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Introduction
— David Finkel, for the editors of ATC

THE YEAR 2009 marks a tragic 70^th anniversary, not only globally – the beginning of the Second World War, which would claim the lives of tens of millions and give rise to a whole new lexicon that includes “genocide” and “nuclear weapons” — but also the final defeat of the Spanish Revolution and the onset of 26 years of fascist rule under Francisco Franco.

We present here a small collection of reflections and reviews on what the Spanish Revolution meant — its enormous inspiration and heroism, the cynical policy of the “democracies” who proclaimed an arms embargo on the Spanish Republic, the murderous betrayal perpetrated by the Stalinist-ruled Soviet Union and its agents in Spain. We hope that these articles will stimulate readers who are new to the subject, as well as those who have previously studied these events, to examine the texts reviewed here and the lessons they offer for today’s freedom struggles.

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 Remembering Spain’s Revolution

— Jane Slaughter

ON THE SECOND page of Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell’s memoir of the Spanish Revolution, he writes, “I had come to Spain with some notion of writing newspaper articles, but I joined the militia almost immediately, because at that time and in that atmosphere it seemed the only conceivable thing to do. The Anarchists were still in virtual control of Catalonia and the revolution was still in full swing….it was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle.”

Orwell goes on to tell how in 1937 practically every building in Barcelona had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags; “even the bootblacks had been collectivized and their boxes painted red and black.” (This will mean something to those who’ve traveled in Central America, where hopeful little boys carry their shoeshine kits around with them although most of the tourists are wearing gym shoes.)

Waiters looked you in the face and treated you as an equal….Tipping had been forbidden. …Revolutionary posters were everywhere, flaming from the walls in clean reds and blues…In outward appearance it was a town in which the wealthy classes had practically ceased to exist….There was much in it that I did not understand, in some ways I did not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for.

A state of affairs worth fighting for. By describing what he saw —“a sort of microcosm of a classless society” — Orwell helps us understand what we’re fighting for and that human beings are capable of it. “Many of the normal motives of civilized life — snobbishness, money-grubbing, fear of the boss, etc. — had simply ceased to exist…one had been in a community where hope was more normal than apathy or cynicism, where the word ‘comrade’ stood for comradeship and not, as in most countries, for humbug. One had breathed the air of equality.”

Orwell’s portrait of revolutionary Spain gives us a glimpse of human beings’ revolutionary and egalitarian potential and their capacity for bravery. That is why, 70 years later, Homage to Catalonia is worth reading for the first time and again. Every time I encounter a servile waiter, I think of Orwell.

Orwell is also instructive about the betrayals of the Communist Party in Spain and elsewhere. He went to Spain sympathetic to Communist policy on the war (“win the war first, then the revolution”) but, because of what he saw with his own eyes, he came to see that “the thing for which the Communists were working was not to postpone the Spanish revolution till a more suitable time but to make sure it never happened.”

Why should we care about this now, when CPs are so weak everywhere? I’ll quote Ken Loach, the director of “Land and Freedom,” a feature film that borrows heavily from Orwell. I interviewed Loach in 1996. He said, “When the possibility of transformative change [revolution] happens, and people start to look around and say, ‘we actually need to take power here,’ then there has to be a political leadership that endorses that. What happened in Spain shows that we can’t say, ‘Hang on, just forget about it for this year, we’ll do it next year.’ When workers take power they have to be supported and they have to follow it through. Because those moments are quite rare and very precious.

“And clearly it will happen again.”

If that moment comes, Orwell and Loach — or really, the thousands of Spanish militia members who fought not just for democracy but for revolution — for land and freedom — remind us not to be stuck in defeatist habits of mind.

In “Land and Freedom,” which in some ways is corny but is still mesmerizing, peasants and militia members discuss for 12 minutes whether to collectivize a rich man’s captured land. It’s an eon in movie time; Loach has trusted the audience to sit still for politics. An American volunteer says no, collectivization might scare off the U.S. and British governments from sending aid.

This was the CP’s policy: in Orwell’s words, “to check every revolutionary tendency and make the war as much like an ordinary war as possible.” Union leaders, politicians and CPs in other countries echoed this line, denying that large-scale collectivizations and factory seizures were going on. Orwell writes, “Outside Spain few people grasped that there was a revolution; inside Spain nobody doubted it.”

Reading Homage to Catalonia will help you recognize a revolutionary moment when you see it. And hunger for one.

I’ve quoted Orwell a great deal because his clean, clear writing is another reason to read this book. The book is full of gems of description, where Orwell invokes a world in a few words: “There were hardly any bullfights nowadays; for some reason all the best matadors were Fascists.” “Chaff is not bad to sleep in when it is clean, not so good as hay but better than straw” — how’s that for practical advice for a militia fighter?

Or this: “You always, I notice, feel the same when you are under heavy fire — not so much afraid of being hit as afraid because you don’t know where you will be hit. You are wondering all the while just where the bullet will nip you, and it gives your whole body a most unpleasant sensitiveness.”

Orwell says what he wants to say directly, with a minimum of fuss, no fancy sentence structures or attempts to impress by writing for writing’s sake. No humbug. Anyone who wants to write about something she cares about could take Homage as a model.

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 A Classic Study Revisited

— Gerd-Rainer Horn

The Revolution and the Civil War in Spain
By Pierre Broué and Émile Témime
Chicago: Haymarket, 2008 reprint edition. $50 paperback.

PIERRE BROUÉ (1926-2005) was one of the few Trotskyist historians who carved out a niche in academia, though this career choice had to overcome many obstacles. Coming of age at a time in France when the historical profession mostly consisted of either conservative anti-communists or historians closely linked to the milieu of the hard-line French Communist Party, Broué, a long-time member of the Lambertiste current within French Trotskyism (until his expulsion in 1989), from early on had to learn to fight on his own.

Eventually settling near Grenoble in the French Alps, Broué was the guiding spirit behind the founding of the leading research publication on the history of international Trotskyism, the Cahiers Léon Trotsky, in 1979. But his long list of publications was by no means limited to the reconstruction of the history of this much-maligned current or his biography of Leon Trotsky himself.

Pierre Broué devoted himself above all to the analysis and description of revolutionary social movements in the first half of the 20^th century and the key political currents within this range of activist organizations. A polyglot, Pierre Broué considered languages as tools to unlock the hidden history of emancipatory social movements, and thus he learned new languages in accordance with the evolution of his wide-ranging interests.

Given the centrality of the Bolshevik Revolution in Broué’s understanding of the contemporary world, the many facets of the Soviet experience received probably the most extensive attention of this prolific scholar, though perhaps some of the most remarkable monographs were devoted to other countries and themes.

