Westlake, Donald E - NF 01 (18 page)

"Myself, I never believed in taking any man's dollars unless I
gave him something for it— something in the way of rolled gold jewelry, garden
seeds, lumbago lotion, stock certificates, stove polish or a crack on the head
to show for his money/'

—O. Henry,
The Gentle
Grafter

The San Francisco Group has been
keeping busy, you can be sure of that. As Newhall says, "We were firmly attached
to Leopold Kohr s theory of the small city-state. Over meals at
San
Francisco
restaurants we talked about things they
could do."

The
San
Francisco
members of the San Francisco Group are, if
you will recall, a newspaper managing editor, an advertising executive, and a
member of a magazine's board of directors. These three, having hitched their
wagon to a fun star, having invented a nation and a flag and a people and
letterhead stationery and cash money, are now looking for something to do next.
What will they do next?

They will run an ad.

"Suddenly," Newhall says,
"the whole matter of the advertisement became very pressing. On Wednesday,
August 2, we heard that a British frigate was preparing to land on
Anguilla
the following week, or sooner, to force them to accept the
Barbados
agreement. We had no time to lose."

Is
the pen mightier than the
sword? Can a full-page ad in
The New York Times
stop a frigate?

Newhall: "Howard came bursting
into the firehouse early Wednesday evening and said, I've got it! It's done!
It's great!'"

What Gossage had that was done and
was great was the ad. It was called "(The Anguilla White Paper),"
parentheses theirs, and it was done as a response to the August 2 editorial in
The New York Times
. It was signed by Ronald Webster, but Newhall says
Gossage wrote it. A bit later, when a dispute came up about
the accuracy of the ad, Gossage told the
Times
he'd written it but said
he'd sent an associate to
Anguilla
to show a copy to
Ronald Webster. This associate and his trip are not mentioned by any of the
participants in the reminiscence in
Scanlan's Monthly
, and Webster told
Times
reporter Henry Giniger that he had only been shown parts of the final
ad.

Who's right? Well, let's look at
some excerpts from the ad and see. We know, for instance, the Anguillan
attitude about telephones; they'd had phones for forty years, Hurricane Donna
knocked down the poles, Bradshaw took the cen-tral-office equipment away, and
the Anguillans had been angry and telephoneless for seven years. The ad quoted
the
Times
editorial as saying the islanders "lack such modern
amenities as telephones," and replied, "This is a terrible indictment
in New York eyes, we suppose, but do you know what one Anguillan does when he
wants to telephone another Anguillan? He walks up the road and talks to
him." The island is fifteen miles long. When you want to telephone
somebody fifteen miles away, do you walk up the road and talk to him? If so,
you'd better pack a lunch, because it will take you four hours to get there.

Then there's terminology. Peter
Adams had been upset when newspapers called him "President" because
it struck him as foolish and demeaning to claim a title he didn't deserve.
There was no Anguillan President. Ronald Webster retained the same attitude,
and the ad is signed with his proper title, "Chairman, the Anguilla Island
Council," but in the body of the ad there is this sentence: "We would
not think it either good or polite that so many visitors should be on the
island at once that they couldn't at least have lunch with the President."
There are other things wrong with that sentence, but for now let us all put our
heads together and try to figure out just who we're supposed to be having lunch
with.

As for the lunch itself, Ronald
Webster was the leader of a rebellion, not the captain of a cruise ship; was he
really planning to spend the rest of his days having lunch with schoolteachers
from
Boise
,
Idaho
?

Another thing wrong with that
sentence is its implication about the number of visitors the island wants. The preceding
sentence reads, "In the first place, we have only 30 guest rooms on the
entire island at the moment, with no plans to expand." Well, Jerry Gumbs
was even at that moment busily adding ten rooms to his Rendezvous Hotel, and
another Anguillan was industriously building a brand-new ten-room hotel that
would open in less than four months, with an ad in the
Beacon
boasting
of "hot and cold running water."

