Spain In Our Hearts

Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939

Adam Hochschild

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780547974538
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER. A sweeping history of the Spanish Civil War, told through a dozen characters, including Hemingway and George Orwell: A tale of idealism, heartbreaking suffering, and a noble cause that failed. For three crucial years in the 1930s, the Spanish Civil War dominated headlines in America and around the world, as volunteers flooded to Spain to help its democratic government fight off a fascist uprising led by Francisco Franco and aided by Hitler and Mussolini. Today we're accustomed to remembering the war through Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls and Robert Capa's photographs. But Adam Hochschild has discovered some less familiar yet far more compelling characters who reveal the full tragedy and importance of the war: a fiery nineteen-year-old Kentucky woman who went to wartime Spain on her honeymoon, a Swarthmore College senior who was the first American casualty in the battle for Madrid, a pair of fiercely partisan, rivalrous New York Times reporters who covered the war from opposites sides, and a swashbuckling Texas oilman with Nazi sympathies who sold Franco almost all his oil — at reduced prices, and on credit. It was in many ways the opening battle of World War II, and we still have much to learn from it. Spain in Our Hearts is Adam Hochschild at his very best. "With all due respect to Orwell, Spain in Our Hearts should supplant Homage to Catalonia as the best introduction to the conflict written in English. A humane and moving book."— New Republic "Excellent and involving... What makes [Hochschild's] book so intimate and moving is its human scale." — Dwight Garner, New York Times

 

PART I

1

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Chasing Moneychangers from the Temple

IN A STATE that was largely brown desert, the wide lawns of the University of Nevada stood out like a green oasis. On a bluff overlooking Reno, tree-shaded red-brick buildings were laced with vines and dotted with cupolas and windows in white frames. Spread around a small lake, the school had an Ivy League look that would make it a favorite location for Hollywood films set on campuses.

Six feet two and a half inches tall, sandy-haired, rangy, and handsome, Robert Merriman was working his way through college. He held jobs at a local funeral home, as a fraternity house manager, and as a salesman at J. C. Penney, where he used his employee discount to buy his clothes. Growing up in California, he had already spent several years in a paper mill and as a lumberjack—his father’s trade—between high school and college. Along the way, he had also worked in a cement plant and on a cattle ranch. Once enrolled at Nevada, he discovered he could earn an extra $8.50 a month by signing up for the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, or ROTC, whose cadets wore cavalry-era dress uniforms including riding boots and jodhpurs. He also found time to play end on the campus football team, and then, when an injury forced him to stop, to become a cheerleader. Indeed, for the rest of his life there would remain something of the clean-cut cheerleader about him.

Bob Merriman met Marion Stone at a dance just before their freshman year. On the first day of school he spotted her as he was driving by in a small Dodge convertible, braked, and called out, “Climb in! We’re going places.” Slender, attractive, and half a head shorter than he, Marion was the daughter of an alcoholic restaurant chef. She, too, had worked for two years after high school and, like millions of other people, had then lost her savings in a bank failure. She was supporting herself as a secretary and by cooking and cleaning for the family who owned the mortuary where Bob worked.

Marion lived most of her college years in a sorority house. By her account, campus courting was a chaste affair: dancing, kissing, and perhaps an occasional daring visit to a Prohibition-era speakeasy. She was chosen “Honorary Major” of the University Military Ball that Bob staged with his ROTC friends, and he splurged some of his hard-earned money to buy her slippers and a taffeta gown. On the morning of graduation day in May 1932, they received their degrees and Bob his commission as a second lieutenant in the Army Reserve. They were married that afternoon. Afterward they drove through the Sierra Nevada to a borrowed cottage on the shore of Lake Tahoe and went to bed together at last. It was, she says, the first time for each of them.

That fall, encouraged by one of his Nevada professors who had spotted his talent, Bob Merriman enrolled as a graduate student in economics at the University of California at Berkeley. In a country gripped by the worst depression in its history, with nearly a quarter of the population out of work, no subject seemed more vital. Berkeley leaned to the left, but with millions of homeless Americans living in “Hooverville” shacks of corrugated iron, tarpaper, cinderblocks, or old packing cases—in New York, one Hooverville sprouted close to Wall Street and another in Central Park—you didn’t have to be a leftist to wonder: was there a better way?

