National Affairs: The Order Is Wrong

Ever since junketing Congressmen began making side trips to Spain last autumn, the news from Madrid has sounded as though they had made their pilgrimages across the Pyrenees just to give Dictator Francisco Franco a kindly pat on the back. Most spoke enthusiastically both of a big U.S. loan to the Spaniards and of full U.S. recognition of Franco’s Fascist government. But last week three traveling members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee bluntly suggested that the U.S. should not be judged exclusively by the sweet talk of its traveling politicos.

Spokesman for the group was New York’s Democratic Congressman Joseph L. Pfeifer, a Brooklyn surgeon. When an impatient Spanish reporter in Madrid asked when the U.S. was going to stop talking and start doing something about Spain, Pfeifer crisply ticked off some hard facts of U.S. political life: the remarks of a few itinerant Congressmen did not mean that the U.S. as a whole was possessed of any overwhelming desire to take Dictator Franco back into the family. A committee staff member, C. B. Marshall, used stronger words: “We give loans only to governments who represent their people. Franco does not. Change your regime and we will change our policy toward you.”

Barrier at the Pyrenees. A little later Pfeifer issued a more diplomatic, but no less straightforward, formal statement: “I’ve been asked, what is the U.S. going to do about Spain? I think the order of the question is wrong. I don’t mean to be harsh when I say Spain is a secondary problem to the U.S. The U.S., however, is a primary problem to Spain. The real question is this: ‘What is Spain going to do about the United States?’ Only the Spaniards themselves can answer that.”

The controlled Spanish press, which had been treating touring Congressmen as if each was a cigar-chomping oracle, bottled the story up tight for 24 hours. Then Madrid’s Arriba burst forth with an angry editorial which accused Pfeifer and his two companions—Democratic Congressmen Clement J. Zablocki of Wisconsin and Thomas S. Gordon of Illinois—of “malice and shortsightedness.” What was Spain going to do about the U.S.? Cried Arriba: “The answer is simple. Nothing. We are going to do nothing at all. We don’t need the U.S. for military adventures. Our fleet does not need American ports. Our bombers do not need American aerodromes . . . But we are not so sure that the U.S. will not someday need us … The Pyrenees [will always be] a solid barrier defended by men with guts and not by existentialists.”

Cannon at Saratoga. The editorial ended on an odd and not entirely accurate note: “We want to remind American parliamentarians that the big, friendly American republic still owes us 2,000,000 gold pounds, 216 bronze cannon, 29 mortars, 12,806 cannon balls, 30,000 rifles with bayonets and 30,000 uniforms—the uniforms that Washington’s men wore after Valley Forge and the cannons that won the Battle of Saratoga.* It is thanks to these rifles and cannon that Messrs. Pfeifer and Zablocki and Gordon are American “Congressmen today.”

Such footnotes to the American Revolution made interesting reading but Arriba was not quite telling all. Hoping to weaken both British imperialism and the threat of a people’s government in the New World, Spain had sent the colonies secret shipments of clothing, salt and munitions through the private mercantile house of Gardoqui & Sons—but only in quantities calculated to protract the struggle without making a real decision possible. When Washington’s army began winning important victories, Spanish interest in the Revolution abruptly vanished.

*One of the decisive battles of the Revolution. Burgoyne had come south from Canada in the summer of 1777 in an attempt to isolate New England by occupying the Hudson Valley; his 5,000 British and German troops were badly mauled by Americans led by Benedict Arnold on Oct. 7; ten days later, surrounded by 20,000 revolutionary soldiers under General Horatio Gates, they laid down their arms.