A Minister's Son, a Haunted Town, and the Spanish Civil

A Minister’s Son, A Haunted Town, and the Spanish Civil War

PEGGY SEIGEL

he day after Christmas 1936, twenty-seven-year-old Walter Grant Tsailed from New York City on the SS Normandie bound for Spain. One of the first American volunteers to fight in the Spanish Civil War, this young man from Marion, Indiana, shared the widespread belief that defeating General Francisco Franco’s Nationalist armies might stop the spread of fascism through Europe and, hopefully, prevent another hor- rific world war. For Grant, as for so many of his generation, preserva- tion of Spain’s democratic government became an urgent moral cause. In defiance of the United States’ official non-intervention policy, he joined soldiers from nations around the world to fight with the Spanish Republi- can army.1 After five weeks in Spain, Grant’s convoy entered into an early battle for Madrid. At dusk on February 16, his truck accidentally drove behind Nationalist lines. Killed in his first combat assignment, Walter

Peggy Seigel is an independent researcher who lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her article, “Olive Rush’s Long Love Affair with Art,” appeared in the September 2014 IMH. She sincerely thanks historians Tim Crumrin, Bill Munn, and James Madison; librarians and archivists at Santa Fe Public Library, Marion (Ind.) Library, Indiana University, Oberlin College, Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, Elmer Holmes Bobst Library, New York City; Rich and Jonathan Grant, nephews of Walter Grant; Maxine Jaubert, historian of Reston Community Church; and the outside reader and editors of the IMH. 1Hugh Thomas, The Spanish Civil War (New York, 1961), 616.

Grant, like some 900 other American volunteers, became a casualty of what Life magazine called a “heroically tragic epic.”2 Today, some eighty years after the Spanish Civil War, Walter Grant should be remembered for his sacrifice in a largely forgotten war that had offered hope in a very dark time. Grant’s experiences in the Spanish Civil War, however, were only one part of a life committed to improving his world. The son of an Indiana Congregational minister coming of age during the 1920s and 1930s—the years in which the Ku Klux Klan was a local concern, the Great Depression was a national crisis, and fascism was an international threat—Grant formed a personal theology that compelled him to live out the ideals learned in his father’s church. His evolution

Walter Grant, 1930. Grant, the son of an Indiana Congregational minister, underwent a personal evolution—shaped by his experiences with the Klan, the Great Depression, and the threat of fascism—that led him to the battlefields of the Spanish Civil War. Courtesy, Indiana University Archives

2Allen Guttman, The Wound in the Heart: America and the Spanish Civil War (New York, 1962), 62. A MINISTER’S SON AND THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR 83

through these dark years reveals much about this idealistic young man, his era, and his yearning for social justice. The third of seven children, Walter Grant was born on February 8, 1909, to Martin Lee and Margaret Grant. He spent most of his childhood on the south side of Detroit where his father served as minister of the Fort Street Congregational Church. From his earliest years, Walter found security in his father’s progressive Congregational theology. Christ-centered teachings that emphasized education, good works, and human rights had seemed a buffer against the growing problems of crowded cities, racial prejudice, and fear of an impending world war. Looking back on these years much later, Walter recalled that he had always been proud to tell his young friends that Congregational churches were among “the most liberal denominations in Protestantism.” Fort Street Church—as part of the national network of Congregational churches— supported schools and medical clinics in the South for impoverished African Americans, which were administered by the denomination’s Home Missionary Society. Closer to home, Detroit Congregational churches endorsed the American Home Missionary Society’s efforts to help African Americans arriving in the city in search of work in automobile factories. From his pulpit, Rev. Grant advocated women’s suffrage and debated topics of social justice.3 In 1920, after eight years in Detroit, Rev. Grant accepted the call to minister to Marion, Indiana’s Temple Congregational Church at 612 S. Washington Street. He welcomed the higher salary that Temple Church offered him because by 1920 he had seven children to support. Described as “a very genial friendly personality and a thoroughly good preacher,” Rev. Grant quickly gained prominence among his religious colleagues. By 1921, Indiana Congregational leaders had already recognized his “con- structive leadership” in building Temple’s church school and promoting church fellowship, and the following year his election as moderator of the Indiana Congregational Conference affirmed his leadership strengths. While Marion seemed to have presented Rev. Grant with favorable

3In 1918, when Walter was nine years old, Martin Lee Grant registered for the World War I draft. Martin Lee Grant, 1935 Quinquennial Report Blank, Oberlin College, Alumni Records, 1833-Pres- ent, Oberlin College Archives, Oberlin College, Oberlin Ohio; Oberlin College Alumni Catalog, 1936; “Personal Opinions on Current Events,” The Gateway: A Magazine of the Times Devoted to Literature, Economics, and Social Service 19 (December 1912), 36; “Progress Among Colored Churches of the North,” The Congregationalist, January 6, 1921, p. 24; “From East to West,” The Congregationalist, March 17, 1921, pp. 345-46; “Martin Lee Grant,” U. S. World War I draft Reg- istration Cards, 1917-1918, online at www. Ancestry.com; “On Being a Minister’s Son,” (1934?), folder 9, box 5, Robert Steck Papers ALBA.104,Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Archives, Elmer Holmes Bobst Library, New York City, New York (hereafter cited as Wagner Archives). 84 INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY

opportunities, the city exposed eleven-year-old Walter to a world of conflict and moral ambiguity.4 Within what might have appeared to be a fairly conventional family, Walter experienced underlying tensions, particularly regarding his future. While he shared his parents’ expectations that he would go to college, he was always considered less practical than his siblings. He was gregarious and fun to be with; he was also introspective and passionate. The routines of his father’s church—regular Sunday morning church school attendance, young people’s rallies, and local and regional church gatherings—left a void that Walter filled with music. Using his small allowance to buy recordings of classical music and opera, he cranked up the family’s Victrola while he and his younger sister Charlotte did Saturday chores. In his spare time, he played the piano, dreaming of one day becoming a concert pianist.5 Years later, Charlotte also remembered that their father considered Walter’s musical ambitions and his growing interest in writing as “a waste of time.” Likely due, at least in part, to his own worries about providing for his large family, Rev. Grant wanted all five of his sons to pursue careers that he felt were more practical. In complex ways that he would have found difficult to understand, Walter began to pull away from his father’s authority.6 In the early 1920s, Walter also faced moral ambiguities related to race, religious tolerance, and his Protestant Christianity. Reflecting on his religious journey years later, Walter wrote, “From the time I could consider things at all I was troubled by the constant confusion between reality and the Protestantism I learned from my father’s pulpit.” He also remembered:

Every Sunday morning I encountered new and more bewilder- ing inconsistencies between Protestant Christianity and reality… As a believer in everything I was told in Sunday school and church and as a serious-minded person seeking the logic of reality, I was astonished and hurt when I heard people who had prayed on Sunday for everyone in the world damn on Monday their friends, members of other religious organizations, negroes, and foreigners.

