American Relief Aid and the Spanish Civil War

Introduction

Introduction In the spring of 1937, Daniel Saidenberg, first cellist for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, conducted twelve musicians in an impromptu performance on Chicago’s North Shore at the estate of the late Julius Rosenwald . The event brought out some of the region’s most privileged citizens. One of the event organizers commented: “We are still trying to figure out just what caused the excitement. People were scrambling for tickets and we succeeded in getting 783 in that yard.” The excitement in question was stirred by a benefit concert for the Spanish Republic sponsored by the North Shore Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy. It was a cultural event repeated in various forms across the United States in the second half of the 1930s by activist intellectuals, union members, artists, and musicians of every variety—the cross-section of the Spanish Republic’s American advocates was wide.1 Despite persistent interest in the war itself and its international volunteers , little is known about the international movement to aid the Spanish Republic. The story of the International Brigades and the nearly 2,800 Americans who volunteered to fight fascism in Spain is well known, and scholarship on the four brigades has bolstered the enduring image of the Spanish Civil War as an exemplar of the various forces in conflict during the Great Depression and as a precursor to World War II. About one-third of these international volunteers died in action; nearly half were injured.2 Yet as historian Daniel Kowalsky has commented in his research on the Soviet Union’s involvement in Spain, “The subject of solidarity and relief aid . . . has received scant attention in Western secondary literature.” On the British side the subject has garnered scholarly attention, but the literature on Americans’ Spanish Republican aid has remained a subject mentioned only in passing. Allen Guttmann’s oft-cited study of Americans’ reactions to the war, The Wound in the Heart, offers an intellectual history of American thinking about the Spanish conflict, but nonetheless fails to explain what actions Americans undertook. This oversight by historians obscures the centrality of the Spanish Republic for many Americans amid the emerging international crisis. The war, as Dominic Tierney recently pointed out, was not only the major international conflict in the interwar period, “it altered the course of European and therefore world politics.” 1 2 American Relief Aid and the Spanish Civil War Americans’ responses to these events and their involvement in Spanish Republican aid reveals an underside to isolationism in that period, the development of postwar internationalism, and what it meant to be antifascist .3 The primary political device for antifascists was the Popular Front, a critical feature of this period that assumed different forms. Its main characteristic was cooperation between communists and others as revolutionary rhetoric was tempered to make a common cause against fascist gains. In Spain, this Popular Front consisted of a coalition of antifascist parties with a vast majority of Socialists and three communist ministers constituting the government elected in February 1936. In the United States, this coalition was more informal than elsewhere but with the ever-present communists serving as a conduit and as its most active organizers. While antifascist cooperation among different political persuasions was not new when it was made official by the Communist Party in 1935, it did expand its reach afterward.4 As international events unfolded in the 1930s, Spain served as a symbol. Fears of fascism’s growing strength and its support for the coup against the Popular Front government butted up against appeasement, isolationism in its American form. Among western governments, the July 1936 coup by half of the Spanish military against a democratically elected Popular Front government provoked concerns for the Republic’s survival. The international community of nations responded to these developments with combined horror and disbelief, mingled with apathy—at times hostility. That hostility was typically directed toward the Popular Front government rather than the insurgents. Although President Roosevelt tilted leftward on a number of political issues, Republican Spain’s cause was one on which he had not yet forged an alliance with the left. Any possible step in that direction the president might have intended to take was headed off by resistance to Spanish aid by that segment of the political right backing Franco, which found allies to conduct grassroots operations against the Republic’s supporters. Isolationism and anticommunism emerged as strong forces obstructing the path of antifascism. At the same time, many citizens in the international community expressed...