by Julie Greene
Displeased by West Indians, Stevens searched for alternatives. He wanted white labor to dig the canal, and he believed whites from the United States could withstand the tropical conditions. Yet he knew this would not be feasible—white Americans would cost too much and would not tolerate the rough labor of canal building. Stevens therefore decided to fight for government approval to import Chinese workers. He had relied on them to build railroads in the U.S. West, and although he conceded that Chinese laborers could be “obstinate,” he declared, “I am a little disposed in favor not only of the Chinaman as a laborer, but as a man, from my contact with them on the west coast. In fact, I have a very high respect and regard for Chinese of all classes whom I have ever met.”24
Winning the right to import Chinese workers proved an uphill battle. In 1905 the Isthmian Canal Commission asked the U.S. attorney general, William Moody, to consider the legal issues involved. Moody analyzed the Thirteenth Amendment, which forbade slavery or involuntary servitude in the United States or “any place subject to their jurisdiction,” and found that it did in fact apply to the Panama Canal Zone. Regardless of how well a laborer is treated by the government, Moody argued, and even if he has agreed to the work, he must be free to leave at any time and be able to “choose the work in which he is to engage.” The importing of “Oriental aliens” under contracts to perform labor “is not necessarily one of involuntary servitude, but it may be and, in fact, usually is a condition of involuntary servitude.” In this way Moody identified a specific ethnic group as particularly vulnerable to involuntary servitude.
Considering the attorney general’s report, ICC chairman Theodore Shonts informed Stevens that although it would theoretically be possible to import Chinese laborers, certain steps would need to be taken so as to avoid even the appearance of involuntary servitude. The government would have to provide for repatriation of its laborers. It would have to “minimize the idea of contract labor, to avoid unfavorable public opinion in the United States, and to magnify the fact of direct employment of each laborer by the Government.” The government would likewise need to pay wages directly to laborers and not to contractors. Finally, Shonts advised, it would be necessary to protect the Republic of Panama from an “invasion” of such laborers contrary to that nation’s immigration laws. Unfortunately, Shonts spelled out, if all these conditions were met and the Chinese workers were truly made “free laborers,” there would be no way to guarantee they would remain on the isthmus. The risks and costs would thus be greater—the government would need to pay Chinese workers a much higher wage so they would not desert the project for a higher-paying one, and perhaps pay a higher fee to those who furnished the laborers. This made it impracticable to import Chinese men. As involuntary laborers, Chinese workers were unsavory; as free ones, they were economically impractical.25
Stevens tried to make do with West Indians, but a year later, after having observed their work for many months, he despaired that the canal would never be finished if he was forced to rely on them. He began to push aggressively again for access to Chinese workers, ignoring the continued protests from U.S. labor unions. Stevens angrily declared he would not “accept the responsibility, in case the labor question here should become acute, of acquiescing in the delay in securing the Chinese labor.” He was particularly frustrated to see that “matters of policy rather than those of business have governed the entire proposition.” Trying to make the idea of Chinese migrants more palatable, Stevens proposed importing Chinese doctors and allowing some family members to accompany the twenty-five hundred laborers he desired.26
In the end, despite Stevens’s efforts, a “violent” public reaction against the idea in the United States, Chinese exclusion laws (in the United States and in the Republic of Panama), and opposition from the Chinese government all worked against him. President Roosevelt waffled on the matter, at times putting himself on record as preferring any other source of workers and declaring, “If you could get white labor,…I should prefer it. But the prime necessity is to complete the canal as speedily as possible.” As late as February 1907, however, Roosevelt agreed “without hesitation” to the hiring of Chinese workers. Soon after he approved the idea, however, the Chinese government issued a proclamation forbidding its citizens to work on the canal. Viceroy Tuan Fang declared that any “coolies” imported to the Canal Zone would be falling into a “dangerous trap.” Exploited, unable to make much money, they would be vulnerable to the whims of their employers.27 This proclamation, combined with Stevens’s nearly simultaneous resignation, sealed the matter.
