by Julie Greene
Could they possibly bring order, health, sanitation, indeed civilization itself, to this rude corner of the world? Tropical nature was seen as threatening the health and civilization of white men who ventured to Panama. Although an earlier discourse had associated the tropics with the Garden of Eden, by the early twentieth century it had come to be seen as sinister. The climate, the heavy rainfall, the prevalence of disease, and the perceived indolence of those native to the tropics all loomed as highly problematic.5
Gorgas believed that succeeding in the tropics depended first and foremost upon eradicating or containing disease. Toward this end he employed the same strategies relied on earlier in Cuba. Years later, in an essay that sounded a triumphant response to Benjamin Kidd’s earlier warnings, titled “The Conquest of the Tropics for the White Race,” Gorgas explained his procedures. He and his staff worked to destroy all possible breeding places of the mosquitoes carrying malaria or yellow fever. Throughout the Zone they drained or filled in ditches, sprayed oil or petroleum over water that could not be drained, used chemicals to kill algae in streams, and cut brush where mosquitoes dwelled. As extra precautions, windows in houses (at least those houses intended for whites) built by the Isthmian Canal Commission, or ICC, received screens, and officials made quinine available to all employees.6
The U.S. government also worked to rebuild the urban environments of Panama City and Colón, which were seen as crucial bases for the canal project, to enhance sanitation and eradicate disease. The streets of each city were suddenly filled with American sanitary officials in white coats and West Indian laborers under their direction. West Indians worked at street sweeping, fumigation, mosquito destruction, draining or oiling of water, building and paving roads and sidewalks, constructing sewers and water lines, and poisoning hundreds of stray dogs and thousands of rats. Officials went door-to-door throughout the cities, again and again, inspecting every home. When inspectors found mosquito larvae in someone’s home, they reported the residents to the mayor of Panama City, who imposed a fine. When they found illness or mosquitoes, they fumigated. ICC officials estimated the total cost of improvements to the cities of Panama to be nearly $ 2 million.7
These early days were dark ones for officials like Gorgas and the chief engineer John Wallace. Named by Roosevelt to head the construction effort, Wallace came to the Zone with experience as engineer and general manager of the Illinois Central Railroad. He suffered through the most difficult and experimental period of the U.S. occupation and possessed less authority than later chief engineers, because the U.S. government’s strategy initially centered power on the ICC—the members of which resided in the United States. Wallace saw his administration hindered by bureaucracy and lengthy delays as he requested provisions and equipment from Washington, D.C. His requests were often questioned or denied by the commissioners, who were concerned about limiting expenditures. Wallace nonetheless accomplished a significant amount: under his supervision, workers repaired hundreds of old French houses and built a few dozen new ones, extended the railroad, conducted extensive surveys, and added to the excavation already done by the French.
