Rum and Coca-Cola: The Arrival of the Americans and the Restructuring of Social Relations in Antigua in the 1940s

Susan Lowes

"I was living with my decent and contented wife
Until the soldiers came and broke up my life..."
Lord Invader, 1943

The U.S. flag was first raised over the small British colony of Antigua on March 21, 1941, to mark the opening of a naval air station and army base.¹ Heralded rhapsodically in one local newspaper as the "union of two democracies in a stern determination to fight to the bitter end the soul-destroying evil of Hitlerism" (Star, 26 March 1941), the opening symbolically marked the entry of the United States on the stage of Antiguan economic and social life. It initiated a period of economic and social ferment, in which two contrasting constructions of social reality — Antiguan and American — came into conflict, a volatile situation that the appropriately named calypsonian Lord Invader was signaling when he gave the title "Rum and Coca-Cola" to the calypso that provides the title for this paper, and "The Soldiers Came and Broke Up My Life" to the calypso that provides the epigraph.² The resolution of these competing realities, mediated by social class, gender, and ethnicity, led to a major restructuring of the kaleidoscope of Antiguan social life in a few short years.

The American Bases

U.S. interest in the Caribbean had been growing since the turn of the century, when Puerto Rico and Cuba were won from Spain, the Virgin Islands were bought from Denmark (in 1917), and the Dominican Republic and Haiti — as well as the Central American countries of Nicaragua, Guatemala, and Panama — were put firmly under U.S. control, whether through outright or diplomatic invasion. The United States was investing large sums in these countries, and the Caribbean was well on its way to becoming what Eric Williams later called an "American Mediterranean" (Williams 1970: 419). This process took an enormous step forward with the advent of World War II. The United States determined that the best way to protect its East Coast and its shipping lanes from enemy attack was to establish bases at strategic points across the Caribbean: this became the "Caribbean Coastal Frontier." Cuba and Puerto Rico were already in hand, but the other sites had to be acquired from the British. This was easier than might have been expected, however, for the British were hard-pressed at home and anxious not to have to defend the Caribbean colonies as well. Thus, in one of the deals of the century, they generously gave the Americans ninety-nine-year leases to eight sites in return for fifty reconditioned but over-age destroyers. The sites were strategically scattered from one end of the Caribbean to the other: British Guiana, Trinidad, St Lucia, Antigua, Jamaica, and one of the Bahamian out islands. Antigua was among the smallest of these sites — its population was then about 30,000 — and was chosen for its strategic position at the northeastern-most corner of the Antilles, where submarines were becoming an increasing threat, and was to be a center for anti-submarine patrols.

Once one of the brighter spots in the British Caribbean, by 1916 the British Colonial Office was referring to Antigua as the "Cinderella of the West Indies" (CO 152/351/155, 3 May 1916). The Great Depression only worsened an already bad situation. The Antiguan economy and population, almost entirely dependent on sugar and its ancillary activities for its livelihood, was by the late 1930s — to quote Antiguan historian Novelle Richards — "a land of misery and depression, an island of slums and hovels, of barefooted, unkempt people" (Richards 1964: 1). By 1938, unskilled sugar workers were earning only a pitiful $.28-.36/day (Williams 1970: 444), when and if they could get it, less than in any other Caribbean island. The second-most important sugar factory closed in 1940. Although the newly formed Antigua Trades and Labour Union had won a 50 percent wage increase, this had only raised average wages from 1s to 1s/6d a day, hardly enough to live on, and much of the increase was eaten up by war-related inflation. Unemployment was high.

Thus for Antigua, facing a declining demand for its sole export, sugar, as well as rising unemployment, worker unrest, and generally straightened financial circumstances, the U.S. bases came at precisely the right moment. The bases offered the Antiguan labor force the first real alternative (aside from migration) to the plantation, and gave a desperately needed boost to all sectors of the economy. Although the overall leasing agreement was not signed until March 27 and the Antigua agreement until May 28, work on the Naval Air Station had begun on February 4 and the first members of the U.S. armed forces, a detachment of fifty Marines, had arrived on March 17. Work on the larger Army Air Base at Coolidge began on May 13.³ The Navy contractor brought about 15 foremen and hired about 1,000 local people to construct barracks, a pier, a concrete apron, and seaplane ramps, and to dredge the channels and blast the reefs for seaplane runways, a turning basin, and a shipping channel. In addition, an observation tower was erected at the tip of the peninsula. Even more people worked constructing the Army facility at Coolidge, where the entire village of Winthorpes had to be moved and rebuilt, a runway constructed, and other facilities constructed.

Although construction was not completed until the spring of 1942, both bases immediately began to operate out of temporary facilities — the first planes landed at Coolidge on June 6 and the first seaplane arrived at Crabbs on June 25. By this time, submarine activity was intense and Antigua's geographical position crucial. Enemy subs attempting to reach the shipping lanes leading to Trinidad and Curaçao, where there were oil refineries, Guantanamo, and the Panama Canal all had to pass near Antigua; in addition, all movement in and out of Guadeloupe (then under Vichy control) had to be monitored. Anti-submarine patrols out of Antigua extended over a 350-mile radius into the Atlantic, and there were frequent sightings well into the summer of 1943. Planes flying out of Antigua dropped depth charges and demolition bombs, although there were no reports of subs destroyed as a result. Survivors from torpedoed merchant ships were brought to both St Kitts and Antigua. There was a blackout beginning on March 29, 1942, and when the harbor at Castries in St Lucia was mined by the French Vichy government, ships were diverted from St John's Harbor to Parham and an anti-torpedo net installed.

The Laboring Classes

The construction of the two bases thus provided immediate work for thousands of unskilled laborers, and their subsequent operation provided maintenance, artisanal, and clerical jobs for hundreds more. For the first time since the 1700s, the Antiguan planters no longer controlled access to work, and therefore to a livelihood, for the mass of the population. In addition, there were longer term benefits: new skills were learned, from driver to motor mechanic to heavy equipment operator, that provided Antiguans with marketable skills — marketable not only in Antigua, but in Aruba, Curaçao, England, and the United States. Where before there had been only one or two tractors on the island, now there were bulldozers, huge trucks, steam shovels, and other of heavy equipment.

