HTML last revised 5th November, 2003.George Augustus McIntosh was born on the 6th March 1886, a faithful product of his times and his own social environment.
Among the influences on the life of George McIntosh were the socialist preachments of J. Elliot Sprott, the Liberal editor of "The Sentry"; the racial message of Marcus Garvey, whose organ "Negro World" penetrated the colonial curtain despite its being banned in St Vincent in 1920; the promise of the Russian Revolution (1917) which was thought to have delivered power to the people; the general ferment of ideas generated by members of the local Ex-Servicemen League who had been "exposed" to libertarian ideas while fighting overseas in the First World War.
There is a sense in which it can be said that George McIntosh was thrown up by the events of his day. The times were hard. The island was experiencing its worst economic days. King Sugar had been dethroned; the estate system was bankrupt, and the mass of people was barely eking out an existence. Given the benefit of hindsight, emancipation was seen only as a cold legal fact, one newspaper noting that:
The emancipated found themselves in a worse position than when in slavery, for the planters had lost all interest in them as a chattel, and native industry was crushed by the importation of foreign labour. Political aspirations were promptly checked, and the plantocracy reigned supreme.1
As if these were not enough, between 1895 and 1902, nature dealt the colony three telling blows in rapid succession in the form of a flood, a hurricane and a devastating volcanic eruption. If not before, it became imperative to embark upon schemes to establish an independent peasantry such as was recommended by the Royal Commission in 1897. For in an effort to cut losses estates simply left large tracts of land lying idle, thus at once aggravating the unemployment problem, worsening still further the island's economic plight and demoralising the bulk of the citizenry. It was heartless planter-response like these that prompted the "Sentry" to tow a line which must have made an impression on the young McIntosh:
Nor do we admit that under every possible circumstance a man has a right to do what he likes with his property. That is a fallacy which has long since been exploded. Property has duties as well as rights. The right to accumulate land to any extent by purchase or otherwise carries with it an equal obligation to cultivate that land for the general good. Land primitively belongs to the people and no man has any right to more of it than he can himself cultivate and use.2
Trained in the old colonial constitutional school, McIntosh believed that he could best make an impact on the system by having men of his own colour hack their way through the social jungle to the Legislative Council. It bears recalling that there were no elected representatives in St Vincent (1877-1925). The Colony enjoyed - if "enjoyed" is the word - what was deceptively known as a pure form of Crown Colony Government in which the seat of Government was monopolised by the Governor and his handpicked team, a system that was deliberately introduced to checkmate the people of African ancestry from gaining access to the policy making body of the island. In 1919, McIntosh joined forces with the Black Intelligentsia to create a political vehicle known as the Representative Government Association with the slogan "Crown Colony Rule Must Go," after the fashion of similar bodies in the sister islands.
It was clear from the outset that the R.G.A. had tapped heavily on the emergent Vincentian middle class and that, perhaps as a consequence, the aims and objectives of the group were tepid and geared primarily to their own advancement as a class. With one or two exceptions (certainly Cipriani in Trinidad and McIntosh, for a time) members of these Associations were not unduly concerned with the welfare of the so-called "barefooted man." Among the membership of the local body, the legal field, the teaching profession, journalists and the merchant class featured prominently. In later times they would be categorized as House Slaves, Fanon's "Black faces white masks," the sort of people who inspired Lloyd Best's coinage - "The Afro-Saxon." They were the much lauded "Get-up-and-get type" who had cut through a path in the Colonial World and yearned for Massa's stamp of recognition of their newly won status in the form of membership of the Legislative Council.
And the British overseers were not averse to drafting such bodies within the fold for, as one member of the Wood Commission was to put it in 1922:
This coloured population possessing something of the European mind in the African body, constitutes the Middle Class and furnishes an increasingly large contingent of the professional classes, notably the law, medicine and journalism. They are obviously of a higher capacity than the pure African.3
Arthur Lewis also had a word to say about the R.G.A.'s:
These Associations were narrowly middle-class in their aims, they wished particularly to see more middle class representation on the legislative councils, and to increase the number of posts in the civil service to which educated Negroes might be appointed. Mass support was easily obtainable for such liberal ends, the urban workers willingly associating themselves in meetings, demonstrations, and petitions with the demand for constitutional reform and racial equality in the civil service.4
The truth is that George McIntosh had been caught on the horns of the traditional colonial dilemma. He could try to build a grass-roots organisation, canvas support from the disprivileged section of the community, and confront the system. Instead he apparently chose the line of weaker resistance, gain respectability by enlisting black intellectual moderates, and even solicit the support of planters who might provide him with the necessary air cover if and when he tried to manipulate the system. The result was that in 1922 the R.C.A. struck up an alliance with other groups to form the Citizens' Committee which made representations before the Wood Commission for an advanced constitution of sorts. The proud boast of this Committee was that it spoke for "all classes and pointed out that included in the deputation were large landed proprietors, members of Council, leading merchants and professional men of the island, and the principal clergy of the different denominations."5
Naturally, the demands of the "Citizens Committee," so-called were vague and limited, and the British escaped with the introduction of the elected principle that was so hemmed in by considerations of property and education as to be meaningless in a colonial setting. The same old faces continued to rule, but now with a semblance of legitimacy accorded by the magic of the ballot. In fact it would appear that qualifications for membership of the House were prohibitively high for men of the calibre of McIntosh, who had to be content with a peripheral political role through his influence in the R.G.A. The elections of 1925, 1928 and 1931 returned white planters and mulatto merchants.
