The Canal Builders

by Julie Greene

  Smith could barely control his anger when asked to respond to Beeks’s report. His counterattack was ­twenty-­three pages long, his words dripping with bitterness and condescension. He defended his hierarchical approach by saying, “It is the practice the whole world over to provide a little better for men occupying the higher positions than for those in the subordinate ones. The same custom prevails in the Army, with the railroads of the United States, and among other corporations this being part of the reward for which an ambitious man or woman works.” Point by point, Smith responded to Beeks’s claims, often pungently: “The man who wants to be clean will be so with cold water, while the one who seeks an excuse for his dirt will remain dirty if hot water is provided.” The “colored laborers,” he claimed, prefer to live in boxcars. Comparing families living in ­four-­family housing to tenements reflects badly “upon the good name of representative American workmen and their wives and daughters,” he wrote, and Beeks must bear the responsibility for the damage her comments caused.65

  Likewise, Beeks’s reference to laws regarding airspace in the tenements of the United States was “absurd, if not idiotic,” for conditions in the Zone and lack of access to supplies made the work far more difficult. Beeks’s critique of the Hotel Tivoli, he argued, “displays a total lack of knowledge of Isthmian conditions and canal affairs in general.” The idea that officials should supply mosquito bars to common laborers was an absurdity, for “they are an absolutely ignorant class who do not understand the use of such an article.” He denied that favoritism ever influenced the assignment of quarters. He found Beeks’s idea of supplying more recreation for employees unacceptable because “too much paternalism is not conducive to the best results.” Overall, Smith found Beeks’s criticisms to be baseless, and his disdain extended from her to all social welfare types: “The trouble with most investigators who have thus far visited the Isthmus seems to be that they permit the ideal to interfere with the practical, and if all the suggestions offered were adopted, and putting aside the enormous waste of money they involved, the Commission would soon be conducting a gigantic nursery.”66

  In a conversation with Beeks while visiting the United States (a conversation in which Taft also participated, apparently to keep Smith from behaving rudely), Smith began by noting bluntly, “According to your report everything on the Isthmus is wrong except the climate.” Relations went downhill from that point. After proclaiming that officials could not supply blankets to laborers since they would only get dirty, Smith was firmly corrected by Beeks: “I told him that blankets are used with the lowest class of employes—the criminal type, drunkards, etc., in New York City’s institutions. I shall add now that they are used at Ellis Island for the immigrants and they have no trouble about keeping them clean.”67

  Smith was not the only official who found Beeks’s presence in the Zone galling, although others responded more temperately. The vice president of the Panama Railroad, for example, believed Beeks’s “various charges are so sweeping and so discouraging where zealous and continuous effort is made … to accomplish satisfactory results, that an adequate answer is difficult to prepare.”68 The ICC officials had carefully limited democracy and heightened their own power in the Canal Zone as they sought to maintain order and enhance productivity. Now, because of President Roosevelt’s concern for creating a positive public relations campaign, they were forced to tolerate a social investigator poking around in their affairs—and a female one at that.

  When theProvidence Journal published a thinly veiled satire about an investigator named Susie Peeks visiting Providence and basing her examination of the city on the work Beeks had done in Panama, the ICC officials loved it. Susie Peeks found, just as Beeks had, that men were losing the girls who loved them due to unavailability of family housing, that residents of boardinghouses complained of having to eat eggs every day (while residents at other boardinghouses, declared Miss Peeks, requested eggs and failed to get them!), that prices were high, and that drinking was a curse. The ICC distributed the satire throughout the Zone to the great enjoyment of officials and managers and wrote theProvidence Journal to congratulate its writer for the excellent work. Meanwhile, an associate of Beeks’s visited the Zone to follow up on some of her investigation and reported confidentially to Beeks that the isthmus was sprinkled with individuals who had only “spicy” things to say about her. One reaction, probably common, came from an official who found Beeks’s report too shaped by her “feminine sentiment—that what would strike you as a hardship for the men, they themselves would not regard as such at all—they actually prefer to rough it in many instances.” As one might expect in the early twentieth century, Beeks’s gender was mentioned often and by supporters as well as by detractors. TheNew York Times, reporting on her Panama investigation, commented that workers there had a “warm and powerful friend” visiting them, one who “noticed many little but essential things that would have escaped the eyes of a dozen investigating committees of men.”69

  ICC officials grumbled mightily over Beeks’s suggestions, and they rejected many of them. Most important, they refused to appoint a labor commissioner even though Roosevelt favored the idea and John Mitchell, the prominent leader of the United Mine Workers, expressed interest in taking the job.70 Nor would they change in any significant way their policies regarding unions, and so the pervasive ­anti-­union atmosphere of the Zone continued.

