by Julie Greene
2.On the “turbulent” character of Spaniards, see Hearings Before the Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce of the House of Representatives, on the Panama Canal (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1908), p. 32.
3.Census of the Canal Zone, February 1, 1912 (Mount Hope, C.Z.: ICC Press, 1912), pp. 54–55. The one important exception involved some Panamanians, who were occasionally allowed to work at clerical or supervisory jobs on the gold payroll. Their privileged status was made possible by President Theodore Roosevelt, who included them on the gold roll in his 1908 executive order in deference to Panama’s having given effective control over the Canal Zone to the United States.
4.Shonts to Stevens, June 5, 1905, ICC Records, 2-E-1; see Pérez, Cuba; Ferrer, Insurgent Cuba; Joan Casanovas, Bread, or Bullets! Urban Labor and Spanish Colonialism in Cuba, 1850–1898 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998); Jackson Smith, “European Labor on the Isthmian Canal,” March 25, 1907, ICC Records, 2-E-3.
5.Shonts testifying in 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. 1, p. 484; Smith, “European Labor on the Isthmian Canal.”
6.William J. Karner, More Recollections (Boston: Thomas Todd, 1921), pp. 206–7; William R. Scott, The Americans in Panama (New York: Statler, 1913), pp. 188–89. On Italian migrants and their role in the Canal Zone, see also Diego dal Boni, Panamá, Italia, y los italianos en la época de la construcción del Canal, 1880–1915 (Bogotá: Panamerica, 2000). For a comparison with Italian migration to North America, see Gunther Peck, Reinventing Free Labor: Padrones and Immigrant Workers in the North American West, 1880–1930 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
7.Smith, “European Labor on the Isthmian Canal.”
8.Spain sent more migrants abroad than any other European country during these decades except for Britain and Italy. See Moya, Cousins and Strangers; Salvador Palazón, Los Españoles en América Latina, 1850–1990 (Madrid: CEDEAL, 1995), pp. 130–34; Walter Nugent, Crossings: The Great Transatlantic Migrations, 1870–1914 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), pp. 101–5; Adrian Shubert, A Social History of Modern Spain (London: Unwin Hyman, 1990); Marco Serra, Los obreros españoles en la construcción del Canal de Panamá. The 1912 census of the Panama Canal Zone includes statistics on literacy. Of the nearly thirty-five hundred Spaniards employed by the U.S. government, thirteen hundred were recorded as being illiterate. Census of the Canal Zone, February 1, 1912, pp. 50–54.
9.Gertrude Beeks, “Report for the National Civic Federation,” issued to William H. Taft, Jan. 28, 1908, esp. pp. 43–46, ICC Records, 28-A-5; “Statements Made by a Delegation of European Laborers,” Aug. 9, 1911, ICC Records, 2-P-59.
10.J. G. Sullivan, the assistant chief engineer, referred to Europeans as “semi-white” in a letter to D. W. Bolich, Aug. 4, 1906, ICC Records, 2-F-14; for an example where Spaniards are unambiguously referred to as white, see acting chief of police to commanding officer, Culebra, Feb. 25, 1909, ICC Records, 2-P-59.
11.Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease, eds., Cultures of United States Imperialism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), especially the article by Amy Kaplan, “Black and Blue on San Juan Hill”; Theodore Roosevelt, The Rough Riders (New York: Modern Library, 1999).
12.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. 67–68. Silver workers were paid in silver, which was worth roughly half the value of gold. When discussing the pay they gave to silver workers, U.S. officials always referred to what the silver pay would be worth in U.S. currency, and I follow the same convention in this book. Thus in the case discussed here, Laborer A is described as earning ten cents U.S. currency per hour, although in reality he would have been paid twenty cents silver per hour. David Roediger employs W. E. B. DuBois’s notion in The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, 2nd ed. (New York: Verso, 2007); by “wages of whiteness” both DuBois and Roediger referred to the psychological and cultural wage white workers historically earned as a result of privileges their race afforded them.
13.Potous to Joseph Blackburn, Oct. 5, 1907; G. Garibaldi to Joseph Bucklin Bishop, Oct. 16, 1907; Blackburn to Potous, June 18, 1907: all ICC Records, 2-P-69. I’ve seen no evidence of involvement by the Italian or Greek consuls, for example, in the records of the ICC, but the archives of those countries—as well as of France—might contain more information.
14.Mallet, annual report for 1908, delivered in May 1909, Foreign Office Records, FO 371/708, The National Archives, Kew, U.K.
15.Garibaldi to Bishop, Oct. 16, 1907; R. E. Wood to Blackburn, July 27, 1907; Potous to D. D. Gaillard, March 4, 1908; Garibaldi to Goethals, June 9, 1908: all ICC Records, 2-P-69.
