Hugo Oehler collection

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In the 1930s, activists worldwide flocked to Spain to participate in the Spanish Civil War. Many Americans, such as George Orwell and Ernest Hemingway, were drawn to the complex and dramatic crisis and fought for a myriad of causes. Hugo Oehler, an American Communist, was among the many who traveled to Spain to help define and shape the conflict. The Hugo Oehler collection, a gem among the Special Collections at Brandeis University, contains 1 linear foot of Oehler’s documents, including letters, reports, publications, and personal notes. Through this collection, the researcher experiences first-hand the ideas, arguments, and sharp opinions that shaped the pivotal Spanish crisis. The materials in the collection help illuminate one of the many camps in the Spanish Civil War, but also reveal important characteristics of the American Communist movement in the 1930s.

The Spanish Civil War is a complex crisis that involves a complicated web of acronyms; from the POUM to the CNT, FAI, CEDA, and JCI, the conflict is often difficult to understand, label, and define. When Hugo Oehler, an American Communist with success in organizing trade unions in the South and in Colorado, traveled to Spain in 1937, he hoped to steer the convoluted crisis toward his ultimate vision: an international proletarian revolution and the advent of worldwide Communism. Oehler hoped to encourage local radical groups and diagnose the problems of the fractured Spanish Left. In May of 1937, Oehler observed the armed conflict between radical left-wing groups and the Barcelona police. His pamphlet Barricades in Barcelona (which is also available in Special Collections), along with countless letters, reports, and articles, centers around this event, celebrating the passion of the Spanish Left, but urging them to form a unified Marxist party. The collection follows Oehler’s attempts to communicate the developments in Spain to his American comrades, along with the efforts of a group of Americans to define, shape, and direct a crucial moment in Spanish history.

Before diving into the specifics of the progress of the leftist camps in the Spanish Civil War, many documents relay the general upheaval and dire domestic situation in Spain. Oehler’s correspondence with Rosalio Negrete (many sources show that this was probably a pseudonym for fellow RWL member Russell Blackwell) is filled with expressions of frustration that reveal the disorder in Spain. Negrete and Oehler discuss complications with mail, censorship, and border control. In one letter, dated Jan 16, 1937, Negrete writes that Oehler’s letter faced a “delay due to censorship,” and later expresses: “it has been impossible as yet to organize a satisfactory system for mail.” He later warns Oehler of possible complications in entering the country, writing, “You cannot get in here without some political or trade union organization OKing you.” Oehler’s correspondence reveals a war-torn, distressed country. This depiction sets the stage for Oehler’s political involvement that emerges in other documents in the collection.

Many documents in the collection help to illuminate one specific wing in the complicated Spanish Civil War. Oehler and his fellow American Communists focus their observations on the left wing and their efforts to defeat both the Fascist and Republican forces. Many periodicals in the collection relay, first-hand, the ideas and policies of left-wing Spanish groups. For example, the collection contains two major publications of the Worker Party of Marxist Unification (POUM): one in English, The Spanish Revolution, and the other in Spanish, Boletín Interior. The Spanish Revolution brought POUM news to English speakers, describing POUM policies, analyzing the tactics of the Fascists, and weighing international support. Similarly, the Boletín Interior circulated party news and ideas to Spanish-speaking followers.

Although the periodicals in the collection directly relay the voices of the Spanish Left, much of the collection focuses less on Spanish visions of the future and more on an American vision of an international revolution. Oehler observes the developments in Spain through the specific lens of an American Communist. Many of his reports discuss radical developments across the globe and assess the vitality of the international workers’ movement. In countless reports, Oehler’s solution to a fractured Spanish left is a unified Marxist front that will bring about the advent of international Communism. Fourteen folders of Oehler’s recorded observations, sent as reports to his fellow Party members, relay this vision and color the American Communist ideology. While the collection reveals much about the left wing in the Spanish Civil War, it reveals even more about the American Communist movement in the 1930s.

