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Faber, Sebastiaan. Anglo-American Hispanists and the Spanish Civil War: Hispanophilia,
Commitment, and Discipline. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Preface: 3 pp.,
Acknowledgements: 2 pp., Introduction: 14 pp., Text: 208 pp., Notes: 22 pp., Bibliography: 22
pp., Index: 7 pp.
In 2008, Sebastiaan Faber was teaching classic Latin American Literature at Oberlin
College in Oberlin, Ohio. He is probably a dynamic and stimulating teacher, although I have
never met him. This book is a psychological, ideological study of four Hispanists who lived
during the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939. They not only experienced living in Spain, but as a
result, they went on to write scholarly books and articles on “the last great democratic cause.”
Faber was born in Holland in 1969 and received his Ph.D. from the University of
California at Davis around 1999. His bread and butter profession is to teach the Spanish
language, and he was rapidly promoted to head his Spanish Department. His real love is to talk
and read about the Spanish Civil War. Faber’s book is an essay in intellectual history of ten
chapters. The arbitrary bibliography, using Spanish and English language sources, illustrates his
thinking. “Commitment” in the title means Hispanophilia, love of Spain, focused on the time
period of the Civil War.
Faber reviews four scholars who were already active during the Spanish Civil War, two
English and two Americans. But first the author wrote four introductory chapters about the
political and ideological views of Ph.D. programs in “Spanish Studies” and disciplines. He
concludes with two more chapters on the “curse of conservatism” and “legitimacy” as ideas
which distort the writing of the history of the Spanish Civil War. Emotionally, Faber seems to
be living in the wrong generation. I think he wished that rather than being born thirty years after
the civil war ended, he would have liked to have been age 37 in 1937, so that he could have
joined the International Brigades to fight against General Francisco Franco and for democracy.
This reviewer posits this bold comment even though I have never met Sebastiaan Faber.
My own book, Hitler and Spain: The Nazi Role in the Spanish Civil War 1936-1939 (University
Press of Kentucky, 1989), spotlights a foreign intervention in the civil war. I was born in
suburbia near Manhattan in 1930, too young to understand much about the civil war but old
enough to collect war cards in 1938 on it. In general, I see myself as an historian of “war and
peace” who regretted that Franco won the Civil War in Spain. Also, as a democrat I certainly am
happy that Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini ultimately lost World War II.
Of Faber’s four hispanophiles, I was personally acquainted only with Herbert
Southworth (Chapter 5). We met several times and corresponded occasionally from 1971 to 1996,
so I am reviewing Southworth as number four among the selected historians. The other three
historians Faber wrote about were Oberlin professor Paul Rogers; E. Allison Peers, professor at
Liverpool University; and Gerald Brenan, English author of The Spanish Labyrinth (1943). All
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four became engaged in Spanish affairs in 1936-1939, and “loved” Spain, so Faber calls them
hispanophiles.
My field is diplomatic history, studying the themes of “Why war? and “How to restore
peace. Faber sees himself as a literary historian. Stories about Nationalist politicians José
Antonio Primo de Rivera or Ramón Serrano Suñer must bore Faber, and he takes it for granted
that Hitler and General Franco were evil. A diplomatic historian has to ask what made these
politicians tick, and why they took certain decisions on 18-26 July 1936 that led to the death of
millions. Saying who was good or bad during a war is generally postponed to the conclusion of
a book of history, because the good historian must maximize objectivity and minimize his or her
subjective judgments. However, when war is raging, a history specialist on a country seldom can
avoid answering the question asked by the old song, “Which side are you on?”
A historiographical essay takes a different approach. Faber wants to know how
Southworth decided to write on Spain. An intellectual historian has more freedom to write about
Ernest Hemmingway or George Orwell or ignore them. Faber’s Bibliography includes material
which I have never seen and he leaves out other works of people in my bibliography. Future
generations may find Faber’s interpretative book more relevant than how Hitler collected
military intelligence and economic goods from Spain, which was my major quest since 1952.
The real heart of Faber’s book is the emotional and moral/religious impact the Spanish Civil War
made on its and subsequent generations of scholars.
Turning first to the essay on Paul Patrick Rogers (Chapter 6), in July 1936, when the war
broke out, Rogers was a left-wing activist and a professor of Spanish classic letters at Oberlin
College in Oberlin, Ohio. Faber makes his predecessor in his job slot of seventy years ago into a
heroic anti-fascist idealist. Rogers was the founding chairman of the Cleveland branch of the
American League against War and Fascism in 1935, and helped organize the League’s third
national congress, held in Cleveland in early January, 1936. (p.102). Rogers ran into an
acquaintance with family in Oberlin, the Negro poet Langston Hughes, in Valencia in August
1937. Faber writes about 23 pages devoted to Rogers, “a lifelong Leftist” (p. 116), active during
the New Deal as “one of the most politicized Hispanists in the country, and likely one of the few
academic specialist on Spain who purposely traveled there during the Civil War.” (p. 112)
Rogers could not get a US visa to travel to Spain, but went to the World’s Fair in Paris where the
Spanish pavilion was exhibiting Picasso’s brand new iconic picture of the bombing of Guernica.
