We Saw Spain Die

by Preston Paul

  After Jay lost his job with the Chicago Daily Tribune in October 1936, he did some work for the New York Times but was principally occupied in various tasks on behalf of the Republic, including trying to buy arms. Gerald Brenan wrote to his friend Ralph Partridge that, on 4 November in London, he had watched Jay make a deal for the purchase for the Spanish Republic of twenty Austrian Army tanks, thousand-pound notes fluttering about ‘like postage stamps’.47 However, his principal task consisted of lobbying in Washington. In April 1937, he sailed for France first class on the Normandie with his wife Ruth and son Michael. David A. Smart, the publisher of the hugely successful men’s magazine, Esquire, and the editor Arnold Gingrich, were on board. Smart wanted to launch a new fortnightly magazine, to be called Ken – The Insider’s World (‘ken’ from the Scottish ‘to know’), and aimed at giving the public the ‘lowdown’ on world events as seen by ‘insiders’. At first, Smart was attracted to the idea of the new venture being radical and militantly anti-fascist and told Jay: ‘this magazine will be the first big break the under-dog in America has had’. Jay’s reputation for scoops and his Washington connections made him the ideal editor, hence the trip to Europe to collect material for the first issue. From Paris, Jay wrote to Smart explaining the Popular Front in France and suggesting that Ken would be the magazine for the future Popular Front in America, as ‘a united front of all decent and intelligent liberal and progressive elements’. Smart was ‘thrilled’ and authorized Jay to engage various journalists. During the summer of 1937, Jay and Ruth stayed in St Jean de Luz, close to the Spanish border, from where Jay made a succession of forays into Spain. On his return to New York, taking Smart at his word, Jay engaged editors, researchers and commissioned investigations. The dummy for the first issue contained a 20,000-word feature on the fascist assault on democracy. Smart did not like it and it was scrapped in favour of more short items. Smart did not like that either. Jay’s concept was too serious and too radical, which did not please potential advertisers. In October 1937, Jay was replaced by George Seldes, who was only slightly more populist and hardly less radical. Seldes wrote later:

  I have seen the dummies, layouts, stories, illustrations, and photographs which Allen prepared, all accurate and interesting pieces, superior to anything which has yet appeared in Ken, and yet I have heard Smart sneer about spending forty or fifty thousand dollars on the Allen regime ‘and not having a damn story to show for it’.

  Seldes told Hemingway that advertisers had threatened to withdraw from Esquire if Ken published pro-union material. Seldes was reduced to the rank of contributor and wrote to Hemingway that ‘Smart has the coldest feet in America. In addition to cold feet he is a dirty hypocrite.’ Learning that Smart had commissioned ‘red-baiting’ cartoons to please the advertising agencies, Seldes wrote that Smart was ‘a doublecrossing son of a bitch’. The first issue did not appear until 31 March 1938, with Hemingway and Paul de Kruif roped in as token editors.48

  In the autumn, while still working on Ken at the New York offices of Esquire, Jay was also acting on behalf of Negrín. It is clear from a rather oblique letter to Claude Bowers about an abortive meeting with the Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, that Jay would appear in Washington from time to time as a lobbyist for the Spanish Republican government. In the same letter, he referred to a meeting in Poughkeepsie with the President’s son, James Roosevelt, to discuss ‘a quite remarkable set of proposals’ from Negrín. He explained what had happened in a later letter to Hemingway’s biographer, Carlos Baker: ‘I myself happened to be the messenger designated to hand to FDR in the early Fall of 1937 a letter stating in black and white how he felt, stating (if memory serves) that the Russians would all too happily crawl back off the limb they were on, IF we would do something to enable the Republic to buy the arms it was entitled to buy under international law.’ Having learned that there was apparently no copy of the letter in the Roosevelt archive at Hyde Park, Jay wrote: ‘All I know is that I handed it to Jimmie Roosevelt in Poughkeepsie when he was seated beside his father in the automobile in which they were about to take off on a vacation.’49

