by Julie Greene
Van Hardeveld brightened at the sight of a beautiful sunset or a viewing of Culebra Cut, both of which served as reminders of the grand patriotic adventure in which she and her husband were engaged. Yet in the early days conditions were so difficult, her life so lonely and isolated, respite and recreation so rare, that often her discomfort gave way to bouts of what she called hysteria. Her worst moment came when Sister caught malaria and the doctor feared they would need to move her to the hospital in Ancon. Van Hardeveld tried to give her daughter quinine, but the girl could not keep it down. In desperation one night she left the house with her other daughter and walked to the nearby creek, where she “gave way to old-fashioned screaming hysterics. … Poor little Janey clung to me, her frightened eyes searching mine for the cause of such carryings on.” Giving vent to her feelings seemed to help, and she returned home stronger and calmer. She realized to her surprise that relief could come from wailing and, when she recalled this moment later, for once did not refer to West Indians as “Fuzzy-Wuzzies”: “Though for me, such yielding to hysteria was a matter for private shame, never to be regarded as an accepted social custom, I could concede to the black people whatever gratification they might find in that way.”21
During these early days on the isthmus, Van Hardeveld confronted her fears that life in the tropics would require a decline into disorder and chaos, a forgetting of civilized ways. She passed the home of a woman who was obviously American and yet had taut yellow skin; the woman’s children ran about with distended abdomens and knobby knees. “Oh, dear! I thought, as I looked at my round-cheeked rosy babies. I wonder how long it will be until we look like that?” Attending a party filled with West Indians and Panamanians, at which she was the only white woman, Van Hardeveld worried that “living among this hodge-podge of humanity whose ideas and customs were so different and unfamiliar” would be harmful, especially to her children.22 She felt particularly concerned on this occasion about the “vulgar and suggestive” dancing of the women. She thought to herself: “Here is where influence makes history, and as far as in me lies my influence shall be for home and decency.”23
Nonetheless, slowly, painstakingly, Van Hardeveld seemed to relax amid the exotic culture of the isthmus as she realized that she and other Americans were succeeding in domesticating their environment. The dry season arrived and made all of life easier. As Gorgas curbed the incidence of yellow fever and malaria, Van Hardeveld heard less wailing in the labor camp. She found servants she felt were more suitable, Jamaicans who had been trained by the British and who therefore, she believed, understood civilized ways. And as life improved, Van Hardeveld found her reactions to unusual customs on the isthmus changing: “Where before I had been concerned with the need to re-establish our American way of life here in this foreign land, I now found delight in its very foreignness.” She began to learn lessons and even find inspiration from the women of color on the isthmus, although she still saw them as exotic beings and identified them with the natural world around her. Van Hardeveld began to enjoy exploring the jungle, finding her “spirits soaring skyward” one day as she followed the trail more deeply into the wilderness. She crossed a stream, and the trail began heading uphill. “Suddenly as though she had dropped from the treetops, a woman was in the path just ahead.” They smiled at each other. Van Hardeveld described the native woman as lovely and slender with brown skin. The woman gestured to Van Hardeveld to follow and led her to a small hut. “ ‘A good chance to see how my brown sister keeps house,’ thought I.” The woman showed her around and offered her water and cacao seeds. Van Hardeveld returned home feeling her “communion with nature” had refreshed and enriched her.24
The holidays provided her with a chance to show off her homemaking skills and to share her family’s domestic life with bachelor Zone workers. She invited all the “unattached white men” to join them for Christmas dinner. The commissary at Empire stocked obvious Christmas fixings like cranberries and canned mincemeat. Since her dinner would include several doctors from the hospital, Van Hardeveld arranged for the giant stuffed turkey to be cooked in the huge ovens of the hospital. She had worried that her daughters wouldn’t experience a true Christmas, for she had managed to buy little for them as gifts. But each of the men brought a gift for her girls, and soon the house was filled with ivory napkin rings and an array of dolls. The Van Hardevelds used boards and boxes to create a table large enough for all, and while they had little silver or linen and not nearly enough dishes, yet “there was American food, and how these fellows did eat!”