Rogers translated into English Picasso’s Sueno y mentira de Franco, and attended Popular Front
rallies. After six weeks in France he succeeded in getting a French visa to go to Spain as a
member of an international delegation of the North American Committee to Aid Spanish
Democracy. Rogers stayed about a month in the Republican zone, and met Prime Minister Juan
Negrín, President Manuel Azaña, Republican general José Miaja, and Italian prisoners of war
(proof of Mussolini’s intervention), as well as the interned sisters of rebel Generals Queipo de
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Llano and Millan Astray (pp. 104-06). Before leaving Ohio, the teacher of language had
encouraged his students to join the fight for democracy.
As history, the Rogers trip remains mysterious, although Faber got details from a diary
Rogers kept during August 1937. In 2005 Faber consulted Rogers’s 936 page FBI file (heavily
redacted), compiled from 1943 to 1969 (pp. 117-188, 249), when Rogers made a number of trips
to Mexico, where he visited Spanish Republicans in exile. Was he earlier trailed by the FBI?
Was he spurred on to go to Spain by debates he had in the previous year with American Legion
veterans dedicated to anti-communism? In order to travel to Spain all Americans had to violate a
State Department administrative rule that prohibited visiting any war zone. The bare facts of the
Rogers trip also may suggest that Rogers only went to Spain for an exciting summer vacation.
When he returned to Oberlin in September he became mostly silent about what he learned about
his trip. What was his real opinion about the Communist Party of the US? He was not called
when the Dies Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) investigated Oberlin in late 1938
(109-10). In his scholarly work he remained politically uninvolved for the remainder of his long
career at Oberlin.
Rogers’s father, as a white Baptist Minister in Arkansas, refused to join the KKK. Paul
Patrick Rogers studied Spanish literature at Cornell University, one of the Ivy League schools.
An article he wrote in 1927 won him a decoration from King Alfonso XIII (p. 102). He was
hired in 1929 by Oberlin, where he would teach for 37 years. In 1931, he welcomed the birth of
the second Spanish Republic and by 1937 was broken hearted by the prospect that the
Republicans in Spain might lose the war. Could anything then be salvaged? He stayed in Paris
in June and July to debate against the position of the more conservative French Popular Front
government and their foreign policy of appeasement.
In Spain Rogers ran into Dolores Ibárruri (La Pasionaria) ( p. 106), a member of the
Spanish Cortes or legislature. In July 1936, in the Madrid barrios, La Pasionaria captured the
imagination of the left-wing press in France, Britain and the United States with her militant
oratory. The daughter of a coal miner, she helped to recruit a diverse, popular front militia to
fight the reactionary elitist regular army officers. Downplayed in the American press was the
fact that she belonged to the rather small Spanish Communist Party. Upon Franco’s victory in
April 1939, La Pasionaria fled to Moscow to become the leader of the Comintern’s Spanish
Communist Party in exile, only returning to Spain after Franco’s death.
Faber calls Rogers a hispanophile and not a scholarly hispanist who tends to be apolitical.
I have no doubt that both Rogers’s and Faber’s feelings were authentic, but authoritarian
conservatives in the US during the 1950s would not have allowed this book to be published at
that time. After 1968 and the US debacle in Vietnam the new intellectuals led to a revival of
interest in the lost cause of the Spanish Republic.
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My own book which came out in 1989 was opportune at that time. The Berlin Wall was
coming down and Michael Gorbachev had recently come to power in Moscow. So a key problem
with writing history, is that historians are victims of a fashionable mass media, whether one is
living in the 1930s, the 1960s or in 2009.
Rogers retired in 1966, moving to Austin, Texas and putting some of his papers in their
library for future historians. Faber did research at the University of Texas and corresponded with
the son of Paul Rogers. By going to Texas, the retired professor Paul Rogers could get closer to
Mexico and bury himself in details of the Spanish language literature. It was a peaceful escape
from politics and ideology. In 1968 with the debate over American imperialism and war in full
bloom, the FBI closed its file against Rogers.