In 1932, however, there was a conference of West Indian Progressives in Dominica to discuss the question of West Indian Federation - always dear to McIntosh's heart - and the necessary prerequisite of more responsible government.6 The R.G.A. delegates at this conference were Robert Anderson and Ebenezer Duncan, editors of "The Vincentian" and "The Investigator" respectively. It would seem that McIntosh was not thought to be good ambassadorial material, given his tendency to radicalism. Although that conference, mistrusting the capacity of the ordinary man to analyse political events, shelved the issue of adult suffrage of which McIntosh, like Cipriani, was an ardent exponent, it did manage to secure an increase from three to five in the elected representatives with lowered qualifications. These changes were sufficient to usher McIntosh formally into the system in 1936 but, before that, 1935 had happened.
This paper can only give a very graphic picture of the social and economic picture which formed the human background to the events of 1935. Briefly, the people were once again suffering grinding poverty that was intensified by the effects on a fragile colonial economy of world recession in general and metropolitan decline in particular. The Estate system still creaked along upheld by a constitutional scaffolding in which the planters were still the main plank. Local racial tensions had become abrasive in the face of the Italian affront to the black people of Abyssinia and the general connivance of the white world with this monumental insolence. Perhaps the white conception of the black masses at the time was best captured in the statement attributed to a former Chief Justice of St Vincent in 1932. In explaining the cause of the colonies' economic plight, Willoughby Bullock remarked that:
The Negro will not work, as Nature provides him with the necessaries of life so far as food is concerned. Two flour bags will make a suit of clothes, and it is always possible to beg a couple of kerosene tins to help him in the construction of a palm-thatched hut.7
One year after the events of 1935 the Administrator of the Colony presented this unflattering picture of the island in a typical British understatement:
To a newcomer to St Vincent, such as myself, the colony presents certain very unsatisfactory features. Land is most unevenly distributed. The housing of a great part of the peasant and labouring population is deporable. In the villages most of the houses are built of mud and wattle with cane trash roofs or of odd pieces of wood with corrugated iron roofs. Most of the houses are badly built and the thatching where it exists is poor.8
George McIntosh's role in the social upheaval that was triggered off by the appallingly low social and economic situation was very dubious. The truth is that the people had moved ahead of McIntosh in assuming a new militancy and resorting to violence as a means of redressing their historical grievances. Initially, however, the people had some confidence in McIntosh who they believed could be used as their sympathetic spokesman before officialdom. When they realised that McIntosh was not being taken seriously by the Administration, the people, to the dismay of McIntosh and other members of the R.G.A., took to the streets. The rest is history.
The ensuing "Riot" so-called was put down by a heavy hand. The leading lights among the people were sentenced to some of the longest prison terms handed down in the then Empire. Most members of the R.G.A. were swift to disasociate themselves from the insurrectionists who in one notorious reference were called "a bunch of uncivilized savages". The Kingstown Board which the R.G.A. controlled passed a Resolution condemning the uprising; a few R.G.A. members had actually shot down people in the name of King and Empire; some had offered themselves as Special Constables to help police troubled areas. Duncan, the historian, was later to refer to the episode as "a blot on our history;" and the planter-element in the R.G.A. cut away from McIntosh, and sent a resolution to the Colonial Office requesting that in the circumstances an immediate brake be applied to the constitution assembly-line. The fear, apparently, was that in the prevailing scheme of things control of the island was likely to fall to the left wing, comparatively speaking, of the R.G.A. According to the Governor's interpretation of events, "their attitude, not unnaturally, is that any form of administration is better than one which would increase the influence of men of the McIntosh type."9
Given the prejudices, preconceptions and predilections of the Colony's official class it was natural for them to believe that the uprising could not have been a spontaneous movement generated from below, which in fact it was. For them it had to have middle-class leadership. And officialdom picked on McIntosh who had often exhorted the workers "to fight for their rights", spouted the rhetoric of the Left, wore a flaming red-tie, was known to read "subversive" literature, and defiantly displayed a large photograph of Stalin in a prominent place in his druggist shop.
