II
John Stevens ushered in what was to be known on the Isthmus as the Railroad Era. And it is one of the ironies of the story that the unseen guiding spirit as the canal got under way was James J. Hill. Stevens was not only Hill’s man, but he would run the work the way Hill ran the Great Northern. Indeed, the building of the Panama Canal was among other things one of the greatest of all triumphs in American railroad engineering.
At the Great Northern the “best-fitted” men were given tremendous authority, then held strictly accountable for results. Familiarity with details was stressed at every level, but obligatory for operating officers. “Intelligent management,” according to the familiar Hill dictum, “. . . must be based on exact knowledge of facts. Guesswork will not do.” How many best-fitted men might be found among the holdovers from the Wallace fiasco seemed questionable at first. Losses from disease, the pell-mell rush to get away, the very serious difficulty in recruiting replacements, had inevitably meant the advancement to key positions of young men who under normal conditions would probably never have been considered. “Personally, I have always felt grateful to the yellow fever for my first great opportunity in life,” wrote Robert E. Wood nearly sixty years later. As a twenty-five-year-old lieutenant he had had “no idea of getting the fever, and did not . . . Anyone who stayed was promoted.” Straight, clean-shaven, as square-jawed and forthright as a Charles Dana Gibson hero, Wood was among the first spotted by Stevens as part of his reorganization. Assigned to the Department of Labor and Quarters, Wood was later to become Chief Quartermaster of the Zone; later still he would become General Wood and ultimately the commanding genius of Sears, Roebuck and Company.
Frank Maltby, Wallace’s division head at Colón, was summoned to Panama City soon after Stevens got settled. “We sat on the veranda under a full tropical moon. . . . Everyone else disappeared,” Maltby would write, recalling the interview. “Mr. Stevens did not talk much but asked questions–and could that man ask questions! He found out everything I knew. He turned me inside out and shook out the last drop of information. . . . At 1 A. M. we retired.” The following day Stevens cabled Washington to say that the man he had in mind for the position at Colón was no longer needed; Maltby would do. Maltby, long-legged and sallow, was given the following guideline: “You won’t get fired if you do something, you will if you don’t do anything. Do something if it is wrong, for you can correct that, but there is no way to correct nothing.”
Wallace’s ranking engineer at Culebra, a glum, scowling man named W. E. Dauchy, was also kept on, but he would last only a short time longer and with few exceptions all the rest of the new regime would be composed of experienced railroad men brought in by Stevens. Whereas Ferdinand de Lesseps had failed to see the project as fundamentally a railroad problem and neglected to send a single railroad specialist to Panama, Stevens never saw it as anything other than that, and he recruited railroad men only. Jackson Smith, young, ill mannered, efficient, had been in railroad construction for five years in Mexico and Ecuador; he was put over Lieutenant Wood as head of Labor and Quarters. William Belding, the new chief of building construction, had been in charge of much the same thing on the Illinois Central. Edward J. Williams, the new disbursing officer, had been paymaster of the Chicago and North Western. A former general auditor of the Oregon Railway and Navigation Company became the new head of accounting. A general storekeeper for the Great Northern became the new chief of Materials and Supplies. William Grant Bierd, brought in to run the Panama Railroad, had been with Stevens at the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific. He replaced the illustrious Colonel Shaler, who was quietly banished to permanent retirement.
The one man ever urged upon Stevens by Washington–by both Taft and Shonts–was of no interest to Stevens because he was not a railroad man. Taft thought he had found the perfect assistant engineer, someone “exceedingly able,” as he told Roosevelt, who could in fact replace Stevens, should Stevens ever take it into his head to do what Wallace had. This was Major George Goethals. Shonts described him in a letter to Stevens as the top construction engineer in the Army, suitable in every way–“direct, resourceful, energetic, and a worker of the most pleasant personality.” Taft even brought Goethals to the Isthmus on another of his inspection tours. But Stevens would have none of it, and so Major Goethals returned to Washington.
Stevens saw at once, as the French had not, that the Panama Railroad was the lifeline along which not only men, food, supplies, everything needed to sustain the work, would have to move freely and efficiently, but the Culebra dirt trains as well. He also saw that there was no sense in working with anything less than the biggest, heaviest equipment possible. The French had tried to improve their output by continuously modifying their “plant,” using different kinds of equipment in different combinations; but generally it was all too small, too light for the size of the task. “Now I would liken that [French] plant to a modern one as baby carriages to automobiles,” Stevens observed. “This is no reflection on the French, but I cannot conceive how they did the work they did with the plant they had.”
The track itself, to begin with, was too light. By his standards the railroad as it stood was a pathetic toy. Equipment on the Great Northern was four times the size of that used on the little jungle line. (Hill had been the first railroad baron to equip his road with large-capacity freight cars and monster locomotives.) So within a year the line was completely overhauled and double-tracked with heavier rails. Bridges were strengthened, signals and sidings were improved upon, equipment was rehabilitated or replaced. A new telegraph and telephone system was installed, using old rails for poles. Warehouses and repair shops were built and enormous locomotive sheds were put up at Matachín. Orders were placed for freight cars, dump cars, refrigerator cars, more than a hundred locomotives, all to be shipped “knocked down,” then reassembled on arrival in the new shops.
