Authors: Preston Paul
Another journalist who could hardly be considered either objective or accurate was Hugh Slater, a handsome middle-class English Communist, who was a graduate of the Slade School of Art. In London, he used his
real name, ‘Humphrey’, but, for Spain, had adopted the somewhat more proletarian ‘Hugh’. Along with William Forrest, Slater had driven into Spain in an aged white Rolls Royce. His objective was to write for
Imprecor
(the International Press Correspondence), the Comintern’s English-language newspaper. The Rolls Royce guzzled petrol and was ‘dreadfully noticeable on the battlefield’. For some time, Forrest and Slater commuted from Madrid to Toledo each day to follow the siege of the Alcázar but Slater was dissatisfied with his journalistic work. Kate Mangan, who worked for a time as Slater’s secretary in Madrid, noted: ‘I had realised at length that Humphry
[sic]
was jealous of the soldiers. It sounds an odd thing to say but he envied them their heroism.’
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Wanting to do more than merely recite the party line in
Imprecor,
Slater joined the International Brigade and was appointed political commissar of the British battalion’s anti-tank battery. His working-class comrades regarded him suspiciously as merely a middle-class ideologue, ‘amiable and decorative’ in the words of Fred Thomas, ‘extremely arrogant’ according to Tony McLean. A brigade report from May 1937 described him as ‘generally unpopular due to sectarian activities etc. alleged. To some extent this may have been eliminated but manner is not one conducive to successful work with rank-and-file.’ A later report commented that he ‘was disliked by the majority of the men. They considered him a schemer.’ Nevertheless, he was apparently a more than competent military tactician, and was named commander of the antitank battery on 30 July 1937. Three months later he was promoted to captain and on 8 April 1938, he was made chief of operations in the general staff of the XV Brigade. Official brigade reports described him as ‘a leader almost of genius but too keen on his own comfort, which had a bad effect on his unit’. He was badly affected by a bout of typhoid and was repatriated in October 1938. After the Spanish Civil War, disillusioned with Stalinism, he became a novelist.
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The difficulties facing journalists who tried to maintain a commitment both to the Republican cause and to the ethics of their profession were illustrated by an incident on the Madrid front involving Louis Fischer. As the rebel Army of Africa approached the capital, Cockburn and Koltsov were joined by ‘an American journalist’ – Fischer – who had just published a brilliant and rather moving article about the
demoralization of the Republican militia who were trying in vain to halt the advance of Franco’s African columns. One of Fischer’s recurrent themes was the imbalance between the rebels’ well-armed, well-trained forces and the barely armed scratch militia of the Republic – ‘untrained, inexperienced, undisciplined and badly officered. They melt away under fire.’ He lamented that, on 25 September, two days before the city fell, he had witnessed frightened militiamen fleeing from German bombing raids on Toledo. Datelined 8 October, his article appeared two weeks later.
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A couple of days after that, Fischer coincided with Cockburn and Koltsov south of Madrid.
When he saw Fischer get out of his car and walk towards them, a furious Koltsov spat on the ground in disgust and refused to shake hands with him. When Fischer asked what he had done wrong, Koltsov said that he had just received the text of the article from Moscow. Fischer remonstrated that he had merely reported the facts, saying: ‘What’s the good of pretending our militia here aren’t demoralized and bewildered? Who’s going to believe me if I tell the old story once again?’ Koltsov responded sarcastically: ‘Yes. Those are the facts. How extraordinarily observant and truthful you are.’ The discussion grew more bitter. Koltsov said: ‘You, with your reputation, you can really spread alarm and despondency. And that’s what you’ve done. You’ve done more harm than thirty British MPs working for Franco. And you expect me to shake hands with you.’ When Fischer persisted that the facts were the facts and that the readers had the right to know them, Koltsov replied: ‘If you were a little more frank, you’d say that what you’re really interested in is your damned reputation as a journalist. You’re afraid that if you don’t put out this stuff, and it comes through someone else, you’ll be thought a bad reporter, can’t see the facts under his nose. Probably in the pay of the Republicans. That’s why you, as the French say, have lost an excellent opportunity to keep your mouth shut.’ Cockburn himself agreed with Koltsov that the public did not necessarily have the right to read the truth. When his wife questioned this, he would respond angrily: ‘Who gave them such a right? Perhaps when they have exerted themselves enough to alter the policy of their bloody government, and the Fascists are beaten in Spain, they will have such a right. This isn’t an abstract question. It’s a shooting war.’
