ALBA Visit #9 and “The Good Fight”

Hearing one of the directors of The Good Fight mention that the film’s first cut was about six hours long was no surprise to me after having seen the enormity of material in the box that the directors’ contributed to ALBA. There were probably thousands of pages of interview transcripts, which constituted the bulk of the files, and hundreds of pages of other research.

The interviews comprised an amazing amount of stories about, and insights into, the lives of various volunteers. In a certain sense it is a shame that more of these stories could not be incorporated in the film, but as a filmgoer I do understand and appreciate the editing. I tried to sift through some of these interview transcripts to identify content aligned with my final project ideas, and came away with some useful material. One of my next blog entries will more deeply analyze my findings, but for the time being I will just summarize my research, because there were many documents that I need more time to read, analyze, quote from, and cite, documents that are in the process of being photocopied for me by Tamiment Library (another valuable library service of which any of my classmates without camera or scanner might like to take advantage).

I noticed a couple of questions relevant to my project that were well addressed, albeit anecdotally, by the interviews with veterans: How did those associated with the cause of the Republic become politicized (politically socialized)? Where and how did they get their information? The anecdotal evidence suggests that most of these volunteers and their social networks were approximately working class, were directly affected by the Depression, and thus became politically liberal. It also seems that by-and-large these people became active in political scenes that aligned with their interests, be they socialist, communist, anarchist, civil rights oriented, or just generally liberal, and that these groups became bases of political knowledge, and disseminated and filtered news and new political information. One of the most influential examples was the Communists’ publication of the Daily Worker, which I will soon begin reading en masse, along with pamphlets, etc., to begin answering my questions about particular political perceptions and actions. However, as far as I know there are no published statistics to underwrite these ideas, or to comment on the extent to which people were active in any given group or were targeted by activism (please let me know if you are aware of any), and I doubt I could put together any such statistics given my time constraints. So it seems I will be doing, in large part, what many other historians did, namely, aggregating anecdotal evidence to paint a big picture as reliably as I can. I suppose in a field of inquiry like this, constructing a coherent and compelling narrative out of potentially misleading bits and pieces is a somewhat inevitable occupational hazard.