Arguing Americanism

Franco Lobbyists, Roosevelt's Foreign Policy, and the Spanish Civil War

Michael E. Chapman

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9781612775289
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

The struggle to define U.S. national identity through a political conflict in Spain

"An unusually original book that challenges established assumptions and reveals the complexity of American reactions to the Spanish Civil War."— Stanley G. Payne, University of Wisconsin-Madison

In 1938 the United States was embroiled in a vicious debate between supporters of the two sides of the Spanish Civil War, who sought either to lift or to retain the U.S. arms embargo on Spain. The embargo, which favored Gen. Francisco Franco's Nationalist regime over the ousted Republican government of the Loyalists, received heavy criticism for enabling a supposedly fascist-backed takeover during a time when the Nazi party in Germany was threatening the annexation of countries across Europe. Supporters of General Franco, however, saw the resistance of the Loyalists as being spurred on by the Soviet Union, which sought to establish a communist government abroad.

Since World War II, American historians have traditionally sided with the Loyalist supporters, validating their arguments that the pro-Nationalists were un-American for backing an unpalatable dictator. In Arguing Americanism, author Michael E. Chapman examines the long-overlooked pro-Nationalist argument. Employing new archival sources, Chapman documents a small yet effective network of lobbyists—including engineer turned writer John Eoghan Kelly, publisher Ellery Sedgwick, homemaker Clare Dawes, muralist Hildreth Meière, and philanthropist Anne Morgan—who fought to promote General Franco's Nationalist Spain and keep the embargo in place.

Arguing Americanism also goes beyond the embargo debate to examine the underlying issues that gripped 1930s America. Chapman posits that the Spanish embargo argument was never really about Spain but rather about the soul of Americanism, the definition of democracy, and who should do the defining. Pro-Loyalists wanted the pure democracy of the ballot box; pro-Nationalists favored the checks and balances of indirect democracy. By pointing to what was happening in Spain, each side tried to defend its version of Americanism against the foreign forces that threatened it. For Franco supporters, it was the spread of international Marxism, toward which they felt Roosevelt and his New Deal were too sympathetic. The pro-Nationalists intensified an argument that became a precursor to a fundamental change in American national identity—a change that would usher in the Cold War era.

Arguing Americanism will appeal to political scientists, cultural historians, and students of U.S. foreign relations.

1

Pro-Franco Anticommunism

There was a one-column hint of trouble on 14 July 1936. Under the headline “Monarchist Chief Murdered in Spain,” New York Times correspondent William P. Car-ney, a Catholic whose sympathies were not with Madrid’s Popular Front government, wired that at 3:00 A.M. uniformed police in an official car arrested rightist opposition leader José Calvo Sotelo and then delivered his bayoneted body to a cemetery at 3:45.¹

As a band of cooler, rainy weather broke the Northeast’s record heat wave, four days passed with little to report, although a “clubfooted writer with a grudge against society” narrowly missed assassinating Britain’s King Edward. Then, on 19 July, the longest-running, most widely reported, and politically stimulating news saga of the decade erupted. “Spain Checks Army Rising” spanned two Times columns; the 20 July edition ran “Rebels Gain in South Spain” across three columns, and by 23 July, “Rebel Success Reported in Spain” covered half of the paper’s eight columns. It might never have garnered one of the rare full-width banners, as did “Roosevelt Sweeps Nation” and “Hindenberg Burns in Lakehurst Crash,” but from July 1936 to March 1939, the Spanish Civil War was rarely out of the news. With 1,069 column inches (8.9 percent), the Times devoted more front-page headlines to Spain than to unions and strikes (7.5 percent), New York politics (7.4 percent), violent crime (6.7 percent), or even Nazi Germany (6.7 percent).²

An ideological lightning rod, Spain’s civil war simultaneously energized and split opinion—although, as in 1776, when a third of Americans were ambivalent about independence, there were always those who opened newspapers at the sports section or classified advertisements. Generously funded by the Comintern and the Spanish embassy and professionally organized through existing Popular Front structures, pro-Loyalists presented a coherent, vocal lobby from the outset. Lobbyists for Gen. Francisco Franco’s Nationalists, by contrast, who first had to identify and then find themselves, operated autonomously throughout 1936–37, coalesced through informal networks, and did not build a national association until the end of 1938.

This chapter introduces the central actors in these overlapping pro-Nationalist circles, and shows how pro-Franco anticommunists influenced public opinion by intensifying an argument over U.S. foreign policy. It begins with John Eoghan Kelly, whose experience, efficiency, and productivity made him a surprisingly effective lobby-of-one, and ends by documenting the Franco advocacy of two old-stock elites, public administrator W. Cameron Forbes and Atlantic Monthly editor/publisher Ellery Sedgwick.

