David McCullough Library E-book Box Set

by David McCullough

  Meals at this same hotel cost 30 cents each (comparable fare in the United States would have run about 75 cents), and since a man needed only work clothes and one or two light suits, his clothing expenses were minimal. For bowling, billiards, pool, a book or a current magazine and the comforts of a Morris chair, for a game of chess, a chocolate soda, the use of a gymnasium or a quiet place in which to write a letter, he could go to one of the Y.M.C.A. clubhouses, where his dues were $10 a year. (One glowing article about the Y.M.C.A. clubhouses written for home consumption was titled “Uncle Sam’s Fight with the Devil.”)

  “In fact, everything is done to make it as pleasant as possible for the men,” one steam-shovel engineer wrote home, after getting settled at Culebra, “and I have not seen a man that was not satisfied. As for myself, I like it very much. This is a pretty town.”

  For diversions or pleasures not provided at the Y.M.C.A. clubhouses, one could take the train to Colón or to Panama City.

  An enormous amount of scrubbing and sanitizing had gone on in the two cities. Yet there remained a sharp division between them and the Zone, on the map and in the mind. On Saturday nights, even on an hour’s pass, men would rush over the line like sailors on shore leave, eagerly forsaking the unrelieved wholesomeness of the Zone and very often to do nothing more licentious than stroll about Cathedral Plaza or take in a movie at the Electric Theater.

  The cities, observed Harry Franck, “serve as a sort of safety valve, where a man can . . . blow off steam; get rid of the bad eternal vapors that might cause an explosion in a ventless society.” There were very few saloons within the Zone itself–half a dozen perhaps–and they were small, rough stand-up bars where, as one writer remarked, “the glitter of mirrors and of cut glass was notably absent,” and closing time was eleven sharp. The saloons in the cities, however, were “many, varied, and largely disreputable.” According to the Canal Zone Pilot, a guidebook that first appeared in 1908, there were 131 saloons in Colón, 40 on Bolivar Street alone. In Panama City there was a total of 220 to choose from. And after dark, things could get pretty rough. Prostitution, if not so gaudy or open as in the French era, was commonplace. Coco Grove, the notorious red-light district in Panama City, was a regular stop for the little horse-drawn coaches, or carimettas, that stood waiting at the railroad station as each train pulled in.

  Most notable of the brothels was the Navajo, on I Street, run by one of the best known of all Americans on the Isthmus, Mamie Lee Kelly, of New Orleans, who would be remembered vividly by one man more than half a century later as “lusty, large, voluptuous, very profane and very capable.” Since all such establishments were known locally as “American houses” and their occupants, irrespective of nationality, were known as “American women,” a local ordinance was put through making it unlawful for American women to be on the streets after dark, a rule that not surprisingly gave rise to a number of unfortunate misunderstandings.

  If a canal employee were to get married, his entire status changed immediately. If he was earning less than $200 a month, he and his bride moved into a furnished, rent-free, four-room apartment, with a broad screened porch (really a fifth room) and a bath. The apartment would be one of four in what was known as a Type 14 house, the model in which the majority of American families was quartered during the construction years. If the employee was making from $200 to $300 a month, then he was eligible for a Type 17 house (two families) or a small individual cottage. Any American earning $300 to $400 lived in a Type 10: two stories, living room, dining room, kitchen, three bedrooms and bath, porches on both levels, while those in the over $400-a-month bracket were given “large houses of a type distinguished by spaciousness and artistic design.”

  Whatever the husband’s rank, his wife would shop at one of the eighteen I.C.C. commissary stores, each essentially a big department store (and forerunner of the military post exchange), which stocked everything from work pants (“Battleship” brand) to lamb chops to finger bowls and at prices nearly always lower than in the States. (The pants were $1.25; the lamb chops, 24 cents a pound; the finger bowls, 10 cents each.) Moreover, as the purchasing department in Washington grew more proficient, the prices kept going down while prices at home were rising. In early 1909, for example, a porterhouse steak was 29 cents a pound in the commissaries, but a year later it was down to 21 cents, which was less than half what it would have cost in New York.