16.Mallet, annual report for 1908, Foreign Office Records, FO 371/708. For the correspondence between Spanish and U.S. government officials over issues like compensation in the years before Potous issued his report in 1908, see, for example, Potous to Blackburn, June 17, 1907, and Spanish minister R. Piña y Millet to secretary (presumably to William Howard Taft, the secretary of war immediately responsible for Canal Zone policies), June 25, 1907: both ICC Records, 2-P-69. See also Hearings Concerning Estimates for Construction of the Isthmian Canal for the Fiscal Year 1911, p. 64; Census of the Canal Zone, February 1, 1912, p. 30.
17.Spanish workmen to Potous, Oct. 30, 1907; Potous to Blackburn, Oct. 31, 1907; and governmental memo, Nov. 1, 1907: all ICC Records, 2-P-69.
18.Shanton to Reed, Feb. 26, 1907; S. B. Schenk to Shanton, Feb. 26, 1907; Benjamin Wood to Shanton, Dec. 13, 1906: all ICC Records, 2-P-59.
19.See A. E. Verdereau to Shanton, April 27, 1907; El Único, May 18, 1912: both ICC Records, 2-P-59.
20.Sibert to Blackburn, Sept. 6, 1907; Shanton to Blackburn, June 1, 1908; A. K. Evans (Zone policeman) to Shanton, May 2, 1907: all ICC Records, 2-P-59. The comment regarding pandering can be found in Hearings Before the Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce of the House of Representatives on Panama Canal, Hotel Tivoli, Ancon, Canal Zone (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1909), pp. 83, 84.
21.Hearings Before the Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce of the House of Representatives, on the Panama Canal (1908), p. 30.
22.Cooper to Shanton, March 13, 1907; Shanton to Reed, March 14, 1907: both ICC Records, 2-P-59.
23.Clipping from the Panama Sunday Sun, March 31, 1907; Stanley Ross (Zone policeman) to Shanton, May 2, 1907: ICC Records, 2-P-59.
24.Sergeant Kennedy to Shanton, Feb. 25, 1909; Captain G. A. Porter (acting chief of police) to commanding officer of Culebra, Feb. 26, 1909; Porter to Potous, Feb. 26, 1909; Charles Palacio (Zone policeman) to Porter, Feb. 26, 1909: ICC Records, 2-P-59. For another example of trouble between Spaniards and West Indians riding together on labor trains, see Canal Zone v. George Playfair, March 13, 1905, case 6, Judicial Records of the Canal Zone, 2nd Criminal District, RG21, National Archives, Washington, D.C.
25.Memo, March 7, 1911, to Colonel Carrol A. Devol (chief quartermaster); Devol to Goethals, March 17, 1911; J. B. Cooper to chief of division, Aug. 24, 1911; M. H. Thatcher to Goethals, Sept. 9, 1911; Devol to Goethals, Sept. 12, 1911: all ICC Records, 28-B-233.
26.Shanton to Reed, April 9, 1907, forwarding a letter written by G. H. Skinner (Zone policeman), ICC Records, 2-P-59.
27.Shubert, Social History of Modern Spain, pp. 124–25.
28.Jose C. Moya found this to be the case in Argentina as well. See his Cousins and Strangers, p. 15.
29.On the decline of the Spanish Empire and its impact on Spanish immigrants, see Sebastian Balfour, The End of the Spanish Empire, 1898–1923 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Jordi Maluquer de Motes Bernet, España en la crisis de 1898: De la
gran depresión a la modernización económica del siglo XX (Barcelona: Peninsula, 1999). For the experiences of Spaniards in Cuba and Argentina, see Casanovas, Bread, or Bullets; Moya, Cousins and Strangers.
30.See Julie Greene, “Race and the Tensions of Empire: The United States and the Construction of the Panama Canal, 1904–1914,” unpublished paper presented at the Johns Hopkins Conference “Between Two Empires,” Nov. 2000; George Brooke to Goethals, Feb. 1, 1909, ICC Records, 2-P-49/P; and Smith, memo, March 25, 1907, ICC Records, 2-E-3.
31.U.S. Senate, Hearings Supplement, Senate Committee on Interoceanic Canals, 62nd Cong. (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1908), p. 90.
32.“Notes of Investigation Held on Sunday, July 30, 1911, in Office of Division Engineer at Empire Regarding Complains of Spanish Laborers in Culebra District,” p. 6, ICC Records, 2-P-59.
