THE HISTORICAL WOUNDS OF CIVIL
WARS: REFLECTIONS ON SPAIN AND
THE UNITED STATES
PAUL D. ESCOTT
Wake Forest University
El dolor de las grandes heridas
históricasafluye, aprovechando cualquier
ocasión.
(Francisco Nieva)
“Let us hope that the grandchildren of my granddaughter will finally
forget” (ABC 2006). This was the comment of a seventy-two-year-old
Spaniard visiting the Valley of the Fallen in 2006. His words reflect the
haunting power of historical wounds, especially those caused by civil war.
Both Spain and the United States have struggled with the legacy of
destructive and bitterly divisive civil wars. This legacy proved a troubling
inheritance, as victory by one side in war failed to create a unified,
consensual society. Underlying conflicts did not disappear when the military
confrontation ended. Sooner or later, in loud arguments or emotional pleas,
debate resumed over the war’s meaning, who was at fault, and who were the
heroes and who the villains. Both societies have struggled to agree on their
war’s meaning, to put a deeply troubled history into the past, and to move on.
The similarities between the two countries are sufficient to make
comparison possible, while the differences offer the opportunity to understand
how societies may be able eventually to heal historical wounds. Both wars
affected largely rural but rapidly industrializing societies, and both resulted
from a clash between powerfully entrenched forces that looked toward the past
and dynamic groups oriented toward the future.1 Among the most important
products of war in both countries were myths and ideologies that sank deep
roots in society. The differences also were numerous. This was particularly
true in the postwar decades, in which Spain saw exiles, imprisonments, and
repression on a large scale that was virtually absent in the United States.
The attitudes of the victors and the resources of the vanquished also differed
significantly in the two countries. Most importantly, because these civil wars
occurred seventy-five years apart, the United States has had a longer period
in which to exacerbate or heal its historical wounds.
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For these reasons a comparison of Spain and the United States – in regard
to the way these nations have dealt with the legacy of their civil wars – can
be revealing. In the limited space of this essay, detailed historical analysis is
not possible.2 Rather, the goal will be to highlight general forces that shape a
society’s effort to come to terms with a bloody past. With references only to
essential background, the focus will be on the painful process by which these
two societies have struggled with historical wounds. What can be learned
about the forces – human, situational, and economic – that have guided
continuing battles and debates? What possibility is there of escape from a
conflicted past? The evidence suggests that the battle of ideologies tends to
be a repetitive, unprogressive phenomenon, whereas social and economic
change broad enough to reorient people’s lives gives hope for the future.
***
It is often said that the victors write our history. “Until the lions produce
their own historian,” says an African proverb, “the story of the hunt will
glorify only the hunter” (Achebe 73). But this is not the whole story. However
dominant the winning side may be, it seems to be part of human nature that
the defeated will seek their day in the court of history and public opinion. The
vanquished have insisted on being heard in both Spain and the United States.
In the United States the insistence on being heard began quickly. The
Confederate government, after an unpopular and controversial existence,
was thoroughly defeated, leaving an impoverished people and a shattered
economy. Yet few southern leaders thought of turning their backs on such a
failure. Instead, elite women mobilized to bury soldiers in newly dedicated
cemeteries and honor them as heroes (Cox, Janney). High-ranking officers in
Robert E. Lee’s army took up their pens to prove that Lee had been God-like
and that the best men had not been defeated militarily, merely overwhelmed
by numbers (Connelly). Within a generation writers fashioned literary myths
about the virtue of those who had been defeated and the charms of their now
lost way of life (Escott, “Uses”).
Male and female societies dedicated to honoring the Confederate heritage
competed for influence (see Cox). The United Daughters of the Confederacy
often proved most powerful in creating a “true” history. They catechized
young children in pro-Confederate ideas, censored schoolbooks, arranged for
the firing of teachers, and promoted museums, prizes, and commemorations.
“Strict censorship,” said one UDC leader, “is the thing that will bring the
honest truth” (Bailey). These elite groups successfully imposed on society a
single, white-supremacist view of the past. The pro-Confederate interpretation
of history became holy writ for the region’s dominant Democratic party.
For many years in Spain, defeated Republicans lacked the opportunity
to speak up in defense of their cause. Hundreds of thousands of Republicans
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were in exile or in prison, and the dictatorship of Generalísimo Francisco
Franco allowed no competition to its ideology. Then upon Franco’s death
Spain grasped the opportunity to make a delicate transition to democracy.
