by Julie Greene
21.Shonts to Sir, May 16, 1906, ICC Records, Alpha files, 2-E-2/China, pt. 2, box 93.
22.Hearings Before the Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce of the House of Representatives, on the Isthmian Canal (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1906), pp. 33–35; U.S. Senate, Investigation of Panama Canal Matters, vol. 2, p. 1574. The need for ethnic/racial competition was articulated by officials so often that journalists covering the construction effort saw it as a central aspect of the government’s strategy. For example, see John Foster Carr, “The Panama Canal: The Silver Men,” Outlook, May 19, 1906, p. 120: “But no large proportion of men is to be brought from any one place, for ‘Labor and Quarters’ tries to profit by the rivalry that exists between the different islands.” For other examples of ethnic division as central to labor management, see Ronald Takaki, Pau Hana: Plantation Life and Labor in Hawaii, 1835–1920 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1983); and Philippe Bourgois, Ethnicity at Work: Divided Labor on a Central American Banana Plantation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989).
23.Hearings Before the Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, 1906, vol. 1, p. 53; Stevens to Shonts, Dec. 14, 1905, ICC Records, 2-E-1. Stevens also declared, “I have no hesitancy in saying that the West Indian Negro is about the poorest excuse for a laborer I have ever been up against in thirty-five years of experience.” For this quotation see Michael L. Conniff, Black Labor on a White Canal: Panama, 1904–1981 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985), p. 25.
24.Hearings Before the Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, 1906, vol. 1, p. 84. It is worth noting that even before Stevens’s tenure as chief engineer, officials had assumed they would not be able to secure whites for the unskilled labor they needed on the canal. See, for example, Governor George W. Davis to Benjamin Lyon Smith, Sept. 9, 1904, ICC Records, 95-A-1: “It is impossible to obtain Caucasian labor for this severe tropical work.”
25.Moody to Secretary of War William H. Taft, June 5, 1905; Shonts to Stevens, Nov. 29, 190 5: both ICC Records, 2-E-1. Readers may recall James Morton Callahan from the prologue, above, who had worried that American imperialism in the tropics would require some form of forced labor in order to succeed, and that, he argued, would endanger the Republic. On Chinese workers in the Americas, see Adam McKeown, Chinese Migrant Networks and Cultural Change: Peru, Chicago, and Hawaii, 1900–1936 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Madeline Y. Hsu, Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home: Transnationalism and Migration Between the United States and South China, 1882–1943 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000); Erika Lee, At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration During the Exclusion Era, 1882–1943 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Alexander Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975); and Lok C. D. Siu, Memories of a Future Home: Diasporic Citizenship of Chinese in Panama (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005).
26.Stevens to Shonts, Jan. 18, 1907, ICC Records, Alpha files, 2-E-2/China, pt. 2, box 93; Claude Mallet to Sir Edward Grey, Sept. 12, 1906, Foreign Office Records, FO 371/101, The National Archives, Kew, U.K. Wives and children, Stevens proposed, were to make up no more than 15 percent of the total number of Chinese immigrants.
27.“Chinese on the Canal Zone,” Independent, Oct. 25, 1906, p. 1009. See also Eugene S. Watson, “Chinese Labor and the Panama Canal,” Independent, Nov. 22, 1906, pp. 1201–5; and “Chinese Contract Labor in Panama,” Outlook, Oct. 13, 1906, pp. 343–44; on opposition by the Chinese government, see “Proclamation Forbidding Chinese Coolies to Go Abroad,” issued by order of the viceroy, Tuan Fang, March 7, 1907, ICC Records, Alpha files, 2-E-2/China, pt. 2, box 93; on Roosevelt’s position, see Shonts to Stevens, Jan. 30, 1907; Roosevelt to Taft, July 27, 1906, and Feb. 1, 1907: all ICC Records, Alpha files, 2-E-2/China, pt. 2, box 93.
28.On Guatemalan Indians, see U.S. Senate, Investigation of Panama Canal Matters, 1907, vol. 1, pp. 84–85. On Stevens’s preference for white labor, see his letter to Shonts, Dec. 14, 1905, ICC Records, 2-E-1.
