by Julie Greene
65.James, Mulberry Tree, pp. 259–60, 228–32.
66.Ibid., p. 235. James added to her observation of the houses looking like meat safes: “I always felt when I went inside those doors that I ought to be given a dish to sit down on.”
67.Ibid., pp. 239–41, 131. The importance of machines and unimportance of humans in the construction of the canal would become a common theme, preceding and helping to generate, no doubt, the complete erasure of human labor that would occur by the time of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in 1915. For other examples of this, see Arthur Bullard describing Culebra Cut: “It is as busy a place as an anthill. It seems to be alive with machinery; there are, of course, men in the cut too, but they are insignificant, lost among the mechanical monsters which are jerking work-trains about the maze of tracks, which are boring holes for the blasting, which are tearing at the spine of the continent.” Similarly, “those midgets of men are not doing the work. They are only arranging it for the monsters of steel whose food is fire.” Bullard, Panama, pp. 50, 549. Even a writer in the official journal of the International Brotherhood of Steam Shovel and Dredge Men repeated this theme. Describing Culebra Cut, he declared, “Here the steam shovel is king and the tourist realizes that it isn’t men but machinery that solve the problem of digging the ditch.” Alexis J. Colman, “How the Work of Digging the Canal Strikes a Layman,” Steam Shovel and Dredge 15, no. 3 (March 1911), p. 196.
68.James, Mulberry Tree, pp. 232–41.
69.Ibid., p. 226; Cameron, Woman’s Winter in South America, p. 221.
70.Colman, “How the Work of Digging the Canal Strikes a Layman,” pp. 193–97; Edith A. Browne, Panama (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1913), p. 58.
71.Franck, Zone Policeman 88, pp. 10, 82. See esp. chapter 8, “The Riots of Cocoa Grove,” below.
CHAPTER TWO: “AS I AM A TRUE AMERICAN”
1.Supplement to Hearings Concerning Estimates for Construction of the Isthmian Canal for the Fiscal Year 1911, Statements of the Representatives of Skilled Employees (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1910), p. 21.
2.U.S. Senate, Investigation of Panama Canal Matters: Hearings Before the Committee on Interoceanic Canals of the United States Senate, 59th Cong., 2nd sess., Doc. 401 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1907), vol. 3, pp. 2265–66, 617.
3.Sergeant George Johnson to George Shanton, March 20, 1905, Isthmian Canal Commission Records, RG 185, 2-P-11, “Labor Troubles and Spy Reports,” National Archives, College Park, Md. (hereafter cited as ICC Records).
4.S. B. Schuck (police sergeant), report of meeting, March 13, 1905, ICC Records, 2-P-11. The battleship Connecticut was built in New York at the Brooklyn Navy Yard in 1904 and 1905. Strikes by government employees in shipbuilding and munitions would have provided an important precedent for the organizing activities of skilled workers in the Canal Zone. My thanks to John Stobo, David Montgomery, Grace Palladino, and Joseph Slater for information about this and related strikes. On the history of public employees and labor organizing, see David Ziskind, One Thousand Strikes of Government Employees (New York: Columbia University Press, 1940); Joseph E. Slater, Public Workers: Government Employee Unions, the Law, and the State, 1900–1962 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004). According to David Ziskind, the earliest recorded strike by civilian employees of the Navy occurred in 1835. He found several strikes by civilian employees of the U.S. military during the early twentieth century.
5.George Shanton to S. G. Schenck, March 17, 1905; Schenck to Shanton, March 20, 1905; R. Gunner to Shanton, March 19, 1905: all ICC Records, 2-P-11.
6.Shanton to Schenck, March 17, 1905; Laurence Angel to Shanton, Sunday noon (n.d.); no signature to Shanton, March 20, 1905: all ICC Records, 2-P-11.
7.Wallace to Admiral John G. Walker (chairman, ICC), March 21, 1905, ICC Records, 2-P-11.
8.Shanton to Dan S. Lehon (Illinois Central Railroad Co.), Jan. 17, 1906, ICC Records, 2-P-11.
