We tend to think about the past based on what we can remember or have heard from our closest ancestors. The American Civil War took place in 1861-1865 and no one currently alive has known a witness or participant. On the other hand, the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939 may still be present in our memory because grandparents talked about it to descendants who will live many years to come. However, the similarities between these two civil wars can be instructive.
The two countries, the United States and Spain, had similar populations at the time, about 30 million and 25 million, respectively, and in both cases the number of victims was about 2.5% of the country's population: about 750,000 in the United States and about 540,000 plus 50,000 executed in the immediate post-war period in Spain.
In neither case did civil war break out overnight. In the United States, riots and angry riots like the ones we've seen in recent times have precedent, as the period before the Civil War was one of increasing confrontation.
After a rather peaceful founding period, the election of General Andrew Jackson, Donald Trump's favorite president, ushered in thirty years of partisan turmoil. For several decades, the average turnout in presidential elections was 80%, a level that would not even remotely be reached again. Congress was a verbal and physical battleground, with more than a hundred incidents of violence in the House of Representatives and the Senate.
Historian Joanne B. Freeman has studied this “field of blood,” in which “armed groups of congressmen from the North and the South engaged in hand-to-hand combat in the chamber...fights became endemic and the Congressmen sheathed knives and guns before heading to the Capitol every morning." The incidents "involved physical actions: punches, slaps, caning, assaults, pushes, duels, wielding weapons, volleying of desks, breaking windows and things like that."
The polarization, mainly around the issue of slavery, culminated in the presidential elections of 1856 and 1860. In the former, the pro-slavery Democratic candidate, James Buchanan, won a majority in the Electoral College with a minority of 45 % of the popular vote against the divided anti-slavery candidacies.
In 1860, in reverse, the Republican candidate, Abraham Lincoln, won in eighteen of the thirty-three states then in existence, with less than 40% of the total popular vote nationwide, against the divided pro-slavery candidacies. The subsequent secession of eleven Southern states triggered Lincoln's military response and the Civil War.
In Spain, the institutional crisis prior to the Civil War had accelerated since the military coup of 1923. During the Republic there were also equivocal elections. In 1933, the right of Catholics and monarchists received the support of 34% of the voters, but together with some center-right republicans gathered a majority of seats in Parliament, against the divided republicans and socialists. Then, in 1936, the leftists united in the Popular Front obtained a majority of seats with the support of only 46% of the voters, against the divided centre-right and right.
In Washington today, the Civil War continues to loom as an important founding moment. The Lincoln Memorial is the most solemn monument visited by American and foreign tourists. Throughout the city there are more equestrian statues of generals from the Civil War than from the previous revolutionary war for independence.
Some time ago, I attended a high-level academic event at George Mason University, which is on the south bank of the Potomac River in Virginia, where the keynote speaker ended a debate on decentralization with the reflection: “ And that's why we lost the war." Only in recent years have monuments and street names dedicated to the leaders of the defeated secessionist Confederacy begun to be removed in some Southern states.
Of course, the big difference is that in the United States the victors restored democracy (although slavery was replaced by racial segregation for several decades), while in Spain the victors kept the country subdued and secluded for forty years. However, the foundation of Spanish democracy in the 1970s was also strongly marked by the dissuasive memory of the Civil War.
President Adolfo Suárez won the first elections "because I kept the Spanish away from the danger of a confrontation after the death of Franco. They did not side with me because of illusions and longing for freedom, but because of fear of this confrontation; because I kept them from the horns of this bull".
With a little emotional and physical distance, one can realize how, in Spain, there often continues to be a verbal civil war, latent in bitter partisan clashes, tertullian shouting in the media and rantings in a polarized Parliament. In the United States, one might expect more oblivion because no one alive has ever known a person who had seen a slave.
However, the political polarization between North and South remains a deep rift, which the extreme right continues to wave with Confederate flags. When does a civil war cease to be an important element of political confrontation? It may be that every traumatic civil war produces endless reverberations.
