A member of the Socialist Party was found on the payroll, a mechanic who had been on the job almost from the start, and he declared that by no means was it socialism. “First of all, there ain’t any democracy down here. It’s a Bureaucracy that’s got Russia backed off the map. . . . Government ownership don’t mean anything to us working men unless We own the Government. We don’t here–this is the sort of thing Bismarck dreamed of.”
II
To Harry Franck, who was to record his experiences in a book titled Zone Policeman 88, one of the most candid and perceptive of published reminiscences, a more fitting analogy was the caste society of India. “The Brahmins,” he wrote, “are the gold employees, white American citizens with all the advantages and privileges thereto appertaining.” But this Brahmin caste itself, he emphasized, was divided and subdivided into numerous gradations, each very clearly defined. The ultimate Brahmin was “His Brahmin Highness the Colonel.” Immediately below him were the “high priests” of the canal commission–Sibert, Gaillard, Hodges, Gorgas, Rousseau, and the portly former Senator, J. C. S. Blackburn, who was officially Chief of Civil Administration, a job and title that meant almost nothing. (Blackburn’s duties were once described unofficially as attending commission meetings, signing cab licenses, and drawing $14,000 a year.)
Down the scale, grade by grade, were the assistant division heads, the highest-paid civil and electrical engineers, the supervisors of construction, the assistant supervisors of construction, heads of machine shops, accountants, paymasters, storekeepers, yardmasters, sanitary inspectors, locomotive engineers, beneath which were the “roughnecks” –steam-shovel men, boilermakers, plumbers, ordinary mechanics, and so forth. (A roughneck, by Franck’s description, was a “bull-necked, wholehearted, cast-iron fellow” who was both admirable and likable, but only to a point: “a fine fellow in his way, but you can sometimes wish his way branched off from yours for a few hours.”)
There was, however, still one lower level within the white community, that of the regular enlisted man, either Army or Marines, for whom Corporal Jack Fitzgerald, of Boston, may serve as an example. Eighteen years old, single, Corporal Fitzgerald was one of some eight hundred regular Army troops based in the Zone at Camp Otis, near Las Cascadas, beside the western edge of Culebra Cut. Being neither an officer nor an employee of the canal commission, he had no entree into the social life of the Army elite or among the canal workers. He had no access to the clubhouses, to the mess halls, to anything maintained or put on for the comfort or amusement of the workers. His pay was $18 a month, or considerably less than that of the lowest-paid unskilled laborer. When he went to town in his uniform–and his uniform was all he was permitted to wear–he was an easy target for the Panamanian police, who had no liking for Americans at best, but who could be vicious when dealing with American servicemen.*
It was a very different Panama that Corporal Fitzgerald knew from the one seen, or perhaps even imagined, by his fellow Bostonian Charles Francis Adams, as different nearly as the two Bostons they came from. Later, when the locks were nearing completion, Corporal Fitzgerald would stand guard at Miraflores; but most of his three-year hitch in Panama was taken up with map duty in the jungle and with endless routine chores in camp. Still: “The natives had stills in the jungle and plenty of sugar cane available,” he would recall happily. “So a lot of us boys got off to a bad start. No ice, no mixing, just right out of a bottle, ninety proof!” Paydays “you took your turn” at one of the dollar houses in Coco Grove. “There was a few [other] places that were closed to the general run, private like, they were for those high up with the canal, engineers and such.”
Corporal Fitzgerald was like those countless others in history who could say in later life that they had been present at some momentous event but who in fact saw almost nothing of it. In his three years he saw little of the excavation going on and took practically no interest in it. He never laid eyes on Goethals, as near as he could recall, but once he did see Taft. His only brush with anything like the glamour or historic grandeur that the rest of the world associated with the work at Panama was to stand at attention for nearly three hours one broiling-hot morning at the side of a little spur on the railroad.
