We Saw Spain Die (57 page)

His friend and colleague, John Whitaker, after commenting that Jay had ‘generally proved himself the best informed journalist in Spain’, noted with respect to this historic report: ‘His story was denied and he was vilified by paid speakers from one end of the United States to the other.’
³¹
An interesting and perhaps representative example of this vilification would be found in a wildly inaccurate letter from Father Thomas V. Shannon to the editor of the New York Catholic magazine,
The Tablet
:

Naturally, like all American writers abroad, Duranty, Gunther, Farson, he was pretty far to the left. Incongruous as it may seem, Allen represented the most conservative, not to say reactionary paper in the country. In a way, he was a free-lance. Colonel McCormick of the
Tribune
picked him up in Europe: he had not been sent abroad. He was dropped once, due to violent protests by Notre Dame, and a second time on protest from another source. He did not quit.

Shannon claimed that Jay Allen was born and brought up as a Catholic until he was nine-years-old and thus saw his later political position as a betrayal:

In Madrid, he fell in with Azaña and his crew. He was frankly committed to that regime, and so wrote. He approved with glee of confiscation and took particular delight in the plight of the Jesuits. He had been filled with all sorts of information about Jesuit wealth, all based on hearsay. He wasn’t in the least shocked with the pillage and arson in Madrid or Malaga. All of this he wrote to whatever American paper would accept his stuff. After the revolt of 1936, he became increasingly violent, and long before Badajoz had been letting his imagination run riot. He
finally became a bitter partisan. The transition was not difficult. He was in the mood for this five years ago when I met him in Madrid.
³²

Shannon’s character assassination of Jay was widely circulated. It was part of a concerted effort by the Catholic hierarchy to smear those who supported the Spanish Republic.
³³
A copy of it eventually reached Jay. The public assault on Jay was carried out by Dr Joseph F. Thorning, one of Franco’s most tireless propagandists in the United States. Thorning was an odd choice of champion to put up against Jay, since he was a man who had no prior knowledge of Spain. Jay recalled later:

Dr Joseph Thorning popped up from where I wouldn’t know, originally with an S.J. after his name. These initials were later dropped for reasons never made clear to me although I did hear something about an inheritance. Poverty, chastity and obedience seemed not to apply to him, not the first two anyway and I know whereof I speak.
³⁴

In 1938, Thorning, hearing that Jay was preparing to write more fully on what had happened at Badajoz, wrote sarcastically: ‘The mere fact that he finds this necessary 18 months after his first efforts indicates that his original story didn’t impress the more thoughtful readers. The unfortunate truth (for Mr Allen) is that, arriving 8 days late, he missed the boat. Hearsay evidence is a poor substitute.’ Thorning’s own account was based on the book of Major McNeill-Moss, who was never there.
³⁵
The success of the Catholic campaign may be measured in the fact that there were references in the American provincial press to ‘the Bolshevik Jay Allen’ and claims that he was earning huge sums in Moscow gold.
³⁶
More specifically, Jay’s beloved aunt, his mother’s sister, turned against him because of the poisonous criticisms of Joseph Thorning. Among other things, Thorning had acquired and published a letter from Jay’s godmother, Mrs J. Ham Lewis, to the effect that, after the death of his mother, he had been raised in godless and alcoholic surroundings.
³⁷

Although the Badajoz article will probably be Jay Allen’s most important legacy, also quite remarkable was his achievement in
securing, on 3 October 1936, the last ever interview given by the imprisoned Falangist leader José Antonio Primo de Rivera. When rumours abounded that José Antonio was dead, Jay was able to interview him in Alicante jail as a result of an invitation from Rodolfo Llopis, who was now the undersecretary to prime minister Francisco Largo Caballero. In order to gain access to the prisoner, Jay had first to convince the local anarchist-dominated Public Order Committee. Over two fraught meetings, he managed to persuade them by saying that, if they did not permit the interview, he would have to write that the Republican Government had no authority. On entering the exercise patio of the prison, Jay Allen found José Antonio and his brother Miguel in good physical condition. The Falangist leader reacted furiously when told that the rebels’ defence of privileged interests had swamped his party’s rhetorical ambitions for sweeping social change, saying: ‘If it turns out to be nothing but reaction, then I’ll withdraw my Falangists and I’ll, I’ll probably be back here in this or another prison in a very few months. If that is so, they’re wrong. They’ll provoke still worse reaction. They’ll precipitate Spain into an abyss. They’ll have to cope with me. You know that I’ve always fought them. They called me a heretic and bolshevik.’
³⁸
José Antonio may have been exaggerating his revolutionary aims to curry favour with his jailers, but his barefaced denials of the activities of Falangist gunmen before the war and of Falangist complicity in atrocities since was clearly infuriating the anarchists who had witnessed the interview.

