include Friend or Foe? Occupation, Collaboration and Selective Violence in the Spanish Civil War (2016) and The Francoist Military Trials: terror and complicity, 1939-1945 (2010).
Anderson applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Age of Mass Child Removal in Spain: Taking, Losing, and Fighting for Children, 1926-1945, and reported the following:
Page ninety-nine of my book explores poverty in 1920s Madrid and looks at issues such as overcrowding and the exposure of children to adult intimacy or to adult criminal behavior. It also considers issues such as the prevalence of TB and shows how conditions in Madrid echoed those found in other major urban centers at the time.Learn more about The Age of Mass Child Removal in Spain at the Oxford University Press website.
The page reveals important aspects of the book’s central arguments. I argue that child-removal in Madrid offers a window onto the wider age of child removal: a time characterized by the growth efficient removal systems in the wake of the founding of juvenile courts from the late nineteenth century. The removal of children from poor parents formed one aspect of this age and the social conditions described on this page help explain the attitudes of officials who presented poor parents not as victims of their circumstances but as moral failures who stood out as a danger to their offspring. The ease with which disease, unemployment or bereavement could push families into extreme poverty also meant large numbers of people became vulnerable to removal (only around 5% of children were removed on the grounds of abuse).
The page also misses some of the book’s other central points. I contend that the age of mass child removal enveloped three groups of youngsters: the offspring of the poor, children displaced by war and children removed from political opponents. The Spanish case illustrates all three phenomena and the records of the Madrid juvenile court allow historians to study each aspect of the age of mass child removal. Other chapters explore how children evacuated in the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939 became vulnerable to removal and discuss the way opponents of the regime established by General Franco came to lose children to juvenile court officials. In all three cases, this was never simply a top-down process based on simple categories of coercion and victimhood. Instead, the book analyses how poor parents, parents of the displaced and political opponents (and their children) all helped drive and resist the removal process. In this way, the book gives voice and agency to both parents and children. It also attempts to overcome the privileging in the literature of the removal of children from political opponents and to recover the history of the poverty-stricken parents and children whose stories have remained untold for too long.
--Marshal Zeringue
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