by Julie Greene
56.Reyes Rivas, El trabajo de las mujeres en la historia de la construcción del Canal de Panamá, pp. 134–61.
57.Bonham Richardson interview notes, 1982, passim, in author’s possession; Dr. Carlos E. Russell, An Old Woman Remembers: The Recollected History of West Indians in Panama, 1855–1955 (Brooklyn: Caribbean Diaspora Press, 1995), esp. pp. 8–9.
58.Richardson interview notes with Mrs. Adina Richards (née Fordringham), March 15, 1982, in author’s possession.
59.Census of the Canal Zone, February 1, 1912, pp. 16–55.
60.Ibid, pp. 42–43. Nearly three-fourths of all black children living in the Canal Zone in 1912, or 1,847 of 2,459, had been born in the Zone.
61.Reyes Rivas, El trabajo de las mujeres en la historia de la construcción del Canal de Panamá, pp. 151–56; Census of the Canal Zone, February 1, 1912, p. 55.
62.For Bigelow’s article (“Our Mismanagement at Panama”) and the resulting investigations, see Message from the President of the United States Transmitting Certain Papers to Accompany His Message of January 8, 1906 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1906).
63.Examination of John F. Stevens and J. W. Settoon; John Stevens, “Exhibit A, Memorandum of Comments”; and Magoon to Taft, Nov. 16, 1905: all in ibid.; 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), pp. 54–57, 20–31, 41.
64.George Shanton to Magoon, Nov. 21, 1905; see also examination of Settoon: both in Message from the President.
65.U.S. Senate, Investigation of Panama Canal Matters, vol. 1, pp. 930–33, 941–81.
66.Louise Cramer, “Songs of West Indian Negroes in the Canal Zone,” California Folklore Quarterly 5, no. 3 (July 1946), p. 255. Cramer listened as a woman sang this song for her. The woman reportedly had originally learned it in Jamaica in 1906.
67.Ibid., p. 256.
68.Courtney Black v. Mary Black, Oct. 10, 1912, case 124, Records of District Courts of the United States, District of the Canal Zone, 1st Judicial Circuit, Civil Case Files, 1904–14, box 1.
69.Eugenia Justine Peters v. Arthur Joseph Peters, June 30, 1913, case 163, Records of District Courts of the United States, District of the Canal Zone, 1st Judicial Circuit, Civil Case Files, 1904–14. For similar cases, see also in the 1st Judicial Circuit: Samuel Donovan v. Elida V. Donovan, Nov. 16, 1910, case 90, box 2; and Beatrice Ford v. Frederick A. Ford, June 20, 1912, case 115, box 2. Putnam, Company They Kept, includes a detailed discussion of marriage and cohabitation among West Indians, but her sources provided little information about divorce.
70.Knox to Knight, Sept. 11, 1906, Foreign Office Records, FO 288/101, The National Archives, Kew, U.K. See also the 1908 petition of Jane Moseley, Port of Spain, Trinidad, regarding the belongings of her deceased brother Samuel Cox, Foreign Office Records, FO 288/109.
71.Ricketts to the British consul, Jan. 21, 1913, Foreign Office Records, FO 288/149. For another example, see Lorline Cargell (imprisoned by the Panamanian government, unjustly, she claimed) to the British consul, Sept. 27, 1914, Foreign Office Records, FO 288/160.
CHAPTER SEVEN: LAW AND ORDER
1.Canal Zone v. Coulson, case 28, decided May 8, 1907, in Canal Zone Supreme Court Reports, vol. 1: Cases Adjudged in the Supreme Court of the Canal Zone from July Term, 1905, to October Term, 1908 (Ancon, C.Z.: ICC Press, 1909), pp. 50–55; see also “Trial by Jury on the Zone,” Canal Record, Sept. 25, 1907, p. 5.
