The Canal Builders

by Julie Greene

  “KEEP THE EMPLOYEES CONTENTED

  AND SATISFIED”

  In their struggle to keep productivity high in the Canal Zone, ICC officials sought ways to control employees’ leisure as well as work hours. The first chief engineer, John Wallace, had declared in 1905 that amusements and diversions could not feasibly be provided in the Zone. Others thought differently. In 1904, as the U.S. occupation of the Canal Zone began, Secretary of War William Howard Taft worried that he would be sending thousands of men to the isthmus to suffer moral degradation: “As we know from our experience in the Philippines, the one great thing that leads to dissipation and dissolute habits, is the absence of reasonable amusements and recreation and occupation during the hours when the men are not at work.” Initially, ICC officials had their hands full combating yellow fever, making decisions about the design of the canal, and building housing, hotels, and cafeterias to provide for the thousands of workingmen. These responsibilities consumed officials through 1904 and 1905. By 1906 and 1907, however, their attention had turned more to engaging employees in pleasant and controlled amusements during their hours away from work. Officials decided that creating a regimented and disciplined workforce required extensive intervention into employees’ leisure time.87

  From the beginning, the tropical environment provided some natural recreational opportunities. The nurse Louise Bidwell recalled that most nurses owned a horse and would go riding on their days off. Visiting the ruins of old Panama was a favorite excursion. Another nurse and one of the first women in the Zone, Alice Gilbert, described her horseback excursions: “The trails were good but the ticks and the red bugs were fierce. There was a trail that led to a tree on a hill in Gorgona in which you could stand and see the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.” She also recalled alligator hunts that lasted two days and involved camping in the jungle. On one trip she traveled with a group that killed fifty large alligators and reflected, ­“Don’t you think that makes up for some of the things we miss by staying down here?”88

  While they encouraged workers to take advantage of the beaches and other scenic attractions of Panama by giving them a free train pass each month, ICC officials also wanted to provide more organized forms of leisure. They saw this as particularly important for their male employees. Religious organizations eager to play a role in the Canal Zone submitted proposals outlining different possible approaches. The most comprehensive plan came from Clarence Hicks, the general secretary of the YMCA. He assessed conditions in the Zone in 1905 and concluded that his organization could play a beneficial role. Hicks itemized the many evil influences available to men in the Zone or nearby in Panama: gambling, bullfighting, cockfighting, and a great many saloons. On the other hand, influences for good behavior were notoriously missing: no libraries, no places of amusement, no meeting places for clubs or social interaction. Hicks concluded: “It is the deep conviction of the International Committee … that the establishing of Young Men’s Christian Associations on the Isthmus would do more to make and keep the employees contented and satisfied than any one thing the Canal Commission might do.” Because of the YMCA’s reputation for instilling a moral sensibility among workers in the United States—and for simultaneously preventing labor unrest—officials chose it to maintain and supervise government clubhouses in the Zone.

  President Roosevelt personally intervened, writing chief engineer John Stevens in 1906 to urge him to work with the YMCA. The ICC should build “an attractive, wholesome, decent club, to which men ­won’t have to be urged to go, but to which they will actually go of their on accord, probably with the purpose of getting amusement, but with the result also of their own moral and physical betterment.” It was important, Roo­sevelt stressed, that the clubhouses offer real diversion, and not just a single little room for prayer meetings. The YMCA had done admirable work among railroad men in the United States, and he knew the same moral improvement could be achieved among canal employees.89

  By late 1907, ICC officials had built clubhouses in the four major towns of the Canal Zone—Empire, Gorgona, Culebra, and Cristobal—and turned them over to the International Committee of the YMCA to run. The clubhouse bylaws specifically limited membership to “white gold employees of the Canal Commission and Panama Railroad” and “other white residents of the Isthmus” who might be accepted as members by special action of the executive committee. The YMCA enforced the color line by ordering an investigation of personnel records when its officials suspected a person of color had attempted to pass as white in order to gain admission. White women could make use of the clubhouses for two afternoons—a total of five hours—each week. More than that, argued the YMCA’s advisory committee, “would endanger the work for which the organization was intended.”90

  That real work involved encouraging better behavior among the white male American employees. For a fee of $ 12 per year the clubhouses provided white gold workers (“regardless of belief or creed”) with libraries and reading rooms, pleasant spaces for writing letters, pool and billiards tables, bowling alleys, soda fountains, and gymnasiums equipped with mats, boxing gloves, fencing equipment, and more. Organizations formed by white American employees now had a place to meet, and clubs that focused on photography, Bible study, singing, Spanish, mechanical drawing, chess, checkers, and production of minstrel shows all took advantage of the opportunity. Police chief George Shanton noted the beneficial influence of the YMCA that same year, writing to its manager: “There is less rowdyism, less loafing in and around saloons, and less drinking among the Americans since the organization of the Y.M.C.A. than ever before.”91