This collection sheds light on a fascinating element of the Spanish Civil War. From descriptions of national instability to reports on armed insurrections and organizations’ treatises, the Hugo Oehler collection illuminates the details of the left wing during the war. The documents also trace Oehler’s efforts to define and shape the vast and complicated crisis. The collection is a valuable find for researchers interested in the details of the Spanish Civil War or in the story of the international efforts of American Communists.

description by Katie Doody, undergraduate history intern in Archives & Special Collections

“The Three Ages of the Colonies” from the Book Collection of Charles J. Tanenbaum

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The Robert D. Farber University Archives & Special Collections Department at Brandeis is pleased to have received a donation of rare books from the collection of Charles J. Tanenbaum, noted bibliophile and father of Ann Tanenbaum, Brandeis class of 1966. The collection comprises some thirty rare texts spanning four centuries, including a 1652 work of cosmography, a 1742 book of law for “the inhabitants of the province of Massachusetts-Bay,” a 1785 edition and atlas of Captain Cook’s A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean, and much more, from geography and exploration to religion and politics, from Machiavelli to Daniel Defoe.

The collection is rich in works from the eighteenth century. Several of these works, as one would expect from the time period, relate to European colonization in the 1700s, mostly British but also French. One such work in the collection is Dufour de Pradt’s three-volume 1801 work Les trois ages des colonies, ou de leur état passé, présent, et à venir, which addresses the crisis of the French colonial empire that accompanied the Napoleonic wars.

At the intersection of religion and politics, and sharing with Machiavelli a strong commitment to statecraft and to his own advancement, the Abbé Dominique-Georges-Frédéric Dufour de Pradt had a political and ecclesiastical career that spanned the French revolutionary period. His work was published in the year in which French forces were defeated and driven from the colony of Saint-Domingue (modern-day Haiti) by the world’s first and only successful slave revolution. While French forces returned to the colony within the year, capturing the rebel leader Toussaint Louverture, attempts by the reconstituted French colonial authorities to reinstate slavery were met with a second, final armed rebellion led by Jean-Jacques Dessalines. The last French troops were to leave Saint-Domingue in 1803, the same year that a militarily overstretched France was to sell its north American holdings (Louisiana, or New France) to the United States.

Dufour de Pradt’s first volume begins by calling attention to the impending collapse of Europe’s colonial empires. “While Europe, absorbed by the duration, the importance and the singularity of the scenes that are going on within her, concentrates all of her attention on herself, the principal source of her riches is going to dry up, and her colonies are on the brink of escaping her” (i). His introduction acknowledges the profound impact of the French revolution on the colonies not only of France, but also of Britain, the Netherlands, Spain, and Denmark. His work takes the form of a history of the “three ages” of European colonization, beginning in the fifteenth century. “Three hundred years have sufficed to bring about this surprising metamorphosis, and these three hundred years have done more for the well-being of the world than the six-seven centuries that preceded them. The end of the fifteenth [century] saw the aurora of that revolution: it died at dusk of a new day that would shine in the universe” (21). Dufour de Pradt goes on to honor Vasco da Gama and Columbus, whose opposite routes each brought them to one of the two Indies and thus set in motion the process of colonization.

Dufour de Pradt relates European colonization to contemporary developments in science, social science, and technology, part of “a new intellectual universe” that opened for the human race beginning in the late fifteenth century. He recognizes the importance of exploration and colonization in the development of that new knowledge, as “astronomy, physics, navigation, art, botany, knowledge of [man’s] own species, all accrued and were corrected along with it.”(22) In successive chapters, Dufour de Pradt tells the triumphal story of this revolution in human affairs. His second chapter describes how Portugal, “unknown in Europe, became all of a sudden a colossus in Asia.”(27) His first volume covers the economic, political, and military aspects of colonization, and successive chapters address the Dutch, British, French, and Spanish empires. The first volume concludes with a chapter addressing the total material benefits accrued by the various colonizing powers, a fitting capstone to a narrative that presents colonization primarily as a pan-European modernizing and money-making enterprise.

