Westlake, Donald E - NF 01 (12 page)

Speak not of my debts
unless you mean to pay them.

—George Herbert,
Outlandish Proverbs

The publicity attendant on
Anguilla
's
declaration of independence had attracted a flow of outsiders, most of whom
were a little stra
nge. There was the kilt-wearing,
cigar-smoking Jewish Chinaman from the United States who wanted land for some
sort of ill-defined "thousand-year-old European religious sect,"
which the Anguillans decided translated into "free-love farm plus abortion
clinic." There was the young American hippie couple who appeared on the
island one day with nothing but a tent and a shotgun and began cadging food
from the natives. There was the American in a business suit who seemed
impervious to heat and who promised to solve all the island's economic problems
in two weeks if he were simply given a free hand and the title "Economics
Minister."

Another American offered
twenty-five thousand dollars a month for an indefinite period if the Anguillans
would mortgage the island to him for security. Another businessman said he was
buying a floating hotel from
Montreal
's
Expo 67 and wanted permission to moor the thing offshore. An Englishman wanted
to dump his freeloading brother-in-law on Anguilla, and a Canadian offered to
build the islanders a radio station if they would give him a couple of beaches.
A man named Dino Cellini, said to be a representative of Meyer Lansky, who in
turn was said to be the head of the Mafia in
Florida
,
dropped by either to chat about gambling casinos or just to get a tan.

A doctor from
America
wanted land on which to build a clinic for the machine he'd invented that cures
all diseases. A group from
America
—they
were coming over in flocks after a while—wanted the Anguillans to join them in
a partnership to make gold from sea water. Yet another American wrote a letter
saying he represented Aristotle Onassis, who was prepared to offer a million
dollars a year for the use of the island as a flag of convenience for his
shipping, in the style of
Panama
and
Liberia
..

The kilt-smoking Chinaman was
gently escorted to the airport. The hippies, minus their shotgun but with their
tent, were bundled into a boat and taken to St. Barthelemy to bother the
French. The would-be "Economics Minister" was thanked for his
interest and asked to provide details; he disappeared instead. The Englishman
with the ne'er-do-well brother-in-law was told to go on being his brother's
keeper. Dino Cellini* got his tan, but nothing else. As to the doctor with the
miraculous machine, Jerry Gumbs had gotten involved with him and had high hopes
of helping him build his "Center for Physical Medicine," but the
trouble was, as Jerry Gumbs said worriedly, "Will I get my people to understand
it? Or will they object to it like the American Medical Association?" They
objected to it, just like the American Medical Association.

As to the other businessmen, with
floating hotels and gold from sea water and radio stations and flags of
convenience, the Anguillans subscribed to the business credit checking agency,
Dun & Bradstreet, and began sorting out this bag of mixed nuts. They also
wrote back to the man who claimed to represent Onassis, politely requesting
further details. He never replied, and some time later the Onassis office
denied any connection with the original offer.

But another little covey of
outsiders had also shown up, with nothing to sell and nothing to offer but
their talents and good wishes. For the next few months they took an active role
in the history of
Anguilla
. They came to be known on the
island as the San Francisco Group, and their contribution could be described as
making sea water from gold.

The San Francisco members of the
San Francisco Group were Mr. Scott Newhall, managing editor of the San
Francisco
Chronicle
; Mr. Howard Gossage, an advertising man; Dr. Gerald
Feigen, a surgeon and a member of the board of directors of
Ramparts
magazine; and Mr. Lawrence Wade, a onetime promotion manager on the
Chronicle.
But they were merely the satellites for the central figure of
the San Francisco Group, Dr. Leopold Kohr, a man whose connection with San
Francisco— in fact, with the planet Earth—is tenuous at best.