  The I.C.C. bakery produced a different fruit pie fresh daily (Monday, apple; Tuesday, mince; Wednesday, peach; etc.). The garbage was collected, lawns were cut, and a black serving girl could be hired for $10 a month. If she did not work out satisfactorily there was always a dozen eager to take her place.

  The whole system was in fact quite intentionally designed to favor the married employee, to provide every inducement for matrimony, to bring stability to the skilled white segment of the community.

  Books from the best-seller list and recordings of the newest hit tunes were no less current than at home. Indeed, with several ships a week arriving from New York, with thousands of tourists pouring through full of news and wearing the latest fashions, many residents of the Zone felt more in touch and up to date than ever before in their lives. For a very large number of the Americans living and working in Panama, perhaps even the majority, the initial voyage to Colón had been their first experience with salt water. Many had never been away from their hometowns. “Lord, yes, I liked it here,” recalled Mrs. Winifred Ewing, a schoolteacher at Empire. “I didn’t know anything else but the hills of West Virginia.”

  The Trail of the Lonesome Pine, by John Fox, Jr., and The Winning of Barbara Worth, by Harold Bell Wright, were popular reading along the diggings in the years 1907–1914, as were When a Man Marries, by Mary Roberts Rinehart, and Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage. In On the Spanish Main, by John Masefield, a young American engineer relaxing on his screened porch at the end of the day, the light of an electric lamp falling over his shoulder, could imagine himself accompanying Henry Morgan on the trek up the Chagres to sack Old Panama. (” . . . They rowed all day, suffering much from mosquitoes, but made little progress. . . . To each side of them were stretches of black, alluvial mud, already springing green with shrubs and water plants. Every now and then as they rowed on, on the dim, sluggish, silent, steaming river, they butted a sleeping alligator as he sunned in the shallows. . . .”)

  Whether anyone was reading Frederick Winslow Taylor’s The Principles of Scientific Management (“Harmony, not discord. Cooperation, not individualism.”) after it appeared in 1911, or Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams in 1913, cannot be determined.

  In the evenings after dinner, with the soft night air stirring the jungle, couples sat with coffee talking of much the same news being talked of at home–the return of Halley’s Comet, the women’s suffrage movement, the income-tax amendment. The most-talked-of story in 1912 was the same as everywhere, the sinking of the Titanic.

  A clerk from the Ancon post office, a Mr. S. C. Russel, walked across the Isthmus in fourteen hours, and that too was news. On April 27, 1913, an aviator from California, Robert G. Fowler, flew a small single-engine hydroplane from the Bay of Panama to Limon Bay, the first trancontinental flight, ocean to ocean in an hour and thirty-five minutes. Four others had attempted the flight before but had failed because of the turbulence of the air. Fowler, who had taken a photographer along for the ride, had banked in a big, slow circle over Culebra Cut to get the first aerial views. Far below, at the bottom of the gaping chasm, men were looking up and wildly waving to him.

  The biggest social occasions, year in, year out, were the Saturday-night dances at the Tivoli Hotel, where the band played such favorites of the moment as “Moonlight Bay” and “Wait ‘til the Sun Shines, Nellie.” Probably the tune danced to more than any other was “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” and it was with special zest that everyone sang “Under the Bamboo Tree.” A better-looking crowd of young people would be hard to find, wrote the correspondent for The Outlook. �
�Hot water and grit soap had been busy on the men, and the scene, except that some of the men were in white, looked like a college dance.”

  Besides the dances there were band concerts every Sunday, performed by a “very creditable” thirty-six-piece I.C.C. band. There were lectures, Halloween parties, Thanksgiving and Christmas celebrations. July fourth was the biggest day of the year. Once the Battle of Lexington was staged at Colón in Colonial costume.

  The number of clubs and fraternal organizations was simply astonishing. There were camera clubs, bowling clubs, literary clubs, debating clubs, dramatic clubs. The Texans had a club. There were nine women’s clubs in nine different towns led by a full-time professional women’s club director, Miss Helen Varick Boswell, who was a paid employee of the I.C.C. There was a Strangers Club at Colón and a Century Club in Panama City. There was a club for Spanish-American war veterans, another for college men, and another for college men who were members of national fraternities. The Isthmian Canal Pioneers Association was reserved for those who had been on the work from the start.

