Truman, Franco's Spain, and the Cold War

Wayne H. Bowen

• Publisher: University of Missouri
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780826221179
• eBook ISBN: 9780826273840
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

Well-deployed primary sources and brisk writing by Wayne H. Bowen make this an excellent framework for understanding the evolution of U.S. policy toward Spain, and thus how a nation facing a global threat develops strategic relationships over time.

President Harry S. Truman harbored an abiding disdain for Spain and its government. During his presidency (1945–1953), the State Department and the Department of Defense lobbied Truman to form an alliance with Spain to leverage that nation's geostrategic position, despite Francisco Franco's authoritarian dictatorship. The eventual alliance between the two countries came only after years of argument for such a shift by nearly the entire U.S. diplomatic and military establishment. This delay increased the financial cost of the 1953 defense agreements with Spain, undermined U.S. planning for the defense of Europe, and caused dysfunction over foreign policy at the height of the Cold War.

CHAPTER 1

YOUNG HARRY’S TWO WARS 1884–1918

WELL BEFORE HE reached adulthood, Harry Truman had identified Spain as an enemy, not only of many of his heroes, but one he was prepared to fight himself. Even though his later battles would be against Germans, not Spaniards, he would continue to hold the strong anti-Spanish feelings developed in his earliest years. Through his reading, the circumstances of his youth, his personal actions, and the involvement of family members in the Spanish-American War, he came to know Spain and the Spanish Empire on the most unfavorable terms possible. During his teens, Spain was briefly the chief enemy of Harry’s worldview, a nation he viewed as an adversary of progress throughout history and of his nation in his time.

Four times in his life Harry Truman attempted to enter active service in the US Army; the first of these times was in 1898, when he unsuccessfully sought to enlist to fight in the Spanish–American War. While his enmity toward Spain would later be joined by anti-German, anti-Nazi, and anti-Communist sentiments, for the rest of his life, and certainly in federal office, he demonstrated the persistence of this Hispanophobia. Indeed, one can see the origins of Truman’s antipathy toward Spain in general, and the Franco regime specifically, in his early years as a schoolboy. He came into this perspective not only through his diligent and prodigious reading program, heavy on history and biography, but from his family. Many of Truman’s own relatives, including those who made an impact on his life, as well as ancestors who remained in living memory, had long embraced Southern sympathies that included a dislike of Catholic Spain.

By the time he entered adulthood, Truman was also a solid Democrat, taking after his father in this regard. Introduced to the oratory and populism of William Jennings Bryan, and having experienced the hard shocks of bankruptcy and business failure, he remained skeptical of the ability of markets alone to solve the problems of society. Described by one economist as a politician who viewed the world as a “progressive populist,” Truman developed his populism into an ardent faith in the common man, with a deep skepticism of corporations and the titans of industry, especially when they colluded with government to skew the marketplace in their favor.¹ Truman’s faith in government grew as he saw its ability, even in the midst of the sketchy morality of city machine politics, to accomplish the common good for those most in need, initially at the local level. Indeed, by his early twenties he had seen firsthand the ability of the state to rescue those down on their luck from falling even lower in society—an experience he would himself go through several times in his own life. He came to see not just untrammeled capitalism, but specifically the Republicans who were its strongest defenders, as culpable for his own failures and those of other farmers and small businessmen.²

During his young years, Harry Truman was an unusual child. While the geographic range of his experience was limited to a relatively constrained region of western Missouri and eastern Kansas, his intellectual range was much more vast. A serious reader from a very early age, he devoured volumes in US and European military history, as well as biographies of wartime leaders, monarchs, and political giants from ancient to modern. Among the works he read, Spain and Spaniards figured little, only occasionally appearing as rivals to Harry’s heroes, or as representatives of a land of corruption, ignorance, and intolerance. Harry would himself write of Spain in this context as a high school student, penning a story that echoed these prejudices.

