Westlake, Donald E - NF 01 (19 page)

Of
course
they'd engaged a
corner suite.

Henry Giniger,
The New York
Times
reporter who had interviewed Ronald Webster, was also present in
St.
Thomas
, and they met at the airport. Gossage says,
"I patiently explained to Henry how all our frustrating efforts on
Anguilla
's
behalf were made because we believed in Leopold Kohr's theory of smallness,
which the Anguillans believed in, too." Giniger suggested that maybe the
Anguillans
didn't
share this belief in the glories of minuscule
isolation, and suggested further that Gossage ask Webster about it, since
Webster was at that moment nearby. Gossage did, and reports his brush with the
truth tliis way:

" 'Hey, Ronald, Henry Giniger
here thinks that you want hotels or a shipping port or something big like that
on the island. Tell him what you really think about remaining small.'

"Webster looked up at me and
smiled. Well, now, Howard,' he said, I've been thinking it over, and maybe it
wouldn't be all that bad an idea to have just maybe one hotel or
so . . .

After that, the downhill plunge was
steep and bumpy. But there was no great enlightenment on either side. The shift
was merely to a new set of misapprehensions.
Anguilla
had seceded from St. Kitts
in order to be reunited with
Great
Britain
, a fact too non-romantic for the
San Francisco Group ever to understand. Their first misapprehension was that
Anguilla
had rebelled against the onset of twentieth-century civilization and was both
spiritually and intellectually united with Leopold Kohr's craving for a return
of feudalism. Once that notion had exploded itself, all they could see was that
the Anguillans had prostituted themselves, had succumbed to the lure of
modernism, and had betrayed both the ideals of Leopold Kohr and the selfless
activities of the San Francisco Group.

As to the Anguillans, they had
started by believing the
San Francisco
Group were philanthropists. When that idea fizzled, some Anguillans decided
they must have been the other thing after all—profiteers. So far as I have been
able to determine not one Anguillan has ever understood that the San Francisco
Group was neither.

The bitterness came first to Howard
Gossage. After his climactic exchange with Ronald Webster at the airport he
went back to the hotel and "they were still talking and drinking. I blew
up, I said that we had financed the whole damned enterprise; we brought their
missions to the
United States
;
we paid the bills for the Ambassador-at-Large and sent a man to help him out. And
what had they done? Discredited us. After my speech they handed me the bar
check to sign, for $32."

Gossage was feeling so betrayed
that he slipped into bad language. He says that when one of the people in the
hotel suite asked what he was going to do next he replied, "I'm going to
get a big boat and tow your fucking island out to sea and watch it sink."
At least he knew it was
their
fucking island.

The checks in response to the ad
were found in the St. Thomas Post Office after all—never believe your Congressman,
that's the moral of that story—and turned out to total twenty-two thousand
dollars. Feigen and Gossage turned it all over to the Anguillan Island Council.
Gossage says, "There was, of course, no gratitude, though I have learned
not to expect gratitude. Feigen was disgusted."

Gratitude. In the first issue of
the
Beacon
, six weeks later, Atlin Harrigan described the San Francisco
Group this way: "They are a group of professional and business men,
inspired by high ideals, who hearing of the needs of Anguilla, have thrown in
their time and resources to help Anguilla. Without their help, we would never
be in the healthy position we are to-day. They have inspired us with their
altruistic ideals, and have been instrumental in focussing the attention of the
United States
,
and the whole world on the cause of
Anguilla
."

It came down at last to divvying
the loot. Three thousand dollars' worth of checks weren't good, leaving
nineteen thousand in response to the ad. All from people whose imagination had
been touched, and who had sent money from their own pockets to a romantic dream
in Howard Gossage's head. But when the envelopes were opened the dream wasn't
there anymore; the pot was split up among people financing a rebellion on the
one side and people recouping their expenses on the other; five thousand
dollars to the San Francisco Group, fourteen to
Anguilla
.

And the
Anguilla
Liberty
Dollars? Newhall says,
"We sent 500 coins to
Anguilla
, about 300 to send
to the donors of the money—or were supposed to be—and the rest they could do
with as they like. The other 9,500 we hope to sell, slowly, to recover as much
of our tremendous expenses as we can." They figure their tremendous
expenses at fifty thousand dollars.

