The Canal Builders

by Julie Greene

  Such a monstrous endeavor required efficient strategies for governing and disciplining the working population and others living in the Canal Zone—more than sixty thousand residents, according to the U.S. government’s census of 1912.43 Despite his obvious contributions to the engineering challenges of the canal, Goethals saw the difficulties of “ruling and preserving order” as the most novel and challenging aspect of his job: “While some experience had been gained in the insular possessions, a new situation existed which had to be solved, and after various changes there was evolved a form of government which was unique, differing from any established methods of administration.” Others agreed with him. Joseph Bucklin Bishop, the longtime ICC secretary who worked under Goethals, wrote, “The problems in administration were new and there were no precedents in American experience from which to obtain light for guidance.”44

  How did Goethals see this challenge when he arrived in the Zone in 1907? Years later, in 1915, when the canal had just recently opened and affairs were rapidly shifting away from the demands of construction and into a new era of operating and maintaining the canal, Goethals was appointed by President Woodrow Wilson to be the first governor of the Canal Zone. In a series of public lectures he gave that year, Goethals described his approach to governing. He explained the choices faced by those seeking to create a stable government in the Canal Zone during the ­post-­construction era, and he based his opinions on what he had learned and experienced as chief engineer. There were four main options, he declared: military government, civil government (democracy), commission government, or government via the executive orders of the president of the United States. For the Canal Zone, Goethals believed, a military government was inappropriate. The canal must be a civil rather than a military accomplishment: “As in the United States in time of peace, the military should be subordinated to the civil, and everything on the Isthmus should be considered an adjunct to the canal.” A civil, democratic government had been tried during the early days of construction but was found to be lacking as well. Many had argued for democracy in the Canal Zone on the grounds that the United States should create a model government to educate Central and South Americans on the virtues and benefits of American civilization. Goethals contended that this had been unwise during the construction era, and it would be unwise now. The canal was “an administrative problem and political problems ­shouldn’t be allowed to encumber it.” To introduce political institutions would be “a step backward” and would incur unwarranted costs. Commission government he despised as inefficient, unwieldy, and generating unnecessary tensions. This left only one feasible form of government: a ­one-­man operation, headed by the president of the United States.45

  In fact, Goethals saw himself as the one man who should be in charge. Soon after arriving in the Zone, he found working with other members of the ICC difficult and inefficient. He pressed Roosevelt for more authority. When Congress refused to restructure the ICC, Goethals drafted an executive order that would centralize all powers under his command. In January 1908, Roosevelt signed the executive order, putting Goethals in complete charge of the ICC and the Panama Railroad. Goethals would make all decisions, and he in turn answered only to the president. The ICC was stripped of all authority. As Goethals described it, the 1908 executive order “resulted in the establishment of an autocratic form of government for the Canal Zone.”46

  Henceforth the requirements of the construction job would dominate every aspect of life. To Goethals, efficiency was a necessary prerequisite, and efficiency in turn required a vast expansion of the powers of the state and a complete elimination of democracy. He noted that members of Congress attempted to limit his power in the Canal Zone and create a more democratic structure, but without success. Democracy, according to Goethals, would be a frivolous distraction: “Conditions were peculiar, for there was but one object in view—the construction of the canal; had the franchise been introduced, the whole structure would have fallen.” He conceded that he may have acted autocratically at times; however, “the end not only justified the means but could have been accomplished in no other way.”47

