Indalecio Prieto - Early Years

Early Years

Born in Oviedo in 1883, his father died when he was six years old; his mother moved him to Bilbao in 1891. From a young age, he survived by selling magazines in the street; he eventually obtained work as a stenographer at the daily newspaper La Voz de Vizcaya. This led to a position as a copy editor and later a journalist at rival daily El Liberal; his career there eventually made him the director and proprietor.

In 1899 he joined the PSOE. As a journalist in the first decade of the 20th century, Prieto became a leading figure of socialism in the Basque Country.

Spain's neutrality in World War I greatly benefited Spanish industry and commerce, but those benefits were not reflected in the workers' salaries. This led to a great deal of social unrest, culminating on August 13, 1917 in a revolutionary general strike. Fear of a repetition of the then-recent February Revolution in Russia (the October Revolution was still to come), the general strike was harshly put down by the military, and the members of the strike committee were arrested in Madrid. Having been involved in the organization of the strike, Prieto fled to France before he could be arrested; he did not return until April 1918, by which time he had been elected to the Spanish Congress of Deputies.

Very critical of the actions of the government and army during the Rif War or "War of Melilla" (1919–1926), he spoke out strongly in the Congress after the Battle of Annual (1921), as well as on the more than probable, though unproven, responsibility of the king in the imprudent military actions of general Manuel Fernández Silvestre in the Melilla command zone.

Opposed to Francisco Largo Caballero's line of partial collaboration with the dictatorship of Miguel Primo de Rivera, he had bitter confrontations with both of them.

In August 1930, he participated on his own behalf, despite the opposition of Julián Besteiro, in the Pact of San Sebastián, which included a broad coalition of republican parties that wished to do away with the Spanish monarchy. In this matter he had the support of Largo's wing of the party, who believed that the fall of the monarchy was necessary in order that socialism could come to power.