Born Fighting: The Poling Family of Lone Wolf OK, Part 1

                                                                                                                         Wayne Pounds, Prof. Emeritus

 Aoyama Gakuin Univ., Tokyo

Part 1

Lon Poling, Daily Oklahoman, 6 Mar 1938, p. 71.

I take my title from Jim Webb’s fine Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America (2004), which expounds the Scots-Irish martial contribution to the history of the United States. In truth, when first reading about the fighting Poling family, I wondered if they too might be Scots-Irish, though if so it was not reflected in their name. It took only a glance at their family history, however, to learn that its roots were in Poland, a country whose tradition of battling for its independence is second to none in Europe. Old census documents from the early 1800s sometimes spell the family name “Poland,” and Polish officers came to North America to fight the British in the War of Independence, their statues today ornamenting the streets of Philadelphia and New York City.

My first attraction was to Eugene Victor Poling (nicknamed “Debs”), whose parents were Oklahomans and who made the trek from New York to Catalonia to fight with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade against the Fascists in Spain. Forty years later, I made a similar trip from Oklahoma to the Civil War battlefields of Spain, but I taught school in Madrid and saw the battlefields only from the back of a friend’s motorcycle. To this day those fields of combat are written in blood in the memories of the

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Spanish people, so let my friend’s memory be honored here. He was born Thomas Entwhistle in Rockford Illinois, emerged from the Vietnam war with sergeant stripes and a purple heart after three tours of duty, and supported his Galician wife and two girls by providing guided trips to the battle fields for foreign tourists, usually American. His favorite scenes were those where the Abraham Lincoln Brigade had left their names and their bodies. Tom’s ashes were strewn along the Ebro Front, the famous cota 666 near Gandesa, Terragona.

My first attraction was to Debs Poling, but the next was to his father. Imagine if you will, Reader, yours truly, an humble college professor retired now, still living in Tokyo, and writing about the history of early day Oklahoma, his research centered by a natural affinity on his own hometown of Chandler Oklahoma. One day he discovers not only the story of Debs Poling but the fact that Debs’s father Len Poling was a pre-statehood Deputy U. S. Marshal headquartered in Chandler. Clearly, I was hooked. The barb sank all the deeper when I realized I’d already referred to Len Poling in my earlier book Wright Cemetery: The Oldest in Chandler Oklahoma, which tells how in 1894, on the streets of Chandler, Poling fought a pistol duel with a wannabe badass named Kickapoo Bill Baker, whose corpse two days later was laid to rest in Wright Cemetery.

This shooting is the episode with which we shall begin, but first a glance at the Poling family history is required. Lon Polling, who won the shootout, was born in what is now West Virginia, the son of Thornton Poling, a farmer. Though Poling men had served in all of America’s earlier wars, Poling’s father missed out on the Civil War. Lon, a mere 7 years old at the outbreak of the Civil War, remembered his father’s part in it. Lon’s son-in-law, the reporter T. T. Johnson, wrote:

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One of his earliest memories is that of his father’s ordeal in being forced into the Confederate army despite his avowed loyalty to the union. . . .
The Polings were fighting men, all right, but they wouldn’t fight for principles they didn’t believe in. Lon recalled. “I can remember when my father deserted the Confederate army after a month of enforced service. He returned to his home in Hampshire county of what was then Virginia.

“For seven weeks we hid him from Confederate troops who visited the place. I was only 7, but I was entrusted with the job of standing lookout duty and shouting warnings to my father when troops came in sight. We had nothing to fear from Union soldiers, but father never waited until they were close enough to determine the color of their uniforms before he would dash out of the back door, leap a fence and hide himself in a thicket.

“The family finally escaped from Virginia to Ohio, and father attempted to enlist in the Union army. But he was not accepted and had no fighting part in the war after that. John, George, and Mitch Poling, my uncles, served with the Union forces. John was in Sherman’s army. George was with the Sixth Ohio battery, Mitch was captured by Confederate raiders twice and escaped both
times.” (T. T. Johnson, “Bringing Up Fighters,” Daily Oklahoman, Mar 6, 1938, p. 71)

As a small lad, then, Lon was serving as a lookout when the Confederate forces were searching for his father. West Virginia was hill country, largely free of slaves, while the economy of the mother state centered on its tidewater plantations where cotton and tobacco were cultivated by

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legions of slaves. West Virginia, it should be recalled, separated from the Old Dominion over the issue of slavery in 1863. They were also a people who never backed away from a fight. James Webb, in the book cited in my opening paragraph, writes of them: “the heavily Scots-Irish people of West Virginia ranked first, second, or third in military casualty rates in every U.S. war of the twentieth
century” (22).

