by Julie Greene
AMERICAN OFFICIALS felt compelled on the Isthmus of Panama to adapt the machinery of their home civilization to “strange needs.” They wanted to create an industrialized, efficient, and autocratic world, and they used police, spies, and segregation in hopes of maintaining order and keeping workers focused on the job. Officials sought, in short, to create a form of government they deemed suited to the isthmus, a benevolent despotism that would allow them to assert control and subordinate everything to the demands of construction. Yet, sensible as it must have seemed to officials, this was an impossible goal. Shifting the focus away from them and onto the world of those who actually built the canal makes clear how difficult it would be for the officials to achieve their goal. The people of the Isthmus of Panama, both within and beyond the Canal Zone, saw different ways of doing things. They came to the construction project for their own reasons and with different goals in mind. In unexpected ways, they challenged, shook, and transformed the vision of Goethals and his peers. The white American workingmen and workingwomen of the Zone, the people presumed by officials to be their most steady allies, provide our first step into understanding this world.
CHAPTER TWO
_________________
“AS I AM A TRUE AMERICAN”
IN 1905, R. B. Elliott, a white American working on the gold payroll as railroad yardmaster in the Panama Canal Zone, was fired from his job. Soon thereafter the U.S. government deported him from the Zone and back to the United States. Like many other skilled U.S. workers in the Zone during the difficult early days of 1904 and 1905, Elliott was unhappy about his working and living conditions. Homesick, scared of disease, and angry about long hours, dangerous conditions, foul food, and lousy quarters, skilled workers had expected better when they got to Panama. It was “not a white man’s country,” they declared, and while the dampness and tropical heat sapped their strength, precious few diversions existed to help them enjoy their leisure time.1 Government officials faced “open expressions of discontent and grumbling on the part of the employees in the Canal Zone and frequent resignations.”2 With dissatisfaction widespread, some workers began organizing for change. Elliott was one among this group of men, most of them skilled railroad workers, steam-shovel men, miners, or carpenters, and he gradually emerged as the movement’s leader.
By all accounts, Elliott was an intelligent and thoughtful man, well liked and respected. An undercover policeman chatted with him one day and reported that he was “a quiet, sensible, straightforward man. I would not class him as an agitator, as during the time I kept track of him he carried himself as a man should.” He drank only a little and didn’t engage in unruly behavior. “Regarding this movement of which he is the head, he is acting straightforwardly and refuses to countenance any talk of strike or disorder.”3
Yet however likable Elliott may have been, his activities raised the ire of government officials. The fact that some of the men involved seemed to lack Elliott’s quiet touch didn’t help matters. In early March at the Hotel Vienna in Culebra, a town positioned near the most dangerous part of the construction project, some workers convened and demanded a strike. One worker argued that their status as government employees should not prevent them from striking. As evidence he noted the workers’ recent militancy at the Brooklyn Navy Yard: “Remember the strike against the U.S. when the Battleship Connecticut was being built.” As the discussion grew more heated, one disgruntled worker began shouting out “Dynamite!” Others demurred, saying “before they would strike against the U.S., they would just quit and hit the trail back to civilization.” Yet all seemed to agree on their main demands: they wanted an eight-hour day, a six-day week, time and a half for overtime, better housing, and equal pay for a job regardless of a man’s color or where he had received his appointment. The latter demands reflected not an effort to include the interests of West Indian workers in their movement, but rather a determination by skilled white men to protect their privileged position: if government officials agreed to pay all workers the same rate regardless of race, they would desire even more vigorously to hire only whites since they would consider the West Indians unworthy of such high pay. Aware that police spies were surely present in the room, most workers conceded that they would obey all laws as well as the U.S. Constitution, yet they stressed that their rights as American citizens entitled them to better treatment.4
The movement gradually attracted more recruits as representatives from each of the trades began meeting secretly, away from the prying eyes of policemen. They hoped to create a federation of all the skilled trades and present their demands to the chief engineer, John Wallace. Elliott remained the most active, hustling through the different towns and camps, talking to the men, encouraging them to join his movement. He was aided by a locomotive engineer and a miner, both of whom had served with Roosevelt’s Rough Riders in Cuba. Meanwhile, police spies were furiously shadowing each of the leaders, as foremen and supervisors searched for reasons to fire them.