The second volume of Dufour de Pradt’s book addresses the current state of the colonial empires in 1801. He begins by addressing issues pertaining to the colonies in general, then looks more closely at the case of each of several colonies in particular. In general, he says,

the colonies are children that have left, or been taken from, the paternal home, for a thousand different reasons. Here, it is the anger of the father that isolates them, and that forces them to search elsewhere for asylum. There, it is the family that is too numerous that separates itself in order to find relief, and that will search outside of its foyers for the sustenance that it has deprived the paternal home of. Elsewhere, it is the sadness of war, of civil dissensions, the vengeance of one part of the citizenry against the other, the ambition to aggrandize or enrich themselves, that has given birth to colonies (v. 2, 7).

For all of these reasons, Dufour de Pradt argues, Europeans have been compelled to take on colonies since ancient times. Yet he carefully distinguishes between colonization in the ancient world and in the modern one. The ancients “surpassed the moderns in truly colonial ideas,” due to the generosity of their outlook and treatment of those they colonized. In essence, the ancients allowed their colonies to be or to become free and independent and did not allow one organization (such as the various East India companies) to monopolize their trade (v. 2, 13). Here begins a surprising shift in emphasis, from the positive economic and political effects of colonization to the exigencies of colonial reform in the face of decline.

Dufour de Pradt seeks to lay out the reasons for the current state of affairs, in order to suggest the outlines of a more productive future colonial regime. He roundly criticizes the existence of trade monopolies (compagnies exclusifs) and advocates as an alternative “freedom of commerce.” He then shifts to the topic of slavery. Although he mentions the “manifest inferiority” of the education of black slaves and the source of the need for a slave trade in the depopulation of the Indians, he approaches the question of what to do about the slave trade as a matter of the fate of the colonial empires rather than as a moral question. “In abandoning all of the metaphysics of the legitimacy of slavery, we confine ourselves to saying that there was nothing in between the trade and the abandonment of the colonies; that it is necessary to choose between them” (v. 2, 60). To free the slaves would be to render the colonies useless for economic purposes, and those who advocate their liberty must be aware that they also are advocating the end of the colonies. He follows this observation with a long and fascinating discussion of his nuanced and original views on the state of the slaves and of the Europeans in the colonies. What emerges from this second volume is an argument in favor of the independence of the colonies, based both on the example of the ancients and on the exigencies of the present situation.

The third volume of the work addresses the “necessity of a change in the colonies” directly. Dufour de Pradt lays out a more hopeful vision of the current state of the colonies, underlining the degree to which they have grown to be able to manage their own affairs. As an example of the strength of the colonists, he cites the resistance of “two million five hundred thousand” residents of English America (the United States) against the full forces of the British Empire (v. 3, 283). He closely analyzes the economic and political strength of one colony after another, assessing how close they are to be ready to stand on their own. Not advocating a sudden cutting-loose of the European colonists, he spends an entire chapter addressing the “dangers of the unprepared separation of the colonies” (v. 3, 340). Using the example of Saint-Domingue, he notes that peoples who are not ready to become free tend toward “brigandage and arms” rather than culture and civilization (v. 3, 341). His detailed plan for decolonization in the Americas, presented as representing “the true interest of Europe, without the exception of any state or country” (vol. 3, 475), will be of great interest to scholars of French history and of the history of the Americas in the age of revolutions. Dufour de Pradt’s conception of Europe is reflected in a number of suggestive lines that are worthy of some interest in their own right. He concludes his work with the following:

It is in European, it is in French that we have written, we would like to repeat; we do not want to, we cannot recognize any other titles; it would be equally outside of our line and of our intentions, and we do not deviate also from the sentiments that we attach to Europe in general, those that we attach to France in particular. Happy if our weak voice can pierce through to her, traversing the tumult of arms and the agitations of a revolution with which her soil quivers again!