29.Shonts to Stevens, June 5, 1905, ICC Records, 2-E-1; Mallet to Grey, Sept. 12, 1906, Foreign Office Records, FO 371/101.
30.Thomas O’Connell (representing the ICC) to the colonial secretary of Jamaica, Nov. 21, 1905, Foreign Office Records, FO 371/101.
31.Wood to Stevens, Oct. 22, 1906, ICC Records, 2-E-1, “Labor Recruiting.” On the emigration tax required by Jamaica, see Lancelot S. Lewis, The West Indian in Panama: Black Labor in Panama, 1850–1914 (Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1980), pp. 30–31. It is difficult to estimate precisely the number of laborers who came to the Zone from any one country. However, Velma Newton estimates that some 60,000 Barbadians and Jamaicans entered the Zone during the construction decade. See Newton, The Silver Men: West Indian Labour Migration to Panama, 1850–1914 (Mona, Jamaica: University of the West Indies, 1984), pp. 92– 93.
32.Reference to hiring “sheiks” from India: U.S. Senate, Hearings Supplement, Senate Committee on Interoceanic Canals, 62nd Cong. (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1908), p. 53. It is very difficult to find precise information about laborers from India and their role in the Canal Zone. According to Claude Mallet, the British government’s representative in Panama, the U.S. sanitary officials (presumably including William Gorgas) refused to allow the employment of Indians, considering them unsanitary. Between 1871 and 1917, nearly 300,000 Indians migrated to the Caribbean, most of them landing in Trinidad or British Guiana. Over the years a small number made their way to Panama, coming either from India or from islands such as Trinidad. Most often they were refused employment in the Canal Zone, but a small number won jobs on the silver roll. See Mallet, telegram to Foreign Office, 1907, Foreign Office Records, FO 288/94; J. H. Kerr, secretary to the government of Bengal, to the secretary to the government of India, March 30, 1912; Mallet to Grey, July 17, 1912: both Foreign Office Records, FO 371/1417; and Walton Look Lai, Indentured Labor, Caribbean Sugar: Chinese and Indian Migrants to the British West Indies, 1838–1918 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), pp. 107–9. For more general information on the recruitment of labor, see U.S. Senate, Investigation of Panama Canal Matters, vol. 4, pp. 3228–50; Foreign Office Records, esp. FO 370/101 and 371/1417, are also extremely helpful on this subject.
33.On Italians, see Jackson Smith to Taft, May 17, 1907, ICC Records, Alpha files, 2-E-2; for Stevens’s comment that the Spaniards had disturbed the complacency of West Indians and also on Europe’s desire to see the United States fail, consult Stevens to Shonts, Jan. 18, 1907, ICC Records, Alpha files, 2-E-2/China, pt. 2, box 93. The Alpha files are filled with comments by Stevens, Shonts, and others on the necessity of having a diverse workforce so the laborers could be placed in competition with one another. Regarding opposition by European governments to emigration, the U.S. secretary of war reported there existed a pervasive sentiment among Spanish government officials: “If America needed common laborers, let her seek it among her own people. The American is too proud to work with his hands! He must work with his head, and Spain must be his hands! Spain refuses to be the hands of an American head.” Cited in Lewis, The West Indian in Panama, p. 35, taken from Report of the Secretary of War to the President of the United States (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1906), pp. 20–23.
34.Hearings Concerning Estimates for Construction of the Isthmian Canal for the Fiscal Year 1911, conducted on the Canal Zone by the Committee on Appropriations, 61st Cong. (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1910); Message from the President of the United States, Transmitting the Report of the Special Commission Appointed to Investigate Conditions of Labor and Housing of Government Employees on the Isthmus of Panama, 60th Cong., 2nd sess., Doc. 539 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1908), p. 7; Census of the Canal Zone, February 1, 1912 (Mount Hope, C.Z.: ICC Press, 1912), esp. pp. 29–31; the quotation from Stevens is in U.S. Senate, Investigation of Panama Canal Matters (1907), vol. 1, p. 55.
