Avuncular American

J. Rives Childs in Wartime Tangier

This post was originally published in 2014 on the Tangier American Legation blog.

In honor of the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, and the Soviet arrest of Raoul Wallenberg, the "Swedish Schindler," I republish three posts on a righteous American diplomat who helped more than a thousand Jews escape the Holocaust.

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The January-February 2014 issue of the Foreign Service Journal contains my article on the Legation's World War II Chargé d'Affaires, J. Rives Childs.  Alternatively, this link to the FSJ gives you an option for either PDF or "FlippingBook" versions of the entire issue, but I've repeated the text below for TALIMblog readers.

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On July 16, 1987, the New York Times noted the passing of J. Rives Childs, a “former American diplomat and authority on Casanova.”

Childs had led many lives: volunteer ambulance driver à la Hemingway and U.S. Army cryptographer in France during World War I (he later received the Medal of Freedom for cracking German codes); postwar White House correspondent; American Relief Administration official (one of “Hoover’s Boys”) in the famine-stricken USSR of the 1920s; and a Foreign Service officer whose 30-year career culminated with ambassadorships to Saudi Arabia and Ethiopia after World War II.

Childs also wrote 14 books, ranging from definitive studies of Casanova and French writers of the 18th century (some written in French) to several works touching on his Foreign Service career. His final memoir, Let the Credit Go (1983), recounts his tenure as chargé d’affaires at the American Legation in Tangier, Morocco, between 1941 and 1945.

Despite the wealth of material generated by and about Childs, he remains an enigma. Was it just luck that he came unscathed through the McCarthy-era witch hunts despite some unconventional views on the Soviet Union? Just how effective a diplomat was a man some called an “insufferable prig” for driving his staff up the wall--including agents from the wartime Office of Strategic Services who were just trying to do their job?

And is Childs an unsung hero of the Holocaust, whose name belongs among the “righteous gentiles” at Israel’s Yad Vashem memorial? Or all of the above?

Franco’s Spain and Petain’s France Meet in Morocco

For sheer complexity and strategic importance, Childs’ four-plus years in Tangier as chargé d’affaires (1941-1945) overshadow his later assignments as ambassador.

Though he resided at the American Legation in the city’s International Zone, Childs was accredited to Morocco, which was divided into French and Spanish protectorates. The U.S. had never recognized the Spanish zone, and the situation was further complicated when the forces of General Francisco Franco, recently victorious in the Spanish Civil War, occupied the International Zone after France fell to German forces in June 1940.

The U.S. continued to recognize the Petain government in Vichy, and American policy was to cultivate relations with Vichy representatives in North Africa. Childs applied himself energetically to that task, cultivating officials favorable to the Allied cause and probing French and Spanish officials about their attitudes on a hypothetical Allied landing.

In particular, would Franco abandon his official neutrality and allow German forces to sweep down from Spain and through Morocco once American troops landed, as they did in November 1942 (Operation Torch)?  (Franco did maintain Spanish neutrality, angering Adolf Hitler.)

These concerns were shared by the new clandestine service set up in the wake of Pearl Harbor, the Office of Strategic Services. This precursor to the CIA chose the American Legation in Tangier as its headquarters for Mediterranean operations, and recruited a Harvard anthropologist, Carleton Coon, who was given diplomatic cover as a vice consul.  Coon’s anthropological fieldwork in the northern Moroccan Rif Mountains in the 1920s and 1930s gave him an entrée with the Berber tribes who had rebelled against Spanish occupation.

The OSS plan was to furnish financial support and weapons so the Berbers would be ready to rise up in rebellion should Franco join the Axis and threaten the Allies (which he never did). Vice Consul Coon invented fanciful code names for his chief Moroccan contacts like “Tassels” and “Strings.” He later described his cloak-and-dagger work in North Africa Story, an entertaining compilation of his wartime reports.

Coon’s exploits did not amuse Childs, however. Though he didn’t name Coon, the chargé later wrote that one of his vice consuls had harbored delusions of becoming “a second Lawrence of Arabia.” 

For his part, Coon paints a damning picture of Childs as so out of touch about the nature of clandestine work that he had the OSS communication operation moved out of the legation because the tapping of the telegraph kept his wife awake at night. Retired Ambassador Carleton Coon Jr. recalls “This appeared treasonable to my father, and after I had started on my own diplomatic career, my father swore he would never allow his son to serve under ‘that SOB’.”

Whether this was “treasonable” conduct or just extreme micromanagement is a matter of opinion. What is less debatable is that many of Childs’ colleagues saw him as priggish. For instance, he proudly recounted his success in prohibiting female American dependents from wearing slacks and shorts within the residential compound in Addis Ababa, his last diplomatic posting, in the early 1950s. When the women protested this vestige of Puritanism, Childs threatened to have any offenders and their husbands transferred out of Ethiopia.

Fascist Visas Save Jewish Lives

During his time in Spanish-occupied Tangier of the 1940s, Chargé Childs had initially approached the Spanish authorities with circumspection, assuming that High Commissioner General Luis Orgaz was a Franco fascist.  But working contacts fostered warmer relations, which would lead to an important humanitarian action.