  Yet the clubhouses seemed not to achieve their promise. Workingmen again demonstrated that they had a different vision from that of ICC officials. The ICC had planned to build four more clubhouses in 1909 as money became available, but for several reasons officials decided to build only one more. In a revealing report written in 1910, chief engineer Goethals assessed what had happened to the ambitious hopes for the clubhouses. Although there had been significant enthusiasm at first among employees, membership had fallen significantly in the years since they opened. Particularly in Gorgona, the machine shop town with the greatest number of skilled workers, membership had declined from 72 percent of all employees in 1907 to only 44 percent by 1910. Membership currently stood at little more than a thousand men, out of a working population of some five thousand. Goethals explained why: “The clubhouses do not draw the men who work in the ditch.” At Empire and Culebra membership remained higher, but both towns had a larger number of ­white-­collar employees. The men who worked in offices found the clubhouses fit more easily into their lives, “as they can always be suitably dressed, [and] present a better personal appearance than men who work in the Cut from eight to ten hours per day.”92

  There was more involved than clothing, however, Goethals admitted. He noted that officials had learned workmen did not care to see the YMCA program expand, “unless the clubhouses were placed under their own management, or they could have more voice in the manner of their operation.” Workers most pointedly expressed unhappiness with the fact that on Sundays, the one day of the week most of them had free, many activities were not available at the clubhouses. The reading rooms and correspondence tables were open on Sunday, and club meetings and talks were allowed. The clubhouse rules stipulated that on Sundays “good music and good fellowship will be prominent features” while “games are set aside in keeping with the custom of the American people.” Goethals noted that “discontent had started in the Culebra Clubhouse, resulting in a ­largely-­signed petition for Sunday opening of the billiard room and bowling alley.” Thus while the YMCA clubhouses continued to operate, overall they proved an expensive and limited experiment. In the United States, YMCA facilities were popular and effective as a medium for instilling ­middle-­class notions of respectability in workingmen. In the Canal Zone, they proved instead another vehicle for negotiations between workers and government officials.93

  ICC efforts to regulat
e leisure time extended well beyond the YMCA clubhouses. Officials outlawed gambling and worked strenuously to enforce the law, raiding bachelor dormitories in search of illegal poker games or craps. Dances were held every other Saturday night at the Hotel Tivoli, attended by women and men in their nicest attire and ready to dance until midnight. Officials built baseball fields, and teams sprang up in each major town, their games popular with players and spectators alike. Singing and theatrical groups from the United States toured the Zone frequently. Social clubs like the Masons and the Red Men opened lodges in most towns and quickly signed up many skilled workers. Independent clubs also sprang up. Louise Bidwell remembered being invited by a group called Tropical Tramps to take a boat trip to Taboga Island. A rowdier singing group called the Society of the Chagres Hymnal declared as one of its rules: “Members who have taken less than six drinks will not be allowed to join in the song service. Whiskey tenors will please stick to the key.”94

  As the latter suggests, alcohol was a serious matter in the Zone. It formed an important part of the day for most workers, and so for officials it became a matter of deliberate and careful regulation. They knew workers would acquire alcohol one way or another, and so they reluctantly allowed it but managed consumption as best they could. There were as many as ­sixty-­three saloons in the Zone at any time. The writer Willis Abbot described them as “rough, frontier whisky shops.” In order to prevent the saloons from becoming social centers, officials allowed no chairs or tables. No alcohol was sold in ICC hotels, although customers could sometimes bring a libation with them to their table. In July 1913, as the construction project moved toward completion and the challenge of managing workers seemed less worrisome, all liquor licenses were suspended, and the Zone became dry in order to be in agreement with federal law that prohibited alcohol on government property. Even before then, however, the Canal Zone became known for regimentation of leisure hours as well as work, another sign of the extensive state intervention. In the rough and hardworking environment of the Canal Zone, it seemed that every effort by the government to control U.S. workers’ lives led those workers to seek outlets beyond the legal boundaries of the Zone even more energetically.95

  AMERICAN CITIZENS working to build the canal, male and female, white and black, lived and worked in the Zone in ways very different from one another. They were separated by boundaries that granted or denied privileges according to current understandings of race, gender, citizenship, and skill. Because of the nature of government in the Zone, the ­so-­called benevolent despotism, the state intervened thoroughly in their lives. Improving their working and living conditions necessarily involved the government, but it also required choosing whether to enforce or transgress the boundaries that separated them from others. Along the way U.S. employees proved more difficult to manage than officials expected or cared to admit. African Americans challenged the racialized segregation system, while female clerical workers and nurses argued for equal treatment. Citizenship rights emerged most often as the basis of employees’ protests.

