Michael: In the 1930s, nearly 3,000 Americans volunteered for a foreign war. Their death rate was higher than in any American war of the 20th century. They weren't drafted. They weren't paid. So what on earth were they fighting for? Kevin: A higher death rate than World War II? For volunteers? That's unbelievable. What war was this? I feel like this should be a much bigger story than it is. Michael: It absolutely should be. And that's the story we're diving into today, through the book Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939 by Adam Hochschild. It's a book that’s been widely acclaimed, and for good reason. Kevin: Adam Hochschild. I know that name. He’s a serious writer. Michael: He is. What's fascinating is that the author, Adam Hochschild, actually co-founded Mother Jones magazine and has built his career writing about human rights struggles. He's not just a dry historian; he's someone deeply invested in stories of moral courage, which is exactly what this book is about. It’s less a military textbook and more a collection of human heartbreaks and triumphs. Kevin: Right, so he's coming at this from a very human, moral angle. That makes sense. Let's start there then. What drove these people to such an extreme? What was happening in the world that made fighting in Spain feel like the most important thing you could do with your life?

Michael: The book opens with one of the most visceral and cinematic scenes I've ever read in a history book. It’s April 1938. Two American volunteers, John Gates and George Watt, are trapped behind enemy lines. Franco's fascist forces are advancing, and the order is to shoot any foreign prisoners on sight. Kevin: Okay, so capture is not an option. They're in a terrible spot. Michael: A terrible spot. For three days, they evade tanks and cavalry, navigating by the North Star. They finally reach the Ebro River, which separates them from safety. But the bridge is blown up. There are no boats. The river is swollen and freezing with melted snow from the Pyrenees. Kevin: Oh man. This is a nightmare scenario. What do they do? Michael: Some of the other trapped soldiers, non-swimmers, try to cross on a farmhouse door. They drown. At least six men are lost in the current. So Gates and Watt, both New Yorkers and both good swimmers, make a decision. They strip off all their clothes, every last bit, and plunge into the icy water. Kevin: They swim for it. Naked. In a freezing river, in the middle of a war. Michael: Exactly. They make it across, but the ordeal isn't over. George Watt describes it in the book. He says, 'We walk stark naked and barefoot over a seemingly endless stretch of sharp stones and burrs that cut our feet. We are shivering from the cold, and our feet are bleeding when we reach the highway.' Kevin: That's insane. And then what? They're just standing naked on a highway in Spain? Michael: A truck driver comes along, gives them a couple of blankets, and just drives away, probably thinking he's hallucinating. But then another car pulls up. And out step two men: Herbert Matthews, a correspondent for the New York Times, and Ernest Hemingway. Kevin: You're kidding me. They just run into Ernest Hemingway? That feels like something out of a movie. Michael: It's completely real. The journalists give them news of friends who made it to safety, and Gates and Watt give them the bad news of who didn't. And then, in a moment of pure, raw emotion, Hemingway looks back across the river at the fascist lines, shakes his fist, and shouts, 'You fascist bastards haven’t won yet! We’ll show you!' Kevin: Wow. That one scene captures so much. The desperation, the camaraderie, the sheer ideological fury. Okay, that's an incredible story of survival, but it feels like the endpoint of a long journey. What was the starting point? Why were they, and thousands of other Americans, even there? Michael: That's the central question. You have to remember the context of the 1930s. The Great Depression was in full swing. For many, capitalism looked like a complete and utter failure. People were starving, unemployed, and desperate for an alternative. At the same time, you have fascism rising in Europe. Hitler is in power in Germany, Mussolini in Italy. They're aggressive, they're expansionist, and they're crushing democracy. Kevin: So the world felt like it was falling apart, and people were looking for a cause, something to believe in. Michael: Precisely. And then comes Spain. In 1936, a leftist coalition, the Popular Front, wins a democratic election. They promise land reform, workers' rights, education. For a moment, it looks like a beacon of hope in a darkening Europe. But almost immediately, the military, led by General Francisco Franco and backed by the old aristocracy and the church, launches a coup to overthrow the elected government. Kevin: And that’s the start of the civil war. Michael: That's the start. And it immediately becomes an international proxy war. Hitler and Mussolini pour in planes, tanks, and troops to support Franco. The Spanish Civil War becomes, as Hochschild puts it, a 'world war in embryo.' For idealists all over the world, this was it. This was the frontline. This was the one place you could go and physically fight fascism. Kevin: So it wasn't just a Spanish problem. It felt like a global showdown. Michael: It was the global showdown. You have people like Robert Merriman, this impossibly handsome, brilliant economics graduate from Berkeley. He and his wife Marion were in Moscow studying the Soviet planned economy, trying to find an answer to the Depression. But when the war in Spain breaks out, he feels he has no choice. He tells his wife, who is begging him not to go, that fascism has to be stopped in Spain, or it will lead to a world war. He saw it coming. And so he leaves his academic career behind to become a soldier. Kevin: That's a huge sacrifice. To leave a comfortable life, a promising career, a wife you love, to go fight in someone else's war. The level of conviction is just staggering. Michael: It is. And that's what Hochschild captures so well. It wasn't an adventure for these people. It was a moral necessity. As the French novelist Albert Camus wrote, 'Men of my generation have had Spain in our hearts.' It was where they learned that you could be right, and still be beaten.

