The Canal Builders

by Julie Greene

  U.S. officials mechanized every possible aspect of the job, inventing track shifters, uploaders, and dirt spreaders to do the work more efficiently. The foundries, repair shops, and roundhouses all relied on highly advanced technology. As James Bryce, the British ambassador to the United States, observed during a visit to the Zone in 1910: “The work is being prosecuted with the utmost energy, and shows the two features most characteristic of American undertakings—the employment of every kind of device for saving manual labour by means of machinery and a superb disregard of expense.”18 As a result, skilled employees spent much of their time operating and repairing machines, working in the cabs of steam shovels, in the engines of locomotives, or next to lathes in machine shops.

  The steam-shovel engineers dominated the skilled workforce from 1905, when construction slowly got under way, until the final years, 1912 to 1914, when dredging machines grew more useful than steam shovels (as water gradually entered the site) and building the enormous locks became the project’s focus. They were the most highly paid, most indispensable, and therefore most powerful of all the skilled workers. Their union, the International Brotherhood of Steam Shovel and Dredge Men, was the most vocal and energetic in fighting in Washington, D.C., to extend or maintain their rights. In 1907 the ICC began publishing a Zone newspaper, theCanal Record, and editors began publishing the excavation and dredging records achieved by different sections of the construction site, comparing them with one another and with records attained during the French era. In December 1909, for example, theCanal Record noted that the most productive excavation had occurred in the Culebra section, with more than one million cubic yards excavated in the previous month alone. Publishing these statistics generated competition and many attempts by engineers and crane operators to ­out­do other teams of steam-shovel operators. In May 1913 two steam shovels heading from different directions finally met each other on the bottom of Culebra Cut, and within several weeks all dry excavation was finished. There would still be frequent landslides to confront, but dredges would henceforward be used to repair the damage.19

  The steam-shovel men were nearly matched in power and prestige by the various employees of the Panama Railroad—the engineers, conductors, brakemen, switchmen, track masters, and yardmasters. The ­constant train traffic (hundreds of trains went by all day long and into the night), and especially the many layers of train traffic in Culebra Cut, made the work challenging for everyone. Train accidents were among the most common causes of injury and death in the Canal Zone, and they presented a special hazard to the employees who worked with trains for eight or ten hours a day. Workers hanging off a train sometimes collided with trees or other obstacles; train collisions injured or killed many; trains running off schedule surprised unwary employees inspecting or repairing the tracks.

  Yet despite the dangers—or perhaps because of them—the railroad men had a certain swagger and bravado that other workingmen envied, and they helped set the tone for skilled workers in general. They and the steam-shovel operators were the “labor aristocrats” of the Canal Zone, the men who possessed the most respectability, union and lodge memberships, more financial resources (often including some savings), nice clothes, and other items indicating success in the world of the working class.

  In 1908 the rare misfortune of murder created a snapshot of the belongings and resources in the life of a locomotive engineer who helped build the canal. Philip Kramer of Tacoma, Washington, worked in the Zone as a locomotive engineer. While asleep in his bachelor’s room in the construction town of Paraiso, Kramer had his skull crushed by an unknown assailant. Robbery most likely was the goal. Kramer left as his heirs two young daughters living with his divorced wife in Portland, Oregon. In his possession when he died were shares in a Los Angeles oil company, about $1, 000 in gold held in a bank in Panama City, and a funeral benefit fund taken out with the Red Men’s Lodge, to which he belonged in Tacoma. His membership in the Red Men also entitled his children to receive money from the lodge’s Orphan’s Fund. In his room Kramer left behind a small world of objects. Compared with that of the engineers and officials in charge of the construction project, Kramer’s wealth was modest indeed. Yet this was a respectable man with many possessions and nice clothes. Along with his marriage certificate, souvenir coins, and lodge ribbons, authorities found oxford shirts, a dress coat, a smoking jacket, a hunting coat, oxford shoes, white pants and cuffs, a leather cigar case, and many books and photographs among the items in his room.20