His 1971 The German Revolution, 1917-1923, translated into English in 2006,(1) a massive and empirically rich tome, should be mentioned here, but also his co-authorship (together with Raymond Vacheron) of a little-known study of Stalinist terror against Left Oppositionists in the French resistance, Meurtres au Maquis.(2)

Pride of place, however, must be reserved for Broué’s very first major monograph, co-authored with Émile Témime, The Revolution and the Civil War in Spain. This book first appeared in 1961,(3) when interest in the libertarian dimension of the Spanish Revolution and Civil War was limited to the few trace elements of the revolutionary Marxist and syndicalist traditions that had managed to survive the terrible defeats of the 1930s and 1940s. This remarkable monograph saw the light of day a full eight years before Noam Chomsky’s pathbreaking critique of the liberal intelligentsia’s dismissal and neglect of the Spanish anarchist contribution to the arsenal of (social) liberation movements in the modern age, Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship.(4)

In short, The Revolution and the Civil War in Spain appeared at a most inauspicious time for the publication of a major monograph on a neglected pivotal moment in 20^th-century European history. But the social movements in the latter half of the 1960s and then, above all, the 1970s widened the potential audience for such non-conformist critiques.

Over time, The Revolution and the Civil War in Spain saw perhaps more translations and republications than any other of Broué’s many volumes. Haymarket Books’ decision to republish it in 2008 is welcome as the most recent in a long list of recognitions of this modern classic.

Two Authors, Dual Traditions

One extraordinary feature of this volume should be highlighted straightaway. The book consists of two parts, the first half concentrating on domestic politics and society in Republican Spain in Year One of the Spanish Revolution. Part Two takes a detailed look at the foreign policy implications of the Spanish Civil War, foreign intervention in the Civil War, and the evolution of the Nationalist side, ending with Franco’s victory.

But it is not this organizational subdivision of the text which is unusual. The highly innovative feature was the decision of the two authors to join their efforts in the reconstruction of events in Spain, for Pierre Broué and Émile Témime hailed from two rather divergent and, in the context of the Civil War itself, rather conflictual political traditions, which, in their common foreword, the authors described in the following terms:

“(T)hough in spirit we were on the same side of the fence, we willingly parted company, one of us more in sympathy with the progressive Republicans and the moderate Socialists in his concern with organization and efficiency and the world balance of power, and the other with the dissident Communists and revolutionary Socialists.” (14) The confluence of differing political trajectories, in the case of this pathbreaking study, resulted in an overall product whose quality far surpasses the sum total of its two individual parts.

Émile Témime (1926-2008), the moderate within this team, later on made his name as an historian of Mediterranean migrations and the history of Marseilles. His detailed reconstruction of the international diplomatic dimension to the Civil War, the internal politics of Franco’s side, and the involvement of international powers in the affairs of the Spanish Republic was, to the best of my knowledge, unsurpassed at that time. Témime’s second half of the volume thus added much-needed international grounding to the efforts of the two authors, who were both ten years old at the onset of the Spanish Civil War.

Yet for the readership of ATC, the pages penned by Pierre Broué probably hold even more interest than the 200-plus pages by Témime which, however, remain a more than worthwhile read. In what follows, then, I will limit myself to highlighting certain select features of Broué’s first 300 pages, in the hope that prospective readers will not only purchase but study the entirety of this captivating book.

One more necessary and obvious comment needs to precede the engagement with the book’s central theses. Some 50 years ago many of the most crucial archival holdings had been closed to the two young French investigators.

Most crucially, of course, Spanish archives remained off limits, as Spain was then still in the midst of the NATO-supported Francoist deep freeze. And back in 1961 the team fared little better when attempting to utilize French and British holdings. Soviet archives and the document collections in the Vatican were equally inaccessible to Broué and Témime.

In the intervening half century, this situation has been nearly completely reversed. Most crucially, Spanish holdings became available to researchers soon after the demise of Franco in November 1975. Soviet archives have no longer been hermetically sealed in the wake of Gorbachev’s reforms and the implosion of the Soviet Union. Last but not least, the recent announcement by the Vatican authorities that materials from the pontificate of Pope Pius XI (1922-1939) will now be opened may well remove some of the last major restrictions on the full investigation of the domestic and international circumstances of the Spanish Civil War — although in all these cases there remain frustrating restrictions which still complicate serious research.

A Modern Classic

The attentive reader of this book must thus constantly keep in mind that Broué and Témime faced serious limitations with regard to their source base. No doubt, anyone wishing to delve further into the respective detail will uncover a host of new published research which casts additional light on the Spanish Revolution and the Civil War. It is likewise beyond doubt that a careful comparison between Broué and Témime’s account and that of succeeding generations of scholars will uncover mistakes and flaws in the work of these two pioneering historians.

Yet it should be underscored that what makes, in my view, The Revolution and the Civil War a modern classic is the fact that the broad outlines of their arguments, their interpretive sweep, and the precision of their analytic insights remain, to this day, unsurpassed and fully valid. Even some of Broué’s introductory comments, setting the stage for his detailed exposition of domestic politics in Republican Spain, remain insightful almost 50 years after they were first published:

“It was one of the tragedies of the Spanish Liberals and Republicans that, in spite of the existence of a Basque and a Catalan bourgeoisie, the incompleteness of the Spanish nation and the persistence of autonomist leanings [i.e. for political independence — ed.] had hindered the formation of a genuine Spanish bourgeoisie. The bankers in the Basque provinces and the biggest Catalan businessmen were hand in glove with the oligarchy. All the petty-bourgeois elements, which in the Western countries served as the base for the parties most strongly drawn to the parliamentary system, had turned toward Autonomist movements.” (46)

Combined with an unusually combative working-class Left, these Spanish peculiarities were omens for disaster. And most of the central passages in Pierre Broué’s text are devoted to the analysis and discussion of the contours, contributions and failures of this working-class Left.

What strikes this reader upon re-reading this seminal text is not only the didactic clarity of language employed by both authors, which makes this work easily accessible as elegant introductory texts even today, but the finely nuanced tone of the authors who consistently refrain from simplistic black-and-white depictions of their respective favorite protagonists and the latter’s detested detractors.

The dissident Communist Workers Party of Marxist Unification (POUM, immortalized in George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia), though often quite favorably portrayed by Broué, is never spared from insightful critique where critique is due. On the other hand, the dreaded Stalinists of the Spanish Communist Party (PCE) are given credit where credit is due. The PCE’s central role in the defense of Madrid in November 1936 is fully described, an organizational effort much-aided by Soviet assistance and adoption of revolutionary measures at the home front in Madrid, which closely resembled the methods of the revolutionary camp elsewhere.

