by Julie Greene
Praise for Julie Greene’s The Canal Builders
“A fascinating look at those who actually built the canal between 1904 and 1914, a largely forgotten population of 60,000 brought to life in a remarkably creative way.… The Canal Builders presents a telling portrait of exploitation, privilege and insularity, backed by a mountain of fresh research.”
—David Oshinsky, The New York Times Book Review
“Just as building the Panama Canal was a miracle of modern engineering, so is The Canal Builders a marvel of historical re-creation. With precision and compassion, Julie Greene guides us through the complex, contentious world of the roughnecks who muscled their way through the Isthmus in the early days of the last century. A compelling story of imperial ambition, class conflict, racial injustice, and the ordinary men and women who remade the map of the world.”
—Kevin Boyle, author of Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights and Murder in the Jazz Age
“Most histories focus on the larger-than-life men who conceived the Panama Canal, particularly President Theodore Roosevelt and chief engineers John Stevens and George Goethals. Greene shifts the focus away from those at the top, instead telling the story of rank-and-file workers on the ground.… Engaging labor history, and an astute examination of American policies.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“The Canal Builders is a marvelous account of an epic feat of engineering and construction, and a profoundly revealing interpretation of U.S. power in the twentieth-century world. Julie Greene has rightfully placed the workers who built the great canal at the center of her compelling narrative—one that sets a new standard of excellence for transnational history.”
—James Green, author of Death in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement and the Bombing that Divided Gilded Age America
“Many books will tell you that Theodore Roosevelt built the Panama Canal, but don’t believe them; in fact it was working men and women from all over the world. In vivid prose, Julie Greene explains how they labored and lived and died, and what in the end they accomplished. In doing so she offers more real insight into the character and costs of American imperialism than any previous writer. This is a story to inspire awe and break your heart—a splendid book.”
—Fred Anderson, coauthor of The Dominion of War: Empire and Liberty in North America, 1500–2000
“In this extraordinary book, Julie Greene has given us the first complete history of the Panama Canal by chronicling the international labor force that built it, the flawed politicians and engineers who designed it, and the utopian notions it inspired in many Americans. The Canal Builders is a landmark in the history of workers in the modern world, filled with revelations on nearly every page.”
—Michael Kazin, author of A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan
“Compellingly written and meticulously researched in Panamanian, British, and American archives, this is the first history of the Panama Canal that tells the personal stories of the people—black and white, women and men—who actually built it, and reveals how they fared under military management in this part of America’s empire.”
—Walter Nugent, author of Habits of Empire: A History of American Expansion
“In this brilliant and pathbreaking book, Julie Greene reframes our under-standing of the Panama Canal story and the imperial agenda at its center. In a riveting narrative Greene shows how racist labor policies, Progressive reformers, workers’ wives and washerwomen, imperial courts, the Panamanian people and especially the laborers themselves all shaped the canal’s con-struction. She’s dug down deep to expose the dirty work of empire—and built a monumental work of her own.”
—Dana Frank, author of Buy American: The Untold Story of Economic Nationalism
“The Canal Builders is magnificent. Julie Greene’s exhaustive research, careful analysis, and eloquent writing style have produced an account of the people who built the Panama Canal that no student of history should overlook. Greene focuses on the tens of thousands of North Americans, West Indians, Europeans, and Asians who came to Panama in search of employment and, sometimes, a new life. As The Canal Builders reveals, their skills, their toil, and too often their deaths carved out the indispensable transit point that made way for twentieth-century globalization.”
—David Montgomery, author of The Fall of the House of Labor
“With crystal clear style and pioneering research, Julie Greene finally, and thankfully, takes us far beyond the well-known technology which built the Panama Canal to reveal two great themes of the project, themes which also characterized much of the following century. First, it was built by a pluralistic labor force—in this case one dominated by blacks and including nurses whose heroism is (until now) little known. Second, a historic U.S. imperialism shaped and drove the project. As the sign said at the outskirts of the Canal’s largest town, ‘Welcome to Empire.’ Greene here reveals the fascinating and central roots of the empire that followed that Empire.”
—Walter LaFeber
PENGUIN BOOKS
THE CANAL BUILDERS
Julie Greene is a professor of history at the University of Maryland at College Park and the author of Pure and Simple Politics: The American Federation of Labor and Political Activism, 1881–1917.
