We Saw Spain Die

by Preston Paul

  The book was an immense success both commercially and in terms of putting the Republican case to the American public. Thereafter, when a hostile reviewer accused her of pro-Communist partisanship – which was evidently damaging to the Spanish Republican position in the United States – she turned to Jay Allen to orchestrate her defence. He did so again when the Robles case was resuscitated with damaging implications for the Republic as a whole and for Constancia’s press office in particular.65

  Not long after the arrival of Constancia, in May 1939, Jay Allen accompanied Negrín as interpreter when he made the rounds of American politicians.66 To his intense disappointment, two appointments set up with President Roosevelt were cancelled at short notice. Eleanor Roosevelt invited them to tea by way of feeble consolation. Jay made frantic, but ultimately unsuccessful, efforts to arrange a meeting with the president. His efforts were hampered by continued allegations from both American Catholics and some Spanish Republicans that Negrín was in the pocket of the Communists. Jay wrote to Bowers: ‘Anyone who tries to raise the “Red” bugaboo in connection with this migration must be called a liar.’ He was understandably distressed that the ever more frenetic anti-Communist stance of both Indalecio Prieto and the ex-Spanish Ambassador to Washington, Fernando de los Ríos, was unjustly damaging the prestige of Negrín.67 Jay also took part, along with Constancia and with Mrs Luisi Álvarez del Vayo, in an unending stream of meetings on behalf of the Spanish Refugee Relief Campaign to raise awareness of the refugee crisis. He also made regular representations to the State Department in an effort to get the American Government to provide shipping to get the refugees out of France to Mexico. This was something that he would go on doing throughout the Second World War whenever he was in the United States. In 1943, he conducted a public conversation on the subject with Isabel de Palencia before a large audience in the New York Town Hall.68

  Through his work on behalf of Spanish refugees, Jay had a serious falling-out with Constancia. The occasion of their estrangement was the revelation in the United States of the appalling conditions in which the Spanish exiles were still being kept in French concentration camps. Short of food, water, clothing and proper shelter, and deprived of medical care, thousands were dying each week. To make matters worse, the French authorities had raided and closed down the headquarters of the Servicio de Evacuación de los Refugiados Españoles. The Reverend Herman F. Reissig, the executive secretary of the North American Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy, which had become the Spanish Refugee Relief Committee with which Jay and Constancia were working, cabled the Department of State requesting that the American Government make an official protest. Constancia interceded with Eleanor Roosevelt in the hope of getting her intervention. It was made clear that the American policy of non-intervention remained in place, not least, in this case, because of suspicions about the SERE’s Communist connections.69

  However, things would get worse when the French Government made a decision – known as the ‘Ménard decree’ after General Jean Ménard, the superintendent of the camps – to send the Spanish refugees back across the Pyrenees. Communist veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion of the International Brigades demonstrated against the decision in front of the French Consulate in New York. Several were arrested, including Milt Wolff, the last commander of the battalion, and Lou Ornitz, who, it will be recalled, had been in the Francoist prison at San Pedro de Cardeña, where he had clashed with William Carney. In the context of the Hitler–Stalin pact, Herman Reissig and Jay Allen did not believe that it was prudent to be associated with Communist-inspired actions nor indeed to provoke the French Government against the refugees. Accordingly, they and the majority of the Spanish Refugee Relief Committee voted against participation in the protests. In consequence, an outraged Constancia wrote from Mexico City an open letter to Jay on 9 April 1940 that destroyed their friendship: ‘Dear Jay Allen, Because I know the excellent work you did in America during the two and a half years of the war in Spain and even afterwards, because I witnessed your clear understanding of the treason that handed over Madrid and its heroic population to Franco, I cannot now comprehend what has come over you.’ She went on to accuse Jay of accepting the French denial that the Ménard order had actually been issued and thereby abandoning the Spanish refugees ‘in this their hour of greatest need’. She ended with an accusation that he was lying in order to safeguard a comfortable living.70

