The Work in Spain

THE situation in Spain, no less than in Mexico, was a very ugly one indeed. The German penetration was evident in every department of Spanish activity, particularly in the army, and many of the most important Spanish papers were receiving German subsidies and pouring out a steady stream of untruths against America. Every effort was made to revive the passions of 1898, and nowhere in the whole country was there a single voice that spoke for America. The following extracts from Madrid papers will show the lengths to which the Germans went in their campaign of vilification:

In my last article I gave a brief account of the horrible crime committed by Wilson against Nicaragua. If this were not more than enough to show that the Yankee President is disqualified in law and in equity to speak to us Europeans in such words as he uses in his answer to the Pope — if the moral opinion of the world had not been excited against the cynicism and unequaled perversities of Wilson, who, though on trial for lesehumanite, has tried to constitute himself the judge of Europe and America, unfortunately there still exist, to the shame of humanity and the dishonor of civilization, other monstrous deeds done by Wilson, against which the world has not protested. . . . No: we must tear the mask from the hypocrite, Wilson.

After having carefully examined the sinister chapters of Yankee imperialistic history, each and every one of which is a crime whose principal author is the actual President Wilson, our heart rebels against this man, against this Puritan, who has the barefaced insolence to appear as a mediator between nations. This is his role in his speeches and proclamations, but his deeds are those of brute force, of war without quarter, of inconceivable extermination and devastation. Blushing at the sight of the repulsive creature, we ask ourselves the question whether the moral sense of humanity has been perverted when it listens to the words of the false and evil Wilson.

In addition to the aspersion of motives there was a continual flood of lies into the news columns as a means of convincing the Spanish people that Germany was winning and that America and the Allies were meeting with disastrous defeats. By way of example, the following is taken from a Barcelona paper of November 10, 1917:

News comes from Halifax via New York that the North American battleship Texas and other units of the North American fleet were sunk by a German U-boat 75 miles from the Island of Guernsey and 120 miles from Cherbourg at the entrance of the Channel, the latter part of September of last year. Eleven thousand men found their death in the waves; only 3,260 soldiers and 2,585 men of the crew were saved.

The counter-attack of the Allies had failed utterly. Not only were the efforts ill-advised, but there was a natural Spanish prejudice against England on account of Gibraltar, and as a Catholic country Spain looked upon France as a land of "Jacobins and libertines."

The first efforts of the Committee were in connection with "movies," and the work was intrusted to Frank J. Marion, president of the Kalem Company and one of the outstanding figures in the motion-picture industry. He carried with him a large stock of films, showing America at work as well as America at war. Upon arrival in Spain he found that neither France nor England was permitted to show their motion pictures in public, but by sheer force of personality and skilful emphasis upon the "movies" that showed agriculture and industry Mr. Marion succeeded in having his entire stock passed by the Spanish censors. An arrangement was made with a great distributing house that sent our film throughout Spain, and from the theaters Mr. Marion expanded to the schools and colleges, eventually giving open-air shows in cities and villages. Some of the audiences ran as high as nine thousand people, and when the Spanish garrisons asked to see the pictures Mr. Marion was justified in feeling that he had succeeded.

The original plan was to have Mr. Marion inaugurate the motion-picture work in Spain and then proceed to Italy. No sooner had he left Spain, however, than a flood of cables commenced to pour in that convinced us that Mr. Marion was the man above all men for the Spanish job. As a consequence he was ordered back from Rome, appointed commissioner for Spain, and given full authority to launch a complete campaign. The fight was a long one, and bitterly difficult, but when the tide turned it turned with a vengeance. Malaga and Barcelona extended the rights of citizenship to President Wilson, city after city in Spain changed the name of some principal thoroughfare to that of President Wilson, and the Declaration of Independence and the addresses of President Wilson were used in the public schools of Spain for the readingclasses.

The following excerpts from Mr. Marion's report, while giving little idea of the genius with which he overcame obstacles, nevertheless indicate somewhat the sweep of his activities:

Before the commencement of the Committee's work, the amount of American news printed in Spanish papers was not only small, but concerned entirely with epidemics, disasters, and lynchings. We learned later that these lynching items were very generously furnished to the Spanish press by the German propaganda office.

