Abraham Lincoln Brigade volunteers Dave Doran, Marian Merriman and Robert Merriman near the battlefield in Spain in February 1938. Doran would be killed in April 1938.
David Doran, the son of a paper-mill worker, was born in Albany, New York, in 1909. His father had emigrated from Russia in 1907 where he found work as a cigar maker. As a boy Doran sold the Albany Times and delivered groceries.
Doran left school at the age of sixteen and found work as a seaman on a tanker owned by Morgan Line. While at sea he read a lot including the works of Upton Sinclair, John Galsworthy and Joseph Conrad.
In 1929 he developed scurvy and when he recovered he found work with his uncle who was a sign painter in New York City. He began to mix with members of the Industrial Workers of the World but in 1930 he joined the Young Communist League.
He agreed to go to the Deep South to build up membership of the YCL among the unemployed. He arrived at Chattanooga on a budget of three dollars a week. In Scottsboro, Alabama, he was beaten up after he became involved in the campaign to free the Scotsboro Boys.
In 1931 he joined the American Communist Party and worked as a trade union organizer with agricultural workers (Alabama), textile workers (North Carolina) and coal miners (Pennsylvania). By 1936 he was the party’s director of trade union activities.
On the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War Doran wanted to immediately join the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, a unit that volunteered to fight for the Popular Front government against the military uprising in Spain. The party rejected the idea claiming he was more important to the cause in America.
After the disaster of Jarama the leaders of the American Communist Party changed its mind about the role of its activists and allowed Doran, Steve Nelson, Joe Dallet and 22 other volunteers to go to Spain.
While at the Tarazona training camp Doran wrote to his wife: “Trying hard to be a good soldier and fill some Fascist bellies with lead. Feel certain that I can more than hold my own when we meet the bastards out there. The tough training has really hardened and toughened me. Just what a guy needs after being a functionary of the League a number of years.”
Doran first saw action at Quinto under Steve Nelson. Doran wrote to his wife after the battle: “The thing I like best is that I have gone into action against the enemy and have had ample opportunity to work under rather sharp and direct fire. Always did want to test myself and am not entirely disappointed with myself.”
Cecil D. Eby added: “Going into battle at Quinto as one of Nelson’s juniors, Doran found that the firing line was not the picket line. In battle, something more was required than collecting scrawls on a petition or nailing a placard to a pole. It is significant that his golden moment during the battle came when he hijacked the water truck and drove it into the American lines-exactly what a dead-end kid could be expected to do.”
After Steve Nelson was wounded at Belchite he was appointed brigade commissar of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion and political advisor to Vladimir Copic. He also worked closely with Robert Minor, the local American representative to the Comintern in Spain.
John Gates related a story:
“I had known Dave Doran well in the States. He was a brilliant and audacious young man in both politics and battle.”
“At Belchite, the brigade had surrounded a fascist unit but its destruction : would have been a long and costly process. Doran got his hands on a loudspeaker and had a young fascist, just captured, broadcast an appeal to surrender-which the enemy unit did.”
After Nelson’s wound at Belchite and Doran’s stunt with the loudspeaker at the parish church (his speech was later called “the heavy artillery of the science of politics”), Doran assumed the post of XVth Brigade commissar. He had done well indeed. Within four months of his arrival in Spain, he had become the highest-ranking American in the International Brigades, for as political adviser to Copic he held a rank equivalent to lieutenant colonel. He was only twenty-six.
The Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives website writes that Doran was “Believed captured and executed on April 2, 1938, Gandesa, during the Retreats.”
Partially excerpted from an account by John Simkin and by the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives.
For other random radicals, see flic.kr/s/aHske413N1
The photographer is unknown. The image is from the 15th International brigade Photographic Unit Photograph Collection, Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives. Elmer Holmes Bobst Library.