Cultured if understated, moneyed though careful, informed yet discreet, politically ambitious but from an ethic of public service, upper-crust Yankees typically learned Latin at Groton School, studied law at Harvard College, worshiped at an Episcopal church, connected in exclusive clubs, and gleaned opinion from literary journals like the Atlantic or Harper’s Weekly. As exemplified by Secretaries of State Henry L. Stimson and Dean Acheson and that most interventionist of presidents, Theodore Roosevelt, throughout the 1890s to 1950s these elite Northeasterners were disproportionately influential in Washington, especially in foreign policy making, where by reputation they favored Britain over Germany in the West, China over Japan in the East, and intervention over isolation, given an opportunity for advancing their liberal exceptionalist ideology and Open Door commercial interests. For otherwise liberal Yankee republicans, therefore, the foreign policy positions of Forbes, Sedgwick, and other like-minded Boston Brahmins in 1938 may seem unusual. Sedgwick’s circle, representative of an important segment of elite opinion, admired authoritarian regimes in Germany and Italy, supported Japan over China, and—when they argued that Franco, by confronting atheistic communism in Spain, was restoring much-needed order to the civilized Christian West—aligned themselves with the isolationists.³

This chapter highlights the Great Debate’s polarized Red-fascist rhetoric, which backed liberal progressives into the conservatives’ corner and laid the discursive groundwork for 1950s McCarthyism. It posits that Forbes and Sedgwick were not interested in Franco per se but promoted his cause because they sought to demonstrate the danger that international communism posed to Americanism during a period of crisis and insecurity. Yet theirs was neither an irrational response nor merely an informational campaign. Rather, it was an educated, if unconscious, effort to emphasize and enforce their particular definition of Americanism. Franco lobbyists mentally mapped Spain onto the United States to contrast what they saw as the amoral anarchy of encroaching foreign Marxism with the civilizing order of traditional American core values. Like later cold warriors, Franco lobbyists confronted the paradox of the necessary enemy. International communism represented the ultimate danger for a nation-state founded on Puritan ethics and the sanctity of private property. Defending the nation against that danger provided the perfect opportunity to strengthen national identity while establishing themselves as guardians and interpreters of national values; but defeating an ideology with the power and appeal of 1930s communism necessitated hard-nosed tactics that risked undermining the very values they aimed to defend.⁴

Kelly Family Activism

Spain’s conflict was of professional interest to U.S. Army Intelligence personnel, particularly those stationed in the soft-coal counties of the Appalachians where armed clashes between rival unions and with nonunion miners resembled small wars. When Assistant Chief of Staff Col. William A. Alfonte heard about a reserve officer in West Virginia who was an authority on Central American military history, fluent in Spanish, and a mining engineer with prior experience of monitoring subversives (“un-American Reds,” in army parlance), Alfonte asked him to find out all he could. By the end of 1936, Captain Kelly was lecturing groups of officers across the United States on the Spanish Civil War, a subject that came to define his life. Yet, ironically, Kelly’s strident anticommunism and unwavering support of Spain’s Nationalists would cost him his commission and land him in federal court in 1943 on a charge stemming from un-American activities.⁵

John Forrest Kelly, born in Ireland in 1859 to schoolteachers Jeremiah and Kate Kelly, emigrated to Hoboken, New Jersey, in 1873 with his mother to join his father, a Fenian who had fled Ireland a few years earlier. John earned a bachelor’s degree at nineteen and a PhD in electrochemical engineering after three years at the Stevens Institute. By 1886 he was chief electrician for the U.S. Electric Lighting Company. While living in Manhattan with his sister, Gertrude Bride Kelly, a pediatric surgeon, John was involved with the Knights of Labor and presided over a mass protest meeting in the aftermath of Chicago’s Haymarket Square riot. Passionate about political philosophy, John and Bride, as she was known, were individualist anarchists, advocating a kind of free-market socialism that stressed personal responsibility, privately funded education, and nonviolent political action through local yet federated societies.⁶