The labor force immediately began to play plantation off against base, and both against the government, which set wage rates. Although the union had tied its own hands by signing a no-strike pledge and was also forbidden from organizing on the bases, it nevertheless successfully put pressure on the government to force the Americans to raise wages.⁴ People had cash to spend — the government even had to introduce larger denomination bills as more money came into circulation — and the merchants and import/export houses prospered. As one participant put it, "The good life was flowing." Roads and drainage were improved, while the water supply was increased (Magnet, 1 November 1940).⁵

Social Class in Antigua in 1940: The Upper and Middle Classes

The Americans arrived on an island whose social structure was comprised of a large and largely black working class, a small nonwhite middle class,⁶ and an even smaller white upper class. The long downward slide of the sugar industry, which had begun in earnest in the mid-1890s, had led to the consolidation of sugar production in fewer and fewer hands and to a consequent steep decline in the British- and Antiguan-born white population. They had fought their own demise in many ways, all of which were ultimately unsuccessful: They had demanded that more whites be recruited from overseas, but few wanted to come. They had instituted schemes to stem the tide of white out-migration, but many still left, particularly the young men; their sisters, who stayed at home to care of aging parents, generally preferred to remain unmarried rather than to marry nonwhite men. They had replaced their partially elected Legislative Council with a fully nominated council in order to prevent the growing nonwhite electorate from electing too many of its own. They had refused nonwhites admission to the Antigua Grammar School and — for much longer — to its female counterpart, the Antigua Girls High School, but pressure from the Colonial Office and the need for an educated labor force forced them to open up to nonwhites. They had refused nonwhites jobs, particularly civil service jobs, and then refused them promotions, but the same pressures led these barriers to fall as well. The entire group thus failed to reproduce itself and by 1921 (the most recent census), there were under 1,000 white people. (At its height, in the 1860s, there were about 2,500 whites, in a larger total population of about 37,000.)

This decline provided an opening for the upper strata of the nonwhite population, which had been engaged in a long struggle to gain access to the grammar schools and then to those occupations — doctor, lawyer, merchant, high-level retail or bank clerk, estate manager, and, most important in terms of numbers and influence, civil servant — that were, until late in the nineteenth century, the almost exclusive domain of the white population. By the mid-1930s, there was a firmly established nonwhite middle class: nonwhites owned all the major retail establishments (but not the major import-export houses), filled the civil service up to the highest clerical level (but did not head departments), and served as both appointed and elected members of the Legislative Council. Although they owned none of the sugar-producing estates and played no role in the management of the sugar factory, as a class they saw themselves as having won a long battle to achieve their rightful place at the top, or almost the top, of Antiguan society. Socially, this middle class was a loosely contained circle of families knit together by ties of kinship, school (Antigua Grammar School, Antigua Girls' High School, T.O.R. Memorial School, and Spring Gardens) and religion (Anglican and Methodist, but seldom Moravian or Catholic). It was a social class that acted as such — that filled certain occupational slots, that had its own social institutions, and that was highly intermarried — and one that was recognized as such: for instance, the Governor always appointed one of their number to the Legislative Council to represent their interests.

Members of the new nonwhite middle class may have risen almost to the top of the occupational and political hierarchies, but they had made far less progress in the social hierarchy and were almost entirely closed off from white social activities. In fact, the extent to which nonwhites and whites shared a social life was directly correlated with the extent of women's involvement in a particular activity or organization. What Mrs Lanaghan had noticed in the early 1840s — that "white ladies are the strongest upholders of prejudice" — remained the case one hundred years later. In the early anthropological literature on women, men and women were described as inhabiting different domains, generally distinguished as public/private, referring both to the locus of social life and the subjects of discussion. This is a useful distinction for Antigua in this period, in particular because geography and content fit so closely together. But rather than public/private, it is more productive to picture the dichotomy in terms of indoor/outdoor, with the spaces in between — the yard, the veranda — being areas of flexibility, and occasionally of tension.

In fact, it was by traversing this terrain that young people often came to know their "class." Thus a young man would suddenly find that he was not allowed inside the gate of a close school friend, and realize that he was socially unacceptable to his friend's parents. Or men who were good friends nevertheless did not visit each other inside their houses; those who reported that they were "very close" often got no further than the veranda. Women, as keepers of the indoors, controlled the most intimate types of socialization, ranging from house visits to marriage. Men, in contrast, socialized outdoors, on the streets and playing fields, in rum shops and clubs, arenas where they were less constrained by indoor standards of respectability. It was by and large the women who policed the distinctions of social class: who knew, and cared about, the genealogies, who determined who their children could socialize with inside the house and who had to remain an "outdoors" friend, and so on.

This contrast between indoor and outdoor social consciousness affected more than the house and street: those social clubs that had both women and men had different, and narrower, standards of membership than those that had men only. Thus the entirely male, very public, and service-oriented Masonic Lodge recruited members of the nonwhite middle class in the 1920s, but white sports and social clubs did not. Similarly, although nonwhite professionals were by this point being invited to Government House for semi-public functions (receptions for visiting dignitaries, for instance), they were not being invited to the more intimate and sociable cocktail parties and dances, the occasions when women would be present. And finally, family life, and marriage — the most basic alliance — remained entirely separate.⁷

It should also be noted that members of the new middle class did not join the clubs their parents had belonged to, presumably because they wanted to distinguish themselves from their elders. When they could, they joined the formerly all-white clubs; when this was impossible, they created their own clubs anew. Thus where their parents had been members of one of the Oddfellows lodges, they joined the previously white-dominated Masons; where their parents had played for the Wanderers, they created the St. John's Cricket Club; and where their parents had had no social club of their own, they created the Antigua Quoits and Lawn Tennis Club.

The St. John's Masonic Lodge was, by the 1920s, in dire financial straights. Founded in 1843, it had had, in the nineteenth century, members from the former free colored elite, but it took in only three Antiguan nonwhites in the period from 1895 to 1920 — all children of the old nonwhite elite. In 1900, many of the plantation managers, planters, and Antigua Sugar Factory people had left to form the Caribbee Lodge and St. John's was only able to attract one or two new members a year after that — compared to an average of seven throughout the 1890s. Finally, in 1921, when no new members were taken in, Robert Bryson and Robert Warneford launched a membership drive, willing to recruit nonwhites so that the lodge would not die. Thus as more and more of the nonwhite middle class joined the Masons, the Oddfellows became the club of the class below: not only did the Masons not allow membership in both, but those among the nonwhite middle class who did not join the Masons considered themselves of Mason caliber and would no longer join the Oddfellows.

