First Interview with Stanley Payne (December 7, 2006) Tapes 1-2

Stanley Payne (#833) Transcript RL: This is side two, side one of tape two of the ongoing oral history interview with emeritus professor Stanley Payne. Stan, when you came in 1968, what was your research program at that time? SP: I was very busy my first years at Wisconsin because I had two projects underway from the last year or two at UCLA. First of these, it really changed my outlook on contemporary Spanish history, was an invitation from Jack Green at Johns Hopkins, to write about, in a series of ten volumes that he was editing, on revolutions in the modern world. Green was a noted specialist in the American Revolution, and was going to do the American volume. He had identified ten revolutions and suggested to me that I write a book on the Spanish Revolution. I was doing Spanish Civil War. This seemed to me quite a good idea. So I undertook the project and began it, began work on it, basically, in 1966. I had also one lucky break on that, which came about serendipitously, in that in 1965, the San Diego campus at La Jolla, University of California, became for the first time a full scale 00:01:00 university campus. It had been a specialized marine and science campus until that time. The first chancellor was John Galbraith, my colleague in British empire history at UCLA. So he was starting up a whole series of new academic departments from scratch. Was looking for a history chairman. And I recommended to him Gabriel Jackson, who was the only other person older than myself who had begun working in contemporary Spanish history. Then teaching at (Vox?) College. In Illinois. And had just published a very attractive book on the Spanish Republic and Civil War. So Galbraith hired him. And Jackson became the founding chairman of the department at San Diego. Really a man not cut out for administration. So the first thing he did after becoming chairman was to hire someone else to become the regular, continuing chairman. But since there was more money in the '60s, he arranged for the library to purchase the private collection 00:02:00 of an American political activist in Morocco, who had collected a good deal of material on the Spanish Civil War and the Spanish Revolution. So that was deposited in the San Diego Library in 1967, my last year at UCLA. So I was able to exploit this very thoroughly before leaving Southern California. And that really helped a great deal with the research on hat book. So I was writing the book on the Spanish Revolution at that time, I was able to take the fall quarter of '67 on leave at UCLA. I was doing research in Europe and in Spain on that, fall of '67. And was just finishing the writing of the book on the Spanish Revolution when I came to Wisconsin in 1968. Curiously, this is still the only book with the title of The Spanish Revolution which deals with the entire revolutionary process of Spain from 1931 to 1939. And went through, in fact, two different Spanish translations. [laughs] Uh, so that several years removed, two different Barcelona publishers brought it out in Spanish. Shows you how loose the Spanish publishing industry is. I didn't even know about the second one, because there was an agent involved in the series. And his papers were clearly not in 00:03:00 order. And so he sold the book twice. But this caused no unnecessary complications, apparently. And so that's the way it was. The book was also eventually translated into Japanese, as well. And it as really, as I say, a very important project for me. Because I had accepted the general politically correct notion at the time that the Spanish left had been fundamentally democratic through the Republic, and that the civil war in Spain was a struggle between fascism and democracy. When I found the degree to with the Spanish left, even the moderate left, had flouted the democratic norms even before the civil war, this changed my perspective on Spanish history. So that was one of the two projects. And the other one was that shortly before leaving UCLA, I received a letter from Norman Cantor --the noted rather maverick medievalist, I think that would be a fair way to describe Cantor-- who was the history editor for a New York firm called Thomas Crowell, an old New York publisher. Soon, in fact, to be bought out. But I didn't know that. Saying it was very important for their list to have a one-volume 00:04:00 history of Spain and Portugal. Would I not like to write that? Hmm. I thought about it, and that would be a good thing to do. There was no new, up to date history of Spain and Portugal in English at all. And I thought this would be an interesting thing to do. In fact, it was in the preparation of this book, this history, that I really learned Spanish history. It's one thing to teach a course. You only have to generate a certain amount of material to give a series of lectures. But to write a thorough and complete history of the Iberian Peninsula, one had to do a lot more reading than I had ever done. So it was really to write that history of Spain and Portugal that I really learned Spanish history I can say for the first time. Remember that I'd never had a course on Spanish history. And I had simply been working up my own research, and then preparing my lectures for my course on my own. So this was also a very important project. It was also the project that began my association with the University of Wisconsin Press. I devoted that semester on leave in '69 when I first came to 00:05:00 Wisconsin to pressing ahead with the history of Spain and Portugal. And in fact, during that spring and summer, very nearly completed that. I'd still be working on it, still, for another year, year and a half more, until about the beginning of 1971. And when I completed my 950-page manuscript, so obviously it was a big book-- RL: Yeah. I was wondering how you would do that in one volume. SP: I went it off to Crowell. He said, "Thank you very much." Nothing happened for the next three months. And it so happened at this point, the spring of 1971, the end of my third year at Wisconsin, I happened to be introduced to Tom [Webb?], the long time director of Wisconsin Press, at a party. And as one does with publishers, we began to talk about books. I said, "I just finished this long history of Spain and Portugal. I've sent it off to the publisher. They acknowledge receipt. They haven't sent me a single word about their plans and schedule for