9.John Wallace, testimony in U.S. Senate, Investigation of Panama Canal Matters (1907), serial set 5097, vol. 1, pp. 641–42; Wallace to Walker, March 21, 1905, ICC Records, 2-P-11; for a lengthier analysis by Wallace of the skilled workers’ reasons for discontent, see Wallace to Walker, Feb. 9, 1905, ICC Records, 2-P-51, “Grievances of Employees.”
10.Wallace to Walker, Feb. 9, 1905, ICC Records, 2-P-51.
11.Wallace, testimony in U.S. Senate, Investigation of Panama Canal Matters, vol. 1, p. 611.
12.John Hall, Panama Roughneck Ballads (Panama and Canal Zone: Albert Lindo, Panama Railroad News Agency, 1912), pp. 9–15.
13.Singer to his family, Sept. 4 and Nov. 23, 1913, letters in author’s possession. For more examples of complaints about improper behavior in the bachelor dormitories, see “Letters from the Line,” Canal Record, March 11, 1908, p. 219.
14.Harry A. Franck, Zone Policeman 88: A Close Range Study of the Panama Canal and Its Workers (New York: Century, 1913), pp. 86–87. Skilled workers also believed they were resented by Army officers. A Panama Railroad conductor complained to Goethals in 1908 that Army officials had declared himself and his peers to be “high-priced conductors getting as much as Captains in the Army.” See “Interview Between Col. George W. Goethals and C. C. Barnett,” Dec. 22, 1906, in George Washington Goethals Papers, General Correspondence, box 6, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
15.Census of the Canal Zone, February 1, 1912 (Mount Hope, C.Z.: ICC Press, 1912), pp. 16, 32–38, 52; Supplement to Hearings Concerning Estimates, passim and pp. 347–48; Supplement to Hearings on the Panama Canal, Senate Committee on Interoceanic Canals (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1908), pp. 52, 89; John Foster Carr, “The Panama Canal—The Commission’s White Workers,” Outlook, May 5, 1906, pp. 21–24. On the government at first discouraging women and children from accompanying their menfolk to the Zone, see Mrs. Charles C. J. Wirz, “Some of My Experiences on the Isthmus of Panama,” in The American Woman on the Panama Canal: From 1904 to 1916, ed. Mrs. Ernest von Muenchow (Balboa Heights, Panama: Star and Herald, 1916), p. 25. For more on women in the Canal Zone, including the wives of U.S. workers, see chapter 6, below.
16.Annual Report of the Isthmian Canal Commission for the Fiscal Year Ending June 30, 1907 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1907), plate 137.
17.Hearings Concerning Estimates for Construction of the Isthmian Canal for the Fiscal Year 1911, conducted on the Canal Zone by the Committee on Appropriations, House of Representatives, 61st Cong. (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1910), pp. 75–78; Canal Zone Trades Council to Goethals, n.d., ICC Records, 2-D-39, pt. 2, box 32. For a summary of the differences between monthly and hourly employees’ situations, see George W. Goethals, “The Building of the Panama Canal,” part 2: “Labor Problems Connected with the Work,” Scribner’s Magazine, April 1915, pp. 395– 418.
18.Bryce to Sir Edward Grey, Nov. 28, 1910, Foreign Office Records, FO 371/943, National Archives, Kew, U.K.
19.“Record of Excavation Since American Occupation,” Canal Record, Dec. 8, 1909, p. 116; David McCullough, The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870–1914 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1977), p. 604.
20.Estate of Philip F. Kramer, deceased, Jan. 14, 1908, case 134, Records of District Courts of the United States, RG 21, District of the Canal Zone, 2nd Judicial Circuit, Empire, Gorgona, Ancon, Civil Case Files, 1904–14, box 3, National Archives, Washington, D.C. According to the Canal Record, Philip Kramer’s gold watch was soon found in the possession of a Spanish workman, who was immediately arrested for the murder. The workman claimed to have found the watch, however, and interrogation of the gang of men with whom he worked generated no more evidence. It’s unknown what happened in this case. See Canal Record, Jan. 29, 1908, p. 170.
21.On Shanton and the police department, see McCullough, Path Between the Seas, pp. 494–95; Carr, “Panama Canal—Commission’s White Workers,” pp. 21–24; Franck, Zone Policeman 88, p. 107.
