The Spanish Civil War began on July 17, 1936 as a series of right-wing insurrections within the military, staged against the constitutional government of the five-year-old Second Spanish Republic. Because it was the first major military contest between left-wing forces and fascists, and attracted international involvement on both sides, the Spanish Civil War has sometimes been called the first chapter of World War II.
The rebels, or Nationalists as they came to be known, were backed by a spectrum of political and social conservatives including the Catholic Church, the fascist Falange Party, and those who wished to restore the Spanish monarchy. They received aid in the form of troops, tanks, and planes from Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, and Germany field-tested some of its most important artillery in Spain. With the rise of General Francisco Franco as leader of the Nationalist coalition, the threat of fascism’s spread across Europe visibly deepened.
The Republicans were backed by Spanish labor unions and a range of anti-fascist political groups, from communists and anarchists to Catalonian separatists to centrist supporters of liberal democracy. The Republicans received aid from the Soviet Union and from Mexico, but their most likely European allies signed a joint agreement of nonintervention. The most visible international aid came in the form of volunteers. Estimates vary, but as many as 60,000 individuals from over fifty countries joined the International Brigades to fight for the cause of the Spanish Republic. Between two and three thousand of these volunteers were men and women from the United States—most served with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.
. . .The Spanish Civil War, especially the anti-fascist side, became a cause célèbre in the United States. Writers and artists including novelist Ernest Hemingway, poets Muriel Rukeyser and Langston Hughes, and painter Robert Motherwell paid homage to the struggling Republic in their work. Baritone Paul Robeson sang for the international brigades. The anarchist Emma Goldman led an English-language publicity campaign. Fictional character Rick Blaine, protagonist of the 1942 film classic Casablanca, struggled against fascism in Spain, as did Robert Jordan, the hero of Hemingway’s 1940 novel For Whom the Bell Tolls.
Franco’s forces won in 1939 and he remained in power until 1975. As the Philadelphia Daily News editorialized at the time (this is the complete editorial): “They say only the good die young. Generalissimo Francisco Franco was 82. Seems about right.”
NewMexiKen was in Madrid in 1992. A crowd had gathered to watch and listen to some Peruvian pan-flutists (they were still a novelty then). The crowd was just enjoying itself when the police told us to disperse — and to my eternal amazement everyone did without a murmur of protest. In the U.S., the police would have been verbally abused at a minimum; in Madrid, nothing.
Repression comes on fast but leaves only slowly.
(Actually I did murmur a little, but I was traveling on a diplomatic passport and decided discretion was more important than valor, even if I was immune from prosecution.)