. . . I think it was in 1912, I’m pretty sure it was in the spring. . . . The President was coming– Taft! William Howard Taft!–and, gee, they got us out there about nine o’clock in the morning, standing, standing, waiting, waiting, waiting, Christ, the sun kept coming up, and it– boy! You know, that place when it rains, it’s just like throwing water on a stove, everything steams. And we waited. Finally the damn train came by. And here’s Taft with a big white suit on–he weighed about three hundred pounds, a big belly on him–standing on the observation platform. And, well, he just . . . he just waved. That was all there was. That was all there was to it.
On another occasion, on a Sunday when he was looking about among the exposed rock down in the Cut, Corporal Fitzgerald saw a fossil print of a fish (“not the meat, just the bones”) and still another of a fern, “proving,” he would recall, “that millions of years ago it was all in the sea. It all makes you feel very insignificant.”
To Charles Francis Adams, as to others, the “innate force” of the entire order was very plainly derived from one man. “The individuality and character of Colonel Goethals today permeate, and permeate visibly, the entire Zone–unconsciously on his part, unconscious on the part of others, his influence is pervasive.”
Praise at home for Goethals was boundless. Collier’s called him “The Solomon of the Isthmus.” He received standing ovations when he appeared before congressional committees. Yale, Columbia, and Harvard conferred honorary degrees. Newspapers were full of speculation about his prospects as a dark-horse candidate for the Presidency. “Goethals has created a wonderful, smooth-as-oil, 100 percent efficient machine that is getting results every working day in the year,” the Atlanta Constitution declared. Everyone returning from the Isthmus spoke of his ability. “Congressmen and senators, civilians, administrators, newspaper and engineering experts, united in the verdict that the digging of the big ditch has developed one of the greatest figures in contemporaneous American life in the person of Colonel Goethals.”
To Harry Franck, he was simply “Omnipotent, Omniscient, Omnipresent.”
The omnipresence had become legendary almost from the moment he began making his daily tour of the line in an extraordinary self-propelled private car. It was bright yellow, heavily lacquered, shined, spotless, and looked like a dreadful cross between a small locomotive and a stagecoach. Powered with a gasoline engine and run by a uniformed driver, it was known as “The Yellow Peril” and the sight of it rounding a bend in the tracks was an instant warning to look sharp, that the “Old Man” was coming. Alice Roosevelt Longworth, who toured the canal with her husband, Congressman Nicholas Longworth, and who shocked everyone by smoking in public, wrote that “nothing was ever pleasanter than riding along in his track motor, ‘The Yellow Peril’ and seeing the big job and hearing him talk about it.” “It rattled by at all hours of the day,” wrote Rose van Hardeveld of the strange-looking contrivance, “this official car of the I.C.C. . . . The Old Man was so constantly on the job that we never thought of him as being at home or eating or sleeping.”
Except for the times he was called to Washington, a few brief vacations, and one official trip to Germany, he was on the Isthmus the entire seven years until the canal was finished.* He seldom entertained, seldom accepted invitations. Only a select coterie appears to have known him on anything more than the most formal working basis-Hodges, with whom he seems to have had the most direct day-to-day rapport; Bishop; Williamson; Major Chester Harding, who was one of Sibert’s ablest assistants; Dr. W. E. Deeks, a Canadian on Gorgas’ staff; and Father Collins, the Catholic priest at Culebra, whose company he appears to have enjoyed above all others.
Mrs. Goethals–Effie Rodman Goethals–tall, vain, a member of an old New Bedford whaling family, was in residence most
of the time, but seemed little pleased with the life or ever very comfortable in her role as the first lady of the Zone. It had been arranged also that their older son, George, now a second lieutenant in the Engineers, be assigned to duty on the canal and he brought with him his bride, who, to judge from her photograph, must have been one of the prettiest young women on the Isthmus. Still, to the rank and file Goethals remained a solitary and enigmatic figure and an endless subject for gossip. Stories of supposed romances with the wives of subordinates would persist through all his years in Panama and on into the succeeding generation of canal employees. One especially vivacious young woman named Henrietta Otis, when asked by a close friend and neighbor to confide whether there was any truth to the gossip that she and the Colonel were “very close,” affirmed that there was. But according to other stories still told on the Isthmus, the Colonel’s lady was someone else entirely.
