The Canal Builders

by Julie Greene

  But what of the Republic of Panama? Its citizens were not a wealthy people, and they were ruled by a small oligarchy of merchants, land­owners, bankers, and businessmen. Even as these groups took their young nation into a Faustian bargain with the United States, they hoped their independence and their friendship with the United States would provide a ticket to wealth, power, and respect in the eyes of the world. But the U.S. occupation of the Canal Zone and the construction project instead generated tremendous strains on all Panamanians economically and culturally, regardless of their ethnicity, race, or class status. Living in a small and scarcely populated province of Colombia, the people of the isthmus had historically felt ignored and disrespected by Colombian leaders. The merchants and businessmen who dominated the region feared and disliked the working masses around them and sought to isolate themselves from any demands urban workers might make. Caught between the disdain of Colombian leaders and the ­working-­class people they themselves disdained, Panama’s leaders had for nearly a century sought the protection of a strong foreign power. Over the course of the nineteenth century they looked to Great Britain, France, and the United States for support.17

  These men also felt anxious to make use of whatever advantages they could to propel forward the economic fortunes of the isthmus—as well as their own political and economic fates, naturally seeing the two as virtually indistinguishable. Throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, this required exploiting their remarkable geography. Panama had little coffee or sugar to sell, but, poised on a narrow strip of land between two great oceans, it had served as a crossing point for explorers and conquerors for hundreds of years. In the ­mid-­nineteenth century, Panamanian elites negotiated construction of a railroad with American contractors, and later they hoped to benefit from the French project to construct a canal. Each of these projects generated destabilizing social and economic change, leading Panama’s merchants and businessmen to worry about their security and future. Nonetheless, they remained convinced that alliance with a powerful foreign nation would provide the best route to prosperity and political might. More than that, the historian Peter Szok has demonstrated, this small group of elites shared, like so many across Latin America, a deep belief in liberalism: the idea that progress and civilization must be brought to the isthmus. They hoped to achieve this through a relationship with a power like France or the United States—a nation that could help them profit from their unrivaled location—and by luring foreign investment and creating a ­Western-­style government in the region. This would not only bring civilization to the isthmus but also help insulate elites from the demands and protests of ­lower-­class Panamanians, most of them people of African or mestizo descent. Economically vulnerable but demographically dominant, the lower classes of Panama had long seemed a threat to the Panamanian upper class, with its European background, and so the latter had developed notions of liberalism and nationalism that carefully excluded all other social groups.18

  And yet there was always a sharp edge to the alliance between the merchants of Panama and the Americans. The Frenchman ­Bunau-­Varilla, representing Panama in the negotiations with the United States, reportedly threatened the young nation’s leaders that if he did not play the central role, the United States might refuse to support independence. Although their alliance guaranteed Panama’s independence, the relationship was fundamentally unequal. As time went on, the canal construction project and U.S. policies together generated a major social transformation of Panama, heightening divisions within the country, and the rift in the friendship grew ever larger.

  The early days of Panamanian independence proved difficult. A constitution was passed that included a clause granting the United States the right to intervene anywhere in the republic to restore public peace, and established an interim revolutionary government to rule until February 1904, when the National Assembly elected the elderly conservative Manuel Amador Guerrero as the nation’s first president. Amador hung a photograph of President Theodore Roosevelt on the wall behind his desk and got to work. Many controversies arising out of Panama’s revolution required handling: Colombia remained problematic; relations with the United States generated difficult issues; and, perhaps most important, Amador needed to isolate those within his country who might cause problems, including liberals and nationalists who criticized the ­Hay–­Bunau-­Varilla Treaty as granting too much to the United States, and the lower and middle classes who were angry over their exclusion from so much of Panama’s public and political life.19

  BACK IN the United States, Roosevelt received criticism for the way he had acquired the Canal Zone. TheNew York Times referred to the Zone as “stolen property” and declared that Roosevelt’s partners in the crime were “a group of canal promoters and speculators and lobbyists who came into their money through the rebellion we encouraged, made safe, and effectuated.” The ­anti-­imperialist Moorfield Storey declared Roosevelt’s seizing of the canal to be morally and legally objectionable: “It teaches the weaker republics of this hemisphere to distrust and fear us. … It sets an unhappy example of lawlessness to our citizens [and] … it lowers the moral standard of our whole people.”20 Stung by the criticism, Roosevelt released documents and developed arguments to defend his actions. His main justification will sound familiar today, in an age of acknowledged globalization: the interests of world trade transcended international law. The needs of civilization itself were at stake, and this trumped any mere sovereignty of Colombia. “If ever a Government could be said to have received a mandate from civilization to effect an object the accomplishment of which was demanded in the interest of mankind, the United States holds that position with regard to the interoceanic canal,” Roosevelt declared.21

