Dark dust floated in the air, covering the lush, green hillsides. As the train snaked its way down the narrow valley in tandem with the rushing black waters of the river Candín, lines of straw-hatted men and women shovelling huge piles of coal could be observed from the carriage. The valley widened and opened onto the industrial expanse of La Felguera. On alighting, Roberto Arlt was struck by the landscape of Asturian industry, from the sight of ‘armour-plated blast furnaces’ and pitheads to ‘chimneys spewing plumes of smoke sideways’. For the Argentine journalist, industry lent the Asturian coal valleys an air of ‘severe, sombre dynamism’.1 The region was the country’s coal capital and, together with the Basque Country and Catalonia, one of the heartlands of Spanish industry, but the image of a smoke-belching powerhouse requires careful examination. This chapter explores the industrial, social and political development of the coalfields within a wider Spanish context from the vantage point of 1931, before ending with a look at the proclamation of the Second Republic in April 1931 and the political panorama at the national and local level.
The Asturian coalfields have long had a reputation as ‘red valleys’ with the mineworkers mythologized as the vanguard of the organized Spanish working class, as witnessed not only in the 1934 revolutionary insurrection but also in the 1962 ‘silent’ strike against the Francoist dictatorship. As an area with strong, distinctive left-wing traditions and political activism, the coal valleys can be compared to similar areas in Europe and beyond, from ‘little Moscows’ like Halluin in northern France or ‘red Clydeside’ in Glasgow, to the ‘red cities’ of Vienna and Turin.2 While the left – understood in broad terms – was hegemonic in the coalfields, society was neither monolithic nor monochrome. Scholars have often emphasized the rivalry between socialists, anarchists and Communists, yet it is also necessary to incorporate the presence of the right and Catholicism, and to complicate the relationship between left-wing groups in order to provide a fuller picture of political dynamics in the coalfields.3 The combination of small communities and overlapping networks of sociability, work and politics meant that male mineworkers of different beliefs coexisted in the village and in the workplace, ensuring interaction and friction, but also the possibility of understanding. Communities were thus multi-layered, which meant that multiple axes of identification and mobilization existed, including affiliations along the lines of politics, class, one’s workplace, gender or place of residence. This was vital for the evolution of the struggles examined in the following chapters.4 Radicalism emerged from a combination of the left’s position of power and local rivalries and cleavages.
Environment and industry
Some 450km and an 11-hour train journey north of Madrid in the 1930s, Asturias – or the province of Oviedo as it was then officially known – comprises over 10,000km2 nestled between the Cantabrian Sea and peaks of the cordillera that divide it from the central plains of the Spanish Meseta. The rolling hills along the coast and mountainous valleys traditionally supported a largely subsistence economy, based mainly on cattle rearing, fishing and smallholdings, but by the twentieth century, coal and iron production had emerged to form the backbone of the Asturian economy. The provincial capital was the regional seat of banking and commerce, but also accommodated two arms producers, two explosives factories and a cement plant within its municipal boundaries. The capital was rivalled by the port city of Gijón, which was both a ‘summer resort and [an] industrial powerhouse’, thanks to coal exporting, shipbuilding and metallurgy, as well as glass-making, ceramics, textiles, tobacco, fishing and construction.5 The principal coal zones were the steep-sided, winding valleys of the Nalón, Caudal, Aller and Turón rivers to the south of Oviedo, towered over by peaks up to 1000m tall.6 Outside the central area formed by Oviedo, Gijón and the coalfields, the rest of the province’s 800,000 inhabitants – of a national population of 23.5 million in 1931 – were widely dispersed.7
The mining of coal in Asturias began in the eighteenth century, but the industry developed slowly. Geology and geography posed significant obstacles. Asturian coal was soft and required washing. Extraction was difficult and the labour process resisted mechanization, for seams were usually narrow and sloped diagonally. The poor quality of the coal and costly transportation out of the valleys meant that Asturian coal was expensive and initially a product destined primarily for local consumption. From the mid nineteenth century onwards, an increase in demand, improvements in transport and infrastructure, the consolidation of larger mining companies, including Fábrica de Mieres (1879), Sociedad Hullera Española (1892) and Duro-Felguera (1900), and the introduction of a tariff on foreign coal, stimulated the development of the industry. Output, which had oscillated between 350,000 and 500,000 tons between 1870 and 1887, increased to over a million tons in 1895 and reached two million tons in 1907.8 As a result, Asturian coal went from being a product for local consumption, to one for export to other provinces by train and ship, although its price ensured that it continued to struggle to compete with foreign imports on the domestic market.
Even as the capital of Spanish coal, the Asturian coalfields never rivalled areas like the Ruhr, northern England or south Wales, which were much larger in scale and production.9 Nor could Asturias match the success and wealth of the other two heartlands of Spanish industry: the Basque Country and Catalonia, whose industrial foundations rested on iron ore extraction and textile production respectively. The Basques were favoured by large deposits of the phosphorous-free iron ore required by the Bessemer process and exported it to Britain; cheap coal flowed in the opposite direction to fuel the Basque Country’s own steel production.10 The interruption of this trade during the First World War sparked a boom in profits for Asturian coal companies. When British coal reappeared on the Spanish market after the war, the contraction was sharp. In an attempt to stay competitive, mining companies lowered wages while forcing mineworkers to cut increased amounts of Asturian coal. Production reached nearly five million tons in 1929 before further economic problems hit the industry during the Republic.11
The expansion of the coal industry during the First World War had created thousands of jobs, which later disappeared in the post-war slump. Dismissals helped the companies maintain the pressure on wages during the 1920s. The mining workforce had peaked at 39,000 in 1920 – which translated into a three-fold increase since 1900 – and had largely been fuelled by an influx of migrants from Portugal and other areas of Spain. The post-war difficulties in the industry meant that between 1922 and 1934 the number of mineworkers fluctuated between 25,000 and 30,000.12 The iron and steel industry in the valleys was much smaller, employing approximately 2,100 and 1,300 workers in La Felguera and Ablaña (Mieres) respectively. (A further plant in Gijón employed another 1,300 workers.)13
Coalmining was almost entirely a male occupation thanks to a legal prohibition on women labouring in the pit galleries. Women were employed in the coal-washing facilities, but their number was in long-term decline and by 1934, they summed only 700 workers.14 In contrast, women outnumbered male workers in the explosives factories that supplied the mines.15 According to official figures, much of women’s employment in the province was concentrated in agriculture, domestic service and tailoring, which reflected national patterns, although such sources neglect less formalized activities and unpaid labour.16 Fragments from contemporary accounts, the press or court records show that women worked in bars and shops, ran lodging houses and market stalls, and engaged in informal activities to supplement the family income, such as coal picking.17 Even so, paid employment among young women was high enough in the 1920s for Dr Jove y Canella to lament that young women in San Martín del Rey Aurelio were not prepared for homemaking, as they spent their youth working rather than learning their domestic duties.18 Jove y Canella published several ‘medical topographies’ of coalfield districts in the 1920s and 1930s, in which he surveyed the factors that impacted on the health of residents, from living conditions and lifestyles to nutrition and disease.
For the men who worked in coal extraction, mine work varied greatly from pit to pit. Companies sank the first shafts in 1916 and thereafter hundreds of workers queued every day for the cages that plummeted to the galleries in the deeper pits, like Sotón, Fondón or the Lláscares mine visited by Roberto Arlt.19 In Aller, in contrast, drift mines peppered the valley sides and the first shaft did not enter into operation until 1942. Drift mines employed much smaller workforces and groups of workers trekked, ‘staff in […] hand’, up the mountainsides.20 The level of mechanization inside the mines varied significantly between different pits, and workforces were highly stratified according to their role and wage. Subcontracting had become increasingly prevalent and served as a further potential dividing factor within the workforce.21 Stratification and different workplace experiences posed potential obstacles to solidarity and co-operation.