Opponents of the regime knew that it was dangerous to move too swiftly.
Fearing the reaction of long-powerful, conservative groups that were losing
power, democrats of all stripes accepted an amnesty law and avoided talking
about the past, the civil war, or the righting of wrongs. To move into the future,
it was necessary to draw a veil on past controversy.3 Communist Party leader
Santiago Carrillo recalled the attitude of many democrats when he explained
that that his party chose to put past issues aside in hopes of “overcomingthe
past – of considering it as a moment of our history” (Carrillo17).
But silence did not last long. With the generation of the nietos, or
grandchildren, the voices of Republican families increasingly were heard.
What had happened fifty or sixty years before, they declared, now needed
to be re-examined. Accounts needed to be balanced. Victims needed to be
identified and mass graves found and opened. The necessary silence of the
Transition now was criticized as olvido, or “forgetting.” In the belief that some
things should not be forgotten, calls for societal recognition of wrongs and
justice for the defeated multiplied. Increasingly the debate entered politics,
with charge and counter-charge. In 2007 the PSOE government of José Luis
Rodríguez Zapatero passed what is known as the Law of Historical Memory.
This broad measure provided for the opening of fosas or mass graves in
which many Republicans had been buried. The law also required the removal
of many monuments, statues, and plaques honoring Franco and his generals.
Additional clauses funded educational efforts relating to the war and gave
support to organizations that were gathering information about murdered or
imprisoned Republicans.4
Was it wise to re-open the wounds of the past? Thoughtful Spaniards
debated that question. Taking sides, argued a number of respected intellectuals,
was counter-productive. A sociologist, Emilio Lamo de Espinosa, reminded
newspaper readers that, as Max Weber said about World War I, “it is the
whole structure of a society that is able to explain that catastrophe” (qt. in
ABC, 2007). Instead of assigning praise and blame, wrote José Jiménez
Lozano, “we all ought to engage in serious mourning for what happened in
the Civil War and not take part in valuing those years” (qt. in La Razón). Luís
María Anson, of the Royal Spanish Academy, pointed out that he had been
exiled, censored, or suppressed by Franco. Yet he believed the new law was
a “blunder.” He urged leaving such matters to the historians “who are writing
[…] with complete liberty.” In their work, “in the truth of facts, is found the
authentic reparation and the historical justice” (qt. inElMundo).
Interestingly, public opinion surveys repeatedly have suggested that a
sizeable majority of Spaniards would prefer to avoid divisive engagement
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with the past.5 In recent years leaders of other societies with a violently
divided history also have urged this as the course of wisdom for individuals
and society. “Personal bitterness is irrelevant,” counseled South Africa’s
Nelson Mandela. “It is a luxury that we, as individuals and as a country, simply
cannot afford” (qt. in O’Connor 174-75). His compatriot, Desmond Tutu, has
insisted that “There is no future without forgiveness” (qt. in O’Connor 166),
and government minister Kader Asmal argued that it was wise to sacrifice the
processes and ends of justice “so as to consolidate democracy, to close the
chapter of the past and to avoid confrontation” or renewed social trauma (qt.
in Allen 324).
Such attitudes of forgiveness – such strategies of elevating
the future good over past resentments – may be possible for some, perhaps
for many. But in any society such high-mindedness and self-discipline cannot
win universal acceptance. There will always be individuals, probably many,
for whom the resentments will burn too fiercely, the family loyalties will
be too strong, and the desire to protest perceived injustice too compelling.
Human nature resurrects old hatreds, hostilities, and conflicts.
On another level, however, it is clear that the emotional demands of
human nature are situationally conditioned. People act within a context that
affects their priorities and their sense of the possible. Levels of determination
respond to what is possible but can shape the social debate. Upon Franco’s
death, grasping a democratic future proved more important than re-visiting
old wrongs. After the defeat of the Confederacy, determined southern women
and defeated soldiers changed the terms of discussion. How individuals act
on the promptings of human nature depends on the social context and the
perceived range of outcomes.
The interaction of human nature and situational effects is clear in other
comparisons, and similarities, between the histories of Spain and the United
States. In both countries the dynamics of debate were similar. The wars
were so destructive that both sides felt a need to justify their actions. Victors
reiterated or elaborated their arguments for going to war, while the vanquished
sought to remove the stigma of being in the “wrong” or on the losing side.
