The Canal Builders

by Julie Greene

  Working people journeyed to the Canal Zone from all over the globe: from the United States and Canada, the Caribbean, northern and southern Europe, and India. Each group brought different strategies for responding to conditions and policies on the isthmus. Workingmen who repaired steam shovels, ran lathes, dug dirt, or drilled dynamite had their own dreams and visions, as did workingwomen who washed laundry and cleaned houses. Their ideas often complicated officials’ plans. In the Republic of Panama, which provided critical support for the construction effort, everyone from politicians to sewer diggers, servants, prostitutes, bartenders, and chauffeurs experienced the transformation of their cities as a result of the American occupation and found diverse ways of responding. U.S. government officials—charged with building towns across the isthmus to supply employees and families with food, housing, medical care, and entertainment—found the chore of constructing the canal large but relatively straightforward. More challenging was the task, endlessly discussed and debated by bureaucrats, of determining how best to motivate, manage, and discipline the people of the isthmus. This book explores the ways working people interacted with one another and with a U.S. government determined to build the canal quickly and efficiently. With a debt to Bertolt Brecht and his questions about the seven gates of Thebes, it asks: Who built the Panama Canal and how? And how does looking at the construction project from their perspective change our understanding of this moment in history?4

  In 1912 an American named John Hall published a book of poems that tried to capture both the idealism of the canal project and the challenge it involved as an exercise of power. Hall had been living in the Canal Zone for five years and had watched men digging, dynamiting, and commanding steam shovels. In his poem “The Canal Builders,” he tried to capture the diversity of the workforce building the canal: “They have come from every nation, / Every breed in all creation.” The workers differed, he said, in many ways, in their language and social station, but all were helping to build America’s new empire. He declared: “For Empire they toil, / In an alien soil.” In their focus on workers and in designating their labor as contributing to the making of America’s empire, Hall’s simple rhymes captured a key element of the canal project. Another of Hall’s poems, titled “The Price of Empire,” noted that many men died while working on the canal, but they did not die in vain:

  A mighty Nation, by their deeds,

  Stands girthed from sea to sea,

  And high o’er their graves proudly waves

  The Emblem of the Free.

  Like much of American political culture at the time, this lyric mixed idealistic notions of America’s gifts to world civilization with pride in its rising stature as a ­first-­class imperial power.5

  These dual notions about American power were reflected at the turn of the twentieth century in numerous events. When the United States went to war against Spain in 1898 and won a victory within a few months, suddenly acquiring formal and informal colonies stretching from Cuba and Puerto Rico in the Caribbean to Guam, Hawaii, and the Philippines in the Pacific, it seemed to have embarked on a new and more promising role as a world power. The defeat of Spain caused much pride and celebration across the United States. Yet the war’s aftermath generated unforeseen conflicts. Exercising power in the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Hawaii proved daunting. Most sobering of all were the actions taken by the people of the Philippines, who immediately went to war against the United States to win their independence. Filipinos had not expected that America’s victory against Spain would simply substitute one colonialist power for another, and the United States became mired in a seemingly endless war. Where America’s fight against Spain had been justified as a noble crusade against a corrupt imperial power that trampled on basic human rights, now America found itself in the position of colonialist, fighting to suppress indigenous peoples’ rights. As the war dragged on, tales of cruelty by U.S. soldiers against Filipino soldiers and civilians made their way into American newspapers. By the time the war ended in uneasy victory for the United States and subjugation of the Filipino people in this country’s first formal colony, many Americans had grown disillusioned with empire building. They worried that it violated American ideals, that it was corrupting their nation’s democracy, and that it was unjust to the world’s citizens.6

  The early twentieth century, therefore, might not have seemed an auspicious time for a colossal ­canal-­building project. And at first America’s project in Panama was beset by controversy. Americans had wanted to build a canal across Nicaragua or Panama since the ­mid-­nineteenth century, and as soon as Theodore Roosevelt became president in 1901, he began negotiations with Colombia for the right to build a canal across the Isthmus of Panama, then under Colombian control. When discussions broke down, Roosevelt opportunistically formed an alliance with a group of Panamanians seeking independence from Colombia. In November 1903 he sent warships to the isthmus to support the Panamanians’ clandestine independence movement. When Panama achieved independence, Roosevelt immediately negotiated a treaty with the new republic that created the Panama Canal Zone and gave the United States complete and perpetual control over it as well as extensive rights in the Republic of Panama. The gentleman representing Panama in the negotiations was himself not even Panamanian, but a representative of the French company that still owned the rights to the canal—and that stood to make a huge profit by selling those rights to the United States.7

  Writing sixty years later, William Appleman Williams declared Roo­sevelt’s seizing of the isthmus “as brazen a bit of imperial ­land-­grabbing as is recorded in modern history,” and his sentiment was shared by many at the time. The editors of the New York Times, writing just days after the U.S.-backed coup brought independence to Panama, declared the situation a “national disgrace” and added that if Roosevelt now followed by building a canal across the isthmus, the United States would “incur the censure of just men and civilized Governments … [and] put a stain upon the country’s good name by such a policy of dishonorable intrigue and aggression.”8 Of course, Roosevelt followed by doing precisely that.

