Double Helix: Blueprint of Nations
Welcome to 'Double Helix: Blueprint of Nations,' the podcast where we analyze and look at the events, people and actions that have shaped the nations of our world . From revolutions to treaties, conflicts to triumphs, we explore the historical blueprints that continue to influence the way nations think and act today.
Double Helix: Blueprint of Nations
The Spanish Civil War: Fragile Republic (Part 2)
What if the choices made during a single decade could redefine a nation's identity for generations? Join us as we explore the seismic shifts of 1930s Spain, a country caught in a tense dance between tradition and modernity. In the vibrant streets of Madrid and Barcelona, the jubilant ousting of King Alfonso XIII heralds the dawn of a republic brimming with promise. Central to this transformation is Manuel Azaña, the formidable intellectual-turned-Prime Minister, whose radical reforms challenge the Catholic Church's grip and push the military towards modernization. With Spain standing at a historic crossroads, we unravel the fierce resistance and ideological battles that defined this turbulent era, all under the watchful eyes of a young Francisco Franco.
As Spain grapples with land reform, the Great Depression, and polarization, the nation's internal divisions deepen, setting the stage for a tragic and inevitable conflict. From the rise of the right-wing CEDA party to the violent confrontations of the 1934 Asturias uprising, we dissect the societal fractures that turned political opponents into existential threats. Standing on the brink of civil war, the fateful choices made during New Year's Eve of 1935 foreshadow the tumultuous year of 1936. Through these episodes, we draw powerful parallels to today's polarized world, where compromise is too often seen as betrayal, asking what lessons history holds for avoiding the same fate.
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Today's episode contains descriptions of political violence, civil unrest and instances of state repression that some listeners may find disturbing until you walk a mile in their shoes. Well, I'd argue, you can't understand a nation until you've walked through its history, not just the highlight reel or the sanitized version you find in textbooks. I mean really getting into its DNA, those defining moments that shaped everything that came after, those moments where paths were chosen, where decisions were made in palaces and backrooms and city streets that changed the course of millions of lives. I'm your host, paul, and this is Double Helix Blueprint of Nations, where we unravel the genetic code of countries through their most transformative moments. Think of it like ancestry testing, but for entire nations. We dig deep into the historical DNA, finding those crucial moments that made countries who they are today.
Speaker 1:Remember that sword on the Duke's wall from our last episode? Well, by 1931, swords across Spain were being taken down, cleaned and sharpened. The Republic was coming, and with it the most ambitious attempt to remake Spanish society in 400 years, 400 years Last time. We explore how Spain's deep divisions between rich and poor, church and secular society, center and regions created fault lines that ran through every aspect of Spanish life. Today we'll see what happened when a new government tried to heal those divisions overnight and instead made them deeper than ever.
Speaker 1:Let me take you to Madrid. It is April 14, 1931. The sun is setting and the streets are alive with celebration. People are singing, dancing, waving red, yellow and purple flags the colors of the new republic. In the Puerta del Sol, the main square, someone has climbed up and placed a pharyngeal cap the ancient symbol of liberty on the statue of the bear and the strawberry tree the symbols of Madrid.
Speaker 1:The monarchy that had ruled Spain for centuries had fallen in a municipal election. King Alfonso XIII hadn't even been overthrown. He just left, saying he didn't want to ignite a civil war. A young journalist named Manuel Chavez Nogales is watching all of this. He'll later write that night, everyone in Madrid was a Republican. The monarchy had fallen without a single shot being fired, without a drop of blood being spilled. It seemed like a miracle. In Barcelona, people were dancing sardanas, the traditional Catalan dance in the streets. In Seville, workers paraded through the city carrying red flags. Even in conservative Pamplona, people celebrated, though more quietly, but in the wealthy neighborhoods, behind drawn curtains, spain's elite are watching with horror. The Marquis of Quintanar writes in his diary. That night the mob is celebrating in the streets. They think they've won a great victory. They don't realize they've opened the gates to chaos. In his palace, the Duke of Alba, whose family had served Spanish kings since the 15th century, was already planning his exile. Both sides were right in their way.