Intensely partisan factions formed within that small but all-important segment categorized by Harry Franck as the Brahmin high priests. There were the Goethals people, the largest faction, and there were the others, chief of whom were Sibert, Gaillard, Gorgas, and Marie Gorgas. Sibert and Goethals all through the final years of the work were barely speaking to each other.
“Colonel Sibert and my father felt sure he was trying to get rid of them,” recalled Gaillard’s son, Pierre, then a young M.I.T. graduate who had been employed as a junior engineer on the locks at Pedro Miguel. “He’d give them the silent treatment. Only my father refused to let him get away with that. My father talked to him the same as always. We’d been great friends of the Goethals for years. Our houses at Culebra were right next door to one another. . . . He [Goethals] did a damn good job, but he got delusions of grandeur.”
In Washington, reporters quoted an unnamed southern Democrat, a recent visitor to the Isthmus, who said Goethals’ “keen dislike” of Gaillard, Sibert, and Gorgas, all three of whom were from the Old South, had been very apparent to him. The Southerners, he said, were “outraged” because Goethals was attempting to freeze them out of their share of the glory.
Marie Gorgas, the only one of the group ever to say anything in print on such matters, wrote that it was Goethals’ ”passion for dominating everything and everybody” that made him such a trial. He had become, by her account, a man virtually without feeling, except for power. Power was “the relish and the sweetness of his life.” And indeed, one evening while escorting Mrs. Gaillard across the way to her door, Goethals said that he cared very much for the power he exercised. The salary, the title, the prestige, he said, were of but small satisfaction compared to the feeling of such power.*
The Goethals-Gorgas rift came to a head over a difference of views about who should cut the grass. Goethals was concerned with cost efficiency in every department and in the Sanitary Department no less than any other, and, like Taft, his private estimate of Gorgas as an administrator was very low. He wanted the mechanical tasks of cutting grass and clearing brush, a substantial part of Gorgas’ operation, put under the quartermaster, where they would normally fall, and he saw no reason why Gorgas should object since such work required no special sanitary knowledge or training. Gorgas did object, however, on the grounds that any change in his campaign against Anopheles mosquitoes would jeopardize his success in reducing malaria (and jeopardize thereby the lives of the workers). But they were grounds Goethals refused to accept. So for six months the grass was cut under the direction of the quartermaster, over a larger area than under the old system and, as it turned out, at appreciably less cost. And since the
At this point in the test of wills, according to Marie Gorgas, Goethals exclaimed, “Do you know, Gorgas, that every mosquito you kill costs the United States Government ten dollars?”
“But just think,” Gorgas replied, “one of those ten-dollar mosquitoes might bite you, and what a loss that would be to the country.”
By Goethals’ account, however, no such exchange ever occurred. Like Marie Gorgas’ other uncomplimentary remarks and recollections, the story appeared in her biography of her husband in 1924, all of which Goethals chose to ignore. But when Mark Sullivan repeated the story Two years later in his popular Our Times, Goethals presented his version in a letter to Sullivan. “No further discussion of the matter ever occurred and the sick rate continued to decrease.”
What he may have felt privately about Gorgas, Sibert, or Gaillard is less than clear, since he kept most of his feelings very much to himself. Apparently, from remarks he made to the unidentified southern Democrat, he thought seriously of firing Sibert. Sibert was known to regard himself as a better man than Goethals and better qualified for the top job. Goethals sensed this and naturally resented it. Sibert, moreover, at least by Goethals’ lights, was a bit too openly ambitious, too political. Primarily the problem seems to have been one of clashing personalities, and though this made the tasks of both no easier, nothing of serious consequence ever came of it. In answer to the charges that he was interested only in the glory his role would bring him, Goethals told one reporter that he intended to resign before the opening of the canal because “I couldn’t stand the glamour.” But Taft would insist that he stay and in the end Goethals would publicly commend Sibert, Gorgas, all his subordinates, for their professional ability and continued loyalty to the work.
