From 1936-1939, Civil War raged in Spain. America's neutral stance on the conflict and recent consolidations in the industry lent American newspaper publishers and the press they controlled immense flexibility in how to cover the war, tempered only by audience expectations and competition from other publishers. While much has been written about the biases of foreign war-correspondents and the mainly east-coast papers that they wrote for, the broader industries response to the conflict has gone under-studied. This paper moves the focus of study to the Midwest, a region long characterized by historians as "isolationist," and specifically Chicago which as a major urban center contained many varied newspaper services. Utilizing a comparative analysis of four Chicagoland periodicals, this paper argues that publishers utilized a variety of methods to channel the public's interest in the war into other linked matters, in many cases concerns over the New Deal. In doing so, coverage of the Spanish Civil War became the language used by the American press to discuss a broad network of subject-matter, indicating that the war was far more impactful culturally to America than the current historiography would indicate.
Alexander Furash (Thu,) studied this question.