For many people, the first reference point for the Spanish Civil War will probably be Orwell's 1938 memoir Homage to Catalonia (or maybe Hemingway's novel For Whom the Bell Tolls), so it makes sense that Hochschild's book on Americans who volunteered there, despite the fact that Eric Blair a.k.a. Orwell was English, maintains a dialogue with him throughout. That dialogue is foreshadowed by the blurb from The New Republic on the cover, which states, "With all due respect to Orwell, Spain in Our Hearts should supplant Homage to Catalonia as the best introduction to the conflict written in English." I think that's reasonable, and it has nothing to do with the quality of the latter. Even if 1984 would probably open with the best odds, Homage would be a sleeper choice for my favorite of Orwell's books. And no, it's not the perfect little fable Animal Farm is, but I think I prefer its raggedness and spontaneity, and the way it eulogizes a lost cause. That being said, having read the book twice, it's worth acknowledging that I still had a pretty cloudy understanding of exactly how the war unfolded. Hochschild, writing three-fourths of a century later, offers the more detached and comprehensive picture that Orwell wasn't even attempting, with a particular focus on what made the war so compelling that it brought volunteers from around the world to Spain, mostly to fight for the Republic.
Well to begin with, even as it was taking place (from mid-1936 to early-1939), the war was widely perceived as more than just a simple conflict between Franco's Nationalists (supported by the country's traditional powers- wealthy industrialists, big landowners, the Catholic Church, the military) and the Spanish Republic (helmed by the Popular Front, a liberal, socialist and Communist coalition that in February '36 had narrowly won a majority in parliament). There was a widespread expectation, rather, that it was a dress rehearsal for a greater European war to come. Nevertheless, when Orwell returned from the war to England, it seemed to him that the country was asleep:
The industrial towns were far away, a smudge of smoke and misery hidden by the curve of the earth's surface. Down here it was still the England I had known in my childhood: the railway-cuttings smothered in wild flowers, the deep meadows where the great shining horses browse and meditate, the slow-moving streams bordered by willows, the green bosoms of the elms, the larkspurs in the cottage gardens; and then the huge peaceful wilderness of outer London, the barges on the river, the familiar streets, the posters telling of cricket matches and Royal weddings, the men in bowler hats, the pigeons in Trafalgar Square, the red buses, the blue policemen—all sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs.
But in the beginning of the war at least, there was also optimism and excitement. Take the testimony of Louis Fischer, a native of Philadelphia who in the 20s ended up living in Moscow, starting a family there, and building a reputation as a pro-Soviet journalist. Despite his dedication to the revolution, however, Fischer was unnerved by the trials of Kamenev and Zinoviev in 1936- it was hard for him to believe that these lifelong revolutionaries, as well as Jews, had conspired with representatives of Hitler. He remembered the beginning of the war in Spain as a welcome distraction from his nascent doubts about the USSR. Everyone in his circle in Moscow was suddenly learning Spanish songs and reading Spanish poets. “Everyone talked Spain. My boys asked me to come to their schools and give little speeches on Spain...the apartment was filled with people all the time, and no one let me ask questions about Russia. 'Spain is more important', they said. 'If we win in Spain we will be happy here.'” Correspondingly in Spain, there was an "upsurge of popular enthusiasm for all things Russian", as Hochschild puts it, including screenings of Russian films like Battleship Potemkin (hardly considered a benign classic at the time, it was banned, among other places, in Britain, France, and Pennsylvania). Even the reception room of a brothel in Madrid "sported large pictures of Marx, Lenin and Stalin", whose faces strike me personally as sort of unlikely aphrodisiacs, but hey.