While the image of a highly industrialized area and the identity of the ‘mineworker’ loomed large and proudly in the collective imagination, the reality was inevitably more complicated. That mineworkers sought other ways of earning a living, from running bars to book-selling, is unsurprising given the precarious nature of employment in the coal industry, and can be illustrated by the cases of two young socialists. Herminio Vallina appears in the archival record as a mineworker, correspondent for the socialist newspaper, Avance, and shop assistant in a pharmacy, while Silverio Castañón described working in construction and selling newspapers and novels after he was sacked for striking.22 Many mineworkers continued to be connected to the rural environment, both in terms of labour and sociability. Historians have suggested that ‘mixed workers’, who combined mining and agricultural labour, predominated prior to 1914, but mineworkers returned to agriculture amid the crisis in the coal industry at the end of the First World War.23 As women worked the land more than men, reframing the unit of economic analysis on the family also highlights that mining families continued to be entangled in some of the rhythms and practices of rural society. Police investigations from the 1930s also reveal quarrels between mineworkers over the demarcation of plots of land belonging to family members and brawling at an esfoyaza, a traditional communal gathering to strip leaves from maize.24
If the reality was more nuanced than Arlt’s vision of the coalfields, the valleys were still starkly different from much of Spain, which continued to be predominantly agricultural. The percentage of Spain’s population working in agriculture – over 50 per cent – was aligned with Mediterranean Europe (Italy and Greece) and halfway between the agrarian east of the continent and more industrialized western and northern Europe.25 As travellers and observers have long remarked, Spain exhibits great geographical and climatological variation from the rainy, fertile valleys of the north to the arid plains of the interior. The different conditions shaped the selection of crops, farming methods and property structures. Market gardening and livestock husbandry tended to characterize the smallholdings of the north. Cereals and legumes were concentrated on the north-central plains – although they were cultivated all over Spain where the topography allowed – and olive trees, vines and fruit trees were mainly grown in Andalusia and on the Mediterranean coast. While large agricultural estates [latifundia] are associated with the southern regions of Extremadura, La Mancha and Andalusia, even in these areas the size of farms varied greatly.26 Although less than one per cent of the landowners possessed nearly half of the agricultural land of Jaén province, the presence of small tenants and sharecroppers should not be overlooked.27 Likewise, small farms [minifundia] populated the valleys and rolling hills of the northern coast, but there were also important differences between regions like Galicia and the Basque Country. Whereas family farms were indivisible and passed to the eldest son in the latter, Galician smallholdings were ‘minute’ and subject to ‘fragmented ownership’. The subdivision of plots stimulated emigration abroad to escape poverty.28
The dependence on agriculture traditionally resulted in a portrait of Spain as economically backward and stagnant, but recent research has depicted instead a country experiencing uneven development and highlighted the evolving nature of the agricultural sector. Mechanization and the use of artificial fertilizers were underdeveloped, but expanded during the early twentieth century, while at the same time agriculture became increasingly oriented towards a capitalist market economy.29 Land dedicated to agriculture increased by nearly a third between 1900 and 1939, and market demands stimulated a gradual shift towards cultivating more profitable products, which in Asturias translated into an increase in cattle production as peasants slowly became integrated into capitalist market dynamics.30 The number of landless agricultural labourers who worked the large estates in the south was in long-term decline, even if their underemployment, poverty and thirst for land posed an important problem for the governments of the Second Republic. The Spanish economy thus followed a ‘Mediterranean path’ of development, characterized by sluggish but consistent growth compared to its northern European neighbours. Rapid transformation of the agrarian sector would only occur during the 1950s and 1960s.31
As the economy evolved during the first third of the twentieth century, Spain underwent an important demographic transformation. Between 1900 and 1931, the population increased from 18.5 million to 23.5 million, facilitated by a decrease in the death rate. Cities across the country expanded.32 Madrid nearly doubled in size, rising from 540,000 to almost one million inhabitants, alongside provincial capitals like Zaragoza and Córdoba, which swelled from 99,000 and 58,000 to 173,000 and 103,000 inhabitants respectively. Barcelona’s industrial complexes attracted labour from southern Spain in search of job opportunities, with the result that a third of the city’s residents were not Catalan by birth in 1930.33 The Asturian coalfields mirrored these wider demographic trends. During the first third of the century, the number of inhabitants of Mieres, San Martín del Rey Aurelio and Langreo more than doubled; in the latter, the population increased from 19,000 to over 39,000. By 1930 the principal coalfield municipalities totalled over 140,000 residents, while 75,000 lived in the municipal district of Oviedo – 42,000 in the capital itself.34
The swelling population posed a significant challenge for housing and infrastructure in the coalfields. Some of the mining companies had financed housing, schools, medical services, company shops, churches, water supplies, washing facilities, and even posts for the national police force, the Civil Guard.35 However, provision was uneven. Not all areas bore the same imprint of paternalism as Turón, where every ‘manifestation of cultural or mechanical labour’ in the valley allegedly had the ‘constant and determined support’ of the mining company Hulleras del Turón.36 Some historians have tended to understand these paternalistic practices reductively as an attempt to inhibit the growth of socialist politics, but this fails to account for why paternalism shrank from the First World War onwards just as the socialist mining union expanded and sought recognition.37 More convincingly, paternalism was a form of ‘social engineering’ designed to attract and ‘fix’ an agricultural society to industrial discipline, and the paternalist drive was considered less necessary during the boom of immigrant labour during the First World War.38 By the 1930s, paternalism was limited to the building of schools, company shops and housing, although provision of the latter continued to be uneven, piecemeal and never sufficient for the needs of the local population.
Company decisions on industrial development shaped patterns of urbanization in the coalfields. As coal pits were sunk, urban density increased on the valley floors, although the lack of overall investment in housing meant that many mineworkers continued to live in the villages clinging to the steep valley-sides. The peculiar case of Aller demonstrates how company decisions on industrial development determined settlement patterns. In the Aller valley, Sociedad Hullera Española (SHE) had resisted the construction of a railway to prevent the emergence of larger conurbations and what the company perceived to be associated vices, including socialism.39 This resistance, combined with the lack of pits, meant that urban settlements in Aller did not reach the size of their counterparts in Mieres and Langreo.
Yet even the more densely populated areas in the coalfields did not see the emergence of large urban centres. Residential patterns resembled the valleys of south Wales rather than the large conurbations of the Ruhr or the self-contained coal villages in north-east England.40 A large proportion of the Asturian coalfield population continued to live in villages and hamlets, as Jove y Canella observed in the early 1920s. He calculated that in San Martín del Rey Aurelio a quarter of the 16,000 inhabitants lived in the main urban centres and the rest were distributed among 124 villages and hamlets.41 San Martín del Rey Aurelio was somewhat exceptional. Forty-seven per cent of the municipality’s population lived in settlements of fewer than 100 inhabitants in 1930, which was higher than in Langreo (18 per cent), Mieres (25 per cent) and Laviana (39 per cent). Even so, the largest conurbations in the coalfields in Langreo and Laviana only accommodated between 2,000 and 5,000 residents, and represented approximately a third of the municipal population, while in Mieres only 15 per cent resided in the capital.42 The contrast with the south of Spain is striking. The population of the coalfields was less urbanized than in certain parts of the agricultural south, where day labourers who worked on the large estates often resided in large agro-towns. Three quarters of the population of Jaén province lived in towns of more than 5,000 people, including 70 per cent of the province’s day labourers.43
The consequences of these settlement patterns in the coalfields were two-fold. First, the coalfield villages were not isolated, self-contained units. It was common for mineworkers to live in one settlement and work in another.44 Neighbours and local kinship networks did not necessarily overlap with their network of workmates in the pit. Both the place of residence and the workplace were sites of sociability and identification that could form the basis for collective action. Second, the Asturian coalfields were largely formed of small communities in which residents were known to one another. This proximity was a double-edged sword. It could serve to forge solidarity rooted in identification with the community or engender bitter disputes and cleavages. Social pressures and gossip in these small communities could contribute to radicalism.