publication. Or the editing of the manuscript or anything. That strikes me as very peculiar. Does it not you?" Tom Webb said, "Yes, indeed. Maybe this no longer interests them. And what is not of interest to a commercial publisher would be very interesting to Wisconsin Press." So I wrote them a letter 00:06:00 asking if they really intended to publish the book. And I found, in fact, that the year before, Crowell had been bought out by Dunn & Bradstreet. And they had a new commercial policy. They wanted to publish blockbusters. They said that since they had a contract, they would undoubtedly publish the book sometime, but maybe not for a long time. So they would be happy to release me from my contract if I would return the advance of two or three thousand dollars they had given me out of the first year's royalties. I said fine. So I entered a contract with the Wisconsin Press. Wisconsin brought it out as two volumes. The history of Spain and Portugal in two volumes in the spring of 1973. And remained in, then later in a paperback edition. And remained in press with Wisconsin, in print with Wisconsin Press, for about ten or fifteen years. It finally went out of print sometime during the course of the 1980s. And it became an alternate selection of the History Book Club. And then of course was eventually published in Spanish as well. So that also was a very important project, and something I was working on quite actively during my first years at Wisconsin. I don't think, however, that I completely answered the question on the last tape about personalities in 00:07:00 the department when I came in the late '60s and early '70s. Certainly in their own way, George Mosse and Harvey Goldberg we've talked about, were major and dominant personalities. And I was very close to George, and simply on good terms with Harvey. But, of course, the people in African history were very important, very influential, had lots of money. And the other person who played a very active role at that time is someone now largely forgotten. Though there's an award in his name in the Latin American program. And this was the founder of Latin American history at Wisconsin, John Leddy Phelan. John Phelan was a remarkable scholar. I had met him, in fact, when I was at Minnesota, because he was a close friend of one of the younger historians there and had come over for Thanksgiving. And he'd started his career in Milwaukee. So I met him in '61 in Minneapolis when he was teaching in Milwaukee. And Madison hired him from Milwaukee, a very good choice, because he began the program as a specialist in colonial Latin American history, and then created the triadic structure that the Latin American program would have from that time on. That is, one specialist in colonial Latin America, one in Brazil, and one in Spanish-speaking Latin 00:08:00 American. Then hired Tom Skidmore in 1966 as the Brazilianist. And Peter Smith as, for modern Spanish-speaking Latin America in 1968. And that created a very strong Latin American program. In fact, as strong, I would say in quality, as any other in the country at that time. And Wisconsin has remained very strong in Latin America from that point all the way to the present. Phelan was a bachelor. And very active in departmental politics. In fact, after [Mort Rostheed?] was the chair from '69 to '72. And then Al [Bogue?] served only one year as chairman, '72 to '73. Then left the chairmanship early because of health problems. Ted Hammer was chair from '73 to '76. Then John Phelan Leddy lobbied very vigorously for the appointment of the youngest chairman probably in the history of the department in recent times, Peter Smith in 1976. Smith was chair from '76 to '79, though Phelan suddenly died of a stroke right after that. A very early age, of only about fifty-two years, in 1976. But Phelan was an important person in the department. Very active in a variety of ways. And 00:09:00 a remarkable scholar, because each of his books, each of his four books was about a completely different part of Latin American colonial, or Spanish empire history. And of course other strong personalities were developing in other areas, such as Kemal Karpat, who came a few years before I did, in Ottoman history. Would be the senior person in the whole Middle Eastern history program. And then Bob Frykenberg in the history of India, who came several years before I did. And of course appointees in the East Asian history as well, so that the department really had, really quite, quite a broad and strong faculty overall in world history, even though the American history program no longer had the distinction that it had had, say, ten years earlier. RL: I want to go back to, you were talking about your book on Spain and Portugal. And you said you had never really had a course, per se, in Spanish history. When you did your research to produce this book, what did you learn that was new to you, that you had not known? SP: The general history of Spain and Portugal? Well simply an awful lot of things. remember that I had 00:10:00 never had to pass any kind of exam in Spanish history, so my reading in early Spanish history had been desultory. I was an autodidact, and I simply developed specific material for specific lectures when I began to teach that course. So I didn't really develop a complete grounding in all areas. It was something I did for the first time starting in 1967, when I began to do the very broad program of reading that I did for this book, that is to learn the ancient history of the peninsula, which I'd [unclear] then to learn all the major phases of medieval history as well, as the sixteenth century. And also, to learn, really, the history of Portugal. Because I had not been teaching the history of Portugal. So I learned the history of Portugal actually from scratch. And in the Spanish edition, in fact, the Portuguese part was published separately as a brief history of Portugal. And some of my Spanish friends who read that book said they enjoyed it particularly because it was the only book on Portuguese history they'd ever read. Which shows, of course, how much attention Spaniards have typically paid to the history of neighboring Portugal. So it was a matter of getting a 00:11:00 really full grounding in Spanish history. Not just, one can teach courses with only a certain amount of knowledge and material. But to really understand all phases of the history, to write a comprehensive and authoritative