Spain: A Unique History (5 page)

Central to the project was the active assistance of Dionisio Ridruejo, without which it probably could not have been carried out. Ridruejo accepted my letter of introduction from his distant political colleague Gorkín and provided almost every kind of help that he could. This consisted primarily of two things: a lengthy series of discussions in the book-lined study in his home on the calle de Ibiza, on the far side of the Retiro Park, and an even more lengthy series of introductions to a large number of veteran Falangist militants, most of whom were willing to talk with me.

Here once more the timing was good, because Ridruejo had only recently passed from nonsupport of the regime to active opposition. His generosity and his effort to be honest, objective, and self-critical were impressive. All the later years of his life were characterized by a deep moral concern not to repeat the errors of his youth but to make amends for them and to do all he could to achieve a responsible and democratic future for Spain. I never achieved the personal friendship with Ridruejo that I did with Vicens and Maurín, but I was deeply grateful for his assistance and extremely impressed with his intellectual and moral seriousness.

At that time no archives dealing with the Falange were open, so my research was conducted in two quite different dimensions. The first was the official publications, newspapers, and secondary literature available in the Biblioteca Nacional and the Hemeroteca Municipal; the second was oral history with Falangist militants from the 1930s and with survivors of other political groups, as well. At that time the term "oral history" was scarcely used, and I had had absolutely no training in it. I simply threw myself into the water and learned to swim. If I had had appropriate methodological instruction, I would probably have done better, but interviewing is a matter partly of intuition, of asking the right questions, and of rapid adjustment, not merely formal techniques. The majority of the Falangists and others whom I interviewed sought to be helpful, though of course often not very objective, and sometimes provided important information and data. Only a minority refused to speak seriously or made elaborate efforts to deceive. The relatively good results that I obtained were partly the product of timing, because they could not have been achieved to the same extent a decade earlier.

A photocopy of the official police report on my activities that had been prepared in 1959, which I recently obtained, observes of its subject that "his appearance is innocent in the extreme though, in fact, he has possession of documents and contacts that are very interesting, having interviewed people ranging from General Aranda to Ridruejo, Suevos, and Hedilla." It goes on to detail two primary documents, copies of which had been provided by my interlocutors, some of whom, of course, were in contact with the police. The report concludes, almost plaintively, that "the work of Stanley Payne is attractive and innocent in appearance," which made it possible for me to carry out research that for someone in an official or political capacity "would be against nature, inherently more difficult, more suspicious. As it is, he can even publish a book in all tranquility there .... beyond the state and in any event relying on the United States, without having to deal with the Spanish government, despite the latter's authority."
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All of which was true enough.

The first person whom I sought when I arrived in Madrid was Juan Linz, and our long talks together in the autumn of 1958 were invaluable, the beginning of a half century of friendship and scholarly collaboration that has benefited me more than my contact with anyone else. Juan was an invaluable source of information, analysis, and advice on Spanish affairs, indispensable in forming my first informed perspective on contemporary Spanish politics and history. By the early part of 1959 he was back in New York, beginning his teaching career at Columbia (later moving to Yale in 1968). Juan Linz is the most outstanding analyst of comparative modern European politics that I have encountered — probably the best in any country during the later twentieth century — combining encyclopedic empirical knowledge with a depth of analysis, comparative study, and scholarly imagination, which have been unrivaled. He helped me a great deal in each of the two main fields of inquiry that I would develop — contemporary Spanish history and the comparative history of fascism — so that it was only fitting that in the 1990s. I dedicated two books to him.
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The other particularly close friend during the first year in Madrid was Francisco Javier de Lizarza, to whom I was introduced indirectly by Jaime del Burgo. Javier Lizarza, like Juan Linz, was a dear friend for an entire half century, and throughout ever the most reliable and true. Scion of a distinguished Navarrese Carlist family, he led in the effort to maintain the highest ideals of traditionalism in the politically correct society of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Following his death in October 2007, it is appropriate that the present book be dedicated to our half century of the warmest friendship.

In Madrid I made contact with Clay La Force, also on an SSRC fellowship, who was preparing a dissertation in economic history at UCLA on state industrialization initiatives in the reign of Carlos III, later to be published by the University of California Press. Clay and I would subsequently be colleagues between 1962 and 1968 at UCLA (he in economics, I in history), where he would go on to become the distinguished director of the Graduate School of Business Management.

In the late autumn of that first year, Juan Linz indicated that we should make the acquaintance of a young American woman "working on Antonio Maura," as current misinformation had it. This turned out to be Joan Connelly Ullman, at that time the director of the Instituto Internacional, who later completed an important dissertation and book on the Semana Trágica, as well as developing an influential career at the University of the Pacific and the University of Washington. She, Clay La Force, and I made up the trio of American dissertators in Madrid that year working on Spanish history of the two preceding centuries, something of a portent of things to come, since we would have many successors.

Two years later Edward Malefakis, who came right after me at Columbia, would begin his research in Madrid. His dissertation on the Republican agrarian reform would in fact constitute the deepest and most accomplished piece of work of all the American dissertations of those early years. I was fortunate in my fellow-researchers, for all were able scholars and have remained good friends, though in later years the only one whom I would see fairly regularly was Ed Malefakis, especially because of his home in Madrid.

It was a unique privilege to live and work in Spain before the close of the 1950s, for at that time many aspects of traditional Spanish society and culture were still alive. In those years manners and mores were in fact more formal, hierarchical, and conservative than they had been a quarter-century earlier, a result of the counterrevolution wrought by the Civil War. At that moment I could scarcely have imagined that within no more than a decade — by the late 1960s — the society and culture would have been drastically transformed by a vertiginous process of modernizing change, for good and for ill. I had arrived just in time to witness the final phase of more traditional Spanish life before it disappeared forever. Undoubtedly the new society, eventually a political democracy, would be much freer and more prosperous and also in some ways happier, but it would also lose touch with many of the values, symbols, and mores that had made Spanish society and culture distinctive. Hence in part the obsessive emphasis on fostering local and regional identities, together with the local festivals, that became so marked by the last years of the century.