To run the line an entirely new force was brought in–yard and train masters, superintendents, dispatchers, master mechanics, and what Stevens described as “an army of conductors, engineers, and switch men.”
Until Colon’s New water system was completed, he used the railroad to run trainloads of clean water into the city night and day. The railroad fed the work force, it ran the commissaries and it ran the Panama Steamship Company by which the food was shipped from New York. A tremendous cold-storage plant was built in conjunction with new terminal facilities at Cristobal. Perishable foods were soon being delivered on a regular schedule along the line every morning.
The men rebuilding the railroad, those building the New towns beside the railroad, began enjoying such luxuries as fresh eggs, lettuce, dressed meats– ice. A bakery was built capable of producing forty thousand loaves of bread per day.
There was no building construction, no construction enterprise of any kind not associated with the railroad. It was as if all the activity of the usual large-scale railroad project, activity normally strung across vast open space, had been compressed into this one narrow fifty-mile corridor, with the result that everything seemed tremendously intensified. The size of the labor force was tripled in six months after Stevens took over. By the end of 1906 there were nearly twenty-four thousand men at work, more than there had been working on the Union Pacific in the final race to finish at Promontory, Utah, more than there had been at any time during the French years at Panama. For several months he had twelve thousand men doing nothing but putting up buildings.
Again, as during the French effort, the labor force came from every part of the world–ninety-seven countries according to the records– but again the unskilled pick-and-shovel workers were nearly all black men and this time it was Barbados, rather than Jamaica, that supplied the majority. Because of the suffering experienced by those Jamaicans left stranded on the Isthmus when the de Lesseps venture collapsed, the Jamaican government refused to allow any recruiting on the island and imposed a tax on anyone desiring to leave to work on the canal. As a result those Jamaicans who immigrated to Pan
ama did so of their own volition and were mostly skilled artisans–those who could afford the tax.
On those islands where recruiting was permitted, all workers were given a contract by which they received free passage to Colón and were guaranteed free repatriation, if they so chose, after five hundred working days (roughly a year and eight months). Martinique and Guadeloupe accounted for some 7,500 men all told, but the total from Barbados was to be nearly 20,000.
Wages were ten cents an hour, ten hours a day, six days a week. Segregation by color, long an unwritten rule on the railroad, as well as in Panamanian society in general, became established policy. There were separate mess halls for blacks. Housing, schools, hospitalization, were separate and by no means equal. And it remained a “Jim Crow” railroad, though restrictions were never hard-and-fast or enforced. Travel on the line was either first or second class, and while most whites rode first class and most blacks second, low-paid white laborers frequently chose second class, just as higher-paid skilled blacks sometimes traveled in the first-class cars.
In all official rules and documents, on signs in post offices and other public places, the color line was expressed in “gold” and “silver” rather than black and white, these designations having been derived from the pay system. Pay for the unskilled work force was in Panamanian silver –balboas, as the standard coins were called. Pay for Americans, on the other hand, was in gold, that still being the monetary standard of the United States. And since nearly all the unskilled workers were black and since virtually all the Americans recruited were skilled workers and white, the terms “gold roll” (gold payroll) and “silver roll” came to be used more or less synonymously for skilled whites from the United States (who might be anything from a steam-shovel engineer to a postal clerk to a nurse to a division engineer) and for black unskilled British subjects (most likely from Barbados and most likely illiterate; but who could also be an educated, French-speaking artisan from Martinique, a Swiss surveyor, or an illiterate Spaniard or Italian). Recruiting offices were opened in New York and New Orleans and recruiting agents were sent out from Washington to rove the country in search of men. The variety of skills and trades suddenly in demand was enormous. Stevens’ own estimate for the upcoming year was for 4,892 American workers skilled in some forty different specialties-bricklayers, blacksmiths, boilermakers, conductors, cooks, car in spectors, car repairers, ship captains, carpenters (1,710 carpenters was the specific request), coppersmiths, calkers, dredge operators, hand-drill operators, steam-drill operators, helpers for the steam-drill operators, engine dispatchers and their helpers, firemen, ironworkers, lithographers, locomotive engineers, locomotive foremen, molders, masons, marine engineers, machinists, plumbers, plasterers, pattern-makers, painters, pipe fitters, riggers, shipwrights, steam-shovel engineers, steam-shovel cranemen, steam-shovel firemen, stationary engineers, timers, watchmen, waiters.
Free transportation to the Isthmus was offered; free housing and medical treatment were part of the enticement. The average pay per month was $87.
The results, however, were disappointing. Too often applicants were those unable to hold a job. These were prosperous years at home and the bad publicity attending the yellow-fever scare had greatly undermined whatever patriotic or romantic appeal Panama might otherwise have had. Instead of 4,892 skilled workers, Stevens got 3,243, and Within a year or so, more than half of these would find life in Panama more than they had bargained for and would quit and go home.
