CHAPTER VI. The republic’s social policy and the CNT

The Congress’s decision to embrace the Federations of Industry would seem to indicate that the CNT’s moderate tendency had seized control of the organization. However, the exact opposite would occur: ultimately, it will be the more radial wing that will impose its revolutionary line on the anarcho- syndicalist confederation.

Shortly after Congress attendees had returned home, the most important labor conflict during the Republic’s five years erupted: the telephone workers’ strike.

After the proclamation of the Republic, the majority of telephone workers unionized with the CNT and formed the National Telephone Workers’ Union. Previously they had not been unionized and thus at the management’s mercy, but after unionizing they began to make demands on the company. The company was intransigent and the workers went on strike. Only CNT workers supported the strike at first, but that changed after there was violence against the strikers and Miguel Maura ordered police to shoot without warning. The rest of the workers then declared their solidarity and joined the CNT men. The Socialists were drawn into the dispute against their will: SP member Fernando de los Ríos was the Communications Minister and it was decided that he would arbitrate the conflict on the government’s behalf. After numerous meetings, he announced a ruling that was quite beneficial to the company but that did recognize the workers’ right to a labor contract. However, the company did not abide by his ruling and the strike dragged on for several more months. Finally, the Prime Minister signed a decree on March 15, 1932 undermining the Communications Minister’s ruling and, with it, the workers’ right to a contract. No one could explain Manuel Azaña’s strange intervention in this matter. [289] Of course the CNT did not accept his arbitration and the strike continued. There were more shootings and acts of sabotage in this strike than any other in Spain’s history.

A reader unfamiliar with Spain’s recent past will wonder why a Prime Minister would annul the ruling of one of his own ministers, particularly in a conflict between Spanish workers and a foreign company. However, the Telephone Company of Spain was Spanish in name alone: it was actually a “branch” of the North American International Telephone and Telegraph Company (IT&T). The English may have occupied Gibraltar but the Yankees had their own Rock of Gibraltar in the heart of Madrid.

Spain’s contract with IT&T dated back to the dictatorship. Gumersindo Rico, Melquíades Alvarez, Primo de Rivera, and Alfonso XIII all played a role in drafting it and of course each one had extracted his “take” from the deal. [290] When this contract mortgaging Spanish telephone communications to IT&T was signed, two types of shares were put into circulation: some were “preferential” and others were “ordinary.” Spanish capitalist owned the first—represented by the Urquijo Bank, which did nothing but take a percentage of the profits—and foreign shareholders held the second. The latter were the only ones with “a voice and a vote” in shareholder meetings. Furthermore, the contract exempted the telephone company from the obligation to pay any taxes or tributes to the state.

The Socialist leader Indalecio Prieto condemned this contract in a talk at the Ateneo de Madrid: [291] “If the Spanish State wants to rescue ... telephone services valued at around 600,000,000 pesetas in 1928 by handing over something slightly smaller than a Spanish province to North America, it should know that we will continue being shackled to this company. That’s because the telephones installed in Spain use apparatuses and systems patented by IT&T member groups, and we will continue paying for them until the patent expires [in fifty years]. Communications are the most delicate and sensitive part of the state’s nervous system; indeed, the security of the state itself can depend on them at times. And yet they’ve been handed over to a foreign business.” [292]

Spaniards were well-informed about this travesty (and others like it). The workers had hoped that the government would annul the contract once the Republic was proclaimed, particularly since one of its strongest critics was a government minister. No one understood why the government did the opposite and used its repressive forces in the interests of a foreign company and against the Spanish working class. However, the reality was that the men of the new regime not only supported the contract, but also replaced its beneficiaries under the dictatorship with Republicans. The deception and theft continued, only now with different people. This was so clear that IT&T’s best known representative in Spain, Captain Roe, publicly stated: “Deals made in the Republic have been much better for my company than under the Monarchy.... You don’t know the power of a blank check in this type of Republic!” [293]

The fishermen of Puerto Pasajes (in San Sebastián) declared a strike in late May 1931. The employers were intractable and the workers organized a demonstration to pressure San Sebastián’s Republican authorities, taking their wives and children with them. The governor of San Sebastián asked Madrid what to do and Maura called in the Civil Guard. “Sixteen Civil Guards were to be positioned at the access point to San Sebastián, the Mira Cruz Bridge, which is a narrow but necessary passage for anyone entering the city on the road from Pasajes. All things considered, it was an ideal place to stop the demonstrators,” said Miguel Maura. He continues:

The mob reached the Civil Guards. I was told that there were more than a thousand of them, including women, and they were armed with sticks, shotguns, and other improvised weapons. They were irate, and their shouting and angry gestures showed that they had been stirred up by outside agitators. These people had never been prone to violence before.

The Guards blocked the road and spread out across it in two lines. The cornet player gave the first call to attention as the throng drew closer. The masses kept advancing. He sounded a second call, which also had no effect on the crowd. And then he finally made the third call, which sparked the demonstrators’ furious assault on the Guards. The Guards were kneeling on the ground now and got ready to fire.