history about it, one has to fill in lots and lots of gaps. So I filled in all the gaps for the first time. RL: After you did that work on Spain and Portugal, did it have any kind of lasting impact on your research on the Spanish Civil War and the, your research into the Spanish Republic and the Franco era? SP: It did in the sense of giving me a broader perspective and making it possible for me to situate Spanish history in comparative terms. Because now I knew so much more about it. And I think that one of the stronger features of my work, from the early 1970s 00:12:00 on, was that I tried to [unclear] with Spanish history in a vacuum, but to place it also in comparative perspective. I was well prepared in modern European history. But then to have the two different parts of the equation come together, I had to know more about Spanish history first, and then I could use them in a comparative dimension. And everything that I've done on Spain, roughly, say, the last thirty-five years. The other thing that did, of course, was to give me really a sense of Portugal. I visited Portugal very briefly in the spring of 1959. But just to take a quick look at the country, because I had to hurry back to Madrid to finish my work in Madrid. And really had not learned anything about Portugal. I had read about one book on Portuguese history, on the Portuguese revolution of 1910, in Madrid that year, and found it incomprehensible. Because I had no background. And it was not really a very well written book, either. And in fact, this new grounding in Portugal led to an important initiative just as I was publishing the history of Spain and Portugal. After the close of the 00:13:00 academic year, '71-'72, the head of the new European Studies program told those of us who were on his steering committee that there was about seven hundred dollars left over in the budget. And of course, as in a typical bureaucratic enterprise, we should spend that this year, or else it would be lost forever. What [did we want to?] do with it? I said, "Well, you know, a West European country that is never studied is Portugal. We have no group focusing on Portugal. And I propose that I would call a very quick conference be held within the next 45 days before the academic year totally ends in June, 1972, here in Madison, bringing together the few people who are interested in Portugal from the point of view of history and the social sciences." And so by collecting also a few hundred dollars from the Latin American program, which always had more money, I was able to bring five people together in Madison in June of 1972 and we organized something which we called the conference group on modern Portugal. And held our first conference at the University of New Hampshire a year and a half later in 00:14:00 autumn. October, 1973. And were fortunate also to have someone in the form of Douglas Wheeler, basically at first an African historian, who had co-authored a book on Angola, who now wanted to study Portugal itself, rather than Portuguese Africa, as the secretary of that conference group, who kept that job for the next thirty years. So that the conference group then became the only group in North America, the English speaking world, perhaps the only one aside from the [SU de Portuguese?] in the [? ] institute in Parish, but focused specifically on Portugal. And held a series of conferences, published a series of books. And eventually, by the 1990s, launched a new journal, The Portuguese Studies Review. So this enabled me to take the initiative in really putting Portuguese studies on the map in the United States for the first time. RL: Portugal has always fascinated me, and I suppose this is a digression. I've always wondered how Portugal came to be. It's so odd to me. It seems like it should be part of Spain, doesn't it? SP: Well this is what, of course, the Spanish have always maintained. And the answer to the riddle has to do, of course, it began really with a kind of 00:15:00 political regional particularism of the sort that was very common in the Middle Ages. There were lots of little kingdoms in the Middle Ages. The Portuguese kingdom began in 1128 in the way that various other Spanish and European kingdoms began at that time, simply with its own separate dynasty and political structure. But managed to sustain its independence. And it wasn't so much the way that it began, because there was nothing really special in its origins, but simply the fact that it managed to hold together, that eventually historically created that identity and a separate set of institutions, but really did not exist in the beginning. In the beginning, the Kingdom of Portugal had the same kind of institutions that one would find particularly in Leon or Castile or other Spanish kingdoms. And in its social structure, its culture, its institutions, was less different from the rest of Spain than, for example, Catalonia was. Catalonia being much more like Italy. But because of the political and military reality of having maintained its independence, it did create an identity, and developed for itself a kind of historical mission. And except for a period of sixty years in the 00:16:00 sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, managed to maintain its independence. By the process, of course, become a strongly independent country that tended to look away from the rest of the peninsula, and rely from the seventeenth century on, on its alliance with England. And so maintained its independence and became, of course, a very singular kind of culture. A And it's always been a kind of frustration to me that I never got back to Portugal and really did any major work on that again after the history of Spain and Portugal together. But on the other hand, there seemed to be so many more important things to either in Spain or in modern European history generally, particularly the topic of fascism. Though I returned to Portugal many times, I never undertook another major research project on Portugal. RL: Well it's not too late, is it? SP: It's not too late, but there's still many other things to do. Portugal always gets shoved farther down the priority list. When we held our first conference of the conference group in New Hampshire in October of '73, the 00:17:00 Portuguese sociologist, [Emilo Maritish?], who made his career at Oxford, presented a paper and said that "Portugal is the land of the negative superlative." What he meant by