In reality, however, things were far from harmonious on the Republican side, which in mid-1936 controlled roughly the eastern half of Spain, including the three most populous cities- Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia. One of the main points of contention seems to have been the question of whether enacting a vast social revolution was a distraction from winning the war, or rather a necessity, so that working-class people and peasants, in a country whose pronounced inequality had helped bring the leftist Popular Front government to power in the first place, would finally have something to fight for. Of the idea that the war and the revolution were inseparable, an idea generally promoted by the anarchists based in Barcelona and the Marxist POUM militia that he had joined, Orwell wrote in his memoir that “...it was less visionary than it sounds. If the government had appealed to the workers of the world in the name not of 'democratic Spain' but of 'revolutionary Spain', it is hard to believe that they would not have got a response.'" Although he would later change his mind about this (see “Looking Back on the Spanish War”), Orwell, before being sent to the front in Aragon, had had time to soak up the revolutionary atmosphere in Barcelona, where workers' collectives had taken over more than 70% of all employment, soldiers slapped their officers on their backs and asked for cigarettes using tu instead of usted (later in the book, a Republican soldier recalls approaching a group of strangers at a campfire in the night and waiting to see how they responded- “if they had answered with usted, I should have been speaking with fascists”), and the red-and-black flag of the anarchists flew from balconies and small poles fastened to automobiles. Even hats had suddenly become anachronistic:
“Pirates, buccaneers, princes, senoritos, priests- these are the hatted folks of history”, an anarchist newspaper proclaimed. “What has the free worker to do with this outworn symbol of bourgeois arrogance? No hats, comrades, on the Ramblas, and the future will be yours.” (Not at all happy about this, however, was the anarchist hatters' union.)
Hochschild, while critical of the majority of foreign correspondents for ignoring the revolutionary aspect of the war (another way to put it might be- for covering the war and not the revolution), nevertheless differs with Orwell’s initial opinion about the revolution's helpfulness, pointing out that a decentralized assortment of militias was not the most effective fighting force, and also that the western powers were less likely to send military assistance to an openly revolutionary enterprise. The Republic indeed never received any meaningful assistance from the United States, the United Kingdom or France, although it's not clear to me that it ever would have been forthcoming in any case. General Franco's Nationalists, on the other hand, were semi-openly supplied with weapons, soldiers, tanks and planes by Hitler and Mussolini; as well as covertly supplied, in violation of a US neutrality law, by a Texas oil baron named Torkild Rieber (CEO of Texaco), with an unlimited flow of oil on credit, crucial to Franco's war effort (Rieber apparently never shared this information with his shareholders or board of directors, not to mention the public at large). In addition to this imbalance, the US actively tried to stop volunteers from reaching Spain, the State Department even threatening them with loss of citizenship (a bluff, as it turned out). The US also encouraged France to watch its border with Spain more closely, which caused some volunteers to have to make harrowing journeys in high altitudes through the Pyrenees at night, journeys during which they would sometimes get separated from their guides, captured by border control, or even fall from cliffs.
The US decision to maintain its embargo on selling arms to the Republic seems attributable to a few factors. While a great number of people were murdered in Nationalist-controlled Spain, for example, the European and American press- such as the Hearst newspaper chain, which enthusiastically backed Franco- focused extensively on the killings in the Republic, “...especially of the clergy, [which] were splashed across front pages. By the end of 1936, the Republican government succeeded in largely bringing such deaths to a halt, but they had done great damage to its chances of getting help from abroad.” Hochschild also speculates that Washington, London and Paris were wary of what precedent it might set, to arm the working-class. And while FDR has always seemed a little inscrutable, the president was apparently a fiend for the relatively new practice of opinion polling, which indicated that Americans were more concerned with pulling out of the economic crisis than with the war in Spain. There may have been reasonable arguments for neutrality- but for all the events that the Spanish war is said to have foreshadowed, it also foreshadows US policy, throughout the twentieth-century and especially in the Spanish-speaking world, of tipping the scales for right-wing military forces against any government with even the vaguest notions of leftism.
The upshot is that the only major world power to send assistance to the Republic was the Soviet Union. And despite what I know of Stalin and the Soviet Union, the first 150 or so pages of this book had me feeling appreciative towards them. After all, these people in Spain were fighting for their freedom; and the Soviets, regardless of their motivations, were not only sending weapons and officers, but organizing the International Brigades. But then I was reminded of how the second half of Orwell's memoir goes. A consequence of the Soviet Union's being the sole supplier of the Republic's weapons, naturally, was an increased ability for Soviet leadership to dictate events on the ground, to fill leadership positions with their own people, and to exert control over the Republic's security services. And in the spirit of heresy-hunting that had blossomed with the show trials not long before in Moscow, the Communists started to arrest those who were loyal to the Republic but not aligned with Moscow (this basically meant the anarchists and POUM, who supported the revolution in Barcelona), for either collaborating with Franco (and by extension, it was implied, the Nazis) or for the imaginary crime of Trotskyism, all of which caused Orwell, his wife Eileen, and a few others to have to escape Republican-held Spain by the skin of their teeth (I was reminded of the scene in Orwell's memoir when they search his hotel room and find a copy of Mein Kampf- clear evidence, of course, that Orwell was a Nazi). It was an especially insulting irony coming from the Soviets, retroactively at least, considering that they were only a couple of years away from enacting the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact.
