We Saw Spain Die

by Preston Paul

Southworth struck this blow, and thus became a major figure in the historiography of the Spanish Civil War, as a result of the publication in Paris in 1963 of his book, El mito de la cruzada de Franco. It was issued by Ediciones Ruedo Ibérico, the great publishing house of the Spanish anti-Franco exile run by an eccentric and massively well-read anarchist, José Martínez Guerricabeitia. Smuggled into Spain and sold clandestinely, Ruedo Ibérico’s books had enormous impact, particularly after the publication of a Spanish translation of Hugh Thomas’ classic work on the Spanish Civil War. From the first moments of the conspiracy that became the military coup of 18 July 1936, the rebels were falsifying their own history and that of their enemies. Hugh Thomas’ book recounted the history of the war in a readable and objective style – in itself a devastating blow for the partisans of what they called Franco’s crusade – and was therefore devoured hungrily by anyone who could get hold of a copy. Southworth’s book was infinitely less immediately popular, but much more devastating. It did not narrate the war but rather dismantled, line by line, the structures of lies that the Franco regime had erected to justify its existence. The consequence of the arrival in Spain of both books was an attempt by the then Minister of Information, the dynamic Manuel Fraga Iribarne, to seal the frontier against the arrival of more copies and to counteract the intellectual and moral impact of both – but especially of the Southworth book, for its corrosive effect on the regime’s self-image.

  In fact, the book by Thomas had arrived first and had been smuggled into Spain in large quantities. Its success saw a tightening of frontier restrictions. Herbert’s book was sent to the Canary Islands, where the customs were much slacker and from there entry into the mainland was relatively easy. This meant that the price when it was finally sold, under the counter, in Spanish bookshops, was more than double that in France. The profit went to the smuggler and the bookseller. Herbert wrote to Jay Allen: ‘I have been writing for more than three years and I have not earned a single centime, a new or an old franc. I have not even recovered the money I advanced to publish the first book in Spanish. It has sold more than 3000 copies, which in view of the difficulties in getting it into Spain is not too bad.’1 Nevertheless, those three thousand copies that filtered in were enough to provoke the creation, within the Ministry of Information, of the special department under the name Sección de Estudios sobre la Guerra de España.

  To direct it, Fraga chose a clever young functionary of the ministry, a chemist who had trained to be a Jesuit before leaving to marry, Ricardo de la Cierva y de Hoces. He came from a famous conservative family; his grandfather had been Minister of the Interior in the governments of the monarchy, his uncle had invented the autogiro and his father had been killed by the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War. His job was, broadly speaking, to bring up to date the official historiography of the regime in order to repel the attacks coming from Paris. The principal weapon in the armoury of this new unit of intellectual warfare was provided by the purchase of the magnificent library on the Spanish Civil War, built up over many years by the Italian journalist, Cesare Gullino, who had originally been sent to Spain by Mussolini. Southworth quickly became the department’s main enemy. In comparison with Hugh Thomas, who was already well known after the worldwide success of his book on the Spanish war, Herbert Southworth was virtually unknown. However, there was another crucial difference between the two men. Thomas had written his great book on the conflict, but the Spanish Civil War was not going to be the central objective of his life. He was already working on his monumental history of Cuba. Southworth, in contrast, dedicated his life to the study of the Spanish Civil War. Moreover, against de la Cierva, who had the staff and resources of a ministry at his disposal, Southworth had his own arsenal: one of the world’s greatest collections of books on the war.

