I am still not sure what I want to research or even in which direction my research is going. However, I am interested in the questions of posed in my last post concerning the societal forces that led to New Yorkers to volunteer to fight in Spain. Today, I searched through the online ALBA archives and found an extensive oral history collection of interviews with veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade created by the journalist and scholar John Gerassi in 1980. Gerassi was the son of a Republican General and after the war, the his family emigrated to New York City, where Gerassi attended Columbia University.

The interviews are a few hours long and therefore, I chose to focus primarily on Bill Bailey's interview. I have already read his letters to Marjorie Polon and find him to be a fascinating character. When I saw his name in the list of interviews, I was extremely excited. I hoped to get a better sense of his personality by listening to him speak. I also hoped to learn his own story and identify any forces that led him to join the Abraham Lincoln Brigadge.

The first thing I noticed when the tape began rolling was Bailey's thick New York accent. This combined with terrible grammar made him sound very uneducated. I could somewhat tell that he was uneducated from the many spelling mistakes in his letters. Nevertheless, it was still odd to match a voice to the words of a man I had already constructed in my imagination. Bill Bailey was definitely different from what I had imagined. I could feel his presence with a better sense of reality than I had by reading his letters. I think that I might have romanticized Bill Bailey slightly when I read his letters. Listening to the audio tapes was a great way to sharpen my image of Bill Bailey, although it by no means makes his character or history entirely clear.

In my time at the library, I managed to listen to only one and a half of the five tapes of Bill Bailey's interview. In the first tape, he describes his parents and siblings. His father was English and his mother was Irish. Bill was born in Jersey City in 1910. He was the second youngest child. Seven of his siblings died before the age of one. The remaining six children consisted of three boys and three girls. Bill tells us about his oldest brother, who joined the navy, in part because "they gave him three meals a day." Similarly, Bill thinks the only reason his father went to political meetings was because politicians "bought you left and right." The families poverty is emphasized even more by the story of Bill's younger brother, who stole milk and bread from stores and in this way "kept the family going for quite some time." Bill recalls bitterly that his brother was eventually caught, arrested, and put into juvenile reform school from the age of 14 to the age of 20. When his brother got out of this institution, he was completely illiterate.

Bill himself was school only through the fifth grade. Then, his mother took him out of school to work for the family. He remembers his first job at the boxing factory, which he hated, and then the job at the waterfront. He remembered that out of the 21-or-so dollars that he earned each month, his mother would allow him to keep only 52 cents. Bill bitterly laughed at this and said "man, that was hard to take!" At this job on the waterfront, Bill acquired an interest in sailing and built his own boat.

In the next chapter of Bill Bailey's life, he travels around the United States, recalling many struggles caused by poverty that continued to build up his strong left political polarization and lead to his volunteerism in Spain.

For example, as a stowaway on a ship to Florida, Bailey was arrested and sent to jail for thirty days. He remembers how unfair the entire situation was and how difficult prison was, describing the claustrophobic bunk beds, the crummy food, and the hard labor. Once he got out of jail, he took a box car to San Francisco, where he found it to be "just as bad" as New York. There was just as much unemployment, poverty, and suffering. On a trip in to London, Bill recalls the sad story of an Indian man who was not allowed to travel back to Indian to see his dying mother because of his lack of identification. Bill says he wrote about this story in a leftist magazine when he got back to the states.

It is clear that there were many forces and experiences in Bill Bailey's early life that shaped his personality and developed his Leftist political ideology- particularly poverty during the Great Depression. I think that the relationships that Bill Bailey developed as he grew up with both his family and his friends were extremely important to his political development because their suffering evoked a human compassion stronger than any selfish sufferings could evoke. Once again, the community becomes most important to the development of personal and political ideologies. I hope to learn even more about these forces from listening to the rest of the tapes.