Spain: A Unique History (6 page)

The year 1962-63, dedicated to researching the politics of the military, was memorable for a number of things, but perhaps most of all because it was the last full year that I spent in Spain in which the old social and cultural order was largely intact. After May 1963 I passed the longest period of my life without returning to the country. I was busy with a new position in UCLA, developing new courses, and becoming a father, and I did not return to Spain until September 1967, a period of more than four years. The mid-1960s constituted a turning point in economic development, and when I got back to Madrid I found that things were not the same. It was not merely that the number of automobiles had greatly increased, so that I encountered the first major "modern" traffic jams that I had ever seen in Spain, but more importantly that social and cultural attitudes were also changing rapidly. The ambience was much more liberal and more hedonist, almost exaggeratedly so, much more in line with attitudes and values in contemporary western Europe.

Research on the politics of the military was in some ways more difficult than working on the Falange, the possibilities of oral history greatly reduced. I spent a considerable amount of time that year at the Servicio Histórico Militar, then on the calle de los Mártires de Alcalá, and used the same heterogeneous mix of source materials that had been employed in the Falangist study. The resulting book was published by Stanford in 1967 and soon afterward in a Spanish edition by Ruedo Ibérico. Its most important finding was that in political terms the military were not as much of an independent variable as most of us had thought. Although they had intervened, or tried to intervene, many times between 1814 and 1936, these interventions, whether successful or not, were much more dependent on general political variables than on the purely independent volition or ambitions of the military. This book was also very well received, particularly in a major review by Gerald Brenan in the
New York Times Book Review
.

It was completed after I had moved to Los Angeles, where I taught at UCLA from 1963 to 1968, passing rapidly through the ranks from assistant professor to full professor, and serving also as vice-chairman of the department (my first term in administration) in 1967-68. Though I had lived the greater share of my early life in California, and though in the mid-twentieth century Los Angeles had remained a very attractive city, that too was changing rapidly by the 1960s. The enormous expansion and crowding, the massive volume of traffic on the freeways and elsewhere, the growth of smog and other pollution, and the pervasive influence of a peculiarly Southern California/Hollywood form of hedonism and materialism — all contributed to an increasingly disagreeable ambiance. My wife and I decided in 1968 that we would be happier in a more tranquil and stable environment at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, whose environs were rather more similar to those of a major European university, such as Cambridge or Marburg, located in a small city.

During the Los Angeles years I was also involved in my first major undertaking in broader European history, being asked by my old mentor Shepard Clough to write part of a new multivolume textbook called A History of the Western World (but meaning essentially the history of Europe, the Mediterranean, and the ancient Near East, at least in the original version.) Together with Otto Pflanze, the noted historian of Germany, who had been my colleague at Minnesota, I wrote the third volume on nineteenth and twentieth-century Europe, published in December 1964. This project went through two revised editions during the next eight years, in which it was broadened to become one of the first of the subsequently fashionable histories of the world. It also became more extensively illustrated, enjoying a viable commercial life of about a decade and a half, the first publishing project from which I drew any significant income in royalties.

I was also asked by the New York publishing firm Thomas Y. Crowell to write a very brief study of the contemporary situation in Spain, which became the short volume
Franco's Spain
(1967). This took little time, but was my first effort to analyze and summarize recent developments in all the major aspects of Spanish affairs, dealing with social and economic changes, cultural life, and international relations, as well as with the politics of the Franco regime.

The 1960s were a decade of greatly expanded interest in history in all the Western world. The student activists who became famous in that era were especially attracted to history, but beyond that, general cultural conditions stimulated enrollment in history courses among the enormously expanded student populations of that decade. Interest in history courses among university students generally follows a sort of cyclical pattern. The 1960s were an especial high point and enormously stimulated the zeal of publishers to bring out new history books. More than at any other time in my experience, they took the initiative in offering lucrative contracts to historians, rather than simply responding to manuscripts presented by the latter. Altogether, I accepted four publishers' initiatives during the 1960s — the aforementioned textbook, the short project on contemporary Spain, a proposal to prepare a history of the Spanish revolution of the 1930s, and also the suggestion that I develop a general history of Spain and Portugal.

The Spanish Revolution
stemmed from the invitation of Jack Greene, a specialist in the era of the American Revolution of the 1770s, to write one of ten volumes in a series called Revolutions in the Modern World. That a volume on Spain was even included demonstrated considerable perspicacity by Greene, since many general and comparative treatments of modern revolutions tend to ignore the Spanish case. I was certainly aware of the presence of the revolutionary worker movements and of the revolution in the Republican zone during the Civil War, but knew little about them. My research was initially assisted by two special collections that had become available in California, the Southworth Collection at the University of California-San Diego and the Bolloten Collection in the Hoover Institution at Stanford, both particularly rich in materials from the Republican zone.
¹⁶
Data on the CNT-FAI, as well as the POUM, were also available at the Institutional Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, but I would not be able to gain access to the Civil War archive in Salamanca (then generally closed to researchers) for another five years.

Research for this book would turn out to mark a kind of watershed in my grasp of Spanish politics. I had been brought up in the standard politically correct understanding of contemporary Spanish affairs, which holds that the Right was iniquitous, reactionary and authoritarian, while the Left (despite certain regrettable excesses) was basically progressive and democratic. My investigation of the revolutionary process in Spain produced quite different findings, revealing that the Left was not necessarily progressive and certainly not democratic, but in fact during the course of the 1930s produced a regression in Spanish affairs from the relative liberal democracy achieved in 1931-32.