  As well as being an anti-Francoist author, Southworth was one of the investors who made possible the survival of the important Spanish publishing house in Paris, Editions Ruedo Ibérico.2 That Ricardo de la Cierva y de Hoces saw Southworth as an opponent to be feared was soon revealed. In 1965, de la Cierva had written to him, saying: ‘I have great respect for you as an expert on the bibliography of our war and many people have been made aware of your book thanks to me. But I sincerely believe, Mr Southworth, that if you were to eliminate all the passion and prejudice that is found in your pages, your work would achieve the status that it deserves’ (Tengo una gran estima por Vd. Como especialista en la bibliografía de nuestra Guerra y muchas personas han conocido su libro por mi medio. Pero creo sinceramente, Mr Southworth, que si Vd suprimiera toda la pasión y todo el partidisimo que rebosa en sus páginas, su obra alcanzaría todo el valor que se merece).3 They met in Madrid in 1965 and de la Cierva invited him to dinner. Southworth told me later that de la Cierva had proudly recounted to him how the police had orders to seize copies of El mito de la cruzada, found when searching bookshops and the homes of political suspects. De la Cierva confided that he recommended and even gave to his friends confiscated copies of the book, proceeding to distribute copies to the other dinner guests. However, in Franco’s Spain, what was said in private was often far removed from what was said in public. Ricardo de la Cierva wrote:

  H. R. Southworth is, without argument, the great expert on the bibliography of our war, as seen from the Republican side… His library on our war is the world’s most important private collection: more than seven thousand titles. I am almost certain that he has read all seven thousand. And he keeps, in a tremendous photographic memory, all the important facts and all the relevant cross-references between these books.4

  De la Cierva had underestimated the numerical size of the library, but not Southworth’s detailed knowledge of its contents. This praise was immediately followed by some ferocious, but superficial, attacks on the alleged deficiencies of Southworth’s methodology.

  Who was this Herbert Southworth, the legendary book-collector who for many years to come would be the legendary intellectual scourge of General Franco’s dictatorship? His books would be quarried by the most serious specialists on the Spanish Civil War and his study of the bombing of Guernica would be one of the three or four most important of the many thousands of volumes written on the conflict. Even so, few people knew who he was because, not having a position in a university, he lacked an easy label. Nevertheless, he had had an extraordinary existence. His passage from poverty in the American West to crusading left-wing journalist during the Spanish Civil War had elements of a John Steinbeck novel. His later transformation into successful radio station magnate and then into a scholar of world-wide reputation was reminiscent of one of Theodore Dreiser’s self-made heroes.

  He was born in Canton, a tiny Oklahama town, on 6 February 1908. When the town bank owned by his father failed in 1917, the family moved briefly to Tulsa in eastern Oklahoma. They stayed longer in Abilene, Texas, where his father prospected for oil. Herbert’s principal memory of that time was reading his father’s collection of the Harvard Classics. The theft of one of the volumes when he was twelve affected him so deeply that it was perhaps the beginning of his own obsessive book-collecting. He educated himself among the stacks of the Carnegie Public Library in Abilene. There, after months of reading The Nation and The New Republic, he decided to abandon Protestantism and the conservative Republicanism of the Bible belt. He became a socialist and an avid lifetime reader of what he joyfully called ‘the muckraker’s school of journalism’. It was to be the basis of his astonishing transformation into a formidable scholar in Europe.5

  He went to secondary school in Abilene until the age of fifteen. He worked at various jobs in the construction industry in Texas and then in a copper mine in Morenci, Arizona. There, he learned Spanish working with Mexican miners. The collapse of the price of copper after the Wall Street crash left him unemployed. He then decided to work his way through Arizona University and when his savings ran out, he went to the Texas Technological College in Lubbock – better known as the birthplace of Buddy Holly. There, he lived in a
cute poverty, paying for his studies by working in the college library. He majored in history with a minor in Spanish. The work in the library had deepened his love for books. With the encouragement of the college librarian, he left, in 1934, with only one thought in mind: to seek work in the world’s most important book collection, the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. When he finally got a post in the Document Department, it was at a salary of less than half of what he had received in the copper mines. Yet, although it barely allowed him to eat, he was happy just to be able to pass his days among the bookshelves.6

  When the Spanish Civil War broke out, he began to review books on the conflict and write the occasional article for the Washington Post. The articles were immensely well informed and based on thorough study of the international press.7 The reviews foreshadowed both the sardonic humour and the hawk-eyed critical acuity that were to be the hallmarks of his later writing. Reviewing Theo Rogers’ Spain: A Tragic Journey, he wrote:

  There is a frightening confusion about this book. I mean the careless, perhaps deliberate, confusing of the words Anarchist and Communist. There is a wide difference between the two and intelligent people recognize it. As Mr Rogers uses the words, they betray the worried indignation of his mind; they do not convey information. It is not fair to speak vaguely of people bought with ‘Moscow gold’ and offer no specific proofs. It is disingenuous to deny that Franco is a fascist and then add that he merely believes in the ‘totalitarian state’.

