Nancy Gardiner Macdonald

From The (Washington, PA) Observer-Reporter of Monday, Dec. 16, 1996:

Nancy Macdonald, aide to Spanish loyalist, dies

By Robert McG. Thomas Jr., The New York Times

New York - Nancy Macdonald, the well-born anarchist who helped radicalize her husband, Dwight Macdonald, in the 1930s, managed his magazine Politics in the 1940s, and then struck out on her own in the 1950s to aid refugees of the Spanish civil war, died last Monday at Cabrini Medical Center in Manhattan. She was 86 and had lived on East 10th Street for more than half a century.

Her son Nicholas said the cause was emphysema.

The darlings of New York’s radicals in the 1930s were the half-million Spanish loyalists who fought in vain against the forces of Francisco Franco, then made their way across the Pyrenees to refuge in southwestern France.

The loyalists got a lot of attention at the beginning, and those who had been Communists continued to receive support, but by the 1950s, with Franco’s fascist dictatorship well-established, the others had become what Mrs. Macdonald called “the legion of the forgotten,” languishing in poverty, unable and unwilling to return to their homeland.

It was then that Mrs. Macdonald decided to remind the world of their plight. In 1953, she founded Spanish Refugee Aid to provide help to the non-Communist exiles.

From her office on Union Square, Mrs. Macdonald attracted money and support from intellectual friends like Hannah Arendt, James T. Farrell, Alfred Kazin, and Barbara Tuchman, while Pablo Casals and Francine Faure, the wife of Albert Camus, distributed the aid in France. And her home, which had been a literary and political social center in the 1930s, was hopping once again.

Where T. S. Eliot had once been among the lionized guests, Alexander Calder mingled with refugees. There was, to be sure, one change on East 10th Street. Macdonald, who had helped establish the aid organization, was no longer around as the marriage had dissolved.