by Julie Greene
The canal opened to the ships of the world in 1914just as World War I erupted in Europe and threatened to bring civilization down with it. In less than three years the United States would be embroiled as well, and its war effort would replicate many of the themes, ideals, and language articulated earlier in the Panama Canal Zone. Large-scale mobilization and segregation of labor, special rewards and recognition of citizenship rights for certain (skilled, white) workers, and a suppression of political dissent and forms of collective organizing deemed radical: all this became central to U.S. strategies at home and abroad during World War I. These practices were carried out in the name of an interventionist state that idealistically articulated the benefits to world civilization to be gained by U.S. participation in the war. Many of those who led the construction project in the Canal Zone sought positions of leadership again in World War I. George Goethals, for example, desperately wanted to participate in the U.S. war effort. He wrote General John Pershing to request an appointment, believing his work directing the canal construction would surely be advantageous in the conduct of war. Appointed quartermaster of the U.S. Army, Goethals worked to centralize and streamline the bureaucratic functions of several branches, from the ordering of food, clothing, and equipment, to the assignment of quarters, to transportation. He collaborated closely with the War Industries Board as he sought to bring prices under control—and later was appointed to that board by President Woodrow Wilson.1
The strategies first negotiated during the construction of the Panama Canal stretched across the following decades, shaping and defining the twentieth century. The U.S. approach to empire—rejection of formal colonialism in favor of economic, political, and industrial management combined with military engagement as needed—made itself felt in military occupations and political interventions in Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Haiti, among others. In all these cases, the true Herculean labor involved not moving mountains but managing and ruling over men and women. In the Canal Zone during the construction era this had meant that Goethals and his officials had constantly to adapt their ideas about government to the needs, desires, and demands of a diverse population. While officials sought to present the construction project as an efficient machine, in fact the system was sorely tested by the tens of thousands of working people on the Isthmus of Panama. Sometimes it broke down altogether.
In the decades after the canal opened, these tensions—the symbolism of the canal versus the gritty reality of social relationships on the ground, and the designs of officials versus the demands of those they sought to govern—persisted. Canal officials’ relations both with their silver employees and with the government of Panama grew increasingly tense during and after World War I. In 1916, six thousand workers (nearly one-third of all silver employees) went on strike for five days, demanding a wage increase. Canal Zone governor Chester Harding commanded that the Republic of Panama take action against the strikers, and Panamanian police moved quickly to break up meetings and arrest and deport strike leaders, effectively killing the strike.2 By 1919and 1920, West Indians were facing pay cuts and widespread unemployment. Many of them had become more militant as a result of both the war and the popular social movement led by Marcus Garvey that emphasized black equality and nationalism. Garveyism surged through Central America, the Caribbean, and the United States after World War I. Explosive labor protests resulted, as West Indians defied officials’ assumptions that they were submissive and easy to manage. After the American Federation of Labor began organizing West Indians in 1919, more than a thousand dockworkers at Cristobal went on strike. Governor Harding banned Garvey and his organizers from the Canal Zone, intensified efforts to house West Indians in the Zone so they could be controlled more easily than if they resided in Panama, increased silver workers’ wages, and soon thereafter announced that strikers would be evicted from government housing and lose access to the Zone commissaries.
