A Federation of Cassandras

Home , Battle of Cerro Muriano, Robert Hale Merriman, Spain in Flames

How American Intellectuals tried to Save the Spanish Republic

Alexander Calder, Mercury Fountain, and Picasso’s Guernica at the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne in Paris, 1937

Inge Gerrebrands Student no: 10411194 Thesis Supervisor: prof. dr. R.V.A. Janssens Master Thesis American Studies University of Amsterdam July 01, 2019

Table of Contents

Introduction 3

1. The American Political Reaction to the Spanish Civil War 11 2. The American Cultural Response to the Spanish Civil War 24

Conclusion 52

Bibliography 58

Introduction

Pablo Picasso’s Guernica first came to New York in 1939 after touring Scandinavia and England. Picasso had been commissioned by the Spanish Republican government to paint a mobilizing piece for the 1937 Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne in Paris that would get the world’s attention for the disastrous Civil War that had been taking place in his native Spain since 1936. Picasso had been uninspired for a long time after accepting the government’s commission, but eventually finished his masterpiece in a little over a month after finally finding inspiration in the horrific bombing of civilians by German Nazi forces in the small Basque town of Guernica. Picasso’s iconic work, accompanied by many other Spanish artworks depicting the horrors of civil warfare, did receive the international attention that the Spanish public art commissioners had hoped for during the World Exposition. As France, England, and the United States had neglected to formally support the Spanish Republicans, the deposed Spanish government embraced the Exposition Internationale as an opportunity to cry for help. Alexander Calder was the only non-Spaniard contributing to the Spanish Pavilion with Mercury Fountain. Encouraged by his friend Joan Miró Calder designed the political artwork explicitly calling attention to the situation in Almadén with the Spanish town’s name in brass wired letters towering over the poisonous fountain filled with quicksilver. Almadén was economically important for the Spanish Republic, because it was home to a very lucrative mercury mine, but it was under siege by Franco’s Rebels in 1937. Calder’s contribution was an enormous success at the Exposition Internationale where visitors would throw coins into the liquid mercury. The money was gathered daily and directly donated to support youthful Spanish war victims.1 Calder was a continuous supporter of the Spanish Republic, most notably by welcoming Spanish refugees to the United States. He even took the famous director Luis Bañuel and his family into his home, enabling Bañuel to continue making his propaganda films for the Spanish Republican Cause in the United States.2 Both Mercury Fountain and Guernica were extremely impractical artworks to travel, respectively because of their chemical composition and size. Still, the American Artist’s Congress brought Guernica to the Valentine Gallery in New York in order to raise funds for the Spanish Refugee Relief Campaign, before it moved to the Museum of Modern Art for the anticipated retrospective Picasso exhibition that drew record crowds. The masterpiece would

1 Jed Perl, Calder: the Conquest of Time: The Early Years, 1898-1940 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2017), chap. 25, Adobe ePub 2 Ibidem. 3 be on an extensive loan to the Museum of Modern Art, because Picasso had prohibited it to be brought back to Spain during Franco’s reign and it remained in the collection of the MOMA until it finally traveled to Madrid in 1981 after both Picasso and Franco had passed away. Guernica came to be an important symbol for the Spanish Civil War, and more importantly, it depicts a universal image of human suffering as inflicted by war in general, giving it a timeless significance. It became a place of protest against the Vietnam War after the My Lai Massacre and it remains a reminder of civilian suffering during wartime.3 A reproduction of Guernica even suggestively graces the walls of the UN headquarters as a memento within the beacon of multilateralism and diplomacy. Guernica was meant to mobilize people internationally into an anti-war and anti- fascist direction and it has done just that. Cultural institutions and individuals working in the art world within the United States were moved by an internationally pressing political conflict and recognized Guernica as political ammunition. By showing the painting to an American audience and collecting funds to support Spanish refugees, the painting became part of a larger movement within the cultural sector that aimed to raise awareness of the Spanish Civil War and may have even aspired to influence the course of American foreign policy. Sometimes a painting can say more than a political leader can and, sometimes, cultural institutions can take up political endeavors more effectively than the actual government can. The government’s hands might be tied, restricted by legal, economic or political issues. The public role that non-governmental institutions and famous intellectuals have, can be extremely politically important. In the case of Guernica, the painting was commissioned by the deposed Republican government of Spain, but it continuous journey was marked by the role of cultural institutions. Picasso’s famous painting is a mere example of a larger cultural movement that was active within the United States throughout the years of the Spanish conflict. The scholarship surrounding the role of the United States (or lack thereof) within the Spanish Civil War usually revolves around the narrative of neutrality and non-interventionism by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration. The American people are included in this narrative by the occasional mention of a public opinion poll in which the people appear to have little interest in getting involved in any foreign conflict. Interestingly, the Spanish Civil

3 Francis Frascina, "Meyer Schapiro's Choice: My Lai, Guernica, MOMA and the Art Left, 1969-70," Journal of Contemporary History, no. 3, vol 30 (1995), 483, 498.

War did manage to arouse a very strong sentimental response amongst many prominent intellectuals and artists. Scholars and journalists alike often look back at the Spanish Civil War as the preamble to World War II and as a kick off of the heightened political tensions that continued through the second half of the twentieth century. On April 10, 1939, when Franco’s fascist forces had won the Spanish Civil War, Life published an extensive photojournalistic article showing a large picture of Francisco Franco with the description “the quirks of his character mean life or death to 2,000,000 Spaniards, possibly even life or death to the imperial ambitions of Britain, France, Italy or Germany.”4 The article continued with pictures of the defeated Spanish Republic, while looking towards the future referring to the Spanish Civil War as “a testing ground” and “a dress rehearsal for the next world war.”5 This claim to a direct linkage between the seemingly domestic Spanish conflict and the following decennia of international hostility has captivated academics since the 1950s. British academics were at the frontline of scholarship on the Spanish Civil War. During the Francoist dictatorship Spanish scholars did not do any independent research on this period in their own history. Only from the late 1990s onwards, the topic started gaining momentum within Spanish academia, often drawing heavily from Anglophone scholars such as historian Hugh Thomas who had already delved into the archival material during the past half-century. Conducting independent research and writing objective scholarship on the topic remains a challenge in Spain and some historians have been criticized for adopting a very particular angle favoring either of the battling sides too much.6 British historian Hugh Thomas published his vast account of the conflict under the title The Spanish Civil War in 1961 and later a revised version in 2003. He is considered to be an authority in his field and scholars up to this day still refer to his research as eminently important. Thomas’ comprehensive reference work also includes the various reactions within the international community. Regarding the United States, Thomas argued that American politicians were aware of the events happening in Spain, but felt a considerable distance towards them and held on to their policy of neutrality firmly and steadily. Thomas did point out the “natural sympathy for the Spanish Republic” of President Roosevelt and illustrated how the Spanish Civil War had reached the American public through propaganda and

4 NA, “Madrid Falls and General Franco’s Spain Joins the European Dictatorships” Life April 10, 1939, 17. 5 Ibidem, 20. 6 Guillermo Sanz Gallego, “La Traducción como Manipulación Historiográfica el el Exilio: Análisis Paratextual e Intertextual de La Guerra Civil Española de Hugh Thomas,” Arbor, no. 780, vol 192 (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.3989/arbor.2016.780n4016. 5 mainstream media, similar to other Western countries.7 The Spanish Civil War also included American involvement by pointing out the substantial support in the form of food that was sent to Spain by the Red Cross and by explaining the phenomenon of the Abraham Lincoln Brigades. Although the various legal developments had made it nearly impossible for Americans to travel to Spain during the years of the Spanish Civil War, there was still a large number of them that made their way over to the conflict areas illegally to fight for the Spanish Republican government. Thomas did not focus on cultural figures, although he dropped the names of Hemingway and Picasso very sporadically. Leading historian on the subject of the Spanish Civil War, Paul Preston, who had been a student and research assistant of Hugh Thomas, has published many books on the Spanish Civil War, dedicating half his career to the conflict. Preston published his research with titles such as La Muerte de Guernica (2016) and The Spanish Civil War: Reaction, Revolution, and Revenge (1978). Taken into account the topic of the American reaction to the Spanish Civil War however, it is most interesting to note that Preston edited Spain and the Great Powers in the Twentieth Century (1999) to which he also contributed with an essay and We Saw Spain Die: Foreign Correspondents in the Spanish Civil War (2007). This extensively researched book offers several international perspectives on the conflict. It shows an overview of the correspondents that were present in Spain during the Spanish Civil War, providing insight in the political restrictions that their employers forced upon them and in the journalistic climate of the late 1930s. Preston included American reporters in his narrative, most extensively focusing on left leaning journalists Louis Fischer, who covered the conflict for The Nation, and Herbert Matthews who reported to The New York Times. Aside from these professional journalists Preston included American authors turned war reporters Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, Martha Gellhorn, and Josephine Herbst in his narrative, but since writing articles was more of a side activity to them, they do not hold a substantial place in Paul Preston’s research. Scholars have also researched the American reaction to the Spanish Civil War in regard to broader questions about United States foreign policy during the second half of the 1930s, American isolationism, and the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration in general. Historians have extensively explored the reasons and circumstances that lay behind the United States’ isolationist approach to the Spanish Civil War. This scholarship has predominantly

7 Hugh Thomas, The Spanish Civil War (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1961), 233. 6 dealt with the politics of the late 1930s revolving around the dynamics between President Roosevelt and Congress and the tensions between domestic and foreign policies. Richard P. Traina was an early contributor to this line of research with his 1968 publication American Diplomacy and the Spanish Civil War. Traina highlighted President Roosevelt’s struggle with his slipping popularity, his personal attitude towards fascism, and the political tendencies of Congress that were decisive in America’s isolationist policy. His book is a detailed account of the actual policies that the United States adopted towards the Spanish Civil War focusing on the influence of a multitude of politicians, both American and foreign. Traina showed how none of the prominent American politicians initiated much creativity in their foreign policy and were not willing to take any unnecessary risks when it came to meddling with European peace. Traina seemed rather negative in his evaluation of the policy makers, describing them as inflexible, diplomatically incompetent, and undetermined. He particularly highlighted the important role of the US State Department and Secretary of State Cordell Hull. Although the policies are often claimed to meet the American people’s demands by following public opinion, Traina did not discuss the American society of the 1930s or explain how this public opinion came about. The study did not mention any cultural individuals or socio-cultural movements. American historian Foster Jay Taylor was an even earlier contributor to the historiography with his 1952 account of the American reaction to the Spanish Civil War: The United States and the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939. Writing from an American perspective, Taylor referred to the claim of “some well-informed observers” that the non-interventionist attitude embraced by the American government was considered “the gravest error of American foreign policy during the Roosevelt Administration.”8 In his attempt to shed light on the combination of both the official diplomatic reaction and the American public opinion during the years of the Spanish conflict, Taylor discussed the origins of American neutrality. He went into great detail in his description of the Abraham Lincoln Brigades, offering a good understanding of their logistics and the legal consequences that the volunteers faced. The role of American Catholics in influencing both public opinion and American politicians towards a pro-Nationalist stance is a substantial focus in this study. Taylor demonstrated that the international political importance of the Spanish Civil War was very clear to its contemporaries and was not only established in hindsight with the knowledge of historical disasters that directly followed such as World War II and the polarized and tense international

8 Foster Jay Taylor, The United States and the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939 (London: Octagon Press Limited, 1971), 8. 7 climate that defined the current of Taylor’s own time with McCarthyism at its height. However, strong anti-war sentiments swayed the American government to remain detached from the conflict. The aim of Taylor’s research seems to be to contextualize the conflict and to explain why both the American government and the American public generally supported strict non-interventionism during the 1930s with consequences that seemed hardly surprising from a 1950s perspective. In his review of Taylor’s The United States and the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939 for the April issue of The American Historical Review in 1959, historian E. Dwight Salmon would historicize the conflict as follows: “with the wisdom of hindsight added, many more people have lamented the official conduct of the democratic governments as in essence appeasement of the totalitarian powers and thus directly contributory to World War II.”9 Salmon’s evaluation of the Spanish conflict within the international community is widespread in American academia, especially in publications written during the Cold War era. The Museum of the City of New York curated an exhibition on the Spanish Civil War in 2007. In cooperation with New York University, the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives, and Insituto Cervantes, they published Facing Fascism: New York and the Spanish Civil War edited by American historian Peter N. Caroll and American Hispanist James D. Fernandez. This publication features short essays on various topics from The New York City Left and the Spanish Civil War to New York Visual Artists and the Spanish Civil War and includes a vast amount of visual material. For example, it shows a picture of a “Lift the Embargo” meeting organized by leftist organizations at Madison Square Garden from 1937 and it presents pictures of several advertisement posters for fundraiser events for Spanish relief. The exhibition and accompanying scholarship clearly meant to shed light on the role that the Spanish Civil War played in the lives of New Yorkers at the time. The publication does not take a political approach, but means to address the topic from various angles of society, therefore creating a combination of different case studies that have very interesting things to say about the role of the Spanish Civil War in public and cultural life in New York. However, the book fails to connect these particularities to make a compelling argument about the existence of a broader American cultural movement that was sparked by the events taking place in Spain. Still, the essays and visual material do suggest that there is a lot more to the

9 E. Dwight Salmon, “The United States and the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939. By F. Jay Taylor,” The American Historical Review, no. 3, vol 64 (1959), 614.

8 story of American isolationism in the late 1930s than the aforementioned historians have acknowledged. Apart from the individuals that had joined the Lincoln Battalion who have been studied to a considerable extent already, there were also American intellectuals who had taken an interest in watching the conflict unfold from up close such as the authors that Paul Preston included in his account on foreign correspondents during the Spanish Civil War. These individuals were the main frame of reference for the American people to learn about the political situation in Spain and about the violent events that it incited. The Spanish Civil War managed to mobilize and politicize many intellectuals and cultural figures in the United States as the essays in Facing Fascism showed. This is certainly surprising in a domestic situation in which the American government strongly opposed any form of intervention and in which most Americans did not show an active interest in foreign policy. Why did these individuals sympathize so strongly with this civil war which was taking place 4,730 miles away from them and which did not directly seem to concern the United States and why did they feel the responsibility to become actively involved in it by using their own cultural profession? In order to discover their motivations, we must understand why the Spanish Civil War drew international attention in the first place and why it triggered military involvement from third countries. The first chapter will take a closer look at the political urgencies that the Spanish Civil War pushed forward. It will give an overview of the origins of the conflict and it will aim to put it in a broader historical and international context. Although many countries became militarily, financially, or politically involved in the Spanish Civil War, the United States did the opposite and stayed the course of firm isolationism. This chapter will delve into the United States’ response to the Spanish Civil War. It will demonstrate how the United States government chose to keep the Spanish struggle at arm’s length. However, this was not true for all American citizens. Therefore this chapter will also demonstrate the private and public preoccupation with the Spanish Civil War within the American context. After coming to an understanding of the Spanish conflict and the reaction that it evoked in the United States, the second chapter will focus on the place that the war took in the field of culture. This chapter will be divided into subchapters concentrating on the various art forms that American cultural figures and institutions chose to become actively involved in the Spanish Civil War in both their professional and personal endeavors. Its aim is to shed light on the actual place that the events in Spain filled in the lives of these individuals. It will explore why it motivated them to become politically active and how they influenced a larger political movement. This chapter will include representatives from the fields of literature, visual arts, (photo)

9 journalism, the performing arts, and film. In order to investigate this cultural movement it will look at magazine and newspaper articles, films, plays, documentaries, and art exhibitions from the Spanish Civil War years. Secondary sources will consist of biographies of cultural figures and scholarship from cultural historians.

