Volume 34, Number 2 · February 12, 1987
The Forgotten People
By Mary McCarthy
Nancy Macdonald's book Homage to the Spanish Exiles,[*] on the refugees of the the Spanish civil war, is the story of a vocation—a calling, such as came to figures in religious history. It was a surprise to read in it that the organization she founded, Spanish Refugee Aid, got started only in 1952; one had had the impression that Nancy Macdonald and a small committee in the Union Square neighborhood had 'always' been helping Spaniards. That is, the hundreds of thousands of Republicans left over, as it were, from the Spanish civil war when it ended in 1939 with Franco's victory, turning what was a trickle into a tide of refugees that poured over the border into south-western France. I remember our first leaflet—'Forgotten People'—written by Dwight Macdonald but with many editorial suggestions from the rest of us, who wanted to do something to help, and I would have dated it much earlier, perhaps 1948. I am mixing Spanish Refugee Aid up, evidently, with the package fund of Dwight's magazine, politics, which it grew out of and which Nancy had done most of the office work for.
Feature, 3470 words
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