by Julie Greene
Government officials saw gambling, on the other hand, as a vice they should eliminate altogether. They didn’t like to talk about it, but gambling was endemic throughout the Zone, particularly in dormitories occupied by single American workingmen. Poker games abounded during workers’ leisure hours, and it proved extremely difficult for police to tell whether any of those games involved money bets. Undercover policemen circulated among the workers to try to catch someone wagering in a poker game, craps, or roulette. The police and judges were particularly eager to catch men running games for profit, and prosecutions were common for such behavior. In one of the earliest such cases, in 1905, a man named Charles Christian was found guilty of running a roulette table. The court fined him $ 100and sentenced him to thirty days in jail. Christian countered, however, that the Republic of Panama had granted him a concession to run his gambling operation and that, in any case, the Canal Zone had no law against it. The court held that it had the right to punish gamblers, but due to the confusion over jurisdiction it agreed to waive Christian’s thirty days in jail. In succeeding cases, gamblers might be sentenced to anything from one day to three months in jail, with the difference in sentence usually depending on the race and ethnicity of those accused.38
Regulating sexuality was considered by government officials a far more complicated problem. Officials created multifaceted policies they hoped would ensure clean living and decency, even as they depended on the accessibility of prostitution in the port cities of Panama. Nurses working in Zone hospitals, for example, found their lives carefully monitored and their social activities restricted. Louise Bidwell, who worked as a nurse at Ancon Hospital, recalled that nurses were required to inform the head nurse if they desired even to miss a meal. They had a curfew of 10: 30p.m. and were not allowed to travel beyond Panama City. Women working as stenographers or in other clerical positions seem not to have been subject to such regulations. Nurses, as a symbol of respectability and as representatives of the Zone government, required more careful monitoring.39
Men who took or showed pictures of women partially clothed or dressed in bathing suits were investigated for indecency (although the investigator in charge noted that more revealing photographs were readily available for sale in Colón or Panama City).40 People living in the government’s married quarters for white Americans risked being reported to Goethals by neighbors if they engaged in adultery, and then an investigation—and possible dismissals, evictions, or both—would result. Thus a locomotive engineer named O’Neill, for example, left his wife and took up with another married woman. After the husband of O’Neill’s mistress complained, Goethals’s investigator assessed the situation. O’Neill wound up losing his job and being barred from further employment in the Zone. Judging from the reports of Goethals’s investigator, it appears that only white Americans, not Europeans or West Indians, went to Goethals with charges of adultery.41
When the courts got involved in cases of adultery, it was usually because West Indians, not white Americans, went to the courts to accuse a husband or wife. Whites were reluctant to rely on the judicial system, but West Indians perhaps saw it as less damaging because guilty parties would typically not lose their jobs but only be sentenced at most to a day or two of jail or a $ 10fine. West Indians did not always get off so easily, however. James Peart, a canal worker from Jamaica, was accused by his brother-in-law of living with a woman in the Zone even though he had a wife back in Jamaica. The court found Peart guilty and sentenced him to three months in prison.42
Occasionally the boundaries between adultery and prostitution were difficult to discern. One such case reached the Canal Zone Supreme Court in 1908. A man named James McFarlane, who had once worked as a Zone policeman, rose from his couch one morning and asked his wife to give him their savings of $ 315. He said he wanted to go into Panama to buy some supplies. He headed to the train station in Culebra and gave the $ 315to a Jamaican woman named Mary Cooper. McFarlane testified that he was simply giving Cooper the money to hold for him until he returned. Cooper told a different story. She testified that McFarlane had paid attention to her for some time and had sought to have sex with her, and that because of his attentions she had been beaten by her husband, Dennis Cooper. McFarlane demanded that she rent a house where they could be together, she said, and that if she refused he would “dye her husband with blood.” They did have sex, she said, and he had given her money as payment for this act. She in turn had passed the $ 315on to her husband, and upon learning this, McFarlane had forced Cooper to return the money to him.