A major concern during that first year in Spain was to make my own assessment of the Spanish and their culture (in the sense of ordinary society rather than high culture). The stereotypes of "romantic Spain," thanks to Ernest Hemingway and others, were by no means dead in the 1950s. Because of the Civil War and the Franco regime, Spain was viewed as an exceptional country, and the Spanish as rather exceptional people, given to violent conflict and fits of passion. Even the government had adopted the tourist slogan that "Spain is different," though its intention was not the same. My concern was to determine whether the Spanish really were "different" or rather normal people whose life had simply been marked by severe conflicts. After my first two months in Madrid I came to the conclusion that the Spanish were indeed basically normal people, not a collection of fanatics and extremists, though like all national groups they exhibited certain cultural idiosyncrasies.

I also devoted considerable time to travel that year, crisscrossing much of the country by bus, train, and plane, with special attention to several parts of the north and to Andalusia, spending more time in the south than I ever would again. In the process I met and dealt with people from every social background and all parts of the political spectrum, with the sole exception of the Communist Party. My own role was strictly that of researcher and observer. The only time that I was tempted to become involved politically was when I learned of the plight of the blind CNT leader Félix Carrasquer, once more in jail, since international publicity might improve the chances for his release. He was indeed released early in 1959, without further prompting from the outside, and I was able to visit Carrasquer within days of his regaining liberty.

Of all political sectors, the one that most impressed me on a personal level was the Pamplonese Carlists, with whom I made contact in December 1958. What most struck me about the Carlists was their spontaneity, forthrightness, and lack of affectation. Their authenticity was impressive, and initiated what would become a long-term friendship with a number of them.

The doctoral thesis on the Falange was largely written during the summer of 1959 and defended at Columbia the following spring. My first teaching took place at Columbia during 1959-60 and at Hunter College (City University of New York), after which I was offered a regular position at the beginning level at the University of Minnesota in 1960. I submitted the manuscript on the Falange to the Stanford University Press and obtained a quick acceptance, the book appearing in October 1961. A year or so later the new émigré press Ruedo Ibérico, founded by José Martínez in Paris, asked for the rights to editions in Spanish and French, which then came out in France in 1964-65.

The success of the book, generally well received on every hand, was gratifying and even surprising. It was also related to the fact that contemporary Spanish history was then a completely unworked field. Virtually all the reviews were favorable, some of them extremely so. The review that appeared in the
Revista de Estudios Políticos
was inevitably negative, standing as the more or less official response of the regime, but I understood that this would have to be the case, and in fact had the response in such an organ been favorable, it would probably have indicated that there was something seriously wrong with the book.

The original study of the Falange was no more than a doctoral thesis, based in part on oral history, an immature work some passages of which are a bit embarrassing to read in retrospect. It was in fact a training device for a fledgling historian who still had a great deal to learn, both about researching and writing history in general, and about contemporary Spanish history in particular. Although the findings about the Falange as an attempt to impose fascism in Spain were all negative, the book made some allowance for the charismatic qualities and intentions of José Antonio Primo de Rivera and some of the original Falangists — more so than would have been the case at a later stage in my career as a historian. There was an element of youthful romanticism in the style of writing that would have been impossible for me to sustain ten or twenty years later, but which probably helped to convey the human drama of the Spanish disaster of those years. At any rate, the first printing in English sold out and soon led to a second, which meant that the book remained available on the market at the Stanford University Press for thirty-five years, until 1996. Ruedo Ibérico undoubtedly sold even more copies in Spanish, but José Martínez never issued royalty reports to his authors in the manner of a normal publisher, so one never knew. Ruedo Ibérico always struggled financially as an émigré press, unable to sell directly in Spain, and depended on the sales of a few particular titles to stay afloat.
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We generally understood this and did not complain when years sometimes passed without any payment of royalties.

The year 1961 was in fact the time of the emergence of contemporary Spanish history as a scholarly field in English, with the publication of Hugh Thomas's
The Spanish Civil War
and Burnett Bolloten's
The Grand Camouflage
, on the fate of the revolution in the Republican zone, as well as my own book. There was a kind of symmetry between them, with one history of the Civil War in general, a second on the Left, and a third on the Right. The most important of these was Thomas's book, even though its first edition carried the inevitable number of minor errors. It was a major scholarly achievement, and the product of a young autodidact abroad, Thomas being only three years older than myself.

At the time that his book appeared, I had been working for some months on a history of the Spanish Civil War of my own, but quickly concluded that at that stage I would be unable to improve on Thomas's work. I soon decided to follow up on Vicens's suggestion of the importance of a book on the politics of the military, being able to carry out a full year of research on it in Spain during 1962-63, thanks to a Guggenheim fellowship, which came as a result of the book on the Falange and especially of the good offices of my senior colleague at Minnesota, John B. Wolf, a noted specialist on the history of seventeenth-century France.

I had first returned to Spain in the summer of 1961, where my efforts were devoted to preparing a brief study on the historiography of Vicens Vives, which became my first major article.
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Most of that summer was devoted to an extensive honeymoon with my new bride, Julia Sherman, a psychologist from Minneapolis, as we spent nearly two and a half months crisscrossing Europe on Eurail passes. Among many other adventures, we twice passed through the Berlin Wall during the first week of its construction.