The Unitarian’s Service Committee Marseille Office and the American networks to aid Spanish refugees. (1940-1943)

The Unitarian Service Committee was one of the most important US aid agencies involved in assisting refugees in the World War II context. In the article I analyse the origins of its action in Europe, focusing on a practically unknown aspect which as its intervention in favour of Spanish Republicans who had fled from Spain and the threat of Francoism in 1939. The Unitarian Service Committee (USC) began its operations in the spring of 1940 and an office of the Unitarian Service Committee would be established in Marseilles in 1941. From this office active work was focused mainly on medical help for the camp inmates in the south of France. The USC had an aid program dedicated exclusively to the Spanish refugees. This program was supported by funding from another American organization, the Joint Antifascist Refugee Committee closely linked to socialist and communist circles and whose chairman, Edward Barsky, was a former international Brigadier who had participated in the Spanish Civil War. I will analyse the links between these two organizations and their connections with international relief networks.

Workers’ Theater Movement

The Workers’ Theatre Movement (WTM) was an international project, largely promoted by the Workers International Relief, to conjoin left militant radical theaters during the period of Stalin’s "Third Period" militant class struggle; it was also briefly the name of a workers’ troupe in London. The historical shape of the WTM follows the ideological progress of the Communist International (Comintern), from the hard left turn in 1929 to the collaborative politics of the Popular Front in 1933–1934. As proposed by its ideological leaders and principal activists, the Workers’ Theatre Movement was evidence of the transnational emergence of a proletarian culture derived from the universal modernity of industrialism. In practice, the movement was an aggregate of practices and theories drawn into the semblance of an organization through the cultural apparatus of the Comintern. The Workers’ Theatre Movement was both a loose international alliance and a range of local experiences that varied greatly. In metropolitan centers, the workers’ troupes occupied a gradient ranging from militant street theaters, such as Ewan MacColl’s Red Megaphone in Birmingham, UK and the Shock Troupe of the Workers’ Laboratory Theatre in New York, to the radical edges of the professional theater, such as the Group Theatre in New York and Unity Theatre in London. Outside of major theatrical centres, WTM troupes were more often organized by radical unions, or, as in the case of the Toronto Workers’ Experimental Theatre, by Communist Party cultural clubs.