4Junior Dean (no name) to Mr. Nicholas Cawthorne, October 30, 1918, Martin Lee Grant Student File, Oberlin College Archives; Rev. John W. Herring, “Snapshots from Indiana,” The American Missionary 76 (November 1921), 342; “The Rev. A. J. Ogilvie Is Named Moderator,” The India- napolis News, May 16, 1923, p.10. 5Charlotte Grant to Bob Steck, April 25, 1982, folder 4, box 5, Robert Steck Papers ALBA.104, Wagner Archives. 6Ibid. A MINISTER’S SON AND THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR 85

The anti-black racism Walter heard from church members seemed to negate the Congregationalists’ proud tradition of helping impoverished Southern African Americans. Moreover, as Christians they bore responsibility for curing what the American Missionary Association identified as “the sickness of the world,” including racial prejudice.7 Walter was well aware of the segregation that prevented black kids from swimming in the city’s public pool in Matter Park and in the downtown YMCA. He also knew that black children had always played on different baseball teams, could not sit downstairs at the movie theatre, or stop for a snack at the same downtown hangouts as white children. Their parents, with few exceptions, worked dirty, low-paying jobs. However, local African Americans undertook efforts to draw attention to their second-class citizen- ship. In 1921, under the dynamic leadership of Flossie Bailey, Marion’s African American community organized a local chapter of the NAACP and began to question long-held practices of discrimination. In April of that year, Mrs. Bailey invited William Pickens, field secretary of the national NAACP, to speak in Marion on pressing issues facing their race, the foremost of which was widespread lynching. Speaking in Civic Hall to some one thousand Marion citizens—black and white—Pickens emphasized that the burden of racial tension rested on whites’ failure to understand blacks. Despite the NAACP chapter’s encouragement of white citizens to help build greater understanding and the Congregationalist tradition of helping poor blacks, Rev. Martin Lee Grant did not join their organization. During these early years in Marion, Walter began to understand that white people, including his own father, hung on tightly to age-old patterns of racial prejudice.8 In the fall of 1922, as Walter was starting his freshman year at Marion High School, the Indiana Ku Klux Klan swept into town like a tsunami. Within months, thousands of townspeople—even members of Temple Congregational Church—pledged to join the Klan’s crusade for a pure, white, Protestant America. Walter’s religious faith, which was founded on the church’s mission to foster good works and social justice, continued to crumble as he struggled to reconcile the Klan’s agenda with the theological training he had acquired in his father’s church. The first sign of the Klan’s arrival was a stranger, rumored to be from Muncie, who huddled with townsmen and passed out flyers, secre-

7“On Being a Minister’s Son”; The Indianapolis News, May 16, 1923, p.10. 8James Madison, A Lynching in the Heartland: Race and Memory in America (New York, 2001), 56-57, 59; “Colored Orator Makes Plea for Stronger Unity,” Marion Leader Tribune, April 20, 1921, p. 3. 86 INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY

Grant’s father, Martin Lee Grant, pastored Temple Congregational Church in Marion, Indiana. Walter once took pride in Congregationalism’s progressive theology, which he thought would help cure the “sickness of the world,” including racial prejudice. Courtesy, Marion (Indiana) Public Library A MINISTER’S SON AND THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR 87

tively soliciting memberships. Soon white-robed, hooded men appeared at church services and public functions to give small donations to show their approval of what they perceived as a shared racial ideology. What made the deepest impression on Marion citizens occurred on a Saturday night in late November when the newly organized Marion Klan staged an enormous theatrical initiation ceremony, reminiscent of the blockbuster 1915 film,The Birth of A Nation. As darkness fell on November 25, thousands of local citizens lined the streets to watch a procession around the courthouse square led by seven masked trumpeters on horseback. Marching behind the horsemen were approximately 1700 new initiates. Next came an automobile supporting a large, electrically lighted cross, followed by Klan bands from Muncie and Grant County carrying huge American flags. In the rear were 500 out-of-town Klansmen in hoods and masks. From the courthouse, they proceeded the half mile to Goldthwaite Park baseball field, where the initiation ceremony began at 10:00 p. m. In solemn prayer, the initiates knelt and pledged allegiance to “their Christian God, their American nation, and their belief in white Protestant supremacy.” Near midnight, their white robes softly glowing against the background of a huge fiery cross burning above the stage, the participants quietly made their ways home in the cold night air.9 Over the next few years, the Grant County Klan grew to include 2,329 men—approximately fifteen percent of the county’s native-born white population—in addition to the wives who joined Women of the Klan.10 Marion Klan members were mostly ordinary citizens. They were factory workers, middle-class business men, community leaders, Republican politicians, and supporters of Prohibition. Historian James H. Madison has claimed that many Klan members belonged to mainstream Protestant churches, “especially Methodists, Baptists, and Disciples of Christ.” Given Temple Congregational Church’s reputation as a “hotbed of the Anti-Saloon League,” Klan members and sympathizers were also Congregationalists.11 Although there are no simple answers as to why the Klan gained such power in Marion—as elsewhere across Indiana—historians draw two main

9Madison, A Lynching in the Heartland, 39-40; Cynthia Carr, Our Town: A Heartland Lynching, a Haunted Town, and the Hidden Story of White America (New York, 2006), 75. 10The exact number of women who joined Grant County’s Women of the Ku Klux Klan is hard to determine as no known membership roster exists. Weekly meetings were held a block and a half south of the courthouse in a room above the Woolworth store, only a few blocks from Temple Congregational Church. Madison, A Lynching in the Heartland, 40; Carr, Our Town, 62. 11Madison, A Lynching in the Heartland, 38; Bill Munn, e-mail to author, January 23, 2015. 88 INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY

Klan initiation in Marion, Indiana, November 25, 1922. Grant questioned traditional Chris- tianity as he witnessed fellow Christians supporting the Klan’s racist agenda, which stood in stark contrast to Congregationalist teaching. Courtesy, William A. Swift photographs, Archives and Special Collections, Ball State University Libraries.

conclusions. First, Klansmen felt empowered by the message that they bore responsibility for cleaning up local corruption and enforcing Prohibition laws. Second, as American society became more diversified, Klansmen also clung to nativist traditions that affirmed their superiority as white Protes- tants. Outsiders, however, deeply resented their white supremacist rhetoric, hooded robes and masks, massive parades, ceremonial cross burnings, secrecy, and intimidation. For blacks in particular, the emergence of the Klan brought back “stories that every Black person knows by the time he or she is five years old.” To Walter, the Klan and its supporters—especially those who belonged to Temple Church— betrayed the Christianity that worked to cure the “sickness of the world” with brotherly love.12

12Madison, A Lynching in the Heartland, 37-38; Leonard J. Moore, Citizen Klansman: The Ku Klux Klan in Indiana, 1921-1928 (Chapel Hill, N. C., 1991), 11; James Cameron, A Time of Terror: A Survivor’s Story (Baltimore, Md., 1982), 44. A MINISTER’S SON AND THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR 89

