The Canal Builders

by Julie Greene

  The canal project inspired for some people utopian visions of a future society. William James and H. G. Wells had advocated the adoption of universal conscription so that an army of citizens could undertake public service projects. While some rejected their ideas as unfeasible, the columnist Robert Herrick hailed the canal construction as evidence of the soundness of their idea. He recommended that the army of laborers building the canal not be dispersed upon its completion but be transferred to a site like Alaska, where future railroads and highways required vast human labor. Such a citizens’ army would solve many problems at once: it would shift energies away from militarism and toward the public good, it would provide “valuable democratic training,” and it would make unnecessary the employment of aliens (which the government unfortunately relied on in the Canal Zone), because universal conscription would make every young citizen of the United States available to the government.7

  Likewise, some thinkers inspired by the Canal Zone linked it to Edward Bellamy’s bestselling utopian novel,Looking Backward, published in 1888, which had generated much debate and enthusiasm and helped popularize collectivist approaches to government.Looking Backward takes place in the year 2000, when collectivism has finally been achieved. Some have seen Bellamy’s vision as a particularly authoritarian sort of socialism, while other historians have argued his collectivism was intended to unleash a new, more fulfilled individuality. Willis Abbot’s popular bookPanama and the Canal in Picture and Prose, which included on its title page “Approved by Leading Officials Connected with the Great Enterprise,” saw the canal as a realization of Bellamy’s vision, particularly by putting collectivism and state power in the service of consumerism and by exerting a degree of control over vast global markets. Abbot argued, “The dream of the late Edward Bellamy is given actuality on the Zone where we find a great central authority, buying everything imaginable in all the markets of the world at the moment when prices are lowest—an authority big enough to snap its fingers at any trust—and selling again without profit to the ultimate consumers.”8

  More commonly, observers noted a parallel between the Canal Zone’s government and the ­single-­tax ideas of the ­nineteenth-­century economist Henry George, whose bestselling book,Progress and Poverty, had argued that landowners who received income from rent on land impoverished other Americans, thereby preventing progress and increasing

  inequality. He proposed a “single tax” on land that would make it economically unfeasible for owners to charge rent for land or do anything other than cultivate it. This would make land more available to poorer Americans, which would result in higher wages for everyone (in part by reducing labor surplus in the cities) and thus generate greater social and economic equality. George became one of the most influential social thinkers of the late nineteenth century, exciting ­working-­class followers across the country—most famously in 1886 in New York City, where he was drafted to run for mayor only to lose to the Democrat Abram Hewitt but handily defeating young Theodore Roosevelt, his Republican opponent. By the first decade of the twentieth century George’s ­single-­tax ideas had declined in popularity. Yet they seemed to find new life amid the challenges of America’s expansionism abroad. In the Canal Zone, it was said, government ownership of all land was realizing George’s dream because speculation and exploitation caused by high rents had become impossible.

  The most noteworthy advocate for the idea was William Gorgas, the chief medical officer of the Canal Zone who had defeated yellow fever. Gorgas declared in a speech to the American Public Health Association in 1915 that his experience in the Canal Zone suggested the United States should apply a special tax on uncultivated land in its domestic territory. He conceded that the battle against yellow fever and other diseases had been crucial in improving the quality of life in the Zone, but he added, “The decrease in the general death rate in the canal zone I attrib­ute to the good wages paid.” Thus, he argued, in the United States the best thing to lower the death rate and improve living conditions would be to tax idle land. We should make “available the millions of acres of idle lands now held vacant, unproductive and unused. This a special land tax will do. It will increase wages without increasing the burden on labor. Thus it will lower death rates and increase health and efficiency rates.”9