There was a marked tendency for old claims to repeat themselves, though
with the passage of time different and more serviceable arguments sometimes
developed. Another similarity was that in both nations one side had a marked
advantage in the debates that followed civil war. However, the possibilities
available to victors or vanquished were reversed. In Spain it was the victors
who dominated debate, as one might expect. In the U.S., however, it was the
losers. This created a curious, mirror-image symmetry in the experiences of
the two countries.
How could defeated Southerners substantially “win” the battle over
the meaning of the war? The answer is that the victorious North passively
allowed a Confederate interpretation of the war to triumph on most points.
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The reason had to do with race. The fundamental cause of the war lay in the
nation’s racial problem. That challenging problem could be described as the
combination of a founding national ideology of equality and the contrary
fact that four million African Americans were despised by the racist white
majority. Slavery was deeply entrenched in the southern states, whereas in
the North slavery was absent but racism remained strong and widespread.
The war came after most northerners concluded that they must restrict
the spread and influence of slavery and elected Abraham Lincoln. Rather
than risk possible disadvantages in the future, most slaveholding states then
seceded, and the war began. After almost two years of fighting, Lincoln
declared emancipation as a military measure to win the war. But racial
equality never became a goal of the North, where the first priority was always
to restore the Union (Escott, “What Shall We Do”). Thus the victors soon
were content with the reestablishment of national authority. Racial issues
could be left to the South, where the vast majority of African Americans
lived. (Blight)
The defeated South thus gained the opportunity to define the war’s
cause. Its leaders swiftly repeated many prewar arguments about violations
of the Constitution or infringements of southern rights. They insisted that
Confederates were honorable men who fought for constitutional principles as
they saw them. Their veterans deserved the respect they had earned through
their bravery and sacrifice. Within a few decades the supposed nobility of
the South’s Lost Cause was an accepted explanation for the war. It became
more widely known and more familiar than arguments that stressed the
importance of the Union Cause or the morality of the Cause of Freedom. Few
Northerners were determined to improve the status of African Americans.
Defeated Confederates, however, were intensely determined to establish their
interpretation and preserve white supremacy.
In one key respect the southerners altered their ideology. According to
their own public statements, they had seceded to defend slavery, and they had
attempted to build a reactionary, aristocratic republic based on slavery as a
“positive good.” But with slavery destroyed and world opinion increasingly
critical of human bondage, they revised history in postwar years. With
unusual frankness, the Virginia writer Thomas Nelson Page admitted that
in the future “the defence of slavery will be deemed the world over to have
been as barbarous as we now deem the slave-trade to have been.” The South
must, therefore, establish the idea that Confederates fought “as a great people
in revolution for our rights” (Page 208, 207). Thereafter slavery, supposedly,
had nothing to do with the war; the Confederacy had fought solely in defense
of states’ rights and constitutional liberty.
In Spain the victorious army of Franco was far more determined than the
American North to impose its ideology. Throughout a repressive dictatorship
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Franco’s government insisted on its interpretation of the war. Republican
counterarguments were silenced, and opponents of the regime were jailed.
But the Franco government’s interpretation also changed over time, in
order to introduce ideas and emphases that were better adapted to changing
circumstances.
The original ideology of a holy crusade for patria and Catholicism was
itself the product of a small adjustment. In the first days of the military
uprising, General Franco’s words tended to focus on Marxist revolutionaries,
communist dangers, and the changes brought or threatened by the Second
Republic. But soon, as the Church defended the uprising as a holy “Crusade
for religion, for patriaand for civilization” (Plá y Daniel), Franco welcomed
the ideology of a religious crusade. National Catholicism then became the
watchword of his movement. It defined itself against radicalism, atheism,
Masons, Protestants, and Jews, and for the protection of fundamentalist
Catholicism and Spain’s traditional social order. Under the dictatorship
schoolbooks compared the caudillo’s regime with the 16th century fusion
of the “Catholic ideal” and a “military monarchy.” Students learned that
Franco’s National Movement had saved the traditional essence of Spain from
liberalism, socialism, democracy, Masons, and Communists. All blame for
the outbreak of a bloody, fratricidal war fell on the Republic (Boyd 83-87).