  He ended his article with the suggestion that readers would ‘doubtless open Mr Rogers’ book (if they open it at all) with hearty approval of the strange words of Sir Wilmott Lewis, who contributes the foreword: “I know nothing save the title of the book for which this is written as a foreword, and with its conclusions, if it draws any, I imagine I should strongly disagree”.’8

  His review of Harold Cardozo’s The March of a Nation noted the contradictions between a series of statements: that on 18 July Queipo de Llano had ‘barely 180 trained soldiers on whom he could depend’ and had to use ‘this handful of men’ cunningly in order ‘to overawe the teeming population’; that ‘the ready supply of volunteers, 300,000 in all, within the first few months of the war, was the best proof that the Army movement was really a national one’, and that in October, ‘General Varela was very short of men. His march to Toledo had been a daring feat of bluff and his march to Madrid was to be even more daring. The African expeditionary force itself did not number much more than fourteen to fifteen thousand men, and it was by shuffling the unit from one side to another that General Varela was able to appear in strength.’9

  Already emotionally affected by the struggle between fascism and anti-fascism, he always said thereafter that the events in Spain gave direction to his life. His articles brought him to the notice of the Republic’s Ambassador, Fernando de los Ríos, who asked him to work for the Spanish Information Bureau. He eagerly left his ill-paid but secure government post in the library and moved to New York. There he worked with passion and wrote regular press articles and pamphlets, including Franco’s Mein Kampf, his anonymous demolition of José Pemartín’s attempt to provide a formal doctrine for Francoism, Qué es ‘lo nuevo’… Consideraciones sobre el momento español presente.10 During this time, he took a Masters degree at Columbia University and formed an enduring friendship with his colleague Jay Allen, the distinguished war correspondent. Jay, Barbara Wertheim (later famous as Barbara Tuchman) and Louis Fischer all knew him as ‘Fritz’ because his rotund figure and blond hair reminded them of the keeper of a German bierkeller. Jay wrote later of the man from Oklahoma whose slow drawl made him sound like a Texan: ‘

  He worked with me as a research assistant in New York in ’38 and ’39. He felt much as I did, was willing to go along with the CP as long as they were going our way but not after the Pact. A Texan and, I believe, a Baptist, he had and still has some very prickly ideas about the Roman Church, ideas shared by anticlerical Catholics generally.11

  Southworth’s views were summed up in a brilliant article on the political power of the Catholic press published in late 1939.12

  While in New York, Southworth also met and married a beautiful young Puerto Rican woman, Camelia Colón, although it was not to be a happy marriage. Herbert was devastated by the defeat of the Republic although, after the war ended, he and Jay continued to work for the exiled premier Juan Negrín. With Barbara Wertheim, he worked on a massive, minutely detailed chronology of the Spanish Civil War, which was intended to be the basis for a book on the war by Jay, never to be finished. With Jay, Herbert helped many prominent Spanish exiles who passed through New York, including Ramón J. Sender and Constancia de la Mora. Herbert also worked sporadically throughout the 1940s on a book about the Spanish fascist party, the Falange, which was eventually rejected by publishers on the grounds that it was too scholarly. In May 1946, he wrote to Jay about the difficulty of doing research while trying to earn a living and, in December 1948, he reported: ‘I keep playing with the idea of a book on the Spanish Phalanx. I have mountains of material and maybe in a year or so, I shall have the time to sit down and put it together.’13 It would be 1967 before he eventually produced his remarkable work Antifalange, dedicated to Jay Allen.