Stevens had cast his eye around the globe for an alternative source of labor, but it seemed every potential worker was either too lazy or too assertive for his tastes. Panamanians and Colombians were believed unwilling to work hard, so the government preferred not to employ them.28 Shonts strongly favored recruiting Spaniards who were working on railroads and sugar plantations in Cuba. “They are white men, tractable, and capable of development and assimilation,” he declared. Stevens imported a few hundred of them, but opposition from planters and government officials in Cuba ended the experiment until recruiting stations could open in Spain. Hiring African Americans, it was assumed, would generate protest from employers throughout the South, so the government recruited only a few hundred of them.29
Lacking any alternative, Stevens regretfully turned back to West Indians to supply the unskilled labor he needed. Yet when officials began encouraging migration to Panama from across the British and French Caribbean, they found resistance among many Caribbean nations. ICC officials negotiated strenuously when they encountered opposition from the Jamaican government, promising, for example, that they would hire Jamaicans as foremen as well as laborers, so they would not have to work under American foremen.30 Nonetheless, the Jamaican government severely restricted the recruitment of labor by requiring that emigrants pay a steep emigration tax. St. Kitts, Antigua, Montserrat, Grenada, and many others shut ICC recruiters out altogether. Some laborers would migrate to Panama from those islands, but they would have to do so on their own. R. E. Wood, the official in charge of securing labor, complained that American recruiters were being compelled to “wander from island to island, picking up men here and there, like discredited fugitives.” Indeed, he declared, many governors in the British Caribbean seemed to lack respect for the U.S. government. They did, however, possess due respect for the British Crown, and so Wood urged Stevens to inform the British government that its Caribbean governors’ behavior was inimical not only to American interests but also to the mercantile interests of England itself. This would induce Caribbean governors to cooperate with the United States, he hoped. We cannot tell whether Stevens took this advice, but as the construction project evolved, agents focused on Barbados because its government was agreeable, it had a good supply of English-speaking workers, and they were known to be orderly, peaceful, and obedient. Recruiters opened offices in Barbados, examining potential laborers and offering them contracts that paid their way to Panama and promised them return fare home. More workers came from Barbados than from any other single nation, with Jamaica coming in a close second.31
ICC officials remained determined to find further sources of unskilled labor and prevent broad class solidarities from developing. They sent recruiters to Europe, in search of Spaniards, Italians, and Greeks, and finally to India, to sign up “sheiks” or “hindoos,” as officials referred to them.32 Stevens hoped that if it should prove impossible to secure Chinese workers, he might ultimately replace all West Indians with southern Europeans. He found the work of Spaniards to be particularly impressive, in part because they goaded others to work harder: his West Indian laborers, he informed Shonts, had been indifferent to work, “but their complacency has been badly disturbed on account of the introduction of Spaniards and Italians, and to a certain extent their usefulness has been correspondingly increased.” Stevens feared, however, that Europe wanted to see the United States fail in Panama and therefore would
not allow a sufficient supply of workers. Over time, a greater disadvantage revealed itself when southern Europeans proved more likely to rebel against the Americans’ authority.33
Securing skilled labor was a simpler task for officials. They turned primarily to white workers from the United States. At any given time, between five and six thousand white Americans worked in the Canal Zone performing jobs as steam-shovel men, machinists, foremen, and the like. A few skilled workers from Panama, from northern European countries like Britain and Germany, and from the Caribbean supplemented the Americans, but their role would grow increasingly problematic when U.S. officials tried to limit skilled jobs to white U.S. citizens. It was not easy to lure white Americans to the Canal Zone, due to the strong economy at home and fears of disease and tropical miasma on the isthmus. The adventurous sorts of men who were most willing to come (many of them with experience in the Philippines or Cuba) often vexed government officials. They didn’t work as hard as officials had hoped, yet seemed always to demand higher wages and better benefits. They also tended to engage in heavy drinking and carousing. Stevens observed, “The worst class we have had [in the Canal Zone], to our shame, has been some of our men that have gone down there from here.”34
