Authors: Preston Paul
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 ever 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.
Once established at Puy, he began to publish the series of books that obliged the Franco regime to change its falsified version of its own past. The most celebrated was the first,
The Myth of Franco’s Crusade,
the devastating exposé of right-wing propaganda about the Spanish Civil War.
21
By putting up the money for Ruedo Ibérico, to publish it, he inadvertently saved the house from financial collapse. In fact, because the French printer had little experience of typesetting in Spanish, the first edition contained so many errors that it had to be pulped.
22
Nevertheless, it appeared in 1963 and a year later in a much expanded French edition, it was decisive in persuading Manuel Fraga to set up the department solely dedicated to the modernization of regime historiography. Its director, Ricardo de la Cierva, in a losing battle with Southworth, went on to write over one hundred books in defence of the Franco regime. This feat was achieved by dint of having the resources of the Ministry of Information at his disposal until the death of Franco, and by a lack of inhibition about self-repetition. Jay Allen sent a copy of
El mito
to Louis Fischer, describing the book as ‘an extremely detailed and able job’. Aware that Herbert was facing significant financial problems, Jay asked Louis in his capacity as a distinguished professor in Princeton if he could use his influence to persuade the university to acquire the Southworth collection ‘and Fritz along with it’.
In 1967, Southworth wrote a second book,
Antifalange,
also published by Ruedo Ibérico, a massively erudite commentary on the process whereby Franco converted the Falange into the single party of his regime. It had significantly less commercial impact than
El mito,
because it was a minutely detailed line-by-line commentary on a book by a Falangist writer, Maximiano García Venero,
Falange en la guerra de
España: la Unificación y Hedilla.
García Venero was the ghost-writer for the wartime Falangist leader, Manuel Hedilla, who had opposed Franco’s take-over of the single party in April 1937.
23
Having been condemned to years of imprisonment, internal exile and penury, Hedilla saw the book as an attempt to revindicate his role in the war. José Martínez, the director of Ruedo Ibérico, asked Herbert to provide detailed notes expanding on the things that García Venero had chosen not to say about Falangist violence. Given his exhaustive knowledge of the Falange, those notes eventually grew to a scale that required their publication in an accompanying volume. Meanwhile, Manuel Fraga had become aware of the imminent publication, and had ensured that the Spanish Embassy in Paris put pressure on García Venero to prevent publication and indeed cause fatal damage to Ruedo Ibérico. Since the enormous book had already been typeset at great expense, José Martínez refused and, after labyrinthine legal complications, the two books were released.
24
Southworth’s devastating demolition of García Venero’s text revealed such knowledge of the interstices of the Falange that it provoked considerable surprise and admiration among many senior Falangists. As a result of his prior research for his projected book on the Falange, Southworth had long since been engaged in a flourishing correspondence with major Falangists, among them Ernesto Giménez Caballero, Jesús Suevos and Ángel Alcázar de Velasco. This continued until his death and was notable for the tone of respect with which many of them treated him.
In the mid-1960s, Herbert had entered into contact with the great French hispanist, Pierre Vilar, who had persuaded him of the utility of presenting a doctoral thesis at the Sorbonne. Initially, he had planned to do so with a complete annotated bibliography of the Spanish Civil War along the lines of a vastly expanded version of
Le mythe de la croisade de Franco.
As he worked on this, however, he got more and more involved in one element, the propaganda battle over the bombing of Guernica.
25
In 1975, Herbert Southworth’s masterpiece appeared in Paris as
La destruction de Guernica. Journalisme, diplomatie, propagande et histoire,
to be followed shortly afterwards by a Spanish translation. The English original appeared as
Guernica! Guernica! A Study of Journalism, Diplomacy, Propaganda and History.
Based on a staggering
array of sources, it is an astonishing reconstruction of the effort by Franco’s propagandists and admirers to wipe out the atrocity at Guernica – and it thus had a very considerable impact in the Basque Country. The book did not reconstruct the bombing itself, but actually begins with the arrival in Guernica from Bilbao of the
Times
correspondent, George L. Steer, together with three other foreign journalists.
It is a work of the most fascinating and meticulous research, which reconstructs the web of lies and half-truths that falsified what really happened at Guernica. The most exaggerated Francoist version, which blamed the destruction of the town on sabotaging miners from Asturias, was the invention of Luis Bolín, the head of Franco’s foreign press office. To evaluate the work of Bolín and the subsequent manipulation of international opinion about the event, Southworth carefully reconstructed the conditions under which foreign correspondents were obliged to work in the Nationalist zone. He showed how Bolín frequently threatened to have shot any correspondent whose despatches did not follow the Francoist propaganda line. After a detailed demolition of the line peddled by Bolín, Southworth went on to dismantle the inconsistencies in the writings of Bolín’s English allies, Douglas Jerrold, Arnold Lunn and Robert Sencourt.
It might normally be expected that a detailed account of the historiography of a subject would be the arid labour of the narrow specialist. However, Southworth managed, with unique mastery, to turn his study of the complex construction of a huge lie into a highly readable book. Among the most interesting and important pages of the book there is an analysis of the relationship between Francoist writing on Guernica and the growth of the Basque problem in the 1970s. Southworth demonstrated that there was an effort being carried out to lower the tension between Madrid and Euzkadi by means of the elaboration of a new version of what happened in Guernica. For this, it was crucial for neo-Francoist historiography to accept that Guernica had been bombed and not destroyed by Red saboteurs. Having conceded that the atrocity was largely the work of the Luftwaffe, in total contradiction of the regime’s previous orthodoxy, it became important for the official historians to free the Nationalist high command from all blame. This task required a high degree of sophistry, since the Germans were in
Spain in the first place at the request of Francisco Franco. Nevertheless, the neo-Francoists set out to distinguish between what they portrayed as independent German initiative and the innocence of Franco and the commander in the north, General Emilio Mola. Therefore, Southworth analysed the massive literature on the subject to advance a clear hypothesis: Guernica was bombed by the Condor Legion at the request of the Francoist high command in order to destroy Basque morale and undermine the defence of Bilbao.