Uncommonly Savage: Civil War and Remembrance in Spain and the United States by Paul D. Escott (review)

The task Paul Escott has undertaken at first seems problematic: to craft a comparative history of civil war memory in two nations, with conflicts that did not share century, political ideology, continent, or language. The American Civil War, 1861–65, and the Spanish Civil War, 1936–39, however, prove sufficiently malleable to the author’s approach to make this book an engaging success on the theme of war and memory.

After a brief introduction and a background chapter, the book is divided into four thematic chapters, examining the major subjects of “Ideology and Memory,” “The Past and Political Evolution,” “Reconciliation,” and “Economic Change and the Transformation of Cultural Landscapes.” Escott skillfully draws parallels between the conservative forces in both countries—southern pro-slavery elites, and Catholic, military, and other right-wing leaders in Spain—that resisted what they saw as dangerous innovations from central governments. In the case of the United States, southerners feared economic modernization, leading to northern financial dominance, but even more the movement for abolitionism. In Spain, the –isms—secularism, socialism, communism, anarchism, and anti-clericalism—provoked the uprising that would become the Spanish Civil War in 1936.

While there are some analogies between right-wing Spain and what would become the Confederacy, the respective aftermaths of these two civil wars were starkly different. In Spain, a civil war won by the Nationalists became the regime of Gen. Francisco Franco, in which former Republicans faced decades of persecution, restrictions on their opportunities, or even imprisonment. In the American South, after a brief period of Union occupation and Reconstruction, the same white men who had led the rebellion against the North resumed their political influence. Just over a decade after the final Union victories, segregation, intimidation, and economic repression had recreated the race-based social order of the pre–Civil War period.

There were more similarities in the nurturing of respective memories after both conflicts, with the losers in each creating a more coherent and enduring vision of civil war. Spanish Republicans in exile spent decades crafting explanations for their defeat, influencing historians in other nations to take up the Republican cause. Even as the late Franco era of the 1960s and 1970s deemphasized the glorious Nationalist movement that had won the Civil War, on the Left the memory of these events remained vibrant, even if during the transition to democracy in the decade after Franco there was a conscious effort to put aside the war in the interest of civic peace. While less consistently, southern historians and popular writers created nostalgic accounts of the lost antebellum era, before the destruction wrought by vengeful industrial armies of the Yankees.

Indeed, instead of a collective vision of these two conflicts, the regional and ideological divisions that had seen the actual civil wars were perpetuated by the generations that followed. Only in recent decades has anything close to a national consensus emerged in both Spain and the United States to explain these wars. Rather than the victory of a vision by winning or losing sides, in both countries a more balanced account is now replacing the rivalry of partisan memories. Complexity now seems more widespread than one-sided assigning of blame. While there continue to be political arguments over physical monuments—Confederate statues in the American South and Spanish streets named for Francoist leaders—these are no longer violent, nor of more than symbolic impact.

Each civil war, especially those of the remarkable violence seen in both the American and Spanish conflicts, features its own peculiarities amid what are, after all, national circumstances and origins. At times, the author draws parallels that are too close, obscuring their historical uniqueness. For example, the gulf between Spanish landowners of the twentieth century and southern plantation owners of the nineteenth was quite significant, but both groups are described similarly, as rural elites. However, Escott has shown that...