American Relief Aid and the Spanish Civil War [1 ed.] 9780826273062, 9780826220097

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Copyright © 2013. University of Missouri Press. All rights reserved. American Relief Aid and the Spanish Civil War, University of Missouri Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central,

Copyright © 2013. University of Missouri Press. All rights reserved.

American Relief Aid and the Spanish Civil War

American Relief Aid and the Spanish Civil War, University of Missouri Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central,

Copyright © 2013. University of Missouri Press. All rights reserved. American Relief Aid and the Spanish Civil War, University of Missouri Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central,

Copyright © 2013. University of Missouri Press. All rights reserved.

American Relief Aid and the Spanish Civil War Eric R. Smith

University of Missouri Press

Columbia and London

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Copyright © 2013 by The Curators of the University of Missouri University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri 65201 Printed and bound in the United States of America All rights reserved 5  4  3  2  1   17  16  15  14  13

Cataloging-in-Publication data available from the Library of Congress ISBN 978-0-8262-2009-7

∞™ This paper meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper For Printed Library Materials, Z39.48, 1984.

Copyright © 2013. University of Missouri Press. All rights reserved.

Designer: Kristie Lee Typesetter: K. Lee Design & Graphics Printer and binder: IBT/Hamilton Typeface: Palatino

American Relief Aid and the Spanish Civil War, University of Missouri Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central,

Copyright © 2013. University of Missouri Press. All rights reserved.

For Aina and Lila

American Relief Aid and the Spanish Civil War, University of Missouri Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central,

Copyright © 2013. University of Missouri Press. All rights reserved. American Relief Aid and the Spanish Civil War, University of Missouri Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central,

Contents Abbreviations

ix

Acknowledgments

xi

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Introduction

1

Chapter 1  International Crisis and Reactions

16

Chapter 2  Movement Culture

42

Chapter 3  The Ethnic United Front and Spanish America’s War

64

Chapter 4  The Catholic Church and Interwar Anticommunism

78

Chapter 5  Refugee Aid and the Coming World War

96

Chapter 6  Retribution

109

Conclusion  A Tomb for Democracy

122

Appendix  The Green Report

129

Notes

133

Bibliography

167

Index

185

American Relief Aid and the Spanish Civil War, University of Missouri Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central,

Copyright © 2013. University of Missouri Press. All rights reserved. American Relief Aid and the Spanish Civil War, University of Missouri Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central,

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Abbreviations ACWU

Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America

AGL

Attorney General’s List of Subversive Organizations

ALAWF

American League Against War and Fascism

AMB

American Medical Bureau

ILGWU

International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union

JAFRC

Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee

MB

Medical Bureau

MBNAC

Medical Bureau and North American Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy

MPAC

Motion Picture Artists Committee

NAC

North American Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy

GNYC

Greater New York Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy

SP

Socialist Party

SRRC

Spanish Refugee Relief Committee

YPSL

Young People’s Socialist League

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Copyright © 2013. University of Missouri Press. All rights reserved. American Relief Aid and the Spanish Civil War, University of Missouri Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central,

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Acknowledgments Due to circumstances unusual in academic publishing, this book has more than its usual share of acknowledgments. When a decision was announced to close the University of Missouri Press in spring 2012, students, faculty, Missourians, and citizens of the world rallied to protest as authors—including this one—suddenly found their already approved manuscripts “orphaned.” My editor, Clair Willcox, immediately went to work helping me and other authors find homes for our work. Clair had been an advocate from the time of the manuscript’s arrival on his desk, and he continued to be so even when it was no longer his responsibility. Joyce Harrison at Kent State University Press then picked up the pieces of my manuscript, only to graciously allow me to take them back to Missouri as the fruits of the protest led to the press’ reopening in late summer 2012. In recognition of the efforts of Clair and the University of Missouri Press staff during a very trying year, I was grateful for the chance to return the book to them. I would like to thank the press’s Managing Editor, Sara Davis, and freelance editor Tim Fox for their work in seeing the manuscript through to completion. Even before the incident at the press, the reality of the collective endeavor that is a book was brought home to me. First among the assistants were the archivists and librarians at the various collections I consulted for research. In particular, I would like to recognize Tara Craig at Columbia University and the archival staff at the Wagner Labor Archives at New York University, as well as the librarians at the Biblioteca del Pabellón de la República in Barcelona for furnishing me with most of my Spanishlanguage sources. A number of librarians also have assisted me with loans of materials: John Matthews, Erika Tenorio, and Ana Ortiz at UIC, and Angie Richardson at the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy. Many classes of students at the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy have patiently endured my discussions of various aspects of this project. I want to thank all of them as much for their listening as for their encouragement. Their excitement for my writing has been infectious, as has that of my colleague Claiborne Skinner, whose role in the book’s production, while psychological in nature, should not go unrecognized. Several institutions funded nearly all of the research. These include the xi

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xii

Acknowledgments

Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute, whose Albert M. Greenfield Research Fellowship assured me access to a number of crucial collections in the presidential library. The American Historical Association’s Beveridge Grant got me to Washington, D.C., and the University of Illinois at Chicago Provost’s Award made it possible for me to spend several stretches of research in New York City, where I met some loyal friends and helpful professionals. Aaron Hilkevitch and Dan Reissig both offered me hours of conversation about this period. I regret that I could not get this book out soon enough for Aaron to see it. Numerous scholars have strengthened elements of this study. The delegates at several conferences offered critiques as the research developed and assured that the project would be stronger going forward. I offer my special thanks to Gareth Stockey for his comments on countless facets of my research over the years. My fellow graduates and friends who offered feedback on select chapters from the outset of the project should not be denied credit: Harvey Partica, Aaron Berkowitz, Beth Collins, and Gabrielle Toth. Jeff Helgeson and all of those who participated in the UIC Dissertation Group offered insightful comments on early versions of the study. In assuring that the revised dissertation became a book deserving of the term “academic,” some of the most constructive suggestions came from Fraser Ottanelli and Wayne Bowen to whom I’m indebted for making the final draft better than I had envisioned. I also owe gratitude to Paul Preston for it was with his understanding and early support that this manuscript ended up with Clair Willcox to begin with. Members of my dissertation committee—Peter Carroll, Eric Arnesen, Renato Barahona, Sue Levine—offered assessments that shaped the revisions evident here. I offer my sincere and deepest thanks to my dissertation adviser Richard M. Fried who supported the project when it was still an undeveloped idea. He has recognized its merits and strengths over the past decade, even when I was not so sure of them. I will never know how other dissertation experiences compare, but I can only wish every aspiring graduate the same dutiful devotion, camaraderie, and support as I enjoyed. In the end, of course, any errors of fact or substance in the text reside wholly with me. Finally, the production of a book can be a lonely and demanding experience. No individual has been more nurturing or integral to the completion of the entire endeavor from initial idea to published manuscript than my best friend, camarada, and wife, Mireia Valls. Her sacrifices have been countless, her love enduring. Moltes gràcias.

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American Relief Aid and the Spanish Civil War

American Relief Aid and the Spanish Civil War, University of Missouri Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central,

Copyright © 2013. University of Missouri Press. All rights reserved. American Relief Aid and the Spanish Civil War, University of Missouri Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central,

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Introduction

In the spring of 1937, Daniel Saidenberg, first cellist for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, conducted twelve musicians in an impromptu performance on Chicago’s North Shore at the estate of the late Julius Rosenwald. The event brought out some of the region’s most privileged citizens. One of the event organizers commented: “We are still trying to figure out just what caused the excitement. People were scrambling for tickets and we succeeded in getting 783 in that yard.” The excitement in question was stirred by a benefit concert for the Spanish Republic sponsored by the North Shore Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy. It was a cultural event repeated in various forms across the United States in the second half of the 1930s by activist intellectuals, union members, artists, and musicians of every variety—the cross-section of the Spanish Republic’s American advocates was wide.1 Despite persistent interest in the war itself and its international volunteers, little is known about the international movement to aid the Spanish Republic. The story of the International Brigades and the nearly 2,800 Americans who volunteered to fight fascism in Spain is well known, and scholarship on the four brigades has bolstered the enduring image of the Spanish Civil War as an exemplar of the various forces in conflict during the Great Depression and as a precursor to World War II. About one-third of these international volunteers died in action; nearly half were injured.2 Yet as historian Daniel Kowalsky has commented in his research on the Soviet Union’s involvement in Spain, “The subject of solidarity and relief aid . . . has received scant attention in Western secondary literature.” On the British side the subject has garnered scholarly attention, but the literature on Americans’ Spanish Republican aid has remained a subject mentioned only in passing. Allen Guttmann’s oft-cited study of Americans’ reactions to the war, The Wound in the Heart, offers an intellectual history of American thinking about the Spanish conflict, but nonetheless fails to explain what actions Americans undertook. This oversight by historians obscures the centrality of the Spanish Republic for many Americans amid the emerging international crisis. The war, as Dominic Tierney recently pointed out, was not only the major international conflict in the interwar period, “it altered the course of European and therefore world politics.” 

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American Relief Aid and the Spanish Civil War

Americans’ responses to these events and their involvement in Spanish Republican aid reveals an underside to isolationism in that period, the development of postwar internationalism, and what it meant to be antifascist.3 The primary political device for antifascists was the Popular Front, a critical feature of this period that assumed different forms. Its main characteristic was cooperation between communists and others as revolutionary rhetoric was tempered to make a common cause against fascist gains. In Spain, this Popular Front consisted of a coalition of antifascist parties with a vast majority of Socialists and three communist ministers constituting the government elected in February 1936. In the United States, this coalition was more informal than elsewhere but with the ever-present communists serving as a conduit and as its most active organizers. While antifascist cooperation among different political persuasions was not new when it was made official by the Communist Party in 1935, it did expand its reach afterward.4 As international events unfolded in the 1930s, Spain served as a symbol. Fears of fascism’s growing strength and its support for the coup against the Popular Front government butted up against appeasement, isolationism in its American form. Among western governments, the July 1936 coup by half of the Spanish military against a democratically elected Popular Front government provoked concerns for the Republic’s survival. The international community of nations responded to these developments with combined horror and disbelief, mingled with apathy—at times hostility. That hostility was typically directed toward the Popular Front government rather than the insurgents. Although President Roosevelt tilted leftward on a number of political issues, Republican Spain’s cause was one on which he had not yet forged an alliance with the left. Any possible step in that direction the president might have intended to take was headed off by resistance to Spanish aid by that segment of the political right backing Franco, which found allies to conduct grassroots operations against the Republic’s supporters. Isolationism and anticommunism emerged as strong forces obstructing the path of antifascism. At the same time, many citizens in the international community expressed a notable sympathy to the Republic, and by no means were these exclusively those on the political left. In the United States, the movement to send humanitarian relief to Spain’s embattled Second Republic represented the most visible manifestation of the Popular Front’s antifascism and illustrated a growing reconsideration of isolation as it was then understood. This activity promoted an involvement in foreign affairs while making concessions to the isolationist disposition, yet this relief work failed to shake the cultural

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Introduction



foundations of diplomatic disengagement or even fully to arouse American opinion on the growing crisis. Still, the aid movement fostered antifascism’s popularity and its growth. It provoked an outpouring of collective concern like no other foreign event of the interwar decades. Spanish aid committees formed across North America and throughout Europe. In the United States, key organizations of various political persuasions disseminated propaganda, lobbied Washington, and raised funds for relief aid to the Republic. A smaller effort to offer nonpartisan aid and another largely unsuccessful one to assist the fascist-backed insurgent forces also captured the imagination of some Americans and has also recently received historical attention.5 However, this larger effort to aid the Republic has not received closer scrutiny. Such an examination will expand our understanding of American reactions to the rise of international fascism, to the relationship between the foreign policy public and Washington, and to the shift from isolation to foreign engagement. Organized American aid efforts were not unprecedented. Americans had most recently responded to crises after the Great War when the U.S. government underwrote massive aid. Just as that war fostered isolationism, its ravages had also inspired aid efforts. Herbert Hoover was a purveyor of large-scale assistance when he directed postwar relief, steering eighteen million tons of American food to Europe. The U.S. Congress allocated $100 million in assistance. Relief to Armenia in 1918 and to famine-wracked Russia followed in 1921. In 1923 relief was undertaken for Japan, where upwards of 200,000 died in an earthquake. At that time the quake was the biggest disaster in history, and the U.S. Congress voted unanimously to send $6 million toward assistance there. In contrast, the Spanish Republic’s supporters directed a relief effort without governmental support, without existing public funds, and amid the general public’s lack of concern. The trend toward partisan relief had also been determined after the World War and was significant for Spanish aid. The humanitarian relief the American government approved for Europe following the war contained an amendment sponsored by Senator Henry Cabot Lodge forbidding any of the relief to be used to feed “enemy” families, adults and children alike. The $2 million in assistance that did reach official enemies came only through a food draft system set up by the American Relief Administration, since the administration itself was forbidden to distribute public funds to official enemies. The nongovernmental effort to aid Republican Spain was akin to the gift-giving among German-Americans who donated through this food draft.6

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American Relief Aid and the Spanish Civil War

So while Spanish aid was in many respects not new, at least four characteristics of the Spanish Civil War distinguish the international solidarity of that conflict from the internationalist but more unilateralist approach that developed in the United States in the following years. First, the Spanish Republic was under a left-wing government at the time of the coup so that international solidarity was intended to bolster the progressive achievements of the young Republic. Second, the involvement of Hitler’s Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Fascist Italy on the side of the rebels provided the republican aid movement with an antifascist focal point. Third, the aid movement’s ultimate goal, aside from supplying relief aid, was to lift the restrictions western governments had placed on the Republic’s ability to procure arms legally in order to defend itself. Put another way, the solidarity movement was defending international law and was critical of the governments that refused to abide by it. Finally, the movement did not articulate a view of blanket interventionism to be applied everywhere. Spanish Republican supporters saw the legal right to arms amid an already existing conflict as the single imperative for avoiding a wider conflict that would most certainly mean devastation on a scale far worse than the Great War. These features, along with internationalists’ sentiments, distinguish the late 1930s from later American articulations, in particular appeals in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries for an almost general intervention by the United States all over the globe to promote—as opposed to defend—democracy and to avert calamities and bloodshed, which is to say that the historical context of the Spanish relief efforts marks their uniqueness from later events. To be sure, the United States had already made forays into foreign territory at the time of the Spanish conflagration. By the administration of Woodrow Wilson the country had committed troops across the Americas and the Caribbean, but such direct foreign involvement was put on hold by Roosevelt in the 1930s under the Good Neighbor Policy. When the Spanish Civil War erupted in 1936, the president was not committed to foreign military actions and the collective attitude of the country had turned against diplomatic entanglements.7

´´´ The present study traces how a group of socialists and communists, and nonpartisan antifascist allies, attempted to build in the United States what they considered to be a political rampart against Hitler and Mussolini. In this way, Spain’s conflict was a test case for the Popular Front. Though it failed in its goal of preventing the next war, the Popular Front succeeded in uniting a broad swath of the American public around antifascism and fostered a movement culture. The aid effort never reached

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Introduction



a critical mass, invited severe criticism because of the presence of communists, and failed to convert popular apathy into concern for collective security. The lack of depth of support among the American public even within a broad range of political persuasions also indicates how powerful isolationism and anticommunism were at that time. Like the Spanish Republic itself, this effort manqué fought a losing battle for the hearts and minds of a nation bent on isolation and burdened by a panoply of other problems.8 No single perspective of the era captures the complexity of American activities for Spain, so this book approaches the subject in several different ways. Intellectual, social, ethnic, and political historical approaches inform its six chapters. A submerged theme, but an important one, is the liberal impulse behind American aid to Spain. Historian Allen Guttmann took up this matter some decades ago in Wound in the Heart and it need not be detailed again. American Relief Aid and the Spanish Civil War underscores some of his earlier findings but arrives at them differently. Therefore, it is worth restating the historical issue here. The Lockian desires for overturning of monarchical rule, support for republicanism, protection of a body of (international) laws all apply in the case of American support for the Spanish Republic. John Locke’s approach held that “war is justified . . . when it is brought about by an aggressor that seeks to destroy or rob one of one’s life or property.” This applies, Locke argued, even to killing a “thief who has not in the least hurt him, nor declared any design upon his life” since the mere intention to deprive one of property was reason enough for a preemptive strike. Political scientist Edward Weisband traced this line of thought in American history through Thomas Paine, George Washington, James Monroe, and James Polk then to “interventionist liberalism: the ideology of American imperialism.” To the supporters of Spanish republicanism one aspect of this Lockian tradition was particularly critical: the Spanish Republic’s legal rights. While the Spanish conflict stirred a number of American political tendencies in a vast cauldron of ideology, liberalism infused the movement.9 The literature for defense of the Republic was rife with references to its democracy and to the threat posed by the medievalism of the church and also of fascism. Spain’s government was “legally and democratically elected,” its constitution “the pure cool aroma of Jean Jacques Rousseau,” its new education system “liberal,” as Guttmann indicates. The prominence of literary supporters of the Republic attested to a collective vision of the Spanish Republic as liberalism and the Enlightenment under fire.10 The Medical Bureau and North American Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy were at the forefront of this aid movement and constitute the focus of this study, though others will also be mentioned. Many of the

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American Relief Aid and the Spanish Civil War

movement’s activists contributed to the propagation of antifascism without having been part of any organization since unity within the movement lay more with the shared precept and the cultural expressions of antifascism than it did with any partisan political program. Many people independent of the movement’s official structures also promoted a sense of urgency and solidarity with the Spanish Loyalists. The transmission lines that communicated and reinforced sympathies for the Spanish republicans and constructed a discourse of “democracy versus fascism” also permitted the fomentation of a culture of dissent. These expressions reflected the deep-seated anxieties of a prescient populace anxious about the next war. All of the devices that served these ends—not just films, art, books, and news items, but also rallies, strikes, and yard parties—fostered a movement culture and promoted sympathy for embattled Spain. Put succinctly, antifascism was expressed in a multitude of ways. What made Spain’s cause distinct was that it increased the reach of the left’s cultural products (these strikes, yard parties, teas, and ambulance tours, alongside art, books, and news reports) upwards and outwards. High society in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia; middle-class activists in California, Ohio, and Iowa; poorer workers in West Virginia, Louisiana, and Florida—all were able to gather for the common cause of Spain under the banner of antifascism.

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Defining Fascism The contemporary understanding of fascism then is of considerable consequence. One of the most recognized American representations of that era is Ernest Hemingway’s protagonist in For Whom the Bell Tolls. As he lay injured and facing certain death from Franco’s advancing army, Robert Jordan narrates: “I have fought for what I believed in for a year now. If we win here we will win everywhere. The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.”11 If it were possible to converse with Jordan at that moment to ask him who he meant by we and what precisely was to be won, the answer would presumably reflect the thinking of the aid movement’s proponents. Much of what these men and women claimed suffered the same vagueness, which proved a detriment to clear understanding of their goals, but such conceptual openness was also among the Popular Front’s virtues. For those watching events abroad, Spain suggested that the next war was already under way. The Republican cause identified the enemy, and the Spanish government’s supporters organized against it. But what enemy? When woven together, two key components formed a common ideological thread evident in activities for Spain. These were devoted to the

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Introduction



defense of “democracy versus fascism” and of “Spanish democracy,” and over time the two concepts were conflated, making them virtually interchangeable so that antifascism became the defense of Spanish democracy. The Spanish Republic provided a tangibility to the more abstract notion of democracy versus fascism by offering concrete images to use in the aid movement’s struggle to penetrate the discourse of international politics at the time. The bifurcation of Spanish democracy versus international fascism was axiomatic and the tie that bound disparate individuals together around one issue. It was quite possibly the only tie, and eventually it reached even to the American presidency, if entirely too late and without inciting a will to act. Fascism remains an enigma to historians because it was not manifested uniformly. As historian Stanley Payne has found, of all European fascist-like regimes, fascism was least applicable as a label for Spain, where an actual fascist movement was nearly nonexistent with the Franco government drawing its doctrines and structures from a right-wing authoritarianism. At the same time, on a theoretical level, the marginal but overtly fascist Falange did develop an official program that conforms to identifiable fascistic doctrines. The one missing key component was any semblance of a strong Spanish nationalism. Payne concludes that early Francoism appeared fascist but was in the end “restricted within a right-wing, pretorian, Catholic, and semipluralist structure [so] that the category of ‘semifascist’ would probably be more accurate.” That said, in the first year of the Spanish conflict use of the word fascist was common, and Franco utilized the term totalitarian self-referentially several times. While this reflects upon the inchoate nature of what became the rightwing regime in Spain, it also means that antifascists could justify their characterization of fascism as applied to the prevailing triumvirate at that moment (Germany, Italy, and Spain).12 For contemporary observers of these events, the prototypes proved the rule and exceptions mattered less. These prototypes assumed two guises, one Italian and one German. The Italian manifestation had won acceptance in surprisingly diverse quarters for over a decade. However, with the rise of Hitler and the emerging coalition between him and Mussolini, many Americans reconsidered the presumably benign nature of the latter’s vision. In the United States pro-fascist expressions and occasional demonstrations suggested that perhaps fascism was not simply a European phenomenon. Intellectuals and the engaged public found linkages between the situation in the U.S. and that abroad. With the impending threat from the right, the status quo—Roosevelt’s New Deal—became the best weapon available for defense, though this was not always aptly expressed by defenders of Spain’s Republic. Nonetheless, support for

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American Relief Aid and the Spanish Civil War

organized labor and defense of the New Deal emerged as the ramparts against the anticipated fascist onslaught.13 Writer Albert Halper recounted how the

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burgeoning activities of local Nazi storm troopers appeared in Manhattan’s Yorkville district, along East 86th Street. Flushed by the successes of their compatriots back in the fatherland, members of the newly formed German-American Bund marched in brown-shirted cadres through the upper East Side streets, right arms extended, shouting: “Heil, Hitler!”

He recalled attending a counter-protest with leftists and Jewish American Legion members side by side, rushing the Nazi protestors. Not long after, a Jewish printer was accosted by Nazis, a swastika scratched in his chest.14 Fascism had a face and a purpose, and it was on the march. That the German Bund existed on the margins and in the shadow of the New Deal was little consolation to observers like Halper or the New York hub of Spanish Republican solidarity. Frequent invocations of fascism’s emergence in the United States, the threats emanating from Nazi Germany, and the New Deal’s apparent precariousness made Spain as good an example of democracy as concerned Americans needed in order to rally to its defense. Spain’s government had been democratically elected, had shifted leftward when the rest of Europe was moving the other direction, and was under attack with the aid of Hitler and Mussolini. Where the Spanish aid movement lacked a “scaffolding of ideology,” it possessed antifascism as a unifying principle.15 To the extent that scaffolding was erected around the Spanish cause, it was a vaguely defined good democracy opposed to the evils of a fascism defined by Spanish, German, and Italian militarism. The use of “democracy” by the Communist Party opened up the Popular Front to charges of disingenuousness. Yet the democracy-fascism dichotomy forged a rather widely accepted concept that permeated the highest levels of American power, and the Popular Front offered the promise of an alliance of the American left. When the antagonist showed no commitment to democracy, and the protagonists at least spoke of one, the allies of Spain faced little difficulty in supporting each other. Moreoever, the rising tide of actual (not imagined) international threats to this democracy from the far right made possible a coalition of those to the left.16 The aid movement generated a large amount of propaganda that constructed imagery of an embattled Spain to produce a movement culture of antifascism.17 The propaganda emanating from all points on the political spectrum in the thirties is what perhaps led poet W. H. Auden to dub

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Introduction



these years “a low dishonest decade.”18 At the same time, the responses by many Americans from various classes and social stations suggest that the propaganda did at least reflect the sentiments of many. A closer look at this propaganda also demonstrates how the democracy-fascism dichotomy was defined and a culture of antifascism came to be forged. What was generally missing from the propaganda was recognition of the complexity of the Spanish situation. Most notably, the class warfare that was so central to the unrest in Spain throughout the Republic’s life, having been consigned to the margins of debate by the Popular Front outside Spain, became impossible to reconcile without adopting the communist position of burying the class conflict for the greater good of winning the war. Class conflict in Spain and the contributions of the anarchists were decidedly elided by the liberal and communist (but not socialist and anarchist) presses. Partisans also avoided mention of violence committed by the Republican side in the early months of the conflict.19 Spanish anticlericalism, a historically complicated and longstanding practice, was consistently downplayed in order to seek Catholic support for the cause and to attenuate criticism of the Republic. The propaganda also downplayed or ignored all violence by the left in Spain while emphasizing that committed by the right. Generally, propaganda from the Popular Front assessed the terror inflicted upon the civilian population by the right by simply referring to fascists as “barbaric.”20 Finally, the propaganda emphasized (Spanish) democracy and the need to defend it actively. In this respect more than any other, propaganda by the aid movement challenged a cornerstone of interwar thinking by urging a more active resistance and involvement in European affairs rather than more passive isolationist tendencies. Yet calls for defense of the Spanish Republic rarely mentioned intervention beyond lifting the arms embargo. Like democracy, fascism too was never clearly defined. One communist aid pamphlet advanced perhaps the most concise understanding of this theme at the time: “Fascism is the destruction of the democratic process by violence and the substitution of the rule of force in order to block any change in the profit system.”21 This explains why the editors at The Nation had been using fascist in an especially vague fashion. In a 1935 article asking “Need the New Deal be Fascist?” the magazine’s editors—especially Raymond Swing—saw the New Deal toeing a line dangerously parallel to Germany and Italy in its leadership by the business community. Moreover, at a conference on the New Deal the magazine reported that business leaders had demonstrated both an inability to lead and a lack of “constructive thinking.” On social welfare the editors deferred to the Roosevelt administration, concluding, following sociologist William F. Ogburn’s claims, that “once business and the government are united, unless the union is

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10

American Relief Aid and the Spanish Civil War

dedicated to the equal interest of all, it is fascism.” That is to say that, “Unless labor is given equal power with management in the new dispensation, ours will be fascism of the European brand.” Legislation soon to be introduced by Senator Robert Wagner and designed to protect collective bargaining prompted further reflection. The Nation editors surmised that Wagner’s bill would prevent the United States from following the fates of Italy and Germany. In those countries, one could see “what happens to free legislatures in countries where business and the government become one and labor is repressed.”22 The fear of domestic fascism and labor’s protection as a defense emerged as a recurring theme at The Nation. Swing, who became editor of the magazine just as the threat of expansionist fascism abroad was moving beyond the theoretical in 1935, attempted to connect European trends to the popularity in the U.S. of populist spokesmen like Huey Long, Father Charles Coughlin, and Francis Townsend. Under the banner the Forerunners of American Fascism, a number of Swing’s essays from The Nation were compiled into a book where they were introduced as a study in fascist demagoguery. In another example, Smedley Butler, a renowned retired Marine, had charged in late 1934 that he had been approached by a group of leading financiers to lead a coup by the American Legion against the Roosevelt administration.23 Swing, like the rest of The Nation’s editors, dismissed the Butler episode as of “no great sociological significance” because unlike the European fascist movements this plot lacked “passion and prejudice,” both of which are necessary in revolutions and cannot “be bought and sold as commodities” as the alleged 1934 Wall Street conspirators seemed to think. Fascism, Swing argued, was not reactionary, but rather “begins as a radical movement, as it must since its appeal is to the primitive passions of depressed and desperate people.” Fascism was “a reorganization of society to maintain an unequal distribution of economic power by undemocratic means” and “a sacrifice of democracy in the interest of economic maldistribution, and it would be fascism even without doing much violence to personal liberties, or after the persecution of minorities has ceased.”24 The Nation was not alone in finding an already-living American fascism. Dwight Macdonald, editor of the anti-Stalinist Partisan Review, held to a Marxist definition of the ideology.25 Significantly, he also denounced the left’s characterizations of all fascists as “madmen” because such a reading implied that only force could restrain them. “The more the American masses are led to think of fascism as something monstrous and unheard of, as one more ‘ism’ peculiar to European nations, the harder it will be to check the growth of American fascism.” In his introduction to the French

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Introduction

11

anarchist Daniel Guerin’s Fascism and Big Business, Macdonald supported Guerin’s perspective in describing how big business in the United States forged a coalition with a populist base, uniting a movement of lower-class people with upper-class interests. “The content of American fascism,” Macdonald concluded, “is the same as that of Europe: big business interests masquerading as anti-capitalism.” To achieve this, the American version of fascism replaced nationalism with provincialism. As Macdonald described it, “The ‘alien’ quality of New York’s culture is used by the hillbilly fuehrers, as by their populist predecessors, merely to sharpen the major antagonism: the resentment the provinces have always felt against ‘Wall Street.’” Moreover, “Demagogues . . . have shrewdly exploited populism, in its day a real movement of mass revolt. With the old political parties offering little that was new during the economic crisis, big business maneuvered accordingly.” “While Hoover and Landon were droning on about cutting relief and balancing the budget,” he continued, “[t]he duPonts were secretly subsidizing such demagogic ventures as the [Georgia] ‘Grass Roots’ Conference of 1936.”26 Given the lack of a serious domestic fascist threat in the United States, Macdonald’s concerns seem especially misplaced. Indeed, the American left seemed to encounter a nearly ubiquitous fascism much as the American right would soon confront communism (though some on the right had already found it, as chapter four will show). Yet his and Guerin’s claim that fascism was “big business interests masquerading as anti-capitalism” was also mainstream, and Guerin’s and Macdonald’s analyses relied on a structural analysis of fascism that made visible what many perceived as lurking just below the American political surface. The need to organize the lower classes in defense against the fascist menace became the lynchpin for the antifascist culture just then being articulated.27 The Black Legion in Detroit, the German-American Bund in New York City, the pro-Italian Brown Shirts, William Dudley Pelley’s silver shirts, and even the Ku Klux Klan’s heyday the decade before (and the South’s persistent caste system) all offered sufficient grounding to the fears of fascist advances, especially given the course of events in Europe.28 Writer Malcolm Cowley even wondered later if the American right wing—collectively in the Khaki, Silver, Blue, Black, and White Shirts, together with Coughlinites, Longites, and Minutemen—did not actually have “more sympathizers and active members—than the communists would ever have.” The case of the Spanish Republic demonstrates that many Americans, if not disposed to what Cowley characterized as the American right, nonetheless preferred sympathizing with Franco.29 One must explain why Republican aid, though capturing the imagination of a wide cross-section of the American public, failed either to activate a critical mass or to sway policymakers.30

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American Relief Aid and the Spanish Civil War

Fraser Ottanelli reasonably observed that “communists were not the only ones to see in the invasion of Ethiopia, the militarization of the Rhineland, and the Japanese attack on China, portents of a global menace.”31 Stoking this fear were writers like Nathanael West (A Cool Million, 1934), Edward Dahlberg (Those Who Perish, 1934), and Sinclair Lewis (It Can’t Happen Here, 1935) who published dystopian novels of an insurgent American fascism. Lewis’s prediction of a dictatorship by a Huey Long–like figure sold 320,000 copies and was in late 1935, according to Malcolm Cowley, “the most argued-about of the fall books.” To Dwight Macdonald or journalist Leland Stowe, though, a phrase like “it can happen here,” surpassed the theoretical. The outbreak of hostilities in Spain provided a living scenario.32 Leland Stowe’s nonfiction assessment in Nazi Means War also offered dire predictions for the United States. Stowe contended that the Foreign Policy Association was alone among civil, political, and news institutions in beginning to ask what the U.S. government might do if (probably when) Europe were in the throes of another general war.33 The political culture by the mid-1930s seemed to suggest to some intellectuals the inevitability of war and the possibility of a right-wing triumph even here in the United States.34 For those who may not have fretted over the immediate rise of domestic fascism, there still loomed the threat of another great clash, which by 1936 Hitler and Mussolini were initiating. “A majority of articulate opinion,” historian Allen Guttmann concluded, “was concerned [about Republican Spain] because the liberal democratic tradition seemed threatened by the retrogression of civilization toward a new Dark Age of irrationality, lawlessness, and barbarism.”35 Americans in solidarity with the Spanish Republic cherished it as a liberal democracy, but they agreed less about how to define the enemy, even less still about what they expected to achieve with victory. Antifascism was a decidedly negative motivator. Expressions of “democracy” contained little substance. The democracy—or liberalism, as Guttman referred to it—that constituted Spanish republicanism was an incipient vision. So philosopher Sidney Hook recognized, ruefully describing the Popular Front as “the defense of whatever democracy now exists.” Hook stated what is now obvious: that socialists, communists, anarchists, and liberals retained their own views of the proper course to achieve democratic ideals. What they agreed on was the need to halt fascism by aiding Republican Spain, even if that arrangement was a short-term expedient. Paeans to a vaguely defined democracy permitted enough rhetorical space for Hook to suggest that “the Roosevelt administration [was] a Popular Front government.”36

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At its core then, Spain was tangential to the very discourse of democracy it inspired yet was all-important as a symbol. In some way all of the Americans activated by the Spanish war recognized the symbolism. Their sympathies were ultimately self-referential: how can we prevent this from coming here? At the same time, Spain’s Republic was a constitutional democracy facing extinction under arms of authoritarian governments and sympathizers. Abandoning Spain was to abandon liberalism as it weathered the storms of the 1930s.37 Antifascism offered the mode of this liberal expression. For its proponents Spanish Democracy was a very real entity, understood differently by each individual. We might presume therefore that, could he actually take the time to tell us, Hemingway’s Robert Jordan would be at a loss to provide a substantive answer to our initial question. The best we might arrive at for motivation would be a point of emphasis: “I have fought for what I believed in for a year now.” As for what was to be won, it could only have meant the defeat of Mussolini and Hitler indirectly through a Spanish Republican victory. Whoever was doing the fighting—Robert Jordan, in this case—was concerned about the defeat of Mussolini and Hitler because his place of origin was “a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.” If the enemy was perhaps exaggerated at home, the fears instilled from abroad were nonetheless wholly real. The political machinations of this solidarity movement combined with the loose definitions of fascism and democracy to cultivate a movement culture, one that confronted both the power in Washington and an organized opposition at the local level.

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Description of Chapters

The book’s first chapter presents a concise overview of the conflict and describes the intellectual origins of the response in the United States and the inception of relief aid. The historical antecedents of the Republican aid movement, especially in the grassroots effort to assist Ethiopia in 1935, will be briefly assessed here. The first chapter then analyzes the political parameters of the various campaigns and their constituents and outlines the movement’s goals and organizing activities. The Spanish Civil War bolstered the Communist Party’s initiative to build a coalition of antifascists under the rubric of the Popular Front. The resulting aid effort generated a network of organizations, some under Communist direction, but many others without. The ideological adherents of the Popular Front—anarchists, socialists, communists—shared low regard for each other and thus each uniquely approached antifascism. Begrudged and

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American Relief Aid and the Spanish Civil War

sporadic cooperation gave the movement its shape. Nonetheless, the Popular Front emerged as a unifying idea so that commitment to the goal of antifascism trumped political affiliation. The second chapter endeavors to offer a new framework for looking at political activity by average people. In further developing the concept of “movement culture” the chapter explores the intersection of political activities and cultural output, including such events as basketball benefit matches, yard parties, and solidarity strikes. The movement can be seen in action from basketball courts in New York City to parties at North Shore estates in Illinois. Across the country a broad constituency was involved in Spanish Republican aid, especially in metropolitan areas. It included both upper- and working-class Americans, sometimes even the poor. This constituency included liberals, socialists, communists, anarchists, and sometimes moderate conservatives. Chapter two touches upon all of these and then explores the connections between the producers of intellectual culture and the working class, the latter of which, by an anthropological understanding, also created critical components of movement culture. One-third of workers in this period were the children of immigrants, and the ethnic component in the Spanish aid movement was prominent. Yet, both labor’s activism and its apathy with regard to the Republic bears further exploration. Although many workers felt pressed by other matters in this period, many labor leaders attempted to build support for the Spanish Republic. As a crucial component of the movement culture, a wave of solidarity strikes in late 1938 suggests that Spain could arouse fury among workers. These were as crucial as any other endeavor in building the aid movement and attempting to advance its goals. Chapter three further examines the role of ethnicity in the movement generally and that of Spanish-Americans, a small but crucial segment to the aid campaigns. Even more significantly, it becomes clear that Spanish came to include non-Spaniards. This chapter then further analyzes the relationships of the Spanish groups with the primary aid organizations in Tampa, Los Angeles, San Francisco, New Orleans, and New York. It then explores ethnic prejudice that put all “Spanish” ethnics a step below the Anglo organizers. Yet the conflation of various ethnic groups under the Spanish label was also a crucial step for many immigrants toward being considered part of the mainstream. The movement was not without its detractors, and chapter four considers the aid effort’s opposition and explores the barriers to the popularity of antifascism, particularly one active strain of Catholicism and an anticommunism that lay just below the political surface. Unified, these two persuasions successfully exploited America’s isolationist disposi-

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tion to halt the aid movement’s political momentum and cut short any possibility of a change in Washington’s policy. By the time the Spanish Civil War officially ended April 1, 1939, interest in the war had reached Washington’s highest levels, but it was too late to make a difference. A body of recent scholarship has taken up the issue of Catholicism and its relationship to fascism. Chapter four not only synthesizes this recent research but connects it to Spanish Republican aid and the development of McCarthyism. The movement did not collapse with the end of the Spanish war, but it did begin to disintegrate and reorganize as a refugee aid movement. Chapter five recounts how the movement spun apart and restructured to aid refugees as the emaciated movement fell into internal turmoil, especially following the Hitler-Stalin Pact. This chapter further elaborates upon the intricacies of the aid organizations as they became more connected over time. Finally, chapter six details the political repression that followed from aid activities. The FBI had been gathering files on key activists from the outset, and the House Un-American Activities Committee launched an ongoing series of inquiries where Spanish aid figured prominently. A raid by the FBI on the Detroit office of the Medical Bureau was the first salvo of this new state of affairs. Anticommunists in the Congress gathered their momentum first in 1939, and a second, more focused effort beginning in 1946 targeted the remnants of the communist wing of the movement that had reorganized as the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee. Even noncommunists were caught up in this pre-McCarthy red hunt.

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A Note on Terminology Throughout this book I have attempted to conform to convention in referring to the various groups and factions. To avoid getting caught up in their origins in the course of the manuscript, I will introduce them here. The Nationalists, Francoists, and insurgents are all the same group, followers of the faction of General Francisco Franco, who rose up in rebellion against the Spanish Republic. The Loyalists and republicans are the same group, those defenders of the Spanish Republic. All political parties are capitalized, but adherents to parties are lowercase. Common usage makes practical the usage here of these styles but also helps to distinguish republicans and the Republic from members of the Republican Party in the United States. The same applies to Fascists in Italy, where adherents to the ideology more generally receive lower-case treatment. Finally, anarchists, lacking a party, are equivalent in their ideological cohesion to socialists and communists and also receive a lower-case treatment.

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Chapter 1

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International Crisis and Reactions

The relief campaigns for the Spanish Republic developed in the immediate wake of the July 18, 1936, rebellion by the Spanish army against its left-of-center coalition government. Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy cast their lot with the insurgents at the outset, providing troops, transportation and matériel. The Republic’s government, elected only that preceding February, pleaded for foreign assistance in accordance with international law as centuries of diplomatic tradition reserved the right of governments to purchase arms for defense against insurrections. Hitler and Mussolini’s involvement in Spain complicated the situation, and a policy of nonintervention followed. Britain’s initiation of the Non-Intervention Committee stemmed from a variety of fears, and France, in sponsoring the committee’s creation, assured Italy that failure to comply would mean French assistance to Spain. The Italians gave their approval, and the League of Nations likewise acquiesced to the Committee’s formation. France and Britain both expected the conflict to spread if not contained and adhered to the Committee’s existence even after both realized “it was largely a face-saving device” that did “not help to localize the conflict.”1 In both Britain and the United States perceptions of the diplomatic situation were shaped by bad intelligence as much as by representative actions like the seizure of properties belonging to Ford, General Motors, ITT, and National City Bank. Anarchist violence and communist subversion were conflated by the diplomatic corps, and a dramatic misreading of German and Italian involvement led to the conclusion that nonintervention would promote a Nationalist government free of Italian and German domination while isolating what one State Department adviser allegedly referred to as “a lot of hoodlums” who constituted Spain’s Popular Front government.2 Great Britain’s policy of appeasement derived from an intention to steer clear of any diplomatic situation that might antagonize Germany and Italy. The Roosevelt administration followed Britain’s lead in Europe 16

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by implementing a policy of neutrality, which the U.S. Congress eventually codified as an arms embargo against Spain. Even as it was announced, many critics of the policy understood that the American embargo effectively assisted the fascist coalition by forbidding the purchase of weapons by the legal Spanish government while permitting aid to the insurgents by Italy and Germany. With the Spanish Republic isolated by its western neighbors, the Soviet Union emerged as its only major ally.

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Toward the Spanish Civil War The temper of a new internationalism had reached the surface, however, and stemmed from the rise of fascism in Italy in the early 1920s and the subsequent advance of the political right throughout Europe. For those on the political left, from France and Spain to the United States, the international situation resonated in gloomy tones. Throughout Europe, in the two decades after the Great War, governments veered to the right (except in Spain and Czechoslovakia, and ostensibly France) so that by 1933 even Germany, the industrial powerhouse of the continent, found itself under the leadership of a demagogic führer. If fascism’s symphony struck ominous chords, most Americans chose to ignore the sound, instead preoccupying themselves with the quotidian challenges of life in economic despair. Many Americans, liberals in particular, were moved by the economic crisis and veered toward the political left. “The depression shook the intellectuals’ faith in capitalism and seemed to demand radical solutions for the nation’s urgent problems,” explained writer Alfred Kazin. During the thirties, “the belief in economic planning for communal ends became a basic touchstone of liberalism.” This predisposed many liberals to cooperate with the more radical left. “All the cleverest and most dynamic people I met,” Kazin recalled, “now gave authority to Marxist opinion—especially if they were from the upper echelons that I had waited so long to see.” The anticipation of a coming conflict provoked anxiety among the foreign policy public about the need for a counter-alliance to resist the impending crisis.3 Yet, the weight of recent history encumbered the left’s ambitions. World War I had prompted Americans to mind their own affairs, the Red Scare that culminated in the Palmer Raids decimated the ranks of radical organizations, and then the Great Depression further reinforced a commitment to noninvolvement. Economic issues ruled the day, and if war was to come, the U.S. would have no part in it. Upon the ascendency of Benito Mussolini, Italian-American antifascists managed a virtual monopoly on such resistance in the United States. This monopoly was displaced by a broader movement in 1935 when Mussolini’s army invaded Ethiopia (traditionally known as Abyssinia), at the

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American Relief Aid and the Spanish Civil War

time the only autonomous nation besides Liberia in an otherwise colonized Africa. The community of Italians who had taken up the banner of antifascism offered a point of reference for the later movement that emerged in the mid-1930s. Italian antifascism, while it offered some assistance to the Popular Front in the U.S. later on, retained its Italian-ness.4 It was the Soviet Union’s belated concern with fascism that laid a foundation for a broader coalition. The Soviets’ fear for their own security resonated among communists, but that same party’s antifascist concerns also reached those “fellow travelers” who became convinced that only resistance would halt the rising tide of fascist militarism.5 The Popular Front had initiated an apparent shift in the landscape of the political left in the United States. In 1932, the World Congress Against War in Amsterdam attempted to forge coalitions to stem the growth of fascism. With the formation of the League Against War and Fascism after the United States Congress Against War in September 1933, what began as a noncommunist affair spun into the party’s orbit. After some efforts of collaboration in several countries, the Comintern approved the strategy in January 1935 and adopted this policy for all Communist parties within the year. A commitment to working in coalition with noncommunist antifascists was the established hallmark of the new policy, though in practice sectarian struggle often continued. A tempering of revolutionary rhetoric did follow, and in the United States these events cultivated a number of political activities of which aid to the Spanish Republic was but one.6 Following from the Popular Front imperative, republican support in the United States emerged with a broad political constituency. Although New York was always at the center, many American cities hosted a variety of fund-raising events. Activists in Chicago, Los Angeles, Detroit, Baltimore, Cincinnati, Tampa, other cities, and even several smaller towns established networks for relief aid with the emergent groups relying on a committed core of local leaders drawn from labor unions, socialists, communists, anarchists, liberals, intellectuals, and even a few political conservatives.7 This movement for aid to the Spanish Loyalists proceeded in several distinct phases with varying degrees of communist influence. The Communist Party’s ranks were spread too thinly to actually steer the aid efforts, and the lack of volition also reflected the demands of the Popular Front: to work with rivals so long as they were antifascist. Geographic dispersal of activities for Spain and the variety of groups at the local level leading these activities also limited the party’s ambitions. Moreover, communists were unable to allocate sufficient resources to co-opt relief efforts while simultaneously undertaking various other activities, especially aid to China. Noncommunists—and this included

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a broad cross section of political persuasions—advanced their own aid campaigns, making gains within the movement by virtue of the Popular Front’s embrace of antifascists. The end result was a loosely united front with many communists in it, but nonetheless a multitiered movement consisting of several campaigns that sometimes complemented each other and other times did not.8 The appeal of this new antifascism and its political apparatus can perhaps be understood in the words of composer Aaron Copland. The typically “circumspect” Copland now “advised those interested in writing songs for the workers, in assuming a ‘firstline position on the cultural front.’” Later, when McCarthyism made such sentiments dangerous he recalled that “it seemed the thing to do at the time.” This cultural front aesthetic—this “thing to do at the time”—inspired his composition of the Popular Front pieces El Salón México, Fanfare for the Common Man, his Third Symphony, and numerous others written between 1932 and 1946. As musicologist Elizabeth Crist found, “the cultural politics and aesthetic ideology behind Copland’s music during the 1930s and 1940s related not to naive populism but to the politics of progressive reform in the context of the Popular Front as a social movement.” Copland serves as but one example. Antifascism made the aesthetic even more specific, and not just among composers and writers.9 With Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia the fascist expansionist strategy was made apparent and the nascent Popular Front was offered a rallying point. Indeed, parallels between Ethiopian and Spanish events require some brief exploration. Ethiopian aid campaigns in the United States promoted an internationalist outlook that complemented the inter-racial activities they triggered. The failure to achieve more than marginal support for Ethiopia reflected both an inability to arouse feelings of solidarity with Africans and the movement’s internal weaknesses. The campaigns lacked appeal because Ethiopia was hardly a sympathetic case. Its government was monarchical and despotic under the rule of Emperor Haile Selassie I. Yet protests in Chicago, San Francisco, and Brooklyn were orchestrated as attempts to arouse antifascist sentiments. A group in Chicago launched a petition drive and staged a march to urge Congress to invoke the Kellogg-Briand Pact, which advocates hoped would be used to impose an embargo on Italy. Protestors also demonstrated in front of the Italian consulate. Longshoremen around the world refused to unload Italian ships. In the United States, other labor unions offered some support for the cause. Union seamen in California successfully halted all West Coast ship departures when they believed militarily useful materials for Italy were aboard the vessels. Spanish Republican sympathizers

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later took the same actions. With the reliable assistance of the American League Against War and Fascism (ALWF), a “Hands Off Ethiopia” campaign was waged in a number of black communities across the country. Later, the ALWF would be integral to Spanish aid also.10 Ethiopia’s cause also produced another parallel that advocates for Spanish aid would later experience. Before long counter-resistance reared its head. In August 1935, a “Hands Off Ethiopia” parade was planned in Chicago, but Mayor Edward Kelly, who had just received a medal from Mussolini, denied a permit. Ten thousand protestors turned out for the demonstration anyway, and the Chicago police red squad—the special unit used to engage and gather intelligence on industrial unrest—began making arrests. Demonstration organizer Harry Haywood, a communist, denounced Kelly for utilizing fascist tactics. As if to verify the claim, police then beat him. The major distinction between Ethiopia and Spain was that the Ethiopia solidarity movement involved relatively few individuals, and the repression hindered its advancement. Spanish aid took a slightly different course, informed perhaps by these events.11 The pro-Ethiopia movement offered some lessons. Problems within and outside the Ethiopian campaigns inhibited the solidarity movement’s further development. Most Americans remained unswayed by the Ethiopian situation and preoccupied with more immediate concerns. The Communist Party’s efforts were weakened by its opposition to the idea of recruiting African-Americans for the Ethiopian army and by the Soviet Union’s weak stand vis-à-vis the invasion. And although the Friends of Ethiopia “developed 106 branches by December 1935 and maintained official affiliations with the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and others in the United States and Europe,” black nationalist hostility to the white presence in Harlem guaranteed that, like Italian antifascism, Ethiopian antifascism remained largely ethnic in its appeal. Finally, the engaged African-American community ignored the racism and slavery that pervaded Ethiopia.12 The ways in which the Spanish aid campaigns contained nearly the same organizational structures and goals as the Ethiopian aid movement is little surprise. Some of the same people were involved. According to historian Robin Kelley, black professionals in the medical field raised money and donated supplies and then later did the same for Spain. In New York City, the Communist Party formed the United Aid for Ethiopia committee to gather goods and medical supplies. Doctor Arnold Donowa, former head of Howard University Dental School and a supporter of one of the aid committees, later volunteered as a doctor in Spain. He was a member of the Medical Committee for the Defense of Ethiopia, a precursor to the

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Medical Bureau to Aid Spanish Democracy. The former New York group consisted of thirty black physicians, nurses, dentists, and pharmacists who began a drive for funds for Ethiopia in September 1935. By November, they were able to send two tons of bandages and a portable hospital. An identical Spanish campaign followed the next year when Salaria Kee, a future volunteer nurse to Spain, helped initiate a fund which sent a seventy-fivebed hospital to Ethiopia. A seventy-five-bed hospital was also an early initiative for Spain.13 Spain even served as a flash point to renew the Ethiopian campaign once it faltered. The Communist Party adopted the slogan “Ethiopia’s fate is at stake on the battlefields of Spain” in early 1937 with the demand that material aid originally collected for Ethiopia now be sent to Spain. The connection between the two was not universally accepted, provoking severe criticism from many black nationalist leaders. However, many black intellectuals and artists nonetheless were willing to wed the two causes. Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes lent his name to the American Writers and Artists corps of ambulances donated to the Spanish Republic, explaining that “It is of tremendous importance that American writers and artists support in every way possible the cause of Spanish democracy in its struggle against Franco and the fascists unless they wish to see book burners install in yet another country their system of terror and suppression of culture.” Moreover, Hughes invoked populist antifascism: “Every triumph of the Fascists brings their reaction just that much nearer our own doorsteps.”14 Ethiopia was not pushed to invisibility, but Spain served the purpose of antifascism far better.15 Where Ethiopia could arguably be seen as a dress rehearsal, Spain brought the struggle against fascism to the international stage. So it was in Spain that an already precarious democracy plunged into a civil war following a military rebellion, but Spain’s conflict was not merely a domestic concern. Besides Germany and Italy’s active intervention, followed by the Soviet Union’s, the authoritarian Salazar regime in neighboring Portugal also offered additional assistance to Spain’s right-wing insurgents. Few outsiders fully grasped the domestic difficulties the Spanish Republic faced. Spain’s economic and social problems abounded. Prior to 1910, 60 percent of New Castile’s agrarian population remained landless, and in Andalusia the percentage reached even higher. Consequently, unemployment in the farm sector reached as high as forty percent for at least part of the year. Following the downfall of Miguel Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship, Spain’s long history of powerful aristocrats and poor peasants still posed problems for the new Republic. Agriculture, the major economic sector, remained stagnant due in large part to wealthy landholders who tended to invest in less risky ventures like land, urban

