Franco Sells Spain to America

Hollywood, Tourism and Public Relations as Postwar Spanish Soft Power

N. Rosendorf

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137372574
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Sozialgeschichte

A groundbreaking study of the Franco regime's utilization of Hollywood film production in Spain, American tourism, and sophisticated public relations programs - including the most popular national pavilion at the 1964-65 New York World's Fair - in a determined effort to remake the Spanish dictatorship's post-World War II reputation in the US.

1

Introduction

A pariah state at war’s end, and an AP interview with El Caudillo

In December 1945 the Spanish dictatorship of Generalissimo Francisco Franco Bahamonde was in dire trouble. Seven months after Nazi Germany’s surrender, the victorious Allies were gearing up to drum the Franco regime out of the postwar international community over Spain’s wartime relations with the Axis powers, a process that had started the previous August with the dictatorship being branded in the Potsdam Declaration as the one neutral state that should be excluded from the new United Nations Organization (UN).¹ Francisco Franco had no one to blame but himself for his current desperate situation. Whether out of gratitude for military aid rendered during the 1936–39 Spanish Civil War, ideological affinity with fascism or a pragmatic desire to stay on positive political and economic terms with the European continent’s most powerful state—at least until Germany was pulverized by the Soviet Union, the US and UK—or, most likely, a combination of all these factors, for the first several years of World War II Francisco Franco maintained a pro-Axis “non-belligerency” until the Soviet victory at the Battle of Stalingrad prompted him to shift to a more equitable neutrality. Indeed, Franco had met with Hitler at the French Basque border town of Hendaye and been photographed and filmed with der Führer—the film and pictures would come back to haunt him in peacetime—and he had allowed both the transfer of thousands of Spanish workers to German factories and the formation of the Division Azul to fight alongside the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front when Adolf Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in 1941.²

But in the aftermath of the surrender of the battered German 6th Army at Stalingrad in February 1943, Francisco Franco realized the magnitude of his miscalculation. The baldness of Franco’s desire to walk back his pro-Axis orientation once the tide of war had turned in the Allies’ favor was symbolized by the Jefe del Estado’s late-1943 removal from his imposing desk of prominently displayed photographs of Hitler and Benito Mussolini and their replacement with pictures of Pope Pius XII and the leader of notably pro-Allied neutral state Portugal, Antonio Salazar, a move noticed with bemusement by US Ambassador to Spain Carlton J. H. Hayes.³ While the US had pragmatically maintained correct relations with Spain throughout the conflict, as the war in Europe drew to a close President Franklin D. Roosevelt wrote to Carlton Hayes’ ambassadorial successor Norman Armour, “Most certainly we do not forget Spain’s official position with and assistance to our Axis enemies at a time when the fortunes of war were less favorable to us . . .. These memories cannot be wiped out by actions more favorable to us now that we are about to achieve our goal of complete victory over those enemies of ours with whom the present Spanish regime identified itself in the past spiritually and by its public expressions and acts.” Roosevelt concluded his excoriation with the assertion, “I can see no place in the community of nations for governments founded on fascist principles.”⁴

Things went from bad to worse for Franco with Roosevelt’s death in April 1945. The new American president was Harry S. Truman, whose unalloyed loathing of Franco was rooted in an ardent anti-fascism that edged out even the anti-communism for which he would become noted during his administration. As a US senator, Truman had notoriously declared in response to the Nazis’ June 1941 launch of Operation Barbarossa against the USSR, “If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible,” but he added, tipping his sense of fascism as being the worse of the two, “I don’t want to see Hitler victorious under any circumstances.”⁵ Now the Axis was crushed, Hitler and Mussolini were dead and Franco was the lonely, beleaguered remnant of the far-right ideology that had consumed Europe and cost tens of thousands of American service personnel’s lives. As of the summer of 1945, a majority of Americans believed that Spain should not be admitted to the UN as long as El Caudillo remained in power. Francisco Franco found himself and his dictatorship decidedly on the wrong end of US politics, policy and public opinion.⁶ And with the US the colossus of the new global postwar order, this was a very dangerous place for the Franco regime.

