The Canal Builders

by Julie Greene

  As leadership passed from Stevens to Goethals in the spring of 1907, officials continued working to clarify the system, stymied, often, by the complicated ethnic and racial character of the Zone’s population. Soon after arriving, Goethals took steps to ensure that white employees would not have to stand in line at the same window as black West Indians to receive their pay. Meanwhile, officials sought guidance for ways to identify individuals’ race and thus best fit them into the segregation system. Hiram Slifer, the manager of the Panama Railroad, wrote in consternation that some of his employees greatly resented their transfer to the silver roll. He seemed especially troubled by a man born in Demerara who claimed to be white. Slifer noted, “There are a number of definitions in the States as to what shall constitute a negro, but I do not believe that we want to go into this subject too deep.” Yet he wondered how the commission was handling the matter. The racial issue was creating awkward relations, he declared, particularly in places like the commissary, where they had now divided the gold and silver employees into different areas: “We have already had one or two cases where people who were a little off color have had some difficulty with our employees as to which side of the house they should deal on.” Jackson Smith, head of the Department of Labor, Quarters, and Subsistence, commented: “We endeavor to keep those of undoubted black or mixture on the silver rolls.” However, if someone from the West Indies claims to be white, then “we place him on the silver roll as a foreigner who has no claim upon us for more than temporary employment, or employment only until we can fill his place with a citizen of the United States.”59

  Officials thus faced two distinct but related issues as they struggled to articulate the meaning and function of segregation. One involved race (the effort to move all “colored” employees to the silver roll) and the other citizenship (the problem of “white” foreigners on the gold roll). In 1908, President Roosevelt issued an executive order that elevated the latter as the key principle, stipulating that gold roll employment would be limited to U.S. citizens except in cases where none were available. Roosevelt later added that Panamanian citizens would also be eligible for gold jobs (in deference to Panamanian leaders who complained that, as the canal was being built across their nation, their citizens should have access to jobs on the gold roll). In 1909 Goethals got the last word, re­interpreting Roosevelt’s executive order in ways that defined the system by citizenship and by race. The gold system would consist of all American citizens and “a few Panamanians.” Other “white employees” (i.e., not native to the tropics) could be employed when white U.S. citizens were not available. Goethals specifically addressed the matter of African Americans and declared that they should all ideally be carried on the silver roll (although some, he conceded, could remain on the gold roll).60

  These rather tortured attempts to make segregation more consistent and principled were complicated by a few fascinating exceptions. The first involved the legacies of U.S. imperialism. After Roosevelt’s declaration that only U.S. citizens should be hired on the gold roll, some alert officials raised the problem of Puerto Ricans. George Weitzel, for example, the U.S. chargé d’affaires in Panama, noted that several Puerto Ricans were seeking ­re­employment on the Panama Railroad. He argued that although Puerto Ricans were not citizens, they were “wards of the nation” and “entitled to the protection of the United States.” He recommended Puerto Ricans be given preference for jobs over any other foreigners. Goethals agreed, thus ensuring that colonial subjects would benefit from their status.61

  A more puzzling, albeit rare, quandary emerged for officials when a few white U.S. citizens desired jobs as common laborers in the Atlantic division of the Canal Zone. The clerk in charge asked if hiring them would be acceptable to Goethals and, if so, how they should be classified. Goethals’s executive secretary, C. A. McIlvaine, thought through the issues for his boss: “I suppose that, viewed from a strictly impersonal, ­cold-­blooded standpoint, no distinction should be made between white Americans employed as laborers, and aliens. At the same time it does seem rather hard to herd an American citizen with the class of men engaged on this work as laborers.” Thus he advised giving the men status as gold roll workers and housing them in gold apartments: “I think that American citizens should be in a preferred class and doubtless these cases will be very few.” Goethals agreed and ordered that white American laborers be paid on the gold roll and that housing be found for them so that “they need not come in contact with the alien laborers.” Gradually, the problem disappeared as white Americans grasped that laborers’ jobs were not meant for them. The policeman Harry Franck confessed he had arrived in the Zone “with the hope of shouldering a shovel and descending into the canal with other workmen, that I might some day solemnly raise my right hand and boast, ‘I helped dig IT.’ But that was in the callow days before I … learned the awful gulf that separates the sacred white American from the rest of the Canal Zone world.”62