that was that in references to Portugal in comparative terms, whereas people talking about most countries like to say that such and such is the most, the leading, etcetera, the idea always was that Portugal was the least prosperous, the least developed Western European country. The most backwards. The one with the highest level of illiteracy and so forth. So that it had become, in the twentieth century, among Western European countries, the land of the negative superlative. And I like to call it the Rodney Dangerfield of countries. The country that just don't get no respect. [Lange laughs] This has been, to some extent, the fate of Portuguese studies. Although Portuguese history has continued to be cultivated to a small degree. And the Portuguese 00:18:00 Studies Review, like the older journal that we started in Madison, which started as a literary review, then became a literary and historical and social sciences review, the Luzo-Brazilian Review always continues to get materials about Portugal. And indeed, I should mention in that regard, that the Luzo-Brazilian Review, which was begun by Lloyd [Caster?] in the mid '60s in the Spanish and Portuguese department, then ten years later, about 1966, became a multi-disciplinary review. Not just literature. It has been the Portuguese language culture review that I worked on most because I was the social studies co-editor about five years. From roughly about 1986 to 1991. And I remain on the board of editors from that time down to the present. So I spent a lot of time working with the Luzo-Brazilian Review as a Wisconsin publication particularly. Though, of course, in that journal, Portuguese studies take second hat to Brazilian studies. And 00:19:00 sometimes we've had a big of trouble keeping that journal afloat. We've always managed to do so. I should say a word or two, perhaps, about the Spanish and Portuguese Department in this regard. The Spanish Department at Wisconsin has been a strong department from the 1920s. And one of the features of the Spanish Department has been that it always paid a certain amount of attention to Portuguese literature. And always had people in Portuguese literature. Portuguese studies were rather stronger in literature at Wisconsin than most other places. When I came in '68, the Spanish Department had been strong for more than four decades. And it was dominated by Iberians, particularly. The senior [?] That is, the most illustrious scholars were people like [Diego Capilan?], the Spanish philologist who was a grandson of the noted [ ??]. Or [Sanchito Verales?], one or two others. [Jorge desena?] in Portuguese literature. These were the people who really were the luminaries of the Spanish and Portuguese Department. They all came from Spain and Portugal. All four of them were hired away by different branches of the University of California. Minor branches of California that could afford to provide [greater ??] San Diego, Santa Cruz, Davis. So that within five years, they 00:20:00 were all gone. And then some of the leading people were Latin Americanists and others. But it was a unique feature of the Spanish and Portuguese Department that the main scholars at that time were Iberians. And then also, of course, the very noted Lithuanian Hispanist [??] who was in fact after that, probably, the leading single scholar of the department during the decades of the '70s and '80s until her retirement in the '90s. RL: Stan, can we talk a little bit about your development into probably one of the nation's leading scholars in Spanish fascism and what John [Turteresey?] has said about you is that your work as a revisionist historian of understanding modern Spanish history is really exceptional and very prominent. Can you talk a little about how your research led you and what findings you were making and what you were publishing that drew such attention to your interpretation of the Spanish Franco period? SP: Let me give you a brief overview of all of that, and then I'll talk about some of these things in detail. The topic of the founder of the Fascist Party in Spain, of course [??] and the Falange movement was suggested to me, as I mentioned, by [Hubert Herring?] at 00:21:00 Claremont. So this became the first group. And then [Vincenze ?] suggested the topic of the military, and I wrote the book on the politics of the modern Spanish army, published in '67. These books could not be published in Spain. [unclear] But they circulated very widely, and gave to me a considerable reputation not merely in American academic circles but in Spain, also. So that well before the end of the Franco regime, I had enjoyed some reputation inside Spain. I published a little book for Crowell in '67 called Franco's Spain, which is kind of a take on Spain in the mid-late '60s. A very brief, 130-page book, which is my third Spanish book. What began to change things, as I suggested, was the work on the Spanish Revolution. And what I found there was that things were quite different on the left than I had led to believe. I had accepted, pretty much, the standard notion of the Spanish Civil War was a conflict between fascism and democracy. I knew that there were revolutionary excesses on the left side. But what I found, of course, was that the Spanish left had largely abandoned what we would call democracy before the civil war began. And that in fact this abandonment of democracy and the pre-revolutionary pressures of the system were really the general cause of the civil war, even though the immediate cause was simply the revolt of part of the Spanish Army in July, 1936. So that these findings were first presented in the 00:22:00 Spanish Revolution book in 1970, though not in the sense of presenting any kind of major thesis, or doing polemical kind of history. Simply recording the facts. [I mentioned?] that book was then appeared in several different translations, two in Spanish and one in Japanese. Then I was involved in really learning Spanish history and developing more of an in depth perspective in the general history of Spain and Portugal. And moved in a variety of directions. I moved, in a sense, kind of sideways in the 1970s. Because the next book was a book on early Basque nationalism, which was prepared during the last years of the Franco regime, when this was shaping up as one of the major political problems in Spain. Though I had no idea, of course, the extent to which this would create a long-lived terrorist movement