Speaker 1:The Republic came peacefully, but peace wouldn't last because the new government was about to attempt something unprecedented the complete transformation of one of Europe's most traditional societies. Picture the Spain of 1931. The statistics tell a stark story. One-third of the population can read or write. Two percent of landowners control 67 percent of all agricultural land. There are 35,000 priests and 28,000 monks and nuns for a population of 24 million. The Catholic Church runs 395 secondary schools to the state's 17. The army has 258 generals for an army of 100,000 men, compared to France's 200 generals for an army 8 times larger. The average daily wage for an agricultural worker is 3.5 pesetas barely enough to buy bread for a family. This is the Spain the Republic inherited and this is the Spain they were determined to change.
Speaker 1:The man leading this transformation was Manuel Asana, and here we need to pause for a moment to understand this crucial figure. Before becoming prime minister, asana was primarily known as an intellectual and a writer. His diary entries reveal a man of deep contradictions brilliant but often arrogant. Democratic in his ideals but sometimes authoritarian in his methods. Democratic in his ideals but sometimes authoritarian in his methods. Spain, he once wrote, is like a convent and a brothel built on top of a Roman ruin. He saw himself as the surgeon who would cut away Spain's medieval past and forge a modern nation. In one of his first acts as Prime Minister, asana took aim at what he saw as the two pillars holding up the old order the church and the army. Let me show you how dramatic this was.
Speaker 1:On a single day, may 7, 1931, the provisional government declared complete religious freedom and made religious instruction in schools optional. For a country where Catholicism had been the official state religion for centuries, where even the Constitution declared it illegal to practice other religions publicly, this was revolutionary. The church's response was swift. Cardinal Pedro Segura issued a pastoral letter calling on Catholics to resist. He said the rights of the Church are being trampled. He also declared the enemies of Christ are attempting to dechristianize Spain. When the government ordered him to leave the country, he refused. The civil guard had to escort him to the French border, but the Church was just the beginning.
Speaker 1:Asagna turned next to the military, and here we need to introduce another key figure in our story, francisco Franco. In 1931, franco was a brigadier general, the youngest in Europe, at age 38. He had made his reputation in Morocco, where his ruthless efficiency earned him both admiration and fear. Unlike many officers who came from noble families, franco was middle class. The son of a naval paymaster, he had worked his way up through merit and combat experience. When Asana announced his military reforms, offering officers the choice between swearing loyalty to the Republic or retiring with full pay, franco chose to stay. But his private letters from this period revealed his growing dismay. To his cousin, he wrote they speak of modernizing the army, but what they really want is to destroy it. Still, franco kept his opinions private. He was nothing if not cautious, a trait that would serve him well in the years to come.
Speaker 1:And the reforms just kept coming. The Republic passed an agrarian reform law that allowed the government to expropriate large estates with compensation. They established mixed juries of workers and employers to settle labor disputes. They granted autonomy to Catalonia. They legalized divorce. They gave women the right to vote, though some Republicans did oppose this, fearing women would vote conservative, under pressure from their priests.
Speaker 1:So let me take you to an estate in Andalusia where land reform played out. It's dawn, the government surveyors are measuring land that has belonged to the same family since before Columbus sailed to America. The old count who owns it stands watching his face rigid in fury. The old count who owns it stands watching his face rigid with fury. The estate is massive 12,000 hectares, worked by peasants who earn three pesetas a day. When they can find work Nearby, these same peasants wait with hope in their eyes. One of them, an old man named Miguel, tells a reporter I have worked this land for 50 years. My father worked it before me, his father before him. Now, for the first time, a piece of it might be ours.