Dr. Leopold Kohr, a professor of
economics specializing in the economic viability of small states, was born in
Obern-dorf
,
Austria
, the town where
"Silent Night" was composed, but he later became a naturalized
American citizen and in 1967 was teaching at the
University
of
Puerto Rico
. At the beginning of
1967, he had visited
San Francisco
to conduct a seminar on city-states sponsored by Scott Newhall's newspaper. The
idea was to consider the possibility of turning
San
Francisco
into an independent city-state. At the time
of the seminar all those who would later be part of the San Francisco Group
thought it an excellent idea.

Since the Group had initially come
together to ponder the secession of
San Francisco
,
it was a pretty sure thing that any help they chose to offer
Anguilla
would be a trifle odd. It was.

One of Dr. Kohr s first suggestions
was that the Anguillans give up automobiles, not only because of air pollution
but also because of the bad balance of trade caused by the necessity of
importing gasoline and oil and spare parts. In place of automobiles, he
suggested horses. In addition to their not using gasoline, horses make a nice
source of natural fertilizer, and Dr. Kohr is death on artificial fertilizer.
Unfortunately, there are no horses on
Anguilla
, and
barely enough water to go around as it is without a lot of thirsty horses
forever at the trough, but theoretically it was a nice idea.

The assembling of the San Francisco
Group was, however, only partly caused by a shared passion for city-states and
natural fertilizer. The rest was chance. It began when Dr. Kohr arrived on
Anguilla
in the middle of June 1967 toting a briefcase bulging with books and articles
he had done on small states. He met with the Peacekeeping Committee and began
to outline his theories. As he later explained to reporters, "When
Anguilla broke loose, it animated me. At last I could put my theories to the
test."

Dr. Kohr s theories boiled down to
a suggestion that
Anguilla
, having removed itself from
St. Kitts, should now remove itself from the twentieth century. Dr. Kohr is a
fervent admirer of the Pennsylvania Amish; what he had in mind for
Anguilla
combined an Amish forswearing of machinery with a sort of
feudalism-sans-barons. He had no desire to make a profit out of the
Anguillans—no, he wanted them to make a prophet out of him—which made him
different from most of the other people the Peacekeeping Committee met around
that time. They listened carefully to his suggestions before declining them
with thanks. Untroubled, Dr. Kohr went away to regroup his arguments and
returned about a week later to start all over again.

At about the same time, Scott
Newhall, the
Chronicle
man, also showed up on
Anguilla
.
Later he reported in
Scanlan's Monthly
, "Having a week I could
spare for a first-hand excursion into a revolution, I decided to accompany
George Draper, the
Chronicle
reporter I immediately assigned to
Anguilla
."

Newhall and Dr. Kohr bumped into
each other in the corridor of Lloyd's Hotel. Astonishment and pleasure on both
sides; they hadn't met since they'd freed
San Francisco
.
As Newhall later reported their dialogue, Dr. Kohr speaks like a minor
character in one of Shakespeare's history plays: "We have a chance to
prove, at last," Newhall says Kohr said, "my theory that the Athenian
city-state will work and is the answer to the future. I just know it! And seeing
you here, I am convinced that this will be the beginning of a new social
organization. I will get hold of Howard Gossage and Dr. Feigen, and two or
three other people, the doctor that takes care of Vice-President Humphrey and
some other very important men, and we shall make here a magnificent
society!"

When Dr. Kohr next went to see
Peter Adams, Scott New-hall went with him, and the result was a certain general
misunderstanding all around. Newhall tells us that Dr. Kohr told Peter Adams,
"We will put together a committee that will help you and see through to
the end of your success in setting up your city-state that will rival, one day,
the glories of ancient
Greece
."
What Peter Adams thought they were saying was that they would help Anguilla
solve its financial crisis—incoming mail, Government salaries and off-island
bank accounts had been frozen for several months—and so he expressed definite
interest.

When Newhall returned to
San
Francisco
, he met with Howard Gossage and Dr. Feigen.
They had dinner at Trader Vic's—there's something awry in the picture of
revolutionary theorists having their first meeting at Trader Vic's—and agreed
to band together to help Dr. Kohr. (What they told each other was that they
were banding together to help
Anguilla
.)

