Emblem on a Hill: A year’s worth of writing about literature, pop fiction, stray history, and other publishing adventures by Joseph Bottum

Author:Joseph Bottum [Bottum, Joseph]
Language: eng
Format: azw
Publisher: Remodeled Books
Published: 2016-11-21T00:00:00+00:00

The War in Spain Has Ended Long Ago

Adam Hochschild’s Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939

May 7, 2016

As recently as twenty years ago—maybe even just fifteen years ago—you had to know about the Spanish Civil War. That is, you had to know about it if you wanted to be a political commentator, a public intellectual, a voice in the ideological battles of the American public square.

To be an intern or a cub writer at the Nation or the Weekly Standard, the New Republic or National Review, even the editorial pages at the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times, you had to be able to talk about Alger Hiss and the Pumpkin Papers. Sacco and Vanzetti. The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. Maybe Big Bill Haywood and the Wobblies, too, but certainly the Rosenberg trial. And certainly the Spanish Civil War. You had to know about that 1930s struggle not just in the way a high school senior cramming for the AP history exam knows. You had to understand. You had to have a position.

Those days are gone, of course. The war in Spain has ended long ago / Aunt Rose, as Allen Ginsberg wrote in a cruel elegy for one of the radical activists of his parents’ generation. Still, this spring, the widely published writer Adam Hochschild released Spain in Our Hearts, a study of the role of Americans in the Spanish Civil War, from 1936 to 1939. And the response, a pouring out of reviews, has been interesting to watch. Interesting, that is, if one remembers the time not so long ago that a position on the war in Spain served as a marker—a useful synecdoche—for much of one’s social philosophy and political worldview.

It’s true that many of the recent reviews read like the work of former AP history students, regurgitating the received opinions of their textbooks with no more pain or passion than they would show reviewing books on Free Silver or the Thirty Years War. For them, the Spanish Civil War is simply an old event of easy judgment. Nationalists bad, Republicans good, of course. The interventions of Germany and Italy bad but typical of fascists, the interventions of the Soviet Union semi-bad but typical of communists, and the failure of the United States government to intervene maybe worst of all, because it reveals the hypocrisy of American rhetoric about support for democracy.

More interesting have been the reviews by the oldsters, the ones who remember the days when—even forty, fifty, sixty years after Generalissimo Franco’s victory ended the fighting—we took the Spanish Civil War as a living symbol for something important. The review in the New York Times, for example, was by Michael Kazin, co-editor of Dissent, an old-style leftist magazine whose very existence in these late days resounds like a call from a distant and dying trumpet. Bob Drogin, a longtime and old-fashioned newspaperman, reviewed the book for the Los Angeles Times, and “few distant conflicts are so burned into our culture and consciousness,” he notes.

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