Tangier, like the Casablanca depicted in the film of that title, was an important hub for refugees fleeing both the war and the Holocaust. Renée Reichmann, herself a refugee from Hungary, was a key figure in relief efforts from Tangier, and was affiliated with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee.

Reichmann’s efforts in sending tons of food parcels to occupied Europe were herculean, and she even performed the unimaginable: a trip back through fascist Europe to Hungary in 1942 to see her parents for what proved to be the last time. By early 1944, the Jewish community of Hungary was targeted for the Final Solution, and Reichmann’s focus shifted from relief to rescue.

She approached Childs to enlist his help in extricating hundreds of Jews in Budapest from the clutches of the Nazis. Reichmann’s request came just after the Roosevelt administration created the War Refugee Board, a belated attempt to intervene on behalf of Jews and other threatened populations.  Childs was therefore able to add official U.S. government weight to what was initially a personal, humanitarian gesture.

It turns out that Spanish High Commissioner General Orgaz was not the fascist that Childs had assumed him to be. He issued several tranches of visas for Tangier, which was sufficient for the Nazis to consider the threatened Jews to be protected by a friendly power.  On the eve of Childs’ departure from Tangier in June 1945, Reichmann wrote him to express thanks “for your extremely noble and generous assistance in the affair of the entry visas for Tangier ... Thus, 1,200 innocent souls owe their survival to Your Excellency.”

At the Tangier American Legation’s museum, we display the full text of Reichmann’s letter, and note the fact that J. Rives Childs kept the letter in his pocket for years afterwards. For this action, worthy of Raoul Wallenberg and other World War II diplomats who saved Jews by the thousand, Childs--as in the title of his autobiography-- “let the credit go” to Reichmann for proposing the action and to Orgaz for issuing the visas.

An Arabist, but Not an Anti-Semite 

The operation, however, clearly left its mark on the seemingly stiff diplomat. Responding to Reichmann, he wrote: “I do not know of any work which I have done in my whole career which has given me greater personal satisfaction than the efforts made on behalf of these friendless persons."

 At the same time, Childs’ motivation for keeping Reichmann’s letter went beyond sentiment.  In his mind, it refuted any potential accusations that he was sympathetic to the cause of anti-Semitism.

His sensitivity to such charges presumably grew over the course of a succession of assignments in the Arab world. He served as consul in Jerusalem during the 1920s, and a desk officer for the Palestine Mandate and a mid-level diplomat in Cairo in the 1930s, followed by assignments to Tangier and Jeddah in the 1940s.  

“There is not the least doubt in my mind,” he commented in reflecting on his 30 years’ experience in the Middle East, “that so long as our unconditional support of Israel continues, there will be no peace in that area.” In 1952, in what he called his “swan song,” he sent a telegram responding to a question about Arab support for U.S. policy as follows: “United States support of Israel has undermined the confidence and trust which we once enjoyed in the Arab world.” He retired from the Foreign Service that same year.

Cane inscribed "J. Rives Childs," gift of Legation staff on Childs' departure from Tangier, 1945

Anti-Zionism, of course, does not equate to anti-Semitism, and there is no evidence at all that Childs was anti-Semitic. But we don’t have to take his own word for that. In his book, The Reichmanns, Anthony Bianco describes that family’s efforts to have Childs recognized at Yad Vashem as a “righteous Gentile.”

The Reichmanns launched that campaign even though they understood full well how unlikely they were to succeed. Not only was Israel loath to give any credit to Franco’s Spain for issuing the Tangier visas, but Childs’ years spent conducting diplomacy in the Middle East were enough to disqualify him from such recognition. It also did not help that Robert Satloff, who devotes his book, Among the Righteous, to the search for “Arab Schindlers” in North Africa in the 1940s, makes no mention of the American diplomat’s role in saving 1,200 Jews.

“Unduly Interested” in Soviet Russia?

Childs had cause to fear political attacks on another front, as well. As early as 1931, Childs recalled, “I received a letter from the State Department saying that attention had been drawn to me for being unduly interested in Soviet Russia.”

Presumably this criticism was based on the fact that Childs had spent two years in the Soviet Union as a relief worker a decade earlier, and had married a Russian woman. Even so, Childs always felt that his interest in the USSR was justified on an intellectual basis as well as for personal reasons. At one point he commented, “One of the quirks of [the] American character is the pathological reaction, bordering on mental disorder, toward anything touching the Russian Revolution or communism.”

In 1939, Childs learned that he had been recommended for promotion, but the move was later rescinded. He never learned exactly why, but assumed it was because “I was believed to entertain unorthodox opinions about Soviet Russia.” Of course, he went on to become chargé in Tangier and a two-time ambassador, so the episode was clearly not a career-ender. 

Jamie Cockfield, editor of Childs’ memoir of the Russian famine years, The Black Lebeda, saw him as a “limousine socialist.” Perhaps so. But in his intellectual embrace of Casanova and other 18th-century writers, Childs primarily seems a man from a bygone age, one who decried the end of the ancien régime in the wake of World War I. 

