CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - The Spanish Civil War explodes to life again - in all its heroics and horror - in a new acquisition and exhibit at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
The papers of William Forrest, a soft-spoken - and openly leftist - Scottish journalist who covered the Spanish Civil War from beginning to bloody end, were just acquired by the U. of I. Rare Book and Special Collections Library, and it is that library that has mounted the exhibit.
The exhibit, titled "The Media and Politics of Modern Warfare: News Reports from the Collection of William Forrest," is free and open to the public and will run through August. The Rare Book Library is in Room 346 of the Main Library, 1408 W. Gregory Drive, Urbana. It is open weekdays from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Forrest wrote for two London papers, the News Chronicle and the Daily Express, reporting mainly from the Republican side. He and British writer-philosopher Arthur Koestler established the Communist International, or Comintern, front news agency Agence Espagne, "although this seems to have been as far as his activities for Moscow went," said Gene Rinkel, who mounted the exhibit and is curator of the Forrest Collection.
According to Rinkel, Forrest's personal papers track the reporter's travels "to nearly every region of the war in Spain through documents certifying his journalistic credentials, and with endorsement of his coverage of the Loyalist Republican cause from a Socialists' point of view sympathetic with moderate communists."
Rinkel said that the items exhibited represent "an intensive contemporary campaign" to interpret and report the Spanish Civil War through a wide variety of formats, including newspapers, posters, photographs, books and pamphlets.
"William Forrest presented a moderate communist perspective among those who covered the events in person, as artists, photographers and journalists," Rinkel said, noting that Spanish patriots, anarchists, Soviet communists and the Comintern, the sponsor of the International Brigades, "voiced their often conflicting views through pamphlets of propaganda, poems of the war and news for the press in Spain, France, Russia, Great Britain and the United States."
The archive and exhibit include vivid accounts of events at the front lines, Rinkel said, but perhaps the most arresting piece is Forrest's description of a visit to the secret headquarters of Prime Minister Juan Negrín at the very moment when the Republican Government collapsed.
Forrest wrote a telegram to the News Chronicle reporting the interview; his undated typed report of that meeting is among the papers exhibited, and reads:
"After a long and difficult search I found Dr. Negrín last night. His exact whereabouts are a military secret for as well as being a premier he is Minister of National Defence. All I shall say, therefore, is that I found him where Cervantes found Don Quixote -- 'in a district of La Manche whose name I do not wish to remember.'
"It was nearly midnight, but the Premier was still at his desk. Before him, among many other papers, lay a telegram from the Red Cross, deploring the alleged revelations of torture cells in the Barcelona prisons during the Republican régime and expressing the hope that the prisoners still held by the Republic would be spared such suffering."
The exhibit also includes an eyewitness account of the bombing of Barcelona in 1939 and of the fighting in the vicinity.
In addition to letters and manuscripts of his news reports and clippings from several European newspapers, the exhibit contains about 60 photographs of the war, including two of la Pasionaria, the best-known Spanish communist and the party's spiritual leader, Delores Ibarruri. Ibarruri was given the name la Pasionaria, meaning "the passion flower," because of her power as an orator.
The Forrest exhibit also includes numerous "laissez passez," or safe-conduct passes, that were issued by various military authorities granting Forrest access to the major battles of the war. Personal items humanizing Forrest's odyssey include the bill for his stay at the Hotel Bustamente, Oct. 21-23, 1937, one of his ration cards and his calling cards.
The exhibit also draws from the university's strong Spanish Civil War collection, in particular, from its cache of propagandist posters.
In one of the posters, titled "Los Nacionales," a ship-of-fools boat is loaded with foreigners: a monocled German capitalist, a Catholic bishop, an Italian general, two Moors and three other Moors below deck. Around the mast is a banner with Francisco Franco's slogan: "Arriba Espagne," Spain Arise. But the mast is actually a gallows from which hangs a huge cut of meat with the map of Spain on it, and above it, a vulture waiting to seize on his next meal. The Ministry of Propaganda issued the poster in 1936.
As the exhibit label for "Los Nacionales" explains: "The Feb. 28, 1938, issue of Time magazine contains a story about Spain's poster with this observation: 'Most popular throughout Leftist Spain is Los Nacionales, a fantasy turned out in the first weeks of the war by a husky, grey-eyed cartoonist named Juan Antonio Morales, 26, who has since joined the Leftist army and was last week engaged in the fighting in Teruel.' " Teruel, a city in east-central Spain, was the scene of several bloody battles.
The Spanish Civil War collection at Illinois, which Rinkel also curates, documents the U.S. literary and military involvement in Spain's war, with emphasis on the American writers who reported the events and interpreted them through poetry, prose and art.
Focusing on writer-members of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, including Edwin Rolfe and Milton Wolff, the archive consists of books, broadsides, clippings, correspondence, documents, manuscripts, photographs, serials and miscellaneous items relating the experiences on the American volunteers in Spain. Several databases can all be searched online, all linked to the Rare Book and Special Collections Library.