One particularly unpleasant story involves a Spanish writer named Jose Robles. Robles rejected the military dictatorship of the 20s and escaped to the US, where he became a professor of Spanish at Johns Hopkins. He'd also learned Russian out of a love for 19th century Russian literature and was a close friend of the leftist American writer John Dos Passos, one of whose novels Robles had translated into Spanish. Robles returned to Spain at the outbreak of the war and volunteered for the Republic, appointed liaison to the Soviet military chief of intelligence. But when Dos Passos arrived in Spain in April '37, hoping that Robles would help him and his friend Ernest Hemingway with a documentary they intended to make about the war, he learned that Robles had vanished. Hemingway apparently warned Dos Passos not to ask too many questions. Later it was discovered that Robles had been executed, ostensibly for treason, and Dos Passos and Hemingway were never friendly again.
The story- or the way Hochschild tells it, anyway- doesn't make Hemingway sound great, and in general he comes across here as a caricature of himself, holding court at the Hotel Florida in Madrid and trying to give off the impression that he was a man's man who understood war, too eager to believe that everything about Spain could be understood from the flood of correspondents passing through the hotel bar (and reinforcing each other's biases). We're first introduced to him when he visits a Republican outpost and takes an opportunity to fire vaguely in the direction of the Nationalist lines, provoking a mortar response “that he did not stay for”; later he seems to blunt the impact of his documentary about the war, which he got a chance to screen for Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, with his own sententious voiceover narration. Only four years older than Orwell, Hemingway nevertheless struck me as someone who'd already accepted old age, obsessed with recapturing past glory. It's interesting to contrast him with the Bostonian Virginia Cowles, one of the only female correspondents of the war. When in late '37 Republican forces took the mountain town of Teruel, for example, the blizzard-like conditions temporarily neutralizing the Nationalists' air superiority, Hemingway wrote enthusiastically that it might prove one of the decisive battles of the war. Cowles, no less sympathetic to the Republican cause, understood the victory for the anomaly it was. All that being said, Hemingway also comes across as someone whose heart was in the right place; whose love for Spain was almost "proprietary", and who regarded the Nationalist coup as "an act of great violence against a culture he loved." Well, yeah. Exactly. It's not hard to understand. When a country you've lived in and have an attachment to is viciously attacked, whether from without or within, it's very difficult to remain objective and emotionally detached. Hemingway never struck me as someone who would fall in love with the Soviet Union; but in the case of Robles, and to an extent in his overall perception of the war, he reminded me of some of the devoted Communists of the 20s and 30s. He didn't want to look too far into the shadows, didn't want to focus on anything that might distract from the main goal of defeating Franco. As he wrote later to his editor, “I am faithful and loyal while under arms, but when it is over I am a writer.” In other words, certain truths can wait until the war is won.
All told, at least 35,000 foreign fighters went to Spain in those years, mostly to fight for the Republic. Some fought for Franco, although I can't seem to find a figure for that, and it is probably complicated by all the Germans and Italians who were there in semi-official capacities. As the main focus of this book, it's estimated that 2,800 Americans fought over there, about a quarter of whom were killed, and the lesser-known stories recounted here are as compelling as those of the more prominent figures like Hemingway and Orwell. The former includes people like Bob Merriman, a student of economics at Berkley who first moved to Moscow with his wife Marion to study Marx-Leninism, and ended up commanding the (American) Lincoln Battalion of the International Brigade; Charles and Lois Orr of Louisville Kentucky, who were on their honeymoon in Europe when the war broke out, both of whom joined the POUM, and became friends with Orwell's wife; and Joseph Selligman Jr., also from Louisville, who arrived in the first wave of volunteers, therefore joined a British battalion, and became the first American killed in combat in Spain. Their political views and world-views weren't monolithic, but, as Hochschild puts it, if you wanted to picture the typical volunteer, “...he was a New Yorker, a Communist, an immigrant or the son of immigrants, a trade unionist, and a member of a group that has almost vanished from the United States today, working-class Jews.”