1. The American Political Reaction to the Spanish Civil War

The Spanish Civil War started in July 1936 when three generals including Francisco Franco organized a military Coup against the newly elected government, claiming that the elections had been invalid. The government was mostly supported by Frente Popular parties existing of socialists, liberal democrats, communists, and anarchists. The Coup was not immediately successful, therefore a Civil War followed until April 1939 when General Franco took Madrid shortly followed by the rest of Spain, leaving the Spanish Republicans no other option but to surrender. Franco was backed by the Catholic Church, the military, and the Spanish aristocracy. Scholars usually refer to his fascist forces as either Nationalists, Insurgents, or Rebels. On the other side of the conflict, those faithful to the elected government fighting for the perpetuation of the Second Spanish Republic are known as Republicans or Loyalists. Their Spanish Republican Cause that many people chose to support internationally is often described as ‘the Cause’ or la causa in Spanish. The Spanish Civil War was an interesting conflict internationally, because it took place in a tense and divided Europe, reflecting both a clash of political ideologies and a shift in political power. The grips on democracy in Spain were challenged and crushed while other countries were either promoting their own political interests within the conflict or watching from the sidelines. In 1931 King Alfonso XIII had fled Spain after the Republican party that opposed the monarchy had won the elections and established the Second Spanish Republic, primarily consisting of socialist politicians. Rightwing Spaniards were used to holding all political power during earlier generations and felt threatened by the promises of change by the Second Spanish Republic. While still dominating the economy and the country’s social order, they also still controlled the press, the banks, the Church, and the armed forces. To feed their own propaganda, the Nationalists claimed to fight for “the cause of Christianity, order, and Western civilization against ‘Asiatic Communism.’”10 They fed the press with the horrors that were supposedly taking place in the Second Spanish Republic, such as the continuous slaughtering of priests, raping and killing of nuns, and iconoclastic activities such as the demolition of churches.11 The country grew divided in an increasingly tense environment between the Left and the Right. Due to abundant use of propaganda by both sides of the political spectrum and skyrocketing conspiracy theories, Spain’s population polarized even

10 Antony Beever, The Battle for Spain (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2006), 239. 11 Ibidem, 241. 11 further and the Left soon became synonymous for communist revolutionaries whereas the Right became fully interchangeable with fascism. Although the Spanish Civil War was inherently a domestic conflict that was about to determine the political future of Spain, other countries quickly became involved, because they recognized the conflict as a struggle between fundamental ideologies. Since these exploded tensions in Spain mirrored the political domestic situation of many other countries, Spain’s internal conflict quickly spread beyond the Spanish borders fueling international responses. The Soviet Union and Mexico actively supported the Spanish Republican Army, whereas Europe’s fascist countries Nazi-Germany, Portugal, and Italy and were backing Franco’s Nationalists. Still recovering from the massive destruction that World War I had brought upon Europe, most countries did not want to get involved, despite of seeing the political urgency of the conflict. Although England and France also became involved in the Spanish Civil War to an extent, nowhere near as much as the Soviet Union did. It sent 2000 individuals to join the troops of the Spanish Republican Government and also sent weapons, food provisions, and medical supplies. Furthermore, the Soviet Union was the main organizer of the International Brigades, which also included many Americans volunteers.12 The Catholic Church was very outspoken in its support to Franco’s Nationalists with the Pope even declaring the Nationalist Catholics who had fallen victim to the Republicans as martyrs of the faith. Several high level Catholics made forceful statements regarding the conflict. The Bishop of Segovia claimed it was “a hundred times more important and holy than the Reconquista,” where the Bishop of Pamplona kicked it up a notch stating it was the “loftiest crusade that the centuries have ever seen … a crusade in which divine intervention on our side is evident.”13 In the United States the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn’s nationwide publication The Brooklyn Tablet declared the Spanish Second Republic to be “a villainous anti-Catholic Movement.”14

The Spanish Civil War and the United States Government The political context of the United States during the Spanish conflict was predominantly shaped by isolationism. Emily S. Rosenberg, historian of International Relations, pointed out

12 Christian Leitz and David J. Dunthorn, Spain in an International Context, 1936-1959 (New York: Berghahn Books, 1999), 81. 13 Antony Beever, The Battle for Spain (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2006), 241. 14 Patrick J. McNamara, “Pro-Franco Sentiment and Activity in New York City,” in Facing Fascism: New York and the Spanish Civil War, ed. Peter N. Carroll and James D. Fernandez (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 96. 12 how Americans grew an interest in international affairs towards the end of the 1920s. This interest was mostly fueled by liberal ideals of world peace and interconnectedness.15 With the lessons learnt from World War I in mind, this raised a debate about the definition of ‘internationalism.’ On the one hand there was an interpretation of a need for supranational institutions that would safeguard peace and Western democratic values. On the other hand there was a voice explaining the achievement of this goal through complete ‘non-intervention’ and a focus on domestic political stability. Rosenberg explained how this debate grew into a divide between ‘internationalism’ of which Woodrow Wilson had been the most famous advocate, and isolationism that became exceedingly dominant in the years following the Great Depression. The 1920s saw a succession of Republican administrations steering a course of detachment from international politics. However, there was space for independent parties to be involved with international issues. Private groups with an academic background or peace organizations would cultivate diplomatic contacts with foreign governments although this was not exactly legal, technically violating the Logan Act of 1799 that prohibited citizens from being involved in diplomatic actions.16 Some of the larger private institutions that carried out diplomatic actions were the Red Cross and Herbert Hoover’s American Relief Administration that later turned into the European Relief Council, striving for political stability and food distribution. These organizations received “special government blessing” for providing international relief, which was a foreign policy priority, without the government having to become directly involved. In this way, the United States established a strong tradition of foreign policy carried out by private philanthropic parties.17 The 1920s generally saw a growth in organized private foundations and philanthropic efforts. Most de facto diplomatic efforts were provoked by economic arguments. Economic influence in the world would simultaneously result in an international appreciation for American ideals and a friendship with other countries based on values of peace and trust. However, World War I had greatly impoverished Europe, which complicated America’s diplomatic strategy. Furthermore, isolationism grew stronger during the Depression Era, when internationally active private foundations were also drastically affected by the economic

15 Emily S. Rosenberg, Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural Expansion, 1890- 1945 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983), 113. 16 Ibidem, 115-116. 17 Ibidem, 117. 13 situation and could not maintain their healthy international economic situation. The 1930s were defined by a strong focus on culture and the economy as domestic issues.18 Foreign economic policy became more an issue of government regulation during the administration of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who started his first term in 1933. During the period between 1935 and 1939 the American government passed several Neutrality Acts that would support an isolationist approach concerning the unsettled international political situation. With the status of government regulation historically being an extremely controversial issue in the United States it evoked a new debate. Rosenberg explained how Roosevelt positioned himself during this struggle between nationalist and internationalist tactics: he would mostly try to maneuver between the two, without empathically choosing the one over the other. This sometimes led to contradictory policy implementations.19 Claude G. Bowers, who was the United States Ambassador to Spain from 1933 to 1939, published a book about his experiences with the title My Mission to Spain: Watching the Rehearsal for World War II after his retirement in 1954. This analogy between the Spanish Civil War and a direct prelude to World War II is a popular one, popping up in most of the academic literature. Aside from Bowers’ subjective accounts of the polarized political climate in Spain and his countless travel stories and anecdotes about Spanish cities and their people, this memoir also includes Bowers’ observations of war developments and of the large and small interventions of many other powerful countries such as France, Germany, Italy, and the Soviet Union, showing how these countries all actively influenced the Spanish internal conflict. Bowers’ recital of his own role as the United States Ambassador in the Spanish conflict, as determined by the American government has a very bitter undertone, explicitly placing his own forced detachment from the situation in contrast with the active engagement of many other countries. There speaks much frustration from Bowers’ memoir showing his fruitless efforts to get his government to understand that involvement would be the desired action.20 During the evacuation of wounded American members of the International Brigades into France, Bowers proved himself especially helpful after Ernest Hemingway pressured him to assist.21

18 Emily S. Rosenberg, Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural Expansion, 1890- 1945 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983), 203. 19 Ibidem, 172-173. 20 Claude Gernade Bowers, My Mission to Spain: Watching the Rehearsal for World War II (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1954). 21 Brewster S. Chamberlin, The Hemingway Log: a Chronology of his Life and Times (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2015), 199. 14

Scholars have written extensively about President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s foreign policy. After the conclusion of World War I the United States had renounced the diplomatic opportunity to become involved with the League of Nations. This decision had put into effect the predominant course of isolationism that defined the United States’ foreign policy throughout the interwar period. The United States finally abandoned this approach wholeheartedly with the events that World War II presented. The shift from isolationism to the country’s active involvement in a major global conflict occurred during the presidency of Roosevelt. This development evidently raised a multitude of scholarly debates concerning Roosevelt’s personal and professional stance towards foreign policy, on the position of the United States within the world’s balance of power, and on the circumstances and incidents that enabled the United States to shift its course regarding foreign policy. Scholarship about Roosevelt’s dealings with the Spanish Civil War predominantly revolves around the Neutrality Act of 1937. Historian Justus D. Doenecke, who devoted his career to United States foreign policy in the 1930s and early 40s, isolationism, and American intervention, described Roosevelt’s concern with this particular example of legislation to be “the greatest political crisis of his entire political life.”22 The Third Neutrality Act was an update of earlier acts that had been passed in 1935 and 1936 born out of sentiments that had already been strong before the Spanish conflict emerged. These laws had been composed to safeguard American neutrality but they did include a loophole for civil wars. This grew into an issue when more countries became entangled in the Spanish Civil War. Under the Second Neutrality Act Franco was able to buy an extensive amount of war related goods from United States suppliers. The Third Neutrality Act of 1937 was drafted to prevent this from happening in the future and also included an explicit prohibition for American people to travel to belligerent countries, including those countries that were caught up in a civil war. Congress felt the need for such measurements in order to prevent a repetition of circumstances that had evoked the United States to become involved in World War I two decennia earlier.23 Over the course of the Spanish Civil War, President Roosevelt and the State Department attempted several times to put the issue of American neutrality back on the table, hoping that Congress would sway, but to no avail. Furthermore, American anti- interventionists were highly critical of the foreign policy approaches of both France and

22 Justus D. Doenecke, “The Roosevelt Foreign Policy: An Ambiguous Legacy,” in Debating Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Foreign Policies: 1933-1945, eds. Justus D. Doenecke and Mark A. Stoler (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2005), 22. 23 Ibidem. 20. 15

England concerning the Spanish Civil War and of the countries lending money directly to Hitler and hereby funding the creation of a strong German army.24 Several interest groups were trying to persuade Roosevelt, and therefore the American government to take into account their leading motives. While Congress was predominantly concerned with maintaining American neutrality by aiming to prevent American companies and individuals to have contact of any kind with either the Spanish Rebels or the Spanish Republicans, Norman Thomas, who led the Socialist Party of America, urged Roosevelt to consider the precarious situation of the Spanish government. He expressed his concern with the Neutrality Act in a letter to Roosevelt by addressing “the possibly disastrous effect of your action in disarming the Spanish Government in the face of well armed and ruthless armies.”25 Roosevelt resolutely answered Thomas by stating that benefiting one party over the other “would be dangerous to the extreme:” Not only would we, by permitting unchecked the flow of arms to one party in the conflict, be involving ourselves directly in that European strife from which our people desire so deeply to remain aloof, but we would be deliberately encouraging those nations which would be glad of this pretext to continue their assistance to the one side or the other in Spain and aggravating those disagreements among the European nations which are a constant menace to the peace of the world.26 According to Doenecke however, Roosevelt would have vetoed the act, which had been passed by the strongly isolationist orientated Congress, but he could not afford to make more political enemies and loose votes for the upcoming reelection. Roosevelt’s biographer Frank Freidel also pointed out Roosevelt’s reluctance to challenge Congress and the American people, and most importantly to go against his powerful Catholic supporters. Freidel quoted Harold Ickes, United States Secretary of the Interior, who had pressured Roosevelt unsuccessfully to benefit the Loyalists by rethinking the Neutrality Act: Finally the President told me that he had discussed the matter with Congressional leaders that morning… He said frankly that to raise the embargo would mean the loss of every Catholic vote next fall and that the Democratic Members of Congress were jittery about it and didn’t want it done.27

24 Justus D. Doenecke, Storm on the Horizon: The Challenge to American Intervention (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2003), 194-195. 25 Justus D. Doenecke, “The Roosevelt Foreign Policy: An Ambiguous Legacy,” in Debating Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Foreign Policies: 1933-1945, eds. Justus D. Doenecke and Mark A. Stoler (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2005), 23. 26 Ibidem, 23. 27 Frank Freidel, Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Rendezvous with Destiny (New York: Back Bay Books, 2009), chap. 20, Adobe ePub. 16

Although the act passed Congress almost unanimously and the President had been less than enthusiastic about it, the issue was not picked up by the press.28 Another argument for not actively supporting the Spanish government was linked to Roosevelt’s recently rolled out Good Neighbor policy that meant to develop a relationship of friendship and non-intervention with Latin American countries in order to cultivate economic ties between the regions. The Latin American countries largely supported Franco’s rebel forces. However, Mexico did send supplies to the Spanish government.29 According to American historian Robert Dallek Roosevelt was strongly concerned with the effectiveness of the competing systems in the world of Democracy, Fascism, and Communism. This question was very dear to his heart after visiting countries in Latin America that had stopped fighting for their freedom and had given up on a democratic government.30 Roosevelt clarified his views in his Renomination Speech on July 27 1936 at the Democratic National Convention: I believe in my heart that only our success can stir their ancient hope. They begin to know that here in America we are waging a great and successful war. It is not alone a war against want and destitution and economic demoralization. It is more than that; it is a war for the survival of democracy. We are fighting to save a great and precious form of government for ourselves and for the world.31 Around the same time, Roosevelt expressed his general concern about world affairs in a letter to the US ambassador to Germany, William E. Dodd, stating, “democracy is verily on trial.”32 Historians have pointed out time and time again how Roosevelt’s personal conviction regarding the Spanish Civil War and its political importance may have differed from his administration’s policy concerning the conflict, but they have also analyzed the elements of action, consequences, and timing within the neutrality course that the United States was steering. Justus D. Doenecke, who described Roosevelt’s “failure to aid the Spanish Republic” as “shortsighted,” argued that the conflict and the United States’ neutrality policies only became a matter of public interest in 1938 when it was already too late for a hypothetical

28 Justus D. Doenecke, “The Roosevelt Foreign Policy: An Ambiguous Legacy,” in Debating Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Foreign Policies: 1933-1945, eds. Justus D. Doenecke and Mark A. Stoler (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2005), 23. 29 Andreu Espasa, “‘Suppose They Were to Do It in Mexico’: The Spanish Embargo and Its Influence on Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy,” The International History Review, no. 4, vol 40 (2018), 774–791. 30 Robert Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 136-137.

