Spain's Struggle
Thomas, Norman
Spain's Struggle Spain's Struggle for Freedom, by Lawrence Fernsworth. Beacon Press. 376 pp. $6. Reviewed by Norman Thomas This is a book to be warmly commended to all those—and their number...
...With one warning, I renew my commendation of a warm and vivid story of Spain's struggle for freedom...
...Fernsworth has deliberately chosen to give us a bird's eye view of Spanish history in order to help us understand the present of her people...
...But commended with a caution to which I'll come later...
...What would have happened if it had failed...
...Lawrence Fernsworth is a lover of Spain and her people who lived within her borders in her years of hope and of agony...
...While the author's point of view on Franco's rebellion and his dictatorship is correct and enlightening, the reader should not believe that he has acquired adequate knowledge on some very important problems...
...In a book of moderate length, Fernsworth reviews Spanish history from its early roots, through the Haps-burg and Bourbon monarchies, the "gallant adventure" of the Second Republic, and its tragic downfall...
...So far as I could make out on my visit, most of the production, and the management of railways and hotels, was in the hands of either the anarchist-syndicalists or the socialist unions...
...That survey makes us conscious of Spain's heritage, her gifts to mankind, her achievements, and her recurring tragedies...
...Fernsworth—who is no Communist but a critic of Communism—dismisses too easily evidence of the extent of Communist inter penetration under Negrin's government...
...Fernsworth says little or nothing about the way some sort of daily life was kept going in the desperate confusion of the civil war...
...He writes in the faith that her struggle for freedom is not lost and that Franco's dictatorship cannot be the last word...
...It cannot cover so much ground and yet deal thoroughly with important problems of the recent past or the present...
...He writes as a good journalist with a feeling for human incident and for color...
...Hence my word of caution...
...In the long struggle for freedom in Spain, Fernsworth's chief villain is the Roman Catholic Church— not the Catholic religion to which many crusaders for freedom have been loyal, but the hierarchical organization and, with few exceptions, its prelates...
...There is little discussion or documentation of the way in which the Spanish struggle tied in with the wretched world politics of the 1930s...
...In his concluding section, "Transition," he examines Franco's government and discusses our pacts with it and essays a prediction of a future for freedom in a situation "loaded with warheads" which may yet escape catastrophic explosion...
...He does not discuss the theory that the German-Italian-Francoist drive which brought victory to the rebels was a small rehearsal of the blitzkreig (union of tanks, planes, and infantry) which later brought free Europe close to destruction...
...And, under the circumstances, they did well...
...Or even if the French had learned its military lesson...
...Reviewed by Norman Thomas This is a book to be warmly commended to all those—and their number ought to be legion—who want to know more about Spain and Spaniards...
...In passing, Fernsworth, correctly I think, speaks of President Roosevelt's "capitulating to Catholic political pressure," but a statement like that requires documentation which he does not give...
...In the early summer of 1937, hotels in Barcelona and Valencia were better run, my wife and I thought, than in Russia from which we had just come...
...Fernsworth passes too lightly over the way factionalism weakened the Spanish loyalists and their failure to produce one great military leader devoted to democracy's cause...
...To illustrate Communist power from a small fact, I can testify from my own experience in Spain how successfully Communists in the government after the coup which brought about Caballero's downfall manipulated my visit so that I should not see people and things I wanted to see...
...And he gives too few details of the crimes committed in Spain by Stalin's secret police...
Vol. 22 • June 1958 • No. 6