The same was not true of white Antigua Cricket Club, which was also in serious financial trouble, although more protected because the main source of cricketers — civil servants — were still white. In the British colonies cricket was a source of legitimacy and status, and in the West Indies the nonwhite middle class was determined to make cricket its own. It therefore formed the St. John's Cricket Club, which soon became the source of the best players on the island. It was here that many of the men of the new middle class made their mark. Its earliest members included Lushington Jeffrey, for many years club secretary; Basil Willock, for many years considered the best player; and Keithley Heath. Not, in the early stages, Antigua Grammar School boys — although before long that became a necessary prerequisite — but Mico boys who had become clerks in merchant establishments. St. John's lasted until after World War II, when it too faced a crisis of recruitment: its founding members had died or migrated, while their children disdained cricket. In addition, in a reprise of St. John's own history, a new club, Maple, had been founded at the end of the war by a group of younger men who had not been welcomed into St. John's and this became the club of choice for the next generation.⁸

The all-white Antigua Cricket Club was able to hang on for a few years, but the all-white social club, called the Antigua Lawn Tennis Club, refused any openness whatsoever, as did the planter-dominated New Club, a social club where planters came to read the newspapers and talk business when they came into town, but which also held events to which women were invited, and the Antigua Golf Club, which had male and female membership. Even when, in the 1930s, the white population was not only decimated but in general quite poor, the Antigua Lawn Tennis Club steadfastly maintained its separate social life.⁹

And this was because, unlike cricket, tennis was a social sport. Women played and drinks were served afterward on the club pavilion — anyone who has visited tennis clubs in the West Indies, with their gin-and-lime after a gentle set on immaculately kept grass courts will recognize this. Refused admittance to the Antigua Lawn Tennis Club, the nonwhite middle class founded the Antigua Quoits and Lawn Tennis Club, which became a center of nonwhite middle-class social life in the 1920s and 1930s; then, like St. John's Cricket Club, it too failed to recruit the next generation. In the 1950s it asked to merge with Maple, and was refused.

Despite considerable progress, then, there remained, by the 1930s, a color-based barrier between whites and nonwhites, a point at which class attributes — education, occupation, and respectability — were not sufficient for further advancement or acceptance. This barrier fell at a different place in different arenas — educational, occupational, social — but in each case it was based on phenotypic considerations. Thus the higher up the occupational opportunity chain nonwhite Antiguans traveled, the more class attributes became disarticulated from skin color, until the point — a point that moved within occupations and differed from occupation to occupation, but a point nonetheless — when only skin color mattered.

The American View of Antiguan Social Reality

Although by the late 1930s there was considerable trade between Antigua and the United States, Americans as such were not well known. This changed immediately after the Americans arrived. In addition to the estimated 2,000 enlisted men at Coolidge and another 300 or so at Crabbs, there were foremen and skilled workers brought by the two civilian contractors, officers, and a constant stream of visitors off ships and airplanes. This was an enormous influx in an island with a population of roughly 25,000. Virtually all were male and white, and many of the enlisted men came from the U.S. South — a decision having been made not to send black American troops to Antigua (FO 371/A3511/18/45, File 34106).¹⁰

Although the Americans were initially greeted with brass bands and open arms, Antiguans at all levels of society soon found that the Americans did not see their society as they did. The Americans brought to Antigua a consciousness of race, and a level of racial discrimination and hostility, that was far greater than any that Antiguans had known, at least since slavery ended — it was so strong, and so different, that many people told me that it was the Americans who had introduced racism to Antigua. This is not to say that Antiguans did not know racism: as we have seen, the middle class still faced a color barrier, although it was gradually rising, while those from the laboring classes who had traveled to England or the United States — and particularly those who had served in the British armed forces in World War I — had returned home angry and vocal about the discrimination they had suffered. In addition, the Garvey movement had affected the consciousness of many West Indians. What they meant was that the American southern — (and army) — style racism of 1941 was unlike any racism they had know in Antigua itself.

The United States in the early 1940s was a society in which racial discrimination was pervasive, and in the South segregation, in the form of Jim Crow laws that had been passed in the early decades of the twentieth century, was still legal. Jim Crow practices were introduced at the base, and separate buses took whites and nonwhites to and from town, a practice the Antiguan government allowed, much to the disgust of the Magnet (20 December 1943).¹¹

Further, American racism not only divided people crudely according to simple phenotypic distinctions between white and black — with black being automatically inferior — but it was fierce and personal: the Americans introduced a new level of racially based violence, verbal and physical: filthy language, drunken driving, fist fights, brawls, and shooting incidents all became commonplace. White soldiers expected Antiguan workers to jump on command, and quickly resorted to verbal and even physical abuse. They were trigger happy and prone to pulling out knives and guns, and there were a number of serious incidents, including at least two murders.¹² There was no equal justice: the Americans got off with a reprimand while the Antiguans were punished with jail time. It was the local belief that, even when they were court-martialed, all the soldiers had to do was pay $.05 as a fine for the price of a bullet and accept transfer out of the country. In 1940, Antigua had the lowest crime rate per capita in the Leewards; by 1942, the rate had doubled (Hammond 1952: 40).¹³

The coming of the base also changed relations between working-class men and women. Because of peculiar — to Antiguans — American notions of "democracy," racial barriers that were strictly enforced during the day suddenly dropped at night, when the American enlisted men were all too happy to socialize with working-class Antiguan women. In addition, the Americans had a whole new way of courting, one that had a lasting effect on Antiguan social patterns. The Americans had money to spend on their dates, and they spent it freely, leading to expectations on the part of the women that Antiguan men found hard to meet. Antiguan men complained bitterly that the women were receiving money and gifts and were becoming much too "independent."¹⁴

The Americans not only imported a view of society that divided people crudely according to simple phenotypic distinctions — all those who were not white were black, and therefore inferior — but they had the power to reconstitute Antiguan social reality in their own image. For the lower classes, there were financial compensations, and although this was unpleasant, it was essentially a more rigid and violent version of an existing situation. For the Antiguan nonwhite middle class, however, the American interpretation of reality was not simply a step backward but a major shift: suddenly they were "black," their color no longer modified by class. Lacking what was to Antiguans a crucial component of class, historical knowledge — in other words, not knowing the background of this class — the Americans took phenotypic reality to be all, and for them nonwhite was not-white, pure and simple.¹⁵