It was perfectly true, as the ad
said, that the islanders didn't want their home to become the lobby of a new
Hilton. But the notion that they didn't want to attract more tourists is just
foolishness. And what of alien home builders? The Anguillans would love to see
more Americans retire to Anguilla— a few already have—build themselves a house,
move in, spend a little money; but there wasn't a word about this in the ad. In
fact the ad would tend to discourage thinking along those lines by being so
totally
Anguilla-for-Anguillans
.

On the other hand, Ronald Webster
was
leading a rebellion and he
did
need money. It's possible he
might have agreed to the ad no matter what Howard Gossage had put in it, since
the San Francisco Group had assured him the thing would make a pot of money. I
don't know if that's what happened, or if Webster saw only a part of the ad, or
if he saw the whole ad but was thinking about something else at the time—Robert
Bradshaw's armed forces, for instance—and didn't quite follow what the thing
said, but whatever happened, the result was that the honeymoon was over.
"(The Anguilla White Paper)" was at one and the same time the San
Francisco Group's biggest caper and ultimate smashup.

But here I've spent all this time
talking about the ad and haven't even said what it was selling. Ads always do
sell something, that's what they're for.

This ad was selling
Anguilla
;
it was a pitch for money, contributions, charity. But in the best traditions of
American hucksterism, the customer doesn't go away empty-handed: "First
off ... we had better send you an autographed picture of the Island Council, a
facsimile of the original handwritten version of our national anthem, and a
small Anguillan flag."

But wait; there's more. "If
you wish to help us with as much as $25.00, we'll also send you one of the
Anguilla Liberty Dollars." Now, that one was a good deal. In January 1970
Jerry Gumbs told me, "The silver dollars are still being sold in
Texas
,
by a man named Long; they're selling them for thirty-nine dollars and fifty
cents." That's a 60 per cent appreciation in less than three years; you
don't hardly get a deal like that one.

Or this one: "Those sending
$100 or more will become Honorary Citizens of Anguilla. They will receive a
document in the form of an Anguillan passport, identical to that which we are
issuing to Anguillans, except that it will have an Anguillan Dollar inlaid as
shown in the picture. While Americans should not expect to use this passport
for foreign travel, it will be good for entering
Anguilla
.
In fact,
only
holders of this passport will be able to visit
Anguilla
as guests."

Yes, well, if you think the
hundred-dollar deal is the one for you, take a tip: go for the twenty-five buck
offer four times. The Honorary Citizen thing never had any reality outside
Howard Gossage's head; there was no such legislation passed by the Island
Council or drafted by the Island Council or even considered by the Island
Council. As to the Anguillan passports, Anguillans much preferred to go on
using their British passports. There are no Anguillan passports, except the
mock-ups done for the ad in
San Francisco
.
(Some others were made up later on to send to the people who sent in the
money.) As to
Anguilla
's refusing admission to any
tourist or other visitor who failed to have one of these passports, why don't
you just think about that yourself for a minute?

The ad was scheduled to be run in
The New York Times
on Monday, August 14. That was the day Roger Fisher,
dweller in a more mundane world, was making his first appearance before the
Colonialism Subcommittee at the U.N. Fisher heard about the ad the day before
and apparently thought it might do him some damage before the Subcommittee—it
would put him in the position, more or less, of asking the U.N. to grant
independence to a Hula-Hoop factory—so he phoned Newhall to get the thing
stopped. Newhall quotes the conversation:

"He said, 'I hear there is an
ad running and I want you to stop it for a day.'

"I said, I certainly will
not.'

"He continued, 'I am going to
call the
Times
and tell them not to run it.'

" 'Be my guest,' I said. 'Be
prepared to see me in court.'"

Newhall then explained to Fisher
that the "timing was crucial" on the ad because of that British
frigate. He doesn't seem to have been aware that the British frigate was going
to be landing not British soldiers but
Caribbean
policemen. In any event, he reports Fisher at last giving up with the words,
"I'm unhappy about this." If Fisher tried to explain anything about
the U.N. and concepts of dignity and taste, Newhall doesn't mention it.