Whether read as a cry for peace in Europe, for the liberation of the New World, or for the development of free trade, these volumes are full of insights into Dufour de Pradt’s thought and his times.

Translations and description by Drew Flanagan, Archives & Special Collections Assistant and PhD candidate in History

Merchant's Scale and Weight box

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While the Special Collections department has many meticulously documented collections,  there are a number of objects about which less is known. One of these objects is a small wooden box containing a set of scales and various weights. We believe this is a merchant’s coin scale and weight box, and, based on the coins represented on the weights and the mastersign imprinted on one of the scale pans, it was probably made in the mid-seventeenth century in Cologne. A circle of paper with French printing that cushions the nested weights hints that it may have been used by a merchant in France.  

 

Merchants’ Scales and Weights

For centuries, the actual weight of a coin mattered, not just the design stamped on it. Merchants would not accept a coin without first verifying its weight, as bits of precious metal could easily be clipped off by people looking to save money. Highly precise scales were made specifically for the purpose of checking coin weights. They were small and easily transportable so merchants could take them with them as they traveled. From the Byzantine period onward  it was popular to keep the sensitive scales and their accompanying coin weights together in a small box. Between the sixteenth and early nineteenth centuries, wooden boxes like the one in our collection were particularly popular in Europe. The boxes were designed to fit each component of the set perfectly and were small enough to fit into a merchant’s pocket.

Primarily manufactured in Germany, where special guilds reserved the right to craft them, these scales were popular export items. They contained different types of weights for different merchants' needs, although the coin types represented were restricted to those most commonly accepted throughout Europe. Although the box in our collection bears no identifying marks, it appears that most would have had a label on the inside lid containing information about the box's manufacture and contents.

The Scales

Coin scales were generally equal-arm balance scales, meaning they had two arms of equal weight and length. It was common for the pans to be of equal weight but different shapes. The coin pan was a flat metal triangle, while the weight pan was a round basin. The mastersign of Jürgen from Metz is imprinted on the bottom of our triangle pan. Each pan is suspended by three cords. They were usually made of silk (in Cologne, this was a requirement) and were almost always green, as are ours. There is no definitive answer as to why, but sources such as a 1574 mineralogy text by Lazarus Ercker promote green as a generally relaxing color on the eyes and good for relieving a merchant’s eye strain.  

The Weights

This case is designed to hold three different types of weights, all useful to the merchant: nested weights, grain weights, and coin weights.

Nested Weights

Nested weights were ideal for the merchant as they required a minimum of space. A set consists of cups of descending weight and size, which fit inside one another. The largest cup of the set weighs as much as all the other cups, and each following weight weighs half the amount of the next largest weight. These weights were usually made of brass. Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, Nuremberg held a monopoly on their production and had a specialized guild for their makers. Only in the late eighteenth century did other countries begin to manufacture them. The mastersign on the top suggests that this set was made in Nuremberg.

Grain weights

There is an empty compartment on the right-hand side of the box; based on comparisons with similar boxes, this is likely to have held grain weights. The compartment would have had a cover to contain the weights, which were small squares of sheet metal.

Coin weights

These weights were used for measuring coins. Different regions preferred different shapes for their weights; those in this set are all truncated pyramids.Coin weights not only had to be the exact weight of the coins but also had to be easily identifiable, and as literacy rates were low, many weights were inscribed with full or partial reproductions of the coin whose weight they represented. About half the weights in the set have images, while the others have abbreviations of the coin names. In addition to these indications of value, the weights are annotated with information about later adjustments.

description by Katherine Morley, Archives & Special Collections assistant and M.A. candidate in Anthropology

Sources:

Kisch, Bruno. Scales and Weights: A Historical Outline. New Haven: Yale University, 1965.

Paris Commune posters

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The Robert D. Farber University Archives & Special Collections Department has seven posters that were displayed publicly during the events of the 1871 Paris Commune. The collection includes posters published on behalf of both the government at Versailles and the Communards. The posters contain orders and communiqués as well as information and propaganda relating to the military and political events of the uprising.

