Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939 by Adam Hochschild, Macmillan, 2016.
How is it that after so many years and so many wars and so many revolutions, counter-revolutions, assassinations, genocides, and betrayals, the Spanish Civil War continues to capture the imagination of idealists and romantics? It was, like all wars, savage. There was brutality, venality, torture, and madness on both sides. Yet the Spanish Civil War, now nearly eighty years in the past, continues to fascinate and move. Some have argued that it was a “dress rehearsal” for World War II, and that if the democracies had come to the aid of the out-gunned Spanish Republic and countered Hitler’s and Mussolini’s support of Franco’s Nationalists with support of their own then we would have in effect stopped Hitler in his tracks and perhaps avoided World War. But the Spanish Civil War’s continued hold on the imagination stems in large part from the addition of thousands of young people who volunteered to fight against Franco, the early anti-fascists who were willing to put their theory into practice, and their words into deeds. Though few of them were trained in warfare or had ever so much as fired a gun, they manned the front lines with books of poetry in their backpacks and sneakers on their feet.
The American contingent of these volunteers–the Abraham Lincoln Brigades–is the subject of Adam Hochschild’s newest popular history, Spain in Our Hearts. Throughout his admirable and justly celebrated career, Hochschild’s curiosity as an historian has been propelled by admiration. His sympathy consistently goes to the defiant few who manage to maintain a kind of morality that not only transcends the pressures of their class and prevailing opinion, but which is validated in the fullness of time. Hochschild’s heroes come out on what we now call the right side of history, whether he is illuminating the opposition to slavery, the struggle against Belgian colonialism in Africa, or the women’s movement fight to keep England out of World War I. (In To End All Wars there is an incandescent scene in which a band of British feminists try to disrupt the British march into World War I by rappelling into the House of Lords, indecorously descending from the ceiling while the bellicose legislators look up in horror.)
Hochschild would be the first to tell you he’s not a trained historian. In defending and explaining his writing life as a generalist in a world of specialists, Hochschild, facing an audience of academic historians, said he felt like a plumber in a room filled with surgeons, and went on to say that he’d done no graduate work in history–or, for that matter, in anything else. Like Barbara Tuchman a generation before him, Hochschild is interested in writing history that side-steps the academy and goes straight to the lay public. He calls it practicing history without a license, and it has its own particular pitfalls, not the least of which is the temptation to grace the narrative with something like a happy ending.
History offers few of those, but Hochschild has found a way to make his books uplifting–by the creation of posthumous role models, the women and men of uncommon bravery who might not have prospered in their own time, but whose words continue to move and inspire, and whose deeds shine all the brighter when seen against the somber backdrop of a lost cause.
Spain in the Heart weaves the story of several American volunteers to the Partisan cause–he amateur historian is loving in his depiction of these amateur soldiers–and along the way functions as a credible, cogent history of the Spanish Civil War, replete with maps of various battlefields, an analysis of the complicit neutrality of the democracies, including our own, and a sane but maddening rehash of the war within the war, in which the embattled left occasionally found the time to form a circular firing squad. It all ended horribly, of course. About 40,000 people from more than fifty countries volunteered to fight on the side of the Spanish Republic, and their losses were monumental. And Franco’s victory over the Republic was not only crushing, but extraordinarily durable, as well. Spain might have been a trial run for worldwide fascist aggression, but decades after Germany, Italy, and Japan re-entered the global community, Spain continued to stumble along in its Fascist doldrums. (I learned this the old-fashioned way, when I was randomly picked up during a 1968 hippie harvest near Malaga, and jailed without charges or recourse for twenty days.) It took the death of Franco–at the ripe old age of 83–for Spain to make any real strides toward modernity.
