by Julie Greene
The joint commission was indicative of a general trend: the United States became deeply involved in the affairs of Panama, playing an influential role in its government and economy. In 1906, for example, the government of Panama decided a streetcar system should be built throughout Panama City. A man named Henry T. Cook bid successfully to win the job. Part of his contract, however, stipulated that he would be responsible for maintaining the paved streets to either side of the tracks. Since the United States had paved these streets, Cook had to win permission from the United States to lay his streetcar tracks. U.S. officials declared they would give permission only if Cook put up a $ 25, 000bond contingent on proper repaving of any streets he tore up. Cook declined to put up the bond and began constructing the tracks. The U.S. government then asked the Republic of Panama to enforce an order that forbade anyone from doing excavation work until financial arrangements had been made for the refilling and repaving of the streets—an amount estimated at exactly $ 25, 000. Panama carried out the Americans’ request, and construction of Cook’s streetcar system was halted until he made the requisite financial arrangements.5
U.S. citizens rapidly moved into important government positions in the Republic of Panama. Many Americans became government advisers or inspectors, helping to oversee preparations for elections, overhauling the police, and administering Panama’s finances. Americans ran the Instituto Nacional, the country’s dominant educational institution. They headed the Santo Tomás Hospital, working with an American woman who supervised nurses at the same institution. “The country was being foreignized,” noted one Panamanian observer. ICC officials contracted with Panama’s government to build railroads connecting its cities to smaller towns, to care for mentally ill Panamanians in Zone hospitals, and to educate Panamanian children in Zone schools. The United States nudged Panama’s leaders to enforce important laws, especially regarding labor recruitment and the maintenance of order.6 The border separating the Canal Zone from Panama was deliberately kept permeable in many respects. Immigrants traveled freely from one side to the other. Accused criminals could easily be extradited from Panama to the Canal Zone or vice versa. In 1910, when Congress passed the Mann Act, Panama and the ICC worked together to enforce it in the Canal Zone. When ICC officials suspected that white prostitutes were being brought to the isthmus via the ports of Panama and were traveling on the Panama Railroad (which was operated by the U.S. government), they collaborated with Panama to track down and arrest those responsible.7
The close ties between U.S. and Panamanian officials were perhaps bound to generate tensions among the citizens of Panama. Sometimes the alliance seemed not only intimate but in visible violation of Panamanian sovereignty. A prime example of this occurred in 1909when a labor agent attempted to recruit canal workers away to other parts of Latin America. Throughout the construction decade ICC officials went to great lengths to investigate and deport labor agents seeking to “steal” canal workers. Hoping to eliminate the practice in Panama as well as in the Canal Zone, the ICC asked Panama to pass a decree prohibiting the recruiting of laborers within its territory as well, and the Panamanian government complied in 1909. A U.S. citizen named W. P. Spiller violated the decree by recruiting workers in Panama and sending them on to Colombia, where they awaited his arrival so he could escort them to a plantation in Brazil. The Panamanian government therefore ordered that Spiller be deported, but the Supreme Court of Panama disagreed, arguing that deportation would deprive Spiller of his liberty. The government of Panama then overruled its own Supreme Court in deference to the wishes of the United States and deported Spiller to New York in December 1909. Among Panamanian businessmen and residents generally, the British consul reported, “the action of the Government in deporting Spiller without trial at the request of the Canal Authorities in defiance of the Supreme Court is generally condemned, and expression has been given to much anti-American sentiment.”8
Meanwhile, foreigners, particularly from the United States and Britain, intervened economically in Panamanian affairs. They dominated much of public finance and commercial agriculture, entering the banking industry as well as the production of coffee, sugar, tropical fruits, cattle ranching, and lumber. The United Fruit Company soared to prominence across the province of Bocas del Toro as Panama granted land concessions. In 1906the British consul reported that Panama’s economy was so vibrant it would soon rival that of the French era. He described the prevalence of U.S. entrepreneurs: “American manufacturers display unusual energy to compete for the new trade; their agents overrun the entire Isthmus, agencies have been opened, and information is gathered which will enable them to understand precisely what kind of purchases of machinery and supplies will have to be made by the Commission during the construction of the Canal.” The boundary between Panama and the Zone remained porous economically, much to the disadvantage of the former. Commissaries run by the ICC and private businesses in the Zone paid no import duties on their vast array of commodities, and a thriving unofficial market emerged in Colón and Panama City as entrepreneurs with access to the commissaries purchased excess goods and then sold them to eager consumers. Panamanian merchants, who did have to pay import tariffs, found it impossible to compete with these cheaper goods from Zone commissaries and businesses, and this became a source of great resentment. Soon the republic was awash in Zonian products.9