  Joseph Bucklin Bishop gave the activities of all such organizations full play in a regular column in the Canal Record called “Social Life on the Zone.” The launching of an Ancon Art Society in 1911 was reported thus:

  The art section of the Ancon Woman’s Club, organized under the title of the Ancon Art Society, will hold its first monthly meeting on the evening of January 29, at the residence of Mrs. Herbert G. Squires, the American Legation, Panama, from eight to ten o’clock. In accordance with the regular plan of the society, the evening will consist of music given during the hour’s sketching; an exhibit and judgment of work by the critic appointed by the society, and a social half hour during which refreshments will be served. The program of work during the month of January has been figure, landscape, still life, genre and applied design.

  “The whole Zone was friendly,” remembered Robert Worsley, a stenographer from North Carolina. “People were always willing to help, it was easy to get to know people.”

  “I just thought I was something. . . . Everybody was so friendly,” Winifred Ewing said.

  Locomotive engineers, train conductors, and steam-shovel men had their respective “brotherhoods.” Fraternal and secret orders abounded. The Masons, the Patriotic Sons of America, the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, the Fraternal Order of Eagles, the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks, the Improved Order of Red Men, the Modern Woodmen of the World, the Knights of Pythias, and the Knights of Malta had chapters and every chapter was extremely active. The Improved Order of Red Men, “the pioneer of all secret, or fraternal orders and societies in the Canal Zone,” had six “tribes,” and for special functions, members turned out in full Indian regalia, war bonnets, war paint. But the organization–“largest and strongest”–was the Independent Order of Panamanian Kangaroos (motto: Optimus est qui optima facit–He is best who does best), founded in 1906 when a number of Americans for their own amusement began staging mock trials, or kangaroo courts, in a boxcar in the yards at Empire. Within a few years, membership had reached a thousand.

  Everyone belonged to something. Everyone was someone’s “brother” in some fashion, and for large numbers of men their standings in these various organizations were vitally important. In 1911, for example, a large, costly illustrated volume much like a college yearbook, The Makers of the Panama Canal, was sold by subscription to American employees, so that by paying the price, any clerk, teacher, or mechanic could have his or her picture, as well as a brief biographical sketch, included along with those of Presidents Roosevelt and Taft, with Goethals, Gorgas, and Panama’s prominent political leaders. In nearly all these biographical sketches the orders and brotherhoods figure quite prominently.

  Most men listed three or four affiliations. Harvey C. Dew, for example, was an “Assistant Chief Clerk” from Dillon County, South Carolina, who had been on the Isthmus since 1906. He belonged to the Independent Order of Panamanian Kangaroos, the Odd Fellows, and the Knights of Pythias, as well as the University Club of Panama and the Strangers Club of Colon. John L. Davis, a steam-shovel engineer from Indiana, belonged to the Masons, the Fraternal Order of Eagles, the Odd Fellows, and the Junior Order of American Mechanics. Charles Montague, a railroad conductor from Allegan County, Michigan, who worked on a dirt train at Las Cascadas, was “Chancellor Commander of Balboa Lodge, K. of P.” (Knights of Pythias), as well as a member of the B.R.T. (Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen), O.I.T. (Order of Isthmian Trainmen), the Modern Woodmen of the World, and the Kangaroos. The complete entry for Joseph H. Painter reads as follows:

  JOSEPH H. PAINTER

  Steam Shovel Engineer, was born in Cincinnati, Missouri. He arrived on the Isthmus in March, 1908. Mr. Painter has taken about all the upright, regular steps in Masonry, having gone up through blue lodge, Royal Arch chapter and Knights Templar commandery on the York Rite side and to the thirty-second degree in the Scottish Rite. He is also a noble of the Mystic Shrine and belongs to the Kangaroos. He is married.