  Throughout the construction decade increasing numbers of ­middle-­class white reformers and journalists evaluated the Canal Zone’s government and used it as a site for considering the virtues of state intervention. Often they ducked the question of democracy or contrived a way to argue that the government, despite its apparent authoritarianism, was in fact highly democratic. In 1906, when John Foster Carr traveled to Panama from New York to observe the construction, his reaction was typical: “We are new at the imperial business of creating republics and dependencies, but our success here has been so great … the most striking and significant work we are doing on the isthmus is not the completion of a vast and comprehensive scheme for canal digging, but the creation of a state.” When the United States arrived on the isthmus, he noted, “we found the old civilization in decay, and throughout a large part of the Zone reverting slowly to savagery.” But then the U.S. government began to exert itself, and soon things were made right. Although the approach might seem absolutist, at the municipal level Carr found a workshop of democracy. In the end, he concluded, we are building with idealism, because our labor “has its origins in the very life and traditions of the Republic.” Similarly, Willis Abbot characterized the government as a “benevolent despotism” and declared it to be what the czar of Russia might implement if he shared Goethals’s dislike of bureaucracies, grafters, and delay. Yet he proclaimed the government “very democratic … for it ­won’t issue to Mrs. Highflyer more than three wicker ­arm-­chairs, even if she does entertain every day, while her neighbor Mrs. Domus who gets just exactly as many never entertains at all.”10

  Workers likewise saw the government’s policies in the Canal Zone as a testing ground. The Zone’s steam-shovel men and machinists struggled to prove that the state was—or should be—a model employer. Labor activists struggling in the United States to build a case for state intervention similarly looked to the Canal Zone. Miners and electrical workers striking in Butte, Montana, in 1917, for example, demanded government ownership of the mines and commented in their strike bulletin: “In no place in the world are better conditions to be found than in the Panama Canal Zone, which is entirely under Government control.” The editors of theMachinists’ Monthly Journal noted in 1908, “When Uncle Sam took hold of the job that was to unite the two oceans, all those who are opposed to the Government taking anything in hand that could be used for the purpose of fattening private interests croaked all kinds of dire prophecies, each one of which declared that the whole thing would end in a miserable failure.” They recounted the government’s achievements in the Canal Zone:

  Uncle Sam took over a festering swamp and made it one of the healthiest spots on earth. He has rebuilt two cities on a modern plan and has constructed a new one on his own account. He has made ports and quays, has driven away contagious diseases and mosquitoes, has reconstructed a railway and enlarged the old canal until it is for much of the way fully completed. All this is very creditable and shows that work prosecuted by the Government is far superior to work done under private contract. And the beauty of it is, the work is done for the nation at large, though the whole world will be benefited. It will stimulate trade and bring the nations of the earth closer together, and thus hasten the day of universal brotherhood.11

  Life was so pleasant in the Zone, one canal employee wrote in theInternational Socialist Review, that “we are really one of the happiest bunches of workingmen in the world.” Most workers would like to stay forever, he declared. “We feel as though we had temporarily escaped the driving lash of Capitalism and the ­Profit-­System and are enjoying a ­fore-­taste of what life will be for all the workers in the Wonderful Days ­A-­Coming.”12

  ­Middle-­class
reformers in the United States who, like Bullard, would later become prominent state builders expressed their admiration for the construction project. In the 1920s the technocrat Stuart Chase described his more radical youth during the Progressive Era in the third person: “He made a laborious summary of ­state-­controlled enterprises the world around, and took much comfort in the Panama Canal Zone as the one rocky ledge in a sea of American ­laissez-­faire.” The prominent welfare editor and progressive Edward T. Devine visited the Canal Zone and cast a careful eye upon the living conditions, the penitentiary, and the judicial system. Overall he deemed it a perfect representation of his faith in progress, efficiency, and triumphant social science. Although he expressed dismay that prisoners were forced to wear a ball and chain and that there existed no juvenile court or probation system, much about the Zone impressed him. Devine praised the officials’ solution to the race problem: “Among the ingenious inventions to which social conditions on the isthmus have given rise, first place must be given to the broad distinction between ‘gold employes’ … and ‘silver employes.’ ” This was not explicitly a racial system, but it rather neatly solved the race problem, according to Devine: “There is no ‘Jim Crow car’ on the Panama Railway; but there is a first and second class with separate coaches, and on work trains there are separate cars for ‘gold’ employes. The patent subterfuge might make ‘trouble’ in some parts of the country; but on the zone, with Negroes who are mainly British subjects, and ‘Europeans’ who are accustomed to the idea of social classes, the plan seems to work satisfactorily.” Devine admired the efficient administration that allowed construction to hum along, and he seemed thrilled to meet “the superb lot of men and boys” doing the actual work. Like most who visited the Zone, he could hardly find sufficient superlatives to describe the project’s grandeur: “All honor to them; for this that they are doing … is a real wonder of the world.”13