Writing in 1983, he saw many of the modern world’s troubles--World War II, the Arab-Israeli standoff—as rooted in that traumatic war in the trenches. “The end is not yet in sight, nor is it ever likely to be.”

J. Rives Childs may well have been a flawed hero. But then again, so was Oskar Schindler.

Gerald Loftus

(originally posted January 3, 2014)

Rives Childs: Remembering the Righteous

This post was originally published in 2011 on the Tangier American Legation blog.

In honor of the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, and the Soviet arrest of Raoul Wallenberg, the "Swedish Schindler," I republish three posts on a righteous American diplomat who helped more than a thousand Jews escape the Holocaust.

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Our post on J. Rives Childs, Chargé d'Affaires at the Tangier American Legation during World War II, has elicited a fascinating comment from a friend of his.  We repeat David Meyer's letter below to give it proper attention, as Mr. Meyer begins to answer one of the questions we raised in January: does J. Rives Childs deserve "Righteous" recognition at Yad Vashem for his role in saving Jewish lives during the Holocaust?  Mr. Meyer's letter addresses one of the key Yad Vashem criteria: "Righteous" designation is reserved for people who not only saved Jews, but also risked their own lives in doing so.

Images from Toledo sword cane inscribed to J. Rives Childs

TALIM Museum, Tangier American Legation

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"Rives Childs was a close personal friend of mine for many years, from 1971 until his death in 1987. Childs was promoted to the rank of Ambassador soon after the war and was the U.S. Ambassador to Ethiopia and then Saudi Arabia in the post-war years that proved pivotal for both the creation of Israel and the resulting conflicts. Childs worked diligently to keep the Arab states, especially the Saudis, from engaging in war with Israel. His rapport with the Saudi King was critical in this regard.

When Senator McCarthy began his campaign alleging that there were Communists in the State Department, Childs had just turned 60 years old and was elgible for retirement. His wife, whom he had married in 1922 in Moscow, was from a formerly prominent, aristocratic Russian family, but had of course had her assets seized by the Bolsheviks. Childs was in Russia at the time, helping Herbert Hoover address the widespread famine that was occuring in Russia, when he met his wife-to-be. Childs told me that he was concerned in the early 1950s that he may become a target of McCarthy, because his wife was Russian. He told me that if he was ever called before the Senate committee, he was prepared to defend himself, in part by reading the letter from Renee Reichmann.

Childs was a native of Virginia, and his family lineage was long and prominent. He told me that he probably could have asked the U.S. Senator Harry Byrd (Virginia) to support him, but he did not want to put his wife through such an ordeal. Consequently, he decided to retire. He lived in Nice, France for the next 20 years (1953-1973) before returning to the United States after his wife's death.

Note also that Childs was awarded the Medal of Freedom by Harry Truman (*see note at bottom of page) after the war for his contribution to the North African invasion by providing intelligence early and continuously to the Allies before Operation Torch began. At one point, the Nazis had targeted him for assassination. The Allies had discovered this (because they had broken the Nazi's code) but did not tell Childs. For whatever reason, the assassination never occurred. Childs discovered this later after the war.

I have in the past thought, like you, that Childs ought to be considered for recognition for his actions regarding the Hungarian Jews he helped save. He told me that there were other diplomats who said, in essence, "Why bother? You are putting yourself at risk." (Evidently, he WAS at risk, but did not realize how much so until after the war. My hunch is that the Nazis wanted him dead because they suspected him of spying for the Allies more than his actions regarding the Jews in Budapest, but who knows for certain?).

I met Childs in 1971 when I was 19 years old and a freshman at Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Virginia. Childs was a 1912 graduate of Randolph-Macon (subsequently received his M.A. from Harvard) and would regularly visit the school for several months in 1971 and 1972. In my senior year, he left Nice, France and returned to the U.S. permanently.

We maintained a close friendship for the many years following my graduation in 1974 - in fact, he introduced me to a woman who became my wife (we have been married for 31 years). I told him that it was remarkable that he could still at the age of 85 have such a profound influence on people's lives by such simply "match making." He was always a modest person, but he found that humorous whenever I reminded him.

Obviously, he was one of many unsung heroes from that horrible time. While I sometimes wish that these types of persons would be able to live forever, I take solace in the fact that there are children and grandchilden alive today, making contributions to this world in ways we will never fully know, because Rives Childs saved those Budapest Jews from certain death in the concentration camps. I write this narrative on Yom Kippur as a testimony of one person's courage long ago that is an example of Atonement for all of us."

David Meyer

Fairfax, Virginia USA

* Note: James Cockfield, in his book on J. Rives Childs' work in famine relief in post-WW I Russia, says that Childs "was belatedly awarded the Medal of Freedom in 1946 for his work in cryptography" [in World War One].  Obviously, Childs (also a renowned expert on Casanova, and a prolific author) was quite a Renaissance man, in addition to being an unsung hero.