  On 7 May 1938, Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Interior, Harold L. Ickes, wrote in his diary:

  Jay Allen came to see me yesterday. Allen used to be a foreign correspondent for The Chicago Tribune, but he was fired while he was covering the Spanish war for that paper. He is outraged over our embargo on munitions of war to Loyalist Spain. He thinks, and I agree with him, that this is a black page in our history. He believes that President Roosevelt has been imposed upon by the career men who sit at the feet of Great Britain and think that all wisdom in international affairs begins and ends with the British Foreign Office. He regards the Loyalists’ brave fight as a real stand for democratic principles. As he put it, neutrality has been made an instrumentality of wanton destruction… More and more letters of protest are coming to my desk against this embargo. The New York Times had a front-page story a few days ago to the effect that the President was getting ready to lift the embargo. Allen thinks that this story was a deliberate plant in order to stir up the Catholics to protest against its lifting and thus make it impossible for the President to act.

  When Ickes called on Roosevelt to lift the arms embargo, the president replied that to do so ‘would mean the loss of every Catholic vote next fall and that the Democratic members of Congress were jittery about it and didn’t want it done. This was the cat that was actually in the bag, and it is the mangiest, scabbiest cat ever.’50 Jay discovered years later that the story had been written by Arthur Krock of the New York Times’ Washington bureau. Given Krock’s close relationship with Joseph Kennedy, the pro-Franco Ambassador in London, Jay believed that the article had been written precisely to stir up Catholic opinion and kill any chance of the embargo being lifted.51

  Jay often managed to see Eleanor Roosevelt and on one occasion, he was able for half an hour to put the case for the lifting of the arms embargo to FDR himself. He had carefully prepared for the moment, polishing and rehearsing his remarks. When the day came, he went to Hyde Park and delivered his speech. When he finished, believing that he had said it all, and said it well, he was thrown into confusion by Roosevelt’s laconic response: ‘Mr Allen, I could not hear you!’ Jay was nonplussed. Had the president really not heard him? Had he not spoken loudly enough? Had he indeed failed at this critical juncture in his life and the life of the Spanish Republic? Seeing his dismay, the president explained: ‘Mr Allen, I can hear the Roman Catholic Church and all their allies very well. They speak very loudly. Could you and your friends speak a little louder, please?’52

  Years later, when trying to fill out his own recollections, Jay made an oblique reference in a letter to Herbert Southworth which reflected the frustrations of their joint lobbying activities:

  Do your files contain any precision about the run-around we got from FDR in June or July ’38 – remember when Corcoran got hold of Drew Pearson and a deal was suggested by which WE should lay off a propaganda line that was getting Protestant bishops excited – with cause – and the State Department would go easy on a shipment of plane parts from Canada. Eleanor invited Ruth and me to Hyde Park, if you remember, to tell me in almost those very words that FDR had welshed.53

  ‘Corcoran’ was the lobbyist Thomas G. Corcoran (known to his friends as ‘Tommy the Cork’). Along with Felix Frankfurter, a law professor at Harvard and an informal adviser to Roosevelt, Corcoran was one of Jay’s most important contacts in Washington. Drew Pearson was a well-known columnist. Both were members of what was called ‘the Roosevelt brains trust’. Pearson was aware that the reactionary wing of the Catholic Church in the United States was conducting one of the most efficient lobbies ever to operate on Capitol Hill.

  Before then, Jay had briefly been back in Spain during the winter of 1937–38 and was at the battle for Teruel. He reached Barcelona from Paris on Christmas Day 1937, the battle having begun just over a week before. He spent a hair-raising time in Teruel with Hemingway and
Matthews. He wrote to Carlos Baker: ‘At Teruel, where it was bitterly cold, EH saved my eardrums when we were on a granite hilltop with no place to hide and being bombed to hell by tri-motor Savoias by showing me how to hold my mouth open by means of a pencil between my teeth.’ Hemingway got annoyed when Jay refused to help move an artillery piece mired in the mud, saying: ‘I was hired to write, not fight this war!’ Jay went on to irritate Hemingway further by reminding him that, under the Geneva Convention, he had no right to wear sidearms. Jay commented: ‘I know, I ran quite a risk of being labelled chicken. But I did not care much; I could think of maybe eight occasions when, if I had been armed, I’d have been a dead duck with no chance to argue.’54