But what
are
these
tremendous expenses? Well, fifteen thousand in fun-loving one-dollar bills was
money given to the Anguillans in connection with the Liberty Dollar
proposition, but that still leaves thirty-five thousand dollars' worth of
tremendous expenses in six weeks' time. What are they?

Why, they're a suite at the
Lombard
^
in
New York
, a suite at the St.
Francis in
San Francisco
, a corner
suite at the Caravan on
St. Thomas
.
They're Howard Gossage's butterfly net, and the boys controlling the situation.
They're receptions, airline tickets, lamb chops, long-distance telephone calls.
They're flags, letterhead stationery, bordelaise snails and tape recorder.

The San Francisco Group used the
fact of the Anguillan rebellion to live a Technicolor movie full of mad dashes,
zany ideas, wonderful guys, breathless arrivals—and the whole thing paid for by
money generated by the existence of Anguilla. The San Francisco Group spent
thirty-five thousand dollars in six weeks of
fun
, and paid for it with
schemes that were supposed to be getting money for
Anguilla
.

And which did get money for
Anguilla
.
Fifteen thousand dollars in one-dollar bills. Seven hundred and fifty Anguilla
Liberty Dollars. Fourteen thousand from the ad. Something over thirty thousand,
all told, and money that was very sorely needed. So the San Francisco Group,
despite all, did no harm and did quite a bit of good.

It's just a pity about the
bitterness at the end. Two years later, Scott Newhall did a series of three
articles in the
San Francisco
Chronicle
and the bitterness is teeth-rattling. He did them under a pen
name, F. Scott Valencia, but at the end of the last piece ripped off his mask
and revealed himself, explaining, "Newhall did not wish to use his own
byline because he has preferred to keep his own name out of the paper."
But he said this
in
the paper. There's a consistency of style in the San
Francisco Group that becomes recognizable after a while.

The San Francisco Group does not
exist in the
Anguilla
story as it unfolds in Newhall's
Chronicle
chronicle. In a parenthetical sentence, for instance, he refers
to the Anguillan Liberty Dollars—which were his own brain storm—this way:
"(Earlier, the Anguillans had arranged for the minting as coinage of
10,000 silver 'Liberty Dollars,' which already have achieved collectors' prices
of up to $100 for the rare items.)"

(If I may be parenthetical myself,
the San Francisco Group kept 9,250 of the coins to cover their enormous
expenses. At one hundred bucks a shot, that's within spitting distance of one
million dollars. Even in one-dollar bills, that would take care of a lot of
enormous expenses.)

In the
Chronicle
Newhall
comes as close as the libel laws allow to calling Jerry Gumbs a crook: "He
became 'Mr. Anguilla' and formed an association of Anguillans who donate
various sums to aid the homeland. Jeremiah Gumbs was the funnel through which
these funds were poured. There has been some debate about the size of the
downspout."

A little later, in parentheses
again, Newhall explains another reason for his bitterness toward Gumbs:
"(Gumbs even designed a new flag to replace that used by the first
independent government.)" He forgets to mention it, but the first flag was
the one he designed himself. (Jerry Gumbs didn't design the current Anguillan
flag; it was done by an American firm that specializes in that sort of thing.)

Newhall is also bilious about
Ronald Webster. Here's a typical sentence: "The spear-carriers in this
pageant were a pair of Anguillans—Ronald Webster, a thin, seemingly-devout
Seventh-Day Adventist, and an Americanized Anguillan from Perth Amboy, N.J.,
who has the delightful name of Jeremiah Gumbs." It's interesting that he
still thinks the Anguillans are the spear carriers in the Anguillan rebellion.

Roger Fisher also gets gummed by
Newhall. "Fisher is a gangling Harvard law professor who could play
successfully the lead in
Charley s Aunt.
He has capered about in the
background of this
Caribbean
pageant as the 'legal
adviser' of the Anguillan government." And, "Fisher somehow ferreted
out Gumbs a couple of years ago, and has had him in the pouch ever since."

