by Julie Greene
Another song recognizes women’s potential power in their relationships with West Indian men, and the role played by negotiations over money and income:
WOMAN A HEAVY LOAD
Woman a heavy load, hi
Woman a heavy load, hi
Woman a heavy load.
O wen Satidey mornin’ com, hi
Wen de money no nuff, hi
Wen de money no nuff, hi
Wen de money no nuff, hi
Wah dem neva go out com back.
Wen de money nuff, hi
Wen de money nuff, hi
Wen de money nuff, hi
Den dey call you honey comb, hi
Wen de money nuff, hi
Why dey call yo sugar stick, hi.
The lyrics declare that if the male singer doesn’t bring enough money home on Saturday morning, his woman or wife will leave and not return.67
This song reflects sources of disagreement between West Indian men and women; sometimes such conflicts prompted men or women to seek justice from the Canal Zone courts. Contrary to American officials’ belief that West Indians eschewed legal marriage ceremonies, there is evidence not only that they married but that they sometimes petitioned the courts for divorce. The dusty judicial records also provide evidence of some women’s determination to behave as they wished. In 1912 a Jamaican canal laborer named Courtney Black sued his wife, Mary, for divorce. They had been married a couple of years earlier in the Zone town of Gatun by a Catholic priest. Now Courtney accused his wife of adultery. He claimed she had lain with a man named Charlie Scott; when he confronted her, she was unrepentant and instead left him for Charlie. Courtney’s brother testified and corroborated the basic story, saying that when he talked to Mary about her behavior, she retorted unapologetically that “her skin was hers to do with as she pleased.” Meanwhile, Mary Black produced a witness who testified she had seen Courtney with another woman. This woman had told Mary about Courtney’s adultery, and in the resulting fight Courtney had beaten his wife, and his paramour had abused her as well. Mary also complained to the court that her husband had ordered her to return home to Jamaica, saying he could not save money with her on the isthmus. Despite Mary’s complaints and the evidence she offered of her husband’s adultery, the Canal Zone courts decided in her husband’s favor, although they ordered that he pay her court costs and $ 10 per month in alimony. The court also ordered that Courtney and Mary Black not marry again so long as the other was alive.68
Relatively few divorce suits involving West Indians exist in the Canal Zone court records, at least as compared with the number involving white Americans. There must have been significant financial, political, and psychological barriers to seeking divorce in the white man’s court. So those West Indians who went to the courts to sue for divorce undoubtedly possessed some resources and education and had perhaps gained experience navigating through the ICC officials’ world. West Indian wives were as likely to sue for divorce as their husbands were. Unlike the suits among white U.S. citizens, West Indian divorce cases never involved charges of desertion. Adultery was a common complaint among West Indian men and women, but equally common were cases in which women sued their husbands for divorce on the grounds of physical violence. A typical case of the latter involved a Martinican woman, Eugenia Peters, who sued her husband, a Trinidadian who worked as a Canal Zone policeman, for divorce on the grounds that he struck and kicked her. Interestingly, as seen above, white American women only very rarely sought a divorce on grounds of violence. The best hope of a white American woman was that a neighbor would complain to Goethals and he would send his investigator over to talk to the man. Fragmentary as the evidence is, existing judicial records suggest that West Indian women were more likely than white American women to seek divorce as a legal solution for domestic violence.69
West Indian women also frequently interacted with the British diplomatic representatives serving on the isthmus. It was the responsibility of such officials to send the dreaded letters to wives or other family members of canal workers killed by workplace accidents or disease. Mrs. Benjamin Knight of Bridgetown, Barbados, for example, received such a letter in September 1906: “I have now to inform you of the very sad death of your husband… . He was crushed by a freight train while crossing a bridge here.” Thomas Knox, the letter’s author, offered to send Mrs. Knight the few belongings and final paycheck due her husband. Knox concluded, “I know how you will feel over this sad news, as you were expecting himself shortly, but you must not despair. Trust in him who is our Creator.” After hearing such news, the wife or sister of a canal worker would need to arrange for the delivery of any possessions of the deceased. Often this took place with no problems or unreasonable delay, but in many other cases West Indian women had to engage in lengthy negotiations with the British consul in order to receive what they believed was due them.70