and become the number one political issue in the country late on. My book, published in 1975 with the University of Nevada Press as part of its Basque series, was simply a political history of early Basque nationalism. Basically from the 1890s down to 1937. So that was kind of a sideways move, which I would say didn't deepen any of the major issues, but simply provided the new scholarly study in the area of what are called the micro-nationalisms, or, in Spanish, the peripheral nationalisms, which became a major topic after 1975. So it later became a 00:23:00 hot topic, but I only developed it to a certain degree in the early '70s, and then really abandoned that topic after that time. And I've always had the tendency to move to some extent back and forth between Spanish history and modern European history, generally. So that in the late '70s, I spent a good deal of time away from Spain, building my first general book, trying to achieve a clear conceptualization and interpretation of European fascism in general. That was the project of the late 1970s. And was published by the Wisconsin Press in 1980. And in fact was a rather difficult thing to do because, had it not been for the encouragement of George Mosse, and also the encouragement of Tom Webb as the director of the press, I might not really have pushed that through to a conclusion. That came out in 1980 while I was chairman of the department, '79 to '82. While chairman, I could not, of course, be away for any kind of research projects. But one always has a certain amount of extra time to read. So as chairman, I cast about for a project that I though I could handle, within 00:24:00 the parameters of the chairman's duties. I decided to try to write an overview historically of Spanish Catholicism, which was based strictly on the secondary literature. I would simply sit at home and read when I was not busy with the chairmanship, and work up the material for an overview of Spanish Catholicism, which then was published in 1983. RL: This concludes side one of tape two. RL: This is side two of tape two, Stanley Payne. SP: So that the overview of the history of Spanish Catholicism came out in 1983, Wisconsin Press, and was subsequently published in Spanish. And recently ahs appeared in a second Spanish edition in 2005. A rather fancy edition of reprints, since it was published with [Boneta?] the largest publisher in Spain, with a slight updating done to the first years of the twenty-first century. And then I thought that I was going to complete my work on the Franco regime by doing a general history of the Franco regime in the mid-1980s. A project that I worked on basically from 1982, 83 to '86. I was offered a contract, in fact, but a Spanish 00:25:00 publisher to do a history of the regime several years earlier, around 1979 or '80. I had rejected that because I thought it was simply too early. But by the mid '80s, I was ready to do it. So I then published the history of the Franco regime, a very sizable volume, with the Wisconsin Press in '87. And that, of course, was also brought out in Spanish. At the behest of one of the Spanish publishers, I even converted it into a short biography of Franco on the occasion of the centennial of his birth in 1992. So I thought that really would be the end of my work on the Spanish aspect of fascism. But this turned out not to be the case. Because after developing the big book of the general history of fascism, which is a separate topic we'll take up later on, when I was in Spain in the summer of '95, one of the leading publishers offered me a contract to redo my dissertation book, in effect. Something that a few other people, like [? ] had done. So I turned that into a much bigger, up to date book on the 00:26:00 Spanish fascist movement. And that in turn was published in '99 in English, also, by the Wisconsin Press. And then was the winner of the first Elizabeth Steinberg Prize, won by the press in 2004. So I ended up doing a good deal more work on Spanish fascism, the history of the Franco regime, than I'd ever intended, doing the general history of the regime in '87, and then in the late '90s, a really complete history of the movement from even before 1931. From 1923 down to it's very, 1977. I would not say that those books were strikingly revisionist, except that they brought out the full complexities. And also the different notes and tones of changes in the regime and in the movement over the course of its long history. What [Jondo Reefy's?] referring to is several other things, like more recent Spanish publications. During the late '70s and early '80s, I formed part of a flying circus of American academics who participated in a variety of conferences and programs about the dramatic Spanish 00:27:00 democratization that took place after Franco. There were so few political scientist who worked on Spain that a historian like myself had to function as a surrogate political scientist. So I was in lots of conferences, contributing to many volumes and studies during that time. And also edited for the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, a book called The Politics of Democratic Spain. It came out in 1986. By the end of the decade, it was clear that the democratization was successful. Whereas the second republic that gave rise to the civil war of 1936 had been a disastrous failure. Why was that? It seemed to me therefore that by the end of the 1980s, the time had come for a new look at the first attempt at democracy in Spain, the Republic of 1931. Why had things gone so wrong? If the republic was such a blissful democracy, as its proponents like to claim, how could it have all collapsed in civil war? Blissful democracies do not collapse in civil wars. There's something wrong here. So I decided to write a one-volume 00:28:00 history of the republic, from 1931 to 1936. So that became the volume called Spain's First Democracy: The Second Republic, 1931-1936. And this was published in English by the Wisconsin Press. My next to last expensive book. Then, of course, also in Spanish. And the analysis that it presented of the republic was quite different. Not a blissful democracy, but in fact a political system of extreme fragmentation and polarization. Which had very few democrats. Not too many democrats particularly on the right, but not democrats on the left, either. In fact, only a small minority center really interested in democracy. So it became quite doubtful that