It was probably through anarchist circles that John met Helen Tischer, who was also the daughter of German political exiles, republicans of 1848 from the Silesian border town of Görlitz. Helen was born in 1866. Shortly after Prussia forced Saxony into the North German Confederation in 1867, the Tischers emigrated to St. Louis, Missouri. In about 1885, Helen went to Manhattan as a social worker. After marrying in 1892, Helen and John moved to Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where John formed a partnership with William Stanley Jr. and Cummings C. Chesney. A pioneer of high-voltage alternating current transmission systems with seventy patents to his credit, John installed a 16,700-volt line from a generating station on the Yuba River eighteen miles to Marysville, California, in 1898 and then proved the feasibility of a 60,000-volt line from Electra, near San Andreas, 120 miles to Oakland. General Electric bought Stanley Electric in 1903, and John left to develop other ventures, including an electric player piano, oil exploration in the South, and the Cooke-Kelly process for dehydrating vegetables, with a manufacturing plant in Humboldt, Tennessee. In 1912 he took Helen and their two sons, John Eoghan (pronounced ŌWĬN) born 4 May 1896 and Domnall Forrest born in 1898, for a year-long tour of Asia and Europe; this was when seventeen-year-old Eoghan first experienced Spain. An indefatigable campaigner for Sinn Féin and Irish independence, John presided over the Massachusetts Friends of Irish Freedom, was the anonymous writer of much of the Irish World’s most politically influential content during 1919–22, and orchestrated a nationwide Irish American boycott of British goods. When he died of angina in October 1922, the World eulogized that Ireland had lost “her ablest champion on this side of the Atlantic.”⁷

John Eoghan Kelly evidently absorbed his parents’ views about radical action in the defense of republicanism, arguing with his eighth-grade teacher at Pittsfield High School that the French Revolution was “perfectly justified” and bringing his father’s copy of The Reds of the Midi by Felix Gras to prove it. An avid reader, he made full use of the 4,000-title family library—a rich resource for medicine, philosophy, or literature, from Cicero (in Latin) to Ibsen, Wilde, Faulkner, Shaw, and Forrester. At Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, he studied chemical engineering, qualified for the ice hockey team, and was an associate editor of The Polytechnic. A scrapper on the ice and “an absolute authority on college fraternities,” according to Rensselaer’s yearbook, Kelly “of the silver skates” enjoyed a reputation as “silver tongued.” But after overexerting himself in hockey training, he developed tubercular laryngitis—or at least that was the diagnosis of his aunt, who recommended he head to a dry climate to recover. This was opportune, since his father had business connections in Chihuahua, Mexico, outside the U.S. War Department draft board’s jurisdiction. While Kelly agreed with his father’s principled refusal to fight in the cause of British imperialism against Ireland’s ally, Germany, military life appealed to him. He first tried registering for the draft in 1917 and then applied for a commission with the Texas National Guard the following year, but his father refused to certify his American birth for the necessary passport application.⁸

In Chihuahua, Kelly worked for American Metals Company, added fluency in Spanish to that of French and German, and completed University of Mexico correspondence courses. With the Great War over, he went to help build his father’s dehydration plant in Tennessee and began dating Frances “Fanny” Mae Jeffries, a schoolteacher. Eager for further immersion in Spanish culture, he took a position as resident manager for a sisal plantation in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, returning briefly in March 1921 to marry Fanny in Chicago. It was the start of a passionate though stormy marriage, with Fanny admitting the following day she had married a Texan named McBee in 1911 but had divorced him, an action Kelly later discovered was invalid. Over the next few years, he helped Fanny McBee’s family, buying her brother a truck, purchasing a house for another relative, and bailing a brother-in-law out of jail for bootlegging. They were “typical poor white trash,” he belatedly realized. McBee, moreover, who, it became clear, married him for his inheritance, was thirty, not twenty-five, as she had said, and while he found her passion exciting he discovered she was unstable and vindictive. Until his father’s death forced their return to the States, they lived in Honduras, where he also acted as the New York World’s Central American correspondent.⁹

As with his father, whatever his business involvements, he never neglected political activism. He wrote to a friend in Chihuahua during the revolution in 1919 that he was lobbying against U.S. interventionists because of his “passionate attachment” to Mexico. Among other endeavors, Kelly tackled the editor of Leslie’s Weekly over an article entitled “What’s the Matter with Mexico.” Many of the mining concessions granted to American interests by President Porfirio Díaz in the 1900s, he noted, had no legal standing. It was therefore hypocritical of Americans, who “stood for honesty and fairness of dealing with all peoples,” to demand millions from President Venustiano Carranza in compensation for the nationalization of those concessions when they held foreign companies operating on their soil accountable to U.S. law. Anti-imperialist philosophy, learned no doubt from his father’s abhorrence of British colonialism in Ireland, was a common theme in Kelly’s articles on U.S. foreign affairs, although he never singled out German imperialism or Franco’s neoimperialism in the Maghreb.¹⁰