Speaker 1:But land reform moved slowly, too slowly for many. By the end of 1932, only 45,000 hectares had been redistributed. Meanwhile, unemployment was rising. Spain, like the rest of the world, was caught in the Great Depression. Walking through Madrid's working-class districts, you'd see lines of men waiting for bread, women pawning their wedding rings and children begging in the streets. This wasn't the republic's dilemma. For conservatives, its reforms went too far, too fast. For radicals, they didn't go far enough, fast enough and caught in the middle was a government trying to remake a nation through legal means while keeping the peace.
Speaker 1:The pressure cooker finally exploded in the elections of 1933. The right, organized under a new party called the CIDA, the Spanish Confederation of Autonomous Right-Wing Groups, campaigned under the slogan All Power to the Chief. They won a majority and immediately began rolling back the Republic's reforms. José María Gil Robles, cida's leader, had visited Nazi Germany and fascist Italy. While he claimed to support democracy, he also said Democracy is not an end but a means to the conquest of the new state. When the time comes, either Parliament submits or we will eliminate it. The left saw CIDA's victory as Spain's equivalent of Hitler's rise to power in Germany. Francisco Largo Caballero, the socialist leader, declared If they want to establish a dictatorship of the right, they will have to do it over our dead bodies. In private meetings, socialist militants began stockpiling weapons. And then came Asturias.
Speaker 1:In October 1934, when SIDA entered the government, the left launched a revolution In these mountainous regions of northern Spain. 30,000 miners armed with dynamite seized control. They took over police stations, declared a socialist republic and held out against government forces for two weeks. The government's response revealed how much Spain had changed. They sent in the Army of Africa battle-hardened troops from Morocco, including the Spanish Foreign Legion and Muris Regulares. Leading one of the columns was General Franco, called back from semi-exile in the Balearic Islands. His instructions were simple crush the revolt. What followed was a preview of the civil war to come.
Speaker 1:The army of Africa used colonial warfare and treated Spanish workers like colonial rebels. Torture was widespread. Summary executions were common. When it was over, 2,000 people were dead, 1,500 more were wounded. Thousands were arrested. Let me share a detail to show how personal this was becoming. In the mining town of Mieres, a civil guard sergeant recognized one of the captured miners. They had served together in Morocco. Why, asked the sergeant? The miner replied because we were tired of being treated like animals. You say we are all Spanish, but some live like lords and others live like beasts. We wanted to change that.
Speaker 1:The repression of Asturias changed everything. For the left, it confirmed the worst fears about the right, and for the right, it justified the fears about the left. And for Franco, it cemented his reputation as the man who could be counted on to restore order by any means necessary. By any means necessary. You know, as I research and tell these stories, I can't help but notice echoes of Spain's division in our own time.
Speaker 1:When societies become this polarized, people don't just disagree about policies. They begin to see their opponents as existential threats. In 1930s Spain, a conservative newspaper writer could look at a trade unionist and see not a fellow Spaniard with different views, but an agent of international Bolshevism bent on destroying Spain itself. Meanwhile, the same trade unionist might look at a Catholic businessman and see not a potential employer but a fascist conspirator plotting to enslave the working class. Does any of that sound familiar? When political opponents become enemies, when compromise becomes treason, societies start to crack.
Speaker 1:In Spain, this process was accelerated by what we now call echo chambers. Conservative Catholics read only Catholic newspapers. Socialists read only socialist papers. Anarchists had their own press. Each group lived in its own reality, with its own facts, its own villains, its own version of Spain's past and future. Let me show you how this played out in daily life. In the town of Salamanca, a researcher named Julian Casanova found records of a Catholic youth group and a socialist youth group. In 1931, they occasionally held debates with each other. By 1934, they were attacking each other on the streets, and by 1935, they didn't even acknowledge each other's existence, except as threats to be eliminated.