As the decades advanced, attitudes changed and the regime developed
new justifications for its hold on power. By the 1950s many Spaniards,
especially students in the universities, were inclined to view the civil
war not as a glorious Crusade but as “a useless fratricidal slaughter,” an
immense tragedy. Textbooks then began to speak of a “national tragedy,”
and the regime emphasized peace rather than victory, prosperity rather than
a Crusade against evil (Juliá, chapter 1; Moradiellos, chapter 1). In 1964, on
the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Nationalists’ victory, the regime chose
to publicize “the Peace of Franco” rather than his military victory in war,
and the Ministry of Information and Tourism published historical works by
Ricardo de la Cierva that dropped the word “crusade” in favor of “the War of
Spain” (Juliá 39, 88-39; Moradiellos 26-27). By the end of the dictatorship,
official sources were placing greater emphasis on the stability and growth of
prosperity under the regime than on its National Catholic mission.6
Nevertheless, when debate broke out anew in the years around 2000,
arguments and counter-arguments quickly flowed into old, familiar channels.
From the 1970s forward there had been a steady stream of careful scholarly
works – books, articles, essays, and documentaries – about the war. But the
outpouring of accurate information seemed not to touch the terms of debate.
What was contested in the 1930s became contested again. For example, a
best-selling book by Pio Moa made a series of pro-Franco arguments: that
the Second Republic came into being peacefully because monarchists had
Paul Escott 75
allowed elections; that the Second Republic immediately began burning
churches, convents, and culturally important buildings; that it allowed leftist
revolutionary violence in 1934; that by 1936 disorder and crime had become
insupportable, for leftists and rightists alike; that Fascism was not a real
danger; and that the real and imminent danger was a radical leftist revolution,
to which Franco’s uprising was a response by “the conservative mass of
the country” (Moa 183-89). Respected historians dismissed these writings
as “nothing less than an up-to-date repetition of what Franco’s people have
always said” (TheGuardian). Moa and César Vidal, wrote one scholar, “are
not historians, but publicists with a police mentality who do nothing but
recover the propaganda that the victors have elaborated since the start of the
dictatorship” (Pérez Garzón 31-32). Nevertheless, the revived public debate
covered this old ground, rather than the landscape altered by scholarship.7
Why was the renewed debate an echo chamber for the past? Surely, in
part, the combative style of some of the popular writers attracted attention;
it was simply more entertaining than measured scholarly judgments. The
public’s knowledge of complex events was rather shallow, and that fact
allowed polemical points that had some measure of factual basis to appear
more convincing than they truly were. But the healthy sales of such books
also revealed a deeper reason. Older attitudes had not disappeared, because
former perspectives on the war still had emotional resonance. Readers
defended the sympathies they had inherited from their family members. The
connections to an earlier era – ties of family loyalty, personal sympathy, or
political ideology – still mattered.
The recrudescence of old debates, unchanged, is hard for scholars to
accept. But scholarship and historical memory in society are two different
things. History is a critical enterprise that can destroy identities and traditions
through its analysis. Memories, on the other hand, usually serve to reinforce
group identity through the generations. As Pérez Garzón has pointed out,
historians change their accounts due to new facts or methods. Memories, on
the other hand, “only change as a function of a change in the interests of the
groups that forge them.” Most historians believe that it is their responsibility
to dismantle a mythical history. But the public may not be ready to listen. “We
are not going to convince them,” observed Eduardo Manzano, who lamented
that the more scholars addressed the live issues, “the more the social debate
surpasses us” (Peréz Garzón and Manzano Moreno 25-26, 106, 130).
Are we, then, prisoners of past divisions and controversies? Can societies
ever move beyond the emotional debates of the past and develop a healthier,
common understanding of their histories? If so, how?
Many believe that the only way to remove the specter of a bloody past
is to confront its realities and then see that justice is done. Although this
process revives latent conflict and energizes opposing sides, an influential
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school of thought holds that it is necessary.8 According to Spanish journalist
Natalia Junquera, more than thirty nations have established investigatory
commissions, whose job was to document human rights abuses, suggest
compensation for victims, and recommend punishment for perpetrators.
Among the countries that took this step in recent decades (with varying
degrees of thoroughness) are Morocco, Guatemala, El Salvador, Argentina,
and Chile. Even Germany could be considered as a participant, since in 1998
its Parliament reconsidered the sentences imposed by Hitler’s military courts
or tribunals (Junquera 14-17). Several countries established such commissions
early in the process of re-establishing a democratic government. As a result,
many of those responsible for killings or crimes against human rights were
still alive and active in society, and many were prosecuted. However, to what
extent this created a healthy and shared historical memory for the future
remains unclear (Aguilar Fernández, Políticas 456-70). It is too early to
know whether it resolved issues or gave future life to conflicting emotions.
