John Eoghan Kelly, mining engineer, writer, activist

John Eoghan Kelly, ca. 1915  ©

John Eoghan Kelly, ca. 1925  ©

Overview:

Born 4 May 1896 to pioneer electrical engineer and Irish nationalist John Forrest Kelly, and social worker Helen Tischer.  Worked as a mining consultant in Mexico and central America during the 1920s.  Wrote an academic history, Pedro de Alvarado, Conquistador (Princeton University Press, 1932), and co-authored an adventure documentary, The Incurable Filibuster: Adventures of Col. Dean Ivan Lamb (Farrar & Rinehart, 1934).  As a reserve U.S. Army officer, G-2, reported on communist revolutionaries.  In late 1936, lectured to Army groups on the Spanish Civil War.

By 1938, was the principal U.S. lobbyist for Gen. Franco’s Nationalist Spain.  His efforts to network influential elites, including keynote speaker Senator David I. Walsh during the American Legion’s 20th National Convention, explain in part Congress’s reluctance to lift the U.S. arms embargo to Loyalist Spain.  Kelly’s activism illustrates the power of a private individual not only to influence public opinion but also to affect foreign policy.

After a witch hunt by Ralph Ingersoll’s socialist tabloid, PM, FBI agent provocateur John Roy Carlson, and Walter Winchell’s “Jergens Journal” radio show, Winchell pressured his friend J. Edgar Hoover to prosecute Kelly under a technicality of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (in 1943).  Following World War II, Kelly lobbied for a private sector steel mill in New England and wrote short stories.  He died in Washington, D.C., on 18 June 1954.

 

John Eoghan Kelly Papers:

Core collection: approx. 5,682 document pages.

Subsidiary collection: approx. 7,562.

FBI File 65-1461: approx 1,721 unexpurgated document pages.

Available to researchers, at Charlestown, MA, by appointment.

 

John Eoghan Kelly Bibliography:

Comprising 53 speeches, 1 radio broadcast, 3 published works,

144 published non-fiction articles, 12 published short stories,

23 letters-to-the-editor, 118 draft non-fiction articles,

3 unpublished books, 82 draft short stories, 16 poems.

 

“Arguing Americanism: John Eoghan Kelly’s Franco Lobby, 1936–43.”

 

      During the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), a Great Debate raged in America between supporters of Madrid’s Loyalist revolutionaries and those of Gen. Francisco Franco’s rebel Nationalists.  This dissertation employs new archival sources to document the long overlooked pro-Nationalist half of the argument.  Franco lobbyists—engineer turned writer John Eoghan Kelly, progressive humanist Ellery Sedgwick, art deco muralist Hildreth Meière, homemaker Clare Singer Dawes, philanthropist Anne Morgan, libertarian pundit Merwin K. Hart—were a far more diverse group than the “fascist crackpot” or “Catholic hierarchy” labels of prevailing historiography.  Why did these Americans work so hard and sacrifice so much to back an unpalatable dictator in distant Spain during a time of unprecedented domestic crisis?  Sources indicate that they found unity of purpose in their loathing of international Marxism.  Though bracketed by the 1920s Red Scare and 1950s McCarthyism, pro-Franco anticommunism differed fundamentally: it was not state sponsored but opposed to the New Deal state, which it judged to be soft on communism while favoring Franco’s Soviet-backed Loyalist enemies.  Consequently, Franco lobbyists’ critique of the Roosevelt presidency attracted Justice Department ire and a conviction for Kelly in 1943 under the Foreign Agents Registration Act.  Caught in a historical singularity, pro-Franco anticommunists were patriots to themselves but un-American to their state.  Franco lobbyists provide an interesting cultural study, for they emphasized traditional core values while advocating modern solutions to socio-economic problems; they were politically important too, for they not only influenced public opinion but also affected U.S. foreign policy.

      At a deeper interpretive level, it appears that these lobbyists were not interested in Franco’s Spain per se, but rather in utilizing Spain’s tragedy to reaffirm American principles.  Yet Franco lobbyists’ argument with pro-Loyalists over the soul of Americanism, at a time when their state was sympathetic to communism, became so corrosive that it reconfigured American national identity through the Cold War liberal consensus.

Michael E. Chapman, Boston College, 2006