By March 17, officials had found—or concocted—their reasons. Elliott’s boss fired him for irregularities in his employees’ time cards. Another activist, the miner J. C. Virden, lost his job a couple of days later, supposedly for detonating too powerful a charge of dynamite.5 Two other leaders resigned their jobs under mysterious circumstances. One, a conductor named Chubb, reportedly drank constantly the next few days until finally leaving the Zone for Panama. Even without their jobs, however, Elliott and the others continued to organize. On March 19, Elliott declared to workers meeting at the Hotel Vienna, “Congress asks for eight hours and we should have it. The ‘big men’ in Panama are no fools and they will work you ten hours until we demand eight.” Police spies reported to ICC officials that dissatisfaction over long hours and low wages was widespread. Police chief George Shanton ordered Elliott shadowed constantly—any threat he might make against the commission was to be reported immediately, so that he could be arrested. One spy reported that “the discharge of Elliott has put a damper on the feelings of the more timid ones, and without his leadership the organization would not hold together.”6 Elliott tried one more tactic, visiting the office of the U.S. minister in Panama, John Barrett, to complain about conditions. Unbeknownst to him, however, John Wallace was visiting Barrett’s office when Elliott arrived. Staying hidden, Wallace advised the minister to tell Elliott he could do nothing, and suggest instead that Elliott simply talk with his supervisor.7
With the main leaders neutralized, the movement disintegrated. Yet officials were still not finished with Elliott. Several weeks later they intercepted letters he had written that demonstrated, they claimed, that he intended to engage in a counterfeiting scheme. The government soon deported Elliott and he returned to the United States. In 1906 he surfaced one last time. Working now as a switchman for the Illinois Central Railroad in New Orleans, Elliott met with the misfortune of an inquisitive boss. Word somehow had gotten out about his activities in the Canal Zone. His employer wrote the Canal Zone government for information about his record. Police chief Shanton quickly, and no doubt happily, responded: “He was a labor agitator, and caused the Isthmian Canal Commission, and the Police Department in particular, a great deal of trouble by his repeated attempts to organise labor unions, cause strikes, etc.” Shanton concluded that Elliott was an “all-round dangerous man.”8 Presumably, Elliott was soon forced to seek another job.
Although he succeeded in killing Elliott’s organizing effort, chief engineer John Wallace apparently did consider the workers’ grievances. He felt compelled to ask the ICC back in Washington, D.C., for guidance. He had believed, he said, that skilled men could be worked longer than eight hours a day, and he felt this to be necessary for the construction work to proceed efficiently. In fact, however, Wallace learned to his shock not only that he must observe the eight-hour day for all American citizens but also that he could be fined by the government if he failed to do so.9 On the matter of hours, at least, Wallace gave in to the workers’ demands.
THE ROUGHNECKS’ WORLD
The skilled American workers proved a constant irritation for officials like Wallace. Their labor and skills were desperately needed, and they seemed always to be in short supply, particularly during the early years, when yellow fever caused many to board a ship back to the United States soon after arriving. Because of this, and because of the danger of their jobs, Wallace had to pay them higher wages than he felt they deserved. As he saw it, skilled workers were terribly coddled by the government, and despite this they constantly complained. In a letter to the chairman of the ICC, Wallace explained how he perceived his skilled workers: “A great many of the young men who come to the Isthmus have been moved by a spirit of adventure. They have heard of this wonderful country, and are anxious to enlarge their knowledge of it, … but arriving here, and surrounded as they are by the conditions that exist, without diversions, without home influences, and especially without the influence of wives, mothers, and sisters, they become discontented and homesick.” Worst of all, they seemed to think the United States would pay to send them back home again if unhappiness drove them to quit. To the workers’ displeasure, this was most definitely not the case.10
Soon after ordering the deportation of Elliott, Wallace left the isthmus as well. His resignation had many causes—by all accounts he was overwhelmed by the job and not performing well or making much progress. But the skilled workers and their demands were certainly a source of frustration to him. Two years later Wallace testified to Congress about conditions on the isthmus and dismissed the skilled workers’ grievances: those who complained, he argued, “expected to swing in a hamock and sip mint julips and smoke cigarettes and be fanned, and all that sort of thing. There was no man down there that came … to do real work … that made any complaint of the way they were fed or the way they were housed.”11