Richard Whitehead, always one of Goethals’ staunchest allies among the young engineers, as well as a lifelong friend and admirer afterward, would concede that possibly Goethals “wasn’t quite human enough for everyone.” But, he added, “None of the others had the responsibilities he did.”
The only real scars were those left by the Gaillard tragedy. In the summer of 1913, following the tremendous slides at Culebra, Gaillard appeared suddenly to have cracked under the mental and physical strain of his responsibilities. He left the Isthmus and did not return. The stories were that he had gone crazy. What actually happened was this:
He was sitting at lunch with his wife and son, looking and acting entirely as usual, when he broke off in the middle of a sentence and began to talk rapidly and incoherently of his childhood at his grandmother’s house in South Carolina. From that point on he remained in a state of terrible confusion. “Poor Gaillard . . . went completely to pieces,” Goethals wrote privately in August, his diagnosis being the same as that of everyone else. “It is a nervous breakdown. His memory seems to have gone and [Dr.] Deeks doesn’t believe he will ever be able to return. He, accompanied by Mrs. Gaillard and Pierre, sailed for the States . . . accompanied by [Dr.] Mason. . . .”
But Gaillard had not broken under stress. He was suffering from a tumor on the brain, “an infiltrating tumor in the brain,” according to the records of the case, and an operation performed at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston and subsequent treatment at Johns Hopkins were to no avail. Gaillard died at Baltimore, December 5, 1913.
His work at Panama had no correlation with the tragedy. The tumor would have killed him had he been serving still at his desk in Washington. However, to his family and numbers of those who had worked with him at Panama, he had been worked to death. At the hospital in Boston, Goethals’ son Tom, a medical student at Harvard, had been invited to observe the operation on Gaillard, which was performed by the famous Harvey Cushing, and afterward he had encountered Mrs. Gaillard. “Your father has killed my husband,” she told him. Once in Washington, years later, Pierre Gaillard and Colonel (by then General) Goethals passed each other in the street. Each looked directly at the other and neither spoke.
III
In the popular picture of life in the Canal Zone as it emerged in hundreds of magazine and newspaper articles, that vast force of black men and women who were doing the heaviest, most difficult physical labor–some twenty-five thousand to thirty thousand human beings-could be but very faintly seen. As individuals they had no delineation whatsoever. They were there only as part of the workaday landscape. That they too were making a new life in an alien land, that they too were raising families, experiencing home
sickness, fear, illness, or exhilaration in the success of the work, was almost never even inferred. In the United States the public had little if any conception of the part played in Panama by “pioneers” who were neither American nor white, or How very small numerically the white American force was by contrast. To judge by many published accounts, the whole enormous black underside of the caste system simply did not exist. Cartoons in the newspapers depicted the canal being dug by cheerful white Americans with picks and shovels and many came to Panama expecting to see just that. Harry Franck would write that he had arrived actually believing he could take up a shovel and descend into the canal with other workmen, “that I might someday solemnly raise My hand and boast, ‘I helped dig IT. ’But that was in the callow days before I . . . learned the awful gulf that separates the sacred white American from the rest of the Canal Zone world. “
Official visitors, congressmen on so-called tours of inspection, writers gathering material for books, could not help but be amazed, even astounded, at the degree to which the entire system, not simply the construction, depended on black labor. There were not only thousands of West Indians down amid the turmoil of Culebra Cut or at the lock sites but black waiters in every hotel, black stevedores, teamsters, porters, hospital orderlies, cooks, laundresses, nursemaids, janitors, delivery boys, coachmen, icemen, garbage men, yardmen, mail clerks, police, plumbers, house painters, gravediggers. A black man walking along spraying oil on still water, a metal tank on his back, was one of the most familiar of all sights in the Canal Zone. Whenever a mosquito was seen in a white household, the Sanitary Department was notified and immediately a black man came with chloroform and a glass vial to catch the insect and take it back to a laboratory for analysis.
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