Lawrence Cane Papers

Lawrence Cane (who changed his name from Lawrence Cohen in 1939, after returning from the Spanish Civil War) was the son of working-class Russian-Jewish immigrant parents and was raised in East Harlem, New York. He attended City College, where he was on the student council, edited the college newspaper and was active in anti-Nazi protests. During the height of the Depression, Cane hopped freight trains across the United States. In July 1936, without telling his parents where he was going, he sailed to France and hiked over the Pyrenees into Spain to join the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War.

In Spain, Cane trained with the Canadian MacKenzie-Papineau Battalion, with whom he entered into heavy combat. He participated in the Aragon offensive in the autumn of 1937, and was a sniper at the Battle of Fuentes del Ebro. Cane was wounded (he would later be wounded a second time, this time by a shrapnel hit to the head). After a spell in the hospital with typhus, he returned to battle at Teruel in December of 1937 and early 1938. In Prisoners of the Good Fight, Spanish Civil War veteran Carl Geiser recounts the story of his own capture by Italian fascists, crediting Cane with saving his life. Cane returned to the United States in December 1938.

Back in New York, Cane worked as a lathe operator and joined the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers Union. In 1940, he married Grace Singer. Cane entered World War II in 1942, and throughout the war he was often consulted for his military expertise garnered from his combat experience in Spain. After a stint as an officer in an all-black Engineer Dump Truck Company, Cane participated in the assault at Utah Beach on D-Day in June 1944, and worked afterwards clearing mines, destroying defenses, and opening roads across France and into Germany. Later Cane was awarded the Silver Star by the U.S. and the Croix de Guerre by France, among other decorations, for his bravery in action. His war letters to Grace were posthumously published in Fighting Fascism in Europe: The World War II Letters of an American Veteran of the Spanish Civil War.

Cane was a lifelong political activist, taking part in the civil rights and peace movements, among other causes. A member of the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade national board, he returned to Spain during Franco's dictatorship to support the student movement there. In the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s, Cane's radical politics attracted the attention of the U.S. Government; the Cane family's mail was periodically intercepted and neighbors informed the FBI of visitors to the Cane household.

Lawrence and Grace Cane had three children, David, Lisa and Joshua. Cane died in 1976.

Sources:

Lawrence Cane. Fighting Fascism in Europe: The World War II Letters of an American Veteran of the Spanish Civil War. Edited by David E. Cane, Judy Barrett Litoff, and David C. Smith. New York: Fordham University Press, 2003.Geiser, Carl. Prisoners of the Good Fight: The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939. Westport, CT: Lawrence-Hill and Company, 1986.