Wallace complained vociferously about the inefficient bureaucracy hindering his work. In the spring of 1905, President Roosevelt undertook the first of several reorganizations, replacing every member of the ICC with a new commissioner and centralizing its operations. Yet Wallace seemed, almost from the beginning, defeated by the job and by the climate and terrain. He saw the unhappiness of workers, their constant flight back to the United States, and accurately evaluated the problem: not only were the men worried about yellow fever, but they felt that housing was inadequate, amusements and diversions were nonexistent, and food prices were much too high. And they were homesick. He knew better quarters would gradually become available, yet he despaired of fixing other problems: “It could hardly be expected that the United States should maintain theatres, dance-halls, bowling alleys … and vaudevilles for the delectation of its employees.” He noted also that a few men had brought their wives with them, but this had added to their misery rather than curing it, because conditions were unpleasant. Wallace concluded, “I have personally done all I could to discourage the coming hither of families until a man could see that he was in a position to take care of his dependents when they arrived.”8
The biggest problem was yellow fever. Like French officials before him, Wallace had arrived in Panama with a coffin to carry him home in case he became victim to an epidemic. During the first year of the occupation disease was by far the greatest threat, and hence Gorgas’s role became the most important. As men and women headed to the Canal Zone to prepare the way for digging, yellow fever began to break out. By the end of 1904, cases were appearing every week. Next bubonic plague appeared, and then malaria and pneumonia. Terror struck the isthmus, and old-timers compared these days to the worst of the French period. They found little solace in the many French cemeteries dotting the isthmus. The majority of Americans packed suitcases and headed home to the United States. That summer Wallace did the same. He resigned, as John Foster Carr put it, “like a general deserting on the field of battle.”9 Those who remained in the Canal Zone seemed paralyzed by fear or given to outbursts. A man known for his calmness exploded one night during dinner, swearing “by the living God” he would henceforth eat alone if his dinner companions mentioned yellow fever one more time.10
Fortunately, the measures taken earlier by Gorgas and his staff soon contained the yellow fever. By the autumn of 1905 the epidemic had subsided, and government officials had stopped bringing metal caskets with them to the isthmus. In the long run, doctors would find the struggle to eliminate malaria and pneumonia much more difficult. (Indeed, they would never fully succeed.) As late as December 1905 the new chief engineer, John Stevens, still complained bitterly that the exodus from the isthmus continued, causing severe labor shortages. Men hoping to escape to their various Caribbean islands often could not find room on the ships. “The Jamaicans are returning [home] almost universally,” Stevens observed.11 Yet Stevens’s presence and his energetic action to prepare the way for construction seemed to signal that the crisis was ending and that death would not spread into every household on the isthmus.12
In his months on the job, from mid- 1905 through April 1, 1907, the autocratic Stevens profoundly shaped the character of the construction project. Stevens was a fifty-two-year-old railroad man. He had cut his teeth helping build James J. Hill’s Great Northern Railroad, which stretched seventeen hundred miles from St. Paul to Seattle. Stevens brought many engineers who had worked under him on the Great Northern to the Canal Zone, and he approached the job as a railroad man, conceiving the railroad as the Canal Zone’s central artery. It would distribute laborers, engineers, foremen, equipment, supplies, and food, as well as family members, politicians, and even tourists. It would also carry away the excavated dirt and rocks. Accordingly, once at work in the Canal Zone, Stevens transformed the existing railroad, replacing the narrow rails with five-foot-gauge ones for almost the entire forty-seven miles of the isthmus and adding double tracks so locomotives could go both directions at once. Thus carloads of dirt would head out for the coasts while empty cars shuttled back for more. The mightiest locomotives available—a world apart from the light equipment the French had used—were sent to the Canal Zone, and the new wide-gauge rails could handle them. Getting rid of the excavated dirt efficiently was one of Stevens’s great contributions. The French had not moved their excavated spoil far away, and the piles of dirt and rock so near the construction had generated more landslides. Stevens, on the other hand, used the spoil to reclaim land from the Pacific Ocean in order to build the American town of Balboa and the Fort Amador military base, both near Panama City; he also used it to construct Gatun Dam, Miraflores Locks, and an enormous breakwater stretching out from Panama City to four different islands.13
As a result of Stevens’s work, the Zone became thoroughly dominated by the ra