31 Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Acceptance of Nomination for Second Term” (speech, Philadelphia, June 27, 1936), Teaching American History, https://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/acceptance-of-nomination- for-second-term/, accessed, June 13 2019. 32 Dominic Tierney, FDR and the Spanish Civil War: Neutrality and Commitment in the Struggle that Divided America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 28. 17

American intervention to make a true impact.33 Franco already had a decisive advantage at that time, controlling most of the Spanish territory including the seas. A few months before the capitulation of the Spanish Republicans, Roosevelt spoke out about the arms embargo that had been enforced by the Neutrality Act of 1937 as “a great mistake.” Instead, Roosevelt would have preferred to be able to support the Spanish Republicans in their fight for democracy by at least allowing the Spanish government to import weapons and other supplies from the United States by their own means.34 Although Roosevelt could eventually not be persuaded to abandon his policy of isolationism and neutrality, he did recognize the conflict in Spain as a possible disaster with radical consequences for the world’s balance of power. He feared that an escalation of the Civil War would evoke an international European war. With his neutrality approach he hoped to forestall the escalation of the conflict.35 The American Institute of Public Opinion conducted polls that showed that only 11% of the American people considered foreign policy matters to be their most pressing problem in the Fall of 1935, some months before the conflict in Spain started. Compared to the years that came after, this percentage was rather low. Americans were much more preoccupied with internal matters and mostly only had an opinion about foreign affairs in regard to safeguarding American neutrality. In the first two years of the Spanish Civil War this percentage had more than doubled. People became much more preoccupied with the role of the United States in international issues. This concern predominantly encompassed the wish to avoid the involvement of the United States in international warfare.36 On October 5, 1937, Roosevelt gave a speech in Chicago in which he discussed the complications of the Neutrality Acts within the currently tense political situation. In this speech, which received a vast amount of criticism, he referred to the anti-interventionist sentiments that continued to dominate public opinion. Roosevelt argued that staying completely neutral within a conflictual global situation would not suffice in keeping the United States away from war. Calling upon the morality of his nation, Roosevelt appealed for a different outlook on foreign affairs. Painting a bleak picture of the current international political situation, emphasizing the needless suffering of women and children by barbaric acts inflicted by 10% of the world’s population, Roosevelt aimed to influence his listeners. He

33 Justus D. Doenecke, “The Roosevelt Foreign Policy: An Ambiguous Legacy,” in Debating Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Foreign Policies: 1933-1945, eds. Justus D. Doenecke and Mark A. Stoler (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2005), 88. 34 Ibidem, 24-25. 35 Michael L. Kurtz, The Challenging of America: 1920-1945 (Arlington Heights: The Forum Press, Inc., 1986), 129. 36 Gabriel A. Almond, The American People and Foreign Policy (New York: Frederick A. Praeger Publishers, 1965), 72-73. 18 stressed the urgency of the situation by stating: “It has now reached the stage where the very foundation of civilization are (sic) seriously threatened. The landmarks, the traditions which have marked the progress of civilization toward a condition of law and order and justice are being wiped away.”37 Roosevelt also emphasized the unfeasibility of isolationism in the modern world with a growingly internationally interdependent economy. Roosevelt did not offer any specific examples of what the United States was supposed to do about this untenable situation in terms of direct action, but he did explicitly disclose that it was the moral obligation of the international community to “put an end to acts of international aggression.”38 Roosevelt primarily pressed for an open attitude towards diplomatic options by stating once more that isolation would not rescue the United States from being dragged into the world’s tumultuous state: The peace-loving nations must make a concerted effort in opposition to those violations of treaties and those ignorings of human instincts which today are creating a state of international anarchy and instability from which there is no escape through mere isolation or neutrality.39

This speech, which became known as Roosevelt’s Quarantine Speech, because of its adopted narrative filled with metaphors such as “spreading disease”, “epidemic”, and “quarantine”, received criticism from opposing politicians and some newspaper articles. These critics were especially condemning the speech as they read an attempt into it of an intended rapprochement to France and England within a conflict that did not directly concern the United States.40 Spanish historian Enrique Moradiellos has described the situation in Spain as “a mini European civil war” because of the involvement of foreign volunteers from various (European) countries through the International Brigades.41 This direct involvement of individuals in the heat of battle incited foreign press to cover the Civil War as a conflict between ideologies, rather than as an internal Spanish struggle. Depending on the adopted point of view, the Spanish Civil War became charged with being either a battle between democracy and fascism, or conversely it was conceived as a struggle between communism

37 Franklin D. Roosevelt, "Quarantine" (speech, Chicago, October 5, 1937) AMDOCS: Documents for the Study of American History, http://www.vlib.us/amdocs/texts/fdrquarn.html, accessed August 8, 2018. 38 Ibidem. 39 Ibidem. 40 Justus D. Doenecke, Storm on the Horizon: The Challenge to American Intervention (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2003), 51. 41 Christian Leitz and David J. Dunthorn, Spain in an International Context, 1936-1959 (New York: Berghahn Books, 1999), 48. 19 and the West.42 In spite of the negativity that the Quarantine Speech did provoke, the public reaction was generally positive and supportive.43 Scholars have taken a particular interest into the contrast between FDR’s personal convictions regarding the Spanish Civil War and the seemingly steady course of non- intervention that the United States Government was clearly steering throughout the 1930s. The specific event that triggered scholarly speculation was Roosevelt’s alleged involvement in the secret plan in 1938 to ship 150 planes to the Spanish Loyalists through France lead by Eleanor’s brother, Gracie Hall Roosevelt, hereby directly bypassing the recently adopted Neutrality Act of 1937. This covert aid plan was never implemented, due to France’s unwillingness to support the scheme. Several scholars have addressed the covert aid plot, coming up with differing interpretations of the involved individuals, due to the lack of evidence. Political scientist Dominic Tierney claimed that Roosevelt could certainly be linked to the covert aid plan based on evidence found in various archives, including the recently opened Russian archives. He interpreted Roosevelt’s involvement as a sign that the President was siding with the Spanish Republicans and that he was already looking for ways to deviate from the isolationist traditions.44 Scholars have assessed Roosevelt’s policies as highly controversial during his terms as President, but also continue these controversies into their own research. To understand and evaluate a leader and his choices depends heavily upon the focus of the particular research and the political angle that the researcher is taking.

The Spanish Civil War as a bone of contention in American Society

Meanwhile, American Catholics were mobilizing themselves in favor of Franco’s fascist forces very successfully. Spaniard Luis Bolín, who was working abroad as a lobbyist for the Nationalists before and during the Spanish Civil War, claimed that the White House had received at least one million telegrams from American priests urging Roosevelt to sharpen the Neutrality Act, making it illegal for the Second Republic to buy arms from US suppliers.45 J. Edgar Hoover biographer Richard Gid Powers had defined the American Roman Catholic

42 Christian Leitz and David J. Dunthorn, Spain in an International Context, 1936-1959 (New York: Berghahn Books, 1999), 48. 43 Mark A. Stoler, “The Roosevelt Foreign Policy: Flawed, but Superior to the Competition,” in Debating Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Foreign Policies: 1933-1945, eds. Justus D. Doenecke and Mark A. Stoler (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2005), 126. 44 Dominic Tierney, "Franklin D. Roosevelt and Covert Aid to the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War, 1936- 39" Journal of Contemporary History, no. 3, vol 39 (2004). 45 Antony Beever, The Battle for Spain (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2006), 242. 20

Church as the backbone of American anticommunism ever since the movement was born.46 Editor Father Francis Xavier Talbot published in America, his Jesuit magazine, how “collaboration with Fascism is possible for the Catholic Church; a collaboration with Communism is absolutely impossible for the Catholic Church.”47 He also predicted that the Spanish Republic “would not stop until the whole of Spain were Sovietized.”48 Most influentially, Vatican City had been one of the first states to give Francoist Spain official recognition. In 1937 they even enabled them to exhibit at the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne in Paris using the Vatican flag.49 Although American Catholics actively supported General Franco within the United States, there are no sources stating that any Americans actually went to Spain to join Franco’s Rebels as volunteers. On the other side of the spectrum, the Spanish Republican Army found particular support from American communists. Representatives of the Communist Party recruited enthusiastic and idealistic Americans to join the International Brigade. In a very short time, the communist recruiters had sent over 2000 Americans to Spain to assist the Republican Cause. More than half of these men and women were from New York City and strongly identified with antifascist and communist ideals.50 The troops called themselves the Abraham Lincoln Brigades, reminiscent of the United States’ own Civil War in which Lincoln had represented the democratically elected government, similar to what these people were hoping to defend for Spain. A second wave of volunteers formed the George Washington Battalion, referring to the War of Independence and the founding of American democracy. The State Department could not stop Americans from reaching Spain through France after they were shipped off from New York City’s ports, even though citizens were legally prohibited to set foot on Spanish soil while traveling with an American passport.51 Shortly after the formation of the Lincoln Brigades, traveling Americans were even obliged to provide an affidavit stating that they would not visit Spain.52 The arriving Americans in Barcelona stated that they had come to “fight for their principles.”53 Since joining a foreign army was strictly illegal, the

46 Patrick J. McNamara, “Pro-Franco Sentiment and Activity in New York City,” in Facing Fascism: New York and the Spanish Civil War, eds. Peter N. Carroll and James D. Fernandez (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 95. 47 Ibidem, 96. 48 Ibidem, 96. 49 Antony Beever, The Battle for Spain (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2006), 224, 249. 50 John Gerassi, The Premature Antifascists: North American Volunteers in the Spanish Civil War 1936-1939 (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1986), 23. 51 Peter N. Carroll, Facing Fascism: New York and the Spanish Civil War (New York: New York University Press, 2007) 14 52 Foster Jay Taylor, The United States and the Spanish Civil War (New York: Bookman Associates, 1956), 103. 53 Ibidem, 101. 21

State Department declared that joining the armed forces in Spain would be considered “unpatriotically inconsistent with the American Government’s policy” and it would be equivalent to taking “an oath of allegiance to a foreign government,” exiling oneself and losing the right to depend on the services of the United States government.54 The Abraham Lincoln Brigades consisted of a broad mix of volunteers: many recent immigrants from every country in Europe, students, and white-collar laborers. The New York progressive art scene was also represented among the troops, with several painters, poets and writers joining the International Brigade. These individuals had joined this international cause for a variety of reasons, ranging from religious beliefs to political and social convictions, but also out of mere curiosity. The first Americans to join the Loyalist Cause through France arrived to Barcelona in January 1937. The American volunteers came late to the game within the International Brigades, as most Western European countries and some Eastern European countries already had volunteers join the Spanish Republican Cause back in 1936, as Americans had been able to read in The New York Times.55 Although not all American volunteers that joined the fight identified as communists, they were pressured with communist propaganda once in Spain. The anti-fascist message that the Popular Front carried out to the volunteers in Spain was most effective in creating a sensation of unity among the Republican army and their international volunteers.56 Although the American government had done everything in their power to prevent American citizens from joining the war, a large number of people completely disregarded these legal hurdles while being aware that there must be consequences to their actions. During the third winter of the Spanish Civil War, in 1938, the Spanish Republican government decided to disengage the International Brigades in a fruitless attempt to persuade Franco’s Nationalists to take similar steps and also dismiss the substantial support from both Mussolini and Hitler. Therefore, the Spanish conflict came to an abrupt and premature end for the international volunteers, having to leave Spain without being able to carry on with the war until its conclusion. Since most of the volunteers had joined the foreign army illegally, they were forced into exile, as they had no home country to which they could easily return.57 The Spanish Civil War came to an end on April 1, 1939 when the Republican Army surrendered. On that same day the United States formally recognized Francoist Spain, without

54 Foster Jay Taylor, The United States and the Spanish Civil War (New York: Bookman Associates, 1956), 102. 55 Verle B. Johnston, Legions of Babel: The International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War (Philadelphia: The Pennsylvania University Press, 1967), 29. 56 Ibidem, 95. 57 Martha Gellhorn, The Face of War (London: The Hollen Street Press Limited, 1959), 30-31. 22 ever making any formal statement of support before to any of the two battling sides until the conflict had completely finished. This chapter has shown why this unflinching course of neutrality and non- interventionism was not necessarily the most logical trajectory to staying out of war. The argument that the Spanish Civil War was only a preamble to the next Great War was not simply invented with the knowledge of hindsight, but it was widely carried during the late 1930s when the Spanish Civil War was quickly turned into an international battle between ideologies fueled with pertinacious propaganda and paranoia on both sides inducing several countries to become militarily involved. This chapter has shown how the United States government’s only answer to the conflict came in the form of a succession of Neutrality Acts, although the President may have preferred personally to handle the conflict differently.