This came as a major shock to the nonwhite middle class, not least because it affected the them most in the one arena in which they were most vulnerable — social life. Once the American officers had established themselves in Antigua, social life for the upper and middle classes, which had previously been based on kinship circles and private occasions, began to revolve around the cocktail parties held for or by the officer corps — the Army, Navy, Marine, and Coast Guard officers who were either stationed in Antigua or on temporary visits. The Americans, with their dichotomous view of society, expected that only whites would be included in these events. This was not the Antiguan expectation, white or nonwhite, and members of the nonwhite middle class were initially invited — until the Americans let it be known that they did not want them there and the invitations stopped. For the nonwhite middle class, raw color prejudice suddenly reared its head in a startling way.

Thus while the Antiguans had expected the arrival of the Americans — who they saw as democrats compared to the British — to open up social life to them, the Americans, not understanding that this class believed itself their social equals — that for them, color had been modified by class — ignored them, effectively relegating them once again to the margins of Antiguan society. As noted above, phenotypic skin color was central to the American conception of race — all nonwhites were black — and since blacks in the United States were by definition lower in the social hierarchy than whites, the same was assumed to be true in the West Indies. Upper level whites in the United States did not socialize with blacks, so the only suitable social contacts for white Americans had to be white Antiguans, regardless of where they fit into the Antiguan social hierarchy. The fact that the British acquiesced in this exclusion, as it had to the Jim Crow practices, indicates the extent to which the nonwhite middle class had overestimated its own acceptance.

The Portuguese

But one of the profound ironies of this situation was that it was not only in terms of what they saw as black that the Americans reinterpreted Antiguan social reality: what they saw as white differed as well. The American officers socialized with white Antiguans and with some of the British Colonial Service people. But there were few young women among them, and so they turned to another group, the Portuguese. The problem with this from the Antiguan — white and nonwhite — point of view was that no Antiguan saw the Portuguese as white. They were classified as "other" by nonwhite Antiguans and as an undefined and shifting "not-white" by the British.¹⁶ Thus the Americans by-passed the group that saw itself as appropriate on a class basis and chose instead a group that they saw as appropriate because of its color.

This too had an ironic twist, however, for it was not the first time the Portuguese had had their color redefined. About 2,000 Portuguese were brought to Antigua as indentured plantation labor in the 1850s. Despite the fact that these were "short dark haired men and women with light olive complexions" — to quote one historian (Honychurch 1981: 104) — they had been imported, primarily from the island of Madeira, specifically to increase the European and white population, and for the next forty years they were indeed classified as white: in the 1891 census, for instance, almost all the Madeirans were under this heading, with only 3 being "coloured" and 4 being "black."¹⁷

One of the West Indian planters' main complaints about the Madeirans as a labor force — aside from the fact that they died in large numbers — was that they refused to stay on the plantation after their indentures were up, preferring to move into trade and independent farming.¹⁸ In Antigua, the majority remained on or near the plantations, married fellow plantation workers, and gradually blended into the population. Nevertheless, a minority moved away, and by the 1870s rum-selling and baking, in the towns and in the countryside, were solidly in Portuguese hands.¹⁹ By the 1890s, the largest bakeries and liquor distributors were owned by Portuguese, and a number of families had acquired small non-producing estates, either those that had gone into receivership or whose owners were leaving and selling out. The one exception was the Camacho family, which owned extensive estates as well as a large import-export and plantation provision firm.²⁰

Despite their wealth — which in some cases exceeded that of the nonwhite population — the Portuguese were not accorded a commensurate social status or place in public life. This was a group that maintained its separateness, or had it maintained for them. Their Catholicism, in a country where the white population was Anglican and the nonwhite middle class generally Methodist, played a role — it meant, for instance, that they were not welcomed into the Masons — as did the fact that they followed their own occupational ladders, so that the sons joined their fathers in the family businesses. The only area that did open to a few, particularly the women, was the banks, for reasons of skin color and education.²¹

Being on the jurors' list was at that time one measure of social status, yet as late as 1900 there were only 17 Portuguese among the 172 registered jurors; in 1934 there were still only 25 (on a list of 144). Like the nonwhite middle class, the Portuguese were considered a "community" by the Governor and Colonial Office, and John J. Camacho was chosen to represent them on the Legislative Council after Crown Colony government was declared in 1898. No other Portuguese served until well into the 1940s. And in striking contrast with the nonwhite middle class, for the Portuguese an Antiguan Grammar School education did not open doors to other occupations, and particularly not to the most desirable, the civil service.²² The Portuguese were admitted to the Antigua Grammar School in large numbers beginning in 1885, long before the new nonwhite middle class. Despite their Catholicism — they had to leave the school during morning prayers — they were accepted because they were legitimate;²³ they did not, however, get government or church scholarships but paid their own way.

In fact, it was when the Portuguese began, toward the turn of the century, to try to break out of their ethnic occupations and apply for the civil service that they began to be reclassified as "coloured" by the British. Thus in the first decades of the twentieth century, highly qualified Portuguese grammar school graduates were repeatedly refused promotion in the Colonial Service commensurate with their qualifications. Imported because they were European, they were now told that they were not "truly British" or of "unmixed European descent" (for example, CO 152/371/Conf., 16 July 1920).²⁴ Imported because they were white, they were now referred to as "coloured." Not surprisingly, perhaps, there was some confusion as to what color they actually were: one Colonial Office official wrote of a particular applicant that "his color is slight," to which another responded, "I should have said decidedly dark." Both, however, considered even the slightest hint of color reason enough to deny the man the job he was seeking. As with the nonwhite middle class, at the point when these Portuguese felt qualified for certain posts on the basis of their class attributes, the British used color as the basis for excluding them. They were also excluded from the white social clubs — the Antigua Cricket Club, the Antigua Lawn Tennis Club, and the New Club — and the few marriages between Portuguese (generally women) and either Antiguan or British whites (generally men) met with fierce disapproval from the men's families. Nevertheless, many Portuguese who migrated to England, the United States, and Canada did marry white men and women, and a few Portuguese in Antigua did as well — although it is telling that these were generally prominent men and the wives were generally American or Canadian, occasionally European and even more occasionally white West Indians from other islands.²⁵

The Portuguese were not only excluded by the white population: they were equally excluded by the nonwhite middle class, which saw them as socially inferior. Ironically, for nonwhite middle-class Antiguans, the wealthiest Portuguese were the most "other" — partly because the higher the social status in the Portuguese community, the greater the endogamy, and partly because of religion. Thus even the wealthiest Portuguese were not only refused membership in white institutions, but were also refused membership in nonwhite institutions, such as the Antigua Quoits and Lawn Tennis Club and the St. John's Cricket Club. Marriages between Portuguese and middle-class nonwhites were few and far between, and social interaction was limited: as noted above, few of my nonwhite middle-class informants could tell me much about the Portuguese and their families.