All of which made the American journalist DeWitt Mackenzie, of the Associated Press (AP), a lucky man when in December 1945 he requested an interview with Francisco Franco during an investigative visit to Spain. AP’s longtime chief foreign affairs correspondent was not especially hopeful, as Franco had a reputation up to that point for rarely granting press interviews. But timing is everything, and times had dramatically changed— the war was over, the Axis had been vanquished and Franco Spain was a country squarely in the sights of the victorious Allies as a candidate ripe for regime change. To Mackenzie’s surprise, El Caudillo said yes to his interview request, with the caveat that the American journalist would have to submit his questions in advance. Hopeful of a scoop and taking the risk that he could simply add more questions on the spot, Dewitt Mackenzie acceded to Franco’s stipulation and trekked to Madrid and the Spanish dictator’s residence at the El Pardo Palace, a grand yet understated 18th-century edifice located just outside the Spanish capital. Franco, as it turns out, was ready for any eventuality, as he knew exactly what he wished to communicate to both the AP reporter and his considerable readership in the US.

The resulting conversation, as Mackenzie wrote in his newspaper account of the interview, took “one of the most unusual turns I’ve encountered in a long experience with heads of government and diplomats.” Intent on disarming his American interlocutor, Franco offered Mackenzie “the most cordial greeting when I was ushered into his private room.”⁷ The reporter took the chance that Franco might terminate the interview and toss him out of the presidential palace for ad-libbing questions, but the Spanish dictator surprised him both by answering freely and by adroitly and forcefully driving home the message that “[h]e is anxious for good relations with the United States. He never subscribed to the policies or to the political views of Hitler and Mussolini and he condemns their persecutions. Spain is developing along her own lines, uninfluenced by either Germany or Italy . . . .”⁸ Given the photographs of Hitler and Mussolini Franco had once kept on his desk as the symbol of an affinity he had averred on numerous occasions (including his 1937 declaration that a Nationalist government “would follow the structure of totalitarian regimes such as Italy and Germany”⁹), his assertions concerning the Axis powers and their leaders were more than a little dubious. But there was nothing uncertain about his desire to spread the good word in the American press about Spain’s desire for the friendship of the US, and to repair the grievous damage Franco’s poor foreign policy bets had inflicted on his regime’s reputation. Francisco Franco’s December 1945 interview with DeWitt Mackenzie was the opening salvo of what would become a massive, quarter-century effort to fundamentally recast Spain’s reputation in the US.

Franco Spain’s US reputational effort: Pursuing the “intangible aura” of respectability

This book is about what came next: how Franco Spain, a country holding an exceedingly weak reputational hand in the US at war’s end, worked diligently to remake its image and reputation in the US, to develop key relationships there, to make itself acceptable to Americans when it had been widely excoriated, and to gain the strategic and economic benefits of American acceptance. For almost 25 years following the end of World War II, Franco Spain, although a state possessing a dearth of attractive-cooptive “soft power” relative to that of the US, sought with considerable success to harness key elements of American soft power, including US overseas tourism, Hollywood film production, American advertising and public relations, and other related US media and institutions including American-based world’s fairs, in order to overcome the stigma of right-wing dictatorship, past association with the defeated Axis powers and a general aura of poverty, stagnation and human misery.