  Meanwhile, when Roosevelt in 1908 articulated citizenship as the central principle in the workings of the silver and gold system, Goethals and his subordinates began purging aliens from the gold roll. Goethals ordered department heads to submit lists of foreigners employed on the gold roll and, when possible, shift them to the silver roll. ­Large-­scale purges occurred when reductions of force became necessary—for example, when officials reorganized a division or department. Throughout this process not only did many West Indians lose their jobs or face demotion to the silver roll; Germans, Frenchmen, Britons, and other northern Europeans did so as well. Britain’s diplomatic representative in Panama reported that excellent employees faced dismissal because of this “selfish policy.” Englishmen had complained to him, he said, that after their dismissal they had “walked from one end to the other of the canal works and the first question that is put to them is ‘what nationality are you? …’ When they answer that they are English they receive the answer that ‘only Americans need apply.’ ” U.S. officials began requiring that any worker on the gold roll who “appeared to be an alien” submit naturalization papers to prove his or her U.S. citizenship. Numerous debates occurred among government officials regarding the degree to which efficiency should be sacrificed in order to comply with the executive order, and many department heads pushed hard—but usually unsuccessfully—to keep aliens on the gold roll.63

  The government officials’ growing emphasis on citizenship had clear racial implications. Goethals indicated this when he responded to a protest from white workers about the government’s employing “colored” engineers on the Panama Railroad: “We cannot very well draw a color line, but we can limit the employment of engineers to American citizens.” Goethals’s treatment of African Americans demonstrates that the system was never purely about citizenship—officials’ protests notwithstanding. After 1907 government officials would no longer hire African Americans on the gold roll, although in most cases they allowed the few existing ones to remain in their positions. Officials created a special status for African Americans, which categorized them as silver workers but gave them privileges like paid vacations as a meager acknowledgment of their citizenship. At the same time officials enforced racial segregation off the job, excluding African Americans from YMCA clubhouses and from cafeterias intended for whites. D. D. Gaillard, a division engineer, summed it up in 1909: “It is not the policy of this Division to employ negroes or aliens.”64

  “LIFE IS NOT SUCH A HARDSHIP IN THE ZONE!”

  Between 1904 and 1908 the three chief engineers established the basic design of the canal, made considerable progress on the construction, and built the infrastructure needed to house and feed tens of thousands of workers. Particularly under the leadership of Stevens and Goethals, the Canal Zone became a more comfortable place to live, especially for white Americans, and its look would remain much the same until the flooding of Gatun Lake began in 1912 and the surrounding towns were abandoned. Entire settlements emerged where none had existed before, and others were expanded. The Canal Zone
became dotted with towns, most of which had American sections as well as labor camps for various ethnic groups. At each end of the isthmus, the Americans had built themselves a town—Cristobal alongside Colón, and Ancon alongside Panama City.

  Following the tour that visitors took across the isthmus may help us to visualize the complex world of the Canal Zone. The British traveler Winifred James described in her 1913 bookThe Mulberry Tree how it felt to arrive by ship at the Atlantic side of Panama. She was caught off guard both by “dank and dripping” Colón and by the small encampment she passed known as Monte Lirio, in which West Indian employees were housed in railroad boxcars fitted with wire doors. By contrast, American settlements like Cristobal became known for their scenic wide avenues and, most of all, for “the famous screened houses that safeguard the white man in Panama, the only form of architecture to be found in the whole of the Canal Zone.” The wood houses with corrugated iron roofs, a wide veranda running along three sides, and wrapped entirely around with a fine copper wire screen, she said, reminded her of giant meat safes or aviaries. James was struck by the contrast between Colón and Cristobal. The former, home primarily to West Indians, felt like a “ramshackle” place to her, but it was also loud and lively. Late into the night people strolled about, listening to a band in the park, buying lottery tickets, or pausing for a drink at a bar. Cristobal, just down the road, was quiet and lovely. As her rented carriage toured that town’s streets, she admired the lights with red or green lamp shades glowing softly inside the copper mesh of the “aviaries,” and she could hear rhythmic ocean waves hitting the shore.65

