Jay Allen

His father Jay Cooke Allen (1868–1948) was born in Kentucky but he settled in Seattle and practiced as an attorney; his mother Jeanne Maud Lynch (1876–1901) was a first generation Irish-American.

She died due to tuberculosis when Jay was 15-months old.

The religion-motivated legal battle for custody over Jay ensued between Jeanne's Catholic relatives and the Methodist father, who eventually emerged victorious.

Some authors speculate that the episode might have influenced later Allen's hostility towards the Catholic Church.

However, Allen's juvenile relations with his father were also tense, since Jay Allen Sr. became a violent alcohol addict.

Jay left home in his early teens and moved to the East Coast, where he became the boarder at the Pullman College in Washington.

Jay Cooke Allen Jr. (Seattle, 7 July 1900 – Carmel, 20 December 1972) was an American journalist.

He worked mostly for the Chicago Tribune, though his contributions appeared also in many other US newspapers, especially between the mid-1920s and the mid-1930s.

He is known mostly as a foreign correspondent active during the Spanish Civil War; his interview with Francisco Franco, report from Badajoz and interview with José Antonio Primo de Rivera are at times considered 3 most important journalistic accounts of the conflict and made enormous impact around the globe.

His work as war correspondent is extremely controversial: some consider him a model of impartial, investigative journalism, and some think his work an examplary case of ideologically motivated manipulation and fake news.

After graduation Jay Allen Jr. entered an unidentified faculty at the Harvard, where he received his master's degree in 1920.

Afterwards in the early 1920s he was employed by The Portland Oregonian.

Allen's job took him to Spain a few times in the late 1920s; he briefly resided in Madrid in 1930.

The Allens became close friends to an aristocrat turned radical socialist Constancia de la Mora, who in turn introduced them to numerous left-wing activists.

In 1924 Allen married Ruth Myrtle Austin (1899–1990), a woman from Woodburn in Oregon; on they honeymoon the couple went to France.

When in Paris they befriended Ernest Hemingway, who tipped Allen off that he was about to resign his job with the Paris office of the Chicago Daily Tribune.

Allen immediately applied for the vacancy and was successful.

Between 1924 and 1934 Allen remained formally based in France though he spent long spells abroad, especially in Geneva, where he reported from the League of Nations.

At the time he covered events in France, Belgium, Spain, Italy, Austria, Germany, Poland and the Balkans.

As foreign correspondent Allen travelled extensively across Europe and went as far as to the Polish-Lithuanian border.

In 1925 he joined the paper's foreign service; Allen's first signed correspondence in Tribune is dated February 19, 1926.

His only son Jay Cooke Michael (later an Episcopal priest and dean of the Berkeley Divinity School) was born in Paris in 1927.

In the mid-1930s Allen settled in Torremolinos, in a hotel owned by a British friend.

Following the news of the July Coup Allen immediately left Torremolinos and fled to Gibraltar; en route his car was mistakenly fired at – according to his own account – by "very nervous squad of Republican soldiers", who killed the driver.

In late July he shuttled between Gibraltar and the Spanish Morocco.

As American press correspondent he gained access to the entourage of Francisco Franco and managed to secure what is often erroneously referred to as the first interview with the general after the coup.

He settled in Madrid again in early 1934, this time with the intention to go on as a journalist but also to study the agrarian question.

Allen resumed his personal contacts with radical left-wing journalists, intellectuals, artists and politicians.

He forged friendship with Juan Negrín, Luis Araquistáin, Julio Álvarez del Vayo, Rodolfo Llopis, Luis Quintanilla and many others.

Following the Asturian revolution he hosted in his apartment Amador Fernández, the leader of Asturian miners who went into hiding.

In his correspondence to American press he remained highly sympathetic towards the revolutionaries; at one point he was arrested and interrogated by the police, but was soon set free.

The conversation took place on July 27 in Tetuán, and the interview appeared in News Chronicle of July 29, 1936.

Allen presented Franco in rather unsympathetic though prophetic terms as an excessively self-confident "midget who would be a dictator", the person consumed by anti-Masonic and anti-Marxist obsession.

According to Allen when asked whether he was ready to "shoot half Spain", Franco confirmed that he was prepared to save the country from Marxism "at whatever cost".

This statement was also emphasized in the sub-title.

Allen's whereabouts between late July and mid-August are not clear, though he probably shuttled between Gibraltar, Spanish Morocco and the international zone of Tanger.

At some time – the exact date remains disputed – he flew from Tanger to Lisbon and than drove to the border town of Elvas.

According to his own claim, on August 23 he visited Badajoz, the city taken by the Nationalist troops on August 14.

In late August he was back in Tanger.

On August 30, 1936 The Chicago Tribune published his correspondence, titled Slaughter of 4,000 at Badajoz, ‘City of Horrors’ and reportedly written in Elvas in the very early hours of August 25.