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Overview
The Spanish Civil War created a conflict for Americans who preferred that the United States remain uninvolved in foreign affairs. Despite the country's isolationist tendencies, opposition to the rise of fascism across Europe convinced many Americans that they had to act in support of the Spanish Republic. While much has been written about the war itself and its international volunteers, little attention has been paid to those who coordinated these relief efforts at home.
American Relief Aid and the Spanish Civil War tells the story of the political campaigns to raise aid for the Spanish Republic as activists pushed the limits of isolationist thinking. Those concerned with Spain’s fate held a range of political convictions (including anarchists, socialists, liberals, and communists) with very different understandings of what fascism was. Yet they all agreed that fascism’s advance must be halted. With labor strikes, fund-raising parties, and ambulance tours, defenders of Spain in the United States sought to shift the political discussion away from isolation of Spain’s elected government and toward active assistance for the faltering Republic.
Examining the American political organizations affiliated with this relief effort and the political repression that resulted as many of Spain’s supporters faced the early incarnations of McCarthyism’s trials, Smith provides new understanding of American politics during the crucial years leading up to World War II. By also focusing on the impact the Spanish Civil War had on those of Spanish ethnicity in the United States, Smith shows how close to home the seemingly distant war really hit.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780826273062 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Missouri Press |
| Publication date: | 10/17/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 208 |
| Sales rank: | 783,832 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
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.
Read an Excerpt
American Relief Aid and the Spanish Civil War
By Eric R. Smith
UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI PRESS
Copyright © 2013 The Curators of the University of MissouriAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8262-2009-7
CHAPTER 1
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." 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.
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 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.
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. 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 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.
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. 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.
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. 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 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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 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-five-bed hospital to Ethiopia. A seventy-five-bed hospital was also an early initiative for Spain.
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." Ethiopia was not pushed to invisibility, but Spain served the purpose of antifascism far better.
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 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 well-developed 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.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from American Relief Aid and the Spanish Civil War by Eric R. Smith. Copyright © 2013 The Curators of the University of Missouri. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI PRESS.
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