Indeed, enemies and invaders of Spain, most notably Napoleon Bonaparte, figured most significantly and heroically in young Harry’s reading. Harry Truman’s interest in Napoleon and the exploits of France was hardly remarkable for his era. Even after their ignominious defeat by the resurgent Germans in 1870 to 1871, ironically while led by Emperor Napoleon III, nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, but possessing none of his competence in military affairs, the French army was still seen as a model, with their tactics, operational art, strategy, and even logistics studied and imitated by the United States and other nations. It would be alongside the French that Harry would later gain combat experience in the First World War, as an ally of what had been one of his favorite nations as a boy.

One of the formative book collections that played an essential role in Harry Truman’s understanding of world history, and the place of Spain in it, was the four-volume Great Men and Famous Women anthology edited by Charles Horne.³ Truman received the books for his tenth birthday in 1894, reading them all the way through within days; they quickly became a treasured and frequently reread part of his personal library.⁴ The first volume, Soldiers and Sailors, was by far Harry’s favorite, with its vivid accounts of the lives of kings, battlefield commanders, and heroes of history and legend: Napoleon, Alexander the Great, Gustavus Adolphus, Andrew Jackson, Charlemagne, George Washington, and others.⁵ As the first major work of history to which he dedicated significant time, these volumes played an early and pivotal role in shaping his understanding of world and US history, as well as the national characteristics—even stereotypes—of nations. As a man well known for his prejudices, both negative and positive, based on ethnicity and religion, it seems reasonable to look to these volumes to determine the values associated with Spain that had primacy with young Harry, that they were mentioned by Truman and acquaintances for the influence they had on him.

Spaniards first make a minor appearance in the account of the Carthaginian general Hannibal, the commander in the Second Punic War. In the third century BC, Hannibal famously led an army across the Alps, accompanied by African elephants, to wreak havoc in the Italian peninsula. In this version, Iberians are described as Hannibal’s auxiliary force, serving as a “motley army” along with “Libyans . . . and Gauls” against the better organized and more civilized Romans. In another account of the Roman era, Spanish tribes are recounted as exhibiting a rebellious “faithlessness,” shifting from encouraging the Roman general Scipio Africanus to proclaim himself as king, to asserting independence from the Romans, to deserting to the Carthaginians. During the period of the Roman Empire, the Spanish territories were pervaded by “banditti,” and even the Hispanic origins of Trajan—the first emperor who had been born in Spain—are cast in doubt.⁶

Great Men and Famous Women presented Spain during the early Middle Ages as a Christian peninsula that was overrun—through its own weakness and corruption—by Islamic states of superior military strength, learning, and civilization. This was in clear contrast to the image of France, which, under Charles Martel and Charlemagne, held off Muslim invaders through battlefield courage and was a shining example of early medieval chivalry. In the biographical sketch of Charlemagne, for example, both Muslim and Christian Spaniards are described as quarrelsome and untrustworthy. In various accounts, it is the betrayal by Spanish and Basque vassals of Charlemagne that were responsible for the infamous ambush that became the literary masterpiece “The Song of Roland,” a tragic epic that shaped a millennium of Western beliefs about the Iberian Peninsula, despite its dubious historical accuracy.⁷

Out of the sixty-nine individuals in the first volume, the only two Spaniards with their own profiles were Hernando Cortés and Francisco Pizarro. Cortés receives the more favorable account. In his five-page sketch, he is described as one of the world’s “Men of Destiny” along with Caesar, Cromwell, Muhammad and Napoleon, “raised up and endowed with great talents and opportunities in order that by their agency the ends of Providence might be shaped.” The conquest of the Aztecs by Cortés is generally a heroic tale in this volume, although the greed and ruthless ambition of the Conquistador receives some attention. Whatever excesses the Spaniard committed, the author makes plain they pale to the human sacrifice, and imperial conquests of the Aztecs themselves.⁸ Pizarro, however, received little more than scorn in Great Men and Famous Women. The conqueror of the Incas is described as “greedy” and exhibiting “none of the great qualities of a born ruler and lawgiver; in the coarseness of his moral virtue, a swineherd to the last.”⁹ As the only Spanish “Soldiers and Sailors,” these were the two portraits young Truman had in this, his favorite volume of this collection. While Cortés emerges as a more sympathetic figure, both nonetheless come through their respective texts as destroyers of native empires, hungry for gold, personally ambitious, intolerant of other religions, and, in what must have been shocking for young Harry, unfaithful to their wives and disloyal to their superior officers.