22.When the construction project began, the International Brotherho
od of Steam Shovel and Dredge Men negotiated a salary of $190 per month for steam-shovel engineers and $165 per month for crane operators. These salaries soon rose to $210 and $185, respectively. A study of wages in the United States conducted by the union found the average wage to be $163 per month for steam-shovel engineers and $110 per month for crane operators. See E. Tipping, “The History of the Panama Canal,” Steam Shovel and Dredge 18, no. 11 (Nov. 1914), pp. 931–34. ICC secretary Joseph Bucklin Bishop estimated that the average pay of workers in the Canal Zone ranged from 25 to 100 percent higher than that of their counterparts in the United States, but the union’s more conservative estimate is probably more accurate. See Joseph Bucklin Bishop, “A Benevolent Despotism,” Scribner’s Magazine 53 (1913), p. 303.
There is a vast scholarship on white male skilled workers in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. Useful portrayals of skilled workers at this time include Michael Kazin, Barons of Labor: The San Francisco Building Trades and Union Power in the Progressive Era (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988); David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865–1925 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Walter Licht, Working for the Railroad: The Organization of Work in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983); Patricia Ann Cooper, Once a Cigarmaker: Men, Women, and Work Culture in American Cigar Factories, 1900–1919 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987); Julie Greene, Pure and Simple Politics: The American Federation of Labor and Political Activism, 1881–1918 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
23.William Howard Taft, testimony in U.S. Congressional Hearings Supplement, Senate Committee on Interoceanic Canals (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1908), pp. 6–8.
24.Ibid., pp. 6–7.
25.U.S. Senate, Investigation of Panama Canal Matters, vol. 3, pp. 2265, 2668; Michael L. Conniff, Black Labor on a White Canal: Panama, 1904–1981 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985), p. 37.
26.On Shanton and the Rough Riders, see McCullough, Path Between the Seas, pp. 494–95; the best source on the Zone policemen is Franck, Zone Policeman 88. See also John Foster Carr, “Building a State,” Outlook, June 23, 1906, p. 440. Franck reports (p. 150) that almost all of the American policemen came to the job with military training under their belts, as did Carr, who visited the Zone in 1906. The organization of the police force, Carr noted, is “half military.” “Most of its officers and petty officers come from the army and have seen active service in Cuba and the Philippines” (p. 440).
27.For a profile of the police department see Franck, Zone Policeman 88, esp. pp. 145–47.
28.W. J. Ghent, “Work and Welfare on the Canal,” Independent, April 29, 1909, p. 909; Franck, Zone Policeman 88, 154, pp. 205–6. The use of spies was a time-tested technique in U.S. factories. On this see, for example, Stephen Norwood, Strikebreaking and Intimidation: Mercenaries and Masculinity in Twentieth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Robert Michael Smith, From Blackjacks to Briefcases: A History of Commercialized Strikebreaking and Unionbusting in the United States (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003); Gary M. Fink, The Fulton Bag and Cotton Mills Strike of 1914–1915: Espionage, Labor Conflict, and New South Industrial Relations (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993).
29.General Davis, testimony in U.S. Senate, Investigation of Panama Canal Matters, vol. 3, pp. 2262–65. For more on deportation, see chapter 7.
30.Theodore Roosevelt’s executive order is discussed in ibid., pp. 2261–65; Reed to Stevens, Oct. 22, 1906, ICC Records, 2-E-1; J. P. Fyffe to M. H. Thatcher (head of Deptartment of Civil Administration), July 29, 1911; D. D. Gaillard to Taft, Dec. 14, 1907; Rousseau to Shanton, Jan. 3, 1908: ICC Records, 94-L-9.
31.Taft gives his views on the matter in U.S. Congressional Hearings Supplement, Senate Committee on Interoceanic Canals, pp. 23–24. See also Brooke to Rousseau, April 13, 1907, and Taft to Roosevelt, “Labor Issues in the Canal Zone, Isthmus of Panama,” May 9, 1907: both ICC Records, 2-D-39, box 32.
32.Brooke to Rousseau, April 13, 1907, ICC Records, 2-D-39, box 32.