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real estate, and government bonds. Investments in newer industrial and commercial initiatives were far riskier and less appealing. A leading indicator of economic volatility was that two percent of the Spanish people owned sixty-five percent of the country’s land. Consequently, a welldeveloped rural proletariat posed considerable problems for republican reformers. By mid-1930, when deflation had hit Spain’s currency, the Unión General de Trajabadores (UGT) and the anarchist Confederacion Nacional de Trajabadores (CNT) both underwent rapid expansion in membership.16 Increasing public pressure and unrest forced an end to Primo de Rivera’s brief dictatorship. Spain’s King, Alfonso XIII, also fled into exile. As historian Stanley Payne described it, the dictatorship had ushered in repressive politics and polarization “to which the left republicans responded partly in kind, unable to transcend the original breakdown of liberalism in 1923.” Some economic advancement had occurred under the dictatorship, like increasing employment, but with this condition also came rising expectations.17 Church and state relations were also a source of tension, especially in relation to education. The Catholic Church, which oversaw the schools, was historically privileged by the Spanish state and hostile to reforms. The church’s privilege and spurning of innovation offered the political left a continued target. The Republic’s Constitution contained two articles—44 and 26—that were a thorn in the side of Spanish conservatives for their secularization of public life in education, divorce, and church-state relations and for their dissolution of several religious orders. By the time of the Republic’s founding in 1931, Spain, which had the largest higher educational system in the world, also spent far less per capita on education than almost any other country in Europe. Reforms under the first Republican government sought to redress this underfunding, in the process effectively diluting the Church’s role.18 The economic depression complicated the Republic’s reforms. Protections of peasants made eviction nearly impossible and angered landowners. Capital flight amid industrial and agrarian unrest further contributed to the volatile political atmosphere. One issue after the next caught the Republic’s leaders in a bind. Moreover, as the political atmosphere became more charged, the Spanish right feared further violence by the left, and the Spanish left lined up against the traditional centers of power, especially the Church. While violence varied, urban workers and landless laborers were the prime instigators, and earlier victories of fascism and the authoritarian right across Europe further polarized the Spanish public.19

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Amid this dramatic division, the Republican government was left highly unstable, a fragility effectively demonstrated in 1934. The Republic had already held its second elections and a center-right government assumed power. When on October 4 that new coalition government announced that its ministry would include three Catholic rightists, a segment of the left fearing the rollback of progressive gains mounted an insurrection. The rebellion was representative of the growing polarization. Protest was evident across Iberia with an armed rebellion by miners in Asturias put down by the air force and navy. Constitutional rights were suspended and 30,000 persons were imprisoned; many were tortured. Socialist town governments were overthrown and conservative businesses took advantage of the crisis to purge unionists and activists from their ranks. The revolt had been a disaster for the left. Continued excesses by the right invited the formation of the Popular Front coalition that was elected sixteen months later.20 In February 1936, the election of that coalition swung the country in the opposite direction, in part because the anarchists who sat out the previous election cycle (by virtue of their hostility to the state) decided to take to the polls this time but also because of the events of late 1934. Anarchist inclusion at the polls made a difference, with the left winning a thin majority. The resulting Popular Front government set the stage for another right-wing reaction. In the weeks prior to the February elections, Ministry of Defense and Catholic party leader Gil Robles and others dispatched a representative to gauge the possibility of orchestrating a coup. General Francisco Franco weighed the possibility but urged caution given the strength of working class and anarchist opposition a couple years before. Rumors of a coup tied to Franco persisted and prompted inquiries from the government as to his intentions.21 The coup on July 18 was the thirteenth army revolt since 1809. The plotters believed that the masses would quickly join their cause as they had in 1923. The right found its liberators in Franco, Robles, General Emilio Mola, and others. Franco, who was credited with training Spain’s formidable El Tercio (“The Legion”), had been exiled to the Canary Islands by President Manuel Azaña as a potential threat to the Republic. He had distanced himself from planned insurgencies before, but this time with logistical support from abroad, Franco led his African troops across the Strait of Gibraltar. The civil war was underway. Most of the navy and air force remained loyal to the Republic. With the death of several key leaders early in the conflict, Franco emerged as the central insurgent figure. He was not a fascist, though he later forged a number of alliances that included the Falange, the small contingent of fascists in Spain. He also

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offered a number of political scenarios early in the conflict hinting at the likelihood of an authoritarian regime to follow his victory. The war was decided almost at its onset by foreign support for the right and lack of it for the left. As historian Gabriel Jackson pointed out, the Spanish Republic lacked any real financial power outside its gold reserve. It had no allies except Mexico and the Soviet Union. The Soviets took possession of the Republic’s entire gold reserve when Prime Minister Francisco Largo Caballero and Minister of Finance Juan Negrín offered it. The Republic had few options, since, if the international community had recognized Franco then these assets, transferred to Swiss or French banks, would immediately fall into his hands. This was a fate as bad as keeping the reserves in Spain awaiting capture. But aside from safely stowing away the gold, its later transfer to Odessa also permitted quick conversion into currency utilizing Moscow’s Banque Commerciale pour l’Europe du Nord (Eurobank) in Paris. In the end, the Russians overcharged the Republic, but the Spaniards ultimately made off with $7 million more in Soviet aid than their gold was valued. Military assistance was slow in coming. Although the Soviets had exploited Spanish events for propaganda purposes both within and outside the USSR, it was not until September—two months into the war—that Stalin approved military aid to the Republic. Additionally, under the international embargo overseen by the League of Nations and adhered to by the United States, the Republic was denied the necessary arms for its defense.22 As Daniel Kowalsky found in his recent study on Stalin’s “Spanish adventure,” selfpreservation was at the heart of the Soviet Spanish policy. While often “cynical” and sometimes “ineffectual,” those policies also, in the end, did little appreciable harm to the Republic.23 On the Spanish right, the situation was far different. On July 19 Mussolini extended aid to Franco’s insurgency. General Franco had requested assistance previously, but Mussolini had refused. Il Duce changed his mind only when Franco asked Hitler. Italian ships then aided the transport of Franco’s African troops on August 5. By the end of July the Italians were also flying them. Neighboring Portugal also offered an invaluable aid to the conspirators with uninhibited movement from north to south. The international financial community also backed the insurgents, as did other corporate interests. Despite the neutrality legislation in the United States, Texaco Oil Company offered an indefinite line of credit to the Nationalists.24 Firestone, Ford, and General Motors all realized profits on insurgent purchases. Franco’s backers also enjoyed unimpeded access to U.S. trade; in July 1937 alone, the United States exported $138,384.31 in military matériel to Germany and a more modest $11,800 to Italy.25

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While France with its own Popular Front government initially supported the Republic, pressure from the United Kingdom hindered that relationship. Only a small number of aircraft and supplies arrived from France. It was the Soviet Union that offered what no other nation would. While Soviet workers had already taken up a fund for Spain, Stalin officially called for solidarity with Spain in mid-October 1936.26 With evidence of the fascist role slow in arriving to the west, even the Soviet Union initially dismissed the conflict as another bourgeois revolution. That changed as the Italian and German roles became known. Moscow initially supported neutrality provided it was enforced against German, Italian, and Portuguese involvement in the conflict. In August, communist advisers arrived in Spain, but the initial aid was medical and humanitarian.27 The Soviet role in Spain tended toward a mix of altruism and selfinterest, and it was at times contradictory. In addition to being a strategy of collective security and international stability, it was also improvised. The Soviets agreed immediately to the British-brokered Non-Intervention Agreement in August 1936 but then renounced the agreement almost exactly two months later, when continued German and Italian violations of it showed no signs of abating. Helen Graham found that as much as half of all military aircraft production by the Soviet Union was diverted to Spain during the conflict. Little more could have been done by the Russians short of endangering their own security, which was precisely the reason for halting the march of fascism in the first place. Soviet aid was, however, inadequate both in the dubious quality of much matériel and for the high price it exacted. Meanwhile, Mussolini and Hitler were instrumental to Franco’s eventual victory with their generous lines of credit, quality arms, and troop support.28 In the United States, Secretary of State Cordell Hull believed that the U.S. position of neutrality had actually found a middle ground: “For once our position seemed acceptable to both the apparently irreconcilable isolationists and internationalists. Isolationists approved because we were keeping aloof from the conflict. Internationalists approved because we were cooperating with Britain and France.” The apparent support from the country’s leading pacifists seemed to validate the perspective. Unwilling to support either side, the United States ultimately sacrificed the historical rights of nations, and ultimately Spain’s Republic, for a temporary peace, what President Roosevelt later would refer to as “a vicarious sacrifice for us all.”29 A constant flow of supplies from the Germans and Italians assured Franco’s rebel forces the ability to march ever forward. The republican people’s militias were crushed once Franco’s African division arrived in large numbers. The vast rural battlefields intimidated the untrained

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militias facing the onslaught of Franco’s legionnaires. Accompanied by systematic terror, the peasants fell before the rebel advance. In Mérida, for example, where the first concerted resistance was mustered, the entire defense committee was executed.30 Defeat and repression continued throughout September. The bravery of the poorly armed workers and landless peasants “was epic” but “failing.” Indiscriminate killing of the poor and working class by the insurgents defined the enemy in class terms, even in areas where there was no civil war in progress. Nationalist General Emilio Mola actually expressed the need for terror: “we have to terrorize, we have to show we are in control by rapidly and ruthlessly eliminating all those who do not think as we do.”31 Violence from the left followed from the vacuum caused by the collapse of the government after the coup. The loss of government authority in July explains the unprecedented wave of killing of religious figures in the already long history of Spanish anticlericalism. By December 1936, the Republic’s reassertion of authority halted the indiscriminate violence in the republican-controlled areas, though a more limited internecine violence persisted through the war’s duration. As historian Helen Graham has found, the violence prior to December in the republican zone was not systematically executed and cannot be attached to any political movement. In any case, the horror the violence elicited abroad varied according to one’s political persuasion, with the right seizing upon leftist outrages and the left playing up the right’s systematic mayhem. Both sides generally ignored violence by their own.32 Although not the first battle in the Second World War, Spain’s international struggle within the course of European liberalism became nonetheless an international battleground with major implications for events that followed in its wake.

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Organizing Support When the Spanish military rose in rebellion, Madrid, the nation’s capital, faced what its republican-minded residents anticipated to be a brief and unsuccessful siege. People’s militias held the rebels at bay for four months, during which time the violence by both sides reached ghastly proportions. Madrileños remained optimistic as did their international supporters. In large banners along the Gran Vía, the city’s main street, residents declared that Madrid would be the “tomb of fascism.” Identification with this slogan followed and, as the war progressed, the political left internationally proclaimed forcefully and optimistically, in many different ways, that Spain would indeed serve as fascism’s resting place. That result depended on many factors, however, especially the collective will of the international community to stem the growth of fascism’s

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ambitions. While the diversity of this community will be considered in the next chapter, some perspective on the collective will among American anarchists, socialists, and communists offers a glimpse at the partisan contours of the movement. Groups throughout Europe, North America, Latin America, the Caribbean, and the South Pacific all organized in support of the Spanish Republic. The leading international aid organization, the Red Cross, assumed a neutral stance on the war, though partisanship emerged within the organization as Red Cross workers on each side came to sympathize with the partisans in their own zones. Regardless, republican aid organizations consequently spurned the International Committee of the Red Cross. As Peter Nyers recently observed in his study on refugees, the ICRC’s adherence to impartiality and neutrality and not “[taking] sides in hostilities or [engaging] at any time in controversies of a political, racial, religious or ideological nature” imposes a bifurcated order on the world: humanitarian versus the political.33 Relief aid involves a labyrinth of political complexities, and for the politicized pro-Loyalist organizations strict neutrality could not be fathomed. For the apolitical Red Cross neutrality was itself political, if unacknowledged.

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Anarchists Among political partisans were a range of political motivations and different movement contributions. Anarchists were one group especially anxious about the fate of the Spanish Republic as the revolutionary conditions in Catalonia inspired anarchists throughout the world. The anarchist labor union CNT and its political wing the Federación Anarquista Iberica (FAI) were the dominant political organizations, especially among Catalan, Andalucian, and Asturian peasants and workers. Anarchist efforts at collectivizing industries and agriculture were being touted internationally, and notable successes of the anarcho-syndicalists apparently even aroused concerns in the Comintern. The Spanish example offered renewed optimism to anarchists elsewhere, and anarchists in the U.S. very much desired the social revolution’s advancement even if they were divided over the best means to achieve it.34 Spanish-American anarchists involved in Loyalist aid collaborated freely with non-anarchists, a tendency not necessarily evident among other ethnic anarchists. This propensity for cooperation predisposed these anarchists to Popular Front cooperation. But their collaborative efforts also offer one possible reason why anarchists’ fund-raising for Spain appears inefficient in the State Department records of aid groups, even while among the Spaniards as a whole fund-raising was quite impressive. The

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anarchists’ official aid group, the United Libertarian Organizations, was unable to send any funds to Spain because expenses outstripped contributions. Because of their collaboration with other groups it seems likely that the anarchists were also contributing aid to the Republic through non-Spanish organizations, which tended to be more efficient in their fund-raising (by the standard of aid raised after administrative costs). This latter tendency would not be reflected in the records of anarchist organizational contributions kept by the State Department on all aid organizations which began in May 1937.35 Formal involvement with the official aid organization was short-lived among anarchists. Carlo Tresca and other Italian anarchists were among those invited to join the leading republican aid organization. At one meeting in particular in late January 1937 Tresca, writer John Dos Passos, Congregationalist minister Herman Reissig (who later was executive secretary of the organization), and the American Civil Liberties Union’s president Roger Baldwin (acting as chair) all sat at the same table. Throughout January 1937, the anarchist Tresca attended as a delegate for the United Anarchists. Tresca’s retreat from the main aid organization probably came from a distrust of the Popular Front. In March he told Dos Passos, “If the communists don’t like a man in Spain, right away they shoot him.” By this time both men dropped out of participation with the leading aid groups, and other groups also flagged in their participation, like the dissident Lovestoneite faction of the Communist Party.36 Anarchists also established other outlets. The SIA (International AntiFascist Solidarity) campaigned on purchasing only products from the anarchist collectives and by “refusing to buy Italian olive oil, or German made goods, or by sending supplies to the Loyalists.” The Spanish Labor Bulletin continued, ”Most of the orange groves are in Loyalist territory. So, the SAC [Spanish Aid Committee] organized a campaign in favor of the use of collectivized oranges.” First they prevailed on the importers to import collectivized oranges. They adopted the slogan: ‘Buy collectivized Spanish oranges and help the Spanish workers in their fight against Franco.’” The SIA also initiated a campaign to send flour for Spain. “In a short time over 850 bags of flour were collected.”37 This was not a great amount of activity within the context of the larger aid movement, but it was an effort undertaken frequently outside the larger Popular Front organizations.

The Socialist Party Whereas the anarchists were generally few in number in the United States and more likely to be part of an ethnic collective, the socialists were

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less ethnocentric and more numerous. However, they were also diminishing in numbers. During this period, the Socialist Party faced a host of internal divisions in large part reflecting the continued influence of an “Old Guard” that remained committed to the party’s tradition of pacifism that held war to be morally wrong under all circumstances. Confronting fascism, though ideologically attractive for some pacifists, was not for these socialists. The more famous faction among the socialists was that of its leader, Norman Thomas, himself Old Guard but aligned with the youth of the party. His faction of young socialists joined the Popular Front, but the party’s pacifist base led to substantial internal debate over the proper course of action on the Spanish issue. After the party’s Cleveland Convention in July 1936, Bill Streeter observed that the “Socialist Party has moved steadily to the right. . . . The right movement is revealed in . . . the Spanish Civil War (support to People’s Front government, to SP, etc.).” Sidney Lens believed that “war and revolution had to go together because it would be impossible to sustain the fighting spirit the Spanish people needed to defeat Franco unless workers and peasants could see immediate benefits.” Finding an appropriate response proved profoundly challenging.38 The younger socialists without personal memories of the Great War reconsidered the party’s commitments and over time gravitated toward the Popular Front. Regarding the official endorsement of assistance to the Spanish Republic, Norman Thomas attempted to reason with the party’s elders: Does this mean that the Socialist Party of America has abandoned its historic opposition to war? By no means. Its resolution concerning opposition to imperialist wars between capitalists still stands. Indeed, it believes that the defeat of Franco will be a definite contribution to making such war more unlikely. In no way is the party seeking to involve the government of the United States in this action.39

Medical and humanitarian relief aid for Spain, in particular, did not violate pacifist principles, Thomas insisted. He later attempted to clarify the position in what appears to be a confrontation with War Resisters League’s leader Devere Allen, who had advocated for passive resistance by the Spaniards: “There is no background in Spain which makes possible a Gandhian-like resistance to fascism. Pacifists, except those of an extremely religious or philosophical type cannot fulfill their duty . . . simply by deploring violence. I myself have not for many years found it possible to accept the type of religious pacifism which I accepted during the World War.”40

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The socialists remained intractably divided beyond Thomas’s attempts to convince the membership of his position. For instance, Arthur Dunham, a “strict pacifist and Quaker” and professor of social work at the University of Michigan, expressed a willingness to meet with one of the aid organizations—the Detroit Social Workers Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy. On the other hand the well-known pacifist and Unitarian minister John Haynes Holmes resigned from the American Friends of Spanish Democracy when he could “no longer make it consistent with my pacifist ideals that help in Spain should be limited to people stricken and suffering on one side only of the struggle.” In the end, strict pacifists were much more likely to gravitate to the Quakers assisting the Red Cross.41 Recognizing the need to head off further fissures within the party’s ranks, Thomas concluded: “I know the heaviness of heart which many of you feel when the Socialist Party is obliged, as in the case of Spain, to use military force against fascist rebels.” In an attempt to reach a compromise that would endorse both passive resistance and active aid to Spain, Thomas asked, “Is there any practicable way in which we could find out what particular arms and supplies are intended for the [Franco] rebels and help to educate and organize the workers to strike against producing those particular arms and supplies.”42 Here was a workable formula, one which had yielded visible results against Italy’s Ethiopian invasion. Against Spain the effect was more limited. “There were those who believed in the United Front, and there were those who did not believe in the United Front,” recalled Sam Baron. A key activist in the Socialist Party and advocate for Republican Spain, Baron later publicly turned on the communists and the Popular Front as a witness for Martin Dies’s congressional committee. “I at that time fought strenuously [along] with those who believed in the United Front,” Baron testified, “and when the Socialist party split I stayed with the official Socialist party, to indicate my support of the United Front.”43 For all of their party’s problems, a few socialists or socialist sympathizers managed to achieve key positions in the Spanish aid campaigns, in effect asserting a socialist influence in the movement far out of proportion to their numbers. Key figures in this faction were Herman Reissig, James Loeb, Harold Siegal, Natalie Hankemeyer, Brendan Sexton, and Nancy Bedford-Jones. Their influence would be key in 1940 to steering the remnants of the leadership of the Spanish aid movement—then reformed as a refugee campaign—from spinning entirely into the orbit of the Communist Party. Socialists also prevailed in the United Spanish Societies to Aid Spain (USSAS), one of the key aid organizations.

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FIGURE 1

Leading Spanish Republican Aid Organizations and Their Later Names The Popular Front (American) Friends of Spanish Democracy (September1936)

North American Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy (October 1936, independent January 1937)

Medical Bureau (to Aid Spanish Democracy) (October 1936, independent March 1937)

Medical Bureau and North American Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy (merged January 1938) Organized Labor

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Labor’s Red Cross (August 1936)

Trade Union Relief for Spain (May 1937)

Socialist Party and Spanish affiliates (United) Spanish Societies to Aid Spain (Sociedades Hispanas Confederadas de Ayuda a España) (November 1936)

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The Communist Party As it had in the case of organized labor in this same period, the Communist Party’s main contribution to the movement came in the form of organizers and providing the infrastructure of the American League Against War and Fascism to set up local chapters of the leading aid organizations. The League’s activists established the contacts for local branches of the Medical Bureau (MB) and the North American Committee (NAC), the two largest aid groups that laid the groundwork for more activism. Robert Morss Lovett, the former New Republic editor, pointed out that “the great increase in membership of the League, especially among workers, was due to its unflinching stand for Spain.”44 The party itself was vague about its contributions. In February 1938, following a request for a report from the CP on its Spanish aid activities, party cadre Clarence Hathaway took until June to finally send a note. He replied that a “complete record” would be impossible to create since the party had been so deeply involved. It had held many of its own meetings at Madison Square Garden and had aided a relief fund set up by organized labor. The party’s American League Against War and Fascism had initiated the campaign that formed what became the North American Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy. One of that organization’s first endeavors was a tour of Spanish delegates sent by the Spanish government to reach out for American assistance. “When tours were decided upon first for . . . [this] delegation representing Spanish democracy,” Hathaway explained, “our party instructed all its local committees and organizations to throw their full weight behind these tours with the idea of making every meeting a success both in attendance and financially.”45 But if the Communist Party played an active role, it was the Popular Front and not the Communist Party alone that was crucial to the effort. Roger Baldwin, for instance, brokered peace between communist and socialist factions. “I am by nature a conciliator in contentious circumstances,” Roger Baldwin told his biographer, Peggy Lamson. In the case of the North American Committee, “I, as executive committee chairman, would insist that as long as we held to our program we could not complain. And the non-communists accepted my good faith.”46 For the most part that tenacity served Baldwin and the committee well through 1939.

Anti-Stalinists The anarchists were not the only group with disagreements with the Popular Front and the aid movement. Consider the young Socialist Irving

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Howe, who became a national leader of the Socialist Workers Party, that Trotskyist faction of the Young People’s Socialist League (YPSL) that eventually broke from the SP. At the City College of New York during the Spanish war, he was known for climbing up on tables to speak. He lambasted the Popular Front Communists as insufficiently antiwar, and published a range of antiwar material and an underground newspaper that also took issue with the university’s leadership.47 In early 1938, writing in the Partisan Review, Philip Rahv also denounced the Popular Front for its moderation. “Listening to the speeches [at the Second Writers Congress] one got the impression that the international class struggle, bag and baggage, had been exported to one country: Spain. And even there it was held strictly to account and told to behave itself—it was a duel between fascism and democracy and no more.”48 Anti-Stalinists lacked cohesion, and a brief accounting of their involvement with the aid movement bears this out. Some of them were content taking issue with the communist presence; others held back their criticisms and joined the campaigns. Paul Eiffel, a German émigré in the Socialist Party, wrote to Sidney Lens that “in case the majority reaffirms the non-revolutionary position [of backing the Popular Front] . . . I would have to withdraw from the organization, in order to make them realize the importance of their decision.” The problem was that “each schism . . . sapped our strength, not only because we lost members, but because we wasted so much time and energy in torrid debate.”49 Dwight Macdonald, who emerged later as another notable anti-Stalinist, was in 1936 leaning “toward the Communists because they alone, on the American Left seemed to be ‘doing something’” and so became a “mild fellow traveler.” Through early 1937 Macdonald became sympathetic to Leon Trotsky but also saw Roosevelt’s Quarantine Speech and the moderation of the CIO as “improvements.” The Soviet purge trials, as his biographer, Michael Wreszin, explains, polarized the left, and Macdonald later complained that the Popular Front was “indefinitely extensible on the right but on the left is strictly limited to the Communist party.”50 In 1937 he was content with the removal of Time’s pro-Franco editor, who had been his boss. By May 1938 he wanted to organize a committee “to defend victims of capitalist and Stalinist persecution.”51 As he recounted, “the speed with which I evolved from a liberal into a radical and from a tepid Communist sympathizer into an ardent anti-Stalinist still amazes me.”52 Other anti-Stalinists were involved in Spanish aid, at least for a time. For example, in response to a cable from the International Federation of Trade Unions, union leader David Dubinsky joined with Sidney Hillman of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers in pledging $5,000 from their

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unions to aid Spain.53 Dubinsky eventually emerged as treasurer of Labor’s Red Cross, with Charles Zimmerman as chair, Alex Rose (of the Millinery Workers) as secretary and Abraham Schwartzman as organization secretary.54 Zimmerman was a Lovestoneite, that faction of anti-Stalinists who had followed American communist leader Jay Lovestone in supporting Bukharin rather than Stalin. Dubinsky’s Lovestone support brought him into conflict with the Communists in the American League Against War and Fascism.55 His further involvement in the American Labor Party and the communists’ boring-from-within in the International Ladies’ Government Workers’ Union (ILGWU) had dampened Dubinsky’s interest in working with the CP. Both men had left the Socialist Party for Roosevelt’s Democrats, and the International Federation of Trade Unions had previously drawn an anticommunist line.56 Yet as antifascism now focused on Spain, these same leaders found themselves working with the Communist Party. A January 1937 meeting of the North American Committee with Tresca, Dos Passos, Reissig, and Baldwin in attendance was followed on January 29 with virtually the same members, minus Tresca, approving the affiliation of the Communist Party Opposition—the Lovestoneites—as an affiliate.57 The socialist Spanish Anti-Fascist Committee (SAFC) withdrew from the Executive Committee around this time, though the NAC moved to invite a fraternal delegate from the organization anyway.58 The SAFC leadership agreed to send the delegate, but only to the NAC’s Purchasing Committee meetings in order to coordinate purchases. All evidence indicates that the SAFC probably remained aloof from the NAC and MB not because those organizations were communist but because the SAFC desired to aid its own socialists with its own funds.59 The Lovestoneites appear never to have actually taken their place in the organization either, though their importance within the ILGWU and the Trade Union Relief for Spain validates Paul Buhle’s claim of communist cooperation with that faction.60 Therefore, when Philip Rahv concluded that “the danger of fascism is tremendous; it must be fought” and then asked “Yes, but how?” The answer for many was Spanish aid, even if the People’s Front was not the answer Rahv desired.61 A number of politically active anti-Stalinists have left traces of their personal difficulties resulting from this period. Los Angeles attorney Carey McWilliams, who publicly kept quiet about his ambivalence with Communist policies, explained privately in late 1937, “I am not a CP member. I have worked fairly closely with them locally because they seemed to be the only people who were doing any work. . . . They know . . . that I am skeptical about the official version of affairs in Russia.”62 The fellowtraveling writer Archibald MacLeish described what he considered the

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necessity of commitment to the Popular Front by criticizing those who would not aid the Spanish Loyalists due to the CP’s involvement: It is the familiar argument advanced by the hypocrites and the cynical and frivolous who do not wish to understand what is happening in Spain. . . . [P]roponents use it to attack the intelligence if not the integrity of those who, not themselves communists, stand with the communists in active opposition to the menace of fascism. They imply that those who find themselves in this position are dupes: that they are being “used,” and “used” without a proper understanding of the “use.”63

The sentiment would seem to have been common enough. Though as will be described below, there were outlets for aid outside the Popular Front for those more akin to Rahv and Macdonald.

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The First Six Months After the events in Spain were set in motion, small communities of Spaniards—at least those Spaniards committed to the Republic—in the United States were the first to take up the Republican banner.64 From sheep herders in Idaho to the “Latin” community of Tampa, Florida, SpanishAmericans watched anxiously as la patria was consumed by civil strife. In New York, Spanish Consul Louis Carreaga promoted Spanish-American solidarity through the United Spanish Societies to Aid Spain, which was formed in November 1936 to organize a Madison Square Garden meeting for Spanish Ambassador Fernando de los Ríos.65 This confederation consisted of several dozen Spanish organizations from across the United States, though it generally concentrated in the New York region. The Socialist Party’s Sam Baron served as Secretary of the USSAS and would later assume a leadership role in the larger Spanish aid movement.66 Like Italian antifascism—Sam Baron’s presence aside—these organizations never reached a critical mass outside of their own Spanish-speaking communities.67 Organized labor took the initial steps in building the broader movement. David Dubinsky, president of the ILGWU, was especially important. He set out to raise $100,000 for Spain through Labor’s Red Cross, a fund set up specifically to aid Spain. On July 28, 1936—less than ten days after the rebellion—labor and organizations of the unemployed, along with the Communist and Socialist Parties, the United Anarchist groups, the Spanish Anti-Fascist Committee, the Communist Party Opposition, and the ubiquitous American League Against War and Fascism formed the

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United Committee in Support of the Struggle Against Fascism in Spain.68 Many union locals formed Spanish aid committees to activate members on the issue. Clothing workers even formed a Trade Union Committee to Manufacture Clothing for Spain. As a measure of effectiveness, in its first year Labor’s Red Cross raised a massive amount of money, arriving beyond its stated goal of $100,000 (of which communist organizations accounted for only about 10 percent). After May 1937, though, the fund failed to reach anywhere near its new goal of $250,000, and new organizations had since emerged to steer relief funds toward Spain.69

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The American Friends of Spanish Democracy In the early days of September 1936, the ACLU’s president, Roger Baldwin, spearheaded a small group of liberal New York activists to form the American Friends of Spanish Democracy (AFSD). Baldwin, along with The New Republic’s George Soule and the Reverend Guy Emery Shipler, contacted a network of colleagues and sent out letters urging the formation of an organization to aid Spain. In the group’s initial planning discussion, their aid agenda was to include military assistance, and steps were even taken by their group to ship weapons. Baldwin himself had abandoned pacifism by disclaiming that “my pacifism goes completely under when it comes to defense of democracy against fascism. What way out have you other than arms? How would you resist the fascists? If you don’t, you just invite an endless tyranny.”70 When the AFSD elected officers on October 5, it was dominated by denizens of American liberal opinion. Episcopal Bishop Robert Paddock was chosen as chair, John Dewey as vice-chairman, with Shipler as vicechair. The publisher W. W. Norton served as treasurer. The Executive Committee included poet Stephen Vincent Benet, author Bruce Bliven, journalist Heywood Broun, and many others, though few of these executives actually attended meetings. These men shaped the movement, but the momentum behind their effort promised to carry it beyond their control. The AFSD launched two affiliate organizations—the North American Committee and Medical Bureau—on trajectories that would render the more politically liberal parent organization largely irrelevant.71 The North American Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy, which eventually emerged as the central hub for relief, officially began business once it rented warehouse space to maintain inventory and a truck to run a route to drop-off centers. Volunteer drivers made runs for the organization to pick up donations. These drivers included Evelyn Hutchins, who later served as the only female ambulance driver in the Interna-

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tional Brigades.72 The warehouse stored nonperishable food and essential items, clothing, and medical supplies. A majority of expenses went toward milk (condensed and powdered), wheat and flour, beans, sugar, shoes, coats, raincoats, bandages, insulin, x-ray equipment, and various other medical and nonperishable items.73 Antonio Ortega, Propaganda Councillor for the Council of Asturias and Leon, explained in early 1937 that “after consultation with the Councillor for Commerce, we are of the opinion that the foodstuffs which we would prefer to receive are the following: Haricots, Peas, Chick-peas, Lentils, Sugar, Flour, Wheat, and Coffee.”74 Chocolate and cigarettes were frequently requested by staff of the Medical Bureau, and considerable quantities of sardines were also shipped. Clothing donations were also a major source of in-kind (nonmonetary) donations and remained a complicated issue. Throughout the Depression years clothing donations were perhaps one of the easiest relief efforts in which to contribute.75 While donating clothing for Spain was easy, shipping it and distributing it were far more difficult. Donors often insisted that their donations be sent directly to Spain, and the donations were not always desirable. To further complicate matters, Spaniards did not tend to wear the types of shoes or clothing donated by Americans. One aid activist recommended: “I feel that the collection of old junk should be slowly discouraged and that women call on wholesalers and get new things for the Spanish people.”76 Shoes, additionally, needed to be discouraged because of the problems of size and variations between American and Spanish styles.77 A Detroit aid committee eventually devised a way of saving on shipping by bundling clothing tighter and shipping it as rags, but by May 1938 the Spanish embassy discouraged clothing donations altogether.78 All of this activity developed in the course of the fall of 1936. When the first two shipments of aid to Spain left New York on October 24, 1936, it was the Spanish Embassy and not the AFSD that coordinated them. Compiled primarily by the Nurses and Hospital Workers Union and Pharmacists Union in New York City, the cargo consisted of $1,000 in supplies including serums, antitoxins and other medical gear.79 Through its embassies and consulates, the Republic’s government played an active role in fostering the aid campaigns.80 The arrival of Ambassador de los Ríos and the cooperation already established by the consulate in New York laid the foundation for this diplomatic relationship between the Republic and its American community of supporters. The Republic’s embassy actively promoted the government’s cause throughout the war while a news service, the Spanish Information Bureau, also published News of Spain, a newsletter with a circulation of 10,000.81

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The first major coordinated campaign between the Republic and the United States was the formation on October 14 of an American Joint Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy tasked with arranging a tour of the U.S. and Canada by a Spanish delegation. Organizing of relief for the Spanish Republic occurred within a broader international context, with this delegation but one example. The International Federation of Trade Unions’ outreach was crucial in internationalizing the Spanish cause. Indeed, its president, Sir Walter Citrine, even spoke in New York in October.82 Even more important for later developments was an earlier delegation on August 13 of two hundred representatives from across Europe who met in Paris to form the International Coordinating Committee (ICC), which emerged as the central international office for relief contributions.

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The Medical Bureau to Aid Spanish Democracy What focused the political movement was the emergence of a medical aid effort following a living-room meeting at Louis Miller’s in October 1936. The biggest immediate concern for the Madrileños in the wake of hostilities was inadequate medical aid. Though nuns remained in the hospitals after the attempted coup, they were chased away by republican radicals, over the protests of republican doctors. The need for nurses, already in short supply a month into the conflict, was becoming increasingly dire. The American doctor Edward Barsky not only played an instrumental role in organizing a committee in the United States to provide medical relief, but he also went on to lead the delegation of nearly 150 American medical professionals who volunteered to serve with the American Medical Bureau in Spain. The units made up an international battalion of doctors, nurses, ambulance drivers, and other medical technicians with the Medical Bureau acting as the primary aid organization to supply them.83 The Medical Bureau’s Dr. Louis Miller knew “a great deal about American medical missions to various foreign lands,” having been involved in foreign aid previously. Some of those present at Miller’s meeting also cited the precedent of the Quaker famine relief after the war as an example of what they might achieve.84 On October 1, the Spanish Medical Commission cabled the American Friends of Spanish Democracy (at that time the MB’s parent organization) expressing the need for two million units of insulin, two thousand ampules of tetanus and diptheria antitoxins, as well as transfusion apparatuses, ambulances, and, just as significantly, medical personnel. These pleas for assistance and requests for specific items continued throughout the duration of the conflict. Two million units of insulin and two thousand ampules could not merely be

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conjured up, so a mass meeting was planned at Madison Square Garden for October 26 when over twenty thousand were in attendence.85 In December, the Spanish delegation arranged back in October made its way across the country. With their appeals, by Christmas supplies were flowing into New York awaiting shipment: 15,000 garments, 5,000 men’s fur coats, 3,000 women’s winter coats, 1,000 leather sheepskin coats, 8,600 aviation caps and fur-lined vests. The Spanish Anti-Fascist Committee contributed 32 field kitchens and 250 water tanks. The inventory was considerable and its geographic origins wide.86 Because the Communist Party was so active in organizing this work, it is notable that the party can only possibly account for a portion of this turnout. The party’s total official membership in January 1937 was 36,877, with nearly a fourth of those concentrated in New York City. Only 2,714 lived in Illinois, so the roughly 10,000 attendees to a Chicago gathering for Spain were mostly from outside the party.87 The sudden surge in international engagement appears exceptional in an “isolationist” decade.

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The Movement Hub and Its Campaigns In May 1937, Congress renewed neutrality legislation passed during the Italian invasion of Ethiopia. Besides severely limiting the sort of assistance the Spanish Republic could receive, the bill’s provisions included the requirement that organizations involved in relief aid to Spain obtain licenses from the U.S. State Department and submit monthly audits of their activities. A total of twenty-six organizations registered for licenses, and many other groups affiliated with these licensed groups in order to undertake their own fund-raising without acquiring their own licenses (see chapter six and the appendix). The growth of the movement was enabled by an expansion in the number of aid organizations across the country. New York City served as the hub, and the spokes spanned across the county with a variety of groups close to the hub crucial to its growth. These included the International Labor Defense, which set up its own Medical Bureau. Still other affiliated committees ran their own campaigns. The United Youth Committee was ostensibly subsumed by the NAC and MB, though it technically remained a separate organization. Lawyers’, dentists’, engineers’, podiatrists’, psychologists’, and social workers’ committees all attached to the NAC as subcommittees.88 According to the NAC’s internal records, New York City, Chicago, Boston, and Washington, D.C., carried the weight of fund-raising with Gotham far out in front. Only Philadelphia came close to approaching these four.89 Indeed, in late 1938, 49 locals in New York and only 34 elsewhere (with New York representing 82,732 or the more than 100,000 members in all)

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passed resolutions urging the lifting of the arms embargo on Spain.90 For this reason, writer Albert Halper could recount later, “In an attempt to conquer loneliness [in New York City] during this period, one went to the almost nightly mass meetings and rallies, one listened to fiery and accusatory speeches directed against Washington, one gave money when the chairman called for collections, and one returned to one’s room or apartment drained, sickened, unable to sleep.”91 Of these twenty-six groups, only five assumed major importance. Nearly half of the total recorded relief aid came from just three organizations: the North American Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy, the Medical Bureau, and the essentially socialist United Spanish Societies to Aid Spain (USSAS).92 A fourth group of Spaniards in Tampa, Florida, managed a strong campaign of its own generally independent of the Popular Front. The main thrust of all of this activity aside from medical aid was to foment a critical mass to pressure the government to reconsider its neutrality policy. The movement proceeded with two distinct demands, one to apply an embargo on Germany and Italy (a move intended to make the Neutrality Act truly neutral by forcing the two countries to adhere to nonintervention) and a second to lift the arms embargo against Spain. Once the Soviet Union entered the fray, the communists in the movement pushed for lifting the embargo. A great many noncommunists also supported this position, however, and the Spanish government too called for lifting the embargo when it began requesting assistance. The two positions were compatible, of course, but combined also would have been a very difficult policy for the State Department to follow. The movement never dictated which one was the proper line, so that as late as 1938 the San Francisco Medical Bureau was still urging an embargo on Germany and Italy while others in the movement were advocating lifting the embargo on Spain.93 No mention was ever made of directly involving the United States in a European conflict. Instead, aid-short-of-war, an internationalist outlook sans militarism, was the collective message being sent by advocates for Loyalist Spain. Despite the two different approaches the movement advocated, the primary message the movement sent to the Roosevelt administration was that complete isolation was not an acceptable strategy for preventing the next war. These campaigns branched across North America with varying degrees of success. The relief organizations collectively defrayed expenses by the Spanish Republic for medical supplies and humanitarian relief. By doing so, the movement may have freed up revenue for the purchase of war matériel. If so, then the aid campaigns not only actively aided one side, but may have indirectly supported the Republic’s acquisition of military aid. One organizer inquired to the New York office: “Every now and

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then someone asks: If the Loyalists had the gold reserves of the Bank of Spain at the outbreak of the war, which they did, and if they have empty thousand dollars on deposit in the US as announced in the papers a few weeks ago, why can’t they buy their food and medical supplies here? In other words, why the Medical Bureau and NAC?”94 The NAC’s Executive Secretary, Herman Reissig, answered for the movement leadership: “[Spain’s] resources are not unlimited. And all the resources it had are required for the purchase of materials necessary to the conduct of the war. The appeal for help from the people of Spain would be duplicated by any nation suffering a similar calamity, no matter how rich in terms of gold the government of that nation might be.”95 This was by no means as helpful to the Republic as lifting the embargo outright, and the actual international assistance only freed up a fraction of the revenue necessary for defense. Significantly, the campaigns did assist the medical advances resulting from the conflict: front-line hospitals and administration, largescale blood transfusions and blood-banking, treatment of malnutrition, and a now-obsolete technique of plaster casting wounds.96 Yet if all of this work on behalf of a government of historically little interest to the United States originated from a diverse group of political persuasions, some common understanding of events abroad must have underlay their activities. However limited was fascism in Spain, it was a popular conception of Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany that provided the focal point for many. Their involvement in the Spanish conflict determined how political events there were understood. A movement culture derived from a shared opposition to a vaguely defined fascism fostered that involvement and determined the course of pro-republican activities.

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Chapter 2 Movement Culture And our faces, the institute-face, the chain-store, the ruin Are projecting their greed as the firing squad and the bomb. Madrid is the heart. Our moments of tenderness blossom As the ambulance and the sandbag; Our hours of friendship into a people’s army.1

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—W. H. Auden, “Spain”

By February 1938, when the newly returned former American Ambassador to Germany, William E. Dodd, addressed the Chicago Council on Foreign relations, Spain and the impending general war had provoked growing interest from the public. “I fear that in two years, or even less, fascism will spread over the world and ours will be the last great nation to stand against it,” Dodd said before a crowd of nearly three thousand. The Chicago Council on Foreign Relations had been witnessing record attendance since October 1937 when Chicago Tribune foreign correspondent Jay Allen opened the series with his lecture “The Spanish Nightmare.” The growing chorus against nonintervention included the Council’s former president, Adlai E. Stevenson, who explained in early 1938 that “the incredible travesty of nonintervention . . . has been exposed and Mussolini is no longer blandly denying the presence of Italian troops in Spain.”2 However disjointed the aid movement, it had succeeded in creating a culture of antifascism that brought together a wide spectrum of Americans. By way of illustration, in December 1937, Life magazine was able to report on a party given at the home of Oscar Hammerstein II for the benefit of Spanish children, and Chicago-based Marshall Field Company changed the name of its signature sweet, Franco Mints, to Frango Mints for fear of association with the Spanish caudillo. Even the Daughters of the American Revolution lamented the fall of the Republic in their official organ. Spanish Republican aid had become the articulation of antifascism in American culture and had acquired a certain respectability.3 42

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Movement social events occurred across the United States. Clothing drives, food drives, tag days, speaking tours, film screenings, sponsorship of displaced children, and general refugee aid were all promoted at some point during the war. Each new initiative at the national level served as a focal point for cooperation by either other aid organizations or the local affiliates. The motivation for these activities—opposition to a vaguely defined fascism—spread across and among social classes through yard parties, labor strikes, sporting events, and film screenings. Taken together, the sum of these events for Republican Spain suggests that the Popular Front’s shared assumptions defined it far more than the internal politics and vague political commitment of the front’s informal members. For the “foreign policy public” observing events across the Atlantic, another war appeared to be on the horizon, but if those committed to resistance focused their energies, this conflict was not inevitable.4 Many people outside of the movement’s official structures also fostered a sense of urgency and solidarity with the Spanish Loyalists. As anthropologist Ulf Hannerz has summarized the process of creating movement culture, the “ultimate concern is with the distribution and use of power or material resources . . . [these] are often very much movements in culture, organization of ‘consciousness raising,’ attempts to transform meanings.” Movements, though usually decentralized, “foster a more deliberate and explicit flow of meaning. . . .”5 With meaning critical to its form, antifascism could develop through “cultural apparatuses,” what C. Wright Mills defined as “observation posts, the interpretation centers, the presentation depots” which are “composed of all the organizations and milieux in which artistic, intellectual and scientific work goes on, and of the means by which such work is made available to circles, publics, and masses.”6 However, the representation of milieux where cultural “work” occurs, while appropriate for analyzing intellectual output, is inadequate in explaining movement culture: those goal-directed activities that advance a political belief system.7 Strikes, yard parties, tea parties, and ambulance tours—intangible and fleeting cultural expressions—served the same function as the “artistic, intellectual and scientific work” activities attributed to a relatively few individuals. This is not to demean cultural workers, only to say that the transmission of movement culture is produced in myriad other ways. These transmission lines that communicated and reinforced sympathies for the Spanish republicans and constructed a discourse of “democracy versus fascism” also fomented a culture of dissent. All of the devices that served these ends, not just films, art, books, and news items, built this movement culture and promoted sympathy for Spain’s government. What made Spain’s cause distinct was that it increased the reach of the left’s cultural products upwards and outwards.

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A sample of these various activities among students, the upper-class and foreign policy public, and workers can demonstrate the point.8

Students

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These campaigns solidified into a political movement through a variety of aid activities and political expressions. College students, for instance, had only recently defined themselves as a political force. Organizations like the American Student Union (ASU), the Young Communist League (YCL), and the Young People’s Socialist League (YPSL) began a process of political engagement and were well placed to build momentum in the Spanish aid campaigns on college campuses. Before the Popular Front was formalized, communist and socialist students were cooperating with each other in an antifascist alliance, a development that has been remarked upon by historian Robert Cohen.9 Students already had been demonstrating in the streets against any future war. Demonstrations in April 1936 brought out 15,000 New York students according to the New York Times. As one observer commented, “we oldsters have proved our utter inability to check the forces that throughout the world are driving us toward another bloody cataclysm, [but] the young men and women in our high schools and colleges have dared to stand up and express their opposition to war.”10 These expressions of opposition to war, however, seemed to suffer from a contorted logic, and to combine several seemingly unrelated ideas. An observer at a 1937 ASU meeting at Harvard found that: (1) [North Carolina Democratic] Senator [Robert] Byrd was hissed when he spoke of the need for a strong Navy; (2) [French author] André Malraux was cheered when he spoke of his military work for the Spanish Republic; (3) a vote was taken to petition Congress to lift the Embargo; (4) the meeting closed with the joint recital of the Oxford Pacifist Pledge.11

These were, as Hugh Parry noted, a group of above-average college students, and their confusion appears to be indicative of the prevailing isolationism.12 The apparent contradiction found expression through Spanish Republican aid in its mix of isolation and desire for antifascist actions and gestures. Both blended quite readily. It was the logic of aidshort-of-war, at once isolationist while also searching for a solution to growing threats abroad. Students motivated by events in Spain faced several options: (1) join the International Brigades or the American Medical Bureau, (2) contribute to the Republican aid movement, (3) contribute to the pro-Franco aid move-

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ment, (4) do nothing. Some 500 students joined the International Brigades. Several, like Aaron Hilkevitch, a University of Chicago graduate, who was completing his medical school residency, joined the American Medical Bureau, the medical equivalent to the Lincoln Battalion. Hank Rubin, who ended the war as a technician in the Medical Bureau, started out in the International Brigades as a medic. The Medical Bureau’s records indicate that other medical students also inquired about undertaking internships in Spain with the AMB, though none was ultimately accepted.13 Of the hundreds who entertained the first option, 88 of them came from the American Student Union, but there were also notable achievements under the second option.14 The newly formed United Youth Committee utilized Student League for Industrial Democracy (SLID) activist Nancy Bedford-Jones as its staff organizer. Her organizing targets included in particular the ASU and its affiliates across the country. If any single figure stands out among this group it was Joseph Lash (who was married to Bedford-Jones). In the summer of 1937 he had volunteered to fight in Spain, but was urged to act as an observer instead. Upon returning from Spain, he was recruited by the Youth Committee to speak during a sixweek tour on behalf of the NAC’s Organizing Department. During this time, serving as the UYC’s staff organizer, he proceeded to build the culture of antifascism.15 The Young People’s Socialist League (YPSL), from whence Lash had come, also participated in the aid campaigns, actively enough that in late 1937 the National Secretary Al Hamilton requested official affiliation with the North American Committee.16 Given New York City’s central place in the movement, with four major aid organizations all residing there, student involvement at the City University would be expected. In fact, thirteen City College affiliates eventually died fighting in Spain. The campus had been the site of a number of major demonstrations in part because the college’s conservative president, Frederick C. Robinson, saw the need to censor student publications. In 1931 Robinson had confiscated a student publication with an anti-ROTC editorial.17 In 1934, two rashes of student expulsions followed first an antiwar demonstration in the spring and the visitation of students from Mussolini’s Italy in the fall term (even after a demand by the Student Council for Robinson not to invite them).18 The Spanish conflict and accompanying fund-raising events were subjects in nearly every issue of the student newspaper The Campus between September 1936 (when the fall issues began) and April 1939 (when the conflict was declared decided). Nearly 80 percent of the student body was also Jewish, a demographic that was especially concerned about events in Europe. Milton Wolff, who went on to be commissar and captain in the International Brigade, began his career at City College.19 The campus faculty, who maintained

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American Relief Aid and the Spanish Civil War

a Federation of Faculty Committees for Aid to the Spanish People, also buttressed the student efforts.20 When the fall 1936 academic year began, Alfred Chaikin, a coach of the American team at the People’s Olympics in Barcelona was back at CCNY as a professor. The Campus interviewed him in the first issue of the year.21 By spring both student and faculty sections of the City College Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy had raised several hundred dollars in funds. The primary vehicle for student involvement there was the American Student Union with the Student Council forming a joint aid organization.22 Students launched an ambulance campaign in late 1937 against the advice of the national organization which had since shifted its focus to children’s homes.23 The campus Dramatic Society, the Spanish Honorary Society (Sigma Delta Pi, Omicron chapter), and the Politics Club joined the ASU in Spanish aid activities (and probably included ASU members in their ranks). Sylvia Pecarsky of the Student Council and The Campus editor Bernard Rothenberg both organized events on the campus. The Campus was a frequent sounding board. Ralph Wardlaw, a professor of Public Speaking at the college and a Columbia University doctoral student who soon would leave to fight and ultimately die in Spain, offered a vignette in The Campus in April 1937 about the owner of Frank’s Bakery who had just donated two dollars for Spain. She and others, he wrote, “aware of Hitler’s threat to the peace of the world are among those who come forward to help Spain. Certainly it is because they see that it is Hitler and the Nazi regime who have joined with the reactionary and Italian fascist forces in an attempt to crush Spain.”24 Two weeks later when millions of students struck against war, Jerome Davis of the American Federation of Teachers told CCNY students that “we are confronted with the threat of a new holocaust. Already international legions in Spain under the command of Franco are endeavoring to destroy the legalized Spanish Government.” Students therefore should “assemble on their campuses to all [sic] the attention of the country to the danger of war and the necessity of peace.”25 The City College was not without its conflicts, but the campus confronted far more challenges than its Midwestern peers. As the U.S. Congress debated a revised Neutrality Act, CCNY students found themselves banned on campus from fund-raising for Spain. A college ruling limited on-campus donations exclusively to the Red Cross in times of emergency except by chartered student organizations. This posed some difficulty for a joint effort with the Dramatic Society which was producing Bury the Dead with proceeds to go towards Spanish aid.26 When Joseph Lash visited the campus in the fall of 1937 to meet with the Student Council and ASU, the

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YPSL taunted him by handing him “an open letter to himself” and calling him a “propagandist for the People’s Front government” in Spain. He also had spoken October 4 at the Methodist Episcopal Church where a picket condemning “Red Spain” was lined up outside.27 By that late date the ASU still had not been recognized as an official student group on campus.28 Moreover, with its sizeable Jewish student body, the campus also had a pro-Nazi student organization, the American Guards, a group that later aligned with the American First Committee.29 An anonymous letter sent to the student newspaper in December began “Perish Jewry —Christianity or Communism, which?”30 And by April 1939, with the Spanish war lost rival antiwar groups emerged on campus anticipating the coming schism within the Popular Front. One faction, the Anti-War Club, invited the Trotskyist Max Schachtman to campus and administered the Oxford Pledge to attendees. The Student Council-Legislative Congress, aligned with the ASU, backed President Roosevelt.31 Student activity in the Midwest is of some interest because of the region’s prevailing isolationist sentiments.32 Northwestern University was also in the midst of antifascist discussion, though unable to muster enough support outside of its campus ASU chapter. In the fall of 1936, The Young Socialist Club sponsored a lecture in the fall of 1936, the Daily Northwestern ran an op-ed predicting general war within six months, and lectures and editorial discussion occurred nearly weekly.33 Stanley Frankel, a conservative student who opposed the Spanish Republic, stirred up debate by dissenting against the campus student left. Editor of the student newspaper Daily Northwestern Julian Behrstock put together a bulletin on the Spanish youth delegation with Peter Rhodes, who a short time later would go on to represent the North American Committee at the International Coordinating Committee in Paris.34 As a student editor Behrstock looked out at the everyday college concerns and was struck by the contradictions of real needs: “The ninth annual Waa-Mu show is launched, and the fashionable co-eds are about to begin to parade in Northwestern’s lavish style show, while in Spain a whole people is engaged in a struggle to the death for the most elementary human rights.” Calling neutrality discriminatory in favoring Germany and Italy over Republican Spain, Behrstock took his argument one step further: “[A] fascist victory in Spain will mean the encirclement of France by fascist powers, and strong possibility of her capitulation from both internal and external pressure to a French form of nationalistic fascism.” War would surely follow, he predicted. His was not the pervasive view, but some students subscribed to it. Behrstock was forced to resign his editorship in March 1937 after he forcefully lambasted the university Naval Unit’s recent ban on student involvement

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in “communistic discussions,” which presumably would have included Spain.35 New York’s City College students had achieved a level of campus dissent that Evanston, Illinois would not tolerate. Possibly the most notable development among students in this period began at Harvard University. Students there began a fund in the dormitories that grew into a campus-wide campaign to purchase an ambulance for the Republic. One was eventually sent to Spain, which then inspired similar activities on other campuses.36 Students at Ann Arbor took it upon themselves to launch a Midwest ambulance drive and contacted students at University of Illinois, University of Chicago, Ohio State, Oberlin College, Wayne State, and Ohio Wesleyan to participate.37 The CCNY students already had launched their own campaign. While few ambulances were donated, these campaigns were important for publicity purposes and for their contribution to the movement culture. Raising money to purchase an entire ambulance in a depressed economy was no easy task, and the political impulses of respectable youth added weight to the endeavor as potential casualties of the next war were organizing to forestall that conflict’s arrival.