The question facing the court was this: Had the money been taken wrongfully from Dennis Cooper? The court found that McFarlane’s story was not believable, declaring, “The story he narrates raises a question of the insane asylum or the penitentiary for him.” The judges found Mary’s story more probable. They concluded, “The red light of lust illumines this case. A lecherous James and a pulchritudinous Mary, utterly destroy the tissue of falsehoods on which this case is built.” Citing the civil code of Panama, the judges held that the husband, Dennis Cooper, was not liable to McFarlane for any money his wife had received from him. And thus the $ 315was ordered returned to Dennis Cooper.43
If adultery and prostitution were murky areas for officials to navigate, cohabitation outside the boundaries of marriage likewise troubled them. They could agree in theory that it was bad and immoral. But how bad? They could not decide how strenuously to police the problem or how severely to punish offenders. In 1905, Canal Zone governor Charles Magoon ordered punishment of any man and woman living together without being legally married. Anyone sharing a room and bed would be fined a maximum of $ 25and thirty days in jail. If the guilty parties married before their case went to trial, they would not be prosecuted. ICC officials devised this law with hopes of nudging West Indian couples, who often lived together without a marriage certificate, to undergo the formal ceremony. Over time, however, officials recognized that expecting all West Indians to marry was unfeasible, and they decided to turn a blind eye to the common practice. To their surprise, meanwhile, cohabitation by white American canal workers proved a more difficult problem, especially since it often involved women of color from the West Indies or Panama.
It is difficult to know how often canal employees engaged in interracial relationships, but popular accounts of the canal construction suggest that it was not uncommon. John Hall, a poet who published a book devoted to the “roughneck” workers of the Zone in 1912, noted the trend. His poem about a steam-shovel engineer, reminiscent in some ways of the African American “John Henry” ballad, added the twist of romance between a skilled white worker and a Panamanian woman. The poem depicted Bill Hicks, a steam-shovel man known for his power:
The “huskies” swore “Bill” was a wonder;
A marvel of skill in his line.
He’d swear by the clock as he loaded the rock
That he’d “rather pull levers than dine.”
Bill, however, hates women and loves only his steam shovel. Until one day, that is, when a Panamanian woman named Juancita comes to watch the steam-shovel engineers:
The little brown “spick” gazed in wonder
Such sights she ne’er had beheld.
Her gaze fell on “Bill,” and he felt a great thrill,
but his case-hardened spirit rebelled.
Bill and Juancita soon fall in love. Bill acquires a nickname and is known to all his friends as “Spickety Bill,” because of his love for a Panamanian. According to the song, he and his gal remain together until an explosion in Culebra Cut ends his life. Then Juancita can be seen shedding tears at the spot where he died.44
ICC officials seem not to have taken strenuous action against interracial relationships until near the end of the construction era. In 1913, however, Goethals ordered investigations into several cases. One involved a locomotive engineer who was living with a light-colored Panamanian woman and their three-year-old daughter in Panama City whi
le working for the ICC. The man, whose name was Frank Day, explained to the inspector that he had a wife at home in the United States in an insane asylum or otherwise would marry the Panamanian woman. Another locomotive engineer living with a Panamanian woman explained he thought it better to live with her than to frequent the houses of ill repute in Cocoa Grove. The response of Oscar Hayes, a white canal worker living with a woman in Panama City, was the most provocative: he declined, the inspector reported, “to state whether he is married to her or not; he says that he pays the house rent, and does not think it is anybody’s business. That he gives the commission 9hours first class service every day, and thinks that is all that is required of him, and he does not want anyone to pry into his private affairs.”45
Despite Hayes’s protests regarding his privacy, government officials saw this as an important public issue. Yet most men living with women of color were doing so on Panamanian soil, not in the Canal Zone, so the U.S. government had little power to change their behavior. Instead, officials sought help from the Panamanian police. If Panama had a law against cohabitation, officials thought, then perhaps they could eliminate or at least discourage such offenses. But this strategy failed as well when the Panamanian chief of police informed the Zone police that “no law is violated and that on account of the quietness observed, and secrecy attempted, it is in no way conducive to disorder or breach of the peace.” Since the Republic of Panama would not punish the men, ICC officials decided instead to discharge them the next time the supervisor reduced the working force.46