36.Bishop and Bishop, Goethals, Genius of the Panama Canal; Howard Fast, Goethals and the Panama Canal (New York: Julian Messner, 1942); “Mrs. G. W. Goethals; Husband Built Canal,” New York Times, Jan. 2, 1942, p. 2; McCullough, Path Between the Seas, p. 571.
37.George W. Goethals, Government of the Canal Zone (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1915), pp. 49–51; McCullough, Path Between the Seas, pp. 508–11; Richard Harding Davis, “The Dirt Diggers,” Collier’s 49 (1912), p. 15.
38.Abbot, Panama and the Canal in Picture and Prose, p. 168.
39.McCullough, Path Between the Seas, pp. 539–41.
40.Abbot, Panama and the Canal in Picture and Prose, pp. 177–80; McCullough, Path Between the Seas, pp. 550, 590–91.
41.McCullough, Path Between the Seas, pp. 590–91, 598; Abbot, Panama and the Canal in Picture and Prose, pp. 180–86; Panama Canal Authority, at http://www.pancanal.com/eng/history/history/index.html.
42.McCullough, Path Between the Seas, pp. 598–601.
43.Franck, Zone Policeman 88, p. 131.
44.Goethals, Government of the Canal Zone, pp. 2–3; Joseph Bucklin Bishop, “Personality of Colonel Goethals,” Scribner’s Magazine, Feb. 1915, p. 129; J. Hampton Moore, With Speaker Cannon Through the Tropics (Philadelphia: Book Print, 1907), pp. 280–86. Marie Gorgas recalled in her memoir that Roosevelt’s choice of Goethals as chief engineer “was based upon the assumption that the Canal needed a persistent driver; one who was possessed, above all, of administrative ability, a talent for handling large masses of men, and even a certain remorselessness of spirit in accomplishing his ends. All these qualities Col. Goethals had in large degree.” She noted also that Goethals’s account of his work in the Canal Zone “upset” the engineers because he had so little to say about Gatun Dam and Culebra Cut but focused rather on the challenges of governing. Gorgas and Hendrick, William Crawford Gorgas, pp. 215–16, 218–19.
45.Goethals, Government of the Canal Zone, pp. 83–86, 92.
46.Bishop and Bishop, Goethals, Genius of the Panama Canal, pp. 191–93; Roosevelt, Autobiography, p. 528; Goethals, Government of the Canal Zone, pp. 50–51.
47.Goethals, Government of the Canal Zone, pp. 50–51; Bishop and Bishop, Goethals, Genius of the Panama Canal, pp. 191–93; Joseph Bucklin Bishop, “A Benevolent Despotism,” Scribner’s Magazine 53 (1913), pp. 303–19.
48.Bishop and Bishop, Goethals, Genius of the Panama Canal, pp. 191–93; Goethals, Government of the Canal Zone, pp. 50–51; see also Bishop, “Benevolent Despotism”; Abbot, Panama and the Canal in Picture and Prose, p. 162. On despotism in the thinking of political philosophers, see Francis McDonald Cornford, trans., The Republic of Plato (London: Oxford University Press, 1945), esp. pp. 175–79; Susan Zlotnik, “Contextualizing David Levy’s How the Dismal Science Got Its Name,” in Race, Liberalism, and Economics, ed. David Colander, Robert E. Prasch, and Falguni E. Sheth (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), pp. 95–96; Mark Tunick, “Tolerant Imperialism: John Stuart Mill’s Defense of British Rule in India,” Review of Politics 68 (2006), pp. 586–611; Robert Michels, Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy (New York: Free Press, 1966), p. 113; Michael Moran, “Thomas Carlyle,” in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Paul Edwards (New York: Macmillan, 1967), vol. 2, pp. 22–25. My thanks to James Maffie for helping me trace the philosophical lineage of “benevolent despotism.” The phrase was commonly used to describe Goethals’s rule. See, for example, Elizabeth Glendower Evans, “The Parable of Panama,” Socialist Review, July 1914, p. 232. Likewise, General George W. Davis, who served as a member of the Isthmian Canal Commission during the early construction years, testified to the U.S. Senate about the government of the Canal Zone: “The simpler the government the better, and I suppose a benevolent despotism is the only really perfect government that has been conceived by man.” U.S. Senate, Investigation of Panama Canal Matters (1907), vol. 3, pp. 2261, 2267.
