Renegades: Canadians in the Spanish Civil War is an essential read for anyone interested in why hundreds of  Canadians would volunteer to fight in a distant foreign war and why Canada passed (largely ineffective) legislation to prevent them from going.

Michael Petrou’s book, published in 2008, was the first academic approach to this little-known piece of 1930s Canadian history. Until then, the few published accounts had been written by the participants themselves or, in one case, a professor of English, who depended on their accounts.

I came to this book because my father, Jim Higgins, was in the Spanish Civil War. Growing up in Peterborough Ontario, I saw him honouring veterans of the First and Second World Wars at the Peterborough War Memorial on Remembrance Day, but it never occurred to me to question why he wasn’t marching along with the other veterans, despite being vaguely aware that he’d fought in a war in Spain.

Petrou’s book tells us why. It has to do with right vs left, capitalism vs socialism/communism, a conflict that has been brought into sharp focus as I write this in August 2020, and one that was also alarmingly clear to those who volunteered to fight fascism in Spain in the late 1930s.

They knew that Hitler and Mussolini were supporting Spain’s military coup, which ended up being led by General Francisco Franco. The western democracies refused to aid Spain’s left-leaning Republican government. Someone had to do it.

Petrou provides new information because he had access to files on each volunteer in Russian archives which wasn’t available to scholars until the mid-2000s. Why Russian? Volunteers, for the International Brigades were only able to get to Spain to help her fledgling government defend itself against the coup because the Comintern—Communist International—organized it. It’s those Comintern archives that are held in Russia.

Petrou determined that close to 1700 Canadians volunteered between 1936 and 1939. Over 400 were killed. There have been wide-ranging estimates over the decades but these numbers are the most accurate. He provides a wealth of detail about the volunteers—background, motivation, ethnic origin, politics etc. He also writes about three of them, giving the reader a sense of their varying stories.

The men (and three women) had read Marx, understood capitalism and the worker’s role in it, and were self-identified anti-fascists. Some were members of the Communist Party of Canada. They also knew what was going on in the world. The newspaper my father read was the Saskatoon Star Phoenix. I read a couple of years’ worth of that paper on microfiche when I was preparing his book for publication: Saskatoon’s citizens were extremely well informed.

You didn’t have to be a member of the Communist Party of Canada to become a volunteer but you did have to have the proper credentials. In my father’s case he was a union organizer and activist in the Relief Camps, a pretty common denominator amongst those accepted and who became members of Canada’s Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion, fighting on the side of the Republican government.

Petrou’s book was particularly helpful to me with his explanation of the Communist Party’s Popular Front strategy in 1930s Canada. It was designed to appeal to everyone on the left, not just party members, and various front organizations abounded.

Though they were soon acknowledged to be fighting for the right side, it mattered not—the Mac-Paps, as the Canadians were known, had flouted Canada’s hastily enacted Foreign Enlistment Act designed to keep them out of Spain. At that point, Canada’s Prime Minister Mackenzie King, amongst other Western leaders, was quite enamoured of Hitler and his accomplishments.

When the volunteers returned to Canada in 1939, Petrou tells us most were tracked by the RCMP and forced to keep their heads low during the McCarthy years. I knew my father had biked from the west coast of the United States to New York and that he spent several months there.

Now I know from his RCMP file—and his book, Fighting for Democracy: The True Story of Jim Higgins (1907-1982), A Canadian Activist in Spain’s Civil War (Sept 2020)—that it was to escape heat from the RCMP.

The RCMP and the government may have seen them as renegades as Petrou’s title suggests, but the common people of Canada hailed them as heroes: witness the cheering crowd of ten thousand that welcomed them at Union Station in February 1939.

Jim Higgins was with the Mac-Paps when Torontonians came out in force, but his spirits sagged as he continued home to Saskatoon and had misgivings about handling the job he’d taken on to organize aid to prairie veterans through citizen donations.

His apprehension was set aside when a crowd of one hundred welcomed him and one of his comrades at the Saskatoon train station, augmented by a few hundred more at an event in their honour that night.

Perhaps the Canadian volunteers in Spain’s Civil War were not so much “renegades,” or even heroes, as they were “brave and good.” Not surprisingly, and gratifying to me, this was the conclusion reached by Petrou at the end of his book.

Not nearly as catchy as a title, though.

Book review by Janette Higgins, August 2020

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Fighting for Democracy by Jim Higgins is the latest book about the Mac-Paps, Canadians in the Mackenzie Papineau Battalion, which was part of the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War. It can be ordered here.

Other books about Canadians in the Spanish Civil War include Not For King or Country by Tyler Wentzell , Mac-Pap by Ronald Liversedge with David Yorke and Renegades by Michael Petrou, reviewed here.