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Adam Hochschild is known to most as the man behind the book “King Leopold’s Ghost,” which documents the rule of the Belgian Free State during the late 1800s. Back in 2016, Hochschild published the book “Spain In Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939.” I was first introduced to this book through a re-airing of an NPR interview between Hochschild and host Terry Gross. The general tone of this interview and Hochschild’s book paints a tragic but heroic picture of Spanish and international defenders of democracy standing up to the Nazi forces of Spanish nationalist general Francisco Franco, in a style similar to that of the Alamo: noble, brave and above all, a thoroughly vile oversimplification of the merits and crimes of the Spanish Republicans and the general context of a hideous civil war which killed hundreds of thousands and still divides Spanish society to this day.
Gross and Hochschild walk through the story of the civil war and the bits of history from American volunteers who joined both the Republicans and the Nationalists, but in every instance the general portrayal of the Republicans suggests that they were a hub of democracy and modernism standing against the fascist hordes of Hitler, Mussolini and their allies in Spain. Neither Gross nor Hochschild, broadcasting to millions of everyday Americans and audiences worldwide, indicate that though the Republicans had genuine democrats, there were plenty of non-democratic factions, the most notable being the Spanish Communists, who had no intention of preserving a democracy or keeping their rule bloodless. This is corroborated by several notable accounts of the war. Foreign volunteer George Orwell (Eric Blair) himself put great blame for the syndicalists’ destruction not on the Nationalists, but on the Communists, who were more busy attempting to persecute internal disputes than the war, in his account, “Homage to Catalonia.” Noted historian Antony Beevor studied the power corruption and purges led by Soviet-backed officials in his account “The Battle for Spain,” with multiple stories of Communist officials bungling the war effort in favor of short-term political gains.
In his book, interviews and lectures, Hochschild paints Franco’s decision to launch his coup less as an extreme reaction to already extreme political violence and more as just a premeditated, villainous plot to annihilate democracy and bring about a New Spanish Empire. By the time Franco launched his campaign to overthrow the Republic, mass murder against conservatives and the religious clergy had intensified greatly, itself a response to another military revolt attempt earlier by other army generals. Hochschild does however acknowledge the brutality inflicted on non-Republicans, as well as Nationalist atrocities, a rare moment of lucidity in the otherwise delirious fever dream that is his interview.
Hochschild’s factual and historical inaccuracies taint his accounts severely in book, interview and lecture, a particularly egregious one being his ignorance of the Spanish Falange (Phalanx) logo, arrows and a cattle yoke representing the union of Spain’s provinces as a single country. Hochschild ignores this cultural meaning to paint it as a symbol of war and subjugation, disregarding any of the cultural or spiritual meanings behind the Falange, completely detached from the realities people imprint upon those objects. Another blatant inaccuracy is the story of two New York Times reporters, Herbert Matthews and William Carney, as a microcosm of his worldview of the war. Matthews is the on-ground, down-to-earth reporter on democracy, contrasted with Carney, the backbencher Nationalist fanatic who waved for Franco from the sidelines. Yes, the Spanish Nationalists were more skeptical of reporters and hence put greater restrictions on them, but this ignores the fact that while Carney leaned towards the Nationalists, his articles often praised the bravery and diversity of fighters on both sides, one of his headlines reading, “Pilots on Both Sides Skillful and Daring…”—hardly the language of a committed fascist. What Hochschild engaged in here is not just a historical assassination, but a rather vile character one. To paint one as the only good man and the other as a villainous Franco sympathizer, when both men were well-regarded as journalists and their writings hold up historically to this day, is not only incompetent, but insidious.
In the NPR interview, Gross and Hochschild then talk about Franco’s anti-Semitism. It is well known that the Spanish Nationalists held an anti-Semitic streak, and that Franco himself was personally an anti-Semite. However, both Hochschild and Gross overlook the fact that though the regime was antisemitic, it granted travel visas to tens of thousands of Jewish refugees fleeing Germany’s advances throughout Europe. Franco and his regime held reprehensible views on Jews, but the allowance of visa-approved refugees indicates that it did not color all policy and gives a far greyer picture than initially portrayed.
Gross then goes on to talk about Soviet support within the Republicans, something which Hochschild noticeably sidesteps in the interview until that is brought up. None of the Soviet-directed communist purges on anarchists, democrats or anti-Stalinists are brought up in the interview, his book or his lecture. In fact, his accounts seem to be so pro-Soviet that the World Socialist Web Site itself criticized it for being Stalinist, a heady hit for a man trying to appear to be the objective rewriter of history. Ironically a lecture on his book, he dubs it, “Rewriting the Spanish Civil War.”
A glaring personal tale Hochschild leaves out in his accounts is the story of Peter Kemp, a British monarchist volunteer who served amongst the Nationalists and who saw the atrocities on both sides, painting a more lucid picture of a war driven by romanticized ideology devolving into base violence amongst humans. Kemp himself was ordered to supervise an Irish volunteer’s execution, the experience severely traumatizing him (especially when he discovered those orders were countermanded too late). Hochschild does mention George Orwell in his lecture on the war, but mainly discusses his joining it, and not that the war made Orwell a devoted anti-Communist. Likely this famous volunteer was skipped over for the fact that his bitter experiences from being backstabbed by the Stalinists would hurt Hochschild’s fantasy of a Soviet democracy standing up to Franco.
Besides the glaring overlooking of various accounts that would have hurt the Soviet factions’ narrative of the Spanish Civil War, the NPR interview with Gross and Hochschild constantly portraying Franco as a committed fascist is a blatant oversimplification of a man who, while he worked with many and may have held some beliefs, was overtly not one himself. There was no major attempt to raise the masses into an extremist nationalist fervor, and many of the genuine fascists among the Falange were later sent off to the eastern front with the Germans to be rid of by combat. The labeling of right-wing dictators or authoritarians with the blanket term “fascist” is a disservice to history, and ironically diminishes the meaning of “fascist” itself, from the mass-mobilizing ultra-dynamic radical of replacing God with Man and more just a generalized label of extreme authoritarianism.
Adam Hochschild is a great storyteller. His interviewee skills are captivating, and he goes along with his story very well. It is a great story for a rose-tinted version of a civil war where neighbors shot each other for being leftists or churchgoers, children were kidnapped to be raised under “better” parents, and communities were erased for leaning to one side or the other. There is no coverage of the Communist massacres of non-Communist Republicans, the incompetence of the Soviet-led factions in driving the Republican armies to repeated attritional battles for show or, for that matter, the indication that by the closing years of the war, the Republican factions were less the democracy they once were and primarily a Soviet client state, where anti-Stalinists were shot and free speech less expressive than even the most radical of Franco’s Nationalists.
Hochschild’s interview with Terry Gross on NPR, his book “Spain in Our Hearts” and his lecture on that book should be a warning to society, that though mainstream historical academia prides itself on supposedly objective analysis, bad actors with rosy goggles such as Hochschild can irrevocably reinforce myths or create new fictions to rewrite atrocities and reframe alignments, and that alone is incredibly disrespectful to the war’s victims, as well as dangerous to future interpretations.