Colin Palmer’s Trilogy on Imperialism in the Caribbean, Omnibus E-Book

Includes Freedom's Children, Cheddi Jagan and the Politics of Power, and Eric Williams and the Making of the Modern Caribbean

Colin A. Palmer

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781469615752
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: History

This Omnibus E-Book brings together all three of Colin A. Palmer's books on the making of the modern Caribbean. Included are: Freedom's Children: The 1938 Labor Rebellion and the Birth of Modern Jamaica This is the first comprehensive history of Jamaica's watershed 1938 labor rebellion and its aftermath. The rebellion produced two rival leaders who dominated the political life of the colony through the achievement of independence in 1962. Alexander Bustamante, a moneylender, founded the Bustamante Industrial Trade Union and its progeny, the Jamaica Labour Party. Norman Manley, an eminent barrister, led the struggle for self-government and with others established the People's National Party. Palmer sheds new light on the nature of Bustamante's collaboration with the imperial regime, the rise of the trade-union movement, the struggle for constitutional change, and the emergence of party politics in a modernizing Jamaica. Cheddi Jagan and the Politics of Power: British Guiana's Struggle for Independence Palmer here tells the story of British Guiana's struggle for independence. The work details the rise and fall of Cheddi Jagan--from his initial electoral victory in the spring of 1953 to the aftermath of the British-orchestrated coup d'etat that led to the suspension of the constitution and the removal of Jagan's independence-minded administration. Bringing the larger story of Caribbean colonialism into view, this work shows how violence, police corruption, political chicanery, racial politics, and poor leadership delayed Guyana's independence until 1966, scarring the body politic in the process. Eric Williams and the Making of the Modern Caribbean In this first scholarly assessment of Williams (1911-1981), founder of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago's first modern political party and the nation's first prime minister, Palmer explores his life as a scholar and politician and his tremendous influence on the historiography and politics of the Caribbean. Palmer focuses especially on a 14-year period of independence struggles in the Anglophone Caribbean, when Williams helped resolve regional disputes and promoted the creation of a pan-Caribbean federation.

FREEDOM’S CHILDREN

The 1938 Labor Rebellion and the Birth of Modern Jamaica

COLIN A. PALMER

THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS | Chapel Hill

© 2014 THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS

All rights reserved. Manufactured in the United States of America. Designed by Sally Scruggs and set in Charter by codeMantra.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Palmer, Colin A., 1944– Freedom’s children : the 1938 labor rebellion and the birth of modern Jamaica / Colin A. Palmer.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4696-1169-3 (pbk : alk. paper)
1. Jamaica—Politics and government—To 1962. 2. Labor— Jamaica—History—20th century. 3. Labor unions—Political activity— Jamaica—History—20th century. 4. Jamaica—History—To 1962. I. Title.
F1886.P35 2014
320.97292’0904—dc23
2013028648

