As recently as twenty years ago—maybe even just fifteen years ago—you had to know about the Spanish Civil War. That is, you had to know about it if you wanted to be a political commentator, a public intellectual, a voice in the ideological battles of the American public square.
To be an intern or a cub writer at the Nation or the Weekly Standard, the New Republic or National Review, even the editorial pages at the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times, you had to be able to talk about Alger Hiss and the Pumpkin Papers. Sacco and Vanzetti. The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. Maybe Big Bill Haywood and the Wobblies, too, but certainly the Rosenberg trial. And certainly the Spanish Civil War. You had to know about that 1930s struggle not just in the way a high school senior cramming for the AP history exam knows. You had to understand. You had to have a position.
Those days are gone, of course. The war in Spain has ended long ago / Aunt Rose, as Allen Ginsberg wrote in an elegy for one of the radical activists of his parents’ generation. Still, this spring, the widely published writer Adam Hochschild released Spain in Our Hearts, a study of the role of Americans in the Spanish Civil War, from 1936 to 1939. And the response, a pouring out of reviews, has been interesting to watch. Interesting, that is, if one remembers the time not so long ago that a position on the war in Spain served as a marker—a useful synecdoche—for much of one’s social philosophy and political worldview.
It’s true that many of the recent reviews read like the work of former AP history students, regurgitating the received opinions of their textbooks with no more pain or passion than they would show reviewing books on Free Silver or the Thirty Years War. For them, the Spanish Civil War is simply an old event of easy judgment. Nationalists bad, Republicans good, of course. The interventions of Germany and Italy bad but typical of fascists, the interventions of the Soviet Union semi-bad but typical of communists, and failure of the United States government to intervene maybe worst of all, because it reveals the hypocrisy of American rhetoric about support for democracy.
More interesting have been the reviews by the oldsters, the ones who remember the days when—even forty, fifty, sixty years after Generalissimo Franco’s victory ended the fighting—we took the Spanish Civil War as a living symbol for something important. The review in the New York Times, for example, was by Michael Kazin, co-editor of Dissent, an old leftist magazine whose very existence in these late days resounds like a call from a distant and dying trumpet. Bob Drogin, a longtime and old-fashioned newspaperman, reviewed the book for the Los Angeles Times, and "few distant conflicts are so burned into our culture and consciousness," he notes. Which is perfectly true, if one is of an age. I suspect his younger colleagues at the Los Angeles Times lack a consciousness seared by the bombing of Guernica and the street fighting in Madrid.
In reviews such as Kazin’s, matching the line Hochschild himself takes in the book, we can discern something that might be called Orwell’s posthumous victory. As Spain in Our Hearts notes, nearly 40,000 foreigners dodged the international non-intervention regulations and journeyed to Spain to fight on the Republican side. Among them was George Orwell, who arrived in Spain at the end of December 1936 to join the mixed brigades of Stalinists, socialists, Trotskyites, and anarchists supporting the Spanish Republican forces. After being caught up in intra-left battles in Barcelona—and called a fascist by the Spanish communists, who would later try him in absentia for treason—he was wounded by a sniper’s bullet. Returning to England to recuperate in 1937, only seven months after he left, he wrote a book about the whole sad mess, published in 1938 as Homage to Catalonia.
The naiveté of leftist forces that Orwell chronicled quickly became the standard narrative about foreign fighters during the Spanish Republicans’ defeat in 1939. But before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, there was still resistance to Orwell’s claim that the Russian-backed communists were determined to lose the war if winning came at the price of allowing non-Stalinist radicals to gain power in Spain. Nowadays, reviewers such as Kazin simply take it as read: The Soviets demanded control in return for material aid—a "devil’s bargain," as Hochschild puts it—and their attempts to purge the ranks of Republican forces contributed greatly to Franco’s Nationalist victory
Naiveté was certainly a dominant feature of the 2,800 Americans who traveled to Spain to support the leftist government. Many of them formed the Lincoln Brigade, which later generations of American radicals would mythologize in story and song, and about 800 of them would die in the war. (The last surviving confirmed member of the brigade—a self-proclaimed "unreconstructed communist" named Delmer Berg—died this February at age 100.) Focusing on individual stories about those Americans, Hochschild uses Spain in Our Hearts to explore the inexperience and impracticality of those who felt that the Spanish struggle demanded their involvement.
"There seemed a moral clarity about the crisis in Spain," Hochschild notes, but in history as it actually unfolds, many claims of moral clarity have a large share of moral myopia. Spain in Our Hearts recounts the tale of Lois Orr, for example, who traveled to Spain with her husband Charles and in 1936 wrote home that they were "living the revolution," in a world where "anything was possible, a new heaven and a new earth were being formed." All this, while she spoke barely a word of Spanish and was living, not so much among the peasants and proletariat, but in a luxury apartment the Republicans had seized from the local German consul.
Spain in Our Hearts is a good read, as long as one understands that Adam Hochschild does not intend it to be a definitive or even well-balanced history of the kind he wrote in King Leopold’s Ghost, his powerful 1998 history of the vicious Belgian colonization of the African Congo. Hochschild is particularly good in his denunciations of the vile Torkild Rieber, the Norwegian American who headed up Texaco Oil and supported the Nazis and Fascists throughout the 1930s.
Still, who now remembers Torkild Rieber? Or the airlift of Nationalist Forces from Africa? Or the May Days of 1937, when Barcelona exploded in street battles between the various factions of the Republican Left? As recently as twenty years ago—maybe even just fifteen—you had to know this stuff if you wanted to be a commentator on the American public square.
And now you don’t. It was back in the 1960s that Allen Ginsberg wrote his chilling line, The war in Spain has ended long ago / Aunt Rose, and the poem is in many ways a cruel production. "To Aunt Rose" wryly dismisses the passion previous generations had invested in such symbolic history, mocks his aunt’s "tears of sexual frustration," and generally predicts the success of a new leftism of sexuality over the old leftism of economics. The poem even brushes off the Holocaust as unliving history, lost in the unimportant past: Hitler is dead, Hitler is in Eternity, Ginsberg sneeringly tells his dying aunt. Hitler is with / Tamburlane and Emily Brontë.
The reaction to Adam Hochschild’s Spain in Our Hearts proves George Orwell’s victory. No one is left to defend the role of the Stalinists and the Comintern in Spain, and what remains of leftist nostalgia for the "moral clarity" of the civil war is all on the side of the anarchists, socialists, and Trotskyites. But what the reaction to Spain in Our Hearts proves even more is Allen Ginsberg’s victory, the final triumph of the New Left over the Old Left. The war in Spain has ended long ago, indeed.