2.On this, see Wayne D. Bray, The Common Law Zone in Panama: A Case Study in Reception (San Juan, P.R.: Inter American University Press, 1977), pp. 62, 87–88; Frederic J. Haskin argues in his book The Panama Canal (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page, 1913), p. 258, that Joseph Blackburn, who headed Civil Administration in the Zone, influenced Roosevelt to issue this executive order. According to Haskin, Blackburn “regarded it as repugnant to American ideas of justice to deny to Americans on the Isthmus the right to be tried for felonious offenses by juries of their peers.” The execution of Adolphus Coulson is listed in the index to the Gorgas Hospital Mortuary Registers, 1906–91, available on the National Archives Web site through its Access to Archival Databases.
3.On the Hay–Bunau-Varilla Treaty, see Bray, Common Law Zone in Panama, pp. 40–41; Wilson v. Shaw, 1907, at http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/cgi-bin/getcase.pl?court=us&vol=204&invol=24 (accessed Sept. 15, 2005); see also J. Michael Hogan, The Panama Canal in American Politics: Domestic Advocacy and the Evolution of Policy (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986), pp. 13, 34; David McCullough, The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870–1914 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1977), pp. 388–94.
4.Bray, Common Law Zone in Panama, pp. 72–74, 79–80.
5.Ibid., pp. 3–18.
6.Ibid., pp. 94–95, 63–64; “Report of Hon. Frank Feuille, Head of the Department of Law,” in Annual Report of the Isthmian Canal Commission for the Fiscal Year Ending June 30, 1912 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1912), app. O, p. 518.
7.Bray, Common Law Zone in Panama, pp. 94–95, 63–64. Bray cites President Roosevelt’s executive order of May 9, 1904.
8.Ibid., esp. ch. 7 and pp. 100, 116.
9.Ibid., pp. 77–84.
10.Ibid., pp. 84–85.
11.Ibid., pp. 86–87.
12.Downes v. Bidwell, accessed at http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/cgi-bin/getcase.pl?court=us&vol=182&invol=244 (accessed Sept. 13, 2005). Dorr v. United States, at http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/cgi-bin/getcase.pl?court=us&vol=195&invol=138 (accessed Sept. 13, 2005). See also Walter F. Pratt Jr., “Insular Cases,” in The Oxford Guide to United States Supreme Court Decisions (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 136–37; James E. Kerr, The Insular Cases: The Role of the Judiciary in American Expansionism (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat, 1982); Efrén Rivera Ramos, The Legal Construction of Identity: The Judicial and Social Legacy of American Colonialism in Puerto Rico (Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association, 2001).
13.Sanford Levinson, “Installing the Insular Cases into the Canon of Constitutional Law,” in Foreign in a Domestic Sense: Puerto Rico, American Expansion, and the Constitution, ed. Christina Duffy Burnett and Burke Marshall (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001), pp. 134–35.
14.Quoted in Frank Ninkovich, The United States and Imperialism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), p. 56.
15.Bray, Common Law Zone in Panama, p. 4; see also Gustavo Adolfo Mellander, “Magoon in Panama” (master’s thesis, George Washington University, 1960); and Gustavo Adolfo Mellander, The United States in Panamanian Politics (Danville, Ill.: Interstate Printers and Publishers, 1971), p. 74.
16.Fitzpatrick v. Panama Railroad Company, decided Jan. 31, 1913, in Canal Zone Supreme Court Reports, vol. 2: Cases Adjudged in the Supreme Court of the Canal Zone from October 1908 to June 1914 (Mount Hope, C.Z.: Panama Canal Press, 1915), pp. 111–32. The quotation is from p. 118.
17.Albert Edwards, Panama: The Canal, the Country, and the People (New York: Macmillan, 1911), p. 503. Edwards was a pseudonym for Arthur Bullard, the well-known socialist.
18.Joseph Blackburn, “Report of the Head of the Department of Civil Administration,” in Annual Report of the Isthmian Canal Commission for the Fiscal Year Ending June 30, 1907 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1907), pp. 162–63. In fiscal year 1907, 56 people were deported from the Canal Zone; in 1912 the number deported was 156, 100 of whom had finished serving terms in the Zone penitentiary. See ibid., p. 152, and Annual Report of the Isthmian Canal Commission for the Fiscal Year Ending June 30, 1912, pp. 464–65.