Touched on briefly in Faber’s account is a comment about George Orwell who had been
a Brigader for the Independent Labour Party of GB and the Partido Obrero Unificación de
Marxista (POUM) in Catalonia. Orwell learned to be a historian on the job and had his own
experience with police, propaganda, imperialists, capitalists, fascists, communists and anarchists.
Orwell remained English and was neither a hispanist nor hispanophile. Orwell’s famous political
novels are left out of Faber’s book, but he does include an obscure essay by Orwell on
“Nationalism” in his lengthy bibliography.
The second biography to be discussed here is Faber’s Chapter 8. It is an essay on
Britain’s Gerald Brenan. I had sampled his 1943 classic work The Spanish Labyrinth,
republished by Cambridge University Press in 1953. The title captured the exact mood in Britain
in 1936-1937 when the public read of a possible second world war starting in Spain. Spanish
history had been generally ignored by the British establishment ever since the Peace of Vienna in
1815; the appeasers were in charge of the government and did not like nosey journalists stirring
up trouble. Brenan covered the period 1874 to July 1936 and outlined the social forces which
started the war—Carlism, the Catholic Church and fascism on the right; liberals, Socialists,
Communists and Anarchists on the left. The weak liberals, helped by a working class vote,
controlled the Madrid government at the beginning of the war because in the February 1936
election the parties on the left campaigned under the banner of the Popular Front. Brenan’s
sympathies were with the 70% rural poor people of Andalucía, largely anarchists. That essay
was the first time I learned that anarcho-syndicalism was an alternative system of local
government.
Four years into World War II, Brenan published his book, based on his years of living in
Spain and then years of research at the British Museum reading room. By then the British
government was fighting fascism and Franco’s position vis-à-vis Britain had been unreliable
since the Rightist Rebellion. Britain’s war against Hitler was a question of survival. In 1954 I
was finishing an MA and Brenan was essential for my bibliography. For my Ph.D. on “Hitler and
Spain,” I had to read Brenan’s book a second time from cover to cover as background for my
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dissertation. Faber sees Brenan as a hispanophile, which is certainly true of his sociology written
as autobiography.
I was sympathetic to Brenan as part of the 1920s’ “lost generation.” My father, as a
veteran who had fought in France in 1918, could have understood Brenan’s disillusion with the
hollow victory of World War I. Howard Whealey’s tales of his army experience made me at age
10 in 1940 an “expert” for my fifth grade class. I held that position through 1945 when the
atomic bomb was dropped. I the news from Spain beginning in May of 1938 by reading stories
on the backs of war cards (now called trading cards), but found the difference between Loyalists
and Rebels puzzling.
In 1954-1955, I had no idea that Brenan left papers to the University of Texas, which
Faber has used. I never realized that his fair treatment of Carlism or Traditionalism was based
on Brenan’s emotional rejection of the industrial revolution in Britain. I was also surprised that
Brenan, the liberal of 1943, gave up on democracy sometime between 1946 and 1957. At that
time, he escaped bureaucratic living and cultivated his emotions on classic Spanish literature.
Those hispanophile attitudes led to his accommodation to the Franco regime, and he moved back
to Andalucia. He published South of Granada in 1958. Young Spanish Civil buffs told me to
read this book, but I never did. I saw Spain as a large laboratory of people who stumbled into a
tragic war. Studying their mistakes as a scientific historian could lead me and my students to
avoid World War III. Glancing at South of Granada led me to conclude it was a travelogue by an
old man now in retirement.
Brenan was a critic of Ambassador Claude Bowers, accredited to Spain from 1933 to
1939. His was a liberal voice for Franklin Roosevelt to counter the conservative advice coming
from the careerists in the Department of State. Bowers was one of my heroes for saying (about
November or December 1936) that Americans are seeing the first shots of World War II being
fired. Faber calls Brenan an “awkward hispanophile hero” (p.180). Faber shows the reader that
George Orwell was an intellectual who criticized those who lumped together Communists,
fascists, Catholicism, cultural and sexual libertines. Ordinary newspaper readers and journalists
are only playing with words. I’m sure Faber’s students love his lectures. But I admire Orwell, as
a historian and political scientist who exposes the press and all orthodox parties.
Chapter 7 spotlights E. Allison Peers, “An Honest Seeker after Truth.” It is a bold idea.
The ideas of the chapter were entirely new to me. In 1955 to 1957 as I was scouring the
bibliographies on Spain, I saw the Peers name many times as a prolific writer. I dismissed his
many essays as too much background and not enough current events on 1936-1939. He seemed
to have made up his mind to be a conservative before the Rebel coup of July. He did not seem to
know much about the Spanish Civil War nor World War II. Faber now proves that I had made a
snap judgment.