During this early period of doubt and skepticism, Walter began to question the role of his father and church regarding the Klan. Newspapers and published reports on the Indiana Congregational Conference reveal that Rev. Grant, like most of his fellow Indiana Congregational colleagues and Protestant ministers in Marion, seemed to have avoided the issue. Ministers who spoke out against the Klan risked becoming targets of Klan intimidation tactics, losing church members and their jobs, and being censured by thousands of their fellow citizens who, if not Klan members, were Klan sympathizers. If Marion clergy had any doubts about the re- percussions of denouncing the Klan, they only had to look at the case of Rev. E. F. Rippey, minister of Marion’s First Presbyterian Church. In early October 1922, before his crowded sanctuary, Rev. Rippey had denounced the Klan as “a peril to America.” Defying the Klan’s warning not to speak negatively about the organization or its members, he condemned their position on African Americans and their intolerance of Catholics, Jews, and immigrants. Furthermore, he led debates at his church and at the Lions Club on “real Americanism.” By June 1923, Rev. Rippey had left Marion for a pulpit in Iowa. Such pressure exerted on one of Marion’s leading Protestant ministers adds credence to a statement made by a member of the local Presbyterian Church, who alleged that “nearly every minister in Marion was a Klansman or Klan sympathizer in the 1920s.”13 Unfortunately, by not speaking out against the Klan—whose “theological approach and social-economic base” contrasted sharply with Con- gregationalism—Rev. Grant risked censure from national Congregational leaders, who “officially blasted the Klan.” Rev. Grant also broke faith with those, like Walter, who had believed in his moral leadership and in the Christian faith that professed love, respect, and fair play.14 To many of his peers, Rev. Grant demonstrated abilities to navigate difficult waters that threatened to bring greater division to their community. His leadership abilities propelled him to prominent positions in local social service agencies. In 1925, he became president of the Marion Family Welfare Society, a position he would hold for the next ten years. The year before he served as president of the YMCA, which received generous gifts from the Klan. Therefore, to Walter and others opposed to Klan influence,

13Carr, Our Town, 73-74. Carr also cites the example of the Klan’s warning to Rev. W. R. Howard, pastor of Horton Street United Brethren Church, to leave town. See “K.K.K. Warn Preacher to Go and Not Return,” The Alexandria (Ind.)Times-Tribune, November 3, 1922, p. 1. Marion city records indicate that Rev. Howard remained in Marion until 1927. Debbie Ruth, Marion (Ind.) Public Library, e-mail to author, August 26, 2015. 14David M. Reimers, White Protestantism and the Negro (New York, 1965), 98. 90 INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY

Rev Grant’s role seemed morally ambiguous.15 More importantly, Walter began to question everything that he had heard growing up in his father’s church: “My faith began to fail, because no one I knew was practicing completely what he professed to believe and what I really believed.”16 Grant’s college years (1926-1932) were years of academic success, stinging personal loss and disappointment, and growing skepticism about traditional Christianity. From his sister’s death to witnessing the lynching of two young African American men on Marion’s courthouse square, twenty-one-year-old Grant’s encounter with a world far different than the secure Christian haven of his father’s church sent him searching for a new personal theology. During his first year at Indiana University (1926–1927), Grant floun- dered for direction. According to his sister Charlotte, he did not “like the atmosphere” on campus. Additionally, in February 1927, he suffered the suicide of his twenty-five-year-old sister Margaret who had been working as a registered nurse in Chicago. The next year Grant left Indiana University and joined his older brother Martin at Oberlin College to pursue his dream of becoming a concert pianist. Two wealthy older women from Marion who “obviously adored him” and shared Grant’s passion for music helped cover his expenses. Grant did not stay at Oberlin long, however. “Either he started too late or didn’t have the talent,” his sister surmised years later.17 Grant returned to Indiana University in the fall of 1928, and he found new purpose. Finding his place in the prestigious and recently organized honors program of the English Department, Grant thrived in an intellectual environment of study and discovery. He loved “learning for the love of it” and “meeting professors as fellow students a little farther advanced in the same pursuits instead of inhuman mechanical monsters who lecture, assign, and examine.” Equally important, he found a stimulating, like- minded, unconventional group of friends that included the campus bohe- mians, even a German Communist. Undoubtedly, one of the highlights of his IU years was co-editing the campus literary magazine, The Vagabond,

15Martin Lee Grant, 1935 Quinquennial Report Blank, Oberlin College, Alumni Records, 1833-Pres- ent, Oberlin College Archives. 16Marion High School 1926 Cactus; Charlotte Grant to Bob Steck, April 25, 1982, folder 4, box 5, Robert Steck Papers ALBA.104, Wagner Archives; “On Being A Minister’s Son.” 17Charlotte Grant to Bob Steck, April 25, 1982, folder 4, box 5, Robert Steck Papers ALBA.104, Wagner Archives. A MINISTER’S SON AND THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR 91

during the academic year 1929-1930.18 Along with co-editor and fellow English major Robert Fink, Grant wrote lively critiques of controversial campus issues such as the required two-year military program for men. His strongest contributions, unsurprisingly, were essays that reflected his ongoing struggle to find purpose and meaning. In “Minothustus the Prophet,” Grant took on the role of a modern- day prophet who reveals to mankind a new understanding of Jesus and the Christian religion. “There is no Heaven, no Hell, and no Future Life,” he declared. “I say to you that this life is all that there is. There is nothing beyond it, no conscious existence.” While he dismissed traditional Protes- tantism, Grant maintained the belief that there was a God that gave order to disorder and irregularity. “God is the Exquisite Whisper that motivates the universes. God is Control and Order and Law.” Everywhere, instead of disorder, there was a balance that was “proof” of a power greater than man. Echoing Ralph Waldo Emerson’s insistence on self-reliance and social responsibility, Grant’s prophet declared that “Man’s duty is to achieve the highest measure of self-cultivation. When this is combined with a proper regard for the welfare and advancement of others, you will have attained a life that is in complete harmony with the truth.” Looking back on your life, the prophet concluded, “If you made no contribution, you had better leave this life at once, for you burden the world with your presence.”19 In “The Cry of Youth,” Grant imagined his life given to “the great beauty that is the world.” Renouncing mediocrity and convention, the intolerant and the evil-minded, he insisted that man must uncover something within him that is divine. “We are life and in us is a part of God.” To those who were mired in the conventionalities of life, he wrote, “We must create our own lives, and to do this, we must distrust everything that we find about us.” Identifying with great artists, he boldly announced, “WE CHOOSE THE WAY OF THE ARTIST! We shall be heaven-stormers!” Recognizing the loneliness of his journey, he concluded, “Such is the cry of youth. What a tragedy it is that the only echo is one of misunderstand- ing and of unkindness.”20

18“Editorials,” The Vagabond 6 (March 1930), 40, Vol. 6 1929/1930 Folder, box 2, C461, Univer- sity Archives, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, https://libraries.indiana.edu/resources/ archivesonline (hereafter cited as IU Archives). Charlotte Grant to Bob Steck, April 25, 1982, folder 4, box 5, Robert Steck Papers ALBA.104, Wagner Archives. 19Walter Grant, “Minothustus the Prophet,” The Vagabond 6 (October 1929), 32-36, Vol. 6 1929/1930 Folder, box 2, C461, IU Archives. 20Walter Grant, “The Cry of Youth,” The Vagabond 6 (December 1929), 46-48, Vol. 6 1929/1930 Folder, box 2, C461, IU Archives. 92 INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY

