Review: Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939

Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939 by Adam Hochschild
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This one is tough to read right now in this Age of Trump and McConnell.

On the one hand, it gives us Franco’s Spanish Nationalists as evident “bad guys,” as characters who are simply wrong. They were barbarous in their methods and execrable in their philosophy. Adam Hochschild says at one point that scholars quibble over whether Franco was an outright fascist, but it’s hard to think the difference matters much. He walked like a fascist, talked like a fascist, and slaughtered his “enemies of the state” like a fascist.

And, most chillingly of all, he won. His death didn’t come until the dawn of my own near adult understanding of politics, and I remember – from when it first appeared as a Saturday Night Live joke – Chevy Chase declaring, “Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead.” Yeah, we laughed, and yeah, I didn’t get it. But, still, part of the joke was the uncomfortable notion that, into the 1970s, he was the embodiment of what we thought we’d destroyed in World War II.

On the other hand, it’s hard to know about the Republicans. I am confident I’d have sympathized with them, and even decades later I still wish they’d won. They spoke of equality. They were two generations ahead of most of the world on women’s rights. They had a sense of economic justice. And they had, in Lorca and others, a kind of poetry that the fascists could never have understood.

But, were they good guys or simply less-bad guys opposing the bad guys? Hochschild plays it both ways here. He finds elements of the Republicans – especially the anarchist POUF that attracted, among others the young George Orwell – the kind of idealists whose vision holds up. Other elements, though, were different. I cannot forgive the Republicans for killing an estimated 50,000 of their own “enemies.” (For perspective, the Nationalists are estimated to have killed three times as many during the Spanish Civil War and then many others after they won.) I also can’t forgive the slaughter of so many of the priests who, even if they’d given comfort to the authoritarian tendencies of some Nationalist supporters, were still fundamentally non-violent participants in the conflict.

Hochschild reminds us that the Republicans certainly lost in large part because the U.S. and others insisted on a neutrality that extended to an international arms embargo. The Republicans had the money to buy arms, but no one would sell to them. The Nationalists had no trouble getting things from Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, though.

That left only the USSR to outfit the Republicans, and that imbalance gave ever greater power to the worst elements of the Republic, to the would-be Stalinists rather than to the more idealistic POUFs and other groups.

It’s in that midst that Hochschild studies the experiences of some of the Americans who were there. He talks at length about Bob and Marion Merriman. It’s a moving story, and he even implies that Bob is one model for Robert Jordan in Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. Bob was an academic, an economist, who – after a stint studying Soviet economic models – decided he needed to pick up a gun and defend the Republic.

What’s fascinating is that, at the same time as he experiences a love story with Marion, Bob finds himself drawn deeper and deeper into conflict. And, as he does so, he in particular is ever more beholden to the Soviets.

The result is that Bob, and the handful of others Hochschild explores most fully, were betrayed by the philosophies they most admire. The Soviets imported a cruelty to the experience that hardened it; the Americans, playing an awkward game of international and national politics, refused to enter the fight, which tipped it the wrong way.

So, to end where I began, what makes this hard to read right now is the sense that, faced with a clear wrong, there may not have been a right way to fight it. Franco and his allies were, at the beginning, a minority, and their philosophy was an ugly one that could have won supporters only through violence.

But the Republic, and the brave and admirable Americans who went to fight for it, was flawed as well. Heroic as the subjects of this book are, they lost, and their loss was prelude to the World War that would follow.

All of that is simply too hard to think about right now.


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