2. The American Cultural Response to the Spanish Civil War

“When the world community cannot act, global issues become personal choices,” wrote Marc Aronson and Marina Budhos in their biography of the widely successful photojournalistic duo Robert Capa and Gerda Taro.58 Both photographers covered the Spanish Civil War and their work was featured by American media. Robert Capa even started the process of becoming a naturalized American citizen right after he left Spain. Capa’s iconic photograph The Falling Soldier (1936) was published in major magazines and newspapers around the world such as Life, allegedly embodying a Loyalist militiaman at the exact moment when the man was shot and killed at the battle of Cerro Muriano. This picture, that shot Capa into stardom, has been the subject of major debate from the 1970s onwards with critics questioning its authenticity. Capa always denied claims of staging the picture stating: “no tricks are necessary to take pictures in Spain. You don’t have to pose your camera (i.e., pose your subjects). The pictures are there, and you just take them. The truth is the best picture. The best propaganda.”59 By 1938 Capa was world famous and was considered “the greatest war photographer in the world.”60 Both Capa and Taro put themselves at grave risk capturing the Spanish conflict with their Leicas. For Taro it even became her death when she received a fatal injury while covering a Republican loss in the summer of 1938. Capa and Taro were part of a large international group of people that were completely gripped by the Spanish Civil War and its ideological implications. They decided to put their photography occupation to good use and bring the realities of the conflict to as many homes as possible on both sides of the Atlantic. Capa and Taro befriended and collaborated with several American intellectual figures such as Ernest Hemingway, and Life editor John Morris. They felt the need to travel to the source of the action to personally make a change when the international community was negligent about the conflict. The previous chapter showed how ‘the world community,’ and more specifically the United States, did not act in favor of the Spanish Republican government. Without the substantial support of both Mussolini and Hitler to Franco, the outcome of the Spanish Civil War might have been drastically different and their involvement had dragged the Spanish conflict into the international sphere. Chapter 1 has also shown how the United States came to

58 Marc Aronson and Marina Budhos, Eyes of the World: Robert Capa, Gerda Taro, and the Invention of Modern Photojournalism (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2017), 249. 59 Richard Whelan, Robert Capa: Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf Inc., 1985) 97. 60 “The Falling Soldier, 1936, printed later,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art, accessed May 3, 2019, https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/283315. 24 a policy of steady isolationism, claiming this was in accordance with public opinion in the mid 1930s. Previous scholarship surrounding the role of the United States’ (or lack thereof) within the Spanish Civil War usually revolved around this narrative of neutrality and non- interventionism by President Roosevelt’s administration. Some scholars have addressed the role of public opinion regarding the Spanish Civil War in relation to the policy of isolationism, often pointing out the aspect of American Catholics. However, they have failed to acknowledge the influential part of American society that actively sided with the Spanish Republicans, apart from the Abraham Lincoln Brigades. Traveling to Spain illegally, taking up arms to save a foreign Republic, making do with the consequences that such actions might entail, is certainly the most remarkable example of American engagement with the Spanish Civil War, but it is far from the only one. Many Americans that remained at home also found a way to get involved. Many Spanish immigrants, socialists, communists, and other active anti-fascists organized themselves in the urban areas of the United States to speak up against Franco. Interestingly, the Spanish Civil War did manage to arouse a very strong sentimental response amongst many prominent intellectuals and artists. They considered the war of the Spanish Republic as a war against fascism and a fight for democracy. Therefore, the stakes of this war reached much further than the borders of the Iberian Peninsula and many individuals felt urged to commit to the Spanish Republican Cause and do whatever was in their power to tip the scales in the Loyalist favor. Many of the prominent Americans invested in the Spanish conflict were working in the creative and cultural sector. This chapter will zoom in on the most prominent cultural individuals, exploring how they dealt with the Spanish Civil War from a professional and personal viewpoint. It will examine if and how they have aimed to influence public opinion in the United States and their government’s policies towards Spain. The chapter will focus both on individuals that left the United States to be present at the heat of battle and on those that stayed and joined the Cause at home. It will explore how these people influenced a larger political movement. The chapter will make a distinction between the art forms, starting with journalism and the writer professionals, moving on to documentary filmmaking and Hollywood, the Performing Arts, and finally, it will look at the response that the Spanish Civil War evoked in the modern art scene. Although the legal hurdles had made it nearly impossible for Americans to travel to Spain during the conflict years, there was still a large number of them moved by morbid curiosity or idealistic inspiration that found a way to personally be present in Spain. Apart from the individuals that had joined the Lincoln Battalion, there were also intellectuals and

25 journalists that had taken an interest in watching the conflict unfold from up close. These individuals were the main frame of reference for the American people to learn about the political situation in Spain and about the violent events that it incited, as they were sharing their experiences with the American public through articles or speeches. The Spanish Civil War had a visual effect on the American people, because of the developed state of international journalism and war photography. Vivid images of the War entered American households through newspapers and especially through the many pictures in the influential Life Magazine that Henry Luce had bought in 1936. Robert Capa spent the better part of two years in Spain, working for Life, photographing battles, cityscapes with suffering children, the International Brigades, and finally the 400,000 Spanish Republican refugees on their way to France, which Capa described as “perhaps the largest exodus in the history of humanity…These tired, brave people were immediately thrown into a concentration camp in France. In this way they earned their freedom.”61 People had become used to constantly receiving updates on world events through radio and many different newspapers that would be released throughout the day. Although media coverage of the Spanish Civil War was often politically charged with either socialist Republican support by figures such as Ernest Hemingway or with pro-Franco perspectives by Catholic Americans, people at least were aware of the War’s details. The 1930s were already an era in which personal political orientations were strongly influenced or even determined by what kind of newspaper or magazine one would read. Large magazines such as Time and William Randolph Hearst’s Journal-American would cover the Spanish Civil War from an anti-communist angle, quite favorable of Franco.62 Hearst was often slammed in the left- leaning press and became an obvious target for Americans engaged in the Spanish Republican Cause. In the 1937 New York play Hello, Franco the media mogul was ridiculed: “Hello, Franco, this is Willie. Yeh. Willie Hearst, your boss. Listen, Franco, you’re not doing so well… The last time you lost a battle I lost the New York American… you got to make the war more colorful. My readers like color.”63 Robert W. Snyder, public historian with a specialization in journalism and urban history, highlighted the ambiguity and lack of objectivity in the journalistic material from the 1930s. He pointed out how even a newspaper

61 Cornell Capa ed. Robert Capa (London: Studio Vista, 1974), 59. 62 Robert W. Snyder, “The New York Press and the Spanish Civil War,” in Facing Fascism: New York and the Spanish Civil War, eds. Peter N. Carroll and James D. Fernandez (New York: New York University Press, 2007) 34. 63 Peter Glazer, ““The Lifted Fist:” Performing the Spanish Civil War,” in Facing Fascism: New York and the Spanish Civil War, eds. Peter N. Carroll and James D. Fernandez (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 166. 26 such as The New York Times would shift its outlook on certain war events. After the Guernica bombing by Nazi-German planes, The New York Times would cover the event as “an atrocity aimed at terrifying civilians.”64 Some days later the newspaper would publish an article defining the aggressors as “anarchists” and the Basque victims in Guernica as “Reds.”65 Snyder clarified this shift in focus by stating that journalists might be confused by the complicated politics of a Civil War and added that the Roman Catholic Church in the United States was also actively combating Loyalist journalists, for example working for The New York Times.66 One of the most prominent American war reporters was Herbert Matthews writing for The New York Times who did not try to hide his Republican support in his articles. He described his time in Spain as follows: “Nothing so wonderful will ever happen to me again as those two and a half years I spent in Spain… it gave meaning to life; it gave courage and faith in humanity. There one learned that nothing counted, nothing was worth fighting for but the ideal of liberty.”67 Matthews had to deal with censorship from his editors and during the Republican defeat in 1939 his editor pressed him not to “send in any sentimental stuff about the refugee camps.”68 On May 10 1937, Life published a photojournalistic article with the title The Basques Become World Heroes about the situation in the Basque country. It shows pictures of the devastation of bombed Basque towns Durango and Guernica by Nationalist forces and the evacuation of Basque women by the British Royal Navy caused by a bluff blockade of the Bilbao coastline supposedly imposed by Franco’s Rebels. The article explained how British ships were to run the blockade and bring food to the starving population of Bilbao only to discover that the blockade was not really there. The captains that exposed this bluff blockade are presented as “overnight heroes” whereas the Basque people are described as “amazingly pure”, “hardy”, and “courageous.”69 Articles such as these show that biased articles were the mainstream, even when objectivity was being pursued. Several famous Americans, who were not regularly working in the journalistic field, profited from this favorable journalistic environment to send in opinion pieces on the Spanish Civil War. Robert Capa had already explained his craft as “the best propaganda” and he found and befriended likeminded Americans amongst the members of the Abraham Lincoln Brigades such as Edwin Rolfe, a

64 Robert W. Snyder, “The New York Press and the Spanish Civil War,” in Facing Fascism: New York and the Spanish Civil War, eds. Peter N. Carroll and James D. Fernandez (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 35. 65 Ibidem, 35. 66 Ibidem. 35. 67 Caroline Moorehead ed. The Letters of Martha Gellhorn (London: Chatto & Windus, 2006), 50. 68 Antony Beevor, The Battle for Spain (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2006), 245. 69 NA, “The Basques Become World Heroes,” Life, May 10, 1937, 60-61. 27 poet who was later also blacklisted in Holllywood after he had moved on to do film jobs, and Martha Gellhorn and Ernest Hemingway. Although these figures were capturing the war’s atrocities in the written word, rather than in the frozen image, they all shared the same passionate conviction that they must diffuse the realities of the Spanish Civil War and inspire sympathy for the Spanish Republicans in the people at home.

“The truth brought back from the war by writers … will be the truth.”

The writer’s profession was especially active in their lobby for the Spanish Republican Cause. They organized themselves through the League of American Writers. This League was established in 1935 and came out of the dissolved John Reeds Club that had consisted of Marxist intellectuals who organized politically orientated art exhibitions since 1929. The League of American Writers was explicitly focused on individuals in the writers’ profession ranging from playwrights to journalists and from poets to critics. Theater Studies professor Sam Smiley asserted in his article on the League of American Writers’ Congresses that 1937 was the first time in American history that cultural professionals came together in such a way to discuss political issues such as the Spanish Civil War.70 These conferences were meant to address plans to act as a community towards political issues, rather than merely individually through their writings. During the Spanish Civil War members of this League often made personal visits to Spain and frequently wrote pieces for New Masses and other left leaning magazines such as The Post and Daily Worker which were generally favorable of the Spanish Republican government. Writers associated with the League of American Writers would also speak at conferences that supported the Spanish Republic, while expressing their strong anti- fascist sentiments. As a prominent member of this writers’ collective Ernest Hemingway addressed the Spanish Civil War in his keynote lecture at the Second American Writers Congress in 1937 at Carnegie Hall for an audience of 3500 congress participants.71 The invitation for this second meeting of the League had called on writer professionals to participate in the conference and take a united stance against fascism.72 During his speech Hemingway emphasized the crucial role of the writer in this fight against fascism: “the truth

70 Sam Smiley, “Friends of the Party: The American Writers’ Congresses,” Southwest Review, no. 3, vol 54 (1969), 290. 71 Alan Wald, “New York Novelists and Poets Respond to the Spanish Civil War,” in Facing Fascism: New York and the Spanish Civil War, eds. Peter N. Carroll and James D. Fernandez (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 134. 72 Sam Smiley, “Friends of the Party: The American Writers’ Congresses,” Southwest Review, no. 3, vol 54 (1969), 296. 28 brought back from the war by writers … will be the truth and not the gabled hearsay that we pass as history.”’73 He also underlined why the people in the audience could not possibly continue their profession under a regime ran by fascists whom he continuously referred to as “agents of evil”, “persecutors of the innocent”, and “civilian murderers:” Really good writers are always rewarded under almost any existing system of government that they can tolerate. There is only one form of government that cannot produce good writers and that system is fascism. For fascism is a lie told by bullies. A writer who will not lie cannot live or work under fascism.74

Although the focus of the League of American Writers was supposed to be on their professional field and on literature, the Congress of 1937 was entirely centered on antifascism. The main message was that culture was endangered by fascism. Martha Gellhorn was one of the writers speaking about this threat to culture and democracy basing her plea on her experiences in Spain.75 Another author who spoke out about Spain was Archibald MacLeish, chairman and opening speaker of the American Writers Congress. He had been a benefactor for Joris Ivens’ propaganda film The Spanish Earth and wrote several articles supporting the Spanish Republican Cause. Two months after the United States recognized Franco’s government, Roosevelt appointed MacLeish as Librarian of Congress for the next five years in June 1939.76 The American Writers Congress of 1937 received criticism from the media, as the Hearst newspapers referred to the gathering as “a Moscow plot.”77 Time on the other hand, featured the congress in a more positive light, praising Hemingway’s rhetoric abilities. In 1939 the League of American Writers published a pamphlet under the name “Writers take Sides” which was signed by 418 writer professionals including Richard Wright, Theodore Dreiser, William Faulkner, and Upton Sinclair. The pamphlet consisted of contributed letters in support of the Spanish Loyalists answering the question: “Are you for, or are you against Franco and fascism? Are you for, or are you against the legal government and the people of Republican Spain?” John Steinbeck was one prominent contributor to this pamphlet sharing his pressing concerns with fascism, which also involved the American domestic situation. He compared the police’s response with tear gas grenades to the Californian Lettuce Strike of 1936, which had taken place in his birth town Salinas, to the

73 Hemingway quoted in ibidem, 297. 74 James M. Hutchisson, Ernest Hemingway: A New Life (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016), 156. 75 Ibidem, 297-298. 76 Brewster Chamberlin, The Hemingway Log: A Chronology of His Life and Times (Lawrence KS: University Press of Kansas, 2015) 213. 77 Caroline Moorehead ed. The Letters of Martha Gellhorn (London: Chatto & Windus, 2006), 53. 29 bombing of civilians in Spain. To the explicit question that authors were meant to answer in the pamphlet Steinbeck was univocal: Your question as to whether I am for Franco is rather insulting. Have you seen anyone not actuated by greed who was for Franco? No, I'm not for Franco and his Moors and Italians and Germans. But some Americans are. Some Americans were for the Hessians England sent against our own revolutionary army. They were for the Hessians because they were selling things to them. The descendants of some of these Americans are still very rich and still touchy concerning the American Way, and our "ancient liberties."78 Steinbeck gave impetus to these words by becoming the president of the Anti-Franco group in the United States and he was one of the initiators to publish an open letter in The New York Times pressing the American government to lift the embargo imposed by the Neutrality Act of 1937. Readers of the letter were encouraged to fill out an attached coupon and send it to the Washington Committee to Lift Spanish Embargo. The FBI and the House Un-American Activities Committee grew very suspicious of Steinbeck in 1943 basing their distrust partly on Steinbeck’s involvement during the Spanish Civil War in the Western Writer’s Congress and the Washington Committee to Lift Spanish Embargo as they had stigmatized these organizations as communist fronts.79 Although mostly famous as the leader of the Communist Party USA, Earl Browder was also invited to contribute to the Writers take Sides pamphlet as a frequent writer of political articles and books including Lenin and Spain, A Message to Catholics, Concerted action or isolation: which is the road to peace? and New Steps to Win the War in Spain during the years of the Spanish conflict. His letter to the League’s pamphlet was unsurprisingly impassioned referring to the “deep blush of shame” that should sweep over the face of each American at the mere mention of Spain. Browder forcefully vilified the American government for putting up the embargo for the Spanish Republicans calling it “a gratuitous act of war against a friendly nation” which was meant to avoid defying Hitler. He emphasized how the Neutrality Act was directly benefiting the fascist forces in Europe and pressed more: "May I further state that we will not be able to raise our heads as Americans, who have fulfilled the traditions of Jefferson in giving aid to other democracies, until this embargo has been lifted, and we observe our treaty obligations to Spain, which we now

78 John Steinbeck, Writers Take Sides: Letters about the war in Spain from 418 American authors, ed. The League of American Writers (New York: The League of American Writers, 1939), 56-57. 79 Herbert Mitgang, Dangerous Dossiers: Exposing the Secret War Against America’s Greatest Authors (New York: Open Road Media, 2015), chap. 3, Adobe ePub. 30 violate.”80 Browder was referring to a bill that Montana Congressman O’Connell, who was later scrutinized by the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1950, tried to push unto Secretary of State Cordell Hull and President Roosevelt after news had reached the United States once again that yet another Spanish town had been bombed by the Luftwaffe with countless victims. O’Connell urged President Roosevelt to formally recognize Germany and Italy to be at war with Spain, rather than applying the Neutrality Act to a civil war situation. Although Roosevelt and Hull had received letters of protest from various organizations, they finally were unwilling to adopt O’Connell’s resolution, claiming it would not have the desired effect. 81 As we have seen, many writers took an active stance with the Spanish Republican Cause, contributing to pamphlets and putting in their best efforts to raise awareness of the atrocities that were taking place in Spain. They pointed out how fascism posed a danger to all of them and how this ideology was the direct antithesis to the fundamentally American values that had shaped the United States. Furthermore, they strived to influence government officials to lift the embargo which would enable the Loyalists to import some much needed supplies from the United States by getting involved with Washington lobby organizations. Some of these writers took these efforts one step further and traveled to Spain in order to be able to report firsthand on the war. “I wanted to be read in the U.S., where I hoped my anger would feed other angers.”