ilroads and the men who worked them. There was little transportation within or across the Canal Zone except by railroad. If trains proved inconvenient, people typically walked, most often using the vacant tracks as their footpath and jumping off when a train approached. Once the excavation work was going at full steam, as many as eight hundred trains filled with dirt and rocks would pass by the towns of the Zone each day. The rumble of trains and the dynamite explosions set off at 11: 30 and 5: 30 each day made the digging site a “noisy, smoky, canal,” as the Zone policeman and census taker Harry Franck put it. The sounds and smells of machinery were ever present. An Englishwoman visiting the heart of the construction site remembered, “The whole earth seems to tremble with the bellow of dynamite, the roar of machinery, and the dull vibration of the loaded trains. All along our route of some ten miles we were never out of sight of dense masses of workmen, nor clear of the black smoke of straining engines, which clanked, groaned, shrieked and whistled through miles of construction track.” Even out at sea one could feel the trembling of the dynamite explosions.14
The noisiest and most dangerous part of the canal was Culebra Cut, the long, devastating stretch that sliced through the Continental Divide. Tourists looking down from observation decks thought of it as a great gorge, a canyon, an unimaginable ditch. The engineers and their army of laborers were, as the American writer Arthur Bullard commented, “gouging out a canyon 10 miles long, 300 feet wide, and in some places over 250 feet deep. Think about that for a minute and then be proud that you are an American.” Culebra Cut was many construction projects going on simultaneously. There were numerous levels to it, and each, set ten or fifteen feet above another, had its own set of train tracks and its own steam shovels, uploaders, and track shifters. Several of the machines, including spreaders (to distribute the excavated spoil after unloading it) and track shifters, were invented in the Canal Zone to answer the demands of construction. The steam shovels, most of them ninety-five-ton monsters, were the “backbone and sinew” of the construction project. More than a hundred of them ate away at the mountains, each one worked by two skilled white Americans, who in turn were assisted by a team of West Indian laborers.15
Although tourists most often remarked on the great machines of Culebra Cut, closer observers were often fascinated by the complex world of laborers in the Zone. Harry Franck observed, “Everywhere are gangs of men, sometimes two or three gangs working together at the same task. Shovel gangs, track gangs, surfacing gangs, dynamite gangs, gangs doing everything imaginable with shovel and pick and crowbar, gangs down on the floor of the canal, gangs far up the steep walls of cut rock, gangs stretching away in either direction till those far off look like upright bands of the leaf-cutting ants of Panamanian jungles; gangs nearly all, whatever their nationality, in the blue shirts and khaki trousers of the Zone commissary, giving a peculiar color scheme to all the scene.” Culebra Cut was the most feared by the laborers: regular landslides, premature dynamite explosions, flooding from the daily rains during the wet season, and the constant railroad traffic and other machines made it an extremely dangerous place to work. Even when one’s life was not at risk, the scorching sun, high temperatures, humidity, and rain showers made daily work extremely difficult. Laborers worked amid water and mud that sometimes reached up to their waists, shoveling, breaking rocks, drilling holes, or performing a multitude of other tasks, the constant rains making the cut a wet and slippery place.16
Even moving away from the cut and into the jungle, an observer would see gangs of laborers scattered about. Harry Franck described traveling through the jungle on a train car not pulled by an engine—it was instead, he explained, a “six-negro-powered-car.” Franck would order the car stopped every few minutes as he came upon another gang of thirty or so men: “Antiguans shoveling gravel, Martiniques snarling and quarreling as they wallowed thigh-deep in swamps and pools, a company of Greeks unloading train-loads of ties, Spaniards leisurely but steadily grading and surfacing, track bands of ‘Spigoties’ chopping away the aggressive jungle with their machetes—the one task at which the native Panamanian … is worth his brass-check. Every here and there we caught labor’s odds and ends, diminutive ‘water-boys,’ likewise of varying nationality.” Interviewing every worker and resident he could find, Franck came to know the Canal Zone like few other people did.17
Managing the men deployed across the construction site was itself an awesome task. The workday began early. The white American machinists, pattern makers, blacksmiths, and carpenters as well as their West Indian helpers often lived near enough to their workplace, in towns such as Empire and Gorgona, to walk to work. Thousands of others would catch the labor train with its segregated cars. Skilled white American workers traveled in passenger cars, while West Indian workers rode in open-air boxcars fully stuffed with men sitting, standing, and hanging off the sides. Trains would transport the men to their site, carry them back to towns for their midday lunch break, and back and forth again for an afternoon of work. This made transportation a dominant source of employment; railroad workers—the conductors, brakemen, engineers, and firemen—were among the most common employees in the Zone.18
