The Canal Builders

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The Canal Builders Page 5

by Julie Greene


  Beresford Skinner was one such man, an estate worker in the parish of St. Lucy, at the northern tip of the island. Skinner left his home with a few other men and headed for the village of Speightstown, where they could catch a cheap schooner to Bridgetown. They stopped to pick up a friend along the way, but the man’s wife was hanging on to his shoulders, crying and pleading with him not to go away. The friend told Skinner to go on without him, but Skinner responded, “My wife’s home crying too, and I left her, come with us.” Yet the man stayed behind, and finally Skinner turned away and headed for Panama.33 Skinner and his friends surely passed by plantation workers as they traveled and exhorted them to join their parade. And when one group of migrants heading for Panama passed by estate workers in a field, a member of the party shouted out, “Why you ­don’t hit de manager in de head, and come along wid we!”34

  Such scenes played out on islands across the Caribbean as workers packed their bags for Panama. The majority of those who signed contracts with the Isthmian Canal Commission were Barbadian men, due to the difficulties U.S. government officials faced when negotiating with other Caribbean governments. Yet with or without a contract, workingmen on islands like Grenada, Martinique, St. Lucia, and Jamaica made the journey as well. Most migrants were male, but over time more women began making the journey, often to join husbands or lovers. Years later Bea Waldron remembered traveling with her mother to join her father in Panama. Once there her mother would add to the family income by selling fruits and coal and washing clothes. Her mother instructed Bea, “Be sweet when you get to Panama. Forget Barbadian.” By this, she meant dialect—she wanted her daughter to sound properly Panamanian.35

  The trip Bea made shared little with Theodore Roosevelt’s pampered journey. Her ship took six days to go from Barbados to Panama, with no stops. No sleeping accommodations were provided for people like Bea and her mother; hence immigrants carried their own deck chairs. No food was provided, though on some ships immigrants received coffee each morning. An awning might be spread to protect them from the sun. Winifred James, an Englishwoman who traveled to Panama to meet her husband, described the West Indians she observed: “On the journey they lie about inert, listless and unwashed. But on the day of arrival there is a great awakening. The parcels are undone, clean dresses and marvellous hats appear out of the ­brown-­paper parcels… . I have seen them make their toilet in the full blaze of morning light, with no more thought than as if they were in the screened privacy of a jealously guarded bedchamber.”36

  For West Indians such as these, the Panama Canal project had already begun to act as a global magnet, drawing families away from their homeland and setting in motion ­wide-­ranging changes involving migration, labor supply, and the distribution of economic wealth and social status. The project would bring a measure of economic prosperity to the nations of the Caribbean and turn many estate workers into globe-trotters familiar with a larger landscape, one ranging from Panama to Costa Rica and Colombia and, for a great many, onward to the United States. And though the canal project mostly drew migrants from the Caribbean, thousands of others came from northern and southern Europe and from as far away as India and China. Peruvians, Colombians, Costa Ricans, and Mexicans all packed suitcases for the Canal Zone. No official recruitment of these groups took place, but foremen might hire them if they showed up. Chinese came to the Canal Zone from south China or from Panama City and Colón, the latter two residences for many Chinese who had first arrived during the French construction effort. Now they moved into the new towns of the Zone to open small shops, selling tobacco and household items, pots and pans, and clothing and handkerchiefs to the new residents of towns like Empire and Gorgona. Many Indians similarly had first migrated as indentured servants to Caribbean islands like Trinidad, but some made the ­six-­month-­long journey from their homes in India.37

