Politics in an Island State

During the decades of the mid-twentieth century, Wills O. Isaacs was a prominent member of the People’s National Party. He was then, and remains, one of Jamaica’s most controversial figures; beloved by many and reviled by some both within and beyond his party. Isaacs joined the People’s National Party soon after its official launch in 1938. Quickly he became a leading nationalist, and a strategist within the PNP. Isaacs’ early work was in union organization and in building local constituency groups, including one intended to attract the commercial class. Another, formed in downtown Mathews Lane, brought him notoriety. In later years, Group 69 was sometimes seen as a precursor to Kingston’s garrisons and the wars between constituencies allied to one or the other major party. Isaacs’ first elected position was on the KSAC council where he served from 1943 to 1954. Elected to parliament in 1949, he held a Central Kingston seat until 1967. In that year, he was elected to the rural constituency of St Ann North East and re-elected in 1972.

Throughout his career, Isaacs was a nationalist and a social democrat who identified as a socialist. As a champion of the unemployed and the racially vilified, he condemned capitalism’s social failures. He also condemned the market failures involved in cartels and private monopolies. Consequently, he supported some nationalization, especially of Jamaica’s central services. Yet, he did not foreclose on capitalism and looked for a détente between classes. His main target was totalitarianism, both of the right and the left, and of the various nineteenth and twentieth century imperialisms. Isaacs’ nationalist ire was raised equally by British treatment of African peoples of the trans-Atlantic, and by the fate of Europeans overwhelmed in turn by Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Russia. He described the path of the PNP as one between “the red shirts” and “the black shirts”.