  Yet despite condemnation from the press and from some ­anti-­imperialists, Roosevelt’s taking of the Canal Zone generated few widespread protests. The ­Anti-­Imperialist League tried but failed to generate a campaign opposed to the canal. At the annual convention of the American Federation of Labor, the longtime activist Andrew Furuseth introduced a measure criticizing the government for violating Colombia’s sovereignty. The AFL instead passed a resolution hailing the construction of an Isthmian canal as “the most important public work ever assumed by this or any other nation.” Roosevelt’s shift away from formal colonialism had made it easier for AFL leaders to support his actions, and the canal’s importance as a public works project made it seem necessary to them.22 Traditional opponents of empire among both the working class and the middle class seemed to be losing their fire. Disturbed by the lack of opposition to the U.S. role in Panama, the philosopher and ­anti-­imperialist William James noted in a letter to a friend: “The organization of slick success in our age is only equalled by the organization of political acquiescence. Between them we shall live in a new form of society.”23

  As expansionists like Roosevelt hungrily looked to begin the construction project, serious questions awaited them. There was a great deal of contemplation across the United States in the early twentieth century about what it meant to be an imperial power, what it should look like, and how to tackle the challenges involved in empire building generally and in constructing the canal more specifically. The United States had to succeed, and succeed marvelously, if it was to exploit the construction effort for maximum effect. The French effort to build a canal across the isthmus from 1880 to 1889 had failed spectacularly due to persistent disease, inadequate technology, insufficient funds, high labor turnover, and, most damaging of all, unfortunate engineering decisions. It cost the lives of at least twenty thousand people. In the aftermath, Ferdinand de Lesseps, the hero of France who had supervised the building of the Suez Canal and who had been expected to triumph in Panama as well, was tried and convicted of fraud and breach of trust.24 Having dishonored France, de Lesseps was surely on American officials’ minds as they plotted their own success. They understood that the French failure gave them an opportunity to showcase the promise and talents of young America. The
project would be a gigantic one, requiring the labor and energy of tens of thousands. It would necessitate creating an entire society in the Canal Zone, housing the workers, keeping them healthy, protecting them, disciplining them, and managing their work. How might all this be done?

  A rush of books and articles appeared in these years, introducing readers to America’s new possessions, questioning their potential impact on the Republic, and analyzing some of the challenges and quandaries they presented. Authors devoted endless pages simply to describing the new U.S. territories, from Puerto Rico to Panama, from Guam to Hawaii. For some, clarifying the relationship between the United States and Panama proved a preoccupation. In the anthologyAmerica Across the Seas: Our Colonial Empire, John Wallace wrote that “while it would hardly be proper to style the Republic of Panama one of the colonial possessions of the United States,” the United States does have complete control over the strip of land known as the Canal Zone. Another book referred to the Panama Canal Zone as “our most important colony.” Some writers celebrated the canal project in ways that must have pleased Roosevelt. William Boyce proclaimed in his bookUnited States Colonies and Dependencies: The Travels and Investigations of a Chicago Publisher, “The Panama Canal is the greatest industrial undertaking ever attempted and successfully carried to completion by any nation of the world, and we should all feel proud of our country, and that we are citizens of the United States of North America.”25

  Yet many others voiced concerns. The English writer Benjamin Kidd had forcefully raised the problems inherent in tropical conquest in his 1898 bookThe Control of the Tropics, which declared that the white man could never adapt to tropical climates or to the peoples who lived there. Kidd wrote that “in the midst of races in a different and lower stage of development; divorced from the influences which have produced him, from the moral and political environment from which he sprang, the white man does not in the end … tend so much to raise the level of the races amongst whom he has made his unnatural home, as he tends himself to sink slowly to the level around him.” In an article in theAtlantic Monthly that closely followed upon publication of his book, Kidd specifically addressed these questions with regard to the United States. He anticipated that it was the destiny of the United States to be the “leading ­world-­power of the next century” and noted that this could not be accomplished without a major commitment to world trade. Kidd took the expansionism of the United States as a given, but he repeated that the white man “can never be acclimatized in the tropics.” Rather, the “natural inhabitants” must continue to people those regions, and the United States must be sure to govern them “as a trust for civilization.” As Kidd’s comments suggest, the “tropics” loomed as a great source of anxiety to many in the early twentieth century. Tropical climates were particularly associated with the absence of civilization—and hence with the same threat of degeneration people had observed in the Philippines.26

  James Morton Callahan, author ofAn Introduction to American Expansion Policy, likewise commented on the fears that colonization of the tropics would bring trouble, especially race problems, and that the people of the tropics could not possibly be governed by democratic means. People worry, he noted, that “some system of forced or indentured labor will be necessary to develop large industries” and that this will threaten the American Republic. Yet Callahan sided with those more optimistic observers who “are telling us that the trade of the tropics will be the largest factor in the era upon which we are entering; that the trend of modern history seems to be toward colonization and protectorates for less civilized peoples; and that it will be futile for any first class power to fold its hands and stand aloof from regions which, although they cannot perhaps be colonized by whites, must be governed by a base in the temperate zones—by the United States and other nations whose duty it is to undertake the work in the interest of all as a trust for civilization.” Expansionists, he noted, merely laugh at the ­anti-­imperialists, and he described the latter as “shrieking at the ­self-­conjured ghost of imperialism, as if empire could grow on freedom’s soil.” To the contrary, he urged, civilization must “reach out in helpfulness to lift the less enlightened to liberty’s plane, to search for fresh resources, to transform seas into paths for ships, and yoke nature to serve man.”27 Thus did Callahan state the expansionists’ cheerful vision of American imperialism.