The censuses for 1870 and 1880 find Lon in Clark County Ohio, but the 1885 census for Kansas locates him teaching school in Edwards County. By his own account (as given in the Daily Oklahoman article cited above), he was teaching in a sod schoolhouse where in the early eighties, when the yearning for adventure struck him. “My existence was just too quiet. When it was announced that Oklahoma would be opened for settlement April 22, 1889, I decided I’d be there.”

He indeed was there, but didn’t file a claim until about 1899. He must have arrived in Oklahoma about 1893, for in that year he began a two and a half year stint as a Deputy U.S. Marshal under E. D. Nix, Oklahoma’s first U. S. Marshal. It’s possible, however, to make the date more precise. 1893 was also the year in which Nix became the U. S. Marshal, taking office on July 1st. About two months after taking office, Nix naively thought he’d put a stop to all of Oklahoma’s infamous outlawry by sending a troop of deputies to Ingalls, where the Dalton-Doolin gang liked to hang out. His deputy marshals were outnumbered and outgunned, and the outlaws killed three of them before the fight was over. This ruckus took place on September 1, 1893.

The fiasco must have covered Nix with shame. The best that can be said about him is that he was a politician who had little experience as a lawman (he’d been running a

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grocery story in Guthrie) and lacked the good sense to listen to his deputies who did have. He then did the only thing he could think of. He hired more deputies--a large number of them. This is where the Daily Oklahoman picks up the story. It begins, “When Nix became United States Marshal, Poling was the first deputy to take the oath of office.” This unsupported statement lacks credibility--why the unknown Poling? The author becomes more believable in what follows: “Nix swore in 100 deputies, whose avowed purpose was to rid Oklahoma of the gangs of gunmen who infested the hills in the eastern part of the state.” Though the roundness of the number 100 makes it suspect, we accept it because this is now Len Poling offering an estimate, and he inspires more trust than the bumbling Nix. The point here, however, is that this was very probably when Lon Poling joined the deputy U.S. marshals--when Nix hired a large number of them. A check of the old newspapers reveals the complete list, but the number of deputies hired never approaches five score--or even half that number.

These non-matching numbers bring us at last to a true match, when Poling encountered Kickapoo Bill Baker on the streets of Chandler and the Kickapoo Bill met his Waterloo. I discussed this encounter in a previous book called Wright Cemetery: The Oldest in Chandler OK, where I told the story from Baker’s point of view since it was he who was buried in Wright Cemetery. The story could as well have been told from Lon Poling’s. Briefly, on August 2nd, 1894, the Cook Gang corralled the town and tried to rob the bank, before being chased away by an angry and armed populace. That evening, Poling who had a warrant for Baker’s arrest on a charge of horse theft,

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Lon Poling, Daily Oklahoman, 6 Mar 1938

noticed Baker in a bar and spoke to him, asking if he could have a few words. Baker had already sworn to kill Poling, a fact of which the lawman was aware. As the two men walked down the street, Baker was holding his pistol down at his side as Poling explained the warrant. Suddenly Baker stopped and was bringing his pistol to bear when Poling drew and shot him. The shots from the two guns were so

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close together that onlookers heard them as instantaneous, but Poling had shot first and hit Baker right above the heart, which stamped finis to his account.

It was decreed by law in those days that when an officer killed a man he must be tried for murder, albeit usually a pro-forma trial. Poling’s trial was more exciting. It was well attended and ran from 2 p.m. until 11. The prosecution established the threats that Baker had made against Poling’s life and showed that Poling

had taken every precaution in trying to make a peaceable arrest, having even risked his life beyond all requirements of the law in making the
attempt . . . .the court held that the killings was justifiable and Mr. Poling was discharged. It seem to take the vast audience an instant to grasp the purport of Judge Mason’s words, then the breathless silence was broken by such cheering as those walls are not often called upon to echo.

The Chandler Publicist’s story about the event, from which the above was taken, was subtitled “Lon Poling Acquitted Amid Great Enthusiasm.” It ended by commenting that Mr. Polling “has a great many warn friends.” Meanwhile, the Kickapoo Kid was in his cold, cold grave.