That the PCE’s recourse to quasi-revolutionary measures in Madrid were calculated and contingent is also underscored, however, and the true nature of its hostility to lasting radical social change shone through even in Madrid. By December 1936, the POUM first experienced bouts of repression and illegality within the Republican camp at the instigation of the PCE.

Yet political parties and organizations, as central as they are in Broué’s account, never take on exclusive pride of place. It is one of the most important insights of this book that it was not so much the political parties of the Left which played the decisive role in the life of the Spanish Second Republic at grassroots level; instead, the author maintains, “the worker’s life gravitated around the casas del pueblo and the labor exchanges, centers of collective life that were veritable strongholds.” (66)

This recognition of the social movement-type character of the Spanish Revolution makes Broué’s contribution to this seminal volume of utmost value and probably explains to a significant degree the continued (relative) popularity of this tome half a century after its first publication.

Revolutionary Self-Organization

With the outbreak of the Spanish Revolution in response to Franco’s only partially successful military uprising on 17 July 1936, this rank-and-file-driven revolutionary impulse manifested itself in ever so many innovative ways.

“In effect, each time that the workers’ organizations allowed themselves to be paralysed by their anxiety to respect Republican legality and each time that their leaders were satisfied with what was said by the officers, the latter prevailed. On the other hand, the Movimiento [fascist] was repulsed whenever the workers had time to arm and whenever they set about the destruction of the Army as such, independently of their leaders’ positions or the attitude of “legitimate” public authorities.” (104)

An extraordinary process of self-organization thus commenced in those parts of Spain where the military uprising had been defeated and where the working-class and peasant revolutionary Left exercised a degree of hegemony. A welter of committees sprang up all over Republican Spain, and Broué clearly portrays the origins and functions of these organizations.

“All had been set up in the heat of action to direct the popular response to the military coup d’état. They had been appointed in an infinite number of ways. In the villages, the factories, and on the work sites, time had sometimes been taken to elect them, at least summarily, at a general meeting. At all events, care had been taken to see that all parties and unions were represented on them, even if they did not exist before the Revolution, because the Committees represented at one and the same time the workers as a whole and the sum total of their organizations....

“All the Committees, whatever their differences in name, origin and composition, had one basic feature in common. All of them, in the days after the uprising, had seized all local power, taking over legislative as well as executive functions, making categorical decisions in their areas, not only about immediate problems, such as the maintenance of law and order and the control of prices, but also about the revolutionary tasks of the moment, the socialization or unionization of industry, the expropriation of the property of the clergy, the “factionists,”or simply the big landowners, the distribution of land or its collective development, the confiscation of bank accounts, the municipalisation of lodgings, the organization of information, written or spoken, education and welfare.” (127-9)

Critical Analysis

This widespread experiment in self-management and self-organization stands at the center of Broué’s analytical gaze. It is perhaps of more than passing interest that more recent historians with an eye for the emancipatory dimension of the Spanish Revolution, such as George Esenwein and Adrian Shubert, have continued to underscore the singularity of this historical process: “When compared to the Russian example [i.e. the Russian Revolution — GRH], it is patent that in Spain the degree of workers’ control was far more penetrating and of a greater magnitude.”(5)

To be sure, Pierre Broué is a far too conscientious scholar merely to praise the evolution of grassroots sentiments and experiments in the aftermath of 17 July 1936. He is quick to point out some self-limiting and debilitating flaws in the attempts of those committees to construct a fundamentally different (and better!) society.

On a regional level, a significant amount of overlap and conflicting interests between the various committees complicated the running of affairs. Moreover, the explicitly desired decentralization of powers led to certain inefficiencies and negative social consequences; “wages varied considerably from one branch of industry and even from one factory to another.” The author even goes so far as to state: “Collectivisation led to the same inequalities and even to the same absurdities that its supporters had criticized in the capitalist system.” (164)

Perhaps most crucially, these committees, “made up of leaders of organizations, whether appointed or elected,” never did become “elected bodies subject to recall, acting democratically according to the law of the majority;” instead,

“(T)he Committees gradually ceased to be genuine revolutionary bodies, because of their failure to change themselves into a direct expression of the insurgent masses. They became “nominal committees,” in which workers and peasants carried less and less weight as the revolutionary battles and the direct exercise of power in the streets by armed workers faded into the past, and in which, to the contrary, the influence of party and union apparatuses came to play a dominant role.” (189)

Still, if there was hope for the Spanish Revolution, it lay within the self-organization of Spanish activists within these committees, “this blossoming of initiatives [which was] not always happy but almost always generous in their inspiration.” (152)

But time was running out. “It was the war that reduced the revolutionary gains to rubble before they had time to mature and prove themselves in a day-by-day experiment compounded of progress and retreat, of groping and discovery.” (170) “In fighting a war, a single authority is essential. The duality between the power of the Committees and the state was an obstacle to the conduct of the war. In autumn 1936, the only problem was to know which of the two powers, Republican or revolutionary, would prevail.” (188)

The Tragic Dead End

Much of the remainder of Broué’s contribution to the co-authored work portrays in cogent analytical and detailed fashion why the “moderate” side won. In the autumn of 1936 even the forces on the revolutionary Left, above all the anarchists, the left-wing activists within the Socialist trade union (UGT), and the POUM all got caught up in the supposed exigencies of the admittedly difficult conjuncture, acquiescing in and indeed supporting the gradual elimination of the committee structure in favor of strengthening the rival structures of the bourgeois state.

In the following winter and then the spring of 1937, the realization of the dead-end nature of this evolution suddenly began to dawn on growing numbers of the increasingly marginalized radical Left; but by then, it soon turned out, it was too late. The 1937 Barcelona “May Days,” the Communist-led suppression of the Left again immortalized by Orwell in his autobiographical account of his months spent in the ranks of a POUM militia unit, provided the symbolic endpoint of Year One of the Spanish Revolution, which in effect put an end to the Spanish Revolution as such.

The Civil War continued to rage for almost another two years, ably described in Émile Témime’s portion of the joint text, but the most outstanding example of widespread libertarian self-organization in 20^th century European (and, probably, world) history had come to an end.

Notes

1. Pierre Broué, The German Revolution, 1917-1923 (London: Merlin, 2006).

2. Pierre Broué and Raymond Vacheron, Meurtres au Maquis (Paris: Grasset, 1997).

3. Pierre Broué and Émile Témime, La revolution et la guerre d’Espagne (Paris: Minuit, 1961).

4. Originally published as part of a larger collection of Chomsky’s writings, American Power and the New Mandarins, it has recently been reissued as a monograph: Noam Chomsky, Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship (New York: New Press, 2003).