Speaker 1:This polarization affected every aspect of life in Spain. In Valencia, people began checking a shop owner's political affiliation before buying bread. In Seville, children from conservative and progressive families were forbidden to play together. In Seville, children from conservative and progressive families were forbidden to play together. In Barcelona, factory owners kept lists of workers who attended mass, while union leaders kept lists of workers who didn't attend socialist meetings. The depth of these divisions becomes clear when you look at how people responded to the same events. Remember the town of Casas Viejas? We talked about it in our last episode. It was a small village in Andalusia.
Speaker 1:As I said before, in January of 1933, starving peasants declare a communist revolution and the government's response was brutal. The Civil Guard killed 24 people, including women and children. But here's what's fascinating when this was debated in parliament, the right and the left couldn't even agree on what had happened. Conservative deputies spoke of brave civil guards defending law and order against violent revolutionaries. Socialist deputies described heroic peasants massacred by the forces of reaction. They were talking about the same event, but they might as well have been describing different planets. The socialist leader, largo Caballero, summed it up when he said there are no longer any bridges between us. The river of blood is too wide.
Speaker 1:This inability to agree on basic facts had devastating consequences when the left won the 1936 elections and we'll cover that in our next episode the right didn't just disagree with the result. Many refused to accept it as legitimate. Does that sound familiar? Meanwhile, sections of the left saw their victory as a mandate not just to govern but to transform Spain completely, regardless of conservative opposition. The tragedy is that the Republic's reforms, while radical for Spain, were similar to changes other European countries had already made. Women's suffrage Britain had it since 1918. Separation of church and state France had that done in 1905. Land reform Many Eastern European countries had extensive programs after World War I, but in Spain every reform became a battle in what both sides increasingly saw as an all-or-nothing war for Spain's soul.
Speaker 1:As an all-or-nothing war for Spain's soul, the Catholic philosopher Miguel de Unamuno, watching his country tear itself apart, wrote something prophetic in 1935. There are two Spains. The Spain that says this will unite us and the Spain that answers this will divide us. And both are right, because in Spain everything unites by dividing and divides by uniting. By late 1935, the division had reached every corner of Spanish society.
Speaker 1:The army, despite Asana's reforms was seething with conspiracy. General Mola and remember this name for our next episode was already drawing up plans for military uprising. The church, its privileges under attack, was increasingly aligning itself with the far right. Workers' organizations were stockpiling weapons and landowners were hiring private militias. Even Spain's past became a battleground. The right spoke of Spain's golden age, the time of Philip II, spanish Inquisition and colonial empire. The left celebrated the medieval communes, the resistance to absolutism, the first republic. It wasn't just that they wanted different futures, they couldn't even agree on what Spain had been. Franco, watching all this from his posting in the Canary Islands, where the Republican government had sent him to keep away from the mainland, wrote a telling letter to a fellow officer Spain is like a ship without a captain and everyone on board thinks they should be steering. He wasn't wrong about the chaos, but his solution, which we will explore in the coming episodes, would prove far more devastating than the problem.
Speaker 1:As 1935 drew to a close, spain was a nation holding its breath. In working-class bars, people whispered about weapons hidden in union halls. In army officers clubs, men spoke quietly about saving Spain. In church rectories, priests warned of coming persecution. In university classrooms, students debated revolution versus reaction. The writer Arturo Barea captured this moment perfectly.
Speaker 1:Standing in Madrid's Puerta del Sol on New Year's Eve in 1935, he wrote the square was full of people celebrating, but there was something forced about the gaiety. It was as if everyone was laughing a little too loud, drinking a little too much, trying a little too hard to pretend that everything was normal. But we all knew that 1936 would be the year when Spain would have to choose his path. None of us knew then that all paths would lead to tragedy, next time on Double Helix. The elections of 1936 brings the left back to power and Spain's divisions reach their breaking point. A militant young socialist will declare better Vienna than Berlin, meaning better to fight and lose, like the Austrian socialists, than submit, like the Germans had, to Hitler. A conservative newspaper will respond Between Russia and Spain, we choose Spain, but which Spain, and at what cost? Until then, thank you for listening and we will see you soon. © transcript Emily Beynon. Thank you.