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From Basketball Courts to Backyards In contrast to the student activism in this period, among activists ranging from workers to intellectuals, solidarity building activities assumed a far more personal and festive variety than they had for students. Although individual local efforts tied to Spanish aid followed the form of the student ambulance campaigns, other activities marked these other attempts at building movement culture. At the Hippodrome in New York on February 19, 1937, the ILGWU Local 22 women played the ILGWU Local 19 women in a benefit basketball match. That game was followed by the International Workers Order challenging the Furriers Union. Then the All-Star Ex-Collegians met the All-Star Non-Collegians, a working class versus the educated class match-up for the benefit of the Republic. Tickets for that night’s three games went for as low as 35 cents.38 More intimate activities for the Spanish Republic, based in private gardens and homes, brought out America’s wealthier Loyalist supporters and expanded the tent of Spanish Republican support. A tea party in October 1938 with Constance Kyle, a veteran volunteer nurse from the Spanish front, as guest speaker brought out New York socialites. Some guests invited but unable to attend included a representative of the local Board of Education, a judge running for the New York Supreme Court, a bond investor, a city magistrate and the New York governor’s wife, Edith Lehman.39

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In another instance, Joan Crawford and Franchot Tone held a private screening of Joris Ivens’s The Spanish Earth at their home to raise funds. Tone was involved in Hollywood’s ambulance campaign. Reporting on the event, Leonard Lyons, society columnist for the New York Post, explained that “the couple became convinced that the present Spanish government is one duly elected by the people of Spain and that democratic sympathies therefore should be with the Loyalist cause. Tone and Crawford reportedly purchased two ambulances for Spain themselves.”40 In August 1937, Adolph Zukor, founder of Paramount Pictures, hosted a “Spanish fiesta” on his estate in Haverstraw, New York. The event was sponsored by the Rockland County Spanish Milk Fund and slated Spanish Ambassador Fernando de los Ríos to speak. Eleanor Roosevelt endorsed the event along with New York Democratic Representativeat-Large Caroline O’Day, poet Edna St. Vincent Millay and others. Given the New York core of the movement it is no surprise that Mayor LaGuardia also contributed to the cause, expressing his concern about the bombardment of open cities.41 The activities of wealthy Americans on Chicago’s North Shore, a string of lakefront suburbs, further demonstrate the reach of the Spanish cause.42 The North Shore Committee—which included among its support base Secretary of Interior Harold Ickes’s daughter-in-law—sponsored the garden musicale on the Julius Rosenwald Estate that was described at the opening of this book. The performance featured twelve musicians conducted by the CSO’s Daniel Saidenberg.43 That summer of 1937 was abuzz with “Spanish” events in Chicago, the country’s erstwhile capital of isolationism. A June 23 speaking engagement by veteran American Medical Bureau nurse Lini Fuhr included poet Carl Sandburg and writer Meyer Levin. The latter went on to pen the novel Citizens in 1940, a fictional account of the 1937 Memorial Day Massacre laced with Spanish Civil War references. In Hyde Park a Shoreland Hotel luncheon hosted one hundred of the University of Chicago and community elites.44 In August, the Chicago Social Workers Committee hosted beach parties, dune parties in nearby Indiana, and a boat trip. On October 16, the wealthy North Shore community of Winnetka hosted a benefit for the Medical Bureau at its Community House featuring classical performances by several recognized professionals, along with a screening of the documentary film The Heart of Spain.45 In the period after the Spanish aid movement, Michigan would witness the most repressive round-ups of Communists, but during the conflict it was distinctive for its moderate pedigree of pro-republican activities. In Grand Rapids, the MB organizers undertook the peculiar strategy of calling the organization the Friends of Democracy because “leaving out the ‘Spanish’ was considered advisable.” The committee formed there

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included a businessman and two socialists but was unsustainable and dissolved by the end of March.46 Winifred “Wynne” North and her husband, who ran a book shop in Grand Rapids, received responses to an ad offering free copies of Upton Sinclair’s No Pasaran. Sinclair’s was a sympathetic fictional account of international volunteers from the political right and left who end up fighting on their respective sides in Spain. The Norths took the names for each request of a copy of the book in the hope of building a new MB chapter from the list. Wynne even took the step of enclosing in each copy of the book photos of Spanish volunteers Dr. Edward Barsky and his secretary Mildred Rackley along with a bulletin sent by the New York office. The couple managed to generate hundreds of letters to the State Department regarding the Spanish issue.47 These attempts at movement building again attest to a more centrist political persuasion that feared for the Republic. Liberals’ support for Spain could be dismissed by conservatives or anticommunists as the participation of dupes—“there was always a stooge to lead them on”—but more was at work than Communist Party manipulation since the movement went far beyond the party’s reach.48 If the party ultimately directed the aid once it reached Spain, the broad, if ultimately shallow, interest in sending it nonetheless demonstrates the reach of foreign concern in this era. Amid an entrenched isolationism and a growing concern about foreign events, antifascism in the name of the Spanish Republic could be found in nearly every major locale in the United States. Across the United States on campuses, in living rooms, in union halls, small events propounded the large event that was Spanish Republican aid. Many prominent people were more than willing to partake because they supported antifascism and were determined to take action.49 The multitude of committees was a real problem. The prospective supporters of Spanish aid had no charts of the various organizations available to them, but the number of organizations and their various party affiliations was staggering. The needs of many efforts spread thin valuable financial resources.50

The Ambulance Campaign

Raising relief aid through donations required outreach. Pamphlets, films, music, art exhibitions and other cultural apparatus propagated by the aid organizations were only in part intended to raise funds. The screening of films in local auditoriums, performances of famous musicians at local venues, hosting of guest speakers in backyards, appeals for a milk fund for Spanish children, and tours of ambulances on their way from or to Spain all contributed to the production of a consciousness of Spanish

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republicanism. Many literati assumed roles in that effort. John Dos Passos was asked to co-head the Press Committee of the North American Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy. The committee never got off the ground, so Dos proposed making a documentary film that would serve the same purpose. Ernest Hemingway, in the meantime, also became involved in the aid movement through ambulances. These campaigns are perhaps the most recognizable of the republican aid movement’s cultural efforts. Indeed, the largest expense the aid movement incurred on a single item was for ambulances, which happened to be the heaviest material casualties of the war.51 By February 1938, sixty-one ambulances had been donated by Americans. By the war’s end, most of these were destroyed by wear or in combat.52 The visibility of the campaigns in part reflects the star power of Hemingway, who willingly accepted from the Medical Bureau (while it was still part of the AFSD) the chairmanship of its ambulance committee. He accepted even while he would not be in the country to run the committee.53 The campaign for the purchase of ambulances was set in motion after John Howard Lawson, veteran ambulance driver of World War I, arranged a Hollywood visit for French writer Andre Malraux.54 A mass meeting featuring Hemingway followed. Hemingway’s celebrity, but also his World War experience as an ambulance driver in Italy, both benefitted the aid effort.55 A Hollywood fund-raiser brought in $15,000. Writer Herbert Biberman chaired the Hollywood Committee (later the Motion Picture Artists Committee) with an executive body that included writer Donald Ogden Stewart, actor Franchot Tone, actress Florence Eldridge March, director Lewis Milestone, and the writers Sidney Buchman, Dudley Nichols, Humphrey Cobb, Samson Raphaelson, and Madeleine Ruthven.56 John Dos Passos, also an ambulance veteran, offered support to the Republic initially, as did ex-driver Malcolm Cowley. Mass rallies and private film screenings raised enough money to purchase ambulances, and an ambulance tour across the country attracted substantial attention. The campaign to purchase ambulances was popular, with donations of entire ambulances coming from groups ranging from the Furriers’ Union, and college groups, to professional organizations and a range of ethnic societies.57 As Hemingway threw himself into documentary filmmaking and touring the Spanish battlefields, the Motion Picture Artists Committee (MPAC) continued its efforts without him. Although it claimed to be “completely autonomous,” the MPAC affiliated with the NAC in January 1937 for the purpose of donating money without acquiring its own State Department license as required under the recent neutrality legislation. This further solidified the centralization of the movement leadership.58 The MPAC’s efforts “to many people in

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in many parts of the world . . . have been the most vital of any created in Hollywood.”59 Hemingway, for his part, remained independent. He and Joris Ivens formed their own Emergency Ambulance Committee and applied for a license from the State Department in order to show the resulting film The Spanish Earth and send the proceeds to the Republic. Touring ambulances—or rather, an ambulance—around the United States was a common tool for the aid movement. The tour demonstrates how ambulances served as a symbol of the defense against fascism, imagery that impressed itself deeply even in the most remote areas of the country. From their tour in West Virginia in August 1937, organizers offered for the New York office details worth citing at length: Up to this time, the work for Spain had been confined primarily to Spanish-speaking people. We decided to broaden the work among Americans and foreign-born elements. The purpose of the tour was to distribute literature about Spain, stimulate collection of funds, arouse public sentiment for Loyalist Spain, and to show those who had already contributed how their money was being utilized. . . . On the way to Scott’s Run, where there are several mining camps, we visited with people who were sympathetic to the cause. These friends were very much concerned about what our reception would be like in Scott’s Run. Until a short time ago, people were hostile to meetings of all kinds, and our friends later drove down to make sure we were unharmed. In spite of the rain, we opened our meeting in the center of the mining camp. We spoke to about one hundred miners and their families who had gathered around the ambulance. After a short talk on the Spanish situation and its effect on workers in America we sold $5.10 worth of literature. A Negro miner bought ten books (Spain) to distribute to friends. After visiting another camp in Scott’s Run and selling more literature, we went on to Barracksville where we gained admission to the United Mine Workers Local. At this meeting there were about 300 Negro and White miners. After a fine introduction by the President of the Local, [Charlotte] Lautner spoke on the effects of fascism on trade unions. We were given a warm reception from the miners and during an intermission we sold another $5 worth of literature. The officers of the local, Negro and White, posed for pictures in front of the ambulance. There was always an interested crowd around the ambulance discussing the question of Spain and reading our literature. . . . The next day we met the Spanish Committee and drove to Weirton, where a picnic to be held on company property had been arranged by the Spanish Committee. We displayed our literature and sold $13 worth and also received $12 from the sale of buttons. [Char-

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lotte] Lautner and A. Stone spoke and made an appeal to the Spanish people to broaden their work among non-Spanish elements. During the speeches, men and women were in tears.60

The report elaborated on the cooperation of local authorities even in formerly company towns like Logan, Beckley, Weirton and Welch where there had been bloody repression and authoritarian control in recent memory. The tour ended with a picnic in Clarksburg organized by the International Workers Order and the local Spanish Committee where every one of the 1,500 in attendance wore a Medical Bureau button. The sale of literature easily detracts from the bigger picture. Republican Spain enjoyed broad appeal and even some of the poorest Americans were willing to make contributions. Moreover, as they lived both outside the trappings of popular media and understood issues of class far better than most Americans, the people visited on this ambulance tour were without prejudices about Spain and easily convinced of the dangers of fascism as it was popularly defined.

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The Spanish Earth and The Heart of Spain

Hollywood’s ambulances were not the only forces at work in sustaining a front for Spain. Hollywood’s star power contributed significantly to the Republican relief effort materially and creatively, most obviously with several film projects. The documentary Heart of Spain, “a dramatic motion picture of the fight against fascism,” was the Popular Front’s crowning achievement of propaganda. Director Herbert Kline and Hungarian cameraman Geza Karpathi led the production crew of what was promoted as “the first authentic film portraying the use of modern medical methods to alleviate the brutal effects of modern fascist warfare.” The images were indeed intimate. Karpathi was wounded during the filming when bullets pierced a vehicle in which he was riding with Canadian thoracic surgeon Norman Bethune.61 The film follows Bethune during his surgeries at the front in Spain. John O’Shaugnessy’s narration added the necessary emphasis on the leitmotif of democracy versus fascism by explaining that the International Brigade volunteers had come “to fight for the idea of democracy, to make Madrid the tomb of fascism.” Oddly perhaps, Franco is never mentioned in the film. Instead, the film’s imagery provides the ideological context for the struggle. As the film historian William Alexander explains, “Women and children in Heart of Spain have an obvious propaganda thrust: negative emotions are most easily aroused by showing the enemy’s destruction of the traditionally helpless.”62

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As financier of the endeavor, the Medical Bureau considered Heart of Spain “our new film” and intended that it “stimulate fund raising and organizational work of Medical Bureau chapters and to offer new ways of penetrating friendly organizations and social groups in their locality.”63 Speakers were normally booked to accompany film screenings in order to provide Popular Front context. In Philadelphia, in October 1937, Bethune himself accompanied veteran Spanish civil war ambulance driver Victor Hirschfield to a screening. By late October the film had been shown more than sixty times. Minnesota Representative Henry Teigan, a FarmerLaborite, and Montana Democratic Representative Jerry O’Connell, along with Spanish Ambassador Fernando de los Ríos were among those who offered testimonials about the film.64 In St. Petersburg, Florida, the documentary was shown to 1,200 high school students and parents who then “pledged to form a local committee to raise funds to continue support of democracy against fascism.” In Jacksonville, Florida, the film was so successful the audience demanded another screening.65 But Heart of Spain was not just “our film,” it was an investment.66 “On opening night, some of Hollywood’s leading actors and directors wired that Heart of Spain was ‘unanimously acclaimed the most compelling document ever shown of war-torn Spain.’”67 All told, the North American Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy (at the behest of the Medical Bureau) spent $3,700 on the Heart of Spain and its semi-sequel Return to Life. Unlike most of the movement’s propaganda, the films tended to yield profits, albeit modest compared to better-promoted Hollywood productions. Wide distribution was never realized so instead the films were used to accompany the ambulance tour. In the fall of 1937, the MPAC undertook the organization of a sixty-city tour of the Heart of Spain with an ambulance in the lead.68 Heart of Spain and Return to Life were not the only cinematic initiatives for Spain. Another film of lesser acclaim but perhaps of more historical importance was The Spanish Earth, narrated by Orson Welles in its original form and screened at the White House. The village of Fuenteduña de Tajo on the road from Madrid to Valencia serves as the film’s setting. The plot involves the villagers’ construction of an irrigation system in order to provide food to the people of embattled Madrid, and the land to be cultivated had been expropriated from landlords who had refused to allow the farmers to use it.69 Democratic Spain finds conceptual expression throughout the film, which also contains appropriate amounts of terror and a crashed Nazi plane as a point of reference. The catchword “fascism” was also inserted. Ernest Hemingway narrated the final print of the film, the version of the documentary normally screened today. Hemingway and Ivens agreed to keep commentary in the film to a minimum and to

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avoid material that might provoke “accusations of purveying red propaganda.”70 On July 7, 1937, the President, the First Lady, and WPA administrator Harry Hopkins viewed a cut of the film narrated by Welles. Hemingway served as ambassador for the aid movement. The producers hoped that the film might affect a change in Roosevelt’s foreign policy and this became the most direct influence the movement ever mustered. Roosevelt reacted to the film positively but offered no comments to Hemingway about the diplomatic situation. “Hemingway and Ivens were surprised when both Roosevelts wanted the film to be made stronger, because neither Franklin nor Eleanor had realized the degree to which land ownership was concentrated in the hands of the church and the nobility and how much the peasants’ hunger for land was at the root of the conflict. ‘That should be brought out more explicitly,’ Eleanor suggested, ‘for it was an experience so different from the American.’” While the left was generally downplaying the revolution in Spain for fear of what that symbolism would project to the public, here was the most powerful couple in America recommending precisely the opposite.71 Outside the White House, the film had encountered resistance. The government of Rhode Island banned it, and reactions in other locales were also heated.72 In Detroit, police moved to prevent showings of portions of the picture that were “uncomplimentary to dictators Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini.” However, legal maneuvering by the producers thwarted the suppression in this instance. It was estimated that, despite these setbacks, over two million viewers eventually saw The Heart of Spain.73 Screenings of the film in Los Angeles in mid-July brought in over $20,000, which went toward the purchase of ambulance chassis from Ford. Unfortunately, fears of theater owners stifled wider distribution.74 Prometheus Pictures eventually managed to book the film into 400 theaters in sixty U.S. cities, not including the 16mm prints used by the North American Committee and Medical Bureau for direct aid. Archibald MacLeish, later a speechwriter for the President, and a co-founder of the film’s production company, felt that the box office take “should go some way to justify the whole venture.”75

Labor

American workers were no less concerned with Spain, and their actions were no less transmitters of a culture of antifascism than those of the hosts of lawn parties. However, labor’s support held significant limits. For most Americans, especially mired as they were in bitter economic struggles at the household level, it was easy enough to stay the course of

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non-involvement and not fret too much if fascism destroyed Europe. For those workers attuned to class struggle, the Marxist interpretation of fascism came more naturally. For most workers, schematic antifascism probably ranked below the immediacy of quotidian responsibilities: keeping a job, supporting a family, a fear of an employer’s management policies, and for that matter religious limits to involvement in Spanish aid. Nonetheless, a notable number of unions and individual workers anticipated a possible conflagration between themselves and the forces on the march in Europe. Labor’s antifascism was already well established. In 1934, David Dubinsky rose to head the ILGWU and to take a position on the AFL executive council. That year the Garment Workers’ union also raised nearly $51,000 for an antifascism fund and initiated a drive for an additional $250,000 “for the liberation of workers in Europe.”76 The ILGWU even invited others in organized labor to an antifascist rally it sponsored at Mecca Temple, thereby taking the lead in what was to become a decade-long struggle for the labor movement. Dubinsky’s leadership in the International Trade Union Federation placed him at the forefront of Spanish aid generally and labor’s own aid campaign (Labor’s Red Cross/Trade Union Relief for Spain). In February 1938, the Spanish socialist trade union Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT) opened an office in New York City to expedite building alliances with American unions.77 The aid that unions offered came in various forms. Some unions like the furriers or shoe makers offered to donate products of their labor rather than monetary gifts.78 Nonmaterial donations were also offered in the form of public statements. Although it served only symbolic purposes, the hallmark of American labor’s concern for Spain was the frequently commented upon resolution in support of the Republic introduced at the December 1936 convention of the American Federation of Labor. It was referred to the Executive Council but never adopted.79 In fact it was never even voted on in 1936, which reflects the difference between local sympathies and the priorities of the national leadership. Motions to introduce the resolution in subsequent years also failed. That the rank-and-file showed more concern than the AFL leadership was to be expected, though the AFL hierarchy did endorse a boycott of Japanese goods.80 Realizing later what had been lost, some in the AFL expressed pangs of guilt and urged “breaking relations with Franco.”81 Despite this organizational inaction, AFL President William Green offered backing to the aid efforts. In April 1938, he met with Ogier Preteceille (co-founder of the Spanish newspaper reporters union and press secretary for the UGT) and expressed his condemnation of “international gangsterism” by fascist dictators. The conservative Green promised to initiate

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discussion of a boycott at the AFL’s executive board.82 The International Federation of Trade Unions, after all, had passed resolutions calling for boycotts on all goods going to Nationalist parts of Spain and demanding that the rights of Spain be recognized so it could defend itself. The autonomy of local unions within organized labor’s structure left activists at the local level to take up the onus of Spanish Republican solidarity. Where funds were short for relief aid, the locals acted instead as beacons for antifascism by entering the debate over neutrality. In late 1938, forty-nine locals in New York and thirty-four elsewhere (representing more than 100,000 members in all) passed resolutions urging the lifting of the arms embargo on Spain.83 Albert Lopez of Cigarmakers’ International Union Local 500, for example, wrote the Medical Bureau’s Trade Union Department in late 1938 that its 5,000 members supported lifting the embargo and had adopted a resolution to that effect. Delegates from the union were to attend the National Conference to Lift the Embargo Against the Spanish Republic in Washington on January 9, 1939. The local also circulated the resolution to other unions.84 The Bakery and Confectionary Workers International Union Local 22 sent a $24 check to the NAC. The money, sent in “the hope that it will do its bit toward helping the Spanish fighters for democracy,” was intended for a milk fund set up by the Trade Union Committee of the ALAWF. Another donation from the union for $46.37 followed on April 19, 1937.85 Other donations came in “to help the heroic Spanish people in their heroic fight against fascism and to preserve democracy.”86 The International Brotherhood of Blacksmiths, Forgers and Helpers in Minneapolis donated a meager $10.10 taken up by 205 workers for the Relief Ship (see chapter five).87 Support ran wide, if underwhelming financially. Also consequential was the geography of the support. New York was over-represented and the rest of the country under-represented. There was a relatively passive response by labor nationally, since the AFL desired no place within the network of transmission for anti-fascism.88 These nearly 100,000 union members represented by leadership amenable to lifting the embargo on Spain is considerable, but far from the watershed the left was hoping to achieve.

Baltimore’s Sea of Discontentment

If labor was in the vanguard of the Popular Front, then maritime workers were the standard bearers. It is of significance that of the 113 seamen in the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, more than ten percent of these volunteers were both communists and from Baltimore.89 During Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia, American workers had staged strikes against Italian freighters with the support of U.S. Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins.90

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The socialists’ Norman Thomas had advocated strikes against ships bound for insurgent Spain shortly after the war erupted. In September 1938 five strikes by seamen took up the Socialist Party’s demand for a strike against Franco. Three of these five strikes were undertaken by the Scandinavian Seamen’s Club of America. While hardly as impressive as the 1934 San Francisco strike, the resistance that eventually emerged on the Eastern seaboard demonstrated an impressive level of solidarity. The strikers gained nothing personally from the action but produced yet another expression of anti-fascism, contributing to its growing variety of forms. These strikes further complicate our understanding of the political history of the era given historian Ellen Schrecker’s finding that “the only jobrelated actions that had to do with international affairs by a communistcontrolled union were the refusals of West Coast longshoremen to load scrap metal for Japan before the Second World War.”91 If Norman Thomas’s appeals for a general strike against Franco had anything at all to do with the marine strikes, it was the Socialist Party’s greatest contribution to the movement. The Socialist Call also reported on criticism of the communists by New York seamen’s unions for not striking ships bound for Franco’s Spain. In the newsletter Spanish Labor Bulletin, anarchists added their appeal for labor actions only weeks before the Baltimore strike.92 So it is especially interesting that within days of these charges, five strikes played out against Spain’s insurgents, suggesting the possibility that the communists were either persuaded by the charges or that noncommunists were striking ships allegedly abetting the rebels. The communists, however, had been urging action too. Early in the conflict communist Roy Hudson published a pamphlet for the North American Committee reminding readers of “the Seattle longshoremen who in 1919 refused to load arms that were used in the war against the Russian workers’ government.” Hudson’s pamphlet, Shipowners Plot Against Spanish Democracy, urged seamen “not to sail on any ships carrying cargo consigned to the fascists!”93 In the summer of 1938, during the Paris Conference of the International Coordinating Committee, which was to oversee all international aid to the Spanish Republic, Swedish and Norwegian trade unions were provided contact information of unions abroad to urge them to incite an international strike.94 The Communist Party’s positioning in the National Maritime Union (NMU) bolstered the ability of party activists to organize the small wave of strikes against these alleged munitions shipments in late 1938 even while the strike support committees were broadly representative (including socialists and anarchists). Baltimore’s activities for Spain are also especially interesting because they occurred in an environment of long-standing race and class conflict

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where communists had been active. Baltimore’s working class was prevalently African American, and its seamen and longshoreman had long been immigrants and ethnic minorities. The economic struggles common at the time were also in evidence there, and the city had witnessed a series of dockside actions throughout the depression. Baltimore had endured an especially bloody 100-day seamen’s strike that began November 1, 1936, and reached all of the major Atlantic and Gulf ports.95 With a substantial communist bloc in the National Maritime Union also, it is perhaps not surprising to find that “the National Maritime Union, entirely upon its own initiative, sponsored a meeting for Spain. . . . This was the first union that saw fit to sponsor such a meeting.”96 Baltimore had established a permanent aid committee for Spain in early 1937.97 In April 1938, 1,600 Baltimoreans attended a rally held for a visiting Spanish delegation (the second such group to tour) and even Spanish-speaking supporters “who have never cooperated in the past supported the meeting.” The ILGWU and ACWU both offered support, and Mayor Howard Jackson, unlike the leaders of many cities, not only attended the event but also made a donation “in spite of [an] election campaign now going on and terrific pressure” from Baltimore’s numerous Catholics. According to one observer, only the local left wing and the universities failed to turn out in significant numbers.98 Loyalist support, however, remained as racially divided as the earlier maritime union sympathy strikes. Reporting on a visit by Salaria Kee, the only African American volunteer nurse in Spain, the Baltimore Medical Bureau’s Doctor Henry Makover detailed the racial minefield that obstructed cooperation in his city: The truth of the matter is that attempts were made by us to interest them [black groups] but they were rather cool to the idea . . . . To attempt to have Miss Kee address the usually conservative white groups in Baltimore would have ended in a fiasco and perhaps have stirred up a situation that would do more harm than good. Although I do not think that the Catholic press in a strongly Catholic city would attempt to make a racial issue out of Miss Kee’s marriage [to an Irish International Brigade volunteer] they would have found ample reason to stir up great dissension by some other means. However, if the Negro groups would sponsor the meeting we would help them as much as we can but I am dubious about getting much of a start from these groups.99

It was amid these divisions, then, and in following earlier job actions that on September 2, 1938, Norwegian seamen in Baltimore struck the steamer SS Titanian. The ship was carrying 6,000 tons of nitrates and

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phosphates and the strikers alleged that these were chemicals for producing weapons which were to be taken to the insurgent-controlled port of Bilbao. The wholesaler claimed that it was fertilizer that could not be used for other purposes. If the strikers’ allegations were true, of course, the shipment violated the neutrality law and federal charges would have been warranted against the exporter. President Roosevelt would have known about the allegations because on September 6, 1938 the strikers cabled the White House an appeal on the Titanian affair.100 The strike was indeed small—only twenty-one men walked off the job —but it was well-supported and organized on shore with a twenty-fourhour picket. A motorboat circled the vessel where it sat anchored in an attempt to prevent the ship from leaving.101 The community of support included the women’s section of the anarchist International Antifascist Solidarity and the Sociedades Hispanas Confederadas, both SpanishAmerican Loyalist organizations.102 The local branch of the Medical Bureau and other groups also rallied to the cause. Maryland Socialist Party leader Elisabeth Gilman, an alleged “leader of the isolationist movement,” supported the seamen as did a socialist support committee.103 Back in New York City, organizations in solidarity picketed the Norwegian Consulate, a departure from the usual picketing of Italian and German consulates. A week into the strike the North American Committee’s Herman Reissig cabled FDR to urge the president to “take action under neutrality law to stop [the] shipment.”104 In fact, the federal government did get involved— in the form of the FBI. In a historical inversion, given the government’s long and stormy history with organized labor, the FBI entered on the strikers’ side. One of the seamen hired for the freighter was apparently from New York. Coleman Blum, of the Joint Committee Supporting Norwegian Seaman to Aid Spanish Democracy, charged that the man was violating federal law, which prohibited the interstate trafficking of strike-breakers. The FBI opened an investigation.105 Any forthcoming activity on the part of the government was about to be meaningless, however. To cultivate public sympathies further, the strikers held a rally at the Odd Fellows Temple on September 13. The International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union’s (ILGWU) Samuel Einhorn, National Maritime Union’s Patrick Whalen, and others spoke in an attempt to raise a strike fund and provoke public indignation, though the ILGWU apparently offered little other help.106 The Titanian’s Norwegian proprietors had been trying to put together a crew since the strike began. While that rally was underway, business agents for the owners of the Titanian “mustered a crew quietly, placed them aboard the vessel and the ship sailed before the meeting closed.” The left-wing press claimed the scab crew was German.107

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That was the end of the Titanian strike but not of seamen’s antifascism. Four more strikes followed. While the Titanian affair was unfolding, the Brooklyn-based Scandinavian Seamen’s Club of America struck the SS Gudvor on September 7, another ship bound for insurgent Spain and also allegedly carrying chemicals. On September 23 the Ceuta-bound tanker MT Cleopatra carrying 11,000 tons of gasoline was struck, again by Baltimore workers.108 Two more strikes followed in Port Arthur, Texas, against the SS Kleopatra on September 27 and then another in Norfolk, Virginia, on October 14 against the SS Gudvor.109 The mini-strike wave was the last gasp of a desperate movement. Anti-fascism was about to enter a new stage. Foreign volunteers were pulled out of Spain only a month later and the last major initiative of the movement—the Relief Ship for Spain—sailed shortly thereafter. The strikes were a united effort, like the student efforts and fund-raising parties, that advanced the movement culture. The communists appear to have played a crucial role in organizing the strikes, while socialists, anarchists, and others all supported the actions. Anarchists were supportive of the strikes and their press offered encouragement, even despite the experience of anarchists the year before during the internecine conflict in Barcelona—the May Days—in which communists violently confronted anarchist militia.110 Yet given their limited numbers, anarchists were not a driving force in the Baltimore strike. Moreover, the socialists failed to mention the strikes in their official organ even while calling for them and some of their members took part. Presumably, this silent treatment stemmed from the communist involvement and several years of communist criticism whenever the socialists attempted actions for Spain. In any case, the anti-Stalinist ILGWU, which maintained its own fund for the Trade Union Relief for Spain, also assisted the struggle. Whatever range of motives existed for this involvement among the partisans to the events, the net effect was to advance the Spanish cause precisely as proRepublic Americans believed it should be. The Popular Front advanced upon the public consciousness to instigate for a new course of diplomatic action. Yet deeper ideological dispositions informed by notions of race and ethnicity set parameters to antifascism.

A United Racial Front? The experience of Baltimore’s strike highlights the difficulty of organizing in a society with deep divisions. Attempting to invite historically marginalized groups into positions of ostensible equality against trenchant racism posed problems. Moreover, as it was with much of organized

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labor, black workers too had far more concerns about their own immediate needs. The economic crisis bore more heavily on African-Americans because conditions had been so bad for so long. The limited activities around Ethiopia’s struggles against fascist aggression failed to translate into equivalent action for Spain. Indeed, Chicago’s Medical Bureau office reported, “We find in our contact with Negroes here that they will have to be drawn into activity regarding Spain through their interests in Ethiopia.”111 Ethiopia was by the time of the Spanish crisis a settled score. A Negro Ambulance Committee was set up under the North American Committee’s umbrella to activate the black community on Spain. The net financial result was discouraging, but the response of black leaders serving as fonts of Spanish republicanism served the movement’s ideological purposes.112 To be sure, as in the movement at large, there were cultural icons at the forefront of black activism. Poet Langston Hughes reported on Spain for the Associated Negro Press and Baltimore African-American. He even incurred an injury from sniper fire. In Paris, at the Second International Writers Congress Against Fascism, Hughes explained that American blacks opposed fascism because they lived with it every day.113 In “Air Raid Over Harlem” Hughes had already connected international with personal events:

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The Ethiopian war broke out last night: BOMBS OVER HARLEM Cops on every corner Most of ‘em white COPS IN HARLEM Guns and billy-clubs Double duty in Harlem114

Writer Ralph Ellison also supported the North American Committee, and, apparently, took part in the July 1, 1937 picketing in front of the Italian consulate where over a thousand others turned out to protest “the war between Loyalists and Fascists,” as he remembered it. He later attempted to sail for Spain himself. After being thwarted by the State Department when he attempted to leave on his own, he tried again under the auspices of the Medical Bureau. During his wait he ran out of money and never made it abroad.115 Labor was also represented with A. Philip Randolph, president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, expressing that he was “wholly sympathetic to the Spanish government.”116 Around one hundred African-Americans, including one nurse, one social worker and one doctor, volunteered for service in Spain as soldiers, drivers, medics,

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and aid workers. The Chicago Defender remarked upon the easily overlooked 200 black Cubans who had joined the International Brigades. For black anti-fascists the demands of solidarity with Spain were going to be difficult to sell to a people historically un-served by formal democracy. And as it was in the case of Baltimore, it would be difficult to make a case for larger political concerns when even the movement could not rise against the prevailing social norms. Historian Brenda Gayle Plummer found that for black Americans “the true moment of internationalism had been the call to arms to defend Ethiopia. Spain was but a trenchant footnote.” That was reasonable enough since “only those Afro-Americans who have some reason to believe that the salvation of Spain would promote Ethiopian liberation could afford optimism.”117 Spanish Republican supporters recognized this. The MBNAC established a Negro Ambulance Committee headed by social worker and writer Thyra Edwards, who was already involved in Spanish aid as a social worker and youth organizer.118 Yet the limits set upon black activities in Baltimore, by way of example, meant the Popular Front would confront limits to its growth imposed from outside. Racism was but one of these. Ideological opposition was also manifest. The case of the Spanish-speaking population in the United States, also attests to the limits and promises of the movement. It is to that example that we now turn.

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Chapter 3

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The Ethnic United Front and Spanish America’s War

Children of immigrants were nearly one-third of the U.S. population at the time of the Spanish Civil War, so an ethnic component to the Popular Front was inevitable. Obviously, Spaniards in the United States paid close attention to the course of events in Spain and were moved to support the Republic’s struggle for survival. Many recent immigrant groups found in Spain an analogy to their own conditions in the United States. This was as true for Latinos and Spaniards as Jews, Italians, and others, including a segment of African-Americans. The Popular Front, therefore, was as personally ethnic and racial as it was political. To consider a few of these groups, German-American and Polish-American antifascism in the Spanish aid efforts followed anxieties about the rise of Adolf Hitler and Josef Pilsudski in their respective home countries.1 Greek antifascists were politically active not just against Greek dictator General Ionnais Metaxas (who like Franco was sympathetic to Germany), but also on the issue of Spain with some two hundred Greek-Americans volunteering for the International Brigades.2 Finns were historically the largest ethnic group in the Workers’ Party in the decade prior to the Spanish war, though their numbers among the radical organizations were in decline by the mid-thirties as the immigrant Finn population also declined.3 Jewish antifascism had many fires to fight. On the Spanish issue Jewish opinion included a domino theory on the fate of Jewry where the fate of Spain’s Republic would determine the advance or halt to persecution in Europe.4 Nationalist General Gonzalo Queipo de Llano, in an October 1936 broadcast, told listeners that his rebellion was “not a Spanish civil war, it is a war of western civilization against the Jews of the entire world. The Jews want to destroy the Christians who, according to them, ‘came from the devil.’” Responding to such vitriol were the no fewer than fifteen percent of the International Brigade volunteers who were Jewish.5 64

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Of all of the various ethnic committees to raise funds for the Spanish Republic the largest were German-American, Lithuanian, and Italian. Of these, the Italians had the most experience by virtue of their opposition to Mussolini dating back over a decade. Italians established a variety of committees, including the Anti-Fascist Committee and Italian Committee to Aid the Children of Spain. Italian antifascism was also quite exceptional for its intersection of nationalism and internationalism.6 In the case of Spanish aid, the archival evidence suggests that Italian antifascism either had reached its capacity or perhaps had disagreements with the NAC. The Italian Anti-Fascist Committee sponsored several major events, including an April 1937 event at the Hippodrome, but the NAC was often without representation of the group at its board meetings. The IAFC seems to have been more concerned with supporting the Girabaldi Battalion in the International Brigades.7 The Spanish-American experience, then, less studied and far less known, emerged in an already existing context of ethnic concerns about events abroad. And like the Italian case, the Spanish case was also exceptional for its combination of internationalism and nationalism. Spaniards were also joined in solidarity by an even larger Spanish-speaking community. Spanish activists’ influence beyond their numbers was due perhaps because they were joined by internationalist-oriented Latino communities. In New York City, as James Fernandez has found, Spanish referred to all Spanish-speaking supporters of Republican Spain regardless of their backgrounds.8 This pattern is in evidence across the Spanish aid organizations.

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The Limits of the Ethnic United Front Easily overlooked because of their small population, from Florida to California, Spanish-Americans exerted an impact on the aid efforts beyond their proportion. In San Francisco, communities of Spaniards and other Spanish speakers assured the local Medical Bureau and North American Committee a Popular Front character the movement lacked elsewhere. In Tampa, Florida, home to a sizable Spanish culture, the predominantly working-class Spanish-American population contributed more money than any other Loyalist partisans in the United States outside of New York City. And in New Orleans, Spanish-Americans were the only segment of the local population engaged on the Spanish issue. The cultural front met the ethnic Popular Front with a Spanish accent, but activism for Spain’s cause also raises questions as to how ethnically integrated was the American effort. The “Spanish” ethnic category meant more than just the small Spanish immigrant community. Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Mexicans, and others

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offered republican support. Volunteers in the American Medical Bureau, for instance, demonstrate a mix of Cuban and Spanish volunteers from the United States. Surgeon Jaime de Guzman, medical technician Jose Dhaga, ambulance driver José Gonzalez, nurse Dulcea Hernaiz, and ambulance driver Epiphano Lopez constituted a Spanish contingent even while they originated from across Hispano-America. The movement culture surrounding Spanish aid was developed largely without the input or involvement of Spanish-Americans, even while Spaniards witnessing the events in Spain were sent on tour to encourage support.9 The relationship between the Spanish-language organizations and the Anglo ones was not necessarily hostile, but neither was it always amicable. Unlike Italian antifascism and African-American solidarity with Ethiopia, in which the ethnic components defined the movements, Spanish-American antifascism nearly always found itself on the outside looking in on the much broader effort. While this may have reflected intractable political differences, it also suggested certain “racial” assumptions that lent an orientalist cast to Catholicism, and the Iberian and Latin American varieties, in particular.10 The “Latin” culture of Tampa, Florida, for example, was only a decade removed from severe anti-Catholic prejudice and faced some of the worst racial violence in the United States. Moreover, historians Allen Guttmann and Frederick Pike both have identified a “primitivism” in images of Spain where the country’s peasants were overrun by fascism’s militaristic modernism.11 The primitive was evident throughout Anglo work for the movement and came at precisely a time when interest in Spanish history and culture had been burgeoning over several decades. The Spanish Earth invoked nature in its title and its focus on a peasant community. Hemingway’s Spaniards in For Whom the Bell Tolls exhibited “animal strength” and “triumphant lust.”12 Even Auden’s lauded poem “Spain” placed Spain geographically as “that arid square, that fragment nipped off from hot/Africa, soldered so crudely to inventive Europe.” However, as Richard Kagan and others have described, the projections of primitivism onto Spain did not curtail interest in Spanish artists and history.13 In California and Florida, for example, primitivism was projected onto people of Spanish descent in a racial manner. In southern California Mexicans, Italians, and other foreigners were discriminated against in public spaces such as public swimming pools by permitting their use by “foreigners” only on designated days. Mexican children were forced into schools separate from white children. California, Arizona, and Texas all passed laws in the thirties that favored American citizens in certain jobs. In Florida, “hostile climate await[ed] immigrants” outside ethnic enclaves where “Latin and Anglo Tampa were separate, hostile worlds.”

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Reflecting sentiments in other parts of the country forbidding other ethnic groups from interacting in the white world, signs in Tampa proclaimed “No Latins Allowed,” a category broad enough to encompass all those of Spanish descent.14 Spain’s provinicial emigrants settled in patterns, hence the term colonia is appropriate. Galicians (Gallegos) were the most represented regional group, particularly in Brooklyn, although Basques were also present there. Andalucians by way of Hawaii were evident in San Francisco as were Asturians. Tampa, Florida, claimed a concentration of Asturians, many of whom came by way of Cuba.15 In Solvay, a suburb of Syracuse, New York, there was a “large Spanish colony” where it was relatively simple to garner several thousand signatures on a pro-Republic petition in February 1939.16 Boise, Idaho, actually enjoyed an exception to the 1924 immigration restrictions because of the need for shepherds from the Basque regions.17 The United States offered inducements in the form of specific types of work to Spaniards with particular skills, and the regional patterns of settlement reflect these trends.18 One further pattern stands out. According to historians Gary Mormino and George Pozzetta, in the five years following the Spanish-American War nearly 150,000 Spaniards left Cuba, and many of these then headed to New York City, Key West, and Tampa.19 The possibility of further movement into Spanish enclaves in other parts of the country would not be surprising, whether by way of one of these cities or directly from Cuba. In other words, Spanish immigration to the United States may have been limited but the Spanish enclaves—colonias—contained elements of Spanish and Cuban-Spanish, and possibly other “Hispanic” émigrés. Certainly, Puerto Ricans easily mingled with Cubans or Mexicans in New York City, and their common language and shared heritage disposed them to working with Spanish aid organizations. Anglo observers in the aid movement do not appear to have noticed the differences. Certainly, the records available offer little guidance as to the origins of many of the aid movement participants save for their Spanish surnames.20 Yet within this atmosphere, Spanish-descended Americans in California found themselves under a single rubric of Spanish, often without distinction. But this in itself is of interest since to be “Spanish” was to be seen as European, if only a European fragment nipped off from Africa. One North American Committee activist in New York recognized differences when he advised organizers in Los Angeles, California, that “I cannot stress this too strongly. Your committee must be wide and include if possible liberal Catholics and representatives of the Spanish or Mexican population in your city.” Yet when California activists reported back they only ever mentioned such references as “numerous Spanish societies”

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and “our Spanish friends.” The existence of groups like the Sociedad de las Señoras de Isabel La Católica of Sunnyvale suggest the possibility of ethnic influences broader than merely Spaniards. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine that a town like Sunnyvale, which would boast a large Mexican population during World War II, would lack in 1938 a Mexican population sympathetic to the Spanish Republic. Put succinctly, the Isabel La Católica was “Spanish” to movement activists in that it included a variety of people of Spanish ancestry. Just as Spanish Harlem contained a racially diverse Puerto Rican and Cuban population that shared a common language, so it would seem that among Spanish republican supporters, “Spanish” in 1930s California represented a diverse group of Spanish-speaking peoples. This is quite significant in light of recent observations that “While apparent for a time in the late nineteenth century, anti-Italian and anti-Portuguese nativism did not dominate political concerns for long in Santa Clara County, and the widespread acceptance of European immigrants and their US-born children as ‘white Americans’ emerged hand in hand with more salient hostilities toward those considered to be nonwhite.”21 For this reason Spanish-Americans were generally cautious in their affiliations, especially in Tampa, where the hostility of the native white population offered reasons for avoidance. The ACLU listed Tampa and adjacent counties as the number one center of repression in the United States in 1936 and 1937 because virulent KKK activity in the region pointed not just at blacks but at Hispanics and Spanish speakers generally.22 The attack on Earl Browder by Tampa’s American Legion during an October 1937 speaking engagement also suggested the extent of hostility to unpopular political ideas. The movement for Republican Spain in Tampa was undertaken independent of the New York–centered Popular Front organizing. So while aid donors of Hispanic descent made the largest sacrifice of any group involved, they also undertook their activities largely outside of the Popular Front organizations. From the perspective of the Spanish-speaking communities, the Popular Front served only as an expedient, a venue in which to support their brethren abroad and perhaps to project anxieties from home. Their Anglo counterparts made few gestures to integrate them into the leadership of the movement, and the Popular Front itself had little interest in Spanishspeaking leadership. Significantly, in New Orleans and Tampa, Hispanic —in the broadest sense of the term—activities were the lifeblood of the aid movement. In San Francisco, a very limited unity was achieved, with Spanish-Americans generally, but not entirely, excluded from the movement’s leadership. In most cases Spaniards carried the movement without access to its decision-making centers.

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Nearly one quarter of the relief aid raised in the United States originated in these Hispanic communities, yet their numbers were absent among the local committees affiliated with the North American Committee and Medical Bureau. Spanish-Americans specifically as a group were, as the Spanish Information Bureau reported,

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strongly organized into anti-fascist groups all over the country. Such organizations as the United Spanish Societies of New York [Sociedades Hispanas Confederadas], which includes 150 anti-Fascist groups all over the country; the Comité Popular Democrático of Tampa, Florida; the Central Spanish Relief Committee of Washington, D.C.; and the Basque Sheepherders’ Overall Dance Association of Boise, Idaho, have done much to aid the cause of Republican Spain.”

The best figures available indicate that at least $545,384.41 was raised by the combined efforts of the United Spanish Societies, Comité Popular Democrático, Central Spanish Relief Committee, and Acción Demócrata Española (Spanish Democratic Action), the four major Spanish-language organizations. This last one, moreover, functioned with virtually no overhead. The United Spanish Societies, as part of its campaigns, also ran one of the most unusual of all of the fund drives. Beginning in late May 1938, the group initiated a cement drive in order to build bomb shelters for civilians. By the first week in June, $35,000 was already collected for the fund. Ultimately, forty thousand sacks of cement were donated. Like ambulances, the cement could have easily been put to military use, but whether or not this item was in violation of regulations, the Roosevelt administration apparently averted its eyes.23 Spaniards had begun their organizing early yet had been relegated to a supporting role. By the time of the founding meeting of the American Friends of Spanish Democracy, a smaller organization of American Spaniards called the Friends of Democracy in Spain expressed interest in merging with Roger Baldwin’s organization. Amador Marin, a businessman from the Spanish group, attended the Town Hall Club founding meeting and assured Baldwin’s faction that the Friends of Democracy in Spain intended to combine their efforts. Marin hoped this merger would finally bring about a clear Hispanic and Anglo alliance. Not long after this initial meeting in September 1936, Marin’s group incorporated as Friends of the Spanish Republic but refused to merge with Friends of Spanish Democracy (FSD). According to the Baldwin faction, the existence of two organizations with similar names allegedly caused confusion among donors who thought Marin’s group was the Friends of Spanish Democracy.24 This was undoubtedly correct, though one less

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similarly named organization among many was not likely to solve the problem. Marin’s refusal to yield provoked a nativist response from the FSD; Marin was sent a letter indicating that the existence of duplicate organizations provoked confusion. The letter also pointed out the “impropriety of a Spaniard organizing Americans who should express their own interest themselves.” This last point was at the least disingenuous given the intended recipients of the aid. The FSD followed the insult with an aggressive courting of Marin’s sponsors to pull them onto the FSD’s own organization and donor list. The move paid off as Marin’s group went nowhere and a number of sponsors came over to the FSD.25 The subsequent estrangement of organizations of Spaniards across the United States from their Anglo counterparts is not difficult to understand, though periodically cooperation was realized.

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Tampa

In Tampa, the Latin community founded an aid organization on August 5, 1936—the Committee for Defense of the Spanish People’s Front— that trailed only the North American Committee in total dollars sent to Spain. The Tampa committee consisted of a broad constituency of immigrants, including Spaniards, Italians and Cubans.26 In August 1936 the committee was renamed the Comité Popular Democrático de Sócorro a España (Popular Democratic Committee to Aid Spain), and Tampa’s aid efforts remained estranged from the North American Committee’s program. When he stopped in Tampa on a speaking tour to raise funds for the Republic, the Spanish politician Marcelino Domingo remarked that “Tampa looks more like a Mediterranean city than a piece of Yankee territory.” To greet him were “the presidents of the Spanish Clubs, of the labor unions, of the Italian and Cuban Clubs, reporters, and authorities.”27 Yet some coordination between local and national organizations was evident. Donations from Tampa were sent initially to the Spanish government and also to the NAC. Tampans even requested assistance from the NAC in securing a youth delegation—the second tour of Spanish delegates —as speakers in Tampa.28 The national NAC invited the Tampa committee to affiliate as early as January 1937, and several times thereafter, but by May 1937 Tampans still had not taken up the matter.29 That did not preclude a semblance of cooperation. In December 1937 Comité Popular in Tampa sent 1,412 pounds of clothing and shoes to the NAC.30 However, since the Tampa Committee had refused to affiliate, it was required to obtain its own permit from the State Department.31 The group had previously been sending all of its money through the Spanish Embassy

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in Washington, which Tampa’s leaders later interpreted (appropriately) as violating the Neutrality Act.32 The Popular Democratic Committee favored the Spanish Red Cross, but Tampa’s population also contributed through the Medical Bureau. Political alliances and organizers’ assurances could not overcome deepseated problems. A general apathy between Anglo Tampans and the Latin community spilled over into Spanish aid organizing. According to Marie Gill, an AFSD Secretary based in Tampa, “we exhausted every means of propaganda to bring out the American people or I should say Non-Latins but to no success.” The big challenge, then, was to convince the Latin community that “there are American people interested in the Spanish struggle.”33

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New Orleans

While not nearly as large in its Spanish population as Tampa, New Orleans confronted even more difficulties in Southern organizing than Tampa encountered. Rather than relying on the American League Against War and Fascism to set up the local North American Committee, as typically occurred, in New Orleans the committee was initiated in March 1937 by Henry Hermes of the J. Bernstein Fur Company along with representatives of the Spanish community. This New Orleans group regularly sent in checks from their small events but rarely corresponded, and even more rarely complained, to New York. One of the few comments the group made explained that the “membership is mostly Spanish and the meeting is conducted in Spanish, although there are some English speaking people there too.”34 Early in 1938, the New Orleans president of the NAC even wrote his letters to New York in Spanish. The group’s treasurer, Enrique Lopez, who could write in English, served as the primary contact with New York. He explained to the national office that “[t]he general condition confronted in New Orleans . . . is somewhat different from that encountered in New York. The general public does not answer our appeals so readily here . . . [and] the opposition in general is strong here and very active in their efforts to discredit and obstruct our activities.”35 It was without a hint of disappointment that Lopez reported on the modest results of a visit by Thyra Edwards. “A great deal of interest among colored people here and a very good Negro committee is carrying forward its work in an energetic and interested fashion. In the recent telegram campaign the Negro and white committees got fourteen telegrams to Washington.”36 If fourteen telegrams was the net result of a progressive effort underpinned by energy and interest, then the New Orleanians were deeply apathetic.

