Robert (Bob) Steffens was one of many journalists drawn to the Spanish Civil War. He was also a member of the International Brigades, thus blurring the lines between impartial reporting and political activism.
Growing Up
Steffens was born July 7, 1908 in Chicago, Illinois. Unlike other members of the International Brigades, he described his home as firmly middle class. His father, a German immigrant, was president of the Indiana and Illinois Coal Company until 1940. Steffens studied journalism in college from 1926 to 1929, then again in 1932-1933. During his college years, he also was interested in theater.
Steffens was introduced to communism in 1929 when working with the Friends of the Soviet Union “dramatic organization,” according to his 1938 membership application for the Spanish Communist Party. By then he was living in California. After college, Steffens was unemployed for three years during which he was radicalized. By 1936 he had joined the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), adopting the party name Frank McCarthy. Well-versed in political theory and speaking English, French, Spanish, and German, Steffens was an ideal recruit for the International Brigades. Steffens left for France in October 1937 on the Queen Mary, the same ship as Michael Feller, another volunteer who signed the fan. From there they travelled to the Spanish border and crossed the Pyrenees mountains on foot.
From Theory to Reality
In Spain, Steffens was sent to the non-commissioned officer school at Tarazona and was promoted to sergeant one month after his arrival. While lacking military experience, his knowledge of political theory and his eagerness for battle were likely reasons for receiving the officer training. As sergeant, Steffens spent a total of six months at the front. At first, he was in the infantry. But when sent to the front he served in the artillery. At the Teruel battlefront, he was promoted to commissar of the 35th Battery, now responsible for the ideological education of his comrades, making sure that they understood the war through the lens of the communist party line.
Influential Correspondents
Journalists flocked to the Spanish Civil War almost as soon as it started in 1936, among them two famous American writers, Ernest Hemingway and Langston Hughes. Hemingway reported for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA) and Hughes for the Baltimore Afro-American newspaper.
As a novelist, activist, playwright, poet, and leader of the Harlem Renaissance, Hughes reported on Black Americans coming to Spain to stop “Fascism [that] preaches the creed of Nordic supremacy and a world for whites only.”
Hemingway, who also supported the Republican side, is best remembered for his Spanish Civil War novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls. In his only play, The Fifth Column, Hemingway created a fictional story about a foreign correspondent in Spain working as a Soviet spy. Indeed, some journalists in Spain did work as intelligence gatherers for other nations. The term “Fifth Column” originated in the early months of the Spanish Civil War, when Nationalist leaders claimed they would conquer Madrid with four military columns advancing on the capital while a “fifth” column had already infiltrated the city to overthrow the democratic Republic.
Louis Fischer, another influential American correspondent, wrote for left-leaning publications like the weekly The Nation. A supporter of communism, Fischer had the ear of many leftwing politicians who entrusted him with information. They included the Prime Minister of the Spanish Republic Juan Negrín and the Soviet Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov. Fischer also had conversations with Eleanor Roosevelt, the first lady and wife of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Fischer hoped, in vain, that Roosevelt might change the American policy of neutrality and help the beleaguered Spanish Republic.
Female Correspondents
Archivo General de la Administración (AGA)
Women journalists, like Millie Bennett, also covered the war. Born in San Francisco in 1897 and attending the University of Hawaii, Bennett moved to the Soviet Union in 1931. There she married Evgeni Konstantinov, who was later arrested on charges of homosexuality and sent to a Siberian labor camp. It is not certain if these accusations surprised Bennett or whether she knowingly married him to provide him with a cover. Though they eventually divorced, she cared for Konstantinov, visiting him often and sending money to his family for many years.
Bennett’s experiences in Russia had shaken but not entirely shattered her support for the Soviet Union. In a letter to a friend she wrote:
“The thing you have to do about Russia is what you do about any other ‘faith.’ You set your heart to know they are right…and then, when you see things that shudder your bones, you close your eyes and say…‘facts are not important.’”
Quoted in Hochschild, 21.