33.A. S. Brook, memo to C. A. S. Zinn, July 28, 1911; petitions of the strikers, n.d.; José Buigasy de Dalmau (Spanish consul) to Goethals, July 28, 1911; Paul S. Wilson, “Memo re the European Laborers of the Culebra District,” July 28, 1911; Goethals, “Notice to the Spanish Laborers on Strike,” Aug. 2, 1911: all ICC Records, 2-P-59. Traditionally, Spaniards drank only coffee at breakfast time. Prohibiting eating on the job meant they would eat nothing between 6:20 a.m., when they arrived at work, until lunchtime at 1:00 p.m.
34.J. P. Fyffe to Thatcher, Aug. 3, 1911; Goethals, “Notice to the Spanish Laborers on Strike”; for the workers’ petition to the government, see La Asamblea a la ICC, n.d.; Goethals to Gaillard, Aug. 7, 1911; “Notes of Investigation Held on Sunday, July 30, 1911”; Zinn (acting division engineer) to Joseph Little (superintendent of construction), July 31, 1911; A. Cornelison to assistant division engineer, Aug. 10, 1911; Cornelison to division engineer, Sept. 2, 1911: all ICC Records, 2-P-59.
35.Shubert, Social History of Modern Spain, pp. 90–103, 193–96.
36.See especially Casanovas, Bread, or Bullets!; and Temma Kaplan, “The Social Base of Nineteenth-Century Andalusian Anarchism in Jerez de la Frontera,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 6, no. 1, (Summer 1975), pp. 47–70; George Reid Andrews, “Black and White Workers; Sao Paulo, Brazil, 1888–1928,” Hispanic American Historical Review 68, no. 3 (Aug. 1988), pp. 491–524; Shubert, Social History of Modern Spain, pp. 97–99; George R. Esenwein, Anarchist Ideology and the Working-Class Movement in Spain, 1868–1898 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989); Raymond Carr, Spain, 1808–1975 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982); Edward Malefakis, Agrarian Reform and Peasant Revolution in Spain: Origins of the Civil War (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1970); Eric Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the 19th and 20th Centuries, 2nd ed. (New York: Praeger, 1963); Gary R. Mormino and George E. Pozzetta, The Immigrant World of Ybor City: Italians and Their Latin Neighbors in Tampa, 1885–1985 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987); Maxine Molyneux, “No God, No Boss, No Husband: Anarchist Feminism in Nineteenth-Century Argentina,” Latin American Perspectives 13, no. 1 (Winter 1986), pp. 119–45; Barry Carr, “Marxism and Anarchism in the Formation of the Mexican Communist Party, 1910–1919,” Hispanic American Historical Review 63, no. 2 (May 1983), pp. 277–305; John M. Hart, Anarchism and the Mexican Working Class, 1860–1931 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1978); Vicente Díaz Fuentes, La clase obrera: Entre el anarquismo y la religión (Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1994); Anton Rosenthal, “The Arrival of the Electric Streetcar and the Conflict over Progress in Early Twentieth-Century Montevideo,” Journal of Latin American Studies 27, no. 2 (May 1995), pp. 319–41; Jose C. Moya, Cousins and Strangers.
37.Paul Wilson to Bishop, Aug. 31, 1911; Gorgas to Goethals, Sept. 9, 1911; F. H. Sheibly to Bishop, Sept. 25, 1911: all ICC Records, 2-P-59.
38.Wilson to Bishop, Aug. 31, 1911; Corporal 5 (Zone police) to Shanton, Sept. 19, 1911; Father Henry Collins to Goethals, Oct. 13, 1911: all ICC Records, 2-P-59.
39.El Único, Suplemento al número 1, Sept. 12, 1911; P.V. (police spy) to Shanton, Sept. 25, 1911; Sheibly to Bishop, Sept. 25, 1911: ICC Records, 2-P-59.
40.Collins to Goethals, Oct. 10, 1911; F. B. (alias Punatazot) to Goethals, Nov. 6, 1911; R. J. Cochran to Goethals, Oct. 24, 1911; C. A. McIlvaine to Goethals, Aug. 17, 1911: all ICC Records, 2-P-59.
41.Father D. Quijano to Charles Mason, Sept. 26, 1911; Collins to Goethals, Oct. 13, 1911; Gorgas to Goethals, Sept. 30, 1911; Thatcher to Goethals, Sept. 29, 1911; J.K.B. to Goethals, n.d.; Eugene T. Wilson to acting chairman, March 21, 1912: all ICC Records, 2-P-59.
42.Hearings Concerning Estimates for Construction of the Isthmian Canal for the Fiscal Year 1911, p. 64; “Report of Lieut. Col. C. A. Devol, Quartermaster’s Department,” Appendix J, in Annual Report of the Isthmian Canal Commission for the Fiscal Year Ending June 30, 1912 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1912), pp. 377–78.