Soon several of the men cohabiting with women of color lost their jobs through force reduction and left the isthmus, including Oscar Hayes and Frank Day. Several others continued living with women in Panama. Commissioner H. H. Rousseau called these remaining men into his office for a conversation in early December 1913. Afterward he felt more empathy for their situation and reported to Goethals: “After taking their side of the matter into consideration … it does not appear to me that there are any facts or occurrence remaining unsettled at the present time which would warrant discharge.” Rousseau warned the men, however, “that they are expected to conduct themselves outside working hours in a manner that is not detrimental to the Isthmian service as a whole, and that if they do not do so they will have to accept the consequences.” The bureaucrats of the Canal Zone agreed with Rousseau’s strategy. Another official commented, “While the moral calibre of these men is apparently below par, are they any worse than the men who make a practice of frequenting the dives in Panama and Colón? Without going into any detail it would seem that the single men on the Isthmus are in a somewhat peculiar position as regards sexual intercourse.”47
Indeed. Officials believed single men required sexual partners, but they wanted no prostitution in the Canal Zone. Yet U.S. government officials found it impossible to create an impermeable border between the Zone and the world of Panama. The perceived immorality of Panama found its way into the Zone, and officials carefully policed the Zone to try to eliminate any houses of prostitution, wandering women “of ill repute,” or pimping. Goethals’s investigators kept an eye out for prostitutes on the trains and streets, reporting any who appeared and escorting them out of the Zone and back into Panama. Likewise, they investigated charges that white slavery existed in the port cities of Panama. In 1908an American woman running a boardinghouse in Panama City charged that white American girls under the age of twenty-two were working as prostitutes in Colón. Goethals sent an investigator to canvass every house of prostitution in Colón and Panama City. The investigator reported that he had found only one “white slave,” a girl named Rosa Goodwin who claimed to be nineteen. She had come to the Canal Zone from Arkansas via New Orleans along with a Memphis girl, who had since married a dredge captain and no longer worked as a prostitute. The investigator noted that Rosa and her friend had caused more than a little comment because of their drunken behavior and especially their young age: “The rest of them in this town have passed the girlhood stage some time past.” But he confirmed that Rosa was not being held against her will.48
After the U.S. Congress passed the Mann Act in 1910, also known as the “white-slave act,” which outlawed forced prostitution and the interstate transportation of females toward that end, the ICC’s Department of Civil Administration became more vigilant. M. H. Thatcher, the department’s head, ordered policemen to watch trains and ships entering the isthmus for women being transported through Canal Zone territory to the port cities of Panama or other foreign soil for “immoral purposes.” Two men and one woman were arrested and sentenced to one or two years’ hard labor in the penitentiary for violating the Mann Act. These became the first successful prosecutions for white-slave trafficking. Thatcher saluted the Zone policemen in his annual report for 1912for thus clearing the Zone of “dealers, vicious prostitutes, and other undesirables.”49
Unfortunately the problem was not so easily resolved. Although prostitution rarely received mention in the annual reports of the ICC, concerns were repeatedly voiced over the years not only about prostitutes traveling through the Zone but about canal employees commingling with them. The Zone investigator T. B. Miskimon alerted his superiors in 1909when a member of the ICC band was seen sitting next to a known prostitute on a train in the Canal Zone: “To my knowledge he sat in the same seat with the woman as far as Culebra, and I suppose entertained her as far as Panama. The fact of this man being in the uniform of the band, and accompanying such a woman, caused considerable comment. The woman, at times, amused herself flirting with the different passengers.”50 Residents persistently complained to Goethals about policemen, including