Social life and politics
In 1931, eleven years after construction had begun, the Casa del Pueblo opened in La Oscura (San Martín del Rey Aurelio). Measuring 1,526m2, the building was another jewel in the crown of the Asturian socialist movement. The network of Asturian socialist ‘Houses of the People’ had developed from the first planned Casa del Pueblo in Mieres in 1900 to number sixty-six in the 1930s. Although the size and facilities varied, the Casas del Pueblo, in addition to housing local socialist union and party sections, could offer assembly halls, theatres, co-operatives, libraries, cinemas, schools, sports clubs, choirs and friendly societies to their male and female members.45 The Casas del Pueblo were not solely an Asturian phenomenon, although the coalfields possessed a particularly dense, active and well-resourced network of such institutions. They existed across the country and in other parts of Europe, where they had first emerged as meeting rooms for socialist organizations towards the end of the nineteenth century. Often financed by co-operatives or mutual aid societies, they responded to a need for spaces in which to educate, socialize, or organize campaigns.46 The network of socialist institutions in ‘red Vienna’ was particularly well developed. By 1931–2, the party had established forty cultural organizations, published 127 newspapers and provided a range of sporting activities for its followers. The objective was to provide cultural education for the working masses in order to forge fit, educated citizens for the Republic and work towards the future establishment of socialism.47
The development of the Casas del Pueblo in Asturias came after the consolidation of an embryonic socialist movement at the turn of the century. An Asturian socialist newspaper – La Aurora Social – was founded in 1896 and there were over 4,200 Asturian members of the socialist trade union federation, the UGT, by the time the Asturian Socialist Federation (FSA) was established five years later.48 Mineworkers continued to organize in pit-based unions until the creation of the socialist Mineworkers’ Union of Asturias (SOMA) in 1910, which quickly became a powerful voice for the coal miners. The key figure behind the establishment of the SOMA was Manuel Llaneza. His experience in self-imposed exile in northern France after being sacked for striking in Mieres in 1906 convinced him of the need for sector-wide trade unions along the lines of the reformist, centralized Vieux Syndicat. Llaneza was also a prominent advocate of the construction of Casas del Pueblo, for he believed they would draw workers into the socialist sphere, away from both company paternalism and the vices of alcohol and sport.49
The SOMA’s first decade was successful. It attracted members and achieved improved wages and working conditions. The union initially adopted a combative stance in labour relations, which led to rapid expansion – 10,000 members within two years – and forced the mining companies to recognize the union as the legitimate representative of the workforce. The SOMA then assumed a more moderate and reformist approach in accordance with the strategy of the UGT and the philosophy of Spanish socialism as a whole. By 1919, it boasted 29,000 members out of a mining workforce of 35,000, for whom it had managed to secure the historic achievement of a seven-hour working day in the mines.50 The union’s growth aided the consolidation of socialism in the coalfields. In elections held in 1918, the PSOE had obtained 40 per cent of the vote in Mieres and San Martín del Rey Aurelio.51
Yet political and economic circumstances conspired to throw the SOMA into crisis during the next decade. The post-war contraction in the coal industry led companies to dismiss thousands of mineworkers and repeatedly cut wages, while the Communist call for the left to join the Third International caused a traumatic split in the Spanish socialist movement. The SOMA hierarchy struggled to respond to these challenges, which produced wildcat strikes and infighting for control of the union between 1920 and 1922. The expulsion of twenty-one SOMA sections did not resolve the union’s woes and membership continued to slide. It had collapsed from nearly 30,000 in 1919 to 7,000 in 1922, before recovering to 12,000 two years later and then slipping again to 8,000 in 1926.52
Llaneza met with Primo de Rivera soon after he seized power in 1923, but socialist co-operation with the regime, including participation in the corporatist mechanisms of the dictatorship, did not improve the fortunes of the SOMA. Socialists defended co-operation with the dictatorship on the basis of defending workers and protecting their organizations. While the UGT maintained a similar level of membership in 1928 compared to 1922, such a situation was not reflected in Asturias, where the SOMA was incapable of defending mineworkers from short-time working, closures and layoffs.53 Primo de Rivera’s decision in 1927 to withdraw the seven-hour day tested SOMA’s moderation further. The union executive finally decided to organize a strike, but only thanks to rank-and-file pressure.54
The SOMA’s fortunes changed at the end of the decade, thanks to the socialist movement shifting to oppose the dictatorship, although the SOMA continued to advocate moderation. The union’s membership doubled between 1930 and 1932, by which time it claimed 21,000 members and 69 per cent of the workforce, cementing its position as the primary trade union force in the coalfields.55 The spectacular recovery in the SOMA appeared to be the result of returning former members. Growth in the wider UGT, which reached over one million members in June 1932, came from newcomers to the union, particularly in rural areas via the National Federation of Landworkers (FNTT).56
The main rival to the socialist unions both in Asturias and at a national level was the anarchist movement, whose presence in Spain stretched back to the 1870s. United by a desire to emancipate citizens through abolishing capitalism and authority – identified with the state and the Church – and establishing libertarian communism, anarchism nevertheless remained a heterogeneous movement. In 1910, syndicalists founded Spanish anarchism’s most prominent organization – the National Confederation of Labour (CNT) – which sought to use direct action to gain material improvements for workers and further the anarchist cause. The CNT swelled to over 700,000 members at the end of the decade, before entering a spiralling crisis of radicalization and repression in the early 1920s. The Primo de Rivera dictatorship forced the union underground. After legalization in 1930, the CNT again grew rapidly to boast 800,000 members by the end of 1931.57
Anarchism had two particular strongholds in Asturias, whose differences reflected an important division within the overall movement. The port city of Gijón had long been the centre for a moderate syndicalism that was open to collaborating with socialists and in 1919 a prominent local anarchist and educator, Eleuterio Quintanilla, had proposed unification with the socialist movement. This is important, for the impulse behind the Asturian Workers’ Alliance signed in spring 1934 originated in the Gijonese anarchist movement. In contrast, the anarchists of the iron and steel town of La Felguera were associated with the more radical, voluntarist and doctrinaire FAI (Iberian Anarchist Federation) – a clandestine organization of small affinity groups formed in 1927.58 Anarchism had a greater hegemony over the steelworkers in La Felguera than over the mineworkers. The CNT-affiliated mining union – the Mineworkers’ Single Union (SUM) – vied with the SOMA for mineworkers’ support but had much fewer members. While most rank-and-file SUM members were anarchists, in reality the union had been a coalition of anarchists and Communists since its creation in 1922 from the twenty-one sections expelled from the SOMA. Membership of the SUM swelled to 9,000 in June 1931 – just over a year after it was authorized to operate – yet this also coincided with the eruption during a strike of underlying tensions within the union due to an unstable combination of a largely anarchist rank and file and a Communist leadership.59
Even though the coalfields were an area of relative strength for the official Communist Party of Spain (PCE), the movement was small both in Asturias and in Spain as a whole. Throughout the 1920s, Asturian Communists struggled in the face of harassment by the state, frictions with the socialists and internal disagreement, which continued through the beginning of the Republic. There were less than a thousand members of the PCE in Asturias in 1932 and just over a thousand in the Communist Youth (JC).60 The weakness of the PCE was also evident in its lack of bricks-and-mortar institutions when compared to the socialist Casas del Pueblo. Communists organized meetings and rallies in cinemas, theatres and bars, as did anarchists outside their stronghold of La Felguera, where ‘La Justicia’ was the hub for anarchist activity and was frequently raided by the police.
There was a third mineworkers’ union beyond the SOMA and the SUM: the Catholic Mineworkers’ Union (SCOM). The SCOM had been created in response to SOMA’s attempts to organize mineworkers employed by Sociedad Hullera Española in Aller. SHE rejected proposals for an independent Catholic organization from one Spain’s leading social Catholic voices, Maximiliano Arboleya, in favour of a yellow union that was amenable to the employers. The struggle between the SOMA and the SCOM in Aller culminated in a shootout in Moreda in 1920, by which time the SCOM had already reached its peak level of influence. Thereafter the SCOM’s membership declined despite the favourable Catholic corporatist climate of the Primo de Rivera dictatorship. By 1932, it could only muster half of the 2,300 members it had claimed in 1919.61 During the 1930s, the SCOM maintained a union centre in Moreda, but the main trace of its public life was through opinion pieces published in Región penned by Vicente Madera Peña, SCOM leader and cousin of Ramón González Peña, a SOMA leader and so-called generalísimo of the Asturian October.
The centres operated by the trade unions constituted one hub of associational life and political and cultural education in the coalfields. Their main rival was the ateneo, which was a liberal, interclass cultural centre that tended to propagate Republican ideals and had its roots in the nineteenth century. The ateneos formed part of a constellation of initiatives including lending libraries and cultural associations that focused on enlightening citizens through education and culture, and which mushroomed during the 1930s. Ateneos appeared in neighbourhoods like working-class La Argañosa in Oviedo and settlements like La Canga in Langreo, where the Ateneo Popular and library newly inaugurated in 1932 boasted a membership of twenty-eight in a hamlet of only twenty-six inhabitants.62 Membership levels were high, but overwhelmingly male. The ateneos in Mieres and Turón claimed 1,000 and 800 members respectively in 1932, and in Trubia the Casino-Theatre boasted 2,000. The Ateneo Popular in Mieres controversially voted to admit women members in autumn 1932, although they were only permitted to attend talks – and indeed, there were lectures on topics including women’s health and rights.63 Young women nevertheless were often an integral part of initiatives like theatre groups (cuadros artísticos).64
The ateneos were founded on a desire for collective self-improvement shared across Republicanism and the left. As one ‘son of Langreo’ declared, the ‘weapon’ of the time was the ‘book, the newspaper’.65 Ateneos organized a range of activities, including lectures, music and theatre, and frequently housed a reading room or library and often a radio.66 Theatrical performances helped to mould and cement left-wing political values through social and political criticism, including the propagation of anticlerical ideas.67 As in Vienna, where over 80 per cent of books loaned from socialist libraries were novels and poetry, there was a strong preference for literature over politics and economics. Popular authors included Vicente Blasco Ibáñez and Benito Pérez Galdós, whose works had a decidedly anticlerical flavour.68 Ateneos emphasized their eschewal of formal politics, yet political debate was difficult to avoid in the 1930s, not least given that the membership of ateneos overlapped with that of parties and unions. The Ateneo Popular in Oviedo elected Javier Bueno as its president in 1934. Bueno was the editor of the socialist newspaper Avance and renowned for his radical views.69