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Only later, after the war, when refugees were the primary concern, and the MB and NAC in New Orleans merged, was it possible to attempt to broaden the base. “We believe that many more people will come in if we embark on a more or less independent career of action in, and for, the South. The work for Spain can now be carried on, on the basis of its humanitarian appeal, a basis freer from prejudice and one giving us greater freedom of action [than during the war when it was about the Loyalists].” The fact remained, however, that “as you know, problems in the South are somewhat more complex and of a different nature, than those in the North.”37

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San Francisco

The urban South posed predictable problems for political organizing, but even in a center of radical activity like the Bay area, the aid movement encountered difficulties. San Francisco had been at the center of the West Coast dock strike in 1934. With an effective political network already in place, one would expect that aid campaigns progressed on a level comparable to a place like New York City, but that is not what transpired. San Francisco activists managed to forge a functioning Popular Front in the truest sense of the phrase—one that included ethnic interests—but with limited results.38 The American League Against War and Fascism helped organize NAC branches in Northern California for the Spanish delegation’s January 11, 1937, visit. The Medical Bureau organizing was initiated through professional associations, utilizing, in this case, Dr. Thomas Addis of Stanford University. The ALWF organizer was instructed—as was the operating mode of the NAC—to hold to strict non-partisanship in the organizational set-up.39 Spaniards, who needed no prompting, organized their own aid groups. Indeed, there were “a variety of political trends represented in almost all of their organizations or at least in any grouping of their organizations cooperating in any particular function.”40 Cooperating was not the same as working within the leading aid organizations. The Spanish-speaking organizations maintained a solidarity not achieved among the Anglos, who were, in any case, quick to pass judgment on their practices. When Lleo Dalty, representing the Catalan regional government, toured an exhibition to raise funds, the MB and NAC critiqued the financial machinations of the effort and suggested that Dalty’s supporters were gullible and that he must be a Trotskyist.41 By May, San Francisco had finally established a committee. Moreover, “For the first time, we had a ‘United Front’ of every Spanish relief and anti-fascist group in San Francisco working on a common enterprise,

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and there was a good deal of enthusiasm, especially among the Spanish and French.”42 Even some Catholics were cooperating, just not Englishspeaking Catholics. Catholic women in Sunnyvale’s Sociedad de las Señoras de Isabel La Católica donated the cost of an ambulance chassis. The Medical Bureau’s Marianne King could only comment: “They are very poor people. It is phenomenal.”43 In fact, women were critical to the efforts in San Francisco. Female leadership was more pervasive there than in any other local committee in the United States. Marion Merriman was wife—and by mid-1938, the widow—of Robert Merriman, the Abraham Lincoln Battalion commander. She was one of only two women to serve in the Fifteenth Brigade in Spain.44 The January 11, 1938, minutes of the Bay area aid committee show twelve women and only three men present. Merriman is the most recognizable, but this same female leadership shows up in other meetings, as well. Hispanic women were active not just in their own Spanish-language organizations, but also later in the city’s Trade Union Conference in 1939. Women’s involvement in the movement overall appears to have been a rather mixed affair, with many women present in the movement in various capacities but only one of them achieving the highest national leadership positions. Still, their involvement was critical to the sustainability of several local organizations, San Francisco’s in particular.45 To measure the full import of these campaigns, a broader picture of San Francisco’s aid experience is necessary. Where the appeal of antifascism provided internal motivation for the movement, external forces were always at work, as well, encroaching upon any gains the movement might achieve. Bay activists, for instance, encountered notable support from the religious community. One Medical Bureau speaker before fifty people at the Congregational Church found that “they had seemed very much interested and had asked good questions.”46 Unfortunately, the interests of the few were overshadowed by the opposition of many more. Stormy opposition to Loyalist aid was a constant problem, as much in the Bay Area as in Chicago, Detroit, Boston, or for that matter in New York City. Liberal and communist organizations alike had to contend with a vociferous political right and an unsympathetic political culture. As in many previous instances of state-supported resistance to labor battles, local authorities willingly collaborated with opponents of aid. The activists complained that in San Francisco a local ordinance inhibited fund raising by “requiring a permit for every individual fund-raising event, even when held in private homes and even when no one connected with it receives any salary, commission or remuneration whatever for his work.” Although the San Francisco chapter had applied for and received a permit for a meeting with Father Michael O’Flanagan,

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a dissident Irish priest, the group still needed to “apply for another for each future event, as well as separate ones covering solicitation by mail, personal appeal, advertisement or any means whatsoever.” At $1.00 per permit, and with local police in charge of issuance, “a great deal of delay and anxiety” was involved. The fact was that “if any official under any degree of anti-Loyalist pressure from any source, wanted to harass us, he could very easily do so.”47 So it was on June 11, 1937, that the San Francisco Medical Bureau wired New York:

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Police Department withholding approval permits requested by NAC and MEDBURO for fund-raising activities on basis can see no necessity for soliciting funds for democratic Spain in San Francisco imperative wires be sent immediately by your office and by state department to Angelo J. Rossi mayor establishing our legal rights with identical wires sent us for press release.”48

Herman Reissig indicated that the New York office contacted the ACLU and that the “State Department told [Ernest] Cuneo [serving as the NAC’s legal counsel] it would do what it could.”49 Negotiations were opened with the city, the press covered the conflict, and the impasse was finally settled only by the direct intervention of Secretary of State Cordell Hull, who sent a personal letter to the San Francisco chief of police.50 The city council had voiced opposition to permits unless aid was going to both sides, though “Councilmen Frank Gaines and Walter Mork cast dissenting votes, arguing the permit should be granted ‘because humanitarian motives should be placed above political considerations.’”51 If the trouble with permits was not enough, organized resistance further thwarted campaign efforts. San Francisco’s secretary, Carol Rehfisch, explained to New York that “the Legion and kindred groups are strong and aggressive in Carmel and that public halls etc. cannot be obtained for anti-fascist meetings.” This left activists with little choice but to find private settings for their fund-raising affairs. The more intimate gatherings typical of Spanish aid, especially among wealthier supporters, were utilized also, but overall these appeals realized very little. “I think that all progressive groups here have the same feeling about the situation, which is that only a small number of people are keenly interested in the fight against fascism and allied subjects, and all of the groups in the field are more or less competing for support of this little minority.”52 The problems plaguing the movement in the Bay were common across the country, with a pervasive public apathy at the forefront. Collectively, isolated events across the United States might suggest the aid effort was

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broad, deep, and successful in producing movement culture, but efforts in single localities leave a different impression. As the second anniversary of the war approached in summer 1938, for instance, San Francisco’s activists exuded pride in their “United Committee” being “still up and running.”53 Yet plans for the second anniversary were inhibited by “little to rally around.” Robert Raven, a Lincoln Battalion veteran blinded by a grenade in mid-March 1937 at the Jarama front, was being sponsored on a tour by the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. San Francisco’s NAC supported that event but planned nothing themselves. Movement organizers found it easier to blame the lack of celebrity support than a public unwilling to engage the issue. The problem was “the one which faces most organizations on the Pacific Coast—lack of outstanding figures around which to build mass meetings.” According to Marianne King, .

Our distance from New York handicaps us in other ways. In raising money for ambulances, for instance, we lack the publicity value of a visible ambulance to show people. The disadvantages of buying an ambulance out here are pretty obvious. Yet these representatives of the IWO last evening felt the actual presence of an ambulance was almost essential to the success of their campaign.54

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King also maintained one view of the underlying malaise: I think that our failure to accomplish more than we have thus far is due mainly to, on the one hand, an underestimation of the receptiveness of the American public to approaches by our active people and on the other hand, to our failure to concentrate on the problem of involving more people in the active work of our committee. It very often happens that the few people who have been originally interested in the work are so given over to carrying on activity themselves that they relegate to the background the question of concentration on involving more people in the actual work, and I think that this matter should be given more attention now than it has been given before.55

Negative publicity of the continuing problems of high overhead did not help matters either. “Receipts have dropped off considerably due to the State Department’s attacks and the fact that Spain has not been front page news,” King concluded.56 Following an exposition in the Bay area, the committee in New York scrutinized the receipts and found it “curious” that expenses nearly outstripped donations among three organizations: the IWO, which brought in $73 and spent $100; the American League, which collected $164 and spent $206; and the United Council, which spent

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$122 of $138. These results were especially discouraging since “there is now a united committee of all organizations in San Francisco with the Spanish committee included. There are very few other places where we have been able to accomplish this.”57 As elsewhere, the Spanish-language population in the Bay area was never integrated into the leadership or organizational structure, so while the Popular Front spread, it did so despite the marginalization of some populations. Paul Ruthling in Carmel reported that a Community Cultural Center was organized for “furtherance of education, world peace, and democracy.” Even more saliently, “A Spanish Relations Committee of three members [Eunice Grary, Antonio Urquidi, Thelma Vickers] was appointed to contact and assist all local organizations formed in this country to help the Spanish government in Europe, and the Chinese, or other victim nations suffering assaults of aggressors.” Of course, all of these concerns competed for attention among the same population. This coalition was even “in contact with Acción Demócrata in Monterey and cooperated with them as far as possible to publicize their dances and help them collect funds.”58 Moreover, the coalition was always tenuous. When three of the officers of the Acción Demócrata Española (Spanish Democratic Action) in San Leandro donated $450 for an ambulance, for example, “they wanted it sent immediately to New York so that they could have evidence to present at a Spanish meeting in Sunnyvale tonight, for an appeal down there.” The evidence was to be “a picture of an ambulance with an inscription showing that it is presented by the Acción Demócrata Española of San Leandro, California.” Rehfisch recommended fabricating one since the purchase was actually made in Paris.59 Distrust characterized the relationship between the two groups throughout the course of the war. In 1939 Acción Demócrata was hesitant to donate to the NAC again after it failed to receive a receipt for an earlier $131 donation.60 After Acción Demócrata Española dropped off another $1,350, King requested that New York send an immediate reply. “Since there are undoubtedly a few either conscious and unconscious disrupters in this organization who may take these three delegates to task in this matter, will you please . . . write an acknowledgment direct to the Acción Demócrata . . . and say something about the speed with which the money has been cabled to Paris.”61 The need was not unwarranted, and the NAC understood why. Out of distrust many donors continued to send aid through the Spanish embassy or contacts in Spain.62 Support by the Spanish community was integral to the base. “It is also the general feeling here that the possibilities of mass meetings have been just about exhausted for some time to come. Without the Spanish population, our last one would certainly have been pretty dismal.”63 In fact,

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only portions of the aid raised by Acción Demócrata actually went to the New York groups, since both the United Spanish Societies and the Central Spanish Relief Committee in Washington, D.C., were also sources of Hispanic funds. Because Acción Demócrata was always suspicious, it held its own State Department–issued export license, allowing it to bypass the MB and NAC.64 What was to stop the Medical Bureau and North American Committee from cooperating with the Spanish organizations or from offering them leadership positions within the local committees? The attempt to promote antifascism among one segment of San Francisco clashed with an already existing one that required no persuasion. When the death blow was finally struck in Spain, activity in the Bay had virtually ceased. By October 1939, when the movement had retooled for refugee rescue, Thomas Addis was understandably fatigued. He had already served with the American Medical Bureau in Spain and returned to his medical position while also serving in the local aid committee. By that fall he expressed despair at even continuing refugee work because public interest had waned.65 Carol Rehfisch commented, “They have completely hypnotized themselves into the belief that it is impossible to raise enough money to justify keeping the office.” Only Addis and the former secretary, Pearl Pell, were at all active, and they “are so involved in other things and are so thoroughly pessimistic, that everything that is proposed to them is impossible.”66 The Spanish refugees languished as much in the public mind as they did in their French concentration camps. Rehfisch reported, “Almost everyone consulted has been of the opinion that the interest in the Spanish refugees in these parts is practically nil.”67 Practically. Newsletters like Ibérica: For a Free Spain continued to agitate well into the postwar period for noncooperation with Franco. The Sociedades Hispanas Confederadas persevered until late 1975—that is, until the death of Franco. At some point after World War II, English translations of articles were included in España Libre, the group’s official organ, broadening its appeal and perhaps reflecting a generational shift as children of the Republic lost their language.68 What is apparent is that the wound in the heart never healed among the “Spanish” population. The same group whose natural inclination toward support of Spanish republicanism was never fully harnessed and integrated into the wider movement was also the group whose efforts remained active throughout the duration of the war and into the ensuing dictatorship.

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Chapter 4

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The Catholic Church and Interwar Anticommunism

In America’s churches, two religious cross-currents were at work in the 1930s. One, a social gospel, had captured the imagination of Protestants like the Reverend Herman Reissig and Methodist bishop Francis J. McConnell, who extended their application of salvation to Spanish relief aid.1 The other current combined Roman Catholic animosity to communism with appeals to Americanism by the American Legion. Not all Catholics were so disposed, but one particularly anticommunist cross-section actively backed Franco. These activists tended to accept the prevailing assumptions of Catholic writers on the benevolent nature of Franco’s regime and endorsed the published criticisms of Spain’s Popular Front government.2 The Knights of Columbus emerged as one visible Catholic force attempting to thwart Loyalist activities. In a place like Cincinnati, for instance, the combined efforts of Catholic reaction and the American Legion constituted the Cincinnati group’s major political opponents. Despite the best efforts of the republican aid movement to reach out to Catholics and liberals nationally, an endorsement of the Republic was as unforgivable as the presence of communists in the movement. The opposition to republican aid in the final analysis foreshadowed later political developments as anticommunism began to spread beyond the communities of Catholics and legionnaires. The Vatican had reiterated its historical position on communism in Pope Pius XI’s 1937 encyclical under the self-explanatory title, “On Atheistic Communism.” Combined with the view that Franco’s army partook in communion every day and so could not possibly “indulge in rapine, mutilation and slaughter,” it was little wonder that the insurgents were the Vatican’s protagonists in Spain, and evidence of their “rapine, mutilation and slaughter” was ignored. The Knights of Columbus, League

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of Catholic Women, and other lay organizations accepted Franco’s anticommunist crusade as untarnished. The Social Action Department of the National Catholic Welfare Conference even formed a grassroots network to track the activities of communists and the Popular Front organizations in the United States.3 To be clear, some Roman Catholics had concerns about fascism, but as Wilson Miscamble has explained, “It was a minuscule movement.” At the same time, this opposition was more rhetorical than practical as many Catholics said nothing. Within the Roman Catholic press, arguably only one publication lacked hostility to the Republic, and its editors voiced an isolationist stance. Dorothy Day’s left-wing Catholic Worker, based in New York City, stated in October 1938: “We do not believe in fighting England’s wars; we do not believe in entering the United Front with Russia as the ‘League for Peace and Democracy’ would have us do. We do not believe that the United States should export arms to any nation, in peace or at war. There is only one purpose for arms—War!”4 Some Catholics undoubtedly shared the sentiments of the layman who wrote to Mussolini that he was “‘very much disturbed’ by the situation in Spain” and urged Il Duce to “send arms to [Franco’s] rebels” who were fighting “for a religious cause.” The writer desired to get “hold of any Loyalists or communists or their like” and “execute them without any mercy as they did the priests and nuns. Make the ones that started this trouble also the ones who burned these beautiful churches rebuild them bigger and better.” (Indeed, Francisco Franco used prison slave labor to build his Valley of the Fallen monument after the war.) There were also clergy like Bishop John Noll of Fort Wayne, Indiana, who “shared an affinity with fascism and feared the same enemies—international Jewry, Masonry, and communism.” With the laity conflating the Vatican’s message, Pope Pius XI attempted in March 1937 to distance the church from fascism in his “Mit Brennender Sorge” (With Burning Sorrow), which denounced Nazism. He reiterated the point within the week.5 With respect to aid to Spain, the Catholic activities and their justifications shared the pro-Republicans’ flair for invective. Catholic opposition to those organizing around the issue of aid to the Republic was fierce. At the local level Catholic institutional leaders activated memberships to respond to the aid movement and to government policies. In Davenport, Iowa, for example, the opposition by the Catholic Church, Chamber of Commerce, and American Legion was so forceful that the NAC found it impossible to form a permanent organization. The ALAWF stepped in offering to sponsor a meeting for the NAC with Irish priest Michael O’Flannagan as speaker in an attempt to ward off the hostility.6

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Catholicism and Anticommunism Activists for Franco in the United States confronted a different set of circumstances than their pro-Republican counterparts. Franco found only one American doctor willing to volunteer for his side in the conflict. Surgeon J. Eastman Sheehan of the Polyclinic Medical School joined the Nationalists to repair the faces of Franco’s mutilated troops.7 Where volunteers were few, and aid funds difficult to deliver, propaganda was easier to come by. Various Catholic writers made outrageous claims, but as Allen Guttman has argued, nearly all of them were made on the grounds of anticommunism and fanciful information about the rebels. The Reverend Joseph Thorning urged all “clear-eyed, democratic, liberty-loving citizens” to demand the embargo be retained.8 On September 4, 1938, an ambulance donated by the Frente Popular Español in Queens, New York, was saved from vandalism by police as it sat in front of the Ditmars Theatre in Astoria where the film Blockade was being shown. Roughly a hundred protestors picketed the theater because they believed the film was “communistic.”9 Whether these protestors were Catholic is open to question, but they need not have been.10 “Though unpopular in many American anti-fascist circles, this [embargo] policy was favorably received by General Franco and by the American Catholic press,” David Valaik found. “To Catholics the Republican government was unworthy of recognition because it had not only tolerated the anti-clerical excesses of anarchists and socialists but also had, in fact, contributed to such violence by its unreasonable and impractical legislative program.”11 How unreasonable is a matter of interpretation as church leaders had refused to address the criticisms raised by the left regarding church responsibility for Spain’s social problems.12 Instead, anticommunism was hinged to neutrality. “The nationally circulated Our Sunday Visitor expressed the fear that Senator Nye, ‘a former believer in American neutrality,’ had become an exponent of Red foreign propaganda, ‘we hope unknowingly,’ and warned its many readers that Moscow would not rest until it had gained complete control over the Iberian Peninsula.”13 For all of the opposition of some Catholics, the concern was with a perceived proliferation of communism rather than with fascism. The Catholic community’s efforts to thwart aid to the Spanish republic and its initiative to aid Franco attest to a political strength Catholics were cultivating across the United States. But as Allen Guttman has commented, the Catholics and profascists generally did not understand the fascists they were supporting. Even Lawrence Dennis, “the dean of American fascism,” failed to mention any positive achieve-

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ments of Francisco Franco in his infamous American Mercury piece on the subject.14 Therefore, anticommunism drove the Francoist aid drives. On November 31, 1936, the International Catholic Truth Society began a drive in New York to raise medical supplies for Franco. Five hundred young women organized for the group. The organization’s president, the Reverend Edward Lodge Curran, made the announcement at “an anti-Communist mass meeting at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, under the auspices of the society’s American Committee Against Communism.” As if to rival the pro-Republican rallies taking place at that same time, 2,500 were in attendance.15 Denouncing Spain as “red” only fueled the rage of an active Catholic opposition to any assistance to the Republic. The source of the animus likely originated in the media. For example, Theo Rogers’s Spain: A Tragic Journey was widely reviewed in the Catholic press. He maintained that Franco’s insurgency was a “democratic uprising against cruel oppression.”16 This disposition is equally evident in the resistance to Edmund Brumbaugh, a Nebraska bookseller, who was attempting to organize for the aid movement. Father Thomas Bowden, dean of the Graduate School at Creighton sent the local paper, the Omaha World-Herald, a letter that is emblematic in its use of adjective and invective: The Catholic friends of Mr. Edmund R. Brumbaugh appreciate his anxiety to preserve them from Spanish white propaganda. They are equally anxious to preserve Mr. Brumbaugh from Spanish red propaganda. . . . The present red government of Spain is communistic, which means atheistic. One of their leaders, Largo Caballero, has recently received from Moscow the title of most honorable atheist. The Spanish reds . . . have since last February murdered over 15 thousand defenseless priests and nuns and destroyed 19 thousand churches and convents. . . . The communists who now rule Mexico and Russia have proved to the world that communism is not democracy. The Spanish nationalists or insurgents assisted by five thousand Moors . . . are fighting a heroic war for Christian culture and democracy—for God and country.17

As Catholic media supported Franco’s supposed defense of liberalism and democracy, the secular media too became special targets of Catholic derision. Catholic activists threatened boycotts of the Philadelphia Record for an editorial in support of the Republic, and the New Orleans Times-Picayune

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and St. Louis Post-Dispatch for their pro-Loyalist war coverage. The New York Times’s Lawrence Fernsworth, a Catholic, admitted being pressured by the church hierarchy to skew his writing. The pro-Republic documentary Spain in Flames was barred by a censor board in Pennsylvania, and The Spanish Earth was banned in Detroit. The syndicated column by Westbrook Pegler, a Catholic, was dropped from many papers for his comment that “If I were a Spaniard who had seen Franco’s missionary work among the children I might see him in hell but never in the Church.” And Catholic priest Peter Whiffen was severely indicted for his criticisms not just of the church’s stance toward the Spanish Civil War, but also for his claims that perhaps something was deeply wrong with the Catholic church if a few communists were able to do so much damage to the entrenched Catholic institutions of Spain.18 Following the Nazi Condor Legion’s bombing of the Basque village of Guernica on April 26, 1937, the propaganda emanating from Franco’s Spain and Hitler’s Germany attempted to obscure that the assault had even taken place. Franco’s Catholic supporters accepted the official Nationalist line that the bombing had actually been undertaken by the communists as a ploy to blame the insurgents’ army of liberation. Franco’s Radio Requeté announced that “the fires provoked by the bombs of our airplanes at Guernica is completely false. . . . The reds have destroyed everything.”19 Among the most activated Catholic opponents were the Knights of Columbus. In Washington, D.C., each member of the Knights received a letter warning him that “friends of ‘Leftist Spain’ and communists were at work to lift the embargo.”20 After all, “[l]ifting the embargo would be a positive act of giving aid and comfort to a regime that bore the responsibility for one of the most cruel persecutions in modern times.” It had, the writers perceived, denied religious freedom to its citizens. At least four thousand people then gathered together on January 9, 1939, in Constitution Hall. The first speaker of the evening was Martin Conboy of the Knights of Columbus, and later Irwin Laughlin, American ambassador to Spain from 1929–1933. Laughlin told the audience that the communists were so deeply entrenched in Spain that only Franco could restore Spanish democracy. As ambassador during this period he should have recognized how insignificant was the Spanish Communist Party during his tenure. Such a claim of communism’s grip served the political ends of arousing opposition. Moreover, Knights of Columbus were also instrumental later in testifying before the Dies Committee and spurring in 1940 an FBI raid on proponents of republican aid.21 Fulton J. Sheen, a Catholic University professor and later one of the country’s most popular Catholic theologians, was “perhaps the most effective speaker of the evening.” He claimed he did not support Franco but did not want the U.S. involved in someone else’s war. Combining isola-

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tionism and anticommunism, Sheen explained that the embargo should be kept because the groups who wanted it lifted were communists, and the Spanish government, even if not red, still bore responsibility for the deaths of eleven thousand Catholic clergy and the burnings of twenty thousand churches and chapels by virtue of being unable to prevent these tragedies. Aileen O’Brien, an Irish writer who had been in Franco’s Auxilio Social (the Nationalist social services) and had written of her commitment to liberal democracy, attested to the common sight of half-buried nuns and priests set aflame. Reportedly, 400,000 signatures filled petitions as a result of this meeting.22 It was on January 15, soon after, that Father Charles Coughlin took to the airwaves and lambasted the organizations supporting the “LoyalistCommunists” and the claims of the “League for War and Dictatorial Communism.” He told tales of how Franco’s territories had no starvation or religious persecution, but “peace and order.” Coughlin called Franco a “rebel for Christ, a rebel for humanity’s sake” and claimed that Loyalists killed not just 12,500 clerics but also 300,000 women and children. Thousands more appeals arrived to Congress after Coughlin’s broadcast.23 Even if church leadership left little space for dissent, this Catholic coalition was not united. While many Catholics were pro-Franco on religious grounds, not all Catholics were profascist. There were, it must be said, plenty among the flock, who while not willing to challenge the hierarchy’s reading of events, nonetheless acquiesced. George Cardinal Mundelein of Chicago and Edward Cardinal Mooney of Detroit, for instance, were both reticent on Franco. In his weekly New World, Mundelein actually advocated for Catholic neutrality on the Spanish issue.24 There was the case of Father Michael O’Flanagan, an Irish priest and socialist who kept his title but whom the Catholic church had removed for political reasons from any official position within the church. During his speaking tour in the United States, he found converts to the republican cause. After hearing him, an Italian-American Catholic nurse, Ave Bruzzichesi, volunteered for the American Medical Bureau.25 From Spain, Bruzzichesi wrote, “It was difficult for me as a Catholic to believe that our priests and nuns would abandon the Spanish people to join an ambitious leader like Franco.”26 One other Italian-American Catholic woman also joined. As Allen Guttman aptly explained, many of the Catholics in the United States, and some self-identified fascists, had no idea what fascism was.27 Historian Peter d’Agostino pointed out that the advent of Mussolini’s alliance with Hitler muffled what had been a Catholic praise for fascist Italy. It followed that “an October 1938 embassy report confirmed [that] American Catholics ‘had never feared . . . [to] exhibit philo-fascist sympathies,’ but the ‘not-too-subtle eyes of the [wider American public] had

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begun to conflate Nazism and fascism.” D’Agostino concluded from this that “Italian Catholics were, to state the obvious, Catholics, and their praise for fascism had different roots than the conservative nationalism of their non-Catholic Italian-American neighbors.”28 At the same time, in several instances Catholic clergy did express concerns. O’Flanagan’s loss of a flock was one example of the consequences. Yet, his speaking tour clearly inspired some Catholic dissent. More typically, Catholics not in sympathy with Franco remained reticent, while those who supported his aims, or at least opposed those of his enemies, raised their voices well beyond their numbers. One study of Catholic attitudes toward the Spanish Civil War found that Catholic leaders utilized—in party parlance—a boring-from-within approach to capture the leadership of lay organizations; and second, Catholic leaders presented a consensus that Spain’s struggle was a communist one while downplaying Franco’s fascist leanings or fascism’s meaning. This was, arguably, the inverse of “democracy versus fascism”—instead democracy versus communism with Franco cast in the role of democrat. While J. David Valaik found that Catholics also read the secular press and were influenced by opinions outside their religious outlook, the fact remains that the Hearst press and several large dailies, as well as many small-town newspapers, often reinforced the clerical view of the conflict. At the same time, secular messages did sometimes penetrate the consensus so that a few Catholics added their voices to the hundreds of thousands of letters arriving at the Department of State urging dropping the embargo.29 They need not even have read the secular press, however. Commonweal, a publication of Catholic laymen, expressed some concern with Franco’s politics and the nature of the Nationalists from the war’s first days. Guttman found that the paper’s editors considered pro-Franco propaganda with some skepticism, though the publication also consistently claimed that the Republic was by nature communist. There also existed little nuance in the paper as to the difference between anarchists and communists. The publication’s editor, Michael Williams, frequently referred to both persuasions together in his writing. The parity of the two insinuated their collaboration with an intent to destroy Catholic Spain. The publication was equally adamant in its stand opposing the repeal of the embargo. Like the isolationist Catholic Worker, Commonweal warned against any warlike activity, any “big stick” policies, or even war preparedness: “There is no enemy at the gate. Any attack on our shores is inconceivable.”30 By June 1938, Commonweal’s editors began to dim some of the more positive light they had previously shed upon Franco. In a reversal of earlier rhetoric on “Red Spain,” the editors published that month one of the more evenhanded appraisals available of the situation in Spain.

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This followed from the organ’s persistent entreaties for a more balanced coverage of the war, which it too had failed to offer.31 The Franco government, “which gives the Church open support, yet, in its conduct of warfare, repeatedly and despite protests from the Holy Father, destroys defenseless civilians, particularly by its air raids upon cities.” The editors also now recognized that “The system of government it utilizes and favors . . . contains elements that should be sharply rejected. Its alliance with the Fascist and Nazi nations implicates it to some . . . extent in the evils of those regimes.”32 With a shift in Commonweal’s support for Franco, circulation dropped by nearly one third.33 Commonweal editor Williams was also alone in agreeing to accept a challenge posed by the Nation to debate someone from the North American Committee. The NAC’s Executive Secretary, Herman Reissig, who was also a Congregational minister, agreed to offer the pro-Republican view. Williams rose to the occasion again, debating Leland Stowe of the Herald Tribune at Carnegie Hall. That debate was broadcast on WNEW in New York on July 7, 1937.34 Just as the Spanish Republic’s advocates attempted to persuade policy makers of the need to change the country’s course on neutrality, so did these Catholic debates hope to do the same. Spain may have been one more instance of President Roosevelt’s underestimating “the ability of Americans to accept bad news and assume new responsibilities, and . . . in his understanding of what the electorate would accept in foreign affairs he was timid and unsure.” Harold Ickes, Eleanor Roosevelt, and many historians have all claimed that the Catholic laity were the crucial domestic influence in retaining the embargo.35 Ickes believed that James Farley had advised FDR as to the massive support of Catholics for Franco. In May 1938 FDR announced that he had no intention of lifting the embargo, a reaction, claims Valaik, to twenty million Catholics opposing it.36 Catholics circulated “a petition to be presented to the President and members of Congress stating ‘[t]hat if we are to have a neutrality law at all, it should be genuinely “neutral” and should not permit the taking of sides—either side—by our Government in the Spanish War.’ Second, it would sponsor a mass rally in Washington, D.C., to coincide with a rally planned by a ‘Lift the Embargo’ Committee.” The endorsement of the Catholic hierarchy was a requirement for such a campaign, so there is good reason to conclude that Roosevelt believed he risked the Catholic vote if he sided with the Loyalists.37 Combined with the appeasement policies of key foreign allies and a general public antipathy toward United States foreign involvement, the Catholic question was enough to torment the President to hold the course. Roosevelt was advised daily on public opinion, including who the proponents and opponents of lifting the embargo were. All of the correspondence, protests, and constructive prodding of the aid movement

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went through Stephen Early, Roosevelt’s press secretary. Early briefed the president daily on received correspondence, summarized the nature of the letters, and tallied them up when they related to a single issue. Mass petitions of the variety the North American Committee orchestrated from time to time were even counted separately. It is therefore difficult to understand how the opinions of Catholics could have been misread as recent evidence suggests. It is far more likely that Roosevelt exaggerated the Catholic influence, utilizing it as an excuse to avoid the issue and demonstrating his concern for public opinion. Another possibility, and perhaps the more compelling in light of the frequency of the claim of this Catholic influence, is that Roosevelt and his advisers assumed that all Catholic opinion was the same and treated it as a unified whole.38 Roosevelt had consistently reached out to Catholics as he reached out to other groups, and the gestures were appreciated. The president was, after all, an Episcopalian in a state Democratic Party whose success required the support of New York Catholics. At FDR’s request, “his private Catholic informants were faithfully advising him as to the role of the hierarchy in opposing any effort to tamper with the embargo.”39 Late in the war church leaders, “always suspicious of the administration’s sympathies and ever-mindful of the many pressures working on the President to lift the embargo . . . began a major effort to influence the government’s policy.”40 In particular they distrusted Eleanor Roosevelt, who already invited the contempt of some Catholics for her benefit to aid Spanish children with milk, as well as for her views on divorce, support of the American Youth Congress, sponsorship of the educational film Birth of a Baby, and condemnation of Franco’s bombing of Barcelona.41 Eleanor had been one of the most prominent guests at the “Spanish fiesta” in August 1937, hosted at the Haverstraw, New York, estate of Adolph Zukor.42 “I talked with my husband,” Eleanor wrote Anna Louise Strong, who was one of the many foreign correspondents who had rushed from Moscow to Madrid. “He agrees with you that something should be done. However, the difficulty is that Franco will not give any guarantees. . . . Franco does not need food because he is in the country districts and, therefore, knows that his chances are greater if he keeps food away from the other side.” When the wife of Spanish ambassador de los Ríos wrote her asking for help for brokering a peace after the fall of Barcelona, Eleanor replied, “I wish that I were not in the White House at the present time and could be free to make some statement.” That her insistence never moved her husband to act, the first lady attributed to “Catholic opposition to any move that might help the Loyalists.”43

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Across the country, the communities of supporters of the Spanish Republic found themselves confronting this hostility of a vociferous crosssection of Roman Catholics. In considering several local examples below, pockets of Republican support can be found in unexpected places. Yet these were, perhaps predictably, stifled by the far more organized opposition within the Catholic community. While American Catholics who favored a Franco victory were probably a minority, Catholic opposition to a Republican victory was aided by a growing anticommunism and the deepseated impulse toward isolation. The Spanish aid movement found itself outflanked on two sides. Catholic action actually prompted some Spanish Republican support for the wrong reasons. An activist in Burlington, Vermont, informed the North American Committee that “one of the surprising things with which I have met here and elsewhere in New England is a violent anti-Catholic sentiment, which fails to differentiate between progressive and reactionary members of the faith. Thus I have had to spend a good deal of time convincing some people that the embargo is not an issue on which to bring in anti-Catholicism.”44 How much antiCatholicism surfaced in the aid movement is difficult to assess. Religious supporters within the NAC’s coalition attempted to diminish the religious hostility by avoiding attacks on the Catholic Church, reaching out to Catholics through pamphlets and inviting Catholic speakers to public forums. However, opposition from the church hierarchy made outreach difficult. As the preeminent theologian Reinhold Niebuhr explained to the NAC’s Herman Reissig in May 1937, “I don’t know of any Catholic who would be willing to speak in favor of the Spanish Loyalists. I know some who have private convictions along that line but it is not healthy for them to utter them.”45 From Michigan, Paul Todd wrote Herman Reissig in late 1938 as the fate of Spain had become inevitable: “A prominent Catholic who is rather high in democratic political circles,” but was also opposed to Hitler and Mussolini, told Todd that proof of the Republic not being communist and an official statement that it did not “countenance” the shooting of priests and church destruction would end Catholic opposition. Todd and others remained convinced it was Catholic opposition that held the embargo in place so the movement had published pro-Catholic pamphlets.46 The NAC’s “Catholics Speak for Spain” and “Catholics and the Civil War in Spain” from Workers Library Publishers both attempted to bridge the religious divide with published statements by Spanish Catholic leaders.

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The target audience was equally trenchant, with Francis Talbot publishing a large pamphlet responding to an open letter from Protestant clergy.47 Activities on both sides underscore the inability of the movement to sway Catholic opinion. Several representative examples offer further perspective on the conflict between local Loyalist supporters and their discontents. In smaller cities in Iowa and Illinois, anticommunist Catholics and isolationists offered joint resistance to Spanish Republican aid. In the larger city of Boston, the sizeable Catholic community and concomitant anticommunism exercised at least as much cultural hegemony locally as any isolationist impulse.

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Resistance in the Midwest In Grand Rapids, Michigan, plans to show Spain in Flames were opposed by the chief of police and local organizations.48 Opposition prevented the local relief committee from being able to secure a hall for a lecture by Lini Fuhr, a former Red Cross employee, and the first of the American volunteer nurses to return from Spain.49 “Every available space is either taken or openly refused to us,” a local activist reported.50 Fuhr had to be booked to speak at a cooperative picnic outside the city limits, except that the cooperatives barred the collection of money at their meetings, so it was moved yet again.51 No local organization was ever established.52 In Illinois, both opposition and active engagement with Spain emerged, if still within the isolationist ethos of the era. At the extreme of behavior Mayor John A. Bengston of Rock Island, Illinois, and his chief of police barred a touring Spanish delegation from attending various scheduled engagements in the city in November 1936. Under mayoral order the local radio station was forced to cancel its air time for the touring Spanish delegation, and three halls canceled their contracts following intense community opposition. The local press smeared the delegates, claiming that they were communists.53 Methodist Episcopal Bishop Francis McConnell, the most publicly visible aid proponent in the United States at that time, wired a personal protest to Bengston, and the Chicago chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union was urged to investigate the situation. In the end, Rock Island retained its eponymous insularity and its virulent strain of anti-Communism. No Spanish aid committee was established there, nor aid ever raised. Springfield, Illinois, was the site of an uncommon event when the Knights of Columbus hall hosted a screening of the Spanish aid propaganda film Heart of Spain. Even the local press offered generally balanced coverage of the events abroad, so that, in all, Springfield seemed ripe for

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supporting the Loyalist cause. Among the diverse sponsors of the Heart of Spain screening at the Knights’ hall were a united front of three local ministers and two medical doctors.54 These were not to be the prevailing voices, however. Some other Catholics urged a boycott of the screening. One local bishop even warned the owner of a book shop selling tickets to the film that continuing to do so would provoke a boycott by all Catholic customers.55 When he spoke in Springfield shortly before the screening, Professor Paul Douglas of the University of Chicago was answered by a Catholic “tirade against our Committee branding them communists, and what not.” On Armistice Day, the tour of an ambulance bound for Spain planned by the Hollywood Committee passed through Springfield rather ominously, the same day that Heart of Spain was to be shown at the Christ Church Parish House accompanied by a guest speaker. The Coe Brothers, a local bookstore facing a Catholic boycott, along with the YMCA and YWCA, all sold tickets to the event.56 The Illinois State Journal reported that the event was “filled to capacity” despite picketers outside opposing Communism.57 Subsequent reports of both apathy on the left and intimidation by Catholics in Springfield, however, led to a predictable outcome. Springfield Catholics organized their own “non-partisan”—in this case pro-Franco—effort with Reverend James Griffin, bishop of Springfield, in alliance with Father Joseph Moisant. Moisant was not only chair of a branch of the America Spanish Relief Association (ASRA) and pastor of St. Joseph’s, but also chaplain to the American Legion.58 The ASRA was the most successful of the four pro-Franco aid organizations in the U.S. In its final correspondence with New York, the Springfield NAC group requested evidence that the ASRA had not actually raised $5,000 for Franco as that group was claiming. The NAC’s Russell Thayer responded that the figure was in fact correct as far as the national donations were reported. Franco received little assistance from the United States, and Springfield, Illinois, for its part, was unable to muster much in the way of donations for the republican side either.59 A similar story on an even smaller scale played out in Burlington, Iowa. On March 21, 1938, veteran volunteer nurse Fredericka Martin visited the Rotary Club. According to Burlington’s primary aid organizer, Dorothy Schramm, Martin received “a very enthusiastic reception.” She also spoke at a local Congregational Church that night, and to high school students the next day. Schramm was wife to local business owner James Schramm of Schramm Drygoods Co. The peculiar Martin-Schramm connection appears even more audacious when we consider that in 1950 as the Cold War was heating up, James was appointed Iowa’s GOP Finance Chairman and later the Chair of the State Central Committee.60

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In 1938, the Cold War was still some years away, and Dorothy Schramm initiated a modest grass-roots effort to aid republican Spain. She relied on the NAC’s Speakers Bureau, which sent out veterans of the war and other speakers on tour. Schramm hosted a children’s party as part of the North American Committee’s Relief Ship Campaign in mid-1938. The small effort brought in a modest $15 plus six cases of milk, “which I shall hold over until I am sure whether or not we have goods to ship with the milk.”61 Milk drives in Iowa were held with such regularity that it is not particularly surprising some of this milk should make its way into Spanish aid. Within the week Schramm had also sent another check for $49.50 following a meeting with Manuel Azcárate and “Mr. Perez” as the guest speakers. The crowd was “disappointingly small . . . but enthusiastic,” she reported. Moreover, Schramm was still “hoping to get aid from the local trade unions (although it won’t be much) and the Negro church here has agreed to raise some money—I also expect a few more donations from individuals.”62 However, Schramm and her husband’s small retail store offered a visible target for opposition organizing. Though she had expected there would be some criticism and her store lost several accounts after she began work for the NAC, when a boycott was finally threatened, Dorothy and James finally succumbed to pressure. Schramm resigned from the organization. By her own estimates she had raised $200 and numerous donations of canned goods and clothes, an amount worth several thousands in present-day value. She drew the line with the boycott. It “would mean a loss in the business running into the thousands. We have therefore decided to tell the Catholic Church that we are discontinuing our activities in behalf of Spain and to actually give up public sponsorship of writings etc since we can afford . . . to send more recovery [sic] to Spain out of our own pockets than I have been able to raise by public benefits during the last year.” Schramm also hoped that by publicly handing the Catholics a victory it would arouse public indignation.63 If it did, the North American Committee and Dorothy Schramm were unable to tap into it.

Boston and the Case of Dr. Walter B. Cannon

If the heartland was idiosyncratic for its coalitions and the active opposition to Republican aid in small cities and towns, Catholic Boston possessed its own peculiarities. In that city the Medical Bureau to Aid Spanish Democracy was presided over by a conservative, Dr. Walter B. Cannon, noted member of the Harvard University Medical School faculty. An Alf Landon supporter in the recent election and one of the country’s most

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respected thoracic surgeons, Cannon was also—should it make any difference to our understanding—a former Midwesterner.64 He emerged as both the most visible doctor in the Popular Front in the United States and consequently a public target for opposition. In February 1937, the NAC’s Roger Chase invited Cannon to head the national fund-raising campaign of the Medical Bureau. Cannon was to that point not an activist, and he declined the offer. The next month when he was asked to be national chairman, he agreed, and also assumed leadership of a Boston committee. Cannon’s concern for Spain despite his own conservative leanings was in no small part forged by a friendship through medical circles with the new Spanish Prime Minister, Dr. Juan Negrín, a professor of physiology in Madrid. In April, in what his biographers describe as Cannon’s first major political speech, he addressed an audience at the Hippodrome in New York, describing how he had come “to support the ‘Reds’ in the war which has been waged in Spain during the past nine months.” Cannon had visited Spain in the year before the Republic was established, and in his speech he recalled how Spanish students he spoke with then had expressed their dreams for a democratic Republic.65 A week after Cannon’s speech in New York, Guernica was destroyed by Germany’s Condor Legion in what served as the dress rehearsal for events to come. Following the speech and subsequent events, nearly overnight Cannon became “known as a leading supporter of the Spanish Loyalists and began to receive letters and calls from all over the country.” In fact, the Harvard students who undertook a drive in their dorms to purchase an ambulance did so with Cannon’s encouragement. He was also instrumental in sending nicotinic acid to fight pellagra aboard the Relief Ship Erica Reed in late 1938. Negrín and others in the Republic later thanked him for his efforts and expressed how “by this time your name has become popular in Spain as that of the main promoter of the assistance, both material and spiritual, we are receiving from North America.”66 Yet visible proponents also made visible targets, especially when there were few other persons of prominence to deflect the attention. Cannon’s involvement invited red-baiting. In the Harvard Crimson two students protested their campus’s ambulance appearance in a New York parade. Cannon responded with a letter of his own arguing that not only was the ambulance a gift of aid permitted by the State Department and not mere propaganda, it was also being sent to a democratic government under assault by German and Italian fascism. Cannon asked the students if “[i]n these circumstances can one question the desirability of letting an ambulance appear in a parade which is destined to aid the struggle against fascism in a foreign land where a Government elected by the

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ordinary democratic process is struggling to maintain a democratic spirit against powerful fascist foes?” Law Professor Felix Frankfurter and others jumped to Cannon’s defense, but the Harvard Student Council was less impressed and launched an investigation of the charges raised by the undergraduates. Although Cannon and the Medical Bureau escaped reprimand, the final report by the student council censured both the ambulance’s appearance in the parade and the collection of partisan aid.67 Cannon’s committee was unable to muster its resources. NAC Youth Director Marion Briggs wrote the Boston committee in October 1937, warning that “the campaign for aid to Spain is lagging miserably and yet the need for relief increases daily. Little response is coming from your city with regard to organization, fund-raising or activities of youth for Spain.” The Young Communist League must become more active, Briggs insisted, but that may have been part of the problem. Communist involvement opened up the movement to charges of communist subversion, diminished the veracity of claims of a “united front,” and reflected the weakness of local committees. In early 1938 Cannon successfully blocked a communist takeover of the Boston committee, even while his reputation was solidifying as a red sympathizer.68 Unfortunately for Cannon, Boston was a Coughlinite city, perhaps more so than any other in the United States.69 Boston’s cardinal William O’Connell was one of the most articulate Catholics in the U.S., and Bostonians’ Congressional representative John McCormack was an active shaper of Catholic opinion on the Spanish war and a staunch anticommunist in the Congress. Moreover, the local Catholic newspaper, the Boston Pilot, was also one of the most widely quoted of the Catholic media. It followed then that the city “lacked a large, vocal group of dissenters who rejected the pro-Franco position of the Catholic hierarchy and press.” Cardinal O’Connell laid the foundations for Catholic understanding of the Spanish Republic by claiming it maintained a communist government and utilized the Pilot as his own personal outlet, supervising its message. Among these were three consistent themes: persecution of the Spanish church, the evils of communism, and the defense of General Franco.70 Boston’s active Catholics were additionally assisted in their opposition by a local version of HUAC chaired by Senator Thomas Burke, who investigated Spanish aid and pulled Cannon into the fray. Massachusetts’s HUAC—the Special Commission to Investigate Communistic, Fascist, Nazi and Other Subversive Groups (1937)—included James Rose and Leo Halloran (both former commanders of the American Legion in the commonwealth). The commission had access to insider information on the party. One source was the National Guard, which had been investigating communists for ten years. The other source was local police. The

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committee published hundreds of names of people labeled communists or sympathizers and thus inhibited Popular Front activities in Massachusetts throughout 1937 and 1938. The local Knights of Columbus also managed to pressure local governments into censoring pro-Loyalist films, though pro-Franco meetings were permitted, including one in Fall River attended by the governor.71 Cannon, disturbed by a claim by Senator Burke that the Spanish government was the same as the Soviet Union’s, wrote Frederick Cook, Secretary of the Commonwealth, in protest: “It was by raising the bugaboo of communism that Mussolini was able to grasp power in Italy and Hitler was able to dominate Germany. If we, as Americans, are not sufficiently skeptical to demand facts and are stupid enough to be swept off our feet by hysterical threats, the chance may arise that it can happen here.” As Cannon was fending off anticommunists on his right, he was also in danger from his left. Cannon and the committee secretary Dorothy Hickie lamented the “incompetence and dissension on the part of its [Medical Bureau] officers.” In October 1938, Cannon and Hickie walked out on a meeting, disturbed by radicals intent on advancing their own agenda.72 The Boston committee effectively collapsed.

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Cincinnati

Cincinnati’s aid experience is representative of an experience of moderate noncommunists.73 Relief efforts in the region following a recent flood interfered with Spanish aid work while also provoking the local Catholic Church to take to “the air three straight nights at the height of the flood, extolling the work of Catholic and other Christian youth locally in connection with the flood and asking where on the flood scene were ‘the communist youth and those who brought to Cincinnati the Spanish delegation.’” To the local organizers it suggested that this political angling by the Church at a time of widespread local distress created a very bad impression of the Church. At the same time our group was on the front line in the flood areas, and the American League Against War and Fascism called a special emergency flood meeting, announcement of which went out over all local radio stations several times at the height of the flood.74

By early April 1937 the Cincinnati organization was being led by a local medical doctor and minister, with support from two professors.75 Like most locals this one was “too small an active group” and “so many of our committee are also working on other projects ‘Japanese Boycott’,

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etc.” Significantly, though, “almost 50 percent of the Cincinnati population is Catholic, which means that the newspapers are subject to pressure if favorable publicity is given us. Certain halls are not open to us for this reason.” Again, veteran nurse Lini Fuhr was expected to speak when “the church hierarchy attempted . . . to have our contract for the hall cancelled by the old pressure route, we reversed the action and used some pressure our self and out pressured them, the committee is expecting them to go to the press again. . . .”76 Once it was approved by the Ohio Censor Board, Spanish Earth was shown on March 4, 1938, and Cincinnati’s committee hosted its largest Spanish aid meeting to date. One thousand two hundred fifty-five persons paid admission. A total of $401 was collected after a 50–50 split with the Japanese Boycott Council, which showed China Strikes Back on the same program.77 Such events failed to propel the organization any closer to the mainstream, leading the group to lament that “Our efforts have been uphill, for one, because Cincinnati has a relatively large Catholic population and we have had a great deal of opposition and calumny from the local hierarchy.”78 While Catholics who expressed anything about Spain were generally antirepublican, this doling out of blame served more generally as an excuse for organizers not to recognize a more deep-seated public apathy. Still, Cincinnati was one of the few places where refugee aid continued the work of the original organizers after the Spanish Civil War ended. The Cincinnati chapter remained with the NAC’s successor organization through 1941, certainly one of the most enduring locals in the entire movement.

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Keeping The Embargo

Opponents of repeal of the Spanish embargo appear to have been embittered by the fight. Though the Republicans swept the elections later that November for a variety of reasons, and Roosevelt was understandably distressed by these Democratic defeats, there is evidence that one’s position on Spain was volatile at election time. Wisconsin Republican Stephen Bolles claimed his victory in the House race of 1938 was due to the Irish Catholic voters responding to his having “had the guts to protest publicly . . . the Red Spain attitude of our congressional delegation.”79 The issue had not died by 1940 when Robert LaFollette, Jr. attributed his close race in 1940 to memories of his having wished the Republic well two years before.80 Following Father Coughlin’s radio address in early January 1939, the Catholic community’s Keep the Embargo Committee overwhelmed the White House with 74,000 telegrams in one week. Herman Reissig reported this to various union leaders, urging them to “help

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put trade unionists on record in this matter in a far greater volume than has been done before?” “The administration gives every evidence of being favorably disposed toward lifting the embargo,” Reissig surmised. “But the voice of the minority is making a deep impression in Washington.”81 While the NAC was able to elicit 250,000 telegrams to Washington, Coughlin’s appeals reputedly led to 1.75 million.82 This imbalance is especially interesting given the lack of organization and funds on the pro-Franco side in contrast to the better-coordinated and better-funded campaigns of the republican aid movement. The Spanish Republic’s proponents could not have known at the outset that the political winds would be against them for the duration of the conflict. Once this had become obvious, they also could not have foreseen that even more dire consequences awaited their proponents a decade later. The possibility of failure, however, also seemed distant. By the fall of 1938, the national leaders of republican aid remained convinced that if their demands were met for lifting of the embargo a republican victory still might be possible.

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Chapter 5

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Refugee Aid and the Coming World War

The Spanish Civil War was decided militarily by late 1938, but the painful conflict festered through March 1939. The Ebro offensive, launched by republican forces on July 25, 1938, was intended to tie up the rebels in the hope that the long-anticipated European general war would now erupt, bringing France and England to the defense of the Republic. Franco and Hitler had also desired a prolonged conflict. Franco’s reasoning was tactical, focused on slowly bolstering loyalty in the captured areas and occupying crucial fabrication plants. Hitler desired to gain time for his own grand strategy. Stalin, on the other hand, began to retreat.1 With neither side in a rush, the war persisted. The Ebro offensive was one of the deadliest losses of the war for the Republic. It was also the decisive victory by Franco’s troops resulting from a superiority in personnel, matériel, artillery, and aircraft. In other words, the victory had been made possible by the embargo and nonintervention.2 The war forced a wave of refugees into France, and the aid movement shifted its focus to assist them. Supporters held out hope that, following the Republican government’s strategy, the embargo would still be lifted. The continued optimism and the refugee crisis both determined the movement’s course. Still another diplomatic development following Stalin’s slow withdrawal from assistance of the Republic would also be a trial for those who remained in the movement after Franco’s victory as the Popular Front strategy came to an end. The Hitler-Stalin Pact began the fraying of the new refugee movement. One segment of republican aid had already determined its postwar path in March 1938 when the Keep America Out of War Congress was founded at New York’s Hippodrome. Its official sponsor was the Socialist Party. Both pacifists Oswald Garrison Villard and Norman Thomas were joined at the event by Robert M. LaFollette, Jr., and columnist John T. Flynn, among others. Anarchist Carlo Tresca, who had left the NAC, also supported the new organization. The ILGWU and Brotherhood of Sleeping 96

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Car Porters, both proponents of Spanish aid, were also represented. This meeting was followed by an antiwar congress called by the New Republic and other liberal denizens of Spanish aid. The American Friends Service Committee, Fellowship of Reconciliation, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and the War Resisters League became cornerstones of this new endeavor. Nearly all of the fifty sections of the organization by July 1940 were organized by socialists. This coalition of socialist fellow-travelers had then already constructed prior to the conclusion of the Spanish war an ideologically consistent transition from Spanish aid as a bulwark against war to a new antiwar coalition.3 As early as 1937, other international events appeared to be obscuring the Spanish cause: China and Czechoslovakia. By the second half of 1939, many other countries also looked grim once general war was under way. The Comintern’s Maurice Kalmanovitch wondered in the middle of the civil war if “China has not spoiled the Spanish campaign in most of the sections. . . . We do not understand why it is a particular problem in America.” Perhaps China served as an excuse for faltering efforts, or perhaps also, Kalmanovitch was not correct. Flint, Michigan, for example, hosted a Joint Committee for Jewish, Spanish, and Chinese Refugees with the county chairman of the Democratic Party as treasurer and wife of the local high school principal as chair.4 The San Francisco chapter of the MBNAC reported to New York in May that “[a] Spanish Relations Committee of three members was appointed to contact and assist all local organizations formed in this country to help the Spanish government in Europe, and the Chinese, or other victim nations suffering assaults of aggressors.”5 Spain’s was not the only cause, even if it garnered the majority of attention. Spain’s republican supporters also geared up around congressional legislation. In early 1938, California Democratic representative Byron Scott and the isolationist North Dakota Republican senator Gerald Nye introduced bills in Congress to lift the embargo. The latter considered the neutrality legislation to have resulted in “aid for one side as against another.” Representative John Bernard, the Farmer-Laborite from Minnesota, noted that 150,000 Americans across the country had urged the sale of arms. But on May 13, when the embargo came closer to repeal than ever in the Congress, Secretary of State Hull officially stated that the administration would steadfastly support the continued embargo.6 The movement had one more effort left.

