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 Admini
strative 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."
The confusions and misreadings here are almost endless; and the vision of Dr. Berman, in the middle of it all, impressing the Anguillans with pictures of himself with Hubert Humphrey, is very sad.
Jerry Gumbs really did think the San Francisco Group would "finance any scheme that we had." And on the other side Scott Newhall is being straightforward when he says of a meeting between Peter Adams and Dr. Kohr, "He and the professor had a long talk, and the professor brought out books and theses to explain himself and his theories of the small city-state. Adams heard him loud and clear." But all Adams heard loud and clear was that the professor knew some philanthropists.
After all, it was on the night of the referendum that Dr. Feigen invited Peter Adams to Puerto Rico in the first place. Dr. Feigen had been right there to listen to Walter Hodge read a Declaration of Independence that began, "We stand before the Queen in the greatest humility . . And at the conclusion of his brief speech just before reading the Declaration of Independence, Hodge had said, "We humbly beg our Queen and the people of Britain to talk to us about sharing the future." Feigen and Newhall and Kohr had all landed at Wall Blake Airport on Anguilla; had none of them noticed that the rebel flag flying over the airport shed was the Union Jack? Peter Adams had been sending telegrams and making statements to reporters all through the summer insisting that what Anguilla wanted was a connection with some power other than St. Kitts, preferably a direct link with Great Britain (but they had also considered joining up with Canada, the United States, the Virgin Islands, St. Martin and several of the other British islands in the Caribbean). Economic isolation in total independence was the last thing the Anguillans wanted. The San Francisco Group could never see, and still can t see, that theories about Athenian city-states are just as irrelevant to Anguilla as they are to San Francisco.
But everybody concerned with the summit conference in Puerto Rico came away convinced that a great and lasting understanding had been reached. As Dr. Feigen wrote, also in Scanlan's Monthly, "Howard and Leopold and I worked on Mr. Adams to the point where he understood we were really trying to help. He agreed in principle with making us the island's agent, so to speak, and told us to go ahead with some of our ideas. We thought we could work out a way to raise some money for him."
The ideas expressed in this house of fantasy were not all on the mundane level of stamps and coins. One idea, for instance, was for an Anguillan schooner to voyage sixteen hundred miles to New York, where it would sail dramatically into New York Harbor with the entire Peacekeeping Committee aboard. Then they would make a direct appeal to the United Nations.
Can't you see that as a television commercial? Haven't you seen it as a television commercial?
Unfortunately, the Anguillans couldn't see it at all. Aside from the hazards of the journey and the fact that nobody would be left to mind the store, they objected to the very idea of the idea; the Anguillans have a natural dignity that some of their friends have perhaps on occasion lacked.
A few days after the Puerto Rico meeting, Peter Adams and Jerry Gumbs left Anguilla again, this time heading for New York. A rally in a church had been planned by the Anguilla Improvement Association, to raise money for the island, and Adams had been invited to come up and speak. He intended, while in New York, to try for some discussions at the United Nations and to do some public agitating in another attempt to catch the ear of Great Britain.
Also in New York was Dr. Feigen of the San Francisco Group. Feigen had arranged for a not inexpensive suite at the Lombardy Hotel and had set up a press conference, which had to be delayed twenty-four hours when it was upstaged by race riots in Newark, New Jersey. Adams and Gumbs accepted what they took to be Feigen's hospitality at the Lombardy; Gumbs brought up a relative or two from New Jersey; and they all began calling room service.
Dr. Feigen complained about this episode later, saying, "Through most of Sunday and Monday the Anguillans, between interviews, were ordering lamb chops from room service —I couldn't believe anyone could eat so many lamb chops. And every few minutes Gumbs would pick up the phone and call St. Thomas or St. Martin or someplace. The hotel's bill for one day included $137 for lamb chops. I think they thought we were millionaires."
How close to the truth. The Anguillans thought the San Francisco Group were not profiteers. They thought the San Francisco Group were the other thing: philanthropists. Philanthropists, generally speaking, are millionaires. Yes, it would be fair to say that the Anguillans thought the San Francisco Group were millionaires. But what did the San Francis
co Group think the Anguillans were?
Howard Gossage reported that he told Scott Newhall at this point, "Obviously we can't chase everybody around the world with a butterfly net. Why the hell don't we bring them out to San Francisco where we can control the situation, and work out the plan to get Anguilla some money?"
Control the situation. In the eyes of the San Francisco Group, they were the heroes of the story and the Anguillans were spear carriers, and damn lucky to be allowed on stage at all. In a Foreword to the San Francisco Group's reminiscences in Scanlans Monthly, American novelist Herbert Gold (well, why not?) had this to say: "The San Francisco heroes, Dons Quixote de la Pan Am, lances tipped with metaphysics, who gave nerve and fancy to the idea of Anguilla, are about to tell their story."
So they controlled the situation. Adams and Gumbs were invited to San Francisco. They understood money was going to be found for Anguilla, so they agreed to go. And Scott Newhall whipped into action. To begin with, he designed an Anguillan flag; he reports that when he showed it to an artist who called it horrible, he answered, "No, it's beautiful. It's not Picasso or Pollock, it's Anguillan."
Anguillan: two Caucasian mermaids, one holding a spear and the other an olive branch, and both leaning on some sort of sea shell. Their hair, fortunately, is long enough to keep Anguilla from having the first national flag with nipples, but that is absolutely the only concession to taste.
But Newhall isn't finished. He is a nation-builder, and a nation needs more than a flag. It also—as Adams and Gumbs have been pointing out—needs money. Newhall invents money.
"My son Tony," he wrote, "had recently bought 1,500 Peruvian soles, which are dollar-sized, or crown-sized, coins. All we would have to do was counterstamp them ... I ordered a die made that would say 'Anguilla Liberty Dollar' around the rim, and in the center 'June 1967'—their Independence Day." (Actually, they said "Juty 11, 1967," which was referendum day.)
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