Walter Chester Lewis fought with the International Brigades volunteers in the Spanish Civil War. Beyond his signature on the fan, little information is available about him.
Fragments
Memorial Page in Findagrave.com
Lewis was born on August 17, 1917 in Wellsville, Ohio. In his International Brigade personnel file, he listed his occupation as steel worker. He probably also worked as cook. While in Spain, where he arrived in November of 1937, he fought in the battles of Teruel and Levante. In World War II, he served in the Air Force as a Technical Sergeant. His first wife was Gladys Mary, his second wife of 46 years Pauline. He was a member of the Iron & Steel Society as well as the Free and Accepted Masons of California. Lewis died at age 89 on September 6, 2006 and is buried in Riverside, California.
Like other signatories of the fan, Lewis was committed to fighting against Franco’s Nationalists in Spain. The surviving sparse documentation provides only few details about his motivations to go to Spain, his experiences in Spain, and his life after returning to the United States. He answered “yes” and “very good” when asked about the politics of the Popular Front and the work of International Brigades. Discrepancies about his name complicate the search: he signed the fan as Ted Lewis, but some documents list him as Walter Charles Lewis or Walter Chester Lewis, Jr. Moreover, Ted Lewis was also the name used by another American volunteer, the science fiction author Theodore Rose Cogswell.
Archival Sources
ALBA Photographic Collection (Tamiment Library, New York University).
The available information on Lewis has been retrieved from the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives, the International Brigades personnel files in Moscow, and genealogical databases like Ancestry.com that provide access to a variety of civil and military records. Sometimes, like in Lewis’ case, archival sources only provide a glimpse at a person’s life. Other sources, like memoirs and scholarly work, can offer a broader picture. Archival records, however, are instrumental for researching and reconstructing the stories of the American volunteers who signed the fan.
First, there are the holdings of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives (ALBA) at New York University. They have two photographs of Ted Lewis with other volunteers aboard the SS President Harding on their trip home from Spain. In one of them, Lewis is with Frank Madigan, another signatory of the fan.
The ALBA website also includes a database with biographical information and photographs of the American volunteers in the International Brigades, including almost all the American volunteers who signed the fan.
Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History
Of equal value are the archives of the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History (RGASPI) in Moscow. Records for the International Brigades are in the “Comintern Archives, Fond 545.” Documents in “Opis 6” include the personal files, with information about the volunteers’ political affiliation, their self-reported biographical notes, and their experience in Spain. Among them are the Biografía de Militantes and Personnel and Repatriation files. The Biografía de Militantes forms include biographical information of International Brigades volunteers who joined the Spanish Communist Party. The Personnel and Repatriation Files, administered by the International Brigades and the Spanish Communist Party, contain detailed information about the activities of the volunteers in Spain as they waited to return to their home countries in late 1938.
Other important sources include databases like Ancestry.com, which provides digital records of personal information, including census records, birth, marriage, and death certificates, draft cards, and ship manifests. The website Newspapers.com, a resource for digitalized copies of local newspapers spanning several decades, is helpful for contemporaneous reports on labor strikes and other political events that involved American volunteers. These newspapers occasionally include obituaries. Finally, findagrave.com, assists in locating burial sites. This source sometimes provides details about American volunteers that do not completely match other archival records.
Research Challenges
in Ancestry.com
Due to the International Brigades’ political ties to communism and the illegality of Americans fighting in Spain, the archival records can be fragmented and misleading. Many volunteers used aliases that make it difficult to connect them to their legal names. Typically, the men who joined the International Brigades were young and had not started their own families, which can make it difficult to determine when and how they moved from place to place. War conditions themselves impacted how records were kept and preserved. Finally, the history of the Spanish Civil War remains a contested and unresolved legacy in Spain today, affecting the writing of history and open conversations about the role of the international volunteers.
What’s Left
Though Walter (Ted) Lewis’ name is largely absent in the historical record, he is still part of the history of the Spanish Civil War. The lack of detailed records does not condemn him to non-existence. Lewis was as much part of the fight for the democratically elected Spanish Republic as the other signatories of the fan and the thousands of International Brigades volunteers who fought, and those who lost their lives, in Spain.
FURTHER READINGS
Adam Hochschild. 2016. “The Taste of Tears.” In Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939. By A. Hochschild. Boston: Mariner Books. Pp. 335-347.
Jorge Marco and Peter Anderson. 2016. “Legitimacy by Proxy: Searching for a Usable Past through the International Brigades in Spain’s Post-Franco Democracy, 1975-2015.” Journal of Modern European History 14/3, 391-410.
Giles Tremlett. 2020. “Introduction.” In The International Brigades: Fascism, Freedom and the Spanish Civil War. By G. Tremlett. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. Pp. 1-10.