democracy was overthrown in Spain by the military rebellion in 1936. That in fact it had largely ceased to function before the rebellion began. I did not present this thesis in any very strongly polemical way. These were simply conclusions drawn from the book. And in fact, later on, I decided to revisit this whole problem with two new books that I prepared in the '90s, going into the twenty-first century. One was another look at the 00:29:00 revolution from the point of view of communism and the Soviet connection, because the opening of the Soviet archives had provided some direct Soviet documentation about what was really going on that we'd never had before. And then also to look at the end of the republic, the final phase of the republic, in a much more detailed fashion. And see what was going on that led directly to the collapse. So this became two books that I published in English with Yale, who became my new main American publisher. And of course also the Spanish book on the Soviet Union, the Spanish Civil War and communism, which has a more exact title in Spanish. It really dealt with Spanish communism,, 1931-1939. And particularly the civil war. I think it provided the first full and objective account of what really went on with communism and the Soviet intervention in the Spanish Civil War. And curiously in the year 2005, it won the Marshall [Schumann?] Award of the American Association of Slavic Studies. Which I was quite gratified with. Because 00:30:00 Hispanists normally don't win awards from Slavic studies associations. RL: Although you did mention earlier that when you were at your undergraduate school, you were thinking about Russian history. SP: So this was the opportunity to bring the two together. I'd finally studied Russian a certain amount, although I read Russian with great difficulty, with the use of a dictionary. I can't actively work easily in it as I can in a west European language. But that made it possible to bring the two together. And this was quite a successful book on the character of communism and revolution in Spain, and the Soviet role. The next book, called The Collapse of the Spanish Republic, dealt with the second half of the republic, concentrating particularly on the last five months, and how the whole thing came apart. And what is revisionist, particularly about that book, the one that's had the greatest revisionist impact of any of my books, was the fact that it showed that Spanish democracy had really come 00:31:00 apart before the civil war began. But in fact the issue was democracy. And if the republic had continued to remain a functioning democracy, then there would have been no civil war. Because the Spanish are not totally irrational people. If you have a functioning democracy, you're probably not going to try to destroy it. It doesn't make any sense. It was really the breakdown of the system before the civil war began that led to the civil war. Though neither side in the civil war intended to replace republic with a genuine democracy. That had now gone by the boards. It's a different issue. But particularly that, more than any single one, but it had a very considerable revisionist impact inside Spain. Particularly since the Spanish left has made of the republican civil war a new political issue in the twenty-first century the way it was not in the 1970s and '80s, and has tried to derive political advantage from that. The question has become for quite a [unclear], not just in scholarly circles, but in Spanish public affairs generally in the last few years. That's why I did so many interviews during the last ten days of November when I was last in Spain. RL: I was going to ask. Are you quite a public intellectual figure in Spain? SP: Well I have always been, to a minor degree. This has sort of ratcheted up enormously in the last few 00:32:00 years, because of these most recent publications. So now I've become an effective active public intellectual in a way in which I was just an occasional one, or a more [unclear] scholarly one, prior to about the beginning of the twenty-first century. So this is what has happened to me in my old age. RL: Are you the subject of vigorous dissent or criticism? SP: Oh, yes. These issues are very polarized now in Spain. To a greater degree than any other European country. There is really no analogy to the extent to which recent history has become highly polemical in Spain in the last five years. And of course there is a politically correct version, which dominates the universities, though there's also a very vigorous independent Spanish press. And in the newspapers and in the publishing houses, and among independent scholars, there is considerable dissent to that. And I am one of the dissenters from now the official, established, politically correct version. RL: Did you, I know that you have made several 00:33:00 references to the fact that you and George Mosse were friends. Did you and he do a lot of work together on this? Did you discuss your work on Spanish fascism? And before he died, did you have a chance to talk about the second republic of Spain? SP: Well, George and I over a period of thirty-one years talked a very great deal. And we talked about all kinds of things. But we certainly talked about European history. And of course the single topic of discussion there more than any other had to do with fascism. And probably we talked more about Germany than we did about Spain. But we had put together, for example, about three years after I came to Madison, a visiting scholars colloquium on fascism around 1971, to which we invited a variety of people to discuss different aspects, different examples, of European fascism. So this was always a main focus of the conversation of George and I. And we talked about these things a very great deal. As I 00:34:00 mentioned earlier, it was George who encouraged me to develop the first general book that I did in fascism, published in 1980, the one that's called Fascism: A Comparison and Definition, which provided, tried to provide a unified interpretation of fascism, and a kind of definition of fascism. Now you might say, well, so what? This is a major topic. Surely it had been done. The curious thing about fascism, however, was that for many years after the end of World War Two, though historians were doing all kinds of research and publication about individual aspects of fascist movements, one of the major topics in the scholarly publication