'A mirror reflecting the image of our own unquiet desperation': America's engagement with the Spanish Civil War

The Spanish Civil War generated a range of opinion in the United States, right across the political spectrum. Roosevelt adopted a policy of neutrality, but that was not reflective of, or overwhelmingly supported by, the majority of the public. Clearly, Americans were concerned with the realities of the war in Spain, especially after 1937. However, the war also offered the United States an opportunity to reflect upon its own identity, its sense of purpose and its position in the world, a world that had changed fundamentally in the aftermath of World War I. The nation was caught between the old and the new, the pre-modern and the modern and the urge to isolationism and the practical impossibility of such a policy. Ernest Hemingway's writings on the Spanish Civil War comprehensively dramatize these themes. Read together, his work narrates a journey from disillusionment with Wilsonian foreign policy, with 'obscene' words like sacrifice and glory, to their necessary rehabilitation in the fight against fascism. These writings, then, carry with them important lessons for the United States at the beginning of the 1940s. The title quotation is from Guttman (1962: 195).