One of the most prominent American intellectual figures to travel to Spain was author and journalist Martha Gellhorn, who reported on the Spanish Civil War to the United States. Her influence reached as far as the White House, because of her close friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt. She had also worked in the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, reporting on people’s daily realities during the Great Depression and she knew President Roosevelt well. Based on her observations she had published the socially engaged fictional The Trouble I’ve Seen in 1936, which gained her substantial literary recognition within the United States. Gellhorn first arrived in Spain in the spring of 1937. She had described herself as a pacifist before, but after having spent some time in Nazi-Germany, she had lost all hope of Franco-

80 Earl Browder, Writers Take Sides: Letters about the war in Spain from 418 American authors, ed. The League of American Writers (New York: The League of American Writers, 1939), 10. 81 Xabier Irujo, Gernika, 1937: The Market Day Massacre (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2015) 62-65. 31

German rapprochement and saw European peace drifting further away. When she arrived in Spain she considered herself an anti-fascist.82 Gellhorn covered the Spanish Civil War by sharing her personal observations of Spain and its people, rather than merely focusing on battles and military advancement. She was very outspoken about her journalistic purpose, describing her profession as a way to say ‘NO’ to the wrongdoings in the world. As a young journalist, she had believed it was her mission to tell the world what was going on and point out those things that were morally unacceptable. Consequently, the people would know about them and those responsible would take it upon themselves to right these wrongs. In 1959 Gellhorn published The Face of War, a collection of her journalistic coverage of the Spanish Civil War prefaced with an introduction which offers more insight in Gellhorn’s experiences and intentions during her years spent in Spain. In this introduction she reflected on her naïve former approach to her profession after seeing wars unfold and world leaders make one wrong decision after another. Gellhorn described how she felt that “1939 was at least three years too late to start fighting Hitler and all his cohorts and everything they did and stood for.”83 When she was covering the Spanish Civil War as an anti-fascist in the years preceding World War II, she described this as a frustration: I belonged to a Federation of Cassandras, my colleagues the foreign correspondents, whom I met at every disaster. They had been reporting the rise of Fascism, its horrors and its sure menace, for years. If anyone listened to them, no one acted on their warnings. The doom they had long prophesied arrived on time, bit by bit, as scheduled.84 Gellhorn worked as a reporter for Collier’s, a very successful American weekly magazine focused on investigative journalism that roughly 2,5 million people were reading in the late 1930s. Gellhorn aimed to spark an emotional response in her readers: “I wanted to be read in the U.S., where I hoped my anger would feed other angers.”85 In The Face of War Gellhorn explained that covering the Spanish conflict was also a way for her to serve the Spanish Republic’s Cause. She saw how badly civilians were suffering in this particular war and she defended the Republican Cause and all that were fighting for it at all cost: “They were fighting for us all, against the combined force of European fascism. They deserved our thanks and our respect and got neither.”86

82 Martha Gellhorn, The Face of War (London: The Hollen Street Press Limited, 1959), 10. 83 Ibidem, 6. 84 Ibidem, 2. 85 Giovanna Dell’Orto, ““Memory and Imagination Are the Great Deterrents": Martha Gellhorn at War as Correspondent and Literary Author,” The Journal of American Culture, no. 3, vol 27 (2004), 305.

86 Martha Gellhorn, The Face of War (London: The Hollen Street Press Limited, 1959), 13. 32

Throughout 1937 and 1938 Gellhorn published various articles in Collier’s. These publications showed Gellhorn’s own experiences, the everyday life of the Spanish people, the constant danger, their cumulating losses, insecurity and helplessness interwoven with the normality that war had become for all of them. It was her goal to highlight the universality of war and the suffering that it brought upon all the people that were involved in it. She wrote about everyday people, rather than political figures and prominent army officers, showing their humanity and personal hardships. In November 1938 Gellhorn published a haunting article describing how the Spanish people were suffering from extreme scarcity and starvation, while living their lives through the routine of the civil war that had become second nature to them. She recounted how many children stayed home from school, because it was too dangerous for them to walk there and how a great many others were extremely malnourished or wounded in the hospital, often severely disabled and traumatized. In one of her articles Gellhorn quoted a nurse whom she had interviewed: “Of course we haven’t enough food to give them. What do you think? If only they didn’t bomb all the time,” she said, “it would help. When the children hear the siren they go crazy, they try to get out of their beds and run. We are only four nurses in these two rooms and we have a hard time with them. At night it is worse. They all remember what happened to them and they go crazy.”87 Gellhorn was dedicated to undermine the propaganda that these Spanish Republicans were depraved communists used as a mere tool for the Soviet Union. In a letter to Eleanor Roosevelt, Gellhorn intended to clear up the misunderstanding of how many Russians were fighting in Spain. She explained how Russians came, similarly to Americans as individuals to join the International Brigades, and there were only 500 of them, rather than several thousands as some sources were implying.88 However, Gellhorn was either uninformed or in denial about the matter, because modern scholarship did confirm that there were in fact 2000 Soviet citizens fighting with the International Brigades as mentioned in Chapter 1. Gellhorn described the many interactions that she had with the Spanish people in her articles, depicting them as relatable individuals who are just like people everywhere. Gellhorn was very outspoken about her stance on the greater significance of the Spanish Civil War: I felt then (and still do) that the Western democracies had two commanding obligations: they must save their honor by assisting a young, attacked fellow democracy, and they must save their skin, by fighting Hitler and Mussolini, at once, in Spain, instead of waiting until later when the cost in human suffering would be unimaginably greater. Arguments were useless during the Spanish War

87 I Martha Gellhorn, The Face of War (London: The Hollen Street Press Limited, 1959), 34. 88 Caroline Moorehead ed. The Letters of Martha Gellhorn (London: Chatto & Windus, 2006), 53. 33

and ever after; the carefully fostered prejudice against the Republic of Spain remains impervious to time and facts.89 Martha Gellhorn had known Eleanor Roosevelt since early childhood through her mother. She had developed a strong friendship with the First Lady while they were living together in 1936 after Gellhorn had been invited to live at the White House while writing The Trouble I’ve Seen. When Gellhorn was in Spain, she was frequently in correspondence with Eleanor Roosevelt. The women updated each other on their daily lives and widely discussed politics, and especially the looming danger of fascism in Europe. In a letter from January 1937 Gellhorn already voiced concern about the international escalation of the Spanish conflict: “If the madman Hitler really sends two divisions to Spain my bet is that the war is nearer than even the pessimists thought.”90 In another letter to Roosevelt that same month Gellhorn even compared the conflict in Spain to the Balkan Wars of the early 1910s that had set the stage directly for World War I. At that time she already saw clearly how foreign countries meddling with Spanish affairs would be a prelude to a seemingly inevitable bigger war.91 Martha Gellhorn became romantically involved with famous author Ernest Hemingway during their shared experiences in the Spanish Civil War. They both collaborated with Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens on the propaganda documentary The Spanish Earth (1937). Thanks to Gellhorn’s friendship with the Roosevelts, the film was screened at a private viewing party at the White House with many personal contacts attending who had not sympathized with the Spanish conflict previously. The Roosevelts were impressed by the film and even provided constructive criticism in order to carry the film’s propagandistic message across even stronger.92 The screening of this film in the White House in the presence of its creators was picked up by the media with one newspaper headlining the event as “Communist Director Invades White House.”93 Gellhorn shared her frustrations with the Catholic lobby in the United States with Eleanor Roosevelt through a letter in June 1937 following a refugee problem with 500 orphans from the bombed city of Bilbao. These children were supposed to be welcomed to the United States and adopted which was prevented by Catholic charities. Gellhorn pointed out how the French and English government were receiving orphans, and how these young victims were Catholics themselves. She empathized the hypocritical irony of the situation: “it

89 Martha Gellhorn, The Face of War (London: The Hollen Street Press Limited, 1959), 13. 90 Caroline Moorehead ed. The Letters of Martha Gellhorn (London: Chatto & Windus, 2006), 45. 91 Ibidem, 46. 92 Ibidem, 56. 93 James M. Hutchisson, Ernest Hemingway: A New Life (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016), 158. 34 is embarrassing to find that they were made homeless and orphaned by the people who wish to destroy the Godless Reds.”94 Furthermore, Gellhorn tried to start a conversation with Eleanor Roosevelt about the role of the United States in the refugee issue: “it seems to me amazing that only America should offer no sanctuary for them… it seems to me that it is two things, an injustice and a sort of backing down on what America likes to think it stands for: kindness to the weak. What do you think about it?”95 Gellhorn also vented her frustration with the general diplomatic approach which was stirring up her “anger against two men who I firmly believe to be dangerous criminals, Hitler and Mussolini, and against the international diplomacy which humbly begs for the continued ‘co-operation’ of the Fascists, who at once destroy Spain and are appointed to keep that destruction from spreading.”96 Gellhorn continuously expressed her fear for the future of the international community if the Spanish conflict would not be dealt with appropriately and strongly believed that the war in Spain was synonymous for the war of ‘all of us’ against fascism.97 She blamed the United States government for neglecting their international responsibility since 1918. She wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt about the importance of the Neutrality Acts, arguing that the Republican Cause was far from lost, if only the Loyalists were able to receive the proper equipment. Aside from her articles for Collier’s and her cooperation on The Spanish Earth Gellhorn traveled across the United States to give lectures about the conflict in Spain. She described her vocation as follows: I don’t believe that anything any of us does now is useful. We just have to do it. Articles & speeches hoping someone will hear & understand. And if they do, then what. The whole world is accepting destruction from the author of ‘Mein Kampf’, a man who cannot think straight for half a page.98 In a 1991 interview Gellhorn explained her perspective on President Roosevelt’s reaction to the Spanish Civil War: Their hearts were in the right place. Both of them, Franklin and his wife Eleanor, were on the side of the Republicans in Spain. He did explain once how it was that he couldn’t do anything: because of the Catholic vote in America. The American Catholics were convinced that all the nuns in Spain were raped every day by the Republicans, and that the Republicans were hard line communists. Don’t forget, in those days American politics were isolationist. First and foremost Roosevelt was a politician. I also tried to arrange grain export to Spain, he felt for that too and sent me to see Cordell Hull, who was Secretary of State at the time. In the end they didn’t dare to do it, though personally they were in favor. The Catholic

94 Caroline Moorehead ed. The Letters of Martha Gellhorn (London: Chatto & Windus, 2006), 52. 95 Ibidem, 52. 96 Ibidem, 54. 97 Ibidem, 60. 98 Ibidem, 58. 35

Church in America was very powerful and well organized. On top of that there was that permanent fear of the ‘Red Peril’. The ‘red scare’ in America began about the day after the Russian Revolution.99

As illustrated, Martha Gellhorn sided with the Spanish Republicans by acting as a mouthpiece for Spain’s regular people. Although she doubted if her articles and speeches could make a real difference, she still continued to share her convictions with anyone that would listen, including the Roosevelts. Gellhorn’s biographer Caroline Moorehead defined her commitment to the Republican Cause as a conviction that it would be the final chance to save democratic Europe from the Nazis. She quoted Gellhorn from a letter to a journalist: “We knew, we just knew that Spain was the place to stop Fascism, it was one of those moments in history when there was no doubt.”100

“No men ever entered earth more honorably than those who died in Spain.”

The most famous American intellectual that was involved in the Spanish Civil War is undoubtedly Ernest Hemingway. In 1940 he published his acclaimed novel For Whom the Bell Tolls, which he based on his own experiences in Spain during the civil conflict as well as on those of Lincoln Brigade commander Robert Merriman. In February 1939 he published the famous short story On the American Dead in Spain in New Masses, which served as a eulogy for the Abraham Lincoln Brigade soldiers that lost their lives while fighting fascism in Spain. This story included the famous quote:

The fascists may spread over the land, blasting their way with weight of metal brought from other countries. They may advance aided by traitors and by cowards. They may destroy cities and villages and try to hold the people in slavery. But you cannot hold any people in slavery. The Spanish people will rise again as they have always risen before against tyranny. The dead do not need to rise. They are a part of the earth now and the earth can never be conquered. For the earth endureth forever. It will outlive all systems of tyranny. Those who have entered it honorably, and no men ever entered earth more honorably than those who died in Spain, already have achieved immortality.101

From both of these publications it is evident where Hemingway’s loyalties lay and how deeply the Spanish Civil War had affected him. However, this chapter will focus on

99 Bas Senstius, “Martha Gellhorn: A Furious Footnote in History” Rozenberg Quarterly http://rozenbergquarterly.com/martha-gellhorn-a-furious-footnote-in-history/?print=pdf. Accessed May 22, 2019. 100 Caroline Moorehead, Gellhorn: a twentieth-century life (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2003) 110- 111. 101 Ernest Hemingway, “On the American Dead in Spain” New Masses, February 14, 1939, 3. 36

Hemingway’s endeavors before these later literary achievements. During the Spanish Civil War Hemingway committed his artistic talents fully to the Spanish Republican Cause by the means of journalism, documentary filmmaking, and playwriting, hoping he would influence his surroundings sufficiently in order to let democracy prevail over fascism. These endeavors would be the groundwork of his future success and reputation. English professor Keneth Kinnamon identified the Spanish Republican Cause as “the most important political commitment of Hemingway’s life.”102 In accordance, Spanish professor Allen Josephs selected 1937 as Hemingway’s “most political year.”103 Hemingway spent long periods of time in Spain, investing all his money in the Republican Cause, producing Joris Ivens’ documentary The Spanish Earth and financing medical supplies to send to the war torn areas.104 He had already traveled extensively in Spain before the outbreak of the civil conflict and he had learnt to understand Spain’s political system and its various principles. The author was tied to a book deal in 1936 restraining him from making his way over to Spain as soon as he would have liked to. Instead, he paid two men to go to Spain and fight Franco’s Rebels in his place.105 Hemingway first collaborated with Spanish New Yorker Prudencio de Pereda, John Dos Passos, and Archibald MacLeish on Dutch filmmaker Helene van Dongen’s propaganda film Spain in Flames in early 1937. This film was composed of real newsreel material that sometimes had never reached the cinema before, due to censorship of gruesome material. It meant to leave a lasting impression on the American public, taking a clear Loyalist stance, but it failed to reach a big audience.106 Since Spain in Flames did not reach its goal of mobilizing Americans for the Republican Cause, Dos Passos, Macleish, and Hemingway joined van Dongen and Joris Ivens’ company Contemporary Historians Incorporated which meant to raise money to make another movie to try once more to reach the desired effect in the United States.107 Shortly after, Hemingway finally traveled to Spain, crossing the border from France in March. He was on the payroll of the North American Newspaper Alliance as a correspondent throughout the Spanish conflict, publishing 31 articles in various magazines

