SPAIN IN OUR HEARTS
Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939
By Adam Hochschild
Illustrated. 438 pp. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $30.
For Americans on the left who know their history, no more tragic — or more romantic — event took place in the entire 20th century than the civil war in Spain. From 1936 to 1939, a freshly elected secular republic backed by most of the nation’s wage-earners, artists and intellectuals battled for its life against a professional army — the Nationalists — that was firmly aligned with the Roman Catholic Church and big landowners, and endowed with advanced aircraft and crack troops from both Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. For its defense, the Republic had to draw on an ideological potpourri of untrained but fiercely revolutionary militias, a steady trickle of weapons from the Soviet Union, and some 40,000 volunteers from other nations organized in the Communist-led International Brigades, whose American detachment took the name of “Abraham Lincoln.”
The Republican cause never lacked for eloquence to help stoke the romance. In Barcelona, Orwell joined a homegrown semi-Trotskyist militia. Wounded in combat, he went home to write “Homage to Catalonia,” a wise, luminous memoir. Hemingway sent dozens of reports to a United States news service. Then he composed “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” whose stoic American protagonist (based on a real guerrilla leader and played in the 1943 film, inevitably, by Gary Cooper) fights with Spanish guerrillas and sacrifices his life to save his comrades. In “Guernica,” Picasso rendered, in his most famous canvas, the wanton destruction by German bombers of a town whose Basque residents had gathered for market day. Aragon, Auden and Neruda all wrote verses to show that the plight of Spain’s embattled republic was close to their hearts.
But art is no surrogate for arms and leaders. Gradually, the Nationalist forces commanded by Francisco Franco overwhelmed their outgunned and politically divided adversaries. In the spring of 1939, they captured Madrid and established a dictatorship that endured for almost four decades. The Republic’s defeat, the historical wisdom goes, helped give Hitler the confidence to invade Poland that summer.
Adam Hochschild is both a gifted historian and a man of the left. In “Spain in Our Hearts,” he retells this familiar tale in an unfamiliar and convincing way — as a collective biography that strongly sympathizes with the Americans who fought for and wrote about Republican Spain but refuses to spare them from criticism. By assembling a well-chosen set of individual narratives, many about figures who are relatively unknown, he captures why so many people thought the fate of the world might be decided by who won the conflict in a poor, mostly rural country on the edge of Europe.
Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration, limited by neutrality laws and fearful of losing Catholic votes, declined to lift the embargo on sending arms to Spain. That didn’t prevent a remarkable variety of young Americans from enlisting in the cause — most as members of the Lincoln Brigade.
There were Communist student leaders like George Watt, who had to swim across a freezing river to escape Nationalist troops. There were sons of privilege, like James Neugass, an ambulance driver from a wealthy New Orleans family whose grandfather had owned slaves. One African-American, Oliver Law, a veteran of the United States Army, briefly had charge of the Lincoln Brigade. Hochschild notes, “This was the first time a black man had ever commanded an integrated military unit of Americans in combat.” In Spain, as in nearly every civil war from England in the 1640s to Syria today, savagery was the norm. Both sides routinely killed their prisoners. About a third of the 2,800 “Lincolns” who went to Spain died there.
Hochschild, the author of eight books, recognizes that the perception of the war back home was probably more significant than what several thousand leftists could do in Spain. He profiles reporters who were committed either to saving the Republic or destroying it. Martha Gellhorn, a correspondent for Collier’s who was then Hemingway’s lover and later his wife, wrote regularly to Eleanor Roosevelt, a close family friend. Gellhorn also sailed back to Washington to lobby the first lady to change her husband’s mind about the weapons embargo.
The New York Times sent a major correspondent to cover each side; neither man made much effort to hide his sympathies. Herbert L. Matthews, who reported from the Republican zone, raged at the routine bombing of civilians in Madrid and elsewhere. Later, recalling the egalitarian spirit of the left, he wrote that Spain “taught us what internationalism means. . . . There one learned that men could be brothers.” Meanwhile, the other Times man, William P. Carney, filled his dispatches with news of Nationalist victories and praise for the officers who led them. Carney even did a propaganda broadcast for a pro-Franco radio station. While he traveled around Spain, he had his mail forwarded to the German Embassy.
Hochschild narrates such tales with prose that is consistently vivid yet emotionally restrained. His main contribution is to retell a familiar story with a focus on Americans and an unromantic assessment of why the “good guys” lost, so that he adroitly evokes the commitments of Americans on both sides while eschewing any retrospective cheerleading for the Republic. The only character who shakes his writerly composure is Torkild Rieber, a Norwegian immigrant who was chief executive of Texaco. Rieber admired Hitler and shipped millions of barrels of oil to the Nationalist forces, which meant unilaterally breaking contracts with the Republican government signed before the conflict began. After the onset of World War II in 1939, Rieber hired pro-Nazi assistants who cabled Berlin “coded information about ships leaving New York for Britain and what their cargoes were.” When word of his behavior slipped out, Rieber had to step down from the helm of Texaco. Yet he remained a wealthy and well-connected man with a “fondness for authoritarian leaders” like Franco and the shah of Iran.
For its part, the Spanish Republic did not, and perhaps could not, spurn aid from one of the bloodiest dictators of his or any day. To accept Stalin’s assistance, Hochschild makes clear, was a “devil’s bargain” that compromised the government’s image as a beacon of democracy and tolerance. In 1937, Communists loyal to the Kremlin took over and expanded the Republic’s security apparatus. They branded as pro-Fascist the many anarchists and other radicals who sought to create a classless Spain. This intraleft venom touched off a battle in the streets of Barcelona that killed several hundred men who were badly needed at the front. In the aftermath, the government threw alleged “fifth columnists” in prison and executed several leaders.
None of the Americans whom Hochschild portrays were directly involved in repressing non-Communists on the left. Still, Hemingway wrote nothing about the brutal squelching of radical dissent. And while some members of the Lincoln Brigade complained privately about stiff-necked dogmatists who sacrificed combat effectiveness at the altar of the Party line, they did not defend their fellow combatants who refused to obey the will of the only foreign power that was giving material support to the struggling Republic.
Midway through his captivating narrative, Hochschild takes up the difficult question Orwell pondered and that historians have debated ever since: Did the goal of building a society of brothers and sisters clash with the exigencies of winning the war? In Barcelona and a few other cities, revolutionary workers briefly took control of their factories and abolished such vestiges of the old order as military ranks — and tipping.
But none of this helped stop Franco’s advance. As Hochschild sensibly concludes, “to fight a complex, mechanized war, a disciplined army responsible to a central command is far more effective than a range of militias reporting to a crazy quilt of political parties and trade unions.”
Perhaps that is the ultimate tragedy of the Spanish Civil War. The Republic had no alternative but to cede a measure of control to Stalin and his minions. Yet doing so only left its defenders embittered and divided and failed to achieve its purpose. Where’s the romance in that?