  Still, Beeks could take credit for many important reforms. Officials supplied beds, rather than cots, to all white American bachelors, and they built more dormitories to ease congestion. They built drying sheds throughout the isthmus, which Beeks personally considered her greatest achievement because of the improvement in health it afforded workers. Prices at the commissaries were lowered, and their sanitation improved. Officials immediately took steps to extend segregation in the commissaries by creating separate counters for white and black workers (although some officials confessed surprise that Beeks encouraged such a policy, one remarking, “If we had any such arrangement as this in existence, Miss Beeks would doubtless be the first to complain”). A newspaper, theCanal Record, was created upon Beeks’s recommendation and became a highly effective part of life on the isthmus, credited with generating a stronger sense of community and solidarity. At Taft’s request, an organizer visited the Zone to create a network of women’s clubs that ultimately affiliated with the General Federation of Women’s Clubs. But perhaps the most important reform of all concerned Jackson Smith.71

  In the summer of 1908, just days after writing his very bitter response to Beeks, Smith was forced to resign. Technically, it was said to be a conflict with Goethals over purchasing orders that led to his departure. But there can be little doubt that the years of protests by employees of all ranks and by unions, especially when reinforced by Beeks’s documentation of the failings of Smith and his office, finally convinced Goethals that he needed to install a new manager.72

  Many of Beeks’s criticisms of government in the Zone, though contested by ICC officials, were backed up by workingmen and workingwomen who suffered as a result and kept a record of their experiences. Mary Chatfield, who left the Zone just before Beeks’s investigation began, found conditions virtually intolerable there and believed Poultney Bigelow’s biting descriptions were closer to the truth by far than the rosy pictures painted by either Arthur Bullard or President Roosevelt. On no point was Chatfield more emphatic than her disgust—which, she declared, was universally shared—with Smith’s handling of housing and food and with his personal style. In letters home to her literary club, Chatfield documented endless evidence of Smith’s corrupt and inappropriate style: inexperienced people promoted because Smith favored them over others, honest men dismissed because they complained to Washington, D.C., about conditions and the complaint got back to Smith, Smith lying to Chatfield herself about a transfer she desired. And above everything else, his management of hotels, dormitories, and mess halls was abominable. When President Roosevelt visited the isthmu
s in November 1906, Chatfield hoped Smith would be relieved of his post. She was disappointed: “This man, whose gross mismanagement of the government eating houses has made misery almost incalculable, has beenadvanced by Pres. Roosevelt; he has been made a member of the ICC and retains what he had.” Months later Chatfield packed her bags to return home, relieved to escape the poor food and bad working conditions in the Zone. Even then, her one thought was of the despised Smith: “Hurrah for the United States! I will soon be there and Jackson Smith does not run the restaurants.”73

  But to Chatfield the problems in the Zone were systemic, not individual. Not only were favoritism and influence peddling widespread, but it seemed that in every office the least experienced person was in charge. Profiteering and graft were pervasive, for there was no other way to explain why everything in the commissaries cost so much or why the food in the mess halls was so bad. Chatfield recited a poem titled “The Grafter’s Version”:

  My country, ’tis of thee,

  Sweet land of jobbery,

  Thou best of jokes!

  I love thy every cove,

  I love each verdant grove,

  But most of all I love

  Thy verdant folks!

  She urged a friend about to visit not to be disappointed as she had been, but to please remember important rules about life in the Zone: “Clear your mind entirely of the idea that the majority of men in high positions here are people to respect and to admire—such are the exception, not the rule.” She had found prejudice toward women to be widespread and believed ICC officials had little respect for the rights of U.S. citizens. If Roosevelt hoped everyone would forget Bigelow’s scandalous charges, Chatfield mentioned his name repeatedly, asserting that what he described was known to everyone on the isthmus. Reading an exposé of the government’s policies in the Philippines, Chatfield observed, “I am glad someone is man enough to talk straight beside Poultney Bigelow.”74 Her perspective on life in the Zone reminds us of the complex challenges faced by advocates like President Roosevelt and by reformers like Beeks. The latter desired to be of help in effecting better and safer conditions in the Zone, but the president’s boosterism would remain an obstacle.

  DESPITE HER battles with Jackson Smith and other ICC officials, Beeks in the end generated improvements in living and working conditions in the Canal Zone, thus helping officials enhance workers’ productivity and discipline. Simultaneously, she tied domestic ideas of progressive social reform more tightly to experiments in state intervention being conducted in the Zone. Her activities and final report were touted in the United States and provided evidence that the science of social reform was alive on the Isthmus of Panama. In this way she helped legitimate the construction project in the eyes of other reformers, journalists, and socialists.

