Recalling a Battle Against Tyranny

...In 1951 Nancy Macdonald went to work for the International Rescue Committee (IRQ, which was aware of the Spanish problem and had a section searching out and assisting needy Civil War refugees in a desultory fashion...

...By 1941 the Macdonalds had parted ways with the Schachtmanites because of the bureaucratic nature of Trotskyite party organization, and were drifting toward the kind of libertarian attitude natural to both of them...

...If I became involved in helping Tibetan refugees, and later in working through small groups to rehabilitate Indian villages, it was largely because Nancy had shown the way by demonstrating in her own efforts how bands of volunteers with comparatively little money could achieve uncommon results once they moved out from under the umbrella of large and expensive charitable bureaucracies like the Red Cross and Care...

...That led Dwight to found politics in 1944 as a magazine broadly open to the non-Communist Left but veering strongly in the direction of anarchism...

...I became its London correspondent—turning an acquaintance into a friendship that has continued with Nancy to this day (Dwight died in 1982) and has given me a personal viewpoint on what she recounts in Homage to the Spanish Exiles...

...Essentially, she set out to help those of her fellow libertarians who were abandoned by everybody else...

...It set the stage for World War II and gave useful military practice to several of the combatant nations...

...I am sure we are not the only people who have been inspired by her example to assist others...

...Her devotion, which shines through the pages of this book, has been a lasting inspiration to me...

...In fact, Homage to the Spanish Exiles is especially interesting as well as valuable because it so accurately fulfills its title...

...Friends of politics like Hannah Arendt, Nicola Chiaromonte and Victor Serge began to send in names of people in need of money and clothes, food and medicine...

...We are reminded of all this in the accounts of their experiences that Nancy gathered from the refugees she aided...

...Her book is a chronicle of unknown, unfamous people caught in the mill of history...

...It was, moreover, the first and only time the idea of free communism long preached by Piotr Kropotkin and other anarchists was successfully applied in the collective farms and factories of Catalonia and other parts of Loyalist Spain...

...Nancy Macdonald gives us just enough autobiographical material to explain her own involvement, and just enough history of the SRA to illustrate its highly unbureaucratic operation— its reliance on people attracted by a sense of affinity to those they helped, rather than by the hope of a career in a charitable organization...

...Increasingly, though, the IRC concentrated on refugees from behind the Iron Curtain, and by the early 1950s it started phasing out its work for Spaniards—a decision linked to the loss of Ford Foundation support that also resulted in Nancy losing her job at the IRC...

...Both were going through a political evolution in the late 1930s and the early 1940s that moved them from Communism to Trotskyism to the faction of Max Schachtman, who dissented from Trotsky by claiming that Russia was no longer a Workers' State...

...Nancy Macdonald's interest in Spain began when she first went to the country in 1932,20 years before SRA was founded...

...they found their own ways of doing reasonably well in exile...

...She got together an international group of sponsors, hired a small staff of workers in New York and in France, and started Spanish Refugee Aid...

...Even in the world of the 1930s, Franco and his generals had no monopoly on brutality...

...Beyond such necessary information, Nancy characteristically tends to efface herself and her organization, concentrating instead on what to her is most vital—the Spanish fighters for freedom whom she encountered and their stories...

...they were, however, the first to apply the already existing concept of total war to civil war, an example followed by an endless series of military adventurers in South American, African and Asian countries...

...But these reports are also important and frequently very moving because they enable one to see into the minds of uncelebrated men and women who resisted tyranny and, although fortunate not to have died in the struggle as many did, paid their own price in an exile that often seemed entirely desperate...

...Consequently, in late 1945 the magazine launched its Packages Abroad project as—in Dwight's words—"a token of fraternal feeling across national boundaries...

...The individuals who received support were anarchists or members of the various Left-Socialist groups...

...Some of the beneficiaries were Spaniards, but they were in the minority: Many of the Civil War refugees had been sent to concentration camps in Germany or were incorporated into Nazi-controlled labor forces, and nobody knew how many survived the rigors of the War years...

...It was Nancy who organized this undertaking, sending tens of thousands of packages of food and clothing, and getting people to "adopt" individuals and families to aid them directly...

...It combines with the autobiography of a modest and dedicated woman a late record of what it meant to be a double loser in the Spanish Civil War...

...Nor did any of the well-known leaders of the CNT (the anarcho-syndicalist trade union organization) or the FAI (the CNT's militant wing) appear in Nancy's lists...

...During the 31 years that she directed SRA, the organization raised over $5 million and gave help to more than 10,000 refugees, in most cases on a long-term basis...

...at thesametime, itisanotable contribution to libertarian and Leftsocialist history, registering the promise along with the horror of those tragic years...

...Reviewed by George Woodcock The underlying subject of Homage to the Spanish Exiles is the life's work of a remarkable, extraordinarily modest woman, and any reviewer or reader who responds sensitively to the book must pay his own homage to Nancy Macdonald...

...On the positive side, the Spanish Civil War presented in its initial stages the rare spectacle of a people rising up and refusing to accept military dictatorship...

...Communists were not included, since they were being looked after by their fellows in the French Communist Party...

...Yet the Spanish Civil War actually was the prelude to many of these events...

...The courage and the good humor a great many of them have exhibited in telling about their hardest times is exceptional...

...But it is also, as Mary McCarthy suggests in her Introduction, the record of "a vocation—a calling, such as happens to figures in religious history...

...Homage to the Spanish Exiles fills in a host of missing details...

...In 1935 she married Dwight Mcdonald, and when he later became an editor of Partisan Review she joined the magazine as business manager...

...What she has written is the story of an organization called Spanish Refugee Aid (SRA), whose moving spirit she was for a third of a century, and of the Spanish fighters for freedom it brought her into contact with during that long period...

...Much in the way of documents and recollections was lost in the process...

...Like McCarthy, I have known Nancy Macdonald and done my modest bit to help her work for many years...

...Deeply conscious of the continuing need to help the tens of thousands of people, most of them ill and old, who were still eking out a wretched existence in an unsympathetic France, Nancy decided to act on her own initiative...

...The history of the defeated is always scantier than that of the victors, and the Spanish anarchists and Left Socialists were twice defeated—first by the Communists and their allies behind the Loyalist lines from May 1937 onward, and only afterward by Franco'stroops...

...It was then, in 1938, that I first came into contact with her and Dwight...

...Indeed, the very name of the small society my wife and I set up in Canada in 1962, Tibetan Refugee Aid, was an admiring echo and a tribute to the organization Nancy had set up a decade before...

...The effect is to reopen, through the memories of the participants, a chapter of history that in recent years has been largely buried under the detritus of later events...

...Nancy Macdonald's book is thus a real homage...

...Not long after politics began publication, as the War in Europe drew to an end, it became evident that a large number of Left-wing Europeans who had somehow endured the persecution for their beliefs were living in great distress...