Kelly’s anti-imperialism went hand in glove with republicanism. Felix Gras’s Reds of the Midi stuck with him, for he cited Gras in a 1922 article for The Nation entitled “White Reaction in Ireland,” which attacked Arthur Griffith for deserting the republican principles of Sinn Féin and Michael Collins for selling out to the British, perhaps to the extent of becoming a double agent. Kelly identified the Catholic Church as a leading force for the conservative, white reaction he had condemned in the article, opposed “as ever . . . to freedom and the progress of the Irish nation.” Church hierarchy banned the Fenians in 1867, fought the Land League, and forbade the teaching of Irish history and Gaelic, although Kelly shifted some blame onto bishops appointed by the British. After Ireland’s hierarchy issued a pastoral letter condemning guerrilla warfare, Kelly wrote an even more trenchant critique of the “Catholic church machine” for the Irish World. With English soldiers, Irish patriots at least knew what they faced, but the Roman Church, in a “most hypocritical and cowardly manner,” had “sneaked into the houses of the Irish nation” in order to “stab in the back” its most devoted followers. Going back to Pope Adrian IV, who sanctioned Henry II’s occupation of Ireland, Kelly noted how Rome always sacrificed the Irish to gain influence in England. It was time for the Irish to throw off the “hierarchical yoke,” to trample that “serpent on their hearths.” Irish folk were quite capable of managing their own affairs, and the longer they allowed Rome to “intrigue, meddle and betray the cause of freedom,” the longer they would have to wait for their republic. Despite Kelly’s claims to be a Presbyterian during his later support of Franco, his papers offer no evidence of church attendance or religious faith. Pittsfield had Lutheran as well as Catholic churches, but his parents advantaged themselves of neither priests nor burial plots. They were atheists, as were both their children.¹¹

Issues drove Kelly, underscoring a concern for social justice if not always human rights. As he showed with his later support of regimes that abused the rights of communists, his judgment was selective, differentiating between those he felt deserving of rights versus those who abused the rights of others. In “Glimpses of the ‘Klan’” by the Passerby, an article probably published in St. Louis in 1923, Kelly attacked “cowardly, hypocritical lawless bands” of Ku Klux Klansmen who “drape themselves in the American flag and prate of law and order, while they spread ruin and death about them.” After working in Oklahoma’s oil fields, where Klan murders were so common that the few opposition newspapers barely mentioned them, he felt safer with the savages of the Amazon. In Tulsa, Greek Americans ran the best restaurant in town, but Klansmen cast them as “vile foreigners” and tried to prevent anyone from patronizing these proud “sons of Hellas” who had fought with the Allies in the Great War. Pointing to a double murder in Mer Rouge, Louisiana, Kelly identified simple jealousy as the motivation for Klan hatred, “driving out workers whose places they coveted and the Jewish merchants whose success they envied,” as well as a fundamental immorality that encouraged a Klansman to “ravage with impunity his Jewish neighbor’s wife” while “hooded bands” stood ready to maltreat the husband should he dare to complain to the police. This indictment of Klan anti-Semitism would also be at odds with Kelly’s later elision of Jews with communists, yet he seems not to have been racist per se. Willie Francis was a black man convicted of murdering a white drugstore owner. When the electric chair failed to snuff out Francis’s life in 1946, Kelly sent a telegram petitioning Louisiana governor James H. Davis for commutation of the death sentence; a trivial anecdote perhaps, but Kelly had a half-hour walk to Pittsfield’s downtown telegraph office.¹²

He was always active politically, from writing letters to editors, of which the New York Times printed seven during the 1920s, to becoming a grassroots activist for Robert M. La Follette’s 1924 presidential campaign. In addition to canvassing and distributing leaflets, Kelly addressed several La Follette rallies up and down the East Coast, including a crowd of three thousand at Newark, New Jersey, when he spoke from the platform alongside La Follette’s running mate, Senator Burton K. Wheeler (D-MT). Support for Battling Bob’s blend of agrarian populism and progressive socialism might seem out of character for someone who would become America’s leading Franco lobbyist. Yet Kelly was something of a latter-day mugwump, picking and choosing among issues then voting for whichever party came closest to his shopping list. He surely appreciated La Follette’s scientific approach to reform, his determination to separate the federal government from corporate trusts, and his no-nonsense rhetorical style. It may be, too, that Calvin Coolidge’s Calvinistic piety scared Kelly and that Democratic candida...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Pro-Franco Anticommunism
• 2. Defending Americanism
• 3. Roosevelt’s Mental Map
• 4. Keeping the Embargo
• 5. The American Union for Nationalist Spain
• 6. Spain in Arms
• 7. Franco Lobbyists and the Christian Front
• 8. Un-American Americanism
• Conclusion
• Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index