5. George Esenwein and Adrian Shubert, Spain at War: The Spanish Civil War in Context (London: Longman, 1995), 134.

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 Chronicles from the Front

— Reiner Tosstorff

Letters from Barcelona
An American Woman in Revolution and Civil War
By Lois Orr with some materials by Charles Orr
Edited by Gerd-Rainer Horn
Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009. 209 pages,
$75 hardcover.

THIS VOLUME CONSISTS of carefully edited contemporary texts from the two U.S. socialists Lois and Charles Orr, who joined the revolutionary events in Spain after the outbreak of the Civil War, from fall 1936 to spring 1937. Two newlywed activists from the left wing of the U.S. Socialist Party, they had been traveling through Europe on their honeymoon when the news of the military revolt under General Franco reached them. They rushed to Barcelona not only to take a look but to become an active part of the workers’ revolution, which had erupted as the answer to the pro-Fascist coup.(1)

The capital of Catalonia in the North-East of Spain lies at the center of the industrially most developed part of Spain, then home to the perhaps most radical labor movement in Europe.(2) Together with the landless agricultural day laborers of the South, Barcelona’s workers formed the core of Spanish anarchism that had found its organizational expression in a radical union federation. The Confederación Nacional del Trabajo — National Labor Federation (CNT) — more than a million members strong, had to contest for hegemony over the workers’ movement in the other parts of Spain with the Socialist Party, but in Catalonia it was dominant.

The Communist Party had been rather marginal up to this time due to its sectarianism and history of bureaucratic splits and expulsions. It only began to grow after the outbreak of the Civil War, mainly because of the support the Republic received from the Soviet Union and because the political price Stalin demanded was not yet openly recognizable.(3)

In Catalonia there existed a small revolutionary Marxist current, which had emerged from the CNT under the influence of the October revolution. It criticized the political limitations of anarchism and stood for self-rule of the working classes based on the model of “soviets,” i.e. democratically elected workers councils. As revolutionaries they had clashed with Stalin’s rising dictatorship over international communism.

Partially influenced by the critique of Trotsky and after overcoming internal fragmentation, this current crystallized in 1935 in the POUM (Spanish or Catalan for “Workers Party of Marxist Unification”). Its strongholds were the small towns and the countryside outside Barcelona. Within the city itself it was second to the CNT, while in the rest of Spain its forces were rather weak. It was still far from being a full-grown party when the revolution broke out.

This meant that the POUM remained a force more driven by events than able to become a mover of them. Though often called Trotskyist, and despite broad sympathies with Trotsky’s struggle against Stalin and the provenance of a part of its militants from organized Trotskyism, it developed a series of political differences. This was particularly true when the POUM joined the Catalan government (September to December 1936). These differences in the short time of the revolution could not really be argued out, but obviously led to public confrontations.(4)

The Orrs, already influenced by the growing revolutionary tendencies within the Socialist Party — which were about to be reinforced during the summer of 1936 by the affiliation of the U.S. Trotskyists after the latter had dissolved their independent organization. The Orrs approached the milieu of and around the POUM, with Charles Orr joining the party and becoming editor of the POUM’s English language journal, The Spanish Revolution.

This organ provided a vivid picture of what was happening in Spain to the world, explaining the meaning of the revolution, its social content and the POUM’s struggle. It described how workers had reorganized factories and farms under their ownership and administration, and outlined how workers’ militias laid the first steps towards a revolutionary army.(5)

Being somewhat more critical of its heterogeneity, Lois Orr never formally joined the POUM. But when the POUM joined the Catalonia’s autonomous goverment she began to work in its foreign propaganda department. Not speaking Spanish or Catalan, nor being able to learn them during their short stay, she principally frequented the milieu of revolutionary foreign visitors who had been attracted to Barcelona.

Some took an active part in the revolution, but more than a few pursued the specific interests of their organizations by trying to win over the POUM to their “correct line,” making use of internal differentiations, often in a sectarian way.

A Woman in the Revolution

The bulk of the material in this book consists of excerpts from letters that Lois Orr sent back home to her family, communicating her day-to-day observations. Charles Orr occasionally contributed and some later material complements their impressions.

There already exist quite a few testimonies that describe these revolutionary events, some were even directly written to be published. If one only thinks of those by English-speaking militants, obviously George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia comes first to mind. There he narrates his experience of the military struggle on the Aragon front and the bitter clashes between different political factions. Less well known is Mary Low’s and Juan Brea’s Red Spanish Notebook, depicting the struggle on other fronts and highlighting the revolution in the hinterland.

So what does the Orrs’ testimony add? The editor, Gerd-Rainer Horn, a historian of modern European social movements at the University of Warwick, explains two central aspects in introductory chapters. One is the way a woman looked at these exciting revolutionary but very male-dominated events. Horn discusses her private correspondence within the context of recent feminist theories of women’s autobiographies.

The other chapter, originally published in the History Workshop Journal some years ago, examines the Orrs’ perception of the revolution through a “language of symbols.” As the Orrs did not know Spanish or Catalan, they had to come to an understanding of events through their symbolic expressions — such as the way people dressed and behaved, how political rallies proceeded etc. From this they drew their conclusions about the course of events and its political meaning.

These letters also contain detailed information about the “radical foreign” milieu in which they moved. With one exception the names mentioned only ring a bell with the few historians of the international radical left of the 1930s. The exception was Charles Orr’s British secretary, the wife of George Orwell. Of course, Orwell was fighting during these months at the front in Aragon.

At the time of their arrival the revolution was still in its heyday. But this soon changed, as they could closely observe. The external pressure of the Fascist advance, due to the unlimited help received from Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy, reinforced the internal contradictions between revolutionaries and the social-democratic and left-liberal reformists who wanted to reverse the revolutionary conquests workers made when they had crushed the military revolt in the main cities.

The latter forces received essential support from the Soviet Union. Stalin, whose main international strategy at that time consisted in forming an alliance with liberal-capitalist Britain and France against Germany, had renounced any anti-capitalist goals as these would have been incompatible with such a foreign policy.

During the first two crucial months of the Civil War, the Soviet Union had therefore refused the help the Spanish republic desperately requested. Only when realizing that a rapid victory of the Fascists would decisively turn the balance in favor of Nazi Germany, and that further refusal to help would definitely damage his reputation, did Stalin decide to send military support. In the expectation this would benefit the Soviet Union’s projected international alliance he also made it clear that he wanted to suppress “revolutionary exaggerations.”

The Communist Party, equipped with new prestige, now began a direct assault on the revolutionary conquests. As the anarchists were too strong to be directly confronted, the main aim was now the POUM, which was calumniated as “Trotskyite wreckers” and “agents of Hitler.” This was the time of the massive “purges” in the Soviet Union and these were to be extended to the international workers movement.

In May 1937 an armed confrontation, provoked by the Communists and immortalized by Orwell, led to street battles in Barcelona, and the workers’ defeat.