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Salvador de Madariaga published a liberal interpretation of Spain in 1958, and it made a
much deeper impression on me than the evasive Peers. One 1959 letter of Madariaga appears in
Faber’s bibliography. I had the good fortune to interview the grand old man of Spanish studies in
Oxford in November 1956. He encouraged me to complete my topic on Hitler and intervention in
the Spanish war although he himself had mostly retired from politics and doing history.
Madariaga had served in the cabinet in several liberal governments of the Republic, 1931 to
February 1936. After the popular front victory at the polls the Centrist Madariaga left his home
in Spain for the rest of his life. But he knew many of the key players of the civil war. His 1958
book is now underestimated by many, including Faber.
Professor Peers taught Spanish literature at the University of Liverpool since 1920. The
literary historian at Oberlin College Sebastiaan Faber on the first two pages of this chapter
describes a meeting in Madison Square Garden, New York City on 29 May 1937. Peers was
invited to speak, as an Anglican, before a pro-Franco rally organized by the New York Roman
Catholic Church. The organizers of the rally were annoyed at the pro-Loyalist bias of the
American press coverage of the war up to that point. Faber plays the role of a naïve journalist in
this chapter. As we all now know from the works of George Orwell no professor or journalist can
be impartial during wartime in which the meaning of democracy, religion, fascism and
communism top the agenda. A professor of history can get closer to an objective story after
everybody knows how a war ends, and after the research historian consults the archives, usually
30 years later.
That May in New York, Peers was on the stage with 1500 devout Catholics who wanted a
token Protestant with Spanish qualifications to speak up for Nationalist Spain. The format was a
very narrow spectrum of the right and the left as contrasted to the broader spectrum of Gerald
Brenan, for one. Peers in fact said the “left wing extremists” are destroying the virtues of
traditional Spain.” (p. 128). It was true, but not the full truth. Going on, he said Franco was
generally welcomed in his zone. The Whites were better than Reds. It is interesting to note that
the diplomats of the Third Reich from 1936 to 1939 referred to the two Spanish sides as Reds
and Whites, concepts picked up from the Russian Revolution of November 1917.
Faber thus confirmed my attitude toward Peers that I had concluded in 1954-1955. But
his title of the chapter is rather indulgent to Peers as a scholar. If he was searching for the truth,
he must have started that search based on a quick read of the London press. The biographer of
Peers must ask, what newspapers had he been reading since July 1936 in Liverpool?
Peers in 1909 undoubtedly was a brilliant reader of Spanish literature at Cambridge
University. As a teacher from 1920 to 1936, he may have had few students who studied Spanish
literature. However, as a port city of foreign traders, Liverpool merchants had a practical need to
hire men who could speak Spanish to conduct business in Latin America. The Chair that Peers
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held in Liverpool was probably the only one in all of Great Britain in 1936. Politically he was a
novice in foreign policy problems facing the British at that time.
Faber’s bibliography for Peers is a long list of publications. He was indeed a first-rate
hispanophile. He had traveled frequently to Spain before the civil war and publicized Spain in
more than fifty articles. Faber portrays Peers as a man who moved from being liberal in 1931,
when the Republic was proclaimed, to reactionary by the end of the civil war, and then back to
liberal at the end of World War II (p.132). This scholar was a high-church Anglican, not a
Calvinist in spirit.
A further notation should be made about the views of Allison Peers on Spanish politics.
The professor from Liverpool was a fan of poetry written in Catalan rather than poems written in
Castilian. This led him to become of supporter of Catalonian separatism, which was opposed by
Franco’s Nationalists. Autonomy for Catalonia was one of the major accomplishments of the
Republic that ensured that Barcelona would be on the left when the civil war broke out.
Republicanism for Peers meant mob rule and anti-clericalism, but he did not openly support the
Generals’ and Colonels’ coup d’état and the Nationalist camp. For Peers, his thinking was a
slow journey to the right, so his participation in the New York Catholic rally in May 1937 was
more one of feeling than a rational choice.
Faber uses the Peers archives in Liverpool and notes that Peers seems never to have
noticed that Hitler and Mussolini were supplying men and war materiel to the Nationalist cause.
He must have been blind to the narrow minded concept Franco had for the future of España.
Nevertheless, Peers as a religious man by the autumn of 1937 saw in the Nationalist crusade a
spiritual movement. The conservative Catalan political party, the Lliga, cleared Peers’ path to the
right. Yet he was still able to deny to himself that he was being recruited as a propagandist for
the Nationalists. This is not surprising because the true believer of an ideology will make the
best propagandists; the ideologue will sing the praises of the leader free of charge. Only a mystic
could visit Franco’s Spain in August 1939 and see only Spanish people and not the Falangist
Party slogans. What did he think that party’s “Yoke and Arrows” stood for and how closely they
reflected Mussolini’s “fasces?” When E. Allison Peers died in 1952, he finally recognized that
rural Spain was being ruined. By the time the readers reach the end of the Faber chapter they
probably realize that Faber by his selection of facts has sabotaged his own title, “An Honest
Seeker of Truth.”