Reporter T. T. Johnson, Lon’s son-in-law, continues his narrative about the marshal’s days as follows, again quoting the old lawman:

“It amounted virtually to a civil war,” Poling recalled. “We hunted and fought in packs and the

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From the author’s Wright Cemetery. Used with permission.

outlaws waged open warfare on us. It was a fight to the death. Either law and order had come to stay or the outlaws would rule Oklahoma. We knew it and they knew it, and both sides fought accordingly.”

Poling had little to say about his own gunfighting, merely observing that it usually wasn’t necessary to shoot a man to arrest him.

This last remark explains why Poling was in no hurry to fire on Kickapoo Bill. Johnson goes on to comment that

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Poling “could sit on his horse and knock a squirrel out of a tree with a shot from his six shooter.”

“But I couldn’t shoot as well as Johnny Jones,” Polling said. (Jones was another Nix deputy and he and Poling usually traveled together). “Johnny could get more game than I could, and once I saw him pull down on a man fleeing on horseback through a grove of trees 250 yards away. The first shot killed the horse and the man gave up.

“Johnny met the fate encountered by so many of our crack-shot deputies. He was shot in the back and killed. That was the way with most of our men who could shoot fast and straight. None of their enemies dared shoot it out with them face to face.”

Though he had handed in his marshal’s star and gone back to his farm in Lone Wolf, four years later, at the outbreak of the Spanish American War in 1898, Poling volunteered.

Forty-three years of age at that time, he was almost too old for service, but he talked his way into the army and was issued the smallest uniform the quartermaster had. Even that was hardly a snug fit. [In his prime, Poling weighed 140 pounds. In 1898, after an illness, he was down to 130.]

His company was captained by Roy Hoffman, now Gen. Roy Hoffman, who lives in Oklahoma City. The top sergeant was Charles F. Barrett, now Gen. Charles F. Barrett, state adjutant. The company was composed of Oklahoma troops. It saw no fighting in Cuba.

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T. T. Johnson, who wrote the 1938 Daily Oklahoman article quoted here, may have been Lon Poling’s son-in-law but he surely was not a native of Chandler, or he would not have stated so bluntly that General Hoffman and his Oklahoma troops didn’t fight in Cuba. He would have found a way to toot Hoffman’s horn.

The article ends with a short view of Lon and his wife. “Now 83 years old, Lon lives with his wife, also a pioneer Oklahoman, in a comfortable cabin on the Spanish- American War veterans’ [colony] in the Kiamichi mountains south of Wilburton.” Earlier we were told that “Poling’s wife--and Eugene’s mother--is the former Hattie Deweese of Indiana. She is 61 years old and has been in Oklahoma since she was 13. Her family settled near Wellston and it was there that Poling met her.”

Her obituary in the Daily Oklahoman for December 1957 states that she was born in 1876 in Morgan County IN and came to Oklahoma when 10 years old with her parents, Capt. and Mrs. S. E. Dewees.

Her father, a veteran of the Civil war, was sent here by the U. S. army to the Kickapoo nation. As a young woman Mrs. Poling taught in the Quaker Indian mission at McCloud. In 1904 when her father founded Lone Wolf and became postmaster there, she served as his assistant postmaster. While living in Lone Wolf she was married to Alonzo Poling, a U. S. marshal.

According to the Kiowa County Review, the marriage took place in March 1931, though by this time the couple had been living together and rearing their children for over thirty years. Their original marriage must have been

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informal and not involving a formal registration. The 1900 census shows Hattie living with her family in Wellston, and since this year corresponds with Lon’s U. S. Marshal service in Chandler (seven miles east of Wellston), it was probably in that year that they met and married.

After Lon’s death, the Daily Oklahoman for December 1949, noting the donation of his personal papers and scrapbooks to the University of Oklahoma library, listed his three sons “whose fighting records compares well with his own.”

The oldest, Eugene, Oklahoma City, served with the “Mac-Paps” battalion of the International brigade in Spain. Wounded and captured, Eugene spent a year in Franco’s prison camps. He also served in the U. S. army during World War II. Carleton, also of Oklahoma City, served as a gunnery sergeant during the war. And Gordon, [of] McAlester, was at Pearl Harbor when the Japanese attacked Dec. 7, 1941.

Of these three, we will now be occupied with the first, Eugene Poling.