  Over the years many referred to Goethals’s government in the Canal Zone as a “benevolent despotism,” a notion that had a long and vigorous history in Western political philosophy. In 360 b.c., Plato had described an ideal republic in which society would be divided into castes (identified by Plato as the gold, silver, and bronze groups) and everyone would be ruled by a single benevolent ­philosopher-­king. In the nineteenth century the Scottish philosopher and historian Thomas Carlyle, amid the pressures of a rapidly industrializing world, revolted against the materialism and excess democracy around him and imagined an ideal government, which he called benevolent despotism. He modeled this government on his image of heaven, but conceded that it would be impossible to achieve. Carlyle’s ideas have long been seen as inspiring both socialism and fascism. Carlyle’s peer and sometimes friend John Stuart Mill, the great philosopher of liberalism and representative government, believed despotism to be inappropriate for a mature society like England. Yet Mill, a supporter of British imperialism who worked for many years for the East India Company, strongly defended despotism in an imperial context. In his essay “On Liberty,” he declared, “Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, providing the end be their improvement.” Thus extensive precedents and justifications existed for Goethals to draw on in dispensing with representative forms of government. Two aspects made his approach particularly significant. First, he was employing benevolent despotism not only among people he identified as inferior but also with a large population of white Americans. Second, it worked—and very effectively indeed. As Willis Abbot, a prominent chronicler of the canal construction, observed, “That crabbed old philosopher Thomas Carlyle would be vastly interested could he but see how the benevolent despotism which he described as ideal but impossible is working successfully down in the ­semi-­civilized tropics.”48

  Goethals not only centralized the state but also extended it deeply into the lives of the residents of the Canal Zone and the Republic of Panama. Whereas Stevens had envisioned constructing much of the canal by contracting work out to individual corporations, Goethals preferred to keep the government in control of almost every feature of the job. The commissaries, cafeterias, hotels, railroad, and hospitals, as well as the actual work of construction (everything except for the locks), were controlled by the government. The government decided how and where people lived, ate, worked, played—or tried to, anyway—and how they should be disciplined. Thus to observers like the journalist John Foster Carr, the Canal Zone government seemed different from that in the United States proper and more akin to an interventionist European government. When Carr described it as a state “with all the machinery and equipment of our home civilization adapted to strange needs,” he likely meant something similar to what John Stuart Mill had advised in the case of Britain. A distant population including large numbers of West Indians, southern Europeans, and Panamanians—all of them perceived by ICC officials as lacking the maturity and capability for ­self-­government that white Americans had—required creative adaptations to establish order and efficient government.

  Goethals’s approach to governing was therefore rather stern and focused on discipline. Marie Gorgas, who was admittedly never fond of Goethals, described him as obsessed with power: “His passion for dominating everything and everybody he carried to extreme lengths. The most desirable gift of the executive is the ability to delegate authority, but this quality Colonel Goethals did not possess. He was impatient of any associate or subordinate whom he could not control.” At its gentlest, Goethals’s style involved a heavy dose of paternalism. Goethals liked to present himself as a fatherly figure, proudly opening his office every Sunday morning to hear anyone’s grievance. The rather saintly portrait of him in the biography by Joseph Bucklin Bishop and Farnham Bishop describes the chief’s ­open-­door policy as an exercise in egalitarian
ism, a $5,000-­a-­year engineer sitting contentedly next to a Jamaican laundress or Spanish tracklayer as petitioners waited for their moment with the colonel. Marie Gorgas saw it differently, comparing Goethals’s behavior during his office hours to that of a “Venetian doge” or a “patriarchal despot.”49

  Goethals did take seriously the complaints made during his open hours. With a ­full-­time inspector working to investigate problems and recommend solutions, including any discipline or punishment deemed necessary, his administration constituted a ­full-­fledged grievance office combined with an independent tribunal. Records maintained by T. B. Miskimon, Goethals’s inspector, provide a world of insight into the Zone’s daily affairs. ICC employees and their wives complained about everything from drunken or adulterous neighbors to fraudulent commissary managers, insulting foremen, cruel policemen, blackmailing supervisors, women of ill repute, gamblers, abusive spouses, salesmen bearing indecent photographs, and a judge who engaged in sexual harassment. Miskimon dutifully investigated each case and recommended a solution to his boss. In one case where Miskimon found fraud involving commissary books, Goethals suspended the men responsible without pay for fifteen days. When a yardmaster of the Panama Railroad was accused by a colleague of working while intoxicated, Miskimon’s detailed investigation resulted in a ­six-­page report for Goethals, in which the inspector concluded that while the yardmaster certainly imbibed, the charge of intoxication on the job may well have been the creation of his jealous and hostile colleague. Thousands of similar examples suggest the challenge of maintaining order in the Canal Zone, with its complicated and diverse cultures.50