Franklin D. Roosevelt entered the Oval Office during Merriman’s first year at Berkeley, voicing in his inaugural address a near-biblical radicalism seldom heard from an American president before or since: “Practices of the unscrupulous moneychangers stand indicted. . . . The moneychangers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.” Some of the moneychangers seemed uneasy. The financier J. P. Morgan Jr., heir to a vast banking fortune, put his yacht in mothballs, writing a friend, “There are so many suffering from lack of work, and even from actual hunger, that it is both wiser and kinder not to flaunt such luxuriant amusement.”

Funds were tight for the newlyweds. For several months, Marion could not afford to leave a new job she had in Nevada. A stream of letters and an occasional love poem from Bob to his “Dearest girl of all” assured her of how much he missed her: “Love and please hurry. I’m tired of living alone and need you and you alone.” At the same time, he kept a wary eye on their finances: “I am very much in favor of your coming down over the holidays if you can make it. However, if there is any possibility of spending much money doing it we had better not try.”

He shared with her his excitement at being on a far more sophisticated campus: “One room in the library is like a handsome club room of some sort. Soft armchairs and all.” It was thrilling for him to become an instructor of undergraduates and to get to know fellow graduate students who had come long distances to study in his department, including a young Canadian named John Kenneth Galbraith. “The most popular of my generation of graduate students at Berkeley” was how Galbraith would remember Merriman. “Later he was to show himself the bravest.”

Bob took a bed in a rooming house while searching for an affordable place for the couple to live. “Since my arrival here,” he wrote to Marion, “I have looked at, at least, fifty apartments. . . . Last nite I left the library early . . . and searched some more. I found one that I consider we can’t beat. . . . So I put down $5 deposit and shall move in tomorrow afternoon. . . . They charge $20 a month so it is no palace neither is it a shack. . . . I have been a trifle skimpy on rations but I’m eating more now all of the books are paid for. I am feeling like a million and just dying to have my sweetheart join me soon.”

Before long she did, in the one-room studio Bob had found five minutes’ walk north of the campus, equipped with a Murphy bed that unfolded from the wall. Despite the Great Depression, Marion seemed to have a knack for landing on her feet and finding work. She first took a job as a bank secretary, then clerked at a housewares store in San Francisco, to which she commuted by trolley car and ferry. Even with little money, married life was a delight. “Bob invented a mischievous game in which we would sneak into the luxurious Nob Hill hotel, the Mark Hopkins, by pretending to be meeting someone at the bar. Once inside we danced for hours, never spending more than the price of the first drink. We got so good at it that we sometimes didn’t even order a drink.” Among their favorite tunes were “Stardust” and “Tea for Two.”

Soon three more people were crowded into the tiny apartment: on a cot in the kitchen was a graduate student without a place to live whom Bob had taken pity on; sleeping on another cot and the living room couch were Marion’s eight- and eleven-year-old sisters. Their mother had died and their hard-drinking father was incapable of caring for them. “You walked in the door and you had to crawl over a bed to get anywhere,” Marion remembered. “Bob was unflappable. He simply figured my sisters, the graduate student, and, God knows, maybe even someone else eventually, were in need; he had room, we ought to share it.” His infectious good spirits made her feel “as though I were a child running and laughing in a wild game of Follow the Leader.”

Meanwhile, the country around them simmered in misery. Thirty-four million Americans lived in households with no wage earner. In every city, long lines of jobless men in cloth caps or Homburgs waited outside soup kitchens, but the churches and charities operating them sometimes ran out of funds and had no food to serve. Families rummaged in trash bins and garbage dumps for anything edible and tried to keep warm in winter over sidewalk hot-air grates. In Pennsylvania, homeless unemployed steelworkers and their wives and children lived inside idled coke ovens. The economic abyss was deepened by a drought of historic proportions that sent millions of people streaming westward from the Great Plains under vast clouds of topsoil turned to dust. Midwestern farmers who managed to harvest a crop sometimes could find no grain elevator willing to buy it. The city of Detroit slaughtered the animals in its zoo to provide meat for the hungry. When the Empire State Building opened to great fanfare, it could rent only 20 percent of its space. For the jobless, telephones became an unaffordable luxury: between 1930 and 1933, the number of households with phone service shrank by more than three million.

A mood of national despair was punctuated by moments when the desperate tried to seize what they needed to survive. Some 300 men and women gathered on the main street of the town of England, Arkansas, and refused to move until shop owners distributed bread and other food. In Oklahoma City, people forced their way into a grocery store and took food off the shelves, while in Minneapolis it required 100 policemen to break up a crowd doing the same thing.

