Spain: A Unique History (3 page)

Moreover, arguably the only book in English at that time that had attempted a searching analysis of the problems of contemporary Spain was Gerald Brenan's
The Spanish Labyrinth
(1944). Based on Brenan's experience of more than a decade in Spain and his research in secondary literature in the British Museum, it probed many of the key political and social issues, often with a depth and originality not to be found elsewhere. Nonetheless, despite Brenan's lengthy personal experience in the country, he often got lost in his labyrinth and sometimes fell far short of objectivity. As William Phillips has pointed out, in his broader judgments and conclusions Brenan often fell back on his own reworking of the stereotypes of both the Black Legend and "romantic Spain." He insisted on the existence of a national character dominated by spontaneity and by "faith," a "religious ideal" that did not stem from Christianity (since Brenan was not a Christian) but instead "is doubtless due fundamentally to the influence of Moorish ideas in Christian communities. The deepest strata of Spanish thought and political sentiment are oriental."
⁹
Only in the final years of his life did Brenan retract such stereotypes in an article published in the Madrid daily
El Pais
.

The question most frequently asked me, especially in Spain, was what led me to become a Hispanist in the first place. This was never part of any careful plan but simply developed as a consequence of a series of events and experiences, some of them perfectly fortuitous. I was born in 1934 in north Texas in Denton, just to the north of Dallas, then a small town of around 12,000 inhabitants. My parents were "northerners" who had moved to Texas from Colorado in the hope of encountering better economic conditions during the Great Depression, a hope that was completely disappointed. Denton was not part of Hispanic south or southwest Texas, but was almost entirely Anglo-American (with a small segregated black population) and culturally more part of the southern "Bible Belt." There were very few Mexicans, though a slight influence of Mexican food was noticeable. During my four years in elementary school in Denton, I only very briefly had one classmate who was bilingual in Spanish.

During World War II, however, the Texas Board of Education decided that the new global context made it desirable that all Texas schoolchildren, from at least the fifth year of elementary education, should study a foreign language. This was done in a very simple and rudimentary way, having the homeroom teacher simply insert two hours of language study per week into the existing curriculum. Few, if any, of the teachers were particularly expert in a foreign language, but the language almost universally chosen was Spanish, which had already become the one most widely studied in the country. There was one Mexican girl in my class, named Carmen, who happened to be relatively bilingual, and it quickly became apparent to me that Carmen possessed a fluency and precision of pronunciation that quite surpassed our teacher, so that I tried to pattern my pronunciation on that of Carmen. The amount of Spanish that I learned in this way was nonetheless minimal. In June 1944 my family became part of the great wartime migration to California, where language instruction in the elementary schools was not practiced, but nonetheless my brief exposure to Spanish during 1943-44 had, in retrospect, set a precedent.

The standard curriculum in American secondary schools at that time offered (indeed, required) foreign language study only during the final two years. In the larger schools the choice lay between Spanish, French, and German, and it seemed natural that I chose Spanish. When I entered university-level studies at Pacific Union College in the Napa Valley in 1951, I found that the curriculum required both a major and a minor field of concentration. It was a foregone conclusion that for me the former would be history. I had been strongly attracted to history since my early childhood, though my reading had been informed much more by stories of Indian fighting and historical novels than by scholarly studies. Yet approaching history through the imagination was almost undoubtedly the best way for a boy to do so, and it gave me a certain empathy with the past that I could then apply in a more systematic and scholarly fashion later on.

