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 posed a major threat to international political equilibrium, and Americans watched closely the events of the conflict. The brutality of the situation also forced many Americans to question the United States' post-World War I noninterventionist policies. Between 500,000 and 1 million Spaniards, both soldiers and civilians, died from war or war-engendered disease and starvation, and thousands more became displaced refugees.
In an interview conducted with members of El Club Español (The Spanish Club) in Barre, Vermont, John (née Juan) Bavine puzzled:
I do not understand it. The Spain I knew years ago was a quiet country, she love' peace. Her farmers work' the rich fields. Her artists were proud to make beautiful our big cities an' cathedrals. We were 22,000,000 people who want only to be left alone - an' now what. You see beautiful cathedrals all smash' an' buried; the cities in ruin. A friend of mine, he say the other day that one Spaniard he is killed every nine minutes. Every nine minutes. God, that is terrible! More than one million of them lay dead from this war.
"Memorandum to Dr. Botkin,"
Barre, Vermont,
Mary Tomasi, interviewer, July 29, 1940.
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.
The Spanish Civil War continued until March 28, 1939, when Nationalist troops led by Franco overcame the Republic's forces and entered Madrid. Just months after the Spanish Civil War ended, Germany invaded Poland and World War II began. Faced with the devastation of his country, Franco declared Spain at first a neutral and then a nonbelligerent nation during World War II, though his sympathies clearly lay with Axis powers.
Francisco Franco sustained a military dictatorship for almost forty years, until his death in 1975. Almost immediately, Spain began a peaceful transformation away from dictatorship; its present democratic constitution was formalized in 1978.
Source: Library of Congress
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