33.According to the official journal of the International Brotherhood of Steam Shovel and Dredge Men, this strike was an independent movement among steam-shovel operators in the Canal Zone and was not supported by the union’s national leadership. Secretary of War Taft later testified that the striking steam-shovel engineers had all returned home to the United States; he did not clarify whether they went voluntarily or were deported, but his wording suggests the former. “The Trouble at Panama,” Steam Shovel and Dredge 11, no. 6 (June 1907), pp. 273–75; Goethals, “Building of the Panama Canal,” pt. 2: “Labor Problems Connected with the Work,” esp. pp. 413–16; Goethals, testimony in Panama Canal—Skilled Labor: Extracts from Hearings of the Committees on Appropriations of the Senate and House of Representatives, Fiscal Years 1907 to 1915 Inclusive, 63rd Cong., 2nd sess. (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1914), pp. 276–81. Taft’s testimony is in U.S. Congressional Hearings Supplement, Senate Committee on Interoceanic Canals, pp. 23–24. See also Gerstle Mack, The Land Divided: A History of the Panama Canal and Other Isthmian Canal Projects (New York: Knopf, 1944), p. 541.
34.Goethals, “Building of the Panama Canal,” pt. 2: “Labor Problems Connected with the Work,” esp. pp. 413–16. For an insightful window into Goethals’s views on labor and his strategy for dealing with it, see “Interview Between Col. George W. Goethals and C. C. Barnett.”
35.T. B. Miskimon to Goethals, memos, n.d., T. B. Miskimon Papers, MS 86-5, box 2, FF 47 and 48, Special Collections, Ablah Library, Wichita State University.
36.Strikes continued to occur, but infrequently. An important strike broke out among plasterers working to complete the new Hotel Washington in 1913, for example. It began in part as a conflict over aliens (West Indians) being hired on the job. See the documentation on this strike at ICC Records, 2-P-21, box 48, in Jan. and Feb. 1913.
37.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. 3. Important works focusing on the relationship between U.S. imperialism, race, and citizenship in the early twentieth century include José Cabranes, Citizenship and the American Empire (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979); Hazel M. McFerson, The Racial Dimension of American Overseas Colonial Policy (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1997); Andrew Neather, “Labor Republicanism, Race, and Popular Patriotism in the Era of Empire, 1890–1914,” in Bonds of Affection: Americans Define Their Patriotism, ed. John Bodnar (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996); Christina Duffy Burnett and Burke Marshall, eds., Foreign in a Domestic Sense: Puerto Rico, American Expansion, and the Constitution (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001). On citizenship more generally, see Rogers M. Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997), esp. pp. 429–39; Ian F. Haney-López, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race (New York: New York University Press, 1996); Paul Taillon, “Americanism, Racism, and ‘Progressive’ Unionism: The Railroad Brotherhoods, 1898–1916,” Australasian Journal of American Studies 20 (July 2001), pp. 55–65; Paul Taillon, “To Speak for the People? Citizenship, the State, and Railway Labor Politics, 1917–1920,” unpublished paper presented at the 2003 American Historical Association Conference; Joseph A. McCartin, Labor’s Great War: The Struggle for Industrial Democracy and the Origins of Modern American Labor Relations, 1912–1921 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); Hendrik Hartog, “The Constitution of Aspiration and ‘The Rights That Belong to Us All,’” Journal of American History 74 (Dec. 1987), pp. 1013–34; Charles Tilly, “Citizenship, Identity, and Social History,” International Review of Social History 40, supp. 3 (1995), p. 10; Kathleen Canning a
nd Sonya O. Rose, “Gender, Citizenship, and Subjectivity: Some Historical and Theoretical Considerations,” Gender and History 13 (Nov. 2001), pp. 430–33.
38.U.S. Senate, Investigation of Panama Canal Matters, p. 3231; Supplement to Hearings Concerning Estimates, pp. 24, 49.
39.Department of Commerce and Labor, Bulletin of the Bureau of Labor, no. 59, July 1905; U.S. Senate, Investigation of Panama Canal Matters, pp. 51, 641–45, 808; Goethals, “Building of the Panama Canal,” pt. 2: “Labor Problems Connected with the Work,” p. 418; Greene, Pure and Simple Politics, passim.
40.Mrs. Flanagan to Goethals, Sept. 12, 1908; Goethals to Sibert, Aug. 11, 1908: both ICC Records, 2-E-11, “Employment of Aliens.”