Eric R. Smith. American Relief Aid and the Spanish Civil War.

Abstract

The story of United States involvement in the Spanish Civil War, in much of the historiography and in popular memory, has tended to focus on the small contingent of U.S. citizens who volunteered in Europe on the side of the Spanish Republic, a group famously dramatized in Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). Yet as Eric R. Smith demonstrates, it is also important to study the movement to aid Republican Spain within the United States and to appreciate how debates over the Spanish conflict shaped contemporary American political culture. Supporters of the Spanish Republic, Smith argues, called isolationism and neutrality into question while embracing a politics of antifascism and liberal internationalism. In so doing, they formed a critical vanguard of pro-interventionist Americans in the years immediately preceding World War II. At the center of Smith's narrative stands a broad coalition of U.S. individuals and organizations, which together made up the movement to aid Republican Spain. Composing this informal alliance were communists, anarchists, socialists, and liberals, many of whom identified with the period's Popular Front. They populated a variety of aid and lobbying organizations, most notably the Medical Bureau and the North American Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy. Though dissimilar in many respects, the members of this movement united in their support of Spanish democracy and their mutual hostility toward Francisco Franco and fascism. Together, they urged the U.S. government and their fellow citizens to intervene in Spain's conflict while trying to generate public support for such expanded international commitments.