Faber maintains that Peers was ambiguous, yet the students of 2009 need to recall that the
Christian religion was far more significant in the 1930s to Anglo-American life as well as in
Spain.
Faber’s Chapter 5 is on Herbert Southworth, and I saved it to last of Faber’s interpretative
accounts of his big four scholars because I might have written from personal memories a chapter
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that in part could have equaled Faber’s. Certainly, though, Faber did better research on
Southworth’s early life. Faber began his account in July 1936 with the outbreak of the civil war
which was when Southworth was only 29 years old. At that time, the young Southworth was
working as a bibliographer of Spanish language books in the Library of Congress. The civil war
did indeed
“…grip [him] for the rest of his life, consuming all of his spare time and money.
Apart from a short academic appointment late in his career, he never worked for, or
at, a university. Yet when he died in 1999, he left behind four books—three of which
are considered major contributions to Spanish Civil War scholarship—a series of
polemical essays, and the largest private library of Spanish Civil War materials ever
assembled.” (pp. 74-75).
This chapter about Southworth was easy to write because Herbert Southworth wrote
many biographical materials in connection with Paul Preston at the London School of Economics.
Preston, then about 24 years old, met Southworth, an American in exile in Southern France,
about 1971-1972 when Southworth was over 60. Preston was then a student of Hugh Thomas,
who was teaching at the University of Reading. Thomas published his standard work on The
Spanish Civil War in English in 1961, and it was a best seller until the 1980s. The opening of
the British archives in 1970 and the death of General Francisco Franco in 1975 opened up a new
field to researchers in Spain, Britain and America. (The French and the Italians were generally
too embarrassed to look at their own nations’ involvement in Spain 1936-1939.) In any case, the
Thomas book went through three or four updated editions. Preston served as a graduate assistant
to Hugh Thomas who eventually was appointed to the House of Lords. Thomas himself became
a professional writer of popular contemporary history and moved on to writing about Cuba,
among other themes. Preston in 1993 has published the more or less definitive biography of
Franco in English, unless some new archives become available in Spain.
Southworth and Preston in 1971-1972 became fast friends on the basis of defending the
history of the Second Spanish Republic. They stimulated each other’s scholarship for 15 or 20
years. Southworth, a professional journalist, was working at the Sorbonne on a doctorate on the
war. He wrote on the most famous bombing in Spain, that of Guernica, immortalized by Pablo
Picasso’s painting of 1937. When Southworth’s thesis was finished, it came out more or less
simultaneously in French, Spanish and English, 1975-1977.
I had the good fortune to have met both Southworth and Preston in France and Spain in
1971. I had finished my Ph.D. in 1963 (on Hitler) based on German archives, but like Thomas I
seek to constantly revise for publication as new materials become available. Indirectly I
introduced Paul Preston to Southworth through letters during my half year of research in Madrid
in 1971. In Faber’s terminology, both men were better hispanophiles than I could ever be.
Southworth encouraged Preston to move to the left, but after a few years Preston out produced
Southworth in research and in publications. Southworth’s research on Guernica was based in
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Spanish and French materials and I had only a few unpublished footnotes from German archives
that re-enforced his research.
The Guernica story is that on 26 April 1937 the Luftwaffe, plus a few Italian
supplemental aircraft, bombed the small Basque town then controlled by the Republic. Franco’s
army captured the village a few days later and denied that the German and Italian planes had fire
bombed it. The Times of London broke the true story a week later, exposing the Nationalist lie
that retreating Basque anarchists had burned the town. No liberal or socialist in Britain or
America believed Franco. But Franco won his war in Spain, and the Nationalist version was the
only version allowed to be printed in Spain until Franco’s death. Conservative writers in the US
and Britain from 1950 to 1971 engaged in anti-Soviet propaganda and wanted to believe
Franco’s official “Ministry of Culture” literature about Guernica. Southworth and I got on
famously because we both knew who had bombed Guernica. NATO was overdoing its anticommunist propaganda. The West German Republic, already in NATO, and the American
government wanted the anti-communist Spain run by Chief of State Generalissimo Franco to join
the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
Faber makes clear that Southworth saw the civil war unfolding while he was living in
Washington D.C. As a reader of books coming out on both sides in Spain, Southworth got a
chance to write a half dozen reviews for the Washington Post in 1937. He wrote on the left, or
the Popular Front perspective. The Post also employed a right wing Catholic to balance
Southworth’s point of view. Herbert Southworth was hired in 1938 as a press secretary for the
slowly dying Spanish Republic.
