The First 25

For the stocky little general with the impassive face, it was a day of memory and triumph. Exactly 25 years ago, with the Spanish Civil War not yet three months old, an army junta met in the Old Castile capital of Burgos and elected him Chief of Government of Nationalist Spain. Since then, the world and its leaders* have changed many times. The Great Depression was followed by world war, which was followed by agonies of reconstruction and the cold war; nations were born, others swallowed up. But Francisco Franco Bahamonde, 68, was still Caudillo of Spain--and for all anyone could tell, he might still be in 25 more years.

Franco last week returned to Burgos, a grey and Gothic city festooned with flags, flowers and triumphal arches. With him went almost everyone of importance in Spain: Cabinet ministers in frock coats, generals and admirals weighted down with medals, Falangists in blue shirts and white coats, and tens of thousands of Castilian peasants, stiffly dressed in their Sunday best. After High Mass and Te Deum in the 13th century cathedral, Dictator Franco went to the Plaza Mayor and told the crowd, in his reedy monotone, that he had defeated Communism and given his countrymen more than two decades of peace. He warned darkly that "liberal democracy easily ends in Communism."

Forced Unity. As Franco often says, the principal accomplishment of his long reign has been peace. From the civil war, he inherited a shattered, shell-shocked nation--without money, industry, food or spirit. On the battleground where brother gunned brother, where international fascism battered international Communism, and where a generation of Western intellectuals bitterly fought for their Marxist illusions, Franco built a regime characterized by greyness, apathy and public order.

Franco managed to keep Spain out of World War II, but his sympathies lay with the Axis (he even sent a division of infantry to fight Russia). In 1946, the new United Nations, determined to bring down the last fascist dictator in Europe, cut him off from the world by imposing a boycott which lasted five years. Spaniards, always resentful of foreign meddling, immediately united behind the Caudillo. From his palace at El Pardo near Madrid, Franco thumbed his nose at the West, saying that the West would eventually come around to him.

Abruptly, Franco was proved right. Looking about for places to put airbases, the U.S. in 1953 signed a ten-year alliance and aid treaty in Madrid, and Franco passed from international villain to member of the Western community. Ever since, Spain has been improving slowly, erratically, but noticeably.

"Organic Democracy." Political repressions, which had been both harsh and frequent at the end of the civil war (an estimated 100,000 enemies of Franco were shot), slowly became less frequent, milder, even playful. Criticizing Franco has become an intellectual exercise of the bored rich and their spoiled sons. On the rare occasions when they are jailed, they are treated like gentlemen, eventually released with sentence delayed--but revivable if they create new difficulties for the regime. Under such a mild eye, almost everyone now feels brave enough to brag quietly that he really hates Franco ("but there's no other choice").

Franco often calls his regime an "organic democracy" in which the individual is represented through family, labor syndicate and township; unfortunately, no such system exists in practice, and there are no free political elections in Spain.

Labor unions now elect shop stewards but the stewards are powerless, and strikes illegal. New laws to relax Franco's tight control over the press have been in the rumor stage since 1957, will probably get no further. This spring, Franco announced that new basic laws were under study by the rubber-stamp Parliament; they will probably remain under study indefinitely. This summer, women were ceremoniously granted equal rights with men, but since men have few political rights, it was a meaningless gesture.

Retreat from a Boom. Spain's real gains have been economic. Inspired by U.S. aid money, Franco in the Fifties embarked on an overambitious program to make Spain a great industrial power. Giant steel plants rose (in nearly inaccessible areas), automobile and truck factories sprang up, and scores of new dams were erected to furnish more electricity (but few to irrigate Spain's parched soil). The sudden boom was accompanied by a runaway inflation that sent the cost of living up 50%. It also nearly bankrupted the economy. By the summer of 1959, Franco's coffers were empty: they contained $6,000,000 in hard currency, not even enough to buy a month's supply of oil.

Faced with economic disaster, Franco had no choice but to bring his headlong boom to a violent stop. A dramatic stabilization program, plotted by able young Spanish economists and backed with loans totaling $418 million from the U.S. and OEEC, put Franco's finances on sound ground for the first time in history (latest surplus: $763 million). Under pressure from both labor and business, Franco was forced to reject two basic changes that would have renovated the whole anti quated economy: an end to the rigid labor laws against layoffs and to government favoritism toward established industries by controlling possible competition. Even so, the economy slowly got started again, is now working at a record level. The individual Spaniard, although poorer paid (an average of $25 a month) than most other Western Europeans, has never lived better. Most families can now afford a motor scooter; many are taking vacations for the first time in their lives.

Actuarial Answer. So impressive has been Spain's recent recovery, that Wall Street's influential Arthur Wiesenberger & Co. last month announced that "Spain's prospects for growth in the period ahead presently appear about as good as those of almost any nation on the globe." One problem troubled Wiesenberger: "After Franco, what happens?" For an answer, he had to resort to an actuarial table. Reported Wiesenberger: "The best answer seems to be that Franco, who will be 69 in December, has a life expectancy of 80."

Indeed, after 25 years, the question of succession is still unanswered. Although Franco in 1947 declared Spain a kingdom, there is no real indication that it will ever have a king--even though the official pretender, the dynamic Don Juan de Bourbon, is often boomed as Franco's logical successor. In fact, Franco has not taken one step to guarantee a normal change of power. "We are like a bottle of champagne," says a Madrid shopkeeper. "If the cork is not held down tightly, it shoots up to the ceiling."

Franco is often criticized because he is a dictator, and to the West's liberals and social democrats he is still the bloodspattered villain of a thousand torture chambers and political executions. The description no longer fits. In the period following the civil war, Spain unquestionably needed a strong hand. Had Franco used his victory well, applied his mandate wisely, he might well have gone down in history as the man who saved

Spain from itself. Unfortunately, unless he does live to be 80 and devotes the next decade to boldly granting freedom and building the broadly based institutions on which rests true stability, Franco may be recorded only as the man who held down the cork.

*Some 1936 contemporaries: Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Roosevelt, Ataturk, Leon Blum, Stanley Baldwin, Eduard Benes; all are dead.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.