Spain: A Unique History Read Free Page A

became my master's thesis, a two-hundred-page study titled "José Antonio Primo de Rivera and the Beginning of Falange Española" (Claremont Graduate School, 1957), which focused on the movement during the years 1933-36.
    This was a mere start, and I assumed that I would have to switch to a completely different theme for my doctoral dissertation. Consequently I had no idea that this was only the first step in what would become a fifty-year involvement with the history of Falangism and Franquismo, and later with the comparative history of fascism in general. I had no personal research "agenda" and at that time had no more interest in fascism and/or the radical Right than in a dozen other themes. Moreover, at that time there was no such field as "fascist studies," and those would begin to emerge only in the following decade of the 1960s.
    I wrote to José María de Areilza, then ambassador in Washington, asking for any materials that he might be able to provide, and he sent to me copies of the Obras completas and the Biografía apasionada by Felipe Ximénez de Sandoval. The only primary data that I had to consult was the complete collection of El Sol for the years of the Republic, then held in the library of UCLA, not far away. This gave me a relatively accurate and objective account of the first street violence between Falangists and the Left in 1933-34.
    It is important to understand that none of my professors, not even Herring, knew anything in detail about contemporary Spanish history, so I had the total personal responsibility of the autodidact. I never complained about this, because I have a good deal of intellectual independence and felt perfectly capable of learning Spanish history on my own.
    During this first phase, the only professor with whom I talked who had extensive personal knowledge of contemporary Spanish affairs was the Catalan Socialist and former Republican diplomat, Luis Monguió, then at Mills College in Oakland. Like Francisco García Lorca and a number of other professional diplomats who had supported the Republic, after the Civil War Monguió became a professor of Spanish and Latin American literature, and soon joined the Spanish Department at the University of California-Berkeley. Perhaps his major work was a volume of criticism that appeared during these years on La poesía posmodernista peruana ; this caught my eye because I have always considered Peruvian postmodernism the most interesting school of poetry in Latin America during the twentieth century.
    Time and distance had not moderated nor added any complexity to Monguiós understanding of contemporary Spanish politics, which he assured me was simply a class struggle between "exploiters" and "exploited." When I pointed out to him that my preliminary research indicated that under the Republic lethal violence was first used in Madrid by the Left and not by Falangists, he simply dismissed the data out of hand as erroneous. This was my first experience of the extraordinary imperviousness of the Spanish Left to any critical research findings, and to their persistent use of a mythified treatment of history. At that time, however, I merely attributed this to the personal idiosyncrasy of Monguió, for I was then strongly sympathetic to the Left.
    Since Claremont did not at that time offer the doctorate in European history, after two years I had to move on for my doctoral studies. Only in 1956-57 did I come firmly to abandon any further consideration of working in Russian history. I had a brief chat with Nicholas Riazanovsky in the summer of 1956 at Berkeley, where I studied the Russian language intensively for six weeks, and he told me that he judged that the field of Russian history was becoming adequately developed and no longer in such need of young scholars as had been the case a few years earlier. My last Russianist application, to study with Donald Treadgold at the University of Washington in 1956, had produced only the meager offer of an alternate