Wallace’s disdain was shared by many other elites in the Canal Zone, who had innumerable nicknames for skilled workers, most of them unflattering. “Roughnecks” was the most popular, though they also called them “huskies,” “tropical tramps,” “mechanics,” “vagabonds,” or “soldiers of fortune.”12 Perhaps no one disliked the roughnecks more than the engineers and other white-collar employees did. These college-educated professionals dressed in clean white shirts and worked mostly in spacious, brightly lit offices, yet circumstances often forced them to live alongside the steam-shovel and railroad men. One such professional was Roland Singer, a young electrical engineer who left his home in Lewisburg, Ohio, for the Zone. He found he had nothing in common with the “roughnecks,” as he habitually referred to them, and yet he had no choice but to share a life with them and pretend to be friendly. Writing to his mother, Roland described the situation: “Every Sunday night about 10: 30 p.m. there are about 8 or 16 fellows come home from spending the day in Panama City. Then they congregate out on the porch in front of the room and adjoining me and cuss and swear and talk about the price fight and hoar houses until 12 p.m. o’clock at night. I sure am getting sick of it.” He singled out the steam-shovel men as especially disagreeable. They lacked education and common sense, he declared, yet “they are making from $ 125 to $ 200 per month so you may know just how overbearing and repulsive they seem to me.” Spending much of his time applying and hoping for a good job back in the States so he could escape the Canal Zone, his letters home sprinkled with references to church and Sunday school, Roland expressed particular shock at having to share quarters with so many “heathens”: “I don’t mean the natives either. … Don’t know which I hate worse a Jew or a Catholic.” The “Catholic boys”—most likely Irish American workers—seemed the ones most likely to waste their money on gambling, alcohol, and whorehouses in Cocoa Grove.13
The policeman and census taker Harry Franck was more generous spirited, but he shared Roland Singer’s impression of the roughnecks. Franck referred to the skilled worker as “a bull-necked, whole-hearted, hard-headed, cast-iron fellow … a fine fellow in his way, but you sometimes wish his way branched off from yours for a few hours, when bed-time or a mood for quiet musing comes. He is a man you are glad to meet in a saloon—if you are in a mood to be there—or tearing away at the cliffs of Culebra; but there are other places where he does not seem exactly to fit into the landscape.” Franck uncomfortably shared a bachelor dormitory with many roughnecks. After supper at a hotel, he explained, he would come home, where “seven phonographs were striking up their seven kinds of ragtime on seven sides of us; and it was the small hours before the poker games, carried on in much the same spirit as Comanche warfare, broke up through all the house.” The house wouldn’t grow quiet until 4: 30 a.m., and soon thereafter “a jarring chorus of alarm clocks wrought new upheaval.”14
As these stories suggest, the world of male U.S. citizens working on the canal was a complex and hierarchical one. In 1912, according to the U.S. Census, the ICC and the Panama Railroad together employed just over forty-eight hundred male U.S. citizens. Another thousand were employed by independent contractors in the Zone, especially McClintic-Marshall, the company building the lock gates. They came from all over the United States, but most came from northeastern and midwestern industrialized states like New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. Almost half of these men, about twenty-five hundred, were married, and of these nearly eighteen hundred had wives living with them in the Zone and keeping house for them. Initially officials discouraged families from coming, but by 1906 they had realized the presence of women and children would comfort these men and civilize and stabilize conditions in the Zone. Increasingly, they encouraged American families to make the trip by doubling the amount of free housing and furnishings allotted to male workers if joined by their wives.15
Atop the hierarchy of U.S. employees were men who performed the supervisory tasks and made the major design and labor management decisions: the commissioners and their surveyors, doctors, civil engineers, superintendents, draftsmen, timekeepers, mechanical and electrical engineers, foremen and sub-foremen, supervisors, clerks, accountants, store managers, stenographers, and disbursers. Almost all of these jobs were restricted to white American men. Timekeepers and foremen played a crucial role, and there was a multitude of them. Already by 1907, as excavation got aggressively under way, for example, the Culebra division of the Department of Dredging and Excavation alone had forty-two timekeepers and more than two hundred gold roll foremen (plus dozens more silver roll foremen).16
One important step below these white-collar employees in the hierarchy of labor were the men referred to as roughnecks. This in itself was a vast and diverse world, including steam-shovel and railroad engineers, crane operators, conductors, firemen, brakemen, yardmasters, train masters, electricians, teamsters, machinists, blacksmiths, miners (to oversee the drilling and placement of dynamite), boilermakers, pattern makers, carpenters, iron molders, bricklayers, painters, plumbers, pipe fitters, wiremen, and telegraphers. More highly skilled workers like steam-shovel and railroad engineers were paid a monthly salary, while most construction and machine shop workers were paid an hourly rate ranging from forty-four to seventy-five cents. A gulf separated those paid on a monthly versus an hourly basis, to the great consternation of the hourly men. Workers on a monthly salary received significant perks, including the highly desirable six weeks of paid vacation. Hourly workers were eligible for a six-week vacation, but they received pay for only two of the six weeks. On the other hand, monthly workers were expected to work longer than eight hours per day without receiving overtime, while hourly workers received overtime for working longer than eight hours and for working on holidays and Sundays. The hourly employees, especially machinists, blacksmiths, pattern makers, boilermakers, and molders, greatly resented the lack of six weeks of paid vacation and the lower status it suggested. They agitated repeatedly, finally forming a trades council in 1910, and petitioned ICC officials and President Taft for both paid vacation and higher wages. In 1911 offic
ials at last granted them a four-week paid vacation.17
The skilled workingmen of the Zone generally had considerable experience and were comfortable in a disciplined, large-scale industrial environment. The construction project was dominated by the most innovative machinery available. The Bucyrus steam shovel used a small team of skilled and unskilled workers to do work that hundreds of West Indians, under French supervision, had once done with hand tools.