Hochschild has his favorites among the partisans he portrays. The journalist Herbert Matthews is appealing and heroic throughout the narrative–though not a real partisan, Matthews came as close to collaborating with the Republican cause as he could, and still keep his job at The New York Times. Ernest Hemingway, on the other hand, is treated pretty roughly–he is called a “show-off” and seems often to be enjoying himself too much–he also seems quite consciously to be researching a novel. Another American journalist, the all but forgotten Louis Fisher, is characterized as a name-dropper and a womanizer. Yet mainly the portraits of the volunteers are heroic–and often very moving. Brave and idealistic men and women such as James Neugass, Marion and Robert Merriman, Charles and Lois Orr, and Toby (“Tillie”) Jensky and the British volunteer Pat Gurney who doggedly courted her all deserve to be memorialized, and though Hochschild is not the first to do so, it feels right that a new generation of readers should hear their stories. His tone is reverent, while avoiding the shallows of hagiography, and as these real life heroes make their way through the pages of Spain in the Heart the reader, knowing that Spain itself will succumb to fascist aggression, can only hope that at least these few women and men will get out alive.
Though Hochschild’s stated purpose is to tell the story of the Abraham Lincoln brigade, the volunteer/combatant who shines most brightly in these pages is British–George Orwell. Orwell comes to us modest, sane, and fearless–and he also manages to find a political path that avoids (and ultimately confronts) the Stalinist presence in the Loyalist cause. Of course, our estimation of him cannot fail to take into account that the Orwell we see here is on the verge of writing one of the great books about Spain, and arguably one of the great books about war and revolution–Homage to Catalonia.
Orwell was an anti-Communist leftist, who threw in his lot with the Partido Obrero de Unificacion Marxists–POUM–which, despite the M part of their name, was a largely anarchist party, with significant strength in Barcelona, where there was an enduring anarchist tradition among the working class. Perhaps the most stirring section of Homage to Catalonia is Orwell’s portrayal of Barcelona beneath the brief, flickering illumination of anarchist control. There was a kind of delirious equality afoot–you could feel it is in the streets, in the factories, in the cafes–but it was, of course, short-lived. Orwell himself was pressed into defending the phone company, where anarchist workers had taken over. Yet who was trying to wrest control of the phone company from the anarchists? It wasn’t the fascists–they had yet to march through Barcelona. It was, basically, the Communists, who viewed POUM and its program as counter-productive and possibly even counter-revolutionary. (The Stalinist line on most of the non-Communist left was that it was penetrated by spies and Trotskyists–this nearly pathological loathing of suspected Trotskyists seems so far-fetched and bizarre in this post-Soviet world, but it was deadly at the time.)
The ultimate tragedy of Spain was that the fascists won, but there were many tragedies leading up to that, and not the least of them was the internecine wars on the Loyalist side. It was the ultimate faction fight, but one that the non-Communist left was fated to lose. Not only did the Stalinists have the numbers, but they also had the guns. The most basic necessities of a fighting army were in shockingly short supply–the Brigades did their brief basic training with sticks standing in for rifles–but what armaments the Republic did receive came mainly from the Soviet Union. And with that much needed support came, quite inevitably, a reliance on Communist advisors. Spain was falling apart on all sides. Not only was there a military attack by the right, but at the same time there was a worker’s revolution on the left. The Communist line, put simply, was United Front, which basically meant that POUM and every other revolutionary force was not only a distraction but an enemy. The Soviets did not trust anyone on the non-Communist left, nor did they want world opinion to decide that what was going on in Spain was basically a workers’ revolt. They wanted the war to be perceived only as a fight against fascism.
The United States and the other powerful capitalist democracies did nothing to help Republican Spain. Even eighty years later, it’s difficult to forgive the West for looking away while Franco, Hitler, and Mussolini crushed Spanish democracy town by town. Hochschild’s narrative interrogates what drove FDR to such fatal inaction, and just as those who have examined Roosevelt’s failure to make room in the US for Jews fleeing Hitler have failed to come up with reasons that put him on the right side of history, Hochschild here pulls up short of condemnation, but stops even further from justification. The fact remains that of the great powers, only the Soviets were of any use to the anti-fascist forces in Spain.
Yet long range Soviet strategy was depending on a world-wide alliance against fascism–otherwise, Stalin feared, quite correctly as it turned out, Germany would one day roll into Ukraine. The Soviets believed that there were forces in the West that would see the up-side of the Nazis waging war against the Reds, and wait until the Soviet Union was destroyed before raising a hand against Hitler. Whether this was Stalinist paranoia or a savvy assessment of the situation is still debated, but the basically nationalist, self-interested nature of Soviet opposition to Hitler was revealed in 1939, Stalin negotiated the infamous non-aggression pact with Germany, and all the talk of a popular front against fascism turned into a two year push for world peace.
