We Saw Spain Die

by Preston Paul

  George Steer wrote: ‘In this war, the Basque fought for tolerance and free discussion, gentleness and equality.’76 He died in a later war for those same values. Next to his body was found his most precious possession, a gold watch given to him by José Antonio de Aguirre, inscribed ‘To Steer from the Basque Republic’.

  9

  Talking with Franco, Trouble with Hitler: Jay Allen

  In the early hours of the morning of 25 August 1936, an American journalist named Jay Allen sat typing in the tiny enclosed patio of a small pension in the white Portuguese walled town of Elvas. He couldn’t sleep, partly because of the oppressive heat and partly because of the sobbing of the woman in the next room. Her husband had been one of the victims of the mass slaughter taking place just across the Spanish border at Badajoz. Jay had just come from the town and, by writing an article, was trying to come to terms with the horrors that he had seen. When published, it would do considerable damage to the cause of the military rebels in Spain. It was to be one of the most important and frequently cited chronicles of the Spanish Civil War and was to make Jay Allen the object of right-wing abuse. His commitment to the Spanish Republicans survived their defeat in 1939. In consequence, in March 1941, Jay Allen would be arrested by the German authorities in occupied France and imprisoned. He was there ostensibly as a journalist, but was trying to arrange the escape of Spanish Republican refugees and anti-fascist volunteers who had fought in the International Brigades. His fame as the man who had done so much damage to the rebel military in Spain made it difficult for American diplomats to secure his release.

  Along with Henry Buckley, Jay Allen was one of the two bestinformed correspondents in Spain on either side. Isabel de Palencia, who had been the Spanish minister plenipotentiary in Sweden and Finland during the Civil War, wrote: ‘if I were asked who I thought was the best-informed North American on the Spanish conflict, I would unhesitatingly say, “Jay Allen”.’ She went on to list other distinguished friends of the Spanish Republic, including Vincent Sheean, Freda Kirchwey and Elliot Paul, and concluded: ‘no one has compiled the history of the Spanish war or had the patience to build up the files that Jay Allen has’.1

  Born in Seattle on 7 July 1900, Jay Cooke Allen Junior did not have a very happy childhood. His mother, Jeanne Lynch Allen, died from tuberculosis fifteen months after he was born. A first-generation Irish Catholic, she had made her Methodist husband, Jay Cooke Allen, promise to raise their children in the Catholic Church. After Jeanne’s death, her family wanted custody of Jay and, when his father refused, they kidnapped Jay. After a court battle, Jay was returned to him. The consequent bitterness in the family hurt the young Jay very deeply and may have influenced his later critical attitude towards the Catholic Church. At the same time, his relationship with his father did little to compensate him for the loss of his mother. Jay wrote years later of his father: ‘When I was a kid, I never saw him sober that I remember. And in my adult years, the few occasions when we were together he was aggressive, drank too much, and though I always enjoyed his immense vitality and appreciated his honest affection, I was always ill at ease.’2 Jay did not find emotional warmth and stability until he met the love of his life, Ruth Austin.

  Chronologically and socially, Jay was part of the American ‘lost generation’. He married Ruth in Woodburn, Oregon on 7 September 1924 and they left for France two weeks later for their honeymoon. During a long stay in Paris, they became good friends of Ernest Hemingway. He tipped Jay off when he was about to resign his job with the Paris office of the Chicago Daily Tribune. Jay applied and got the job. Between 1925 and 1934, he covered events in France, Belgium, Spain, Italy, Austria, Germany, Poland and the Balkans. Their son Michael was born on 16 October 1927. Jay was based much of the time in Geneva, although his interest in Spanish events became his all-absorbing passion because, as he constantly told his wife, ‘it was the one country in Western Europe where the democratic ideal had a promise’.3

  Jay first moved to Madrid in 1930, where he had rented an apartment from Constancia de la Mora. Jay, Ruth and son Michael had hardly moved in when Constancia turned up to inform them that, after separating from her husband, she and her infant daughter needed the apartment and to ask if they would mind leaving. To her surprise, Jay and Ruth responded with sympathy. Constancia later recalled the episode with some embarrassment:

  I had plenty of household problems to discuss with my mother. While I was still in Málaga, I had rented the apartment through Zenobia to an American newspaperman, Jay Allen, and his wife and small son. Now when I returned to Madrid, I found the paper hangers and painters busily making the apartment ready for the Americans. The Allens were impatiently waiting for the paint to dry while they stayed at a hotel. With my heart in my mouth I went to call on them to beg them to let me have the apartment back for myself. Jay Allen was in bed when I arrived–sick, he explained cheerfully. His counterpane was covered with newspapers, books, and typing paper. His small son, dressed in long blue pants, occupied a corner of the room where he played an intricate and exceedingly noisy game with himself. Mrs. Allen, a young and charming woman, moved around the room, answering the telephone, finding books for her energetic husband, and bringing order out of the confusion that began afresh the moment she relaxed her efforts. ‘I hope you will forgive me’, I stammered. The Allens listened to my story and then all three, including the grave child, assured me that it was no trouble at all, of course I should have my own apartment, they would start immediately to look for another, I shouldn’t waste a moment of worry for disturbing their plans – it was nothing.4

  It was the beginning of a deep friendship that would flourish with close collaboration in putting the Republic’s case during the Civil War and after, but which would end sadly in political disagreement over the strategy to be pursued in trying to help Spanish refugees.

  During his visits to Spain in the late 1920s and even more so after he settled there in 1930, Jay met a wide range of Spanish politicians, including those on the extreme Right. He was a welcome guest at the Madrid home of the poet and novelist Princess Bibesco (Elizabeth Asquith, the daughter of Herbert Henry Asquith, who was British Prime Minister from 1908 to 1916). In 1919, aged twenty-two, she had married the Romanian diplomat Prince Antoine Bibesco. During her husband’s posting as Ambassador to Spain from 1927 to 1931, she ran a salon where the great and the good from Madrid’s literary and political elite would gather. Before the fall of the monarchy, Jay used to meet there the cousin of King Alfonso XIII, Alfonso de Orleans Borbón, and his wife, Princess Beatriz of Saxe-Coburg Gotha, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria and a cousin of Alfonso XIII’s consort, Queen Victoria Eugenia. Prince Ali, as he was known in the family, was an intrepid aviator. It was at the Bibescos that Jay first met José Antonio, the son of the military dictator, General Miguel Primo de Rivera. Despite the political distance between them – José Antonio would found the Spanish fascist party, the Falange, in 1933 – they had cordial relations: ‘I liked him though I hated his crowd, the señoritos and señoritas of good families who flashed their gats in the smart bars from ’34 on, often pearl-handled revolvers with the Sacred Heart of Jesus on them.’ Years later, Jay told Herbert Southworth: ‘As I think you know, I had a sneaking sort of affection for José Antonio. I had been present when he and Miguel [his brother] took on Queipo de Llano in a café on the Alcalá – lovely fight they had! And I used to see him all too often at Elizabeth Bibesco’s. Her lover? I don’t know. She was a very odd number, soggy with alcohol and ether.’5 José Antonio would eventually grant Jay the last interview that he ever gave, shortly before his execution in 1936.

  On several occasions, Jay met José Calvo Sotelo, the monarchist leader whose assassination on 13 July 1936 would be used as justification for the military coup launched five days later, although prepared many months before. He had a certain sympathy for Calvo Sotelo because, when Finance Minister during Primo’s dictatorship, he had run into serious problems when he tried to nationalize the Span
ish oil industry. Jay wrote later:

  I thought him a smoothie, rather bright so of course hailed as a great brain by his fellows (any brain at all passed as a great brain in that milieu). I confess that I did feel a little sorry for the guy who had had the rug pulled out from under him – under the peseta to be more precise – by Deterding of Shell [Henri Wilhelm August Deterding, chairman of Royal Dutch/Shell, the so-called the ‘Napoleon of Oil’], among others in the international oil fraternity because he had dared set up CAMPSA, the oil monopoly under Primo.