(originally posted October 9, 2011)

Tangier: Guides and Gateways

Cover by Robert McDonald, Tangier: The Golden Gateway (Tangier: Mediterranean American Press, 1952). Collection TALIM Research Library.

The following is a guest post by Emma Chubb, who made a presentation on her subject to a group of American, European, and Moroccan researchers and interested members of the public at TALIM on June 17.  Emma Chubb is a doctoral candidate in art history at Northwestern University (Evanston, Illinois USA) and is a 2013-14 American Institute for Maghrib Studies (AIMS) fellow in Morocco.

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Guides and Gateways

I spent much of last fall reading through TALIM’s collection of guidebooks and tourism magazines published between the 1940s and 1970s. Perhaps it was because I too was a newcomer to Tangier, but these guides fascinated me. Some folded out like maps, mixing quirky tips for the European or American traveler to Tangier with black-and-white photographs and brightly colored illustrations.

Tanger, Porte du Maroc [Tanger, Door to Morocco] (Marseille: Syndicat d’initiative et de tourisme de Tanger, nd). Collection TALIM Research Library.

With others, it was the advertisements that drew me in. I was particularly struck by how, in the space of a half-page, they bore such efficient witness to the complexity of colonial Tangier when it was an International Zone.

Take, for example, the advertisement for a shop called Butterfly published in the 1952 American guide, Tangier: The Golden Gateway, in which the United States, France, and the so-called Far East come together in the space of a few inches. While both the shop’s name and ad content appear in English, its rue des Vignes address and accented “e” in the abbreviation “Tél” point to France. Yet despite being in Morocco, shoppers will find nary a babouche here. Instead, this Tangerine store sells “rare objects from the Far East,” including, perhaps, silk kimono-clad, paper parasol-wielding female figurines like the one pictured.

Advertisement in Tangier: The Golden Gateway (Tangier: Mediterranean American Press, 1952). Collection TALIM Research Library.

Not surprisingly, many of the stereotypes and stock characters for which the city remains (in)famous appear throughout these guides. Frequent mentions of beaches, sunshine, modern hotels, and a favorable exchange rate promise various kinds of pleasure, while Moroccan handicrafts and produce sold by Rifi women in bright red-and-white striped foutas and pompom-adorned straw hats lend an “authentic,” “traditional,” and, yes, “exotic” ambiance.

Photograph in Hassan Dehbi, “En parcourant le Rif [Crossing the Rif],” in Maroc tourisme 59 (1970). Collection TALIM Research Library.

These clichés don’t only appear in guides from the colonial period, however, as TALIM’s collection of materials published by the Moroccan Ministry of Information and Tourism, such as Maroc Tourisme, makes clear. With its many examples from both before independence and after, TALIM’s guidebook collection raises important questions about the persistence of colonialist clichés in the postcolonial period.

These questions, like the guidebooks themselves, merit further study, particularly today as Tangier and the North take center stage in Morocco’s efforts to become a top global destination for tourists and in the many new guidebooks that they will undoubtedly bring with them.

Emma Chubb

Gaetana Enders, Tangerina in New York

It was only last month that Gaetana Enders, née Marchegiano, was back in the Tangier of her youth.  We don't often have the pleasure of hosting eighty-something researchers in our library, and I regret that I don't have a photo of Gaetana poring over a stack of books on Tangier, International Zone.

Another regret: she was in the final, fact-checking stage of writing her autobiography, and I wish that I had had more than a tantalizing look at the draft, filled with detail on the war years, when Italian families in Tangier were divided between loyalties to Mussolini, or, in the case of Gaetana's father, to Italy's monarchy.

Gaetana Enders, widow of career Ambassador Thomas Enders, passed away in New York on May 21.

Her trip to Tangier in late April was to revisit the city where she was born and grew up, and where she met her husband.  Which was at the American Legation.

In 1951, when Minister John Carter Vincent - who, as a "China Hand" was in diplomatic purgatory in Tangier, prior to his departure from the US Foreign Service in the worst days of McCarthy - wanted to give a reception for the visiting Thomas Enders, then still a student, he thought of young Gaetana Marchegiano.  She would be the hostess, and invite her young friends.

Daughter of the International Zone's judicial administrator on the Commission of Control, Gaetana not only threw a great party for Thomas Enders but soon became his wife.  She recalled her marriage in Tangier a few years later: "I was paraded through the medina in my white wedding dress, to the accompanying you-yous of the Moroccan women."

 

Wedding in Tangier, courtesy Enders family

Thomas Enders joined the Foreign Service in the late Fifties, and made a meteoric rise through the ranks, serving in several ambassadorial posts, including Canada, Spain, and the European Union.  After his death, Gaetana presented a rare map to the Legation in his honor, in the place where the two had met.

Gaetana led an extremely active life, first as an ambassador's wife, then as International Editor of ¡Hola! magazine (or Hello in its English edition), interviewing a series of international figures and celebrities.