FOUNDING
EDITOR
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
BOARD
MEMBERS
Alan Brinkley, John Demos, Glenda Gilmore, Jill Lepore,
David Levering Lewis, Patricia Limerick, James M. McPherson, Louis Menand,
James Merrell, Garry Wills, Gordon Wood
AUTHORS
Richard D. Brown, James T. Campbell, François Furstenberg, Julie Greene,
Kristin Hoganson, Frederick Hoxie, Karl Jacoby, Stephen Kantrowitz,
Alex Keyssar, G. Calvin Mackenzie and Robert
Weisbrot, Joseph Trotter, Daniel Vickers,
Michael Willrich
THE CANAL BUILDERS
_______________________
MAKING AMERICA’S EMPIRE
AT THE PANAMA CANAL
JULIE GREENE
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
First published in the United States of America by The Penguin Press,
a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 2009
Published in Penguin Books 2010
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Copyright © Julie Greene, 2009
All rights reserved
Frontispiece photo © Hulton Archive/Getty Images
“A Worker Reads History” from Selected Poems by Bertolt Brecht, translated by H. R. Hays.
Copyright 1947 by Bertolt Brecht and H. R. Hays and renewed 1975 by Stefa
n S. Brecht and H. R. Hays.
Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company and Ann Elmo Agency, Inc.
“The 13th Labor of Hercules” poster by Perham Nahl courtesy of the Larson Collection,
Special Collections Research Center, California State University, Fresno.
THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE HARDCOVER EDITION AS FOLLOWS:
Greene, Julie, 1956–
The canal builders : making America’s empire at the Panama Canal / Julie Greene.
p. cm.—(The Penguin history of American life)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-59420-201-8 (hc.)
ISBN 978-0-14-311678-3 (pbk.)
1. Panama Canal (Panama)—History. 2. Canals—Panama—Design and Construction—History.
3. Canal Zone—History. I. Title.
F1569.C2G66 2009
972.875051—dc22 2008028650
Printed in the United States of America
DESIGNED BY MARYSARAH QUINNMAPS BY JEFFREY L. WARD
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not,
by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s
prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means
without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only
authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy
of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.
FOR JIM AND SOPHIE
my beloved
CONTENTS
__________________________
INTRODUCTION
PROLOGUE: PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT’S STEAM SHOVEL
One A MODERN STATE IN THE TROPICS
Two “AS I AM A TRUE AMERICAN”
Three SILVER LIVES
Four LAY DOWN YOUR SHOVELS
Five PROGRESSIVISM FOR THE WORLD
Six THE WOMEN’s EMPIRE
Seven LAW AND ORDER
Eight THE RIOTS OF COCOA GROVE
Nine HERCULES COMES HOME
EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
APPENDIX: TOTAL POPULATION DISTRIBUTED BY PLACE OF BIRTH, SEX, AND PERIOD OF FIRST RESIDENCE IN CANAL ZONE
NOTES
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
A WORKER READS HISTORY
Who built the seven gates of Thebes?
The books are filled with names of kings.
Was it the kings who hauled the craggy blocks of stone?
And Babylon, so many times destroyed.
Who built the city up each time? In which of Lima’s houses,
That city glittering with gold, lived those who built it?
In the evening when the Chinese wall was finished
Where did the masons go? Imperial Rome
Is full of arcs of triumph. Who reared them up? Over whom
Did the Caesars triumph? Byzantium lives in song.
Were all her dwellings palaces? And even in Atlantis of the legend
The night the sea rushed in,
The drowning men still bellowed for their slaves.
Young Alexander conquered India.
He alone?
Caesar beat the Gauls.
Was there not even a cook in his army?
Philip of Spain wept as his fleet
Was sunk and destroyed. Were there no other tears?
Frederick the Great triumphed in the Seven Years War. Who
Triumphed with him?
Each page a victory.
At whose expense the victory ball?
Every ten years a great man,
Who pays the piper?
So many particulars.
So many questions.
—BERTOLT BRECHT
INTRODUCTION
______________________
IN 1915, as Americans planned a grand world’s fair to celebrate the completion of the Panama Canal, California artist Perham Nahl created a lithograph he called The Thirteenth Labor of Hercules. In Greek mythology Hercules, the brave and strong son of Zeus, had to complete twelve arduous labors, including such unimaginable tasks as diverting rivers and carrying the earth on his shoulders. With the construction of the canal, Nahl suggested, Hercules—symbolizing the United States—had finally and triumphantly completed his thirteenth labor.