But this sort of thing isn't
entirely one-sided. Jerry Gumbs is himself one of the Anguillans who came
around to the idea that the San Francisco Group, having failed to be
philanthropists, must be profiteers. About the ad, he told me, "They were
here again, trying to create this ad, figuring that if it went over big they
would maybe make a million dollars, clean up, and just use the people of
Anguilla
.
It was another form of exploitation."

And so it goes. Dr. Kohr, the
gentle and not-entirely-practical man who was described by
Scanlan's Monthly
as "theoretician of the Anguillan revolution," is no longer connected
with
Anguilla
, nor with the
Caribbean
.
He left the
University
of
Puerto
Rico
and went to the
University
of
Wales
, where he got involved
with the Plaid Cymru, Welsh nationalists with whom the San Francisco Group
would feel right at home; Dr. Kohr has described them as "beloved friends
and fans of mine."

The isle is full of noises,

Sounds and sweet airs,
that give delight, and hurt not.

—William Shakespeare,
The Tempest

After a summer as jam-packed with
incident as
Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe,
the fall and winter of
1967 passed with placid serenity on the
island
of
Anguilla
, as free from action as
a Saul Bellow novel. Colonel Bradshaw had demonstrated his inability to mount
an invasion of the island, and all his potential allies had demonstrated their
unwillingness to help him, so the danger of military conflict had at least
temporarily receded.

All
Anguilla
's
diplomatic overtures to
Great Britain
had met with the same dense response. The United Nations was or was not
considering the problem, but in either case there was nothing left for
Anguilla
to do on that front either. Other countries—the United States, Canada, various
Caribbean islands, and so on—were consistent in their refusal to get involved
without an okay from the U.K. Nothing was being done to
Anguilla
,
and there seemed to be nothing for
Anguilla
to do, so
the island merely settled into the independence it didn't want and waited to
see what would happen next.

It was obvious that
something
would have to happen sooner or later, since the island's economic problems
weren't getting any better. Colonel Bradshaw was still holding back the mail
and blocking bank accounts and refusing to pay Civil Servants' salaries or
pensioners' pensions. (The
United States
was routing Anguillan mail through
St. Thomas
,
so that some expatriates could
still send their
remittances home, but
Great Britain
was blandly accepting mail for
Anguilla
and then sending
it to St. Kitts.)

Walter Hodge, formerly Chairman of
the Peacekeeping Committee and now in charge of island finances, was keeping
the island government solvent—mostly through postage-stamp sales and customs
collections—but as he explained to me in the spring of 1970, they had kept in
the black only by eliminating all capital expenditure—no road building, no
school construction, virtually no expenditures except salaries and necessary
supplies. This could be nothing but a short-term arrangement, and the
Anguillans knew it but couldn't find anything to do about it.

They were getting some financial
help from outside. Medical supplies came from the
United
States
and the U.S. Virgin Islands and other
places. Money came from a couple of American foundations. And there were also
some real-life philanthropists involved.

One of these was Herbert B. Lutz, a
New Yorker who lives most of the year at one or another of his homes in the
Caribbean
.
(His New York operations include coproducing a 1970 off-Broadway production of
Waiting for Godot
, a play which is in many ways a perfect summation of the
Anguillan rebellion). Lutz had taken an interest in
Anguilla
a few years before the rebellion and, seeing how skimpy medical care was on the
island, had at that time tried to give the Anguillans a mobile operating unit.
(This was a complete operating room, fully equipped for most general operations
and containing its own electric generating equipment, mounted on the frame of a
Dodge truck. Incredibly expensive, and incredibly generous.) Since this was
before
the rebellion, the gift had to go through St. Kitts, and a
representative of the St. Kitts Government told Lutz, "What you want to
care about those bubber-johnnies for? Give it to us here on St. Kitts."
"Bubber-johnny" is the contemptuous Kittitian word for Anguillans;
some say it is a bastardization of the Dutch word for "monkey," but
whatever the source, it means "hick." The people of St. Kitts, most
of whom never in their lives travel more than twenty miles from the shack of
their birth and most of whom still work the same sugar fields their
grandfathers worked as slaves, call the Anguillans, who build the boats and
travel around the world, hicks; it seems a strange sort of insult.