  The next day James awoke and, like most tourists, caught a train across the isthmus from Colón to Panama City. The trip took two and a half hours, with stops in most towns of the Zone along the way. “Every station,” she noted, “is alive with people of every colour.” As her train departed Colón and entered the Zone, it passed through a West Indian labor camp with large ­two-­story dwellings complete with balconies (but no copper screening) alongside the railroad tracks: “In these houses scores of families live together, and on the verandahs and balconies everything happens.” Her train headed southwest through the isthmus, passing through the old town of Gatun and the ­twenty-­three-­mile stretch that would one day be submerged under Gatun Lake. She watched as the train wove in and out of dense jungle, stopping at labor camps like Bohio and Frijoles; passing by Camp Elliott, the headquarters of the Marines (“where the Stars and Stripes were first flown in the Zone”); and moving onward to the major towns of Gorgona, Culebra, and Empire. These last three were at the heart of the Zone, each of them nestled around the gaping Culebra Cut. Gorgona was said to have more and bigger machine shops than anywhere else in the world, while Culebra served as headquarters of the administrators and engineers. At the town of Empire, the largest in the Zone, James observed how “the words ‘Welcome to Empire,’ done in letters ­man-­size … greet you hospitably, while on the hill, and all around, flock the gigantic ­meat-­safes of dark gauze in white painted wood frames.”66

  Soon after her train passed Gorgona, James could see the Chagres River and then the beginning of Culebra Cut. She found the cut to be “like something seen through the wrong end of a telescope.” She observed the trains and steam shovels rushing back and forth: “And over the face of everything crawls a swarm of little ants that might be men or men that might be little ants. One feels like Gulliver in Lilliput.” She felt “dazed and stupefied” by the huge scope of the excavation job in the cut and noted especially “the curious manner in which the men and the machines seemed to have changed places; the men had become machines, the machines were uncannily like men.”67

  Onward her train went, passing more labor towns, boxcar settlements, tenements housing Spaniards and Greeks, screened “aviaries,” and Pedro Miguel and Miraflores, the towns that would someday provide a home to enormous locks. She finally arrived in Panama City and grabbed a coach that took her back into the Zone, up the hill to Ancon, to deposit her at the Hotel Tivoli, the fine residence built by the United States to house visitors: “In the great cool hall crowds of people are sitting and standing and lining up three deep at the ­booking-­office. Negro ­bell-­boys, dressed in the height of certain American fashions, with ­low-­cut, ­bulldog-­toed shoes, tied with sash ribbons, and enormously full trousers turned up at the hem, go ceaselessly up and down the double staircase, carrying bags and showing people to their rooms in the galleries above.”68

  James was impressed by the Americans’ determination to civilize the Canal Zone: “The American ‘roughs it’ superbly. His desert is made to blossom immediately with all the products of the most modern civilization. … The first things with which he plants his jungle are telephones, ­ice-­boxes, and porcelain baths.” Of all these, she argued, the icebox was the most important: “Who ever heard of an American without an ­ice-­box? It is his country’s emblem. It asserts his nationality as conclusively as the Stars and Stripes afloat from his ­roof-­tree, besides being much more useful in keeping his butter cool.” James concluded: “The ordinary tourist has every reason to be very grateful to the American for … his magnificent way of bringing the tropics to heel.” Another British traveler, Charlotte Cameron, put the matter less sardonically: “The U.S. have done more than make a new route for commerce. They have put in training a race of overseas Americans who will one day rival our own Indian administration.”69