Missing from Faber’s story is the importance of the last premier of the declining Republic,
Juan Negrín. Most journalists in Britain and America who had had great hopes for Spanish
democracy in 1936-1937 gradually lost faith in a victory by the Popular Front. Some assumed in
April 1938 that Franco would win the war in about a month. After Franco’s victory (April 1939)
and Hitler’s victory in France (June 1940), mainstream reporters new to the job and without
much historical understanding began to suspect Negrín’s motives as a proclaimed Socialist.
Some Spanish Republicans who fled to Mexico, Paris or London charged that Negrín fought on
in 1939 at the behest of Stalin.
On 3 March 1939, Colonel Sigismundo Casado in the army of the Republic rebelled
against the Negrín cabinet, then in exile north of Barcelona. Casado wanted to shorten the time
until the inevitable defeat, and surrender some military units to Franco’s divisions. Southworth
told me orally in 1996 (in Ohio) that he was a “Negrínista.” He found it difficult to admit even
then at that late date that General Franco had won the civil war of Spain on 1 April 1939.
After the Roosevelt administration entered the bigger war against Hitler and Mussolini,
Southworth was hired to work in intelligence for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and the
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Office of War Information (OWI) in 1941-42. His job then was to help pressure Franco to
remain neutral and not join Hitler against Britain. Southworth worked at a US-run radio station at
Tangier to present OWI propaganda that the Yanks were coming, the British would win in the
end, and Franco’s military commitments to Hitler should be cut back. Franco did send a
“volunteer” Blue Division to aid the Wehrmacht’s attempt to conquer Leningrad. On the other
hand, Franco depended on Anglo-American sea power for vital imports. Therefore he was
“malevolently neutral” toward the West, or non-belligerent toward Britain and the US.
Ideologically Franco was committed to a Hitler victory over the communism that Franco hated.
Among the journalists-historians Southworth resented for “betrayal” of the “last great
cause” was Burnett Bolloten. He was an English journalist who went to Spain in 1936-37 with
great anarchist ideals. In 1939 he fled to Mexico and assembled a great newspaper collection.
His research was dedicated to exposing Stalin for betraying the Spanish Republic. The first
edition of his book blamed a conservative Stalin for betraying “the Revolution,” which assumed
that the Spanish Civil War was modeled on the French Revolution of 1789 or the Russian
Revolution of 1917. George Orwell had a similar thesis in 1938 when he wrote Homage to
Catalonia. Faber’s essay touches on the Bolloten-Southworth conflict with ample notes. I read
these works in complete detachment.
In the period of my acquaintance with Southworth, 1971, 1978, 1991, 1996, I smiled at
Southworth’s oral explanation of his relations with Bolloten, before his own essays were
published. At that time I was in no position to debate fine points of this dispute. Both Bolloten
and Southworth were journalists who became creditable historians through dedicated research
bolstering their different points of view. The Faber account is detached, and it illustrates how
journalists, through will-power to some ideal, can become good research historians. Every
historian has his biases, but the honest historian is obligated to provide sources for his point of
view. The reporter writes about current political, economic, and military power with the next
election in mind. The good historian is concerned about future generations.
What I learned from Faber that was really new concerned the American journalist Jay
Allen. He was a foreign correspondent for the Chicago Tribune in Spain long before July 1936,
and scooped the Anglo-American wire services by covering Franco’s conquest in August 1936
of the poor city of Badajoz near the Portuguese frontier. His army executed 1000 of poor people
in the Badajoz bull ring. Strategically the city was important to the Nationalists for cutting the
transport lines from Madrid to Lisbon, and also for allowing Franco’s army to continue marching
north to meet General Emilio Mola marching south from Burgos. Allen was a man of the left
even though he worked for the conservative Chicago Tribune. He was well known to Southworth,
Ambassador Bowers and all the American friends of the Loyalist democrats. Allen stayed in
Spain to the end of the war and briefed all the newcomers from London and New York on the
recent history of Spain since 1931. After 1939 Allen disappeared from the public view since he
had backed the wrong horse. Up to my reading this book, neither Southworth nor I knew what
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had happened to Allen. Did he have a personal archive? Faber reveals in his Bibliography that
Jay Allen’s papers are in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives at New York University.