In his third essay, “The Death of God,” Grant speculated about what would happen if man lost his belief in God. Without believing in something beyond oneself, man would become “a mechanical thing,” “an embittered being.” Such “men lived only for the satisfaction of their every whim and desire.” If men were so reduced, Grant imagined, God would have to destroy the entire universe so that there might be hope of spiritual rebirth. Despite distancing himself from his father’s religion, Grant still believed that there was a God that brought order and meaning. Without God, the universe would self-destruct.21 Grant stayed on campus during the 1930 summer session to complete a required language proficiency exam, but returned to Marion in early August for a brief summer break. There, he witnessed one of the darkest moments in Indiana history.22 For three weeks, oppressive heat and humidity had clung to northern Indiana. In the evening people sat on their porches or took walks seeking relief. Wednesday night, August 6, was one such night in Marion, but it was also different. Thousands of people crowded downtown on the square to watch a Human Fly scale one of the city’s taller buildings diagonally across from the courthouse. However, the Human Fly’s feat was not the only event that night that captured Marion’s attention.23 On Thursday morning, August 7, Marion citizens woke up to an alarming front-page story in the Leader-Tribune. The night before, 23-year-old Claude Deeter of Fairmount had been “shot down in a valorous effort to save the honor of his sweetheart” by “three colored hold-up men.” He was not expected to live. Nineteen-year-old Mary Ball had been raped. Within hours, police apprehended the robbers: 19-year-old Tom Shipp, 18-year-old Abe Smith, and 16-year-old James Cameron. By the time the afternoon newspaper, the Chronicle, went to press, Claude Deeter had died. The front-page double banner headline announced: “SEEKS DEATH CHAIR FOR TRIO IN MURDER.” Who fired the fatal shots remained unclear as Mary Ball, according to the newspaper report, “was unable to identify any of the suspects due to her nervous condition.”24

21Walter Grant, “The Death of God,” The Vagabond 6 (March 1930), 18-22, Vol. 6 1929/1930 Folder, box 2, C461, IU Archives. 22G. D. Morris to Prof. H. C. Carter, August 3, 1930, Walter Grant 1930-1932 Folder, General Correspondence 1922-1971, Correspondence 1922-1971, C287, Indiana University Department of English Records, 1886-1960, bulk 1940-1960, IU Archives. 23Carr, Our Town, 102. 24Ibid., 99-100. A MINISTER’S SON AND THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR 93

Marion citizens were not willing to wait for justice to take its course. The Ku Klux Klan had risen to power by pledging to clean up corruption and vice. While the young mayor, Jack Edwards, was popular among some groups, he was also known for his “relaxed and selective law enforcement.” Within the past year, five union members had been murdered, and all cases remained unsolved, making it hard for Marion citizens to believe justice would be served. Murder, rape, white victims, and black offenders: with tempers flaring, white citizens drew their own conclusions and began to talk in small groups. To those who knew what was likely to come, Grant County Sheriff Jake Campbell gave assurances that the prisoners were not in danger.25 The details of what happened that night at the Grant County Jail and on the courthouse square—and of what did and did not happen in the weeks and years afterwards—forever changed the people of Marion.26 The double lynching of Shipp and Smith, and the subsequent failure of the criminal justice system to bring charges against the lynch mob, reveals with striking clarity the unequal ways in which concepts like justice and democracy were applied in a racialized society. Many whites living in Marion during the 1930s believed that the lynchings had been justified. They had no interest in prosecuting any of the accused lynchers, despite the fact that witnesses and key mob ring leaders had been identified. Con- versely, blacks and a minority of whites believed that lynchings and mob rule violated the most essential rules of democracy and justice because they allowed people to act collectively as judge, jury, and executioner. More- over, blacks were convinced that Mary Ball had lied about the rape—an accusation that seemed to confirm long-held fears about the threat black men posed to white women and that was certain to enrage white citizens.27 From his sister Charlotte’s correspondence with Robert Steck—a veteran who went on to write biographical sketches of Grant—we know that both Walter and his father Rev. Grant were on the courthouse square on the night of the 1930 Marion lynchings, and that both tried to stop the

25Madison, A Lynching in the Heartland, 36-37. 26Lawrence Beitler’s photograph of the Marion lynching—characterized by ghoulish-looking men and women crowded below the bodies of Shipp and Smith—has become one of the most iconic images of American racism. 27See Madison, A Lynching in the Heartland. Chapters five and six include newspaper coverage of lynching and court proceedings. The Kokomo Tribune was one of the more unbiased and critical newspapers in Indiana. See, for example, “Marion Lynching Inquiry Report Hits at Officials,” Kokomo Tribune, September 2, 1930, p.1. 94 INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY

lynch mob.28 At some point in the evening, Walter walked the mile down Washington Street from his home and pushed through the thousands of people crowded in front of the county jail. According to Charlotte, Walter “pleaded with neighbors and the town banker to stop the outrage, to no avail. He fell to his knees and pleaded with God, to no avail.”29 Charlotte was then seventeen, a recent high school graduate. Apparently, she had been told to stay home, for she wrote, “I had sneaked out of the house to follow Walter and met him coming back with tears streaming down his face. He grabbed me and made me go home with him and didn’t talk for two days. When he did he blamed Dad for not doing more.” Walter’s siblings, on the other hand, seemed more understanding of the situation in which their father found himself. According to grandson Jonathan Grant, his father Donald Grant passed on stories that Rev. Grant “had talked to the local police about increasing security for the prisoners who were lynched.” Charlotte wrote, “My father was the only white man to try to stop the lynching and received many threats subsequently.” The lynching, she said, was “one of the more traumatic events in my life. Dad lost half his congregation for preaching against the lynching, but he never wavered. Mother was frightened for the three youngest of us and tried unsuccessfully to keep us in.” She also remembered seeing “tarred and feathered items on our front porch.”30 Rich Grant, Jonathan’s brother, remembered the story that “Martin Lee Grant exchanged pulpits with the pastor of the AME church in Marion for the two Sundays that followed the lynching.”31

28Bob Steck’s sketches of Walter Grant are “The Life and Death of Walter Grant,” The Volunteer: Organ of Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade 6 (July 1984), 1-2, folder 37, box 2, Albert Prago Papers ALBA.135, Wagner Archives, and “Memories of the Good Fight,” http:www.brooklynrail. org/2001/10/express/memories-of-the-good-fight. 29Steck, “Memories of the Good Fight.” 30Charlotte A. Grant to Bob Steck, January 26, 1982, folder 4, box 5, Robert Steck Papers ALBA.104, Wagner Archives. Like all of Grant’s siblings, Donald Lee Grant (1919-1987) was deeply affected by the 1930 Marion lynchings and by his brother’s death in Spain. According to his son Jonathan Grant, “There is no doubt that those events had a deep impact on my father and what would be his ultimate career path.” Donald Grant’s life work, The Way It Was in the South: The Black Experience in Georgia, was published in 1993. Jonathan Grant, e-mail to author, October 4, 2015. 31In an e-mail to the author on October 4, 2015, Jonathan Grant also recalled that his father “re- vered” Walter. Rich Grant stressed that their father, Donald Lee Grant, “felt the Marion lynchings were a formative experience in his life,” e-mail to author, September 19, 2015. A MINISTER’S SON AND THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR 95