The Government analysis was simplistic: McIntosh "is mainly responsible for staging the whole business." He was arrested and spent nine days in jail after which he was acquitted following the mockery of a truncated trial.
The political fall-out from the uprising was significant. First, it split the R.G.A., the planters abandoning and avoiding McIntosh like the plague; it gave the people a "respectable" leader in McIntosh with a foothold in the House; and it forced McIntosh into seeing that the people wanted more militant leadership and that a presence in the legislature without a bread-and-butter organisation, was like a shadow without substance. So it was that McIntosh took with him the more radical section of the defunct R.G.A. and formed the Workingman's Co-operative Association on the 2nd March 1936, partly in response to the social forces about him, partly on the instruction of Cipriani under whose benign influence he had progressively fallen.
It was through the Workingmen's Association that McIntosh realised himself, and through its policy that one can glean something of the philosophy of the man. First of all, McIntosh had broad socialist leanings. As he was to say in the House in 1946, "Socialism is the only way that we can hope to oust the capitalist system and bring people to a decent standard of living." As late as 1955 McIntosh was persuaded to admit that "I like communism." A general framework of socialist doctrine must therefore be accepted if one is to assess most of the political conduct of McIntosh and his followers. Perhaps the basic ideology of the man was best summed up in an election speech he made in 1937:
I will do all that lies in my power to see these hungry and oppressed people get some land. I am bound to the working class. I belong to the common people. I am one of them. I want no titles, no M.B.E. or O.B.E. What St Vincent needs are men with human hearts and no letter of the alphabet can make up for that.10
Because St Vincent is an agricultural community McIntosh felt that he must first tackle the skewed distribution of land from which he believed most of the social ills stemmed. For him, the lopsided distribution of land was:
the root of all West Indian problems. To it can be attributed directly the poverty of the masses of the people, reflected..... in inadequate wages, insanitary housing, illiteracy, etc. What is now most urgently needed in the West Indies is that the abolition of slavery be taken a step further by destroying the economic foundations of slavery and redistributing the land more equitably.11
Naturally, McIntosh drew fire from the "Vincentian" newspaper, the mouth piece of the planters. But strengthened in the knowledge that his movement was part of an entity that transcended the narrow boundaries of St Vincent, McIntosh was emboldened to dismiss such critics with biting sarcasm:
A certain newspaper that represents the interest of the proprietor class may write all the piffle imaginable but that will not stop the labour and trade union movement of the world..."12
McIntosh's unceasing toils in this area were directly responsible for the land Settlement Scheme of 1946 in North Leeward, though it needs to be said that his dream of creating an independent peasantry has been shattered and the "Settlement" remained virtually a State capitalist enterprise until 20 years or so ago when it was given practical recognition.
McIntosh next confronted the problem of trade union organisation, noting that:
agricultural labourers are hard to organise [thus].... The onus is on the State to provide minimum wage-fixing machinery and to legislate regarding hours of work and child labour, workingmen's compensation, housing, etc., if the labourer is not to be exploited by a small clique of planters.13
McIntosh worked assiduously to get the necessary legislation enacted, and it is no fault of his that such laws when they were enacted have been more honoured in the breach that in the observance.