Other countries have shied away from re-opening old wounds. In Brazil
and Uruguay governments recently refused to overturn earlier amnesty laws
and re-examine killings, torture, or repression that had been carried out by
military dictatorships. Investigating past injustice seemed too traumatic, too
disruptive. The president of Brazil’s supreme court described the amnesty
law as the nation’s “choice in favor of national concord, and it ought to
be respected” (El País 2010). In Uruguay voters twice, in 1989 and 2009,
affirmed that country’s amnesty law by narrow margins, and last year a tie
vote in Congress, after a long and contentious debate, left the amnesty in
place (The Washington Post; El País 2011).
A striking development of recent decades has been the invention of a
third way. Various nations established truth commissions or truth and
reconciliation commissions as a different means to address the past and build
a healthy future. This approach emphasized neither amnesty, with impunity
for wrongdoers, nor justice, with efforts to punish all violations of human
rights. Between the extremes of ignoring the crimes of a repressive regime,
on the one hand, and insisting on judicial investigation and prosecution of
all wrongdoers, on the other, such commissions have sought to balance the
moral demands of the past with the practical needs of the present. Spain’s
Law of Historical Memory included some measures to shed light on a hidden
past, so it could be said to embrace a small part of this approach, but nothing
similar is part of the United States’ experience.
The most famous Truth and Reconciliation Commission was South
Africa’s, created in 1995. Structurally, it consisted of three committees –
one to investigate Human Rights Violations; a second to grant Amnesty;
and a third to recommend Reparations and Rehabilitation. Those who chose
to come before the Committee on Human Rights Violations and testify to
Paul Escott 77
their crimes could qualify for amnesty. Thus, truth-telling and confessions
of wrong-doing received encouragement, as steps toward revealing the past
and reconciling opponents in the present. The Truth and Reconciliation
Commission, however, did not have to accept all applications for amnesty,
and it could issue subpoenas in support of its search for the truth. Those who
did not seek amnesty, or who misled the commission in some way, could still
be prosecuted (Minow 320, 322-23, 326).
The committee on Human Rights Violations received twenty thousand
statements by February of 1998. Its public hearings, which were televised,
captured the most attention by far.9 These often were dramatic and heartwrenching spectacles, as victims and perpetrators told their stories to each
other and the world.10 The experience of testifying seemed to be cathartic for
many. A man who had been blinded by a notoriously ruthless police officer
told the committee, “I feel what has been making me sick all the time is
the fact that I couldn’t tell my story. But now I – it feels like I got my sight
back by coming here and telling you the story.” A woman whose son had
been killed by apartheid security forces struggled with her feelings. When
able to speak, she declared, “This thing called reconciliation [...]if it means
[...] this man who has killed [...] becomes human again, this man, so that I,
so that all of us, get our humanity back [...] then I agree, then I support it
all.” Bishop Tutu viewed the healing potential of the commission’s work in
a religious context – that of forgiveness. He added that the African concept
of forgiveness, “ubuntu,” also involved restoring dignity to people (Minow
341, 325-32, 340, 342).
Psychologists and psychiatrists who worked with the Truth and
Reconciliation Commission judged that the act of testifying was vital to
the mental health of victims. But social scientists point out that there is no
body of objective, longitudinal studies that can demonstrate long-lasting
benefits. It also was true that the hearings of the commission were not always
a success. Former President Frederick De Klerk turned against the process,
condemning it as biased, and threatened a law suit. Winnie Mandela also
refused to cooperate and encouraged hostility to the commission. In addition,
some individuals could not accept the idea of granting amnesty, even after the
truth was told. “Unless justice is done,” said Churchill Mxenge, “it’s difficult
for any person to think about forgiving.” He did not share Tutu’s belief “in
miracles” (Minow 336, 340-42).