Her final visit to Tangier, though she was still recovering from serious medical problems, was especially touching, revisiting as she did places like the Legation that were so important in her life.  We feel honored that we were able to share this moment with her, and our hearts go out to her family.

Gerald Loftus

Legation on the Holocaust Remembrance Map

With the Association Mimouna and the UN Holocaust Office, TALIM hosted a special event on Jews in Tangier during the Second World War.

Mimouna is a group of young Moroccans who work to underscore the Jewish heritage of their country.  They explain their genesis and goals:

Traditionally celebrated at the end of Passover, “Mimouna” is a unique Moroccan Jewish celebration of liberty and community. Moroccan Jews would often invite their Muslim neighbors to join in the festivities associated with returning to eating leavened food once Passover ended.

We are a group of Moroccan Muslim students striving to preserve and promote the history of Morocco’s ancient Jewish community. Founded in 2007 at Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane (AUI), the MIMOUNA takes its name from the original “Mimouna,” a symbol of the heritage shared by all Moroccans. We seek to educate the Moroccan people about the Jewish culture that used to flourish in the country, and encourage harmony between Jews and Muslims.

Coming from all over Morocco to Saturday's event at the Legation, the members of Mimouna also arranged for Kimberly Mann of the UN Holocaust program to address the group.  One member of our audience, a Jewish woman who grew up in wartime Tangier, brought her own eyewitness testimony to bear.

Vanessa Paloma of Brandeis and the Sorbonne, who did her Fulbright research in Tangier, reported on her work on the archives of Tangier's dwindling Jewish community.  There were poignant passages from the community's proceedings, hopeful during the early part of the war before the fall of France in June 1940, and increasingly guarded after that.  "Pray, but not too loudly" the faithful were constantly admonished, as uncertainty reigned after Franco's occupation of Tangier, and Vichy took over in the nearby French Protectorate.

Paloma, who has begun an ambitious project to preserve the sound archives of Jewish Morocco (Khoya: Les Archives Sonores du Maroc Juif), even found a rare recording of Jewish children in Tangier singing a ditty on the death of Adolf Hitler (I could make out "hijo de puta" somewhere in the lines).  When the sound didn't carry through our conference room, Vanessa, equally at home in concert mode, treated us to a live impromtu rendition.

For many in the audience, we were able to introduce them to the story of the Legation's role in helping to save some 1,200 Hungarian Jews from the death camps, which we first covered in 2011 and then again this year in the Foreign Service Journal.  The story of Renée Reichmann, her relief packages for European Jews, the story of the Joint Distribution Committee's aid to Jewish refugees in Tangier (check the JDC's archival photos of wartime Tangier) were a prelude to the rescue effort in which the Legation Chargé d'Affaires took a major part.

Now this story has not only gotten wider coverage among young Moroccans, but it has also been brought to the attention of the UN Holocaust Remembrance office.  The Legation is on the Holocaust Remembrance map.

Gerald Loftus

American Pirate in the Consular Court

1952: The case of the U.S. vs. "Nylon Sid"

Consular Court?  Piracy?  By an American?  Yes, this was Tangier, International Zone.

We couldn't find the Tangier Gazette article (not even sure there was one) about Sydney Paley, the American pirate in Tangier.  But thanks to Margery King, one of the Legation's steadfast friends, who remembers her father being called to serve as a juror at the Legation, we have this item from Time Magazine of December 29, 1952, Nylon Sid & the Jolly Roger:

The location was the Barbary Coast, Technicolored to perfection in the midwinter sunshine; the set was a makeshift courtroom in the ancient Moorish palace that houses the U.S. consulate in torrid Tangier. On trial was Tangier's No. 1 manufacturer of nylons and lingerie: dapper Sidney Paley, 32, a spunky ex-G.I. from New Jersey known to his intimates as Nylon Sid. The charge: plotting piracy on the high seas.

From a procession of multilingual witnesses came the story of how an 80-ton privateer (the ex-British Admiralty launch Esme) rammed the Dutch ship Combinatie one night in October and hijacked its cargo of $100,000 worth of U.S. cigarettes. Masked and heavily armed, the pirates sailed their prize to a cove "somewhere in Corsica." There, they unloaded their booty, and abandoned the Combinatie a few miles offshore, leaving its crew locked below decks.

 

The leader of the pirates, said the prosecution, was one Elliot Burt Forrest, 29, Bronx-born operator of a Tangier nightclub and now a fugitive from justice. But the brains behind the exploit was Nylon Sid, who was lurking in Marseille waiting to dispose of the loot when the Esme's crew was captured. Spanish cops nabbed Nylon Sid when he skipped to Madrid; last week he faced trial before a U.S. consular court in the internationalized port of Tangier.

Nylon Sid insisted that he and Forrest had chartered the Esme to do a "salvage job" off Malta; anything else that happened was all Forrest's doing because Nylon Sid wasn't there. Besides, said his lawyer, "this is the season of 'Peace on earth, good will to all men.'" U.S. Consular Judge Milton J. Helmick was unmoved; he found Nylon Sid guilty and sentenced him to three years in prison. Nylon Sid would be allowed out on appeal, said the judge, if he would put up as bail $10,000 and his cream-colored Cadillac.

