Transatlantic Anarchism during the Spanish Civil War and Revolution, 1936-1939

Fury Over Spain

Morris Brodie

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000051520
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Weltgeschichte

Between 1936 and 1939, the Spanish Civil War showcased anarchism to the world. News of the revolution in Spain energised a moribund international anarchist movement, and activists from across the globe flocked to Spain to fight against fascism and build the revolution behind the front lines. Those that stayed at home set up groups and newspapers to send money, weapons and solidarity to their Spanish comrades. This book charts this little-known phenomenon through a transnational case study of anarchists from Britain, Ireland and the United States, using a thematic approach to place their efforts in the wider context of the civil war, the anarchist movement and the international left.

1 From Depression to revival

The onset of the Depression presented transatlantic anarchists with several challenges that threatened to condemn the movement to political oblivion. Ageing activists, increasingly bitter after years of disappointment, eked out an existence with waning enthusiasm. With the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, a new sense of urgency pulsed through the transatlantic anarchist community. Anarchists began to organise, with many travelling to Spain to aid the efforts of their Iberian comrades, both in the rearguard and at the front. Those that stayed behind set up new groups, fundraising organisations and publications to raise awareness of the CNT-FAI and to funnel support to the anarchist stronghold of Barcelona.

Within six months of the war’s outbreak, five newspapers appeared devoted to the Spanish anarchist struggle in Britain and the United States, and the CNT-FAI set up bureaus in London and New York. This was the base from which Spanish solidarity campaigns sprang for the next two and a half years. Little wonder that the anarchist historian George Woodcock later wrote that the ‘enthusiasm aroused by the Spanish Civil War’ led to a ‘revivified movement’.¹

This chapter looks at the state of the anarchist movement in the early 1930s and the initial responses amongst transatlantic anarchists to the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in July 1936. It briefly outlines the main foreign solidarity organisations in Britain, Ireland and the United States, and looks at the reception of the propaganda produced by the CNT-FAI Foreign Language Division in Barcelona. It ends with a discussion of transatlantic anarchist volunteers in the armies and militias of the Spanish Republic.

Anarchism before July 1936

Spanish anarchism was unarguably the strongest in the world in the 1930s. The CNT, established in 1911 in Barcelona as an anarcho-syndicalist trade union confederation, claimed between 500,000 and a million members (known as cenetistas) in 1936. The FAI (whose members were known as faístas), founded in 1927, was smaller, with a pre-civil war peak of 5,500 affiliates in 1933, but more radical and intransigent in its anarchism. During the early 1930s, the CNT and FAI instigated several uprisings against the state that, whilst unsuccessful, destabilised the Spanish political system. These ‘revolutionary gymnastics’ reflected an impatience amongst anarchists to take advantage of the new opportunities that came with the abolition of the monarchy and establishment of the Republic in 1931, and a confidence in the strength of the movement. Their bloody suppression was a severe blow from which the Spanish movement took time to recover, but even these doomed actions were well beyond the capability of most international anarchists.²

Internationally, anarchism was at a low ebb during the interwar period. The movement split over participation in the First World War, with Piotr Kropotkin, Jean Grave and others backing an Entente victory over the Central Powers. Anti-war anarchists, such as Errico Malatesta, Emma Goldman and Rudolf Rocker, deplored this break from anarchist orthodoxy, with Goldman imprisoned in the United States for her anti-conscription activities.³ The Russian Revolution of 1917 also had damaging effects on the anarchist movement. Before the Bolshevik seizure of power, as Benedict Anderson points out, it was anarchism, not orthodox Marxism, which ‘stole hearts and headlines’ as the primary source of leftist opposition to capitalism and imperialism.⁴ After 1917, communists could point to the Soviet Union as proof of their success, regardless of the repression of dissenters, including anarchists, in the ‘workers’ paradise’. As the membership of communist parties worldwide rose, the anarchist movement lost potential recruits.