  In the summer of 1941, the office in New York run by Jay Allen on behalf of the Spanish Republic was forced to close down, and Herbert was recruited by the State Department because his anti-fascist credentials were assumed to be of utility in the anticipated war against the dictatorships. Shortly after Pearl Harbor, the section where he worked was converted into the US Office of War Information. In April 1943, he was sent to Algeria to work for the Office of Psychological Warfare. Because of his knowledge of the Spanish situation, he was posted to Rabat in Morocco, where he spent most of the war directing Spanish-language broadcasts to Franco’s Spain.14 At the end of the war, he stayed on for a while working for the State Department until, in May 1946, he was fired. He wrote to Jay: ‘I am told by a friend inside that I have been placed on a State Department blacklist and will never be employed by the Department. This is a bit bothersome for a man of 38 whose greatest claim to employment is the five years he has spent in American information work.’ The anti-fascist qualifications that had secured him his original employment were a serious disadvantage in the context of the Cold War. Nevertheless, Herbert believed that ‘the basis of the charges against me lies not in my pro-Spanish Republicanism, nor in my lack of anti-Soviet feeling, but in my activity against the political manoeuvres of the Roman Church’.15

  He decided not to use his demobilization air passage home but stay in Rabat, partly to await the fall of Franco but largely because he had fallen in love with a strikingly handsome and powerfully intelligent French lawyer, Suzanne Maury. He had already separated from his wife Camelia, although they did not divorce until 1948. Suzanne too had problems separating from her husband. When both were free to do so, they married in 1948. Knowing that there were no controls on broadcasting from Tangier, Suzanne advised him to buy a quantity of US Army surplus radio equipment with which he founded Radio Tangier. He remained in frequent contact with Jay Allen and, like his friend, continued to hope for the fall of the Franco regime.

  At the end of December 1948, he wrote to Jay:

  We spent a month in Paris in October and November. I saw Vayo and half promised to do something on Spain, but I don’t do it. What do you think of something starting like this: a political objective is not unlike a military objective. No general would use the same strategy to take a trench that he would use to take a castle, and the forces thrown against a barn would differ from those deployed against an atomic city. In the efforts to overthrow Franco, all the ammunition is being used against a fascist regime, which no longer exists. To admit this will compel many an emotional wrench etc. …As you can see, I am incapable of writing anything without getting profound and ideological.16

  During these years, he travelled regularly to Spain in search of material for what would become the largest ev
er collection of books and pamphlets on the Spanish Civil War (which now resides at the University of California at La Jolla, San Diego). In his December 1948 letter to Jay, he commented: ‘I crossed Spain twice, once by Malaga–Barcelona and the other time by San Sebastian, Burgos, Valladolid, Madrid, Cordoba. I really think that a little blockade would topple Franco in three weeks if not sooner.’17

  The radio station was nationalized by the Moroccan Government at midnight on 31 December 1960. Herbert and Suzanne had already gone to live in Paris. He continued to buy books through an enormous world-wide network of booksellers. Occasionally, he bought the libraries of some Spanish exiles, among them that of the President de la Generalitat de Catalunya, Josep Tarradellas. He also established a close relationship with Father Marc Taxonera, the tall, gaunt librarian of the Monastir de Montserrat, with whom he would exchange spare copies of books.18 Herbert lost money in a vain effort to launch the potato crisp in France. That, the problems of finding an apartment big enough to house his library, which was deposited in a garage, together with an incident in which he was beaten up by policemen during a left-wing demonstration, inclined him to leave the capital. The problem of his by now enormous library saw him move south, where property was cheaper. In 1960, he and Suzanne bought the run-down Château de Puy in Villedieu sur Indre. He never really liked the area, writing jokily to Jay Allen: ‘You have missed nothing in not knowing this part of France. I would gladly participate in the next war against the peasants.’19 Some years later, in September 1970, they would move to the faded magnificence of the secluded Château de Roche, in Concrémiers near Le Blanc. He wrote to Jay Allen: ‘we have passed six months heroically trying to get this house in order. We are now in fair condition. Confusion reigns. Worrying about roofs, heating and WCs has impeded my work.’20 Finally, in the centre of the huge run-down château was a relatively modernized core, the equivalent of a four-bedroom house, where they lived. On the third floor and the other wings lived the books and the bats.