Spain

Spain enters the narrative less as a visited landscape than as a political battleground whose crisis reached into the lives of J. Robert Oppenheimer, Jean Tatlock, and their circle in California. The Spanish Civil War made the country an urgent cause: a struggle against fascism that prompted fundraising, public appeals, and private donations, and that helped turn political concern into organized action.

The Civil War and the International Cause

In July 1936, right-wing factions in the Spanish army rose against the democratically elected left-wing government in Madrid. Led by Francisco Franco, the rebels expected to overthrow the Republic within weeks, but popular resistance was tenacious and the conflict became a brutal civil war. The United States and European democracies declared an arms embargo against both sides, suspicious of communist influence in the Spanish government and encouraged by the Catholic Church. The policy left the Republic at a disadvantage: Hitler’s Germany and Benito Mussolini’s Italy provided generous aid to the fascists, while the Soviet Union was the only state aiding the besieged Republican government.

The war also drew volunteers from beyond Spain. Communists and other leftists joined international brigades to defend the Republic; between 1936 and 1939, some 2,800 Americans volunteered for the communist-sponsored Abraham Lincoln Brigade. The defense of the Republic became a cause célèbre in liberal circles. In the book’s account, Spain’s importance therefore extends beyond the battlefield: the conflict became a test of what anti-fascist commitment required from people far from the fighting.

Tatlock and the Spanish Cause

By the autumn of 1936, Spain was the single cause that most captivated Jean Tatlock. Her political commitments were sometimes expressed through Communist Party USA membership, but the narrative distinguishes her concern for the causes from allegiance to the Party or its ideology. She was moved by social injustice and by the defense of the Spanish Republic in particular. That commitment belonged to a broader social conscience that had also shaped her ambitions to become a psychiatrist and help others in practical ways.

Tatlock pressed J. Robert Oppenheimer to act rather than remain a sympathetic observer. When he suggested that he might be only an underdogger at the periphery of political struggle, she urged him not to settle for that position. They began organizing fundraisers for Spanish relief groups. Their relationship thus became one channel through which the war’s distant stakes entered Berkeley life: Spain was not simply a subject of discussion, but a reason to raise money and seek forms of aid.

Fundraising and Aid from California

In the spring of 1937, Haakon Chevalier joined a California tour by a recently wounded writer who was promoting novels and raising funds for the Spanish Medical Bureau, an organization sending medical aid to the Republic. The episode connected the Spanish cause to Chevalier’s conviction that intellectual life and political commitment belonged together. The book presents that combination as characteristic of the circle around J. Robert Oppenheimer, where literary, scientific, and political interests crossed paths.

In the winter of 1937–38, Tatlock introduced J. Robert Oppenheimer to Thomas Addis, the chairman of the Spanish Refugee Appeal and a mentor who had encouraged her medical studies. Addis became a friend of J. Robert Oppenheimer and drew him further into relief work. He first approached him for financial contributions to the Republican cause. Later, in a private meeting at his Stanford laboratory, Addis proposed that J. Robert Oppenheimer send money through Communist channels if he wanted it to support the fighting effort. J. Robert Oppenheimer subsequently made regular cash payments to Addis, who later suggested that contributions be given to Isaac Folkoff, a veteran member of the San Francisco Communist Party.

The form and purpose of these payments mattered. J. Robert Oppenheimer gave cash because he thought contributions toward military equipment, unlike medical aid, might not be entirely legal. He understood the money as going to the fighting effort, and his annual donations through the Party for Spanish relief amounted to about $1,000, a substantial sum in the 1930s. After the fascist victory in 1939, Addis and Folkoff solicited funds for other causes, including efforts to organize California’s migratory farm workers; J. Robert Oppenheimer’s last such contribution apparently came in April 1942. Spain was the starting point of this pattern of giving, but not its only destination.

Public Action and Aftermath

Organized relief also took public forms. In late January 1938, the People’s World reported that J. Robert Oppenheimer, Haakon Chevalier, and other Berkeley professors had raised $1,500 to buy an ambulance for shipment to the Spanish Republic. That spring, J. Robert Oppenheimer joined 197 other Pacific Coast academics in signing a petition urging Franklin D. Roosevelt to lift the arms embargo. The two actions reflected different responses to the same dilemma: medical aid could relieve immediate suffering, while lifting the embargo would change the military terms on which the Republic fought.

The Republic’s defeat in 1939 changed the direction of the fundraising network, which turned toward other political and social causes. Spain nevertheless remained a formative episode in the circle’s political history. For Tatlock it had been the foremost cause of 1936; for J. Robert Oppenheimer it had prompted sustained giving and a more active engagement with public affairs. Its narrative significance lies in this passage from distant conflict to local action—and in the contrast between the Republic’s defeat and the hope that had made its defense a shared cause.