Lutz had been forbidden by the
Government of St. Kitts to give the mobile operating unit to
Anguilla
,
but after the rebellion he dealt directly with the Anguillan Island Council,
and gave them the unit.

He also helped with cash, paying
salaries for teachers and administrators whose wages had been cut off by St.
Kitts, and also helping pay for other talent brought in after the rebellion.

For instance, Roger Fisher had
arranged for a young man named Frank McDonald to stay on the island and form a
sort of liaison between Fisher and the Island Council, to give advice whenever
any problem in Fishers domain might arise. Lutz paid a part of McDonald's
salary and an American foundation paid the rest. (In a somewhat tactless move,
all of McDonalds salary was sent to him on
Anguilla
.
Since he was being paid according to American standards, his income was twice
that of the Council members; this amount of money, to a young man fresh from
his graduate studies and taking his first job, eventually caused some bad
feeling on the island.)

McDonald tells a story of one of
Lutz's charities that gives the flavor both of the man and of
Anguilla
's
circumstances at the time. The Island Council found they didn't have any cash
to pay teachers' salaries for the month of December 1967 and sent McDonald to
St.
Thomas
to ask Lutz if he could help. McDonald told
Lutz the problem, and Lutz said, "How much?"

"Ten thousand
U.S.
"

Lutz wrote a check, then and there,
and drove McDonald to the nearest branch of his bank to cash it; but the branch
didn't have ten thousand dollars in cash, so they had to go to the main bank,
where the manager was startled but willing. Lutz and McDonald and the manager
all stood around in a back room of the bank while a teller carefully counted
out ten thousand dollars—not in one-dollar bills—and then McDonald stuffed it
all in a money belt and took the next plane back to Anguilla; the money paid
the teachers' salaries for two months.

But McDonald did more things than
go places and collect money. Shortly after his arrival on the island, the Great
Esso Crisis took place, and his role : 1 that was to get on the phone to Roger
Fisher. The St. Kitts Government had ordered Esso to stop delivering gasoline
and fuel oil to
Anguilla
; if Esso were to refuse, St.
Kitts would shift its own trade to Shell or some other competitor. Esso didn't
refuse.

The first the Island Council knew
about any of this was a letter from Esso, saying it couldn't make deliveries
anymore. The big storage tanks on
Anguilla
were Esso
property, but they could stay on the island for the time being.

Whatever electricity there is on
the island—such as in the hospital—comes from gasoline generators. In places
without electricity, like most private homes, light at night comes from lamps
fueled by Esso kerosene. Esso deliveries were, in a lot of different ways, very
important to the life of the island.

Frank McDonald went over to
St.
Martin
, called Roger Fisher in
Boston
and told him the situation. Fisher looked in his law books and found the proper
legal justification for governmental expropriation of private property. He gave
McDonald the references and told him to tell the Island Council to send
somebody over to the Esso tanks and stencil on them "Property of the
Government of Anguilla."

Next, the Esso office on
Puerto
Rico
was told its property had just been expropriated, and
Fisher's legal references were cited. The Esso people were told the Anguillans
would buy their petroleum products henceforth from the pirate tankers that work
the
Caribbean
from bases in
Venezuela
.

Esso management said, in effect,
"Hey, wait a minute." A meeting was organized on
St.
Martin
, with two representatives from Esso, plus Ronald Webster
and McDonald. Every time the Esso people said something smooth and
multisyllabic, McDonald got on the phone to Fisher up in
Boston
,
and Fisher hit them long distance with his law books. Finally, the men from
Esso surrendered. They agreed to resume deliveries; as for Colonel Bradshaw,
they'd tell him the Anguillans had forced them into it. Which was, after all,
simply the truth.

