neighbors were 'visited' by them; and they made a point of interfering with any job opportunities.… When white men wearing suits came to our door, I knew they were not our friends."

A militant foe of the Vietnam War and of U.S. interventions in Central America in the 1980s, Kailin threw himself into the struggle to prevent the invasion of Iraq. After the war began, he was a stalwart backer of the successful effort to have the city of Madison go on record for immediate withdrawal from that conflict.

Kailin, for whom the Madison Veterans for Peace chapter is named, had no taste for war. What irked him was a sense that his country often fought the wrong battles, or came to the right ones too late. "The United States should have backed the Spanish people against Franco," he said. "The reason we had to sneak into Spain as volunteers was because the U.S. government refused to get involved. They remained neutral, even though it was obvious to anyone who was paying attention that Franco was aligned with Hitler and Mussolini. We knew that if we didn't fight the fascists in Spain, they would keep grabbing other countries. And, of course, they did. It led to World War II. But even when we were proven right, the politicians in Washington never admitted it; they called us 'premature antifascists.' Well, you know what? I can't think of a more honorable name than that one."

John Cookson, a rural Wisconsinite who was Kailin's best friend, died in Spain, as did roughly half of the U.S. volunteers. Kailin was badly wounded in battle but made it home alive. And amid all his other activism, he dedicated himself to recalling the comrades with whom he fought. It was a lonely struggle at first, but over time historians began to reveal the story of the courageous "Lincolns" and their premature antifascism.

By 1999, when hundreds of fans cheered Kailin as he dedicated a monument in James Madison Park celebrating the Wisconsinites who fought and died in Spain, he was lavished with praise. Madison Mayor Sue Bauman issued a proclamation the memorial in James Madison Park. The state Assembly and state Senate issued citations. Congresswoman Tammy Baldwin entered a statement in the Congressional Record. A "Citation of Special Recognition" came from the office of U.S. Senator Russ Feingold.

It would have been easy for Kailin to rest on his laurels on that sunny Sunday in 1999. Instead, he reminded everyone that "they shouldn't see this as a memorial to old soldiers. That was how Clarence Kailin saw himself, as a part of a movement for economic and social justice that began before his birth and that will extend beyond his death. But what a remarkable part he played.

The great Spanish radical Dolores Ib¡rruri, La Pasionaria, told the international brigades as they withdrew from Spain in late 1938: "You can go with pride. You are history. You are legend. You are the heroic example of the solidarity and the universality of democracy." Those words, uttered more than 70 years ago, when Clarence Kailin was a young idealist fighting fascism in Spain, remain his most fitting epitaph.