Thus when the Americans arrived and began to socialize with — and even to marry — Portuguese women, they did not simply ignore the Antigua middle class's construction of social reality, as they had with their treatment of the laboring classes, but rather ignored the construction of both white and nonwhite elites — while reinforcing the conception that the Portuguese had of themselves. Much to the surprise of middle class (and white) Antiguans, a group they had all considered their inferiors for class reasons was suddenly being treated as superior, for color reasons. The definition of "white" had suddenly shifted around them.

Conclusion

In much of the past literature on the British West Indies, class and race were linked in a hierarchy in which white was equated with upper class, brown (or colored) with middle class, and black with lower class. Class was reduced to skin color. This was not only true for the scholarly literature and for school textbooks at every level, but it was true for every century from the eighteenth into the twentieth: the entire structure was assumed to have existed in much the same form since emancipation — indeed, its origins are assumed to have been in the slave era hierarchy of master, free colored, and slave. Those scholars who challenged this conception simply turned it on its head: they posed the issue as race or class, arguing that one or the other was the dominant ideology at any one point in time.

As the events described in this paper show, both these approaches simplify a more complex and shifting reality. Both are ideologies that serve particular interests: the three-tier phenotype-equals-class conception was how the British wanted to see these societies. It was the British who insisted that color be linked to class, that color be considered the key to social mobility. On the other hand, the race-or-class conception was that of the marginalized lower classes (or those seeking to lead them).

More recent work in anthropology and history sees the point at which race and class intersect as an arena of struggle and analyzes the ways in which both are contested and manipulated. In Antigua, while the British colonial authorities tried to use skin color as the basis for exclusion in their effort to maintain their domination, Antiguans resisted, with different degrees of success.²⁶ As Jamaica Kincaid has said, "I think it's just a question of power — who can enforce race, who can enforce class" (quoted in Garis 1990: 78).²⁷ All Antiguans, however, knew that the two were linked: in this sense, they shared an understanding of how the society was organized. The Americans did not. They arrived in Antigua with a very different view of social reality. They not only saw Antigua through this lens but had the power to enforce their conception on all social classes in the island. Rum and Coca-Cola mixed and remixed in Antiguan society, leaving the island a profoundly different place in a few short years.

Notes

1 Most of the information on the Naval Air Station material found at the Operational Archives Branch of the Naval Historical Center, Washington Naval Yard, Washington, D.C. See the References for details. Note that although contemporary maps have "Crabs," both old maps and the archival records use "Crabbs."

2 Lord Invader, a Trinidadian, wrote several calypsos about the Americans "invasion" of Trinidad, including "Rum and Coca-Cola," "The Soldiers Came and Broke Up My Life," and "Yankee Dollar." Although there were major differences between Antigua and Trinidad, there were also major similarities between the two situations. On this, see Annette Palmer's article in Military Affairs (Palmer 1983), as far as I know the only published discussion of the effect of the U.S. military presence on Caribbean societies.

3 The land at Crabbs was acquired from independent peasants; for Coolidge, the 970-acre Millar's estate was essentially confiscated from the Camacho family and Winthorpes from the Gomes. The contractors were the Arundel Corporation and Consolidated Engineering Co., Inc. for the Navy and S.J. Groves & Sons Company for the Army.

4 According to the Magnet, the laborers believed that wages were being kept low by the Antiguan government, which was refusing to protect them from exploitation by outsiders, while the Americans were sympathetic to the demand for an increase (Magnet, 9 April 1941, 23 May 1941). To prove the point, the Magnet printed a letter from the U.S. Department of Labor that pointed out that wages throughout the Caribbean were fixed in consultation with local governments (Magnet, 3 May 1941). The British government was also pushing the Americans to raise the rates, although the local administrator was resisting (FO 371/A3382/20/45, A4526/20/45).

Novelle Richards, in The Struggle and the Conquest, argues that the union failed to progress during the early war years and pins the blame on Stevens — his personality, his inability to stand up to Moody — Stuart and the governor/administrator, and, ultimately, his signing of the no-strike pledge (for the same point of view, see also Tim Hector's article in Outlet, 17 February 1989). As a result, Stevens' popularity declined and in the 1943 Legislative Council elections he was only fifth elected member. V.C. Bird won the presidency of the union in 1943 and Stevens' Legislative Council seat in the by-election held after Stevens' death in 1945 (Richards 1964: 24). From that point forward, the union's leadership was from among the upper levels of the working class and peasantry. It is part of the importance of the base that it provided a training ground for these men, and most of those elected to the leadership in 1943 had worked there, including V.C. Bird, Kem Roberts, Bradley Carrott, Lionel Hurst, and J. Oliver Davis. So had later leaders, including Denfield Hurst.

5 By July 1943, with a change of regime in the French islands, the submarine threat diminished and Antigua's importance as a base immediately declined. Aerial patrols moved over to Coolidge in December 1943 and Crabbs became a Naval Auxiliary Air Facility in February 1944, providing refueling facilities, quarters for visiting crews and some communications. It went into caretaker status in January 1945.

6 I deliberately use the term "nonwhite" to avoid limiting and value-laden color terms such as black or brown, but locally this is known as the "brown" or "colored" middle class. Although the term Afro-Caribbean is favored by some scholars, and is accurate in the sense that I am referring to those Antiguans with an African ancestor somewhere in their family histories, it is nevertheless too limiting because it ignores the British or Antiguan white aspect of their heritage. However, I do not include under this term nationality groupings such as Portuguese, Chinese, and Lebanese, who although not white, are not "nonwhite" in the sense I am using it here. For an extended history of the upper and middle classes in Antigua, see Lowes 1994 and Lowes 1995a.