West Indian women also appealed most often to the British consul—rather than to Goethals—for assistance if they were accused of a crime, facing imprisonment, or mistreated by police. A seamstress named Melvina Ricketts, for example, requested help from the British government when serious misfortune befell her. The troubles began when Ricketts became unable to keep up the payments on her sewing machine. When she refused to pay a debt collector, he called a Panamanian policeman who subsequently robbed and beat her severely. Despite treatment at the hospital, her injuries prevented her from working. By the time she wrote the British consul, the policeman had been arrested for the crime, but Ricketts held little hope of recovering her property. Declaring, “I am a British subject, and as such apply to you for your assistance in this matter,” Ricketts asked for the return of her property and for compensation from the Panamanian government for her inability to work, the expenses she had paid to doctors, and her unjust arrest by the policeman. She concluded, “I am a poor woman, and unable to afford the amount of money which would be requisite for a lawsuit.” It was left to the consul to do what he could or would to help her, although unfortunately no record remains to tell us what became of the petitioner.71 Nonetheless, Ricketts’s insistence on her rights as a British subject reflects West Indian women’s awareness of the British government’s responsibilities to help them in times of need.
WHITE AMERICAN housewives became valued citizens and contributors during the construction of the Panama Canal. By creating homes for their husbands, they proved essential to U.S. government efforts to civilize the isthmus and maintain a stable and relatively content workforce of skilled white North American workers. Yet beneath the celebratory rhetoric regarding women’s civilizing and domesticating mission on the isthmus, there was a more complex reality. Although these women’s lives undoubtedly included moments of great pleasure as they cared for husbands and children and watched the blossoming of social networks across the Canal Zone, they also struggled with disagreeable neighbors and numerous threats to the respectability they craved. For wives who refused to travel to the Canal Zone, life alone in the United States became economically difficult, and they faced demands from their husbands—supported by the Canal Zone courts—that they rethink their decision. Those working-class housewives who uprooted their lives and moved to the Zone found themselves confronting boundaries that separated them from the worlds inhabited by men, more elite women, and especially the women of color who made their very mission as civilizers and homemakers possible.
Indeed, a great part of the challenge of tropical housekeeping involved complicated negotiations with the West Indian and Panamanian women whom white housewives depended on and yet disliked and disdained. While West Indian women seemed unknowable to white American housewives, they proved strategic at crafting a life to their liking, either through skilled negotiations with their employers or by exercising their ability to move on to better conditions.
Different as their lives were in many respects, American and West Indian women both found themselves interacting at times with government representatives. West Indians called upon the
British consul or, less often, the Canal Zone courts. U.S. housewives complained to Goethals, who then sent his peripatetic inspector, T. B. Miskimon, to investigate and determine a solution. Although the ICC provided them with many comforts, at other times it seemed unfair, lacking in crucial supplies and unwilling to take action in cases of domestic violence. Government officials often considered women’s problems small and unimportant. When issues normally deemed domestic and private began to loom as barriers to full labor productivity, however, officials’ perspective abruptly changed. An exploration of law, order, and punishment in the Canal Zone reveals how and when “women’s issues” could become urgent matters requiring aggressive and efficient state intervention.
CHAPTER SEVEN
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LAW AND ORDER
A WEST INDIAN man named Adolphus Coulson had been living and working in the Canal Zone for nearly two years when a personal problem led him to commit murder. He had been sharing a home and bed with another woman when his wife unexpectedly arrived from Barbados one December day in 1906. Coulson immediately acquired a new place for himself and his wife, but he continued to see his mistress. His wife, Mariana, complained vociferously about these visits, even soliciting the help of a policeman to make her husband leave the woman and return to their home. After a few weeks of this, Mariana suddenly became violently ill. She told a doctor that her husband had recently given her medicine in the form of a powder, and the next day she died. An autopsy showed that she had ingested more than twelve grains of arsenic. Adolphus Coulson confessed to having murdered her, and the Second Judicial Court of the Canal Zone sentenced him to death by hanging. But his case wasn’t finished yet, and it would end up as one of the most important in the history of the Canal Zone.
