by Julie Greene
As the numbers of unemployed laborers grew in Panama City and Colón, officials grew anxious about the potential for disorder. By 1914large numbers of impoverished West Indians filled the streets of Panama’s port cities. The ICC that year lowered the basic wage for silver employees from thirteen to ten cents per hour. Simultaneously, food prices and rents in Panama were rising precipitously. Panamanian police began arresting unemployed men to maintain order and relieve the pressure of congestion. Claude Mallet, the British consul, was inundated with letters of complaint from West Indians who felt they had been imprisoned unjustly. One group of prisoners wrote Mallet complaining that the Panamanian government was routinely imprisoning West Indians and holding them six to eighteen months without trial, then releasing them with no money, no job, and no home. Some West Indians specifically criticized not only the Panamanians and Americans for the social crisis but also the British diplomatic representatives. One man wrote Mallet and demanded: “We Say that this Record country is greatly inhabited by all nation unaccount of the Panama Canal; And there is a counsil of all de damn nation suppose all There counsil was to do there duties; What would happen.” This writer concluded by stressing his credentials: “Sir I am not his Counsil But I am an english subject … also I has a great knowledge of this Law I know what you can do from what you cant.”14 Congestion, rising prices, and unemployment continued to shape life in the cities of Panama for many years to come.15
As American officials sought to reduce the rapidly growing army of unemployed laborers, they found many West Indians reluctant to return to their island homes. Repatriation began on a large scale in the autumn of 1913, but Jamaicans and Barbadians anticipated that wages would be higher and working conditions better if they could remain in the Zone or at least in Central America. In November 1913, Mallet vividly portrayed the ongoing swirl of human migration—and the inability of the ICC to control it—as the canal project began to conclude: in the last three months alone, he reported, nearly thirty-four hundred West Indians had arrived in Colón looking for jobs, some three thousand others had departed the isthmus as the ICC began sending contract laborers home, and another thirteen hundred had departed for jobs throughout Central America. ICC officials and British diplomatic representatives began negotiating with potential employers throughout Latin America, since Chile, Bolivia, Peru, Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela, and Mexico were planning to construct railroads, harbors, and ports to exploit the new commercial opportunities made possible by the canal’s opening.16
The officials’ best hope, however, for finding a place for unemployed West Indians was Central America. The governors of British Guiana and British Honduras expressed interest in receiving laborers from the Canal Zone, and they declared they had land available that could be leased or purchased by canal workers so that they could grow some crops. Unemployed canal workers could also attain work on plantations. The governor of British Guiana declared that West Indians in the Canal Zone “have been receiving high wages: wages much higher than any planter can afford. On the other hand they have been accustomed to work much harder than any agricultural labourer ever works here for his employer; and the comparatively low rate of wages given to agricultural labourers is due to the smallness of the tasks performed by them.”17 The United Fruit Company, or UFCO, sought laborers for its expanding plantations in Panama, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Colombia. Mallet noted that “the higher wages earned in Central America attract them to remain abroad in preference to going back to the Islands in the West Indies.” Hasty arrangements were made for UFCO to hire ten thousand men.