Still, some lawyers and scholars defend the goals and methods of such
commissions. Although they sacrifice retributive justice by granting amnesty,
they may unearth truths that would not come out in adversarial trials, which
tend to narrow and foreclose the areas of investigation. Discovery of new facts
occurred in South Africa, and Martha Minow argues that such commissions
can “cut through myths, rumors, and false pictures about the past,” whereas
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trials may obscure the larger picture (Minow 324, 325, 337). Jonathan Allen,
a political scientist and a native of South Africa, notes that there are times
when societies cannot seek full justice, because the effort “is bound to wreak
havoc in politics.” Nor could the Truth and Reconciliation Commission create
“communal intimacy.” But it represented a kind of “principled compromise”
between justice and unity, furthering some of the goals of punitive justice
while educating people’s sense of injustice and promoting greater respect
for human rights (317, 349, 352). Informed debate continues, but only time
will reveal to what extent truth and reconciliation commissions can speed the
healing from bitter past divisions.
The comparison of Spain and the United States offers another perspective
on how societies can escape from the hostilities of the past. The longer
experience of the United States after its civil war ended allows us to see how
historical memory can change. In the United States the once-sacred tenets of
the Lost Cause myth have lost importance in southern and national society.
A truer understanding of the civil war prevails. When that happened is clear,
and the causes of that change and the conditions necessary for its success can
be identified.
To be sure, adherents of the Lost Cause myth – in all its elements –
still exist. But socially there has been a sea-change in their identity and
character. For roughly one hundred years after the Civil War, those who
proclaimed and insisted upon the Lost Cause myth were the elite of society.
Leading politicians, well-known writers, members of the wealthiest and
most influential families – these elite figures ensured that mythical history
was the accepted history. Now, however, the defenders of the Confederacy
are marginal groups or voluntary organizations with an aging membership
and little influence. The powerful in southern society have a very different
agenda. Their interests and ambitions are focused on economic growth and
greater prosperity. Far from defending white supremacy, they are interested
in achieving enough racial harmony to encourage economic investment. The
young are part of a nation-wide youth culture. They are not taught the proConfederate catechism of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, and as
college students they have no trouble accepting that southern states seceded
to protect slavery. The sense of regional loyalty sometimes emerges, in sports
or in business, as an impulse to keep others from “looking down their noses
at Southerners.” 11 But white supremacy and the idea of a civil war to protect
states’ rights have been discarded.
This change occurred during the New Deal, World War II, and the Civil
Rights Movement. The impact of the Civil Rights Movement is quite clear
and easy to understand. That great democratic, mass movement of African
Americans forced citizens of the United States to confront the racial issue they
had been avoiding since the Civil War. Landmark legislation in the 1960s,
Paul Escott 79
and court decisions soon after, finally established equality before the law.
Registration by black voters and the number of black officeholders soared.
The language of politics and of daily life changed as equal rights became
the only socially respectable attitude. A new cohort of southern governors
in the 1970s made sincere declarations like Jimmy Carter’s: “I say to you
quite frankly that the time for racial discrimination is over.” Reactionary
elements that remained had to change their language, if not their hearts. “By
1968,” admitted conservative political operative Lee Atwater, “you can’t say
‘nigger’ – that hurts you. Backfires” (Loewen and Sebesta 332, 18). But if
it was not complete, the change was real. Even George Wallace, who once
had promised “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever,”
abandoned his racist appeals. In a changed, second phase of his career, he
won many black votes working for an Alabama that “belongs to all of us—
black and white, young and old, rich and poor alike” (Time).
Just as important, if less plainly visible, was the impact of fundamental
economic change. For generations the South had been backward and poor.
It had functioned as a low-wage region in a high-wage national economy.
Impoverished, with unskilled labor, locked out of major capital markets, the
South’s overall economy suffered, while established groups – such as textile
owners and large landholders – extracted modest benefits from the separate
pattern. As long as education “ruined a good field hand” and a high-school
diploma was “a ticket to leave the mill village,” there was little incentive
for leaders to change the system and advance in prosperity. In the 1930s
and 1940s, however, much happened to undermine that system of economic
isolation and stagnation. (Wright 14, 78-79, 123)
Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal put a floor under many wages. Federal
policies pushed the South toward the national labor market. The Fair Labor
Standards Act brought “national wage standards” to the southern textile
industry. Hourly wages in other industries rose between 21.5 and 70 percent,
a dramatic change that made skills and technology more important. New Deal
agricultural programs reduced sharecropping in favor of wage labor. World
War II then proved even more effective than World War I in encouraging
unskilled laborers to leave the South. During the war two and a half million
rural southerners migrated to northern cities. Owners of large plantations,
instead of relying on low-skilled, low-wage workers, began to purchase
tractors “much faster than the rest of the South.” With greater interest in
machines, manufacturers accelerated technological innovations to harvest
traditional southern crops, such as cotton and tobacco (Wright 213-19, 23336, 242-25, 198-201, 205; Bass and DeVries 503).