102 Keneth Kinnamon, "Hemingway and Politics," in The Cambridge Companion to Hemingway, ed. Scott Donaldson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996) 154. 103 Allen Josephs, “Hemingway’s Spanish Sensibility,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hemingway, ed. Scott Donaldson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 226. 104 Caroline Moorehead ed. The Letters of Martha Gellhorn (London: Chatto & Windus, 2006), 56. 105 Keneth Kinnamon, "Hemingway and Politics," in The Cambridge Companion to Hemingway, ed. Scott Donaldson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 154. 106 James M. Hutchisson, Ernest Hemingway: A New Life (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016), 157. 107 Brewster Chamberlin, The Hemingway Log: A Chronology of His Life and Times (Lawrence KS: University Press of Kansas, 2015) 176. 37 and newspapers.108 This was a well-paid gig, but Hemingway did not need much convincing to take on the job as he was already greatly invested in the Spanish Republican Cause. Hemingway made an enormous financial investment in the project of realizing The Spanish Earth, which he made in close collaboration with communist Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens. The film was meant to subsequently raise money for the Spanish Republican Cause. For Hemingway this was a way to frame a story of non-fiction based on facts that should influence its viewers to see the Spanish Civil War in the same way that he himself was seeing it, as a turning point in world history.109 Hemingway was involved in all aspects of making the film, from writing the script and narrating to scouting the actors and being the translator on set.110 After The Spanish Earth impressed the guests at the White House it went on to screen at a fundraiser in the LA Philharmonic Auditorium organized by the Committee of Film Artists for Spanish Democracy and at private viewing parties, such as the one from actor Fredric March, who had been the star of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931) and cofounder of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League.111 Hemingway introduced his documentary at this fundraiser screening which raised 17,000 dollars for medical relief for the Spanish Republic.112 Although The Spanish Earth mostly benefited from private viewing parties it did also screen officially at the 55th Street Playhouse in New York during the summer of 1937.113 In October, the National Board of Review proclaimed the film to be amongst the three best American films of the year.114 Hemingway’s further activism for la causa consisted mostly of writing articles. In August 1938 Hemingway wrote an article for Ken, a magazine that was focused on political content in 1938 and 1939 of which Hemingway was a frequent contributor. His articles for Ken such as Dying Well or Badly, The Time Now, The Place Spain, and A Program for U.S. Realism strongly criticized the Neutrality Acts that had been passed in the previous years and slammed American isolationism in general by pointing out how this approach was outdated

108 Keneth Kinnamon, "Hemingway and Politics," in The Cambridge Companion to Hemingway, ed. Scott Donaldson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 154. 109 Elizabeth Dewberry, “Hemingway’s Journalism and the Realist Dilemma,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hemingway, ed. Scott Donaldson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 31. 110 James M. Hutchisson, Ernest Hemingway: A New Life (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016) 156. 111 Brewster Chamberlin, The Hemingway Log: A Chronology of His Life and Times (Lawrence KS: University Press of Kansas, 2015), 189. 112 James M. Hutchisson, Ernest Hemingway: A New Life (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016), 158. 113 Brewster Chamberlin, The Hemingway Log: A Chronology of His Life and Times (Lawrence KS: University Press of Kansas, 2015), 191. 114 Ibidem, 193. 38 and untenable urging the United States to reevaluate its role in the international balance of power. Hemingway had criticized President Roosevelt’s policies before, referring to the New Deal as “some sort of YMCA show run by starry-eyed bastards” and blaming Roosevelt for the death of many war veterans that had been hit by a hurricane while working on a construction site in Florida as part of the New Deal project. 115 In the period between April and August of 1938 Hemingway wrote various articles for Ken pressing the United States government to recognize the urgency of the situation in Spain and start supporting the Spanish Republican Cause. With the government’s continuous policy of isolationism without showing signs of a change of course, Hemingway’s articles grew increasingly negative, pleading that the next great war was not a matter of if but when, and it would be catching up with the United States any day now. Hemingway’s endeavors to support the Spanish Republican Cause predominantly revolved around influencing American public opinion by publishing articles highly critical of United States foreign policy. Disappointed in the lack of proactivity from his government, Hemingway appears to single-handedly have aspired to save the Spanish Republic from fascism by investing all of his money into a propaganda film, which later managed to raise great sums of money to fund relief for the Spanish victims. Furthermore, Hemingway capitalized on his acquired fame to stimulate his peers to take an active stance against fascism and for the Spanish Republic. He urged them to step up and take responsibility to tell the truth where nobody else would. After all, a good writer could impossibly work in a fascist system.

The Spanish Civil War in Hollywood

Aside from widespread media coverage, the Spanish Civil War also reached American audiences as the backdrop for fictitious stories through film. Cultural historian Thomas Doherty argued that the Spanish conflict sparked Hollywood’s interest both because of its strong ties with the Popular Front and because of the cinematic interest that the novelty of moving image war coverage had enabled for the first time in history.116 Since the War in Spain was a civilian conflict the moving images that reached the American people through newsreels were horribly gripping if not censored. For the first time, Americans had to deal with the moving violent material depicting destroyed homes, orphaned children, and the dead and the wounded covering the streets of bombed cities. The first mainstream Hollywood

115 Nicholas Reynolds, Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy: Ernest Hemingway’s Secret Adventures, 1935-1961 (New York: HaperCollins Publishers, 2017), 8. 116 Thomas Doherty, Hollywood and Hitler 1933-1939 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 140-141. 39 feature that took the Spanish Civil War as its setting was the Paramount Pictures production The Last Train From Madrid (1937). This film showed how various couples meet and fall in love over the course of 75 minutes while trying to secure a seat on the coveted final train that will leave Madrid for the safety of Valencia. It cleverly avoided controversy by putting a disclaimer in the opening credits stating: “We neither uphold nor condemn either faction of the Spanish conflict. This is a story of people – not of causes.”117 Even though the film refrained from any political content, the characters are all Loyalist citizens or Republican soldiers, trying to get away from a city that might soon be destroyed by the enemy, so it still shows one single perspective. A more contentious example is William Dieterle’s 1938 film Blockade starring Madeleine Carroll and Henry Fonda. This romantic war drama distributed by United Artists tells the story of a peasant defending his home region against Franco’s Rebels while falling in love with a mysterious girl who’s father turns out to be a Soviet spy. The film sparked controversy and it was banned from screening in Boston cinemas after 50 Catholic organizations petitioned against it claiming it to be “a communistic film.”118 The ban by the Boston City Council evoked a debate on film censorship and the freedom of the screen. As a result, the Motion Pictures Artist Committee organized a high profile conference on the topic featuring many Hollywood A-listers.119 Blockade was featured as the ‘Movie of the Week’ in the Life issue of June 13, 1938. The article included various stills from the movie depicting battle scenes and Spain’s hungry population. The feature praised the film’s realism and its “magnificent fidelity” to the actual events happening in Spain.120 It also discussed the uproar that the film ignited abroad and stated: “those who know their newspapers will see in Blockade a stern indictment of General Franco’s war, a passionate polemic for the humble Spaniards fighting for Republican Spain.”121 One month later, Life featured Blockade again in a large write up on political movie censorship: “Can the movies treat such bitter modern realities such as the Spanish War? Many Catholics think not. Or the Jewish refugees? Many foreign countries think not.”122 The article explained how Hollywood movies were previously only censored on the basis of morals and nudity and were now for the first time questioned politically. Although

117 George M. Arthur, The Last Train From Madrid (directed by James P. Hogan, Paramount Pictures, Hollywood, 1937). 118 NA, “Boston Ban Voted on ‘Blockade’ Film,” The New York Times, July 19, 1938, 15. 119 Ibidem, 15. 120 NA, “Movie of the Week: Blockade The Spanish war comes to the screen with shots that look like newsreels,” Life, June 13, 1938, 60. 121 Ibidem, 60. 122 NA, “The Movies Enter Another Censorship Fight, This Time with a Clean Record,” Life, July 18, 1937, 55. 40 critics praised the movie and did not find Blockade’s angle very obviously supportive of any of the two sides in the Spanish Civil War, Catholics started a crusade against its release in cinemas throughout the United States.123 Blockade was nominated for two Academy Awards but did not do well at the box office. As the Life article made clear: “Some producers may have the courage to defy the wishes of foreign governments, but they cannot, at the same time, hold out against a boycott by any large section of the American public.”124 There was a precarious element to making films with internationally controversial subject matters. Hollywood was depending heavily on selling distribution rights to foreign markets and polarizing films with a strong political focus risked offending foreign markets which would strongly affect the film’s international reach which would ultimately determine its financial success, as foreign film markets were responsible for 40% of Hollywood’s proceeds.125 Screenwriter John Howard Lawson was nominated for an Academy Award for his work on Blockade. Earlier, Lawson had benefited from the Federal Theatre Project, but was later blacklisted as one of the Hollywood Ten by the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947. Lawson was a long-term active member of the Communist Party USA and was strongly engaged in various anti-fascist associations in Hollywood.126 Given the controversy that followed Blockade, a film that does not take a strong political stance, it is evident how sensitive the Spanish Civil War was in the United States, making it impossible to make a commercially successful film about the conflict. Therefore, filmmakers invested in the Republican Cause sought the opportunity to share their vision away from the mainstream media as they started making documentaries. They drew heavily from the newsreel material that had often never been broadcasted due to censorship. Within Hollywood, several organizations were invested in the Spanish Republican Cause: the Theatre Arts Committee, the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, the Motion Picture Artist Committee, and Frontier Films, which had even been established with the intention to produce socio-politically relevant films, going against Hollywood’s general fear of loosing success by being controversial. These organizations joined forces to recruit volunteers for the International Brigades, to collect money for medical relief for Spain, and they tried to pressure the isolationist US government to lift the Neutrality Act of 1937.127 The division between the Popular Front and Catholic organizations became especially disruptive in

123 NA, “The Movies Enter Another Censorship Fight, This Time with a Clean Record,” Life, July 18, 1937, 55. 124 Ibidem, 55. 125 Ibidem, 55. 126 Ron Briley, “Book Review: The Final Victim of the Blacklist: John Howard Lawson, Dean of the Hollywood Ten by Gerald Horne,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television, no. 1, vol 29 (2009), 137. 127 Thomas Doherty, Hollywood and Hitler 1933-1939 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 140. 41

Hollywood. When several Popular Front organizations in Hollywood formed the North American Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy to make a strong political statement, they also took the opportunity to protest against the misconception of being referred to as “Communists, reds, and other names” by American Catholics.128 The charity events that these associations organized for the Spanish Republican Cause were highly successful and widely visited by Hollywood A-listers who donated large sums of money. Several high profile actors even visited Spain to either physically fight for the Republican Cause or contribute to it in another way while being as close to the action as possible. Errol Flynn, who was most conspicuously famous for his leading part in the widely successful film The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), visited Spain in 1937. Although his purpose for going remained somewhat unclear, the American press took an interest in Flynn’s presence in Spain and often updated the American public on his whereabouts and whether he was alive and well through news articles. Flynn had the innate romantic idealistic tendency to believe strongly in any kind of cause or ideal similar to his famous character Robin Hood and he was drawn towards the Spanish conflict, believing in the possibility of creating a better world.129 Flynn was also amongst the actors being watched by the FBI from 1940 onwards as he was on a list of possible communists or “party sympathizers.”130 Joan Crawford, who ordered a private screening of The Spanish Earth in 1937 to help raise money for the Republican Cause, was one of the actors that had her name grace an ambulance that was sent to Spain as medical relief. As Crawford’s fame easily reached across the Atlantic, the ambulance was received enthusiastically. The magazine Hollywood Now coined Joan Crawford as “the sweetheart of democratic Spain.”131 The FBI was highly suspicious of this magazine, claiming that it openly supported numerous projects that were directly associated with the Communist Party and that the supported anti-fascist fundraisers “had become diverted to Communist channels.”132 In October 1937, The New York Times reported on the Spain trip of author Dorothy Parker and her actor husband Alan Campbell who were both sympathizers of the Republican Cause. Parker had been active as a screenwriter in Hollywood and was very involved in several anti-fascist organizations. She organized fundraisers for Spain at her house for writer

128 Thomas Doherty, Hollywood and Hitler 1933-1939 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013, 142. 129 Alberto Elena, “Cuba sí! Errol Flynn and the Adventure of Revolution,” Journal of Popular Film and Television, no. 1, vol 41 (2013), 12. 130 Ibidem, 15. 131 Thomas Doherty, Hollywood and Hitler 1933-1939 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 140. 132 Jonathan Miles, The Nine Lives of Otto Katz: The Remarkable True Story of a Communist Super-spy (New York: Random House, 2010), 163-164. 42 colleagues and Hollywood heavyweights. Parker was steadfast on not letting the Spanish democratically chosen government “and therefore Civilization” loose this war.133 She invited Marion Merriman, wife of Abraham Lincoln Brigades commander Robert Hale Merriman and fervent anti-fascist in her own right, to speak at one of her events where guests would write checks for thousands of dollars.134 Parker eventually also ended up on the Hollywood blacklist, but only in 1950. As we have seen, the Spanish Civil War managed to cause quite a stir in Hollywood when Catholic organizations campaigned against a commercial film portraying the conflict. This provoked a debate on censorship and freedom of the screen regarding political issues for the first time in the industry’s history. Moreover, Hollywood was a fruitful place for sympathizers of the Spanish Republic with many organizations popping up that supported the Cause. Similar to the writer’s community, many professionals working in the film industry showed a strong attachment to antifascism. They actively took part in the fight to save Spanish democracy from the fascist forces primarily by organizing and attending fundraisers for Spanish relief.

The Spanish Civil War and the Performing Arts

Dorothy Parker was close to playwright and screenwriter Robert Sherwood who was very active in the New York theater scene in the 1930s and was later employed by President Roosevelt to write his speeches. Sherwood wrote the Pulitzer Prize winning long running play Idiot’s Delight (1936) about an international group of individuals that get trapped in a hotel lobby together in an unnamed foreign country at war. The comedy did not explicitly specify the details of the war, but aimed to shed light on the moral and ethical perspectives on war in general. While the geographical details were changed from Spain to France for the purpose of fiction, the play did include one pacifist character referencing the Spanish Civil War with a captivating message:

“While you sit here eating and drinking, to-night, Italian planes dropped twenty thousand kilos of bombs on Paris. God knows how many they killed. God knows how much of life and beauty is forever destroyed! And you sit here, drinking, laughing with them – the murderers! ... We stand together! France – England – America! Allies! ... The free democracies against the Fascist tyranny!”135

133 Thomas Doherty, Hollywood and Hitler 1933-1939 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 140. 134 NA, “Fund Raising in Hollywood,” The New York Times, June 08, 1986, 45.