  By 1910 there were also thirty-nine churches within the Zone, twenty-six of which, like the Y.M.C. A clubhouses, were built and owned by the I.C.C. Fifteen full-time chaplains were employed–three Catholic, four Episcopal, four Baptist, two Methodist, one Wesleyan, one Presbyterian–their salaries and living expenses being charged off, as someone in Goethals’ office decided, to the Sanitary Department.

  The cost to the I.C.C. of all these various “privileges and perquisites” was something over $2,500,000 a year.

  But neither were the possibilities for unorganized activities limited or ignored. On Sundays, the one day off in the week, hundreds of employees with their wives, girl friends, or families joined the swarms of tourists sight-seeing at Culebra. There were day-long excursions to the beach at Toro Point, across Limon Bay from Colón, and to the old Spanish fort of San Lorenzo, looking down on the mouth of the Chagres.

  Taboga Island, in the Bay of Panama, was the most popular of all Sunday destinations. It seldom rained heavily at Taboga, the air was cooler, and while there was also no overabundance of things to do once one arrived, the three-hour boat trip across the glassy bay imparted a sense of getting far away. The one village on the steep little island stood beside a sheltered crescent of bathing beach. Excursionists in their Sunday clothes trailed up and down narrow paths of crushed shells and spread their picnics under the trees near the brown sand. Families went swimming. They took snapshots of themselves grouped in twos and threes beside a lime tree, or in the hard white sunshine in front of a tiny, ancient church at the head of a miniature plaza in the village. In old photograph albums brought back from the Isthmus, they stand arm in arm, their beaming faces half shadowed by hat brims.

  They bought pineapples and cold Coca-Cola and a good, crusty bread sold in a pink bakery shop overhung with a filigreed balcony painted an electric blue. On the slope just beyond the village stood the old French sanitarium, the former Hotel Aspinwall, which was still used for convalescents from Ancon Hospital, but took paying guests as well. The view from its long verandas was lovely. For many young couples it seemed very near to paradise.

  Numbers of people became keenly interested in Panama’s history. Lieutenant Colonel Gaillard, for example, bought and read every book he could find on the subject, and Gorgas’ favorite Sunday pastime was to lead day-long excursions on horseback to the ruins of Old Panama. When it was learned that gemstones–sapphires, opals, garnets–as well as fossil shark’s teeth could be found in and around the canal diggings, many men spent their Sundays that way, and with considerable success. Mrs. William Sibert raised a dozen or more varieties of orchids on her front porch. Lieutenant Colonel Sibert, among others, sent to the States for a pack of hounds, organized hunting parties in the jungle (for deer mostly), and kept a pet eleven-foot boa constrictor which he fed live possums.

  To some visitors it seemed that perhaps everyone was having too good a time, that a little too much was being done at government expense. Others worri
ed more over what the future effect might be of so efficient and apparently so successful a demonstration of socialism. In this largest of all modern enterprises, reporters were writing, not one man at the top, no one at any level, was working for profit. Visiting bankers and business people went home to report that the government-run Panama Railroad was a “model of efficiency and economy in every department.” No railroad in the United States was better equipped with safety devices. No private contractor in the world was feeding laborers so well as the I.C.C. In every phase of employer-employee relations the I.C.C. was more liberal than any private concern of the day, as several publications had already emphasized. The government ran the Tivoli Hotel, very well and at a profit. The steam-ship line between New York and Colón, also government-run, was earning a profit of some $150,000 a year.

  What were to be the consequences when the canal workers, spoiled By such paternalism, came home again?

  When these well paid, lightly worked, well and cheaply fed men return to their native land [warned a New York banker], they will form a powerful addition to the Socialist party. . . . By their votes and the enormous following they can rally to their standard they will force the government to take over the public utilities, if not all the large corporations, of the country. They will force the adoption of government standards of work, wages and cost of living as exemplified in the work on the Canal.

  Yet how could it be socialism, some pondered, when those in charge were all technical men and “little interested in political philosophy,” as one reporter commented. “The marvel is,” wrote this same man, “that even under administrators unfriendly or indifferent to Socialism, these socialistic experiments have succeeded–without exception.”