  Gradually, American journalists joined travelers like Winifred James in describing the Canal Zone’s civilization as impressive. In Cristobal, according to a writer in the trade union magazineSteam Shovel and Dredge, living conditions “are not only bearable but so attractive that one thinks he would like to live there.” On the train “one finds himself in thoroughly ­up-­to-­date coaches, seated among his own race, and altogether it is as if one were taking a summer ride through suburbs of Chicago on trains of the Northwestern or Illinois Central. Only when one looks out of the windows and sees the tropical, luxuriant foliage and thatched cabins of natives perched on the hills is he made to realize that he is in the tropics 2000 miles from home.” This writer described how the wives and daughters of canal employees waited at each train station for their menfolk, dressed in lovely summer dresses and hats and waving at the passing trains, thus suggesting to him how “Americanized” the towns throughout the Zone had become. Best of all, he noted, “the fact that work trains carry the Jamaican and Barbadian negroes to and from their work along the canal makes it unnecessary for the casual tourist to mingle with these types en route. Life is not such a hardship in the Zone!” Likewise, a British traveler noticed as she crossed the isthmus by train, “It seems as though we must be dreaming, so curious is the contrast between the ­highly-­civilized train in which we are travelling and the wild luxuriance of the country through which it is carrying us.”70

  As these quotations suggest, the Isthmus of Panama was pervaded by the appearance and the reality of boundaries, themselves generated by notions of difference based on class, gender, race, and nationality. There existed many different “zones” on the isthmus. There was the zone of women versus that of men, the zone of American citizens versus that of foreigners, and the zone of white people versus that of people of color. The isthmus during the construction era was a hierarchical world, and even among white women or white men there were different levels of status and social or cultural acceptance. Such boundaries shaped relations between groups, and between them and the U.S. government. Furthermore, accepting these boundaries of difference or deciding when or where to contest or transgress them would become central to life in the Zone.

  One of the most important and yet most frequently crossed bound­aries was that between the Canal Zone and the Republic of Panama. Panama never became a colony of the United States, and American troops did not invade the nation as they did Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. Instead, the republic became a protectorate of the United States and a model for the sort of neocolonialism that w
ould dominate U.S. efforts to control the Caribbean and Central America in the twentieth century. ICC officials, U.S. diplomats, and military personnel all became deeply involved in Panama’s affairs, and the relationship between Panama and the United States, involving as it did a tense and constant negotiation over sovereignty, sometimes grew explosive. Over the years, while the Canal Zone gradually became an “Americanized” and rigorously civilized world, Panama continued to seem to Americans different, exotic, and uncivilized. The Zone policeman Harry Franck described leaving the ICC administration building one day in Ancon, the American town just outside Panama City. He took a shortcut down the mountainside and suddenly entered “a foreign land.” He had unknowingly crossed an international boundary and entered the Republic of Panama. He knew he had left the Zone because of “the instant change from the trim, screened Zone buildings, each in its green lawn, to the featureless architecture of a city where grass is all but unknown; for the formalities of crossing the frontier are the same as those of crossing any village street.” Travelers would gain their bearings, Franck advised, by checking to see whether a Zone policeman wearing khaki patrolled the sidewalk, or a black policeman (that is, a Panamanian) in a dark blue uniform and a heavy, wintry helmet. Alcohol was highly regulated in the Zone, while gambling and prostitution were forbidden and rigorously suppressed. Leaving the Zone and crossing into Panama, Americans delighted in finding “everything ‘wide open’ and raging,” particularly in the ­red-­light district of Panama City known as Cocoa Grove. The journey to Cocoa Grove, where the streets were filled with saloons, brothels, Chinese shops, and lottery ticket sellers, provided Americans with an easy escape from the regimented Zone. (Panamanians crossing into the Zone, on the other hand, found themselves suddenly subject to the discipline and sometimes punishment enforced by a vastly superior power.) This particular boundary crossing, with its rich meanings and opportunities for exotic diversions, excitement, and, often, contests over power, emerged as a central motif of life on the isthmus.71