  In much larger numbers men and women migrated to the Canal Zone from the United States. Many were similar to Ted Sherrard, a young man from Kansas, fresh out of college with a major in engineering, eager for adventure and opportunity. While working in Pittsburgh as an apprentice at Westinghouse, Ted learned the federal government was recruiting men for jobs in the Panama Canal Zone. He applied for a position and within a few weeks received a telegram offering work as an assistant switchboard operator. His foreman urged him to take the job, saying it would be “the best thing in the world to do.” If he did well, the foreman added, the government would find him another job after that one ended. Ted soon made up his mind. Surely, he must have thought, a job in the Panama Canal Zone would bring adventure, good pay, and good experience. He wrote to his mother, “I will be on one of the healthiest chunks of soil that Uncle Sam owns.…I have talked with fellows who have been down there and they say the conditions there are first rate.” He packed his bags and headed to New York City, where he caught a ship to Panama. Assigned on the ship to a tiny room right over the propeller, Ted described a noise that sounded like “an empty lumber wagon on a rocky road.” But he enjoyed meeting workingmen who were on their way back to Panama after a vacation in the States, and he managed the trip with only a few bouts of seasickness.38

  Henry Williams of Houston, Texas, also found the recruiter’s terms attractive. An African American born in 1870, Henry was a stout man of 210 pounds. At the age of ten he had begun working at farm labor in Texas, then moved into such jobs as longshoreman, railroad track worker, and freight loader. Gradually, he moved his way up into the job of blacksmith helper for the Southern Pacific Railroad. In 1907 a government labor agent hired Henry to work on the canal as a blacksmith helper at ­forty-­four cents gold per hour. This must have seemed to him a great stroke of luck—working at a prestigious job for the federal government. Perhaps he also hoped that leaving Texas for the Canal Zone would bring him respite from the harshness of Jim Crow segregation, economic discrimination, and racial violence. And so Henry said ­good-­bye to his mother and his daughter, Henrietta, and traveled to Panama for a job in the town of Empire, working in the vast mechanical shops there that repaired and maintained tools and steam shovels throughout the Canal Zone.39

  As conditions on the isthmus improved, after 1906, American women gradually began packing bags for Panama so they might work as secretaries or nurses (many of the latter traveling from Manila or Havana), or, more commonly, to join husbands already there and provide a home for them. In 1907, Elizabeth Kittredge joyfully received a note from her fiancé, Charlie, who worked in the Department of Labor, Quarters, and Subsistence in the Canal Zone. At last, he said, he felt the Zone had become safe enough, with the yellow fever now eradicated, for her to join him. Young Elizabeth traveled to Colón with a chaperone, watching the blue Caribbean sea flow by during the ­six-­day trip.40 Arriving in Colón, she observed, with some trepidation, “the blackest man ­I’d ever seen” hoist her trunk onto his head and carry it up the hill to a small wooden house poised high on stilts. The house belonged to Charlie’s boss, and it would serve as the couple’s wedding chapel. She entered the house and noted the bare wooden walls. More worrisome yet was the boss’s wife, “a lanky woman with faded hair and colorless cheeks.…I wondered, subconsciously, how soon the tropics would fade my shining hair and take the color from my red cheeks.” Elizabeth cleaned herself up, changed clothes, and headed into the living room to be married by a missionary. Afterward everyone sat down to a wedding luncheon served on the house’s ­screened-­in porch. On the table were nice white china and fancy silver, pâté de fois gras, champagne, and roast turkey, but “all served awkwardly by a little Jamaican maid in a gingham dress.” That evening a gang of West Indians carried the couple’s belongings to a new bungalow that awaited them with two rooms, two enclosed porches, a bathroom, and a kitchen. “In the soft glow of the kerosene lamps, we unpacked our wedding gifts, hung our clothes in the crude wardrobe—and the little house became our home.”41

  The one other group that journeyed to Panama in large numbers, comparable to those of the Americans, wa
s Europeans. Frenchmen, Germans, English, and Swedes were almost uniformly destined for supervisory or skilled jobs, while the thousands of Spaniards, Italians, and Greeks who came found themselves working unskilled jobs as tracklayers, freight loaders, or diggers. Labor recruiters were especially keen on importing Spaniards, believing they would work better than West Indians. When they discovered the Spaniards worked only marginally better but caused a great deal more trouble (in the form of food riots, strikes, and other protests), they nonetheless continued to recruit a few of them to goad the Caribbeans to work harder. One Spaniard who traveled to the isthmus was Antonio Sanchez, a ­thirty-­year-­old who would spend more than four years laying track in Culebra Cut. The Spaniards with whom he traveled, he later recalled, arrived in Panama with one belief: “Everything here was gold and all things were as sweet as honey. However, they were to find out the gold was silver and the fruits were sour.”42