The Relief Ship for Spain The movement to aid Spain enjoyed its greatest opportunity to attract public attention in early autumn of 1938. “Day after day excited radio commentators had provided an hour-by-hour account of the dramatic and frightening developments,” experts on this period have reminded

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us. Even “moderate opinion deplored the submission of the democracies under threat, and among liberals and radicals there was vociferous protest against abandonment of the Czechs and surrender to the detested Hitler.”7 Following the Munich agreement, the New York Times even ventured a number of editorials critical of isolationism and the “sell out” of the Czechs.8 The November 1938 departure of the Erica Reed, the Relief Ship For Spain, should have been a minor public relations coup in the United States.9 Even Newsweek reported on the ship’s valiant arrival following an attempt by German planes to bomb it.10 When the MBNAC began selling Relief Ship pins in its New York office to promote the ship, “they went so fast that we are out of the first 10,000 already. It is literally true that lines form at our office to get them.”11 Canadians donated a thousand tons of wheat. Blacks in Harlem sent a fully equipped ambulance. Five thousand tons of food, clothing, and medical supplies were contributed. All told, the cargo was worth an estimated $250,000, with Newsweek reporting its value at $300,000.12 The initiative to raise the aid severely limited the discretionary use of donations and meant that wartime medical needs would now be consigned a diminishing importance. The aid movement found itself in an awkward position. After spending three months promoting the cause, the MBNAC took the unusual step of donating collections to the same cargo load carrying donations from the American Red Cross and American Friends Service Committee (with a substantial wheat donation from the U.S. Government’s Federal Surplus Commodities Corporation). Within months, all of these organizations would be cooperating either in refugee aid or the Keep American Out of War Congress. In the planning stages for the Relief Ship, the MBNAC eventually sent nearly 3,100 tons of coffee and sugar for the shipment as well as covering dock charges and the cost of the wheat cargo, which was to be brokered by the AFSC through the Red Cross’s connections with the Surplus Commodities Corporation. Subsequently, however, the Red Cross refused to commit to the endeavor, citing the dangers of losing the shipment.13 The American Friends Service Committee lacked the allies and resources the MBNAC had cultivated. Even the nonpartisan Quakers faced legitimate criticisms. The group had raised $218,612.51 for Spain to aid both sides, with $141,234.52 actually expended. $125,000 of this amount may have originated from the American Red Cross, but at 35 percent overhead expenditures the AFSC had not exactly set an example for the movement. If the Red Cross figures are added in, the efficiency of the collective AFSC-Red Cross effort increases, but at the expense of aiding the bettersupplied Franco insurgents.14

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The AFSC and Red Cross were averse to promote their alliance with the MBNAC, so the publicity that followed from the Relief Ship’s arrival must have created some confusion. One can only wonder at the reaction by readers who may have read both the Spanish Information Bureau’s newsletter, News of Spain (the official organ of the Republican government) on November 23, or Newsweek on November 28, and who had also picked up the New York Times that same week to find that the vessel the Erica Reed being lauded by Newsweek as the MBNAC’s Relief Ship for Spain was the same Erica Reed whose relief shipment was attributed by the New York Times to the American Red Cross. The News of Spain decided not to attribute the shipment to anyone.15 The socialist press also elided organizational responsibility for the shipment, but the Daily Worker mentioned the MBNAC and the Federal Surplus wheat (though tactfully avoiding mention of the Quakers and Red Cross).16 To the extent that the resulting shipment marked a high point for the movement, no celebration followed.

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The Republic’s Final Days

In mid-January 1939, just as the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was about to take up the issue of neutrality again, several victories by Franco’s army provoked an avalanche of mail to both the president and congress. Millions of signatures were gathered from supporters of both sides in the conflict, and organizations and local political bodies passed advisory resolutions. For example, California state senator Jack Tenney (a Democrat who switched parties in 1940) was about to head up an investigation of communists in his state, but also co-wrote a resolution urging the president to revoke the embargo on the Spanish Republic. On the other side, the Francoists responded to the call by Father Charles Coughlin.17 The republican supporters rallied behind an appeal by the Medical Bureau and North American Committee. The response by Democratic Senator Key Pittman of Nevada, who headed up the Foreign Relations Committee, was to inform Assistant Secretary of State Abbott Low Moffat that the senators were “on too hot a spot to sit with ease and that the sooner they could get off it by avoiding the issue the happier they would be.” Finally, isolationists held a “Keep the Embargo” rally in Washington, D.C. Both Reverend Fulton Sheen and Senator David Walsh (Massachusetts) were in attendance to support neutrality—but not Franco—as they described it. Sheen had never expressed any attraction for Mussolini or fascism, only for defense of the church.18 The move from the right was accompanied by a petition from the left. Students at the University of Chicago sent a petition to President Roosevelt

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urging lifting the arms embargo on Spain. It was signed by fifteen hundred students and several dozen faculty representing campus groups from the religious to the socialist. Later, when peace organizers on the campus had “been disastrously split by [an] isolationist minority in opposition to the President’s program,” they requested that President Roosevelt personally assure them a “good speaker to give force to their meeting” and “to aid in getting a prominent speaker to defend his foreign policy.”19 The MBNAC had attempted to embolden pro-Loyalist officials by releasing in December a pamphlet entitled “Catholic Evidence on Spain,” which contained pro-Republic statements from Catholic clergymen. The White House, State Department, and Congress all received copies, and the president for his part also made a point of reading several news items from late 1938 estimating Catholic attitudes. One from the New York Times on December 14 and another from the Washington Post on December 30 both claimed that Catholic support for the Republic had become more evident in recent opinion polls.20 Counter-organizing by the Catholics, however, outflanked the Republican supporters’ public relations maneuver by generating at least a million signatures of their own urging the retention of the arms embargo. Republican Spain was left—again—to languish, this time in its death bed.21 Prevention of the general war had been one thing; its arrival was entirely another. It was perhaps with the utmost irony that U.S. secretary of state Cordell Hull told a meeting of the Intergovernmental Committee on Political Refugees in October 1939, “I think it would be most unfortunate if future historians should be called upon to say that civilized man confessed his inability to cope with this harrowing problem and let the undertaking die at its most critical period.”22 As far as the aid movement was concerned, Hull had allowed precisely that scenario to develop throughout the Spanish conflict. Having been denied a victory, many of the Popular Front’s proponents withdrew into isolation. The movement’s demise stemmed from its inability to move effectively a critical mass to action, or to bend the country’s leadership. A collective fatigue from confronting the deteriorating international order further arrested the Spanish Republic’s formerly eager supporters. And in any case, once general war arrived, aid-short-of-war no longer made sense. If public opinion serves as a political compass, then a series of polls in 1939 suggest that several years of increasingly inauspicious news from Europe had provoked a marked shift in the public outlook. By the end of that year the polls reflected reactions to Hitler’s march across Europe and rated neutrality as the top issue of the day. Given the responses to questions about retaining neutrality—and not just neutrality as an issue—it

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appears to have been in the forefront of many minds.23 Gallup polls indicate that by December 1938 nearly 75 percent of Americans favored the Spanish Loyalists. A substantial cross-section of the public remained informed of foreign events, but nearly a third in January 1937 had no idea there was even a war going on in Spain, a figure comparable to the third during World War II who did not know the Philippines were occupied by Japan. The marked recognition by the other two-thirds which eventually became three-quarters is therefore of some significance, even if the aidshort-of-war argument of the Republic’s advocates could not advance.24 If any two trends emerged from this period it is that while most Americans sought to keep out of war, many also desired to prevent fascism from arriving on their shores. Some Americans seem to have believed by 1939 that they could achieve both by doing nothing. The seemingly incoherent position of public support for Republican Spain but against foreign involvement may be further explained by a letter from Herman Reissig to the Nation magazine in July 1937. Describing the public temperament as he had encountered it in the course of his work at the NAC, he found “not once have I heard or read the suggestion . . . that America should participate in a war on behalf of democracy against fascism. . . . If anything is calculated to make a general war inevitable it is refusal of aid to a democracy fighting for its life and the granting of aid to warring fascism.”25 Combined with the quotidian difficulties of the depression, local resistance, polarized press coverage, political timidity, and the specter of isolation, it was perfectly reasonable for the few who were concerned about events in Spain to desire a limited policy of diplomatic containment. The Roosevelt administration had chosen not to attempt to educate the public on that issue, and the British, who led Washington on the Spanish question, continued to reject the possibility that resistance was compatible with neutrality. Given the inability of the aid movement to find a groundswell of support, it seems safe to conclude that any newfound public salience of the conflict can be attributed to the prominence of Spain’s presence in the news, the increasingly desperate international situation, and perhaps the few public remarks the president had offered. In the background, however, the aid movement set the parameters of the political discourse on the subject and the mainstream press and cultural agents reacted accordingly. Agitation for the Republic undoubtedly loomed in the shadows, and its direct impact is difficult to qualify.26 With the Spanish defense against another global conflict now toppled, and the West shortly after plunged into another great conflict, retrenchment may have seemed appropriate. It would be incorrect to assume that all Spanish aid advocates were in full retreat, though many were. Just as not all of the Republic’s supporters advocated the same political line,

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they now departed in their postwar strategies. The Molotov-Ribbentropp Pact muted some members of the coalition as aid to the allies was the new clarion call in which some Spanish Republican aid veterans—generally those not on the far left—took up the matter. Professor Paul Douglas at the University of Chicago, for instance, had been active with the North American Committee’s Chicago branch. Future Illinois governor and recent former president of the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations Adlai Stevenson joined Douglas in going to work with the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies.27 Socialists and pacifists organized the Keep America Out of War Congress. Mixed motivations for aiding Spain in the first place and an emotional depletion from fighting a losing battle over a single issue for three increasingly depressing years explain why not all of the Republic’s advocates joined such an organization. Most turned first to refugee work.

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Refugee Campaigns Grow, the Movement Splits Barcelona fell in January 1939. Madrid held out through March, still hoping that help was on its way. An armistice was reached April 1, 1939, on the promise that no retribution would follow for the republicans. Franco promptly reneged and directed a massive purge of the republican holdouts after they had laid down their arms. Hundreds of thousands were caught up in the deadly net, exacerbating a refugee crisis and landing at least 200,000 in prison. Daily executions in Madrid reached 200 to 250 per day. Return to Spain would now be fatal for many, and refugee camps in France were populated beyond their capacity. Far worse awaited communists, who by early 1939 were facing reprisals from both sides in the conflict.28 By this time the aid movement had long since depleted its resources, even while gaining new allies among nonpartisan organizations who were also concerned for the welfare of refugees. The challenge for relief aid was to focus attention on the humanitarian crisis when the optimism of antifascism was quickly fading. North American committee secretary Herman Reissig, writing to the Los Angeles office of the MBNAC in mid– 1939, recognized the course of popular sentiment: “The tide inevitably moves away from Spain and its refugees, but like good anti-fascists we must resist the tide and do everything in our power not only to help the refugees but to strengthen all the forces working for Republican Spain.”29 Even for the stalwart, the weight of current history proved too heavy. Following the Relief Ship rallies, what remained of the NAC’s national network collapsed with the fall of Barcelona. A few pockets of support refocused their campaigns toward refugees at the prompting of the national office. At the time of the surrender, the faltering Republic labored

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under the humanitarian crisis of three million refugees. Only ninety thousand Francoists were displaced. Though France accepted a half-million refugees from the Republic, there was no long-term plan for them. When general war broke out in September 1939, France desired the refugees’ return to Spain.30 The re-tooled aid movement took up the refugee issue and traversed a path riddled with pitfalls. Already the Quakers’ practices had left perplexed those in the new organization, the Spanish Refugee Relief Campaign (SRRC). The AFSC had established a colony for Basque children in Enghien, France, where the conditions for Basques were “infinitely better than that of the Spaniards.”31 A report to this effect prompted the SRRC to wonder at what it had been supporting when more pressing concerns demanded the group’s attention. However, the deteriorating international situation sealed the relationship. By December 1939, the SRRC was the sole American group funding yet another new organization, the Friends for Refugee Relief. But which refugees? The communist refugees were at the highest risk of retribution. Having already undergone a belated purge from the Republic’s faltering wartime political structure, they now potentially faced firing squads in Spain, Nazi Germany’s occupied European territories, and Italy. As the insurgents advanced across Spain, eventually severing the Republic in half at the Ebro River in the summer of 1938, a growing stream of refugees sought succor in Catalonia, the region of northeastern Spain that became the last Republican frontier for the afflicted. Herman Reissig described the SRRC’s goal as getting the at-risk out of Europe, but for the Communist Party, communists were a priority. They were, after all, at serious risk. Once again, while noncommunists asserted power in decision-making within the SRRC, it was communists on the ground in France who implemented the policies, to the exclusion of noncommunists, many claimed.32 Even refugee aid was vacillating by the time of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in mid-1939. This is of some consequence as the pact opened a political rift within the North American Committee/Spanish Refugee Relief Campaign that affected its refugee assistance. By March 1940, with World War II and a new refugee relief effort under way, the remnants of the MBNAC splintered along party lines. A veteran nurse of the American Medical Bureau, Ester Silverstein, was one of many members who resigned from the party as a consequence of the pact. Herman Reissig attempted to downplay the internal situation on the SRRC executive, explaining that “there are in this committee wide differences of opinion on that subject, but these differences do not and need not obtrude themselves into our work. We have kept our eyes solely upon the hundreds of thousands of homeless exiles in France, and have tried to help them as effectively as

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we could.”33 As an organization, their eyes were upon exiles, but Reissig and the others remained unaware of what political party precisely was being saved. One activist complained that the pact incurred fear from liberal donors that the CP would be taking over organizations they had previously supported.34 Internal dissensions that had been tactfully suppressed throughout the Spanish ordeal now rose to the surface. Almost immediately following Franco’s victory, Dr. Walter Cannon at Harvard received a letter from Norman Thomas indicating that the Socialist Party intended to withdraw from the MBNAC because the organization was demonstrating favoritism in Europe toward communist refugees.35 The socialists intended to support the Quakers and asked Cannon to join them. Cannon, who had been parrying charges of communism thrust upon him since his initial support for the Medical Bureau, now demanded proof of the allegations and was concerned about public statements the socialists intended to make that would affirm the claims of red-baiters regarding the partisan makeup of the MBNAC/SRRC. Cannon also contacted Roger Baldwin, who reiterated the need to break up the coalition and to direct money through the Quakers rather than the International Coordinating Committee in Paris and its communist partisans. Cannon immediately resigned as chair of the Boston committee, though he continued to offer assistance informally.36 In December, in response to a query from the book publisher and NAC board member W. W. Norton, Reissig described the politics on the committee. “No one ever did deny that the communists had influence in the work on behalf of Spain. The only think [sic] we deny is that our policies and our actual work would have been in any way different if there had not been a single communist nearer to 381 Fourth Avenue [the NAC’s New York office] than the Kremlin.” He then identified Sam Baron as the major source for criticism, but the fault lines were hardly evident that December. The NAC’s support for the Quakers and the growing crisis in France accentuated the partisanship just then surfacing in the new organization, the SRRC. The Popular Front had receded, and the collapse of the network allowed communist influence finally to subsume what remained. Even while the SRRC had emerged virtually devoid of communist leadership at the national office, the group had no control over the actions of those actually rescuing refugees or in the local affiliates, in particular at the Greater New York Committee.37 The political fissures were wrenched open by the Greater New York Committee at an Executive Board Committee meeting on March 6, 1940, just before several Spanish refugee organizations called an international conference to meet in Mexico City to address the refugee crisis. Two issues were present in this period: the treatment of refugees by the French, and

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the earlier move to support the Quakers, which disadvantaged communist refugees.38 The French issue emerged when the Greater New York Committee determined that it would protest “the action of the French government . . . [and the] treatment of the refugees and the closure of S.E.R.E [Emigration Service for Spanish Refugees].”39 The SERE had been raided and closed down by French security forces in October 1939.40 It appears that the SRRC did not necessarily recognize, or simply did not care about, the communist involvement in SERE, which in response to the refugee crisis had now emerged as the international coordinating organization in Paris.41 Former Spanish Republican president Francisco Largo Caballaro explained from his exile in Paris that “Theoretically, the SERE is a perfect organization, representing all political parties and syndicalist organizations: a miniature of the extinct Popular Front of Spain. But in practice it is something widely different. . . . [T]he communists are the only ones drawing benefits from the subsidized aid which the [exiled] Negrín government is giving.”42 Anticipating the difficulty any protest of French conduct would pose to the national organization, at the March 6 meeting the City Committee sent a message to the SRRC “respectfully” suggesting that one of its representatives be permitted to present its point of view at the National Executive meetings. Moreover, it urged the SRRC to increase the representation of the City Committee on its board, “in the light of the important role which the Greater New York Committee plays in the entire functioning of the Spanish Refugee Relief Campaign.” The GNYC went so far as to contact people it hoped to seat in those positions. While not all of them were specifically named, it is evident they were sympathetic to the City Committee’s political outlook.43 The New York Committee was intent on stacking the national executive with its own communists.44 The implied coup should have hinted to the SRRC’s leaders the danger that lay ahead. In Mexico City, SRRC publicity specialist Douglas Jacobs took a stand against the French government, something that many at the SRRC had explicitly forbade given the delicacy of the situation.45 Some questionable practices were being utilized in the refugee camps, including forced labor, and the Menard Order requiring Spaniards to return was also contentious.46 Jacobs reported from Mexico City that in addition to abolishing the small stipend for the labor the refugees were expected to undertake, French authorities were removing beds and durables donated through relief aid to use for military purposes. And “pressure, both moral and physical, is used on a large scale to make the refugees go back to Spain. . . .” The nurse Ave Bruzzechessi described her observations of refugee conditions in a letter home: “In order to keep warm they dug holes in the ground and covered themselves with what blankets, twigs, tin or anything they might get to protect themselves from the cold wind.

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Four thousand refugees, and the majority in the camps such as these.” The French had been pressed diplomatically to address the refugee problem. Reissig forwarded Jacobs’s report to Roosevelt’s secretary of the interior, Harold Ickes, who had been supporting the NAC/SRRC from the beginning. Ickes decried the report by Jacobs. With this official rebuke, the SRRC board, sensitive to both the need for French cooperation and an official refutation of Jacobs, chose not to criticize the French openly.47 As an employee of the SRRC, Jacobs was expected to remain subordinate to the positions of the SRRC, but in Mexico City he seized the opportunity to condemn France and called on others to follow his lead.48 With board backing Reissig demanded Jacobs’s resignation. Within weeks, however, the Mexico City coup would be realized, and the communist faction within the refugee aid movement broke away; it is clear that they acted collectively.49 The communist faction explained its action on April 6 in an open appeal to allies:

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The program adopted by the First Continental Conference to Aid Spanish Refugees, held in Mexico City . . . MUST BE PUT INTO ACTION IMMEDIATELY if the Spanish refugees and Internationals are to be effectively aided and if terror in Franco Spain is to be halted. . . . Yet for two months the national executive board of the Spanish Refugee Relief Campaign has done nothing to put this program into effect.50

A second conference on refugees was called for April 14 at the Murray Hill Hotel in New York City to create a new organization. What Reissig explains is that “subsequent to the last meeting of the Board, the nine minority members sponsored a call to a national conference in opposition to our organization.” The SRRC’s other members asked the nine to resign; eight of them held out until May 1.51 The GNYC was more heavily communist than the national organization, and spurning of the Greater New York Committee’s request to be more represented required a new tactic. If the Communist Party had finally decided to capture the organization but had been unable to, this would explain the need to break from the national organization and to attempt to bring the local affiliates along. To complicate matters for the loyal faction, the communists tried to utilize the name of the North American Committee to rebuild the organization.52 Reissig and Baldwin’s noncommunist bloc in the executive successfully halted the effort to coopt the name with a court order, but the damage was done. The entire SRRC network collapsed. The few remaining local committee activists overwhelmingly joined the communists with only a few exceptions. Notably the Cincinnati committee and the

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Social Workers Committee remained loyal to the Baldwin-Reissig faction. Cincinnati had remained noncommunist for the war’s duration, and the social workers had also maneuvered against communists throughout. The Chicago office was restructured. In general, only the rank-and-file of the remaining organization joined the CP faction since most of the leadership of the organizations had been left in the hands of noncommunists in following the modus operandi of the Popular Front. The problem was that few functioning locals actually remained by that time. After some initial confusion, many of the remaining affiliate leaders allied with Reissig and the SRRC, but the momentum and key organizers were lost to the new communist organization. The new communist group would take some months to find its stead and eventually emerged in 1942 as the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Relief Organization. Reissig was embittered by the ordeal. Ray Gibbons would later explain in a brief biography of Reissig that “communists were trying to use the organization for specifically communist purposes.” Reissig would write How to Combat Communism in 1961, insisting that organizations can avoid his organization’s fate by utilizing democratic procedures in choosing officers, raising money, and offering recourse to members. Having been subpoenaed by HUAC himself, he also opposed Dies and McCarthyist measures as an appropriate response.53 Following the fracture, the SRRC loyalists now forged close ties with the Emergency Rescue Committee, a crucial organization for European refugee rescue that employed the former North American Committee publicist Varian Fry. He had resigned in mid-1937 in opposition to the communists on the NAC’s executive committee.54 By September 1940, the SRRC was nearly subsumed by Fry’s organization when the SRRC was “listed in public appeals of the ERC as a cooperating organization” and directed “not to make independent financial appeals while this arrangement is in force.” The ERC even controlled SRRC finances as the latter was “assured of a regular and fixed monthly income” and could then “operate on a fixed budget of administrative expenses.”55 In essence, the SRRC had surrendered its leadership and independence and also its devotion exclusively to Spain. With that arrangement the fractured aid movement entered a new phase, but because “the experience of the last four months has shown that it is difficult for an organization such as ours to retain its vigor and effectiveness if it does not conduct its own financial campaign,” the SRRC considered terminating its arrangement with the ERC. Reissig, however, sensed other possibilities. Varian Fry had recently written from Europe that he “has no contact whatever with the individuals and with the situation in which our organization is interested.” Furthermore, an independent SRRC would only “add to the competition in an already over-crowded refugee

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aid field.” Therefore, Reissig suggested that the SRRC instead make several proposals to the ERC: more prominence of the SRRC in funding appeals, agreement that Spanish refugees be part of ERC effort, and a larger monthly share of income.56 The ERC was no more secure than the SRRC, however. Varian Fry was busy smuggling other refugees out of France and had recently managed to send in a report to the ERC past the censors there, but his own group was poorly organized in the U.S.57 For all of Fry’s venerable underground activity, his Emergency Rescue Committee’s American office was in considerable disarray, and the SRRC was frustrated by the problems. “There is a persistent complaint that the office of the Emergency Rescue Committee is run in such a haphazard and confused fashion,” Reissig wrote one of its board members, “that it is impossible to get prompt and sympathetic attention.”58 The ERC was understaffed even while volunteers were turned away. If that was not bad enough, Reissig wrote, the group’s leader refused to respond to constituents.59 The proliferation of many organizations inhibited the new refugee effort just as it encumbered the earlier aid movement, but lack of leadership also assured that no single group emerged as a central refugee organization. Walter Cannon wrote Reissig in an attempt to find out which refugee groups were “specializing in the rescue of communists.”60 The number of refugees in Europe at this point included not just German, Spanish, and other fascist government exiles, but also Czechoslovakian and soon the French. Further crises awaited, all of which could have been avoided as far as the Spanish Republic’s international community of defenders were concerned.61 While the refugee movement was searching for leadership, and the antiwar Congress was finding its footing, the political winds gathered against the Republic’s backers. Franco’s supporters in the United States never had to face political consequences for backing the emergent dictatorship. The Republic’s advocates were much less fortunate, especially if they had any suspicious associations. Trouble was already on the horizon for the communist end of the movement, and a number of republican supporters of various political persuasions were caught up in the emerging anticommunist zeitgeist. The cooperation Reissig had mentioned among the SRRC leadership turned out to be a mirage, but that made little difference to critics of the organization. The House Un-American Activities Committee, which had little appreciation for the partisan nuance of Popular Front activities, listed the SRRC as a communist front in January 1940. Its search for communists among Spanish aid activities had begun two years earlier.62

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Chapter 6

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Retribution

The activists for what became the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee found it difficult to organize anew. By late 1940, the organization had virtually no presence outside of New York City. Having changed names several times—United American Spanish Aid Committee, American Committee to Save Refugees, and American Rescue Ship Mission—the group finally became the JAFRC in March 1942. Anticommunists’ interest, however, was the presence of communists in an organization, not the breadth of political affiliations represented. Before long the JAFRC along with many who had only offered donations to the North American Committee would find themselves facing a wave of political repression where retribution for aiding the Republic became a precursor to a new era. Conflicts had been in evidence almost from the day the first relief campaign meetings were held, but now the opposition was gaining in political strength.1 The first signs of official resistance came with the revised neutrality legislation. President Roosevelt and his advisers had seen fit to isolate the movement throughout the conflict. In the course of the war, the Republic’s activists had encountered hostility over their shipments of aid, the need for passports for aid workers, and the legitimacy of their claims. Only a month into the Spanish conflict, the president had met with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to discuss threats to domestic security. One of those threats, though only by coincidence, would come to be Spanish aid.2 Then on June 26, 1939, the president issued a confidential memorandum that authorized all intelligence services—the FBI, Military Intelligence Division, and Office of Naval Intelligence—to investigate “all espionage, counter espionage, and sabotage matters.” The FBI was supposed to limit its investigations to violations of federal statutes, but Hoover interpreted his charge more broadly.3 By 1937, the bureau was already maintaining files on the North American Committee. As the San Diego, California, field office’s informant described it in February 1937: 109

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The North American Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy is an organization contrivance also figured out by the Communist Party as not only a title intriguing to many, but as an extremely profitable investment as well. Through this organization, the Communist Party has probably collected more hundreds of thousands of dollars than it has been able to do through any of its other multiple organizations. . . . Series of mass meetings with Spain as their subject, are constantly being held all over the United States. . . . Collections taken at these affairs are enormous.4

The file goes on to enumerate organizational affiliates including the quite noncommunist and liberal American Friends of Spanish Democracy, but also the Spanish-language organizations. This information would later inform the Dies Committee when it began its investigation into Spanish aid the next year. The first signs of difficulty, however, came from the administration, not from surreptitious intelligence gathering. The State Department’s sanction on all travel to Spain came just as the first passenger ship with medical personnel was about to leave New York City in March 1937. The State Department withheld visas for American Medical Bureau staff, but Democratic representative Samuel McReynolds of Tennessee, who chaired the Committee on Foreign Affairs, reported a thousand communications sympathetic to the Loyalists to his office protesting the State Department’s decision. The administration buckled and permitted the issuance of passports for aid workers.5 In May, with the renewal of neutrality legislation, the aid movement now found itself closely scrutinized over its use of funds. All aid organizations were required by law to register with State, obtain a license, and thereafter file monthly expense reports. Most of the aid movement was dogged by charges of inefficient use of donations throughout the course of the war. This included the pro-Franco organizations, where the final donations to Franco were fifteen times less than for the Republic and where in some cases expenses overran total collections. As the organization that positioned itself at the forefront, however, the North American Committee invited the most scrutiny, and because of its importance the Communist Party has been held accountable for the organization’s shortcomings. Early on, Roger Baldwin recognized that unless the NAC could find a way to minimize waste and maximize relief, we are going to be in an indefensible position before our public, if money is so lavishly used without sufficient care in advance.”6 On September 3, 1937, the New York Times published figures on the movement based on the audits provided by the State Department over

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the previous four months. From the data available, the month of August 1937 was perhaps the most efficient, showing the North American Committee with overhead held at nearly ten percent of the receipts, which had topped $22,000 for the month.7 In the meantime, the NAC’s Russell Thayer made a trip to Washington, D.C., to meet with the State Department about the apparent inaccuracy of the New York Times story. The issue of overhead was frequently seized upon by critics and used to tarnish the organization. The State Department reserved the right to revoke licenses of inefficient organizations (defined by 25 percent overhead) though it seems quite likely that the Roosevelt administration feared the fallout of revoking licenses in an already contentious atmosphere, so no licenses appear to have been revoked during the course of the conflict.8 Joseph C. Green, head of the Office of Arms and Munitions Control, who was to administrate after the war an internal audit of the State Department’s registry of the twenty-six licensed organizations after the war, “readily agreed [that though] the Department of State figures as released by them were substantially correct, they gave a complete misunderstanding to the public regarding the North American Committee.” The concession derived especially from the problem of accounting for in-kind donations and the absence of financial figures for 1936. Indeed, the Neutrality Act did not account for these in-kind materials and according to the NAC if it had, overhead would only be running at seven percent. The Nation magazine, reporting on the same matter, arrived at 19 percent.9 (See the book’s appendix for the full official accounting.) The issue of finances emerged at HUAC hearings, as well, carrying the same assumptions of inefficiency. These frequent allegations of inefficient administration combined with a dismissiveness within the executive branch. The most obvious example came at a Washington press conference on December 20, 1938, when President Roosevelt fielded questions from the Associated Church Press. One reporter, apparently John Van Schraick, said, “We hope that you have been thinking of the way our neutrality laws have been operating, have been working out. For example, in Spain, they have worked out against the Loyalists.”10 FDR responded: “The neutrality law—I am talking off the record—but the neutrality law at the present time is so rigid that, acting on it in accordance with its rigidity, may mean a complete lack of neutrality. . . .” This would seem to support the claims of the aid movement but, continuing, the president added: If . . . I had last month or the month before declared that war was not going on in Spain . . . [i]t would have meant that the Franco forces, which are in control of the ocean, . . . would have been able to get

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American Relief Aid and the Spanish Civil War direct shipments of munitions from this country, right into the revolutionary camp because they have complete control of the seas. . . . That would not have been neutrality; I would have been playing into the hands of Franco. . . . Q. If the embargo on arms to Spain was lifted, it would not help the Loyalists, in your judgment? THE PRESIDENT: No, it would not; it would help Franco because the Loyalists could not get them except through France. Q. There is a concerted movement, we have been led to believe, to try to have you lift the embargo?

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THE PRESIDENT: I know it. It is by the people who sympathize with the Government of Spain and of course they have never thought the thing through.11

In a backhanded manner the president seemed to suggest that opponents of the embargo should let up on their concerns while the earlier issue of applying the embargo to Germany and Italy was by this time avoided. That American munitions might be getting to both sides in Spain from third parties was entirely assumed. The “concerted movement” had by now moved in the other direction away from a full embargo, and Roosevelt had a far more effective answer in reply, brushing aside the entire effort as lacking foresight.12 Parry characterized Franco’s blockade as “an immense joke. . . . The fact that the majority of the Spanish Navy had remained loyal to the Republic gave him little to blockade with. Italian attempts to supply this deficiency were sporadic and fairly well blocked by the Anti-Piracy Patrol.”13 If not belittling, taking this official position before the Catholic press could only serve the purpose of distancing the executive branch from the arguments of the aid campaigns. Backed by the FBI’s new activism, which the president had endorsed, Spanish Republican aid would also now become suspect.

HUAC Anticommunist intelligence-gathering would find an official outlet with the creation of a new institution, intent on discrediting the New Deal.14 The House established the Special House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) in 1938. Initially headed by Martin Dies and bearing his name, the Dies Committee began to identify Spanish aid activities with communism from the war’s early months. Drawing on FBI intelligence, local police, patriotic organizations, and discontented movement activists, the committee had no difficulty finding people to testify. The value of the

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accumulated testimonies was limited but laid the foundation for the process that was to destroy careers and send some to prison in the years that followed. The American League Against War and Fascism, the original Popular Front organization and architect of many of the Spanish aid affiliates to the MBNAC, was an early subject of anticommunist concerns. In 1936, anticommunist activist Hillman Bishop had already compiled material for a short book on the organization. Bishop had been a member of the Anti-Fascist Association at CCNY. His group had been invited to join the ALAWF until “it was apparent that the League was not the broad-based non-partisan united front which it pretended to be.” Bishop’s forgotten endeavor would eventually join The Red Network and other grassroots anticommunism in bolstering intelligence gathering that went into the government’s counter-subversive measures in the coming decade.15 Bishop’s report is among the thousands of pages of evidence submitted to HUAC at its inception. By the summer of 1938, HUAC reported that the NAC was adjunct to the Communist Party based on evidence from Walter S. Steele, an American Legionnaire who appeared as representative to both ROTC and the VFW. His document had the Friends of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade listed as an NAC affiliate organization. The list of associated names was broad and characteristically lacking in subtlety. As the report details, “The interest of the ‘reds’ in the war in Spain centers around the creation of another Soviet.” The Committee’s interest was in the “aid from the United States in support of the ‘red’ front.”16 The government’s friendly witnesses also returned to the theme of finances. An eager socialist, Sam Baron, was among the first to testify. He had been president of the anti-Stalinist ILGWU and served as correspondent in Spain for the Socialist Call, in which capacity he reported widely on events. He was eventually arrested by the Servicio de Investigación Militar (Military Intelligence Service) for his investigation into the events of May 1937 where police moved against the POUM in Barcelona.17 In his testimony, Baron said nothing about his work on Spanish aid despite his claims of bad experiences with the communists but then explained that the greatest issue presented by the Communist movement of the world is the people’s front against Fascist aggression. There are various other slogans, but they all fit into the same picture, and that is their most fundamental alleged objective. By this slogan there are all sorts of united fronts, all sorts of organizations created to perpetuate the supposed ideals of this slogan. But I want to show what a mockery this slogan is in actuality, by starting first with Soviet Russia.18

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He then enters a collection of his own textual evidence into the record with the conclusion:

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The text of those articles goes into details of the activities of the Communist Party in Spain. It quotes authorities and it lays down the basis I am trying to bring out, and my major contention, that the Communist movement is not concerned in any united front, but that its chief objective is to eliminate its opposition and the organized forces they call the Fascist power.19

Events in Spain—and in the case of the Barcelona May Days, an entirely Catalan affair as recent investigations have shown—were used to make a broader case against the aid movement.20 Another socialist, Alba Ryan (née Novac), who volunteered for service in Spain with her husband, told the Dies Committee in 1939 that “very little” of the NAC’s money made it to the level of aid in Spain. She served as a cook in Spain and based on her experience, “Whatever did arrive in Spain was almost all used up in the officers’ mess, and the same thing was also true of the cigarettes. Our ration was one package of cigarettes every 10 days, and the commissars smoked all the time. It was the same way with food.” She further claimed that she was ordered to take food away from patients to feed visiting delegates.21 That her experience was marginal was not relevant to the committee. Another witness friendly to the Committee was found in Martha Mitchell, who had served the American Medical Bureau as an assistant to the dentist Dr. John Posner. Mitchell turned over a small archive of material to the Dies Committee. In her testimony before the committee she said “. . . [T]he money was [intended] for the Spanish people but it really went to support the International Brigade Hospitals, and the Spanish Government could not touch any of the supplies unless given special permission by the Heads of the International Brigade.” Moreover, she went on, “it is plain to see that the Communist party was soliciting funds under false pretenses, and that very few Americans would have donated a penny to keep up Communist Hospitals in any land.” When Mitchell spoke of the diversion of funds, perhaps she meant material aid since other documents contradict her assertions. Mitchell then claimed that she approached the Republic’s medical head about transferring into positions directly serving the government. Apparently, Dr. Abraham Ettleson did this in late 1937, but according to Mitchell, “he was called a traitor by the American Communists, looked down upon, and was absolutely refused any supplies from the American Hospitals.”22 In the end, Dies Committee’s questioning seemed to be interested in dupes, those who were unwit-

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tingly convinced to support the communists by virtue of their concern for Spain. Whatever Mitchell’s experience had been, only one-third of nurse volunteers appear to have been party members.23 Francis Henson made damaging claims, as well. He had served as treasurer of the Committee on Fair Play in Sports and was an activist in the Medical Bureau. In October 1939 he explained before HUAC that the Medical Bureau had been from the outset a communist organization and that Party Secretary Earl Browder had opposed its merger with the North American Committee because the NAC was not party dominated.24 The latter claim, easily substantiated by supporting lists that the NAC submitted under subpoena, should have been enough to at least insulate the organization from the investigation, but already at this point guilt by association had become the Committee’s operating mode. Moreover, Henson claimed, “[A] very considerable amount [of funding] was spent for administrative purposes in raising the money. It was largely spent on a very large office staff and office set-up.” No figures were cited, though the official records submitted to the State Department, if properly audited as the group had contended, should have offered a sufficient defense. Dies was nonplussed. “I think that a most thorough audit of the books of many of these organizations for relief purposes throughout the country is going to disclose a shocking situation of the misappropriation of the funds and of their use by certain people.” Others active in the campaigns would make similar allegations, though not at the committee hearings. Sandor Voros, a former Communist Party member who had been a commissar in Spain, claimed contrary to Mitchell that the purse strings . . . were controlled by the French Party. The monies raised in the United States for Spanish Aid were turned over to the International Committee, which meant the French Communist Party. They, in turn, allotted as much money as they saw fit. This was somewhat remedied later. . . . The system was certainly conducive to large scale corruption.

He offers no further details but cites two instances of theft that he was aware of and assumed the practice was commonplace throughout the North American Committee.25 In all, in addition to these hostile witnesses, four veterans of the war in Spain provided testimony about the Communist Party there. Two of these witnesses had deserted their units, and one was the only veteran to actually be prosecuted by the government for enlisting in a foreign army. Once again extrapolation from Spanish events in these testimonies was to

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impart meaning for prosecutors in a search to unveil what was perceived as a communist monolith where spies and Spanish Republican sympathizers were indistinguishable.26 Former communist J. B. Matthews, now employed by the HUAC, argued that Colonel William J. Crookston must be a communist due to his ties to Louis Gibardi. Crookston, who died in mid1937, was a World War I veteran who had been at the founding meeting of the American Legion and was later active with the Medical Bureau. Gibardi was a Communist Party member also involved in the MB. The president’s secretary of the interior, Harold Ickes, was also painted as a communist dupe for his associations with the North American Committee.27

The Loyalist Indictments

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The search for prosecutable crimes against the aid movement led to the unusual case of what has become known as the Loyalist Indictments. John D. McGillis of the Knights of Columbus told the Dies Committee in October 1938 that “[a]s secretary of the Detroit Council 305, of the Knights of Columbus, it has been part of my work to investigate un-American activities. I have been asked to do that.” These activities included “recruiting of American youth for the Loyalist cause in Spain” based upon interviews with recruits. McGillis also provided the committee an affidavit signed by Paul Padgett that past June. Padgett had volunteered for the Lincoln Battalion. He was just 18 and unemployed. He claimed that “Mary Paige, also known in party circles as ‘Sock’ Paige, became his intimate friend and endeavored to induce him to attend their [YCL] school at Mena, Ark.” Later, “Young Paul talked to [Phil] Raymond, who told him that he would make the arrangements and instructed him to go to the offices of Dr. Eugene Shafarman, 5320 John R. Street.” It was there that he . . . was examined by Dr. Frederick C. Lendrum who, incidentally, was a candidate for coroner at our latest election and failed [sic] of nomination. He was also sent to see Dr. Verne C. Piazza, a dentist, with offices on the corner of Forest and Mount Elliott. Dr. Piazza pulled two of his teeth and filled others. He paid neither of these doctors. Neither asked him for money, and to this day he does not know who paid them for their services. Padgett returned to Raymond’s office and was told by Raymond that they were having some difficulty in securing passports, and in order for him to leave at once it would be necessary that they fake a passport by using another name. This Padgett hesitated to do, and his hesitation saved him from becoming “lost” in the Spanish war.28

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In the course of his intelligence gathering, McGillis also documented health records showing that the doctors checking the volunteers for Spain charged the city for shots and other services. Under a Detroit ordinance, the patients were entitled to these services, but the claim in this context sounded scandalous. Two Detroit police officers, active in that city’s red squad, also testified. Sergeant Leo Maciosek, again confusing the activities of the NAC and Medical Bureau with the activities of the International Brigades, told the committee:

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It was brought to our attention, on or about August 1936, that there was a Committee to Aid the Spanish Democracy organized, and it was organized under the auspices of the Conference for the Protection of Civil Rights, which is an organization functioning here in Detroit, and Lorene Brown was the secretary of this committee. And later on, through the information we obtained in talking to Dr. Lendrum, we learned that a man by the name of Bavaley was the treasurer of the organization.29

After furnishing a long list of names and documents, Maciosek was asked if he could identify any party members. He had none except for those in the Friends of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. “There was considerable recruiting of boys to go to Spain to fight with the Spanish Loyalists. Recruiting started in 1936 and it was reported to us a man by the name of Phil Raymond, which I know personally is a member of the Communist Party.”30 The questioning continued to conflate the activities of the two groups. In fact, Mitchell Webb, Secretary of the Detroit Medical Bureau, had written to the NAC national office requesting permission to merge the group’s operations with those of the FALB, and he was directed to not do so.31 This distinction was of no interest to the authorities. In light of this evidence, in the early morning of February 6, 1940, the FBI coordinated arrests of a dozen activists who had been involved in the Medical Bureau in Detroit. The arrested were Harold Hartley, who chaired the Detroit chapter of the International Labor Defense; Joseph Cohn, an editor of the YCL newspaper; Frank Feldt, Jr., of the FALB; Leon Davis and Robert Taylor, two veterans of the war; Philip Raymond, the Communist Party gubanatorial candidate; Peter Kowal and Rudolph Schweir of the Workers Alliance; Mary Paige, daughter of the mayor of Dickersville, Michigan; and the doctors Eugene Shafarman, John Rosefield, and Frederick Lendrum (who was practicing in Milwaukee at the time of his arrest). Paige’s incarceration received widespread sympathy due to a medical condition in need of constant physician attention.32 The

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twelve were being prosecuted under an 1818 statute that was stated to be “an act to prevent citizens of the United States from privateering against nations in amity with, or against the citizens of, the United States.”33 The case elicited widespread attention and civil liberties groups flocked to it. In his memoirs Communist leader Earl Browder recalled the Detroit incident: “The ensuing storm of public indignation was great enough to cause Washington to quash the indictments promptly. No official wanted to test how deep American sympathy was for the beleaguered Spanish Republic.”34 The protests forced a reversal of the charges by Attorney General Robert Jackson, who had taken office on January 18. He insisted that unless every case of alleged recruitment was to be prosecuted—and they were not—then this one could not be either. The Spanish case would once again set precedent in policy-making as the 1818 statute was again updated in response.35 However, there were other targets during this sweep. Joe Clark, who does not show up on the list of the Detroit 12, was also arrested. Manny Cohen, who no one at the VALB’s headquarters claimed to know, was also a target but was not picked up on February 6 as intended. In New York several days later, the FBI raided the headquarters of the VALB and delivered subpoenas to the group’s leaders, Milt Wolff and Gerald Cook. According to the New York Times, “the FBI agents rifled desks, emptied waste baskets and took many notes.36

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Black Lists This victory for the aid movement was only short-lived. The DetroitMilwaukee case was only the beginning, though there had already been signs during the war. Senator Thomas Burke of Massachusetts’ Special Commission had already begun his work. The Knights of Columbus had managed to pressure local Massachusetts governments into censoring pro-Loyalist films, though pro-Franco meetings were permitted, including one in Fall River attended by Governor Charles F. Hurley, who made no secret of his view of republican Spain as under “communistic reds.”37 Smith College professor Oliver Larkin, who was active in the Massachusetts Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy and went on to win a Pulitzer for his 1949 book Art and Life in America, was among those caught in the net of the investigations.38 The Dies Committee had taken up the issue of communist involvement in the aid movement the following year. In January 1946, it was now Mississippi Democrat John Rankin’s HUAC (the postwar successor to Dies’s Committee) that began exerting pressure and demanding the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee’s (JAFRC) donor list.

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The FBI was convinced that the VALB, in conjunction with the JAFRC, was intent on using experienced communist veterans to create a communist army. One 1942 report advised that

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the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade had the great pleasure and privilege of being initiators of a movement in New York for the establishment of a mixed brigade in the United States Army. It was suggested that the various posts sponsor a series of meetings around the question of a negro and white brigade. . . . At least 200 veterans are in the army at this time.

A mixed army could not have augured well for J. Edgar Hoover, whose reputation for intolerance of civil rights is famous. HUAC’s Harvey Matusow and Louis Budenz along with John Janowitz informed on the organization. The committee demanded donor names, aid recipients, and a full financial accounting of the organization. Since the recipients were Spaniards in need of assistance, Barsky, backed by the organization’s board, spurned the subpoena. What apparently began this particular inquiry was a speech by Harold J. Laski at a well-attended JAFRC event in Madison Square Garden in September 1945. According to Republican (and Catholic) Representative J. Parnell Thomas of New Jersey, Laski lashed out at the Catholic Church at the event. Catholic actor Frank Fay organized a campaign in response in which HUAC received “over 8,000 complaints.”39 Congress voted 339–4 to hold Barsky and the Joint Committee’s board in contempt. Ten members were sentenced to three months in jail. Barsky was given six, eventually serving five of them. Upon his release he found himself without a medical license; the New York State Medical Committee had suspended it because he was a convicted criminal. Barsky’s appeal of the suspension went to the Supreme Court where he lost his case. The JAFRC itself ended its career in enormous debt brought on by the constant legal wrangling and loss of tax-exempt status.40 By November 24, 1947, a new instrument emerged. Attorney General Tom Clark compiled his first list of subversive organizations. The Attorney General’s List of Subversive Organizations (AGL) would have tremendous impact on the successor organizations to Spanish Republican aid. The JAFRC, VALB, Abraham Lincoln Brigade, and North American Committee (no longer even in existence) were all on it. They joined a long list of others including the International Workers Order (IWO).41 It is of some interest that the guidelines for the AGL stipulated that “the whole matter” of the Spanish Civil War was to be “scrupulously avoided” as an indicator of “pro-communism.”42

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People with ties to the organizations also lived under a long shadow, and the Supreme Court refused protection in such cases when it heard Barsky’s appeal in 1948. The ties of communists to the JAFRC were reason enough to attract official suspicion to the group. To exacerbate the problem, Gerhart Eisler, who was under investigation by the FBI for a range of activities, was also making frequent visits to the New York office of the JAFRC and was one of numerous recipients of refugee aid from the group (and its “Julius Eisler” fund, named after a dead German communist). By 1946 the FBI had mistakenly made Eisler out to be the leader of the CP in the United States, a condition that spelled doom for the JAFRC, as well. With Barsky and Executive Secretary Helen Bryan already imprisoned and now further harassed by the Eisler case, the group was forced to sever its connection with Eisler.43 Lini Fuhr (née DeVries), a successful public health expert who had briefly served as a nurse in Spain, was pursued by the FBI as early as 1937. In the course of her public health work, one doctor asked her about the FBI’s interest: “What on earth has the fact that you were in Spain got to do with reducing infant mortality?” She did not leave the CP but ceased her activism because “[m]any of the communists in the United States seemed more like dictators to me. I began wondering if I were a communist.” Her membership in the party also would imperil her employment. Under the Smith Act, she could have been prosecuted. She took a job in 1940 as an administrator of the WPA Health Service for Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, and she later continued to be active with the VALB. She eventually landed on the FBI’s subversives list in 1947. Fearing HUAC, she fled to Mexico.44 But it was not just communists, or alleged communists, whose republican sympathies attracted the attention of the Dies Committee and HUAC. Paul Draper, the era’s most-recognized vaudeville dancer, recalled later that his “political awareness had nothing to do with the Depression. It was the Spanish Civil War. It was around 1937, ’38. I danced to raise money for the Spanish Loyalists.” This landed him in trouble when he was blacklisted as a “Communist sympathizer.”45 In 1949 Draper and harmonica player Larry Adler pressed a libel suit against their accusers, but the jury was hung.46 “Everybody was suspicious of everyone else,” he later recounted. “The question was not what you were doing, but who you were doing it for.”47 Exiled republicans also lived in the shadow of anticommunism. Writer José Rubia Barcia initially fled to Cuba from Spain but was able to enter the U.S. in 1943 with the intervention of a Princeton University professor. During World War II he was employed under the name Andrés Aragon by the Office of War Information. He was later fired for his refusal to

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translate a pro-Franco speech for rebroadcast in Spain. The Spanish surrealist film director Luis Buñuel employed him next, but when Buñuel went to Mexico, Aragon’s visa forbade him to follow. He secured another position at the University of California in Los Angeles and was urged by immigration authorities to go to Canada to get a reentry permit that would lead to permanent residency. In the interim, HUAC accused Barcia of being a communist (which he was not). The accusation led to his arrest in Canada and then jail in Seattle where he awaited deportation back to Franco’s Spain. Only the intervention of the chancellor at UCLA forestalled deportation and permitted his eventual citizenship.48 A few years later, as Barsky was continuing his legal fight and as the AGL became a new weapon, Parnell Thomas’s Committee instituted the Hollywood Blacklist. Spanish ties were all over it since nearly everyone on the Hollywood Blacklist had some connection to the civil war–era’s activities. Herbert Biberman had been the chair of the Hollywood Committee (later the Motion Picture Artists Committee) that was organizing the ambulance tours and raising funds for the Republic. Alvah Bessie had even served in the International Brigade, and Ring Lardner’s son had been killed in action in Spain.49 John Howard Lawson, not one of the ten but called to account for his activities, had been the writer of the Spanish Civil War film Blockade (1936) starring Henry Fonda. The film never mentioned fascism or Franco, but Lawson was public about his own communism.50 A different set of memories of Spain was now coming into focus. In the early 1950s, as the Cold War was heating up, an exhibit containing a collection can reading “Save a Spanish Republican Child” was introduced as evidence in the atomic spy trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.51 While Spanish democracy was left to languish until Franco’s death, some of its champions now endured the postwar era’s consequences for such sympathies. The cause of Spain would henceforth be associated with communism.