  Some of the Canal Zone’s American male workers, whether engineers, machinists, or carpenters, came to the isthmus with a taste for adventure after serving in the Philippines or Cuba. George Shanton, for example, who had fought as a member of Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders in Cuba during the War of 1898, went to the Canal Zone to create a police force at Roosevelt’s request soon after the United States acquired the Zone. J. C. Virden, the miner who worked alongside R. B. Elliott to create a labor federation, was one who had fought under Shanton’s command. When John Foster Carr spent time in the Canal Zone, mingling among the skilled workingmen, he was struck by how many had served in the War of 1898 or, subsequently, in the imperial sites the war created. Carr painted a vivid picture of skilled workers on their days off: “They generally spent the day … on the hotel verandas, smoking, lazily watching the vultures floating high up in the air, ‘talking shop,’ and telling tales of Cuba and the Philippines, where scores of them have been.” The Zone policeman and census taker Harry Franck likewise observed the global origins of these workingmen in his 1913 book on the canal’s construction: “We ­world-­wanderers, as are a large percentage of ‘Zoners,’ with virtually no fixed roots in any soil, floating wherever the job suggests or the spirit moves, have the facts of our past in our own heads only.”21

  Many others hailed from stalwart ­working-­class communities across the United States, from Portland or Los Angeles, Memphis or Little Rock, Detroit or Pittsburgh, Boston or Newark. They were among the most highly paid and skilled members of the working class and were the most likely to have the power and benefits that came with union representation. They could afford relatively pleasant homes in nice neighborhoods. Yet in many cases they were eager for opportunity and higher pay. Some related how recruiters had made the Panama Canal Zone sound enticing, and although during the early years of 1904 and 1905 workers commonly believed ­they’d been misled, from 1906 onward they typically believed the promises had been kept—although this did not mean they relented in their efforts to maintain or improve their working conditions. Skilled American male workers received pay 25 to 35 percent higher than anything at home plus free quarters, electricity, medical care, and sick leave. Besides such perks, the job in the Zone undoubtedly provided some men with a means of escape—from hard economic times, from blacklisting, or from personal troubles.22

  “WE ARE ALL PATRIOTIC AMERICAN CITIZENS”

  Skilled white male workers from the United States came to Panama already accustomed to certain privileges resulting from their race, gender, skills, and relatively high wages. In the Canal Zone such privileges became heightened: these men knew that the government desperately needed them and that the success of the canal project hinged on their skill, experience, and energetic labor. The government therefore needed to keep them content and avoid desertions. Indeed, although Secretary of War William Howard Taft believed that skilled workers received excessively high wages compared with the payment for similar jobs back home, he resisted efforts by Congress to reduce wages on the grounds that recruiting ­high-­quality skilled workers was one of the great difficulties involved in the construction project. Quality men were simply not willing to go to the isthmus—if they did go, they ­didn’t remain long enough. As late as 1908, when conditions had improved radically compared with the beginning stages of construction, Taft declared that the problem of securing sufficient skilled labor remained, and he blamed it on the tropics: “There is something in the absence of rational amusement, something
in the continued high temperature, that puts a man under a nervous strain—something in the remoteness from home … that makes labor there dissatisfied; and the men just give up and go home without any reason.” Few skilled workers had been on the job for a full year, he noted.23

  Government officials kept a careful eye on public relations as well, needing to maintain support for the canal project among the taxpaying public back home. They believed that if private contractors had been put in charge of the work, they could risk strikes in order to make the work more efficient. However, the canal construction was a government job, and as Taft explained to congressmen, “There is a good deal more responsibility on the Government officer.…The whole public are engaged as critics of the issue; and if it should lead to a disastrous strike, the results would be so burdensome.” The silver and gold payrolls irrefutably reinforced white skilled workers’ status as aristocrats, differentiating them from other workers by granting highly visible privileges. Skilled workers also enjoyed membership in strong and politically effective unions (like the Steam Shovel and Dredge Men or the International Association of Machinists), and they benefited from lobbying activities carried out by the American Federation of Labor and its ­high-­profile president, Samuel Gompers. The U.S. Senate and House of Representatives conducted innumerable investigations into every aspect of life and work in the Zone, from engineering issues to labor conditions, quarters, housing, and so on, giving skilled workers and their unions an almost constant vehicle for making demands or at least building the case for why they should maintain their excellent pay and benefits. This put great pressure on ICC officials to find ways of controlling, managing, and amusing their skilled workers.24