  A week after seeing the letter, a deeply mortified Jay wrote to Claude Bowers:

  The Spanish Refugee Relief Campaign, a development of the old North American Committee and the Friends of Spanish Democracy, was supposed to be non-political in character. Our enemies called us ‘communists’. We were not, or at least not since I went on the Board last May. It was I who insisted that our funds be expended in France through the Quakers last October when our regular agencies over there broke down. In the past six weeks there has been an effort on the part of our communist friends to run the organization to suit themselves and in ways that would have discredited us and, what is more, prove retroactively the truth of charges against us. I stood my ground and was aided by my valiant colleague, Mrs Vincent Sheean. A bust-up resulted and the communists withdrew to a rival organization of their own creation in which I wish them much success. There was a hell of a row over the Menard expulsion order which Daladier stupidly saw fit to deny as a ‘fake’. It was not a fake. But I saw no reason to allow the communists to come out in front and compromise all of our friends in behalf of the refugees. To have done so would have been to discredit Don Juan [Negrín] and Vayo and the other Spanish Republicans.

  Constancia de la Mora was absent from the meeting at which the decision was taken to channel funds through the Quakers and incandescent with rage. Her consequent attack on Jay was especially painful:

  I am now considered Public Enemy No.1 by our communist friends and the recipient of an open letter from a lady whom I have always known as Connie but who signs herself ‘Constancia de la Mora’. I enclose it for your perusal. Let me say that I have answered it with a personal letter to Connie and signed Jay in which I point out that I find it difficult to answer an open letter from a friend, particularly an open letter ending as hers ends.71

  Over twenty years later, Jay was still smarting from the injustice of her accusations and wrote to Louis Fischer:

  I did indeed express myself...about what I considered to be the harshness of the French towards the Spanish refugees but also about the ghastly unwisdom of the Lincoln Brigade boys picketing the French consulate in New York. On this subject I had several times spoken my piece in public. (Incidentally, I find a letter from Ernest Hemingway at that time saying that while the French were bastards any other nation would have simply called out the cavalry and driven our people back to Franco.)

  Jay felt so bitter that when Constancia asked for help to return to the United States, he refused: ‘I sent her a message by a mutual friend to the effect that I worshipped her memory and hated her guts. And this was fairly accurate.’72

  Jay was also accused by the veterans’ association of being ‘more friendly to the French Government than to the Spanish refugees’. He was linked with Ralph Bates, now denounced as a red-baiting liar, and with the Dies Committee, as the House of Un-American Activities Committee was known. Around this time, he met Earl Browder, the Secretary-General of the Communist Party of the USA, and told him that ‘there was little difference between his attitude towards his “liberal” allies and that of Congressman Martin Dies: they both considered us to be stooges’.73 After all he had done for the Republican cause, it must have been unutterably saddening to read in the veterans’ newsletter that ‘the Spanish refugees can expect only betrayal, imprisonment and death from these defenders of British and French Imperialism’.74 In fact, Juan Negrín had insisted that the plight of the refugees never be used against the French. Accordingly, he wrote to Negrín: ‘I am very glad that we took the position we did, in spite of having lost many friends like Connie. Had we
not taken that position we would never again have had this country’s ear.’ He went on to say:

  if today this country does not view with alarm the activities in behalf of the Spanish Refugees it is not because of any intelligent action taken by Connie and her friends. And may I also say that I view as nothing short of criminal any action that would tend to label Spanish Republican refugees with a label that, in many parts of the world, is the equivalent of a death sentence. With us, it was not a question of ‘defending Daladier’ as Connie seemed to think but of defending the refugees. That is still our position and we are doing all we can.75

  At the time, Jay and Ruth were looking out for Negrín’s estranged wife and their three sons, Juan, Rómulo and Miguel.76