The Marion lynching and its fallout for the Grant family put even more distance between Walter and the religion of his youth. Stunned by his inability to stop the lynching, Grant struggled to grasp the inhumanity of a world that contradicted all that he had heard in his father’s church. As a devout believer in a God who gave purpose and order, Walter was lost in a spiritual wilderness. Grant was also at an impasse in his academic career. He should have graduated from Indiana University in June 1931, but a series of setbacks delayed his degree. He had fallen behind in required reading. Although he passed the exam on the classics, he had failed a class in freshman chemistry needed for graduation. At the end of the summer, back home in Marion, Grant was faced with greater uncertainties as he awaited confirmation of financial aid so that he would be able to return to campus. Writing to Dr. Henry H. Carter, chairman of the English Department, he shared his hope to re-enroll in freshman chemistry and begin graduate classes for a Master’s Degree in English. In the next weeks, Grant received an appointment as a tutor in the Department of English.32 In the spring of 1932, Grant again faced academic difficulties. He needed to re-write his honors paper. That summer, he learned that he would not be reappointed to a teaching position for the next year. Dr. Carter explained to Grant that the state legislature had cut funding, and that he had chosen another student who was “a steadier and a more all- around reliable person than you are.” Grant’s plan to become a university professor was thus aborted. In November 1932, when he was no longer on campus, he was awarded an A. B. in English with Honors.33 During the early years of the Great Depression, like so many unemployed young people of his day, Grant moved back to his parents’ home. Fortunately, he found a community of people with whom he could share music and ideas. According to Charlotte, he “was never judgmental about people, just capitalists, rich ones, and phonies. He liked and was liked in

32HHC [Henry H. Carter] to Walter, May 27, 1931, HHC to Walter, July 14, 1931, Walter Grant to Dr. Carter, July 22 [1931], Walter Grant 1930-1932 Folder, General Correspondence 1922-1971, Correspondence 1922-1971, C287, Indiana University Department of English Records, 1886- 1960, bulk 1940-1960, IU Archives; IU Bloomington Archives, e-mail to author, April 14, 2015. 33Walter Grant to Dr. Carter, April 20, 1932, Walter Grant to Dr. Carter, August 31, 1932, HHC to Walter, September 2, 1932, Walter Grant 1930-1932 Folder, General Correspondence 1922- 1971, Correspondence 1922-1971, C287, Indiana University Department of English Records, 1886-1960, bulk 1940-1960, IU Archives. Walter was awarded an AB in English (with Honors) on November 4, 1932. IU Bloomington Archives, e-mail to author, April 16, 2015. 96 INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY

return.” Those who knew him well also understood his strong need for purpose and meaning. Turning again to writing, he found courage to take the difficult next steps.34 In a fifteen-page essay, “On Being a Minister’s Son,” probably written in 1934, Grant re-examined the religious beliefs of his youth with new detachment. While he had long recognized “the disparity between the world as it really is and as it exists in the mind of a clergyman,” he had only fairly recently, as an adult, been able to understand how his religious education had failed him. Its narrow focus on the Bible’s absolute truth had prevented him from questioning religious dogma. He had missed learning about the enormous richness of the Bible and other world religions. Similarly, he had come to reject the indoctrination he had received from both his family and church that American society was superior because it was “guided by Christianity.” What seemed to hurt him most was that his church’s “blanket denunciation” of all wrong behaviors did little to prepare him for understanding life, including human sexuality. “The minister’s son is often unfit for love, because he has not been taught to understand it, and because his parents have always believed the Song of Solomon should never have been written.”35 Continuing to look back on his life in Marion—without specific references to the Klan or the 1930 lynchings—Grant blamed society for deception, and ultimately, for complicity in corruption. “I learned I could not with justification direct my criticism only to my church, because intellectual honesty demanded I indict the whole society of which I and my church were a part,” he wrote. “The minister’s son learns his father and his church are really supporting governing organizations which deserve not support but extermination. The graft and corruption of city and county is duplicated by that of state and nation.”36 In this same essay, Grant expressed his growing alarm about the spread of fascism and poverty. Alluding to Italy’s and Germany’s designs for empire building, he wrote that he knew that “every country in Western Europe has fallen or will fall before the menace of fascism, and sooner or later this issue will be fought out in this country.” Holding on to his youthful Christian idealism, he hoped that the next generation would

34Charlotte A. Grant to Bob Steck, January 26, 1982, folder 4, box 5, Robert Steck Papers ALBA.104, Wagner Archives. 35“On Being a Minister’s Son.” 36Ibid. A MINISTER’S SON AND THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR 97

experience a world free of the crippling poverty, exploitation, and human indifference that he saw affecting nine-tenths of the world’s population. Freed from the narrow perspective of his church and society, he alluded to his growing interest in Communism, “another voluntary choice of life” that was never discussed in his conservative upbringing.37 As he cast off earlier beliefs, Grant recognized that he would make his journey alone. He could not share his religious doubts with his father, for he feared his “superior mind.” He would not have wanted his exposé of Marion’s darkest years to be seen by anyone but a few of his closest confidantes, including his sister Charlotte. As he had recognized in his essay “The Cry of Youth” written years earlier, “the world is there to be saved, and the minister’s son feels it is his duty to contribute to the rescu- ing processes, if only to describe the amazing idealism he has learned from Christianity. That is the whole trouble: he cannot accept the world as it is because he has learned to believe it can be made better.”38 Sometime during this period, likely in 1934, Grant took his first step to fight injustice.39 Aided by President Franklin Roosevelt’s National Recovery Administration (NRA), Marion’s Anaconda Wire and Cable Company had agreed to put unemployed people back to work. Rev. Grant persuaded the plant manager to hire Walter, his younger brother Clifton, and eighteen other unemployed college graduates. For Walter, however, working conditions were unacceptable. Going against his employer and no doubt his own father, he started a union. He had been generally well-liked, Charlotte recalled, but he had gotten on the wrong side of management. He and all the other young men employed with him were subsequently fired.40 As hard times worsened, Grant was increasingly drawn to Commu- nist Party efforts to call attention to the plight of millions of unemployed Americans. By 1933, fifteen million people—one third of the country’s workforce—stood in bread lines and worried about how they would pay utilities, keep a roof over their heads, and feed their children. The Communist Party of the United States was a visible catalyst for change. Communist Party members and sympathizers alike—white and African American—joined together to demonstrate in seventy-five American cities