18 17 16 15 14 5 4 3 2 1

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Jamaican Currency in 1938

Introduction

ONE Jamaica in 1938

TWO The Labor Rebellion

THREE Race and the Colonial Imagination

FOUR Looking Back, Moving Forward

FIVE Bustamante, Unionism, and the Politics of Performance

SIX Bustamante and the Politics of Power

SEVEN Challenging Power and Facing the Consequences

EIGHT Constitutional Change

NINE Party Politics

Conclusion

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS, TABLES, AND MAP

Illustrations

Norman Manley, ca. 1938 | 54

Alexander Bustamante and striking workers, June 1, 1938 | 62

Tables

1. Population Classified by Racial Origin and Sex Showing Numerical and Percent Distribution, 1943 | 14

2. Percentage Distribution of Certain Racial Origin Groups, Jamaica, 1881–1943 | 15

3. Racial Origins and Literacy, Seven Years of Age and Older, 1943 | 16

4. Gross Annual Incomes in Jamaica, 1935 | 17

5. Ordinary Workers’ Estimated Monthly Minimum Budget | 18

6. Distribution of Landholdings, 1938 | 22

7. The West Indies Sugar Company, Ltd., Scale of Pay Prior to May 3, 1938 | 34

8. The West Indies Sugar Company, Ltd., Cultivation Rates | 35

9. Membership of Unions in Jamaica, 1943 | 169

Map

Jamaica | 8

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank several persons for their kind assistance as I conducted the research for this book. The staffs of the Jamaica Archives; the Institute of Jamaica; the National Archives in College Park, Maryland; the British Archives; and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture deserve my gratitude. Nora Strudwich of the Bustamante Museum was particularly helpful. I also want to thank Jobert Bienvenue and Maristela Perez for typing the manuscript. My good friends and colleagues Franklin Knight, Patrick Bryan, Nicole Burrowes-Caserly, and Sean Greene read the entire manuscript and provided me with trenchant criticisms and useful suggestions for its improvement. The manuscript also benefited enormously from the criticisms of the two readers for the University of North Carolina Press. I thank these six scholars for their selfless and priceless contributions to the preparation of this volume.

JAMAICAN CURRENCY IN 1938

1 farthing (1/4d) = lowest denomination
4 farthings = 1 penny (1d)
6 farthings = 1 penny and a half (1 ½)
12 pennies = 1 shilling (1/−)
18 pennies = one shilling and sixpence (1/6)
4 shillings = 1 dollar
20 shillings = 1 pound (£)

INTRODUCTION

This book is the third in a series that began with the publication in 2006 of Eric Williams and the Making of the Modern Caribbean. That volume was primarily a study of the important role that the brilliant scholar and statesman from Trinidad and Tobago played in imagining and working to construct a politically and economically integrated Anglophone Caribbean. Williams was the most outstanding personage that his country produced in the twentieth century, serving as head of its government from 1956 to 1981. The book was, in a larger sense, also a study of Trinidad and Tobago’s quest for self-determination and Williams’s attempts to call a new and modern Caribbean into being.

Published in 2010, the second volume in the trilogy examined British Guiana’s tumultuous struggle to achieve nationhood. The Guyanese nation in formation was damaged by the corrosive politics of race, the self-serving and destructive machinations of the British and the Americans, and the mediocrity of its elected leaders. Entitled The Politics of Power: Cheddi Jagan and the Struggle for British Guiana’s Independence, the book was a case study of a colonial tragedy.

More positive in tone, this volume is concerned with the labor rebellion that occurred in Jamaica in 1938 and how it helped to create a new polity. Beginning in the mid-1930s, workers in many colonies of the Anglophone Caribbean rejected the appalling conditions that had imprisoned them, challenging an oppressive status quo. Predominantly of African descent, these descendants of enslaved peoples did not experience a fundamental change in their life chances since the abolition of slavery in 1838. The worldwide economic depression of the 1930s exacerbated their dire circumstances, and so would World War II. Jamaican workers were no strangers to abuse, exploitation, and economic deprivation. But some of them were starting to realize their collective power and their ability to force the barons of capital to change, or at least to alter, the texture of their relationship with labor.

This is the story of Jamaican workers who forged a class consciousness in contestation with capital. Workers began to draw psychological strength and energy from one another, despite their variegated jobs, skills, age, gender, and residential location. This book describes the dynamism that emanated from below and discusses the social unrest that engulfed the island in May and June of that fateful year, 1938. Neither the colonial state nor the elite groups were prepared for the ubiquity of these challenges to the status quo, their fervor, and their frightening urgency. They began on the West Indies Sugar Company’s estate in Frome on May 2, 1938, spreading to Kingston’s waterfront and elsewhere three weeks later. These streams of protest were the result of numerous tributaries of discontent that had been eroding the island’s workplaces, awaiting the moment when they would coalesce into one mighty river.

This spontaneous outpouring of discontent initially lacked leadership, direction, strategy, or even a coherent series of objectives. The workers’ inchoate but passionate and irrepressible demands for change could not be contained, tempered, ignored, or diverted. Although a modern trade union, the Jamaica Workers and Tradesmen Union, had been founded a year earlier by Allan George St. Claver Coombs, the workers did not consult him before they began their strikes. Coombs had invited a self-identified wealthy man and usurer to assist him in the union, but the relationship was acrimonious and short-lived. William Alexander Bustamante, a charismatic personality, had no experience as a labor leader before he enlisted with Coombs, but he would develop into the most celebrated trade unionist that Jamaica has produced.