This solution was also problematic. Mallet warned that “the labourers in the Canal Zone are accustomed to work and live under superior conditions such as they will not find on new Banana plantations in the midst of virgin forests which will make them dissatisfied and troublesome.” As a result, UFCO’s managers preferred to hire laborers directly from Bridgetown. This, however, would leave thousands of laborers on the isthmus, “and the West Indian Governments will be brought face to face with the problem of providing for thousands of their people who are destitute and unable to obtain work in the Republic of Panama or the Central American States.”18
By 1915the ICC had reduced the number of its employees by more than twenty thousand. Days were filled with the packing of suitcases and farewell parties. In the final year of construction alone, nearly sixteen thousand people left the Zone for good, mostly canal employees moving back to homes in Europe, the Caribbean, and the United States or, in the case of many West Indians, taking up residence in Colón or Panama City and seeking employment there. The population of Panama’s two port cities increased by 50percent between 1913and 1921(from 66, 500to 99, 800), as many canal employees sought work there. At the same time, prices and rents both increased significantly in Panama, while the economy entered a depression and jobs became difficult to find.19 Despite the early worries of British colonial officers, West Indians who returned home to Barbados or Jamaica often had an easier time than those who remained in Panama. The geographer Bonham Richardson, in interviews he conducted with Barbadians decades after the construction effort, found that work on the canal often made possible significant economic mobility once employees returned home. Savings from their jobs in the Zone led to opportunities to buy a bit of land and achieve, in many cases, an important degree of economic independence. The Barbadian Cleveland Murrell, for example, remembered how his father had worked as a janitor in the Canal Zone, all the while carefully saving his money. He returned home with about $ 100and used it to rent a bit of land. Rising prices during World War I earned him a solid profit on the sugarcane he grew, which he then used to buy six acres and open a shop. Murrell recalled how proud he felt of his father’s economic achievements: “When my father finished working the land, he would peel the mud off of his feet and throw it back on to the land. He would save and save. I don’t know how he did it. He was very thrifty—different from those who would sit around and drink rum.”20
Amid the evacuations and emigration, the canal moved steadily toward completion. In September 1913officials tested the locks for the first time. A few weeks later President Wilson, in a great publicity stunt and a milestone in the history of telegraphy, pushed a button at the White House to send an electric signal to Panama and blow up Gamboa Dike, the last major earthworks preventing water from flowing through the canal. The telegraphic signal traveled by land from Washington, D.C., to Galveston, Texas, and from there underwater through the Gulf of Mexico to the isthmus, where it detonated forty tons of dynamite in the dike. More than three thousand spectators, including Colonel Goethals, many leading Panamanian officials, and the Frenchman Philippe Bunau-Varilla, came to see the explosion and watch as the vast Culebra Cut quickly filled with water.21
Across the United States, people expressed delight at the news of Gamboa Dike’s explosion, but nowhere more enthusiastically than in San Francisco, where workers were already busy building the palaces and towers of the coming world’s fair. On the day President Wilson sent the electric signal hurtling toward Panama, a large crowd gathered at Union Square in the city’s heart. Upon hearing that the dike had exploded, they sang the national anthem while officials hoisted the American flag, bombs were set off, and factory whistles across the city blew. At the fairgrounds Don Lefevre, the official representative of the Republic of Panama, took possession of the site for Panama’s building, supervised the hoisting of the Panamanian flag, and received an artillery salute from U.S. battleships stationed off the Presidio.22
Officials meanwhile prepared for the end of construction by overhauling the government of the Canal Zone, appointing George Goe-thals the first governor of the Zone, and restructuring the Zone judiciary to fold it into the district court system of the United States. All the while, the waters gradually rose higher in the canal, and the creatures of the Zone—monkeys, snakes, insects, and sloths—fled to higher ground. Finally, as Elizabeth Parker remembered, “only the mighty hardwood trees r
emained, their bare branches stretching over the blue water—ghostly reminders of a once-teeming jungle.” The day they sent the first tugboat through the locks, Parker and her husband were among the first to watch it pass: “On the prow proudly stood Col. Sibert; on the lock wall stood Col. Goethals, chain smoking, his steel-blue eyes fixed on the tiny craft.”23