49.Bishop and Bishop, Goethals, Genius of the Panama Canal, pp. 241–49: the quotation is on p. 248; Gorgas and Hendrick, William Crawford Gorgas, pp. 218–19. In an essay for Scribner’s Magazine, Joseph Bucklin Bishop actually referred to Goethals’s smile as “beatific.” See “Personality of Colonel Goethals,” p. 145.
50.Miskimon to the acting chairman, March 9, 1909; Miskimon to the secretary to the commission, Feb. 18, 1909: both T. B. Miskimon Papers, MS 86-5, box 2, Special Collections, Ablah Library, Wichita State University. These and similar challenges will be explored further in chapters to come.
51.For Goethals’s policy regarding unions, see his letters to Fred Westcott, Dec. 14, 1908, and to Sibert, March 21, 1910: both ICC Records, 2-P-11; and his interview with C. C. Barnett, Dec. 22, 1908, in George Washington Goethals Papers, General Correspondence, box 6, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. To Sibert, Goethals remarked: “Whatever may be our views in the matter, we are obliged because of instructions from higher authority to recognize the unions, to receive grievance committees, and to extend to them proper treatment.” The quotation explaining why Taft wished Goethals to meet with committees representing the workforce is from George W. Goethals, “The Building of the Panama Canal,” part 2: “Labor Problems Connected with the Work,” Scribner’s Magazine, April 1915, p. 415.
52.Bishop, “Personality of Colonel Goethals,” pp. 147–49.
53.Franck, Zone Policeman 88, p. 205. More information on police and deportation can be found in chapters 2, 3, 7, below.
54.Frederic J. Haskin attributes the emergence of the segregation to a disbursing officer in his Panama Canal (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page, 1913), p. 159; Velma Newton discusses the origins of the silver and gold system in The Silver Men: West Indian Labour Migration to Panama, 1850–1914 (Mona, Jamaica: University of the West Indies, 1984), pp. 131–33; David McCullough treats the subject briefly in Path Between the Seas, p. 576; see also Raymond Allan Davis, “West Indian Workers on the Panama Canal: A Split Labor Market Interpretation” (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1981). Charles Magoon, governor of the Canal Zone, informed senators in 1905 that the differential pay system emerged because of fears that widespread use of U.S. currency would generate runaway inflation, as had happened in the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Cuba. For this reason, he said, the U.S. government had decided to pay the more numerous unskilled workers in Panamanian (silver) currency. See Newton, Silver Men, pp. 131–32.
55.Goethals explained the origins of the system by saying that Americans wanted to be paid in gold, while West Indians preferred to be paid in silver. He concluded: “This divisional designation was found not only convenient but politic, since it avoided all reference to the color line.” Goethals, “Building of the Panama Canal,” part 2: “Labor Problems Connected with the Work,” pp. 395–96; Sullivan to D. W. Bolich, Aug. 4, 1906, ICC Records, 2-F-14, “Transfers, Gold to Silver”; McIlvaine to Mrs. William Swiget, Jan. 1, 1916, ICC Records, 28-B-233, pt. 1. On arguments that segregation would enhance sanitation, see Sutter, “Nature’s Agents or Agents of Empire?” According to American Heritage Dictionary, the term “dago” is pejorative slang for a person of Italian or, sometimes, Spanish origin. It originated as a contraction of the name Diego.
56. Benson to Magoon, Sept. 4, 1905; Stevens to all department heads, Sept. 5, 1905: both ICC Records, 2-F-14.
57.For Stevens’s order, see E. P. Shannon to W. M. Belding, Nov. 12, 1906; Shannon to J. G. Holcome, division engineer, Nov. 15, 1906: both ICC Records, 2-F-14.