  At the project’s outset, the gigantic challenge of building a canal across the isthmus became a symbol of governmental inefficiency, corruption, graft, and immorality. Exposés charged the U.S. government with everything from creating a quicksand of bureaucratic red tape in the Canal Zone to importing prostitutes for the comfort of canal employees. Congressmen kept busy during these years investigating various scandals and accusations and seeking ways to improve the U.S. government’s performance on the isthmus. At first, then, the canal project seemed to fit within a larger, troubling pattern of America’s weak and ineffective role in world affairs. It might easily have become an example of the U.S. government’s fecklessness and ineptitude. Instead, it became an icon of what a strong, progressive federal government could accomplish in world affairs.

  How did this happen? The canal construction project married values, ideals, and strategies that many Americans admired in their nation to the new challenges involved in managing life and labor in the international setting of the Panama Canal Zone. It was not always an easy or comfortable marriage, and much of the story in these pages concerns the tensions between the two. Those tensions suggest the need for a double focus, one that looks closely at events in the Panama Canal Zone while rethinking the relationship between U.S. domestic and international history. We need to disrupt the boundaries between domestic and “­off-­site” history in order to focus on the connections between them.

  Looking about their country at the dawn of the twentieth century, many Americans observed problems, certainly, but overall they felt optimistic. They possessed a deep faith in progress, and it seemed warranted. Their nation was now the ­top-­ranking industrial power in the world, its technological and scientific expertise widely envied. While city dwellers saw skyscrapers rapidly rising around them and streetcars and subways stretching out to the suburbs, and as millions of immigrants arrived yearly
to labor in the nation’s factories, new conflicts became apparent. The unchecked power of corporations worried some, though others looked to business leaders to solve the pervasive ­working-­class discontent. Labor unions, socialists, ­single-­tax advocates, progressives, and African American and immigrant leaders all voiced critiques of the status quo.

  Those Americans actively working to eradicate social problems during the early twentieth century tended to coalesce around the progressive movement. Progressives combined an optimistic belief in progress and scientific achievement with a fervor for greater government intervention to achieve changes in the nation’s political economy. Their movement became a terrific force throughout the land as progressive reformers created voluntary organizations (such as settlement houses), new strategies of labor management, and corporate welfare policies and fought for new levels of state intervention. Bureaucracies emerged to tackle a wide array of perceived problems at the municipal, state, and federal levels. Reformers experimented with new approaches to urban planning, municipal government, direct democracy, and laws to regulate working and living conditions.

  As numerous historians have pointed out, there was another aspect of the progressive movement that emphasized social order and discipline. This strain of progressivism focused on racial segregation, disenfranchisement of African Americans and immigrants, new forms of judicial and prison discipline, vagrancy laws, and moral sanitation efforts such as the temperance movement. Historians have deemed these dual aspects the social justice and social control wings of the progressive movement. Although they might seem contradictory, both influences remained prevalent throughout the era, and each strain contributed to give the ­early-­twentieth-­century United States its particular shape.9

  Each powerfully influenced life and work in the Panama Canal Zone as well. Canal engineers would employ not only the latest in technology, like Bucyrus steam shovels, but also new ideas about state intervention, labor management, urban planning, judicial and prison discipline, and the modern utility of segregation systems based on race, ethnicity, and nationality. Welfare policies borrowed from a triumphant corporate capitalism proved important, as did ideas about women’s indispensable role in taming a wilderness. These strategies combined with prevailing ideas regarding civilization and citizenship to make the canal construction project a spectacular success. And its success, in turn, reinforced these virtues for American and world audiences. To many, the genius of the Panama Canal lay precisely in the fact that it seemed unconnected to imperialism; instead, it was seen as a display of America’s domestic strengths in a world setting. In its triumph, the Panama Canal articulated American expansionism as a positive, humane, and beneficial activity, one equally valuable to world civilization and to American national identity. Emerging as the apparent antithesis of empire, the Panama Canal ironically helped make American empire possible. Yet as officials in the Canal Zone confronted the diverse cultures of a global workforce as well as disease, a tropical climate, and a rough mountainous terrain, they found themselves struggling to revise and adapt their initial ideas and strategies. Officials felt caught between faith that benevolent state intervention could create a more pleasant and just civilization and the belief that they must master, discipline, and control the population around them. These turned out to be the key approaches in the U.S. program to rule over the men and women of the isthmus.

