An illustration from N.Y.-based “Spanish Revolution”
When right-wing generals launched a coup attempt in Spain in July 1936, the U.S. left leaped into action.
Representatives of the ruling Republican forces toured the country to draw support. Communists and socialists quietly recruited military volunteers. And in Donora, Washington County, a small but active community of Spanish-born anarchists organized support clubs and raised hundreds of dollars for their comrades overseas.
Little is recorded in English about the largely vanished Spanish community in Donora, and even less about its politics. But radical newspapers, antifascist clubs and donation records offer a glimpse into a once-active movement there.
When fascist troops threatened Madrid in fall 1936, thousands of foreigners — mostly Communists, but also anarchists, organizers and adventurers of all stripes — rallied to save the Spanish Republic. “The men who paid for it with their blood did so without bitterness,” Robert Colodny wrote two decades later. “And the price paid was another down payment. . . . And others would come to pay it.”
Colodny himself would be among the later arrivals, as a soldier of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion of U.S. volunteers. He would be wounded, would return home and pursue an academic career at the University of Pittsburgh. Colodny one of at least nine Spanish war veterans buried in western Pennsylvania.
This year, for Memorial Day, Red Pittsburgh has compiled a list of biographies and a map of their resting places for anyone interested in paying respects (or even leaving a flag). Click on a marker to find details, and read on to learn their stories.
This is the first post of Pittsburgh in Spain, an occasional series covering locals who served in the Spanish Civil War. The first item covers local activism in defense of the Spanish Republic; future posts will include brief biographies of those who served.
When Robert Raven stepped off his train at the Pennsylvania Railroad station on Nov. 26, 1937, a clutch of local Communist Party representatives greeted him with a banner. The 24-year-old’s brothers were there, too, to guide him as he hobbled atop crutches. Eight months earlier, a grenade had left Raven — a Pittsburgh native and onetime University of Pittsburgh medical student — blinded and seriously injured on a Spanish battlefield.
Raven told his story to a Pittsburgh Press reporter in a hotel room. “What am I going to do, now I’m blind, you ask? Well, I suppose I will speak with ‘Friends of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.’ I hope the American people hear the truth. Democracy will win.”
Former Pitt student Robert Raven (center), blinded in the Spanish Civil War, at the first gathering of the war’s U.S. veterans in 1938. (Library of Congress)
Raven was one of dozens with Pittsburgh ties to volunteer in Spain. Some were killed, others returned home wounded; a few are buried here. As locals sparred over the war at rallies and in letters to the editor, Pittsburgh Communists and their allies raised funds and spread the word for the Spanish Republic.