They had to do it—fire the volley—to stop the avalanche of people falling upon them. There were eight deaths and more than a few injuries.... Hours later police arrested the four Galician CNT leaders who had provoked these sad events.[294]

Miguel Maura was not any Minister but a senior minister with nearly absolute power to apply his own brand of “justice.” That is what he told the journalists who gathered in his office to hear about the deaths among the Pasajes fishermen: “I reminded them that as far as the press was concerned, they were in the presence of a minister who had full powers over public order.... I didn’t tell them to conceal the news, but rather pleaded with them to do so meticulously and truthfully. I wanted Spain to know that it had a government that was not to be played with.” [295] None of the newspapers except La Voz commented on the events. The other ministers, seeing that Maura had frightened the press into silence, applauded the good work of Antonio Maura’s son.

Maura accomplished another feat in Sevilla. We previously noted that the government had declared a state of emergency in Andalusia. Of course it wasn’t the landowners who let the harvest rot or refused to plant that worried the Republican government, but rather the hungry peasants. It was against them that it declared the state of emergency.

Elections had been called for June 28. In Sevilla and throughout Andalusia, Ramón Franco’s electoral campaign had strong socialist hues. He was clearly popular, like another candidate, Dr. Cayetano Bolívar, who leaned toward communism but didn’t declare himself a member of the Communist Party. Both later became deputies, and their popularity indicates that many workers believed that the country’s continued problems were due to the government’s novelty and that things would improve once national elections were held. The results of the elections seemed to justify that hope.

The Socialists elected 116 deputies and the rest of the seats in the Parliament went to the Left. The right-wing was eclipsed; the Monarchists only elected one deputy; la Lliga Catalana, three; and the more moderate “Al Servicio de la República,” fourteen. The Left, including the Socialists, was victorious across the board. With 116 Socialist deputies, the peasants thought the government would institute agrarian reform and urban workers thought it would confront the work stoppage that was spreading across the country like an oil stain.

Although it looked like the Socialists had achieved a lot, that was not the case and Interior Minister Maura was there to prove it. Miguel Maura’s black beasts were the CNT and the anarchists, who had been rebuilding themselves throughout Spain. In Andalusia, the CNT was displacing the UGT as the predominant labor organization, which must have felt like a sharp blow to the UGT’s General Secretary, who was also the Minister of Labor. We don’t believe that there was a deal between Maura and Largo Caballero, but simply that Maura hoped that his relentless persecution of the CNT (in Andalusia and elsewhere) would strengthen the UGT. This was why this he devised the “Tablada conspiracy,” for which he hoped Ramón Franco would take the fall and lose his deputy’s certificate. [296]When that conspiracy unraveled, Maura plotted another, more notorious one: “the bloody week of Sevilla” (July 18 to the July 25).

According to Maura, an anarchist doctor by the name of Pedro Vallina was organizing an insurrection in Andalusia that would be centered in Sevilla but break out into a general revolutionary strike throughout the region. Just like with the Pasajes fishermen, Maura needed to crush the rebellion and teach its organizers a lesson. We will see how he did so, drawing on Maura’s previously cited work as well as Pedro Vallina’s memoirs, written forty years after the events.

“When I arrived in Sevilla,” Vallina writes, “I received a confidential letter from some completely trustworthy comrades in Madrid. They told me that Interior Minister Miguel Maura had called the Governor of Sevilla, Antonio Montaner, to his office to propose something despicable to him. Montaner behaved himself well: he immediately rejected Maura’s overture and resigned from his Governor position. Maura’s plan was to provoke a general revolutionary strike in Sevilla, arrest the leading militants, dissolve the workers’ organizations, and blame all this on me; trying to destroy me forever. What a dignified man like Montaner did not accept, a vile man accepted fully: Mr. Bastos. He was appointed Governor and went to Sevilla to occupy his post and carry out his mission.” [297]

Here is Maura’s version: “When the Republic was proclaimed, the UGT—that is, the Socialist Party—was preponderant in Sevilla. That labor federation and party were so strong that they were considered the only ones really organized there....” Later, while discussing Ramón Franco, he states:

“I watched his adventures closely and learned that in the Andalusian countryside a doctor named Vallina, an anarchist who was very popular among the region’s peasants, had made a deal with Franco and other soldier friends of his to assault the city of Sevilla on the eve of the elections, that is, on Saturday, June 27.”

Maura continues: “Mr. Montaner began his efforts to destroy the UGT and Socialist Party as soon as he arrived in Sevilla, giving the CNT every chance to surpass its rival.... In reality, when Bastos occupied his post, the UGT had practically disappeared from the scene and the CNT had enlisted almost all the province’s worker and peasant masses, who were armed and ready not only for a general strike in the capital but also for the assault on it that Dr. Vallina would lead.”[298]

Vallina writes: “The new Governor Bastos arrived a few days later and the most reactionary and dangerous figures in the area came to see him. My Madrid friends told me to sound the alarm to the militant workers in Sevilla, so that the agent provocateurs wouldn’t dupe them. I told them what was happening, but my meeting with them gave me with such a bad impression that I was upset when I went to the city. It wasn’t that there was any complicity with the enemy, but simply a state of great excitement prompted by the ungainly conduct of the Republican leaders.”