Sooner or later any advocate of serious social change was bound to run into conflict with organised religion such as was represented by the orthodox middle class churches. McIntosh was no apologist of the status quo unconcerned about the plight of Vincentian man. In a fit of righteous indignation, he declared:
Our civilisation is all wrong, - our Religion is a farce ... Why do the churches waste time to read the parable of Dives and Lazarus. All the mad struggle in the world would cease when fear of poverty has vanished. Then and not till then will a truly Christian civilization become possible.14
Still, McIntosh was a respecter of religious freedom and he was appalled when the conservative element in the Council voted out his motion to make legal the practice of Shakerism in 1939. McIntosh rightly saw this negation as yet another example of the big fisted methods by which colonialism set out to obliterate every vestige of African or indigenous cultural forms. He took the opportunity once more to show the linkage between the religious and economic hierarchy in the colony in making damning reference to:
the capitalists and all large landowners who grab all the land and hold it for the exercise of power in all directions. They influence even the churches and make so-called Religion serve their purposes, in disregard for the feelings, wishes or desires of the great majority.15
Until 1946 there was an uncanny consistency in the policies of George McIntosh. Even after that year when he began to go back on many of the things for which he previously stood, glimpses of the old McIntosh would sporadically reassert themselves. Two such "flashes" are recorded here because of their contemporary relevance. He wanted the people to get their priorities right on the matter of secondaryeEducation, observing that:
These visionaries... are not advocating a free secondary education for all Vincentian children; they are specially concerned with what happens to their own children. Before we talk about secondary education at all, thinking Vincentians should make it a concern of theirs to see that all children, especially the children of poor parents, receive an education. In fact we should have compulsory [primary] education in St Vincent.16
And on the very vexed question of West Indian two party politics McIntosh commented scathingly in 1958:
In Jamaica, there is a Labour Party in power and a Labour Party in opposition, and so it appears to be throughout the West Indies. They are devoid of principle or policy and have but one aim, getting a few in power who are able to deceive the poor illiterate masses, and so these parties although they are all supposed to be Labour parties continue with one object, that of cutting each other's throat...17
As mentioned above, it is an historical fact that McIntosh played false to his earlier ideas in the post-1946 period. By then he had become the darling of the planter class, an unbeliever in true democracy, a convert to elitist politics. It is beyond the scope of this contribution to analyse the reasons for the change. Suffice it to say that it is this very enigma of the man which explains why he has such a cross-sectional fan club in the island. The young generation harp on the exciting period of the 1930s and 1940s when McIntosh preached fire and brimstone and could utter a clarion call to the people in very Marxist terms, such as:
Working people, awake from your slumber and be not satisfied to live in misery and squalour! The change of conditions lies in the hands of the working people.18
It is clear that the trip to the Festival of Britain in 1951 coupled with the total electoral defeat of his Party undid all that, leaving its scars on the psyche of our hero.
Mention has already been made of his blistering attack on the two-party system in which he claimed that "the World looks on with amazement at our stupidity, marveling at our childish behaviour, all as the result of our wonderful but unique party system."
To be sure, before setting off for England on the eve of the 1951 elections, McIntosh had sounded a public note of warning that "misleaders have sprung up to traverse the road prepared by us."
After his twin defeats in General Elections in 1951 and 1954, McIntosh switched his theatre of action to the Kingstown Board where he had won a seat from 1923 continuing on to 1960, and had been Chairman on about a dozen occasions.
Suddenly, the tribune of the people who had struggled for the universal franchise with regard to Central Government, argued for the retention of the nominated element at the level of the Kingstown Board in order to neutralize off any democratic stampede.
Let us have adult suffrage for the Kingstown Board, yes. But let us have a stabilizing influence as exercised by the House of Lords with a measure of dignity thrown in, for when one visits the House of Lords the difference is striking, and if all sections and interests are to be represented as they should be for God's sake don't leave it only in the hands of the ignorant and the uncultured, for however much we may talk of democracy in these parts we find that the rule of the majority of ignorance and while we are trying to make the world safe for democracy, let us try to make democracy safe for the world.19
Having awakened the sleeping masses, the conclusion has to be drawn that McIntosh became frightened of their muscle and potential strength and would not be comforted until he could lay them back to rest. It was during this process of beating a retreat from the socialist banner that the Establishment befriended McIntosh, that "The Vincentian" decided to extol his "virtues",20 that the Labour Party embraced him. Perhaps there is a sense in which, from a people's point of view, George McIntosh is both friend and foe, saint and sinner, hero and villain. Perhaps it is this quality, too, which makes him such an interesting study. For in George McIntosh we see at work the conflicts and complexities of the human condition, the inconsistencies which bedevil man (especially the colonized) as he tries to come to grips with his social environment and hammer out an appropriate philosophy.
George McIntosh died on the 1st November 1963, and was paid glowing tribute in the following editorial of "The Vincentian" newspaper.
In the halls of West Indian fame, the names of Crichlow, Cipriani, Marryshow, Rawle and others must be inscribed. There along with them the name of George Augustus McIntosh must also be written; nay, his should find a special niche, for it was that little man who brought dignity and respect to the common man of St Vincent. It was he who made them realize that their labours were worth that which would permit them to live in some degree of comfort. It was that little man who made employers realize that they needed the worker as much as the worker needs them, and it is to George Augustus McIntosh that the credit must go for awakening a political consciousness in St Vincent. He got nothing for it...
His life and work will however never be forgotten. His was a noble service to this Colony.21
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© Kenneth John, 2003.
HTML last revised 5th November, 2003.
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