  The great international oil giants had combined to undermine the value of the peseta and Jay commented: ‘I thought Calvo Sotelo a babe in the woods not to have foreseen this and I remember José Antonio once agreeing with me somewhat bitterly.’6

  Obviously, given his deep commitment to the Republic, Jay was more at home on the Left. Through his close friend, the artist Luis Quintanilla, whom he had known in Paris, Jay developed friendships with several prominent Socialists, including the future premier Dr Juan Negrín and a number of followers of Largo Caballero, Luis Araquistain, Julio Álvarez del Vayo and Rodolfo Llopis. Indeed, in early 1931, leaders of the Spanish Socialist Party had occasionally gathered at his apartment as they plotted the overthrow of the monarchy.7 In the early days of his time in Spain, Jay toured the country extensively and was even taken on an election campaign by Julio Álvarez del Vayo. He wrote a lengthy series of stories for the Chicago Tribune, which attracted a lot of attention. As he later told Herbert Southworth: ‘somebody on the paper sent them in to the Pulitzer Prize Committee. The Trib’s house organ ran a picture of their fair-haired boy and mentioned that he was “being considered” (whatever that means) for a Pulitzer Prize.’ The Chicago Tribune’s reactionary owner, Colonel R. R. McCormick, was furious. He ‘erupted, informed the Pulitzer Committee that no correspondent of his wanted or needed their accolade. I have no reason to think that I would have won it although I did hear rumours.’8

  Jay was fired in early 1934 from the Chicago Tribune by Colonel McCormick because he had refused to take part in a scheme to help remove a senior colleague whom he described as ‘an expensive old ornament’. Having recently inherited some money, Jay began to do research for a book on Manuel de Godoy, the all-powerful minister of Carlos IV. Political events, however, would soon distract him. A right of centre coalition had come into power after the elections of November 1933 and immediately set about dismantling the reforms introduced in the previous two and a half years. Throughout 1934, a series of strikes had been deliberately provoked as what seemed to the Left to be the first step to the crushing of the labour movement and the imposition of a corporative state. The entry into the government on 6 October of the right-wing CEDA was taken by the Socialists as the next step. The response had been a revolutionary general strike.

  During the repression that followed, Quintanilla brought Negrín, Araquistain, Álvarez del Vayo and Llopis, along with the Asturian miners’ leader Amador Fernández, to take refuge in Jay’s Madrid flat in the Calle Alcalá from 8 to 10 October. As a result of what was, at best, malicious gossip and, at worst, deliberate mischief by his neighbour, the fervently Catholic correspondent of the New York Times, William P. Carney, a report appeared on 9 October claiming that Jay had been arrested and charged with harbouring members of the revolutionary committee before being released with a warning that he ran the risk of expulsion from Spain. To have harboured the revolutionary committee had been fraught with risk and the report emanating from Carney put Jay in serious jeopardy. In fact, Jay had been detained, along with Leland Stowe of the Herald Tribune and Edmund Taylor of the Chicago Tribune, not because he had hidden the Socialists, but because some machine-gun-toting Guardias de Asalto claimed that they had been shot at by a sniper from the building in which he lived. After briefly holding Jay and his companions at gun-point, the Assault Guards accepted a whisky and soda and left. They obviously had some inkling that Jay was hiding the revolutionary committee because they returned shortly after and arrested him. After intervention by the American Ambassador, Claude Bowers, he was released. Leland Stowe protested to the managing editor of the New York Times that Carney’s story was biased, false and libellous.9

  Jay wrote later of Carney: ‘I did not know then the extent to which he was tied in with the Jesuit organ El Debate, whose editor, now Bishop of Málaga, had worked on the Times on a student basis (I think I refer to Ángel Herrera – he was the eminence grise of Gil Robles).’ During the Civil War, Carney would write as a fervent partisan of Franco’s cause. In 1934, Jay had few friendships with rightists other than with those he had met through Elizabeth Bibesco. Gil Robles, the leader of the Catholic authoritarian party, the Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas, had worked hard to provoke the uprising of October 1934 in order to have an excuse to crush the organized working class. Jay recalled later: ‘Gil Robles, a constipated, malevolent little man, wasn’t my kettle of fish. Nor was I his.’10 Not surprisingly, with Gil Robles’ party in government, Jay was arrested again a couple of weeks later because of a story about the repression in Asturias that he had written for the Chicago Daily News. According to the American Ambassador, Claude Bowers, the material on the atrocities in Asturias had been provided by Indalecio Prieto. After being threatened by the police, Jay was again released. Meanwhile, Quintanilla had been arrested and Jay took part with Hemingway in efforts to drum up support for an American campaign to have him released. The episode consolidated even further Jay’s close friendship with Luis Quintanilla.11

