If Franco wins

Title

If Franco wins

Creator

Paul McGuire

Language

English

Source

Panorama

Year

1939

Rights

In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted

Fulltext

1[The Spanish rebel government is now recognized. IF FRANCO WINS As the Spanish War draws to its end, interest inevitably shifts from the military effort to that other and greater effort which must be made, is being made, to create a new and a better Spain. Amongst even those who have most strongly supported Franco's cause, there is some natural anxiety: what form will the new State take? I do not believe for an instant that the Germans and Italians will dominate Spain. Italy went into Spain because she can no more afford to have Sovietism in Spain than she could afford to have it on the Brenner Pass. The defeat of Sovietism in Spain achieves a major score for Italian policy: it is, in itself, Italy's reward. The Germans, it seems, have been paid on the nail for every item of assistance, in Spanish products. But, more than this, it is difficult to see how either Italy or Germany could dominate Spanish policy. Certain concessions, in mining and so on, may be granted in Africa, but foreign capital has long been a powerful and not a happy influence in Spain (the British in the Rio Tinto and in Vizcaya, for instance) , and it is difficult to believe that Spain 10 will welcome an extension of these outside influences. But, more than that, one has to reckon with the remarkable Spanish pride. Franco has insisted from the beginning of the war, and even in its darkest days, that not an inch of Spanish territory would be yielded, and Spaniards almost universal1 y echo him. Further, it may seem cynical, but it is true, that nations are not commonly grateful to people who help them. It is not the benefit received, but the benefit expected which influences behavior most, and in this, one suspects, nations are not unlike individuals. I believe that we may expect from Spain an intensification of nationalism, both for good and for ill. The new Spain is not the familiar Spain of recent centuries. It is an active Spain, with an army; the one army in Europe of veterans. It is, too, culturally active. It is certain that the new Spain will have greater influence amongst the other peoples of her culture, in South America. A nation tempered, as Spain is being tempered, is not an easy victim for exploitation from outside. PANORAMA The oddest impression I have brought from Spain is that the people at large, and the administrators in particular, are more interested in the rebuilding of Spain than in anything else; even than in the war which continued at their doors. The Spaniards have a remarkable talent for looking after their own affairs. The war, it was always impressed upon one, was an affair of the soldiers. The task of the civil officers was the creation of the new order. And it seems reasonably certain that the general strategy of the soldiers has been subjected to the strategy of the civil command. When one thinks of the new Spain and the forms it is taking, one must always remember the intense feeling for personal liberty which all Spaniards have. The peasant or the workman meets on the freest terms the general or the official. and all are very much given to speaking their minds. The Spaniards may not have that fetish of individualism which is the heart of the parliamentary regimes, but they have a great regard for the human personality. No regime which neglects the person will ever survive in Spain: a Nazification of Spain is beyond belief. In the reconstruction of Spain, as in all human affairs. there will be disappointments MARCH. 1939 and failures; but I am convinced that the spirit in which it is being undertaken is profoundly sane and Christian. The mere fact that it is being undertaken, that it has so far progressed, in a country still at war is surely a symptom of determination and sincerity. The new order, will, almost certainly, be a "corporatisme d' association," rather than a "corporatisme d' etat"-i.e. it will resemble the order which comes into being in Portugal, rather than the order of Italy, or the order of Germany. The Spaniards see the corporate order as something which must grow from below, not as machinery to be imposed from above. Societies grow, they are not manufactured: both Franco and Salazar, President of Portugal. avoid the heresy of the "planners." Some initiative, some direction, is necessary from the political State, but only that the people themselves, each vocational group, should be stimulated and encouraged to deveI_op their own economic organizations. But, just as the Portuguese organism grows slowly, so, too, will the Spanish. Franco knows, as Salazar knows, that his people must grow to their stature, and he will not force a polity on them until they are ready to fill it. 11 What he does is to encourage their growth. He insists, for instance, on the moral and social importance of the family, and he strives to create the conditions which will make each family aware of its significance. Great emphasis is placed, as in Portugal. on good housing, and upon their own separate houses for the workers. President Salazar said: "The family which dwells beneath its own roof is necessarily more thrifty, more stable, better constituted. Great blocks of :flats, colossal houses for the workers, with their adjoining restaurants and their common table, do not interest us. We prefer the small, independent house, inhabited by the family which owns it." The new Spanish State will favor the small man, will promote the wider distribution of property. Salazar's words apply, I believe, equally tQ the Spanish regime: "If we are obsessed exclusively by the idea of wealth, of production, we cannot be either for or again~t the large or the small owner: we must favor the one here and the other there, according to geographical. climatic and economic conditions. But if we do not reduce the life of society to terms of the production and the utilization of wealth; if we find that aspect of life, however necessary, should be tempered, 12 completed or corrected by other realities-such as tranquility, happiness, well-being, and the beauty of family life-then we can laugh at the cut-and-driedformulas for higher productivity, and decide at once for a policy of breaking up the great rural estates, and of systematically making small holdings, in which peasant families can be established in their own ownership." Portugal is rapidly becoming what we would call a Distributist State. Spain will follow. Spain will restore property over as wide a human province as she can. Where the wage system must continue, she has already shown that she accepts the principle of the family wage. The low-paid trades have already been tackled,' especially those industries, like domestic service and dressmaking, in which women workers are chiefly concerned. Domestics in Spain now have a minimum wage and protection in their working conditions. Taxi-drivers, by the way, have had their wages increased by 50 per cent. With this has gone a rapid extension of public health services. There are now sanatoria for consumptives in every province of Spain, with beds enoµgh for every patient in Spain. Treatment and hospital accomPANORAMA modation is free up to what we would consider a middle-class level of income. Special attention has been given to children's sanatoria, and to schools for backward and abnormal children. Anyone who recalls the old conditions in these services will realize that there is now a new temper in Spain, a new command: this is a new spain.Pa.ul McGuire, condensed from (Jolumbia. WHICH couple enjoys the more complete life--the childless pair who can sit down to a quiet, uninterrupted meal, who can count on the luxury of privacy, the balm of solitude, who can :find time to keep upto-date on the things that feed the souls-books, music, painting, sculpture, the theatre, sports, the dynamic fabric of our changing times--or the harried parents whose fevered round of dishes, diapers, and disorders allows them leisure for neither culture, hobbies, nor company? Perhaps your .children will support you when you become too old to worlc. Perhaps, on the other hand, they won't. Perhaps they will still be relying on you to support them-along with such incidental dependents of their own as they may have acquired by marriage.-]. H. S. Moynahan, in Forum. SOME people ought to have children and some ought not. Some people are made to be parents and some are not. I still contend and will contend that nobody needs to have naughty children or nasty children. That is just bad management! The reward of having children is not in what they will do for you. The reward is solely in the joy of watching personality unfold and grow, in seeing at last a rich, full nature matured and ready to live. If everything you have done for the child, from washing diapers to reading poetry, has not been joy, if the knowledge that youi" child is a :fine human being is not reward enough in itself, then you know that you should not have been a parent.-Pearl Buck, in Forum. MABCH, 1939 13

pages

10-13

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