The 2,800 American volunteers who fought Franco in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade broke the Neutrality Act to do it, and the state never forgave them. Volunteers were prosecuted and imprisoned over the passports they traveled on; recruiters faced federal charges; and returning veterans found themselves branded — in the phrase they wore as a badge — "premature anti-fascists": surveilled by the FBI, purged from wartime officer candidacy, hauled before HUAC and the Subversive Activities Control Board for decades.

Brigade veterans thread through this database's later cases — Smith Act defendants like Robert Thompson, whose Guadalcanal Distinguished Service Cross did not spare him prison; blacklisted seamen and union men; Bill Bailey and Harry Bridges' comrades of the waterfront. Their treatment established the American rule that fighting fascism too early was punished longer than collaborating with it ever was.