A Book Review… Portraits From The Spanish Civil War
By JUDE DOUGHERTY
Hochschild, Adam. Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, Harcourt, 2016. xxi + 438 pp.
I was 14 years old when I attempted to check out at a local public library Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. I had a duly issued library card, but the librarian refused to let me have the book. I was not old enough to read it, she said. An indulgent aunt later then checked it out for me. I doubt if she read it.
True, there were a few scenes of carnality that the librarian thought a 14-year-old need not be exposed to, but whatever the effect at the time, those scenes had no lasting impact. Though I vaguely remember one, I was mainly drawn to the nobility of the mounted officer who was fighting on the side of the Nationalists. He was a Hemingway character, to be sure, but even Hemingway recognized that the conflict was not clear cut.
Somehow that freshman high school student had been sufficiently educated to recognize the evil cause of the Lincoln Brigade and the International Brigades, and to hope for the best for the forces of Franco. Years later I knelt at the tomb of Franco and tears flowed spontaneously, much to the surprise of my host.
The left’s caricature of Franco prevails, and nothing can erase it in the common mind. Similarly, the Black Legend of the Spanish Empire will prevail no matter how many books seek to describe events truthfully.
Medieval Spain also gave us Avicenna and Maimonides and the 12th and 13th-century translators at Toledo who were rendering into Latin the Greek and Arabic translations of important books of Aristotle, theretofore unavailable to the West. Maimonides had to flee Cordoba for his life when confronted with the Islamic persecution of Jews and Christians. His rabbinic tutor was beheaded.
Sixteenth and 17th-century Spain gave us El Greco and Murillo, among others of distinction, the 19th century, Rubio, the 20th century, the Barcelona architect Antoni Gaudi, and the list could go on. I have not even touched on music and literature.
The phrase “Spain in our hearts” comes from an essay by Albert Camus, published in L’Espagne libre (Paris, 1946). Camus was lamenting the Nationalist victory in Spain. “Men of my generation,” he wrote, “have had Spain in our hearts. It was there that they learned…that one can be right and yet beaten, that force can vanquish spirit, and that there are times when courage is not rewarded.”
Hochschild provides an entirely different attitude from the one I expressed above. Franco is depicted as leading a military uprising against a democratically elected government. That is of course true, a government that forced the abdication of King Alfonso XIII, after he had himself called for the election that brought the Republicans to power. The new government was decidedly Communist and anti-Catholic.
“Franco’s prolonged battle for power,” writes Hochschild, “is the fiercest conflict in Europe since the First World War, marked by a vindictive savagery not even seen since then. His forces have bombed cities into rubble, tortured political opponents, murdered people for belonging to labor unions, machine-gunned hospital wards full of the wounded, branded Republican women on their breasts with the emblem of the movement, and carried out death sentences with the garrote.”
With similar reports coming from Spain, there is no wonder that thousands from other countries, many of them Americans, came to join the Republican forces. Herbert L. Matthews and Ernest Hemingway covered the war for the North American Newspaper Alliance. Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls became the best-known novel to be based on the war. Another novel that became popular after the war, Homage to Catalonia, was authored by George Orwell.
Approximately 2,800 Americans, men from 46 states, fought in the war. Their losses were significant. Who were they? Three-quarters were Communists, half were Jewish. Hochschild offers this profile: “If there was a prototypical volunteer, he was a New Yorker, a Communist, and a son of a working-class Jew.”
Spain’s Catholic hierarchy, of course, backed the Nationalists. Roosevelt declined to support the Republicans, and his government tried to prevent Americans from entering the conflict. That the Nationalists won was due in part to the support they received from American industry. Texaco, Ford, and the makers of truck tires and spare parts provided essential materials that gave Franco military superiority.
There is much more to the story, and not everything is black or white. Hochschild writes from a leftist point of view, and that shades his objectivity. Spain in Our Hearts not only provides many a revealing statistic, but is rich in describing the personal lives and the motivations of many of those who were engaged in the conflict. He tells us that at the end of the war, Pope Pius XII sent a telegram of congratulations to Franco: “We give sincere thanks to Your Excellency for the victory of Catholic Spain.”
That, more than any other sentence, tells you what the war was all about.
