Facing Fascism: New York and the Spanish Civil War [Paperback]

Peter N. Carroll (Editor), James D. Fernandez (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1, 2007 | ISBN-10: 0814716814 | ISBN-13: 978-0814716816

When the Spanish Civil War began in 1936, loosely affiliated groups of writers, artists, and other politically aware individuals emerged in New York City to give voice to anti-fascist sentiment by supporting the Spanish Republic. Facing Fascism: New York and the Spanish Civil War examines the participation of New Yorkers in the political struggles and armed conflict that many historians consider a critical precursor to World War II. Nearly half of the 2,800 Americans who volunteered to fight in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade against Generalissimo Francisco Franco came from the New York area. Fundraising, propaganda, and deployment for anti-fascists everywhere in America were orchestrated through New York City. At the same time, powerful voices in New York expressed sympathy for the pro-fascist side.

The fighting in Spain brought to the surface the complex ideological and ethnic identities always present in New York politics. Facing Fascism examines the full range of this experience, including that of the New Yorkers who supported Franco. It addresses the role of doctors, nurses, and social workers who left New York hospitals to provide assistance to the defenders of the Spanish Republic, as well as those who remained active on the home front. The book also describes the involvement of students in the war, the key role of writers and the media, and the contributions made by members of New York's art and theater communities.

Facing Fascism also serves as the catalog to an exhibition of the same name appearing at the Museum of the City of New York in the spring of 2007. The book and exhibition both make use of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives' extensive holdings, which range from historical documents to video recordings of oral histories. Numerous other libraries, archives, museums, and private collectors have also been consulted to make this the most complete exhibition of its kind ever mounted. The exhibition will also appear in Spain.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“The editors of this well-illustrated collection of essays bring together a distinguished group of historians, writers, and archivists, including Joshua Brown, E. L. Doctorow, Patrick McNamara, Robert Snyder, and Mike Wallace, to shed light on the city's role in this civil war. Between the collection's glossy covers are intellectually engaging and cleverly written essays exploring New York's contributions to the war effort.”
-Choice

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About the Author

Peter N. Carroll is Chair of the Board of Governors of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives. He is the author or editor of fifteen books, including The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade: Americans in the Spanish Civil War andThe Good Fight Continues: World War II Letters from the Abraham Lincoln Brigade (NYU Press, 2006), co-edited with Michael Nash and Melvin Small.

James D. Fernandez is Director of the King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center and Chair of the Department of Spanish at New York University. He is the author of Apology to Apostrophe: Autobiography and the Rhetoric of Self-Representation in Spain (Duke, 1992).

Product Details

• Paperback: 228 pages
• Publisher: NYU Press (March 1, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0814716814
• ISBN-13: 978-0814716816
• Product Dimensions: 10 x 7 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.9 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #984,241 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Facing fascism but not Stalinism, December 28, 2007

By 

Harry Eagar (Maui) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Facing Fascism: New York and the Spanish Civil War (Paperback)

Gad! Ack! Is there anything so tedious as the self-righteousness of a Stalinist?

Yes, the self-righteousness of a Trotskyist.

Especially when enshrined in a gallery.

"Facing Fascism" is the catalogue of an exhibition (which I did not see) at the Museum of the City of New York, which was sponsored by -- surprise! surprise! -- Abraham Lincoln Battalion admirers and the government of Spain. It was an interesting, but depressing, show.

The 16 academic contributors try, not very successfully, to show an even hand. Their problem is that they are all committed to the view that the show is about, in Eric Smith's words, "the obvious struggle between democracy and fascism." Spanish democracy was a fleeting thing, and by the time the Americans -- under the lash of the Popular Front (that is, Stalin) -- got organized to "help," the democrats were on the way out.

The struggle was between two totalitarianisms.

Nor was it a "prelude to World War II," as several of the essayists aver. The Spanish tragedy was a postlude, not a prelude, the second-to-the-last war of the European 19th century (the war among the South Slavs in the 1990s being the last, I hope).

Some naifs may have fallen for the claptrap about fighting for Spanish democracy, but few of the hard-bitten veterans of New York's savage infighting among Stalinists, Trotskyists, Lovestoneites etc. were under any delusions about being on the side of democracy, on either side of the ocean.

The exhibit is a paean to New York's lively leftism -- the area provided up to half of the American contributions of soldiers, money and aid workers to Republican Spain. And, since it was New York, where you can get anything you want, also the source of most of the support for Franco and his buddies Mussolini and Hitler.

The story of the brigadistas has been often told before. One would have liked a bit more about the anti-Republican side, the Catholic Church and the newspapers, who were anticommunist without being antifascist.

The Catholics, except the group around William Buckley and his National Review, would like us to forget how cozy they (many of them, and all the bishops) were with Franco, Mussolini and Hitler back in the day. Here was an opportunity for the curators to make hay out of real grass, and they, surprisingly, took only modest advantage of it.

The biggest single section -- obviously because it is the most graphic -- is devoted to the "response" of the visual and, to a slightly lesser extent, textual artists. The curators, of course, want us to see this as the voice of the conscience of freedom, as presented to us hoi polloi by the noble creative artists.

Well, as compared with the same moral imbeciles offering up the same fetid lessons today about Iraq, at least some of the 1930s artists had the courage to go fight and (in too many cases) get killed. But to my eye, page after page of drawings of suffering Spanish peasants demonstrates not the flaming concern for freedom and humanity of these creeps, but the absence of any similar collection of drawings of Ukrainian peasants who had had the bad luck to own a cow.

The exhibit carries the Spanish tragedy down through the years, where it still resonates, ever more weakly, with "progressive" (that is, antidemocratic) thought in New York City today. Steven Jaffe quotes socialist Michael Harrington, too young to have been there, as saying in 1977, "I had read and internalized my Orwell, I knew the crimes committed by the GPU in the name of antifascism in Spain; and yet, I never cease to thrill at the songs of the International Brigade."

So do I. "La Quinta Brigada" stirs the blood. But after 70 years, it should have cooled enough to allow a more grown-up assessment of what editor Peter Carroll calls "the complexities and nuances of the years leading up to World War II."

"Facing Fascism" offers all too much nuance, all too little realism.