19.The ordinance took effect on Jan. 1, 1908, and was added to the penal code of the Canal Zone by executive order of President Roosevelt on Jan. 9, 1908. See extracts from the minutes of meeting of the ICC, Dec. 9, 1907, and Roosevelt’s executive order: both Isthmian Canal Commission Records, RG 185, 94-L-9, National Archives, College Park, Md. (hereafter cited as ICC Records); Canal Zone v. Rebecca Merchant, for di
sorderly conduct, Nov. 11, 1911, case 127611-11-11, Records of District Courts of the United States, RG 21, District of the Canal Zone, 2nd Judicial Circuit, Empire, Gorgona, Ancon, Criminal Case Files, 1904–14, box 7, National Archives, Washington, D.C.
20.Canal Zone v. Abel Emanuel Scott, March 14, 1905, case 9, Records of District Courts of the United States, District of the Canal Zone, 2nd Judicial Circuit, Criminal Case Files, 1904–14, box 1.
21.Canal Zone v. Samuel Griffith, case 215; Canal Zone v. George Owens, Dec. 17, 1908, case 207: both in Records of District Courts of the United States, District of the Canal Zone, 3rd Judicial Circuit, Cristobal, Criminal Case Files, 1904–20, box 1.
22.Canal Zone v. Garcia, June 29, 1907, case 115; Canal Zone v. Ah Mee and Ah Chow, July 16, 1909, case 247: both in Records of District Courts of the United States, District of the Canal Zone, 3rd Judicial Circuit, Criminal Case Files, 1904–20, box 1.
23.T. B. Miskimon to Goethals, memorandum, Sept. 10, 1910, T. B. Miskimon Papers, MS 86-5, box 2, folder 40, Special Collections, Ablah Library, Wichita State University.
24.Miskimon to Goethals, memorandum, Sept. 19, 1910, Miskimon Papers, MS 86-5, box 2, folder 41.
25.Thatcher’s testimony is in The Panama Canal: Hearings Before the Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, House of Representatives, 62nd Cong., 2nd sess. (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1912), vol. 1, p. 320.
26.Miskimon to Goethals, memorandum, Dec. 16, 1908, Miskimon Papers, MS 86-5, box 1, folder 30.
27.On convict labor in the United States, see Karin A. Shapiro, A New South Rebellion: The Battle Against Convict Labor in the Tennessee Coalfields, 1871–1896 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Alex Lichtenstein, Twice the Work of Free Labor: The Political Economy of Convict Labor in the New South (New York: Verso, 1996).
28.L. G. Thom (assistant engineer) to Major W. L. Sibert (division engineer), Aug. 13, 1908, ICC Records, 62-B-78, pt. 1. Prisoners sentenced to less than one year were not required to wear shackles. See also “Instructions to Prisoners,” ICC Records, 55-A-1, pt. 1.
29.Blackburn to Goethals, Aug. 18, 1908, ICC Records, 62-B-78, pt. 1.
30.Shanton to Blackburn, July 23, 1908; Sibert to H. H. Rousseau, Jan. 25, 1908: both ICC Records, 62-B-78, pt. 1.
31.Thom to Sibert, Aug. 13, 1908, ICC Records, 62-B-78, pt. 1; and “Instructions to Prisoners,” ICC Records, 55-A-1, pt. 1.
32. Shanton to police officer in command, Cristobal, Feb. 19, 1908, ICC Records, 62-B-78, pt. 1. In 1905, as the government made its plans for recruiting labor to build the canal, one enterprising newspaper journalist wrote a treatise to convince officials they should import convicts from the United States to the Canal Zone and use them as a major source of labor. According to this journalist, Samuel Fox of Kansas City, Missouri, the Department of Labor and Commerce considered his suggestion sufficiently feasible that it asked him to forward his ideas to the Isthmian Canal Commission. Fox declared: “Important Government Work has been accomplished in foreign lands by the use of Convicts or Criminals. The Australian Colonies attest that fact.” Fox anticipated officials would have no trouble securing convicts in the United States except in those areas where their labor was already sold to contractors. One is reminded, upon hearing of Fox’s scheme, of the worries in the 1890s that America would not be able to launch large projects in the tropics without recourse to forced or indentured labor. The ICC rejected Fox’s proposal. See Fox to the chief clerk, July 19, 1905; and Samuel Fox, “Convict Labor for the Panama Canal,” July 19, 1905: both ICC Records, 62-B-78, pt. 1.