As Van Hardeveld and her servants ran up and down the hill to the hospital to get extra dishes and supplies, the male guests played with her children. “Some of them got down on the floor and helped with naming and putting to bed of all the new babies. Home-hungry and heart-hungry men they were.” Then they sat down to a delicious dinner, and the table was “uproarious with talk and laughter. Nobody talked of the work. They just talked and laughed and ate. The day was glorious, bright and sunny and not too hot because of a delightful breeze that blew onto the veranda. The white blossoms from our lime tree sent waves of sweet perfume through the house.”25
Yet even in this moment of domestic triumph, the anxieties of empire did not disappear. Van Hardeveld had hoped to decorate the table with bananas from their own trees, for that “would be something to write about to the folks in western Nebraska.” But they found the tree bare of bananas and assumed their servants had come and stolen them during the night. As the family and a few guests sat on the porch after dinner, watching as nighttime fell, they heard a commotion and saw a group of “dusky” figures headed up the hill toward their home. They wondered what the group had come to steal. Seeing the men carrying sticks and pipes, they began to suspect impending violence. As Van Hardeveld considered what she should do, suddenly the group of men clustered together and began singing Christmas carols to her family. Using the sticks and pipes as instruments, the West Indians burst into “Silent Night” and “God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen.” Van Hardeveld was touched and relieved. Yet she could hardly bear the flat tones of their singing. Her husband bounced down the stairs, thanked the carolers, and handed out coins before ushering them away. While the fine Christmas dinner allowed Van Hardeveld to feel they had transplanted America to the isthmus and created a home for bachelor friends, the carolers helped her remember that “we were still in the tropics after all.”26
Rose Van Hardeveld was one of the first white American women to arrive in the Canal Zone, so the conditions she faced were undoubtedly rougher than for many who followed. Yet those who came later shared important aspects of her experiences. Elizabeth Parker, the young woman who came to the Canal Zone to marry her fiancé, Charlie, was even more dependent on her servants—perhaps because she was a newlywed. A West Indian boy appeared early that first full day on the isthmus to take Elizabeth’s grocery orders. Her husband had also hired a girl named Sarah who arrived with her hair neatly braided into many tiny pigtails, wearing a starched dress and fresh white apron. Sarah showed her mistress how to work the iron stove in the kitchen and explained how to manage shopping and housekeeping chores in the Canal Zone.
Yet like Van Hardeveld, Elizabeth Parker found that managing servants proved one of her greatest trials. Sarah couldn’t cook, she used Parker’s best Irish linen napkins as cleaning cloths, and she ruined a silver coffeepot Parker had received as a wedding gift. When Parker struggled to throw an elegant dinner party for her husband’s boss, Jackson Smith, she hired Sarah’s five-year-old brother as a butler, and the boy spilled a tray of martinis over her guests. That same evening Sarah, who could not read, served fish that had been cooked in cleaning rather than vegetable oil. Sarah never returned to work after that incident, and when Parker sought to replace her, she found it difficult. Next came a series of servants who lasted only a few days.27
Parker commiserated with a neighbor about what she called her “Battle of the Maids and Houseboys.”
The neighbor declared, regarding her own struggles with West Indian maids, “They seem so stupid, but when I tried to do without one, I decided they weren’t so dumb after all. We have to realize they’ve never seen the inside of a civilized home before. They’ve always cooked on charcoal braziers, washed their clothes in the river, and used gourds for dishes.” Parker struggled along, and when she found a servant she deemed competent, the isthmus at last became a home for her and her husband. Julius had migrated from British Guiana, where he had been trained by a British family. He was an excellent cook, and he worked energetically and eagerly. Julius became a regular part of their household until finally, years later, he achieved his dream and moved to the United States.28
Parker worked hard to conquer the challenges of tropical housekeeping. One day, after indulging in self-pity as she struggled to start a fire without help from a servant, she began scolding herself: “What did I think I was—a Dresden figurine to be put up on a shelf? No, I was a housewife! A housewife with a college degree and, while the degree wasn’t in domestic science, I was supposed to have a trained mind.” While many a wife grew disgusted with conditions and fled home to the United States, Parker remained entertained by the challenges, she told her friends, even if she complained privately to her husband. She also relied heavily on other white American housewives for companionship and advice, just as Van Hardeveld had. Her friends showed her how to develop a standing order for the commissary so she’d receive a different meat each day, how to keep tinned food and butter in the house at all times in case her commissary order didn’t come through or her husband unexpectedly brought company home for dinner, and how to make meat go far if she didn’t have enough—or if necessary buy some fish from the Martinican vendor who came regularly by her home.29 Parker learned to keep sugar in the icebox and put table legs in oil, and if ants were on the cake when company came, she would calmly tap the dish and allow the ants to run away before serving a slice.30
Gradually, more American women moved to the Zone. By 1909 they had created a larger social network and encouraged the government to find ways of making their lives more comfortable. Commissaries began by selling a greater diversity of goods, catering more successfully to women with hand-embroidered petticoats, fine linens, fancy dishes, fabric, and hats. It was said that buying such items became a preoccupation for some women, who would set them aside to take home to the United States, thereby accumulating fine goods that might have taken a lifetime to afford back home.31 As the commissaries became more pleasant, they became a central rendezvous point for housewives eager to see their friends. A traveler visiting the commissary watched “the numerous young matrons with delightful babies and small children, all in pretty summer afternoon array, who made their purchases and then remained to chat with friends, or strolled around the neighborhood, waiting probably for the train which would bring the husbands and fathers home from their work.”32 Those babies and small children provided perhaps the surest evidence that “civilization” had arrived in the Zone. By 1912, as the population of the Zone grew, the maternity wards at Ancon and Colón hospitals filled up, and young mothers met to compare notes on formulas and remedies for teething pain. That year the ICC census listed the number of white children under six years of age living in the Canal Zone who had been born in ICC hospitals at more than thirteen hundred.33