In the first place, the anarchists had not been willing to “fight for power.” The POUM accepted this limitation. Trotsky had already critized the rather cautious and reluctant tactics of the POUM. With this defeat there were even fiercer polemics, and these are reflected in the Orrs’ letters.(6)

The events of the May days were used by the Stalinists to suppress and scapegoat the POUM. Many activists were arrested and the party made illegal. The aim was to organize a show trial with defendants who would “confess” having acted in the pay of Hitler — forced, of course, to confess by means of torture.

The most famous case was that of the POUM’s main leader Andreu Nin, an internationally known working-class figure who “disappeared.” (He refused to cave in and was subsequently assassinated by Stalinist agents. This was immediately suspected, but only with the end of the Soviet Union was it substantiated through the Soviet archives.)

Foreigners were another target as this was to prove an “international conspiracy.” The Orrs were among those arrested; they describe the horrors of their experience in the book’s final section. They were lucky, however, as their arrest caused an outcry in the United States and they were released.

The fate of the German and Italian revolutionaries, obviously without any diplomatic support from their fascist governments, was much worse.

The Orrs returned to the United States after a stay in Paris where they met other refugees from the repression in Spain. They joined the U.S. Trotskyists, now again in an independent organization and, when it split in 1940, were active in the Workers Party (the “Shachtmanites”).

Memory Recovered

All these texts are thoroughly edited with footnotes explaining biographies and events. An introduction gives a short summary of the revolution in Catalonia. A fortunate addition are illustrations Horn found in contemporary drawings by the Catalan artist Josep Bartolí, who at that time was close to the POUM. In a dense and detailed way his drawings depict scenes from the revolutionary struggle and convey its political atmosphere.

Letters from Barcelona is a welcome antidote against the loss of memory of one of the most important revolutionary events in the history of the international working-class movement. For a long time the story has only been remembered by a narrow milieu of the independent left, perhaps because it ended in such a terrible defeat.

To be sure, this has already begun to be overcome in the last years by other contributions as well. In a large part this is a long-term result of the marvelous movie Ken Loach made in 1995 about the fate of an international volunteer in the militia of the POUM, “Land and Freedom.” Now Hollywood has announced a film version of Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia (reported by Variety in May 2009) which will certainly have a bigger budget than Loach had, and will almost certainly reach many more screens, but will be probably less political.

Recent publications deal with what undisputedly constituted a “path not taken” but which in times of a growing capitalist crisis, and after the collapse of Stalinism, arouses interest as a potential historical alternative. Obviously the attention is most developed in Spain.

Over the past few years activists interested in the fate of the POUM and the history of the struggles in which it took an active part — and with the help of its few surviving militants — have republished many of its old texts accompanied by new historical research. An important element of their work is their constantly expanding website in Spanish and Catalan (www.fundanin.org/ http://fundacioandreunin.com).

Notes

1. The historiography of the Spanish Civil War is immense. A good introduction to it is Andy Durgan, The Spanish Civil War, Basingstoke 2007. For an overview based on a selection of principal primary sources see George Esenwein, The Spanish Civil War. A modern tragedy, New York 2009.

2. However, the nationalities’ question should not be overlooked as an additional instigator of the political and social struggles. Catalonia has a language and a culture, distinct from “Spain,” i.e. from Castilia, the region around the capital Madrid. Conflicts between the center and the Catalan periphery have shaped the political landscape of Spain since the 19^th century.

3. For the historical background of the peculiar development of the Spanish labor movement see Benjamin Martin, The Agony of Modernization. Labor and Industrialization in Spain, Ithaca 1990.

4. Certainly, the POUM is dealt with in the general historiography of the Civil War, albeit usually rather briefly. To date there is only one English-language history of the POUM: Victor Alba and Stephen Schwartz’s Spanish Marxism versus Soviet Communism: A History of the P.O.U.M., New Brunswick 1988. Its main author, Victor Alba had been one of its younger militants during the Civil War years. He had written the book before Franco’s death, and without access to a larger collection of contemporary sources, which were unavailable or difficult to find, had been forced to rely on his memory. Although he tried to be as accurate and objective as possible, one can note that Alba’s political origins did not lay in the Trotskyist part of the POUM. For Trotsky’s attitude see Leon Trotsky, The Spanish Revolution 1931-1939. Introduction by Les Evans. Ed. by Naomi Allen and George Breitman, New York 1973. For a critical discussion of Trotsky’s positions and the response of the POUM see Andy Durgan, “Marxism, War and Revolution: Trotsky and the POUM”, in Revolutionary History, No. 2, Vol. 9, 2006, 27–65.

5. This journal was reprinted in the 1960s and can be found in major libraries. Reading it still brings alive the atmosphere of Spain in those months.

6. An informative selection of contemporary statements and articles from the international revolutionary left on Spain and especially the POUM together with new analyses has been published in two issues of the British journal Revolutionary History: Vol. 1, No. 2, Summer 1988, “The hidden history of the Spanish Civil War,” and Vol. 4, Nos. 1 & 2, Winter 1991-92, “The Spanish Civil War. The View from the Left” (the latter has now been republished as a book: Monmouth 2007).

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 The Journey of James Neugass

— Alan Wald

War Is Beautiful:
An American Ambulance Driver in the Spanish Civil War
By James Neugass, edited by Peter N. Carroll and Peter Glazer
New York: The New Press, 2008, 314 pages,
$26.95 hardcover.

AT THE AGE of 32, Isidore James Newman Neugass (1905-49), a lesser poet of the Lost Generation crowd who published as “James Neugass,” departed New York City to spend six months mostly on the front lines of the Spanish Civil War. In late 1937 and early 1938, Neugass, serving as a volunteer ambulance driver as part of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, was present at Teruel, one of the conflict’s bloodiest battles, claiming over 100,000 casualties.

Back home, Neugass’s contemporaries, especially those from similarly affluent families able to bestow elite educations on their sons at Phillips Exeter Academy and Yale University, were settling down to jobs and raising families. Why did Neugass go to Spain?

This is a famous question. English novelist Virginia Woolf, in a memoir of her nephew, poet Julian Bell, killed at age 29 during the battle of Brunette, inquired over and over again: “What did he feel about Spain? What made him feel it necessary…to go?....What made him do it?”(1)

Neugass, in his unfinished but mostly poignant journal War Is Beautiful, is equally vexed by the issue: “Why did you come to Spain?” asks his friend, Jack. “Tell you after the ‘all clear’ signal blows,” quips Neugass.