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Born Fighting, Part 2

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T. T. Johnson, the author of the 1938 Daily Oklahoman essay used extensively in the first part of this essay, starts his history of the fighting Poling family in medias res with the oldest son, Eugene V. “Debs” Poling (hereafter “Debs”) jumping from a Loyalist troop train at the sound of an air raid warning. After Debs has dived under the screening foliage of some orange trees, he is introduced as “Eugene Poling, 29 years old, formerly of Lone Wolf and Hobart [Oklahoma].” Later, writing to his parents of the incident, Debs states "Yes, here I am in a land of milk and honey, dodging fascist murderers, but they won't get me."

Johnson then raises the question “What would inspire a young American to forsake the safety of his own shores and hurl himself into a foreign conflict? Why should this young American become embittered and defiant toward ‘fascist murderers’ who are killing and being killed by communists?” That is a question that suggests “a long foreground somewhere, for such a start” (as Emerson wrote Whitman upon the publication of the first edition of Leaves of Grass in 1855), but in one of his letters Debs answered it with two words, "Political consciousness," where consciousness includes the meaning conscience. The question requires more than a two-word answer, and Johnson provides what he can of the foreground. As Lon Polling’s son-in-law, he is well positioned for the job.

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In Spain, Debs had a compañero named James “Doc” Hill who was from the town of Marlow. The thumb- size photo below reveals that the two men were standing side by side when the large photo of Debs (above) was taken. The photo commemorates their receiving citations of valor. A sergeant, Hill would serve with the XV International Brigade, MacKenzie-Papineau Battalion and be killed in action during the Ebro Offensive at Corbera in September 1938.

Eugene V. Debs Poling and James “Doc” Hill.

Johnson begins by quoting Jim Hill, who from Albacete wrote a letter to Lon which discusses Debs:

'He (Eugene) is a real man--a chip off the old block.' And if there's anything in heredity, Hill had something there. For Eugene comes from fighting stock, men of principle, who have farmed, fought and pioneered for centuries, men who have conquered savage frontiers.

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This of course is Johnson’s thesis as implied in his title “Bringing Up Fighters”: “Coming to New England [and then West Virginia] . . . the Poling family settled in this country before the American revolution. Their menfolk fought against England in that conflict . . . . Polings have been in every American war since then.”

Eugene V. “Debs” Poling was born in 1908 on his father’s farm in Lone Wolf, Kiowa County. The town was named for Chief Lone Wolf (1843–1923), a warrior chief of the Kiowa who fought to preserve his people's autonomy and way of life, and as such it seems an appropriate starting point for young Debs. The town itself was founded in 1901, but Lon’s homestead, approved in 1907, had to have been staked in 1900 at the latest.

Johnson continues the tale of Debs’s youth while keeping his eye on the military traditions of the family.

So Eugene comes by his taste for soldiering naturally. Yet he probably never would have become a soldier in the Spanish loyalist army had it not been for hard times and unrest in his own country. With thousands of other Oklahomans and millions of other Americans--many of them young like himself--he discovered what the pangs of depression could mean to human welfare and happiness. Thrown out of work by circumstances over which he had no personal control, he found it impossible to get another job. He became discontented and morose and finally decided to utilize his idle time in furthering his education. He could have gone on relief in Oklahoma, but he was too proud to accept governmental doles.

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The solution to Debs’s dilemma appeared in Mena, Arkansas, at Commonwealth College, which offered him an opportunity to support himself and earn his higher education. The college's founders, members of the Socialist Party of America, had named the school after the phrase "the cooperative commonwealth" which was used by many party members to describe their vision of a post-capitalist society. It was an outgrowth of Job Harriman's New Lano Cooperative Colony in Louisiana, founded in
1923. (Harriman ran with Eugene V. Debs as vice- presidential candidate in 1900. See image below.)

1900 Social Democratic Party’s presidential ticket

Commonwealth College was essentially oriented towards training organizers for the rapidly growing labor movement. Tensions within the cooperative community led to a split, and some of the founders moved

to Mena, Arkansas in December 1924, where the institution re-opened the next year.