Anarchists also suffered repression at the hands of their eternal foe: the state. Following a series of bombings carried out by anarchists after the end of the First World War, the US government launched a crackdown on radical activists. During this period of repression, known as the First Red Scare and culminating in the Palmer Raids of 1919–20, thousands of anarchists and other radicals were imprisoned, and hundreds deported. Emma Goldman was one of almost 250 radicals banished to Soviet Russia aboard the USS Buford in 1919. All left-wing agitation was viewed as subversive: the New York State Assembly expelled five newly elected Socialist Party members, and thirty-two states passed laws outlawing the display of the red flag. The Italian-American anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were caught up in the anti-radical hysteria, accused of armed robbery, and, despite a worldwide campaign for clemency, were executed in 1927 in one of the most infamous miscarriages of justice in American history. The Red Scare was a severe blow to the US anarchist movement, made worse by the restrictive immigration controls introduced by Congress in the early 1920s. These actively targeted immigrants from countries with a history of radicalism, particularly from southern and eastern Europe.⁵

Despite this plethora of problems, pockets of anarchism continued to exist in areas with historic immigration from traditionally anarchist-rich communities. These included Jews and Italians in New York and New Jersey, Spaniards in Miami, California and the Midwest, and Russians in Chicago. Often, these pockets centred on newspapers. As Table 1.1 shows, the most significant hub of US anarchist newspaper production in the 1930s was New York. The Road to Freedom was the most noteworthy English-language publication in the 1920s and early 1930s, but from 1932 this was supplemented by Vanguard, a theoretical journal produced largely by the movement’s young people.⁶

Table 1.1 Significant anarchist periodicals in the United States, 1930–36.

Newspaper	State	Years active	Language	Peak circulation
Cultura Proletaria	NY	1927–53	Spanish	4,000
Dielo Truda	IL	1927–39	Russian	675
Eresia	NY	1928–32	Italian	3,050
Freedom*	NY	1933–34	English	2,000
Freie Arbeiter Stimme	NY	1890–1977	Yiddish	30,000
Il Martello	NY	1916–46	Italian	10,500
L’Adunata dei Refrattari	NY	1922–71	Italian	5,000
L’Emancipazione	CA	1927–32	Italian	3,000
Man!	CA	1933–40	English	5,000
Road to Freedom	NY	1924–32	English	3,000
Vanguard	NY	1932–39	English	3,000

* Not to be confused with the British newspaper of the same name.

Figures taken from Kenyon Zimmer, ‘Anarchist Newspapers and Periodicals 1872–1940’ available at University of Washington Mapping American Social Movements Project (https://depts.washington.edu/moves/anarchist_map-newspapers.shtml) (3 June 2019).

The Italian-language periodicals L’Adunata dei Refrattari (The Call of the Refractories, often shortened to L’Adunata) and Il Martello (The Hammer) were important publications in the 1930s, as was the Spanish-language Cultura Proletaria (Proletarian Culture), edited by Marcelino García, a Spanish migrant from Oviedo. L’Adunata was produced by followers of the insurrectionist Italian anarchist Luigi Galleani (known as Galleanisti), who was deported from the United States in 1919. During the interwar years, they were constantly at loggerheads with Carlo Tresca, editor of Il Martello, himself an organiser for the IWW in the 1910s. This feud was a key feature of Italian-American anarchist organising in the period, perhaps best symbolised by the outrage of the L’Adunata group to Tresca shaking hands with President Calvin Coolidge after his release from prison in 1925. From Italy, Galleani advised his followers to seize on the incident as proof of Tresca’s submission to the state and lack of anarchist credentials, and ensure that the ‘unmasking continue[s] until the immutable characteristics of his muddled and Jesuitic countenance are revealed’.⁷ Jewish anarchism was also historically very strong in New York. The leading Yiddish-language journal, Freie Arbeiter Stimme (The Free Voice of Labor), had a peak readership of 150,000 during the First World War, although the print run had fallen to around 5,000 by 1934. It was also in New York that Jewish groups re-formed the Jewish Anarchist Federation in 1921.⁸

There were groups in other parts of the country too: the Free Society group and the Russian-language newspaper Dielo Truda (Workers’ Cause) in Chicago; the International Group in San Francisco (which published L’Emancipazione (Emancipation)) and the Libertarians and Workman’s Circle groups in Los Angeles. In 1933, Marcus Graham, a Romanian-born individualist anarchist, began producing the theoretical journal Man! with the help of Galleanisti from San Francisco. Anarchists in the IWW tried to organise the unemployed through unions in New York, Chicago and the Pacific Coast, and encouraged members to picket employers cutting workers’ wages.⁹

This activity masked another serious issue for US anarchists during the 1930s. The state’s reaction to the Depression led to an increase in working class dependence on the very entity anarchists hoped to destroy: government. For many workers – particularly the unemployed – state relief was the only thing preventing starvation during the lean years of the Depression. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal increased public expenditure substantially in comparison to the earlier Harding, Coolidge and Hoover administrat...