58.Shannon to H. D. Reed, Nov. 13, 1906; Burnett to Stevens, Feb. 15, 1907; Reed to Stevens, Feb. 15, 1907: all ICC Records, 2-C-55. Brooke to Stevens, Nov. 1, 1906, ICC Records, 2-F-14.
59.Goethals to all department heads, May 6, 1907; Slifer to Gaillard, Feb. 12, 1908; Smith to Gaillard, Feb. 15, 1908: all ICC Records, 2-F-14.
60.President Roo
sevelt’s executive orders Feb. 8, 1908, and Dec. 23, 1908: both ICC Records, 2-E-11, “Employment of Aliens.” See also Goethals to W. W. Warwick, Nov. 16, 1909, ICC Records, 2-F-14.
61.Weitzel to Goethals, Nov. 17, 1908; Goethals to department heads, Nov. 23, 1908: both ICC Records, 2-E-11.
62.Sands (chief clerk, Department of Construction and Engineering, Atlantic division) to McIlvaine, Nov. 25, 1908; McIlvaine to Goethals, memo, Nov. 27, 1908; Goethals to the chief quartermaster, memo, Nov. 28, 1908: all ICC Records, 2-F-14; Franck, Zone Policeman 88, p. 12. On the other hand, when Constantine Stephos, a Greek American working as a mate on a ladder dredge, asked to be transferred from the silver to the gold roll because he was a U.S. citizen, Goethals refused, arguing that such classification was decided on the basis of the sort of work an individual did, not his nationality. See Stephos to Colonel, April 28, 1911, and Goethals to Stephos, May 8, 1911: both ICC Records, 2-F-14.
63.H. T. Hodges to Goethals, March 7, 1908; Smith to the acting chairman, Feb. 28, 1908; Goethals to all department heads, April 18, 1908; W. G. Brewer (master mechanic) to Lieutenant F. Mears (acting superintendent, Panama Railroad), Sept. 24, 1910; Gorgas to Goethals, Aug. 18, 1908: all ICC Records, 2-E-11. For the comments by the British consul Claude Mallet, see his letters to Grey, April 4 and Aug. 21, 1908, Foreign Office Records, FO 371/101.
64.Goethals to Smith, Sept. 25, 1912, ICC Records, 2-P-49, “Demarcation of Grades of Work to Be Performed by Silver vs. Gold Employees”; Gaillard to Goethals, June 19, 1909, ICC Records, 2-P-49/P, “Protest by Labor Organizations Permitting Silver Employees to Perform Grades of Work That Should Be Done by American Citizens.” See also McIlvaine (Goethals’s executive secretary and the person who presumably drafted the document cited above) to Goethals, Sept. 25, 1912: ICC Records, 2-P-49: “I thought it advisable to make this a question of citizenship, which will accomplish the same end, as I believe the Government cannot very well draw the color line.” On African Americans in the Canal Zone, see Charlie Walker, John Hicks, Charlie Woodard, A. Benson, Thomas Onsley, and Sandy Odom to Goethals, Jan. 13, 1909; memo to Goethals, Oct. 10, 1912; Goethals to Henry Hart and John Thomas, March 18, 1910: all ICC Records, 2-C-55, “Employment of Colored American Citizens, General”; and Patrice C. Brown, “The Panama Canal: The African American Experience,” Prologue 29, no. 2 (Summer 1997), pp. 122–26. On the “special” silver roll for African American employees, see Wood to Henry A. Smith, July 24, 1907; Gaillard to Jackson Smith, Feb. 11, 1908; Jackson Smith to the acting chairman, Feb. 12, 1908: all ICC Records, 2-C-55. By 1912 only forty-four African Americans were working for the U.S. government in the Canal Zone. Twenty-five more worked for a contractor in the Zone. Goethals to Rudolph Forster, July 10, 1912, ICC Records, 2-C-55.