After attending Commonwealth College, where he would have read Marx, Debs Poling joined the US Communist Party in 1935. It was in early 1937 (Griffin, 25

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Aug. 2016) that he adopted the nickname “Debs,” in honor of his namesake Eugene V. Debs, the five-time presidential candidate of the Socialist Party of America in 1900, 1904, 1908, 1912, and 1920. Through his presidential candidacies as well as his work with labor movements, Debs eventually became one of the best-known socialists living in the United States. Again one thinks of “the good gray poet”: with the first publication of Leaves of Grass in 1855, Walter Whitman the newspaper editor changed his name to Walt Whitman, announcing himself the poet of the American people.

Debs Poling would have had two reasons for joining the Party. The U. S. Communist party had always been the friend of the working class and oppressed minorities, and in the years of the Great Depression it attracted many left- leaning intellectuals in the U. S. to join the Party. (Famous cases are Edmund Wilson and Kenneth Burke.) The Communist Party USA was also the first political party in the United States to be racially integrated. The truth about Stalinism put an end to the old leftist honeymoon, but the disillusionment didn’t emerge until well after the Moscow Trials of 1936-1938, by which latter date Poling had already returned from Spain to the U.S.

It is a well known and --with the wisdom of hindsight--hard-to-forgive fact that during the Spanish Civil War, which was the first war aimed at stopping fascism and which led directly to World War II, the western powers stood aside with their hands folded in a neutrality pact, allowing fascist Germany and Italy to provide war materiel to the military rebellion while providing nothing to support the duly elected government of the loyalists. Given the prohibitions in the U.S. and Canada about supporting the loyalist cause in Spain, enlistments had to be clandestine, but even so there were thousands of volunteers from North

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America. These are known today under two common sobriquets, the International Brigades and the Abraham Lincoln Brigades.

According to records available at The Volunteer, the official website of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives (hereafter ALBA), Poling volunteered for Spain and in the Spring of 1937 sailed from Canada for Europe on June 16, 1937 and crossed into Spain on July 3, 1937. A 1983 New York Times article remarks about the ALB volunteers, “their passports were marked ‘'Not valid for travel to Spain,’” so they entered the country secretly. Most came by foot across the Pyrenees from France. Along with many other North American soldiers, Debs served with the XVth International Brigade's MacKenzie-Papineau Battalion. The Mac- Paps were a battalion of Canadians who fought as part of the XV International Brigade on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War in the late 1930s. Except for France, no other country had a greater proportion of its population volunteer in Spain as did Canada The XV International Brigade, made up also of volunteer battalions from the United States and Britain, was involved in
the Battle of Jarama, in which nine Canadians are known to have been killed (Wiki).

The Canadian connection here could be completely wrong. Debs’s good friend in Spain, Jim Hill from Marlow, wrote his mother a letter from Spain which was printed in the Marlow Review for 23 December 1937. There it is reported that he enlisted at Oklahoma City, “where an agent of the Spanish government was secretly signing up young Americans for service in the Spanish army. Their first destination was New York.” Poling could have well come by the same route.

The ALB (Brigada Abraham Lincoln), officially the XV International Brigade (XV Brigada Internacional),

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was a mixed brigade that fought for the Republic as a part of the International Brigades. The brigade mustered
at Albacete in Spain, in January 1937, comprising mainly English-speaking volunteers – arranged into the mostly British Saklatvala Battalion and the mostly North American Lincoln Battalion. It also included two non- English-speaking battalions, the Balkan Dimitrov Battalion and the Franco-Belgian Sixth February Battalion. It fought at Jarama, Brunete, Boadilla, Belchite, Fuentes de Ebro, Teruel and the Ebro River (Volunteer).

During the unit's first action at Fuentes de Ebro Poling was wounded in the thigh by a piece of shrapnel. After recovering he rejoined the battalion and during the Retreats he was captured. After a year in San Pedro de Cardenas prison in Burgos, he was released on April 22, 1938. He returned to the U.S. May 6, 1938. Poling divorced his wife in 1942 and in 1944 he joined the US Army. He served with the 4th Army as an information and education officer at Fort Hood TX before being released from service in Dec 1945.

Poling later married Juanita Louise Folson. The ALBA’s Volunteer carried a further article about him in 2016:

A farmer and agronomist who believed in the natural healing powers of plants, Poling would remain close to the land the rest of his life, settling for several decades in Dougherty, Oklahoma, where he would launch repeated unsuccessful campaigns for a U.S. House seat from the 1950’s to 1990 as a Democrat.