  In 1935, Jay shelved the Godoy project, as he would do with several books that he began. This was largely because he was a meticulous perfectionist, although his friend John Whitaker claimed that his lack of productivity was because he was ‘nearly as lazy as me and equally diffident when in the company of the Muse’.12 Jay began to work on a book about the Second Republic, provisionally entitled Revolt. Because it was to be centred on the agrarian struggles in the south, he took Ruth to live in Torremolinos, then still an idyllic and unspoiled fishing village on the coast south-west of Málaga. They were alone because he and Ruth had decided that they wanted Michael educated in the United States and, in the late summer of 1934, she had made a brief trip to take him to be with her family in Oregon.13 Jay was now working on at least two books – on Godoy and the Spanish Republic. His routine was writing from 7 a.m. to 12.30 p.m., when he would go with Ruth to the beach. They would have lunch at 2 p.m. followed by a walk and then more writing until dinner at 8 p.m. In mid-February, Jay wrote to Claude Bowers, inviting him and his wife to come and stay, but before anything came of the idea, Ruth had had to return to the United States because Michael had been taken seriously ill. Jay spent part of the spring of 1936 travelling in Extremadura collecting material for his book on the agrarian problem, accompanied for part of the time by Louis Fischer.14 When he later revisited Badajoz after its occupation by the Francoists in August 1936, Jay Allen recalled: ‘I had been there four times in the last year to do research on a book I am working on and to try to study the operations of the agrarian reform that might have saved the Spanish Republic – a republic that, whatever it is, gave Spain schools and hope, neither of which it had known for centuries.’15

  In the spring of 1936, Jay was deeply affected by what he saw in Badajoz and, on returning to Madrid, met with Negrín to discuss it. He recalled their meeting in a 1945 letter to the then exiled prime minister:

  I remember so vividly a conversation I had with you one night when I got back from Extremadura after a tour with Louis F. and Demetrio. I remember telling you how shocked I was at the irresponsibility of Madrid Socialists (some of them) their complete lack of any sense of the realities of the situation in the campo… And I recall your reaction. Apparently you had thought that I was committed to the Pasha’s position. You seemed pleased to find out that I was not.16

  ‘Demetrio’ was Demetrio Delgado de Torres, a close friend of Negrín who, during the Spanish Civil War, would be his Undersecretary f
or the Economy at the Spanish Treasury (Ministerio de Hacienda) with responsibility for the procurement of war materials, for the management of Republican funds abroad including the transfer of gold to Russia. ‘The Pasha’ was Luis Araquistain, the principal spokesman and adviser of the party president Francisco Largo Caballero.

  This 1945 letter revealed not only the closeness of Jay’s friendship with Negrín, but also just how well informed he was about the internal politics of the Spanish Socialist party. In the spring of 1934, the PSOE was deeply split between the partisans of the Largo Caballero and those of Indalecio Prieto. Disillusioned by the limits of reform in the years of Republican–Socialist coalition from 1931 to 1933, Largo Caballero had adopted a revolutionary position, in rhetorical terms at least. From May 1934 onwards, through his theoretical journal Leviatán, Araquistain, who had witnessed the rise of Nazism during his time as Spanish Ambassador in Berlin, had encouraged Largo Caballero’s opposition to collaboration with the liberal Republicans. Although Largo Caballero had been brought around to accepting the need for an electoral coalition in the form of the Popular Front, he was resolutely hostile to collaboration in government with the Republicans and sabotaged Prieto’s opportunity to form a Republican–Socialist cabinet in mid-May 1936. Negrín believed that this fatally weakened the Popular Front Government and undermined the possibility of preventing a military uprising.17