The Oppression of Spain’s Protestants and Jews: Neutralizing the Franco Regime’s Key US Reputational Threat

Abstract

As the Franco regime worked assiduously in the early postwar period to make inroads of acceptance in the US via tourism, Hollywood productions in Spain and various public relations strategies, these efforts were being undermined by an ongoing, self-produced reputational crisis: Spain’s oppressive policies toward the country’s non-Catholic minorities, primarily Protestants and Jews. The discriminatory “tolerance” imposed on these groups by the regime in World War II’s aftermath incensed co-religionists and a broad swath of liberals in America, which resulted in an ongoing barrage of US secular and religious media invective and political activism that for over a decade and a half kept the Spanish dictatorship perpetually on the back foot. It was only with the advent in 1957 of Fernando Maria Castiella as Minister of Foreign Affairs, who brought with him the conviction that these oppressive policies were both substantively wrong and inimical to Spain’s international reputation and goals, that the regime began to slowly move toward granting religious liberty to Spanish non-Catholics.