Spain in Our Hearts
CBC Books | CBC | Posted: April 24, 2017 6:41 PM | Last Updated: April 24, 2017
Adam Hochschild
For three crucial years in the 1930s, the Spanish Civil War dominated headlines in America and around the world, as volunteers flooded to Spain to help its democratic government fight off a fascist uprising led by Francisco Franco and aided by Hitler and Mussolini. Today we're accustomed to remembering the war through Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls and Robert Capa's photographs. But Adam Hochschild has discovered some less familiar yet far more compelling characters who reveal the full tragedy and importance of the war: a fiery nineteen-year-old Kentucky woman who went to wartime Spain on her honeymoon, a Swarthmore College senior who was the first American casualty in the battle for Madrid, a pair of fiercely partisan, rivalrous New York Times reporters who covered the war from opposites sides, and a swashbuckling Texas oilman with Nazi sympathies who sold Franco almost all his oil — at reduced prices, and on credit. (From Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
From the book
Today we remember the American Communist Party as the handmaiden of a ruthless and ultimately failed Soviet dictatorship. But as the historian Ellen Schrecker has written, it was also "the most dynamic organization within the American Left during the 1930s and '40s." Thanks to its influential role in great labor battles like the San Francisco waterfront strike and its pioneering efforts to organize farmworkers, the Party had won respect from many far beyond its small membership. In a highly segregated and sexist age, it campaigned to get black Americans onto jury and voter rolls and fought for the rights of women. A New York trade unionist, who would later cross paths with Merriman in Spain, joined the Party after he saw members of its youth league defiantly carrying the belongings and furniture of newly evicted tenement dwellers back upstairs to their apartments. "There was an organization that didn't just talk, but actually did something."
From Spain in Our Hearts by Adam Hochschild ©2016. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.