While still in the Soviet Union, Bennett became friends with fellow American Robert Merriman, who later became the commander of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Through Merriman, she received firsthand information on the war inaccessible to other journalists. Bennett reported for the Associated Press, United Press, and London Times. While in Spain, she married Hans Amile, another volunteer of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.
Martha Gellhorn, another female correspondent, reported for the magazine Collier’s Weekly. In Spain, she met Ernest Hemingway, and in 1940 they got married. Gellhorn’s articles were unabashedly pro-Republic. In her book, The Face of War, she stated that Republicans “were fighting for us all against the combined force of European fascism. They deserve our thanks and our respect and got neither.” (p. 17). After the Spanish Civil War, Gellhorn covered World War II. She was the only woman reporter on the beaches of Normandy on D-Day (June 6, 1944), when the Allies landed on the Western front of Nazi-occupied Europe.
Conflict of Interest
Because of the political nature of the Spanish Civil War, journalistic neutrality was frequently abandoned for partisan reporting. Journalists of different political persuasions competed with each other, sometimes in the same publication. Herbert L. Matthews and William P. Carney, for example, worked as journalists for the New York Times. Matthews was firmly behind the Republican cause whereas Carney supported the Spanish Nationalists. Matthews complained that the New York Times editorial board heavily edited his but not Carney’s reports. According to Matthews, the predominantly Catholic board leaned toward supporting the Catholic Nationalists in Spain.
On April 26, 1937, the Basque town of Guernica was destroyed by 23 bombers from Nazi Germany to frighten Republican Spain and to test its new air force. Guernica became famous through Pablo Picasso’s painting by the same name. The bombing, however, was denied by Spanish Nationalists. Carney misleadingly reported that the damage was consistent with a fire which, he claimed, was not caused by aerial bombardment but by the retreating Republican forces. Carney ignored survivors’ testimonies and the evidence of hollowed-out buildings. After the war, he became a lobbyist in the United States for Franco.
Reporting for the Troops
Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History (RGASPI)
While many journalists reported for an audience at home, Bob Steffens and other volunteers wrote for his fellow comrades in the International Brigades. The archive of the International Brigades in Moscow (RGASPI) holds scores of titles of publications produced by the different brigades and military units in many languages, including The Volunteer for Liberty. Steffen’s task was to keep up morale and help his comrades understand the political nature of the war.
Signing Off
San Francisco Examiner, 26 January 1939
By the fall of 1938, it became clear that International Brigades volunteers would be sent home. After waiting several weeks to be repatriated Steffens and other signatories of the fan were among the 400 volunteers that reached France at the end of January, under heavy bombardment by nationalist forces. A few days later they boarded the President Harding and arrived in the United States in February. Steffens died in Santa Monica, California on February 23, 1962. In a memoir, Ronald Liversedge, a Canadian volunteer who fought in the same anti-tank battery, recalled Steffens as “a chap from San Francisco [who] was always describing succulent dishes that he had eaten in the past” when the volunteer fighters were hungry on the front.
FURTHER READINGS
Matt Crawford. Shots of War: Photojournalism During the Spanish Civil War.
Paul Preston. 2008. We Saw Spain Die: Foreign Correspondents in the Spanish Civil War. London: Constable.
Noël Valis. 2018. “From the Face of My Memory: American Women Journalists in the Spanish Civil War.” The Volunteer (27 February).
SOURCES
“Bay Area Group Flees from Spain.” 1939. San Francisco Examiner (26 January) p. 4.
Martha Gellhorn. 1993. The Face of War. 5th ed. London: Granta Books.
Adam Hochschild. “Civil War at the Times.” 2016. In Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1938. Boston, MA: Mariner Books. Pp. 151-165.
Sam Knight. 2019. “A Memorial for the Remarkable Martha Gellhorn,” The New Yorker (18 September).
Ronald Liversedge. 2016. Mac-Pap: Memoir of a Canadian in the Spanish Civil War. Vancouver: New Star Books.
“Robert William Steffens.” Personal File. RGRASPI, Fond 545, Opis 6. File 994.
“Robert William Steffens.” Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives. Biographical Database.