In 1941-1945 when Southworth was a US government employee stationed in Tangier, he
often traveled to Gibraltar by ferry. As a bibliophile, he bought a huge library of Nationalist
propaganda pamphlets very cheaply. Meanwhile he had married a Frenchwoman, a highly placed
lawyer who had helped the French Popular Front Government. Southworth’s wife remained in
Morocco during the Vichy period and when General Eisenhower had secured a technically
French Zone in Morocco for the Free French of Charles De Gaulle. After the Second World War,
the Southworths opened a privately financed English language radio station in Tangier. When
the French and Spanish governments had to withdraw from an Islamic Morocco, Southworth
bought a chateau in Southern France to store his vast library of Spanish Nationalist literature.
The Sultan of Morocco confiscated the radio station in December 1960. During the decades of
the 1960s-1990s that library was sold to the University of California at San Diego (La Jolla).
Through the good offices of history professor Gabriel Jackson, who wrote his own study on the
Republic and the Civil War in Spain (1965), Southworth sold his collection to UCSD. The
Southworth Collection in the future will remain one of the major Spanish Civil War collections
in the US.
While his library was being shipped to California, Herbert Southworth finished his
dissertation for Pierre Vilar on Guernica at the Sorbornne in 1975. Pierre Vilar was a Catalan
who fled to France in the last months of the Republican defeat in 1939. The ambitious
Southworth published this dissertation in three languages within two years. Before starting his
thesis, Southworth had helped a Spanish Republican exile, José Martínez, to set up a Spanish
language press in Paris called Ruedo Iberíco. Faber used the Martínez papers in Amsterdam to
fill out his account of Southworth. That press specialized in writing anti-Francista stories to be
sold on the black market in Spain as Franco’s regime began to totter.
I first discovered the existence of Herbert Southworth, an American in exile, by reading
his essay on bibliography published by Ruedo Iberíco in 1963 in both French and Spanish. The
book was called, El mito de la crusada de Franco. The book received very little attention in the
US, then favorable to the Franco regime and crusading itself against the USSR. Its title probably
annoyed young Ph.Ds. who typically tended to be uncritical fans of the State Department’s press
releases. This book motivated Franco’s Minister of Culture and Tourism to denounce
Southworth for not having a doctorate. Faber down plays the importance of this Minister, the
aristocratic Ricardo de la Cierva, and his sneer at the unknown American, Southworth. Herbert
Southworth was motivated as an exiled journalist, then in his late 50s, to register for0writing a
thesis with Vilar. This work enabled Southworth to make a counter attack for the benefit of the
Spanish public through Ruedo Iberíco and demonstrated that he too had finished an academic
thesis. At age 68, Southworth finished his dissertation in French and Spanish published in two
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languages in Paris. The English edition was published by the University of California Press as
Guernica! Guernica: A Study of Journalism, Diplomacy, Propaganda and History (1977).
The originality of the work was to demonstrate beyond a shadow of doubt that in fact the
Legion Condor had bombed Guernica destroying 70% of its buildings. Although the London
Times and the New York Times had published this basic story in April and May 1937, Franco
through the French press agency Havas presented his story to conservative, Catholic opinion in
France and all of Latin America. The conservative editor of The Times of London fired reporter
G.L. Steer who wrote an eye witness story of the German bombing. So conservatives after 1938
in Britain and the US seldom read Steer’s 1938 book based on oral testimonies of fleeing
Basques. Details like who the pilots were and how many planes participated were still unknown.
We now know that the bombers were mostly Ju 52’s with incendiary bombs, under the
command of the Legion Condor. A single Do 17 and two or three Italian Sa 79s first bombed the
concrete buildings with percussion bombs. Several waves of Ju 52’s followed up the morning
bombing with the incendiary bombs until about 4:30-500 PM. The incendiary bombs burned the
city and did most of the damage. The purpose was to rout the population so that the Nationalist
Spanish Army could enter a burned out town near the front. It was in fact a mass, indiscriminate,
terror bombing, greatly expanded during World War II and in Vietnam as a new weapon of war.
With access to the Havas papers, what Southworth did was to trace down 100s of
conservative, Spanish, French, even a few British and American journalists who had picked up
Franco’s propaganda services account. They selected the “fact” about the Basque destruction of
their own historic city. Southworth supplied ample footnotes to show how many conservatives
got the story wrong.
After my book on Hitler was published in 1989, I wrote a subsequent article about
Hitler’s Propaganda Minister’s treatment of the Guernica story ,"Nazi Propagandist Joseph
Goebbels and the Spanish Civil War," The Historian 61 (Winter 1999): 341-360. What
Goebbels did was simple. The German press denied that there was ever any bombing. Second,
the Nazis simply reprinted the Havas press releases. “See, even the French press say there was
no Luftwaffe in Spain.” Göring simply gave orders to the German Foreign Ministry and the
Legion Condor never to mention Guernica again. Franco gave orders to the German
expeditionary corps no more mass bombing of Spanish towns. The conquest of the rest of Spain
would have to be done primarily by his own infantry. However, neutral ships in Barcelona and
other Catalan coast harbors were bombed within the three mile limit Spanish waters as part of the
Franco blockade throughout 1938 and 1939.