Contrasted with these Spanish adventurers, Truman would also have read the far more favorable and heroic accounts of the Englishmen Francis Drake and Walter Raleigh. Drake’s raids on Spanish ships, cities, and colonies were “a just reprisal upon the Spaniards for their faithless and cruel practices,” while Raleigh’s nobility in dealing with local populations in South America is contrasted with the “savage conduct of the Spaniards.” Even more, the execution of Raleigh, at the behest of Spain, which had suffered multiple attacks by the English explorer and his crews, is an entirely hagiographic depiction of the persecution of a saintly and innocent man. While Raleigh was clearly executed for political reasons, and under Spanish pressure, the image of a Protestant hero killed at the behest of Catholic Spain added to Truman’s early perspective on the Spanish monarchy.¹⁰

The ambitions of Napoleon Bonaparte, another hero of Truman’s, were frustrated by the Spanish, who rose up against French occupation in 1808 and, with British aid, held off an occupying army for five years, until the Grande Armée’s losses forced a withdrawal from the Iberian Peninsula. Through their resistance to Napoleon, the Spaniards were able “to paralyze half Napoleon’s strength,” thus preventing the Corsican “genius” from achieving his vision of a Europe united under the civilizing authority of France. This “hopeless struggle against an entire people” crippled Napoleon at a critical juncture, weakening his will and forces in the struggle against England and, after 1812, the Russian Empire. While the profile of Marshal Ney, in which the struggle against Spain is featured most prominently, does give a nod to the courage of the Spanish people, Truman might have felt some sense of disappointment in their negative impact on Napoleon’s vision, which Truman would later describe in very favorable terms.¹¹

In moments of adolescent speculation, Truman dreamed of being Napoleon himself, imagining ways he could have won battles Napoleon lost, to preserve France’s imperial glory. He fantasized of being a great man of history, leading armies into battle and returning as a triumphant hero. While Truman did not later mention Napoleon’s defeat in Spain, accounts of the “Spanish ulcer,” the resistance to the French by the Spaniards that was the origin of the term “guerrilla war,” pervade the military history of the first French Empire. Napoleon remained a hero to Truman, an admiration developed during the early years. Beyond Great Men and Famous Women, Truman read and reread military accounts of Bonaparte’s campaigns, including the favorable biography, “Life of Napoleon,” by the French general and strategist Baron Jomini. Despite Napoleon’s defeat at the hands of the Spanish and the Russians, as recounted by Jomini, young Truman was continually imagining ways the French enterprise could have come to a different conclusion for Napoleon, “always hoping in the end he’d win the Battle of Waterloo.”¹² Presumably, the thought crossed his mind of ways he could also have defeated the Spanish rebels who opposed his favorite French general.

Contrasted to the perfidious Spanish, the example of Robert E. Lee in Great Men and Famous Women was even starker. The Southern general and commander of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia was, in the profile written by [British] General Viscount Wolsley described as “the greatest of his age” and “the most perfect man I ever met.” Of Lee, Truman would read that he had been not only “the model Christian gentleman in thought, word and deed” but also “what a true hero should be.” If Lee—Protestant, Southern, military, and the consummate supporter of tradition and order—was a role model for Truman, it is easy to see how this image would stand in opposition to the Spanish characters mentioned or profiled in Great Men and Famous Women.¹³ Lee would continue to serve as a hero for Truman throughout his life, a sentiment cemented through hearing first-hand accounts from Missourians who had served under the Confederate commander.¹⁴ Indeed, Harry was so transfixed by accounts of Pickett’s Charge, as recounted by his Latin teacher, whose father had served in that battle under Lee, that he embraced an opportunity to meet the old veteran.¹⁵

