Active With The Activists: Anti-Fascist Plaque Re-Dedicated After 24 Years In NH State House Vault

By ARNIE ALPERT, Active with the Activists, InDepth NH

Arnie Alpert spent decades as a community organizer/educator in NH movements for social justice and peace. Officially retired since 2020, he keeps his hands (and feet) in the activist world while writing about past and present social movements.

ALBANY, NH — After being locked in a State House vault for 24 years, a plaque honoring the New Hampshire soldiers who fought against fascism during the Spanish Civil War was put on display at the World Fellowship Center in Albany, New Hampshire at a Sunday afternoon ceremony.

The fighters were members of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, a force of nearly 3000 volunteers who saw the writing on the wall when forces led by Francisco Franco and backed by Nazi Germany and fascist Italy went to war against the Spanish Republic in 1936. In Spain, they joined a larger group of some 35,000 volunteers from 50 countries known as the International Brigades. Thousands, including 800 Americans, died in the losing fight against fascism. As they understood, the war in Spain heralded worse things to come in Europe. Of the Americans who survived Spain, many went on to join the U.S. military in the war that followed.

On the initiative of Burt Cohen, then a State Senator from Portsmouth, the Joint Legislative Historical Committee voted in 2000 to commission and display at the State House a plaque honoring the members of the Brigade who hailed from New Hampshire.

But there was a problem: The Lincoln Brigade members were leftists, many of them Communists. The International Brigades were organized largely by the Communist Party. Since the United States was at the time neutral in the Spanish conflict, the Brigade members were breaking the law by going to Spain and taking up arms against Franco’s fascist army. And the plaque Cohen commissioned to honor the New Hampshire veterans featured a large, raised fist.

In a February 7, 2001, news release announcing the plaque’s first dedication ceremony planned for the following week, Cohen said, “The State House is a museum of sorts. Schoolchildren and other people come through this building regularly. We have so much here that can inspire someone’s imagination. Almost 3000 Americans were part of an international volunteer force fighting against fascism in Spain before World War II, and I hope this plaque will result in people learning more about it.”

In a sense, Cohen’s hopes were realized. The announcement that the State House would feature a plaque honoring a group connected to communism caught the attention of the Manchester Union Leader, then the state’s dominant news outlet. By the time of the February 12 unveiling, right-wing groups and individuals were there in the Hall of Flags alongside Lincoln Brigade supporters. The plaque hung for only an hour before being whisked away and secreted in the vault in Room 103.

The following week, the legislature’s Joint Facilities Committee held two days of hearings about the plaque flack. Supporters, including Vietnam veterans and scholars testified about the Lincoln Brigade’s historical significance and the importance of its role in ringing alarm bells about the danger of European fascism. Opponents, also including military veterans, denounced Cohen, the plaque, the Lincoln Brigade, and anything else associated with communism. One State Representative, a Korean war veteran, was quoted saying, “Cohen and his plaque should be flown over Russia and dropped from 20,000 feet without a parachute.”

Above, The plaque honoring NH veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. ARNIE ALPERT photo

At the hearing’s conclusion, committee members agreed that the plaque would not be displayed, but that a committee, including Cohen, would form to consider a more acceptable design for a memorial to the Brigade veterans.

The new committee never met and the controversial plaque remained locked in the vault until earlier this year, when it was declared to be “surplus property.” At that point, it was acquired by Senator David Watters and transferred via Cohen to the World Fellowship Center, a nonprofit summer resort long associated with left-wing causes.

The Center had its own run-in with the state government in the 1950s when Attorney General Louis Wyman demanded the organization’s director, Dr. Willard Uphaus, turn over the Center’s guest list to his inquiry into “subversive activities.” When Uphaus refused, he spent a year in the Merrimack County Jail on a contempt charge.

“The New Hampshire State House’s loss is World Fellowship’s gain, because now we can carry forward the history that needs to be known by everyone in New Hampshire and everyone in this country as we face the specter of rising fascism,” said Megan Chapman, the Center’s co-director, prior to the plaque’s second unveiling on Sunday.

For the seventy or so people present, Chapman didn’t need to go into details like masked police abducting people off the streets and taking them away in unmarked vehicles; a prison camp erected in an alligator-infested swamp; college students disappeared off the streets due to their political beliefs; prisoners flown to a foreign prison known as a torture center; and orders that appear to bar educational institutions from teaching about topics like slavery and genocide.