Born William Alexander Clarke in Blenheim in the parish of Hanover in 1884, he formally changed his surname to Bustamante in 1944 after using that name for a decade or more. Of mixed racial ancestry, young Clarke received an elementary school education. He migrated to Cuba in 1905, joining the ranks of many thousands of Jamaicans seeking their fortunes in that island. Clarke worked as a tramway operator in Cuba before relocating to Panama. He returned to Cuba either in 1919 or 1920, procuring a job with the Special Police Force. Clarke visited Jamaica three times between 1922 and 1932, eventually settling in New York, where he obtained a job in a hospital, probably as an attendant.

Clarke’s/Bustamante’s overseas sojourns are shrouded in mystery. The veracity of the narrative he recounted when he returned to Jamaica cannot be established, as he invented and reinvented his past. Bustamante claimed that he made a fortune in the stock market in the United States of America, but there is no independent corroboration of his story.¹ Returning to Jamaica permanently in 1934, he became a usurer with a mostly impoverished clientele.

Although Bustamante’s association with Coombs was short and bitter, he remained committed to labor’s cause, building a reputation as a friend of and advocate for the island’s working people. When the workers on Kingston’s waterfront began to protest against their condition in May 1938, they invited Bustamante to assume the leadership of the developing rebellion. His acceptance of that invitation not only changed the trajectory of his life but fundamentally altered Jamaica’s history. The still-unseasoned leader founded seven unions in 1938, each one directed at particular occupational groups of workers. Known as the Bustamante unions, they would coalesce in 1939 into the Bustamante Industrial Trade Union (BITU), which became the second modern trade union to exist in the island. In 1943 Bustamante founded the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP), which was really the union’s progeny. The workers had created Bustamante and provided the space for his emergence as a political leader and their most passionate advocate, but he was not always their most rational, visionary, and sagacious chieftain.

The workers’ rebellion also produced another leader of distinction: Norman Washington Manley. He was Bustamante’s cousin but followed a different career path. Born in the parish of Manchester in 1893, the brilliant young student attended Jamaica College, distinguishing himself as an athlete and winning the prestigious Rhodes Scholarship, tenable at Oxford University. Manley took leave from Oxford to serve in World War I. Resuming his studies at war’s end, he graduated as a barrister-at-law in 1922. Returning to Jamaica, he pursued an enormously successful legal career, becoming a respected counsel for the elite. Manley received the highly coveted appointment as a King’s Counsel in 1932.

Prior to the rebellion that began in May 1938, Norman Manley eschewed any involvement in the political life of Jamaica. He experienced an epiphany during the turmoil, however, offering his services as a mediator between capital and labor. Manley emerged from the conflict with his prestige enhanced and with a commitment to pursue a political career. Along with others, he founded the People’s National Party (PNP) in September 1938, ultimately embracing socialism as its ideology. Manley led an aggressive movement for self-government in the island, making a significant contribution to the politicization of the people through his speeches before various audiences.²

Bustamante and Manley, the two brown-skinned cousins, dominated Jamaica’s political life after the rebellion, but they did not stand alone. There were others who played important roles, as this book will show. But the new Jamaica was called into being not by members of the elite but by those workers who rejected their oppression in 1938, became members of the trade unions that emerged, and provided Bustamante in particular with much popular support. Recognizing that the rebellion created the moment for widespread changes in the society, Norman Manley and his allies demanded constitutional reforms that would give the Jamaican people more control over their own affairs. But it was the workers who had unleashed the creative energies in the society. The new and modern Jamaica that emerged was their monumental achievement.

This book describes the rebellion and the changes it wrought in Jamaican society between 1938, when it began in earnest, and 1944, when the island elected its first legislature under the aegis of universal adult suffrage. It is organized thematically and attempts to capture the dynamism of those years as the workers, their allies, and leaders engaged in the task of imagining and constructing a new Jamaica. The book privileges their voices, sometimes extensively, but it does not engage in hagiography. It is a critical assessment of a people’s travail, their struggles, their successes and failures, and their human foibles too.