Though the idea of building the canal entirely with American labor, unskilled as well as skilled, received some consideration in the early stages and was described by the press as the proper course idealistically, it was never taken seriously. Unskilled white workers, even those at the very bottom end of the pay scale, had no desire to go to Panama. Union leaders strenuously opposed any wholesale shipment of men to “that deathtrap” and particularly after an inspection team from Japan, representatives of large contractors of Japanese labor, reported the Isthmus too unsafe to risk the lives of their men.
What was needed for the heavy physical work, according to the accepted doctrine, were battalions of men who by nature and habit could withstand the punishing climate: black men from the West Indies. That black North Americans might also serve–as General Ben Butler once proposed to Abraham Lincoln–was taken into account, but this too met with strenuous opposition from southern congressmen who foresaw their home states suddenly drained of their natural supply of cheap labor.
The comparative inefficiency and technical ignorance of the West Indian became a source of terrible aggravation for the American engineers and foremen, not a few of whom were naturally prone to scoff at any black man and particularly if he had a singsong British accent. By Stevens’ own estimate the efficiency of the average West Indian was about one-third that of an American laborer, white or black.
Reporters were told of the West Indian’s “childish irresponsibility,” that he was “wasteful . . . stupid . . . possessed with unutterable hatred of exertion other than conversation.” And reporters from their own observations reached much the same conclusion. A writer for the popular Outlook magazine declared that in all his weeks on the Isthmus he had never once seen a West Indian swing a pick properly, that “their dullness is almost beyond belief.”
It does not matter whether they are digging a drainage trench- in Colón, or laying tracks at the very bottom of the Great Cut, or breaking up the ancient cobblestone pavements of Panama. Watch them work for but a single day and you are puzzling over the worst problem that faces our engineers. The only labor they can find in the Western Hemisphere for building the canal has less than one third the efficiency of our labor of the North. The West Indian’s every movement is slow and bungling; every small object a subject for debate; anything at all a sufficient excuse for all hands to stop work. A slow upward look from one or two of a gang is usually the only sign that they have heard the foreman’s yell, for there is no change in pace or manner of work.
Still, the same writer could see a “certain and unjustified cruelty” in forcing “poor half-fed fellows” to work eight to ten hours in such heat. “Until you have tried to do a good fifteen minutes’ work with a pick and shovel during the rainy season . . . you can have no idea of the exhaustion that tropical heat brings even to the laborer who is used to it.”
From his experience in the West, Stevens preferred contract Chinese labor gangs above all other choices and he wanted to bring Chinese to Panama in the shortest time possible. Consequently, bids were invited on contracts to furnish up to fifteen thousand Chinese at a pay scale the same as that of the West Indians. But the prospect of wholesale shipments of coolie labor into the Canal Zone by a government that had excluded the importation of such labor since 1882 was received at home with what Stevens called “the customary outcry.” The Panamanians protested even more strenuously. In reaction to the success of Chinese merchants in Colón and Panama City, many of them descendants of Chinese laborers left over from earlier projects, the New republic had enacted its own Chinese exclusion law. Moreover, the government of Chin a protested as well, its view being the same as that of the Japanese contractors.
So the matter was dropped. Stevens, infuriated by the politics of the incident, failed to comprehend, he said, what difference it made whether a laborer was white or black or yellow; or why some people would rather spend millions On one variety rather than another, when the performance of the other was so plainly superior.
As an experiment, he had several hundred unskilled workers brought over from the Basque Provinces of Spain. The physical endurance of these men, their effectiveness whenever gang labor was called for (such as in moving railroad track), proved so exceptional that he imported nearly eight thousand more and paid them twice what the West Indians were getting, a policy he justified On the grounds that they worked three times as hard.
But recruitment at Barbados went ahead as rapidly as possible, under the direction of William Karner, Wallace’s former as
sistant. work of any kind was extremely scarce On the vastly overpopulated island. The mass of the populace, black and desperately poor, survived primarily on a few months of planting and harvest On the sugar plantations, when an able-bodied man could earn about twenty cents a day, the same as he could earn in Panama in Two hours. So for every man who was picked to go to Panama there were five or more others eager for the chance. On the days Karner opened his recruiting office off Trafalgar Square in Bridgetown, the police had to be On hand to keep the crowds in order.
Examinations were conducted in a large, bare loft. The men, in batches of a hundred-odd at a time, were formed in a line around the wall. Any who looked too old, too young, or too feeble were told to leave. The others were checked first for trachoma, then were told to strip, after which they were gone over for tuberculosis, heart trouble, and rupture. By the time the process was finished, only about twenty men would have passed. A correspondent who watched one such session wrote that he had never seen a more serious-looking body of men until the doctor told the remaining twenty they had been chosen to go. The change was immediate; they started to shout and dance about, clapping one another on the shoulders.
A flood of light came in through the window at the end, and many streaks shot down through the broken shingles on their naked bodies. It was a weird sight–something like a war dance–as they expressed their relief . . . It meant semi-starvation for themselves and their families if they were rejected, and untold wealth–a dollar a day–if they passed. They were all vaccinated . . . their contracts signed, and they went prancing down-stairs to spread the good news among their friends in the square.
David McCullough Library E-book Box Set Page 383