From the first gun of the war the enemy had been maintaining a wireless service from Nauen, which was distributed to the Spanish press free of charge. England, France, and Italy were maintaining a so-called news service through their embassies, but the propaganda element was so strong as to make them worthless. The material was sent to the newspapers on embassy letter-heads in embassy envelopes by uniformed embassy messengers, and in almost every instance the embassies received a bill for the printing at a substantial figure per line.

Most of the leading papers in Spain were under regular subsidy from the German Embassy, and I was told by my French colleagues that space could not be secured in the Spanish press without paying for it. A very large sum was suggested as necessary to carry out the plan. However, I was convinced that truthful news items from America would be welcomed by all the progressive papers and that the system then in vogue of sending out "official" communiques from the various embassies virtually compelled the treatment of the material as advertising.

Looking around, I discovered the Fabra Agency, a Spanish press association doing a small business, and I laid before the managers a plan to incorporate our cable services into their daily "flimsy." I had no difficulty in procuring complete co-operation, even to the extent of having their news editor come to my office each day so that the translations might be made under my direction.

The venture was a success from the start. As a matter of fact, our news service was printed in papers known to be under German subsidy. The point of it was that it was real news, and interesting news from a newspaper point of view. It was what Spain had wanted from America for years, and when the service was finally discontinued there was a storm of protest from the leading Spanish papers.

However, the Fabra Agency was not furnishing the service to the smaller papers of the provinces which could not afford to pay the telegraph tolls, because of the high cost of print paper and the scarcity of advertising. Accordingly, with the aid of Captain Decker, the naval attache, who placed his various secret agents throughout Spain at my disposal, I organized my own distributing system and within a short time had the satisfaction of seeing the entire press of Spain printing more news from America than from the Allied countries combined.

Following the establishment of the Foreign Press Bureau of the Committee in New York my office commenced to receive regular weekly instalments of special articles, photographs, posters, window-display cards, etc. This material necessitated further expansion. Very little that appears in the Spanish newspaper carries any influence unless it is signed with the name of a writer of acknowledged standing. As a consequence, none of the hundreds of special articles that were sent us was put out over the names of the American authors responsible for them. Each article was given as an exclusive fund of material to some Spanish writer, who would rewrite it in his own particular style. It would then be published in the Spanish papers over his name and with his authority. We were suspected of paying these distinguished literary lights for the work, but not a cent ever went to a single one of them. My chief translator, Senor Jose Armas, for many years correspondent of The New York Herald, and Sefiorita Raquel Alonzo, formerly of the Gulick School for Girls, performed prodigies of labor and could always be relied upon to give not only accurate translations, but translations of a high literary style.

One of our original beliefs was in the value of pamphlets. A visit to the offices of the British, Italian, and French organizations soon convinced me that if there had ever been any advantage in this phase of work, it had completely disappeared, for in nearly every instance the pamphlets, which had been prepared at the home offices to be distributed in Spain, were used to keep fires going in the grates. The main trouble was defective Spanish. A pamphlet which was prepared by my own committee in Washington, and sent to me as a sample, was so full of errors as to be absolutely useless. Later when large window-display photographs were sent to me lettered in Spanish, many of these were found to be useless for a similar reason.

WTiile attending the propaganda conference in Paris, I became convinced that the strongest arguments in behalf of the Allied cause were embodied in the various official utterances of President Wilson, and following that conviction, we used every effort to give them widest possible publicity. Not only were they published immediately in the Spanish press, but they were printed in pamphlet form as well and sent under letter postage to upward of ten thousand prominent Spaniards. So accurate and elegant in its diction was Prof. Romero-Navarro's translation of the President's famous Fourteen Points speech that it was adopted as a literary text-book by one of the leading schools for boys in Madrid. In the distribution of this and other material we were greatly assisted by Senor Amato of the Fabra Agency. As a general proposition, pamphleteering had been overdone in Spain by both the Allies and the enemy embassies and we did not deem it advisable to enter to any great extent into this branch of work.