The book’s documentation is grounded in manuscripts located in the British National Archives, the National Archives of the United States, the Jamaica Archives, and the Bustamante Museum. The Jamaican newspapers, particularly the Daily Gleaner, were also invaluable resources. Freedom’s Children is based almost entirely on these records, many of which have hitherto remained unexamined. This new documentation allowed me to make a more-trenchant analysis of the labor rebellion and its aftermath and to underscore my argument that the events of 1938 were as much an assault on the barons of capital as they were a racial conflict.

This study is an exercise in labor, political, and social history. While it is organized thematically, each of its chapters includes a chronological discussion of the issues addressed. Inevitably, this methodological approach involves some overlap since it is sometimes necessary to refer briefly to previously discussed events. Although the period covered coincides roughly with the outbreak and duration of World War II, I reject any assertion that the principal developments in the island were initiated, influenced, and shaped by the war. The major exceptions to this claim were the persecution and detention of some of the war’s critics by Governor Arthur Richards and the increase in the price of some imported and scarce consumer items. The labor rebellion preceded the outbreak of the war and was primarily the product of local conditions.

The book is divided into nine chapters. Conceptually, the first four chapters focus on the origin and course of the rebellion. Chapter 1 provides a brief discussion of the evolution of Jamaica’s history under British suzerainty up to 1938. But more important, it focuses on the social and economic conditions that existed in the 1930s and that produced the fuel for the rebellion. Chapter 2 is a discussion of the labor rebellion of May and June 1938, the rise of Alexander Bustamante to the leadership of the workers, and Norman Manley’s emergence as a mediator. The third chapter addresses the volatile issue of race in Jamaica, the racist narrative that some English people constructed, and the growing assault on racial and color discrimination in the wake of the rebellion. Chapter 4 concludes the first half of the book with an account of the Royal Commission that the Colonial Office dispatched to the colonies in the Caribbean to investigate the conditions that fed the rebellions and make appropriate recommendations to redress the people’s grievances.

The second half of the book is concerned principally with the actualization of the rebellion. Chapter 5 is a detailed discussion of the development of trade unionism in the island and Bustamante’s frequently unsteady but charismatic leadership of the workers. Governor Arthur Richards’s internment of Bustamante for seventeen months in 1940 for allegedly inciting a worker-led race war and the labor leader’s split with Norman Manley and the People’s National Party are examined in chapter 6. Chapter 7 discusses the governor’s suppression of political dissent during wartime and the opposition it spawned in the island. Chapter 8 analyses the struggle to achieve constitutional changes in the island in the wake of the rebellion. It addresses the emergence of a nascent Jamaican nationalism and the denial of self-government in the new constitution that was promulgated in 1944. The concluding chapter focuses on the introduction of party politics in the island, providing a comprehensive account of the formation of the People’s National Party in 1938, the subsequent founding of other parties, and the first election conducted under the aegis of universal adult suffrage in 1944.

Modern scholars maintain that “race” is a social construct. I use the word in this book in the way it would have been understood at the time. The appellation “Bustamante unions” refers to the seven unions that bore the labor chieftain’s name and that existed between June 1938 and January 1939. They were replaced in the latter month by the umbrella Bustamante Industrial Trade Union. Thereafter, most of the extant manuscripts employ the singular “union” instead of the plural “unions,” although not consistently. In researching and writing this book, I have tried to respect the admonition of Dr. Roy Augier, a historian at the University College of the West Indies (later the University of the West Indies), that “the first law of history is to tell the whole truth about the past.”³ Many aspects of the story I tell in this book are being addressed for the first time and are likely to be controversial, and the veracity of my account likely will be questioned, especially by general readers. Consequently, I include in the narrative copious excerpts from the sources that I consulted. This is particularly the case in the extensive discussions of the activities a...

Table of contents

• Colin Palmer’s Trilogy on Imperialism in the Caribbean, Omnibus E-Book
• Freedom’S Children
• Cheddi Jagan and the Politics of Power
• Eric Williams and the Making of the Modern Caribbean