135 Robert Emmet Sherwood, Idiot’s Delight (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1936), 113-115. 43

In 1937, throughout the Spanish Civil War, and during the years after it was finished, there were several Broadway and independent theater productions addressing the Spanish conflict with a pro-Loyalist and vigorous anti-fascist angle, most notably Hemingway’s only play The Fifth Column (1938), which was a spy story of an American man dedicated to the Spanish Republican Cause. The main character in the politically mobilizing play explained his commitment to this Cause as follows: “you do it so no one will ever be hungry. You do it so men will not have to fear ill health or old age; so they can live and work in dignity and not as slaves.”136 Although the play ran on Broadway, Hemingway was displeased with the director and actors of his play and it was a commercial disappointment.137 Independent theater productions such as these were often tied to the Theatre Committee for the Defense of the Spanish Republic. This organization was established to collect money for Spain within the Performing Arts scene through mobilizing plays and fundraiser events. As the Spanish Civil War continued, such events became more and more frequent. For example, in the spring of 1938, the Theater Arts Committee made an open call to everyone in the Dance industry, emphasizing how critical the situation in Spain had become and how Spain was crying out to help her wounded. A poster for one of their fundraisers read: “Within one week, Spain needs as many ambulances as possible. Surely the dance profession in New York can contribute one ambulance for the wounded defenders of Spanish Democracy? Spain’s fight for Freedom is our fight for Peace and Democracy.”138 Actor and musician Paul Robeson had been an active anti-fascist since the early 1930s and grew passionate about the Spanish Republic, referring to its precarious situation as “the new slavery”. After participating in several rallies and writing extensively about the Cause, he exchanged his success in the theater for an illegal ticket to Spain and joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigades. Robeson felt morally responsible to do so: “The artist must take sides. He must elect to fight for freedom or for slavery. I have made my choice.”139 Robeson was a celebrity figure amongst the International Brigades and he was able to boost morale by performing his famous songs.140 Robeson’s view on fascism having a direct connection to

136 Keneth Kinnamon, "Hemingway and Politics," in The Cambridge Companion to Hemingway, ed. Scott Donaldson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 164. 137 Peter Glazer, ““The Lifted Fist:” Performing the Spanish Civil War,” in Facing Fascism: New York and the Spanish Civil War, eds. Peter N. Carroll and James D. Fernandez (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 162. 138 Peter Glazer, ““The Lifted Fist:” Performing the Spanish Civil War,” in Facing Fascism: New York and the Spanish Civil War, eds. Peter N. Carroll and James D. Fernandez (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 163. 139 Ibidem, 167. 140 Ibidem, 167. 44 slavery and racism was an idea he shared with American poet Langston Hughes. Hughes contributed to the Writers take Sides pamphlet by stating:

Of course, I am against fascism with its spread of color prejudice and race hatred and working class oppression. How could any sensible Negro be otherwise? Therefore, I favor the legal government of Spain in its struggle against the Franco Rebels and all who believe as Franco does in crushing the people by force of arms.141

Choreographers also embraced the theme of the Spanish Republican Cause as several dance companies were performing shows inspired by the Spanish conflict in 1936 and 1937, sometimes in collaboration with the Medical Bureau to Aid Spanish Democracy. One notable example was a performance by choreographer Helen Tamaris supported by the Federal Theater Project with the name Adelante. This dance production showed a female figure embodying an inspiring Republican politician, before turning into the female embodiment of Spain itself.142 A reviewer of the Dance Observer described experiencing Adelante as follows: “It is not Spain that we see in her clear impassioned movement; it is the realization that Spain’s tragedy is ours, is the whole world’s tragedy. The dedication is not a Spaniard’s; it is an American’s.”143 As illustrated, Americans working in the Performing Arts scene supported the Spanish Republican Cause professionally by turning their shows into fundraisers and donating the revenue to charity organizations for Spanish relief. Furthermore, several playwrights and choreographers directly embraced the Spanish Civil War as their theme, aiming to engage their public with the Spanish Republican Cause driving them in an antifascist direction. The Performing Arts are ideally suited for this purpose as they can affectively appeal to people’s emotions by taking an audience on a journey of relatability and compassion. The aforementioned cultural individuals were very vocal about their stance on the Spanish Civil War, often not leaving much room for interpretation. With the visual arts on the other hand, there are no words involved, enabling viewers to start a dialogue of their own with an artwork. This open space of perception and analysis is especially attainable with abstract art from artists such as Calder and Picasso. During the years of the Spanish Civil

141 Langston Hughes, Writers Take Sides: Letters about the war in Spain from 418 American authors, ed. The League of American Writers (New York: The League of American Writers, 1939), 31-32. 142 Lisa Jackson-Schebetta, Traveler, There Is No Road: Theatre, the Spanish Civil War, and the Decolonial Imagination in the Americas (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2017), 44. 143 Peter Glazer, ““The Lifted Fist:” Performing the Spanish Civil War,” in Facing Fascism: New York and the Spanish Civil War, eds. Peter N. Carroll and James D. Fernandez (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 166. 45

War, the modern art scene was still relatively new in the United States and institutions, the government, and artists were still in the process of figuring out what collaboration on culture could mean for both domestic and foreign policies. Many scholars have addressed the role of culture in the public perception of American policy. Frank A. Ninkovich included the importance of New York’s philanthropic community for the eventual organization of the United States’ cultural policies within the United States as well as abroad. This community consisted of organizations that were backed by rich and influential families such as the Rockefellers and the Guggenheims.144 The philanthropic Rockefeller Foundation had been active in Spain since the 1920s. The Spanish Civil War had brought a famine upon the Spanish people and the Rockefeller Foundation set up a nutrition program to research and resolve the problem.145 These philanthropic foundations also played a big part in the development of the cultural scene in the United States, especially during the time after the Wall Street crash of 1929. This “disaster of capitalism” was also the time in which the American Communist Party grew immensely. Party leader Earl Browder even claimed that they were “the only true Americans.”146 The party attracted especially those progressive intellectuals that had become disillusioned with the capitalist developments prior to the crash. In 1935 the Communist Party had a couple of associated organizations such as the League of American Writers. Representatives from this League went to the First International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture. Intellectuals adopted cultural media as an outlet for political thought en masse and organized themselves on these grounds.147 As controversial as Roosevelt’s New Deal policy was, it received exceptional critique on the federal programs for writers, artists, actors, dancers, and musicians that Roosevelt initiated in 1935. Most famously, the Federal Art Project which aimed to make both art and the profession of the artist more accessible to all layers of society.148 The Museum of Modern Art in New York was founded in this cultural climate in 1929 and run by members of the same wealthy New York families that were actively involved with philanthropy. Many

144 Frank A. Ninkovich, The Diplomacy of Ideas: U.S. Foreign Policy and Cultural Relations, 1938-1950 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 15. 145 Isabel del Cura and Rafael Huertas, “Public Health and Nutrition After the Spanish Civil War: An Intervention by the Rockefeller Foundation,” Am J Public Health, no. 10, vol 99 (2009), 1772-1779. 146 Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 18. 147 Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 21-22 148 Stephen Baskerville and Ralph Willett eds., Nothing Else to Fear: New Perspectives on America in the Thirties (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), 179. 46 scholars have addressed the role of culture in the public perception of American foreign policy. Using culture as a political and diplomatic tool is a method that is strongly associated with the Cold War Era but the political organization of culture already found its roots in the 1930s. Nelson A. Rockefeller was a famous public figure at the time as part of a family that exceeded in business and philanthropy. He was on the cover of Time on May 22, 1939. He was also on the board of trustees of both the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art. During the 1930s Rockefeller intensified his long-lasting influence on the MOMA by accepting roles as treasurer and president of the growingly influential art institution. Despite having no political experience whatsoever, he was simultaneously appointed as the leader of the Office for the Coordination of Commercial and Cultural Relations between the American Republics by President Roosevelt. This Office would be involved with the Latin American region and had no dealings with foreign policy regarding Europe, but it does show the interconnectedness and shared interests of the American government, popular, famous public figures, and cultural institutions. This is an early example of cultural diplomacy, which is closely linked to both Nelson A. Rockefeller as an individual and the Museum of Modern Art.149 Aside from political rallies, the performing arts, and media and film coverage, the Spanish Civil War was also present in prominent American museums during the raging conflict. In March and April of 1938 the MOMA presented Luis Quintanilla: An Exhibition of Drawings of the War in Spain. Spanish artist and author Luis Quintanilla had been a prominent Republican since the early days of the Second Spanish Republic. He had been incarcerated in 1934 when he was caught planning a socialist revolution in Spain. Shortly after, his good friends John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway organized a benefit exhibition of Quintanilla’s artworks in the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York as a sign of protest against Quintanilla’s imprisonment, but most importantly to introduce the artist to the American public. The two American authors also wrote the preface to the exhibition’s catalogue.150 The majority of Quintanilla’s work had been destroyed in the Madrid attacks during the Spanish Civil War, as Hemingway wrote in his preface for The Quintanilla MOMA exhibition in 1938. Hemingway described the artist’s role at the front in the Spanish Civil War, calling him “a great man” for his efforts in saving Madrid for the Republican government, protecting the capital through a fascist attack. Quintanilla made the drawings on

149 Darlene J. Sadlier, Americans All: Good Neighbor Cultural Diplomacy in World War II (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012), 10. 150 Keneth Kinnamon, "Hemingway and Politics," in The Cambridge Companion to Hemingway, ed. Scott Donaldson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 153. 47 display at the MOMA after the Spanish Republican Government had ordered him to use his artistic talents for the Republican Cause rather than continuing as a military commander. Hemingway invited the visitors to let the war drawings speak for themselves.151 Other contributors to the exhibition’s catalogue included American author Elliot Paul, who had written the book Life and Death of a Spanish Town (1937) about the effect of the Spanish Civil War on the civilian population of Ibiza and controversial leftist journalist Jay Allen who covered the Spanish Civil War for the Chicago Tribune.152 However, MOMA curator Alfred H. Barr concluded the catalogue by stating: “although the artist has been a participant in the Spanish Civil War he wishes these drawings to be considered as objective works of art, not as partisan documents. It is entirely in accordance with this intention that the Museum places them on exhibition.”153 In spite of taking an explicit neutral stance, Barr did advertise the sale of the artworks through the MOMA. Given Quintanilla’s steadfast commitment to the Spanish Republican Cause it is plausible that the revenue of the drawings would indirectly favor this cause as well.154 Pablo Picasso’s Guernica that became the most famous image of the atrocities that went on in Spain was the eye catcher of the 1939 MOMA exhibition Picasso: Forty Years of his Art. The painting became iconic for its depiction of human suffering as inflicted by war. Although the painting is often commemorated for its universality, it was directly inspired by one particular war atrocity as the title explicitly discloses: the bombing of the small Basque town on April 26, 1937 targeting civilians. Picasso had never manifested any political affiliations before, but the sharp division that was tearing up his native country did not leave him unmoved. As of 1936, Picasso strongly supported the Republican Cause. He ridiculed Francisco Franco in his art and he also supported his deposed government financially.155 Historians have increasingly challenged the importance of the bombing of Guernica for the progress of the Spanish Civil War and claim it has mostly Picasso’s portrayal to thank for its abiding reputation and significance. The success and meaning of a painting could sometimes

151 “Quintanilla: an exhibition of the war in Spain, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, March, 1938,” Museum of Modern Art New York, accessed June 12, 2019, https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_2965_300074164.pdf 152 Brewster Chamberlin, The Hemingway Log: A Chronology of His Life and Times (Lawrence KS: University Press of Kansas, 2015), 198. 153 “Quintanilla: an exhibition of the war in Spain, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, March, 1938,” Museum of Modern Art New York, accessed June 12, 2019, https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_2965_300074164.pdf 154 Ibidem. 155 Hugh Thomas, The Spanish Civil War (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode Publishers Ltd., 1961), 421. 48 have more of an impact than the coverage of the event itself in a newspaper or the speech of a government official. The catalogue of the Picasso exhibition was edited by curator Alfred H. Barr and prominently featured the etchings that Picasso created in the years between 1935 and 1937. These works discernibly mirror the violent events that were going on in Spain at the time. Minotauromaquia, depicting an extremely violent and threatening scene, is often referred to as “the direct precedent to Guernica.”156 Barr introduced the image as “probably Picasso’s most important print.”157 The series Sueño y Mentira de Franco, which is Picasso’s other work that most explicitly criticized the Spanish Civil War, and more specifically Franco’s cultural claims and military endeavors, is also included in the exhibition’s catalogue. Barr elaborated on the series: “These two plates were published together with a facsimile of a prose poem by Picasso, part of which is reproduced on the following page together with an English translation of the whole. The eighteen designs were subsequently printed separately in postcard format and sold for the benefit of the Spanish Republican Government.”158 Guernica is the only art work in the catalogue accompanied by a large description. Barr, whom The New York Times later described as “the most powerful tastemaker in the art world,”159 established the status of Guernica as protest art by describing the painting as “the artist’s revenge” to General Franco’s actions and “one of the most important paintings of recent years.”160 He let Picasso tell the story of the situation in Spain through his cubist brushstrokes. Barr also invited viewers to compare Guernica to the aforementioned works by Picasso, which had also been inspired by the Spanish Civil War.161 Nelson Rockefeller was also an admirer of Picasso’s Guernica. After his failed attempt to persuade Picasso to sell him his masterpiece, Rockefeller commissioned the tapestry workshop of Jacqueline de la Baume Dürrbach to make a reproduction with Picasso’s blessing. This tapestry later toured to war inflicted regions such as Hiroshima and Nagasaki before Rockefeller donated it to the UN headquarters.162 Before Guernica was installed on the wall of New York’s MOMA it was on view at the Art Institute in Chicago for a little over a month in the spring of 1939. Before that,

156 “Picasso Minotauro,” Museo Reina Sofia, accessed May 17, 2018, http://www.museoreinasofia.es/en/exhibitions/picasso-minotauro. 157 Alfred H. Barr ed., Picasso: Forty Years of his Art (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1939), 169. 158 Ibidem, 169. 159 Sibyl Gordon Kantor, Alfred H. Barr, Jr. and the Intellectual Origins of the Museum of Modern Art (Cambridge: the MIT Press, 2002), 6. 160 Alfred H. Barr ed., Picasso: Forty Years of his Art (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1939), 171-172. 161 Ibidem, 171. 162 “Réplica,” Museo Reina Sofia, accessed June 12, 2019, https://guernica.museoreinasofia.es/relato/replica. 49