Outside the workplace, ateneos and Casas del Pueblo vied with the football pitch, brothel and tavern as spaces of masculine leisure and sociability.70 Bars were ubiquitous – Dr Jove y Canella claimed that there were no hamlets without a bar in San Martín del Rey Aurelio – and central to male working-class sociability. Bars were sites of leisure, but also places to find work and of political education, even if unions and political parties disapproved of bars as a vice-ridden distraction from politics.71 Women’s spaces of sociability are often hidden from view in the sources. Women would have come into contact through daily chores and errands imposed by running the household and caring for family members.72 The riverbank or public washhouses were particularly important as sites where women gathered to talk as they laundered clothes.73 Trade unions for women were formed in 1931, including that for seamstresses in the Nalón valley. Female socialist militancy continued to grow throughout 1932. Politically active women had to struggle against misogyny. Women in Laviana created their own socialist section after complaining that the local socialist group would not let them join.74
Ateneos and bars attracted more heterogeneous crowds than the Casas del Pueblo, although the socialists did not limit themselves solely to the latter – the ‘Red Bar’ in Sama was a meeting place for Communists and the left in general.75 Due to patterns of urban settlement and the organization of mining trade unions, there was no stark separation of individuals of different political affiliation in such spaces of sociability, at the workplace or at the level of the locality. Mining trade union sections were small and organized at the level of the locality. Whereas the CNT metalworkers’ union in La Felguera claimed 3,000 members, the CNT-affiliated SUM in Ciaño-Santa-Ana had only twenty-five.76 In the municipal district of San Martín del Rey Aurelio, there were nineteen SOMA sections for a population of less than 17,000.77 Even as certain localities are associated with the predominance of a particular political culture, such as anarchism in La Felguera and Communism in Turón, pockets of Communism and anarchism coexisted with socialism throughout the valleys. The resultant image of the coalfields is one in which small communities predominated and where ideological rivals coexisted in villages and at the workplace. Such a picture is different to how scholars have sketched the relationship between social groups and political positions in the German-speaking lands and the Low Countries. Through ‘pillarization’ and ‘milieu’ they have argued for the close correlation of politics with the life-world of particular groups: each had its own values, spaces of sociability, institutions and representatives and was segregated from others.78
The effect of the patterns of residence, sociability and political and union affiliation in the coal valleys was that rivals tended to know one another intimately. In the slurs and attacks printed in the provincial press, they revealed a familiarity with the background and trajectories of their neighbours and political rivals.79 Sabino Menéndez, a PCE member, used one such intimate encounter to challenge socialists to an open debate. He alleged that he was ‘calmly’ discussing politics at the annual La Laguna fiesta in Ciaño-Santa Ana when a group of drunken socialists approached him. Menéndez touched one of them on the arm in a sign of friendship, but was brushed off with the comment, ‘do not touch me; you’ll defile me’.80 The details were doubtless exaggerated, but encounters with rivals were nevertheless a quotidian occurrence, as a Communist warned rival anarchists: ‘they forget … that we communists do not live on the moon, that we go to the workshop, mine and factory to work alongside our exploited companions, and it is there that we think of ways of mitigating our state of slavery’.81
Rivalry and conflict did not correlate with separation or estrangement, which is important for comprehending the dynamics of radicalism in the coalfields during the Republic. On the one hand, familiarity with a neighbour’s background could provide fuel for impugning his anticlerical credentials and lead to radicalism, as chapter 3 will examine. On the other, familiarity with a rival who was more than a faceless socialist, anarchist or Communist could lay the foundations for solidarity and collaboration, which would emerge at the level of the workplace in 1933 and 1934. In the coalfields, the face-to-face communities and intersecting networks, combined with certain shared practices and values, explain the bitterness of the disputes, even though engagement could also open the door to mutual understanding. This is suggestive of the ‘volatile intimacy’ Radcliff used to describe the violent encounters between political opponents in Gijón. The blows exchanged suggested the ‘existence of community ties, not their disintegration’.82
Later alliances between union rivals built on not only on the inhabitation of the same social spaces, but also shared values and practices across the left. This left-wing culture provided a common idiom through which different groups communicated and bitterly disagreed with one another. Rivals engaged with one another at the local level in a fractious and unstable form of grassroots ‘democracy’, characterized by a combination of dialogue and confrontation. During strikes, mineworkers from different unions participated in workplace assemblies to debate, and elect representatives to negotiate on their behalf.83 More confrontational were the controversias – a form of verbal sparring in which local union or political figures debated formally and struggled to influence an expectant and critical audience. At times activists disrupted rival union meetings by shouting slogans and demands for a platform for debate in an improvised controversia.84 The ritualized rhetorical boxing of a controversia frequently descended into bitter conflict, as revealed in an observer’s surprise at the good-natured atmosphere during an impromptu debate at a CNT rally in Barros (Langreo), at which all three speakers shook hands: ‘a wonderful example of magnanimity … if only it was always thus!’85
Together the controversias and workplace assemblies provided the structures of a grassroots democratic culture, based not on consensus, but on dialogue and confrontation. Yet there was an interest in engaging with opposing ideas and sufficient openness and respect for two cathedral canons to be invited to the Communist stronghold of Turón to speak at the Ateneo on separate occasions. They both commented on how respectfully they were treated.86 Two years later the most violent episode of anticlerical bloodletting during the revolutionary insurrection occurred in this same valley.87
There were significant frictions between the socialist, anarchist and Communist movements, but the differences between them at the local level could be difficult to identify. Boundaries were often more blurred than neat political labels imply, even if rivalries were very real. A more nebulous reality is unsurprising given that working-class movements across Europe were ‘eclectic’ and ‘autodidactic’ at the grassroots.88 As Jorge Uría acknowledged, it is difficult to disentangle a specific Communist culture from a wider ‘radical culture’ in the coalfields.89 PCE distinctiveness came in part through performing the self-image of the PCE member as a disciplined, austere and self-sacrificing activistas opposed to possessing a thorough knowledge of Communist doctrine, not least because key concepts like ‘soviet’ were not always well understood by the rank and file.90
An interest in the Soviet experiment was far from the exclusive domain of the Communists. In early 1932, Florentino Moral and Antonio Seoane gave a series of talks in the theatres and union centres of the coalfields on their impressions of their two-month visit to Russia (paid for by the International Association of Friends of the Soviet Union). The talks were well attended by interested workers from across the left. The travellers’ political affiliations were important. They had been elected at public assemblies to visit the USSR as objective – even critical – observers and ‘authentic workers’ in order to cut through polarized reports of the realities of the Soviet experiment.91 The SOMA in Laviana ceded space for Moral to speak ‘because he [was] not a Communist activist’.92 Stressing this alleged neutrality was common. Most loquacious was PCE member Olegario Vega: ‘The workers of Ciaño-Santa Ana said that no one could provide an account as impartial as Florentino, as he is an authentic worker, a metalworker and free of all prejudices that produce passion for one side or the other’.93 It is possible that Moral was secretly a Communist, but the emphasis on authenticity and independence is nevertheless revealing of the interplay between the desire for objective knowledge of the USSR and anxieties over Communist proselytizing.
Beyond an interest in the Soviet Union, which ranged from critical and reserved curiosity to whole-hearted enthusiasm, there were shared reference points and practices across the left. At the most fundamental level all three movements promoted class-based solidarity, which was a matter of collective and personal pride. Newspapers published lists of contributors to strike funds and one worker even wrote to El Noroeste to correct the appearance of his name next to a 0.25-peseta donation. He had actually handed over a peseta and the confusion originated in two workers sharing the same name.94 In 1933, a collective barbershop opened in Mieres offering free haircuts to the unemployed while municipal workers in Sama decided to donate a percentage of their wages to those out of work.95 A commitment to anti-militarism meant that anti-war committees included delegates from a variety of groups, as in Mieres, where it represented Radical Socialists, Communists, socialists, cultural institutions, trade unions and local choirs.96 Processions, banners and speeches honouring the working class on 1 May were an established tradition, although unions tended to organize separate celebrations.
One of the cornerstones of Spanish left-wing political culture was a commitment to secular or even anticlerical values. Activists expressed their values in ceremonies marking milestones in their own lives, facilitated by the Republic’s establishment of civil marriage as the default option. There are few details of these rites of passage in the press, but the description of the wedding of Gloria Orviz and José González provides a glimpse of what they could be like. The celebration included an ‘intimate meal’ in the ‘Red Bar’ – the local Communist haunt – attended by 200 guests. Two ‘enormous portraits’ of Lenin and Stalin against a red cloth presided over the meal and the well-wishing speech was followed by a collective intonation of The Internationale accompanied by the gramophone and dancing.97 Such practices served to integrate individuals into particular political communities and cement left-wing identities.
This image of a left-wing working-class community that marched behind banners on 1 May, assiduously attended talks on international politics at the local ateneo and thumbed novels penned by Zola and Dumas does not tell the whole story of the coalfields. Left-wing culture predominated sufficiently for activists to project it onto their understanding of the community, yet hegemony did not signify a monopoly. The political right and Catholicism offered different world-views and visions of the community and both existed in the coalfields, although historians have hitherto neglected their presence. Catholic activists claimed to have obtained 2,000 and 3,300 signatures protesting against the secularizing intentions of the Republic in Ciaño-Santa Ana and Moreda respectively, both of which were areas of important socialist influence.98
To a certain extent, the Catholic community appeared separated from those exhibiting secular or anticlerical values. Catholic organizations and local elites maintained their own networks for charitable work and spaces for sociability, such as associations for the alumni of Catholic schools, or casinos – clubs for the middle and upper classes.99 Overall, however, the working class far outnumbered middle-class residents of the coalfields and the Catholic community was less formally organized than the left. Catholic Youth circles were not created in coalfield towns until the end of 1931.100 Catholicism continued to be woven into the physical fabric of the valleys and the lives of residents via the network of parish churches, shrines and the schools. The latter, owned by mining companies and staffed by religious orders and congregations, namely the Brothers of the Christian Doctrine (de la Salle Brothers) and Dominicans, served over 5,000 children in the 1932–3 school year and inevitably catered for left-wing families.101 Catholic schooling would become an important point of contention in 1932. Moreover, the liturgical calendar still had an imprint on social life in the valleys. Although many Holy Week processions disappeared from public space during the Republic, processions of children making their first communion or celebrating Corpus Christi were annual events – in 1931 300 and 400 children processed in Moreda and Ciaño respectively.102 Catholicism maintained a public presence even in areas with a ‘red’ reputation. Grappling with the right and the Church would prove to be at the heart of radicalization between 1932 and 1934.