I recently came across mention of Nylon Sid in an entertaining book from the Fifties, Turbulent Tangier by Aleko Lilius.  Lilius knew a thing or two about pirates.  His 1931 book I Sailed With Chinese Pirates was the inspiration for the long running comic strip Terry and the Pirates.

When he arrives in Tangier to cover the Nylon Sid trial, Lilius starts to get the feel of the place: a hotel clerk is wary of talking to him about the "important exporters" (a.k.a. smugglers) who stay at the hotel.  He plays cat-and-mouse with Sid to get a photo for Life Magazine, which, like Time, is following this story intently.  "The general talk in Tangier was that Lucky Luciano had had a hand in most of these operations" - with hints of the Mafia and "American gangsterism," no wonder people were nervous.  A note arrives in his hotel pigeon hole: "Lay off Sydney."

Consul Milton Helmik, "acting judicially" according to notices in the Tangier Gazette, presided over the Consular Court, with Vice Consul Miklos playing bailiff ("Hear ye, hear ye").  Writes Lilius:

We assembled in the Legation's big drawing room.  The presence of prison guards, a police van outside, and an armed Marine inside the courtroom created an ominous atmostphere.

In the end, after appeals, Paley was given a suspended sentence and his fine was reduced.  Later Nylon Sid tells Lilius that his pirate days are over, and that he would henceforth confine himself to smuggling.

In the 1950s, as Moroccan independence was looming, Tangier continued to have its unique set of institutions, with an American Consular Court at the Legation, but also with an American judge, Juan Sedillo, on the International Court.  The city's transition from International Zone to Moroccan city took several years, described here.

By the time I joined the US Foreign Service in 1979, vice consuls no longer got to play bailiff or consular court judge.  Lucky for me: my legal duties amounted to "adjudicating" visa applications, for which very skimpy familiarity with US regulations sufficed.

Gone were the days of Nylon Sid at the Consular Court.

Gerald Loftus

Mapping Tangier's Literary World

As Josh Shoemake puts it, his book started off as a map.

Landing in Morocco as a young English teacher at the American School of Tangier, he started plotting the haunts of the city's literary greats as a way of keeping track of their references.  He even provides an electronic version of his map (you have to drill down, but there's lots of good detail).

Josh, appropriately seated among the Legation's collection of ancient maps, regaled the audience last weekend with many of these details that he so well illustrates in his book.  We were treated to anecdotes about some of the eccentrics that made Tangier such a draw, and continues to do so.

Who now remembers Alfred Chester and his wig?  We thought we knew a thing or two about the American writers who gravitated to Tangier, many coming to visit Paul Bowles.  But Alfred Chester was news - mostly forgotten here it must be said.

I had read and reviewed Josh's book earlier this year, but it was great to listen to this born storyteller recount some of the best.  Josh shares my weakness for tales of the weird from the Legation, and with upwards of two centuries to work with, there is plenty there, including Crazy Consuls shooting at their replacements.

With his canny crafting of a literary guide for travelers, Josh Shoemake has written a book that is likely to last, and will provide many a cultural tourist with plenty of material for Tangier exploration.

Gerald Loftus; photo courtesy Sandra Shoemake Zwollo

The Sultan's Declaration of Independence

Sultan Mohammed V with members of Tangier Committee of Control, International Zone

9 April is not a Moroccan national holiday, but it is nevertheless remembered in Tangier and beyond, marking that day in 1947 when Sultan Mohammed V traveled to the International Zone and made a speech which was an important milestone in Morocco's road to regaining its independence.

So it was fitting that Dr. Bernabé López Garcia of the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, eminent scholar of modern Morocco, chose April 9th to present his research into the context and the impact of the Sultan's speech.

And the venue of the Legation was highly appropriate, as the United States had already, in the early 1940s, made clear its support for the Sultan.  Roosevelt's dinner invitation to Mohammed V during the January 1943 Anfa or Casablanca Conference brought the Sultan to the table with the US President and Prime Minister Churchill, and American diplomats at the Legation incurred the wrath of French officials for opening their door to Moroccan nationalists.

Roosevelt's memory remained dear to Moroccans after the President died in 1945, and the aircraft carrier bearing his name visited Tangier to great fanfare (there was even the creation, in several Moroccan cities, of the "Club Roosevelt al-Moghreb" in honor of the late President).  The Sultan also paid his respects at the second anniversary commemoration of Roosevelt's death.

López Garcia spoke of the largely hostile Spanish reception given to the Sultan's plans to travel to Tangier.  Some imagined a nefarious French hand trying to undermine the Spanish position, and others suspected the US of wanting to extend its influence.

Spanish authorities came up with various plans to delay the trip, citing security and logistical concerns ("where will they all stay?").  Morocco's multiple borders (French Protectorate to Spanish Protectorate to Tangier International Zone) created multiple roadblocks to restrict mass movement on the international city, and Spanish authorities also feared that the event might be exploited by Spanish Republican dissidents who had escaped to Morocco from mainland Spain after their defeat in the Spanish Civil War.