So the ad was run on
August 14, 1967
. That was a
red-letter day for the Anguillans. They had a full-page ad in
The New York
Times;
they had a Harvard professor pleading their case at the United
Nations; the two Caribbean Civil Servants from the second Barbados Conference
were on Anguilla itself, in the process of being discomfited by that large and
noisy crowd; and Jerry Gumbs became the first Anguillan ever to be "Man in
the News" in
The New York Times.
All on the same day. Not bad for
six thousand people who for 145 years hadn't been able to get anybody to listen
to them. Things were looking up.

But not for the San Francisco
Group. Once they had put their ideas down on paper the game was up. The
theories of Professor Kohr had glittered through the wording of "(The
Anguilla White Paper)" like the gilt border on a Peruvian bronze-mine
stock certificate.

On Friday, August 18,
The New
York Times
ran an interview with Ronald Webster under the headline "
Anguillan Leader Seeks
Visitors and Hotels
," and the subhead, "Disputes Ad Saying
Island Will Attempt to Block Tourism." Webster was quoted as saying,
"We cannot depend on rain any longer for produce. Tourism is the only
source of money-making on the island." He was also quoted as saying he had
no objection to resort hotels; it was only gambling casinos the Anguillans would
refuse. But the harpoon that really struck "(The Anguilla White
Paper)" in its vitals was Webster's comment on the passport gimmick:
"It sounds so cheap," he said. He told the
Times
he hadn't
known a thing about that part of it in advance.

All of this was both baffling and
painful to the San Francisco Group. They must have felt like the ventriloquist
whose dummy suddenly turns against him. Hadn't the Anguillans
wanted
a
city-state that would rival, some day, the glories of
Greece
?
Hadn't Peter Adams heard Leopold Kohr loud and clear? Hadn't the whole thing
been both great fun and essentially
goodP
Or had some sort of ghastly
mistake been made somewhere along the line?

No. Scott Newhall discovered the
true explanation: "I had rather expected this reaction from the
Times—
no
newspaper will sit by passively and let itself be attacked in its advertising
columns." And referring to the peacekeeping force —"the seeming
imminence of a forcible landing on
Anguilla
" is the
way he phrased it—he consoled himself with the thought that, "I still feel
that the ad played a part in stopping precipitate action." But the second
Barbados Conference, which had been called because of "snags in the plan
to send a Peacekeeping Force," had taken place the weekend before the ad
appeared.

The San Francisco Group soon had
more pressing problems to think about than the betrayal by Ronald Webster of
Leopold Kohr. The Chase Manhattan Bank office in
St.
Thomas
, where the ad had told the customers to send
their cash, refused to give them a bank account. Then the Virgin Islands
National Bank did the same thing.

Absolutely nobody wanted to have
fun.
There were rumors that checks were coming in, checks were being sent
back, checks were disappearing. Nobody knew precisely what was happening; the
only clear fact they had was that their Congressman had talked to the people at
the Post Office, who had checked with
St. Thomas
,
and there wasn't any
Anguilla
mail in the St. Thomas
Post Office.

And it was Howard Gossage's
birthday. They were having a party, described by Newhall as "a glorious
affair on a remodeled
San Francisco
Bay
ferryboat." But it was impossible for the gang to really have fun at the
party with all this mess hanging over their heads. For all they knew, they had
giggled themselves into a mail-fraud rap. As Newhall says, "All our fun,
our good intentions, had somehow turned to a horror."

At least they didn't lose their
sense of humor. They decided the only thing to do was go down to
Anguilla
themselves, and Gossage describes the trip: "It was hilarious enough. We
were all so tired and this whole venture had become so disastrous that there
was nothing to do but laugh."

They didn't laugh to the firehouse
this time; they laughed to the Caravan Hotel on
St. Thomas
.
Gossage again: "A lot of people had gathered for this meeting. Ronald
Webster was there, the banker Clifford Rogers, and a few other assorted
Anguillans. Leopold Kohr was there, too, talking about
Andorra
and
Liechtenstein
.
A little later Roger Fisher arrived with another lawyer. We had engaged a
corner suite for the meeting, and it was pretty full."