Catholicism did not suffuse local society in the coalfields as it did in other parts of Spain where ‘the village and the parish were conterminous’.103 In areas like the Basque town of Villava – a stronghold of the ultra-conservative, Catholic and monarchist Carlist movement – or the Andalusian village of Casas Viejas, where ‘Catholic ritual and canon were interwoven into daily life’, Catholic rituals could mark belonging to and the reproduction of a Catholic notion of community.104 This did not necessarily mean regular attendance at mass, but rituals that marked the life course, like baptisms and funerals, or the practices of popular religiosity, such as leaving votive candles at local shrines.105
Comparing the Asturian coalfields with such areas throws the polarizing division over religion in the latter into sharp relief, which is clearer still when the valleys are contrasted with other mining regions. In Spain – and the coalfields in particular – the secular–religious divide mapped onto the left–right political cleavage in Spain with relative clarity, given Catholicism’s close association with the monarchy and conservatism. In the Ruhr, religion was a divisive and fragmentary factor. Sectarianism was more important than a secular–religious divide. The Catholic–Protestant fracture existed both horizontally within the workforce and vertically, as pit owners were usually Protestant, while the workforce was further fragmented by ethnicity – Polish Catholics had their own ministers. In Wales, in contrast, non-conformism had provided ‘social cement’ in mining villages and ‘cut across … ethnic divisions’. Religious institutions did not attempt to rival the clubs and activities as they did in Ruhr, where society was much more ‘rigidly divided’.106
Whatever their ideological persuasion, individuals in the coalfields mapped their beliefs onto the community. Local identity served as a battleground, for it constituted a common point of reference for different ideologies and groups. The community identity associated with originating or inhabiting a particular locality was particularly sharply drawn on the occasion of the annual feast of the patron saint of the town or village, which combined civic and ‘profane’ acts with masses and processions. Special two-page spreads in local newspapers attempted to capture the essence and character of the pueblo while young males engaged in the traditional forging of masculine bonds and affirmation of community identity by brawling with outsiders who descended on the locality to partake in the festivities.107 The strong sense of a geographically rooted community based on residence was also betrayed by anxieties about vagrants, beggars and the unemployed from ‘outside’, which were expressed from left and right.108 Yet concerns over alleged outsiders did not preclude solidarity. One of the core principles of left-wing organizations was to build solidarity between workers, whether on a local, regional or transnational level. The introduction of tourism societies to the coalfields was a strategy that sought to overcome localist impulses and encourage enlightened attitudes by arranging trips that aimed to forge fraternal bonds between towns.109
As a point of reference, the ‘community’ was also an arbiter that was invoked in the context of local political struggles and strikes. The pueblo had a moral authority that could confer legitimacy on conflicts. In Tudela Veguín, in the midst of the cement factory strike, a meeting was held so that the community could judge the conduct of the strike committee, alleged by the contractors to be ‘revolutionaries, troublemakers who the community [pueblo] hates’.110 Appealing to the community as the ultimate guarantor of moral authority was common during the Republic and occurred not only in the context of strike action, but also when coalfield society grappled with the fallout from the repression of the Asturian October.
The springtime of the people
During the election campaign of spring 1931 it seemed highly unlikely that Spain would wake up as a Republic on 14 April. Yet municipal elections succeeded where a botched military uprising supported by a general strike organized by the Republicans and socialists had failed five months earlier. The election campaign was one of intense activity and became a de facto plebiscite on the monarchy.111 Although the elections returned a majority for monarchist candidates, the widespread vote-rigging, intimidation and manipulation by local bosses in rural areas – a system known as caciquismo – meant that clear victories for the Republican–socialist slate in urban areas signalled a defeat for the monarchy. Within two days, King Alfonso XIII had fled into exile (although he believed it to be temporary) and the Republic was proclaimed. Joyous crowds celebrated the results and new regime in a ‘popular fiesta’ that expressed the ‘redemption and emancipation’ of the people.112 The crowds destroyed monarchist symbols, as in Mieres, where portraits of the king were burnt, and renamed public spaces in honour of Republican heroes, as occurred in Sama.113
In the Asturian coalfields, the Republican–socialist coalition was victorious and appeared to confirm not only left-wing political hegemony, but also the socialist movement as the most influential political force. The socialists (10) were second to the left Republicans (13) in Langreo, but outnumbered their right Republican (3), monarchist (1), and Communist (3) opponents. In Mieres and Laviana, the socialists formed the largest minority on the council and in San Martín del Rey Aurelio they obtained an outright majority with fifteen councillors out of twenty-one seats.114 In Aller and Lena, the results were annulled due to complaints of irregularities and later repeated.115 Yet political control did not mean a political or cultural monopoly and the underlying conflicts and pressure points at the local level along with the re-emergence of the right would be central to the emergence of radicalism in 1932.
Two-and-a-half months after the municipal elections, the wave of enthusiasm for the young Republic translated into an overwhelming victory for the Republican–socialist coalition in elections for the Constituent Cortes. Even though no party gained an overall majority, the PSOE boasted the most seats (116). The Republican deputies belonged to a number of different parties. Described as a party ‘without ideas or ideals’, the Radical Party led by Alejandro Lerroux, who had moderated the populist, firebrand views of his youth, followed the socialists with ninety seats. The Radicals possessed a relatively well-developed apparatus on a national level, although they were weak in Asturias. Towards the end of the year, the Radical Party withdrew from government and moved to oppose the government from the centre-right.116 The left wing of the Radicals had peeled off in 1929 to form the Radical Socialist Party, which was characterized by anticlericalism and left-wing populist Republicanism. The Republican ranks were completed by a number of parties who combined prominent, influential leaders with a small membership, which did not bode well for binding the masses to the new Republic. Prime minister and minister of defence, Manuel Azaña, led the left–Republican party Republican Action, while veteran politicians Niceto Alcalá Zamora and Miguel Maura, who occupied the presidency of the Republic and the ministry of the interior respectively, belonged to the small Liberal Republican Right.117
Given the small apparatus and membership of the Republican parties, the socialist movement would provide the ‘arm and support’ for the Republic.118 Yet the socialist position towards the Republic was complicated. Reformism, moderation and reliance on the levers of state power – whether through arbitration or representation – had always been hallmarks of Spanish socialist politics, but occupying positions of political power proved a divisive issue during the Primo de Rivera dictatorship and the Republic. Indalecio Prieto, a pragmatic, centrist socialist ‘who made no claims to Marxist faith’, was appointed minister for the economy alongside two other socialist ministers: Francisco Largo Caballero, a veteran trade unionist leader and now minister of labour, and Fernando de los Ríos, minister of justice. Julián Besteiro, a professor of logic who held a rigid, scientific view of the road to socialism, opposed their position and strongly rejected socialist participation in Republican governments.119
Even as the socialists co-operated in the construction of the Republic, they were careful to explain that the Republic of 14 April was not their regime. The Republic was a ‘kind of capitalist antechamber to Socialism’.120 Such sentiments were expressed at both the level of national and local politics. In May, Cándido Barbón, a socialist councillor in Mieres, declared socialists to be ‘the best and most enthusiastic defenders of the Spanish Republic’, yet it was ‘still bourgeois and we are socialists’.121 This sentiment was echoed by González Peña two weeks later at the SOMA congress and reflected the wider position of the socialist movement.122 Attempting to resolve this tension as the Republic was built and contested would prove to be an important component in radicalization.
