Carl Slater was one of the oldest American volunteers of the International Brigades who signed our fan—in his late thirties by the time he arrived in Spain. His story tells us about personal and political struggles before, during, and after the Spanish Civil War.
Illegal Recruitment and World War I
Struggle appears to be a key theme in Carl Slater’s life, beginning with his birth. His World War II registration card listed his birthday as June 2, 1901; his gravestone marked it as June 1, 1901; in an oral history interview, he said 1900; and the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives recorded it as June 2, 1899.
Slater’s childhood was not easy. In an interview in 1980 he stated that he was an only child, and that his family had “lost track” of his mother after she left for nursing school and never returned. In 1915, his grandparents, who had been raising him, died. Slater and his father then moved in with his aunt and uncle, Finnish immigrants living in northern Minnesota. As Carl’s new guardians, they enrolled him in their local one-room school. Two years later, in 1918, Slater moved to Minneapolis. He had planned to go to school there but instead he walked into a British recruiting office. Britain at the time looked for reinforcements for their troops on the Western front during World War I. At age seventeen, Slater enlisted with the British infantry in Minneapolis. Given his age and American citizenship, this was not quite legal.
Wikimedia (Minnesota Historical Society).
In an interview, Slater later recounted that he arrived in Britain in 1918, trained with the infantry in North Wales, and was sent to the Western front. He noted that the British military planned to send him to Constantinople—today Istanbul in Turkey. British, French, Italian, and Greek forces occupied the former Ottoman territory that had sided with Germany in the war. Illness prevented Slater from going to Constantinople, but he was sent to Ireland in 1919, where Irish nationalists tried to rid themselves of British rule. During the Irish War of Independence Slater was a guard at police barracks on the side of the British—but only for six months. His family had reported him and the War Department tracked him down and shipped him back to the United States in 1919.
Workers’ Rights and Communist Ties
Back home, Slater had a hard time finding steady employment due to the Great Depression. He held temporary jobs throughout the Midwest in the metal, gas, and lumber industries. During this time, he became interested in workers’ rights and communist ideology. He joined the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) and read its paper, The Daily Worker. He was also involved with the Workers Alliance and the Farmer Labor Progressive Federation addressing working class issues, such as low wages, strikes, and exploitation. Slater’s politics and earlier war experiences in Europe must have motivated him to follow events in Spain. In his interview, he recalled that “being able to get a gun and shoot back” at fascism played a large role in his decision to go to Spain.
When Slater arrived in New York to be shipped to Spain, he saw how a Black American man in the group was refused entry to the YMCA where they were going to stay. Slater and the others then decided to join the Black volunteer in the “Jim Crow YMCA.” This personal act of solidarity mirrored the American Brigadistas’ general opposition to racial segregation.
Struggles in Spain
Slater sailed from New York to France on the President Roosevelt in February 1937. Crossing from France into Spain proved difficult because France had closed the border. Slater and his group were sent to Narbonne in southern France, where they waited until they could cross the Pyrenees mountains with the help of a guide. He arrived in Spain in March 1937.
(Marx Memorial Library)
Once in Spain, Slater became a chauffeur in the French 14th Brigade, like Bali Kilas, another signatory of the fan. Because of his difficulties with the language, he was later sent to Albacete, the International Brigades’ headquarters. Slater expressed concerns with the working conditions in the transportation service. Drinking water was scarce. He complained that even at Albacete there was just enough water to fill his personal jug. He also worried about the shortage of gas when transporting local Spanish women working in Albacete to and from their local villages. Local woman and international women volunteers served during the war as nurses, chauffeurs, ambulance drivers, and, on a few occasions, among the fighting troops.
Chicago Tribune, 27 January 1939.
Slater eventually left the transportation service to join the 35th Battery, 4th Artillery Group made up of American, Canadian, and British volunteers. Later he joined the anti-tank battery of the 129th Brigade. He fought at the battle of Teruel and in the Levante Offensive. In the fall of 1938, when Spanish Prime Minister Juan Negrín announced that the International Brigades had to leave Spain, volunteers started the difficult journey back to their home countries. Many volunteers, Slater and Joseph Yonules (another signatory of the fan) among them, survived the bombing of Barcelona by Franco’s forces and eventually found shelter in France at the end of January. Slater arrived in the United States in February of 1939 aboard the President Harding. A year later, he enlisted in the U.S. Army. He fought in World War II until he was discharged in 1944.
Those Who Protest Together, Stay Together
Slater married Agnes Cecelia Jessen. Born in 1908 in Wisconsin, Jessen was an artist and had worked for the Works Project Administration in the 1930s. She was also active in the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), an organization founded in 1915 that united women from different political, racial, and religious backgrounds to oppose war.
Credit: Waukesha Daily Freeman, 16 August 1975
In the 1960s and 1970s, Agnes and Carl were part of a small local group in Milwaukee called the Waukesha County Citizens for Peace in Vietnam. In a 1966 letter to the editor of her local newspaper, Agnes Slater voiced her opposition to the U.S. military’s use of napalm against Vietnamese civilians and argued that economic interests in Vietnam’s natural resources drove the American involvement in the war. The peace group also protested the Vietnam war every Saturday on the side of the road. People often heckled them. When asked if their protest yielded any results, a Citizens for Peace member said: “One way to be effective is to have people react to us, even if negatively. At least they notice us.”
Over time, the group dwindled down to a handful of members, including Agnes and Carl. Carl Slater died in November of 1991. Agnes followed three years later in June of 1994. They were buried together in the Wood National Cemetery in Wisconsin.
FURTHER READINGS
Harriet Hyman Alonso. 1993. “Dilemma, Quandaries, and Tensions during War, 1935-1945.” In Peace as Women’s Issue: A History of the U.S. Movement for World Peace and Women’s Rights. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. Pp. 125-156.
Peter N. Carroll. 1994. “Bridging Old Left and New.” In The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Americans in the Spanish Civil War. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Pp. 345-358.
Giles Tremlett. 2020. “‘Premature Anti-Fascists.’” In The International Brigades: Fascism, Freedom, and the Spanish Civil War. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. Pp. 521-541.
SOURCES
Barbara Dewey. 1971. “Peace-seeking citizens keep marching on.” Waukesha Daily Freeman. (6 March) p. 15.
Kenneth Germannson. “Workers Movements.” Encyclopedia of Milwaukee.
John Schroeder. 1975. “War Over but Protesters Carry on.” Waukesha Daily Freeman. (16 August) p. 3.
Mrs. Carl Slater. 1966. “Sees Vietnam War as U.S. Exploitation.” Letter to the editor. Waukesha Daily Freeman. (4 November) p. 12.
“Carl Theodore Slater.” The Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives.
“Carl Slater.” Personal File. RGASPI. Fond 545, Opis 6. File 990.
“Carl Slater.” Oral History Transcript. 1980. John Gerassi Papers. Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives. New York University.
“Three U.S. Embassies Function in France—Two Are for Spain.” 1939.
“Twentieth Century Radicalism in Minnesota Oral History Project.” Minnesota Historical Society.
Fletcher Warren. 2014. “Minnesota Volunteers in the Spanish Civil War.” The Volunteer.