  THUS THE Panama Canal project beckoned to working people from around the world, as well as to expansionists like Theodore Roo­sevelt. As many Americans saw it, the War of 1898 had ended in victory and made their country a power in the world. John Foster Carr wrote in theOutlook that U.S. expansionism had “made the Pacific almost an American ocean.” The United States needed to use the power it had won in 1898 to consolidate its empire; exercise power in significant, productive, and impressive ways; win its citizenry over to a new identity as an imperial power; and impress the people and ­nation-­states of the world. If the United States could accomplish this, it would emerge as one of the world’s great nations.43

  Industrialization at home and the broad range of social, economic, and cultural changes associated with it had the majority of Americans focused on their immediate lives, on their jobs and families. They were saving money, perhaps for a beachside trip or new shoes for their children. In ways they likely did not grasp, however, their lives at home had become connected, inextricably, to events and movements occurring all over the globe. Within the United States one could see this most obviously in the millions of immigrants trudging down the ships to enter American ports, crowding into cities, and rushing to sign up for jobs in the booming factories. In neighborhoods like the Lower East Side in New York, you could barely find room to cross the streets, so crowded were they with people, dogs, horses, and carriages. Immigrants, especially those from southern and eastern Europe, seemed to bring a new world to America’s doorstep, bringing with them also new ways of dressing and speaking and relating to the world. To some, everything about the new immigrants seemed to threaten traditional cultures and manners in the United States.

  But the Isthmus of Panama was also now, in effect, on America’s doorstep, and thousands of immigrants from the Caribbean, Europe, Asia, Latin America, and the United States would build a different world there in the years to come, one that would shape and be shaped by conditions, cultures, and circumstances back home. As the United States dug more deeply into the Isthmus of Panama, officials struggled to build a comfortable and nurturing society for white Americans—one they might proudly call a civilization—in the Canal Zone. Simultaneously, they sought ways of managing, disciplining, and maintaining order among the men and women they employed. Officials needed to succeed in this venture, as a great deal was riding on it—the reputation of America in the world, the status of Roosevelt and his government at home. How they attempted this grand adventure and how the people of the Isthmus of Panama forced reckonings of many kinds is the story of the pages that follow.

  CHAPTER ONE

  _________________

  A MODERN STATE

  IN THE TROPICS

  IN 1906 the journalist John Foster Carr traveled from New York City to Panama in order to observe the construction project. In a series of articles for theOutlook, he stressed the “splendid human story” being written in the Panama Canal Zone. What he found most fascinating was the challenge to develop an effective form of government there: “You begin to understand that our Republic is doing something more on the Isthmus than the mere building of a canal. It is creating a State with all the machinery and equipment of our home civilization adapted to strange needs.” Carr, like most other observers, stressed that the canal was made possible by the great democratic ideals of the American Republic.

  Ironically, he also noted that government in the Zone was evolving in a way very different from its counterpart in the United States. The water supply, the fire department, the postal service, and more, he argued, were “such as might be provided by a progressive and strongly centralized European government.” However much Americans hoped to transplant the culture and politics of their “home civilization,” something happened along the way. Challenged on all sides by a difficult climate, a colossal construction project, rampant disease, and tens of thousands of workers and their families who emigrated from all over the world, officials struggled to govern and manage the isthmus. They needed to create a civilized and efficient society in the Canal Zone while establishing a firm boundary between the Zone and the Republic of Panama. At times, particularly in the early days, it seemed they would not succeed. Before the project was more than a few years old, Roosevelt had been forced to find a second and then a third chief engineer to supervise the construction after their predecessors had resigned, unable or unwilling to tolerate the poor conditions and difficult challenges.1