  Even Goethals’s admiring biographers noted that he could be strict and unyielding, and the workingmen and -women of the Zone more often saw that side of him. Goethals quickly acquired a reputation (which he relished) for toughness with workers, particularly if they attempted to negotiate with him as part of an organization rather than as individuals. For years he refused to recognize unions or meet with any committee representing the workforce. He proudly declared that in his earlier jobs, “We did not deal with unions; we did not employ unions; we employed individuals and dealt with them individually.” When railroad workers in the Canal Zone attempted to organize in 1908, Goethals refused to meet with them. Conferring with one leader of their committee, he explained his refusal: “I will not take another man’s word for another man’s grievance. If you have a grievance you are the man who can talk to me intelligently about it.” This policy continued for years, until President William Howard Taft declared Goethals’s position unacceptable, since “organized labor was recognized everywhere.” Taft required that Goethals either meet with labor representatives or allow the appointment of a special labor commissioner to handle workers’ grievances. Amid much grumbling, and desiring to avoid the appointment of a labor commissioner at any cost, Goethals agreed to meet with committees of workers. Even then, he insisted that most grievances be presented to him not through unions but through individuals making use of his open door on Sunday mornings.51

  In 1910 a locomotive engineer was convicted of involuntary manslaughter and sentenced to a year in the penitentiary because of a train accident that killed a man. At a mass meeting, transportation workers demanded that the engineer be released from prison and threatened to strike if their demand was not met. Goethals refused and declared, “I will take no action in response to the demand of a mob.” Any man who failed to show up for work the next day would be transported immediately back to the United States. The threatened strike did not materialize.52 Although government officials commented often and publicly on the affection Zonians felt for Goethals, the latter’s reliance on deportation, police spies, and vagrancy laws for controlling his workers suggested a different side to his rule. The observation of the Zone policeman Harry Franck, who conceded Goethals’s popularity, is worth keeping in mind: “That he is omnipotent—on the Zone—not many will deny; a few have questioned—and landed in the States a week later much less joyous but far wiser.”53

  THE SILVER AND GOLD SYSTEM

  The most important tool the U.S. government relied on for controlling and managing the Canal Zone’s workers and residents was a system of segregation, and this system reveals how Americans struggled to adapt domestic policies to the “strange needs” of the isthmus. Although the origins of the segregation system are somewhat unclear, its roots apparently lay in ­long-­standing practice on the U.S.-built Panamanian railroad to pay unskilled workers with Panamanian silver and skilled workers with U.S. gold currency. When the United States began construction, the story goes, a disbursing officer slapped up signs designating “gold” and “silver” on the pay cars, and gradually the differential pay scale evolved into segregation. Initially, bosses would reward productive employees by shifting them, regardless of their race, ethnicity, or nationality, from the silver to the gold payroll. Gradually, it hardened into a system of segregation comparable in some ways to the U.S. practice of Jim Crow. Segregation came to shape every aspect of life in the Zone, from work to housing, leisure activities, sexual relationships, and shopping. One would see, for example, large signs at the commissaries denoting the silver and gold entrances. The government paid silver employees far less, fed them unappetizing food, and housed them in substandard shacks. Gold workers earned very high wages and terrific benefits, including six weeks of paid vacation leave every year, one month of paid sick leave every year, and a free pass for travel within the Zone once each month. The government also developed an attractive social life and provided it at no or low cost to white American employees, hiring bands and vaudeville acts to perform regularly throughout the Zone and building grounds for baseball and other sports. Clubhouses provided white Americans with reading rooms, bowling alleys, and gymnasiums. The government allowed only white U.S. citizens to enjoy these leisure activities.54