  Through such books and articles Americans who never laid foot on the Isthmus of Panama would become acquainted with its geography. Bounded on the Atlantic (Caribbean) side by the city of Colón and on the Pacific shore by Panama City, the Republic of Panama possessed a climate shaped powerfully by the proximity of the ocean. Three and a half million years earlier the oceans had met there and sharks had swum freely through the water. The oceans’ impact could still be felt in tremendous downpours of rain, particularly in the wet season, which lasted from May to December and, when combined with high temperatures and humidity, made life across the isthmus a challenge. During one of the downpours that came daily during the wet months, an inch or two of rain could fall within minutes, flooding streets, complicating the construction process, and making almost unbearable the workers’ time on the job. James Anthony Froude had described Panama in 1885 as “a hideous dung heap of physical and moral abomination … a damp, tropical jungle, intensely hot, swarming with mosquitoes, snakes, alligators, scorpions, and centipedes; the home, even as Nature made it, of yellow fever, typhus, and dysentery and now made immeasurably more deadly by the multitudes of people who crowd thither.”28

  The memoirs of those who traveled to the isthmus during the French and early American eras repeat such horrifying images over and over again. Marie Gorgas, the wife of the sanitation director, William Gorgas, and one of the first to arrive in Panama, recalled, “Nature herself seemed to have set aside the Isthmus as the headquarters of the worst manifestations of the human spirit. The whole ­forty-­mile stretch was one sweltering miasma of death and disease.” She saw on the isthmus “an apparently hopeless tangle of tropical vegetation, swamps whose bottoms the engineers had not discovered, black muddy soil, quicksands, intercepted now and then by a tall volcanic mountain or crossed by rivers that, at flood tide, sometimes rose twenty feet and more in a single night.” The floods regularly “obliterated the landscape.” Altogether it impressed her as a land of “dank terror.”29 As Americans prepared to head for the isthmus, conquer the tropics, and build a new civilization, they knew the task would be formidable.

  MEANWHILE, MEN and women around the world heard of the Yankees’ project and began to think of making their own trip. Their journeys and experiences in the Canal Zone were different—but no less important, and no less rich in meaning—from those of Theodore Roo­sevelt. U.S. government officials had established offices in the Caribbean and in Europe to begin recruiting labor for the construction project, and their labor agents fanned out around the globe looking for ­able-­bodied men. The islands of the Caribbean emerged as their main target, with Barbados feeling the impact most intensively. Sugarcane plantations of a few hundred acres each dominated Barbados and were worked by a rural proletariat of African descent. The typical plantation manager had moved to Barbados from Britain and knew his workers by name—these were not the distant corporate owners that dominated many Caribbean islands. The Barbadians who harvested and processed the cane, or who worked as blacksmiths or wheelwrights, were for the most part impoverished. Many owned no shoes. Estate workers who sought ­better-­paying work elsewhere often faced prosecution for deserting the job. Some managed to acquire small plots for growing a few vegetables, which helped them survive. When hunger grew desperate, particularly among the children, a rough form of justice known as the potato raid might be carried out, where hundreds of estate workers would loot a potato crop, beating off anyone who tried to stop them.30

  Considering their circumstances back home, it is perhaps not surprising that over the course of a decade, twenty thousand Barbadians signed contracts with the U.S. gove
rnment and traveled to Panama. Probably at least that many more went to work in Panama without a contract, many of them wives or children of contract laborers. As migrants headed for Bridgetown to catch a steamer, their excitement must have been as palpable as the planters’ horror. One estate worker remembered a song that spread through the estates after Panama migration began:

  We want more wages, we want it now,

  And if we ­don’t get it, we going to Panama.

  Yankees say they want we down there,

  We want more wages, we want it now.31

  Those who left for Panama were eager for adventure, the chance to make more money, and freedom from the toil of plantation work, but they were also nervous about leaving loved ones behind for the unknown world of the Yankees. One Barbadian woman remembered the night before the boats left: there was such a big party that some ­didn’t make it to the boat the next day.32 The preparations for departure could be extensive: saving up money and purchasing shoes and a suit coat, perhaps a nice hat, and a canvas folding chair for the journey. Old kerosene tins often served as suitcases. Across the island one would see men saying ­good-­bye to their families before joining others to hike to meet the ship in Bridgetown. It became a common sight, these men marching across the island, dressed in suit coats and heading for Panama.