Left-wing opposition to the Republic came from the Communist Party and the anarchist movement. The PCE did not have any representatives in the Constituent Cortes and was guided by the isolationist Comintern policy of the Third Period, which rejected collaboration with other parties. Whereas the dissident communists of the tiny Workers’ and Peasants’ Bloc (BOC) celebrated the arrival of Republican democracy, the PCE rejected the new regime and demanded ‘all power to the Soviets!’123 The anarchists’ position was more complex. They welcomed the fall of the monarchy insofar as the Republic would ensure that, at least in principle, unions and associations could operate freely.124 Their criticism of authority, state power and formal political participation made them no friend of the Republic, although this did not stop anarchists from voting in elections, particularly in 1931 and 1936. The CNT grew to a membership of a million in 1932, even as the movement had become mired in divisions over strategy. These differences culminated at the end of summer 1931 with the signing of the ‘Treintista’ manifesto. The thirty signatories believed in moderation, union discipline and preparation prior to any attempt at revolution. In contrast, a sector of the CNT under the influence of the more radical yet numerically small FAI believed that revolution was nigh. The radical sector prevailed. The Treintistas were expelled over the following months and the CNT embarked on a process of ‘revolutionary gymnastics’ – priming the masses for insurrectionary action. The strategy aimed at revolution through an escalating dynamic of collective action followed by police repression. Between January 1932 and December 1933, the CNT attempted three ill-fated revolutionary movements that tested the Republican authorities.125
The challenge to the Republic did not emanate solely from the left. Most of the political right opposed the Republican project. The Catholic, monarchist right coalesced into two main positions: catastrophism and possibilist ‘accidentalism’. The former included recalcitrant monarchists, who would form Renovación Española in 1933, and the Carlists, an ultra-conservative movement characterized by its opposition to liberalism and industrial modernity through a defence of monarchism, Catholicism and an idealization of a traditional rural socioeconomic order.126 The Carlists would be joined by Spanish fascism, whose most prominent, yet still very small, party – Falange Española (FE) – was not founded until 1933. These groups did not believe in an accommodation with the Republic and preferred to plot its violent downfall. Carlist militias engaged in military training from 1931.127 In contrast, the ‘accidentalist’ position signified participating in the Republic without actively supporting it. Parliamentary seats could be used to undermine the Republic from within. The ‘accidentalist’ position was occupied by the parties that coalesced into the first mass Catholic political party in Spanish history: the Confederation of Autonomous Right-Wing Groups (CEDA). Its origins lay in National Action, an organization created at the end of April 1931 and rebadged as Popular Action (AP) from spring 1932. Under the leadership of José María Gil Robles, a lawyer from Salamanca, AP joined forces with other groups, including the Valencian Regional Right, to form the CEDA in 1933, a loose organization united by the principles of religion, fatherland, order, family, work and property.128
Catholicism provided a powerful unifying and mobilizing tool for the political right. That the new regime would reshape the relationship between the Catholic Church and the state was unavoidable, given the established privileges of the Catholic Church, the latter’s association with the monarchy and the strong current of secularism and anticlericalism that ran through Spanish Republicanism and the left. Unsurprisingly, the Church met the new regime with apprehension.129 The hierarchy showed initial caution, which was not always shared by parish priests, as revealed by the many letters to the press criticizing priests for anti-Republican sermons.130 A significant watershed moment for the ‘religious question’ occurred on 11–13 May, when the playing of the monarchist national anthem in Madrid sparked a riot and a wave of anticlerical incendiarism that affected convents, religious schools and churches, and spread to Andalusia and the Levante.131
The burnings facilitated the reorganization and consolidation of the political right after the proclamation of the Republic thanks to the identified need to defend the Catholic faith, which was galvanized further by the debate over the draft Republican constitution in autumn 1931. The original draft had ‘aroused deep clerical apprehension’, which worsened over the course of the debate.132 The new carta magna separated the Church and state. It removed state funding of the clergy, dissolved the Jesuit order and placed limitations on others; it asserted state-licensing of marriage, and restricted the public display of faith, such as religious processions. Revision of the Constitution deriving from the self-appointed defence of the Church proved to be the ‘rallying cry’ for the right and demonstrations took place across Spain.133 Over the next few months, National Action extended its organization in Asturias and across the country, with newly enfranchised women a particular target for recruitment.134 In Asturias, women’s groups formed in Gijón, Oviedo, Mieres and Avilés in January and February 1932, and female AP activists in Gijón created and ran their own combative newspaper, Acción.135 This combination of right-wing reaction and left-wing anticlericalism was critical to the emergence of radicalism in 1932.
Reform of the relationship between the Church and state was one plank of the policies pursued by the Republican–socialist governments from their offices in the ministries in Madrid. Yet building the new regime was also a local affair. The crowds that celebrated the arrival of the Republic thronged the public galleries at the first municipal council meetings to observe Republican democracy in practice.136 The new municipal councillors saw themselves as representatives of their local communities and as conduits for a new kind of democratic politics removed from the stagnation and corruption of the monarchy. It was the ‘people’ who had brought the Republic and they were invoked as the ‘driving soul’ behind the new regime.137 Celso Fernández, the republican mayor of Langreo, explained to the press that his priority was to do away with ‘old cacique-style techniques’ in contracting workers in favour of ‘strict justice’.138 The municipal council chamber would be the platform for the regeneration of Spain.
In the ‘red’ valleys of the Asturian coalfields, beneath the belching chimneys and smog described by Arlt, mayors and councillors attempted to combine constructing the Republic with negotiating competing pressures from their constituents and the responsibilities of office as workers, political groups and communities agitated and petitioned in favour of their own objectives. The coalfield communities were far from homogenous. A number of factors, including industrial development and company paternalism, had shaped a landscape of largely small communities in which political rivals cohabited and coexisted at the workplace, in the bar and in cultural institutions. The communities were crisscrossed by tensions and pressure points, as well as different axes of identification and potential mobilization. This image of intimate communities, in which individuals engaged in bitter conflict but also occupied common ground and shared a political idiom, provides the foundation for understanding the development of radicalism during the rest of the Republic.
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1 R. Arlt, Aguafuertes (andaluzas, marroquíes, gallegas, asturianas, vascas y madrileñas) (Paracuellos de Jarama, 2015), p. 276.
2 E.g., L. Boswell, Rural Communism in France, 1920–1939 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1998); T. Stovall, The Rise of the Parisian Red Belt (Berkeley, Calif., 1990); D. H. Bell, Sesto San Giovanni: Workers, Culture and Politics in an Italian Town, 1880–1922 (New Brunswick, N.J., 1986); C. Ealham, Class, Culture and Conflict in Barcelona, 1898–1937 (Abingdon, 2005).
‘Rethinking the red valleys’, in M. Kerry, Unite, Proletarian Brothers! Radicalism and Revolution in the Spanish Second Republic, 1931–6 (London, 2020), pp. 19–48. License: CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0.
3 On rivalry, see e.g., D. Ruiz, Insurrección defensiva y revolución obrera: el octubre español de 1934 (Barcelona, 1988).
4 For similar approaches, see e.g., H. Barron, The 1926 Miners’ Lockout: Meanings of Community in the Durham Coalfield (Oxford, 2009); S. Ward, Unemployment and the State in Britain: the Means Test and Protest in 1930s South Wales and North-East England (Manchester, 2013).
5 P. Radcliff, From Mobilization to Civil War: the Politics of Polarization in the Spanish City of Gijón, 1900–1937 (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 19–20, 66.
6 The Nalón valley accounted for 43% of coal production, the Caudal (including Turón) 28% and the Aller 18% in 1931 ( Estadística Minera y Metalúrgica de España [1931] (2 vols, Madrid, 1931), ii. 281).
7 V. Rodríguez Infiesta, ‘Asturias en los siglos xx y xxi’, in Historia de Asturias, ed. A. Fernández Pérez and F. Friera Suárez (Oviedo, 2005), p. 702; A. Shubert, A Social History of Modern Spain (London, 1990), p. 24.
8 G. Ojeda, Asturias en la industrialización española, 1833–1907 (Madrid, 1985), pp. 335, 355, 363.
9 The Ruhr coal basin yielded 123 million tons in 1929 before the onset of the Great Depression (J. Gillingham, Industry and Politics in the Third Reich: Ruhr Coal, Hitler and Europe (London, 1985), p. 58). The ‘precarious’ south Welsh coal industry produced 36 million tons in 1898 (C. Williams, Capitalism, Community, and Conflict: the South Wales Coalfield, 1898–1947 (Cardiff, 1998), ch. 2, at p. 26).
10 G. Tortella, The Development of Modern Spain: an Economic History of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Cambridge, Mass., 2000), pp. 86–9. See also J. P. Fusi, Política obrera en el País Vasco, 1880–1923 (Madrid, 1975), p. 19.
11 A. Shubert, The Road to Revolution in Spain: the Coal Miners of Asturias, 1860–1934 (Urbana, Ill., 1987), pp. 27–30.
12 Shubert, Road, pp. 29, 38–40.
13 Estadística Minera y Metalúrgica de España [1931], ii. 306–7.
14 Estadística Minera y Metalúrgica de España [1934], 477.
15 Estadística Minera y Metalúrgica de España [1931], i. 94.
16 Ministerio del Trabajo, Censo de la población de España [1930] … regiones de Asturias y León. Cuadernos III y X (Madrid, 1942), pp. 40–1, 44–5; Shubert, Social History, p. 38.
17 For lodging houses, see e.g., cases in Archivo Histórico Provincial de Asturias (AHPA), Audiencia Provincial (AP), box 78436. A woman in a police investigation defined as a homemaker actually ran a bar, see AHPA, AP, box 79435, file 251 (1934). For coal picking, see Región, 28 Oct. 1931. For lodging houses in Bilbao, see P. Pérez-Fuentes Hernández, “Ganadores de pan” y “amas de casa”: otras miradas sobre la industrialización vasca (Bilbao, 2003), pp. 46–8.
18 J. M. Jove y Canella, Topografía médica del concejo de San Martín del Rey Aurelio (Madrid, 1923), pp. 64, 84–5.
19 Arlt, Aguafuertes, pp. 278–84.
20 S. Nevares, El patrono ejemplar: una obra maestra de Acción Social (Madrid, 1936), pp. 16–17.
21 Shubert, Road, pp. 47, 58–9. It was also present in Britain ‘well into the twentieth century’ (R. Church and Q. Outram, Strikes and Solidarity: Coalfield Conflict in Britain, 1889–1966 (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 27–9).
22 La Libertad, 7 Aug. 1930; Avance, 14 Apr. 1932; AHPA, AP, box 97435, file 280 (1934); Mundo Gráfico, 1 Sept. 1937. See also R. García Montes’ recollections of his father in Ángeles rojos sin alas para volar (Siero, 2009), pp. 19–20.