Jack, however, barges ahead with a narrative of his own exit from New York, one that entails dodging an unwelcome marriage commitment. At the finish Jack blurts out: “But I came over here for political reasons and I’m staying for political reasons. I didn’t tell you that, did I?” (73-4)

Before long Neugass runs into Commandante Crome (Dr. Leonard Crome, a British Chief Medical Officer), and reflects: “Why has he come to Spain?” (81) Once more, after arriving at Teruel, Neugass asks: “Why did I come to Spain?” (168) The query, posed from the outset of this journal-like chronicle, continues to be tendered. Yet Neugass provides hardly any specifics as to his own motives.

The answer, as Jack indicated, is both political and personal. Writing in the moment of political catastrophe that was the late 1930s, Neugass no doubt felt that the political component was patently obvious. The rise of fascism in Europe demanded action — extreme action — and Leftists throughout the world responded to the calamity with an idealism and bravery commonly acknowledged.

For anti-fascists in the United States, the Abraham Lincoln Brigade was the supreme manifestation of the internationalist principles animating the radical vision of the 1930s. African-American author Langston Hughes paid tribute to these qualities in “Hero — International Brigade,” a poem first published in the Communist Party’s Daily Worker in November 1937.(2) The essentials of the Brigade’s story ought to be at the fingertips of socialist activists of all generations.

Defense of the Republic

In February 1936, a Popular Front government (Socialists, Communists and Liberals) was narrowly elected in Spain. By the end of June the forces of the Far Right acquired backing from the fascist leaders of Germany and Italy, and in mid-July Spanish army generals launched a military uprising of “Rebels” against the “Loyalist” Republican government. In reply, the Communist International, with headquarters in Moscow, sent out a call for international volunteers purportedly to defend democracy in Spain with arms, while the USSR and Mexico provided weapons.(3)

In the United States, stirred by the Communist Party, an initial thirty-six volunteers sailed from New York City on December 26, 1936, with the number increasing to 450 by 1937. Even though recruitment for and service in Spain became illegal that year, more than 3000 U.S. citizens were to assist. Most felt amiably toward the Soviet Union and U.S. Communism, but some identified themselves with other brands of radicalism.

The U.S. volunteers were assigned primarily to two battalions (the Lincoln Battalion and the Washington Battalion) of the six in the Fifteenth International Brigade, a component of an overall army of 35,000 individual foreigners from 53 nations. A number of individuals also joined the John Brown Artillery, the MacKenzie-Papineau Battalion (from Canada, named for two patriots), the Regiment de Tren (a transportation unit), and, like James Neugass, the staff of the field hospital of the American Medical Bureau to Save Spanish Democracy.

Together, all U.S. volunteers became known as “The Abraham Lincoln Brigade,” albeit such an entity did not officially exist. Recruits came from assorted social classes, but a disproportionate percentage from the United States were Jewish (close to 50%) and, for the first time, Euro-American soldiers served under African-American officers. The Lincolns fought determinedly, but their training, weapons, and numbers were inadequate. Nearly one-third never returned. Confusing the situation was the at times reprehensible role that Soviet Union and its close allies in Spain played in their treatment of rivals on the Left.(4)

The most repellent feature of the political landscape after 1936, nonetheless, was the refusal of the United States, England and other Western democracies to come to the aid of the Republicans. Germany and Italy were left free to test out new weapons and techniques of massacring civilians. No wonder George Orwell declared, two years after the April 1939 victory of Franco, “The outcome of the Spanish war was settled in London, Paris, Rome, Berlin — at any rate, not in Spain.”(5)

Among those who risked life and limb for what has been called “The Last Great Cause” were a striking number of creative writers, artists, journalists, and other cultural figures.(6) They fought (and were wounded and killed) in the battalions, and served in the medical corps. They also entertained and reported from the front lines — Paul Robeson, Langston Hughes, Ernest Hemingway, Martha Gellhorn, Dorothy Parker and Josephine Herbst are just a sampling of non-combatant partisans from the United States.

The Odyssey of James Neugass

One of the most gifted and intriguing of the lesser-known literary-minded volunteers in combat circumstances was James Neugass. The Introduction to War Is Beautiful, prepared by Peter Carroll and Peter Glazer, two scholars associated with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives, efficiently recapitulates the chief events of his sojourn in Spain. They report that Neugass arrived in mid-November 1937, joining the American Medical Bureau at Villa Paz, and a month later found himself in the thick of battle at Teruel.

Throughout the brutal attacks and counter-attacks, Neugass drove an ambulance back and forth in hazardous combat zones, personally assisted in setting up hospital units, and received a number of shrapnel wounds. During the “Great Retreats,” when Republican lines began to collapse, Neugass found himself engaging in hand-to-hand combat for survival.(7) Following an exhausting escape in which he transported Dr. Edward Barsky, leader of the U.S. Medical volunteers, and other personnel to safety, Neugass was advised to return home with a letter of special commendation (which the editors partially reproduce on page 307).

Neugass’s own portrayal of these experiences comprise 90% of the volume, which is loosely constructed as a diary containing descriptions, lists, dialogues, reports of conversations, whimsical observations, memorials, vignettes, and occasional forays into gallows humor.

But what about the personal motives that drove Neugass to the Spanish front? The Carroll and Glazer Introduction also provides four paragraphs summarizing Neugass’s life and literary activities before and after Spain. These sketch his privileged youth in New Orleans as the grandson of an industrialist and philanthropist, and then his education at a fancy prep school in New Hampshire. Next came a sequence of academic stopovers at Yale, Harvard, Michigan, and Oxford, where he dabbled in everything from mining engineering to archeology to fine arts to history.

Neugass started writing poetry at 17 and labored at literary projects while he spent the 1920s traveling about Europe. Returning to the United States in late 1932, he further pursued his writing while migrating from job to job.

Much of War Is Beautiful was drafted by hand in Spain and typed up upon his return. Neugass published a section of it in Salud! Poems, Stories and Sketches of Spain By American Writers (1938), a collection of mostly literary sympathizers of the Communist Party, but an incomplete version of the manuscript was circulated to publishing houses and then apparently withdrawn before strangely vanishing.

Neugass did finish a long poem about Spain and a few shorter ones, meanwhile marrying Myra Shavell, with whom he had two sons. Working as a cabinet maker and foreman in a machine shop during the 1940s, he began writing short fiction for popular magazines and concluded a novel based on his New Orleans family. This was Rain of Ashes, appearing in 1949, the year he died of a heart attack in Greenwich Village. A half-century later, in 2000, a typed copy of War Is Beautiful unexpectedly turned up in a Vermont used bookshop.

