After six months of war, a parade or demonstration barely ruffled the surface of downtown Barcelona. Whenever bands and crowds occupied the Plaza de Cataluna and lightly shook the surrounding buildings with anthems and vivas , only a few clerks at the United States consulate abandoned their desks for the windows.
The reason for these disturbances was ever the same: the volunteers of the International Brigades were arriving from France, or Catalan troops were departing for the front.
But on January 6, , Mahlon F. Perking the consul general, who watched the crowd teeming below, spotted an object that had never before appeared in the marches and rallies. Coming up the street was the flag of the United States. Behind it ambled sixty men in doughboy uniforms. They were lined up in four-front squads with their leader out in front, a. The United States Army in Barcelona?
It flashed upon him that the spectre that had haunted the Department of State for the past three months had materialized under his very window. Roosevelt and underlined many times by Secretary of State Cordell Hull, the first group of American volunteers had arrived in Spain. Their leader refused to say whether they possessed legitimate passports. As yet only a trickle of American volunteers was seeping across the French frontier.
It quickly became evident, however, that men willing to expose their flesh to fascist bullets were not likely to be intimidated by American consuls brandishing rubber stamps. At Barcelona, Perkins continued to be troubled. Powerless to prevent or dissuade the volunteers, he could do nothing more than count them as they trooped through the city in their odd apparel, singing and laughing. So far as Perkins knew, the Department of State had not formulated a policy to cover American volunteers: Should they be accorded diplomatic protection, like other citizens, or had they forfeited this privilege when they agreed to serve a foreign power?