23 Shubert, Road, p. 42; Jove y Canella, Topografía médica del concejo de San Martín del Rey Aurelio, p. 142.
24 J. M. Jove y Canella, Topografía médica del concejo de Laviana (Madrid, 1927) p. 63; AHPA, AP, box 78437, file 335 (1934) and box 79435, file 319 (1934). For a description of an esfoyaza, see Jove y Canella, Topografía médica del concejo de San Martín del Rey Aurelio, p. 65.
25 L. Boswell, ‘Rural society in crisis’, in The Oxford Handbook of European history, 1914– 1945, ed. N. Doumanis (Oxford, 2016), p. 245.
26 As noted early on by E. Malefakis in Agrarian Reform and Peasant Revolution in Spain: Origins of the Spanish Civil War (New Haven, Conn., 1970), pp. 35–6, and frequently emphasized since.
27 F. Cobo Romero, De campesinos a electores: modernización agraria en Andalucía, politización campesina y derechización de los pequeños propietarios y arrendatarios: el caso de la provincia de Jaén, 1931–1936 (Madrid, 2003), p. 133.
28 This summary is based on J. Simpson, Spanish Agriculture: the Long Siesta, 1765–1965 (Cambridge, 1995), ch. 2. For more detail on Ourense, see J. Prada Rodríguez, De la agitación republicana a la represión franquista (Ourense 1934–1939) (Barcelona, 2006), pp. 12–13.
29 Simpson, Spanish Agriculture, chs 5 and 7.
30 F. Sánchez Marroyo, La España del siglo XX: economía, demografía y sociedad (Madrid, 2003), p. 41. For the shift from cereals to wine in La Mancha, see F. Rey, Paisanos en lucha: exclusión política y violencia en la Segunda República española (Madrid, 2008), p. 31 and for the preference for almonds in Andalusia, see Cobo Romero, De campesinos, pp. 89–90. See also Shubert, Social History, p. 13. On Asturias, see J. Uría, ‘Asturias, 1898–1914: el fin de un campesinado amable’, Hispania, lxii (2002), 1059–98.
31 See Tortella, Development; Sánchez Marroyo, España, p. 26.
32 Shubert, Social History, p. 23.
33 Ealham, Class, p. 4.
34 ‘Alteraciones de los municipios en los censos de población desde 1842’ <http://www.ine.es/intercensal/> [accessed 5 May 2017].
35 For a contemporary description of Aller, see Nevares, El patrono, pp. 42–4. For a recent analysis, see J. Muñiz Sánchez, Del pozo a casa: genealogías del paternalismo minero contemporáneo en Asturias (Gijón, 2007). On housing, see e.g., J. Sierra Álvarez, ‘Política de vivienda y políticas industriales paternalistas’, Ería, viii (1985), 61–71. On education, see e.g., M. V. Álvarez Fernández, La escuela del paternalismo industrial asturiano (1880–1937) (Gijón, 2006).
36 Región, 24 June 1931.
37 See Shubert, Road, ch. 4.
38 J. Sierra Álvarez, El obrero soñado: ensayo sobre el paternalismo industrial (Asturias, 1860– 1917) (Madrid, 1990).
39 Muñiz Sánchez, Del pozo, pp. 181, 190.
40 L. James, The Politics of Identity and Civil Society in Britain and Germany: the Miners in the Ruhr and South Wales, 1890–1926 (Manchester, 2008), p. 31; Ward, Unemployment, p. 9.
41 Jove y Canella, Topografía médica del concejo de San Martín del Rey Aurelio, pp. 49, 50–1, 99.
42 Shubert, Road, p. 66.
43 Cobo Romero, De campesinos, p. 129.
44 Shubert, Road, pp. 66–7.
45 L. Arias González and M. J. Álvarez García, Los palacios obreros: Casas del Pueblo socialistas en Asturias, 1902–1937 (Oviedo, 2010), pp. 83–111, 187, 190–3, 196; L. Arias González and F. de Luis Martín, ‘Las Casas del Pueblo y sus implicaciones geograficas’, Biblio 3W: Revista bibliográfica de geografía y ciencias sociales, xv (2010), available at <http://www.ub.edu/geocrit/b3w-884.htm> [accessed 12 Sept. 2018]. For a contemporary overview, see Boletín de la Unión General de Trabajadores de España, liii, May 1933.
46 M. Kohn, Radical Space: Building the House of the People (Ithaca, N.Y., 2003), pp. 95ff.
47 Gruber is nevertheless skeptical as to the achievements of these organizations, see H. Gruber, Red Vienna: Experiment in Working Class Culture, 1919–1934 (New York, 1991), ch. 4.
48 Shubert, Road, p. 108.
49 J. Muñiz Sánchez, ‘Encontrando el Norte: Manuel Llaneza y la influencia francesa en el sindicalismo español de principios del siglo XX’, Hispania: Revista española de historia, lxix (2009), 793–820. For the early history of the SOMA, see also E. Moradiellos, El Sindicato de los Obreros Mineros de Asturias, 1910–1930 (Oviedo, 1986).
50 Shubert, Road, p. 112.
51 A. R. Felgueroso Durán and A. Fernández García, ‘La gestión de los socialistas en el Ayuntamiento de Langreo entre 1909 y 1936’, in Historia del socialismo en Langreo 1897–1997, ed. A. Fernández García and J. Girón (Gijón, 1997), pp. 153–4.
52 Shubert, Road, p. 133.
53 J. L. Martín Ramos, Historia de la UGT, ii: Entre la revolución y el reformismo, 1914–1931 (6 vols, Madrid, 2008), p. 157.
54 Shubert, Road, ch. 6.
55 Shubert, Road, pp. 135, 142.
56 M. Bizcarrondo, Historia de la UGT, iii. Entre la democracia y la revolución, 1931–1936 (6 vols, Madrid, 2008), p. 18.
57 J. Casanova, Anarchism, the Republic and Civil War in Spain (1931–1939) (Abingdon, 2004), p. 51.
58 For anarchism in Asturias, see Á. Barrio Alonso, Anarquismo y anarcosindicalismo en Asturias (1890–1936) (Madrid, 1988).
59 For the SUM, see C. Álvarez, El Sindicato Único de Mineros de Asturias (Oviedo, 2004).
60 See F. Erice, ‘El PCE en Asturias, de los orígenes a la guerra civil’, in Los comunistas en Asturias (1920–1982), ed. F. Erice (Gijón, 1996), pp. 41–84.
61 A. Shubert, ‘Entre Arboleya y Comillas: el fracaso del sindicalismo católico en Asturias’, in Octubre 1934: cincuenta años para la reflexión, ed. G. Jackson et al. (Madrid, 1985), pp. 243–52. See also D. Benavides, El fracaso social del catolicismo español: Arboleya Martínez, 1870 – 1951 (Barcelona, 1973).
62 El Noroeste, 19 Oct. 1932.
63 Á. Mato Díaz, La Atenas del norte: ateneos, sociedades culturales y bibliotecas populares en Asturias (1876–1937) (Oviedo, 2008), p. 96; El Noroeste, 20 Jan. 1932. For lectures on women’s issues, see e.g., El Noroeste, 27 Aug. 1931, 18, 26 Feb. 1932.
64 For a Communist cuadro, see e.g., El Noroeste, 10 June 1932.
65 El Noroeste, 5 May 1931. For a similar focus in the Austrian socialist movement, see Gruber, Red Vienna, p. 87.
66 For the installation of radios in ateneos in Trubia and Mieres, see El Noroeste, 9 Sept. 1931 and Región, 4 May 1932.
67 See Uría, ‘Traditional popular culture and industrial work discipline’, in A Social History of Spanish Labour: New Perspectives on Class, Politics and Gender, ed. J. A. Piqueras and V. Sanz Rozalén (New York, 2007), pp. 166–7.
68 Gruber, Red Vienna, p. 95; Uría, ‘Cultura’, p. 156.
69 See the encyclopaedic Mato Díaz, La Atenas.
70 For football, see Ruiz, Octubre, pp. 222–5. For prostitution and male sociability, see J-L. Guereña, ‘El burdel como espacio de sociabilidad’, Hispania, lxiii (2003), 551–69. Anecdotally, see criticism of the distractions of football and sex from Vegadotos (Mieres) in La Aurora Social, 24 May 1929.
71 Jove y Canella, Topografía médica del concejo de San Martín del Rey Aurelio, p. 59; Uría, ‘Asturias 1920–1937’, p. 272 and his ‘La taberna en Asturias a principios del siglo XX: notas para su estudio’, Historia contemporánea, v (1991), pp. 64–7. For southern Spain, see J. Sierra Álvarez, ‘“Rough characters”: miners, alcohol and violence in Linares at the end of the nineteenth century’, in Piqueras and Sanz Rozalén, Social History, pp. 176–96.
72 As in Gijón, see Radcliff, Mobilization, p. 98.
73 Women also petitioned for improved washing facilities (El Noroeste, 27 March, 6 Apr. 1932).
74 M. A. Mateos, ¡Salud, compañeras! Mujeres socialistas en Asturias (1900–1937) (Oviedo, 2007), pp. 108–10, 129–30; Avance, 8 May, 15 June 1932.