Regrettably, the Carroll and Glazer summary of Neugass’s biography contains some minor errors. Neugass’s marriage date is given as 1939, but Neugass did not meet Myra Shavell until 1940, when they were employed as social workers in the same office; the marriage was later that year.(8)

The correct date brings into question Carroll and Glazer’s speculation that it was Myra who typed up the War Is Beautiful manuscript soon after Neugass’s 1938 return to New York. It seems likely that another friend or professional typist was involved, which could be a source for locating further information on the saga of the manuscript’s disappearance and surprising rescue.

The editors should also have included the information that Neugass had an earlier marriage, perhaps not unrelated to his Spanish adventures and other issues in his life. In 1928 he wedded Helen Larkin Wiesman who, with her second husband, famous radical journalist George Seldes, covered the Spanish Civil War in 1937 for the New York Post.(9)

Another error, mainly of significance to scholars, is the statement that Neugass died on September 17, 1949; it was actually Wednesday, September 7, and a New York Times obituary can be found on September 10. Moreover, Carroll and Glazer state that Rain of Ashes was published “posthumously” (xvi), which means that Neugass never beheld the fruits of his last labor. But the novel appeared in June of 1949, allowing Neugass the satisfaction of reading a large number of reviews in papers from around the country (including the New York Times and Daily Worker in July 1949). He even gave a newspaper interview where he was referred to as a “best-selling author.”(10)

Finally, the editors state that they were told that the Neugass manuscript was likely found among papers of Max Eastman (1883-1969), once a famous revolutionary writer. They then quote hand-written comments on the manuscript that raise questions about the political utility of Neugass’s book for the anti-fascist political cause, and speculate that these “ideologically inflected” doubts about Neugass’s work emanate from Eastman: “The main question to decide is: Is this a book that will help the fight, and the building up of the people’s movement against fascism.” (xvii)

But this attribution doesn’t make sense in the history of U.S. radicalism; Eastman had abandoned the Left by the time of the Spanish Civil War and in the 1940s morphed to the Far Right. Eastman’s biographer observes of Spain: “Max was uninterested in this struggle and could not understand or sympathize with those who were.”(11)

What is more, a simple match of these written queries with Eastman’s handwriting is not difficult to accomplish, given that samples of Eastman’s script are on-line and in his archives. Although I am not a graphologist, I have made such a comparison and find the likelihood that they were written by the same hand to be zero.

I then compared the handwritten queries on Neugass’s manuscript to handwriting by Maxim Lieber (1897-1993), the primary literary agent for pro-Communist writers of the time, including those with connections to the Spanish Civil War such as Langston Hughes and Alvah Bessie. The resemblance is about 90%.

The Communist Connection

To fully answer the “personal” part of the question as to why Neugass went to Spain — why he responded so dramatically to the call so many others disregarded — is a near-impossible task 50 years later. But a starting point would be to acknowledge, as this volume does not, that Neugass was closely connected to the Communist Party for most of the 1930s and 1940s — an affiliation that might be criticized today but nothing of which to be ashamed in the context of the anti-fascist era!

A November 1938 interview in the Daily Worker provides clues to Neugass’s thinking. The headline is: “Poet James Neugass, M.A., Teruel.” Neugass’s opening remarks recall novelist Herman Melville’s Moby Dick where the wandering Ishmael famously announces that “A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.” Neugass says: “I attended many schools here and abroad, including Yale and Oxford. But I got my B.A. in Gimbel’s basement, my B.S. in the 13^th Street Police Precinct, and my Master’s degree at Teruel.”

Although 1938 was the era of the Popular Front, and Left writers were by then calling for a “People’s Culture,” the upper-class Neugass is depicted in the interview as a “proletarian poet.” He places his youth of writing “surrealist poetry” decidedly in the past, and points to his experiences working at Gimbel’s department store as transformative for his art.

During this time, Neugass reports, he served as editor of a union paper published by the Office Workers Union (a Communist-led organization originally affiliated with the Trade Union Unity League) and soon he was jailed for activities in support of the Ohrbach workers’ strike — an event wonderfully recreated in Leane Zugsmith’s 1936 radical novel, A Time to Remember, and Reginald Marsh’s 1936 eminent painting “End of the Fourteenth Street Crosstown Line.” Neugass then helped to form the State, County and Municipal Workers of America.

When asked by the Daily Worker specifically about his reasons for joining the Lincoln Brigade, Neugass humorously responds: “First of all, I was spending too much money each day buying newspapers to read about the Spanish situation. Secondly, I went there to get some sleep…New York City is such a noisy place.”

More noteworthy, perhaps, is Neugass’s remark that Spain resolved his earlier concerns about “contact” between workers and intellectuals because “ideals here become realities there.” He reports that, since his homecoming, he had written “hundreds of leaflets and trade union papers,” which further convinced him to change his view of the poet from a private to a public figure.(12)

If one traces back Neugass’s writing through pro-Communist books and journals of the mid-Depression — for example, Proletarian Writers in the United States (1935), Partisan Review & Anvil (1936), and Get Organized: Stories and Poems About Trade Union People (1939) — one can see how the times pressed Neugass to reorganize his literary sensibility around the Communist program.

One example is his poem “To the Trade,” from the Communist magazine Dynamo in May 1935, which addresses “the function of the intellectual” and contains a reference to writings of Maxim Gorky (1868-1936), the pro-Bolshevik Russian writer who is associated with socialist realism. Neugass calls for a new role for poets as “the book-keepers of the international agony,” one that requires dramatic action.(13)

Whether this aspiration to a new integration of art and communism was ever personally fulfilled is subject to debate. Rain of Ashes begins with a quotation from the poet Edwin Arlington Robinson’s 1920 narrative “Lancelot”: “God, what a rain of ashes falls on him/Who sees the new and cannot leave the old.” Is the reference to the characters based on Neugass’s family in the years of World War I, or is it actually to himself? Rain of Ashes was projected as the first of three autobiographical volumes that would have recreated much of his life, but no sections of the latter parts have survived.

Although most of War Is Beautiful seems to be a Hemingway-like description of daily events, the need for a new and long-term vision underlies its sensibility. One afternoon in February 1938, Neugass reflects: “…no officer’s pistol can fire fast enough to make men stay in their trenches unless they are given something better to fight for than ‘making the world safe for democracy,’ ‘for race, for blood and honor,’ or ‘for God and Country,’ or ‘for the fatherland.’” As an alternative standpoint, Neugass declares himself “For a New World”:

“We will not run from the trenches if we know we are making a new world. We will hold our ground, to share in the wealth with which the world is ever more overflowing. That poverty amidst plenty should cease, we will bear against the full weight of mechanical death-machines bought by men who think that poverty amidst plenty is the natural and immortal principle of life laid down by the essential foulness of what they call ‘human nature.’” (191)

Behind “War is Beautiful”

This passage also suggests why Neugass gave his book the title War Is Beautiful. The phrase itself comes from Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876-1944), the Italian poet and Futurist, who combined nationalism (later, fascism) with a worship of technology.

