See Jamal Hannah's Spain pages, and Archie Anderson'saccount of the November 1996 reunion.Eugene W. Plawiuk's extraordinarily well-linkedsite on Spain.
When Franco's fascist troops invaded Spain in July 1936 with thepurpose of overthrowing the young and unstable Republic, the Spanishworking class responded by making a revolution that went much furthertoward realizing the classless and stateless ideal of proletariansocialism than any preceding popular revolt. Spontaneously and almostovernight, workers seized factories and other workplaces; land wascollectivized; workers' militias were formed throughout the country;the church--age-old enemy of all workingclass radicalism and indeed,openly profascist--was dismantled, and its property confiscated;established political institutions disintegrated or were taken over byworkers' committees.
In a decade of cataclysmic worldwide depression and spreading fascism,the revolution in Spain signaled a message of renewed hope to thescattered forces of working-class emancipation throughout the globe,not least in the United States. American intellectuals and unionistsresponded very favorably; for an overview of the Abraham LincolnBrigade, click here.
Supporting the workers' revolution were Spain's largest unions, theanarcho-syndicalist Confederacion Nacional del Trabajo(National Confederation of Labor: CNT) and its rival, the UnionGenerale de Trabajadores (General Union of Workers: UGT), largelyled by the Socialist Party (then in a markedly Left phase), as well assuch revolutionary groups as the Iberian Anarchist Federation, theindependent Workers Party of Marxist Unity (POUM), and a small nucleusof Trotskyists. The Spanish Communist Party, however, and manysocialists, maintained that Spain was not historically ripe for ananticapitalist revolution and openly declared themselves for thebourgeois republic. After Franco secured military assistance fromHitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy, the Spanish Communist Party(CP), which, in the early days of the revolution, had been a smallsect, rapidly became a major power in the land as Stalin's Russia sentnumerous military officers and political advisers, as well as somemilitary aid, to shield the fragile remnant of the republicangovernment.
The anarchist movement in the United States in the 1930s was notlarge, but it quickly mounted a nationwide campaign in defense ofworkers' Spain that vastly exceeded its numerical energies. The CNT'sU.S. representative, Spanish-born Maximiliano Olay--veteran ofanarchist labor struggles in Cuba and among immigrant cigar-makers inTampa, Florida, and for many years a leading figure of Chicago's FreeSociety Group--moved to New York and opened an office for propagandaon lower Fifth Avenue. At his instigation, the various U.S. Jewish,Russian, Spanish, and Italian anarchist federations and groups, aswell as English-language groups such as the New York Vanguard groupand several branches of the Industrial Workers of the World, formedthe ad hoc United Libertarian Organizations to produce a paper of newsand information titled Spanish Revolution. (Though not actuallyaffiliated, the Gillespie, Illinois, branch of the Progressive Minersof America wholeheartedly supported the effort through a sizablemonthly assessment of its members.) Besides publishing SpanishRevolution, the United Libertarian Organizations held mass meetings inmany cities and raised thousands of dollars for their embattledcomrades in Spain. The ULO's constituent groups also promoted therevolution in their own papers, and issued separate publications oftheir own. The Yiddish-language weekly Freie Arbeter Shtimmebrought out an English translation of Rudolf Rocker's pamphlet TheTruth About Spain. The Italian-language L'Adunata dei Refrattaricarried important communications from Spain by the renowned anarchisttheorist Camillo Berneri. The IWW's weekly Industrial Workerand One Big Union Monthly featured reports by Pat Read andother Wobblies in the Spanish trenches.
In many countries the social-democratic parties opposed therevolution, but in the United States the Socialist Party, largesections of which had moved sharply to the left--a developmenthastened by the influx of a disciplined and energetic group ofTrotskyists--took up the banner of the workers' revolution and evenorganized and funded a substantial military unit, the [Eugene] DebsColumn, to fight in Spain. Ernest Erber, a leader of the YoungPeople's Socialist League, joined the editorial staff of the POUM'spaper, La Batalla. The Friends of Workers' Spain in Chicagoexisted primarily to promote English-language POUM publicationsthroughout the American labor movement. Also oriented toward thePOUM, though not without sometimes severe criticisms of its policies,were Hugo Oehler's Revolutionary Workers League and Albert Weisbord'sCommunist League of Struggle. Oehler's oft-reprinted pamphletBarricades in Barcelona remains an important eyewitness accountof the workers' "May Days" revolt of 1937. Weisbord went to Spain ascorrespondent for the Nation, and issued a "Special SpanishIssue" of his own mimeographed journal, Class Struggle, inSeptember 1937. The Trotskyists, inside the Socialist Party but stillproducing publications of their own, issued many polemics by Trotskyand others. Other small Marxist groups, including the ProletarianParty and the Lovestoneites [named after Jay Lovestone], also defendedthe revolution in Spain and devoted much space to it in their press.
When fascism emerged triumphant in Spain in 1939, many Spanishrevolutionaries sought political asylum in the United States. By farthe largest group rallied round Espana Libre, a broad-basedbilingual paper devoted to news of struggles in Spain as well as ofthe widely scattered exile community. Produced in New York by theConfederated Spanish Societies, Espania Libre continued toappear monthly until the death of Franco in 1975.
The first U.S. study of the Spanish Revolution was Trotskyist FelixMorrow's pamphlet Civil War in Spain (September 1936), followeda little over a year later by his full-length Revolution andCounter-Revolution in Spain. American radicals, especiallyanarchists, have written prodigiously on the subject ever since. NoamChomsky's essay "Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship" in his AmericanPower and the New Mandarins (1969), Sam Dolgoff's anthologyThe Anarchist Collectives (1974), and David Porter's Visionon Fire: Emma Goldman on the Spanish Revolution (1983) are amongthe more influential works that have emphasized the revolutionarynature of the struggle in Spain.