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Conclusion

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A Tomb for Democracy

The prospect of a new general war was met with less enthusiasm than was opposition to fascism in Spain. In many cases the same proponents of Spanish aid, noncommunist and communist alike, resumed an isolationist disposition. This trend affected primarily the socialist and communist wings of the movement which had lost an ally in the Spanish Republic. Other left-leaning liberals supported aid to the allies. Communists followed the Comintern’s lead, as was to be expected, though following the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact a mass of resignations from the party indicated significant disagreement with the new policy. The departures further suggested the depth of commitment to antifascism and Spain’s cause. Yet even Norman Thomas and the socialists reconsidered their Spanish Civil War stance, if for different reasons. In Keep America Out of War, written just over six months after the Spanish conflict ended, Thomas argued, “[T]his Second World War is the continuation of the first.” Thomas had long articulated his belief—shared by many liberals and conservatives during the decade—that involvement in another global conflict was the first step on a path to dictatorship. Defense of Spain was intended to prevent a general war; with a general war, only remaining aloof would prevent dictatorship from emerging here. The country’s mood had begun to shift. The Nation and New Republic magazines, for instance, which had published supportive articles for Spain’s Republic, by 1939 supported aid to the allies. A prowar community of liberals, including the two magazines, now distanced itself from the Socialist Party. This reconsideration of the past by the socialists is curious, especially since President Roosevelt, whom the left had been prodding for the past three years, was now advancing toward a more active foreign policy, though one far beyond aid-short-of-war. The president’s new outlook was in tune with a call that emerged from a Trade Union conference on Spain in San Francisco in 1938. The working class delegates there offered what prefigured the AFL-CIO’s Cold War stance: “[W]e must make 122

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our government realize the danger to the U.S. of the success of German and Italian intervention in Spain. . . . What we need today is a ‘Roosevelt Doctrine’ that any attempt anywhere to destroy a free and democratic government is an unfriendly act, and the U.S. has both moral and legal precedents for interfering.”1 After World War II the United States asserted a newfound authority in world affairs, but its new direction, while informed by the Spanish events, was not entirely the result of the antifascist cause. Michael Hunt’s analysis of American ideology and foreign policy demonstrates that a desire for national greatness is among Americans’ primary impulses in confronting foreign crises. That impulse derives from an inherent missionary zeal—evident in the country’s first European roots in John Winthrop— and from a liberal tradition which bestowed upon the United States the distinction of being the first nation to implement a lasting democracy in the liberal mode, made evident in the Federalist Papers. In other words, leading Americans have continued to desire the expansion of their type of democracy, have intervened on occasion to advance it, and have justified that intervention on the grounds of the righteousness of this vision. Since the 1960s a growing body of literature has been contesting the justifications for these interventions and suggesting that aggrandizing national motives have long been a feature of U.S. foreign policy, but a revision appears to be underway that advocates an interventionist foreign policy closely adhering to the line Hunt described.2 Long before this revisionism and re-revisionism, publisher Henry Luce sounded a clarion call for the realization of “The American Century,” a liberal unilateralism. In 1941, on the brink of U.S. entry into the Second World War, Luce considered aid-short-of-war a “halfway measure,” at least at that point when the world war had already enveloped Europe. Given the circumstances—“the realities of our age”—it was up to the United States not only to arrive at an understanding of what was being fought for but to tell allies that this was the case. Rejecting both “isolationism” and aid-short-of-war (the modus vivendi of the Spanish republican aid movement), Luce proposed seizing the day. “[Americans must] accept wholeheartedly our duty and our opportunity as the most powerful and vital nation in the world,” Luce declared, “and in consequence to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit.” This did not mean imposing democratic institutions, Luce insisted, but rather a “truly American internationalism.” Luce posited an “internationalism of the people, by the people, and for the people.” This internationalism would include free enterprise, technical training, feeding the hungry, and a commitment to the ideals of justice, truth, and charity.3 “Because America alone among the nations of

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the earth was founded on ideas which transcend class and caste and racial and occupational difference,” Luce wrote in Life magazine a year later, “America alone can provide the pattern for the future. . . . America must be the elder brother of the nations in the brotherhood of man.”4 Luce’s challenge offered cover for a wide assortment of interventions. International involvement in the Spanish Civil War exemplified a brotherhood of men and embodied a liberalism that attempted to come to terms with contradictory positions: pacifism and antifascism, war and humanitarian assistance. Like Henry Luce, the Spanish Republic’s defenders were children of progressivism and witness to Rooseveltian liberalism of the 1930s. Events in Spain unfolded at a moment when the United States was undergoing a collective reconsideration of its place in the world, a consciousness with immense consequences for the future. At its core, Republican aid was a moderate political impulse intent on defending a perceived threat to American democracy, and it served the purposes of the Popular Front in which Spain was one singular battle in a larger conflict. Yet more importantly, the Republic’s defenders never called for military intervention by the United States, nor for a pre-emptive strike against possible aggression. They urged the application of international law as it then stood, which permitted the Spanish Republic to purchase armaments to put down an existing insurrection and served the additional purpose of thwarting an already aggressive and advancing fascist alliance in Europe. The Republic’s leaders pleaded for international assistance, and proponents of the effort to aid the Spanish Republic, organizing against pervasive isolationist sentiments, implemented a strategy set on keeping the United States, as they claimed, out of another war by forestalling the next conflict before it could spread. This resulting broad interest in Spanish solidarity that reached across class and geographic boundaries and that captured the imagination of Americans with few or no ties to the Spanish conflict cannot be explained either by the prevalence of communist influence or by a latent prowar sentiment. While strict isolationists seemed tortured by the effects on the U.S. of another war, proponents of aid-short-of-war worried about resigning their fates to Hitler. It was fears of what a victory of Hitler’s and Mussolini’s allies in Spain would mean for democracy internationally that led to flying the Republican banner in the international community. With collective security rendered impossible by the Western democracies and a German-Italian alliance backing the rebellion in left-wing Spain, disaffected parties of the “foreign policy public” in the U.S. sought out allies to provoke a change in the diplomatic course of action. So with few governments rallying to the defense of Republican Spain, a popular front coalition of political groups and in-

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dividuals organized resistance to a growing threat before a general war might erupt. The resulting movement was multitiered with a heavy communist presence at the ground level but an overall Popular Front coalition across its ranks that permitted broad involvement by noncommunists. The front functioned with collaboration, though not necessarily cooperation, between different groups, and Spain itself mattered (initially) only in the sense that two fascist powers were involved there. Fascism and its proliferation were the aid movement’s first concern. However, the “isolationist” bloc that resulted from America’s involvement in the Great War retained its grip on the public mind throughout the period. Along with the lingering concerns over the daily adversity of economic depression, a concerted resistance to European involvement worked against these advocates of Spanish Republican solidarity. The alleged inefficiency of the movement and the presence of communist supporters were both used by opponents to impugn the cause of Republican aid, but any inefficiency of the campaigns to aid the Spanish Republic distracts us from the larger concern of how broad and how active were the American proponents of a Republican victory. Fostering a culture of dissent carried financial costs within a culture of isolationism, as stories of relief aid in small towns attests. In the end, few aiding the Spanish Republic advocated anything greater than diplomatic interventionism, and even this effort came up short. George Orwell, reflecting on the war in the years after Homage to Catalonia, was convinced that the outcome of the Spanish war was settled in London, Paris, Rome, and Berlin—at any rate, not in Spain.”5 Curiously, for the anti-Stalinist Orwell, not in Moscow either. On the western side of the Atlantic, Washington shared some responsibility for that outcome as the Loyalist aid movement tried to convince President Roosevelt to take decisive action. The effort ultimately failed to move the political mountain that was “neutrality” but succeeded in galvanizing support across the political spectrum. The shallowness of its unity and the limited reach of its political front into American hearts was another matter. Anticommunist rhetoric, which played up the flaws of Republican Spain without acknowledging the complexities there and a general apathy toward foreign events contributed to the mounting political crisis and the political ineffectiveness of the movement. The communist presence was also easily misconstrued. In a 1938 statement to the McNaboe Committee, the “little HUAC” investigating subversion in New York, Earl Browder claimed that most of those recruited to the CP recently joined “precisely as a result of the Party’s publicly

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proclaimed policies, and would quickly abandon it if they should find a contradiction between its inner convictions and beliefs and those which it publicly proclaims.”6 That is in part what followed as one-third of the membership resigned. The party’s critics on the right seized on the contradictions apparent before the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact and exploited the party’s ties to Moscow during the campaigns to make illegitimate all Spanish Republican aid. In the meantime, people like Dorothy Schramm in Iowa and others in Cincinnati were making efforts, and with the nation’s press turning against appeasement following the Munich agreement—yet adhering to traditional isolationist tendencies—the movement might have enjoyed a renewed vigor. Public opinion by late 1938 had finally come around to favor assisting the faltering Republic. That the movement was unable to rally the masses resulted from several realities. Both the vociferous opposition, interpreted as a crucial Catholic bloc by many in the administration, and the unwillingness of Washington to blaze a path independent of the foreign policies emanating from London and Paris remained formidable barriers. Additionally, most Americans were not interested in attending to this particular challenge. Support for the Republic, after all, was accompanied by collective desires to retain neutrality. That many Americans hoped for a victory of the leftist revolution in Spain because they believed such a revolution was democratic matters less than the popular concern for a growing fascist threat that seemed threatening to their democracy. Yet, in the final analysis, antifascism focused on Spain mattered even less than a more general fear of entanglement in another World War. For those who lent a hand to Loyalist solidarity, the shortcomings of the movement and the flaws of the communists, indeed the inability to move a mountain, are not appropriate benchmarks. Antifascism followed from the imperatives of a growing threat—not just one perceived—but a threat actively demonstrated and manifested in Spain. Given the international political stakes in Spain, many agonized over the question: How could the Axis and its allies possibly prevail? As Alfred Kazin described this moral trajectory: “[T]he outrage of Franco, Mussolini, and Hitler working together was a challenge, not a defeat; I trusted to the righteousness of history.”7 While antifascism may have been founded on amorphous principles or assumptions, it nonetheless possessed real meaning to its adherents and would several years later come to define American culture. It became apparent not long after its death that the Republic’s proponents were right about the dangers ahead. When their actions failed, introspection was bound to follow. Unfortunately, that introspection came to define a dominant ideological strand after the war. Another strand, reflecting

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the deflated optimism of a common cause after defeat, has derived its most persistent meaning in France. Albert Camus’s oft-cited reflection remains the compass for historical thinking on the Spanish Civil War: “It was in Spain that my generation learned that one can be right and yet be beaten, that force can vanquish spirit, that there are times when courage is not its own recompense. It is this, doubtless, which explains why so many, the world over, feel the Spanish drama as a personal tragedy.”8 Of this struggle and its loss, the Spanish Civil War remains a living symbol in which many Americans shared in both embrace and mourning.

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Appendix COMPLETE LIST OF AID ORGANIZATIONS REGISTERED WITH STATE DEPARTMENT AND AMOUNTS OF AID AND EXPENSES ACCORDING TO THE GREEN REPORT ORGANIZATION (LOCATION AND DATE TOTAL RELIEF OF INCORPORATION IF AFTER MAY 1, 1937) COLLECTIONS EXPENSES Medical Bureau and North American Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy (New York City) 805,799.78 573,215.81 Spanish Societies to Aid Spain (Brooklyn)

249,342

374,815.27

289,899.02

32,345.37

6,148.56

29,776.45

None

89,086.62

73,570.49

15,422.01

American Friends Service Committee (Philadelphia)

218,612.51

141,234.52

50,939.99

Comité Popular Democrático de Sócorro a España (Tampa)

148,090.95

133,810.53

8,829.34

Central Spanish Relief Committee For Republican Spain (Washington, DC)

108,409.25

96,231.97

7,664.95

Friends of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade (NYC, June 4, 1937)

215,456.37

114,544.62

72,394.24

8,138.76

6,531.35

2,681.99

The Brooklyn Tablet (Newspaper) America Spanish Relief Fund (NYC)

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PUBLICIty COSTS

Ben Leider Memorial Fund (NYC, June 22, 1937)

129

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130

ORGANIZATION (LOCATION AND DATE OF INCORPORATION IF AFTER MAY 1, 1937)

TOTAL COLLECTIONS

RELIEF EXPENSES

1,099.34

1,103.50

Trade Union Relief For Spain (NYC, June 23, 1937)

32,903.97

21,040.00

5,236.90

Acción Democrata Española (San Francisco, June 28, 1937)

11,628.94

10,864.84

615.45

Auxiliary Committee For Aid and Assistance of Spanish People (Canton, OH July 14, 1937)

16,673.41

15,859.54

25.00

American Friends of Spanish Democracy (NYC, July 22, 1937)

15,850.22

5,059.86

10,701.45

422.46

422.46

81,565.71

78,585.85

2,875.80

5,789.93

251.23

United Libertarian Organizations (NYC, June 22, 1937)

Cooperative League of the USA (NYC) International Anti-Fascist Solidarity (NYC) American League for Peace and Democracy (NYC) War Resisters League (NYC) Copyright © 2013. University of Missouri Press. All rights reserved.

Appendix

6,043

PUBLICIty COSTS

None

None

189.79

189.79

None

National Spanish Relief Association (NYC, Nov 1937)

72,179.41

63,784.65

None

Spanish Child Welfare Association of America (NYC Dec 17, 1937)

46,892.37

26,928.00

17,524.75

Basque Sheepherders’ Overall Dance Assoc. (Boise, ID Dec 20, 1937)

1,366.00

1,104.00

262

Agrupacion Hispano Gallega (Newark, NJ Jan 24, 1938)

3,333.37

2,790.40

477.59

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Appendix ORGANIZATION (LOCATION AND DATE OF INCORPORATION IF AFTER MAY 1, 1937) Spanish Nationalist Relief Committee (NYC, Feb 10, 1937) Comite de Ayuda a Los Desvalidos a la España Leal (Manila, Philippines, Oct 28, 1938) Committee for Aid to Civilians in the Territory Loyal to the Spanish Republic of Spain (Manila, Nov. 18, 1938) Auxilio Social (Manila, Jan 7, 1939) Sociedades Hispanas Aliadas (San Francisco, Feb 13, 1939) Registrants who have ceased To operate and whose registrations Have been revoked

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Totals

131

TOTAL COLLECTIONS

RELIEF EXPENSES

PUBLICIty COSTS

15,628.31

2,859.35

2,057.92

2,933.40

2,185.95

406.2

894.75

712.50

12,506.97

5,880.68

921.22

637.86

162.45

58,690.46

28,645.67

31,707.65

2,356,214.53

1,733,259.59

523,004.05

57.50 2,349.1



Note that in some cases amounts include collections prior to May 1, 1937, but not always. Additionally, adding up the numbers will sometimes show a surplus which is the unexpended amount as of March 31, 1939. The total of unexpended collections for all groups is $121,325.56 and excludes expenses that may have gone out in March. MBNAC claimed it had shipped to Spain contributions valued at $257,301.62 during the duration of May 1, 1937 to March 21, 1939, so the values of aid before that time are not included here. Brooklyn Tablet Reported receiving $36,800.05 prior to May 1, 1937 and expending 12,282.78 of that.

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Appendix

The FALB of course is not really contributing to Spain, but to Americans. Spanish Child Welfare Association stated shipping contributions in kind of $2000 from April 1, 1938 to March 31, 1939. Spanish Nationalist Relief stated that $4,835 was contributed by the committee itself for office expenses and not relief.

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Pro-Franco organizations are in bold type.

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Notes

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Introduction 1. Mary Gordon to William Crookston, June 11, 1937, Medical Bureau 2, Box 10, Part K, Spanish Refugee Relief Organizations, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University (herein SRRO); Mary Gordon to John Sherman, July 13, 1937, Medical Bureau 3, SRRO. 2. The literature on the brigades is extensive. A range of introductions might include Peter Carroll, The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade: Americans in the Spanish Civil War (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994); the classic Arthur H. Landis, The Abraham Lincoln Brigade (New York: The Citadel Press, 1967); and the recent revisionism of Cecil B. Eby, Comrades and Commissars: The Lincoln Battalion in the Spanish Civil War (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007). 3. Daniel Kowalsky, Stalin and the Spanish Civil War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 4: 2; for the British treatment see Angela Jackson, British Women and the Spanish Civil War (New York: Routledge, 2002); and James Fyrth, The Signal Was Spain: Spanish Aid Movement in Britain (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986); Allen Guttmann, The Wound in the Heart: America and the Spanish Civil War (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1962); Dominic Tierney, FDR and the Spanish Civil War (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007), 3. 4. The Popular Front grew out of a series of events, in particular the Seventh Congress of the Comintern in 1935, though many scholars point to earlier indications of antifascist cooperation. This literature is too vast to cite in full. A concise treatment can be found in Malcolm Sylvers, “American Communists in the Popular Front Period: Reorganization or Disorganization?” Journal of American Studies 23, no. 3 (1989): 375–93. See also Jonathan Haslam, “The Comintern and the Origins of the Popular Front, 1934–1935,” Historical Journal 22, no. 3 (1979): 673–91; and Fraser M. Ottanelli, The Communist Party of the United States: From the Depression to World War II (New Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers University Press, 1991), 58–61, 120. Dimitrov’s report to the Seventh Congress is online: Georgi Dimitrov, “The Fascist Offensive and the Tasks of the Communist International in the Struggle of the Working Class against Fascism,” Marxists.org, accessible at: http://www. marxists.org/reference/archive/dimitrov/works/1935/08_02.htm. 5. Michael E. Chapman, Arguing Americanism: Franco Lobbyists, Roosevelt’s Foreign Policy, and the Spanish Civil War (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2011). 6. This includes the foregoing paragraph on post–World War aid. Merle Curti, American Philanthropy Abroad: A History (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1963), 272, 273n24, 339–40. 7. These entanglements can be found, for instance, in Mark T. Gilderhus, The Second Century: U.S.-Latin American Relations Since 1889 (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, Inc., 2000), 37–112; Neill Macaulay, The Sandino Affair (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1985 [1967]); Bruce Calder, The Impact of Intervention: 133

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Notes to Pages 5–9

The Dominican Republic during the U.S. Occupation of 1916–1924 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1984). 8. Richard H. Pells, Radical Visions and American Dreams: Culture and Social Thought in the Depression Years (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), 309. 9. Edward Weisband, The Ideology of American Foreign Policy: A Paradigm of Lockian Liberalism (Beverly Hills and London: Sage Publications, 1973), 15. 10. Guttmann, Wound in the Heart, 66, 84–85, 87–88, 96. 11. Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls (New York: Scribner, 2003), 467. 12. Stanley G. Payne, Fascism: Comparison and Definition (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1980), 196–207, 141–47. Even Robert Paxton, in his thesis on the continuities of fascism across Europe, concedes it was largely not evident in Spain. Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (New York : Knopf, 2004), 149. Franco did assign significant tasks to the JONS, Spain’s fascist party, during his regime. For an interesting treatment of the party’s role see, for example, Olivia Muñoz-Rojas, Ashes and Granite: Destruction and Reconstruction in the Spanish Civil War and Its Aftermath (Brighton and Portland: Sussex Academic Press, 2011). 13. John Patrick Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972), 24–30, 103–5, 290–93; Peter d’Agostino, Rome in America: Transnational Catholic Ideology from the Risorgimento to Fascism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 250; William E. Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932–1940 (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), 275–78; Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (New York: Verso, 1996), 5–6. 14. Albert Halper, Good-bye, Union Square: A Writer’s Memoir of the Thirties (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1970), 215, 218. 15. “A bare scaffolding of ideology” is from Frank A. Warren, III, Liberals and Communism: The “Red Decade” Revisited (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1966), 108. 16. Ibid., 6–7; Denning, Cultural Front, 4. 17. Propaganda produced by the political right is discussed in chapter four. 18. Ian Patterson, Guernica and Total War (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007), 5. 19. Ibid. Helen Graham contends that this elision was not out of malice but reflected the realities of a power vacuum following a coup. See Helen Graham, The Spanish Republic at War, 1936–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 85. 20. How barbaric has been the subject of an ongoing scholarly battle between the Republic’s academic defenders and its critics. That literature is too expansive to review in full, but a convincing review article can be found in Chris Ealham, “The Emperor’s New Clothes: ‘Objectivity’ and Revisionism in Spanish History,” Journal of Contemporary History 48 (2013): 191–202. An interesting mix of essays from both camps offering a broad perspective on Spanish violence can be found in Santos Juliá, ed., Violencia política en la España del siglo XX (Madrid: Grupo Santillana de Ediciones, S.A., 2000); on the Civil War, two recent opposing perspectives can be found in Paul Preston, The Spanish Civil War: Reaction, Revolution, and Revenge (New York: Harper Perennial, 2006) and Stanley Payne, The Spanish Civil War, the Soviet Union, and Communism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004). For considerations of the revisionist literature see Enrique Moradiellos, “Critical historical revision and political revisionism,” International Journal of Iberian Studies 21, no. 3 (2008): 219–29, and Ángela Cenarro, “Francoist nostalgia and

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memories of the Spanish Civil War,” International Journal of Iberian Studies 21, no. 3 (2008): 203–17. 21. American League Against War and Fascism pamphlet, “Fascism—What is It?” June 1936, R Misc., Part B, Box 28, SRRO. 22. “Need the New Deal Be Fascist?” The Nation, January 9, 1935, 32, 33. 23. George Seldes, One Thousand Americans (New York: Boni & Gaer, 1947), 287–92. 24. Raymond Gram Swing, Forerunners of American Fascism (New York: Julian Messner, Inc., 1935), 16–17, 15. 25. Dwight MacDonald, “Letters to the Editors: The American Writers’ Congress,” The Nation, June 19, 1937, 714. Macdonald dismissed himself from the Popular Front following the American Writers’ Congress in 1937 where he found that the front was “indefinitely extensible on the right but on the left is strictly limited to the Communist Party. . . . It was made quite clear to me that radicals with my heretical views about Stalinism were not welcome.” 26. Dwight MacDonald’s pamphlet Fascism and the American Scene (New York: Pioneer Publishers, 1938) was reprinted as the introduction to Daniel Guerin, Fascism and Big Business (New York: Pioneer Publishers, 1939), x–xi, xvii–xviii, xix. 27. Ibid., 12. Alan Brinkley offers an insightful analysis of the connections between Huey Long and Fr. Charles Coughlin and the fascist movements abroad, as well as the incongruities between them. Alan Brinkley, Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression (New York: Vintage Books, 1983), 278–83. 28. See, for example, John L. Lewis’s expression of this fear of fascism’s growth in “Lewis sees threat to U.S. by fascism with aid of capital,” New York Times, September 12, 1938, 1. For coverage of the far right in the U.S. in this period see M. J. Heale, American Anticommunism: Combating the Enemy Within, 1830–1970 (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 99–121. 29. See Michael E. Chapman, Arguing Americanism, 1–34; Patrick J. McNamara, “Pro-Franco Sentiment and Activity in New York City,” in Peter N. Carroll and James D. Fernandez, eds., Facing Fascism: New York and the Spanish Civil War (New York: Museum of the City of New York and New York University Press, 2007), 92–101. 30. Malcolm Cowley, The Dream of the Golden Mountains: Remembering the 1930s (New York: Penguin Books, 1981), 157; see also Heale, American Anticommunism, 99–121. 31. Fraser M. Ottanelli, Communist Party of the United States, 164. 32. Of the three novels, only Lewis’s received more than academic attention as Knoenagel explains. Axel Knoenagel, “The Historical Context of Sinclair Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here,” Southern Humanities Review 29, no. 3 (Summer 1995): 221–40; Cowley, Dream of the Golden Mountains, 296. 33. Leland Stowe, Nazi Means War (New York: Whittlesey House, 1934), 136. 34. Some scholars have used the term brown scare. The omens of war were evident in the political opportunism by the likes of Long, Coughlin, and Smith, and in the more visible rumblings of the German-American Bund and Italian brown shirts (especially on the streets of New York). The omens abound as well in a body of it-can-happen-here literature. See Leo P. Ribuffo, The Old Christian Right: The Protestant Far Right from the Great Depression to the Cold War (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983), 178–224.

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Notes to Pages 12–20

35. Guttmann, Wound in the Heart, 206. 36. Sidney Hook, “The Anatomy of the Popular Front,” Partisan Review 6, no. 3 (Spring 1939): 32, 38. 37. The liberal impulse to support Spain is explained in Guttmann, Wound in the Heart, 81–83, 88, 90–96.

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Chapter 1 International Crisis and Reactions 1. Quote from British Ambassador Robert W. Bingham in Richard P. Traina, American Diplomacy and the Spanish Civil War (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968), 41. 2. The adviser was James Clement Dunn, the chief of the Division of Western European Affairs. Douglas Little, Malevolent Neutrality: The United States, Great Britain, and the Origins of the Spanish Civil War (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1985), 228–63. 3. Ibid., 305–10; Warren, Liberals and Communism, 6–7, 33, 92–102; Ralph Lord Roy, Communism and the Churches (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1960), 66–68; Alfred Kazin, Starting Out in the Thirties (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1965 [1962]), 87. For a brief discussion of the foreign policy historiography see Thomas G. Paterson, On Every Front: The Making and Unmaking of the Cold War (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1992), 145–46. 4. Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism, 111–43. 5. The historiography on the Popular Front is vast. The understanding here generally derives from Ottanelli, Communist Party of the United States, 58–61, 120; Denning offers a lucid rebuttal of the dismissal of “dupes”—noncommunist fellow travelers—in Cultural Front, xvii–xviii. 6. Haslam, “The Comintern and the Origins of the Popular Front,” 673–91; see also Sylvers, “American Communists in the Popular Front Period,” 375–93; Ottanelli, Communist Party of the United States, 173. 7. Fraser M. Ottanelli, “The New York City Left and the Spanish Civil War,” and Eric R. Smith, “New York’s Aid to the Spanish Republic,” both in Carroll and Fernandez, eds., Facing Fascism, 40–51, 60–69. 8. Carol Rehfisch to Jack Sherman, May 20, 1938, San Francisco 2, Box 4, Part K, SRRO; Carol Rehfisch to Jack Sherman, November 5, 1938, San Francisco 4, Box 3, ibid.; Hugh Henshaw to Thayer, March 7, 1938, Cincinnati 2, Box 25, ibid. Even the most cautious historians have tended to imply, if not characterize, the aid campaigns as more communist than not. See Hugh Thomas, The Spanish Civil War (New York: Harper & Row, 1986), 225, 305; F. Jay Taylor, The United States and the Spanish Civil War (New York: Bookman, 1956), 131; Traina, American Diplomacy and the Spanish Civil War, 181–81. A recent example of broad over-reaching is Eby, Comrades and Commissars, 9, where the NAC is called the fund-raising arm of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion; for a treatment of partisanship, see Eric R. Smith, “The Communist Party, Cooptation, and Aid to the Spanish Republic,” American Communist History 8, no. 2 (2009), 137–66. See also MacDonald, “Letters to the Editors,” 714. 9. Pells, Radical Visions and American Dreams, 309. 10. The Kellogg-Briand Pact was the 1928 attempt to outlaw war. Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism, 304–9; Brenda Gayle Plummer, Rising Wind: Black Americans and U.S. Foreign Affairs, 1935–1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 47, 50.

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11. Peter N. Carroll, Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, 54; Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism, 289; Plummer, Rising Wind, 44. 12. Carroll, Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, 54; Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism, 289; Robin D. G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: Free Press, 1996), 131; Plummer, Rising Wind, 43–44, 47. 13. Kelley, Race Rebels, 52, 132–33; Carroll, Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, 55. 14. Kelley, Race Rebels, 132; Langston Hughes to Roger Chase, February 9, 1937, Part A, Box 2, SRRO. 15. “Ethiopia Deserves Aid of All Liberty-Lovers,” Daily Worker, Oct. 8, 1936; Mark Naison, Communists in Harlem during the Depression (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005 [1984]), 174–75. 16. Stanley Payne, Spain’s First Democracy: The Second Republic, 1931–1936 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993), 7, 9, 11, 22–23, 28, 375; Dominic Tierney, FDR and the Spanish Civil War, 16. 17. Payne, Spain’s First Democracy, 375. 18. See ibid., 378; Gabriel Jackson, The Spanish Republic and the Civil War, 1931– 1939 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1967 [1965]), 48–52. 19. This is another place to consider the historiographic divide. The foremost authority on the church violence is Julián Casanova, who offers a brief introduction to the subject in “Franco, the Catholic Church, and the Martyrs” in Anindya Raychaudhuri, ed., Spanish Civil War: History, Memory, and Representation (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2013), 8–19; revisions can be found in Luis Pío Moa Rodriguez, Los Mitos de la Guerra Civil (Madrid: La Esfera de los Libros, 2003), 21–33, and in Stanley G. Payne, The Collapse of the Spanish Republic, 1933–1936 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006), 52–95; a multidimensional treatment that considers motivations on both sides of the 1934 violence can be found in Paul Preston, The Coming of the Spanish Civil War: Reform, Reaction, and Revolution in the Second Republic, 1931–1936 (New York: Routledge, 1994), 92–129; see also the original edition: Paul Preston, The Coming of the Spanish Civil War: Reform, Reaction, and Revolution in the Second Republic, 1931–1936 (New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1978), 51–61; Graham, Spanish Republic at War, 84; and finally Payne, Spain’s First Democracy, 12, 375. 20. Payne, Spanish Civil War, 53, 56, 57; Jackson, Spanish Republic and the Civil War, 148–68; Graham, Spanish Republic at War, 58; Preston, Spanish Civil War, 66–101. 21. Paul Preston, Franco: A Biography (London: HarperCollins Publishers, 1993), 112–13. 22. Previous paragraphs derive generally from Tierney, FDR and the Spanish Civil War, 16–17; Jackson, Spanish Republic and the Civil War, 318; Daniel Kowalsky, Stalin and the Spanish Civil War, 11: 4, 7: 11, and 11: 19. 23. Kowalsky, Stalin and the Spanish Civil War, 4: 22, Conclusion: 29. 24. Payne, Spanish Civil War, 158; Richard P. Traina, American Diplomacy and the Spanish Civil War, 169. 25. Tierney, FDR and the Spanish Civil War, 68; Press release on arms trafficking. Part E, Box 7, Embargo—State Dept., SRRO. Germany received aircraft engines, propellers, and parts plus some miscellaneous small-caliber ammunition and large-caliber guns and ammunition (over .22 caliber). Italy received aircraft, either assembled or unassembled.

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Notes to Pages 25–29

26. Taylor, United States and the Spanish Civil War, 133. 27. See Geoffrey Roberts, “Soviet Foreign Policy and the Spanish Civil War,” in Christian Leitz and David J. Dunthorn, eds., Spain in an International Context, 1936–1959 (New York: Berghahn Books, 1999), 85–87. 28. Roberts, “Soviet Foreign Policy and the Spanish Civil War,” 83–85, 97; Graham, Spanish Republic at War, 153; Robert H. Whealey, Hitler and Spain: The Nazi Role in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1989), 103; Payne, Spanish Civil War, 172; Angel Viñas, El Escudo de la República (Barcelona: Crítica, 2007), 89–121; Gerald Howson, Arms for Spain: The Untold Story of the Spanish Civil War (London: John Murray, 1998), 121. 29. Hull quoted in Robert Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 127–28; Tierney, FDR and the Spanish Civil War, 73. 30. Graham, Spanish Republic at War, 111. 31. Ibid., 115–17. 32. Ibid., 85–87. 33. Peter Nyers, Rethinking Refugees: Beyond States of Emergency (New York and London: Routledge, 2006), 29–30. 34. Ronald Radosh, Mary R. Habeck, and Grigory Sevostianov, Spain Betrayed: The Soviet Union in the Spanish Civil War (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001), 122, 141–46, 152, 155–65. 35. Associations beyond anarchist circles probably lie in the adoption of Spain’s CNT-FAI model where the motto was “Everything within the organization. Nothing outside the organization.” Paul Avrich, Anarchist Voices: An Oral History of Anarchism in America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995), 148–49.; Green Report, Cordell Hull Papers, Microfilm Reel 49, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (herein Hull papers). The significance of Italian anarchists can be found in Fraser M. Ottanelli, “‘If Fascism Comes to America We Will Push It Back into the Ocean’: Italian American Antifascism in the 1920s and 1930s,” in Donna R. Gabaccia and Fraser M. Ottanelli, eds., Italian Workers of the World: Labor Migration and the Formation of Multiethnic States (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 186–88. The Spanish Labor Bulletin claimed that “[t]here are factory and mining towns in the United States where the whole Spanish population is enrolled in the SIA.” Spanish Labor Bulletin 1, no. 23 (August 19, 1938), in Spanish Civil War Collection, Special Collections, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois. 36. Executive Board Minutes, January 2, 21, and 27, 1937, Organizational Minutes and Reports—Executive Board folder, Box 2, Part C, SRRO; Tresca to Dos Passos, March 3, 1937, cited in Virginia Spencer Carr, Dos Passos: A Life (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1984), 357. For an account of Dos Passos’s disillusionment see Paul Preston, We Saw Spain Die: Foreign Correspondents in the Spanish Civil War (London: Constable and Robinson, Ltd., 2009 [2008]), 72–108. 37. Spanish Labor Bulletin 1, no. 29 (November 4, 1938). 38. Bernard Johnpoll, Pacifist’s Progress: Norman Thomas and the Decline of American Socialism (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1970), 185–87; Charles Chatfield, For Peace and Justice: Pacificism in America, 1914–1941 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1971), 241–44. Bill Streeter, “Memo on SP Convention,” February 23, 1937, Sidney Lens Manuscripts, Box 22, Chicago History Museum, Chicago, Illinois. Sidney Lens quote in Sidney Lens, Unrepentant Radical: An American Activists’ Account of Five Turbulent Decades (Boston: Beacon Press, 1980), 82.

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39. Norman Thomas Memo, January 1937, Reel 54, Norman Thomas Papers, New York Public Library, New York City (herein Thomas papers). 40. Ibid. Allen and Thomas would collaborate in 1938 on the Keep America Out of War Congress. See chapter five. 41. Charles Chatfield, For Peace and Justice, 415n59; Challman to Ditkoff, August 20, 1937, Detroit, Box 3, Part M, SRRO; Minutes, May 12, 1937, Minutes, Box 2, American Friends of Spanish Democracy, New York Public Library (herein AFSD). 42. Norman Thomas to Devere Allen, August 26, 1936, Reel 54, Thomas papers. 43. U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, Special Committee on Un-American Activities, Investigation of Un-American Propaganda Activities in the United States, 75th Cong, 3rd Sess., Vol. 4, November 22, 1938, 2526–27. 44. Quote in Robert Morss Lovett, All Our Years: The Autobiography of Robert Morss Lovett (New York: The Viking Press, 1948), 26; Klehr, The Heyday of American Communism (New York: Basic Books, 1984), 400–404. 45. Reissig to Browder, June 17, 1938, Communist Party folder, Box 4, Part H, SRRO. 46. Peggy Lamson, Roger Baldwin: Founder of the American Civil Liberties Union (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976), 202; Reissig to Browder, June 17, 1938, Communist Party, Box 4, Part H, SRRO. 47. Alan Wald, The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 313. 48. Philip Rahv, “Two Years of Progress—From Waldo Frank to Donald Ogden Stewart,” Partisan Review 4, no. 3 (February 1938), 22–30. Schism quote in Lens, Unrepentant Radical, 47. 49. Emphasis in original. Paul Eiffel to Sidney Lens, July 26, 1937, Box 22, Sidney Lens Manuscripts, Chicago History Museum, Chicago, Illinois. 50. Macdonald, “Letters to the Editors,” 714. 51. Michael Wreszin, A Rebel in Defense of Tradition: The Life and Politics of Dwight Macdonald (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 62; Dwight Macdonald to Dinsmore Wheeler, May 30, 1938, in Michael Wreszin, ed., A Moral Temper: The Letters of Dwight Macdonald (Chicago: Ivan Dee, 2001), 97. 52. Dwight Macdonald, Memoirs of a Revolutionist: Essays in Political Criticism (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Cudahy, 1957), 11. 53. See Trade Union Relief for Spain, Accounting: Monies Raised and Expended, August 1936–April 1937 (New York: The Union, 1937), 1–7; also Gus Tyler, Look for the Union Label: A History of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1995), 216. 54. Trade Union Relief for Spain, Accounting, 1–7. 55. Tyler, Union Label, 166. 56. The International Federation of Trade Unions (and also the Socialist International), though critical of the Non-Intervention Committee, refused to cooperate with the Comintern. See Payne, Spanish Civil War, 147; “The Neutrality Trap,” Daily Worker, September 27, 1936, 8; and “Dubinsky’s Red-Baiting,” Daily Worker, September 28, 1936, 6. 57. Executive Board Minutes, January 2, 1937, Organizational Minutes and Reports—Executive Board folder, Box 2, Part C, SRRO. 58. This departure prompted an invitation to Reissig to join the Executive

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Notes to Pages 34–36

Committee until the SAFC could be convinced to return. They never did, and Reissig remained. Ibid., January 29, 1937. 59. Ibid., March 5, 1937; Conferencia Nacional de Sociedades Hispanas Confederadas de Ayuda a España, Memoria del Congreso Nacional Celebrado Durante los días 6 y 7 de Noviembre de 1937 en la Ciudad de Pittsburgh, Pa. (Brooklyn: The Sociedades, 1937). 60. Paul Buhle, “Lovestoneites,” in Paul Buhle, Mary Jo Buhle, and Dan Georgakas, eds. Encyclopedia of the American Left (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 435–37. 61. Rahv, “Two Years of Progress,” 25. 62. McWilliams to Louis Adamic, December 26, 1937, cited in Daniel Geary, “Carey McWilliams and Antifascism, 1934–1943,” Journal of American History (December 2003): 912–34. 63. “Spain and American Writers,” in Henry Hart, ed., The Writer in a Changing World (New York: Equinox Cooperative Press, 1937), 57–58. 64. Substantial work has been undertaken on Tampa’s response by Ana VarelaLago. Marcelino Domingo also wrote about the community in a document translated by Varela-Lago. See especially a series of articles in Tampa Bay History: Marcelino Domingo, “‘Tampa, Altar of Spain’: A Spanish Republican View of Tampa in the 1930s,” Tampa Bay History 19, no. 2 (1997), 69–72; Ana Varela-Lago, “‘We Had to Help’: Remembering Tampa’s Response to the Spanish Civil War,” ibid., 36–56; “‘No Pasaran!’ The Spanish Civil War’s Impact on Tampa’s Latin Community,” ibid., 5–35; and “Tampa and the Spanish Civil War: A Photographic Essay,” ibid., 57–68. See also Crystal Taylor, “For Love of Liberty: Tampeaños Remember the Spanish Civil War,” Southern Exposure 21, no. 1 (Spring 2003). The Spanish aid activities in Tampa revolved around the Centro Asturiano which is the subject of Ana Varelo-Lago, “From Patriotism to Mutualism: The Early Years of the Centro Española de Tampa,” Tampa Bay History 15, no. 2 (1993), 5–23. 65. U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, Special Committee on Un-American Activities, Investigation of Un-American Propaganda Activities in the United States, 75th Cong., 3rd Sess. (Vol. 4, November 22, 1938), 2525; Sam Baron to “Friend” [form letter], December 24, 1936, United Spanish Societies, Box 7, Part H, SRRO. 66. This group appears to be the same as the Sociedades Hispanas Confederadas de Ayuda de España (SHC), i.e. Spanish Confederated Societies to Aid Spain. The name change appears to have grown out of a Madison Square Garden meeting in early January of 1937. Conferencia Nacional de Sociedades Hispanas Confederadas de Ayuda a España, Memoria del Congreso Nacional. 67. Marta Rey Garcia, Stars for Spain: La Guerra Civil Española en los Estados Unidos (Sada: Edicios do Castro, 1997), 120. 68. “American Unions Send Spain $10,000 to Fight Fascists,” Daily Worker, August 1, 1936, 1; “United Action to Support the Fight Against Fascism,” Daily Worker, July 29, 1936, 1. Relying on documents from W. Steele of the National Republic, HUAC investigators associated any positive comments by the communists as evidence of control of an organization. They credited the International Labor Defense as responsible for the movement’s infrastructure, a notion that attributed to this one organization the work of the number of groups and initiatives discussed here. See Investigation of Un-American Propaganda Activities in the United States, 75th Cong., 3rd Sess., Vol. 1, 1938, 569–71. For a detailed treatment of the political and movement aspects of aid to Spain, see Eric R. Smith, “Anti-Fascism,

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the United Front, and Spanish Republican Aid in the United States, 1936–1940” (PhD. diss., University of Illinois at Chicago, 2007), 101–48. 69. The accounting report by the relief organization showed a total collected of $125,000 with $98,000 actually sent to the International Federation of Trade Unions. The remainder (21 percent of collections) covered expenses. See Trade Union Relief for Spain, Accounting, 1–7. Trade Union Relief for Spain raised $32,903.97 for the duration of the war following May 1937, with a total of $21,040 distributed in aid (36 percent overhead). See the Appendix. 70. Robert Cottrell, Roger Nash Baldwin and the American Civil Liberties Union (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 235. 71. “Form Group to Aid Spain,” Daily Worker, October 2, 1936, 3; any doubts about the AFSD’s liberal credentials are dispelled by Bert Leech to Reissig, February 1, 1937, San Francisco NAC 1, Box 5, Part K, SRRO, in which a communist organizer discusses the uses of a liberal organization like the AFSD. 72. Julia Newman, Into the Fire: American Women in the Spanish Civil War (New York: Exemplary Films, 2002). 73. Schedule 3A—Food and Clothing, Statement of Receipts and Disbursements, October 31, 1936, to January 31, 1939, Organization Minutes and Reports, Box 3, Part C, SRRO. 74. Antonio Ortega to AFSD, March 1, 1937, Miscellaneous D 1, Box 9, Part B, SRRO. 75. Studs Terkel, Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression (New York: The New Press, 1986), 39. 76. Mary Gordon to Jack Sherman, December 22, 1937, Box 10, Part K, SRRO. 77. Gordon to Sherman, December 28, 1937, ibid. 78. “Thomas” to Medical Bureau, May 3, 1938, Translations 4, Box 4, Part J, SRRO. 79. “New Shipment of Medicine Sent to Spain,” Daily Worker, October 24, 1936, 2. 80. Rey Garcia, Stars for Spain, 116–22. 81. Virgilio Zapatero, Fernando de los Ríos: Biografía Intelectual (Valencia: PreTextos, 1999), 418. 82. “Citrine Calls Spain Most Democratic,” Daily Worker, October 9, 1936, 2. 83. “Medical Facilities Lacking in Madrid,” New York Times, August 22, 1936, 1; Carroll, Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, 68. It is also worth noting that the medical volunteers did offer medical aid to enemy combatants, as well. Volunteer nurse Ave Bruzzichesi recounts how “we operated on an Italian pilot whose plane was hit when he came over the city to drop bombs.” The pilot told her that he had little choice in the matter with “a wife and children to support.” See Bruzzichesi, “I Was a Catholic Nurse in Loyalist Spain,” American Relief Ship Publicity Campaign, Box 4, Part O, SRRO. 84. See material in Edward Barsky Papers, particularly Edward Barsky, “The Surgeon Goes to War,” (unpublished manuscript, undated), Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives, Robert Wagner Labor Archives, Tamiment Library, New York University (herein ALBA). 85. Guy Emery Shipler form letter, October 28, 1936, Minutes, Box 2, AFSD; “Loyalist Spain Needs Medical Aid Urgently,” Daily Worker, Oct. 1, 1936, 3; “New Shipment of Medicine Sent to Spain,” Daily Worker, October 24, 1936, 2; Roy, Communism and the Churches, 117.

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Notes to Pages 39–43

86. Roger Baldwin and Fred Hodgson to Albert MacLeod, December 24, 1936, Canada, Toronto—NAC 1, Box 2, Part J SRRO; “$100,000 Raised in U.S. and Canada for Spain,” New York Times, December 30, 1936, 13. 87. Klehr, Heyday of American Communism, 380. 88. Taylor, United States and the Spanish Civil War, 87; Reissig to R. Baron, February 17, 1937, ILD 1, Box 5, Part H, SRRO. For more on New York City, see Smith, “New York’s Aid to the Spanish Republic,” 40–51, and “Anti-Fascism, the United Front, and the Politics of Spanish Republican Aid in the United States,” 101–48. 89. Schedule B1, Organization Minutes and Reports, Box 3, Part C, SRRO. 90. Unsigned note, December 17, 1938, Embargo-Trade Unions, Box 7, Part E. 91. Halper, Good-bye, Union Square, 215, 218. 92. Green Report, Hull Papers, Library of Congress. 93. Kathleen Norris (San Francisco Medical Bureau) to FDR (cable), February 17, 1938, 422C, Official File, Roosevelt Papers, Franklin Delano Roosevelt Presidential Library, Hyde Park, New York (herein FDRL). 94. Marion Merriman to Jack Sherman, July 1, 1938, San Francisco 1, Part K, Box 4, SRRO. 95. Reissig to Merriman, July 7, 1938, San Francisco 1, Part K, Box 4, SRRO. 96. As Helen Graham has pointed out, acquiring weaponry on the black market— the only way the Republic could acquire such matériel—caused insurmountable problems of incompatibility, overhead costs, and price inflation. Graham, Spanish Republic at War, 157–58. For medical details see Nicholas Coni, “Medicine and the Spanish Civil War,” Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 95, no. 3 (March 2002): 147–50; Fyrth, Signal Was Spain, 144–50; Frances Patai, “Heroines of the Good Fight: Testimonies of U.S. Volunteer Nurses in the Spanish Civil War, 1936– 1939,” Nursing History Review 3 (1995), 80–81. The discovery of antibiotics a few years later made this innovation of plaster casting unnecessary, but the technique addressed a shortage of supplies at the time. Hugh Jones, “The Spanish Civil War: A Study in American Public Opinion Propaganda and Pressure Groups” (PhD. diss., University of Southern California, 1949), 168n38.