During the summer of 1914, as Europe mobilized for war, Americans along the isthmus prepared for the formal opening of the canal. On August 15the steamship Ancon left Cristobal at 7:00 a.m. and traveled through the canal with Goethals and other American and Panamanian officials, including President Porras of the Republic of Panama, on board. All canal employees had a holiday for the occasion, and they and their families lined the banks of the canal. The Ancon smoothly made its way as a band of musicians from the U.S. Army and from Panama on board the ship played “The Star-Spangled Banner.” On the ship’s foremast flew the flag of the American Peace Society, while the U.S. flag flew on the jackstaff. The ship crossed the isthmus in nine hours, not docking at Balboa but going onward to the deeper waters off the Pacific, then returning to Balboa to deliver its passengers. During the long day’s trip the officials and their wives enjoyed a splendid buffet lunch that lacked only wine, the New York Times carefully pointed out, as the Zone was now dry territory.24
This formal opening drew little attention from the vast majority of Americans, however, distracted as they were by the outbreak of war in Europe. For those leaving the Zone for good, it must have seemed a bittersweet moment. Maybe they felt happy to head back home, to leave a place of toil and struggle. Maybe they expressed a measure of sadness to leave a place that for so long had provided a sense of adventure. Harry Franck, the globe-trotter who worked as a policeman and census taker in the Zone, wrote eloquently of his last visit to Empire, where he had lived for years, when it was about to be abandoned: “It seemed like a different place. Almost all the old crowd had gone, one by one they had ‘kissed the Zone good-by.’ … It was like wandering over the old campus when those who were freshmen in our day had hawked their gowns and mortarboards… . I felt like a man in his dotage with only the new, unknown, and indifferent generation about him.” Franck visited the old suspension bridge, where he saw some of the last men scurrying about and a few steam shovels digging out final loads of dirt. “Soon the water will be turned in and nine-tenths of all this labor will be submerged and forever hidden from view … and palm trees will wave the steamer on its way through what will seem almost a natural channel.” Mostly, Franck regretted leaving behind his friends in the Zone police force, but he ended his memoir on a cheery note, declaring he’d see them all again in San Francisco in 1915.25
“AMERICA’S GIFT TO THE WORLD”
As people continued to leave the Canal Zone, as machinists and steam-shovel engineers made their way home to Kansas City, Detroit, or Newark, their suitcases filled with souvenirs from Chinese shops, Americans took time to reflect on the larger meanings of the canal project. Over the years businesses had increasingly adopted the canal as an effective way to advertise their goods. One pervasive ad from the period declared, “The Two Greatest in History: the Panama Canal and Budweiser Beer!” Another company poignantly compared its contribution to the human alimentary canal to the great effort on the isthmus. “Two World Wide Wonders,” proclaimed the ad: “The Panama Canal for Universal Commerce, Hostetter’s Stomach Bitters for Dyspepsia, Indigestion, Biliousness, Constipation, and Malaria.” Keepsake postcards also circulated freely through the United States in these years. A Christmas postcard depicted Santa Claus in his sleigh high above the earth, flaunting a large U.S. flag and looking down contentedly as ships approached the new Panama Canal. Another, titled “The Kiss of the Oceans,” introduced a homoerotic note by showing the seas transfigured into two beautiful women kissing at the very spot where the canal married the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.26
Across the United States there was discussion of the canal’s significance for the future of the nation and, indeed, for all of humanity. Americans were proud to see commentators around the world hailing the canal’s completion as the most important event of the century. Previous chapters suggested the ways Americans debated the meaning of the canal over the years, particularly in terms of progressivism, the benefits of state intervention, concerns about the government’s use of racial segregation in the Zone, and labor’s role in the body politic. Now, as completion neared, Americans’ feelings about the canal were overwhelmingly positive; they proclaimed it as a beacon of American industrial and technological triumph, a wonder of the world, and a terrific gift to civilization. In 1913, just weeks after helping to dynamite Gamboa Dike, President Wilson issued a proclamation designating the upcoming day of Thanksgiving, and he singled out the canal project as especially deserving of the nation’s gratitude: “We have seen the practical completion of a great work at the Isthmus of Panama, which not only exemplifies the nation’s abundant resources to accomplish what it will and the distinguished skill and capacity of the public servants but also promises the beginning of a new age, of new contacts, new neighborhoods, new sympathies, new bonds, and new achievements of cooperation and peace.” Many described the canal’s impact in tones of benevolence, referring to it as Ladies’ Home Journal did: “America’s Gift to the World.” A writer in Manufacturer’s Record considered the canal the “mightiest change in the world’s material affairs since the discovery of America.” Everyone, from “the far Himalayan Mountains to the wilds of the Andes, from Siberia to the utmost limit of South America,” the people of all classes throughout the entire world, would feel the benefits of the canal.27