  In the spring of 1940, Jay was immensely moved when the German novelist, and International Brigade commissar, Gustav Regler, dedicated his novel The Great Crusade to him. He was trying, along with Hemingway and Eleanor Roosevelt, to help Regler get from France, where he had been held in a concentration camp, to Mexico.77 In October 1940, Jay wrote to his friend, the Supreme Court judge Justice Felix Frankfurter, who had been a supporter of the Spanish Republic and was now taking part in Roosevelt’s campaign to be re-elected for a third term. His letter both reflected his life-long doubts about whether to write a book about the Spanish war and also revealed just how much hope he had tied up in the struggle for democracy in general and in Spain in particular. He wrote:

  I am very glad that you found time to read Regler’s book. He did not let us down. Also it is a true book. There are so few true books. Hemingway’s too is a true book. It is also a miraculous book. That is the way Spain was. Reading it, I am not unhappy that I have written so little but that little was true. I think that I could not have written the kind of book that I was always being urged to write and that I was sometimes tempted to write, and kept it as rigorously, as imaginatively true as Gustav and Ernest, great artists and great spirits both, have known how to do. It may seem silly to say this but to have a good conscience in 1940 is something.

  In the letter, he made a passionate statement of his own political position. He recounted his indignation when Adolf B. Berle Jr, the Assistant Secretary of State, an admirer of Franco, had suggested to him that the supporters of the Republic were Communists. He was particularly outraged in the context of the Nazi–Soviet Pact:

  If we were all Communists how come that Negrín and Álvarez del Vayo are so passionately pro-British? How come that Regler and Gustavo Durán, two of the great heroes of that incredible holding action, men who accepted Communist discipline for the duration because it was the only discipline and because we of the western democracies threw Spain into the arms of Stalin, how come that today they are as passionately anti-Nazi as ever? The Communists aren’t anti-Nazi. How come that all of the correspondents, Ernest, Jimmie Sheean, Lee Stowe, Matthews, Edgar Mowrer, Fernsworth, Whitaker, Buckley and your servant feel as we do about this war?

  He asked Frankfurter to suggest to Berle that he read Regler and Hemingway:

  If for no other reason, to find out why one people in Europe, a rabble, poorly armed, facing hideous odds, betrayed by the world, could fight for two years and a half and hold, never giving in until the British and the French and Mr Kennedy’s little boy and God knows who else conspired to kick the last prop out from under them.78

  One week later, Jay Allen went to occupied France, with a commission from the North American Newspaper Alliance, although he had also been asked to work with a committee devoted to helping anti-fascist intellectuals and artists escape from occupied France. What neither NANA nor the American Emergency Rescue Committee knew was that Jay had also been commissioned by British Intelligence to make contact with the nascent French underground to determine the whereabouts of British troops left behind at Dunkirk.79 The American Emergency Rescue Committee was run from New York with its local office, the Centre Américain, in Marseilles, administered since the summer of 1940 by Varian Fry, a rather prickly American journalist and classical scholar. The New York headquarters had been unhappy with Fry for some time both because of the scale of expenditure that he was incurring and also because of a touchy irritability reflected in numerous petulant and insulting messages. In one letter to his wife on 17 October 1940, Fry referred to Mildred Adams Kenyon, the secretary of the AERC, and her colleagues as ‘those boobs in New York’, ‘those blithering idiots in New York’ and ‘those imbeciles in New York’.80 He refused to rein in his expenditure and, in consequence, they had been looking for a replacement. Mildred Adams had been a journalist during the Spanish Civil War, had met and admired Jay Allen and now worked with him in helping Spanish refugees. She therefore thought that he would be an ideal replacement for Fry. Jay was prepared to take on the job because he hoped to be able to extend his work on behalf of Spanish Republican refugees and International Brigaders in captivity. Hemingway had given him a list of names of men whom he particularly wanted to be helped.