During his tenure Stevens pushed the work ahead far more energetically than his predecessor had done, finding sources of labor that would remain largely the same throughout the construction era and influencing the engineering design of the project. Yet by April 1907 he had resigned. In a letter to Roosevelt he complained bitterly about his discomfort on the isthmus, the attacks on his judgment, and the disruption to his home and family life. He did not think, he confessed, that he could tolerate the strain of the job for the eight years or so required to do it. Roosevelt accepted his resignation and days later summoned the Army major George Goethals, an engineer, to the White House and invited him to accept the job as chief engineer. Frustrated by the resignations of Wallace and Stevens, Roosevelt reportedly declared, “I’ve tried two civilians in the Canal and they’ve both quit. We can’t build the canal with a new chief engineer every year. Now I’m going to give it to the Army and to somebody who can’t quit.” Goethals accepted the job, and a new and final era in the construction of the canal began.35
“THAT HE IS OMNIPOTENT—ON THE ZONE—NOT MANY WILL DENY”
The man who would shape the character of life in the Canal Zone more than any other was tall, straight backed, and white haired. The same age as Roosevelt, Goethals was quite a different personality. People knew him as an introverted and sometimes stern and judgmental figure. Born in 1858 in Brooklyn to a woodworker and his wife who had emigrated from Ghent, Belgium, some years before, Goethals graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 1880 and was then appointed to the Army Corps of Engineers. He met Effie Rodman, the daughter of a New Bedford, Massachusetts, whaling captain, in 1883, and they married the next year. Goethals’s Army career for the next decades included teaching at West Point, working on improvements in the Ohio River valley and the Cumberland and Tennessee rivers, building canals in Tennessee and Alabama, and serving with the volunteer army in Puerto Rico during the War of 1898. When tapped by Roosevelt for the job as chief engineer, he was working as an assistant to the Army’s chief of staff.36
Goethals served as the chief engineer for the remaining, critical years of the canal construction, and particularly for the matters that most concern us—the government’s role in shaping the lives and work of Canal Zone residents—his influence would prove profound. This was due partly to his nature but also to the way Roosevelt reorganized the job when he hired Goethals. After losing two chief engineers as well as receiving great criticism for the amount of second-guessing and endless bureaucracy involved in the project, Roosevelt decided to centralize the job. He appointed Goethals not only chief engineer but also chairman of the Isthmian Canal Commission—previously, these jobs had been held by different individuals. Roosevelt also brought new members onto the ICC, so that five of the eight members (including Goethals) came from the U.S. Army or Navy. Army officers who had a taste for military-style discipline, including D. D. Gaillard, William Sibert, and H. H. Rousseau, would dominate the project. Roosevelt knew that as Army men they would feel honor-bound to remain on the job until its completion, and a sense of military hierarchy and efficiency now pervaded the project. Simultaneously, however, he stripped the ICC of any executive authority. Goethals’s government would be a one-man operation. Richard Harding Davis, the journalist who had famously covered the war in Cuba against Spain, wrote in 1912: “As a spectator the writer has been in the field with armies of several nations, but never has he known such an army as this one commanded by Colonel Goethals. For seven years it has been on foreign service, and always in action, always on the firing line. … It is an army that knows no rest, no armistices, no flags of truce.”37
Goethals became known and celebrated mostly as a statesman, yet it’s important to remember that he was also an engineer. Stevens had made huge contributions to the basic design of the canal, but much remained to be determined and strategized when Goethals’s work began in April 1907. Surveys remained incomplete, little excavation had been done by Wallace or Stevens, and although the decision had been made to build a lock canal, those locks and Gatun Dam had not yet been designed. The railroad would also need to be relocated before the canal could open, as much of its current path would be underwater or on the wrong side of the canal, farthest from Panama City and Colón. Almost all the construction project lay ahead of Goethals, and an army of labor awaited his command.