33.Miskimon to Goethals, memoranda, May 11, 1909, Oct. 28, 1910, Miskimon Papers, MS 86-5, box 2, folders 9 and 42. It is difficult to know for sure whether beating of prisoners continued after this investigation, but the inspector’s critical tone in his report to Goethals suggests that it may henceforth have been discouraged. One year later a black policeman hit a prisoner and was himself then beaten by a white policeman in the presence of the warden. The black policeman, angry at his treatment, responded that he “was as good as any Damn white officer” and then moved as if to pick up an inkstand on the desk in front of him to use against the police officer, at which point the warden himself got involved. The black policeman made a complaint against the warden and the white policeman for this incident, but Goethals’s inspector believed that the white men had done nothing wrong. Miskimon to Goethals, March 30, 1910, Miskimon Papers, MS 86-5, box 2, folder 30.
34.First-Class Policeman George Fisher to Sergeant Joseph Seeger, April 30, 1909; Seeger to Blackburn, May 2, 1909: both ICC Records, 46-D-7.
35.Thatcher to Sir, Dec. 14, 1910; Peter Johnson (second lieutenant, Zone policeman) to Shanton, May 4, 1909; Seeger to Blackburn, May 2, 1909; J. P. Fyffe, “Grading of Prisoners,” n.d.; J. P. Fyffe, “Instructions to Prisoners” (approved by Blackburn and Goethals), n.d.; Fyffe to Thatcher, Feb. 10, 1912: all ICC Records, 46-D-7.
36.Edward T. Devine, “The Canal Builders,” Survey, March 1, 1913, pp. 765, 768.
37.In July 1913, as the construction project moved toward completion and the challenge of managing workers seemed less worrisome, all liquor licenses were suspended, and the Zone became dry in order to comply with federal law that prohibited alcohol on government property. See Willis J. Abbot, Panama and the Canal in Picture and Prose (New York: Syndicate, 1914), pp. 346–47; George Goethals in Panama Canal: Hearings Before the Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, vol, 1, p. 328.
38.As in the case of R. B. Elliott in chapter 2, above, police sometimes relied on gambling charges to harass workers involved in union organizing. For the court cases discussed in this paragraph, see the following in the Records of District Courts of the United States, District of the Canal Zone, 2nd Judicial Circuit, Criminal Case Files, 1904–14: Canal Zone v. Charles Christian, filed Jan. 26, 1905, case 5, box 1; Canal Zone v. Uriah Lee, George Gordon, and others, July 18, 1911, case 1166, box 7; Canal Zone v. Geo Tolluck, Joseph Johnson, and George Wray, July 21, 1911, case 1175, box. 7. These last three men were charged with playing at a game of dice for money. Two were sentenced to ten days in prison; the other was found not guilty.
39.Louise C. Bidwell Collection, MS 86-13, folder 1, Special Collections, Ablah Library, Wichita State University.
40.Miskimon to D. D. Gaillard, Feb. 27, 1908, Miskimon Papers, MS 86-5, box 1, folder 38; Miskimon to the acting chairman, May 27, 1910, Miskimon Papers, MS 86-5, box 2, folder 35.
41.Miskimon to C. A. McIlvaine, memo, Sept. 15, 1909, Miskimon Papers, MS 86-5, box 2, folder 13. The concluding assessment is based on a reading of the Miskimon Papers, which span several years.
42.See especially Canal Zone v. James Peart, filed Dec. 27, 1908, case 606, Records of District Courts of the United States, District of the Canal Zone, 2nd Judicial Circuit, Criminal Case Files, 1904–14, box 4.