7 There were very few early twentieth-century examples of marriages between whites and members of the nonwhite middle class before the Americans came, and most of these were with foreigners. Nonwhite parents worried that their children would have "no place" if they married white people and lived in Antigua, and that the marriages would therefore fail. When it did happen, it was most often an older white man who married his housekeeper, nurse, or maid. The woman then became "a little more than a maid, a little less than a wife" — a comment that indicates something about how these marriages were seen.

8 In Beyond a Boundary, his classic book on cricket in the West Indies, C.L.R. James (1963) describes the reigning cricket clubs in Trinidad as conforming to a strict hierarchy, from the wealthy white elite to the poor black plebeians. This situation held for islands throughout the Caribbean, Antigua among them: from the all-white Antigua Cricket Club to the nonwhite middle-class St. John's to the artisanal Rivals and the lower-middle-class Rising Sun, each club was based in a social class. These clubs, like the classes they belonged to, were more likely to die out as the class structure changed rather than recruit from below in order to stay alive. Thus the Wanderers had faded out by about 1920, while the Rivals gradually lost members to St. John's and had dissolved by the 1940s. Rising Sun, founded in 1922 as the cricketing population expanded, had become the strongest team by the 1950s. The all-white Antigua Cricket Club, founded in 1863 or 1864, was able to hang on by recruiting expatriate civil servants, but eventually it could no longer compete with St. John's and closed. In addition, the Portuguese, excluded from both the white and nonwhite clubs, founded their own — called Ovals, or more formally, the Caribbean Cricket Club — in the mid-1920s, but it did not last long.

The struggle among the nonwhite population to play first class cricket is a story in itself. The white Antigua Cricket Club, whose members were mainly government workers, had time — Saturday afternoons, when others were working, and often a weekday afternoon as well — money for equipment and travel, and coaching. The nonwhite clubs had little of this and depended on membership subscriptions and an occasional financial angel. Nevertheless, the nonwhite clubs contributed members to the island team, and in growing numbers after World War I. There was surprisingly little movement from club to club, so that although there was a status hierarchy, as cricket opened up to larger numbers of people, the clubs of lower social status became the "best" clubs in terms of the number of skilled cricketers they contributed to island teams. Thus in 1913, the island team included seven members from St. John's; by 1922, there were fewer from St. John's but four from Rivals. The captaincy, however, remained white until 1925 (according to Sydney Walling's reflections as reprinted in Outlet, 7 February 1992; the rest of this information comes from oral memories and the examination of photographs of various island and club teams).

9 The Antigua Lawn Tennis Club remained virtually all-white until well into the 1940s, when a few Portuguese joined; it was not until the 1950s that nonwhites were invited in, and by that time the English were dropping out. The club was closed by about 1970.

The New Club was officially all male, but it was also social in that it sponsored dances and cocktail parties for its members and visiting dignitaries. It went through some difficult times and was able to maintain itself primarily by recruiting temporary residents.

10 Black American troops were sent to Trinidad, but not Antigua, presumably because of the secret nature of the anti-submarine activity in Antigua. There was a great deal of correspondence about this issue: the British were concerned about reports of racial animosity in Trinidad and were under pressure at home not to appear discriminatory. Thus in 1941, the British assured Washington that they had not requested that no black Americans be included among the civilian employees sent to build the bases in the Caribbean. In 1942, the question was again raised in the House of Commons and again the Americans were assured that the allegations were unfounded (CO 971/20/72059/1941; FO 371/A1065/10/45, 1942, File 30638). Nevertheless, the British were concerned that nonwhite Americans would be working beside nonwhite West Indians while earning many times more, leading to local unrest, and so insisted that they preferred the use of local labor (see, e.g., FO 371/A1798/10/45, File 30640).

On Trinidad, see Annette Palmer's article in Military Affairs (Palmer 1983), as far as I know the only published discussion of the effect of the U.S. presence on Caribbean societies. However, Marilyn Krigger's discussion of similar reactions to the Americans in St Thomas when the United States took over in 1917 is illuminating (Krigger 1986).

11 The British were determined to leave such matters to the local authorities. One complaint from Trinidad alleged that the Americans were trying to restrict "places of refreshment" to whites only, but this was denied by the Colonial Secretary. A British M.P. was told by the Colonial Office that this issue had to be "left to the Governors concerned in consultation with the local United States authorities." See CO 971/20/2, File 72059 (1941); FO 371/A1134/10/45, File 30639 (1942).

12 This information comes from the U.S. files, as well as from oral interviews. Unfortunately, most of the material on racial prejudice in the British Foreign Office and Colonial Office files for these years has been destroyed. Although all the material on criminal offenses has been kept, it primarily concerns endless jurisdictional disputes between the Americans and the British. One report of American violence is in CO 971/20/72063/2/1941.

13 As the war progressed, the British increasingly capitulated to American interpretations of justice, even when they felt they were not in the best interests of the local population. For instance, the Americans refused to have their men tried by local (nonwhite) juries, and the British then discussed how to rewrite the jury law to take this into account — although they noted that such legislation "would require very careful drafting to avoid any suspicion of colour prejudice" and that this was possible in the United States not because of the laws but because the "sheriff only picks white persons when a white person is going to be tried" (FO 371/A7337/10/45, File 30647; A9614/10/45, File 30649). In the end it was agreed that no colonial jury would satisfy the Americans and the matter was dropped.

14 It is interesting that this critique of white soldiers in Antigua is exactly the same as the critique of black soldiers in Trinidad. Palmer (1983) details how their presence "upset the very delicate social and demographic balance" in the island, and reports the vociferous objections from the local men: "debauching" the women, "disrupting" families, creating a crime wave. Trinidad being Trinidad, some of the most pointed observations were made in calypsos, including the one by "Lord Invader" that provides the title for this chapter. As a line in another calypso of the time went, "I was living with my decent and contented wife/Until the soldiers came and broke up my life ..." — a sentiment that was echoed in Antigua.