Every center of population in Spain from the tiny mountain pueblo to the capital city has its atheneum. This is a civic center. For the purpose of taking advantage of these forums, Prof. M. Romero-Navarro of the Department of Romance Languages in the University of Pennsylvania, a Castilian by birth and education, and still a Spanish citizen, was persuaded to give up his collegiate work and come to Spain for the purpose of giving an extended series of lectures. Professor Navarro lectured on Spanish artistic, literary, and historic influences in America, and against this background painted a splendid picture of America's idealism, unselfishness, and military invincibility.

A Spaniard likes to have things visualized and the illustrated papers were all eager for American photographs. The Committee offices in Washington, New York, and Paris sent us a weekly supply well selected as to subject and excellent as to photographic quality, and as a result we had a virtual monopoly of the illustrated press in Spain. It was not at all unusual for us to have two-thirds of the pictures in one illustrated paper. None of these pictures was distributed from our own office. We employed a local agent, who peddled them from paper to paper as his own stock and sold them on their own merits to pro-German as well as to pro-Ally papers.

The poster situation presented one of our greatest problems. The German posters were scurrilous and indecent. One most widely circulated in Spain purported to represent typical soldiers of the various armies opposed to Germany, and in each case the type was as brutal and degenerate as the German mind could conceive. It would have been easy to plaster Spain with our own posters showing the American idea of the Prussian face, but we decided that the best answer was to fill the illustrated papers and the store-windows with photographs of our manly 23 341 doughboys at the front so that the Spaniard could judge for himself.

For our window-display campaign we started by securing the co-operation of American firms doing business in Spain. These were very few indeed, but one alone, the Singer Sewing Machine Company, put the windows of some seven hundred branch stores in Spain at our disposition, saw to the trimming of the windows, the display of the material, and even took care of the transportation expenses. All we had to do was to deliver our material at the main office of this patriotic concern and the rest was attended to better than we could have done it ourselves.

The Eastman Kodak Company and the ^Eolian Company were two other American concerns which gave us the continual use of their window-display space without cost.

The central feature of all of our window-display work was a handsomely framed group of photographs covering both the preparations in America and behind the line scenes in France. Hundreds of frames were made up and kept in continuous circulation, and our own personal observation shows that they invariably attracted a great deal of attention and favorable comment. On at least two occasions the Eastman Kodak's window display of our materials in their handsome store on the Puerta del Sol nearly blockaded traffic.

Quite a notable success was made with the exhibition of Joseph Pennell drawings. One of the stanchest friends of America in Spain was Sorolla, the great painter. Senor Sorolla personally took charge of this collection, patronized its exhibitions throughout the leading cities of Spain, and finally saw to it that the collection was properly housed in the National Academy of Modern Arts in Madrid as the gift of Mr. Pennell to the Spanish government. These magnificent pictures showed various phases of our preparatory work in shipyards and munition-plants. If they had been exhibited in the ordinary way as propaganda they would have come under the ban of Spanish censorship, but shown as a pure art exhibit under the patronage of Sorolla, they met with no objection and everywhere attracted favorable comment from the press.

In July, 1918, we started the publication of a weekly bulletin in English, the American News, which was distributed free of charge to all Americans whose names we could secure in Spain and Portugal. The purpose of this bulletin in the form of a small eight-page newspaper was to put the facts of our war preparations and achievements into the hands of Americans to be disseminated by them in their contact with the Spanish people. The editor of this paper was Seward B. Collins, a Princeton student unable to get into the army or navy, but eager to serve. In many respects this was one of our most important activities.

The spy system maintained by the Germans, and by the Allies as well, may only be described as a "scream." After about six months' residence in Madrid I happened in at an outof-the-way cafe and met a reliable Spanish friend.

"What are you doing here? " he asked.

"Having a cup of coffee."

"Don't you know what sort of a place you are in?"

"No, I don't. Tell me."

"This is the place," he said, "where all the spies get together at four o'clock every afternoon and exchange lies to be reported to the various embassies the following morning. The German spies hand a bunch of inside information from their embassy to their friends who are working for the Allies, and in return receive a mess of stuff which they hand back to the Germans. Thus both sides are satisfied and a prosperous business is established."