These reflections hint at another common theme. The canal had transformed the earth, profoundly and permanently, including the spatial and commercial relations of all nations. Maps were drawn up to show the new relations of nation-states. A book by Ralph Emmett Avery, titled The Greatest Engineering Feat in the World at Panama, included the new miraculous cartography of the world. San Francisco and Honolulu were now five or six thousand miles from New York rather than thirteen thousand; much of Asia could be reached more quickly, and the Suez Canal had suddenly been rendered redundant, at least to the United States, because Melbourne, Manila, Hong Kong, and Yokohama could all be reached more easily via the Panama Canal. The markets of Asia (China, Japan, and the Philippines, as well as Australia and New Zealand) had become as accessible to the United States as to the nations of Europe.28
In fact, the most profound spatial consequence of the canal lay in reorienting the nation toward Asia and the Pacific. The American Historical Association convened a special congress in San Francisco during the Panama-Pacific International Exposition to examine the historical significance of the Pacific. It announced that the Panama Canal would transform relations between the Americas, Asia, and Australia: “One era of Pacific Ocean history comes to an end; another begins.” Besides papers on the history of China, the Philippines, Australasia, and California, the conference included a powerful essay by Theodore Roosevelt on the history of the canal. He defended at length his actions in acquiring the Canal Zone and the right to build the canal and ended by concluding, “There is not one action of the American government, in connection with foreign affairs, from the day when the Constitution was adopted down to the present time, so important as the action taken by this government in connection with the acquisition and building of the Panama Canal.”29
The canal’s impact on the Americas was likewise seen as transformative. Its opening, particularly since it coincided with World War I, would lead not only to more trade with South America but also to much greater and more permanent settlement of Americans throughout Latin America. The obvious result would be, one author noted, the “Americanization of Latin America,” because now U.S. residents would settle there in greater numbers and begin demanding more of the conveniences and comforts of home.30 One could observe this process of Americanization by considering the case of Panama. The
United States had truly made the tropics safe for white men, just as Colonel Gorgas promised, and the inevitable consequence would be a vast diaspora of white North Americans settling permanently throughout the tropics.31 The editor of the Independent reminded readers of Benjamin Kidd’s warning years before that whites could not make it in the tropics. Kidd had been proven wrong, the editor averred: “All around the equator there are now experiment stations, where attempts are being made to grow northern races, and among these none is more successful than the one we have established in the region that has the worst reputation for disease and death.” This editor concluded: “Our occupation of the Zone is not temporary.” More Americans would be living there twenty years from now, and Americanization would gradually produce unimaginable benefits. Consider agriculture alone. As the white man tamed tropical agriculture through scientific methods, what innovations might result? “We can only guess at it by trying to solve the proportion; as the corn of the Indians is to the corn of the white farmer, so is the banana of the Panamanian to the banana of the future.”32
Thinking further ahead, William Boyce of Chicago proposed that the United States build on its work in Panama by establishing the entire Zone as a vast “duty-free” region. A new era of global connections had begun. Boyce proposed in a speech to the Southern Commercial Congress that the United States should build in the Canal Zone a vast city of 500, 000Americans, where manufacturers and distributors would flock to enjoy freedom from import and export duties. The Canal Zone, he imagined, “would become an immense world’s department store, where everything for the use of all people of all nations could be found. It would become the greatest transshipping port in the world.” Less visionary commentators agreed that Panama presented remarkable opportunities for “American enterprise,” as C. H. Forbes-Lindsay described it. He declared: “One of the most marked characteristics of the Anglo-Saxon is land-hunger—the desire for elbow-room, and the longing to be lord of broad acres.” Accordingly, Forbes-Lindsay urged Americans to emigrate to Panama for the cheap land and vast opportunities in agriculture.33