For my minor field of concentration I chose Spanish, without the slightest hesitation, simply because I found studying the language interesting and congenial. At the age of seventeen or eighteen I had little if any thought of using it in a serious way. Moreover, studies in Spanish or about Spanish-speaking countries in the United States had come to focus primarily on Latin America, not Spain. Thus as an undergraduate I learned something about Spanish literature but almost nothing about the history of Spain, nor, for that matter, did the latter then interest me in the slightest. For me, serious historical study revolved around the United States, England, Germany, and Russia. I did learn to read Spanish reasonably well and began to develop a modest conversational ability in the language, but I still had not a thought of using it for more advanced work. My principal research paper dealt with the Colombian poet José Asunción Silva, not with a Spanish writer, and when my Spanish instructor suggested that I might want to learn Portuguese as well, I shrugged the suggestion off, having at that point no particular interest in the Iberian Peninsula. (I could not have imagined that within less than twenty years I would become, so far as I know, the only American historian ever to write a history of Portugal.)

My most absorbing interest in history and culture, during the last two of my four years as an undergraduate, was focused on Russia. At that time, immediately after the death of Stalin, the Soviet Union seemed at the height of its power, but I was more attracted by the literature and culture of Russia, and by its history prior to Communism. This seemed to me the most singular and fascinating of European histories, because of the uniqueness of the culture and the character of its development. The Russian language was not taught at my small college, however, so I was not prepared to enter a doctoral program as a candidate in Russian history. I made application to the Russian Institute at Columbia University, then the leading center of Russian studies, but the institute asked for further letters of recommendation, a response that was held up for some three months in the mail. By the time that it arrived, the deadline had long since passed, together with my principal opportunity to become a Russianist. But "no hay mal que por bien no venga" (there is no ill that doesn't lead to good) — this breakdown in mail delivery proved a blessing in disguise. Temperamentally I would have been unsuited to research in the Soviet Union, which would have been a source of endless irritation and frustration. Undoubtedly I would have accomplished much less in that field, but I never abandoned altogether my interest in Russia. Even after beginning research on Spanish history, I took six weeks during the summer of 1956 to enroll at the University of California-Berkeley in order to begin the study of the Russian language. In retrospect, however, I never necessarily curse inefficient mail service, because in 1955 it had possibly changed the course of my life for the better. I received only one good offer of a fellowship to begin graduate study in 1955. It came from the Claremont Graduate School (now Claremont University), one of the cluster of colleges in Claremont, at the eastern end of Los Angeles County in Southern California. Claremont provided the encouragement to begin work on Spanish history and also an attractive and supportive environment for me to gain the experience needed to make the transition from a small college in a rural setting in northern California to a much more complex and sophisticated scholarly environment in Columbia University and the city of New York two years later.

It was during the summer of 1955 that I first developed an interest in Spain as a possible area of research, stemming from two books that I read at that time. One was a treatment of Spanish society and culture,
The Spanish Temper
(1954), by the noted British literary critic (and avocational Hispanist) V. S. Pritchett; the other was a book on Spanish art history, focusing especially on the Middle Ages, whose title and author I have long since forgotten. These two works were in fact the first that I had ever selected to read on Spain (aside from the minimal reading required in literature courses) and both fired my imagination, for the very first time giving me the idea that Spain might be a genuinely interesting — and original — area of study. Since at Claremont I had been accepted in modern European history but was obviously not going to be specializing in Russia — a field not then offered at Claremont — I had to find a focus for my initial research.

The faculty at Claremont were completely receptive to the idea of working on Spain, which seemed to them both valid and original. I had two different faculty advisors, the first being Henry Cord Meyer in German history, who served as my Europeanist advisor. I also worked for him as a research assistant and learned a great deal from him about becoming a professional scholar and about European history more generally.

There was no one at Claremont who specialized in the modern history of Spain, as indeed no such field was offered in any other graduate school, though a very few American scholars, such as C. J. Bishko at Virginia, worked in earlier Spanish history. Gabriel Jackson at that time was teaching at Wellesley College, but this was a women's institution with no doctoral program. At Claremont I was therefore referred to the only professor who taught Latin American history, Hubert Herring. This was a fortunate encounter, for at that time Herring was one of the few Latin Americanists in the United States with an interest in Spain. Herring had been at one time a Protestant missionary in Latin America, but later turned to an academic career and was best known for a popular textbook on general Latin American history,
Good Neighbors
, published in 1955. He had visited Spain three times and at least had some sense of the country.