The Franco regime was in part pursuing specific strategic and economic goals toward the US to which elements of the outreach/reputation-building programs contributed, directly or indirectly. The most prominent of these postwar regime objectives were, first, the re-normalization of US–Spanish diplomatic relations; and second, once having exchanged ambassadors in 1951, the establishment of American air and naval military bases in Spain, with the dollar-hungry dictatorship seeking the most financially advantageous terms possible from the negotiations that resulted in the 1953 US–Spanish Madrid Pact, as well as when the base agreements came up for renewal during the 1960s.¹⁰ In this effort Francisco Franco was a prime beneficiary of the Cold War. Despite Harry Truman’s persistent loathing of El Caudillo as a character akin to Hitler and Stalin and Dean Acheson’s blunt declaration that it was commonly known that Spain had a fascist government,¹¹ the State Department did a volte face and concluded, late in 1950, that “our immediate objective should be to develop the military potentialities of Spain’s strategic geographic position for the common defense . . . [then] we should approach the Spanish Government in order to acquire such facilities as air and naval bases.” The new order was formalized by Secretary of State Dean Acheson in January 1951.¹² Negotiations between the US and Spain would begin later in 1951 and lead, two years hence, to the Madrid Pact, which gained for the US Air Force bases at Torrejon and Zaragoza and submarine pens at Rota, and a flow of military and economic aid for the Franco regime.¹³

Francisco Franco referred to the Madrid Pact as “military in origin with political consequences and definite implications for the economy,”¹⁴ and several of the reputation-enhancing and relationship-building programs described in this volume aided the regime in its endeavor to develop and maintain the Spain–US strategic alliance and extract maximum monetary value from it. Washington DC political lobbying from the late 1940s on was explicitly formulated in this regard; while other programs provided salutary by-products concerning maintaining the partnership, as in the case of the series of grand, historically themed special events held in Spain and the US in the 1960s that drew in politically prominent American guests, including some, like Secretary of State Dean Rusk, whom the Spaniards would face across the negotiating table. But at least as important as these specific, tangible strategic goals was the Spanish dictatorship’s fervent desire to gain respectability and acceptance in the US for their own sake. This fundamental obsession was not lost on American observers: as a 1963 report from the US Embassy in Madrid to the State Department on “Spain’s International Objectives” put it,

[T]he Spanish, hyper-sensitive at best, have suffered for over twenty years from a feeling of not being loved and somehow not being respectable. To develop this intangible aura has always been the first objective of Franco foreign policy.¹⁵

And the knowledgeable journalistic observer Benjamin Welles, who served from 1956–62 as the New York Times’ Madrid correspondent, echoed this assessment and focused on the psyche of El Caudillo himself, declaring, “Underlying Franco’s devious foreign policy is a morbid craving for respectability. No statesman in modern times has been more universally condemned . . . and Franco is weary of censure.” Welles termed Franco’s need for respectability as nothing short of “pathological.”¹⁶ This was not the policy mindset of a hard-nosed Realpolitiker.

Indeed, if Generalissimo Francisco had merely been interested in gaining formal relations with the US, the establishment of American military bases and the funding that could be squeezed out of them over time, in the fevered atmosphere of the early Cold War he could have stood pat once an American ambassador had presented his credentials and the Madrid Pact had been concluded, secure in the knowledge that the Americans would hold their noses for the sake of shoring up a staunchly anti-communist regime, maintaining a European military bulwark beyond the Pyrenees and protecting the continent’s southern flank from Soviet pressure.¹⁷ The Madrid Pact’s formalization of the US–Spanish strategic relationship offered the Franco regime a baseline of international legitimization, sending the message to antagonistic Western European states that as far as the leader of the “Free World” was concerned Spain was no longer out in the cold; and indeed in the Pact’s aftermath Spain found its way into the Organization for European Economic Development (forerunner of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development ([OECD]), the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank (although not into the nascent European Community and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which would only occur three decades later, after Spain had embraced democracy).¹⁸ But this was clearly not enough for Francisco Franco: the author of a key 1952 study on promoting US tourism to Spain well knew which of El Caudillo’s buttons to push when he wrote that not only would bringing Americans to Spain help fill the country’s coffers with much-needed hard currency; if properly done it would “convert” the US visitor “into the most active propagandist of our nation, increasing in this manner our prestige in the world.”¹⁹ The “intangible aura” of broad-based American acceptance and the equally unquantifiable notion of Spanish “prestige” permeated Francisco Franco’s thinking, along with that of a number of his key appointees who shared and reflected his preoccupation; and the dictatorship’s extensive series of reputation-building efforts aimed at the US were in large part the manifestation of this desire for approbation, which in any event synergized with more conventional strategic concerns, as we will see.