  The most privileged of all employees demonstrated the system’s harsh character. By 1907 white male gold workers had bargained, complained, lobbied, quit, or organized strikes in order to achieve comfortable lives in the Canal Zone. The power and perks of skilled workers combined with the demands for full productivity and cost efficiency to prod officials toward a rethinking of the nature and purposes of the silver and gold system. Goethals and his staff fine-tuned existing policies and invented new ones to manage and discipline workers—such as replacing white American workers with ­lower-­paid West Indians. The ICC’s strategies placed white skilled workers in a contradictory situation. They became more fully embedded in the system and more actively agents of their expansionist nation—seeking ways to enforce their privileges, emerging as spokesmen for the silver and gold system, pushing for firing of aliens, and complaining when nonwhite workers attempted to break through the color line. Yet simultaneously their positions in the Zone became vulnerable and threatened as officials replaced them with West Indians. This generated unhappiness among skilled workers and unacceptable rates of turnover. Officials had tamed their most powerful employees, but maximum productivity required more. It demanded that workers be satisfied enough with life in the Canal Zone to keep the protracted, ­ten-­year project going. So ICC officials sought other mechanisms for managing and calming their workforce, turning increasingly to leisure activities as a diversion and encouraging workers’ wives to come and provide the comforts of home. Yet these, too, emerged as arenas of conflict and mediation.

  Meanwhile, a vaster challenge awaited the ICC officials. The tens of thousands of West Indians and southern Europeans who carried out the heaviest and dirtiest labor involved in building the canal, and who lived much less comfortable lives, were explicitly excluded by gold workers’ emphasis on their rights as citizens. They labored for a nation that refused to see itself as an empire yet treated them like colonial subjects, a nation that saw them as outsiders yet did not hesitate to use them as a tool to curb the power of their white American employees. Officials never counted on their West Indian workers as allies, but they expected to find them a tractable and pliant source of labor. Those ideas would be dashed at nearly every turn.

  CHAPTER THREE

  _________________

  SILVER LIVES

  A GRENADIAN man named Isaac McKinzie came to the Canal Zone at age ­twenty-­four and got work as a helper building the canal’s lock gates. The year was 1912, and the U.S. government had contracted out to ­McClintic-­Marshall the building and installing of the gigantic lock gates. For unskilled silver employees this was extremely dangerous work, frequently resulting in injuries or even death. McKinzie’s job involved climbing down into the gate and guiding or extracting bolts that more skilled workers hammered through from outside. Just the day before, another silver employee had quit when ordered to do this task, but McKinzie accepted the job. He had worked for two weeks at the assignment when one of the bolts went in crooked and he was instructed to direct it as workingmen tried from the outside to straighten it. There was no light inside the gate, and so McKinzie had to get down very close to the bolt to see it. As he was bending down to examine the bolt, a skilled worker on the outside of the lock gate shouted, “Watch out then!” as he hit the bolt hard with his hammer. The bolt shot straight into McKinzie’s head and shattered his eyeball. A surgeon removed his eye, and he spent a month in the hospital recuperating without pay.1

  After he left the hospital, McKinzie sued the company for damages and asked for $10,000. The company’s lawyer argued that McKinzie was to blame, that he had failed to take proper precautions, and that many other men were performing the same job and never complained about it. The circuit court of the Canal Zone found in McKinzie’s favor but ordered him an award of only $500. The judge argued that he had lost only one eye, thus he was not disfigured, and so would still be able to work. McKinzie ­wasn’t satisfied. He appealed the case to the Supreme Court of the Canal Zone, which found that given the pain and suffering he endured, and because his livelihood would be threatened for the rest of his life, the amount awarded to him should be $1,200.

  West Indians inhabited a difficult world and confronted racist hostility and condescension from their U.S. employers. Only after 1908 did the U.S. government provide compensation for disabilities or death, and then only for artisans and laborers engaged in work considered “hazardous,” and only if evidence was provided that they were not responsible for causing the injury. Before that time, the U.S. government gave injured silver workers only free medical attention and time off without pay.2 Like McKinzie, many disabled West Indians fought aggressively for financial support they believed was due to them. McKinzie’s case was unusual both because he pursued it all the way to the Supreme Court and because he won a large financial reward. Often West Indians lost their court cases, with judges ruling in favor of the defendants or dismissing the cases altogether. Yet West Indians’ e
nergetic use of the legal system to try to achieve justice suggests their creative ability to adapt in the face of an unfamiliar and bureaucratic foreign government.

  McKinzie’s case not only reflects the pathos of occupational injuries that so often afflicted West Indian workers but also demonstrates a degree of persistence and assertiveness that disproves common assumptions held at the time about West Indians. Officials like John Stevens saw West Indians as exotic creatures, lazy and unintelligent albeit gentlemanly. In fact, West Indians developed a wide range of strategies to shape their personal and working lives, improve their circumstances, and resist attempts by government officials to control them. Some, like McKinzie, used the judicial system to push for recognition and enforcement of their rights. Others devised more subterranean strategies involving careful choices to work and live where or how they wished. For West Indians, geographical and occupational mobility provided one of the most effective tools for creating independence for themselves in the regimented and industrialized Canal Zone. Viewing life and work from their perspective makes the world of the construction project look different. Officials could not conceive that silver workers developed such complex strategies and calculations. Nonetheless, the commissioners, engineers, and foremen of the ICC had to find ways to respond to West Indian laborers’ actions, choices, and life strategies.