  The Zone was a territory ten miles wide (five miles on either side of the projected canal), covering dense jungle, mountains, and swampy lowlands across the nearly ­fifty-­mile-­long isthmus. The construction of the canal officially lasted ten years, from May 1904 to August 1914, and was characterized by experimentation and strategic reorganizations of the Canal Zone’s government, a process that overlapped to a large extent with the tenure of the three chief engineers. John Wallace, the first one, lasted only one year and oversaw an anxious and poorly organized period. His successor, the railroad engineer John Stevens, remained on the job less than two years (  June 1905 to April 1907), but his tenure was vastly more effective, and he played a key role by convincing Congress to build a lock rather than a ­sea-­level canal. The third and final chief engineer, George Washington Goethals, oversaw most of the actual construction and continued with the job through its completion. Goethals’s era witnessed the construction of the spectacular lock gates, the completion of Gatun Dam, the flooding of Gatun Lake, and the first ship’s successful traversing of the canal in 1914. The latter occurred just as World War I erupted in Europe, somewhat overshadowing the U.S. success with the canal. Nonetheless, the next year the United States emphatically celebrated its triumph at the ­Panama-­Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco.

  The three chief engineers each faced the challenge of how to govern the Zone’s growing population and how to overcome the engineering and medical difficulties the region posed. The construction project formally began in 1904 as a small group of men—surveyors, geographers, engineers, doctors—and a handful of female nurses boarded ships for the isthmus. The French failure was fresh on Americans’ minds as they arrived to find ghostly mementos of the earlier construction effort lurking in every swamp hole—old, rusting machinery, locomotives, dilapidated houses. Philippe ­Bunau-­Varilla had written about his time working on the French project, “Death was constantly gathering its harvest about me.” Convincing workers to go to Panama—and keeping them alive once they arrived—would prove daunting tasks indeed.2

  THE GREAT PROBLEM OF LABOR

  As the U.S. occupation of the Canal Zone began, Roosevelt chose the Army doctor William Gorgas to head the U.S. sanitation effort. Born in 1854, Gorgas grew up in a household profoundly affected by the Civil War. His father, a Pennsylvanian trained at West Point, moved to Richmond during the war and joined the Confederate cause. Jefferson Davis appointed him chief of ordnance, and William grew up in a social world that included the top leaders of the Confederacy. He later remembered fleeing with his family as the war came to an end: “I first came to Baltimore a ragged
, barefoot little rebel, with empty pockets and an empty stomach. My father had gone south with the army. At the fall and destruction of Richmond my mother’s house, with all that she had, was burned, leaving her stranded with six small children. She came to Baltimore, and was cared for by friends.” After the war the family was impoverished until, after some years, William’s father won a job as head of the University of the South.3

  William dreamed of a military career but failed to win admission to West Point. He decided to become an Army doctor in spite of his father, who objected that it was not an honorable career. After attending medical school, William Gorgas spent twenty years as an Army doctor in North Dakota, Texas, and Florida. When the War of 1898 began, the Army sent Gorgas to Havana to fight the spread of yellow fever among soldiers there, and after the war he was appointed chief sanitary officer of Cuba. In these years the U.S. government realized that yellow fever threatened its effort to control and clean up cities like Havana. Under the leadership of the Army physician and research scientist Walter Reed, and following the earlier ideas of the Cuban Carlos Finlay, doctors demonstrated that yellow fever was spread by mosquitoes. Gorgas then helped implement sanitation measures to rid Cuba of the disease.

  Gorgas and his wife, Marie, would be among the first Americans to venture into Panama. Their ship arrived at Colón, and as they wandered the city, they found the streets “unspeakably dirty and ­mud-­filled, swarmed with naked children; the ugly frame houses rested on piles, under which greenish slimy water formed lagoons. Such dilapidation and desolation!” They gamely enjoyed the train ride across the isthmus to Panama City, finding their mood lifted by the beautiful mountains and jungle, and then descended again into mud and a slow carriage ride up to Ancon Hospital, where living quarters had been arranged for them. After dinner they sat with friends in their living quarters, which happened to be a reconversion of the old officers’ ward. This ward, Marie Gorgas noted, had been the site of more yellow fever deaths than any other spot on the isthmus during the French period. It was a grim reminder of the difficulties awaiting them.4

 

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