When Stevens came to the isthmus in 1905, the U.S. government had still not decided on its plan for building the canal. The question loomed, most importantly, of whether the canal should be built as a sea-level or lock canal. The French had attempted to build a sea-level canal, which required not only cutting a pathway through the mountains but lowering that route to the level of the sea. A lock canal, by contrast, would use lock chambers to raise ships gradually eighty-five feet up to the level of a huge lake, itself created by damming the powerful Chagres River. Ships would traverse the lake to another set of locks that would then lower them back down to sea level. Some engineers and politicians worried about the safety and efficiency of a dam. An international board appointed by Roosevelt recommended that the canal be built at sea level, just as the Suez Canal had been. Stevens at first supported a sea-level canal, but over time the torrential rains and flooding of the Chagres River convinced him that only locks would succeed. He declared a lock canal would take only eight years to build, whereas a sea-level canal would take twenty-four years. Once the senators became confident that the huge dam could be constructed in a way that ensured safety, they voted, by a narrow margin, to authorize construction of a lock canal.19
Even before excavation began, Stevens took steps to provide for the massive working population that would be needed to build the canal. “Civilized” life in the Zone would require a complete infrastructure: a fire department, post offices, a police force, sanitation services, hospitals, bachelor and family housing, separate cafeterias for different nationalities (white U.S. workers, Caribbean workers, and European workers all ate at different cafeterias), hotels, schools, churches, a judicial system, jails, and a penitentiary. The government laid out towns; built roads, bridges, sidewalks, and sewage disposal plants; installed streetlamps; planted trees; and drained ditches to bring the mosquito population under control. Stevens estimated that he had overseen the construction of more than five thousand buildings, including more than forty hotels and restaurants, plus piers, docks, and warehouses. He built machine shops and roundhouses. He was especially proud of the combination ice, cold-storage, bakery, and laundry facilities he built that kept meat shipped in from the United States cold, produced twenty-five thousand loaves of bread a day, and did the laundry for more than three thousand “white people.” He bragged that his employees would order fresh meat from the packinghouses of Chicago and keep it refrigerated every minute until it reached the hands of consumers along the isthmus.
While building towns and roads, however, Stevens still needed to secure workers to dig the canal, and this presented his greatest challenge. He proclaimed, “The greatest problem in building a canal of any type on the Isthmus … is the one of labor. The engineering and constructional difficulties melt into i
nsignificance compared with labor.”20 Stevens strongly believed in certain key principles, undoubtedly derived from his work constructing railroads across the United States. First, he believed, the government must find workers of several different ethnicities and nationalities, so as to divide them from one another and let competition between groups spur them to work harder. Theodore P. Shonts, the chairman of the ICC, noted the importance of this at an early stage. Depending on one source of labor, he argued, would lead workers to see themselves as indispensable. More important, “a labor force composed of different races and nationalities would minimize, if it did not positively prevent, any possible combination of the entire labor force which would be disastrous to the work.”21 Second, as an engineer explained to congressmen in 1907, “there must be on the Isthmus a surplusage of labor. Otherwise we will have interminable strikes and everything in the nature of a strike.”22
But where should this vast surplus come from? Stevens and his staff debated at length the virtues of various kinds of workers, ranking their efficiency by race and nationality. West Indians had supplied most of the labor during the French effort, so they remained a natural choice. Yet many ICC officials believed their labor to be inferior. Stevens considered West Indians the most “harmless and law-abiding” workers he had ever managed, yet he also believed them to be indolent, childlike, and unintelligent. He complained, “I have about made up my mind that it is useless to think of building the Panama Canal with native West Indian labor. It is possible that by flooding the Isthmus with about 40, 000 laborers, we could keep our gangs full; but there is no doubt in my mind that, owing to their inferiority as laborers, we are paying a price in gold for labor which we cannot continue.”23