Spokesmen of the old order complained, but fundamental changes
had arrived. Southern political and economic leaders no longer benefited
by being isolated from national labor and capital markets. The effect on
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incentives and patterns of thought was dramatic. The “selling of the South”
began, and in earnest. States and local communities set up offices to lure
businesses into the South. Aggressive recruiters courted northern industries
and foreign investment. Then, when the Civil Rights Movement occurred,
its impact reinforced all the main lines of economic progress. The image of
the South began to improve. Northern companies no longer faced resistance
from workers reluctant to move to a backward, segregated region (Bartley
160; Cobb; Wright 257-62).
In this changed situation influential, powerful Southerners left old
attitudes behind and embraced the attractive vision of a new, Sunbelt South.
Their world had altered – socially, economically, and politically. In response,
businessmen became more interested in expanding, competing, and winning
beyond the South than in protecting minor advantages rooted in segregation.
Young women of the elite became far more likely to join the Junior League
than the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Politicians developed national
ambitions, following the example of President Jimmy Carter. The retrograde
pro-Confederate myths of the Lost Cause became irrelevant because they had
lost their meaningful connection to people’s lives. They no longer spoke to
people’s present or to their hopes for the future. Pro-Confederate historical
memories could wither and be discarded because, as Peréz Garzón put it,
there had been a “a change in the interests of the groups that forge them”
(Peréz Garzón and Manzano Moreno 106). A changed social world produced
different interests.
What, then, can we say about the future of historical memory in Spain?
Much less time has passed since Spain’s civil war ended than is the case for
the United States, and fewer years still since the Transition. Consequently,
the past is much closer to the present. Spanish society has had less time to
move mentally beyond the controversies of war. If the American experience
is to be duplicated, battles over historical memory will persist in Spain for
many more decades. On the other hand, physically and socially much has
occurred to lay the foundation for future change. To put it another way, the
world experienced daily by Spaniards has changed far more rapidly than it
did for white southerners in the United States, and that fact makes old issues
less relevant.
From the 1950s through the 1970s, and beyond into today’s European
Union, Spain’s economy has undergone fundamental changes. Largescale foreign aid, foreign investment, and loans spurred the growth of an
urbanized, middle-class society. The United States initiated this process in
the Eisenhower administration. It sought, ironically, to bolster the Free World
by making long-term agreements with a repressive dictatorship. In return
for military bases the United States sent to Spain, in the first seven years of
its agreements, almost 1.5 billion dollars – $618.2 million in grants, $404
Paul Escott 81
million in loans, and $436.8 million in military aid. Over the next seven years
the total amount of money injected into the Spanish economy fell but still
amounted to nearly half a billion dollars. After Spain joined the Organization
for European Economic Cooperation, the International Monetary Fund, and
the World Bank, it gained additional important funds: $420 million from
the OEEC; $75 million in IMF drawing rights; $70 million in commercial
credits from big U.S. banks; and $30 million in loans to foreign companies
from the U.S. Import-Export bank. Between 1959 and 1973 “direct foreign
investment . . . increased twenty-sevenfold” (Harrison, Economic History
152-55; SpanishEconomy 8, 156, 160-61).
Such developments produced substantial change in the economy, which
meant significant alterations in people’s lives. Between 1960 and 1975
“almost 5 million Spaniards (15 per cent of the entire population) abandoned
the countryside” in what was “the largest movement of people in Spain’s
demographic history.” A population that had been overwhelmingly rural
became more than 80 percent urban. The service sector expanded from 31
percent of employment in 1960 to 66 percent in 1999. At that point, tourism
directly employed ten percent of the workforce, and by 2001 Spain ranked
second only to France in foreign visitors and behind only the United States
in terms of tourism earnings (Harrison and Corkill 43-44, 99-101; Harrison,
SpanishEconomy 156, 160-61; Harrison, EconomicHistory 154-56).