37Ibid. 38Ibid. 39Charlotte wrote that Grant made this first step “in thirty four (or five?).” Charlotte A. Grant to Bob Steck, April 25, 1982, folder 4, box 5, Robert Steck Papers ALBA.104, Wagner Archives. 40“On Being a Minister’s Son.” 98 INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY

to demand unemployment relief. In the spring of 1931 and the summer of 1932, Communists led hunger marches to Indianapolis to urge a special session of the state legislature to discuss providing greater unemployment assistance. Delegations from a dozen Indiana cities and towns, including Marion, had participated. Communist-led unemployed councils, such as those in nearby Kokomo, reached out to workers and their families with practical assistance.41 While Grant’s fears of European fascism were not yet widely shared in the United States, many Americans worried that their nation was one step away from a revolution. Bloody attacks on unarmed demonstrators by police and military troops—the Chicago unemployed workers demonstration in March 1930, the Ford Hunger March, the Bonus Army March in 1932, the Toledo Auto-Lite Strike in the spring of 1934, to name only a few—appeared to have become commonplace. For Grant, there seemed to be few differences between fascist terrorists in Europe and the police and soldiers on American streets.42 Sometime during 1935 or 1936, Grant wandered around Indiana.43 He then hitchhiked to New York City, where, alongside roughly 500 other aspiring and published writers, poets, academics, journalists, book editors, and literary agents, Grant won a job and a regular weekly paycheck ($23.86 weekly, the regular salary for an editor) in the federally funded writers’ project—likely as a contributor to the New York City Guide, the largest of the eighteen projects. In the “maelstrom of conflicting personalities” that existed in New York, Grant found others who were equally impassioned about the need to save the world from fascism.44

41Jerre Mangione, The Dream and the Deal: The Federal Writers’ Project, 1935-1943 (Philadelphia, Pa., 1983); Fraser M. Ottanelli, The Communist Party of the United States: From the Depression to World War II (New Brunswick, N. J., 1991), 28, 36-38; Harvey Klehr, The Heyday of American Communism: The Depression Decade (New York, 1984), 53; “’Hunger March’ Led by Youth, Coming for Talk with Leslie,” Indianapolis News, May 2, 1931, p.3; “Caravans of Unemployed,” Kokomo Tribune, July 16, 1932, p.3. 42See Steve Nelson, The Volunteers (New York, 1953), 15, for a first-hand account of the March 1, 1930, unemployment demonstration in Chicago that turned bloody when fourteen demonstrators were “brutally beaten.” Ottanelli, The Communist Party of the United States, 31-33; Klehr, The Heyday of American Communism, 58-62, 124. 43Charlotte A. Grant to Bob Steck, April 25, 1982, folder 4, box 5, Robert Steck Papers ALBA.104, Wagner Archives. 44Charlotte A. Grant to Bob Steck, April 25, 1982, folder 4, box 5, Robert Steck Papers ALBA.104, Wagner Archives; Kathleen O’Connor McKinzie, “Writers on Relief: 1935-1942” (Ph. D. dis- sertation, Indiana University, 1970), 166; Mangione, The Dream and the Deal, 155, 157, 172; Walter Grant to Charlotte, December 10, 1936, folder 9, box 5, Robert Steck Papers ALBA.104, Wagner Archives. A MINISTER’S SON AND THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR 99

In the fall of 1936, Grant joined the Communist Party of the United States, a commitment that he took very seriously and that demanded much of his time. Aside from being neither foreign-born nor Jewish, he fit the profile of a typical American Communist in that he was white and between 30 and 40 years old, had experienced long-term unemployment, and was living in New York. Like other party members, Grant was reluctant to tell his parents about his new affiliation. Being identified as a Communist, especially in Indiana, carried the risk of public shame or, worse, possible prosecution under state criminal syndicalism laws. As a party leader, he attended late-night meetings and political rallies, completed endless reports, and recruited new members. He also became experienced in Communist direct action tactics to call attention to the plight of the Depression’s victims.45 In a letter written to his sister December 10, 1936, Grant described his involvement in recent strikes that had followed massive Works Prog- ress Administration (WPA) layoffs in the New York City cultural projects. “Should have written you before, but have been so busy with strikes, committees, picket lines, leaflets, etc.,” he began. “Did you read about our sit down strike last week?” he asked, referring to the widely publicized December 3 strike. Grant had led writers in a mass protest “to try to break the police terror” that had marked a late November sit-down strike by unarmed artists. Police had arrested more than 200 artists and beaten thirteen others so severely that they had been hospitalized. In contrast, the December 3 writers’ strike had ended peacefully, even if demands for restoring jobs were not met. On the upper floors of the block-long building that housed the writers’ project, Grant and other demonstrators had barricaded themselves behind office furniture and locked arms for twenty-six hours. As they sang “Solidarity Forever” and “America,” they had wondered if the police would attack. “We won,” Grant wrote, “and the police commissioner issued an order saying the N. Y. police wouldn’t bust up WPA demonstrations.”46 In the same letter, Grant confided that he expected to leave for Spain at the end of the month. Soon after the Spanish Civil War had broken out in July 1936—when it became clear that Italy and Germany were violating

45According to Klehr, “35 states had criminal syndicalism laws and Communists were prime candidates for prosecution,” The Heyday of American Communism, 158. For profiles of members of the Communist Party of the United States of America, see 161-65. 46See also McKinzie, “Writers on Relief,” 182-183; Walter Grant to Charlotte, December 10, 1936, folder 4, box 5, Robert Steck Papers ALBA.104, Wagner Archives. 100 INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY

the European Non-Intervention Treaty by backing General Franco with arms and troops—Grant had shifted his priorities. When Communists began to recruit soldiers to form the International Brigade, he had been one of the first Americans to sign on. Referring to his required military training at Indiana University, he glibly assured her that he had learned how to use a rifle, “which is the main thing.” His last three government paychecks would cover costs for equipment for Spain. More than ever, he told her, he felt he had the obligation “to beat the hell out of the fascists. The front line trenches of the world class struggle right now are in Spain, so cheerio. I’m off to the wars!”47 The day after Christmas 1936, Walter Grant left New York harbor as part of a group of ninety-six American volunteers bound for Le Havre, France. His journey to Spain would be similar to those of more than 2,800 Americans during the next year and a half. Because U. S. neutrality laws made fighting in a foreign war a criminal offense, Grant and other volunteers tried to pass as tourists or students. Some even changed their names. From Le Havre, they travelled in small groups by train to Paris, where they made arrangements with the French Communist Party to join the International Brigade. Continuing on, they rode in packed-full, all- night trains across eastern France to Perpignan near the Mediterranean Sea. At dusk, along with volunteers from twenty other countries, Grant and his fellow Americans boarded old buses and travelled south across the Pyrenees under the cover of night. Around midnight, the caravan reached the ancient castle at Figueres (Castell de Sant Ferran) overlooking the Mediterranean.48 At this entry point for international volunteers, Grant learned basic survival strategies, Spanish commands, and elementary military proce- dures. After days with little or no sleep and food, he was grateful for his straw mattress on a plank bunk, a shower, and hot food. As he and other recent arrivals paraded through the streets, villagers hailed them as sav-