Franco not only won the war, but remained in power in Spain until his death in the 70s. The western powers allowed right-wing fascism to thrive, happy that Franco wasn’t a Communist. After he took power in 1939, the working-class was crushed, and the Catholic Church and large landowners were returned to their dominant places in the social hierarchy. He also did what all fascists do: torture, mass imprisonment, women once again became second-class citizens, etc. And yet somehow the detail that has stuck with me is that priests began to keep lists of who showed up on Sunday and who didn't. So after all this, they forced people to go back to church. Fucking sadists.
Hochschild reminded me to re-read “Looking Back on the Spanish War”, but he never touches on the other piece of Orwell's that I would recommend pairing with his book, a three-part essay from 1940 called “Inside the Whale.” It begins disguised as a book review of Henry Miller's 1934 novel Tropic of Cancer (banned for obscenity in the US until 1961, immortalized of course in Seinfeld as the book 16-year-old Jerry checks out from the library because he's heard there's a lot of sex in it) and gradually broadens into an examination of Miller's worldview. At one point in the essay, Orwell describes meeting the American expatriate Miller:
I first met Miller at the end of 1936, when I was passing through Paris on my way to Spain. What most intrigued me about him was to find that he felt no interest in the Spanish war whatever. He merely told me in forcible terms that to go to Spain at that moment was the act of an idiot. He could understand anyone going there from purely selfish motives, out of curiosity, for instance, but to mix oneself up in such things from a sense of obligation was sheer stupidity. In any case my ideas about combating Fascism, defending democracy, etc., etc., were all baloney. Our civilization was destined to be swept away and replaced by something so different that we should scarcely regard it as human- a prospect that did not bother him, he said. And some such outlook is implicit throughout his work. Everywhere there is the sense of the approaching cataclysm, and almost everywhere the implied belief that it doesn't matter.
Orwell is regarded in our culture today more like a prophet or patron saint of critical thinking than as a fallible human being, so it can be hard to imagine he was ever wrong, complained like an octogenarian about the new-fangled inventions of his day like aspirin (see The Road to Wigan Pier), or was ever simply fatalistic about the course of history. You might imagine therefore that he let Miller have it for his intensely subjective and arguably selfish outlook. And who knows, maybe in the course of their conversation he did. But the essay is much more interesting and ambivalent than that, because it finds Orwell just as skeptical of his own sense of having a responsibility to participate in the affairs of the world as he is of Miller’s “quietism.” As he acknowledges, he understood very well the sense of being powerless against the tidal forces of history, and the impulse to live “inside the whale.”
In another light, that very Miller/Orwell dichotomy can seem inadequate or naive. As Lois Orr wrote, after meeting Orwell (to her, Eric Blair) in Spain for the first time, “We tried to explain to the newcomers that the war would be decided by politics, not personal valor. There was more than enough of that...deafest of all was Eric Blair...he had come to Spain for a clear moral confrontation of good vs. evil, and did not want a lot of politics to confuse him. He wanted only to carry his ideals and his feelings into...action, and soon left Barcelona for the front.” So responsibility to participate how, and with what group? Orr seems to have been making reference here to the tensions that had been building between the anarchists and the Communists. But then again, first of all, no one has the lay of the land when they first arrive in a foreign country, prophetic author or not. Especially a foreign country at war. Everyone has misconceptions that slowly get corrected; that's the way it works. Secondly, it's hard to blame Orwell for assuming (if he did assume this) that the threat posed by Franco would eventually compel all the leftist factions to put their differences aside, at least for the time being. And lastly, reading through “Looking Back on the Spanish War” shows that Orwell was pretty aware of the big picture. He actually downplays the significance of the infighting Orr alludes to, and that he was almost a victim of, but determines that
...the outcome of the Spanish war was settled in London, Paris, Rome, Berlin- at any rate not in Spain...the much-publicized disunity on the Government side was not a main cause of defeat...the Fascists won because they were the stronger; they had modern arms and the others hadn't. No political strategy could offset that.
