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. INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY, 112 (June 2016). © 2016, Trustees of Indiana University. 82 INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY 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 se- curity 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 sick- ness 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.

Load more