The demographic transformation created by the French and the American canal construction projects caused an explosion in the populations of Panama City and Colón. Tens of thousands of people were drawn to the isthmus, arriving with hopes of jobs in the Zone or the promise of work in the bustling service economy that emerged in Panama City and Colón. Many of these immigrants settled in one of Panama’s two cities, preferring not to live in the Canal Zone because of poor conditions and repressive policies, and vast tenement neighborhoods arose to house them. As many as 200, 000West Indians arrived on the isthmus during the construction era and businesses, churches, and social institutions emerged to serve them. The heterogeneous culture that resulted discomfited many Panamanians, who felt uneasy about the African heritage of West Indians as well as the Anglo-Caribbean traditions and language possessed by so many of them.10
West Indians constituted only one of many groups arriving on ships day after day. Thousands of others arrived as well, including Americans, Italians, Greeks, Spaniards, Chinese, South Asians, Britons, Germans, Canadians, Colombians, Peruvians, and Costa Ricans. Many of these sojourners were on their way to the Zone, but others were drawn by Panama’s expanding economy. The presence of so many diverse groups made Panama City and Colón renowned for their sophisticated, international atmosphere. Added to the polyglot residents were crowds of tourists, especially wealthy Americans and English who put Panama on their world tour so they could witness firsthand the marvels of the canal. One such tourist explored Panama City and described the vision before him: “A Panamanian cart, loaded with English tea biscuit, drawn by an old American army mule, driven by a Hindu wearing a turban, drove up in front of a Chinese shop. The Jamaican clerk, aided by the San Blas errand boy … supervise[d] the unloading.” This tourist’s account continued: “That is Panama every day. Across the street is an Italian lace shop run by a Jew.” To some native-born Panamanians, these demographic changes threatened to dilute the Hispanic character of the isthmus. The Jamaican who ran his modest business with a picture of King George on the wall seemed to them entirely out of place and inappropriate. The growing working class of Panama City and Colón had its own needs and appeared ready to make more forceful demands of the nation’s small elite. Thus the canal project brought more than diversity: it overhauled social and political relations in a way that compromised the ability of elites to continue their rule.11
Cocoa Grove, the major entertainment district of Panama City, stood at the center of these tumultuous changes. The modestly sized neighborhood, about ten square blocks, was packed with saloons, dance halls, and brothels. The latter, with names like
the Navaho, La Boheme, and the Tuxedo, crowded up against hotels, Chinese lottery shops, and Chinese and Panamanian restaurants. Panama City was known for its nightlife. The English traveler Winifred James, who explored much of the Caribbean and Central America in the early twentieth century, wrote of Panama City as a busy and cosmopolitan town where the bars played music until late into the night. The streets and sidewalks of Cocoa Grove were typically crowded with carriages and horses, hawkers and peddlers. James toured the city one night by carriage and described a common scene: “As we pass by a cantina at the corner of a square, suddenly there is a pistol shot from upstairs. The men sitting at the tables start and look at one another, and some loiterers upon the pavement gather at the entrance. Only the man who is serving the drinks is undisturbed. He goes on serenely polishing the glass in his hand. This place is known as one where such things as pistol shots have been heard before with rather grim results. It behooves the barman to keep his head lest a panic should attract the law. Our driver is not unduly moved, and shrugs his shoulders when we ask him what it means.”12
Many Panamanians worked in Cocoa Grove, but so did a great many Americans and Europeans—as bartenders, waitresses, prostitutes, and piano players. One of the most successful madams in Cocoa Grove was a U.S. citizen named Alice Ward, and indeed prostitutes in the district so often hailed from the United States that a slang term for prostitute was “American woman.”13 While visiting the isthmus, Winifred James attended a white-slavery trial held in the Canal Zone courts, and her report gives us firsthand a sense of the international origins of Cocoa Grove prostitutes. A Southampton man had been convicted of white-slave trade and sentenced to a year in prison. Now three women were accused of having arrived on the isthmus with him. All three argued they had come to Panama of their own free will, planning to open a business. They had needed more money, however, and so entered a brothel as prostitutes to earn some cash. Since prostitution was legal in Panama, they would be allowed to practice their trade unhindered if they could prove their story. If not, they would face deportation or prison.
