39 Facts About Jay Allen

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

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

Jay Allen's father Jay Cooke Allen was born in Kentucky but he settled in Seattle and practiced as an attorney; his mother Jeanne Maud Lynch was a first generation Irish-American.

Jay Allen 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.

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

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

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

Jay Allen's only son Jay Cooke Michael was born in Paris in 1927.

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

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

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

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

Jay Allen forged friendship with Juan Negrin, Luis Araquistain, Julio Alvarez del Vayo, Rodolfo Llopis, Luis Quintanilla and many others.

Jay 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.

Jay Allen was last seen in Spain in May 1937, when in Bilbao he interviewed a shot down German pilot, who earlier had taken part in the bombing raid over Guernica.

Jay Allen was hired as the first editor-in-chief, largely thanks to his earlier Chicago Tribune correspondence.

In early summer of 1937 Jay Allen returned to New York and began to gather a staff of militant liberal writers.

The meeting was cancelled at short notice; eventually Negrin met Eleanor Rosevelt and Jay Allen managed to forge a friendly relation with her.

Jay Allen toyed with an idea of writing a history of the Spanish Civil War; he worked with Herbert Southworth and Barbara Tuchman compiling data.

Some time in 1940 Jay Allen became engaged with Emergency Rescue Committee, an American NGO set up to assist endangered individuals trapped in the Vichy France.

In January 1941 Jay Allen interviewed Petain and posed as a journalist impressed with Vichy France.

The struggle for control against Fry lasted until February 1941, when Jay Allen departed to Paris.

Jay Allen was placed in prison in Chalon-sur-Saone and was held there until July 1941.

Jay Allen was Interrogated by the French police, SS and Gestapo, but according to his own account, he revealed no meaningful information on his ERC-related activities.

Back in the United States Jay Allen became engaged with the US military, though neither the timing nor exact mechanism of his involvement are clear.

When Operation Torch commenced in November 1942, Jay Allen was heading a propaganda unit named Psychological Warfare Branch.

In 1944 Jay Allen moved to Seattle to take care of his ailing father, but in 1947 the family settled in Carmel, California.

Jay Allen intended to publish a book titled The Day Will End: a personal adventure behind Nazi lines; eventually this project came to nothing.

Jay Allen effectively retired as a press correspondent, living off his father's inheritance.

Jay Allen was reportedly increasingly downcast and disillusioned, especially that "all conspired to drain away his optimism and determination to go fighting".

Jay Allen remained in touch with many Hispanists, though particularly with Southworth, who turned from his junior research assistant to a recognized though non-academic historian; he remained a great admirer of Allen.

Jay Allen cultivated friendship with Gerald Brenan, whom he inspired towards Spanish history back in the mid-1930s.

However, Jay Allen was somewhat skeptical about Hugh Thomas, who reportedly refused to take sides and was "terribly fuzzy about a lot of things"; he remained cautious about Burnett Bolloten.

Recent works are supposed to demonstrate that Jay Allen has visited neither Badajoz nor even the province of Badajoz and that he faked the entire correspondence, including false days when the article has allegedly been written and wired.

Some authors claim that Jay Allen produced lies to divert attention from carnage in the Modelo prison.

In some historiographic works related to ERC activities in Marseille and in France Jay Allen is presented as a particularly repulsive figure.

Jay Allen's personality is presented as opposite to this of Varian Fry, the genuine heart and mind of the Marseille ERC.

Jay Allen's intention to run the Marseilles mission by proxy does not result from his incompetence, cowardice or laziness, but is a mark of his professional caution and far-sightedness.