15 The confusion of class and color faced by the Antiguan middle class after the arrival of the first Americans was compounded when, in 1943, the United States decided to send Puerto Rican troops to replace "continental" U.S. troops in the British West Indian islands. The local governors were polled and all — Jamaica, Leewards, British Guiana, Trinidad — objected, concerned about the "serious political difficulties" that could result if "other West Indians" were brought to defend their islands when local troops were not considered trustworthy enough to do so. It was not just that Puerto Ricans were "other" West Indians, however, but that Puerto Rican troops, who were of a "Spanish-negro strain," would as United States nationals "expect to be treated as white men, a thing that would in practice almost certainly involve serious trouble amounting possibly to disorder." Governor Jardine wrote from Antigua that he was worried about contact between Puerto Ricans, who were well on the way to self-government, and "leftist coloured Antiguans." In Trinidad, where there had been serious clashes between the American black troops and the local population, the governor was pushing hard to get the black Americans removed, and although he was concerned that he might end up with both black Americans and Puerto Ricans, he agreed that Puerto Ricans would be preferable. He warned, however, that although the Puerto Ricans might "feel themselves to be white, they are not likely to be so regarded here," and this would undoubtedly lead to problems. The Chief of Staff, Porto [sic] Rico Dept. of U.S. Army, cannot have helped matters much when he wrote the U.S. army commander in Antigua (who passed the letter along to the governor, who in turn passed it to the Foreign Office) that "We draft Porto Rican troops into white and coloured units... Porto Rican officers are white and of social class equal to continental officers." The United States told Britain that it needed to find a place for 15,000 Puerto Rican troops and wanted them in inactive theaters involving minimal shipping — not a sign of great trust. It refused to bow to any British concerns: that Puerto Ricans replace black troops in Trinidad, that this be for the duration of the war only, and that the numbers be limited. It was, however, willing to select only "white Puerto Ricans with knowledge of English and high school standard" for the West Indies. The Foreign Office had no choice but agree, and Puerto Rican troops began to arrive in September 1943. (On all this, see FO 371/File 34106: A3511/18/45; A4276/18/45; A4277/18/45; FO 371/File 34111: A8080/18/45; A8250/18/45; with enclosures. Much of this correspondence was marked "Secret" and "Most Secret" and one letter noted that the matter was "explosive" and "too dangerous to be handled on paper" — presumably because it concerned issues of race, which was tied in the Foreign Office mind to wartime security.) To Antiguans, the Puerto Ricans were a real puzzle. They considered themselves white — one even refused to work with a black man at the base — and they were treated as white by the Americans. But as Governor Clifford had foretold, the Antiguans did not accept the ascription so easily: Puerto Ricans may have ridden on the whites-only busses, but to Antiguans they neither looked nor behaved like whites. An article in the Magnet referred sarcastically to the passengers as "white and so-called white" employees (Magnet, 20 December 1943).

In one of history's nice ironies, the black unit that had been in Trinidad went on to become part of the Puerto Rican unit, the 84th Anti-Aircraft Artillery Gun Battalion (see Palmer 1983: 61).

16 When I presented nonwhite Antiguans with a list of surnames for ranking, the Portuguese names were always placed off to the side, in a pile that was not ranked internally.

17 In other parts of the West Indies, the Madeirans continued to be considered white, although not members of the elite: Bridget Brereton, writing on Trinidad, reports that "The Portuguese immigrants from Madeira ... were of course white" (1979: 34, 211; see also 1981: 10, 99) — as they considered themselves (Gomes 1974: xviii). Similarly, Gordon Lewis, writing on Guyana, describes the Portuguese as "racial whites with a relatively low ascriptive status" (Lewis 1968: 261), and Douglas Hall, in a paragraph on both countries, includes them under the heading "white immigrants" (Hall 1982: 89-90). Local usage could be ambiguous, however, as in Guyana, where the census specifically excluded Portuguese from the category of white, classifying them as "Other European" (Lowenthal 1972: 200, citing C.Y. Thomas).

That censuses generally raise more questions than they answer, however, can be seen from the treatment of two other immigrant groups, the Chinese and the Indians, in this same census. In both cases, they were mostly classified as coloured, although the Chinese at least can hardly have been darker than the Portuguese and a fair number were also classified as white. (In the Leeward Islands as a whole, there were only two Chinese, and no Indians, who were classified as black.) It seems likely that the tendency of the enumerators to classify the majority of Portuguese as white and the majority of Chinese and Indians as colored was the European origin of the Madeirans. What is not so clear is what made some Chinese and Indians, who were either rural workers or urban petty bourgeoisie, white, and a few Madeirans colored — much less what made any of them black. Unlike in Trinidad and Guiana, where the Portuguese were considered ineffectual plantation laborers and were quickly replaced by indentured Indians, in Antigua there was no demand for additional labor and thus virtually no Indian in-migration — there are only 71 Indians listed in the 1891 census. There were also very few Chinese: although 500 were reportedly imported in the 1880s (Oliver clix), there were only 131 counted in the 1891 census.

18 In British Guiana, for instance, as early as 1851 the Portuguese owned more than two-thirds of the rural shops and more than half of those in Georgetown (Lowenthal 1972: 199). In Trinidad, they quickly became market gardeners and small shopkeepers (Brereton 1981: 99).

19 Of the twenty liquor licenses issued in August 1871, eleven went to Portuguese, including the only licenses in All Saints, the Point, Newfield, Parham, and Cochranes — in other words, all those outside St John's except for one in English Harbour. One went to a woman:

Victorine de Fratus (liquor license, Long Street)
John De Nunes (liquor license, Point)
Manoel De Silvia (liquor license, Long Street)
John Souza (liquor license, Cochranes)
Joseph Ferara (liquor license, Point)
Manoel Gums (liquor license, High Street)
Francis Fernance Jardine (liquor license, Parham)
Joseph Gonsalves (liquor license, Newfield)
Francis Gracias (liquor license, All Saints)
Manoel Rodriguez Mendes (liquor license, Market Street)
Antonio Perrara (liquor license, Market Street)

The spellings are as reported in the records for each date. Either Portuguese names were still unfamiliar to Antiguans or writing them was unfamiliar to the Portuguese themselves, or both. The spellings were at first very literal, and changed gradually over the next few years.