Despite such strenuous measures, dissatisfaction among West Indians across the isthmus was severe, and militancy was running high—much as in the United States, where labor activists in 1919crippled the steel, mining, meatpacking, and other industries before facing widespread defeat. The West Indian community in the Canal Zone and in Panama increasingly articulated its discontent in the postwar period, influenced both by Garveyism’s emphasis on race pride and by the organizing efforts of a union in the United States, the Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employees, that stressed the importance of fighting for their rights as workers. West Indian discontent now had a voice in a newspaper, the Workman, founded in 1919, which kept up a drumbeat of protest against “Jim Crowism and racial suppression.” Its editors denounced a range of unjust conditions, from low wages and expensive housing to racial discrimination in every area of life, cruel treatment by Panamanian police, and inadequate medical care at hospitals and clinics. Furthermore, one editorial proclaimed, “our children do not get the best in the schools; our women are not yet respected as ladies; our capabilities are still spurned by illiterate crackerism and we are still receiving the mouse’s share for doing the lion’s part of the work.” In 1904, the editors argued, the case for silver and gold segregation had been built on claims that Americans were unaccustomed both to the tropical climate and to interactions with large numbers of West Indians and that as U.S. citizens they deserved higher salaries and other privileges. “During all these days, and until 1914 when the water rushed into the great divide, the silver employees found it discreet to continue their work with as little murmuring and as great determination as they could possibly summon. But the times have changed, and what was tolerated between the years 1904 and 1914 will no longer be taken, lying down.”3
In this atmosphere of determined protest, between twelve thousand and sixteen thousand West Indian silver workers launched a great strike on February 24, 1920. They demanded a pay increase, an eight-hour day, equal pay for women, and a grievance procedure. During the eight days that it persisted, this massive, disciplined strike arguably posed the most effective protest against racism and labor exploitation ever seen on the Isthmus of Panama. With little external support, however, the silver workers’ strike was defeated. Their union, based in Detroit, provided no financial assistance. Workers faced dismissal, deportation, and bans on strike meetings. After the strike failed, Governor Harding punished strikers by deporting or refusing to rehire their leaders. Harding categorized those rehired as “new employees” and paid them the lowest possible amount. The strike had signaled not only a new assertiveness among West Indian workers but also the stern determination among Zone officials, in the words of one observer, to lay the “bridle hand on the negroes.” Panamanian government officials observed this and other labor troubles in the Zone during the 1920s and tried to demand more jobs for their citizens, but the United States reacted coldly, refusing to make even the gesture of preferential treatment toward Panamanians that it had offered during the construction era. Panama’s politicians responded in 1926by passing a law banning from their country any people of African descent whose native language was not Spanish.4
The silver and gold system remained in place until 1955, when U.S. officials replaced it with a single-wage rate but continued to reserve almost all high-level jobs for Americans. Likewise, Americans retained related perks like travel and tax privileges, and the schools of the Zone remained segregated.5 Yet World War II and its aftermath heightened antiracism, civil rights consciousness, and nationalism around the world, and these transformations shaped both the United States and Panama. Tensions around sovereignty became more acute as Panama began to demand more control over its territory. U.S. officials felt themselves swept into a dynamic in which concessions they made to the Republic of Panama only reinforced nationalism and led to yet more demands.
In 1940the United States occupied additional Panamanian territory to better defend the canal, but nationalist protests forced the United States to retreat for the first time and abandon the land. In a 1955treaty the United States
attempted to give more economic benefits in return for the use of Panamanian lands and as a substitute for concessions regarding sovereignty. The treaty generated controversy in the United States, and Panamanians remained dissatisfied. In 1956, Egypt nationalized the Suez Canal, and this reinforced and validated the rising nationalism in Panama. Protests continued, most significantly a movement called Operation Sovereignty that included a march by students into the Canal Zone to raise Panamanian flags. As demonstrations sometimes escalated into rioting, President Eisenhower in 1959conceded that “we should have visual evidence that Panama does have titular sovereignty over the region.” This meant that, in a major concession, the U.S. government would now allow the Panamanian flag to be flown in the Canal Zone.6