  THUS THE canal project became a signal moment in the building of America’s new empire, and it also became a moment wrapped up inextricably with idealism and notions of selfless gifts to civilization. This book originated in my desire to uncover the history of America’s empire and its ties with U.S. domestic politics and culture. In 1993 the literary scholar Amy Kaplan published an essay on Americans’ peculiar and historic reluctance to perceive their nation as an empire, and it initiated an exciting intellectual ferment that gave rise to the “new imperial” school of historical and literary research. As Kaplan noted, she was not the first scholar to make this observation. William Appleman Williams had argued in 1955 that “one of the central themes of American historiography is that there is no American empire.” American national identity, according to this view, has historically accepted that the United States is a world power while denying that it operates with imperial intentions or consequences. Even as Kaplan’s essay returned scholars to Williams’s original argument, historians grew increasingly interested in the historical relationship between the United States and the world. Numerous studies have appeared in recent years that explore U.S. empire from different perspectives—for example, in the Philippines, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Mexico. The new scholarship on empire, however, has failed to explore how the construction of the Panama Canal shaped this crucial period. The Canal Builders addresses this absence as a way to contribute to a broader rethinking of America’s “new empire” in the aftermath of 1898.10

  In the early twentieth century the canal construction project resonated not with notions of empire but with civilization, progress, humanity, and the proper role of government. Much of the canal’s significance—and perhaps a key explanation for why the recent scholarship on empire has neglected it—derived from this. This book explores how the canal became a positive symbol of American power, how it helped shape Americans’ perception of their role in the world as something bigger and better than empire, and how in this way it helped to justify and make possible America’s empire in the decades to come. While some, like the poet John Hall, saw the canal as empire building, for many others, whether Theodore Roosevelt or maids and diggers from Barbados or Jamaica, the canal’s potential legacy went beyond empire. At its heart the canal project involved the construction of a global infrastructure; the early roots of globalization; the easier and faster flow of commerce, labor, and military vessels; and state intervention on an international level.

  More than forty years ago, Walter LaFeber published The New Empire, in which he sought to link the rise of American empire to U.S. industrialization: “It was not accidental that Americans built their new empire at the same time their industrial complex matured.”11The New Empire focuses on agricultural and industrial leaders’ demands for more markets in the late nineteenth century. Since LaFeber’s book appeared, a vast scholarship has enriched our understanding of U.S. industrialization and the political, social, and cultural history that accompanied it. Transnational methodologies that focus attention on the flow of people, ideas, and capital—and that transcend the boundaries of the ­nation-­state—have more recently given us a fruitful vantage point from which to explore the canal, its construction, and its significance for U.S. history. As the scholar Isabel Hofmeyr observed, “The claim of transnational methods is not simply that historical processes are made in different places but that they are constructed in the movement between places, sites, and regions.”12 Hofmeyr’s perspective suggests that we consider how the canal project shaped the United States economically, militarily, politically, and culturally and how it influenced even debates considered purely “domestic” affairs. By acquiring territory around the globe, the United States itself had grown larger and more complex. American experiences in territories quite distant from Washington, D.C., would now influence the ­nation-­state’s history.The Canal Builders thus integrates fields of scholarship that have traditionally remained separate, bringing the domestic history of industrialization, the working class, and state building into dialogue with the history of empire building and transnational methodologies.13

  Scholars have shown that many Americans, despite reluctance to describe their nation as an empire, fervently believed in expansionism since the founding of the Republic. Thomas Jefferson, for example, perceived expansion of the nation as essential for the continuation and blossoming of freedom. Such ideas inspired territorial acquisitions and wars of conquest against indigenous peoples and foreign nations throughout the nineteenth century. By the 1890s the popularity of social Darwinism, the belief in a racial hierarchy of the world’s cultu
res, and the presumed superiority of Western civilization had made expansionism seem more desirable than ever. The ­so-­called new empire that blossomed in the 1890s was hardly new, but rather a matter of pushing expansionism, which had heretofore been focused on the North American continent, into the overseas arena. Once the conquest of the American West was complete, Americans could begin to apply Manifest Destiny to foreign shores. By defeating Spain in the War of 1898 and engaging in other opportunistic moves around the same time, the United States acquired territories that stretched halfway around the globe and included control over Puerto Rico, Cuba, Guam, Hawaii, and the Philippines. These were heady days for politicians like Theodore Roosevelt and Albert Beveridge, who had advocated a strenuous expansionism for years, as they watched their nation rapidly attain a new status as a world power.14

  Yet the new empire generated a lengthy and heated debate. Would expansionism contradict the ideals of the Republic? And what form should it take? Even before news and scandals from the ­Philippine-­American War began fully to shape the debate, many Americans argued against formal imperialism from a pragmatic and ­pro-­business perspective. In 1899 and 1900, Secretary of State John Hay issued famous declarations in response to his perception that the European powers were being given unequal access to Chinese ports and markets. Hay’s writings, known as the Open Door Notes, articulated an alternative to formal imperialism, one that would ultimately come to dominate ­twentieth-­century American foreign policy. Hay argued for free and equal access to Chinese markets and announced the desire of the United States to safeguard China’s territorial integrity while upholding the rights guaranteed to all nations by international law. In this way the United States sketched out a different approach to world power, one based on its spectacular industrialization. The American strategy would eschew formal territorial control, annexation, or colonialism in favor of economic and commercial relationships and, when necessary, military intervention. This approach paved the way for the Panama Canal project, which would in turn transform Americans’ notions of the nation’s proper role in world affairs.15