Dr. López Garcia's anniversary presentation revealed a few nuggets about the Legation as well, including Chargé d'Affaires John Goodyear's successful insistence on US precedence in the diplomatic lineup, a not inconsiderable advantage when symbolism meant everything.

According to a contemporary Spanish diplomatic source, Sultan Mohammed V paid an incognito visit to the American Legation after his historic speech to thank the US for its crucial support.  Note to researchers: it would be interesting to check American sources (US National Archives) for confirmation of this historical footnote of interest to scholars of Moroccan - American relations.

We had a capacity audience for Dr. López Garcia's excellent presentation, and are happy that history can be recounted with such verve in the very building where a part of it took place.

Gerald Loftus

Claude McKay's Love Songs to Morocco

The following guest post by Jacqueline Bishop on Claude McKay introduces many of us to an African American writer of the 20th century about whom too little is written in the literature on Americans in Morocco.  Jacqueline Bishop is a writer and visual artist who teaches full time in the Liberal Studies Program at New York University.  She collaborates with the photographer Lhouceine Aamar in documenting Claude McKay’s Morocco.

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When I came to Morocco on a Fulbright Fellowship in 2008 I was surprised to learn that almost no one knew that the celebrated African American writer Claude McKay had lived and worked in the country. Even more surprising were the people who knew of Claude McKay’s importance as a writer, without knowing that he had written most of his books in Morocco. Back in the United States, almost no one seemed to take seriously the author’s time in Morocco. To date there hasn’t been any examination of the influence living in Morocco had on the author’s work and the development and clarification of both his anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist ideas. This is a lacunae still waiting to be filled, as this is but a brief introduction to Claude McKay and some of the work that he did in Morocco.

 When he first came to Morocco in 1928, Claude McKay was in an upbeat mood. His first novel, Home to Harlem, had just been published and was steadily climbing up the New York Times best-seller list, one of the earliest such feats for an African American writer. McKay had money in his pocket and was well on his way to writing his second and perhaps most celebrated novel, Banjo, which he would complete in Morocco.

 In fact the time McKay would spend in Morocco, roughly from 1928-1934, would see the author producing an astonishing body of work in the country --- not only did he complete Banjo on his first trip in 1928; but he would go on to complete the short story collection Gingertown and the novel Banana Bottom while living in Morocco. He would also revise the novel Savage Loving (which would later be re-titled Romance in Marseilles) while living in Tangier. Sometime in 1933, McKay thought of a new novel and began to write what would eventually become Harlem Glory. In addition, he wrote several poems and various sketches of Moroccan life while still living there. Later he dedicates a significant portion of his autobiography to his time in Morocco and the country would keep showing up in subsequent works as well. Though McKay would eventually leave Morocco to return to the United States, Morocco would not leave McKay and he would be preoccupied with the country, and all the relationships he forged there, until the end of his life in 1948.

 What made Morocco, more than any of the other countries that McKay lived in, so conducive to his producing such a substantial body of creative work? I believe the answers can be found in his biography.

 Born in 1889 on the island of Jamaica, McKay would come to the United States as a youthful twenty two year-old after having publishing two collections of dialect poems on the island. More publications would follow in the United States, but McKay was an ever restless and wandering person; after only a few years in the United States he set off for Europe, where he would end up living for a decade and a half, primarily in England and France. But always there was the pull to Africa. McKay writes in his autobiography that he was first invited to visit Morocco by a sailor from Martinique he met while working in France. In time McKay would take the sailor up on his offer to visit Morocco.

  From the very start McKay fell in love with Morocco, and his published works - particularly his moving poems about Morocco - give us some sense of why the country became so meaningful to him. There was, of course, the colorful landscape, so reminiscent of his native Jamaica. His poem “Two Songs of Morocco” is a love song to the northern landscape of Morocco, where McKay lived for most of his time in the country. Here, in the breathtakingly beautiful cities of Tetouan, Chefchaouen and Tangier were the flaming “yellow daisies” that McKay remembered from his Caribbean childhood. Here too was a landscape of abundance, in which “fishes leap up like tumblers in the air.”  In his lovely poem Xauen, McKay is particularly taken with the tiny all-blue mountain municipality, where the waters kept “… flowing like the dawn … [in] the gem the Moors call Xauen.”

 

When Sidi Bouariqiya Was a Nationalist Shrine

Dr. M'hammad Benaboud, a leading Moroccan scholar of the Andalusian diaspora and of Tetouan, and a major force in the intellectual and cultural life Tetouan and northern Morocco, wrote the following as a comment on the TALIMblog post commemorating Sidi Bouariqiya, the shrine to the patron saint of the city of Tangier.  To Dr. Benaboud, Sidi Bouariqiya is much more than that: it is the final resting place of his father, who gave his life in the cause of Moroccan independence.