My friend then pointed out to me the agents of the various embassies, enemy agents and Allied agents chatting like the best of friends. Scarcely a day went by but that a half-dozen men would call upon us to tell the same kind of story ; that they had been employed by the German Embassy, that they were poor but honest men, that their hearts were really with the Allies, and if we would pay them a little more money they would come to us and tell us secrets of the greatest importance.

A book might be written on this phase of outside war-work alone. From the standpoint of an American I want to go on record as being of the opinion that the spy system as I saw it in operation in Spain for eighteen months, both enemy and the Ally, is "bunk." There is no other word that so adequately expresses it.

Jack Johnson, the ex-champion, was generally understood to be a spy in the employ of the Germans. He claimed to have access to the German Embassy, and offered to make a night entry and rob it of all its files if by doing so he could only get back to his "dear old U. S. A." again. He was told that the best way to do that would be to go to France and enlist, upon which he faded away. Johnson posed in Spain as a typical American, claiming that he was still champion of the world, and was one of the worst elements of negative propaganda in Spain. There seemed to be little doubt that he was being paid by the Germans to keep in a prominent position, and there was seldom a gala performance at the opera that did not see Johnson in full evening dress seated directly in front of the royal box. There was murder in the hearts of all Americans, but there was nothing we could do.

The Palace Hotel, where Johnson made his headquarters, was a nest of German spies. Every employee of the hotel was a German spy. I arrived in Madrid at two o'clock one fine afternoon, with Mr. David Harrell of the War Trade Board, Mrs. Harrell, and their son David, a lad of seventeen. David stayed behind for a minute as we went down the hall, and before we had time to round the corner a German spy was in the room, ransacking our bags. David reached out of the bathroom door, grabbed the man by the collar, and sprawled him headlong into the hall. The man struck his head so hard that David was afraid he had hurt him, so he gave him two pesetas to square himself and then came down and told us about it. During the two weeks we were compelled to stay at the hotel, our every step was dogged and our every word was listened to. None of us had any information of the slightest use to the enemy, but the sleuths were set on us just the same.

Most of the German propaganda was as stupid as their spy system. A typical specimen of their work was a comic picture book printed in Barcelona by the German propaganda office. This was gotten up like our five-cent story editions of Puss in Boots or Jack the Giant Killer — fifteen or twenty pages of grotesque figures in color with verses. The title of the book was Kings Without a Throne, and a page was devoted to each of the petty European rulers who had lost his crown because of defying the wrath of the all-powerful one in Berlin. This book was printed in enormous numbers and distributed to the children as they came out of school. The object-lesson, of course, was that if the King of Spain did not recognize German might, he, too, would lose his throne. Many of the pictures in this book were positively obscene. The German cartoon of President Wilson found everywhere in Spain in the form of picture post-cards was that of a lantern-jawed maniac. Always in the German window displays the central feature would be the Kaiser, Ludendorff, and Hindenburg, portrayed as magnificent and inspiring specimens of manhood, while the representatives of the Allies were pictured as degenerates.

Another example of stupidity was the insertion of a paid article in one or two papers in all the principal cities that the American army was irreligious, that no Catholic priest was allowed to function in his sacred vestments, that Pershing and his staff were all members of the Liberty Lodge of Masons in Brooklyn, and that the American army in France was being directed by the Masonic order, its real purpose the crushing of Catholicism in Europe. Our answer to this, in illustrated papers and window displays, was a magnificent picture of six thousand soldiers in uniform attending an open-air mass near the front lines in France.

Of course, the principal accusation against the Americans was that all our claims were Yankee bluff, that we had no army, couldn't raise an army, couldn't train an army if we could raise one, had no officers, and even if we could raise and train an army we couldn't transport them, because we had no ships, and even if we did get ships, the German submarines would take care of them. We sent a delegation of prominent Spanish newspaper men to France, headed by the Marquis Valleglesias, owner and editor of Epoca, and this delegation returned to Madrid after ten days with our troops and announced that, instead of bluffing, the Americans had not told one tenth of the story.