Guernica had already been to San Francisco and Los Angeles to raise funds for the Spanish Refugee Relief Campaign. On December 15, 1939 Barr sent a radiogram to Picasso stating the enormous success of the exhibition in New York that had even surpassed the success of the record holding van Gogh exhibition: “Exposition succès colossal soixante mille visiteurs surpassant exposition vangogh stop puisque guerre empêche renvoi vos tableaux espère votre consentement leur inclusion tour triumphal grands centres cultureaux états unis.”163 This request of Barr to hold on to Picasso’s grand pieces a little while longer because of Europe’s political instability was granted by Picasso. He agreed to an extensive loan of all of his privately owned 96 works to MOMA up to 1958. This enabled MOMA’s successful exhibition to also travel to Boston, New Orleans, St. Louis, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and back to San Francisco during the first years of World War II with Guernica as a symbol for war inflicted human suffering. After the works returned to Picasso’s personal collection, Guernica still remained on extensive loan to the MOMA, because Picasso would not accept its return while Franco’s government was still standing in the way of the Spanish democracy.164 Ten years after Picasso: Forty Years of his Art, Alfred H. Barr Jr. published a book revisiting this highly anticipated exhibition that he had curated himself, elaborating on the importance of Picasso’s work: Picasso: Fifty Years of His Art. This work also enabled Barr to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard.165 Looking back at Guernica, from his 1946 perspective, Barr expanded its meaning from propaganda to a response of “horror and rage against brutality and darkness” which Barr interpreted as a prophecy of the violent years to come.166 Barr addressed the Spanish Civil War as a very serious political event of global scale that had “profoundly disturbed” Picasso: “an event of world importance (though at the time many felt it to be a crisis on merely a national scale).”167 Barr quoted MOMA trustee James Soby in calling the Spanish Civil War “the first European campaign of World War II enlisting the sympathies of artists throughout the world more than had any struggle since the Greek War of Independence over a hundred years before.”168 Barr highlighted Picasso’s own endeavors to raise money and support for the Spanish Republic by selling his works and starting to adopt

163 “Alfred H. Barr Jr.’s telegram to Pablo Picasso, dated 15 December 1939,” Museo Reina Sofia, accessed April 14, 2018, https://guernica.museoreinasofia.es/en/document/alfred-h-barr-jrs-telegram-pablo-picasso-dated- 15-december-1939. 164 “Original Stretcher for Picasso’s Guernica Rediscovered in MoMA Storage,” Museum of Modern Art New York, accessed April 14, 2018, https://www.moma.org/explore/inside_out/2016/09/07/original-stretcher-for- picassos-guernica-rediscovered-in-moma-storage/ 165 Sibyl Gordon Kantor, Alfred H. Barr, Jr. and the Intellectual Origins of the Museum of Modern Art (Cambridge: the MIT Press 2002), 4. 166 Alfred H. Barr Jr., Picasso: Fifty Years of his Art (London: London Secker and Warburg, 1975), 12. 167 Ibidem, 195. 168 Ibidem, 195. 50 political engagement in his art, which he had never done before. Barr emphasized Guernica’s role as “a public statement intended to arouse public feeling against the horrors of war and implicitly, at least, against Franco and his German bombers.”169 Although MOMA’s decision of exhibiting may not have been explicitly political or ideological, it did encourage Americans to think about the Spanish Civil War by looking at the conflict through the eyes of Spaniards Quintanilla and Picasso, enabling them to draw their own conclusions.

169 Alfred H. Barr Jr., Picasso: Fifty Years of his Art (London: London Secker and Warburg, 1975), 202. 51

Conclusion The Spanish Civil War marks an interesting period for United States foreign policy as the conflict is directly situated in between two world wars catching the United States at a vulnerable time. The Roosevelt administration was in the process of rebuilding the country’s domestic situation after the Wall Street crash of 1929, which had not only destroyed the country’s economy, but also paved the way for the American Communist Party to grow vigorously. Meanwhile, most Americans wanted to stay as far away from war as possible. After all, World War I was still a fresh and horrid memory and people were generally not keen on joining another foreign conflict. These years, right before the United States was dragged into World War II, also marked the shift from strict isolationism to interventionism. This thesis showed how this was far from a smooth transition, as the issue of the Spanish Civil War came to be a bone of contention within the United States. The United States government had to maneuver around in a tense political climate, being pressed on one side by a strong Catholic lobby, and being urged by leftist movement to formally support the Spanish Republic on the other. When it was already past the point of possibly being of meaningful help to the Republican government of Spain in 1938, President Roosevelt seemed to try to convince the American people that isolationist policies would not help to keep the United States out of war in the near future. However, Roosevelt did not manage to persuade Congress to abandon their isolationist convictions. Most scholars have assessed Roosevelt’s policy towards the Spanish Civil War as a mistake, arguing that he should have supported the Spanish Republic in order to stand firmly against the enemies of the upcoming world war in which the United States would inevitably partake. These scholars wrote their accounts with hindsight during the postwar era. Intellectuals at the time however, had a very similar perspective on the place that the Spanish Civil War would take within the broader context of world history. The second chapter showed how intellectuals across the board in cultural America took a stance for the Spanish Republican Cause and against fascism. The Spanish conflict managed to mobilize and politicize them, upon which they used their cultural vocation to spread their ideas and share them with the American public. Although the battles were taking place very far away from their homes, many American intellectuals recognized the conflict as a war that was just as much about them, as it was about the Spanish Republicans. They predicted how the conflict of ideologies, which had laid the groundwork for the Spanish Civil War and which had triggered third countries to get involved, would not be an isolated incident in European politics, but would induce the next world war. 52

American cultural individuals grew frustrated with the American government as the Spanish conflict continued, while it became more and more obvious that the Spanish Republic could only prevail with the help from third countries. The Spanish government itself had already turned to culture as a cry for help by commissioning artists to contribute politically engaging pieces to the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne in Paris in 1937. Cultural figures in the United States tried to press their government to stand up against fascism and adjust the Neutrality Acts, which would enable the Spanish Republicans to import essential war supplies. They joined various lobby organizations in Washington working to lift the Embargo, they wrote articles directly criticizing the government, hoping they would get the American public behind them, and they participated in anti-fascist rallies, all without any success. The approach of these cultural individuals to use their art to share and spread their beliefs, rather than going into politics and aim to influence policies in a more direct and official manner is understandable as Congress was very clear about their isolationist views, making it an insuperable mission to convince them to sway, even though the President showed signs of being sympathetic to the Spanish Republic. Furthermore, the Catholic lobby was extremely forceful in American politics, especially with presidential elections around the corner where Roosevelt was hoping to be reelected. It had been the habit of private institutions to carry out part of the ‘foreign policy’ under the system of isolationism since the 1920s. Therefore it is not surprising to have seen many organizations emerge with the goal to raise funds for Spanish relief such as the many organizations that were founded to organize fundraiser events during the Spanish Civil War by famous Americans. Organizations such as the North American Committee to aid Spanish Democracy took on the responsibility that the American government had disregarded. Media statements by figures such as Martha Gellhorn and Ernest Hemingway criticizing the United States government for neglecting their moral responsibility to get involved in the fight against fascism, while there still might have been a chance to protect the Western World from massive destruction were plenty. Nonetheless, they were well aware of the hopeless situation, not trusting their own government to step up. Gellhorn captured this desperation by stating “I don’t believe that anything any of us does now is useful. We just have to do it.” Due to this lack of influence on the government’s actions, many individuals in the cultural sector aimed to persuade the American public to get on board with the Spanish Republican Cause by sharing the war’s atrocities both through the media and through their artistic manifestations.

In spite of their best efforts, the shift from isolationism to interventionism did not occur until World War II. Although these cultural individuals were unsuccessful in their endeavors to break their country’s isolationist traditions and save the Spanish Republic, they still set in motion an expansive cultural movement that was undeniably important in the years of conflict that followed and that laid the groundwork for the Second Red Scare. Although many scholars have extensively dealt with Roosevelt’s own conflicting attitude towards the Spanish Republic, this element would be much more compelling with an understanding of the political tensions in the cultural climate of the late 1930s. The majority of the existing literature on the American reaction to the Spanish Civil War failed to recognize its importance and paid no special attention to the cultural sector within the opposition to the United States isolationist policy. Almost all of the intellectual figures that were discussed became subject of the government’s suspicion in the years that followed the Spanish Civil War. Their involvement in the conflict or the way they addressed its political implications in their art became a reason for the FBI to spy on these figures. The FBI even kept a file of 187 pages on Pablo Picasso over the course of 25 years, even though the artist never spent one day in the United States.170 The intellectuals working in Hollywood who had openly supported the Spanish Republic often ended up on a black list, making it impossible for them to share their political views with the public through the medium of film. Although files often originated from the period after the Spanish Civil War, the suspects’ activities during the Spanish conflict were always mentioned as suspicious behavior and put forward as enough legitimization to keep track of the individual in question. Since the discussed cultural individuals had been operating during the Democratic administration of President Roosevelt, their leftist convictions were still tolerated to an extent in the years before World War II. However, from 1946 onwards, Republicans took charge of both the Senate and the House of Representatives, taking advantage of the opportunity to drastically change the nation’s course that Roosevelt had initiated with his New Deal policies. Simultaneous with the Truman Doctrine, the House Un-American Activities Committee prospered, investigating those Americans who were suspected to undermine core American values. Blockade screenplay writer John Howard Lawson was one of the Hollywood Ten

170 Herbert Mitgang, “When Picasso Spooked the F.B.I.,” New York Times, November 11, 1990, accessed June 24, 2019, https://search-proquest- com.proxy.uba.uva.nl:2443/docview/108454302?rfr_id=info%3Axri%2Fsid%3Aprimo. 54 because of his reputation of being a “dogmatic Stalinist and humorless enforcer of communist discipline” who had “drastic ideas on every subject under the sun.”171 During his trial Lawson appealed to the First Amendment, when he was asked if he was a member of the Communist Party: “I am framing my answer in the only way in which any American citizen can frame his answer to a question which absolutely invades his rights…I shall continue to fight for the Bill of Rights, which you are trying to destroy.”172 Hemingway followed the HUAC trials nervously, fearing prosecution for being anti- fascist during the Spanish Civil War. In a letter to fellow writer Charles T. Lanham, he voiced his concerns: “now, in the course of the present witch hunt, all premature antifascists would probably end up in concentration camps.”173 Long time New York Times editor and proclaimed historian Herbert Mitgang recognized the importance of figures such as Picasso and Hemingway in his journalistic exposé Dangerous Dossiers: Exposing the Secret War Against America’s Greatest Authors. The author, who also claimed the Cold War to have already started in the final years of World War I, researched the dossiers that the FBI kept on famous intellectuals. Membership of organizations centered on anti-fascism or Spanish relief, or having advertized in any other way for the Spanish Loyalists would be a red flag for the FBI, leading them to open a file.174 The FBI’s working file on Ernest Hemingway consisting of 121 pages dates from 1942 and was kept until 1974, 13 years after the author’s death. It has since been partly declassified. The legitimization behind the file speaks clearly from its first few pages. Hemingway was being watched because he had “been accused of being of Communist sympathy, although we are advised that he has denied and does vigorously deny any Communist affiliation or sympathy.”175 Hemingway’s involvement in the Spanish Civil War had particularly sparked the FBI’s suspicion of the author. They monitored Hemingway’s contact with the Spanish Republican refugees that had been on the loosing side of the Civil War. Many had fled to Cuba where Hemingway was also residing. American intelligence expert Nicholas Reynolds claimed that the FBI was already watching Hemingway during the Spanish Civil War and his book Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy (2017) even goes as far as to unravel Hemingway’s secret past as a NKVD spy. Although

171 Nicholas Reynolds, Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy: Ernest Hemingway’s Secret Adventures, 1935-1961 (New York: HaperCollins Publishers, 2017), 197. 172 Ibidem, 197. 173 Ibidem, 199. 174 Herbert Mitgang, Dangerous Dossiers: Exposing the Secret War Against America’s Greatest Authors (New York: Open Road Media, 2015), chap. 2, Adobe ePub. 175 “FBI Records: The Vault: Ernest Hemingway,” The Federal Bureau of Investigation, accessed April 13, 2019, https://vault.fbi.gov/ernest-miller-hemingway/ernest-hemingway-part-01-of-01/view. 55

Reynolds did not manage to provide a ton of evidence to support this claim, he did stretch his argument even further, suggesting that the stress of his ties with the NKVD as an American during the 40s and 50s eventually led to Hemingway’s suicide. During his time working on The Spanish Earth with Joris Ivens, Hemingway evidently became acquainted with Soviet officials in Madrid but, although the FBI always watched Hemingway, they did not suspect him to have ties with the NKVD or later with the KGB.176 In 1940 Hemingway was involved in the protest that was triggered by the FBI’s arrest of 11 recruiters who had illegally enlisted volunteers for the Abraham Lincoln Brigades. This protest is even mentioned as an attack on the Bureau in the FBI’s file.177 His FBI file also shows trackings of Hemingway’s third wife, Martha Gellhorn, who was suspicious for reasons of her own, having covered the Spanish Civil War critical of United States government policies. Dorothy Parker’s file was already opened in the 1930s and it counted 900 pages, expanding until her death in 1967. She published critical articles throughout her life about a variety of topics causing the FBI to consider her to be an enormous threat to United States’ security. Parker’s membership of organizations such as the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, the United American Spanish Aid Committee, the Writers and artists Committee for Medical Aid to Spain, and the Friends of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade were especially suspicious to the FBI as many of these organizations were suspected to have communist ties.178 Although the House Un-American Activities Committee’s blacklisting of Hollywood professionals and the FBI’s espionage of many famous intellectuals is mostly associated with the Cold War era, the suspicion certainly found its roots in the years leading up to World War II where intellectuals were directly trying to influence the course of history. As we are left with such a vast amount of anti-fascist cultural material about the Spanish Civil War after it ended, it may have also influenced the way in which historians have adopted this ‘preamble of World War II’ narrative that became mainstream ever since the first scholarship on the topic emerged in the 1950s. However, historians who dealt with the American reaction to the Spanish Civil War have mostly failed to include this very important part of American society at the time. Although it is impossible to measure the actual influence of cultural products, the FBI certainly evaluated these cultural figures to be substantially threatening, given the fact

176 Brewster Chamberlin, The Hemingway Log: A Chronology of His Life and Times (Lawrence KS: University Press of Kansas, 2015), 180.181. 177 “FBI Records: The Vault: Ernest Hemingway,” The Federal Bureau of Investigation, accessed April 13, 2019, https://vault.fbi.gov/ernest-miller-hemingway/ernest-hemingway-part-01-of-01/view. 2. 178 Herbert Mitgang, Dangerous Dossiers: Exposing the Secret War Against America’s Greatest Authors (New York: Open Road Media, 2015), chap. 4, Adobe ePub. 56 that most of them were watched for decennia to come or even blacklisted by the House Un- American Activities Committee preventing them from pursuing their profession. Their activities regarding the Spanish Civil War were always mentioned as particularly suspicious.

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