War was “beautiful” to Marinetti because he saw its violence as a subjugation of machines to a human will that would produce a new literature and art. But one sees in the above-quoted sentences that Neugass clearly believes that “mechanical death-machines” are actually at the service of the ruling elite and that the mass of humanity must fight back through a collectivist vision.

Such a preoccupation with countering Italian Futurism was not Neugass’s alone; three years earlier, in 1935, German Marxist Walter Benjamin also took up the challenge of Marinetti’s “aesthetics of war” in his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.”

War Is Beautiful shows that yet another facet of Neugass’s personal motivation in taking the extreme action of volunteering was to uproot ugly vestiges of his family history. In a memorable passage, after a long day of driving in December 1937, Neugass finds himself sharing a bed in a bathless hotel with an African American, Lieutenant D. (probably the Trinidad-born Dr. Arnold Donowa, a dental surgeon):

“This was the first time I had shared a room, much less a bed, with a negro. My grandfather had been a slaveholder. Two ancestors had fought with the Confederates. The eyes of three generations of New Orleans private bankers and their women were on me as I stood in the room with D. He sensed this but made no comment. Both of us knew that I had an opportunity of permanently putting to sleep a hundred years of prejudice. This I did. For a century my family has had its laundry done by negroes, and its cooking. Negro women have taken care of the men’s overflow sexual desires and the children they had with their wives.” (47)

One wonders if, as in Ishmael’s “wedding night” with Queequeg in Moby Dick, the two men awoke with their bodies ambiguously intertwined.

Marching with Blinkers

In War Is Beautiful, Neugass says that he felt “ashamed” that his extreme nearsightedness forced him to serve in the medical corps instead of the infantry, and he distances himself from the conventional picture of the writer going to war in search of adventures: “I don’t like the literary, intellectual, here-to-be-revolted-by-the-horror-of-war, later-to-write-a-book.” But he proudly separates himself out by insisting that those others were “non-political.” (23)

In contrast, Neugass of course was unabashedly quite “political.” So I find it disingenuous to see War Is Beautiful marketed on the book-jacket as “free of ideological blinkers”: “Unlike some other memoirists, he [Neugass] has no political or personal axe to grind.” To be sure, War Is Beautiful is far from a political tract but it is unquestionably a view of the war situation refracted through the famous “blinkers” of those who served under the leadership of the Communist movement or were otherwise allied to the Popular Front.

Faith in the Popular Front policy leads Neugass to be sadly incurious about the various arrests, executions, labeling of other radicals as infantile Leftists, and the contradictions of what he describes as the “First Win the War” theory. Indeed, some of the fascination of reading this journal may come from observing how those blinkers worked, even on the most intelligent and sensitive of men.

One can certainly see this in Neugass’s Spanish Civil War poetry. “Give Us this Day,” often reprinted but appearing initially in Story (November-December 1938), begins with a quote from Dolores Ibárruri, an orthodox Stalinist, but is replete with haunting images of olive trees as headstones and the shoes of dead men marching on the feet of others.

In War Is Beautiful we find Neugass negotiating his congenital opposition to international war with the demand created by fascist aggression to participate in armed resistance. This is a work rooted not only stylistically but somewhat attitudinally in the anti-militaristic disenchantment of the post-World War I Lost Generation — Hemingway, John Dos Passos and e. e. Cummings; these veterans (often having served as ambulance drivers) were disillusioned with moral heroics and wrote mainly of survival. In sections of War Is Beautiful, such as his narrative of “Heliodoro, the Heroic Kitchen-Boy” (195-96), Neugass assumes a spectatorial position as he stoically depicts self-sacrifice by a very ordinary person.

Perhaps the saddest part of James Neugass’s own story is that, on the book-jacket of Rain of Ashes and in publicity statements for the novel, he omitted entirely references to service in Spain and even his experiences as a union activist. The anti-radical witch-hunt was under way and in 1947 Dr. Barsky, for whom Neugass had served as a personal driver in Spain, was cited for Contempt of Congress.

Barsky had refused to turn over to the House Committee on Un-American Activities the records of the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee, which primarily aided Spanish refugees and lobbied Congress on behalf of the deposed Spanish Republican government. Barsky subsequently served six months in prison.

The New Press edition of this long-lost memoir should serve as part of a tribute to a generation of freedom fighters like Barsky and Neugass, far from perfect in their comprehension of a turbulent world but consummate in their personal commitment to their vision of socialist ideals.

Notes

1. Bell also served as an ambulance driver for the Spanish Republicans. Virginia Woolf, “Remembering Julian,” in Valentine Cunningham, Spanish Front: Writers on the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 231-234.

2. Reprinted in Cary Nelson, ed., The Wound and the Dream: Sixty Years of American Poems about the Spanish Civil War (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002). Nelson’s collection also reprints four poems by Neugass.

3. The orthodox Trotskyist view is that Stalinism crushed an authentic revolution in progress that could have defeated fascism. Much scholarship confirms the existence of a massive social movement that held the Spanish Right in check prior to the arrival of Soviet aid. But it is impossible to judge whether this indigenous revolt was sufficient to beat back the international Fascist forces ultimately lined up against the Republic. Recently published documents from the former Soviet Union reinforce the view that the pro-Soviet elements were out to establish a dictatorship of their own, although there is no way to know how that perspective would have ultimately fared if there had been substantial military and financial support to the Republic from the West. George Orwell describes some of the controversies of the era in his 1943 essay, “Looking Back on the Spanish Civil War,” available on-line at:
http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/Spanish_War/english/esw_1:
“As to the Russians, their motives in the Spanish war are completely inscrutable. Did they, as the pinks believed, intervene in Spain in order to defend Democracy and thwart the Nazis? Then why did they intervene on such a niggardly scale and finally leave Spain in the lurch? Or did they, as the Catholics maintained, intervene in order to foster revolution in Spain? Then why did they do all in their power to crush the Spanish revolutionary movements, defend private property and hand power to the middle class as against the working class? Or did they, as the Trotskyists suggested, intervene simply in order to prevent a Spanish revolution? Then why not have backed Franco? Indeed, their actions are most easily explained if one assumes that they were acting on several contradictory motives. I believe that in the future we shall come to feel that Stalin’s foreign policy, instead of being so diabolically clever as it is claimed to be, has been merely opportunistic and stupid.”

4. The problem of addressing the relationship of the Lincoln Brigade to Stalinist repression in Spain is more fully discussed in my essay “Humanizing the Lincolns,” The Volunteer, Winter 1998-99, 5-7.

5. This statement can be found in Orwell, “Looking Back on the Spanish Civil War”: http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/Spanish_War/english/esw_1.

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