Kevin: That Camus quote is haunting. 'You can be right and still be beaten.' It sets a tragic tone. So it sounds like a very clear-cut, good-versus-evil fight. You have the democratically elected Republic versus the fascist coup backed by Hitler. A real-life Captain America story. But I've heard the book is more complicated than that, and it actually got some mixed reviews for its political framing. What's the catch? Michael: The catch is a big one, and it’s the moral core of the book. The Western democracies—Britain, France, and the United States—declared themselves 'neutral.' They established an arms embargo that, in practice, only hurt the Republic, because Germany and Italy were openly ignoring it and arming Franco to the teeth. Kevin: So the good guys were left defenseless by the other democracies. Who did they turn to? Michael: They had only one major power willing to sell them weapons: Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union. And that, as Hochschild calls it, was the 'devil's bargain.' Kevin: Okay, that complicates the picture. Fighting for democracy with the help of one of the world's most brutal dictators. Michael: Exactly. And the book explores this through the devastating story of Louis Fischer. Fischer was a prominent American journalist, a true believer. He grew up in the slums of Philadelphia and saw the Soviet Union as this grand, historic project, a 'vision' that was lifting a nation out of poverty. He wrote glowing articles about it, even defending the secret police. He was all in. Kevin: He was a propagandist, essentially. Michael: In many ways, yes. But his faith gets shattered in Spain. He goes there to help the cause, even joining the International Brigades as a quartermaster. But on the ground, he sees the dark side of his Soviet allies. The Comintern, the international communist organization, is running things with an iron fist. He witnesses the paranoia, the political purges. He sees fellow volunteers, good anti-fascists, get accused of being 'Trotskyist' spies and simply disappear. Kevin: So the 'war within a war' that you hear about. The communists were fighting the fascists, but also fighting other leftists who weren't loyal to Stalin. Michael: Precisely. The most chilling part of the book for me is when Hochschild describes his own research journey. Decades after the war, in 1991, he's in Kazakhstan, visiting the site of a former gulag labor camp. And in a desolate cemetery, he finds graves marked with Spanish names. Kevin: Wait, Spanish graves? In a Soviet gulag? Michael: Yes. It turns out thousands of Spanish Republicans, including children, had been taken in by the USSR as refugees after the war. But in the paranoia of Stalin's regime, many were branded as spies or traitors and sent to the camps to die. They escaped fascism only to be consumed by their supposed ally. Kevin: That is just heartbreaking. It completely destroys the simple 'good guys versus bad guys' narrative. How did the volunteers on the ground, people like Robert Merriman, deal with this? Michael: That's the tragedy. Many of them either didn't see the full extent of it, or they rationalized it. They were in a desperate fight for survival. The Soviet tanks and planes were the only things stopping Franco from marching into Madrid. What choice did they have? It raises that impossible question: do you accept help from a monster to fight another monster? Kevin: And there's no easy answer to that. It's the ultimate trolley problem, but with armies and nations. Michael: It is. And it's the lesson Camus was talking about. The war taught them that 'force can vanquish spirit, and that there are times when courage is not rewarded.' They had the moral high ground, but morality doesn't stop bullets or bombs.