Faber closes his chapter on Southworth with a plea that the good historian has to be
objective. A reporter like Southworth also needs to be objective on a daily, weekly and monthly
basis as any war unfolds. But at the end of Franco’s victory in 1939, Southworth was still
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cheering for the Spanish Republic. Southworth died in 1999 having the satisfaction of seeing the
defeat of the Francistas in Spain. Like George Orwell, Southworth knew that some reporters
were honest, but editors might distort the facts for governmental policy objectives. Truth is the
first casualty during war time.
After writing the stories of four scholars, Faber turned to his two chapter conclusions.
Those chapters are very subjective. To speak of Southworth’s “committed objectivity” is not
helpful (p. 85). Nor would I call Southworth “naïve” (p. 85). He flowed with the times. By
1971 El País had given up on hard-line anti-communism. The die-hard hawks on the AmericanVietnam war were also giving up.
Chapter 9 is entitled British Hispanists and the Curse of Conservatism. I would not call
the conservatives a ”curse.” The thrust of the chapter touches on a basic truth and a critique of
most Departments of Spanish and their apolitical attitudes. “Curse” is too strong, because every
rational political/moral thinker is going to be conservative on some issues and liberal or radical
on others. This has been a four way political dialogue in England, France and the US since 1789.
The four choices people have to make are: reactionary on the far right; conservative toward the
center, but sometimes willing to make deals with liberals on the center left; and finally the far
left radicals who think liberals are corrupt for making deals in the center. Actually, politics is the
art of the possible arrived at through discussion, which is central to democratic government. The
far right and the far left have convictions that sometimes lead to violence, war and revolution.
My own position is that I am 25% Christian, 25% liberal, 25 % socialist, 15% conservative, 7%
anarchist and about 3% open to future growth. Everybody has to bend with the events.
A historian has to weave together the actions of many individuals: generals, prime
ministers, ideologues, propagandists, banks, corporate directors and bureaucrats in any conflict.
The job of the historian is also to record the murders, lies, and crimes committed during a war.
An American or British historian, molded by his national education, will observe many Spains
during its bloody Civil War. That civil war was a stepping stone to a wider war in the European
Theater. Since I was raised as a Methodist, I did my own research with a bias against Hitler,
Mussolini and Pope Pius XII, but I had to admit that Franco understood how the balance of
power operated, and, in the end, he survived Hitler and Mussolini, two ideologues who became
intoxicated on their own theories of life and politics. Faber makes some comments about
conservative scholars Raymond Carr and Hugh Thomas. I found both very helpful for insights,
and Thomas was in 1961 more liberal than Carr. But Lord Thomas is not a devoted hispanist in
the eyes of Faber.
Stalin’s crimes were mostly domestic and carried out on the peoples of Eastern Europe.
His intervention in Spain was an experiment that failed, in part because the British and French
foreign offices had been suspicious of the Soviet Union dating back to 1917. In 1936-1939 they
were not yet ready to ally with the Soviet dictator. After the fall of France, Winston Churchill
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had no other choice but to ally with Stalin. Character and ideology had nothing to do with it.
Alliances are made on the basis of geography and the immediate military situation.
Chapter 10 concludes with “Legitimacy and Spanish Civil War Discourse.” I am much
more suspicious of ideology than Faber or his four historians. “Legitimacy” is a vague word that
suggests monarchy based on heredity. In American law the Constitution is supreme. America is
a federal government. American democrats do not have to fret over legitimacy very long. Franco
legally was a “regent” for the Bourbon king who succeeded him in 1975. Stalin’s “soviet man”
collapsed in 1991.
People in Spain’s Communist Party, like the French Communist Party, had a right to vote
in a democratic constitutional system. The reason the Spanish Civil War is still a vital subject
has little to do with the Spanish language, Latin America or Catholicism. The war exposed
Britain, France, and the United States, with their three democratic constitutions, to the forces of
militarism and corporatism. Powerful forces within the three democratic countries assumed that a
conservative, reactionary or fascist Spain could serve them against the USSR. “Democracy vs.
imperialism” had to be debated again in the US from 1961-1975 over Indochinese issues. Since
2000, the debate “democracy vs. imperialism” is again on the table in the US. Some valuable
lessons can be learned about the possible future of the United States by looking again at the
Spanish labyrinth, 1936-1945.
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