Spain: A Unique History Read Free Page B

teaching assistantship, and I then put that offer firmly behind me.
    In 1957 I applied for admission to the doctoral programs at Harvard, Columbia, and Chicago. All three admitted me and offered a fellowship, though only in the case of Chicago was the fellowship large enough to pay my full expenses for a year. I decided to accept the fellowship at Columbia not because that university was any more prestigious than the other two, but because I calculated that a university in a city like New York would be more likely to have the resources to foster research in a new field such as the contemporary history of Spain. This was not something that I knew for a fact but more an intuitive hunch or wager, which, in fact, turned out to be exactly correct.
    Columbia proved to be the best choice for three different reasons. First, it had adopted an accelerated doctoral program, which required of students already possessing a master's degree scarcely more than two semesters of class work (most of which could be taken simply as "registration credit"), as well as a written qualifying examination and a two-hour oral examination for the doctorate, before moving on to dissertation research. Thus, given the powers of concentration that I possessed at that time, I had only to spend one academic year meeting requirements at Columbia, whereas at Harvard and Chicago two full years or more would have been required. This enabled me to move much more rapidly and greatly eased the potential financial strain, since I was otherwise hard put to finance graduate study.
    Second, I had the good fortune to have Shepard Clough as my adviser at Columbia, although I had not been aware of this ahead of time, and it formed no part of the reasoning behind my selection of that university. It turned out that Clough had served on the admissions and fellowship committee of the History Department the year before and had urged that a fellowship be offered to the potential young candidate in Spanish history. Clough was a former student of Carlton J. H. Hayes, who had been ambassador in Madrid during 1942-45; Clough was a specialist in modern French and Italian economic history. About that time, his Economic History of Modern Italy was awarded a prize by the Italian government. Clough had no knowledge of Spanish history but thought it useful and even important that others study the topic. Thus I became the first of several students to carry out research on Spain under Clough (the next would be Edward Malefakis). He strongly supported my work, helping me to obtain a fulsome research fellowship from the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), which would in fact provide more money than I could spend in the very inexpensive Spain of 1958-59.
    The third advantage that I derived from Columbia was key contacts with the Spanish émigré community, which worked out even better than I had hoped. The first Republican exile I met was Emilio González López, who had been one of the two key leaders of the Organización Regional Gallega Autonoma (ORGA), the main party of the Galicianist Left Republicans (its other principal leader being Casares Quiroga). In exile Don Emilio was for many years professor of Spanish literature at Hunter College (City University of New York), and I had several fruitful conversations with him about contemporary Spanish history and historiography, in addition to the politics of the Second Republic, in which he had played such an active role. Though González López had been a man of the Left, he was not sectarian like Monguió but objective and insightful. He was, in a totally informal way, the only instructor in Spanish history I had had to that point.
    In addition to my discussions with Don Emilio, I made a series of other contacts, such as those with Eloy Vaquero, a veteran politician of the Radical Party who had been a cabinet minister under Lerroux, and with the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT — National Confederation of Labor) leader and