Herring encouraged my interest and also suggested a very fruitful research topic. I myself had few ideas about that, for the notion of working on Spain had just entered my mind, and I had had neither time nor opportunity for the preliminary reading needed to select a topic. I believe that I first suggested Manuel Azaña as a topic; besides Franco, he was one of the few figures in contemporary Spanish history that I had even heard of. Little did I suspect that he would later become a sort of bête noire of mine.

Herring, to his credit, wanted me to do something different and rather more original. He suggested the figure of José Antonio Primo de Rivera, whom I had never heard of, but I responded instinctively to Herring's guidance and to what seemed to me an interesting project. This became my master's thesis, a two-hundred-page study titled "José Antonio Primo de Rivera and the Beginning of Falange Española" (Claremont Graduate School, 1957), which focused on the movement during the years 1933-36.

This was a mere start, and I assumed that I would have to switch to a completely different theme for my doctoral dissertation. Consequently I had no idea that this was only the first step in what would become a fifty-year involvement with the history of Falangism and Franquismo, and later with the comparative history of fascism in general. I had no personal research "agenda" and at that time had no more interest in fascism and/or the radical Right than in a dozen other themes. Moreover, at that time there was no such field as "fascist studies," and those would begin to emerge only in the following decade of the 1960s.

I wrote to José María de Areilza, then ambassador in Washington, asking for any materials that he might be able to provide, and he sent to me copies of the
Obras completas
and the
Biografía apasionada
by Felipe Ximénez de Sandoval. The only primary data that I had to consult was the complete collection of
El Sol
for the years of the Republic, then held in the library of UCLA, not far away. This gave me a relatively accurate and objective account of the first street violence between Falangists and the Left in 1933-34.

It is important to understand that none of my professors, not even Herring, knew anything in detail about contemporary Spanish history, so I had the total personal responsibility of the autodidact. I never complained about this, because I have a good deal of intellectual independence and felt perfectly capable of learning Spanish history on my own.

During this first phase, the only professor with whom I talked who had extensive personal knowledge of contemporary Spanish affairs was the Catalan Socialist and former Republican diplomat, Luis Monguió, then at Mills College in Oakland. Like Francisco García Lorca and a number of other professional diplomats who had supported the Republic, after the Civil War Monguió became a professor of Spanish and Latin American literature, and soon joined the Spanish Department at the University of California-Berkeley. Perhaps his major work was a volume of criticism that appeared during these years on
La poesía posmodernista peruana
; this caught my eye because I have always considered Peruvian postmodernism the most interesting school of poetry in Latin America during the twentieth century.

Time and distance had not moderated nor added any complexity to Monguiós understanding of contemporary Spanish politics, which he assured me was simply a class struggle between "exploiters" and "exploited." When I pointed out to him that my preliminary research indicated that under the Republic lethal violence was first used in Madrid by the Left and not by Falangists, he simply dismissed the data out of hand as erroneous. This was my first experience of the extraordinary imperviousness of the Spanish Left to any critical research findings, and to their persistent use of a mythified treatment of history. At that time, however, I merely attributed this to the personal idiosyncrasy of Monguió, for I was then strongly sympathetic to the Left.

Since Claremont did not at that time offer the doctorate in European history, after two years I had to move on for my doctoral studies. Only in 1956-57 did I come firmly to abandon any further consideration of working in Russian history. I had a brief chat with Nicholas Riazanovsky in the summer of 1956 at Berkeley, where I studied the Russian language intensively for six weeks, and he told me that he judged that the field of Russian history was becoming adequately developed and no longer in such need of young scholars as had been the case a few years earlier. My last Russianist application, to study with Donald Treadgold at the University of Washington in 1956, had produced only the meager offer of an alternate teaching assistantship, and I then put that offer firmly behind me.