Kicking Out the Communists

Last April, British Guiana, the Kansas-sized land of jungle, mountains and coastal sugar lands that is Britain's only colony on the South American continent, held its first popular elections under a newly granted constitution--and returned the first openly pro-Communist government ever to hold office in the British Empire. Last week, after six months of mounting frustration over the colony's Red-created unrest and subversive intrigues, Britain suspended the constitution and sent in troops to guarantee public safety. Said Colonial Secretary Oliver Lyttelton: "Her Majesty's government is not willing to allow a Communist state to be organized within the British Commonwealth."

Chicago Schooling. Habitually less concerned than Americans about the menace of international Communism, the British had hoped by the example of good manners and management to cool off the hothead East Indian and Negro leaders elected in backward Guiana. But the crown-appointed governor, Sir Alfred Savage, soon found that the Reds of the victorious People's Progressive Party, holding 18 of 24 seats in the legislature, were too hot to handle. Their Premier was a 33-year-old East Indian dentist named Cheddi Jagan (rhymes with pagan), a rapid-fire orator in both English and Creolise (an abused English spoken in the colony). But the real brains of the Communist movement was his blonde, Chicago-born wife, Janet Rosenberg Jagan, 32.

Alone among Guiana's "Progressives," Janet Jagan, graduate of the U.S. Young Communist League, was trained in international Communism (although she says she now has no Communist Party connections). Daughter of a prosperous plumbing contractor who lived in Chicago and Detroit, she had finished 3 1/2 years of college (Michigan State, Wayne, Detroit), and was a student nurse at Chicago's Cook County Hospital when she met Cheddi Jagan, a dentistry student at Northwestern in 1942. Ditching five other suitors, she married Cheddi, converted him to Marxism, helped him set up practice in British Guiana's capital of Georgetown in 1943.

Rumania Refresher. Starting the colony's first women's political group, stumping through the canebrakes to demand better housing for low-paid East Indian sugar workers, slim, serious Janet Jagan soon became the most talked-about woman in British Guiana. The waiting room of the Jagans' dental office became the meeting place of the discontented, and especially of those who sought independence for the colony. In 1947, after Jagan won a seat in the legislature, the Jagans sparked a bitter sugar strike in which five workers were killed. Founding the Progressive Party, Janet became secretary general and went from village to village making speeches and organizing study and propaganda cells. In 1951, her husband traveled to East Berlin. This year, after their April electoral sweep, Janet left her four-year-old son Joe with her husband and went first to Denmark to address the Copenhagen congress of the Communist-run Women's International Democratic Federation, then on to Rumania.

After Janet got back, Governor Savage quickly realized that he could never work successfully with the Reds. As soon as he let them repeal a ban on importing subversive literature, they brought in stocks of Communist propaganda. Then the new ministers fomented another big sugar strike that shut down the colony's main industry. When that petered out, they brought in a bill to force recognition of their Red-led union, and denounced "that man Savage" in open-air rallies. And when Janet Jagan drafted a party declaration demanding that London abolish the governor's control powers and other constitutional checks, the Colonial Office apparently decided that it was faced with a determined Red plot to seize full power.

London Lesson. Taking no chances after all the oratorical threats, London ordered 1.600 troops and four warships rushed to the colony. Though news leaked from Bermuda that the cruiser Superb had sailed with sealed orders, there was no violence. As the Royal Welsh Fusiliers and Marines fanned out to occupy key points around Georgetown, and the radio announced suspension of the constitution and dismissal of the legislature, Premier Jagan made the understatement of the week: "We are most unhappy about the situation." He and the other Red-tinged ministers were not detained or molested in any way, but the legislature's dismissal had neatly squeezed them out of their jobs.

At first, adopting an air of injured innocence. Jagan & Co. announced that they would take their case to the U.N. and to British opinion. Then they got their second wind, and Janet dashed off a fiery manifesto beginning: "Our country has been invaded by foreign troops . . ." and calling, almost in the same breath, for a general strike, a boycott and nonviolence. In London, a few Labor M.P.s cautiously questioned whether it had been necessary to act quite so forcefully. "Better to be in good time than too late," replied Winston Churchill. That seemed to be exactly the view of the U.S. State Department, which issued a prompt statement declaring itself "gratified" at the "firm action" against a Communist bid for power within the U.S.'s vital strategic zone.

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