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Despite his outburst against Fischer, Koltsov was not entirely comfortable with the need to tailor what he wrote to political necessity. This can be discerned in what another Soviet correspondent, Ilya Ehrenburg, wrote years later:
The history of Soviet journalism knows no greater name, and his fame was well deserved. But having raised journalism to a high standard, having demonstrated to his readers that a report or an article could be a work of art, he did not believe it himself. More than once he said to me with wry irony: ‘Other people write novels. But what will remain of me after I’ve gone? Newspaper articles are ephemeral stuff. Even an historian won’t find them very useful, because we don’t show in our articles what is going on in Spain, only what ought to be happening.’
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That it was possible to combine high professional standards with a passionate belief in the Spanish Republic was demonstrated by Matthews, Fischer, Buckley, Forrest, Cox, Fernsworth and many others, but perhaps most of all by Jay Allen. Like Buckley and Fernsworth, Allen had followed events in Spain for a long time, first working out of Paris in the 1920s and eventually going to live in Spain at the beginning of 1934. There he formed close friendships with many of the most prominent figures of the Socialist Party. A deep interest in the problems of rural Spain lay behind a warm appreciation of the Republic’s attempts to introduce universal education and agrarian reform. Among many important articles written before and after the military coup of July 1936, Jay Allen filed what, along with Mario Neves’ reports on the massacre of Badajoz and George Steer’s report on the bombing of Guernica, were three of the most important, and frequently quoted, articles written during the war. These were an exclusive interview with Franco in Tetuán on 27 July 1936, his own account of the aftermath of the Nationalist capture of Badajoz and the last ever interview given by the about-to-be-executed founder of the Spanish fascist party, the Falange, José Antonio Primo de Rivera. The interview with Franco was remarkable for the rebel leader’s declaration of his readiness to unleash mass slaughter in order to achieve his ends.
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The immensely moving
report from Badajoz led to Jay Allen being denigrated by right-wing broadcasters and journalists across the United States.
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A journalist who supplied defamatory material about Jay Allen, William P. Carney, was one of a small number of pro-rebel correspondents who worked for a time in the Republican zone. A thirty-eight-year-old Catholic from San Antonio, Texas, Carney had been covering Spanish Republican politics since 1931, on the basis of regular short trips from the
New York Times
’s Paris office.
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Carney had spent the early months of the war as the
New York Times
correspondent in Madrid. After some friction with various Republican authorities, he was reassigned to Salamanca. In both zones, he frequently used his reports to benefit the Francoist cause and, in consequence, he was nicknamed ‘General Bill’ by other correspondents. As a correspondent of the rival
New York Herald Tribune,
James Minifie believed that Carney not only tilted articles in favour of the rebels, but also invented ‘news’ on the basis of ‘eye-witness’ reports. When these ‘absentee eye-witness reports’ appeared in the
New York Times,
Minifie would receive from his own paper queries about the episodes described. So blatant were they that he was able to respond adequately simply by cabling back the words ‘Another Carney exclusive’. He remembered later the difficulties created for Herbert Matthews by Carney’s practices. Matthews not only found his own credibility questioned but also, according to Minifie, ‘was conscientious enough to check every wide-eyed Carney story that his paper had printed. He was then faced with the problem of straightening out the facts, without too obviously undercutting his colleague.’
