The UB pays tribute to brigadier Robert H. Merriman with a replica of his monument, which will be installed at UC Berkeley

The original monument, made by sculptor Mar H Pongiluppi, was unveiled in 2019 in Corbera d’Ebre, where Merriman and other Lincoln Battalion commanders allegedly lost their lives during the Battle of the Ebro. Marcos Mandojana, the US Consul in Barcelona, attended the inauguration. The new replica will be installed at UC Berkeley, where Merriman had studied and worked as a professor before joining the brigades to fight during the Spanish Civil War.

DIDPATRI has funded exclusively this piece and has coordinated the project with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives (ALBA) and the Department of Spanish and Portuguese of UC Berkeley. The latter have adapted a small square in the campus to house the sculpture, with a large rock that will support the bas-relief. The Delegation of the Government of Catalonia in the United States and Canada has facilitated its transport.

​​​​​​​Robert Hale Merriman (1908-1938) is a key figure in the history of international engagement against fascism. He graduated in economics at the UC Berkeley, where he also worked as a professor, and spent two years training in the reserve officers’ training corps. In early 1935, he left to study the Soviet agricultural model, and while he was living in the Soviet Union, the Spanish Civil War broke out. In 1937, Merriman went to Spain, where he trained other volunteers and was elevated to the rank of Chief of Brigade Staff of the 15^th International Brigade, which included the Abraham Lincoln Battalion of American volunteers.

The most popular version is that he was taken prisoner in Corbera d’Ebre and shot on 2 April 1938. Many years later, his wife co-wrote, with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Warren Lerude, the book American Commander in Spain: Robert Hale Merriman and the Abraham Lincoln Brigades (1986). Merriman met Ernest Hemingway during the war, and the writer apparently used him as a model for the character of American university professor Robert Jordan in the well-known novel For Whom the Bell Tolls.