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Chapter 5 Refugee Aid and the Coming World War The Spanish Civil War was decided militarily by late 1938, but the painful conflict festered through March 1939. The Ebro offensive, launched by republican forces on July 25, 1938, was intended to tie up the rebels in the hope that the long-anticipated European general war would now erupt, bringing France and England to the defense of the Republic. Franco and Hitler had also desired a prolonged conflict. Franco’s reasoning was tactical , focused on slowly bolstering loyalty in the captured areas and occupying crucial fabrication plants. Hitler desired to gain time for his own grand strategy. Stalin, on the other hand, began to retreat.1 With neither side in a rush, the war persisted. The Ebro offensive was one of the deadliest losses of the war for the Republic. It was also the decisive victory by Franco’s troops resulting from a superiority in personnel, matériel, artillery, and aircraft. In other words, the victory had been made possible by the embargo and nonintervention.2 The war forced a wave of refugees into France, and the aid movement shifted its focus to assist them. Supporters held out hope that, following the Republican government’s strategy, the embargo would still be lifted. The continued optimism and the refugee crisis both determined the movement’s course. Still another diplomatic development following Stalin’s slow withdrawal from assistance of the Republic would also be a trial for those who remained in the movement after Franco’s victory as the Popular Front strategy came to an end. The Hitler-Stalin Pact began the fraying of the new refugee movement. One segment of republican aid had already determined its postwar path in March 1938 when the Keep America Out of War Congress was founded at New York’s Hippodrome. Its official sponsor was the Socialist Party. Both pacifists Oswald Garrison Villard and Norman Thomas were joined at the event by Robert M. LaFollette, Jr., and columnist John T. Flynn, among others. Anarchist Carlo Tresca, who had left the NAC, also supported the new organization. The ILGWU and Brotherhood of Sleeping 96 97 Refugee Aid and the Coming World War Car Porters, both proponents of Spanish aid, were also represented. This meeting was followed by an antiwar congress called by the New Republic and other liberal denizens of Spanish aid. The American Friends Service Committee , Fellowship of Reconciliation, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and the War Resisters League became cornerstones of this new endeavor. Nearly all of the fifty sections of the organization by July 1940 were organized by socialists. This coalition of socialist fellow-travelers had then already constructed prior to the conclusion of the Spanish war an ideologically consistent transition from Spanish aid as a bulwark against war to a new antiwar coalition.3 As early as 1937, other international events appeared to be obscuring the Spanish cause: China and Czechoslovakia. By the second half of 1939, many other countries also looked grim once general war was under way. The Comintern’s Maurice Kalmanovitch wondered in the middle of the civil war if “China has not spoiled the Spanish campaign in most of the sections. . . . We do not understand why it is a particular problem in America.” Perhaps China served as an excuse for faltering efforts, or perhaps also, Kalmanovitch was not correct. Flint, Michigan , for example, hosted a Joint Committee for Jewish, Spanish, and Chinese Refugees with the county chairman of the Democratic Party as treasurer and wife of the local high school principal as chair.4 The San Francisco chapter of the MBNAC reported to New York in May that “[a] Spanish Relations Committee of three members was appointed to contact and assist all local organizations formed in this country to help the Spanish government in Europe, and the Chinese, or other victim nations suffering assaults of aggressors.”5 Spain’s was not the only cause, even if it garnered the majority of attention. Spain’s republican supporters also geared up around congressional legislation . In early 1938, California Democratic representative Byron Scott and the isolationist North Dakota Republican senator Gerald Nye introduced bills in Congress to lift the embargo. The latter considered the neutrality legislation to have resulted in “aid for one side as against another.” Representative John Bernard, the Farmer-Laborite from Minnesota, noted that 150,000 Americans across the country had urged the sale of arms. But on May 13, when the embargo came closer to repeal...

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