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On leaving Madrid, Carney had gone to Paris, whence he sent a lengthy and virulently anti-Republican article to the
New York Times,
which was published on 7 December 1936. It appeared under the subheading ‘All Semblance of Democratic Forms of Government in Spain Disappears – 25,000 Put to Death by Radicals – Priests, Nuns Slain’. Ignoring the fact that the conditions in a besieged capital demanded some form of censorship, he was outraged that he had been prevented from publishing pro-rebel articles, claiming falsely that: ‘Any one engaged in reporting the course of events is in danger of being seized as a spy and perhaps shot summarily before he can prove his innocence.’ Within the list of his hardships could be found the complaint that his
apartment had been wrecked by a Francoist bombing raid, an incident which somehow intensified his resentment of the Republican authorities. Elsewhere in the article, he portrayed the deaths of civilians during the bombing of Madrid residential districts as the fault of the Republic by quoting the rebels to the effect that the government had made itself responsible for all the harm that may befall civilians by attempting to defend what they called an unfortified open city. Indeed, he was ready to express his annoyance because he had to walk through darkened streets during the black-out and because he had to wait his turn to phone out his stories.
There were many aspects of his article which, for obvious reasons, were not to the liking of the Republican authorities. Not least among them was the fact that they were simply untrue. He claimed for instance that the international volunteers who had come to help defend Madrid were mostly Russians and that ‘for some time, Russia has been running the show in Spain in so far as the Madrid government’s resistance to General Franco’s insurgent movement is concerned’. He asserted that the Russian Ambassador, Marcel Rosenberg, had hand-picked the government of Largo Caballero and presided at cabinet meetings. He also complained that the staff of the censorship for the foreign press included a Russian and an Austrian Socialist, a reference to Ilsa Kulcsar. The latter was true, but he failed to take into account that it was not easy in the besieged city to find people capable of reading a wide range of Western and Eastern European languages. All of these claims were aimed at generating antipathy to the Republic in the United States. He also described in street-by-street detail how the rebels could take the capital. Such details would have been lost on the great majority of
New York Times
readers but might have been of some use to the rebels. Even more sensitive was his detailed account of the city’s anti-aircraft defences:
Machine guns and ridiculously ineffectual anti-aircraft guns firing one-pound shells are mounted on the tops of all the ministries and tall buildings in the centre of the city, such as the Fine Arts structure in Calle Alcalá, Madrid’s main street, and the Palace of the Press in the Gran Vía. Batteries of six-inch guns
have been placed in Callao Square, directly in front of the Palace of the Press, and in one corner of the Retiro, the vast public park; near the Prado Museum, the observatory and the Ministry of Public Works.
Graphically and accurately describing the appalling conditions of the starving capital, without light and heating, and often without shelter, Carney made it clear that its sufferings were the fault of the ‘ferocious proletarian-directed determination to defend the city unto death’. The great popular mobilization in defence of the city was dismissed in contemptuous terms.
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Carney’s article also included details of the activities of self-appointed extra-judicial squads, although by his own admission, his own encounters with them always ended with an apology by the authorities. Given the wealth of detail that it provided about the persecution of priests, nuns and right-wingers, this unequivocally pro-Nationalist article was reprinted as a pamphlet by
Catholic Mind,
with the sub-headings ‘No democratic government in Spain’, ‘Russia’s part in Spain’s civil war’ and ‘Murder and anti-religion in Spain’.
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Once in the Nationalist zone, Carney continued to write about Madrid in a hostile manner, describing it as a ‘shabby, proletarian city’, populated by hopeless and violent riff-raff.
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According to Constancia de la Mora, who was eventually to head the Republic’s censorship office, Carney had been given every facility to travel within the Republican zone, ‘although he was known to have fascist sympathies and fascist friends’.
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In his article, Carney had complained:
the censorship established in Madrid, both for the Spanish press and for foreign correspondents, was on lines much more in keeping with Soviet ideas than with the customs of a democratic regime. All telephoned and telegraphed despatches had to be passed personally by a censor, and objections that the censors raised were constantly of such a nature as to exact strict adherence to government policy and the removal of all critical statements with regard to the situation in Madrid.
He seemed oblivious to the fact that such strictures were normal in wartime. The fact that the only ‘punishment’ for journalists who transgressed the rules was prohibition of the offending part of the despatch did not really sustain his claim that these were Soviet-style restrictions. When he went to the Nationalist zone, where transgressions of the censorship regularly provoked death threats, imprisonment and/or expulsion, he found the censorship arrangements to be admirable. This was perhaps because his writings were so openly favourable to the rebels that they never encountered difficulties with the censors.