In September of 1870, Emperor Louis Napoleon Bonaparte (known as Napoleon III) and Marshal Patrice MacMahon led the French army into battle at Sedan. In a day of desperate and bloody fighting, the French forces were badly beaten by a German army led by Prussian Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke and Prussian King Wilhelm I. The Germans took many prisoners, most notably the emperor himself, and French Republicans seized the opportunity to depose Louis Napoleon and to bring an end to the Second French Empire. A new republic was declared at Versailles, committed (at least at first) to carrying on the war. German forces occupied a significant proportion of French territory, including the contested border region of Alsace-Lorraine, and laid siege to Paris. The "Government of National Defense" at Versailles soon realized the hopelessness of its situation and renewed armistice talks with the newly declared German Empire.

The commanders of the National Guard declare their intention to resist the forces of the counter-revolution: "It is no longer time for parliamentarism: we must act and severely punish the enemies of the Republic."

As rumors of the negotiations trickled into Paris, left-wing groups, including socialist followers of Louis-Auguste Blanqui and radical Republicans (or Jacobins), began to organize resistance to the planned armistice with the support of the citizen's militia of Paris, the National Guard. Their movements were also influenced by distrust of the Versailles government, which was dominated by monarchists and which was suspected of planning to restore the monarchy. In response to efforts by the Versailles government to disarm the National Guard and pacify Paris, a council calling itself the Central Committee of the National Guard prepared to defend the city. From early April to late May of 1871, the Communards battled troops loyal to the government at Versailles. The bloody repression of the insurrection by government troops and the execution of its leaders followed. The Commune has since occupied a place of special importance for political theorists of the left, perhaps most notably Karl Marx, who viewed it as the first historical example of rule by the working class.

The collection at Brandeis consists of posters associated with notable events in the history of the Commune. One details the first outbreak of violence on April 2, 1871, framing it as an act of aggression by "royalist conspirators," who, "unable to count on the French army, have ATTACKED with Papal zouaves [soldiers] and Imperial police." The poster mentions unspecified casualties as a result of the attacks carried out by "these furious people," who, "not content to cut off communication with the province and to make vain efforts to reduce us through starvation [...] wanted to imitate the Prussians to the end and bombard the capital." The message concludes by pledging that, "Elected by the population of Paris, our duty is to defend the great city (la grande cité) against the guilty aggressors. With your help, we will defend it."

Another poster, from the last days of the uprising, details the plans of the Commune's leadership to confiscate the home and property of Adolphe Thiers, leader of the Versailles government. The order, carried out on May 13, was accompanied by another order to destroy a chapel that had been erected to commemorate the death of Louis XVI.(1) It identifies Thiers as "the bombardier," who, along with "the rural assembly, his accomplice," brought this treatment upon himself. In six articles, the declaration itemizes what is to be done with Thiers's property:

Article 1: 

All of the linen originating from the Thiers house will be put at the disposal of the ambulances.

Article 2: 

The art objects and precious books will be sent to the national libraries and museums.

Article 3: 

The furniture will be sold at auction, after public exposition at the guardhouse.

Article 4: 

The profits from that sale will remain assigned only to pensions and indemnities that must be furnished to the widows and orphans of the victims of the infamous war that the ex-proprietor of the George residence has made upon us.

Article 5: 

The money that the demolition materials will bring in will go to the same destination.

Article 6: 

On the grounds of the residence, a public park will be established.

Both the Communards and the Versailles government made use of the official heading and motto of the French Republic, "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity." The Communard posters simply added specification as to which arm of the revolutionary leadership produced a given poster, and noted the date according to the French revolutionary calendar. This collection will be of interest to students of modern French politics and political culture, as well anyone who is interested in the history of the left-wing revolutionary tradition.

description by Drew Flanagan, Archives & Special Collections Assistant and PhD candidate in History

(1) Williams, Roger L. The French Revolution of 1870-71. (New York, W.W. Norton and Company, 1969), 145.