The volumes Statesmen and Sages, Workmen and Heroes, and Artists and Authors reflected even more the absence of Spaniards among his catalog of idols, with only one in each book. Isabella of Castile is the token in Volume 2. Along with a generally favorable account of her life, the author describes her reign as queen as one characterized by “religious bigotry,” with strong criticism of the expulsion of the Jews and Moors, as well as the “terrors of the Inquisition” and the “blind zeal” with which the Catholic monarchy crushed Protestantism within Spain.¹⁶ Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, who ruled largely through Spanish power, and who set the stage for the reign of his son, Philip II, is similarly accounted for as an ardent Catholic monarch who had no love for his subjects, instead “mowing down their lives by hundreds of thousands in war.”¹⁷

El Cid, a medieval knight and nobleman, is the only Spaniard profiled in Workmen and Heroes. In his medieval Spain, “war raged perpetually” between Christians and Muslims, and between those of the same faith in “unnatural and deadly quarrels.” While a reasonable interpretation of Spanish history, this hardly made Spain unique for its time. The Spanish monarchy comes under additional criticism for its treatment of Miguel Cervantes, author of Don Quixote, with King Philip III blamed as being responsible for allowing the famous author to remain “bowed down by poverty and infirmities, and nothing was done for him by the king or his courtiers.” Decadent, warlike, and besotted by dour religion, Spain was an image that countervailed the values Truman would develop in his political and spiritual life.¹⁸

Throughout these sketches, the image of Spain that Truman saw was one of intolerance and violence, with few exemplars of the military, creative, and political genius demonstrated elsewhere in Europe. Even those, such as Miguel Cervantes and El Cid, who showed positive attributes were noted as exceptions in their times, with opposition to them widespread among the elites, hidebound by ultra-Catholicism and petty quarrels. For many years, Truman would remain interested in Cervantes, with an English translation of Don Quixote among the few books in the personal library of his DC apartment in the early 1940s. Did he remember the miseries of Cervantes that he had learned about as a young boy in Great Men, and the neglect of his countrymen in Castile?¹⁹ The volumes of Great Men and Famous Women, which Truman would often cite among those works most influential to him, would eventually make their way into the White House, with a spot on the bookshelves of President Truman, demonstrating the long-term impact of these childhood stories.²⁰ Truman would frequently insist that history mattered to him, that he saw it as a guide, and that successful leaders drew on the lessons of the past, lessons he had repeatedly drawn from a four-volume collection of stories.²¹

He was also a fan of Mark Twain, a fellow Freemason, and would reread this Missouri author’s fiction and nonfiction for the rest of his life. Twain, “ironic, blunt and pithy,” also reflected an anti-Catholicism in some of his writing, often more implicit than explicit.²² In A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court, there are frequent unfavorable portrayals of the Catholic Church as corrupt, obsessed with power, and decidedly un-spiritual. As in Great Men and Famous Women, it is the Protestant hero in the novel who saves the day, against the efforts of nefarious priests, monks, and bishops of the church. While Twain in general was a skeptic of organized religion, a path followed in many ways by Truman—not coincidentally—both reflected a time of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when to be skeptical of organized religion meant to be especially suspicious of the most organized among the religions: Roman Catholicism.²³

To the extent that Spain entered into the imagination of young Harry, it was as an adversary: of England, the Protestant Reformation, of Napoleon. Even more directly, Spain was the national enemy of his youth, killing Americans in Cuba, the Philippines and elsewhere, its evils portrayed on the front pages of US newspapers. Indeed, as the Spanish-American War began in spring 1898, the fourteen-year-old Harry had in his mind the idea of enlisting.

Harry knew that military experience was important in the careers of great men. Demonstrating his organizational ability, he formed a rifle company (.22 cal), the Independence Junior Militia. The dozen or so boys elected a captain, and drilled weekly around the neighborhood.²⁴

Perhaps this experience was nothing more than young teens running through the backyards, fields, and woods in and around Independence. However, the United States was at war, boys slightly older—or able to pass as such—were being taken into the US Army and Navy, and the ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 - Young Harry’s Two Wars, 1884-1918
• Chapter 2 - Senator Truman, the Spanish Civil War and World War II
• Chapter 3 - No Love for Franco, 1945-1947
• Chapter 4 - A Necessary Evil, 1947-1949
• Chapter 5 - Magnified by Controversy, 1949-1951
• Chapter 6 - Reluctant Allies, 1951-1953
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index