I originally created this while I was writing for Bob Plain’s RI Future. I’ve always had a certain soft spot for this music and wanted to create an interesting program for listeners about a conflict that seems to barely register for anyone but the most devout afficianados.
In 1936, General Francisco Franco led a military coup attempt against the democratically-elected Spanish government. The coalition of progressive and leftist forces, including Socialists and Communists, created a Popular Front government during the 1930s that had legalized abortion, implemented land redistribution to the peasantry, and stripped the Catholic Churh of power and stature via education reforms. This in turn generated a tremendous amount of reactionary fervor within the entrenched powers of large landowners, the clergy, and capital.
Meanwhile, Hitler and Mussolini were approaching what we retrospectively can correctly designate as the peaks of their respective powers. Il Duce had served as a preliminary exemplar that was inpiring fascist formations across Europe to assert themselves and the successful election of Der Fuhrer in 1933, followed rapidly by the Reichstag fire, preliminary measures of what became the Holocaust, and German rearmament, made it seem as though the Western democacies would fall rather rapidly.
Gen. Franco was not a fascist, he was a monarchist, but he took fascist money, weapons, and military recruits in order to defeat the Spanish Republic during the period of 1936-1939. Other Western democracies, like Britain and the US, intentionally sat on their hands, most damnably in the case of the Texas Oil Company (Texaco). The American petro-powerhouse opted to sell gas products to Franco as part of what became a four-decade Cold War relationship between Madrid and Washington.
By contrast, the Soviet Union did supply the Spanish Republic, both with imports and military aide. This included the International Brigades, a volunteer armed militia populated by recruits from across the globe. The American Communist Party played a significant role in creating the Abraham Lincoln Brigade but it was not composed solely of Communists; instead, the Party’s own ecumenicism, embraced after nearly two decades of bitterly divisive sectarianism, made it into a hub for American volunteers who believed in the importance of confronting the further expansion of the Axis Powers.
The most impressive cinematic rendering of this history I can suggest is a 1984 documentary titled The Good Fight, directed by Noel Buckner, Mary Dore and Sam Sills. Featuring interviews with surviving Lincoln Brigadiers and their kin, it provides a compact history of this Quixotic attempt to “make Spain the tomb of fascism.”