Labor turned militant. More than 300,000 textile workers walked off the job in 1934 in the largest strike America had yet seen. From Maine to Georgia, clothing mill employees clashed with police, strikebreakers, and the National Guard in violence that left some dozen people dead. The Georgia governor put the whole state under martial law. Elsewhere, by the hundreds of thousands, small farmers and homeowners lost their property to foreclosure—or sometimes gathered neighbors with shotguns and refused to move.

In the summer after his first year at Berkeley, Bob Merriman worked on a Ford auto assembly line in the nearby industrial city of Richmond and was appalled to find that the workers, not even allowed bathroom breaks, were routinely splashed by battery acid. The next summer, in 1934, he would be swept into a far more political world than the one he had known in Nevada. Some 15,000 West Coast longshoremen had formed a union and, when shipping firms refused to recognize it, walked off the job. Sailors, harbor pilots, and truck drivers carrying cargo to the docks joined them. In a display of solidarity rare for that era, the strikers and their allies—whites, blacks, Chinese and Filipino Americans—marched eight abreast up San Francisco’s Market Street under a union flag.

The maritime companies hired replacements, sometimes housing them on shipboard to keep them beyond reach of the fists and boots of angry longshoremen. At Berkeley, hundreds of professors and students, like Merriman, fervently backed the strikers, while the football coach—William Ingram, an Annapolis graduate known as “Navy Bill”—organized players to work as strikebreakers.

All major Pacific coast ports were shut down, but the heart of the battle was in San Francisco, then a rough-edged, blue-collar city and the country’s biggest union stronghold. A thousand men at a time blocked the waterfront in 12-hour shifts. Tensions rose, and any truck that tried to drive through the line of picketing workers was met by fusillades of rocks and bricks. From the hills that overlooked the wharves, thousands of San Franciscans watched the ensuing street fighting and listened to police gunfire. When tear gas grenades lit a hillside of dry grass on fire the city looked even more like a war zone. In several days of fighting, two strikers were killed and well over 100 injured people were taken to hospitals. A solemn crowd of 15,000 escorted the bodies of the dead along Market Street in silence. The San Francisco Labor Council voted, for only the second time in American history, to call a general strike. Throughout the Bay Area, nearly 130,000 people stopped working.

Some 500 special police were sworn in, and vigilante groups joined them in wrecking union offices and a kitchen feeding the strikers. The attackers smashed furniture, threw typewriters out of windows, and beat up union members and other radicals. “Reds Turn Black and Blue” ran the triumphant headline in the San Francisco Chronicle. Well over 250 unionists and their sympathizers were arrested, and the governor mobilized 4,500 National Guardsmen. Along the waterfront, helmeted soldiers manned sandbag barricades and a machine-gun nest.

The conflict did not bring on the revolution that many dreamed of, but the strikers won some of their demands. The union took firm root among longshoremen, and until cranes for shipping containers replaced dockworkers’ cargo hooks several decades later, it would be one of the country’s strongest. Working as a volunteer in the strike publicity office, Bob Merriman had a front-row seat at a historic labor victory.

Just as the strike was one part of Merriman’s introduction to the political strife of his day, his surroundings at Berkeley were another. Teaching in his department, for instance, was the economist Paul Taylor, husband of the photographer Dorothea Lange; the couple went into sunbaked fields to research and publicize the dire conditions of California’s migrant farmworkers, among the poorest of the country’s poor. Berkeley was home to many others on the left: Democrats who wanted Roosevelt’s New Deal to be more far-reaching, Socialists who advocated a peaceful transition to public ownership of industry, Communists, and members of a host of smaller sects.

It was hardly surprising that the Merrimans became interested in the Soviet Union. Nor were they the only Americans to feel that the USSR was worth a sympathetic look. Surely, many felt, there must be an alternative to an America where workers trying to organize risked bloody beatings and an economic system drove so many to depths of despair. Every day brought more headlines that underscored the enormity of the national crisis. Ten paroled prisoners asked to be readmitted to a penitentiary in Pennsylvania because they couldn’t find jobs. Chicago ran out of money to pay its schoolteachers. In Appalachia, men, women, and children survived on wild grass, roots, and dandelions. Capitalism, it seemed, was at last experiencing the death throes that Karl Marx had predicted. Couldn’t a planned economy, by contrast, put the unemployed to work building much-needed housing, schools, and hospitals? And wasn’t that just what they were doing in Russia?