Coulson appealed the decision on the grounds that his trial violated the U.S. Constitution, since he had requested a jury trial and was refused. His lawyers argued that Coulson’s trial violated the Fifth and Sixth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, which guaranteed due process of law and the right to an impartial jury. The case went to the Supreme Court of the Canal Zone, where judges upheld the earlier decision. They denied that Coulson had a right to a jury trial by referencing the Canal Zone’s status as a part of the American empire. The judges cited the Insular Cases of 1901 to 1904, recently handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court, which had established a legal foundation for America’s empire by declaring, in essence, that the Constitution does not follow the flag. In the 1904 case Dorr v. the United States, for example, the Supreme Court held that residents of the Philippines did not possess a right to a jury trial. Citing these precedents, the Supreme Court judges of the Canal Zone declared that the power of the United States to acquire territory included the ability “to prescribe upon what terms the United States will receive its inhabitants, and what their status shall be in … [the] ‘American Empire.’ ”1
Coulson’s case therefore raised complex questions regarding the relevance of the U.S. Constitution in the Canal Zone and the legal status of its residents. ICC officials adamantly wanted to avoid jury trials because they felt putting canal workers on juries would compromise the productivity of the construction project. They also claimed that racial divisions on the isthmus would make it impossible to find an impartial jury—whites would not accept blacks on their juries, and blacks would similarly distrust the judgment of whites. Yet to some, it was not a simple matter to abrogate the rights of Canal Zone residents, particularly since they included several thousand U.S. citizens. A delegation of U.S. congressmen happened to be visiting when the Canal Zone Supreme Court decided Coulson’s case. Two of the congressmen, known as “sticklers for the rights of the Constitution,” hired a Boston lawyer to take Coulson’s case to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The day before his scheduled execution in late 1907, Coulson won a temporary reprieve when the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to consider his case. In November 1908, however, the Court refused to overturn the Insular Cases and held that the Canal Zone lay outside its jurisdiction. The U.S. Constitution would not apply in the Zone. During the months of waiting for the Supreme Court justices to issue their decision in this case, however, some people had urged President Roosevelt to take matters into his own hands. Joseph Blackburn, the head of civil administration in the Canal Zone, reportedly argued to Roosevelt that refusing U.S. citizens their constitutional right to a jury trial was “repugnant to American ideas of justice.” Ultimately, Roosevelt agreed, and in an executive order issued in February 1908 he extended the right to a jury trial in capital cases to the Canal Zone. This allowed him, in a sense, to have his cake and eat it, too—he preserved the rights of Zone residents to a jury trial while protecting the legal ruling that the Constitution did not apply in the American empire. The executive order was too late to help Adolphus Coulson, however, and he was hanged in the Canal Zone penitentiary at Culebra on March 12, 1909.2
Coulson’s case reflects the Canal Zone’s ambiguous position within the U.S. empire. It also reveals that as a last resort the ICC had numerous judicial strategies for maintaining order in the Zone. Over the years a social and political machine had been built in the Zone, one designed to subordinate everything to the canal construction project. Tools like the silver and gold system, labor spies, Goethals’s paternalism, and the importation of white and West Indian women and children were used to try to subdue, comfort, and discipline the population. Yet each of these strategies generated new sources of discontent and rebellion. When disorder grew serious enough that it threatened the construction project itself, ICC officials intervened more extensively by creating laws, courts, and prisons that could punish unacceptable behavior. Officials believed this was important not only for maintaining labor discipline but for generating the boundaries of proper moral and social behavior in a civilized territory like the U.S.-occupied Canal Zone. The judicial and prison systems in the Zone were constructed to play this dual but critical role—to discipline and maximize the productivity of Canal Zone residents and to maintain social and moral order.
