Marion Merriman (1909–1991)

Marion Merriman, later Wachtel, was married to Robert Hale Merriman, an agricultural economist at the University of Califiornia, Berkeley. In 1935, she accompanied him on a research trip to Moscow to study how the Soviet Union was addressing economic injustice and inequality. In 1936, he volunteered to fight fascism in the Spanish Civil War, and was the first commander of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade of American volunteers. Some have said Merriman was one of the inspirations for Ernest Hemingway’s hero Robert Jordan in the novel For Whom the Bell Tolls. Marion went to Spain when her husband was wounded and stayed on to join the brigade herself.
She returned to the USA to help raise awareness and support for the Spanish forces loyal to the Republic (Loyalists), giving speeches at public rallies. After Merriman was killed in the fighting in 1938, she remarried to Emil Wachtel, a lawyer, with whom she had three sons. She worked as an administrator at Stanford University and was active in the Bay Area Chapter of Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade (VALB). Many years later, with journalist Warren Lerude, she wrote a memoir, American Commander in Spain: Robert Hale Merriman and the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, published in 1986.