20 The common belief in Antigua is that the first Camacho, Antonio Joseph, came out as a poor indenture, and there are a number of romantic stories about how he acquired his wealth. None of these seems plausible, however, because he does not appear to have arrived until the late 1860s — his son was born in Madeira in 1868 — and by 1871 he was listed as owning A.J. Comache & Co., shipping agent (Antigua Times, 5 August 1871). He appears on the 1872 jurors' roll as Josephy Agusto Comacho, merchant. (The spelling of Camacho's name changed several times in these early years — either as a result of printers' errors or because it took a while to settle on one spelling.) Antonio Joseph bought his first two estates, Bellevue and Briggins, between 1871 and 1878 — well before the other Portuguese began buying land — and this was only the beginning of a buying spree that made him, by 1900, the single largest landowner, and sugar producer, on the island (the Maginley family owned more acres, but there were more of them). He acquired Jonas, Ottos, and Langfords between 1878 and 1891; and Woods, Lower Freemans, Olivers, and Turnbulls by 1894. By the time he died (in 1894), he had over 1,600 acres under cultivation. He was also a generous supporter of the Catholic church, buying the land for the cathedral's expansion (Outlet, 23 January 1987). A.J. Camacho had three sons, John J., Emmanuel Oliver, and Martin Joseph, who inherited from their father at his death. As was only possible in wealthy families, each son took over different area of his father's holdings. Thus John J. was the most involved in the estate part of the business, which he continued to expand. In 1898 he is listed as representing 14 estates; he had bought another 7 by 1902, adding 1,227 acres of cultivated land to his holdings. John J. was the representative of the Portuguese interests on the Legislative Council, beginning in 1890, and after Crown Colony government was instituted he was immediately appointed a nominated unofficial, as well as a member of the Executive Council, positions that he held until his death in 1929. He (and his brother Emmanuel O.) joined the St. John's Lodge in 1879, despite the fact that they were Catholics, but resigned in 1882. When John J. died in 1929, he left an enormous estate, valued at £52,624. He had no children, and his wife (he was married to Mary Gomes) presumably died before him because he left the bulk of it to the Catholic church, the lunatic asylum, and other institutions, with a miserly £275 to be divided among five men who were either friends or people who had done him services in some way.

Finally, Martin J. went into the professions and by 1891 had qualified as a lawyer. He served on the Legislative Council from 1894 to 1898. He does not seem to have had much of a day-to-day interest in either the business or the estates, although he is listed as part proprietor of eight of his father's estates in 1898.

21 A few Portuguese became artisans: Innocent Pereira was listed as a jeweler in 1885; Jose Anjo, photographer, was responsible for preserving the memory of an older Antigua, and also had one of the first motorcars and a taxi service on High Street; John Rodrigues Anjo was a "Hair Dresser and Tobacconist" (Tempany 1911: ads); A.A. Camacho (son of E.O.) was a licensed surveyor. No Portuguese went into teaching, but some went into law, including George Ignatius Mendes, Maurice Vivian Camacho, and, somewhat later, Fabian Camacho.

After World War I, the Portuguese began to venture into such new areas as the cinema — John and Francis Anjo opened the Deluxe in the 1930s, and then sold it to Joe Fernandez and Frances Joaquim, who also bought out the Globe for its Kittitian owners in the 1940s. The rum distillery was established by the Techeiras in the mid&-1930s.

22 The Portuguese had something of the same problem with education — in this case, Catholic education — that the nonwhite middle class had, finding it difficult to support their own schools because of financial constraints. The first Catholic priest arrived in 1859 but the first church building was not consecrated until 1871; there was no Catholic church in the countryside until 1932.

Catholic education was even less developed than the churches, and the fact that there were no Catholic primary schools in the countryside must have furthered the amalgamation of the rural Portuguese with the rural nonwhite population. There was a Catholic school in St John's that opened and closed several times between 1860 and 1900, but nothing from then until the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary opened the Convent School in 1933. From this point on, few Portuguese attended either of the grammar schools. (On the history of the church, see Commemorative Booklet on the Opening and Blessing of the Holy Family Cathedral [St. John's, 1987] and Outlet, 23 January 1987.)

23 Although there is no space to discuss this issue here, the British used legitimacy to control access to the Antigua Grammar School, and through that to the occupations that opened up to those with an Antigua Grammar School occupation. Legitimacy thus became a key attribute of middle-class status.

24 James Geschwender, Rita Carroll-Segun, and Howard Brill (1988) show a similar process at work in Hawaii. Here too, in an effort to increase the number of Europeans, Portuguese immigration (also from Madeira) was encouraged; here too, once the immigrants arrived they were no longer considered European. Although listed in the census as "Caucasian," they were separated out into a subcategory "Portuguese." They moved off the plantation into ethnic niches, and, despite equal educational qualifications, were kept out of key white-controlled sectors of the economy and social life.

25 One additional aspect of the marriage situation is that many Portuguese who went abroad were considered white, certainly in the United States and Canada, and usually in England as well. This depended on phenotypic skin color, however, because Trinidadian Albert Gomes (1974) experienced the reverse when he went to England. In Through a Maze of Colour, he wrote that although in Trinidad he was considered white, in England, because of his "swarthiness," he was considered coloured.

26 The fact that the nonwhite middle class struggled to be seen in class terms does not mean that other classes did not use race. Even before Garvey's influence, members of the working and lower middle classes had at various times argued that the "black man" should run Antigua. For more on this, see Lowes 1995b.

27 Indeed, nonwhite Antiguans even used this emphasis to their advantage when they could, turning their skin color into what Rolph Trouillot (1990) has called "epidermic capital." For instance, since the members of one family could (and did) range in shade from light to dark, parents might favor their lighter skinned children, giving them access to more opportunities, because they believed that they would have a better chance in the white world. There are therefore cases of phenotypically fairer people leapfrogging over their darker class counterparts (and even family members), thus turning phenotype — their own, at least — into an avenue to inclusion. But this possibility was only available to a few, not least because only some members of this class were actually phenotypically light; many were much darker. Further, this worked best with those who were the most socially and physically distant — the British bank managers, for instance, who hired Portuguese or English Harbour women simply because they were fair. White Antiguans, more engaged in the local situation and knowing each family's history, were more likely to ignore skin color; for them, class attributes were more relevant than they were for the distant British. Eric Williams called this the "high market value of white skin" (Williams 1942: 64).

Bibliography of Works Cited

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