When I went to Dougherty to talk to people who knew Mr. Poling, they said he was nice but a bit odd, chewing on plants and talking of their

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healing powers, all while keeping baby-smooth skin on his face well into his 70s and 80s. And then the truth about his communist past ultimately came out. (Griffin)

Debs died Feb 29, 2000 in Clinton, Custer OK, and was buried in Lawnview Cemetery, Cordell, Washita County, but in fact he is remembered by several memorials, only two of them mortuary. Two of the memorials are testimonies which long predate Debs’s demise, so they take precedence. They are in fact contemporary, 1937 letters home written by comrades in Spain. They appeared in The Marlow Review, the local paper from Marlow Oklahoma.

The first was written by Debs’s compañero Jim Hill, who came from Marlow, where his father had been a policeman killed in the line of duty in 1931. The letter is from the December 23, 1937, issue of the newspaper:

Dearest Mother:
Just a few lines to let you hear from me. I

am OK, doing fine. I am first sergeant in a machine gun company in the people's army in Spain. We are fighting for a chance to live as people should live and not be pushed around by the capitalists and Fascists of the world . . . One of the boys here got a letter from his mother saying how proud she was to hear from her boy and proud of the fact that he was fighting for the working class of people in Spain-- people that never had a decent living, people that rose to defend their rights.

So I hope you can understand as that mother did and also be proud that I have chosen to fight for the common working class as we are called by the white collar and big shots . . . .

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Your son,
No. 254 Plaza del Altazar James C. Hill
Albacete, Spain

The second letter was written by another friend of Jim’s fighting in Spain, a man named Morris Brier:

Dear Mrs. Hill
I wish to take this opportunity of telling

what respect we hold for your son, J. C. (Jim). [Brier then lists the qualities that make Jim a fine soldier]. Last, and most important is that, possessing these personal qualities so much admired by his comrades, he has the ability, guts, and sincerity that once he saw the necessity--and necessity there was and is--of coming to Spain to fight Fascism, he came at once and is still continuing to do his bit.

I know it is hard for a mother to think of the danger her son is in while fighting for his beliefs. But when we consider that this fight is to save the lives of millions of people . . . [ellipses in the original, here and below] when one reads of bombs dropped on schools, hospitals, homes of workers-- thousands of lives snuffed out (and Mrs. Hill, I, who have been here for 10 months have seen all this and more) it is then with a feeling of pride that one can say "My son is fighting for the vast majority of the people against Hitler and Mussolini."

I do not want to write a long political tract in this, my first letter to you, the mother of my friend J. C., but I must jot down that this battle in Spain is not solely for the help of the Spanish people, but instead a fight for our friends and family in the

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United States. A victory for Hitler and Mussolini in Spain would encourage and strengthen Fascists in America . . . .

It is for this reason that J. C. and myself and approximately 3,000 other American boys--some single, some married, many fathers--have come to Spain as Americans who love Democracy . . .

I could give you many reasons for we Americans being here in Spain but I would like to close by saying that nothing we can do can even approximate what the Spanish people have sacrificed for us workers in America. They are using their blood as history's ink in writing a lesson for all workers to study . . . .

I wish you would write to me regularly and I will to you.

Your friend
Morris Brier
No. 254 Plaza del Altazar Albacete, Spain

Earlier we noticed the reporter Johnson quoting Debs in response to the question of what the men were fighting for. “Political consciousness" was Debs’s answer, to which I commented that the question required more than a two-word answer. Morris Brier seems to be a man better educated than his two friends--at least, more eloquent--and he provides the kind of coherent answer which the reader might be hoping for. Now we know what Debs Poling, Jim Hill, Morris Brier, and most of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade thought they were fighting for.

The next two memorials to be considered are the kind of thing we usually mean when we speak of

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memorials: mortuary monuments commonly made of marble or similar durable stone.

The first, mentioned above, is in Cordell, a flat metal military marker bearing his name and dates with the legend “World War II,” while the second one is in Oklahoma City’s Memorial Park Cemetery and bears a more nearly complete and more informative legend.