The above photo of the senior Benaboud is courtesy of Hassan Eltaher of Ottawa, whose richly illustrated website Eltaher.org is dedicated to the work of his father Mohamed Ali Eltaher, the pioneering Palestinian-born Egyptian publisher.  The caption under the photo indicates that the man "to the left of Saudi Crown Prince Saud Bin Abdelaziz, in Cairo in February 1947 while on an official visit, is Moroccan nationalist leader Mohamed Ben Abboud, from Tetouan in northern Morocco. Ben Abboud was killed in an airplane accident in Pakistan."

Dr. Benaboud's resemblance (cameo, right) to his father is remarkable.

Thanks to Dr. Hsain Ilahiane of the University of Kentucky for providing a link to the Eltaher trove of information on the Arab nationalist world of the early to mid-twentieth century.

Dr. Benaboud's essay, which contains a moving tribute to his mother's faith, has been edited and abridged below.

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On the first of January 1950, a procession marched to Sidi Bouariqiya, but it was different from this year's in both purpose and form. That procession started from the main post office across the "Boulevard" past Café de Paris just like this one up to Sidi Bouariqiya Mausoleum. The marchers included a number of eminent nationalist leaders including Abdelkhalaq Torres, Allal Fassi and Shaykh Mekki Naciri.

When it approached Sidi Bouariqiya's main gate, men and women sitting on the wall began to shout Allah Akbar, God is the Greatest, and to make you you sounds which are common in wedding celebrations. But this was not a wedding procession, it was a funeral procession, my father’s funeral procession.

He died in a plane crash between Lahore and Karachi on the 12th of December, 1949. He had participated in the first Islamic international Conference in Karachi with Ali Hammami from Algeria and Dr Habib Thameur from Tunisia. They all died in that plane accident. Thameur’s body was completely burned. Hammami was buried in Algiers on the same day that my father was buried in Tangier, the 1st of January, 1950. Several nationalist leaders including Allal Fassi and Abdelkhalaq Torres gave obituary speeches inside the mausoleum grounds, then his body was buried.

I was told by people who attended this funeral that it was a truly emotional event for two reasons. Mhammad Ahmed Benaboud, after whom I was named posthumously, had sacrificed his life for the independence of his country. The second reason is that he was buried in Tangier because the Spanish High Commissioner in Tetouan took the decision that he had been exiled when he was alive and would also be exiled after his death. He therefore forbid his body to cross the International Zone and Spanish frontiers between Tangier and Tetouan.

Many years later after Independance, it was suggested that his body be transferred to his hometown of Tetouan, but our family decided to let him rest in peace in Tangier on the basis that as a martyr, his soul had already reached paradise and that this was no longer a political matter. Sidi Bouariqiya is in a Muslim land too. This is what my mother told me before she died in 2010.

The Khalifa, Abdelkhalaq Torres and many others in Tetouan had tried to convince General Varela, the Spanish high commissioner in Tetouan to allow his body to be buried in Tetouan, but the General had made his choice and would not change his mind. There was no way I could have learned all this because I had not been born yet. My mother was in Cairo when all this happened.  She lost consciousness for two months when she was informed of her husband's death by my uncle, Dr Ahmed Benaboud who was in Cairo too [note: Ahmed Benaboud was later named Moroccan Ambassador to Egypt].

Mother recovered her senses two months later and found the room where she had been full of empty medicine boxes. My uncle brought her, with me in her womb, by ship to Tangier and then to Tetouan where I was born about six months later on June the 23rd, 1950.

There is an interesting point I would like to express here. My mother obviously never forgot what had happened to her when she was only 22. But I have always admired how she had handled the situation throughout her life. Shortly before she died, I asked her for an interview which I published in Arabic in a regional weekly magazine called Achamal which is published in Tangier. In the interview she said that as a devout Muslim woman, she accepted her fate because she did not consider herself to be in a position to question God’s decision. She stated that she continued to be a staunch nationalist and that she would never regret it. Looking at the situation with hindsight, she had one basic objective in her life following my father’s death: to give me the best education and upbringing that she could. I was her only child. And she was my only mother, and father...

Abdelmajid Benjelloun, one of Morocco’s top Arabic novelists and one of my father’s best friends wrote an article which he published in the newspaper Al-Alam seven years after his death. It was entitled, A Rendezvous With a Grave. He visited my father's grave at Bouariqiya and had an imaginary dialogue with his friend. He starts by describing the cold marble grave under the moonlight (the grave later was incorporated inside the mausoleum when the buiilding was expanded). Benjelloun wrote a poem for his own tomb, in which he addresses his future visitors and tells them that he was in the realm of the dead, and they are in the realm of those who are still alive, and asks them to leave his grave and carry on with their lives normally.

So forget all that you have read, and think of Tangier's colorful procession to Bouariqiya to celebrate the annual anniversary of the Prophet Muhammad’s birthday.

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For the entire text of Mhammad Benaboud's comment, click here (scroll down to Comments).

Images of newspaper accounts of the burial of Mhammad Ahmed Benaboud from the TALIM library Tangier Gazette collection, 6 January 1950.