In view of José Antonio’s anything but conciliatory attitude, Jay felt obliged to terminate the interview ‘because of the astounding indiscretions of Primo’.
³⁹
He later told Claude Bowers’ biographer, Holman Hamilton:

I believe that in the Fall of ’36 when I went to see him in prison in Alicante just before his execution, I was the last foreigner he spoke to and perhaps the last human being apart from his jailers, a wild and woolly lot calling themselves a Committee of Public Safety – which was before Negrín put a stop to that sort of thing.
⁴⁰

In fact, there was more to the visit to Alicante than there seemed at the time or than Jay was prepared to tell Hamilton. In fact, as he recalled to Herbert Southworth:

As I believe you know, Negrín had urged me to see JA and then go on to France or England and try to promote an exchange. For Caballero’s son, although Caballero had refused to consider that. I did my damnedest bit but, as you know, I accomplished nothing. Negrín’s idea was that José Antonio was a patriot by his lights and bull-headed besides and that he would cause Franco a lot of trouble. Maybe. But, thinking back on the mood of the Committee of Public Safety in Alicante, I doubt whether they would have let José Antonio out of their grasp regardless of what Madrid asked or ordered.
⁴¹

In April 1937, Jay made a speech to the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations. He started off saying: ‘When I came out of Spain I could not talk about it at all to anybody. It was like a nightmare, a four months long nightmare, the only difference being that from a nightmare you awake.’ He talked about the horror unleashed when the military coup provoked the collapse of the Republican state and opened the way to violence in Republican territory. He tried to explain why the Republic had such a bad press in the United States, arguing powerfully that the truth does not come out of rebel Spain:

No correspondent can write it and stay there… What the rebels do the world does not know, perhaps does not care to know. But every last atrocity on the loyalist side has been told amply and more often than not without any explanation at all. There is another reason why the truth has not been told. Most of the correspondents who went to Spain were ignorant of the Spanish scene. They knew all about fascism and communism, the issue about which everyone nowadays is so glib, and they knew nothing about Spain. They took stock in Franco’s crusade to save Spain from the ‘reds’. Franco’s rebellion is in reality the
French revolution in reverse. But how can you expect a correspondent whose stock in trade is communism and fascism to deal in anything so démodé as the French revolution? They do not know. Then there is another reason. There are elements in this country, press services and organizations, that have sought to draw some profit from the red issue.

Stressing that ‘It has been a great tragedy, a great tragedy!’, he ended: ‘I ask as someone about to return to this “horror” that people in this democracy of ours try to read about Spain with open minds. And I ask too that in this country of ours interested groups not be allowed to muzzle truth, to stifle press, to pin “red” labels on correspondents who are writing the truth as they see it. They, we, can do no more.’
⁴²

Catholic efforts to discredit Jay Allen and Herbert Matthews were partly based on material supplied by William Carney and Edward Knoblaugh. Thorning distributed to a wide network of correspondents a statement from Edward Knoblaugh about Jay:

It is not exactly a secret among the foreign correspondents in Spain that Mr Allen, ardent Socialist, did a considerable amount of stumping (some uncharitable souls might call it ‘agitating’) in Spain for the Leftist revolt cause long before the war. Close friend of Socialist leader Del Vayo, and of Leftist revolt leader Luis Quintanilla, the painter, Allen was arrested during the 1936
[sic]
revolt for allegedly harbouring the revolutionary executive committee in his apartment. Files of the
New York Times
during that month will reveal that he was warned by Ambassador Bowers to keep out of Spanish politics. The article in question (I do not recall the exact date) was written by Mr Carney, and resulted in a bitter feud between the two during the remainder of their assignment in Madrid.
⁴³

Knoblaugh himself published extremely dubious atrocity propaganda for the Francoists and contributed to the cover-up on Guernica. According to Jay Allen, the entire book written by Knoblaugh was a fabrication: ‘As you know, some Jesuit or other helped him with his book.
He was hardly literate. If you remember the book, it was a very special production, wildly untrue. Of course, Eddie did have some odd ideas and his powers of observation were not exceptional but it was odd that his “memoires” came out in that special pattern.’
⁴⁴
In 1942, Jay met him in Peoria, where he was working on the local paper, the
Peoria Star.
When Jay raised the issue of the letter, Knoblaugh, who was not very bright, replied that it had been ‘taken care of’, by which he meant that he had written to Thorning to protest that personal letters should not be circulated freely. Jay retorted that ‘the matter may have been “taken care of” with the man of God but not yet with me, seeing as how the letter had been written and was about me and, among other things, was quite wrong’.
⁴⁵
In a similar effort to convince Milly Bennett that his slanders were of no importance, Knoblaugh wrote: ‘I am happy to say that not a single statement of fact that I made in the book about the forces that were at work was challenged by those who would most have liked to have torn me to pieces. I knew what I was talking about and the Loyalist supporters knew that I knew.’ This was far from the truth, but it was hardly surprising that it was the view of someone who could write: ‘I think I have read almost every book out on the war, and believe me, I have never seen such a mess of junk as some of them are. Others have a modicum of fact, but it seems that no one tried to be objective and impartial except myself.’ Since Knoblaugh believed that the Russians were behind the Asturian miners’ uprising of 1934, his views could hardly be described as objective.
⁴⁶

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’.