47Walter Grant to Charlotte, December 10, 1936, folder 4, box 5, Robert Steck Papers ALBA.104, Wagner Archives; Ottanelli, The Communist Party of the United States, 175. 48Because France had not yet officially closed its borders, Grant’s group avoided the treacherous night-long hike across the Pyrenees or boat trip that later volunteers faced. For a description of the first American volunteers’ journey to Figueres, see Edwin Rolfe,The Lincoln Battalion: The Story of the Americans Who Fought in Spain in the International Brigades (New York, 1939), 18-24. For a description of the journey on foot, see Alvah Bessie, Men in Battle: A Story of Americans in Spain (New York, 1939), 18-27. Statistics regarding numbers of American soldiers are in Thomas, The Spanish Civil War, 637. A MINISTER’S SON AND THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR 101

Propaganda poster, circa 1936-1937. During the Spanish Civil War, Loyalists used images of women and children facing destruction to rally international support for their cause. Courtesy, University of California-San Diego, Mandeville Special Collections Library 102 INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY

iors and saluted them with the lifted clenched fist of the Popular Front government.49 From Figueres, the new soldiers boarded a rundown, overcrowded train and travelled south along the Mediterranean. As the train stopped at crowded platforms, they caught oranges that villagers tossed to them through the open train windows. Everywhere, the Spanish people raised their clenched fists at the soldiers as a gesture of hope. As darkness fell, the exhausted men stretched out in the aisles of the train or under the wooden benches to catch a couple hours of sleep. Towards midnight, they passed through the sprawling industrial yards of Barcelona. Late the next afternoon—hungry, cold, and tired beyond awareness— they reached Valencia. For a few hours they were able to get off the train, stretch, and have a warm supper at a mansion used by the International Brigade. After two more days and nights, once again travelling south, then west, they reached the small city of Albacete, the International Brigade’s military center.50 At the train station, the newcomers were welcomed by a spirited brass band and marched through the streets to the great mansion that served as the International Brigade headquarters. Inside its massive courtyard, flags representing thirteen nations hung from the circular second-floor balcony. Uniformed men welcomed them in five different languages.51 Within days, Grant and the other American volunteers crammed into trucks and rode thirty-seven miles north through mountains covered with vineyards and olive trees to reach Villanueva de la Jara. Soon 300 more Americans arrived. In this small village southeast of Madrid, they spent five weeks learning war strategies and training with rifles and machine guns. During afternoon free time, they practiced speaking Spanish with local people in cafes, and they wrote letters home. On occasion they gathered in the town’s bullring to hear addresses by leading officers of the Inter- national Brigade, André Marty of France and Peter Kerrigan of Britain.52 During his first weeks in France and Spain, Grant wrote three letters to family and friends back in the United States. Like other Americans fighting in the Spanish Civil War, he confided his real purposes only to those

49Bessie, Men in Battle, 28-34; Rolfe, The Lincoln Battalion, 23-24. 50Bessie, Men in Battle, 36-44. 51Ibid., 45-47. 52Rolfe, The Lincoln Battalion, 26-28. As more American volunteers arrived, they organized as the Abraham Lincoln and George Washington Brigades. Americans also joined the Canadian Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion of the International Brigade. Rolfe, The Lincoln Battalion, 76; Klehr, The Heyday of American Communism, 219. A MINISTER’S SON AND THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR 103

whom he felt would best understand his mission and keep his secret. He implored his four younger siblings—Clifton, Robert, Donald, and Char- lotte—to keep his role as a soldier and a Communist hidden from “the family,” by which he meant their parents, their Uncle Stanley, and friends from Marion. Grant wanted them to believe that he was going to Spain on assignment for a small East Coast newspaper.53 In his first letter dated “Havre, January 2” and addressed to “Folks back, Way Back, in the States,” Grant confided in his siblings and friends details about his first days in France. They had arrived in Havre on De- cember 30 and cleared customs “very easily,” he wrote. Instead of transfer- ring by train to Paris directly, however, they were delayed because “4,000 anti-fascist Germans” had just arrived in Paris and were “waiting to be shipped across the border. They will go first,” Grant continued, referring to the processing of volunteers by the French Communist Party, “and we will slip over after they get through.” Seeing Europe for the first time, he was shocked by the poverty. “We have had plenty of opportunity to see all the misery and poverty here in Havre. I’ve seen hovels and squalor worse than anything I’ve seen in America.”54 In a second letter dated “Paris, January 2” and addressed to “Dear Family,” Grant feigned the role of a young American eager to take on a job as a war correspondent. Like other Spanish Civil War volunteers, he wanted to educate fellow countrymen about the Spanish Republican government and its reform programs. “If the Spanish situation were accurately understood, every great democracy in the world would be forced—not by its own volition but by public opinion—to demand an end to German and Italian intervention in Spain,” he wrote. “The triumph of German and Italian Fascism in Spain,” he continued, “means the end of democracy in Spain and a serious threat to the security of England and France.” Con- trary to popular opinion, there were few Socialists, Communists, or labor organizers in the Republican government, he continued. When Italy and Germany supported the military revolt, only the Soviet Union sent food and money to the Republican government, but “no soldiers.” Volunteers from all over the world were now arriving in Spain as part of the “Inter-

53Uncle Stanley Grant’s concern for Walter is evident in the letter he wrote to the State Department asking for more information about Walter’s disappearance. E. Stanley Grant to the Honorable Summer Wells, Assistant Secretary of State, Washington, D.C., December 18, 1937, folder 3, box 5, Robert Steck Papers ALBA.104, Wagner Archives. 54Walter Grant to Family, Havre, January 2, 1937, folder 9, box 5, Robert Steck Papers ALBA.104, Wagner Archives. 104 INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY

national Anti-Fascist Brigade” to help the democratically elected Spanish government. “A group from New York is coming soon, and I am anxious to see them.” With the help of foreign soldiers, he believed that the Span- ish government had a chance to beat the fascists and fulfill its promises of building schools and health clinics and reforming feudal agriculture policies. “Things are rather at a draw now,” he confidently predicted.55 Grant’s third and last letter, dated January 22, 1937, was a chain letter written from his basic training camp in Villanueva de la Jara and addressed to Charlotte, his younger brothers Robert and Donald, and a dozen others. Once again, he wanted his whereabouts in Spain kept hidden from “the home folks.” “Greetings for all from war-torn, romantic Spain! Love, copious love to all,” he began. He would have written sooner, but he had been confined with the flu for the past eight days in the unit’s hospital, which was the grand summer home of a wealthy Madrid aristocrat. Ten days of intense drilling after many nights with little sleep had taken its toll, but he was feeling stronger. Based on his success at using weapons, he predicted that he would be “Machine-Gun Grant from now on.” He added, “We were joined the other day by a second group from America and by a large group of Irishmen, so what with the international composi- tion of our own men, there are plenty of stories going around the barracks of life here in Spain, in So. America, India, etc.” Young anti-fascists from all over Europe were also eager to have the chance to fight. Recent arrivals included men who had been imprisoned in concentration camps by the German Reichswehr and “two men who had spent three days trying to get by the border patrol in the Alps—fifty miles on snowshoes, both of them, to come to Spain!” The soldiers had paraded in Barcelona and been cheered by the local people, he continued. Finally, he described Vil- lanueva de la Jara as a place that “reeks with a thousand years of feudal oppression.” The people were all poorly dressed, but what impressed him most was that they treated the American boys “very kindly.” Finally, as an afterthought, Grant reported that land reforms advocated by the Spanish Republic had already taken place “in this section,” and that “each land worker and his family (who all live in the town) now has his own soil.” Such reforms were among the reasons he and thousands of other foreign volunteers had come to Spain.56

55Walter Grant to Family, Paris, January 2, 1937, folder 9, box 5, Robert Steck Papers ALBA.104, Wagner Archives. 56Ye Chain Letter from Walter Grant, January 22, 1937, folder 9, box 5, Robert Steck Papers ALBA.104, Wagner Archives. A MINISTER’S SON AND THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR 105

Lincoln-Washington Battalion [checking rifles], 1937-1938; International Brigades Archive, Moscow: Selected Images; ALBA.PHOTO.177; Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives’ Elmer Holmes Bobst Library; New York University Libraries.