Michael: And that desperation was made a thousand times worse by the fact that the West wasn't just neutral—some parts of it were actively helping Franco. Kevin: Actively helping him? I thought the whole policy was 'non-intervention.' Michael: Officially, yes. But Hochschild uncovers a story that is absolutely infuriating. It’s about a man named Torkild Rieber. He was the CEO of Texaco oil company. Kevin: Okay, I have a bad feeling about where this is going. Michael: You should. Rieber was a huge admirer of Adolf Hitler. He had a bust of him in his office. And throughout the war, he secretly supplied Franco's entire army with oil—on credit. He violated the US neutrality policy, ignored a direct warning from President Roosevelt, and kept the fascist war machine fueled. Kevin: So an American company was single-handedly fueling the fascist side of the war? Michael: It gets worse. Hochschild, drawing on research from Spanish archives, discovered that Texaco wasn't just selling oil. Rieber set up a clandestine intelligence network. Texaco employees in ports around the world would report the movements of oil tankers heading for the Spanish Republic. They'd cable the information to a Texaco office in Paris, which would then pass it on to Franco's navy. Kevin: Wait, an American company was helping the fascists sink ships carrying supplies to the other side? That's not just business, that's espionage. That's actively participating in the war. How was this not front-page news? Michael: That's the other part of the hidden war. The press was, in many ways, complicit. Hochschild talks about the journalistic 'herd behavior.' Most reporters clustered in Madrid, covering the battles, creating a simplified 'heroes-vs-villains' story. They almost completely ignored the massive social revolution happening in places like Catalonia, where workers had taken over factories and were trying to build a new society. Kevin: They missed the biggest story? Michael: They missed one of the biggest. And you also had what Hochschild calls a 'civil war at the Times.' The New York Times had two main reporters in Spain. One was Herbert Matthews, who was on the front lines with the Republic, filing passionate, eyewitness accounts. The other was William Carney, who was on the Nationalist side. Carney rarely left his hotel bar and basically just filed Franco's press releases as news. At one point, during the Battle of Teruel, Matthews is in the city, reporting that the Republic has captured it. Meanwhile, Carney files a story, which the Times runs, claiming Franco's forces have retaken it. Hemingway, who was with Matthews, was furious, shouting that 'The Times retook the town for Franco!' Kevin: So you have fake news and corporate espionage tipping the scales. It feels like the idealists in the trenches never stood a chance. They weren't just fighting Franco's army. Michael: They were fighting a global system that was tilted against them. They were fighting German bombers, Italian troops, Texaco's oil tankers, and the indifference of the world's democracies. It was an impossible fight.

Michael: When you put it all together, you have these incredibly brave Americans, fighting and dying for an ideal, but they're caught in this perfect storm. Their only ally is a murderous dictator, their own country's corporations are arming the enemy, and the world's democracies have abandoned them. Kevin: It's a story of incredible courage and profound tragedy. It really makes you think about today. When we see injustice in the world, what are the 'devil's bargains' we might have to consider? And who are the hidden Torkild Riebers influencing events behind the scenes? It’s not a comfortable thought. Michael: It's not. And Hochschild leaves us with that. The book is a tribute to the spirit of these volunteers, but it's also a brutal lesson that courage isn't always rewarded. There's a moment near the end of the book where he recounts an interview he did as a young reporter in the 1960s with a veteran of the Lincoln Brigade. He asked the old man how he looked back on the war. Kevin: What did he say? Michael: Over the clatter of the newsroom, the veteran just said with immense feeling, so different from the usual newsroom banter, 'I wish we’d won.' After all the complexity, all the sacrifice, all the moral compromises, it came down to that simple, heartbreaking wish. Kevin: A powerful and heartbreaking note to end on. For anyone listening who has a story about a family member's involvement in a historical cause, we'd love to hear about it on our social channels. It's these personal histories that keep the past alive and remind us what's at stake. Michael: This is Aibrary, signing off.