The Lincoln Brigade By Sherry Miller The Oldest Woman on the Web July, 1999 July 19, 1999 Today would have been my former mother-in-law's ninety-second birthday. I read in the paper that the last Bay Area survivor of the Lincoln Brigade just died at 89. My mother-in-law and father-in-law were journalists who moved from Moscow to Paris in 1936 so their first child could be born there. They were Americans who had been working in Moscow. She went because of the ballet. He went to sell tractors. They both became journalists there. Then in Paris they became involved in the Spanish Civil War. Only the clever act of a friend prevented my father-in-law from boarding a plane to the Spanish combat zone. He survived and published a newspaper about the war in Paris until the summer of 1939. They came home to the states for their first visit in ten years. World War II broke out and they never returned. They were intellectual New York leftists when I met them in the sixties. They weren't like the other middle-class parents that we kids knew. They read everything; had all the intellectual magazines; went to the cultural events in the city; participated in the avant-garde. Then came the Vietnam War. I was eight months pregnant in October, 1965. My husband and I participated in a march from 94th and Fifth Avenue all the way to the United Nations. But I stopped at 59th Street before the parade turned and watched the whole rest of the event. People were grouped by professions: lawyers, teachers, doctors, firemen, police, nurses, etc. There were probably 25,000 people marching. No one saw the demonstrators except a few maids in the apartments overlooking Fifth Avenue and Central Park. If you weren't interested, you weren't there and there were no spectators. That night we rushed out to get the Sunday New York Times and watched the 11 o'clock news. In print, in the Times, it said 2000-3000 marchers. And on TV they only showed the one minor incident of a skin-head type egg thrower. This had been an orderly march and anyone could have seen the people fill forty blocks of Fifth Avenue and take four hours to pass by that corner where I stood. This wasn't 3000 people. The next day, Sunday, we ate with my in-laws at Luchow's, a famous German restaurant on Fourteenth Street. When we were telling these two experienced journalists what had happened, my father-in-law, who had also worked for the International Herald Tribune, became very indignant and insisted that the New York Times doesn't lie. I was a young woman but I knew what I saw. I remember slamming my little fist on the table (like Kruschev) and insisting, but to no avail. I couldn't convince them of anything. Who knew then that one day I would be a journalist; that I myself would discover the power of the written word for sharing, spreading, growing, giving birth to ideas. I had thought my husband would be a writer and I had no idea, then, that it was I who would be putting words out there – not great ideas, not shattering the earth, but hopefully just getting the seeds scattered. Journalism brought me online in 1992. It's the thrill of instant publishing with no intervening editors. Thinking of my in-laws, I wonder how the web will look during our next major war. In the past two years one big thing has taken over the web, which used to be dominated by content people like myself. Today it's 100% usurped by the e-commerce people. But we're not all shoppers and not all retailers. Hopefully the commerce will find its place and content will too. Meanwhile our idiosyncratic personal storytelling sites are obscure and relegated to the dark channels of the web. Horrible portal home pages with more text items than any normal person would ever read in a space 10 inches by 10 inches have set the standard for a "norm" that no one likes and probably no one needs. Sometimes I fancy that the next "big thing" will be a home page with ONE thing on it. Just one. There are millions of people – students and adults – who have never heard of the Lincoln Brigade and the Spanish Civil War. I want them all to come to the web. I want them all to do what I do – search for things and then follow links that aren't what I searched for at all. I want them to learn and discover and later, bandwidth willing, to experience knowledge and history like never before. And tonight as I write this for some reason I'm happy and proud to be making a little content here that might be a seed for someone or something – even if it's only for my own child or my own friends. You never know where your ideas fly to, if you're a journalist. Could those people ever have imagined, in Moscow in 1932, sitting in a café with the other western journalists, that 68 years later their daughter-in-law would be writing a story published in a way that everyone in Russia could read it? I don't think about those Russians reading this column. I think about the PROMISE of the internet – that any work of art, any piece of information, any creative effort, any effort to mobilize, can spread far and wide today by efforts just like the one I'm making now. So I salute them, Bob and Jenny Miller. May their spirits live on in the digital ether. ©1999 Sherry Miller. All rights reserved. For reprints and permission, please contact Sherry Miller. Spanish Civil War/Lincoln Brigade Links The Spanish Revolution & Civil War Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives Brandeis University Spanish Civil War Collection Posters of the Spanish Revolution Return to Oldest Woman on the Web