  On board ship en route home, he wrote an optimistic cable to Bowers:

  I feel that even if Franco takes back Teruel he will have suffered a fearful loss, prisoners, material, prestige and most important of all, his fire has been drawn. They made him strike where they wanted him to strike. Elsewhere would have been more dangerous. Short of busting through our lines east of Teruel he can’t recoup. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a hot government offensive a long ways from Teruel and then the way of Teruel will be clear. Matthews, Hemingway and I can testify that no prisoners were shot.

  He commented with approval: ‘I was interested in the cold shouldering of the Communists. They are being pushed out all along the line. They will stand for that and more, I think, because they want to win the war unlike Caballero.’ Nevertheless, he ended: ‘I still won’t buy any stock in your Mr Azaña. The republicans are in the saddle but I don’t think that when it is over the war will have been fought entirely to make Spain safe for the Marcelino Domingos et al.’55

  Given that Thorning and other Catholic propagandists continued to claim that his article on Badajoz was a fake, in the course of 1938, Jay had begun to write a lengthy justification proving from other sources, especially the contemporary Portuguese and Spanish rebel press, that the massacre had happened as he described it. In early 1939, he wrote to George S. Messersmith, Assistant Secretary of State:

  I find myself in the strange position of being obliged to prove that I saw what I saw (and I am proving it for publication with documents from rebel sources exclusively… I have finished a job on the ‘bullring massacre’ at Badajoz in August 1936, which it was my misfortune to cover. This has been dismissed as a simple lie by Franquist friends. I have gone back to Rebel and to Portuguese papers to prove it. And I find I have thrown myself open to a charge of much greater gravity, for a Chicago Tribune correspondent, than lying; I am guilty, it would seem from my own findings, of the most serious offence on the Tribune calendar, namely UNDERSTATEMENT.

  The manuscript on Badajoz was an exhaustive piece of work, utterly vindicated by later scholarship, yet Jay never published it. He distributed copies to his contacts in the American press and politics, among whom it created little echo. In the 1960s, when he began to toy with doing something about it, he had to ask Louis Fischer for a copy. In the end, it was Herbert Southworth who had kept a copy and proposed that they expand and publish it.56

  The work on the Badajoz massacre was intended not just to counter the smears of Thorning and other Catholic propagandists, but was part of a much more ambitious project. This was eventually intended to be the definitive history of the Spanish Civil War. As a preliminary step, Jay wanted to establish a detailed, hour-by-hour, day-by-day, chronology of what had happened all over Spain. When he could spare time from his other activities, he worked, at his office in the front of his home in New York City, with Herbert Southworth (whom he always called ‘Fritz’), and a young radical journalist Barbara Wertheim (who would later find fame as historian Barbara Tuchman). What has survived of their work, the Badajoz manuscript, the preliminary notes for the chronology and the chronology itself suggest that, had the project been finished, it would have been a work of supreme importance.57 During this time, through the house at 21 Washington Square North came a constant parade of Spanish refugees and representatives of Negrín’s government. Some, such as Luis Quintanilla or Constancia de La Mora, stayed for lengthy periods. Others were guests at Ruth Allen’s endlessly hospitable table, where more often than not the languages spoken were Spanish and French.58