  In late November 1940, the New York headquarters of the AERC had informed Varian Fry that a replacement was en route. At the end of the year, he received a message at the office, asking him to go to the Hotel Splendide at a certain time, ‘to meet a “friend” at the bar’. The emissary was Jay Allen, whom he found sitting with a large Scotch and soda before him. That Jay should have whisky was the first brick in the wall of Fry’s hostility (‘he must have brought the Scotch from Lisbon, for Marseille’s supply had long since run out’). If he took an instant dislike to Jay, Fry was hardly less taken by his companion: ‘an American woman of more than middle years whom he introduced as Margaret Palmer’. Fry’s hostility had little to do with anything that Margaret Palmer did or said. Henry Buckley recalled meeting her in Jay’s apartment in 1934 and described her then as ‘a charming American who has lived in Madrid for more years than she cares to recall’.81

  Jay had travelled to France via Casablanca, to avoid passing through Spain. On 5 December 1940, in Marrakech, he had managed to get an interview with General Weygand, the seventy-four-year-old commander of Vichy French North Africa. Although the published article was anodyne, it clearly made the point about Weygand’s commitment to Pétain and Vichy. In a deeply perceptive unpublished account, written shortly after, Jay wrote critically of Weygand’s defeatism in June 1940. Comparing him unfavourably with De Gaulle, he made it quite clear that Weygand was utterly unreliable as a potential ally. On the following day, Jay interviewed General Charles Auguste Paul Noguès, the Commander of French forces in Morocco. The interview as published has not survived but Jay’s own private account presented Noguès as a cunning and deceitful opportunist, if anything less trustworthy than Weygand.82

  Jay was also planning to go into Vichy in order to interview Marshal Pétain. He aimed to combine his work for NANA with that of the committee and hoped that his journalist’s credentials would be a good cover for his more clandestine activities. To establish distance between himself and the committee, Jay had put Miss Palmer in charge as the filter through which he could keep in touch and also issue instructions to the staff, whom he specifically avoided meeting. After their first meeting, Jay wrote to Fry:

  Following up our conversation today, let me say: First: That I assumed that you are making preparations to leave, with the clear understanding that your work here will be carried on to the best of my ability, without however doing it necessarily in your way and, if possible, expanding in other directions. Second: That, because I have a certain responsibility in all of this, you will consider me in charge as of January 1. Naturally, you will do what you think best in matters already begun, but you will inform me. I suggest a brief memo daily no matter how cryptic. In this way, we will be able to put Allen au courant. This memo to be left with MP.

  He went on to call for a record of all expenditure to be kept and that copies of all correspondence be passed to him via Margaret Palmer.83

  Fry resented the proposed arrangement, reluctant to hand over his operation, in part because of a fear that
Jay, as a journalist, would be under close surveillance by the police. Accordingly, he ignored Jay’s instructions, failed to pass on correspondence in and out of the ERC office and exceeded the budget. Jay wrote sternly: ‘I must ask you to reread your letter from the Committee which I brought you from New York. You will also reread my note of January 2, please. In the meantime, I must request you formally to do nothing without discussing this further with me; otherwise I shall take effective steps to make you realize what your present position with the ERC actually is.’84 The nervous and hypersensitive Fry could hardly have been more different from the worldly and battle-hardened Jay Allen. Fry’s resentment of Jay grew by the day. He complained to the AERC headquarters in New York about the tone of Jay’s note. He justified his opposition to Jay on the grounds that he was ‘altogether too impatient, too bossy, too unwilling to listen to others or to benefit by the experience – often painful and costly – of others’. By others, he meant himself. Fry wrote to his wife in embittered terms that make it difficult to recognize Jay Allen: ‘The Friend is dictatorial and stupid. He is incapable of listening to anyone (proverbially) and he is utterly uninformed about what we are doing and apparently quite uninterested in learning. He just keeps bullying me into going, without ever stopping to consider the consequences.’ During the transition period, Fry informed Margaret Palmer about the cases he had worked on, legally and illegally. Every night she would return to the Hotel Splendide to inform Jay about what she had learned during the day.85