  Although the silver and gold system became central to the industrial environment of the Canal Zone, officials apparently felt conflicted and confused about its precise purpose and the principles that should govern it. Amid the confusion, however, racial justifications repeatedly came up. Some people, like the influential C. A. McIlvaine, Goethals’s executive secretary, believed it was meant to show quickly how many blacks or whites the government employed at any time, or to avoid conflicts between workers of different races. Others argued segregation would enhance efforts at sanitation and disease eradication by separating outsiders from those native to tropical areas. A more common explanation attributed the system to ­long-­standing worries that white men could not withstand the tropical climate (giving them, for example, extended paid vacations so they could return home). When an engineer inquired whether it was acceptable to have foreigners on the gold roll (by which he meant ­non-­U.S. citizens), the assistant chief engineer J. G. Sullivan responded, “The great distinction between gold and silver basis is that employes on a gold basis are given vacations every year, in which to go to the States to recuperate. The point that I have always maintained is that in deciding whether or not a white foreigner, or ­semi-­white foreigner (Dago) should be put on a gold basis is the fact as to whether or not they would take or whether or not they need, a trip to the States every year.” In other words, Sullivan argued, the system should remain as fluid as possible, leaving decisions about where workers belonged up to the officials in charge. There were several Canadians among the nurses, Sullivan noted, and an English foreman came to mind, and he did not think it feasible to move all of them off the gold roll.55

  Over time, however, the system became more rigid and more emphatically—but never exclusively—a racial hierarchy. This was a murky evolution, difficult to delineate, but upon closer examination some key steps in the process emerge. As early as September 1905, E. S. Benson, the general auditor of the Canal Zone, wrote to Governor Charles Magoon that officials in some departments were giving “silver employes a promotion by putting them on the gold roll. … [This] is being done as a mark of favor to certain e
mployes, who may be negroes, the idea being that if a man is on the gold roll he has a certain amount of prestige which he would not otherwise secure.” Benson argued that promoting men in this manner was unsatisfactory from “an accounting standpoint when we undertake to distribute certain classes of expenditures between the Departments and Divisions based on the relative number of gold and silver employes.” He asked that it be discontinued. John Stevens, then the chief engineer, agreed and issued an order forbidding the practice.56

  A year later Stevens issued another order. He now required that all “colored employes” be shifted from the gold to the silver roll. He wanted them to see no decrease in their pay; he merely wanted them to serve on the silver rather than the gold payroll. He also excluded “colored” employees who were U.S. citizens from this order but, remarkably,only if they had received labor contracts in the United States that stipulated they were being hired on the gold roll. Any other African Americans would, like West Indians, be transferred unceremoniously to the silver roll.57

  Some officials found this drawing of the racial line to be inconvenient, rude, or threatening to productivity. Most controversial was the issue of skilled workers from the West Indies—did they belong on the gold roll or the silver roll? Henry Burnett, for example, the manager of the Canal Zone commissaries, protested: “It would, I think, be very impolitic to separate all of the Commissary employees, by color putting all the colored men on the silver roll. They would naturally feel it to be in a measure, a humiliation.” He added that he had several valuable “colored clerks” who drew higher salaries than some white clerks. Likewise, George Brooke, superintendent of motive power and machinery, responded to Stevens’s order by saying he had earlier moved many “colored men” from the gold to the silver roll, and “by doing so I lost a number of excellent men on account of their seriously objecting to begin put on an equality with the ordinary colored laborer.” Those still on the gold roll, he argued, “are our best colored men remaining, and I have hesitated about arbitrarily placing them on the silver basis for the reason that I should probably lose more or less of them.” Brooke had twelve West Indians working for him on the gold roll in such occupations as machinist, blacksmith, boilermaker, and coppersmith. Most hailed from Martinique, but some came from St. Lucia, Guadeloupe, Antigua, and Jamaica. These were most likely men who had gained experience in the French era of canal construction, which had enabled them to move into skilled positions. John Stevens remained firm, conceding only that a few ­Afro-­Caribbean clerks and “colored policemen, school teachers, and postmasters” could remain on the gold roll. As officials saw it, these latter groups performed key functions and therefore needed some authority and prestige to do their jobs effectively.58