Oklahoma City, Memorial Park

But there is an additional memorial--an on-going memorial, one would like to think--represented by Woody Guthrie’s daughter Nora Guthrie performing “Jarama Valley” at the San Francisco Bay Area Gala. Ms. Guthrie began her career as a modern dancer, founded the Woody Guthrie Archives in 1992, and is president of Woody Guthrie Publications. Guthrie himself, born 1912 in Okmulgee Oklahoma, came to maturity with the Socialist Party of Oklahoma (Pounds, “Clematis”) Woody recorded “Jarama Valley” in 1952 as one of a series of songs against Franco, an act of courage considering that Franco would continue living until 1975 and his fascist government had friends in Washington D. C. The tune to which he set his lyrics is Oklahoma’s state song (which he may have written), “Red River Valley.” At some

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Nora Guthrie at Brooklyn book Festival 2012

point in these years he painted a legend on his guitar: “This machine kills fascists.”

During the period when the FBI was smearing Guthrie with insinuations that he was a pinko, someone asked him if he was a communist. Guthrie famously replied, “No, I ain’t a communist necessarily but I been in the red all my life.”

Guthrie and his fascist killing machine, date unknown

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***** ALBA on the Education Battlefront

Since the issue of fascism versus freedom raised in the second half of this essay is still with us, it would be inappropriate for me to end this essay in a staid academic fashion. Rather, I think that the reader should have a personal statement from the author. First, however, let me note that the Abraham Lincoln Brigade also is still with us and now turns its highly motivated attention the present- day battlefront of education The current (Dec. 2022) number of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archive’s Volunteer is headlined “Letter from ALBA: The Education Battle Front.”

“There are now states in this country where this document cannot be taught,” a teacher remarked pointedly at one of the two workshops we taught in November.

We were discussing a letter sent from civil- war Spain by Canute Frankson, a Jamaican-born mechanic who in April 1937 left his home in Detroit to join the fight against fascism. “I’m sure that by this time you are still waiting for a detailed explanation of what has this international struggle to do with my being here,” he writes to a friend. “All we have to do is think of the lynching of our people,” he points out: “We can but look back on the pages of American history stained with the blood” of African Americans, “stink[ing] with the burning bodies of our people hanging from trees.” “Here, where we’re engaged in one of the most bitter struggles of human history, there is no color line,” he adds.

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Our teacher was right. Frankson’s letter, which suggests that this country’s past is “stained with blood,” would be controversial in the 36 states that have restricted education on “divisive concepts” such as racism in U.S. history in high schools—and, in some cases, college—or are in the process of doing so.

We always knew education was important. But we honestly never imagined that it would be the battlefront it has become, as state legislatures are censoring—and censuring—teachers while local school boards are banning books by the dozens. At the same time, we hear politicians discredit the student loan forgiveness program by ridiculing college students as lazy moochers. What happened to the conservatives who once championed college as a road to social advancement? Or who, for that matter, believed that democracy stands and falls by the people’s right to vote and for their vote be counted?

Education is at the center of all we do.

My response to this letter touches on two points, Spain and the U.S.A. It is greatly to Spain’s credit that, whatever its internal turmoils--and they have been many over the centuries--they were not and are not primarily racially motivated. Spain remains a country of diverse linguistic-cultural regions however these are enumerated. It has been described as a de facto pluri-national state.Its identity accrues from an overlap of different territorial and ethnolinguistic identities rather than from a sole Spanish identity. In some cases some of the territorial identities may conflict with the dominant Spanish culture. Distinct traditional identities within Spain include

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the Basques, Catalans, Galicians, Andalusians and Valenci- ans, and today the country is divided into seventeen autonomous communities, all of which may claim a distinct local identity. Native Spaniards today make up 88% of the total population, with the other 12% originating mainly in Latin America (39%), North Africa (16%), Eastern Europe (15%) and Sub-Saharan Africa (4%) (https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spain). Like the octopus which has nine brains, one for each of its nine tentacles, this arrangement evidences a superior intelligence. It is the cultural diversity of the people of Spain that makes it such a welcoming country for foreigners to visit or sojourn, a warmth from which I personally benefited in ways too many to enumerate during the year I spent in Madrid (1977-1978) and subsequent returns. I have recounted the Civil War battlefields part of this experience in the opening of the present essay.