The three women hailed from France, England, and the United States. James described each one. The Frenchwoman had been a milliner off Tottenham Road in London, and James felt no pity for her: “Trim, well-corsetted in a corsetless country, her hair smartly dressed, her face carefully made up, she commanded respect through the respect she showed herself. All through her cross-examination she lied very heartily.” Angry and indignant, she rebelled against the proceedings in every way, her foot tapping impatiently through the trial, and James felt she would someday return to respectability in her home country. The second woman, from Hampstead, England, was the mirror opposite: “Untidy, slatternly, she made you feel that she would have been little use either as a servant or a prostitute.
Her hair was twisted up anyhow, her dress disordered. She made purposeless, bewildered movements with her pasty-white, irritating hands, and looked helplessly around her like an animal that is seeking an escape.” And finally, there was the American woman, with her “good-natured acceptance of things as they were, whether they turned out dressmaking or the other thing, she apparently had no more sexual morality than the other two, yet she affected one very much as a nice morning does; she seemed clean and nice and fresh.” Of the three, James concluded, only the Frenchwoman was likely to see her life turn out right. But James hoped the best for the American, too, as “she was a nice little thing.”14
Canal employees and U.S. military personnel often turned to Cocoa Grove for adventure and recreation since activities in the Zone were so limited and tame. Gambling and prostitution, effectively banned in the Zone, were omnipresent in Panama City’s entertainment district. While the United States had the power to eliminate a red-light neighborhood like Cocoa Grove, ICC officials implicitly depended on it as a place where canal employees could relax before heading back for another period of construction work.15 The entertainment district offered live music, free-flowing alcohol in comfortable saloons (with chairs!), fascinating crowds of people from all over the world, and partying that lasted most of the night, every night. There was a sense in Colón and Panama City that identities became more fluid and that one might interact with a very different set of people. A poem by John Hall, published in 1912, expressed this mixture of danger and opportunity canal workers enjoyed when they visited Colón. Roughnecks gambling their money away, racial transformations, interracial romances, and the white-slave trade all made entrances into Hall’s poem:
AS IT WAS
’Way down in Colon town,
The land of the gambler clan.
’Way down in Colon town,
Where they “trim” the roughneck man.
Where night’s turned into day,
And the “live-ones’” coin goes fast:
Where the suckers like to play;
Where the “gringo” hates the past.
Where mateless men soon mate;
Where siren’s song sounds sweet;
Where jeering men mock Fate;
Where siren’s life is fleet.
Where water man ne’er craves,
And beer the drunkard spurns,
And adds one to the graves
When wine his liver burns.
’Way down in Colon town
Where Mongol mates with Turk;
Where white man’s skin is brown;
Where white-slave traders lurk.16
In all these ways Panama City and Colón provided an escape from the more regimented, respectable, and segregated world of the Zone. Soldiers and marines on U.S. military bases enjoyed the contrast as much as canal employees did. Their environment was even more segregated than that of canal workers, their only nonleisure contact with Panamanians or West Indians coming when workers brought food into the base or arrived to pick up laundry, or when military duties took them into Panama. And although officials at the time portrayed Panama City and Colón as sources of disorder and worried that the wildness of Panama would cross boundaries and enter the Zone, the truth lay at least equally the other way around. U.S. canal employees and military personnel crossing into Panama after a week or two of hard-driving labor discipline, jockeying for social and economic position, and feeling they had earned a chance to let loose were a source of disorder and disharmony, especially once they entered districts like Cocoa Grove.