Nahl depicted Hercules thrusting apart a mountain range, his back pushing against one side while his arm forces away the far side. His mighty labor allows a gentle stream of water to pass by at his feet. A small boat traverses the distance toward a mythic city on a hill. Hercules shows no sweat; his muscles are poised but not straining. He is turned away from us, his head lowered as if in benediction. We do not see his face. What we see is his masculine body conquering Mother Earth and making possible a great wonder of the world. By connecting the canal construction to Greek mythology, Nahl’s image brilliantly invoked the spirit of the canal while honoring the nation that built it and linking it to the greatest ideals of Western civilization. America now stood as a Hercules, achieving a godlike task through a bloodless conquest over nature.
The lithograph of Hercules helped draw people in 1915 to the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, where more than eighteen million visitors marveled at the wonders of American industrialism—including many of the technologies that helped make the Panama Canal possible. The fair emphasized the links between industrialism and America’s emergence as a leading world power. Nothing exemplified those links more clearly than the recently completed canal, hailed by observers around the world as a miracle of engineering and industrial technology. The fair, like Nahl’s lithograph, celebrated the canal while diminishing the role of the tens of thousands of men and women required to build it.1
These are the aspects most of us remember about the canal—it’s a tale enshrined in popular memory and innumerable histories and novels. Most narratives begin by pointing out that the dream of a canal was centuries old, but only the Americans achieved it. In 1880 the French, under the leadership of Ferdinand de Lesseps (who had previously constructed the Suez Canal to great acclaim), began trying to build a canal across the Isthmus of Panama. France’s effort ended in failure in 1889 due to mismanagement, devastating disease, financial problems, and engineering mistakes. In 1904 the United States took over the job, with the ingenious President Theodore Roosevelt leading the way. Breakthroughs in medicine, technology, and science and wise engineering decisions, according to traditional accounts of the project, allowed the United States to succeed where France had failed. Engineers who had helped build the transcontinental railroad and diverted rivers in the United States applied their experience and determination amid the chaos (and debilitating humidity and rain showers) of the Isthmus of Panama. The engineers brilliantly figured out how to dig through the Continental Divide, how to dispose of all that dirt, and how to handle the mudslides. Most important of all, they decided they must rely on locks to raise and lower the ships, rather than attempting to build the canal at sea level. It was built ahead of schedule and under budget, costing only $ million. The Panama Canal opened to tremendous celebration in August 1914, and it marked the emergence of the United States as a world leader at the very moment when World War I broke out and split the nations of Europe apart.
It was a difficult, challenging task—in a word, Herculean—but thanks to a few individuals of genius, it worked. And through it all the will and spirit of Americans never wavered. Indeed, central to this common narrative is the notion that the canal project demonstrated the superior character of the American people. In 2005 the historian Davi
d McCullough, author of The Path Between the Seas (1977), a bestselling account of the canal’s history, took a cruise through the canal. Afterward he noted, “I think often about why the French failed at Panama and why we succeeded. One of the reasons we succeeded is that we were gifted, we were attuned to adaptation, to doing what works, whereas they were trained to do everything in a certain way. We have a gift for improvisation.” In this speech as in his book, McCullough, like so many Americans, was particularly fascinated by the work of the engineers who built the canal. He described the landslides and floods the engineers confronted and the way they succeeded against all the odds. He gave as an example the engineers’ ability to make concrete stronger and more durable than anyone expected: “That ingenious contrivance by the American engineers is a perfect expression of what engineering ought to be at its best—man’s creations working with nature.” The canal, he concluded, is “an extraordinary work of civilization.”2
The industrial prowess that enabled the canal also earned a place for it in popular memory as an affirmation of American national identity. McCullough’s comments provide just one indication of the force these ideas still hold today. Yet this emphasis on the canal as above all a feat of engineering has obscured some of the most significant and dramatic elements of the construction project. This book tells a different story. It takes as its starting point the perspective of the chief engineer George Washington Goethals, who oversaw construction of the canal from 1907 until its completion in 1914. Years later Goethals reflected on the success of the American project. Despite prevalent ideas about the canal, he argued, its construction required no innovations from the standpoint either of engineering or of medicine. The engineering challenges were solved by applying “known principles and methods.” Eradicating yellow fever and malaria likewise required tactics and rules previously developed in Cuba, India, and Egypt. It was the human rather than the technological or scientific dimensions of the project that struck Goethals as most challenging. The size of the workforce and the fact that workingmen and —women came so far from home both required efficient forms of government: “a novel problem in government was presented by the necessity of ruling and preserving order within the Canal Zone.” Goethals would have agreed that the canal was a major engineering achievement, but he took even more pride in his ability to govern the vast and unwieldy population of employees and family members. We have long perceived the canal as involving conquest over nature, and there’s some truth in that. But it also involved conquest over the tens of thousands of men and women in the Canal Zone and in the Republic of Panama.3