Hayes Family Diplomats in Spain - 1944

Hayes Family Busy Diplomats in Spain

Bainbridge News & Republican, April 27, 1944

 

The following is from the "Waterbury Republican" published Sunday morning, Apr. 2, 1944 and written by Charles S. Foltz, special correspondent.

 

Madrid:  When President Roosevelt appointed Carlton J.H. Hayes to be ambassador to Spain in 1942 he didn't name just one ambassador, he named four.

 

Boss ambassador is, of course, the one Mr. Roosevelt chose--an author, historian and political theorist of world reputation.  Hayes, a Catholic, seemed a good choice to Spaniards when he arrived five months after Pearl Harbor.  With him came Mrs. Hayes, energetic, capable and modern, a leader in her own right in American Women's organizations; Mary Elizabeth Hayes then 18; and Carroll Hayes, a lithe boy of 16 with all an American youngster's likes, enthusiasms and hobbies.

 

In that spring of 1942, the position of a new ambassador of the United States in Spain was not neutral but nonbelligerent. German troops were on Spain's Pyrenees frontier and the Spanish Blue Legion fought on the Russian front.  Corregidor had fallen and the Axis was boasting about the imminent fall of Alexandria.  The Allied policy toward Spain was designed to do everything possible toward Franco's reported desire to keep this country out of the war.  Spain's position was of tremendous importance to the Allied plans--how tremendous was obvious only after American occupation of French North Africa, the next November.  Hayes went to work on that basis and so did the whole Hayes family.

 

"I am by profession, sir, a  historian" Hayes told Franco when he presented his credentials, and he might had added:  "Neither I nor my family are professional diplomats--we're here to do a wartime job."  Franco said he too was "confident of the benefits to be derived from economic interchanges" between the United States and Spain."  He went further than usual when he offered Hayes "my own and my government's friendship and sincere cooperation."

 

Hayes set out to meet and tell the American story to as many influential Spaniards of all types as possible to make friends where there had been only enemies, to make contacts where there had been none.

 

While the Ambassador organized the embassy, Mrs. Hayes organized the embassy wives.  Save for a small group of Spanish aristocrats, the embassy social contacts with Spaniards were limited.  Mrs. Hayes mobilized the wives of both embassy and colony--there were less than 10 American women in the whole American colony of Madrid--into a team which abandoned its social contacts with each other and set out to know Spaniards and more Spaniards. 

 

Mary Elizabeth helped and so did Carroll.  Before Mary Elizabeth returned to Barnard college in the Fall she had a whole group of Spanish friends her own age.  Through her friends, her parents met their parents.  Carroll stayed in Madrid and went to a Spanish school, the Colegio de Nuestra Senora Del Pilar.  Mary Elizabeth rides horseback with one group, plays tennis with another, goes to the University of Madrid with still another.  Frequently she was hostess at the embassy for her friends and frequently Carroll was host to his friends.  One of Carroll's companions was the young Duke of Veragua, and Christopher Columbus, descendant of the admiral and now a cadet in Spain's naval academy.  Carroll's enthusiasm was aviation and through it he met many a young Spaniard, the sons of high army and navy officers, high government officials, leading aristocrats.  During school vacations, Carroll worked in the railroad yards delivering and receiving embassy shipments.  He worked at the airport on the naval attache's plane with the Spanish mechanic.  He spent several weeks as a working guest in the Monastery of Montserrat near Barcelona, a Benedictine colony will known in Spain.

 

French refugees by the thousands poured across the Pyrenees frontiers into Spain shortly after the Hayes family arrived.  Few had proper clothes.  Not long after the U.S. entered the war, escaped American prisoners, most of them aviators, crossed the mountains too.  Mrs. Hayes organized the women of the embassy and the colony to knit and sew clothes for them.  The summer house in the embassy garden was filled with dozens of sewing machines where American women and their Spanish friends worked for hours each afternoon.

 

The Hayes are seldom alone for lunch or dinner.  But there's always one meal together, breakfast, at which the family--now three because Carroll has returned to the States--pools news and activities of the day before. 

 

Such teamwork spread the Hayes family all over Madrid.  Perhaps the ambassador is busy working nights in the embassy and can't go to this reception or that--Mary Elizabeth will be there.  Perhaps the ambassador should be--but can't call--on one of his Spanish friends--Mrs. Hayes makes the call instead.  Perhaps the ambassador hasn't heard from this Spanish high official in an long time--Carroll calls on the friend's son.  So it went. Spain's policy has changed now, from nonbelligrency to neutrality, and things are better for Americans than they once were.

 

The whole Hayes family, like all the other diplomats of the American embassy, is well aware that the main reason for this change is not diplomacy but military events.  But Spaniards are equally well aware of the importance of the "breakfast table" teamwork of the four American "ambassadors" in Madrid.