With much of the infrastructure ready to house and feed the working population, more aggressive excavation work began as Goethals assumed his position in the spring of 1907. The steam shovels and train cars filled with spoil were soon more busily at work. Under Goethals’s leadership three million cubic yards of spoil were being excavated along the line each month, whereas the excavation during Wallace’s and Stevens’s entire combined tenure amounted to less than six million cubic yards.38 Goethals oversaw a major widening of the floor of the canal (in order to cope with landslides), a reconceptualization of the size and location of the planned locks, and the building of Gatun Dam.39
Begun in 1908, the dam would become the largest in the world, at a mile and a half long and half a mile wide at its base. Its base was constructed mostly from the spoils of excavation. To one side of the dam were the Gatun Locks, three pairs that would lower ships from Gatun Lake down to sea level and out into Limon Bay, or raise those approaching from the other direction. In 1910, even before construction of the dam was complete, engineers closed down the diversion they had built for the Chagres River and allowed the waters to begin rising slowly in front of the dam. Gatun Lake would cover more than 160 square miles. Numerous towns that had existed since the earliest days of navigation and commerce across the isthmus were located on land that would be submerged by Gatun Lake. Other towns, including Empire and Culebra, were abandoned as unnecessary once construction was finished; many of the houses and public buildings in those towns were transferred to the new American headquarters at Balboa.40
The most spectacular aspect of the project from an engineering standpoint was the design and construction of the locks. All the lock chambers were identical in dimensions (110 by 1, 000 feet) and were constructed in pairs so that traffic could flow in either direction. Construction of the lock gates began in August 1909 and lasted four years. They were the only major aspect of the project built by a contractor—the Pittsburgh company McClintic-Marshall, known for efficiently constructing steel bridges—rather than by the U.S. government. The mammoth side walls were constructed by creating a molding of steel and then pouring concrete from overhead to fill them up. The lock gates of steel were built to be hollow in their bottom halves so they would be buoyant in the water and easier to swing back and forth without placing too much pressure on their hinges. Water would flood into the lock chambers through tunnels an
d culverts using gravity alone. The lock gates then opened and shut using electricity to operate a gigantic cogwheel placed within each gate, which in turn operated a huge steel arm to push the gate out or pull it back. The entire canal used electricity generated by a hydroelectric plant built next to Gatun Dam as the motor for its operation. The complex operation was as one might imagine a child playing in a bathtub. A ship would enter a first lock chamber with water at a low level, and the lock gates would swing shut behind it. The chamber would then flood with water, and the ship would rise naturally with the water. Once the ship rose sufficiently, the lock gates in front of it would swing open, and it would enter the next chamber, where the same process would be repeated. After passing through three lock chambers, a ship would have been raised and then lowered eighty-five feet, from sea level up to the level of Gatun Lake, and back down again.41
The locks and Culebra Cut involved the greatest hardship for workers and became terrific sources of fascination for the Americans and tourists from around the world who traveled to the isthmus to see them. They remain celebrated today as a great engineering wonder of the world; less commonly noted is the indispensable role played by U.S. corporate capitalism. Besides the vast machine shops of the Canal Zone, like those in Gorgona and Empire, and in addition to the central role played by McClintic-Marshall, more than fifty factories in Pittsburgh worked making supplies like rivets, bolts, and steel plates for the canal. The locomotives that helped pull ships into and through the locks were built in Schenectady, New York. The Bucyrus Company in Milwaukee built most of the steam shovels. A Wheeling, West Virginia, manufacturer supplied the cogwheels and lifting mechanisms and a great deal of other machinery for the lock gates. Nearly all the electrical equipment was manufactured by General Electric. The canal thus represented a tremendous achievement of American industrialization.42