world, there was really no agreement about what's called the concept of generic fascism, whether there was a general phenomenon that one could broadly call fascism, as distinct from National Socialism in Germany, fascism in Italy, Falangism in Spain, and so on. There did develop considerable 00:35:00 debate about this in the 1960s and '70s, in a series of congresses that I participated in. These congresses, though they resulted in the publication of new volumes, did not present, in any case, a unified overall interpretation of fascism. What it was as a specific historical phenomenon, if it existed as a general phenomenon, rather than a series of completely separate representations, which would not amount to any kind of unified general phenomena, and how you would define it. When I had done the first book, the dissertation book on Spanish fascism, I had no question about subtitling it A History of Spanish Fascism. But in fact it was only a history of the first ten years of Spanish fascism. But if you'd asked me what was fascism generally, why was this Spanish fascism, all I would have been able to have done was given you several rather vague, general ideas as to what this was about. And the first couple of essays I tried to write about this later on in the late '60s and early '70s were not particularly successful. And, in fact, were not published. Two of my three particular unpublished papers that were rejected in the course of my career were about this. And, I think, correctly so. Because I was trying to think my way through it. But George 00:36:00 encouraged me. And then later on, Tom Webb did. I finally knuckled down in the late '70s to try to write a book which was not a history. That is, fascism compares to the definition, is not a history of fascism. It's really more of a political science type book. What do we mean by fascism, what were its cultural, intellectual, political origins. What were it's principal manifestations. What were the features that these had in common. What conclusions can we draw from them in general. How would we define any common phenomenon such as fascism. And how much of it is left of it historically and politically after the [unclear]. So it was these analytical issues that I was trying to deal with, not historical description, not historical research. And that book was published in 1980 and was generally quite successful. I think it's gone out of print now in English. There's been a recent reprinting just this fall of the 00:37:00 Spanish edition, which has sold more than twenty thousand copies. And then took its place, really, as probably the first reasonably successful effort to provide a unified definition and interpretation of European fascism. It was not a history. So that in fact later on, in the early '90s, after I'd finished the book on Spain's first democracy, a general history of the second republic, I was talking to George. "I don't know what I'll do next." George said, "Why don't you write a big history book about fascism?" I said, "Well, I'd been possibly thinking of doing that." So with George's encouragement, I developed a book that was much more of a history of fascism. This became the big book, published by Wisconsin in '95, called A History of Fascism, 1914-1945, which had all of the analytical and interpretive features of the first book. In fact, even more elaborately developed than the first book. But also a history of the principal fascist movements, 00:38:00 and in capsule form of the German [unclear] regimes. So it was both an interpretation, an analysis, and also a general history of fascism. And that has also been quite successful in editions in Spanish, in Italian, and German. And [Ustein?] has brought out, in fact, just in 2006, a cut-rate clothbound edition of a very big book, a 700-page book, for fifteen Euros ninety-five. It was very cheap by European standards. So the general history of fascism has been I think [unclear] successful as well. But this was the sort of thing that really was a product also of the formal and informal, more informal than formal, collaboration with George Mosse over a long period of time. RL: Stan, this is a digression, but I wonder if you're concerned in contemporary political discourse, how easily and casually the term "fascist" or "fascism" is thrown around. SP: Well one throws up one's hands at this 00:39:00 sort of thing. I participate every couple years in a long talk show with Milt Rosenberg of WGN in Chicago. And we talk about this kind of thing. Fascism, of course, has become the favorite political pejorative of everybody. And it's used so frequently as a general pejorative that all it really indicates in most cases is that the person strongly disapproves of whatever it is that he's calling fascist. It doesn't really tell you anything, necessarily, about what this thing is that is called fascist. We have fascists as different as Ronald Reagan, George Bush, Margaret Thatcher, whoever I might be, anyone that anyone is opposed to. Similarly, we have this business of Islamo-fascists, which I think is also a different kind of abuse of the term fascism, though it makes somewhat more sense in that case. "Fascism" became the favorite all-purpose political pejorative of the twentieth century, particularly in the second half of the twentieth century. And this was the case particularly because the word itself, outside of Italian, doesn't really mean anything. Liberalism is about liberty. Democracy is supposedly about the demos, the rule of the people. Fascism is about fasc. What does that tell you? You see, if you don't speak Italian, it doesn't really mean anything at all. I think because the term itself is so 00:40:00 indeterminate in its fundamental word, that it's more easily used as an all-purpose pejorative. It doesn't really have to mean anything specific. Simply something very reprehensible, whatever that may be. So, but also the fact that with the double sibilance, "fascist" is a rather sinister sounding word that also makes it more useful as an all-purpose pejorative. So one simply gives up any possibility of the term being used with any kind of analytical or intellectual precision. [pause] RL: Stan, I'd like to refocus your attention now on the climate at UW Madison when you first came here in 1968, which in some senses would be the worst possible time for a new professor to come to the campus because of the turmoil here. Or perhaps not. SP: It was, in fact. 