  In 1913, while visiting the Canal Zone, the writer Willis Abbot spoke with a financier from New York City, a man he described as “a banker of the modern type with fingers in a host of industrial enterprises.” The banker was impressed by the “education in collectivism” which the U.S. government was giving to thousands of people in the Canal Zone through its extensive intervention. As the banker described it, “The big thing is the spirit of paternalism, of modern socialism, of governmental parenthood, if you will, which is being engendered and nursed to full strength by Federal control of the Canal. This is no idle dream, and … within three years, it will begin to be felt in the United States.” The thousands of workingmen, he anticipated, would return to the United States ready to demand more extensive state intervention on behalf of working people. This would not be a battle of capital versus labor. It would involve no bombs, but rather a peaceful and irresistible momentum that would force the federal government to take over the public utilities—or perhaps all corporations—and adopt the fine standards of “work, wages and cost of living” as existed in the Canal Zone.75

  Contrary to the imaginings of this banker, no straight line would emerge between the government’s policies in the Zone and socialist utopia in the United States. But his reflections suggest how governmental experiments being carried out to further U.S. ­empire-­building fueled notions that a more powerful state, domestically and internationally, could be a force for scientific efficiency and social justice. As Americans built the canal and sought to create a model civilization in the Canal Zone, their efforts were shaped by values and reform traditions they brought from home. Yet they also confronted a world undergoing tremendous change amid U.S. expansionism. This challenge—the project of creating a “progressivism for the world”—emerged as a new and important theme in America’s ­self-­definition.

  Yet progressivism in the world of the isthmus had significant limitations. As reformers from Bullard to Beeks looked to the Canal Zone to imagine, observe, and apply lessons of social reform, they drew close boundaries around the proper arena in which they and the U.S. government should work. Their concerns focused mainly on the white U.S. citizens in the Zone, and when they did consider southern Europeans and West Indians, they saw them as separate peoples who required lesser standards than those of the more civilized Americans. Beeks focused some attention on the European and West Indian laborers—or at least the men among them—and sought to improve their living conditions, but like other reformers she embraced racial segregation as a natural and desirable approach to maintaining order. Meanwhile, her laboratory for social reform was itself made possible by the support that people just across the boundary line, in the Republic of Panama, provided. The American utopia in the Canal Zone could not exist without the seeming dystopia of Panama. The failure of progressives to acknowledge, much less breach, this boundary line would disrupt life on the Isthmus of Panama in the short run and compromise the reformers’ progressive ideals. In the years to come, such neglect of the wider world would shape the character of the American empire.

  CHAPTER SIX

  _________________

  THE WOMEN’S EMPIRE

  WHEN HER husband went to take a job building the Panama Canal in 1905, Rose Van Hardeveld and her two young daughters left the Wyoming mining town where they had lived for three years and returned to her family’s homestead in western Nebraska. There they would “wait as women have waited since the beginning of time, for the call to join my husband.” After many months she received word that her husband, Jan, had been assigned married quarters in the Canal Zone. She packed up the family’s belongings and dressed Janey and Sister in their best clothes. Heartsick and uneasy, they headed to New York City to catch a ship to Panama. As the ship slowly made its way through the Caribbean, Van Hardeveld read and reread the letters her husband had sent. Then, she remembered, “for the first time I began to picture Panama as ‘home.’ ”1

  Making the Isthmus of Panama feel like home would prove a challenge to Rose Van Hardeveld and many other American women who journeyed there during the construction decade. Like her, most white American women moved to the Canal Zone not for a job but to work as housewives and support the efforts of husbands building the canal. By ­re-­creating the private, domestic realm of the home in the towns of the Zone, American women became central to the U.S. construction project. Their efforts enhanced canal workers’ productivity by making the isthmus more comfortable and soothing—making it feel like “home,” as so many observers noted—helping to keep men away from dissipating evils like saloons and ­red-­light districts, and along the way making the Zone a model of civilization. In the United States at this time women were energetically entering the public sphere, but they still lacked full citizenship, as signified in their continued exclusion from the franchise. Supporting the canal construction project through their homemaking labor allowed these women, even while focused on traditional feminine duties and obligations, to participate in a very public episode of American civilization building.2

  This message was forcefully broadcast by President Roosevelt during his 1906 visit to the isthmus, when he addressed canal employees and their wives: “You are doing the biggest t
hing of the kind that has ever been done. … [I]t is not an easy work. … [I]t is rough on the men and just a little rougher on the women. It has pleased me, particularly, to see, as I have, the wives who have come down here with their husbands, the way in which they have turned in to make the best of everything and to help the men do their work well.” The General Federation of Women’s Clubs similarly highlighted the contributions of white American housewives after the canal had been completed:

  The wives of the civilian employees in their brave efforts to make a semblance of a home in a malarial, ­insect-­infested country, have made it possible for their Government to boast at all times of an efficient force of workers. Without the support and encouragement of their wives these employees would not have remained in the tropics to carry on. … Some day there will be a story written of how these women braved the terrors of the sea, challenged the evil reputation of a tropical country, faced the yellow fever mosquito, the perils of a jungle country, nursed the sick and buried their dead with an unfaltering spirit whose armour could only have been that of inspired fortitude.3