  The U.S. government’s methods for disciplining labor rivaled those in place anywhere at the time in terms of rigidity and efficacy. Although strikes rarely broke out among skilled workers during the construction years, this was not only because of the lavish pay. Employees might find themselves fired and blacklisted, like Elliott, if they engaged in labor activism, and officials relied heavily on their police force to maintain order and discipline workers.25 After President Roosevelt sent George Shanton to Panama to create a police force and clear the “criminal element” out of the Canal Zone, Shanton designed a uniform that virtually replicated the one worn by the Rough Riders. Most of the white policemen he recruited had experience in the War of 1898 or the ­Philippine-­American War that followed it. Many of the West Indians he recruited had military or police experience as well. The journalist John Foster Carr observed the police force in action and considered it “possibly the most soldierly and efficient to be found on American territory, and its success was immediate.”26

  The force consisted of roughly 250 officers, half of whom were white Americans and the other half West Indians. The latter policed only the West Indian community. Policemen had to handle many different tasks, keeping the peace in communities often torn by violence, rounding up sailors who fled their ships, suppressing rowdy revelers on a Saturday night. Many towns in the Zone were known for their partying.27 Often policemen worked undercover, sometimes assisted by marines and soldiers working in civilian clothes, spying on the labor force and targeting any efforts among workingmen to organize themselves. The reformer W. J. Ghent visited the Canal Zone and observed that there existed “in spite of the denials of the Commission, an exasperating system of ‘­gum-­shoeing’ or spying on the men.” The chief of police chose his undercover policemen from different ethnic groups so as to infiltrate the labor force most effectively. At one time a Swede, a Colombian, a Chinese man from Martinique, and a Greek all worked undercover alongside the more common white U.S. citizens. The young Secret Service of the United States hired an untold number of men, including Chinese assigned to work undercover and help them control gambling and unauthorized liquor sales. The government used information gathered by spies to control the workforce, engaging, for example, in dismissals, blacklisting, or deportation of “troublemakers.”28

  An executive order issued by President Roosevelt had given officials sweeping powers of deportation. Anyone seeking to “incite insurrection, … create public disorder, endanger the public health, or in any manner impede the prosecution of the work of opening the canal” could be deported. According to General George Davis, who had served in 1904 as the Zone’s first governor, the Canal Zone was the only place under the control of the United States where such broad powers of deportation existed. Testifying during one of many congressional investigations into conditions on the isthmus, the general—as well as the senators questioning him—seemed uneasy because these deportation powers contradicted the Bill of Rights. They resolved the tension by deciding that the U.S. presence in the Canal Zone was a military as well as a civil occupation, and under those conditions the nullification of the Bill of Rights was acceptable. His worries allayed, Davis argued that deportation could and should be used even against U.S. citizens—in particular he cited its usefulness in eliminating workers who threatened to strike.29

  Officials frequently availed themselves of this right—a peculiar situation, when U.S. citizens could be deported from U.S. territory and sent back home to the United States. It gave government officials absolute power when it came to enforcing productivity on everyone residing in the Canal Zone, and organizing a strike was a principal offense that could result in deportation. The government matched its deportation powers with vagrancy laws, and it enforced the latter, as the executive secretary H. D. Reed put it, “vigorously”: “These enable us to compel every man to work, if he is able to work, if he remains in the Zone.” The police arrested men for loitering, vagrancy, intoxication, or disorderly conduct, and the number of arrests grew particularly high just after payday.30