Speaking at World Fellowship, with the plaque covered by a Spanish flag, Burt Cohen said the plaque’s new life was “a long time coming.”

Later disparaged as “premature anti-fascists,” the volunteers who risked their lives in Spain “were not premature anything,” he said. “They were visionaries who could see what was coming, and as many said, as they geared up for their self-sacrificing voyage, somebody had to do something. Today, as fascism has indeed come to our country, they are role models, courageous heroes fighting the good fight.”

The program also featured a reading by Dan and Molly Watt from a play they wrote based on the letters between Dan’s parents, Ruth Watt, who was living in New York, and George Watt, who served with the Lincoln Brigade in Spain. Dan had been among those who testified before the Facilities Committee back in 2001, when he and Molly were living in Antrim.

“I know that for my father and for the men—there were some women, but mostly men—who fought with him in Spain, this was the greatest moment of their lives,” Watt told the committee. “They felt they had made a commitment to freedom. They felt that they had put their lives on the line for freedom. Many of their colleagues had died there, as you’ve already heard. Most of them who survived, or many of them who survived and came back to the United States, served in World War II, as did my father. They were sincerely fighting against fascism. My father, being Jewish, was fighting particularly against Hitler. As he said many times, we had to try to stop Hitler.”

Watt said his father later came to criticize the crimes committed by the Soviet Union, but he never apologized for fighting fascism in Spain.

Mark Wallem, executive director of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives in New York, said his organization has been following the story of the New Hampshire plaque all along. “It’s enormously meaningful to us to have these vets memorialized,” he said. According to Wallem, New Hampshire is now the fourth state, after California, Wisconsin, and Washington, to have a memorial honoring Lincoln Brigade members.

“I wish that we were just a historical organization,” Wallem said during the dedication ceremony. “However, we are an organization that is engaged actively in the fight against the rise of fascism.” If young adults were willing to take the ultimate risk back then, he asked, “What are we willing to do?”

Other speakers included Sanbornton resident Chris Hobby, whose late husband, Ken Reichstein, had been one of the people who testified before the Facilities Committee about the Lincoln Brigade’s importance. Dan Watt said it was Reichstein who encouraged him to delve into the letters his parents had exchanged decades earlier.

When the speeches were over, Cohen and the Watts pulled the Spanish flag off the plaque, revealing it in its new home, out of the closet at last. There, on a newly constructed kiosk, it will be on public display along with the names of 12 New Hampshire veterans, background on the Spanish Civil War, and a narrative about the commemorative plaque.

The plaque, which hadn’t been seen in public for two and a half decades, still features the large fist in the center and the words, “Voluntarios Internacionales de Libertad,” Spanish for International Volunteers for Freedom. In smaller letters, the plaque reads, “You are history, You are legend. 40,000 international volunteers came to the defense of the Spanish Republic when Franco, Hitler, and Mussolini attacked. Among them were 3000 young Americans, the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, and nearly half of them lie buried in Spanish soil. Their dedication to freedom and democracy is an inspiration to future generations. Several volunteers from New Hampshire joined that historic struggle.”

“Viva la Brigada Lincoln!” it says underneath.

Megan Chapman said the plaque really belongs in the Hall of Flags, but “until it goes back up in the State House, it will be here.” As Rep. Luz Bay pointed out, though, “The political situation right now is such that it's probably not going to happen anytime soon.”

Ben Marriner Pratt drove over from Swanville, Maine, for the occasion. Pratt works as a firefighter paramedic but has devoted hours of his free time to researching people from northern New England and Quebec who joined the international brigades in Spain. “It’s important to me that we remember these cats,” he told me, “that we remember these guys, and we don't forget their names, and we put their names up on plaques, and we share this history with people.”

Based on Pratt’s research, two additional New Hampshire names may be added to the memorial.

“They stood up when their government told them they weren't allowed to,” he said. “They knew what was right. They saw what was going on, and they acted on it.” We need to do the same, he said, in our own time. “Stand up for what's right,” he said, “Call out what needs to be called out, which is overt fascism.”

This article first appeared on InDepthNH.org and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.