Today we remember the American Communist Party as the handmaiden of a ruthless and ultimately failed Soviet dictatorship. But as the historian Ellen Schrecker has written, it was also “the most dynamic organization within the American Left during the 1930s and ’40s.” Thanks to its influential role in great labor battles like the San Francisco waterfront strike and its pioneering efforts to organize farmworkers, the Party had won respect from many far beyond its small membership. In a highly segregated and sexist age, it campaigned to get black Americans onto jury and voter rolls and fought for the rights of women. A New York trade unionist, who would later cross paths with Merriman in Spain, joined the Party after he saw members of its youth league defiantly carrying the belongings and furniture of newly evicted tenement dwellers back upstairs to their apartments. “There was an organization that didn’t just talk, but actually did something.”

The national sense of crisis was so deep that, in the presidential election of 1932, 52 prominent American writers—including Sherwood Anderson, Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, Langston Hughes, and Edmund Wilson—announced their support for the Communist candidate for president. Even that very non-Communist chronicler of high society F. Scott Fitzgerald urged Marx on his daughter: “Read the terrible chapter in Das Kapital on The Working Day, and see if you are ever quite the same.”

As the ’30s went on, it only became clearer that the New Deal was doing little to pull the country out of the Depression. And elsewhere things seemed even worse. Riding a deadly wave of street violence by his brown-uniformed storm troopers, Adolf Hitler had taken power in Germany, burned books, fired Jewish professors, pulled his country out of the League of Nations, and thrown more than 50,000 Germans into “protective custody” in prisons and concentration camps. In 1934, in the “Night of the Long Knives,” he personally led the contingent of SS men who gunned down more than 100 of his enemies inside and outside the Nazi movement, including a former German chancellor; one man was murdered with pickaxes. The next year Germany dramatically stepped up its military spending and stripped citizenship and civil rights from the country’s Jews, whom propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels called “syphilis” infecting the people of Europe. In Italy, Benito Mussolini’s paramilitary Blackshirts terrorized anyone who resisted his Fascist dictatorship. On the other side of the world, a militarized imperial Japan had brutally occupied the Chinese region of Manchuria.

In many countries hit by the Depression, right and left clashed violently—and the right seemed to be winning. When revolution-minded Spanish coal miners armed with dynamite seized mines, factories, banks, and other businesses in the province of Asturias in the fall of 1934, at least 1,000 of them were slaughtered by government troops and artillery. The soldiers included the much-feared Spanish Foreign Legion, whose men sported the sliced-off ears of their victims on wire necklaces and sometimes cut off miners’ hands, tongues, and genitals. Rebellious miners saw their wives raped, and thousands of them were thrown in prison. The victorious troops were led by one of Europe’s youngest generals, the tough-talking Francisco Franco, whom the Associated Press referred to as “Spain’s ‘man of the hour.’”

By comparison, events in the Soviet Union sounded promising. In these apocalyptic times, it became a place onto which millions of people projected their hopes. There were no strikes—at least none that anyone in the United States heard of—and whatever other problems the new society might have, unemployment was not one of them. The Soviet economy appeared to be booming, enough so that Joseph Stalin ordered 75,000 Model A sedans from Henry Ford.

More than that: the Russians were hiring. When the government posted job openings for American engineers and technicians, in an eight-month period more than 100,000 applied. Thousands more headed for the country on tourist visas hoping to find work when they got there—enough American and British newcomers so that the weekly English-language Moscow News went daily. Two brothers who would later become major labor leaders, Walter and Victor Reuther, were among the tens of thousands of foreigners who found jobs in Russia, working in an auto factory in the city of Gorky. A book originally written for Soviet schoolchildren, New Russia’s Primer: The Story of the Five-Year Plan, spent seven months on the American bestseller list. “In the great financial storm that has burst on us your own ship is sinking,” the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw told American radio listeners after returning from a visit to the USSR, “and the Russian ship is the only big one that is not rolling heavily and tapping out SOS on its wireless.”

Although he had become head teaching fellow in Berkeley’s economics department, Bob Merriman was an activist at heart. He was more interested in a society that was remaking itself than in texts about supply and demand curves that seemed to have little relevance to a world caught in the Depression. Though not a Communist Party member, he began to move in its circles. The chair of the economics department was a conservati...