75 Erice, ‘El PCE’, p. 77.
76 M. Villar, El anarquismo en la insurrección de Asturias: la CNT y la FAI en octubre de 1934 (Madrid, 1994 [1935]), p. 68; El Noroeste, 2 March 1932.
77 La Aurora Social, 16 Oct. 1931.
78 The idea of pillarization has been the subject of some debate. For a critique, see J. C. H. Blom, ‘Pillarisation in perspective’, West European Politics, xxiii (2000), pp. 153–164. For a comparative discussion of milieux in the Ruhr and South Wales, see James, Politics, pp. 4–6.
79 E.g. criticism of Benjamín Escobar, Avance, 25 June 1932.
80 El Noroeste, 15 July 1932.
81 El Noroeste, 21 Aug. 1932.
82 Radcliff, Mobilization, p. 98.
83 E.g. at Carbones La Nueva in 1933 the SOMA was chosen to represent the whole workforce, as it it represented 90% of mineworkers (Avance, 17 Aug. 1933).
84 E.g. Communist disruption of a socialist meeting in Blimea (El Noroeste, 12 May 1932).
85 El Noroeste, 14 May 1932.
86 Región, 2, 30 Apr. 1932.
87 For Arboleya’s later reflections, see D. Benavides, ‘Arboleya y su interpretación de la Revolución de Octubre’, in Jackson, Octubre, pp. 259–60.
88 G. Eley, Forging Democracy: the History of the Left in Europe, 1850–2000 (Oxford, 2002), p. 46.
89 See Uría, ‘Asturias 1920–1937’, pp. 250–9.
90 For Communist culture, see R. Cruz, El Partido Comunista de España en la Segunda República (Madrid, 1987), pp. 77–9, 86.
91 El Noroeste, 6, 10 Jan. 1932. Moral was even interviewed in Región, 16 Feb. 1932.
92 El Noroeste, 12 March 1932. See also in Turón, El Noroeste, 6 Apr. 1932.
93 El Noroeste, 17 Feb. 1932.
94 El Noroeste, 23 Apr. 1932.
95 Avance, 1 Feb., 22, 28 June 1933.
96 Avance, 18 Oct. 1933.
97 El Noroeste, 29 June 1932. For ‘red baptisms’ and ‘red confirmations’, see Cruz, El Partido, p. 88.
98 Región, 14 June, 6 July 1931.
99 The situation is complicated as some working class institutions also employed casino as a descriptor, like the Casino Obrero in Trubia.
100 For the Catholic Youth, see Región, 24 Nov., 11 Dec. 1931.
101 Á. Mato Díaz, La escuela primaria en Asturias (1923 – 1937): los procesos de alfabetización y escolarización (Oviedo, 1992), p. 205.
102 Región, 3 June 1931.
103 F. Lannon, Privilege, Persecution and Prophecy: the Catholic Church in Spain, 1875–1975 (Oxford, 1987), p. 20. See also M. Vincent, Catholicism in the Second Spanish Republic: Religion and Politics in Salamanca, 1930–1936 (Oxford, 1996).
104 J. Mintz, The Anarchists of Casas Viejas (Bloomington, Ind., 1994 [1982]), p. 67; J. Balduz, Segunda República y Guerra Civil en Villava (1931–1939) (Villava, 2006).
105 See Lannon, Privilege, p. 24. For popular religiosity and community in a later period, see W. A. Christian, Person and God in a Spanish Valley (New York, 1972).
106 James, Politics, pp. 34–7. See also S. H. F. Hickey, Workers in Imperial Germany: the Miners of the Ruhr (Oxford, 1985), ch. 3. For a comparative overview, see S. Berger, ‘Difficult (re-)alignments – comparative perspectives on social democracy and religion from late-nineteenth-century to interwar Germany and Britain’, Journal of Contemporary History, liii (2018), 574–96.
107 E.g. Avance, 23 July 1932. For fights between youths in the south of Spain, see J. Pitt-Rivers, The People of the Sierra (London, 1954), p. 11.
108 E.g. Región, 29 May 1931; El Noroeste, 9 March, 1 Apr. 1932. For similar anxieties in southern Spain in the 1950s, see Pitt-Rivers, People, p. 27.
109 E.g. El Noroeste, 9, 25 July, 16 Sept. 1931. A Feminist Trip Society in Trubia organized a 400km tour of Asturias for 50 young women employed in domestic service (Región, 16 July 1931).
110 El Noroeste, 13 Oct. 1931.
111 R. Cruz, Una revolución elegante: España 1931 (Madrid, 2014), pp. 63–6; S. Ben-Ami, The Origins of the Second Republic in Spain (Oxford, 1978), pp. 213–38.
112 For the ‘popular fiesta’, see S. Juliá, Madrid, 1931–1934: de la fiesta popular a la lucha de clases (Madrid, 1984), pp. 7–21. For ‘redemption and emancipation’, see Cruz, Una revolución, pp. 74–101.
113 El Noroeste, 15 Apr. 1931; Región, 15 Apr. 1931. For similar scenes in Madrid, see ABC, 16 Apr. 1931.
114 For the results, see J. Girón, ‘Elecciones y partidos políticos en Asturias, 1890–1936’, cited in D. Ruiz et al., Asturias contemporánea, 1808–1975: Síntesis histórica. Textos y documentos (Madrid, 1981), p. 118; La Voz de Asturias, 14 Apr. 1931.
115 See La Voz de Asturias, 14 Apr., 2 June 1931. For the rerunning of elections, see Ben-Ami, Origins, pp. 270–4.
116 P. Preston, The Coming of the Spanish Civil War: Reform, Reaction and Revolution in the Second Republic (London, 1978), p. 98. For the Radical Party, see N. Townson, The Crisis of Democracy in Spain: Centrist Politics under the Spanish Second Republic (Brighton, 2000).
117 For the Republican parties, see J. Avilés Farré, La izquierda burguesa y la tragedia de la Segunda República (Madrid, 2006).
118 L. Araquistaín, El ocaso de un régimen (Madrid, 1930), quoted in Bizcarrondo, Historia, p. 2.
119 P. Heywood, Marxism and the Failure of Organised Socialism in Spain, 1879–1936 (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 112–9, the quotation at p. 112.
120 Heywood, Marxism, p. 116.
121 La Aurora Social, 15 May 1931.
122 La Aurora Social, 29 May 1931. See also S. Juliá, ‘“Preparados para cuando la ocasión se presente”: los socialistas y la revolución’, in Violencia política en la España del siglo XX, ed. S. Juliá (Madrid, 2000), p. 166.
123 For a summary, see H. García, ‘De los soviets a las Cortes: los comunistas ante la República’, in Palabras como puños: la intransigencia política en la Segunda República, ed. F. del Rey (Madrid, 2011), p. 112.
124 Ealham, Class, p. 76; Casanova, Anarchism, pp. 3–4.
125 Contrasting interpretations in Casanova, Anarchism, pp. 53–83 and Ealham, Class, pp. 108–31.
126 See M. Blinkhorn, Carlism and Crisis in Spain 1931–1939 (Cambridge, 1975); J. Canal, El carlismo: dos siglos de contrarrevolución en España (Madrid, 2000).
127 Blinkhorn, Carlism, p. 63.
128 For the CEDA, see J. R. Montero, La CEDA: el catolicismo social y político en la II República (2 vols, Madrid, 1977).
129 W. J. Callahan, The Catholic Church in Spain, 1875–1998 (Washington, D.C., 2000), pp. 276ff. See also Lannon, Privilege, pp. 179–80.
130 E.g. El Noroeste, 23 May 1931.
131 For a summary of incidents, see A. L. López Villaverde, El gorro frigio y la mitra frente a frente: construcción y diversidad territorial del conflicto político-religioso en la España republicana (n.p., 2008), pp. 195–203.
132 Callahan, Catholic Church, pp. 286–92, the quotation at 287; for Asturian National Action’s response, see Región, 8 Oct. 1931.
133 Preston, Coming of the Spanish Civil War, p. 35. For rallies in Salamanca, see Vincent, Catholicism, pp. 180–3.
134 For the decision to expand in Asturias, see Región, 10 Jan. 1932. For Galicia, see E. Grandío Seoane, Los orígenes de la derecha gallega: la CEDA en Galicia (1931–1936) (Sada, 1998), pp. 102–6 and for Salamanca, see M. Vincent, ‘The politicization of Catholic women in Salamanca, 1931–1936’, in Elites and Power in Twentieth Century Spain: Essays in Honour of Sir Raymond Carr, ed. F. Lannon and P. Preston (Oxford, 1990), pp. 115–26. See also I. Blasco Herranz, ‘“Tenemos las armas de nuestra fe y de nuestro amor y patriotismo; pero nos falta algo”: la Acción Católica de la Mujer y la participación política en la España del primer tercio del siglo XX’, Historia social, xlviii (2002), pp. 15–19.
135 Acción, 27 Feb. 1932.
136 E.g. in Mieres, Región, 25 Apr. 1931.
137 J. M. Macarro Vera, Socialismo, República y revolución en Andalucía (1931–1936) (Seville, 2000), p. 21. See also Juliá, Madrid, p. 7.
138 El Noroeste, 23 Apr. 1931.