43.Canal Zone v. Cooper, case 52, in Canal Zone Supreme Court Reports, vol. 2: Cases Adjudged in the Supreme Court of the Canal Zone from October 1908 to June 1914, pp. 16–19.
44.John Hall, “Spickety Bill,” in Panama Roughneck Ballads (Panama and Canal Zone: Albert Lindo, Panama Railroad News Agency, 1912), pp. 27–29. On John Henry, see Scott Nelson, Steel Drivin’ Man: John Henry, the Untold Story of an American Legend (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).
45.Peter Johnson to Goethals, Sept. 19 and 28, 1913, ICC Records, 62-B-248, pt. 1, box 364, “Cohabitation or Immoral Conduct of White Employees with Native or Colored Women.” The title given to this file by the ICC indicates what sort of cohabitation troubled them: white men cohabiting with women of color.
46.Captain Barber (Zone police) to Goethals, memo, Oct. 21, 1913, ICC Records, 62-B-248.
47.Rousseau to Goethals, Dec. 3, 1913; and WPC, memo, Dec. 4, 1913: both ICC Records, 62-B-248. Rousseau was the head of the Department of Municipal Engineering, Motive Power and Machinery, and Building Construction.
48.Canal Zone v. John Lane, for
pimping, Dec. 18, 1908, case 607, Records of District Courts of the United States, District of the Canal Zone, 1st Judicial Circuit, Balboa, 1904–14, box 4; Miskimon to Gaillard, Jan. 30, 1908, Miskimon Papers, MS 86-5, box 1, folder 32; Miskimon to Goethals, Oct. 21, 1907, Miskimon Papers, MS 86-5, box 1, folder 6.
49.“Report of M. H. Thatcher, Head of the Department of Civil Administration,” Annual Report of the Isthmian Canal Commission for the Fiscal Year Ending June 30, 1912, app. N, pp. 465–66.
50.Miskimon to Goethals, April 5, 1909, Miskimon Papers, MS 86-5, box 2, folder 7.
51.B. W. Caldwell, M.D., to Charles Magoon, June 22, 1906; Magoon to Caldwell, June 23, 1906: both ICC Records, 62-B-248, pt. 1, box 364.
52.H. G. Belknap, memo, June 10, 1913; Belknap to Captain Barber, June 23, 1913; Barber to M. H. Thatcher, June 24, 1913; C. F. Johnson to chief of division, July 2, 1913: all ICC Records, 62-B-248, pt. 1, box 364.
53.Canal Zone v. John T. O’Brien, Feb. 12, 1908, case 154, Records of District Courts of the United States, District of the Canal Zone, 3rd Judicial Circuit, Criminal Case Files, 1904–20, box 1; Canal Zone v. O’ Brien, case 43, in Canal Zone Supreme Court Reports, vol. 1: Cases Adjudged in the Supreme Court of the Canal Zone from July Term, 1905, to October Term, 1908, pp. 121–22. To contrast arrests for sodomy in the Canal Zone with those in the United States, see George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1995); Peter Boag, Same-Sex Affairs: Constructing and Controlling Homosexuality in the Pacific Northwest (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).
54.Canal Zone v. William Waite, Nov. 7, 1905, case 27; and Goethals, memo, Dec. 21, 1908: both Records of District Courts of the United States, District of the Canal Zone, 2nd Judicial Circuit, Criminal Case Files, 1904–14, box 1. Supporting the pardon, the judge of the Second Circuit Court noted, “The girl was under 13 but gave her consent to the act, and was well grown for her age; I may say almost fully developed.” In a similar case a white conductor named Campbell was accused of attempting to rape two girls aged nine and ten. This case was not taken to the courts, because none of the parties wanted the bad publicity that would come from legal action. Instead, the parents complained to Goethals. He ordered an investigation, which in turn recommended that Campbell be discharged and refused any other job in the Zone. See T. B. Miskimon, “Personal: Memorandum for the Chairman,” Jan. 16, 1910, Miskimon Papers, MS 86-5, box 2, folder 23.