Abstract
In June 1946, a United Nations Sub-Committee published a long and damning report, cataloguing the help provided by Franco to Nazi Germany during the World War II. It demonstrated that while Spain had not actually come into the war on the side of the Axis, it had certainly not remained neutral. Consequently, during the latter half of the 1940s, Spain was ostracized by the western powers and denied admission into the United Nations. Yet, by 1950, as the priorities of the world war were supplanted by those of the cold war, it was important to recast Franco’s dictatorship as a necessary bulwark against potential Soviet expansionism. In order to provide his regime with some element of legitimacy, this necessitated tarnishing the reputation of the former Spanish Republic, ‘the last remaining jewel in the Communist crown’. Consequently, agencies such as the central intelligence agency (CIA)-sponsored Congress for Cultural Freedom and the British Foreign Office’s Information Research Department were charged with supporting and promoting writers who could help legitimize and disseminate this world view. Their efforts are the subject of Anthony Burrowes’ Historians at War, an ambitious new study that examines the impact on four key Anglo-American writers on Spain.
Rather than adopting a comparative structure, Burrowes tackles each writer in turn. His first subject is George Orwell, whose Homage to Catalonia remains the most widely read book in English on the conflict. Politically out of step with much pro-Republican thinking at the time, the book flopped when it was initially published in 1938. However, it scored much more success when it was republished in 1952, when its anti-Communist message struck a powerful chord with western cold-war attitudes. Burrowes’ second subject is the renowned Hispanist, Gerald Brenan, whose enduringly popular Spanish Labyrinth was first published in 1943. Strongly pro-Republican during the civil war, Brenan returned to Franco’s Spain to live in 1950, a strange choice for an anti-Francoist. The third writer, Burnett Bolloten, was, like Orwell, important in helping reinterpret the Civil War as one in which the principal story was the vicious crushing of the anti-Stalinist Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification (POUM) by the Communists. As Burrowes recounts, critics have long wondered whether the one-time Republican supporter had been ‘got at’ and questions were asked about the source of his funding. One of Bolloten’s fiercest critics was Herbert Southworth, the fourth writer under examination, who was infamous for his ruthless and forensic demolition of the work of official Francoist historians. So effective was the work of Southworth (and others such as Hugh Thomas) that the dictatorship was forced to create an entire department within the Ministry of Information to counter them.
Burrowes’ book raises a number of important and demanding questions: How much did the Cold War actually impact upon Spanish Civil War historiography? Was it the cause of deliberate distortion and misrepresentation? Did the intellectuals, writers and historians who benefitted, albeit indirectly, from CIA financial largesse know who was holding the purse strings? And how much were the four writers’ wider outlooks influenced and framed by the Cold War? Establishing definitive answers to all of these questions is not straightforward, not least because influence is often subtle and hard to gauge. And Burrowes’ already demanding task was not helped by a limited access to archives, intelligence files and with no funding for freedom of information (FOI) requests. Consequently, as the author admits, ‘some conclusions in Historians at War have to be drawn on the grounds of what was most likely, based on circumstantial evidence’. While Burrowes concludes, I believe correctly, that the four writers’ work was clearly appropriated; yet he was unable to find any definitive evidence that any of them were actually coerced into writing cold war compliant arguments, nor establish how useful to the anti-Communist cause they really were. Nevertheless, he has a number of interesting things to say, particularly about Orwell and Bolloten.
Cautious though his conclusions may be, Burrowes’ book undoubtedly makes an important contribution towards deconstructing some of the enduring myths established during the cold war. Like Sebastiaan Faber’s study of Anglo-American Hispanists that precedes it, this book should prove to be of interest beyond professional historians and students, for this is no dry academic (pun intended) debate. As even a cursory examination of the contemporary Spanish media will demonstrate, it is not just historians who become embroiled in memory wars.