But during the years of the Spanish Civil War, the Soviets were in full Popular Front mode, and the Comintern sent out the word that Communist parties throughout the world were to send troops to aid the fight against Franco. Clearly, the idea behind the Brigades was to rivet the world’s attention on Spain, turning it from a civil war of interest mainly to the Spanish people, to a harbinger of things to come–Hitler’s first step toward world domination. The idea that the Spanish war was of special significance was given further credibility by the Brigades. Suddenly, the war was being fought by boys from Oklahoma and Brooklyn.
It stood to reason that the American contingent would call themselves the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. It was in keeping with the nature of the CPUSA at the time, whose leader Earl Browder liked to say that Communism was 20th Century Americanism. (Communists in the Browder era, were more likely to extoll the heroism of Patrick Henry than V.I. Lenin.) Not all of the young people who volunteered for Spain were Communists, but most were. And most of them, though gallant, were woefully unfit for active duty. Some of the more hardened, and experienced squadron leaders on the Loyalist side were openly furious that they were suddenly saddled with so many untrained men, but as Hochschild makes clear the volunteers made up with bravery what they may have lacked in skill.
But so many were slaughtered, or maimed. And as eloquently as Hochschild’s book presents their sacrifice, there is an unanswered question at the heart of his book, as there is in all remembrances of the Lincoln Brigade: of what real use were these volunteers? One old Red once told me that the Party in the US didn’t allow anyone to go to Spain if they were doing valuable work right here. Perhaps their value was to raise the morale of the Spanish citizens, Surely, it must have encouraged the rank and file of the Spanish Republican Army to know that brave men and women from all over the world were willing to risk their lives with them. But lending moral support to a lost cause seems an unfair trade if it is paid for in the loss of thousands of young lives. Tossed into battles without preparation, without proper armaments, and, finally, without any realistic hope of victory, the citizen-soldiers of the Brigades were killed at three times the rate of the rest of their comrades.
Hochschild’s narrative winds its way toward its heartbreaking conclusion– the Republic in tatters and the Brigades marching for a last time through Barcelona.
From packed sidewalks, from windows and crowded balconies draped with flags, and from precarious footholds on sycamore trees and lampposts, 300,000 Spaniards wept, cheered, waved and threw flowers, confetti, and notes of thanks. It was October 28, 1938, and 2500 troops from what was left of the International Brigades were marching…for an official farewell. Along the boulevard were signs with the names of battles the volunteers had fought…The 200 Americans who marched included a handful of nurses from the medical detachment. The rest were men, who came along the avenue with blanket rolls slung over their right shoulders, the shabbiest of uniforms, and mismatched footgear. They walked nine abreast, sometimes ankle deep in flowers. (p. 333)
After that came La Pasionaria’s famous farewell speech, which lives on as a kind of leftist catechism. “Mothers! Women! When the years pass by and the wounds of war are stanched…when pride in a free country is felt equally by all Spaniards–then speak to your children. Tell them of the International Brigades. Tell them how, coming over seas and mountains, crossing frontiers, bristling with bayonets…these men reached our country as crusaders for freedom. They gave up everything, their loves, their country, home and fortune…they came and told us: ‘We are here…'”
There is no question that the volunteers were a remarkable lot, brave and selfless. But in reading Hochschild’s affectionate group biography, you can’t easily escape the feeling that they were badly used. The brigades were martyrs to a cause, but there is something about their slaughter that suggests the sacrificial lamb. Hochschild has written another great work of popular history, but I have come to the end of my appetite for books about the Abraham Lincoln Brigades, and the nobility of their deaths. Quite simply, they brought knives to a gun fight. The blood they shed, the terror they felt, the cold, the hunger, the lives cut short before they ever took shape–there is pathos and a kind of poeticism in martyrdom, and sections of the left have been making use of the sacrifice those young people made for eighty years now, but when you look at what the brigades were actually able to accomplish, it all seems like such a waste.