Joseph Vogel’s The Innocents, like Mildred Rackley’s Death of a Spanish Child, portrays civilian casualties, a common theme for conveying the horrors of the war to audiences at home. Rackley and Vogel were both veterans of the ALB in Spain: Rackley served as a translator and played a crucial role in evacuating a hospital in Murcia, while Vogel fought on the front line in Córdoba. Because the United States remained neutral in the Spanish Civil War and the WPA was federally sponsored, fighting fascism through artistic means often meant testing U.S. law. Artists were permitted to use the WPA press to show civilians, but not soldiers. Antifascists like Rackley and Vogel travelled covertly to Spain, and many were surveilled by the Federal Bureau of Investigation afterwards.