  When the Western Powers acquiesced in the betrayal of Czechoslovakia at Munich, Jay was shattered. He knew it spelt the end for the Spanish Republic. Years later, he wrote to Herbert Southworth: ‘Munich took the guts out of me.’59 As the Civil War reached its end, Jay Allen worked feverishly to get help for the hundreds of thousands of refugees who had trekked into France and to raise awareness of the threat hanging over the defeated from the victorious Francoists. When Constancia de la Mora arrived in New York in February 1939, he roped her into his campaigns. They lobbied influential and powerful people, and Jay Allen made contact with politicians in Washington to discuss the refugee crisis and Franco’s Law of Political Responsibilities. The assistant to Henry A. Wallace, the Secretary of Agriculture, wrote to say that he and Secretary Wallace (who would later be vice-president in Roosevelt’s second term) agreed entirely with the points put to them by Allen and Constancia de la Mora.60 They each wrote letters to the National Labor Relations Board in Washington describing the situation of the defeated Republicans, facing hunger and terror in equal measure.61 In mid-March, Jay organized a fund-raising dinner of the North American Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy. According to Mrs Vincent Sheean [Diana Forbes-Robertson], Jay chaired ‘beautifully’ a forum which was addressed by himself, Jimmy Sheean, Leland Stowe, George Seldes, John Whitaker and other correspondents who had been in Spain. Dorothy Parker, W. H. Auden and Ralph Bates also spoke. The event was such a success that it was repeated several times.62

  Jay was devastated by the final defeat of the Republic at the end of March 1939. His son Michael, twelve years old at the time, recalled: ‘The night the Spanish Republic fell was the darkest night I remember in my life. My mother and father were unreachable, gone, lost in grief or depression – and now I think this was probably the beginning of my father’s depression.’63 Nevertheless, Jay knuckled down and went on fighting for the Republic.

  The British journalist Henry Buckley, who had started his career in Spain as a stringer for Jay, was not surprised by this. He later wrote of him with affection for the man and admiration for his political commitment:

  I wish there were more people in the world like Jay and I wish I were a good enough writer to describe him adequately. But for me his company is always a wonderful tonic. Conversation with him is like drinking at a cool, refreshing wayside fountain. Jay, like myself, has as far as I know never belonged to any political party. His father is a prosperous lawyer in Portland, Oregon, and Jay has been sailor, Harvard graduate and, finally, foreign correspondent. He has an X-ray mind which goes to the heart of the most intricate questions. And he can, and does, explain them clearly. I am morally lazy. I know that it is all wrong that a Spanish peasant should toil endlessly and remain half-starved and that factory workers should sicken and die of consumption because hygienic conditions are not looked after, and I know all the sordid beastliness of poverty, but I am very apt to just forget about it and to feel that after all I am not to blame and that instead of pointing out the dark spots of our civilisation in my writing as a reporter it is so much simpler to gloss over this and pat the man in power on the back and thus sit pretty with the people who count. But Jay does not have my faculty for putting my conscience into a twilight sleep. His alert and vigorous mind sweeps the cobwebs from the problems of the day.64

  One of Jay’s ideas was that Constancia de la Mora should write an autobiographical account of her part in the Spanish Civil War and thereby bring the cause of the Spanish Republicans to a much wider audience. It was a brilliant idea. Connie was not only an eye-witness, but was a woman who had lived through the war and could tell a dramatic story of her own flight from an aristocratic background to commitment to the Republicans. She was taken in by Jay and Ruth Allen in t
heir house at 21 Washington Square. Constancia de la Mora’s biographer, Soledad Fox, has revealed that Jay arranged for a ghostwriter in the form of Ruth McKenney to put Constancia’s story into its eventual form. In fact, doubts about the authorship were expressed at the time by the exiled poet Pedro Salinas.

  In a letter to his friend, Katherine Whitmore, a professor of Spanish with whom he was in love, Salinas wrote:

  Did you like Connie de la Mora’s book? I haven’t read it totally but I have flicked through it slowly. Hers? I doubt it. I suspect that it is a collective product of the group that hangs around Jay Allen, a great friend of hers and her husband… The whole thing has the whiff of a political-literary clique. The last time I was in New York, in the home of Jay Allen (a man, incidentally, of the highest intelligence and quite a character) I promised myself not to go back because of the mixture of guests, pseudo-communists and pseudo-writers, who mix everything up. It goes without saying that Connie is not capable of writing the book on her own.