The Spanish Revolution
was brought out in New York by W. W. Norton in 1970 and became my first book to appear inside Spain, thanks to two factors. One was the new press law introduced by Fraga Iribarne four years earlier, which finally began to loosen restrictions on publication; the other was that this book offered a critical perspective on the Left, rather than on the Right, as in the case of the two previous books, so that it might theoretically be more acceptable to the censorship that continued to exist. Even so, there was continuing resistance in official circles to permitting a book of mine to appear within Spain, a resistance only finally vanquished by a vigorous review published by Ricardo de la Cierva, strongly endorsing publication. Without this initiative by La Cierva, the book might not have appeared, despite the eagerness of Alejandro Argullós to publish it in the new series on contemporary Spain presented by Ediciones Ariel. Due to a mistake on the part of the agent in charge of the series, a completely separate Spanish edition was brought out by Argos Vergara five years later, while the Tokyo firm Heibonsha published a Japanese translation in 1974, thanks to a strong recommendation made to them by Joaquín Maurín prior to his death.

Equally or even more important was the invitation extended by Norman F. Cantor, the imaginative medievalist who served as history editor for Thomas Y. Crowell, to write a full-scale general history of Spain and Portugal. This had not been done in the English-speaking world for a very long while and presented me with a great opportunity, for it was the preparation of this book that gave me a full grasp of the history of the peninsula for the first time. It was nonetheless a daunting undertaking, which occupied me for four years and required a huge amount of reading in the secondary literature. Though it was possible to read no more than a fraction of the enormous bibliography pertaining to the subject, that bibliography had not yet undergone the exponential expansion that took place during the latter part of the century and which would make such an enterprise by a single scholar totally impossible within any finite amount of time. My goal was not merely to narrate facts but to render intelligible the peninsula's history, so that most subsections of each chapter were organized by concepts, not chronology. In general I think that I was successful in achieving an analytic focus on the subject matter that generally made sense, although some points would have to be modified as a result of the massive research by historians during the decades that followed. The most original aspect for me was coming to grips with the history of Portugal, which first gave me an understanding of that country's history and decisively broadened my perspective on the peninsula.

Crowell was soon taken over by Dun and Bradstreet, which immediately lost interest in the project, so that I managed to redirect it to the University of Wisconsin Press, thanks to an invitation from Thompson Webb, its director. This initiated my long collaboration with this university press.
A History of Spain and Portugal
came out in two volumes in 1973, remained in print for about fifteen years, and was briefly a History Book Club alternate selection. A slightly revised and expanded Spanish edition was finally published in five brief paperback volumes by Carlos Alberto Montaner's Editorial Playor in Madrid between 1985 and 1987, enabling the Portuguese chapters to be grouped together as a one-volume Breve historia de Portugal (1987), which for several reasons was at that time unique among publications in Spanish on Portugal. An inexpensive reprint edition was done by Editorial Grupo five years later, and a digital edition of the original first volume of the English edition was later made available by the digital publisher LIBRO in 2002.

From the time of my first visits to Barcelona and Bilbao in 1958-59, and after my initial discussions with Aguirre and Vicens Vives, I had formed considerable interest in the peripheral nationalisms. I thought that they were important in the country's contemporary history and would also be important in the future, though for some time neither I nor many others would understand how large a role they would play in the politics of a future democratic Spain. After 1970 the emergence of a radical form of Basque nationalism in ETA achieved greater prominence than the more moderate initiatives of the Catalanists, exactly the opposite of the relative salience of the two movements during the years of the Republic.

My original intention was to prepare simply a very long article on the politics of Basque nationalism under the Republic for a special issue on contemporary Spain to be published by the
Rivista Storica Italiana
.
¹⁷
During the summer of 1971 I visited the University of Nevada in Reno to spend a brief period researching the collection of the Basque Studies Program, initiated there not long before. I had known the noted Basque bibliographer Jon Bilbao for nearly fifteen years, having been introduced to him by Aguirre and having stayed at his home in Guecho briefly during an earlier visit to Bilbao. He and the anthropologist William Douglass, the long-term director of the Basque Studies Program, urged me to expand the long article into a short monograph on early Basque nationalism. I had never conceived of this as a full-length project, but at that time there was scarcely any scholarly literature on the topic, so over the next year and a half I expanded this into a brief account of the early political history of the Basque movement, up to 1937.
¹⁸

During those final years of Franco's life, the cultural environment was becoming progressively relaxed, even as politics became more active. I developed some ambition to publish this brief book in Spain, encouraged by the reforms of Pío Cabanillas as minister of culture, with Ricardo de la Cierva as Director General de Cultura Popular. I mailed a copy of the manuscript to La Cierva in the winter of 1974, and on the eve of an international conference convened in March of that year by the Instituto de Cultura Hispánica, I received a telegram from La Cierva telling me that he considered it "important" to publish the book in Spain. A few days later I carried a copy of the manuscript with me to Madrid and quickly reached a deal with Sebastian Auger to bring it out in Barcelona with the latter's ambitious new publishing firm Editorial Dopesa.
¹⁹
It published a Spanish edition within six months, in August, which was crucially important, for Cabanillas was dismissed by Franco little more than a month later, bringing in turn the resignation of La Cierva.
²⁰
Had this taken place only a month earlier, publication of the book would have been prohibited. As it was, a special book fair in Bilbao, in which the book would have been one of those featured, was canceled. Dopesa provided a good advance for the book but submitted statements the next two years indicating that few copies were sold, which seems quite doubtful, according to all reports. Because of the dearth of material on Basque nationalism at that time, this gained for me altogether exaggerated credentials as a Basque specialist, which I really was not. I did no further research in the area after 1972-73, while only a few years later, after the death of Franco, work in that field would expand exponentially.