The Canal Zone’s legal system was shaped by a remarkable amalgam of diverse legal and national cultures. Its courts borrowed as heavily from Colombian and Panamanian law as from U.S. legal traditions, somewhat ironically, given that ICC officials struggled painstakingly to make the Canal Zone seem an outpost of American civilization and to distinguish it in every possible way from the Republic of Panama. In fact, however, the Zone’s judicial system reflects how expansionist activity pushed the United States into a realm where diverse nation-states exercised influence. The colonial experiments undertaken in the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Cuba in the aftermath of the War of 1898 powerfully carved the contours of law and order in the Zone as well. The new possessions of the United States generated ideological and legal tensions between the rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution and the need to rule effectively over foreign populations.
The Canal Zone fit into this larger debate over empire and the Constitution because it was seen as one of the finest examples of the new world leadership being promulgated by the United States. Expansionists believed that the Zone, as part of the American empire, should be treated differently from the United States proper. Yet the more officials worked to make the Zone feel like home, like a bit of American civilization in the tropics, the less effective this argument proved to be. As more and more U.S. citizens made the move to the Zone, first to work on the canal and then to join husbands and fathers already there, the more troubling it seemed to ignore their constitutional rights. Unlike Filipinos or Puerto Ricans, U.S. citizens in the Zone and their supporters at home could clamor for protection of their rights. They might not always see those rights protected—indeed, their rights were often limited in ways that would have been unconstitutional in the United States—but they assertively raised the issue and shaped the debate. Sometimes, as when President Roosevelt responded to the Adolphus Coulson case by guaranteeing the right of Canal Zone residents to a jury trial in c
apital cases, they saw those rights protected.
“THE CONSTITUTION FOLLOWS THE FLAG, BUT IT DOES NOT CATCH UP WITH IT”
The legal basis of U.S. power in the Canal Zone derived from the Hay–Bunau–Varilla Treaty of 1903, particularly Article 3 of the treaty, which declared that Panama “grants to the United States all the rights, power and authority within the zone … which the United States would possess and exercise if it were the sovereign of the territory,” rights and powers that were granted in perpetuity. In 1907 the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed that the territory of the Canal Zone belonged to the United States and that the U.S. government did have the right to exercise its power there and build the canal.3 To ensure discipline and social order, the ICC created a judicial system that ranged from municipal and circuit courts up to the Zone’s Supreme Court. The courts were not independent, like their counterparts in the United States, but formed one part of the executive branch of government in the Zone. The principle of separation of powers, the bedrock of constitutional government in the United States, did not apply in the Canal Zone. In legal terms this meant the Zone courts were not constitutional but merely legislative. They lacked important powers such as the right of judicial review.
The ICC divided the isthmus into three circuit courts, with the judge who presided over each serving also on the Canal Zone Supreme Court. Three judges would hear cases appealed to the Supreme Court, one of whom had already passed judgment on the case. Even this seemed an abundance of courts and judges to some observers during the early months of U.S. occupation. As he contemplated the Zone’s legal environment in 1904, William Howard Taft argued the government had gone overboard: “All judges in excess of one will have nothing to do. These people do not seem to be litigious. So far they have shown themselves to be very tractable.” He acknowledged that more criminal and civil cases would arise once the population increased as the construction project got under way. Yet Taft believed that even if the population rose as high as 50,000, “probably not more than 2,500 of them will be Americans of the white race.” He knew most would be unskilled workers from outside the United States since it would not be possible or acceptable for white American citizens to do heavy labor in the tropics. Taft failed to recognize how important the courts would be for maintaining order not only among white Americans but among all residents of the Zone. Over time he discovered his expectations to have been unrealistic, as the courts proved extremely busy in the years to come.4