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Chapter 2 Movement Culture 1. W. H. Auden, “Spain,” in Stephen Spender and John Lehmann, eds., Poems for Spain (London: The Hogarth Press, 1939), 57. 2. Kenneth T. Jackson, Chicago Council on Foreign Relations: A Record of Forty Years (Chicago: Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, 1963), 20; Jay Allen, “The Spanish Nightmare II,” October 8, 1937, Chicago Council on Foreign Relations Papers, Special Collections, Daley Library, University of Illinois at Chicago; William E. Dodd, “The Dilemma of the International Situation,” February 28, 1938, ibid; Walter Johnson, ed., The Papers of Adlai E. Stevenson : Beginnings of Education 1900–1941, vol. 1 (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1972), 377; Kenneth S. Davis, The Politics of Honor: A Biography of Adlai E. Stevenson (New York: G. P. Putnams’ Sons, 1967), 125. 3. Life reported on the event in its December 20 issue. Jack Sherman to Charles Page, December 30, 1937, Hollywood 1, Box 2, Part K, SRRO; Andrew Bagnato, “A chocolate lovers’s paradise—bar none,” Chicago Tribune, November 17, 1985, section 3, 4; Guttmann, Wound in the Heart, 220. 4. On the foreign policy public see Paterson, On Every Front, 146; Gabriel Al-

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mond, The American People and Foreign Policy (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1950) 4–8, 66–69. 5. Ulf Hannerz, Cultural Complexity: Studies in the Social Organization of Meaning (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 49–51. This discussion is not to suggest that academic agreement exists on what movement culture is but that the present case illustrates obvious intersections that might advance such a discussion. 6. C. Wright Mills, Power, Politics, and People: The Collected Essays of C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963), 406. 7. Denning, Cultural Front, 38. 8. For previous uses of this framework see Robbie Lieberman, “My Song is My Weapon,” People’s Songs, American Communism, and the Politics of Culture, 1930–1950 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), xvi–xvii, 14–24; Lawrence Goodwyn, The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 84–87. 9. Robert Cohen, When the Old Left Was Young: Student Radicals and America’s First Mass Student Movement, 1929–1941 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 38, 137–41. 10. “Nation’s Students Join Peace Rallies,” New York Times, April 23, 1936, 14; John D. Singleton, “Youth’s Move for Peace” (letter), ibid., 20. 11. The Oxford Pledge was a pacifist statement picked up by American students from English students at Oxford. Parry, “The Spanish Civil War,” 150. 12. Ibid. 13. Daniel J. Yovich, “Last of a Brave Breed,” Hyde Park Herald, November 8, 2006, 8; Mary Gordon to Stella Carmon 16 August 1937, Illinois–Chicago 3, Box 10, Part K, SRRO; Walter Cannon to William Crookston, May 17, 1937, Cannon, Box 4, Part B, SRRO; Cannon to Ben Segal, May 20, 1937, ibid.; Segal to Cannon, May 24, 1937, ibid.; Hank Rubin, Spain’s Cause Was Mine: A Memoir of an American Medic in the Spanish Civil War (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997), 16–21; Aaron Hilkevitch interview, February 1, 2004, in author’s possession. 14. Cohen, When the Old Left Was Young, 156. 15. Minutes, October 4, 1937, Organization Minutes and Reports—Executive Committee, Box 2, Part C, SRRO. 16. Al Hamilton to Russell Thayer, October 22, 1937, YPSL, Box 7, Part H, SRRO. 17. Cohen, When the Old Left Was Young, 29–30. 18. Ibid., 114–15. In a series of articles in the student newspaper in early 1938, students waged a campaign against Robinson ultimately leading to his resignation. “SC Asks Board to Investigate, Remove President Robinson,” The Campus 62 (30) June 1, 1938: 1; “Robinson Resigns as President,” The Campus 63 (24) December 16, 1938: 1. 19. Milton Wolff to Reissig, February 19, 1937, College of the City of New York, Part I, Box 2, SRRO; for some details on the Jewish students see Cohen, When the Old Left Was Young, 24–25. 20. Lyman Bradley to Colleagues, April 29, 1939; Faculty Activists, The Struggle for Free Speech at City University of New York, 1931–1942, Virtual New York City, CCNY Digital Archives and Collections, City College of New York. Accessible at: http://www.virtualny.cuny.edu/gutter/panels/panel1.html. 21. Harold Kocin, “Coach Alfred Chaikin Tells of Rebellion in Barcelona on

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Return from People’s Olympics Shifted by War,” The Campus 59 (1) September 23, 1936: 1. The archivists at City College have now archived The Campus online. All issues referred to herein are accessible at: http://digital-archives.ccny.cuny.edu/ gallery/?page_id=625. Like the other electronic materials from the free speech exhibition, these appear in the bibliography as CCNY materials. 22. The NAC’s folder on College of the City of New York is fairly thin, though the proximity to the national offices facilitated speakers as the correspondence makes abundantly clear. Moreover, there was overlap in membership between the S.C. and the ASU. See for example, Sylvia Pecarsky to Dorothy Parker, April 6, 1938, College of the City of New York, Part I, Box 2, SRRO; Rose Schweitzer to Sonay Merims, March 3, 1938, ibid.; Marion Briggs to ASU, December 15, 1937, ibid.; Roslyn Lichteman to NAC, February 28, 1938, ibid. 23. “$1500 sought to Aid Spain,” The Campus 61 (18) November 19, 1937: 4; Margaret Cummings to Bernard Rothenberg, November 18, 1937, College of the City of New York, Part I, Box 2, SRRO. 24. Ralph Wardlaw, “Aid For Spain” (letter), The Campus 60 (16) April 7, 1937: 2. 25. Jerome Davis, “Davis’ Letter to Students, April 15, 1937,” The Campus 60 (21) April 22, 1937: 2. 26. “Police Place Ban on Donations for Aid to Spain,” The Campus 60 (24) May 4, 1937: 1. 27. “Lash asks SU Readjustment to Fight War: Discusses History of War in Spain and Power of ‘Steel Battalion’,” The Campus 61 (6) October 8, 1937: 1. 28. “S.C. wants ASU to be recognized,” The Campus 61 (5) October 5, 1937: 1. See also “Board Defers ASU legality for a Month,” The Campus 61 (18), November 19, 1937: 1; “Unchartered Organizations May Meet in College Rooms, Trustees Resolve: Board Action Okays Policy of Authorities,” The Campus 61 (13) November 3, 1937: 1; William L. Rafsky, “Board Legalizes ASU by 17–2,” The Campus 61 (31) January 18, 1938: 1. 29. Sol Kunis, “College Nazi forms group; seeks charter,” The Campus 61 (16) November 12, 1937: 1; “Board Gives Fascist Group Permit to Meet at College,” The Campus 61 (26) December 21, 1937: 1; see also George Stolnitz, “’Nationalist’, American Guards’ Organ, Scores ‘Campus’, Communists, Loyalists,” The Campus 62 (1) February 10, 1938: 1. 30. “Anonymous Letter Mailed to ‘Campus’ by Anti-Semite: Promises to Paste Anti-Jew Stickers Around College,” The Campus 61 (23) December 10, 1937: 1. 31. “SC-Congress Rally in Lewisohn Stadium Endorses FDR Challenge to Fascists; Anti-War Club Holds Counter Meeting,” The Campus 64 (18) April 18, 1939: 1. On the Oxford Pledge see Cohen, When the Old Left Was Young, 79–82. 32. A succinct treatment of Midwestern isolationism can be found in Joseph A. Fry, “Place Matters: Domestic Regionalism and the Formation of American Foreign Policy,” Diplomatic History 36, no. 3 (June 2012): 451–82. 33. Bob Friedman, “Antagonistic World Forces Nearing Boiling Point,” Daily Northwestern, September 29, 1936, 1; “Perez Explains Spanish Revolt,” ibid., October 20, 1936, 1; “News Writer to Discuss Spanish War,” ibid., October 27, 1936, 6; Leo Sazanoff, “European War Lamentable,” ibid., October 28, 1936, 6; “Goldman and Olay Discuss Spanish War,” ibid., November 25, 1936, 3. 34. Undated memo, Lash Papers 30, FDRL. 35. Behrstock was later one of eight employees of UNESCO to undergo scrutiny by anticommunists during his tenure at the organization. His investigation was later dropped. The experience is described in his autobiography, The Eighth

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Case. Julian Behrstock, The Eighth Case: Troubled Times at the United Nations (New York: University Press of America, 1987), 84–98. “Behrstock Resigns Editorial Post,” Daily Northwestern, March 24, 1937, 1. The editorial appeared without a byline, but Behrstock, as chief editor, wrote nearly all of them without claiming credit. “Spain’s Civil War—What Does it Mean?” ibid., March 18, 1937, 4. 36. Massachusetts–Harvard University Youth, Box 1, Part I, SRRO; Michigan– Youth, Box 1, Part I, SRRO; Illinois–Youth, Box 1, Part I, SRRO; Elin L. Wolfe, A. Clifford Barger, and Saul Benison, Walter B. Cannon, Science and Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Boston Medical Library in the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, 2000), 359–60. 37. Evelyn Ahrend to Mary Gordon, December 7, 1937, Illinois—Chicago Medical Bureau 5, Box 10, Part K, SRRO. 38. “ILGWU Leader All for Sports,” Daily Worker, January 4, 1937, 8; “Sport Fans Rally to Games for Spain,” ibid., December 6, 1936, 14; “Manhattan Stars in Game for Spain,” ibid., December 22, 1936, 8. 39. Marshall Tea folder, Box 2, Part M, SRRO. 40. “The Lyons Den,” The New York Post, September 16, 1937, 17. 41. “Spanish Envoy to Speak,” New York Times, August 9, 1937, 7; Blanche Mahler to Fiorello LaGuardia, July 28, 1938, General Correspondence, Box 1, Part M, SRRO; Millay published her lament for the imminent end of the Republic in Harper’s Magazine, “Say That We Saw Spain Die” (October 1938), 449. 42. Klehr, Heyday of American Communism, 380. 43. Rosenwald died in 1931. The Julliard has named a recital series after Saidenberg. Mary Gordon to William Crookston, June 11, 1937, Medical Bureau 2, Box 10, Part K, SRRO; Jeanne Nienaber Clarke, Roosevelt’s Warrior: Harold L. Ickes and the New Deal (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 193–98. 44. Mary Gordon to Crookston, June 11, 1937, Medical Bureau 2, Part K, Box 10, SRRO, CU. 45. Program, October 16, 1937, Winnetka Community House, Medical Bureau 4, Part K, Box 10, SRRO. 46. Sherman to Chase, January 21, 1937, Detroit—Med Buro 3, Box 16, Part K, SRRO; Wynne North to Sherman, April 1, 1937, ibid. 47. The letters were protests of the passport issue then erupting in Washington. For more on this matter see chapter five. North to Sherman, April 1, 1937, Grand Rapids, Box 16, Part K, SRRO; North to Sherman, April 27, 1937, Grand Rapids, Box 16, Part K, SRRO. 48. Quoting J. B. Matthews in U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, Special Committee on Un-American Activities, Investigation of Un-American Propaganda Activities in the United States, 76th Cong., 2nd Sess., October 24, 1939, 6930. 49. U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, Special Committee on Un-American Activities, Investigation of Un-American Propaganda Activities in the United States Hearings before a Special Committee on Un-American Activities House of Representatives, 75th Cong., 3rd Sess., Vol. 1, Washington, D.C., August 1938, 874. 50. The details on finances and the multitude of organizations is developed in Eric R. Smith, “Anti-Fascism, the United Front, and Spanish Republican Aid in the United States, 1936–1940,” 101–48. See also chapter six and the Green Report in the appendix. 51. The report shows a total outlay for ambulances of $128,314.72, second only to the total of $130,237.67 spent on various food, clothing, and other relief items. Staffing the medical units cost $330,400.70. These figures differ from what the

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organization reported to the House Un-American Activities Committee when it claimed only $127,406.11 in ambulances, but a much higher $232,669.31 in food and clothing. The latter can be explained by the Relief Ship in late 1939, but the ambulance figure is inexplicably discrepant if only minutely. Report to the Paris Conference on Aid to Republican Spain, July 1938, Paris Conference, Box 24, Part B, SRRO (herein, the Paris Report); Exhibit A, Statement of Receipts and Disbursements, October 31, 1936, to January 31, 1939, Organization Minutes and Reports, Box 3, Part C, SRRO. 52. Natalie Hankemeyer to Harold Colee, February 27, 1938, Folder C, Box 1, AFSD. Ambulances that survived the war were later either taken over by the regime or served refugees in France. Herman Reissig to Dorothy Hickie, May 6, 1940, Misc. Massachusetts, Box 13, Part K, SRRO. 53. “Writer to Aid Loyalists,” New York Times, January 12, 1937, 4. 54. Sanora Babb to Franklin Folsom, December 23, 1937, Hollywood 1, Box 2, Part K, SRRO; Reissig to Page March 20, 1937, ibid. 55. Executive Committee Medical Bureau Minutes, January 21, 1937, Minutes 1937—Steering Committee and Social Workers Committees, Part C, Box 2, SRRO. 56. Jack Sherman to Charles Page, April 14, 1937, Hollywood 1, Box 6, Part H, SRRO. 57. Paris Report, July 1938, Paris Conference, Box 24, Part B, SRRO. 58. Vera Harris to Sherman June 2, 1938, Hollywood 1, Box 2, Part K, SRRO; Reissig to Page, March 20, 1937, Hollywood 1, ibid. 59. No attribution, cited in Nancy Lynn Schwartz, The Hollywood Writers’ Wars (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982), 118. 60. A. and H. Stone, “Report on Trip to West Virginia With Ambulance,” Miscellaneous, Part C, Box 3, SRRO. 61. William Alexander, Film on the Left: American Documentary Film from 1931 to 1942. (Princeton, N.Y.: Princeton University Press, 1981), 161; “Who’s Who in the Production,” [undated], Heart of Spain 1, Part B, Box 14, SRRO. 62. Quoted in Russell Campbell, Cinema Strikes Back: Radical Filmmaking in the United States, 1930–1942 (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1982), 187, 166. Heart of Spain has importance to the history of documentary film making, as well. See William Alexander, “Frontier Films, 1936–1941: The Aesthetics of Impact,” Cinema Journal 15, no. 1 (Autumn 1975): 16–28. 63. Evelyn Ahrend and Rose Schweitzer to Friends, July 30, 1937, Heart of Spain 1, Part B, Box 14, SRRO. 64. Ad for October 8 event, ibid.; Evelyn Ahrend to Leo Hurwitz, Oct. 28, 1937, ibid.; “Who’s Who in the Production,” ibid. 65. “Heart of Spain Goes South,” [unsigned, undated], Heart of Spain 1, Part B, Box 14, SRRO. 66. “Thomas” to Medical Bureau, December 7, 1937, Translations 2, Part J, Box 4, SRRO. 67. Alexander, Film on the Left, 165. 68. Frank Thomas Woodbury to Jacob Kalmanovitch, October 13, 1937, France— CSI 1, Part J, Box 4, SRRO; Heart of Spain 1, Part B, Box 14, SRRO. 69. Alexander, Film on the Left, 153. Return to Life resulted from the shots edited from Heart of Spain plus some additional footage. 70. Ibid., 152. 71. Ibid., 153, 157–58; Joseph Lash, Eleanor and Franklin: The Story of Their Rela-

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tionship, Based on Eleanor Roosevelt’s Private Papers (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1971), 567. 72. ACLU, Let Freedom Ring! The Story of Civil Liberty, 1936–1937 (New York: ACLU, June 1937), 39, 59; ACLU, Eternal Vigilance: The Story of Civil Liberty, 1937– 1938 (New York: ACLU), 1938, 54. 73. Campbell, Cinema Strikes Back, 169. 74. Alexander, Film on the Left, 157–58. 75. MacLeish to Reissig, July 23, 1937, MacLeish, Archibald, Part A, Box 4, SRRO. 76. Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism, 180. 77. Executive Board Minutes, Feb 9, 1938, Medburo, Part C, Box 2, SRRO. 78. Reissig to Mr. Ivanoff (Bronx), Feb 6, 1937, Misc. I, Box 15, Part B, SRRO. 79. American Federation of Labor, Report of the Proceedings of the Fifty-Sixth Annual Convention of the American Federation of Labor, Tampa, Florida, November 16 to 27, 1936 (Washington, D.C.: American Federation of Labor, 1936), 578–80. 80. Dallek, FDR and American Foreign Policy, 151. 81. Taylor, United States and the Spanish Civil War, 136; “‘Largest May Day’ Planned for Labor,” New York Times, March 31, 1946, 36. 82. Press release, May 6, 1938, Spanish Delegation, Box 9, Part B, SRRO. 83. Unsigned note, Dec. 17, 1938, Embargo-Trade Unions, Box 7, Part E. 84. Albert Lopez to Sol Green, Dec. 21, 1938, Embargo—Trade Unions, Box 7, Part E, SRRO. 85. L. Pospisil (Bakery and Confectionary Workers Intl. Union Local 22) to NAC, December 10, 1936, Bakers’ Union, Box 35, Part B, SRRO. 86. P. J. Shimik to NAC, September 15, 1938, Misc. I, Box 15, Part B, SRRO. Money from September 9 regular meeting. 87. Jacobs to P. J. Shimik, September 20, 1938, ibid. 88. Memo, unsigned, December 17, 1938, Embargo-Trade Unions, Box 7, Part E. 89. Leonard Levenson, “U.S. Communists in Spain: A Profile,” Political Affairs 65, no. 8 (August 1986): 6. 90. Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism, 297. 91. Ellen Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998), 31. 92. “Seamen and Longshoremen—Make a Stand for Spain!” Spanish Labor Bulletin, July 29, 1938, 1, SCWC. 93. Roy Hudson, Shipowners Plot Against Spanish Democracy (New York: Workers Library Publishers, 1937), 8, in Southworth Spanish Civil War Collection, Mandeville Special Collections Library, University of California—San Diego, California. 94. Report by Reissig on Paris Conference, August 10, 1938, Paris Conference, Box 24, Part B, SRRO. 95. Andor Skotnes argues that the refusal by African Americans to join the strike was in large part due to a desire not to risk the possible gains for something unpredictable and new. Andor Skotnes, “The Black Freedom Movement and the Workers’ Movement in Baltimore, 1930–1939” (PhD. Diss., Rutgers University, New Brunswick, N.J., 1991), 435, 436, 439; Linda Zeidman and Eric Hallengren, “Radicalism on the Waterfront: Seamen in the 1930s,” in Elizabeth Fee, Linda Shopes, and Linda Zeidman, The Baltimore Book: New Views of Local History (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999), 155–74; also Vernon L. Pedersen, The Communist Party in Maryland, 1919–57 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 96–98.

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96. Frank Furstenberg to Carmon, July 15, 1937, Baltimore 1, Box 12, Part K, SRRO. 97. Pedersen, Communist Party in Maryland, 102; Frank Furstenberg to Carmon, June 9, 1937, Baltimore 1, Box 12, Part K, SRRO. 98. Isidore Benesch to Jack Sherman, April 11, 1938, Baltimore NAC 2, SRRO. 99. Henry Makover to Ahrend, June 13, 1938, Baltimore MB 2, SRRO. 100. Coleman Blum to FDR (Cable), September 6, 1938, 422 C, Official File, Roosevelt Papers, FDRL. 101. “Ship Strike is Viewed as World Movement,” The Sun (Baltimore), September 14, 1938, 4; “Alleged Munitions Ship for Spain Passes Capes,” The Sun, September 15, 1938, 22; “Franco-laden Cargo Ship Still Struck,” Daily Worker, September 8, 1938, 2. 102. “A Cargo of Death is Stopped,” Spanish Labor Bulletin, September 16, 1938, 1. 103. The committee included James Blackwell (CIO and Peoples Unemployed League), Lloyd Leigh (also PUL), Rabbi Edward Israel, Rev. Asbury Smith, and Prof. Gertrude Bussey (Goucher College). Skotnes, “Black Freedom Movement and the Workers’ Movement in Baltimore,” 438; Benesch to Reissig, March 27, 1939, Baltimore NAC 3, Part K, Box 12, SRRO. 104. Herman Reissig to FDR, September 13, 1938, Official File 422C, FDRL. 105. “U.S. Asked to Probe Hiring of Seamen,” The Sun, September 11, 1938, 9. 106. “Ship Strike is Viewed as World Movement,” The Sun, September 14, 1938, 4; Esther Walters to Jack Sherman, September 20, 1938, Baltimore NAC 2, Part 12, Box K, SRRO. 107. “Alleged Munitions Ship for Spain Passes Capes,” The Sun, September 15, 1938, 22; “Norwegians and Striking Crew Seek Support,” Daily Worker, September 12, 1938, 5. 108. Gabriel Jackson found that “the Insurgents were well supplied with petroleum products from the beginning. In July 1935 the Texas Oil Company had signed a long-term contract to supply the Spanish government oil monopoly, CAMPSA. On July 18, 1936, some five tankers were at sea. The chairman of the board of Texaco, Thorkild Rieber, decided immediately to send the oil to Francocontrolled ports, and the Texas Company continued to supply gasoline on credit until the war’s end.” Jackson, Spanish Republic and the Civil War, 1931–1939, 250. 109. “Third Ship for Franco Halted by Norwegians,” Spanish Labor Bulletin, October 14, 1938, 3. 110. This remains a popular debate among scholars because it raises a range of questions. See, for example, Gabriel Jackson, Juan Negrín: Physiologist, Socialist, and Spanish Republican War Leader (Brighton and Portlang: Sussex Academic Press, 2010), 77–101; Preston, Spanish Civil War, 199–265; and for revisionism see Moa Rodriguez, Los Mitos de la Guerra Civil, 391–409; a middle ground albeit without the benefit of recent evidence can be found in Antony Beevor, The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939 (New York: Penguin Books 2006 [1982]), 263–73. At the time the U.S. Consulate was reporting, “It has not been possible to state the precise alignment of all factions engaged in fighting of the last three days.” Mahlon F. Perkins to Hull, May 6, 1937, Confidential Telegram, in James W. Cortada, A City in War: American Views on Barcelona and the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939 (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, Inc., 1985), 113. 111. Mary Gordon to Sherman, April 13, 1937, Illinois, Chicago—Medical Bureau 2, Box 10, Part K, SRRO.

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112. The Negro Ambulance Committee, at $820.84, contributed more materially (the cost of almost two ambulance chassis) than the Engineers, Optometrists, and Pediatrists Committees combined, but about half of what the Puerto Rican Committee donated. None of which is terribly impressive in monetary terms. Exhibit A, Organization Minutes and Reports, Box 3, Part C, SRRO. 113. Laurie F. Leach, Langston Hughes: A Biography (Westport, Conn., and London: Greenwood Publishers, 2004), 99, 101. 114. Langston Hughes, “Air Raid Over Harlem,” The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, edited by Arnold Rampersad (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 186. 115. Arnold Rampersad, Ralph Ellison: A Biography (New York: Alrefd A. Knopf, 2007), 93–94. 116. Olga Paz (Chicago NAC) to Nancy Bedford-Jones, June 21, 1937, Chicago— United Youth Committee, Box 11, Part K, SRRO. 117. Plummer, Rising Wind, 60–66. 118. Gwynne Gertz, “Thyra J. Edwards,” in Rima Lunin Schultz and Adele Hast, eds., Women Building Chicago, 1790–1990: A Biographical Dictionary, (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2001), 244–47. For a thorough biographical perspective on Spanish aid and the racial anxieties that drove it, see the chapter in Gregg Andrews, Thyra J. Edwards: Black Activists in the Global Freedom Struggle (University of Missouri Press, 2011), 100–128.

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Chapter 3 The Ethnic United Front and Spanish America’s War 1. L. Straud to Franklin Roosevelt, April 10, 1937, 422C, Official File, Roosevelt Papers, FDRL. 2. Dan Georgakas, “Greek-American Radicalism: The Twentieth Century,” in Paul Buhle and Dan Georakas, eds., The Immigrant Left in the United States (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 220. 3. Peter Kivisto, “The Decline of the Finnish American Left, 1925–1945,” International Migration Review 17, no. 1 (Spring 1983): 66, 79. 4. Robert Singerman, “American-Jewish Reactions to the Spanish Civil War,” Journal of Church and State 19, no. 2 (1977): 261–78. 5. Albert Prago, “Jews in the International Brigades: Over 7,000 Jews from 54 Countries Fought in the International Brigades,” Jewish Currents (February 1979): 15–21; the article concluded the following month in Albert Prago, “Jews in the International Brigades: 2: Botwin Company Volunteers—Symbol of Jewish Resistance,” Jewish Currents (March 1979): 6–9, 24–27. 6. Fraser Ottanelli, “Anti-Fascism and the Shaping of National and Ethnic Identity: Italian American Volunteers in the Spanish Civil War,” Journal of American Ethnic History 27, no. 1 (Fall 2007): 9–31. 7. See in particular Girolani Valenti to Reissig, March 4, 1937, and Valenti to United Youth League, March 11, 1937, both in Italian Anti-Fascist Committee, Box 15, Part B, SRRO. 8. Hispanos was their preferred term at the time. James D. Fernandez, “Nueva York: The Spanish-Speaking Community Responds,” in Peter N. Carroll and James D. Fernandez, Facing Fascism: New York and the Spanish Civil War (New York: Museum of the City of New York and New York University Press, 2007), 88.

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9. Vicente Navarro comments that “[i]t is characteristic of . . . all the literature, movies, plays, and cultural expressions about the Spanish Civil War known in the Anglo-Saxon world, that the main characters are usually non-Spaniards, with true Spaniards relegated to the background.” Vicente Navarro, “Fascism and Antifascism: Yesterday and Today,” Monthly Review 47, no. 8 (January 1996): 14–26. 10. Frederick B. Pike, The United States and Latin America: Myths and Stereotypes of Civilization and Nature (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992), 97. See also Gary R. Mormino and George E. Pozzetta, The Immigrant World of Ybor City: Italians and Their Latin Neighbors in Tampa, 1885–1985 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998), 147–48; ACLU, Let Freedom Ring! 1; ACLU, Eternal Vigilance, 13. The “Latin” culture of Tampa, Florida, for example, was only a decade removed from severe anti-Catholic prejudice and faced some of the worst racial violence in the United States. Moreover, historians Allen Guttmann and Frederick Pike both have identified a “primitivism” in images of Spain where the country’s peasants were overrun by fascism’s militaristic modernism. 11. Pike, United States and Latin America, 285–87; Guttmann, Wound in the Heart, 167–96. 12. The Spanish Earth, DVD, produced by Herman Shumlin (Sherman Oaks, Calif.: Slinghot DVD, 2000 [1936]); Pike, United States and Latin America, 286. 13. Spender and Lehmann, eds., Poems for Spain, 57. Richard L. Kagan traces the history of American characterizations of Spain in Richard L. Kagan, ed., Spain in America: The Origins of Hispanism in the United States (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 1–19. Additional work on the subject of the “Spanish craze” is forthcoming in Richard L. Kagan, “The Spanish Craze in the United States: Cultural Entitlement and the Appropriation of Spain’s Cultural Patrimony, ca. 1890–ca. 1930,” Revista Complutense de Historia de America 36 (2010): 37–58. A very brief overview is also available at the website of the Fundacion Zuloaga, http://www.fundacionzuloaga.com/fzuloaga/actividades/ conferencias.pdf (accessed July 11, 2010). The Spanish population in the U.S. was concentrated in New York City, but colonias also existed in Louisiana, California, and Florida; a majority of these “colonists” emigrated in the period 1900–1924. The 1930 Census indicates nearly half of the Spanish population was concentrated in New York and California. Congress’s 1921 Quota Law cut off the flood of immigrants that followed World War I, so that in 1922 only 665 Spaniards entered the United States. Moreover, the 1924 Quota Law curtailed the influx even further, to 131 per year, though a revised law permitted 252 in 1929. The best estimate of a total of Spanish immigrants in the U.S. is 174,000; with a 59 percent attrition rate, only about 110,000 remained in 1940. Through private bills, Congress allowed in a few additional émigrés, but generally by the time of the war in Spain the Spanish population in the United States had been there for at least a generation, and the possibility of refugees joining them was rather limited. Only family members of American citizens might circumvent the quota. See A. Gomez, “Spanish Immigrants in the United States,” The Americas 19 (July 1962): 59–77. 14. Mario Barrera, Race and Class in the Southwest: A Theory of Racial Inequality (Notre Dame and London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979), 107; José M. Alamillo, Making Lemonade Out of Lemons: Mexican American Labor and Leisure in a California Town, 1880–1960 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 49; Mormino and Pozzetta, Immigrant World of Ybor City, 234, 239. 15. Gomez, “Immigrants,” 74–76; Mormino and Pozzetta, Immigrant World of Ybor City, 70–72.

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16. Harold Siegel to Herman Reissig, February 3, 1939, Siegel, Box 31, Part B, SRRO. 17. Gladys Nadler Rips, Coming to America: Immigrants from Southern Europe (New York: Delcorte Press, 1981), 116. 18. Gomez, “Immigrants,” 63–67. 19. Mormino and Pozzetta, Immigrant World of Ybor City, 73. 20. Again, a starting point is Fernandez, “Nueva York: The Spanish-Speaking Community Responds,” in Carroll and Fernandez, eds., Facing Fascism, 84–91. 21. This “Spanish” conflation of various nationalities appears most evident in King to Sherman, May 5, 1938, San Francisco 2, Box 4, Part K, SRRO, where a news item on an obviously Mexican organization was included with a letter on the discussion of “Spanish friends.” See also Sherman to King, May 12, 1938, ibid., and Hodgson to Aurel Leitner, October 31, 1936, and Rehfisch to Sherman, May 20, 1938, both in Los Angeles NAC 1, Box 3, Part K, SRRO; also Merriman to Sherman, December 14, 1948, San Francisco 4, Box 3, Part K, SRRO; Lleo Dalty to Sherman, December 30, 1938, Los Angeles 3, Box 2, Part K, SRRO. On Catholics see Hodgson to Aurel Leitner, October 31, 1936, Los Angeles NAC 1, Box 3, Part K, SRRO. Finally, Rehfisch to NAC, April 11, 1938, San Francisco 2, Box 4, Part K, SRRO. 22. Most of the centers were in the south except for Michigan, which was home to the Black Legion. See ACLU, Let Freedom Ring! 1; ACLU, Eternal Vigilance! 13. 23. Quote from Spanish Information Bureau, “Spaniards for Spain,” News of Spain, June 8, 1938, 7; Spanish Information Bureau, “Cement Saves Lives,” News of Spain, August 10, 1938, 8. 24. The taxonomy of organizations is imposing and even many participants were confused. Potential aid supporters received fund-raising appeals from the New York committee in direct competition with mail from local committees. In one case following an appeal by the New York committee, the Chicago office received inquiries into whether or not it was still functioning. Mary Gordon to Stella Carmon, July 26 1937, Part K, Box 10, SRRO. 25. Minutes, October 21, 1936, Minutes, Box 2, AFSD. 26. Varela-Lago, “‘No Pasaran!’ The Spanish Civil War’s Impact on Tampa’s Latin Community,” Tampa Bay History 19, no. 2 (1997): 5–35. 27. Marcelino Domingo, “‘Tampa, Altar of Spain’: A Spanish Republican View of Tampa in the 1930s,” translated by Ana Varela-Lago, ibid., 69–72. 28. Pedro Ramirez Moya to North American Committee, January 27, 1937, Florida, Tampa, Box 8, Part K, SRRO. 29. Fred Hodgson to Albert Simmons, January 4, 1937, Florida, Tampa, ibid.; Reissig to the Committee for the Defense of the Spanish Peoples’ Front, February 3, 1937, ibid. 30. December 21, 1937 Minutes, Organization Minutes and Reports—Executive Committee, Box 2, Part C, SRRO. 31. Reissig to Simmons, May 14, 1937, Florida, Tampa, Box 8, Part K, SRRO; Simmons to NAC, May 13, 1937, ibid. 32. Simmons to NAC, May 3, 1937, ibid. 33. Gill to Sherman, April 16, 1938, Florida, Tampa, Box 8, Part K, SRRO. 34. Isolina Fernandez (Secretary of NAC) to Russell Thayer, Dec 1, 1937, Louisiana, New Orleans 1, Box 12, Part K, ibid. 35. Enrique Lopez to Siegel, January 25, 1938, Louisiana, New Orleans 2, ibid. More emphatically Lopez added: “As you know, whatever is done on behalf of Democracy in New Orleans, frequently runs into obstacles of a religious nature—

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another reason for more effort—besides other prejudices and misunderstanding.” From March 1937 through January 1938 the small group raised a meager $1,326 in aid. 36. Walter Gaulke (Secretary, New Orleans NAC) to Reissig, April 6, 1939, Louisiana, New Orleans 3, SRRO. 37. Gaulke to Sherman, April 29, 1939, ibid. By this time the local committee consisted of A. Cueto (Chair), Enrique Lopez (Treasurer), Walter Gaulke (Secretary). 38. See Bruce Nelson, Workers on the Waterfront: Seamen, Longshoremen, and Unionism in the 1930s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990),127–55. As Robert Cherny has recently demonstrated, an anticommunist network on the west coast was not only well developed but well funded. Robert W. Cherny, “Anticommunist Networks and Labor: The Pacific Coast in the 1930s,” in Shelton Stromquist, ed., Labor’s Cold War: Local Politics in a Global Context (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 17–48. 39. Sherman to Harry Ellis, March 30, 1937, San Francisco 8, Box 4, Part K, SRRO. 40. Sherman to King, May 12, 1938, San Francisco 2, ibid. 41. Ibid.; Rehfisch to Sherman, June 3, 1938, ibid.; Minutes of March 1, 1938, San Francisco 3, SRRO. 42. Marianne King to Sherman, May 5, 1938, San Francisco 2, Box 5, SRRO. 43. Translation: Society of Women of Isabel the Catholic. “Catholic Women Donate Ambulance to Loyalist Spain,” unspecified news clipping, undated, San Francisco 2, Box 5, SRRO. 44. Carroll, Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, 158. The other woman was the ambulance driver Evelyn Hutchins. 45. For further discussion see Eric R. Smith, “American Women and the Spanish Civil War: The Gendered Origins of Spanish Republican Aid,” in Anindya Raychaudhuri, ed., Spanish Civil War: Exhuming a Buried Past (Cardiff, Wales: University of Wales Press, 2013), 20–38. 46. Minutes of meeting, June 27, 1938, San Francisco 2, Box 5, Part K, SRRO. 47. Marianne King to Sherman, June 8, 1937, San Francisco 9, Box 5, Part K, SRRO. The local ordinance King cited referred to Chapter VIII (“The Police Code”), Sec. 1154 and Sec. 1160, both of which governed solicitation. City of San Francisco, San Francisco Municipal Code (San Francisco: Works Progress Administration, 1939). 48. San Francisco Medical Bureau to Jack Sherman, June 11, 1937 Cable, San Francisco 9, Box 4, Part K, SRRO. 49. Reissig to Carmon, memo, undated, ibid. 50. King to Carmon June 21, 1937, ibid. 51. Report on activities, June 16, 1937, ibid. 52. Carol Rehfisch to Sherman, May 20, 1938, San Francisco 2, Box 5, ibid. 53. Rehfisch to Sherman, June 17, 1936, San Francisco 2, Box 4, ibid. 54. King to Ahrend, October 27, 1937, San Francisco 5, ibid. 55. Sherman to Rehfisch, June 23, 1938, San Francisco 2, Box 4, ibid. 56. Carmon to Rehfisch, October 22, 1937, San Francisco 7, ibid. 57. Minutes of United Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy (San Francisco) March 9, 1938, North American Committee San Francisco 2, Box 5, ibid. 58. Rehfisch to Sherman, May 20, 1938, San Francisco 2, Box 5, ibid. 59. Rehfisch to Sherman, March 19, 1938, San Francisco 3, Box 4, Part K, SRRO;

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Minutes of March 1, 1938, San Francisco 3, Box 4; Minutes of March 22, San Francisco 3, all ibid., show that Sunnyvale contributed another $450. 60. Reissig to International Pour Infance, September 20, 1939, International Pour Infance, Box 5, Part J, SRRO. 61. King to Sherman, March 24, 1938, San Francisco 3, Box 4, Part K, SRRO; Minutes of March 1, 1938, ibid. 62. King to Sherman, March 24, 1938, San Francisco 3, Box 4, Part K, SRRO; Minutes of March 1, 1938, ibid. 63. Sherman to Rehfisch, June 1, 1938, San Francisco 2, Box 5, ibid. 64. King to Sherman, March 23, 1938, San Francisco 3, Box 4, Part K, SRRO; Minutes of March 1, 1938, ibid. The Green Report indicates the group raised $32,903.97 and contributed $21,040.00 to Spain, an overall overhead of over 36 percent. See appendix. 65. Addis to Sherman, October 19, 1939, San Francisco 1, ibid. 66. Gallaher to Sherman, October 20, 1939, ibid. 67. Rehfisch to Sherman, July 3, 1939, ibid. 68. Financial records are not available after the Civil War ended, but one issue of España Libre ten years after the conflict suggests that donations remained exclusively Spanish in origin (based on surnames) and modest (based on the typical $1.00 donations among around fifty donors); “Lo Que Ayuda a España Libre,” España Libre, October 7, 1949, 2, 6.

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Chapter 4 The Catholic Church and Interwar Anticommunism 1. Writing before the war, Reissig was advocating for a social gospel. Herman F. Reissig, “Let the Church Face the Issue!” Christian Century, June 17, 1936, 867– 68. See more generally, Doug Rossinow, “The Radicalization of the Social Gospel: Harry F. Ward and the Search for a New Social Order, 1898–1936,” Religion and American Culture 15, no. 1 (Winter 2005): 63–106 2. Guttmann, Wound in the Heart, 25–51. 3. Donald F. Crosby, “Boston’s Catholics and the Spanish Civil War: 1936–1939,” New England Quarterly 44, no. 1 (1971): 86, 95, 99; “rapin” quote from The Pilot, cited in Crosby; see also Thomas C. Reeves, America’s Bishop: The Life and Times of Fulton J. Sheen (San Francisco: Encounter, 2001), 104. 4. Last two paragraphs from Wilson D. Miscamble, “The Limits of American Catholic Antifascism: The Case of John A. Ryan, Church History 59, no. 4 (December 1990): 523–38. 5. d’Agostino, Rome in America, 245; Reeves, America’s Bishop, 104. 6. Reid to Reissig, May 20, 1937, Iowa, Davenport, Box 11, Part K, SRRO. 7. “U.S. Surgeon Repairs Faces of Rebels’ War Mutilated,” New York Post, September 10, 1937, 9. 8. Guttmann, Wound in the Heart, 43–44, 50–55. 9. “Ambulance for Spain Causes Clash Here,” New York Times, September 5, 1938, 10. 10. On Catholic anticommunism in this period see Chapman, Arguing Americanism, 1–34. 11. David J. Valaik, “Catholics, Neutrality, and the Spanish Embargo, 1937–1939,”

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Journal of American History 54, no. 1 (June 1967): 74; Helen Graham reaches the opposite conclusion in Graham, Spanish Republic at War, 21–30. 12. The violence in Spain was real enough, but as Júlian Casanova notes there has been a lack of historical attention to its motivations. See the earlier reference in note 19 from chapter 1. See also Julián Casanova, Anarchism, the Republic, and Civil War in Spain (London: Routledge, 2004 [1997]), 197n7 and 200n20. In English, Bruce Lincoln offers a convincing interpretation that could use further academic investigation in “Revolutionary Exhumations in Spain, July 1936,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 27, no. 2 (April, 1985): 241–60. A different perspective can be found in Joan Connelly Ullman, “The Warp and Woof of Parliamentary Politics in Spain, 1808–1939: Anticlericalism versus ‘Neo-Catholicism’,” European History Quarterly 13 (1983): 145–76. In Spanish there is also José Alvarez Junco, “El Anticlericalismo en el movimiento obrero,” in Gabriel Jackson, et al., eds., Octubre 1934: Cincuenta Años para la Reflexión (Madrid: Siglo XXI de España Editores, S.A., 1985), 283–300. 13. Valaik, “Catholics, Neutrality, and the Spanish Embargo,” 76. 14. Guttman, Wound in the Heart, 25. The title “dean of American fascism” is from Neill Macaulay writing on U.S. involvement in Nicaragua in Macaulay, Sandino Affair, 26. 15. “To Aid Spanish Fascists; 500 Young Women to Seek Funds Here for Medical Supplies,” New York Times, December 1, 1936, L15. 16. Guttmann, Wound in the Heart, 44. 17. Brumbaugh to ALWF, Dec 3, 1936, Nebraska, Omaha, Part K, Box 18, SRRO. 18. On media see Guttmann, Wound in the Heart, 33; quotes from Taylor, United States and the Spanish Civil War, 150–51, 153–54. 19. It seems Hitler was originally disposed toward involvement in order to gauge the reactions in Rome and Paris. Whealey, Hitler and Spain, 9, 103; quote in Patterson, Guernica and Total War, 2, 17. 20. Valaik, “Catholics, Neutrality, and the Spanish Embargo,” 73–85, 77. 21. Ibid., 77–78; U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, Special Committee on Un-American Activities, Investigation of Un-American Propaganda Activities in the United States, 75th Cong., 3rd Sess., Vol. 2 (October 11–13, 1938), 1241–49. 22. Valaik, “Catholics, Neutrality, and the Spanish Embargo,” 79. There is a complete transcript of the January 1939 mass meeting in Washington, D.C., including Sheen’s remarks in Keep the Spanish Embargo Committee, Keep the Spanish Embargo! (Washington, D.C.: National Council of Catholic Men, 1939), Southworth Collection. See also Beevor, Battle for Spain, 241–42. 23. Valaik, “Catholics, Neutrality, and the Spanish Embargo,” 79–82. 24. David J. O’Brien, American Catholics and Social Reform: The New Deal Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 89. 25. Fraser Ottanelli, “Anti-Fascism and the Shaping of National and Ethnic Identity: Italian-American Volunteers in the Spanish Civil War,” Journal of American Ethnic History 27, no.1 (Fall 2007): 20–21. 26. Ave Bruzzichesi, “I was a Catholic Nurse in Loyalist Spain,” American Relief Ship Publicity Campaign, Box 4, Part O, SRRO. 27. Guttmann, Wound in the Heart, 29–51. 28. d’Agostino, Rome in America, 250, 257. 29. Robert Morton Darrow, “Catholic Political Power: A Study of the Activities of the American Catholic Church on Behalf of Franco during the Spanish

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Civil War, 1936–1939” (PhD. Diss., Columbia University, 1953), 18; M. J. Heale, McCarthy’s Americans: Red Scare Politics in State and Nation, 1935–1965 (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1998), 149–70; Judith Larrabee Holmes, “The Politics of Anticommunism in Massachusetts, 1930–1960” (PhD. Diss., University of Massachusetts Amherst, 1996), 6; Valaik, “Catholics, Neutrality, and the Spanish Embargo, 1937–1939,” 84–85; Parry, “The Spanish Civil War,” 244; Chapman, Arguing Americanism, 87–107. 30. Valaik, “Catholics, Neutrality, and the Spanish Embargo,” 76. 31. For the journal’s biases see, for example, “The Commonweal’s Spanish Relief Fund,” The Commonweal, May 7, 1937, 31–32; Michael Williams, “Open Letter to Leaders of the American Press, on Spain,” The Commonweal, May 7, 1937, 33–37; E. Allison Peers, “The Spain that Had no Easter,” The Commonweal, May 14, 1937, 39–40; E. R. Pineda, “Is Spain with the Loyalists,” The Commonweal, May 21, 1937, 89–91; Michael Williams, “The Truth About Spain: Open Letter to the Press: No. 3,” The Commonweal, May 28, 1937, 113–115. 32. “The Civil War in Spain,” The Commonweal, June 24, 1938, 29. 33. O’Brien, American Catholics and Social Reform, 88. 34. Executive Board Minutes, May 28, 1937, Organization Minutes and Reports— Executive Board, Part C, Box 2, SRRO; Executive Board Minutes, June 11, 1937, ibid.; Executive Board Minutes, June 18, 1937, ibid. 35. Valaik “Catholics, Neutrality, and the Spanish Embargo,” 83, 85. 36. Ibid., 82; see also Harold L. Ickes, The Secret Diary of Harold L. Ickes, Vol. 2: The Inside Struggle, 1936–1939 (New York, Simon and Schuster, 1953), 470; Valaik, “Catholics, Neutrality, and the Spanish Embargo, 1937–1939,” 75. 37. Valaik, “Catholics, Neutrality, and the Spanish Embargo,” 77. 38. Tierney, FDR and the Spanish Civil War, 61–62, 115, 123–24. 39. Michael Francis Doyle to Marvin McIntyre, January 15, 1939, OF 422C, FDRL. 40. Valaik, “Catholics, Neutrality, and the Spanish Embargo,” 76. 41. Ibid.; Lash, Eleanor and Franklin, 568–69. 42. “Spanish Envoy to Speak,” New York Times, August 9, 1937, 7. 43. Strong published a book on the conflict and was in demand as a speaker during this period. Like other women involved in Spanish aid, Strong offered no especially gender-oriented reading of the events. She was but one more woman concerned about the trajectory of international developments. Lash, Eleanor and Franklin, 567–70. 44. Alden Whitman to Herman Reissig, February 21, 1939, Alden Whitman, Part B, Box 37, SRRO. 45. Reinhold Niebuhr to Herman Reissig, May 5, 1937, Niebuhr, Reinhold, Part A, Box 4, SRRO. 46. Todd to Reissig, November 3, 1938, Todd, Paul H., Box 7, Part E, SRRO. 47. Catholics and the Civil War in Spain: A Collection of Statements by World-Famous Catholic Leaders on the Events in Spain (New York: Workers Library Publishers, 1936); Catholics Speak for Spain (New York: North American Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy, 1937); Catholics Reply to “Open Letter” on Spain: Signed by 175 Priests and Laymen (New York: The American Press, 1937); all in Southworth Collection. 48. North to Sherman, June 2, 1937, Grand Rapids, Box 16, Part K, SRRO. 49. North to Ahrend, June 16, 1937, ibid.

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50. North to Ahrend, June 18, 1937, ibid.; for Lini Fuhr’s Red Cross history see Ahrend to Gosman, July 9, 1937, Michigan, Detroit—Medical Bureau to Aid Spanish Democracy 1, ibid. 51. Lini Fuhr to Ahrend (Cable), June 27, 1937, ibid. 52. Ethel Scholes to NAC, October 14, 1938, ibid. 53. Edmund Brumbaugh to Comrades (ALAWF), December 3, 1936, Nebraska, Omaha, Part K, Box 18, SRRO. 54. These were Rev. A. Ray Grummon, Rev. Hudson Pittman, Rev. Gay White, Dr. David Lewis, and Dr. H. T. Morrison. 55. Louise Hamburger to Reissig, November 26, 1937, Illinois, Springfield, Part F, Box 11, SRRO. 56. “Film on Spanish Conflict Will [Be] Shown at Church,” Illinois State Journal, November 6, 1937, 3. 57. “Large Audience Sees Spanish Film Despite Picketing,” Illinois State Journal, November 12, 1937, 24. 58. “Program to Aid Victims of War in Spain Organized,” Illinois State Journal, December 21, 1937, 9; News clipping, December 21, 1937, Illinois, Springfield, Part K, Box 11, SRRO. 59. In an endnote, Chapman cites $181,622 raised with $179,533 actually sent based on information from the Francis X. Talbot Papers at Georgetown University. Chapman, Arguing Americanism, 235n34. Based on the Green Report (see appendix), the combined distributions of the National Spanish Relief Association, Spanish Nationalist Relief Committee, America Spanish Relief Fund, and the Brooklyn Tablet were around $140,000. The Tablet actually ran at a deficit of over $23,000 so that the paper could not contribute anything to Franco. 60. James’s biographical information is from the finding aid of the James Schramm Papers at the University of Iowa. James and Dorothy Schramm to MBNAC, March 22, 1938, Iowa, Burlington, Part K, Box 11, SRRO; Dorothy Schramm was politically active well outside just the Spanish issue. She published a booklet for the League of Women Voters in Iowa urging participation in political issues. Dorothy Schramm, You Are Democracy: A Handbook for Iowa Citizens (Des Moines, Iowa: League of Women Voters, 1947), 5. 61. Schramm to Evelyn Ahrend, September 26, 1938, Iowa, Burlington, Part K, Box 11, SRRO. 62. D. Schramm to Sherman, October 4, 1938, ibid. 63. D. Schramm to Sherman, Oct. 27, 1938, ibid.; Sherman to Schramm, November 1, 1938, Iowa, Davenport, Part K , Box 11, SRRO, thanks her for her work and hopes she will find a replacement. 64. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., A Life in the Twentieth Century: Innocent Beginnings, 1917–1950 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000), 182–83. 65. Elin L. Wolfe, A. Clifford Barger, and Saul Benison, Walter B. Cannon, Science and Society, 357. 66. Ibid., 264, 357–59. 67. Ibid., 359–60. 68. Ibid., 374; Marion Briggs to David Grant, October 22, 1937, Young People’s Communist League, Part H, Box 7, SRRO. 69. Holmes, “Anticommunism in Massachusetts,” 62. In a recent analysis of Couglin, Charles Gallagher argues that the church failed to reprimand Coughlin’s anti-Semitism because Monsignor Joseph Hurley, who prepared reports on Coughlin for the Vatican, was himself “an intense anti-Semite.” Charles Gallagher, “A Peculiar Brand of Patriotism: The Holy See, FDR, and the Case of Reverend

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Charles Coughlin,” in David B. Woolner and Richard G. Kurial, eds., FDR, the Vatican, and the Roman Catholic Church in America, 1933–1945 (New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 270. By late 1930 Coughlin’s anticommunism was also well developed. See Alan Brinkley, Voices of Protest, 95–96. 70. Crosby, “Boston’s Catholics,” 82, 84–86, 89. 71. Holmes, “Politics of Anticommunism in Massachusetts,” 82–89. 72. Wolfe et al., Walter B. Cannon, 366. 73. For the religious composition of the local Cincinnati group see the meeting rosters in Cincinnati 5, Box 25, Part K, SRRO. 74. Carl Levy to NAC, February 2, 1937, Cincinnati 1, Box 25, Part K, SRRO. Carl Levy was executive secretary of the local American League Against War and Fascism and a treasurer of the Cincinnati NAC. 75. They were Dr. George Hedger (chair), Rev. Harry Granison Hill (co-chair), University of Cincinnati Professor Dillwyn Ratcliff (executive secretary), James Marsh (organizational secretary), and Max Senior (treasurer). Levy to NAC, April 5, 1937, Cincinnati 1, Box 25, Part K, SRRO. 76. The proportion cited is one-third Catholic in Mrs. Hugh Henshaw to Thayer, March 7, 1938, Cincinnati 2, Box 25, Part K, SRRO; James Marsh to Chodrow, June 4, 1937, Cincinnati 1, ibid. 77. Henshaw to Thayer, March 7, 1938, Cincinnati 2, ibid. 78. Elizabeth Seeberg to Sherman, Aug 3, 1938, ibid. 79. George Q. Flynn, Roosevelt and Romanism: Catholics and American Diplomacy, 1937–1945 (Westport: Greenwood, 1976), 41; Tierney, FDR and the Spanish Republic, 115, 124. For a different reading of the elections where the Spanish Civil War was not a factor, see the compelling argument by Shirley G. Kulevsky, “Facets of Isolationism: North Dakota’s Reaction to the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939,” North Dakota Quarterly 46, no. 4 (Autumn 1978): 5–20. 80. Roger T. Johnson, Robert M. LaFollette, Jr., and the Decline of the Progressive Party in Wisconsin (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1964), 61. The point is reinforced in Fred J. Lipovetz to Orland Loomis, December 19, 1938, Box 16, Orland S. Loomis Manuscripts, Wisconsin Historical Society. 81. Reissig to Zimmerman (ILGWU), Whitney (Railway Trainmen), A. P. Randolph (Porters), Quill (Transport Workers of America), Merrill (United Office and Professional Workers), Garriga, and Dubinsky (ILGWU), January 14, 1939, Trade Unions, Box 7, Part E, SRRO. 82. Tierney, FDR and the Spanish Civil War, 128.

Chapter 5 Refugee Aid and the Coming World War 1. Robert H. Wheatley, Hitler and Spain: The Nazi Role in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2005), 104. 2. Howson, Arms for Spain, 241, 250. For a view of the battle from inside the Spanish government see Jackson, Juan Negrín, 191–99. 3. This history is traced in detail by Justus D. Doenecke, “Non-Interventionism of the Left: The Keep America Out of the War Congress, 1938–1941,” Journal of Contemporary History 12, no. 2 (April 1977): 221–36. 4. Kalmanovitch to Medical Bureau, October 27, 1937, Translations 2, Part J, Box 4, SRRO; Sherman to Reissig, November 16, 1939, Sherman, Box 31, Part B, SRRO.

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Notes to Pages 97–99

5. Rehfisch to Sherman, May 20, 1938, San Francisco 2, Box 5, Part K, SRRO. 6. The isolationist Nye’s unusual alignment on the issue is explained by Wayne S. Cole, Senator Gerald P. Nye and American Foreign Relations (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1962), 112–18, 114 (quote). See also Kulevsky, “Facets of Isolationism,” 5–20 and Traina, American Diplomacy and the Spanish Civil War, 59–60, 118–42; Congressional Record, 76th Cong., 1st Sess., 1939, 84, pt. 2: 1455; Congressional Record, 75th Cong., 3rd Sess., Appendix: 2310–2311. On Bernard see Barbara Stuhler, “The One Man Who Voted ‘Nay’: The Story of John T. Bernard’s Quarrel with American Foreign Policy, 1937–1939,” Minnesota History 43, no. 3 (Fall 1972): 82–92. 7. William L. Langer and S. Everett Gleason, The Challenge to Isolation, 1937–1940 (Harper & Brothers Publishers: New York, 1952), 35, 36. 8. See, for example, the Times’s excerpts of editorials from across the country on the subject of the Munich agreement: “American Editors Speak Betrayal of the Czechs, but They Urge Isolation,” New York Times, September 21, 1938, 6. 9. Herman Reissig to Norman Thomas, June 14, 1938, Translations 4, Part J, Box 4, SRRO. 10. “Relief to Barcelona,” Newsweek, November 28, 1938, 17. 11. Jack Sherman to Carol Rehfisch, August 9, 1938, San Francisco 1, Box 4, Part K, SRRO. 12. Ibid.; Braun press release, September 14, 1938, International Coordinating Committee 2, Box 5, Part J, SRRO. 13. Curti, American Philanthropy Abroad, 391; Douglas Jacobs to John Reich, November 15, 1938, AFSC, Part B, Box 1, SRRO. Traina describes financial as well as public relations difficulties in American Foreign Policy, 196–201. In response to these developments the NAC settled for donating money to the AFSC outright. Reich to Jacobs, November 16, 1938, AFSC, Part B, Box 1, SRRO. See also other correspondence in same folder. 14. The AFSC figures are derived from the Green Report and the Red Cross figures from Charles Hurd. Green Report, Cordell Hull Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; Charles Hurd, The Compact History of the American Red Cross (New York: Hawthorn Books, Inc., 1959), 218–19. There appears to be tremendous double-counting by bookkeepers throughout the movement in the recording of contributions. See Curti, American Philanthropy Abroad, 401. 15. Spanish Information Bureau, “Food Crisis,” News of Spain, November 23, 1938, 1; “Relief to Barcelona,” Newsweek, November 28, 1938, 17; “Children in Spain Get Bread Rations,” New York Times, November 29, 1938, 16. 16. “Spain,” Socialist Call, December 3, 1938, 2; “Unload Spanish Relief Cargo in Record Time,” Daily Worker, November 19, 1938, 1. 17. Michael Chapman, utilizing two Catholic sources, claims that the Franco supporters sent just over $179,000 to Nationalist Spain. It was apparently wired directly to London. Chapman, Arguing Americanism, 15, 235n34. According to the Green Report the numbers are lower still. The New York Times, in a piece critical of the aid movement as a whole, showed that the pro-Franco organizations were actually in the red. 18. Edward L. Barrett, Jr., The Tenney Committee: Legislative Investigation of Subversive Activities in California (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1951), 6; quote from Traina, American Diplomacy and the Spanish Civil War, 218; Reeves, America’s Bishop, 95, 106.

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159

19. University of Chicago telegram to FDR, January 28, 1939, Official File, 422C, Roosevelt Papers, FDRL; Steve Early memo, undated [responding to April 10, 1939, wire from Emily Shield at the University of Chicago], PPF 5057, ibid. 20. Clippings, ibid. 21. Traina, American Diplomacy, 210; 208, 206–7; Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 179–80; Traina, American Diplomacy, 209–11. See also Taylor, United States and the Spanish Civil War, 206; Peter Sehlinger and Holman Hamilton, Spokesman for Democracy: Claude G. Bowers, 1878–1958 (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society, 2000), 200. 22. State Department Press Release, October 17, 1939, Part B, Box 15, Intergovernmental Committee for Refugees, SRRO. 23. Gallup and Rae, Pulse of Democracy, 315–16, 319–20. 24. Parry, “Spanish Civil War,” 367. 25. Herman F. Reissig, “Challenging Mr. Villard,” The Nation, July 24, 1937, 110. 26. Parry, “Spanish Civil War,” 247. 27. James Schneider, Should America Go To War? The Debate Over Foreign Policy in Chicago, 1939–1941 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 2. 28. “Report of the Conversation between the Minister of Foreign Affairs, [Count Galeazzo] Ciano, and the Head of the Spanish State, Franco,” July 19, 1939, in Puzzo, Spanish Civil War, 183–84; Thomas, Spanish Civil War, 408–12, 900, 905, 909; Payne, Franco Regime, 216–17. Again the historiography offers different assessments of postwar violence. An impressive accounting just for the region of Aragón in the course of the conflict can be found in Julián Casanova, Ángela Cenarro, Julita Cifuentes, M. Pilar Maluenda, and M. Pilar Salomón, El Pasado Oculto: Fascismo y violencia en Aragón (1936–1939) (Madrid: Siglo Veintiuno de España Editores, S.A., 1992), 1–28, 167–216. 29. Reissig to Seema Matlin (Executive Secretary of the Los Angeles MBNAC), May 19, 1939, Los Angeles 3, Box 2, Part K, SRRO. 30. Curti, American Philanthropy Abroad, 392, 407. 31. The claim comes from Manuel de la Sota, head of the Basque delegation to the U.S., in a letter to Herman Reissig. See Reissig to Roger Baldwin, January 18, 1940, Executive Board Correspondence 3, Part C, Box 1, SRRO. 32. Largo Caballero to David Dubinsky, June 30, 1939, Spain, Ernest Cuneo Papers 49, FDRL. Additionally, the French wing of the aid movement found rampant exploitation in the camps. “The Truth about the Incidents at the Camp at Agde When Work Companies Were Being Made Up” (translation), France/Spain Correspondence, Box 5, Part J, SRRO. 33. Reissig to Isaacs, October 3, 1939, Misc. I, Part B, Box 15, SRRO. 34. See, for example, Andrews, Thyra J. Edwards, 131–33. 35. For proper measure, the anarchists also favored their own refugees. The difference was that the anarchists aiding refugees did not claim to be part of a united front. Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 252. The American Student Union also endured fissures. See Cohen, When the Old Left Was Young, 291–92. 36. Cannon eventually agreed to offer his name as honorary chair to the committee so long as he need not be involved in the workings of the re-formed organization. Wolfe, et al., Walter B. Cannon, 372–77. 37. Largo Caballero to David Dubinsky, June 30, 1939, Box 49, Spain, Papers of Ernest Cuneo, FDRL; Louis Stein, Beyond Death and Exile: The Spanish Republicans in France, 1939–1955 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), 88.