On
Puerto Rico
,
Dr. Kohr was collecting more people to participate in his
Anguilla
scheme. They included an architect named Henry Klumb, and Dr. Edgar Berman, who
was Hubert Humphrey's personal physician.

Dr. Gerald Feigen flew from
San
Francisco
to
Anguilla
on referendum
day, the eleventh of July. He had dinner at the home of the local bank manager,
who told him the bank had advanced all of its funds to the Anguillans, could
get no more, and the island desperately needed around twenty-five thousand
dollars right away, just to keep going. Dr. Feigen said that was what he was
there for.

That evening he waited at the
Administrative
Building
till after the results of
the vote were announced and then buttonholed Peter Adams and said, "Look,
it's very important that you come to
Puerto Rico
to a
meeting of people who want to help you without any thought of personal profit,
because they believe in Professor Kohr' s theories."

Adams
wasn't
entirely convinced, but he agreed to go and listen, mostly because of the
island's financial problems. He talked it over with the rest of the
Peacekeeping Committee, and it was decided that Jerry Gumbs should go along
with him. Peter Adams is not a businessman; Jerry Gumbs, being not only a
businessman but also a fellow who'd been living among Americans for thirty
years, could serve as a sort of interpreter.

The breakdown in communication
between the Anguillans and the San Francisco Group was total from the beginning
and remains total to this day. The Anguillans understood two kinds of outsiders;
profiteers and philanthropists. They had met both and they could tell them
apart. The San Francisco Group clearly weren't profiteers, so the Anguillans
concluded for a while that they must be the other thing: philanthropists.

But they weren't. Profiteers work
at a profit, and philanthropists work at a loss, but the San Francisco Group
was performing in the service of a theory, and all they asked was that they
break even. This was the unstated corollary to their offers to help the
Anguillans raise money, and it was to cause some bad feeling all around a
little later.

So Peter Adams and Jerry Gumbs went
to
Puerto Rico
to get some money. They were given theory
instead. The meeting took place at night in the jungle home of architect Henry
Klumb; the Group members there included Dr. Kohr, Dr. Feigen, Dr. Edgar Berman
and Howard Gossage. As Gos-sage described it all much later in
Scanlans
Monthly
, "It was a lovely tropical house surrounded by a verandah and
trees. It had no real walls, and the wind went right on through. This makes for
wonderful tropical living, but that night it was rather windy and we could
hardly hear each other talk."

Jerry Gumbs described the setting
to me this way: "We were met at the airport and taken to some place in
Puerto Rico like in the Bohemian Mountains, to a luxurious home, a nice home
set among trees like bamboo, with record players set on the outside so the
music sounds, is played around the house, and all kinds of fantasy."

Not all the fantasy was
architectural. Howard Gossage reported, "Leopold Kohr was more or less
chairman of the evening and we addressed ourselves to figuring out some
solutions for
Anguilla
's financial crisis." The
idea of selling coins and stamps was discussed. Gossage again: "I tried to
hedge those suggestions with a good round maybe, but Kohr would have no maybes.
He had an unlimited and, it seemed to me, unwarranted faith in our ability to
solve all the problems of this tiny principality. Why, Mr. Gossage here will
solve your problems with a wave of his hand,' he told the Anguillan leaders. I
tried to hold Leopold down, but there was no way of stopping him."

Jerry Gumbs has a slightly
different memory of that night: "We listened to Professor Kohr exhort all
type of smallness, and small nations, how they could be independent. It went on
till maybe one,
two o'clock
in the
morning after we heard all that. And there was a man there supposedly from the
United States State Department, by the name of Doctor Berman. He was supposed
to be close to Humphrey at the time, had pictures of himself and Humphrey. And
at that time they said they had the resources to assist the people of
Anguilla
and were willing to finance any scheme that we had. But at no time that I asked
them for a substantial sum of money did anybody say how they would come up with
this money."