Foreign capital has invested heavily in Spanish industry, controlling
36.5 percent by 1990, and by 2000 Spain developed an economic advantage
in some technology-intensive sectors, such as “electronics, aerospace
equipment, computers and office automation, and chemicals” (Harrison and
Corkill 43-44, 19, 88-89, 125-26; ISTA). Despite weaknesses in its economy
and the depth of the current crisis, Spain clearly has become a very different
economy – one that is modern, industrial and post-industrial. The new
generation in Spain today seems less interested in thinking about and talking
about the Civil War and more focused on contemporary economic problems.
Indeed, the current crisis is itself sufficiently grave and prolonged to reorient
priorities.
The experience of the United States shows that as the social and cultural
surroundings of people change, the myths and resentments of the past lose
their relevance. Other issues more relevant to contemporary life assume
greater importance. In this manner, if not through innovations such as truth
and reconciliation commissions, societies eventually do move on. Surely that
will be the case for Spain, and quite possibly it will occur more rapidly than
was the experience of the United States. For the good of future generations,
all can hope that the historical wounds from civil war will finally close.
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NOTES
Interestingly, these civil wars occurred when the two nations’ populations
were roughly equivalent —twenty-six million for Spain and thirty-two
million for the United States. Neither nation has exact figures on wartime
deaths, whether military or civilian, and efforts to established more precise
counts continue to the present day. In both cases, however, the death toll
was approximately two percent of total population (and far heavier, of
course, among males of military age).
In Spain the Army, the Church, and traditional landed elites looked back
toward a religious, aristocratic Spain different from the modernizing,
secular, more European Spain favored by the Republicans. The
slaveholding leaders of the American South saw themselves resisting the
Atlantic world’s powerful anti-slavery movement and wanted to found
a reactionary, aristocratic, slaveholding Republic, whereas the North
was home to the commercial, industrial, and anti-slavery energies of the
country.
1
This essay is based on a larger comparative study now under
consideration for publication. For reasons of space, many topics explored
there cannot be introduced here.
2
The dangers of the Transition came fully to life on February 23, 1981
when Lt. Colonel Antonio Tejero Molina violently seized control of the
CongresodelosDiputados.
3
As Paloma Aguilar Fernández and other have documented, this was
certainly not the first law of post-Franco Spain to accord various types
of recognition to the defeated Republicans, but it was by far the most
publicized and controversial.
4
The percentage of the population that viewed Franco’s dictatorship
favorably fell steadily to around ten percent by 2000, while the percentage
of the population that viewed it negatively rose to almost 40%. But a large
plurality – still 46.4% in 2000 – persistently described the dictatorship
as a time that would be viewed both positively and negatively (Aguilar
Fernández and Humlebaek 130-31, 140-41, 145, 149-50; Aguilar
Fernández, in Juliá, Memoria 295-315).
5
It is worth noting that Ricardo de la Cierva’s “War of Spain” avoided
the term “civil war,” which would have given too much legitimacy to
6
Paul Escott 87
the losing side. Another part of these developments was the fact that as
time passed, some individuals who had been part of the Nationalist cause,
including the disillusioned Falangist writer Dionisio Ridruejo, began to
consider some type of social reconciliation.
Moa also argued in pages 190-94 that the left “was not progressive or the
representative of the workers, but a radical group seeking the abolition of
religion, the state, and the family. A “good part of the real people found
such medicine much worse than the disease.” The right was not a champion
of the rich and reaction but of “religion, private property, the family,
the state, and the unity of Spain.” He defended the truth of religion and
claimed that conservatives were so moderate that their actions were “next
to cowardice at times, until the threat made it a question of life or death.”
7
Legal scholars often argue that the pursuit of justice should not be limited.
In addition the United Nations Commision on Human Rights and some
international courts hold that amnesty laws are illegitimate in any case of
human rights abuses.
8
Unfortunately, the committee on Reparations and Rehabilitation never
had many funds to carry out its work.
9
Witnesses cried or struggled with powerful emotions. Commission
members, when confronted with narratives of heinous and cruel acts,
themselves were shocked, stunned, and moved to tears. In one session
Bishop Desmond Tutu himself was overwhelmed by a horrifying story;
the only response he could make was to bury his face in his hands as he
lowered his head onto the table before him (Minow 330, 333-35).
10
These words were used by banker Dennis Rash of Charlotte, N.C., as he
celebrated NationsBank’s take-over of Bank of America (Goldfield 8).
11
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