1968-'69 was the most tense year of my first three years in Madison in general. Although the worst incident occurred two years later in August, 1970, with the Sterling Hall bombing. I was shielded from it the first year because I taught two small 00:41:00 courses: an advanced upper division course in Spanish history, and a graduate pro seminar. So I didn't have to deal with large numbers of students. And the second semester, I was on leave. The first instance of this tension I saw came at the all-department reception, held in the Union, at the beginning of the semester in 1968. Which Dave Cronon, the chairman, had asked George Mosse to address the department and the students. Because George was basically a man of the moderate left. But not a radical. Didn't really approve of the radicals, but someone whom the radicals could talk to. And he thought that George was the kind of prestigious, responsible professor who could bridge things over and might be able to make a common appeal to rally everyone together at the beginning of the academic year. The theme of George's [unclear] remarks, which only lasted about ten minutes, was that, in fact, there's not leftwing scholarship or rightwing scholarship, there's only good scholarship or bad scholarship. Which was exactly correct. Absolutely correct. Nothing could be more accurate than what George said. But this was the only time I've ever seen George Mosse give a public address that failed. It fell flat. It did not impress the radicals, who formed a large part of the graduate students. And there was no response. That was the end of the talk, and things simply went their merry way with sit-ins in departmental 00:42:00 meetings, but no massive incidents affecting the history department in general during 1968-'69. This finally came around to touch me at the end of my third semester. Third semester being the first semester of 1969-'70. I was teaching that year the survey course in recent European history, and had two teaching assistants. And about the first of December, well, maybe even later, early December, because we were on a different kind of schedule in which the semester didn't end until mid-January. In early December, it turned out that student radicalism was turning a new leaf in that the activists of SDS, the Students for Democratic Society, were beginning to think about their futures and their careers, and they were tired of being arrested in student demonstrations. And they wanted SDS to adopt a somewhat more moderate and responsible profile on campus. Whereas a minority dissented, and wanted to begin a new edition, in which they decided to begin, at that point, just before the Christmas break in December, 00:43:00 1969, by trying to make political addresses to large classes of students in the classroom, at the beginning of classes. And so on one occasion, I was delayed by a long-distance phone call in my office, and got down to class in the second floor of the humanities building a minute late, and found the class had been taken over by a group of SDS people who were haranguing the students. And so I turned on my heel, but was very quickly caught up with by plainclothes campus policemen, who had been following the SDS and activists from class to class for several hours, but had not been able to obtain the correct conditions in which they could be brought to authority for disrupting classes. They told me I should simply go in and indicate who were addressing the class and disrupting the class, and they would arrest them. I did. And three of the four of them were. And that ended that entire offensive, in fact, by SDS, in December of 1969. Though it also meant that the more radical of my two teaching assistants called me a pig and walked out and resigned his TAship for the remainder of the semester. I don't know whether he collected the money or not. Things were so loose at that time, possibly he 00:44:00 did. But I had to grade his papers at the end of the semester. So I had to do a little extra work at that time. But as a result, entirely beyond any plan which I would ever have had in mind, I had no idea this was going on, ten minutes before it happened, I was instrumental in taking the action which brought an end to SDS on campus. Because then the radicals broke away from SDS and formed their own activist organization, the Mother Jones Society, which became the radical successor to SDS, but it was smaller and less active. And so that particular incident in the humanities building in December of 1969, was a turning point with the arrest of three of the four SDSers who were disrupting the class at the beginning of class. And it really meant that radical politics then entered a new chapter on campus. One in which, in fact, most of the former SDS students became more moderate. It was a different group of people the following August, in 1970, who then carried out the Sterling Hall bombing. People who really had not been SDS activists. And the result of that was that the student radicals at the beginning of the 00:45:00 fall semester of 1970 absolutely settled down. Academics '70-'71 was more or less a normal year, with the exception of-- RL: Really. SP: Yes. Pretty much a normal year, compared to the two preceding years. Because that traumatized much of student radicalism. There was much less activist pressure. Nothing in the classroom. Generally, classrooms were not normally affected anyway. But generally the atmosphere was much more tranquil on campus, during academic '70-'71 that it had been either of the three or four preceding years. This was the cathartic effect of the Sterling Hall bombing. It really took the wind out of the sails of radical agitation. So that department meetings, classes, scheduled activities, really did not see radical pressure to speak of in '70-'71 at all, compared to the preceding years. it was, in fact, a turning point. RL: Were you on campus when the Sterling Hall bombing happened? SP: I was sleeping tranquilly in my home barely two miles west of campus, and didn't hear it. My wife was awakened by it. She heard some loud noise around 4:00 AM. It did not wake me up. So I was here. Not teaching. I have never taught summer school in Wisconsin. I always did at UCLA. So this has been one of the pleasant things 00:46:00 about Wisconsin. I was never in a circumstance where I had to teach summer school. But I was here, working on my own work that summer, the time the bombing took place. But it