"Utopian Dream for Caribbean Isle Goes Bad"

[Somebody]

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/06/20/EDME187R7F.DTL

San Francisco Chronicle
Editorial by Warren Hinckle [pioneering New Left author and reporter]
21 June 2009


The annals of journalism are rife with unintended consequences. The  
San Francisco Chronicle's inadvertent role in the invasion of the tiny  
Caribbean island of Anguilla in 1969 by the military forces of the  
declining British Empire is a bells-and-whistles example.

This story is so similar to the Leonard Wibberley classic, "The Mouse  
That Roared," that it hints of plagiarism, although The Chronicle's  
Anguilla misadventure was an original. In Wibberley's 1955 satire, the  
tatterdemalion Duchy of Grand Fenwick intrigues to declare war on the  
United States and then surrender post-haste to enjoy the comforts of  
the generous reconstruction aid America famously afforded its  
vanquished enemies; very funny.

It was not so funny, however, in 1969 when Great Britain invaded  
Anguilla - a leeward sand spit in the Lesser Antilles islands then  
without telephones let alone an army - to put down to a perceived  
threat to Her Majesty's government. The invasion was the real deal -  
paratroopers landed! - and the proximate cause of this international  
incident was The Chronicle and the antics of some of the fabulous San  
Francisco characters the newspaper held dear.

Scott Newhall, The Chronicle's buccaneering, wooden-legged editor - he  
lost a limb adventuring in Mexico - was gung-ho for the cause of  
Anguillan independence and put his money where his editorials were:  
Chronicle copy boys were dragooned into service to work an antique  
coin press outside the newspaper's offices to counter stamp 10,000  
foreign coins that Newhall had purchased with the words "Anguilla  
Liberty Dollar." The plan was to sell the coins to collectors to get  
the foundling republic on a firm financial footing.

Newhall's private Marshall Plan for Anguilla included the creation of  
snazzy Republic of Anguilla passports with faux-leather covers. He  
designed an Anguillan flag - two comely mermaids on a field of blue -  
that first kissed air over the St. Francis Hotel when the Anguillan  
freedom delegation came to visit San Francisco in 1967. Anguilla's  
passport and flag appeared overnight courtesy of Freeman, Mander &  
Gossage, the advertising shop of Howard Gossage, Newhall's buddy and  
Anguillan co-conspirator.

Gossage was an advertising genius who hated his profession and made  
his living biting the hands that fed him. "To explain social  
responsibility to advertising men is like trying to convince an 8-year- 
old that sexual intercourse is more fun than a chocolate ice cream  
cone," Gossage would often say. (Gossage, in the 1960s, presciently  
predicted the current plight of daily newspapers. He said that  
advertising would eventually kill off newspapers by artificially  
subsidizing subscription prices below their costs: "A newspaper should  
cost as much as a pack of cigarettes.")

Gossage hosted a world-class intellectual salon at his magnificently  
restored firehouse-office on Pacific Street and was always on the hunt  
for the next big idea. Tom Wolfe, in a famous essay on Marshall  
McLuhan, credits Gossage for virtually inventing the man, and the  
genesis of the great Anguilla caper was the occasion of Gossage  
introducing the thinker he had handicapped as the next McLuhan -  
Professor Leopold Kohr, the prophet of smallness. Kohr maintained that  
when things - corporations and governments alike - became too big,  
they no longer functioned well, if at all. He advocated that San  
Francisco become a city-state. Newhall was all ears.

When Anguilla declared independence July 11, 1967, it was the moment  
the city-staters had waited for - a wannabe country of the perfect  
size (6,000 population, salt-farm and fishing economy) to try out the  
professor's theories. Newhall immediately assigned globe-trotting  
reporter George Draper to the story, and the editor himself  
accompanied his ace to Anguilla "for a firsthand excursion into a  
revolution." Draper was a suave and perpetually tanned slave of  
deadline who wore the mufti of Brooks Brothers pink shirts and threw  
louche parties in his Nob Hill apartment to which the social set  
thronged. Draper's copy breathed a world-weariness and droll  
acceptance of the continuing foibles of humanity. Newhall once sent  
Draper to Africa on an inventive assignment to expose the Zanzibar  
slave market by buying a slave girl and then dramatically freeing her  
at the United Nations, but the plan was aborted when Draper ran out of  
expense money en route. Professor Kohr had hastened to Anguilla to  
advise the government-aborning that by applying his principles of  
smallness, Anguilla would "rival, one day, the glories of ancient  
Greece."