Vallina went to Alcalá de Guadaira, where he lived, and the next day received a militant from Sevilla who, he says, “told him that it looked probable that the revolutionary general strike would occur.” Vallina immediately informed local workers about Maura’s ploys: “After listening to me attentively, they said that they were also worried about strange things happening in relation to a strike that they had called. The employer himself had told them that he would have settled it already, but was being pressured from above to prolong it.”[299]

Nonetheless, the provocation was stronger than Vallina’s warning and the workers went on strike: “I was sleeping peacefully at home, unaware that the strike had been declared that day, when a mob of Civil Guards showed up, under the command of an officer. They smashed into my house and arrested me. They later arrested four workers, whom they described as my ‘general staff.’”[300] Authorities took them to Sevilla by car and from there to Cádiz, where they were held incommunicado in the Santa Catalina Castle. Several days later Rodrigo Soriano, a Republican deputy and friend of Vallina’s, used the prerogatives of his position to find Vallina and tell him what had occurred: 234 The republic’s social policy and the CNT“The general strike had exploded, as Maura had hoped, with the collaboration of unthinking and provocative elements. The Civil Guard was ordered to shoot without warning, which is what happened in the province’s towns and capital. There were many deaths: thirty-nine in Sevilla and one hundred in the rest of the province.” “The most repugnant act was the murder of four defenseless workers in María Luisa Park, on the edge of the Guadalquivir, and the most stupid was the bombing of the ‘Casa Cornelio’ in La Macarena, because the café had been a meeting place for revolutionary workers.”[301] Vallina spent three months in prison. Authorities finally freed him after being unable to find any evidence against him. This is Maura’s account of the events:

The revolt became more intense between July 19 and 21. Three Civil Guardsmen died in the street on July 20 after being fired at from the balconies and four workers fell after the police shot them.... Bastos and I had decided that we wouldn’t relinquish military command except in the last instance ... their offensive became even more severe on the morning of July 22, thanks to reinforcements that the rebels had apparently called in. This occurred despite the fact that Dr. Vallina had been arrested and imprisoned when the march on the city began, led by a caravan of trucks that were full of rebels [so ferocious that they let authorities peacefully arrest their leader!].... It was necessary for the military authorities to take control. General Ruiz Trillo led the Division of Andalusia. He took over the command and proclaimed the state of emergency.... The struggle continued throughout July 22. In the early morning, when the prisoners were being transferred from Sevilla to the port, where they were going to be taken to the prison in Cádiz, they were changing vans in the middle of María Luisa Park and several of the detainees tried to escape. The soldiers fired on them and killed four. [As always, the Ley de Fugas!][302]

The Parliament’s sessions had begun on July 14 and news from Sevilla made them contentious. The government formed a commission to investigate the events and one of its members, Antonio Jaén, a deputy from Málaga, declared: “The Andalusian peasants voted against the Monarchy on April 12; on May 12, with the events in Madrid and Málaga, they affirmed their radical sense, and on July 22, they showed their social disposition. There is no civil war in Andalusia but rather a social war whose roots can be traced to the beginnings of the Reconquest; a social war whose echo can be heard in all the rebellions and is even perceptible in ballads and popular folk songs. I’ll cite a folksong from Andalusia that perfectly indicates the feeling in our land:

God in heaven wants

Justice to return

And the poor to eat bread

And rich to eat ... grass *

A vote of confidence in the provisional government, which would ratify the government and confirm the ministers in their posts, was scheduled to occur on July 29. Lluís Companys, who gave up his position as Barcelona governor to be a deputy (he was replaced by Anguera de Sojo) suggested that the government should only be made up by Republicans. Miguel Maura felt like Companys had plunged a spear into him. Maura swore his republican faith and then audaciously declared the following in front of four Socialist ministers and 116 Socialist deputies:

“Is the CNT somehow exempt from legal obligations and duties and yet entitled to all the rights conceded to Spanish citizens?” This was the real question and, to concretize it, I took a stand in the government: “My duty is to say to the CNT and FAI, and also to the SS.SS, that Spanish law forms a whole. If they are exempt from duties within the law—given that they do not accept the laws that regulate work, do not recognize the parity committees, mixed tribunals, and, above all, governmental authority—then they will also be exempt from their rights, and the laws of assembly, association, or any of the others that protect them won’t exist for them. If they honor the laws of work and those regulating commerce, then they’ll have the right to a normal relation with the government. The Chamber ratified my position with a prolonged round of applause and the dispute [with Companys] was over.[303]

—————————

(* The final word of this popular folksong is “shit” [mierda], but the deputy used the euphemism “grass” [hierba] out of respect for the Chamber.[304])