The U.S.A., poor in comparison, is a pluralistic culture crucified on the cross of a dominant white monoculture. As a historian, I see this mostly clearly today in the field of education. The crucifixion is bloodiest and most glaring in the case of black Americans. In 1953-1955, the Supreme Court outlawed segregation in the public schools, but an unforeseen and today seldom discussed consequence of this mandate was the wholesale loss of African-American teachers and administrators which followed it. Leaders of the white schools didn’t want black colleagues, since integration applied only to the students, not to the faculty and administration. Under desegregation, graduate schools across the nation stopped producing black teachers. The result today is that school boards feel the pressure to hire black teachers in proportion to the black students, but there aren’t enough teachers available. The better graduate students have gone into other, more

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profitable lines of work. I tell this story in my recent book,

Desegregation and the Fate of Black Teachers in Oklahoma

(2022). I speak only of Oklahoma, the state where Woody Guthrie and I got started, but the last chapter, called “The Demand for Diversity” applies to teacher and administrative employment problems across the nation. Or so I believe.

Aoyama Gakuin University Tokyo, Japan
26 December 2022

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Print

Sources

Nix, Edward Dumas. Oklahombres, Particularly the Wilder Ones. As Told to Gordon Hines. No place of publication or publisher, 1929.

Pounds, Wayne. Desegregation and the Fate of Black Teachers in Oklahoma. Independently published, July 2022.

_____. Wright Cemetery: The Oldest in Chandler Oklahoma. Independently published. Printed Middletown DE, 2020.

Shirley, Glenn. West of Hell’s Fringe: Crime, Criminals, and the Federal Peace Officer in Oklahoma Territory, 1889-1907. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1978.

Webb, James. Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America. New York: Broadway Books, 2004.

Online

Many of my online sources are the local newspapers archived at newspapers.com and gateway.okhist.org. In addition are the following (ALBA = The Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives).
Brooks, Chris. “Commoners in Spain: Students,

Faculty, and Alumni of Commonwealth College in the Spanish Civil War.” https:// albavolunteer.org/. Consulted Dec. 2022.

Commonwealth College. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Commonwealth_College_(Arkansas). Accessed Dec. 2022.

Darnton, Dina. “Lincoln Veterans Muster on Battlefields of Spain.” New York Times, 24 Oct.

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1983. Consulted Dec. 2020.
Faber, Sabastiaan, and Peter N. Carol. “Letter from

ALBA: The Education Battle Front.” https:// albavolunteer.org/2022/11/letter-from-alba-the- education-battlefront/. Accessed Dec. 2022.

Faculty, and Alumni of Commonwealth College in the Spanish Civil War. https://albavolunteer.org/ 2018/11/commoners-in-spain-students-faculty- and-alumni/. Consulted Dec. 2022.

Griffin, Andrew. “From Oklahoma to Spain: Fighter for Justice.” The Volunteer, 25 Aug. 2016. https:// albavolunteer.org/2016/08/from-oklahoma-to- spain-fighter-for-justice. Accessed Dec. 2022.

Guthrie, Arlo, and Pete Seeger, “Jarama Valley.” From the album Spain in My Heart. https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=qI9XjWskM0w. Consulted Dec. 2022.

Johnson, T. T., “Bringing Up Fighters,” Daily Oklahoman, 6 Mar 1938, p. 71.

“San Francisco Bay Area Gala Inspires.” ALBA , 18 November 1022. https://albavolunteer.org/. Accessed Dec. 2020.

The Volunteer: Founded by the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Latest issue, Nov. 18, 2022. https://albavolunteer.org/. Consulted Dec. 2022. 

Sources

Print Sources

Nix, Edward Dumas. Oklahombres, Particularly the Wilder Ones. As Told to Gordon Hines. No place of publication or  publisher, 1929. 

Pounds, Wayne. Wright Cemetery: The Oldest in Chandler Oklahoma. Independently published. Printed Middletown DE, 2020. 

Shirley, Glenn. West of Hell’s Fringe: Crime, Criminals, and the Federal Peace Officer in Oklahoma Territory, 1889-1907. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1978. 

Webb, James. Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America. New York: Broadway Books, 2004. 

Online Sources

Most of my online sources are the local newspapers archived at newspapers.com and gateway.okhist.org. 

Commonwealth College. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonwealth_College_(Arkansas). Accessed Dec. 2022.

Faculty, and Alumni of Commonwealth College in the Spanish Civil War. https://albavolunteer.org/2018/11/commoners-in-spain-students-faculty-and-alumni/. Consulted Dec. 2022.

Johnson, T. T., “Bringing Up Fighters,” Daily Oklahoman, 6 Mar 1938, p. 71.

The Volunteer: Founded by the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Latest issue, Nov. 18, 2022. https://albavolunteer.org/. Consulted Dec. 2022.