Reporter Draper was not so sure. "The future course of the Anguillan  
republic is open at this moment to the most extreme conjecture," he  
wrote, in a Chronicle front-page dispatch from the rebellious island.  
Robert Bradshaw, the premier of the British Commonwealth Federation of  
St. Kitts-Nevis-Anguilla, from which Anguilla was attempting to free  
itself, was not so diplomatic. He went on the radio to blame  
"interfering Americans" for all the bother. By "interfering  
Americans," he meant those busybodies from San Francisco.

This bother came to a boil when Anguilla boldly asserted its  
independence in Times Roman large type in that most contemporary of  
proclamations, a full-page advertisement in the Aug. 14, 1967, New  
York Times. The Times ad copy was written by Gossage and, in one of  
the finer ironies of competitive newspapering, personally paid for by  
the editor of The Chronicle. The arresting headline on the  
advertisement was: "Is it 'silly' that Anguilla does not want to  
become a nation of bus boys?" The ad pledged Anguillans to the strict  
code of smallness and rejected any ideas about turning their idyllic  
island over to tourist-hotel developers - because then most of their  
citizens would end up working for the hotels at menial tasks, such as  
busing tables. Anguilla could make it on its own with a little help  
from its friends, particularly friends who would buy their Liberty  
dollars and use their passports, dual citizenship being an implied  
nonproblem. This way, Anguilla could remain small.

The advertisement had the opposite effect. The unspoiled island  
prompted international interest from developers and other schemers.  
Proposals cascaded in for casinos, offshore banks, cancer-cure  
hospitals, free-love colonies. These seemingly lucrative offers both  
rattled and tempted the fledgling we-will-stay-small government. The  
pragmatic Anguillans went sideways on the idealistic San Franciscans.  
Could just one, well, maybe two, hotels possibly be so bad?

"It was then our plans began to go awry," Newhall recalled, without  
acrimony. When the Crown's representatives began to publicly fret that  
organized crime might be infiltrating the island, Great Britain  
dispatched some 300 troops in March 1969 to take control. Draper and  
Newhall had long gone. There was no resistance.

The well-meaning San Franciscans who had fronted the expenses for  
Anguilla's attempt to stay small were left to pay off large bills,  
including airline tickets and hotel room-service charges - lamb chops  
were the Anguillans' favorite, at 10 bucks apiece. They also were left  
with a disposal problem of some 5,000 Anguilla Liberty dollars.Today,  
you can buy them on eBay. In its history, The Chronicle has been no  
novice at newspaper promotion - it was not an accident of positioning  
that Luisa Tetrazzini sang "The Last Rose of Summer" on Christmas Eve  
of 1910 directly in front of the-then Chronicle building at Kearny and  
Market streets - but Anguilla was not a circulation promotion. The  
Chronicle neither gained, nor sought, advantage from this great  
endeavor. This was at a time - it was after all the Panglossian '60s -  
when ideas were the lingua franca of San Francisco and there was  
competition over who could be the most effective Don Quixote.

For many years, the unused flag of the Republic of Anguilla hung in a  
place of honor in the Telegraph Hill apartment of Dr. Gerald Feigen,  
the third member of Newhall's free-Anguilla triumvirate. Feigen was  
Gossage's partner in the idea business, and a legendary wise-cracking  
proctologist. Feigen loaned Anguilla's only bank the funds to  
replenish its bare coffers and lost all his money. Anguilla today is  
no longer so small. It is a self-governing British territory that is  
headquarters to offshore corporations and a neon-less Vegas Strip in  
the far Caribbean of hotels and resorts that employ many, many busboys.


Warren Hinckle is a San Francisco journalist and author.