  The three chief engineers, Wallace, Stevens, and Goethals, all prided themselves on their tough responses to skilled workers, and usually officials in Washington, D.C., supported their decisions. The most important effort at labor organizing among gold workers began in February 1907, when ­steam-­shovel operators demanded more pay. Engineers wanted to see their pay rise from $ 210 to $ 300 per month, while crane operators sought an increase from $ 185 to $ 250 per month and firemen requested a raise from $ 83 to $ 110 per month. The workers made this demand of chief engineer Stevens, and their union representative in Washington, D.C., forwarded it to President Roosevelt. While Roosevelt and Stevens considered the grievances, the locomotive engineers and conductors working on the Panama Railroad began organizing too. Stevens offered hints of compromise, but most negotiations waited until Secretary of War Taft visited the isthmus at the end of March 1907. Taft received the various committees and heard their complaints. He understood that a great deal was at stake, because the wages of steam-shovel engineers set the standard for all other American employees. He believed it would be highly embarrassing if they stopped working, yet it would also be embarrassing to pay them much more than they already made.31

  The men rested their demand for more pay mostly on the discomfort imposed by working on the isthmus: the distance from loved ones, the absence of amusements, the difficulties caused by the humidity and heat, the risk of illness and injury as a result of careless supervisors, and the absence of compensation from the government for injuries. They also expressed concern about frequent dismissals without a hearing or a chance to plead their case, arguing that the result was often unfair and unjust. Taft took more than a month to make a public decision on the steam-shovel operators’ grievances. In the meantime, the protest threatened to blossom into a general strike: by now, in ­mid-­April, railroad employees and skilled workers employed on an hourly basis (mostly building trades and machine shop workers) began arguing for higher pay as well. George Brooke, the superintendent of motive power and machinery, reported that “many threats were made by the union men on the Isthmus to make a showing of force at our Gorgona Shops” or send in their resignations. “If we are to have any trouble of this kind,” Brooke concluded, “it is much better to have it now
than later on.” He took a strong stand against the hourly men’s demands and refused even to send their petitions on to Secretary of War Taft, stating, “These men were notified that no shop rules or regulations would be recognized or received … that our shops must be ‘open’ shops; and an organization would not be recognized by committee.”32

  When Taft at last responded, the steam-shovel operators considered his offer of a 5 percent pay raise unacceptable. They called a strike in early May 1907. Within two days only thirteen steam shovels were at work, instead of the full force of ­forty-­eight. One member of the ICC ordered the Marines to patrol Culebra Cut and remove all agitators to their base, but Goethals learned of the order and countered it in the belief that it would generate more trouble. For several weeks excavation output remained very low. Gradually, however, Goethals replaced the striking steam-shovel operators through promotions, transfers, or hiring of new workers, and the strikers departed for the United States. In the end, Goethals argued, “the action taken had a wholesome effect on all classes of employees, for the ­steam-­shovel crews had appeared to be indispensable, yet the outcome showed conclusively that defection by them or any other one class of men could not tie up the whole work.” In the aftermath of this strike, the conductors and locomotive engineers working for the Panama Railroad again asked for higher pay. Goethals reminded the men that the canal was an “open shop” and that it was “­ill-­advised to makedemands for increases in pay or other concessions, and thereafter none such would be given any consideration.” He also repeated his policy that he would not meet with committees, but only with individual men.33

  In 1908, however, government officials in the United States suggested that a labor commissioner be appointed to work with Goethals and represent the interests of workers. Goethals vehemently rejected this idea (“I felt certain that the men themselves did not want such an official,” he remembered). The following year Taft, now president of the United States, agreed that a labor commissioner was unnecessary but ordered Goethals to accept meeting with committees representing the skilled workers. Taft, Goethals reported, “thought my position was untenable, for organized labor was recognized everywhere.” From then onward, Goe­thals accepted the “less of two evils” and met periodically with union committees regarding issues of salary, working conditions, and so forth, yet he required that individual grievances be presented to him during his Sunday open-office hours. He continued to brag, years later, that he never relented on his refusal to consider or discuss demands from workers. He would respond to their grievances, he declared, but never their “demands.”34