Throughout this period the Americans living in the Canal Zone—known as Zonians—grew increasingly influential. Much as the skilled white American workers had done during the construction era, Zonians used the patriotism associated with the canal and the sense of entitlement they gained from their status as U.S. citizens to demand the maintenance of sovereignty over the Canal Zone. One Zonian greeted the 1955treaty, for example, in language similar to that used by skilled workers during the construction era: “With each replacement of a United States citizen with an alien employee, Panama’s wedge to obtain sovereignty is enlarged.” Zonians found ready allies, particularly among conservative politicians and activists in the United States who perceived any diminution of American power in the region as a sign of appeasement, a failure of leadership, and an unacceptable admission that U.S. control over the Canal Zone since 1904 had been dishonorable. As cold war tensions increased, anticommunism fit neatly into this paradigm. Congressman Daniel Flood linked Panamanian efforts to regain sovereignty over the canal to “the hidden hand of cunning and malignant Sovietism manipulating their local puppet figures to destroy the just rights of the United States and to jeopardize the peace of the world.”7
Yet agitation continued at both popular and elite levels in Panama, and resentment between Panamanians and Zonians remained very high. By 1964the governor of the Canal Zone had ordered that U.S. and Panamanian flags both be flown at specific sites. They were not to be raised at schools, but American students at Balboa High School rebelled against their own government and flew the U.S. flag outside their building. To counter this perceived insult, Panamanian students attempted to add their flag to the school. The Panamanian students’ demonstration generated widespread riots throughout Panama City and Colón. U.S. troops and Canal Zone police gradually restored order, but the cost in human life was high: nineteen Panamanians and three Americans killed. Canal Zone governor Robert Fleming blamed his countrymen—and particularly Zonians—for the rioting: it was “the perfect situation for
the guy who’s 150percent American—and 50percent whiskey.” Although he believed Zonians had provoked the situation, he argued also that the U.S. government failed to take proactive steps to defuse an increasingly volatile situation. Tens of thousands of Panamanians took to the streets to protest the U.S. occupation of their nation’s territory, stoning banks owned by North Americans, attacking the U.S. embassy, and setting fire to the U.S. Information Agency, Goodyear and Firestone tire factories, and offices of Pan Am and Braniff Airways. U.S. soldiers dodged bullets, dug into foxholes in front of the Zone’s Hotel Tivoli, and were finally ordered to respond by shooting to kill. Before it ended, the fighting had spread to Colón and other regions of Panama. President Roberto Chiari of Panama cut off diplomatic relations with the United States, while President Lyndon B. Johnson praised the U.S. troops for “behaving admirably under extreme provocation by mobs and snipers.”8
The riots of 1964and the deaths that resulted proved a turning point in relations between the United States and Panama. They drew sympathy to Panama’s demands for greater control over the canal from people around the world. Although President Johnson showed little interest in major negotiations, his successors gradually moved toward the notion that the United States should transfer titular and substantive sovereignty to the Republic of Panama. A military coup in 1968led by Colonel Omar Torrijos delayed progress and raised concerns about the political future of Panama. In 1973, however, the United Nations Security Council met in Panama City, and the United States was forced to offer the single veto to a resolution calling for a new treaty to “guarantee Panama’s effective sovereignty over all its territory.” After this vote, the Nixon and Ford administrations began more serious negotiations with Panama.9
The stumbling block, however, proved to be public opinion in the United States—and the highly effective mobilization of that public opinion by conservative politicians. President Gerald Ford ceased working toward a new treaty when it became clear during his campaign for reelection in 1976that the public strenuously opposed transferring the canal. Ford’s opponent for his party’s nomination, Ronald Reagan, found to his surprise that few issues stirred the public more than the threat of losing the canal. Reagan later confessed he had no intention of raising the issue but discovered as he campaigned that audiences wanted to discuss it. He confronted “utter disbelief” in one community after another at the notion that the United States would give up the canal, and when he responded by arguing the United States should retain sovereignty permanently, he received “tumultuous applause.” Reagan turned the canal into a major issue, declaring repeatedly at campaign stops, “We