On February 15, 1937, Grant mailed an envelope to Charlotte post- marked ‘‘Albacete’’ containing the poem “When I Am Dead.” The next day he would be sent into the fierce battle along the Jarama River that was testing the Republicans’ ability to hang on to roads linking Valencia, their capital, to Madrid. Grant clearly anticipated his death, but he was fully convinced that his sacrifice would have purpose and beauty. He wrote, “When I am dead, say some have felt/ My heart has bled, my soul has knelt…When I am dead, think it no wrong; I’ve spun my thread, I’ve sung my song.” At the bottom of the page-long poem, he wrote “Walter Fairbanks Grant (1909-1937).”57

57Walter Grant, “When I Am Dead,” Albacete, February 1, 1937, folder 9, box 5, Robert Steck Papers ALBA.104, Wagner Archives. 106 INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY

Eight months later, a newswire story dated October 16, 1937, reported that “Walter Grant, former Hoosier, while fighting against Franco’s Fascists in Spain” had been captured. The news reportedly “came as a distinct shock” to his father, Rev. Martin Lee Grant. The family believed that he had gone to Spain as a war correspondent for a small New York newspaper, Rev. Grant had told the reporter. On December 1, 1937, Congresswoman Virginia E. Jenckes, a Democrat from Indiana, released a press notice reporting that she had received “confidential advices from an unquestioned authority” that there was “little reason to fear his execu- tion.” She was making efforts to have him freed in a prisoner exchange. This was the last official communication the Grant family had relating to Walter’s disappearance on the Jarama Front.58 Over forty years later, as historians of the Spanish Civil War tried to make sense of what happened to Grant and others riding on the same truck, parts of the long mystery began to come together. Drawing from memories of Spanish Civil War veterans, historian Peter Carroll concludes in The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade: Americans in the Spanish Civil War (1994) that Grant was part of a truck convoy that left the base camp in the early evening of February 16, 1937. Early the next evening, as they approached enemy lines, the drivers heeded instructions to keep their headlights off. Grant’s truck took the wrong road and crashed under enemy fire. “The survivors took refuge in a small gully, but they were over- powered. Walter Grant and about twenty other Americans thus became the first of the Lincoln casualties.”59 Walter Grant volunteered to fight in the Spanish Civil War believing in the possibility of defeating fascism before it spread further across Europe and possibly to the United States. In the end, however, his dreams and those of his generation were shattered by the reluctance of the Roosevelt administration to lift the arms embargo, the power of the Catholic lobby, and the breakdown in Republican leadership. Trapped in a complex politi-

58“Terre Haute Man Captured in Spain,” Greenfield (Ind.) Daily Reporter, October 16, 1937, p. 4; “Seeks Grant’s Release,” Kokomo Tribune, December 1, 1937, p. 1. The memorial service for Walter Grant was held February 10, 1980, in the Unitarian Universalist Reston Community Church. Charlotte Grant donated an organ in Walter’s memory. “Woman Donates Organ in Brother’s Memory,” The Reston (Virginia) Times, February 21, 1980. 59Peter N. Carroll, The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade: Americans in the Spanish Civil War (Redwood City, Calif., 1994), 98. The search for more information about the soldiers on the “lost trucks of Jarama” continues. An undated document lists twenty-four names—sixteen Americans and eight Canadians—“who were on the Jarama trucks,” folder 6, box 5, Robert Steck Papers ALBA.104, Wagner Archives. A MINISTER’S SON AND THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR 107

cal and social caldron, Franklin Roosevelt and his advisors followed the United States’ traditional deference to Great Britain’s lead in foreign policy. To send arms to the Republican forces would have broken the United States’ pledge to follow the 1936 Non-Intervention Agreement, despite Germany and Italy’s gross violations of the pact with relentless air attacks on civilian populations. Furthermore, the Roosevelt administration worried that defiance of congressional neutrality acts would alienate southern Democrats and weaken their democratic base. Americans were also persuaded by Roman Catholic leaders that Franco’s fascism was preferable to a possible communist victory. Finally, the early promising leadership within the Spanish Republican hierarchy disintegrated. As historian Hugh Thomas concludes, “Disunity among Republicans” became the “prime factor in their defeat.”60 As one of the first American victims of the Spanish Civil War, Wal- ter Grant died before hundreds of thousands of Spanish were left dead, homeless, or imprisoned. He died not knowing of the deaths of his fellow soldiers. Finally, he died still believing in the possibility of his cause.61 While ghosts may continue to haunt his hometown of Marion, Indiana, Grant’s journey, at least in part, lifts some of its deepest shadows. Hav- ing witnessed the 1930 double lynching, he committed his life to living out the ideals of brotherly love and social responsibility he had learned in his father’s church. Grant once wrote, “If you made no contribution, you had better leave this life at once, for you burden the world with your presence,” and he made sure he would not leave this life until he had made his contribution.

60Guttman, , The Wound in the Heart, 116; Carroll, The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, 211; and Thomas, The Spanish Civil War, 611. 61For an overall study of the Spanish Civil War, this writer recommends Carroll, The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. The Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives at the Tamiment Library list twenty-four American volunteers with Indiana ties. In her research, this author has found three more young Indiana men who enlisted in the Spanish Civil War. Harry Dearmont of Spiceland and Edward Loy of Connersville, both World War I veterans, left New Castle, Indiana, on Janu- ary 2, 1937, to enlist in New Orleans. “World War Vets Enlist,” (Hammond) Times, January 2, 1937, p. 39. Jean Szkopice of East Chicago was part of a group of American soldiers who escaped from Spain during the bombings of Barcelona in January 1939. With him was James Clinton (Pete) Barnett of Franklin, Indiana, who is identified in ALBA records. In addition, three Hoosiers served in Spain with the American Friends Service Committee: Dan West and Martha Rupel, both Manchester University graduates, and Emily Parker of Richmond, Indiana. See Farah Mendle- sohn, Quaker Relief Work in the Spanish Civil War, Quaker Studies, Vol. 1 (Lewiston, N. Y., 2002).