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Conclusion After a counterrevolutionary insurgency by Gen. Francisco Franco’s Nationalists in July 1936 degenerated into a brutal, protracted civil war, many Americans for whom Spain seemed closer than 3,600 miles away took interest in the conflict. There were those who had no particular ideological axe to grind—entrepreneurs hoping to recover investments, vacationers with romantic attachments, immigrants worried about relatives, officers keen to evaluate the latest weaponry—but their concerns soon became subsumed into a divisive political argument that would have major repercussions. Millions of Americans identified with the attitudes , if not necessarily the aims, of Popular Front socialism—perhaps as journalists , feminists, social workers, pacifists, civil rights leaders, WPA job beneficiaries, or trade unionists—and this constituency empathized with Spain’s Loyalists not only as fellow Fronters but also as front-line surrogates in their own fight against exploitative forces of reaction. That so many Americans became passionate backers of the Loyalist cause was in part because the disciplined CPUSA, in conjunction with the well-funded Spanish embassy, so successfully propagandized the Spanish Civil War as a moralistic struggle between fascism and democracy. Article 26 of the Second Republic’s constitution of December 1931 marginalized the Catholic Church in Spain by abolishing the parochial school system on which middle-class parents depended; there was an escalation of church burnings in the months after the February 1936 election, over which the Popular Front government acquiesced, and then an anticlerical onslaught followed the Nationalist insurgency of July, resulting in the systematic murder of 6,800 religious. It was natural, therefore, that America’s Catholic hierarchy, along with many parishioners , saw the conflict in different but equally moralistic terms, as a struggle between Christian civilization and atheistic communism. To exemplify this position , historians have dwelt on Father Charles E. Coughlin, stressing both his influence as the Radio Priest and his anti-Semitism. Still, while America, the Pilot, and other hierarchy organs were as dogmatically partisan as any Daily Worker or 217 218 arguing americanism PM, the Catholic lay newspaper Commonweal under George N. Shuster’s editorship opposed Franco, Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker sympathized with the Loyalists , and at the Catholic World editor James M. Gillis was critical of both sides.1 German American Bundists and self-styled American fascists such as William Dudley Pelley’s Silver Shirts also held an ideological position on the conflict, which they saw as a struggle between fascism and communism. Though their rhetoric was no less dogmatic, they had little time for Spain, as their primary political philosophy was race-based nationalism. Isolationists represented a fourth category of Americans interested in the Spanish Civil War on political grounds, for they saw a struggle among Old World powers that threatened to entangle the United States. Because they insisted on embargoing arms to Spain, isolationists could appear to be in the pro-Nationalist camp even if their sympathies lay with the Loyalists. Robert M. La Follette Jr., the Senate’s foremost isolationist, upheld the arms embargo while supporting the Loyalist cause against fascism.2 There was a fifth ideological grouping of Americans hitherto ignored by historians but documented here: those who lobbied for Franco’s Nationalists because they saw a struggle in Spain between dictatorial communism and the kind of middle-class liberal republicanism they enjoyed at home, and they worried that the Comintern’s agitprop was replicating that struggle in America. While they associated with the crude Christianity versus communism argument made by the Catholic hierarchy, and even exploited it, their interest in Spain was essentially as concerned liberals, as individualistic professional intellectuals, as reformers, as Progressives, as neo-mugwumps, and even as erstwhile socialists. Had they lived in Spain in April 1931, they would have cheered the departure of Alfonso XIII and the establishment of the Second Republic, as did most professional, intellectual, and middle-class Spaniards.3 Theirs was a complex as well as a conflicted position, which they tried to simplify and ultimately failed to reconcile. Franco lobbyists could hardly argue that communism had snuffed out Christian civilization in the Loyalist zone without allying with Spain’s Catholic Church and its antediluvian reputation. Yet many lobbyists were Protestants or atheists for whom hierarchical Catholicism was inimical to individualistic Americanism. They could not emphasize that a communist revolution meant the end of civil liberties without downplaying Nationalist repression. Yet they recognized that eradicating communism in America would be equally difficult while maintaining constitutional rights to free speech. They could not advocate Franco’s...

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