The Soviet Union and many on the left supported the loyalists of the Spanish Republic. Britain and France refused to intervene and did nothing to prevent outside intervention. Moderate peace groups such as the APD refused to support the republican cause and opposed the imposition of sanctions. The policy of nonintervention gave the advantage to Franco, since his forces controlled the seaports and received more technical assistance from the fascist states than the republic received from Moscow. The US Congress adopted an arms embargo resolution that cut off military support to the beleaguered republic but that did not stop Hitler and Mussolini from aiding Franco. Senator John Bernard of Minnesota complained that the measure was a sham intended to “choke off democratic Spain . . . at a time while it is being assailed by the Fascist hordes of Europe.” The arms embargo was not truly neutral, critics argued, when it had the effect of aiding the fascists and hastening the defeat of democratic Spain.
As evidence mounted that Germany and Italy were providing weapons and even troops to aid Franco’s forces, sympathy for the republic increased. Most major peace and internationalist groups in the United States and Europe urged their governments to support the republic. Thousands of Americans signed up for the Lincoln Brigade and joined the fighting in Spain. Thousands more rallied behind the republic and supported political efforts to repeal the arms embargo. Support for lifting the embargo came from many quarters, including former Secretary of State Henry Stimson, Norman Thomas, Albert Einstein, and many educators and Protestant Church leaders. A Bill to lift the arms embargo was introduced in the Senate. A group of 800 women marched in Washington and delivered a petition to the State Department calling for repeal. The Roosevelt administration was sympathetic to these appeals but chose not to act. The president did not want to break ranks with Britain and France and was afraid of offending his many Catholic constituents who were influenced by the Vatican, which favored Franco over the left-leaning republic. Reinhold Niebuhr wrote at the time, “It is now quite clear that Franco’s victory was the first, and may have been the decisive, defeat of the democracies” as the world war began. He blamed the allied failure in Spain on “Tory class interests”in Britain and Roosevelt’s dependence on the Catholic vote in the USA.
For many pacifists Spain was a turning point, as illustrated by the odyssey of British Member of Parliament Ellen Wilkinson. A former communist and member of the WILPF, Wilkinson returned from a visit to Spain in 1937 convinced that it was the central battleground in the international struggle against fascism. She resigned from the PPU and later served as a member of the wartime government. Like other peace advocates at the time, “her antifascism proved stronger than her pacifism.”
Musical Talents in France and Spain in Sixteenth Century