Not long after this, Esso had an
accident while making deliveries and spilled several thousand gallons of
gasoline all over the ground. The ground of
Anguilla
is
always
thirsty; it drank up the gasoline in nothing flat. Esso chalked
it up to profit and loss, but the Anguillans looked at the ground and thought
about things. They thought about the fact that their island has a thin soil
over a coral base, and that the coral is full of salt water, and that gasoline
is lighter than water and therefore floats on top. If we dig down, they
thought, we should come pretty quick to pure undiluted gasoline. And so they
did, and so it happened, and for a while after that the Anguillans were digging
gasoline out of their back yards. They may not have electricity, the Anguillans,
but they're bright.

McDonald, to return to McDonald,
also came in handy another way. The indefatigable Jerry Gumbs had come up with
an idea for a "Bank of Anguilla," to be owned by himself, of course.
The big thing with this bank, anytime Gumbs talked about it, was that it would
have anonymous numbered accounts; why should Central American dictators send
their loot all the way to
Switzerland
?
The Island Council wasn't entirely sure this was proper, but they were willing
to listen, particularly when Gumbs told them he had a bona fide American banker
to set the thing up and run it for them.

The bona fide banker was named A.
Hunter Bowman, and McDonald met him with Gumbs in
New
York
in October. Gumbs talked to McDonald about
numbered accounts for a while and said that he and Bowman were on their way to
Anguilla
to present the idea to the Island Council. McDonald wished them well and went
off to dinner with some friends, where he mentioned Bowman's name, at which
someone else at the table said, "A. Hunter Bowman. Isn't he the one who
was just indicted for embezzlement?"

McDonald never did finish that
dinner. He quickly looked into the background of A. Hunter Bowman, and there it
was; only three months before, in July, Bowman had been indicted in New York City
for embezzling nearly half a million dollars from the Rockefeller Center branch
of the Marine Midland Trust, a major New York bank in which he had been a
vice-president. Of course, Jerry Gumbs had already come up with the doctor in
trouble with the American Medical Association, so it was probably inevitable
that when he went out looking for a banker he would come back with A. Hunter
Bowman.

McDonald next phoned Fisher, told
him about Gumbs and Bowman, and Fisher decided to take a trip to
Anguilla
.
He and McDonald followed Gumbs and Bowman south, and the confrontation took
place at the meeting with the Island Council. Bowman had brought along a lawyer
and a tape recorder, and he very ostentatiously started both. What was read
into the tape recorder's microphone, however, were the details of Bowman's
indictment.

Bowman and Gumbs responded with a
rhetorical question: Shouldn't a man who has slipped once be given a chance to
prove himself, to rebuild his shattered etc.? (In January of 1971, Bowman was
still slipping; he appeared in court on a charge of violating probation.)
Council members also say that Bowman claimed many ties with the Kennedy family,
saying that Ethel Kennedy was paying his defense and the Joseph Kennedy
Foundation was repaying the embezzled money; the Council waited for the
pictures of Hubert Humphrey. They were not forthcoming, however, and eventually
the Council bade good-bye to A. Hunter Bowman.

Another American who showed up
around the same time was a veterinarian from
Chicago
who was seeking a place that was quieter and warmer than his home city; most
places are, but he picked
Anguilla
. There was then no
regular channel
Anguilla
could go through in buying
weapons, so Ronald Webster was looking for something similar to the source
found a few months earlier by St. Kitts. The veterinarian managed to make
arrangements in
Chicago
, and
Webster paid for the guns out of his own pocket.

And so the year waned, a restful
pause after the helter-skelter summer. On October 7, 1967, the Island Council announced
that the first Anguillan election, for a new five-man Council, would take place
on October 25; but on nomination day, the seventeenth, there turned out to be
only five candidates, so there wasn't an election after all, just a declaration
that the five had won. Ronald Webster was among them and was made Chairman
again. According to the rules they'd set up ahead of time, the five then got
together and appointed two more members, to bring the Council strength back up
to seven.

Anguilla
dozed. The economic problems were chronic and occasionally acute. The Council
was forced to accept loans of several thousand dollars each from both Ronald
Webster and Jerry Gumbs. They knew they couldn't count on gifts and charity
from outside forever, but there seemed nothing to be done about it.

In
Great
Britain
, some Anguillans and some of their
English friends were still making local efforts to attract
Whitehall
's
attention, but for a long time it seemed as though nothing was going to come of
that, either.