CHAPTER FIVE: PROGRESSIVISM FOR THE WORLD
1.Arthur Bullard, Panama: The Canal, the Country, and the People (New York: Macmillan, 1911), p. 562. See also Albert Edwards, Testing Socialism in the Canal Zone (Girard, Kans.: A. W. Ricker, 1908). Technically, Bullard pointed out, one of the two railroads in the Canal Zone—the Panama Railroad, for passenger travel—was in private hands. But as the government owned virtually all stock in the company, he considered that as well to be government owned. For an interesting exploration of how the construction of the Panama Canal shaped the thinking of British Socialists, see Kevin Morgan, “British Guild Socialists, and the Exemplar of the Panama Canal,” History of Political Thought 28, no. 1 (Spring 2007), pp. 120–57.
2.Arthur W. Thompson, “The Reception of Russian Revolutionary Leaders in America, 1904–1906,” American Quarterly 18, no. 3 (Autumn 1966), pp. 452–76; James Boylan, Revolutionary Lives: Anna Strunsky and William English Walling (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), p. 68; Mark Pittenger, American Socialists and Evolutionary Thought, 1870–1920 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993); Jane E. Good, “America and the Russian Revolutionary Movement, 1888–1905,” Russian Review 41, no. 3 (July 1982), pp. 273–87. See also Jane E. Good, “Strangers in a Strange Land: Five Russian Radicals Visit the United States, 1890–1908” (Ph.D. diss., American University, 1979), pp. 20, 161–62.
3.Bullard, Panama, pp. 48–49.
4.Ibid., pp. 572–78, 507.
5.Ibid., pp. 577–78.
6.Samuel Merwin, “The American Revolution at Panama: An Impression . . . and a Question,” Chicago Daily Tribune, July 14, 1912, p. H3. For a similar analysis, see Willis J. Abbot, Panama and the Canal in Picture and Prose (New York: Syndicate, 1914), pp. 325–29.
7.Robert Herrick, “Imagination and the State,” Chicago Daily Tribune, Jan. 10, 1915, p. A5; see also H. G. Wells, Social Forces in England and America (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1914); for arguments about employing similar methods in Alaska, see Merwin, “American Revolution at Panama”; and Abbot, Panama and the Canal in Picture and Prose, pp. 325–29.
8.Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward: 2000–1887 (New York: Signet Classics, 2000); Abbot, Panama and the Canal in Pictures and Prose, p. 328. For interpretations of Bellamy, see Shelton Stromquist, Reinventing “The People”: The Progressive Movement, the Class Problem, and the Origins of Modern Liberalism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), pp. 39–42; Arthur Lipow, Authoritarian Socialism in America: Edward Bellamy and the Nationalist Movement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982); James Gilbert, Designing the Industrial State: The Intellectual Pursuit of Collectivism in America, 1880–1940 (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1972).
9.Henry George, Progress and Poverty: An Inquiry into the Cause of Industrial Depressions and of Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth: The Remedy (New York: D. Appleton, 1882); on Gorgas and the single tax, see “Tax Idle Land to Aid Health, Plan of Gorgas,” Chicago Daily Tribune, Sept. 7, 1915, p. 7. See also Stromquist, Reinventing “The People”; David M. Scobey, “Boycotting the Politics Factory: Labor Ra
dicalism and the New York Mayoral Election of 1884,” Radical History Review 28–30 (1984), pp. 280–325; John L. Thomas, Alternative America: Henry George, Edward Bellamy, Henry Demarest Lloyd, and the Adversary Tradition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983). For others who mentioned the government ownership of all land in the Canal Zone as a positive feature, see Bullard, Panama; and Merwin, “American Revolution at Panama.”
10.John Foster Carr, Sixth Paper, “Building a State,” Outlook, June 23, 1906, pp. 435–45; Abbot, Panama and the Canal in Picture and Prose, pp. 328–29.
11.Joint strike bulletin, July 9, 1917, issued by the Metal Miners Union and the Electrical Workers’ Union in Butte, Butte–Silver Bow Public Archives, Labor History Collection, Butte, Mont.; Machinists’ Monthly Journal, Oct. 1908, p. 872. Others besides Bullard believed skilled workers would be converted to socialism as a result of seeing the lovely benefits accruing from government control. See, for example, Abbot, Panama and the Canal in Picture and Prose, pp. 326–27; Edith A. Browne, Panama (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1913), p. 74. For connections between socialism and imperialism in the British context, see Anna Davin, “Imperialism and Motherhood,” in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), pp. 95–97. My thanks to John Enyeart for providing the Butte miners’ perspective on the canal.