The U.S. military already had a long history on the Isthmus of Panama at the time construction began in 1904. In 1856, during construction of the Panamanian railroad by U.S. companies, the United States sent 160soldiers to put down the Watermelon Riot, an event that eerily echoed the Cocoa Grove riots of the early twentieth century, similarly involving tensions over sovereignty and race. In the decades between that intervention and Panamanian independence in 1903, the U.S. military intervened thirteen more times.17 Marines began serving in the Zone in 1904, as U.S. possession and preparations for canal construction began. In late 1911, nearly one thousand soldiers representing the U.S. Army’s Tenth Infantry Regiment arrived on the isthmus, many of them fresh from their work suppressing the insurrection of Filipinos against the U.S. government. The number of soldiers increased gradually to fifteen hundred. They were new to the Canal Zone and would replace the marines altogether by 1914(to the dismay of the latter, whose officer had proclaimed his men “as essential for the completion of the Canal as the steam shovel”). The soldiers set to work conducting surveys and maneuvers throughout the Zone and the Republic of Panama. They and the marines served also as an auxiliary police force, and in the decades that followed, Panamanian officials often relied on U.S. troops to help them quell riots, strikes, and popular uprisings, to provide support for endangered presidential administrations, and to oversee elections. The thousands of soldiers and marines in the Panama Canal Zone came most often from rough working-class communities of the United States. Unemployment, a desire for adventure, a migratory life—these were just some of the fact
ors that likely led them to enlist in the military. Not only were their lives more racially segregated than those of canal employees; soldiers and marines also had fewer opportunities for leisure, which led them often to seek entertainment in Panama City.18
The chagrin of some white-collar canal employees over blue-collar workers’ tendency to go “whoring” and drinking in Cocoa Grove every weekend was noted earlier. U.S. officials had to work to keep not only American canal employees under control but also military personnel and Zone policemen, particularly when they visited Panama City. Goethals’s inspector T. B. Miskimon reported on numerous troubles, including marines who begged for money in the streets of Panama City so they could buy drugs. The inspector referred to them as “snifflers,” remarking, “They will go in the saloons and beg money, openly stating that they do not want anything to drink but do want the money for Cocaine. I personally saw about eight marines indulging in this practice on the streets of Panama last evening.” Even in the relatively tame Zone, policemen engaged in some unprofessional behavior. One afternoon two officers on the Zone police force, for example, rode their horses into a Zone saloon, dismounted at the bar, and ordered drinks. As they drank, one of the horses defecated on the floor. Seemingly unperturbed, the policemen finished their drinks, jumped on their horses, and departed.19
Ample evidence suggests that Americans visiting Cocoa Grove sometimes brought with them not only unrestrained behavior but also arrogant and patronizing attitudes. They were tempted by the perceived danger and disorder of Cocoa Grove and wanted to interact with the wilder side of Panama, but they also looked down on the nation and its people. Like more elite Americans, they tended to regard Panamanians as an inferior and less civilized race. Joseph Bucklin Bishop, the secretary of the Isthmian Canal Commission, commented: “The average American has the utmost contempt for a Panaman and never loses an opportunity, especially when drunk, to show it.”20 The combination of their unrespectable behavior and swaggering attitudes led many, not only Panamanians, to question whether the Americans were bringing civilization or barbarism to the isthmus. Innumerable problematic incidents emerged in these years. State Department officials worried over opium and cocaine trafficking and outbreaks of violence that resulted from drunken revelers in Cocoa Grove. Stories spread of canal employees routinely drinking to excess, of men spending all weekend in a drunken state in Cocoa Grove. Tourists received warnings to beware of rowdy Americans in Panama City, and it was said that well-to-do Panamanian women rarely ventured out into the city, fearing the Americans who would crowd them off sidewalks and into the street. Even Americans received warnings to beware their countrymen. When the American traveler Evelyn Saxton arrived in Panama City by train, her husband failed to meet her at the station. A young Panamanian man urged her not to wait at the station as “there are rough Americans about who would not hesitate to insult you.” Saxton responded that she had nothing to fear, as she was herself an American. She received the following response: “The Americans I know about Panama are not of your class. They are here in great numbers, and they are very rough and vulgar.”21