leaders of the force, patronizing prostitutes. One man complained about two Jamaican prostitutes who regularly had policemen, including a sergeant, as clients: “We who are on the Zone and try to support the decent notions of society, who in our best efforts try to protect our wives and families from all knowledge and contact with such characters, are requesting that these women be prosecuted and removed.” The police sergeant in particular had been seen caressing a prostitute in public: “This officer is supposed to protect the tenets of the law. He breaks them. He openly encourages these women and parades in the company of one of them before the white women of Bas Obispo.” This case went to municipal court, but the judge dismissed it for lack of sufficient evidence.51
By 1913a similar case indicated that officials had grown more determined to rid themselves of prostitutes. The town of Gorgona acquired over the years a special fame as a center of prostitution in the Zone. Residents complained about police and canal employees frequenting prostitutes. Police established surveillance in the area and determined that several women from Jamaica and St. Lucia were seeing white American canal workers. U.S. officials decided they lacked evidence to press charges. Instead, they called the offending men in and informed them they must cease visiting such houses if they wanted to keep working for the ICC. Then they deported the suspected prostitutes, citing their “general reputation and bad conduct.”52
Male canal employees who sought comfort from other men or from boys were also a problem for government officials, police, and judges. The relatively low number of such cases in the judicial records of the Canal Zone leads one to speculate that homosexual activity usually remained discreet, unobserved, and therefore tolerated. There is no evidence, as there is in the case of prostitution or cohabitation, that the police set up surveillance or otherwise attempted to catch men in the act. Instead, there exist merely a handful of complaints by men or boys alleging they were assaulted, or cases where suspicious sounds led police to come upon men who failed to exercise discretion. Such was the case, for example, of the canal employee John O’Brien and a West Indian boy named Granville Rees.
Rees lived with his mother in Colón and worked as an office boy for a lawyer there. He met John O’Brien one day as they both walked along the main street of Colón. O’Brien invited Rees to his room in the single men’s dormitory in Cristobal, took him to his b
ed, and hugged him, “telling him he was going to use him as he would a girl.” Occupants of the room next door heard suspicious noises and beckoned a policeman to investigate. Hearing noise in the room, the policeman broke through the door and found both men partially dressed, O’Brien aroused, while Rees hid under the bed. Rees testified that he had resisted the sexual assault, but the policeman declared he had seen no signs of struggle. The circuit judge found O’Brien guilty of “the infamous crime against nature” and sentenced him to five years in the penitentiary. O’Brien appealed the case to the Canal Zone Supreme Court, arguing that Rees had been an accomplice in the crime and therefore his testimony should not be sufficient to convict the defendant. The court, while finding that Rees had engaged willingly in the sexual act, noted that his testimony was corroborated by others. The judges then abruptly concluded, “We do not think it is productive of any good to enter into a fuller discussion of a question of such revolting character.” They upheld the lower court’s ruling, and O’Brien was sentenced to the penitentiary.53
The case of William Waite, a young Barbadian man, provides insight into how the Zone circuit courts and George Goethals assessed alleged sexual assault on girls. The victim was an eleven-year-old girl named Keturah Lewis. Waite was a twenty-year-old boarder and canal employee in the home of Lewis’s parents in the town of Las Cascadas. She was delivering clean clothes to his room one day when, according to her testimony, he took her by force into his bed and “had connection” with her. Waite countered that she had consented to the act and had returned another time, when they again had intercourse. Waite was found guilty of rape in 1905and sentenced to five years in the penitentiary. Three years later Goethals personally reassessed the crime, noting, “It appears, however, that the girl with whom the offense was committed was of such physical development as to lead Waite to believe that she was more than thirteen years of age.” Despite the girl’s testimony to the contrary, Goethals declared that she and her parents had all consented to the act and that Waite had offered to marry the child, and therefore Goethals pardoned him.54