We had so many different schemes at work at the same time that the Germans finally became rather bewildered. Prince Ratibor and his daughters, the Princesses of Taxis and Thurn, went to a ball at the Ritz one night and had a wonderful time dancing to the music of "Over There" and all our popular war songs. We were supplied with orchestrations of all this music from our foreign service department in New York, and for the last six months of the war we had all the bands in Spain playing American music.

The educational campaign in Spain was not conducted by the representative of the Committee on Public Information alone and unassisted. In the first place the need of the work was recognized by Capt. Benton C. Decker, Chief of Naval Intelligence, of Spain. When I arrived in Spain every facility of Captain Decker's office was put at my disposal. Although ordered by the Ambassador to refrain from assisting or helping the Committee on Public Information in any way, Captain Decker, with a high sense of patriotic duty, insisted upon doing so, and was recalled at the request of Ambassador Willard in May, 1918. From that time on the work of the Committee on Public Information was entirely detached from all other American agencies, but the utmost encouragement and all needed help were given by Captain Crossley, succeeding Captain Decker, and later by Capt. Chester Wells, succeeding Captain Crossley. Both the Madrid and Barcelona branches of the War Trade Board, headed by Mr. Waldmar Chadbourne of the former office, and Mr. David Harrell, of the latter, were in the warmest sympathy with our work, and gave every possible assistance and encouragement. Preston Morris Smith of the War Trade Board did almost as much work for the Committee on Public Information as for his own department, all without recompense and for the good of the cause.

Among the Spanish gentlemen who aided the cause in many and varied ways may be named Senor I. DeMora of The Pictorial Review; Senator Paloma of Seville; Sorolla, the painter; Azorin, Ariquistain, and Aznar, three of the most famous editorial writers; the entire personnel of the Fabra News Agency, headed by Senor A. Mato; and Ledesma and Villeseca, the motion-picture distributors.

On my own staff particular credit is due to my secretary and personal representative, Senor Jose M. Gay, an American citizen of Filipino descent, a lawyer and a thorough patriot. Next to Senor Gay I am indebted to Mr. Collins and to Prof. Romero- Navarro.

Every American in Spain loyally assisted, but particular service was rendered by the gentlemen of the American Chamber of Commerce of Barcelona, headed by Messrs. Brewer, van Tress, and Preston M. Smith, all of whom could be relied upon to do any work that seemed necessary in their territory. And above all, the most effective argument was the work of our army and navy. As our campaign progressed, the pro-German tendency of Spain began perceptibly to fade, and when Spain sent its peremptory note to Germany regarding the sinking of Spanish merchant-ships we felt that the climax of our efforts had been reached.

As evidencing the value of the Committee's work in Spain, carried forward under the direction of Mr. Marion, the Madrid correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor wrote as follows under date of October 23, 1918:

A development of the popular attitude that has been most marked in recent months, and has become a significant feature of Spanish inclination, has been a sincere, anxious, and deep interest that Spain has begun to take in all that concerns the United States, and especially on her productive and industrial side. . . . Demonstrations by cinema pictures and in other ways of how things are done in America have been greatly appreciated. So have the object-lessons of what the Americans have been doing in the way of metamorphosis in France in various directions. An indication of the new state of interest that Spain feels in regard to American institutions, systems, and so forth, is furnished by the long articles that continually appear about them in some of the daily newspapers, especially in the newer journals. Lectures on similar subjects are increasingly popular, and multitudinous papers have been read before the members of literary and scientific institutions concerning different aspects of American development.

In this connection it is of special interest to point out that at the present time Senor Miguel-Navarro, professor of Spanish language and literature at the University of Pennsylvania, is in the country and has been delivering some pointed discourses which have received close attention and have been reported in detail in the newspapers.

And on December 11, 1918, The Monitor said:

What may be called the Wilson cult is truly making astonishing progress in Spain, as shall be shown. Three months ago the President of the United States was known but little to the general community. To-day there is hardly a city of any consequence in Spain whose newspapers are not devoting innumerable columns to articles upon his career, his views in general, and his present actions, with occasional personal details.