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Notes to Pages 105–106

38. For examples of French treatment see Isabel de Palencia, Smouldering Freedom: The Story of the Spanish Republicans in Exile (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., Inc., 1945), 41–48. 39. Greater New York Committee of SRRC Executive Board Committee meeting, March 6, 1940, Organization Minutes and Reports—Executive Board, Box 2, Part C, SRRO. 40. Stein, Beyond Death and Exile, 98. 41. Jack Sherman to Emma Pearlin, February 15, 1940, Boston 7, Box 13, Part K, SRRO. 42. Largo Caballero to David Dubinsky, June 30, 1939, Spain, Box 49, Ernest Cuneo Papers, FDRL. 43. Greater New York Committee of the SRRC Executive Board Meeting, March 6, 1940, Organization Minutes and Reports—Executive Board, Box 2, Part C, SRRO. 44. That the GNYC would do this at all attests to the fact that the NAC was not a communist organization. Reissig had explained to Norman Thomas earlier that “the Communist Party played a very prominent part in the work of our committee . . . and the fact is entirely to the credit of the communists. . . . [I]t was probably inevitable that here and there, and at certain periods, the communists should have had disproportionately large representation on the committee.” Reissig to Thomas, June 29, 1939, AMB NAC; “Refugees: Dispute with Norman Thomas,” Box 34, Fredericka Martin Papers ALBA 001, Tamiment Library/Wagner Archives, Elmer Holmes Bobst Library, New York University, New York. For an overview of the board see Smith, “Communist Party, Cooptation, and Spanish Republican Aid,” 154. 45. Guy Emery Shipler to Doug Jacobs, March 21, 1940, Executive Board 3, Box 1, ibid.; Copy of First Motion (Mexico), ibid. 46. Stein, Beyond Death and Exile, 46–49, 58–59, 60–61, 66, 72–73. Ave Bruzzechesi to Leo Eloesser, January 31, 1940, VALB, accessible at: http://www.alba-valb.org/ resources/document-library/letter-from-ave-bruzzichesi. Details on the Mexico City conference are in Douglas Jacobs, “Report on the First Commission of the Continental Conference to Aid Spanish Refugees, Mexico City, February 15–18, 1940, Folder 13, Box 9, Series I—Subseries B Subject Files, 1933–1940, Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Records, ALBA. 47. Jacobs, “Report on the First Commission,” ALBA; Reissig to Ickes, June 19, 1940, Ickes, Box 15, Part C, SRRO; Ave Bruzzechesi to Leo Eloesser, January 31, 1940, VALB. 48. Greater New York Committee of the SRRC Executive Board Committee, March 6, 1940, Organization Minutes and Reports—Executive Board, Box 2, Part C, SRRO. 49. Roger Baldwin claims that he and his allies provoked the split intentionally. Roger Baldwin, “The Reminiscences of Roger Nash Baldwin ,” 364, Oral History Research Office, Butler Library, Columbia University. 50. Organizing Committee for the National Emergency Conference to Save Spanish Refugees To Friends of the Spanish Refugees, April 6, 1940, Reel 24 in Southworth Collection. 51. Report of Executive Secretary, May 1, 1940, Executive Board Correspondence 2, Organization Minutes and Reports, Box 1, Part C, SRRO. 52. Guy Emery Shipler to Douglas Jacobs, March 21, 1940; Copy of First Motion [from Mexico City]; Reissig to Executive Board, February 26, 1940; Reissig to

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Jacobs, February 24, 1940, all in Executive Board 3, Box 1, Part C, SRRO; Minutes, March 19, 1940, Executive Board Minutes—1940, Box 1, Part C, SRRO. 53. Gibbons quotation and Reissig’s comments both in Herman F. Reissig, How to Combat Communism (New York: Council for Christian Social Action, United Church of Christ, 1961), 3, 17–18, from the Sourthworth Collection. Reissig rarely discussed these experiences with his children, but the communist rift was not an issue on which he remained silent, according to his son. Dan Reissig interview, April 15, 2005, in author’s possession. 54. Fry was apparently embittered by his NAC experience. William Leuchtenburg to author, November 28, 2005, in author’s possession. The story of the Emergency Rescue Committee and Varian Fry’s role in refugee rescue, as well as his earlier work with the North American Committee, is told in Andy Marino, A Quiet American: the Secret War of Varian Fry (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999). 55. Executive Secretary Report, September 1, 1940, Executive Secretary’s Reports, Part C, Box 2, SRRO. 56. Executive Secretary Report, September 1–December 26, 1940, ibid. 57. Reissig to Harold I. Ickes, December 26, 1940, Ickes, Harold, Part B, Box 15. This was the final correspondence between the SRRC/NAC and the Interior Secretary. 58. Reissig to Freda Kirchwey, November 16, 1940, Kirchwey, Freda, Part B, Box 16, SRRO. 59. Ibid. 60. Reissig to Paul Kellogg, November 29, 1940, Kellogg, Paul, Part B, Box 16, SRRO. 61. Existing neutrality legislation continued to require permits for some refugee activities but not others. The splinter organization seems to have run afoul of State Department requirements for efficiency and had its license revoked December 6, 1940. FBI Report, Boston (File 100–307), January 6, 1942, United American Spanish Aid Committee. 62. Martha Gellhorn, FBI File, in possession of the author.

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Chapter 6

Retribution

1. A concise history can be found in Philip Deery, “A blot upon liberty”: McCarthyism, Dr Barsky and the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee,” American Communist History 8, no. 2 (December 2009): 167–96. The FBI sketched out the origins in FBI Report, Boston (File 100–307), January 6, 1942, United American Spanish Aid Committee. It began with a meeting for the National Emergency Conference to Save Spanish Refugees on April 14, 1940. The conference subject and the origins of the rift described in the last chapter suggest that the saving of communist refugees was likely a determining factor in the creation of the new organization. 2. Frank J. Donner, The Age of Surveillance: The Aims and Methods of America’s Political Intelligence System (New York: Vintage Books 1981 [1980]), 53. 3. Ibid., 57; Neal Katyal and Richard Caplan, “The Surprisingly Stronger Case for the Legality of the NSA Surveillance Program: The FDR Precedent,” Stanford Law Review 60, no. 4, 1023–78. 4. FBI Report, San Diego (File 100–894), February 3, 1941, North American Spanish Aid Committee; United American Spanish Aid Committee, 2.

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Notes to Pages 110–114

5. Tierney, FDR and the Spanish Civil War, 66–67. 6. The issue in this instance was whether to take out a St Louis Post-Dispatch ad after the New York Times ad failed to generate sufficient interest. Baldwin to Racolin, May 26, 1937, Finance Committee, Box 2, Part C, SRRO. 7. Executive Board Meeting Minutes, September 6, 1937, Organizational Minutes and Reports—Executive Board, Part C, Box 2, SRRO. 8. Executive Board Minutes, September 6, 1937, Organizational Minutes and Reports—Executive Board , Part C, Box 2, SRRO; “Aid for Spain Cut by High Expenses: One New York group got $30,753 but spent $25,793,” New York Times, September 4, 1937, 4. The Francoist American Committee for Spanish Relief was the article in the subhead. Its treasurer was former U.S. Ambassador to Spain, Ogden Hammond. The original chair was Michael Williams of the Catholic publication Commonweal. 9. Because of Joseph C. Green’s leadership in collecting the information, the report is often referred to as the Green Report, the title the State Department gave to it; Executive Board Minutes, September 6, 1937, Part C, Box 2, SRRO; Resident Executive Committee Minutes, September 16, 1937, Organizational Minutes and Reports—Executive Board, Part C, Box 2, SRRO; F. V. Keys (Toronto) to NAC, February 3, 1938, Part B, Box 16, SRRO. See the appendix for the full report on Loyalist aid. 10. Samuel Rosenman, The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1938 Volume: The Continuing Struggle for Liberalism (New York: Macmillan Company, 1941), 252; Curti, American Philanthropy Abroad, 394n9, identifies the questioner as Schraick. 11. Rosenman, Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1938, 252–53. 12. Ibid. 13. Parry, “Spanish Civil War,” 292. 14. “Martin Dies was a David come to judgment on the New Deal” according to Walter Goodman, The Committee: The Extraordinary Careers of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968 [1964]), 19. 15. Hillman M. Bishop, The American League Against War and Fascism (1936), New York Public Library; American League Against War and Fascism, Box 55, House Un-American Activities Records, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C. 16. U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, Special Committee on Un-American Activities, Investigation of Un-American Propaganda Activities in the United States, 75th Cong., 3rd Sess., Vol. 1 (August 12–23, 1938), 569–71. 17. The POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista) was the Trotskyist party in Spain made famous in George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia and revisited in the 1995 Ken Loach film Land and Freedom. 18. U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, Special Committee on Un-American Activities, Investigation of Un-American Propaganda Activities in the United States, 76th Cong., 2nd Sess., Vol. 4 (November 22, 1938), 2531. 19. Ibid., 2569. http://archive.org/stream/investigationofu193804unit/investigationofu193804unit_djvu.txt 20. Franco’s partisans promoted the events in Barcelona as anarchists and international communists at war with each other, but the events were an entirely Catalan affair with Soviet intelligence reacting after the fact. See Viñas, El escudo de la República, 487–548, especially 524–25; Morten Heiberg and Manuel Ros Agudo,

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La trama oculta de la guerra civil: Los servicios secretos de Franco, 1936–1945 (Barcelona: Critica, 2006), 131–42; and Ferran Gallego, Barcelona, mayo de 1937 (Barcelona: Random House Mondadori, 2007), 355–96. 21. Ibid., 6947. 22. All quotes from Martha Mitchell to Cordell Hull, April 3, 1939, House Un-American Activities Committee Executive Session Transcript, September 27, 1945, to October 19, 1946, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C.; Mitchell to Hull, 3 September 1939, ibid. 23. Files of the Communist Party of the USA in the Comintern Archives / Rossiiskii tsentr khraneniia i izucheniia dokumentov noveishei istorii (Moscow and New York: IDC Publishers, 1999–2000), Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives, New York University. This collection is sometimes referred to by scholars as the Moscow Microfilm. 24. There are good reasons to dispute Henson’s claim of the NAC as a communist organization, which are taken up in Eric R. Smith, “The Communist Party, Cooptation, and Aid to the Spanish Republic,” American Communist History 8, no. 2 (2009): 137–64. The NAC was later designated a communist organization anyway. See Robert J. Goldstein, American Blacklist: The Attorney General’s List of Subversive Organizations (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008), 141–42. 25. “Spanish Diary,” 46, Sandor Voros Manuscripts, Adelphi University, Garden City, New York. 26. Carroll, Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, 295–312. 27. “Statement on the Description of the Spanish Refugee Relief Campaign in the Dies Committee Report to Congress,” undated [probably December 1940], Dies Committee, Box 10, Part B, SRRO; Griffin Fariello, Red Scare: Memories of the American Inquisition (New York: Avon Books, 1995), 348, 442, 443; Carroll, Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, 285–88; Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes, 124–28; U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, Special Committee on Un-American Activities, Investigation of Un-American Propaganda Activities in the United States, 76th Cong., 2nd Sess., Vol. 11 (October 24, 1939), 6370–77. 28. Block quote and foregoing paragraphs all from U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, Special Committee on Un-American Activities, Investigation of Un-American Propaganda Activities in the United States, 75th Cong., 3rd Sess., Vol. 2(October 11, 1938), 1241–45. 29. Ibid., 1296. 30. Ibid., 1281. 31. Martha Fainaru to John Sherman, February 20, 1940, Detroit, Michigan folder, Box 16, Part K, SRRO; in the same folder see also Mitchell Webb to Sherman, March 23, 1939; Sherman to Webb, March 25, 1939; Sherman to Webb, March 25, 1939. 32. Ernest Goodman, “The Spanish Loyalist Indictments: Skirmish in Detroit,” The Guild Practitioner 36 (Winter 1979): 1–13; Civil Rights Federation, FBI Detroit: The Facts Concerning the FBI Raids in Detroit (Detroit: Civil Rights Federation, 1940), 1–16. 33. An 1896 case Wiborg v. the United States was later used to defend the same type of recruitment by President Kennedy for the Bay of Pigs invasion, with his brother RFK arguing that “the neutrality laws were never designed to prevent individuals from leaving the United States to fight for a cause in which they believed. Nor is an individual prohibited from departing from the United States,

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Notes to Pages 118–121

with others of like belief, to join still others in a second country for an expedition against a third country.” Edward Kwakwa, The International Law of Armed Conflict: Personal and Material Fields of Application (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic, 1992), 116. 34. Rita James Simon, ed. As We Saw the Thirties: Essays on Social and Political Movements of a Decade (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1967), 235. 35. An excellent analysis of anticommunism in Detroit in this period can be found in Alex Goodall, “The Battle of Detroit and Anti-Communism in the Depression Era,” The Historical Journal 51, no. 2 (2008): 457–80. 36. Martha Fainaru to John Sherman, February 20, 1940, Detroit, Michigan folder, Box 16, Part K, SRRO; in the same folder see also Mitchell Webb to Sherman, March 23, 1939; Sherman to Webb, March 25, 1939; Sherman to Webb, March 25, 1939; “FBI Raids Spanish Loyalist Veterans Here; Records Seized, Two Leaders Subpoenaed,” New York Times, February 10, 1940, 1. See also Carroll, Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, 231. 37. “Governor Hurley of Massachusetts Calls a Spade—a Spade!” Reel 23, Southworth Collection. 38. Holmes, “Anti-Communism in Massachusetts,” 82, 79–89, 84, 91–92, 85. 39. As Deery points out, Parnell, who led the Hollywood Ten investigation the next year, would also land in prison himself on corruption charges. Philip Deery, “’A blot upon liberty’: McCarthyism, Dr Barsky, and the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee,” American Communist History 8, no. 2 (2009): 167–96. Quote about army from informant in FBI Report, Chicago (File 100–3514), February 13, 1943, Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee; American Committee to Save Refugees; United American Spanish Aid Committee, 3. The JAFRC Supreme Court case is taken up in Goldstein, American Blacklist, 150–51; Goodman, The Committee, 177–78. 40. Carroll, Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, 286. Philip Deery, “’A blot upon liberty,’” 167–96. 41. Goldstein, American Blacklist, 104–5. For more context on the AGL see also Richard M. Fried, Nightmare in Red: The McCarthy Era in Perspective (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). 42. Goldstein, American Blacklist, 41. 43. Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes, 124–28. 44. Lini DeVries, Up From the Cellar (Minneapolis: Vanilla Press, 1979), 238, 255, 264–307. 45. Terkel, Hard Times, 372. 46. “Hung Jury,” Time, June 5, 1950, Accessed August 1, 2007, at: http://www. time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,812557,00.html. 47. Michael Freedland, Hollywood on Trial: McCarthyism’s War against the Movies (London: Robson Books, 2007), 52. 48. Gladys Nadler Rips, Coming to America: Immigrants from Southern Europe, 120–21; see also June Namias, First Generation: In the Words of Twentieth-Century American Immigrants; Roberta Johnson, “Jose Rubia Barcia: Ethical Humanist, Hispania 80 (May 1997): 290–92. 49. The focus came to be on the Hollywood Ten, but the ten were not the only ones called. A brief overview can be found in Freedland, Hollywood on Trial, 81– 82. See also Goodman, The Committee, 207–25. 50. Lawson’s testimony is available at “They Want to Muzzle Public Opinion”: John Howard Lawson’s Warning to the American Public, History Matters, American Social

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History Project and Center for Media and Learning (Graduate Center, CUNY) and the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (George Mason University), accessible at http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/6441. 51. Carroll, Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, 291.

Conclusion

A Tomb For Democracy

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1. Norman Thomas and Bertram D. Wolfe, Keep America Out of War: A Program (New York: Stokes, 1939), 145, cited in Justus Doenecke, Storm on the Horizon: The Challenge to American Intervention, 1939–1941, 5; Robert Dallek, The American Style of Foreign Policy: Cultural Politics and Foreign Affairs, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983), 118; Frank Warren, Noble Abstractions: American Liberal Intellectuals and World War II (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999), 204–5; quote from Proceedings of Trade Union Conference on Spain Held at the Palace Hotel, December 11, 1938, San Francisco, Box 3, Part K, SRRO. 2. That foundation was William Appleman Williams’s The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (New York: Delta Books, 1962). His students have contributed a large body of work, including Thomas J. McCormick, America’s Half-Century: United States Foreign Policy in the Cold War and After (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989). Leading the new re-revisionism, and returning to Hunt’s parameters of orthodoxy but with a refined clarion call, is Samantha Power, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 2002). 3. Henry R. Luce, The American Century (New York and Toronto: Farrar & Rinehart, Inc., 1941), 3, 22–39. 4. Quoted in Dallek, American Style of Foreign Policy, 142. 5. George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia and Looking Back on the Spanish War (Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1975), 241. 6. Ottanelli, Communist Party of the United States, 125. 7. Kazin, Starting Out in the Thirties, 86. 8. This English translation is in common usage. The original is from a letter from Camus to Georges Bataille reprinted as the “Preface” to George Bataille, ed., L’Espagne Libre (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1946). The full paragraph reads: Voici neuf ans que les hommes d’ma génération ont l’Espagne sur le cœur. Neuf ans qu’ils la portent avec eux comme une mauvaise blessure. C’est par elle qui’ls ont connu pour la première fois le goût de la défaite, qu’ils ont découvert, avec une surprise don’t ils sont à peine revenus, qu’on pouvait avoir raison et être vaincu, qu e la force pouvait se soumettre l’esprit et qu’il était des cas où le courage n’avait pas sa récompense.”

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Books and Pamphlets ACLU. The Bill of Rights: 150 Years Later: The Story of Civil Liberties, 1938– 1939. New York: ACLU, 1939. ———. Eternal Vigilance: The Story of Civil Liberty, 1937–1938. New York: ACLU, 1938. ———. Let Freedom Ring! The Story of Civil Liberty, 1936–1937. New York: ACLU, 1937. Alamillo, José M., Making Lemonade Out of Lemons: Mexican American Labor and Leisure in a California Town, 1880–1960. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006. Alexander, William. Film on the Left: American Documentary Film from 1931 to 1942. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1981. Almond, Gabriel. The American People and Foreign Policy. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1950. American Federation of Labor. Report of the Proceedings of the Fifty-Sixth Annual Convention of the American Federation of Labor, Tampa, Florida, November 16 to 27, 1936. Washington, D.C.: American Federation of Labor, 1936. Andrews, Gregg. Thyra J. Edwards: Black Activists in the Global Freedom Struggle. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2011. Avrich, Paul. Anarchist Voices: An Oral History of Anarchism in America. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995. Barrett, Edward L., Jr. The Tenney Committee: Legislative Investigation of Subversive Activities in California. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1951. Barrera, Mario. Race and Class in the Southwest: A Theory of Racial Inequality. Notre Dame and London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979. Bataille, Georges, ed. L’Espagne Libre. Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1946. Beevor, Antony. The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939. New York: Penguin Books 2006 [1982]. Behrstock, Julian. The Eighth Case: Troubled Times at the United Nations. New York: University Press of America, 1987. Bendiner, Robert. Just around the Corner: A Highly Selective History of the Thirties. New York, Harper & Row, 1967.

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Articles Alexander, William. “Frontier Films, 1936–1941: The Aesthetics of Impact.” Cinema Journal 15, no. 1 (Autumn 1975): 16–28. Cenarro, Ángela. “Francoist nostalgia and memories of the Spanish Civil War.” International Journal of Iberian Studies 21, no. 3 (2008): 203–17. Coni, Nicholas. “Medicine and the Spanish Civil War.” Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 95, no. 3 (March 2002): 147–50. Crosby, Donald F. “Boston’s Catholics and the Spanish Civil War: 1936– 1939.” New England Quarterly 44, no. 1 (1971): 82–100. Deery, Philip. “’A blot upon liberty’: McCarthyism, Dr Barsky, and the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee.” American Communist History 8, no. 2 (December 2009): 167–96. Doenecke, Justus D. “Non-Interventionism of the Left: The Keep America Out of the War Congress, 1938–1941.” Journal of Contemporary History 12, no 2 (April 1977): 221–36. Domingo, Marcelino. “‘Tampa, Altar of Spain’: A Spanish Republican View of Tampa in the 1930s.” Translated by Ana Varela-Lago. Tampa Bay History 19, no. 2, (1997): 69–72. Ealham, Chris. “The Emperor’s New Clothes: ‘Objectivity’ and Revisionism in Spanish History.” Journal of Contemporary History 48 (2013): 191–202.

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“Ethiopia Deserves Aid of All Liberty-Lovers.” Daily Worker, Oct. 8, 1936. Geary, Daniel. “Carey McWilliams and Antifascism, 1934–1943.” Journal of American History (December 2003): 912–34. Gomez, A. “Spanish Immigrants in the United States.” The Americas 19 (July 1962): 59–77. Goodall, Alex. “The Battle of Detroit and Anti-Communism in the Depression Era.” The Historical Journal 51, no. 2 (2008): 457–80. Goodman, Ernest. “The Spanish Loyalist Indictments: Skirmish in Detroit.” The Guild Practitioner 36 (Winter 1979): 1–13. Haapamaki, Michelle. “Writers in Arms and the Just War: The Spanish Civil War, Literary Activism , and Leftist Masculinity.” Left History 10, no. 2 (Fall 2005): 33–52. Haslam, Jonathan. “The Comintern and the Origins of the Popular Front, 1934–1935.” Historical Journal 22, no. 3 (1979): 673–91. Haynes, John Earl. “Reconsidering Two Questions: On Arnesen’s ‘No Graver Danger’; Black Anticommunism, the Communist Party, and the Race Question.” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas 3, no. 4 (Winter 2006): 53. Hook, Sidney. “The Anatomy of the Popular Front.” Partisan Review 6, no. 3 (Spring 1939): 29–45. Johnson, Roberta. “Jose Rubia Barcia: Ethical Humanist.” Hispania 80 (May 1997): 290–92. Kagan, Richard L. “The Spanish Craze in the United States: Cultural Entitlement and the Appropriation of Spain’s Cultural Patrimony, ca. 1890–ca. 1930.” Revista Complutense de Historia de America, no. 36 (2010): 37–58. Katyal, Neal and Richard Caplan. “The Surprisingly Stronger Case for the Legality of the NSA Surveillance Program: The FDR Precedent.” Stanford Law Review 60, no. 4 (February 2008): 101–56. Kivisto, Peter. “The Decline of the Finnish American Left, 1925–1945.” International Migration Review 17, no. 1 (Spring 1983): 65–94. Knoenagel, Axel. “The Historical Context of Sinclair Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here.” Southern Humanities Review 29, no. 3 (Summer 1995): 221–40. Kulevsky, Shirley G. “Facets of Isolationism: North Dakota’s Reaction to the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939.” North Dakota Quarterly 46, no. 4 (Autumn 1978): 5–20. Levenson, Leonard. “U.S. Communist in Spain: A Profile.” Political Affairs 65, no. 8 (August 1986): 6. MacDonald, Dwight. “Letters to the Editors: The American Writers’ Congress.” The Nation, June 19, 1937, 714. Miscamble, Wilson D. “The Limits of American Catholic Antifascism: The Case of John A. Ryan.” Church History 59, no. 4 (December 1990): 523–38.

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Moradiellos, Enrique. “Critical historical revision and political revisionism.” International Journal of Iberian Studies 21, no. 3 (2008): 219–29. “Need the New Deal Be Fascist?” The Nation, January 9, 1935, 32, 33. Ottanelli, Fraser. “Anti-Fascism and the Shaping of National and Ethnic Identity: Italian-American Volunteers in the Spanish Civil War.” Journal of American Ethnic History 27, no. 1 (Fall 2007): 9–31. Prago, Albert. “Jews in the International Brigades: Over 7,000 Jews from 54 Countries Fought in the International Brigades.” Jewish Currents (February 1979): 15–21. ———. “Jews in the International Brigades: 2: Botwin Company Volunteers—Symbol of Jewish Resistance.” Jewish Currents (March 1979): 6–9, 24–27. Navarro, Vicente. “Fascism and Antifascism: Yesterday and Today.” Monthly Review 47, no. 8 (January 1996): 14–26. Patai, Frances. “Heroines of the Good Fight: Testimonies of U.S. Volunteer Nurses in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939.” Nursing History Review 3 (1995): 79–104. Rahv, Philip. “Two Years of Progress—From Waldo Frank to Donald Ogden Stewart.” Partisan Review 4, no. 3 (February 1938): 22–30. Rossinow, Doug. “The Radicalization of the Social Gospel: Harry F. Ward and the Search for a New Social Order, 1898–1936.” Religion and American Culture 15, no. 1 (Winter 2005): 63–106. Singerman, Robert . “American-Jewish Reactions to the Spanish Civil War.” Journal of Church and State 19, no. 2 (1977): 261–78. Smith, Eric R. “The Communist Party, Cooptation, and Aid to the Spanish Republic.” American Communist History 8, no. 2 (December 2009): 137–64. Stafford, Paul. “The Chamberlain-Halifax Visit to Rome: A Reappraisal.” The English Historical Review 98, no. 386 (January 1983): 61–100. Steele, Richard W. “The Pulse of the People. Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Gauging of American Public Opinion.” Journal of Contemporary History 9, No. 4, (Oct., 1974): 195–216. http://www.jstor.org/stable/260297 (accessed: July 7, 2008). Stuhler, Barbara. “The One Man Who Voted ‘Nay’: The Story of John T. Bernard’s Quarrel with American Foreign Policy, 1937–1939.” Minnesota History 43, no. 3 (Fall 1972): 82–92. Sylvers, Malcolm . “American Communists in the Popular Front Period: Reorganization or Disorganization?” Journal of American Studies 23, no. 3 (1989): 375–93. Taylor, Crystal. “For Love of Liberty: Tampeaños Remember the Spanish Civil War.” Southern Exposure 21, no. 1 (Spring 2003).

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Tierney, Dominic. “Franklin D. Roosevelt and Covert Aid to the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–39.” Journal of Contemporary History 39, no. 3: 299–313. Valaik, J. David. “Catholics, Neutrality, and the Spanish Embargo, 1937– 1939.” Journal of American History 54, no. 1 (June 1967): 73–85. Varela-Lago, Ana. “From Patriotism to Mutualism: The Early Years of the Centro Española de Tampa.” Tampa Bay History 15, no. 2 (1993): 5–23. ———. “‘No Pasaran!’ The Spanish Civil War’s Impact on Tampa’s Latin Community.” Tampa Bay History 19, no. 2 (1997): 5–35. ———. “Tampa and the Spanish Civil War: A Photographic Essay.” Tampa Bay History 19, no. 2 (1997): 57–68. ———. “‘We Had to Help’: Remembering Tampa’s Response to the Spanish Civil War.” Tampa Bay History 19, no. 2 (1997): 36–56. Wilentz, Sean. “Red Herrings Revisited.” Voice Literary Supplement (June, 1985).

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Newspapers and Periodicals The Commonweal, 1936–1939 The Campus (CUNY), 1936–1939 Daily Northwestern, 1936–1937 Daily Worker, 1936–1938 Democrat and Leader (Davenport, Iowa), 1936–1937 España Libre, 1937–1938 Illinois State Journal (Springfield), 1937–1938 The Nation, 1935–1938 News of Spain, 1938 Newsweek, 1938 New York Post, 1937 New York Times, 1936–1939 Socialist Call, 1936–1938 Spanish Labor Bulletin, 1938 The Sun (Baltimore), 1938 Time

Interviews Baldwin, Roger Nash. The Reminiscences of Roger Nash Baldwin. Interview with Harlan B. Phillips, November 1953–January 1954. Oral History Research Office, Butler Library, Columbia University. Hilkevitch, Aaron. Interviews by author, February 1, and April 24, 2004. Audio recording and notes in author’s possession. Reissig, Dan. Interview by author, April 15, 2005. Via telephone. Notes in author’s possession.

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Public and Government Documents

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City of San Francisco. San Francisco Municipal Code. San Francisco: Works Progress Administration, 1939. FBI Report (released under FOIA). Boston (File 100–307), January 6, 1942, United American Spanish Aid Committee. FBI Report (released under FOIA). Chicago (File100–3514), February 13, 1943, Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee; American Committee to Save Refugees; United American Spanish Aid Committee. FBI Report (released under FOIA). San Diego (File 100–894), February 3, 1941, North American Spanish Aid Committee; United American Spanish Aid Committee. U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, Special Committee on UnAmerican Activities, Investigation of Un-American Propaganda Activities in the United States, 75th Cong., 3rd Sess., Vol. 4, November 22, 1938. U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, Special Committee on UnAmerican Activities, Investigation of Un-American Propaganda Activities in the United States, 76th Cong., 1st Sess., pt. 2. 1939. U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, Special Committee on UnAmerican Activities, Investigation of Un-American Propaganda Activities in the United States, Congressional Record, 75th Cong., 3rd Sess., Appendix, pt. 3, 1941. U.S. Congress. House. Extension of remarks by Representative Bernard on the Spanish Embargo. 75th Cong., 3rd Sess., Congressional Record 83, pt. 11, June 2, 1938. U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, Special Committee on UnAmerican Activities, Investigation of Un-American Propaganda Activities in the United States, 76th Cong, 2nd Sess., Vol. 11, October 24, 1939.

Visual Materials Newman, Julia. Into the Fire: American Women in the Spanish Civil War. New York: Exemplary Films, 2002. Shumlin, Herman. The Spanish Earth. Sherman Oaks, Calif.: Slinghot, 2000 [1936].

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Index Abraham Lincoln Battalion, 57, 75, 116, 119 See also International Brigades Acción Demócrata, 76–77 Addis, Thomas, 72, 77 Adler, Larry, 120 African–Americans, 19–21, 58, 61–63, 90, 98, 112, 149 Aid–short–of–war, 40, 44 Alexander, William, 53 Allen, Devere, 29 Allen, Jay, 42 Amalgamated Clothing Workers, 33 Ambulance campaigns, 46, 48, 50, 146n51 American Civil Liberties Union, 36, 68, 74, 88 American Federation of Labor, 56 American Friends of Spanish Democracy, 30–31, 36, 38, 51, 69, 71, 110 American Friends Service Committee. See Quakers American Guards, 47 American League Against War and Fascism, 32, 35, 57, 71–72, 75, 79, 113 American Legion, 68, 74, 78–79, 89, 92, 113 American Medical Bureau, 45, 83 American Relief Administration, 3 American Spanish Relief Association, 89 American Student Union, 44–45 Anarchism, 9, 11, 16, 27–28, 35, 58, 61, 159n35; United Libertarian Organizations, 28. See also Confederación Nacional de Trajabadores (CNT) Andalucians, 67 Anti–communism, 2, 78–95, 110–21 Anti–fascism, 2; defined, 6; democracy versus fascism, 6–7, 33, 43, 84. See also various ethnic groups Anti–Semitism, 47, 64 Anti–Stalinists, 32–33; Lovestoneites, 28, 34

Arizona, 66 Asturians, 67 Attorney General’s List of Subversive Organizations, 119–20 Auden, Wystan Hugh (W. H.), 8–9, 42, 66 Azcárate, Manuel, 90 Bakery and Confectionery Workers International Union Local 22, 57 Baldwin, Roger, 28, 32, 36, 104, 110 Baltimore, Maryland, 57 Baron, Sam, 30, 35, 104, 113 Barsky, Edward, 38, 50, 119–20 Bedford–Jones, Nancy, 30, 45 Behrstock, Julian, 47, 144n35 Benét, Stephen Vincent, 36 Bengston, John, 88 Bernard, John, 97 Bessie, Alvah, 121 Bethune, Norman, 53–54 Biberman, Herbert, 51, 121 Bishop, Hillman, 113 Blackwell, James, 148n103 Bliven, Bruce, 36 Blum, Coleman, 60 Boise, Idaho, 67 Bolles, Stephen, 94 Boston, Massachusetts, 39, 90 Bowden, Thomas, 81 Briggs, Marion, 92 Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, 62, 96 Broun, Heywood, 36 Browder, Earl, 68, 115, 118, 125 Brown, Lorene, 117 Brumbaugh, Edmund, 81 Bruzzichesi, Ave, 83, 105, 141n83 Bryan, Helen, 120 Buchman, Sidney, 51 Budenz, Louis, 119 Buñuel, Luis, 121 Burke, Thomas, 92–93, 118 185

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Index

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Burlington, Iowa, 89 Burlington, Vermont, 87 Bussey, Gertrude, 148n103 Butler, Smedley, 10 Byrd, Robert, 44 California, 66–68 Camus, Albert, 127 Cannon, Walter, 90–93, 104, 108 Carmel, California, 74, 76 Carreaga, Louis, 35 Catholics, Roman, 68, 78–87, 89–90, 92, 94, 100; Anticlericalism, 26, 154n12; Anti–Catholic sentiments, 66, 87, 119. See also Spanish (Second) Republic, problems of Catholic Worker, 79 Chaikin, Alfred, 46 Chase, Roger, 91 Chicago, Illinois, 1, 20, 39, 42, 62 Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, 42 Chicago Symphony Orchestra, 1, 49 China, aid to, 76, 97 Cigarmakers’ International Union Local 500, 57 Cincinnati, Ohio, 78, 93–95, 106 Citrine, Sir Walter, 38 City College of New York, 33, 45–46, 112 Clark, Joe, 118 Clark, Tom, 119 Cobb, Humphrey, 51 Cohen, Manny, 118 Cohn, Joseph, 117 Comité Popular Democrático de Sócorro, 70 Committee for Defense of the Spanish People’s Front. See Comité Popular Democrático de Sócorro Committee to Defend American by Aiding the Allies, 102 Commonweal, 84–85 Communist Party, 2, 8, 9, 30, 39, 50, 103– 6; relief aid, 32, 35, 39; Ethiopia, 20 Communists. See Communist Party Conboy, Martin, 82 Confederación Nacional de Trabajadores (CNT), 22, 26 Cook, Frederick, 93 Cook, Gerald, 118 Copland, Aaron, 19

Coughlin, Charles, 83, 94–95, 99, 156n69 Cowley, Malcolm, 11–12, 51 Crawford, Joan, 49 Creighton University, 81 Crookston, William, 116 Cubans, 68, 70 Cuneo, Ernest, 74 Curran, Edward Lodge, 81 Czechoslovakia, 97 d’Agostino, Peter, 83 Dahlberg, Edward, 12 Dalty, Lleó, 72 Daughters of the American Revolution, 42 Davenport, Iowa, 79 Davis, Jerome, 46 Davis, Leon, 117 Day, Dorothy, 79 Democracy versus fascism. See Anti– fascism Dennis, Lawrence, 80 Detroit, Michigan: censorship in, 55; Loyalist Indictments, 116 Dewey, John, 36 Dhaga, José, 66 Dies, Martin. See Dies Committee Dies Committee, 30, 82, 110, 112–14 Dodd, William, 42 Domingo, Marcelino, 70 Donowa, Arnold, 20 Dos Passos, John, 28, 51 Douglas, Paul, 89, 102 Draper, Paul, 120 Dubinsky, David, 33, 55 Dunham, Arthur, 30 Early, Stephen, 86 Edwards, Thyra, 63, 71 Eiffel, Paul, 33 Einhorn, Samuel, 60 Eisler, Gerhart, 120 Eldridge, Florence, 51 Ellison, Ralph, 62 Embargo on arms, 9, 40, 83–84, 94–95, 97, 112 Emergency Rescue Committee, 107–8 Ethiopia, 19–21, 57, 62 Ettleson, Abraham, 114 Farley, James, 85 Fascism, 7–12; German Bund, 8

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Index

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Fay, Frank, 119 Federal Bureau of Investigation, 109, 112, 119–20 Feldt, Frank, Jr., 117 Fellowship of Reconciliation, 97 Fernsworth, Lawrence, 82 Finnish–Americans, 64 Florida, 54, 66–67 Flynn, John, 96 Foreign Policy Association, 12 France, 16, 25, 38, 102–3, 105 Franco, Francisco, 23, 53, 79–81, 84–86, 96, 99–102, 112, 126 Frankel, Stanley, 47 Frankfurter, Felix, 92 Friends of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, 113, 117 Fry, Varian, 107–8, 161n54 Fuhr, Lini, 49, 88, 94, 120 Furriers Union, 48, 51 Gaines, Frank, 74 Galicians (Gallegos), 67 German–Americans, 8, 64–65 Germany, 4, 7, 16, 24, 40, 46, 64, 82, 91, 96–98, 126 Gibardi, Louis, 116 Gibbons, Ray, 107 Gilman, Elizabeth, 60 Girabaldi Battalion, 65 Grand Rapids, Michigan, 49–50, 88 Grary, Eunice, 76 Great Britain, 16, 25, 101 Greater New York Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy, 104–6 Great War. See World War I Greek–Americans, 64 Green, Joseph, 111 Green, William, 56 Griffin, James, 89 Guerin, Daniel, 11 Guernica, 82, 91 Guttmann, Allan, 4, 12, 66, 80, 83–84 Guzman, Jaime de, 66 Halloran, Leo, 92 Halper, Albert, 8, 40 Hamilton, Al, 45 Hammerstein, Oscar, II, 42 Hankemeyer, Natalie, 30 Hannerz, Ulf, 43 Hartley, Harold, 117

187

Harvard University, 48, 90–91 Hathaway, Clarence, 32 Hawaii, 67 Haywood, Harry, 20 Hearst Press, 84 Heart of Spain, The, 49, 53–54, 88 Hedger, George, 157n75 Hemingway, Ernest, 4, 51; For Whom the Bell Tolls, 4, 13, 66 Henson, Francis, 115 Hermes, Henry, 71 Hernaiz, Dulcea, 66 Hickie, Dorothy, 93 Hilkevitch, Aaron, 45 Hill, Harry Granison, 157n75 Hillman, Sidney, 33 Hirschfield, Victor, 54 Hitler, Adolf. See Germany Hitler–Stalin Pact. See Molotov– Ribbentropp Pact Hollywood: Committee, 51, 54, 89; Hollywood Ten, 51 Holmes, John Haynes, 30 Hook, Sidney, 12 Hoover, Herbert, 3 Hoover, J. Edgar, 109, 119 Hopkins, Harry, 55 Hospital Workers Union, 37 House Un–American Activities Committee, 112, 118, 120 Howe, Irving, 33 Hudson, Roy, 58 Hughes, Langston, 21, 62 Hull, Cordell, 25, 74, 97, 100 Hunt, Michael, 123 Hurley, Charles, 118 Hutchins, Evelyn, 35 Ickes, Harold, 49, 85, 106, 116 Immigrants, 64. See also specific groups International Brigades, 1, 45, 57, 63–65, 73 International Brotherhood of Blacksmiths, Forgers and Helpers, 57 International Coordinating Committee, 38, 58 International Federation of Trade Unions, 38, 57 International Labor Defense, 39, 117, 140n68 International Ladies Garment Workers Union, 34, 48, 55, 60, 96, 113

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188 International Workers Order, 48, 52, 75, 119 Interventionism, 4 Isolationism, 2 Israel, Edward, 148n103 Italian–Americans, 17, 55, 65, 70, 83 Italy, 4, 7, 16, 24, 40, 45–46, 57, 126 Ivens, Joris, 52, 55. See also Spanish Earth, The Jackson, Howard, 59 Jackson, Robert, 118 Jacobs, Douglas, 105–6 Janowitz, John, 119 Japan, 3, 12, 56, 94, 101 Jewish Americans, 45–46, 64 Joint Anti–Fascist Refugee Committee, 107, 109, 118–19

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Kagan, Richard, 66 Kalmanovitch, Maurice, 97 Karpathi, Geza, 53 Kazin, Alfred, 17, 126 Kee, Salaria, 21, 59 Keep America Out of War, 96 Kellogg–Briand Pact, 19 Kelly, Edward, 20 King, Marianne, 73, 75–76 Kline, Herbert, 53 Knights of Columbus, 78, 82, 88, 93, 116, 118 Kowal, Robert, 117 Kowalsky, Daniel, 1, 24 Ku Klux Klan, 68 Kyle, Constance, 48 Labor: organized, 10, 19, 32, 35–36, 55–61, 70; 1938 strike wave, 58–61, 148n103; Labor’s Red Cross, 31, 34, 55. See also specific unions LaFollette, Robert, Jr., 94, 96 LaGuardia, Fiorello, 49 Landon, Alf, 90 Largo Caballero, Francisco, 105 Larkin, Oliver, 118 Larnder, Ring, 121 Lash, Joseph, 45, 46 Laski, Harold, 119 Laughlin, Erwin, 82 Lawson, John Howard, 51, 121 Lehman, Edith, 48 Leigh, Lloyd, 148n103

Index Lendrum, Frederick, 116–17 Lens, Sidney, 29, 33 Levin, Meyer, 49 Lewis, Sinclair, 12 Liberalism, 4, 12, 35, 123; Depression– era capitalism, 17 Lithuanian–Americans, 65 Llano, Gonzalo Queipo de, 64 Locke, John, 4 Lodge, Henry Cabot, 3 Loeb, James, 30 Long, Huey, 10, 12 Lopez, Albert, 57 Lopez, Enrique, 71, 151n35 Lopez, Epiphano, 66 Lovestoneites. See Anti–Stalinists Lovett, Robert Morss, 32 Loyalist Indictments. See Detroit, Michigan: censorship in Luce, Henry, 123–24 Macdonald, Dwight, 10, 33 Maciosek, Leo, 117 MacLeish, Archibald, 34–35, 55 Makover, Henry, 59 Malraux, André, 44, 51 Marin, Amador, 69 Marsh, James, 157n75 Martin, Fredericka, 89 Matthews, J.B., 116 Matusow, Harvey, 119 McConnell, Francis, 78, 88 McCormack, John, 92 McGillis, John, 116–17 McNaboe Committee, 125 McReynolds, Samuel, 110 McWilliams, Carey, 34 Medical advances, 41 Medical Bureau, 5, 15, 21, 31–40, 51, 54, 59, 71–72, 77, 116–17 Medical Bureau and North American Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy, 5, 98, 100, 103–4 Merriman, Marion, 73 Merriman, Robert, 73 Metaxas, Ionnais, 64 Mexican–Americans, 66 Mexico City, First Continental Conference to Aid Spanish Refugees in, 104–5 Michigan, 49, 87–88, 97 Milestone, Lewis, 51

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Index

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Millay, Edna St. Vincent, 49 Miller, Louis, 38 Mills, C. Wright, 42 Miscamble, Wilson, 79 Mitchell, Martha, 114 Moffatt, Abbott Low, 99 Mola, Emilio, 23, 26 Molotov–Ribbentropp Pact, 102–3 Monterey, California, 76 Mooney, Edward Cardinal, 83 Mork, Walter, 74 Mormino, Gary, 67 Motion Picture Artists Committee. See Hollywood Mundelein, George Cardinal, 83 Mussolini, Benito. See Italy Nation, The, 9, 101, 122 National Catholic Welfare Conference, 79 National Guard, 92 National Maritime Union, 58–60 Negrín, Juan, 91, 105 Neutrality, 17, 24–27, 39, 42, 47, 57, 71, 100–101, 161n61 New Orleans, Louisiana, 71 New Republic, The, 122 New York City, 18, 35, 39, 60–61, 80–81, 106, 119 Nichols, Dudley, 51 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 87 Noll, John, 79 Non–intervention. See Neutrality Non–Intervention Committee, 16 Norfolk, 61 North, Winifred, 50 North American Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy, 5, 31–36, 40, 45, 51, 57, 63–65, 70–72, 77, 86–87, 109–10, 115–19 North Shore Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy, 1, 49 Northwestern University, 47 Norton, William Warder (W.W.), 36, 104 Norwegian seamen, 59–60 Nye, Gerald, 80, 97 Oberlin College, 48 O’Connell, Jerry, 54 O’Connell, William, 92 O’Day, Caroline, 49 O’Flanagan, Michael, 73, 79, 83–84

189

Ogburn, William, 9 Ohio State University, 48 Ohio Wesleyan University, 48 Ortega, Antonio, 37 Orwell, George, 125 O’Shaugnessy, John, 53 Paddock, Robert, 36 Padgett, Paul, 116 Paige, Mary, 116–17 Parry, Hugh, 44, 112 Payne, Stanley, 7, 22 Pecarsky, Sylvia, 46 Pegler, Westbrook, 82 Pell, Pearl, 77 Perkins, Francis, 57 Pharmacists Union, 37 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 39, 81 Piazza, Verne, 116 Pike, Frederick, 66 Pilsudski, Josef, 64 Pittman, Key, 99 Pius XI, Pope, 78–79 Plummer, Brenda Gayle, 63 Polish–Americans, 64 Popular Front, 2, 4, 18, 43 Port Arthur, Texas, 61 Portugal, 21, 24 Posner, John, 114 Pozzetta, George, 67 Preteceille, Ogier, 56 Primitivism, 66 Propaganda, 8–9 Puerto Ricans, 68 Quakers, 30, 38, 97–99, 103–5 Rackley, Mildred, 50 Rahv, Philip, 33–34 Randolph, A. Philip, 62 Rankin, John, 118 Raphaelson, Samson, 51 Ratcliff, Dillwyn, 157n75 Raven, Robert, 75 Raymond, Phil, 116–17 Red Cross: American, 46, 98–99; International, 26; Spanish, 71 Refugees, 96, 102 Rehfisch, Carol, 74, 76–77 Reissig, Herman, Reverend, 28–30, 41, 60, 74–78, 85–87, 101–7, 160n44, 161n53

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190

Index

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Relief Aid: Communists, 17; items, 37–39, 69, 98; partisanship, 3; Spanish Civil War precedents, 3 Relief Ship for Spain (Erica Reed), 57, 61, 90–91, 97–99 Rhode Island, 55 Rhodes, Peter, 47 Ríos, Fernando de los, 35, 37, 49, 54 Robinson, Frederick, 45, 143n18 Rock Island, Illinois, 88 Rogers, Theo, 81 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 49, 55, 85–86 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 2, 55, 60, 84–85, 100–101, 109–12 Rose, Alex, 34 Rose, James, 92 Rosefield, John, 117 Rosenwald, Julius, 1, 49 Rossi, Angelo, 74 Rothenberg, Bernard, 46 Rousseau, Jean–Jacques, 4 Rubia Barcia, José, 120–21 Rubin, Hank, 45 Russia. See Soviet Union Ruthling, Paul, 76 Ruthven, Madeleine, 51 Ryan, Alba, 114 Saidenberg, Daniel, 1, 49, 145n43 St. Louis, Missouri, 82 Salazar, António de Oliveira. See Portugal Sandburg, Carl, 49 San Francisco, California, 72–77, 97, 122 San Leandro, California, 76 Santa Clara County, 68 Schachtman, Max, 47 Schramm, Dorothy, 89–90, 126, 156n60 Schramm, James, 89 Schrecker, Ellen, 58 Schwartzman, Abraham, 34 Schweir, Rudolph, 117 Scott, Byron, 97 Senior, Max, 157n75 Sexton, Brendan, 30 Shafarman, Eugene, 116–17 Sheehan, J. Eastman, 80 Sheen, Fulton J., 82, 99 Shipler, Guy Emery, 36 Siegal, Harold, 30 Silverstein, Ester, 103 Sinclair, Upton, 50

Smith, Asbury, 148n103 Smith College, 118 Socialist Party, 29–31, 35, 58, 60–61, 96–97, 122 Social Workers Committee, 30, 39, 49, 107 Soule, George, 36 Soviet Union, 3, 17, 24–25, 35 Spain in Flames, 83, 88 Spanish, use of term, 65–68, 149n8, 151n21 Spanish–Americans, 35, 60, 64–65, 72, 150n13 Spanish delegations, 32, 38, 66, 72 Spanish Earth, The, 49, 51, 53–55, 82, 94 Spanish Refugee Relief Campaign, 103 Spanish (Second) Republic, 2, 16; embassy in Washington, DC, 37, 70, 76; foreign military aid to, 25; problems of, 21–24. See also Spanish delegations Springfield, Illinois, 88–89 Solvay, New York, 67 Steele, Walter S., 113 Stewart, Donald Ogden, 51 Stevenson, Adlai, 42, 102 Stowe, Leland, 12, 85 Streeter, Bill, 29 Strong, Anna Louise, 86, 155n43 Student League for Industrial Democracy, 45 Students, 44–48, 91–92 Sunnyvale, California, 68 Swing, Raymond, 9–10 Talbot, Francis, 88 Tampa, Florida, 35, 40, 66–67, 70–71 Taylor, Robert, 117 Teigan, Henry, 54 Tenney, Jack, 99 Texas, 66 Thayer, Russell, 89, 111 Thomas, Norman, 29, 58, 96, 104, 122 Thomas, J. Parnell, 119, 121 Thorning, Joseph, 80 Tierney, Dominic, 1 Todd, Paul, 87 Tone, Franchot, 49, 51 Trade Union Conference of 1939 (San Francisco), 73, 122–23 Tresca, Carlo, 28, 96 Trotskyists, 33, 47

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Index Unión General de Trabajadores, 22, 56 United Libertarian Organizations. See Anarchism United Spanish Societies to Aid Spain, 30, 40, 69, 77 United States: trade, 24, 148n108; corporations, 16, 24; Spanish Republican relations, 25 United Youth Committee, 39, 45 University of Chicago, 48, 99–100 University of Illinois, 48 Urquidi, Antonio, 76 Valaik, J. David, 80, 84–85 Vickers, Thelma, 76 Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, 118–19 Voros, Sander, 115

Wayne State University, 48 Webb, Mitchell, 117 Weisband, Edward, 4 Welles, Orson, 54 West, Nathanael, 12 West Virginia, 52 Whalen, Patrick, 60 Whiffen, Peter, 82 Williams, Michael, 84–85, 162n8 Wilson, Woodrow, 4 Wolff, Milton, 45, 118 Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, 97 World War I, 3 Young Communist League, 44, 92, 116–17 Young People’s Socialist League, 44–45 Zimmerman, Charles, 34 Zukor, Adolph, 49, 86

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Walsh, David, 99 Wardlaw, Ralph, 46 War Resisters League, 29, 97

191

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About the Author

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Eric R. Smith completed his Ph.D. in history at the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2007. He has taught at Loyola University Chicago and Columbia College Chicago and is presently a full-time instructor at the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy.

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