The program of selling Franco Spain to America was not conceived and implemented all at once, but rather piecemeal and, in some respects, experimentally over time, until all the elements were firmly in place and operating as part of a unified effort by the early 1960s through the end of the decade, when the integrated project of reputational outreach came abruptly to a halt with a sharp rightward turn in the dictatorship’s government. And while there were a number of key figures in the development and implementation of the Franco regime’s program of outreach to the US, most notably Fernando María Castiella, Spain’s foreign minister from 1957 to 1969, and Manuel Fraga Iribarne, Minister of Information and Tourism from 1962 to 1969, the single most important figure was the dictator himself, Francisco Franco, who gave his support at early junctures to fostering American tourism, to allowing Hollywood producers to operate in Spain and to employing a range of public relations tactics in and toward the US, beginning with his 1945 interview with the Associated Press’s DeWitt Mackenzie. Underlining the Spanish dictator’s own key role in this process, when it became evident that no amount of tourism, Hollywood production and PR could overcome an acute threat to Spain’s standing in the US in the form of widespread American revulsion over the official oppression of Spanish Protestants and Jews, Franco made the critical decision to support the domestically controversial project led by Foreign Minister Castiella to push for the enfranchisement of Spain’s religious minorities. And the Jefe del Estado additionally lent his imprimatur to another of Fernando Castiella’s ambitious and initially controversial outreach projects, the fabulously expensive Pavilion of Spain at the 1964–65 New York World’s Fair, which had become a vicious political battleground within the Spanish government and would emerge as the triumphant crystallization of Franco Spain’s entire postwar US outreach program.

Franco Spain’s US soft power ju-jitsu

In political scientist Joseph Nye’s succinct formulation of his conception of using the tools of attraction and cooptation, rather than coercion and bribery, in pursuing foreign policy objectives, “[S]oft power means getting others to want the same outcomes you want,”²⁰ and what Franco Spain wanted, desperately, was the widest and warmest possible acceptance in the US, along with strategic partnership and access to both aid and trade dollars. As we will see, by the metrics of “outputs” and “outcomes” outreach efficacy²¹ used by the Franco regime in the first few post-World War II decades, and which reflected prevailing measurement norms—for example, the dramatically rising number of US tourists, the quantity and sometimes specific topics of Hollywood films produced in Spain, the torrent of paid and earned positive media coverage generated by carefully orchestrated public relations, the neutralizing of massive negative media coverage and political pressure over religious minority policies by changing the reality on the ground and with it the narrative in the US, and the millions of visitors at the widely praised Spanish pavilions at 1960s US world’s fairs— the regime executed an extraordinary feat for a country starting out with a severe reputational deficit in the US. The extant “outputs” and “outcomes” metrics provide strong evidence that the Franco dictatorship made significant soft power inroads in the US as the result of its e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Be El Caudillo’s Guest: Postwar American Tourism to Franco Spain
• 3. “Hollywood in Madrid”: The Franco Regime and the American Film Industry
• 4. The Franco Regime’s Postwar US Public Relations Strategies: Media, Messages and Relationships in America
• 5. The Oppression of Spain’s Protestants and Jews: Neutralizing the Franco Regime’s Key US Reputational Threat
• 6. The Spanish Pavilion at the 1964–65 New York World’s Fair: Franco Spain’s $7 Million US Outreach Summa
• 7. Conclusion: Success, Inertia, Death, Democracy and a Fallacy
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index