By the end of the construction period in 1914, an active social life beckoned to American families in the Canal Zone. The government organized dances every Saturday night at the Hotel Tivoli. Residents of the Zone as well as visitors, whether ordinary tourists or congressional delegations, typically donned their finest garments to attend. The dances quickly became a central part of the Zone’s social scene. Churches, including Catholic, Episcopal, and Protestant ones, were active and well attended. The YMCA clubhouses, though they offered membership only to men, established weekly open hours when women might attend. Women and men created literary clubs and musical societies. The ICC arranged for musical groups, theater companies, lecturers, and minstrel shows to visit the Zone. As each town organized baseball teams, games became common events, and women were encouraged to attend. Invariably, a group of women in white summery dresses could be seen at games, cheering on their team. Families took occasional excursions to tourist spots like Taboga Island and visited the canal construction sites regularly—in part to inculcate in children the patriotic virtues of the project.34
Recreation had been one of Gertrude Beeks’s top concerns when she visited the Canal Zone in 1907. She believed that the scarcity of recreation, particularly on Sundays, was harmful to the men, women, and children of the Zone. Many of her suggestions, such as her idea that the government might build an amusement park modeled on Coney Island, were ignored. But government officials seem to have taken to heart her critique that American housewives in the Zone were suffering from isolation, monotony, and boredom. To address this, Beeks urged the government to send an organizer from the General Federation of Women’s Clubs to create a system of clubs throughout the Zone, and Secretary of War Taft readily acted upon her suggestion.35
Beeks chose her good friend Helen Varick Boswell to organize the women’s clubs. Born in 1869 in Baltimore, Boswell received a law degree in 1902, a rare achievement for a woman in those days. By 1907 she had gained extensive experience as an organizer for the Republican Party, especially in the state of New York. She was also an active member of the Welfare Department of the National Civic Federation, the Daughters of the American Revolution, and the General Federation of Women’s Clubs.36 She would spend nearly a month in the Canal Zone, arriving in September 1907, her expenses and salary paid by the ICC. Rheta Childe Dorr, writing inWhat Eight Million Women Want in 1910, described Boswell’s mission in the following way: “The United States Government asked the co-operation of the women’s clubs to save the precarious Panama situation. At a moment when social discontent threatened literally to stop the building of the canal, the Department of Commerce and Labor employed Miss Helen Varick Boswell, of New York, to go to the Isthmus and organize the wives and daughters of Government employees into clubs. The Department knew that the clubs, once organized, would do the rest. Nor was it disappointed.”37 As Dorr’s comments suggest, the creation of women’s clubs became another opportunity to celebrate American housewives’ contributions to improving the Zone’s social environment and thereby assist in the canal’s construction.
Once she arrived in the Zone, Boswell outlined to interested women how a network of clubs might benefit them. It would bring women together, promote social feeling among them, make it possible for them to play a role in municipal government, and provide classes in subjects like Spanish and home economics. She noted that women were already proving a major positive influence in the Zone. And so she began organizing. Largely retracing Beeks’s steps across the isthmus, she found some women anxious for the clubs to succeed. Yet she also encountered obstacles, including a significant elitism among officials’ wives. The club movement sought, among other things, to bring women of different class backgrounds together, to unite in one organization wives of steam-shovel men and wives of leading officials. But Boswell found that the more respectable wives had no desire to unite with their working-class counterparts. She observed to Beeks, “There is rather more snobbishness here than elsewhere,” and she worked overtime to convince prestigious women like Mrs. Gorgas and Mrs. Goethals to become involved. When finally the latter signed on as president of the federation, other officials’ wives decided to participate. By early October 1907, when she departed for the United States, Boswell reported that she had established clubs in Culebra, Empire, Gorgona, Cristobal, Gatun, Ancon, and Pedro Miguel, and in a few smaller towns. Nonetheless, like its counterpart in the United States, the club movement of the Canal Zone remained predominantly a world of middle- and upper-middle-class white women. In the years to come, club leaders would continue to exhort members not to exclude working-class wives.38
Clubs presented regular lectures for the enlightenment of members, on topics ranging from horticulture and homemaking challenges (such as the elimination of insects) to the sociology of community development and the culture of Japan. Members visited hospitals to cheer up recovering male patients and attended classes to study Spanish or literary topics (one club tackled the plays of Shakespeare, for example). Back home, charitable work among the poor and efforts to achieve reform became a focus for many clubs, but in the Canal Zone white women focused virtually no attention on improving the lives of West Indians or southern Europeans because they felt their actions might be seen as a critique of the U.S. government.41 Unsurprisingly, given that government officials had initiated it, the women’s club movement focused much energy on serving as a cultural ambassador and all-around booster of the U.S. government’s work on the isthmus. Its goals included projecting a positive image for the benefit of Americans at home as well as foreigners abroad. The clubs throughout the isthmus agreed, according to one report, that “women should unite in fostering favorable instead of adverse criticism of conditions in the Zone.”42 The Canal Zone’s women’s club movement lasted only six years; in 1913 it was disbanded as the canal neared completion. During that time club members contributed to publicizing the role of U.S. women as a visible and honored part of the canal construction project and meanwhile helped the isthmus feel more like “home.”