The American government, as mentioned above, did everything possible to stop the volunteers from going over there; and when 148 survivors returned to the US in December 1938, on the liner Paris, waiting for them were, in the words of one Lincoln commander, “more cops than people.” Their passports were confiscated; and when one of the volunteers asked a State Department official when they would be returned, the official replied, “Never- I hope.” It’s not hard to understand how some volunteers came to look back on their experience in Spain with fondness.
Some survivors quickly came face to face with what had not changed at home. When James Yates's ship docked in New York, he was taken to a hotel where Lincoln supporters had reserved a block of rooms. “Several of the men had signed for their rooms, but when my turn came the clerk didn't even seem to look at me. ‘Sorry’, he said. ‘No vacancy.’” Yates was black. His white comrades then moved to another hotel in solidarity with him, which was some comfort, but still “the pain went deeply as any bullet could have done.” The equality that he felt he had experienced in Spain was still decades away in the United States. A fellow black Lincoln told him, “Spain was the first place that I ever felt like a free man.”
In the decades that followed, they were harassed by the FBI and the HUAC, sometimes fired from jobs when employers learned of their backgrounds. Not all of them had been or remained Communists, but they were all associated with Communism in the eyes of these institutions. One veteran burned his memoir of the war, afraid that his house was about to be searched. It's fair to say that what they'd done was unsanctioned, after all. They'd looked across the water, seen people they had more of a common struggle with than many of those in their own country, and acted in accordance with a simple principle: No matter that we speak different languages, no matter what our passports say, your problems are my problems.
But we aren't supposed to make those moral judgments for ourselves; we're supposed to let the people in the Pentagon make them for us. Only they get to decide what we should risk our lives for. The domestic propaganda machine therefore never got behind these veterans, and some would be told in later years that they looked awfully young to have fought in the Spanish-American War. It would be wrong however to say that they were never appreciated:
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 2,500 troops from what was left of the International Brigades were marching down the Diagonal, one of Barcelona's grand avenues, for an official farewell. Along the boulevard were signs with names of the battles in which the volunteers had fought. The brigades had borne the brunt of so much combat that their soldiers had been killed at nearly three times the rate of the rest of the Republican army. Many of the Internationals still in Spain were in hospitals, but men from 26 countries made it to the parade. 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...
...As the volunteers passed through the city, they could see the gutted buildings and peeled-away apartment house walls that bore testimony to Mussolini's intensive bombing raids earlier in the year. Republican fighter planes flew overhead, on guard against new attacks. Bands played but could barely be heard. “The women and children were jumping into our arms”, remembered a New York volunteer, “calling us sons, brothers, calling 'come back'...I never had such an experience...because these men, such tough fighters, every last one of them was crying.”
Oh gosh, Mike! Visiting the Gulags! Oh, hello, there, I am here to visit my friend Navalny!
Mike, thank you for such a terrific essay. My sincere compliments. While I did read ‘Homage to Catalonia’ by Orwell, I agree with you that you never got much background in Orwell’s book as to the exact causes and consequences of the Spanish Civil War, so I appreciated your further deliberations. Interesting also, to read about Hemingway’s presence in Madrid and also what Miller’s attitude was. Nevertheless, when Orwell did not provide much actual background in ‘Homage to Catalonia’ the book was devastating in the sense that it provided the reader with the sense of despair of fighting against Franco’s troops. When Franco was still in power, I remember, when on holiday in Catalonia, people were severely punished for speaking Catalan or even make a tiny allusion to things Catalan. There are still, till this day, indications of Franco’s legacy, like in the village I stay often at the Costa Blanco, there is a mountain site called ‘the German Mountain’, of which I only heard a few years ago that this beautiful mountain site with fantastic views was a gift of Franco to the Germans for their help during the Civil War. I was shocked to hear it. Sometimes you also notice Franco’s face in high up murals. Indeed, until this day, the Spanish population knows exactly which towns and villages were backing Franco’s troops. But, then again, we have a same phenomenon here in the Netherlands that people till this day know who were German collaborators during the war.