bought it, we paid for it, it’s ours, and we should tell Torrijos and company that we are going to keep it.” Henry Kissinger tried to educate Reagan on the facts and later complained to a newspaper columnist that he had never confronted “a more gullible pupil with less knowledge.” Yet Reagan was not the only one who played the issue to his advantage. Echoing notions formed during the construction era that framed the canal as a triumph of American idealism and technology, Congressman David Bowen, Democrat from Mississippi, declared, “When I am home … there is only one thing I can say that invariably makes them cheer. … I say that if we can keep the striped-pants boys out of it and leave the canal to the Corps of Engineers, then the thing will work out fine. Many Americans have been raised to regard the canal as an engineering wonder that only the U.S. could have built and run. … [It is] emblematic of an entirely beneficent and successful way to help an inferior people.”10
Negotiations resumed after Jimmy Carter won the presidency in 1976. Although he had promised during the campaign never to support relinquishing control over the canal, Carter as president shared the consensus among many policy makers that the best course for the United States lay, as his future negotiator Sol Linowitz put it, in “adjusting to nationalist aspirations rather than confronting them.” Avoiding a difficult battle over the canal’s future would allow the United States to control the process toward the inevitable, it was hoped, and thereby allow it to maintain maximum security for the canal. The Carter administration noted that many nations around the world saw the Canal Zone as a “colonial enclave” and believed the existing relationship between Panama and the United States to be inappropriate and anachronistic. Thus Carter sent Linowitz into negotiations with the Torrijos administration. The Torrijos-Carter Treaties were approved by a special plebiscite in Panama and signed by the United States and Panama in September 1977. The treaties promised an end to U.S. control over the canal, affirmed the permanent right of the United States to intervene to defend the neutrality of the canal, but prohibited it from interference in the internal affairs of Panama. They mandated the elimination of the Canal Zone as of October 1, 1979. The United States would continue running the canal until the year 2000, but the treaties arranged for Panamanians to gradually play a greater role. Finally, as of 2000the Republic of Panama would assume full responsibility for maintenance of the canal and for its defense.11
With the treaties signed, the focus turned to winning ratification by the U.S. Senate. As Ronald Reagan had indicated, the American public was strongly opposed to transferring the canal to Panama. This opposition was intensified by mobilizati
on led by conservative activists, innovative direct-mail efforts by Richard Viguerie, and grassroots organizations created throughout the United States by Zonians. Indeed, the historian Michael Hogan has shown that the Panama Canal became a turning point in the emergence of the New Right, allowing conservative activists to rally Americans who lacked unity over other issues. Congressman Daniel Flood of Pennsylvania warned President Carter that if he returned the canal to Panama it “could well be your ‘Bay of Pigs’ and prevent your renomination or re-election.” Although the White House worked hard to unite liberal, labor, church, and business groups, and although Carter ultimately succeeded in winning enough votes in the Senate to pass the treaties, public opinion remained adamantly opposed. Carter frankly admitted to senators the danger involved: “Rarely is a national leader called upon to act on such an important issue fraught with so much potential political sacrifice… . I thank you for your personal demonstration of statesmanship and political courage.”12
Many Americans felt passionate about and devoted to the canal, seeing in it, as Theodore Roosevelt had intended, a symbol of America’s selfless contributions to civilization and its technological and industrial accomplishments. Representing all that seemed good about America and extending those virtues to the world, the Panama Canal became an ideological linchpin, justifying and holding together America’s role in the world during the American Century. Journalist William Schneider argued during the debate over ratification that the construction project had generated a “primordial attachment” to the canal: “Americans regard the Panama Canal as a monument to our technological know-how and to our humanitarian instincts, as a symbol of Yankee ingenuity, not Yankee imperialism.” Take away the Panama Canal, it must have seemed, and the prevailing ideas regarding America’s beneficence in the world would potentially collapse as well. Although Carter and his allies portrayed those opposed to the canal as ill informed and tried to educate the public about technical aspects of the canal’s history (the United States had not bought the Canal Zone, as Reagan and other conservatives contended, for example), it did not matter, because something much larger was at stake.13