  The Canal Zone thus seemed a living laboratory for the sorts of activist state policies, closely tied to science and the latest technology and managed by experts, that advanced progressives like Herbert Croly advocated. As historian William Leuchtenburg pointed out decades ago, Croly became not only the ­best-­known advocate of expanded state power (coining the term “New Nationalism,” which would be adopted, famously, by Theodore Roosevelt) but also one who married the ideals of progressivism to America’s new empire. Croly advocated an assertive foreign policy and the creation of an American international system, and he repeatedly noted the interconnections between domestic and foreign policies. He credited the War of 1898 with generating progressivism itself: “That war and its resulting policy of ­extra-­territorial expansion … availed, from the sheer force of the national aspirations it aroused, to give a tremendous impulse to the work of national reform.” Now the United States had begun the mighty job of creating an international system, both by “pacifying” Cuba and by introducing “a little order into the affairs of the turbulent Central American republics.” Furthermore, he noted, “the construction of the Panama Canal has given this country an exceptional interest in the prevalence of order and good government in the territory between Panama and Mexico; and in the near future our best opportunity for improving international political conditions in the Western hemisphere will be found in this comparatively limited but, from a selfish point of view, peculiarly important field.” Nor in the long run should these expansionist activities be considered separate from domestic reform: “The irresponsible attitude of Americans in respect to their national domestic problems may in part be traced to freedom from equally grave international responsibilities. … [I]t is entirely possible that hereafter the United States will be forced into the adoption of a really national domestic policy because of the dangers and duties incurred through her relations with foreign countries.”14

  POULTNEY BIGELOW AND THE PRESIDENT’S TRIP

  How did progressive reformers come to perceive the canal project in such a rosy way? The reactions were not always so positive, and closer examination reveals how the canal came to be seen as a wondrous application of scientific and efficient government policies. In the years after its victory in the War of 1898, as the United States replaced Spain in the Philippines, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, it found the exercise of power difficult and contested by its new subjects. The brutal repression of rebels in the Philippines after 1898 particularly challenged America’s positive image of its role in the world. An energetic insurrection had broken out as Filipinos resisted the new occupying power. Under the leadership of Emilio Aguinaldo, thousands of Filipinos took up arms to achieve national independence. The U.S. government was determined to assert its control over the archipelago. For Americans who had sought to portray themselves as using their new power only for civilizing purposes, the Filipino insurrection proved a great embarrassment. Whether measured in duration, resources expended, or the number of mortalities, it ultimately dwarfed the War of 1898. More than 125,000 Americans served in the ­Philippine-­American War; it cost the lives of at least 16,000 Filipino insurgents, perhaps as many as 700,000 Filipino civilians, and 4,200 U.S. soldiers.15

  The situation in the Philippines generated widespread concern among Americans about the supposed benevolence of their government overseas. In the war’s early stages government censorship limited the spread of information. Gradually, as soldiers returned home and particularly as ­anti-­imperialists dug for information, revelations came out in the press about the U.S. military’s use of torture. Most infamous was the widespread “water cure” (in which gallons of water would be poured down the victim’s throat, then pressure applied to the stomach to force the water back out), but the American press and public also grew concerned about concentration camps, the indiscriminate burning of Filipino villages, and the killing of Filipinos who had surrendered. Brigadier General James Bell reported to theNew York Times that in the province of Luzon alone, more than 600,000 Filipinos had died, either in battle or from dengue fever, itself at least partially a consequence of famine brought about by the war. Critics of the war effort pressed successfully for an investigation into alleged atrocities committed by the United States. The investigation lasted from January through June of 1902. Although Republicans carefully managed the hearings (refusing to allow the public or the press to attend, and preventing critics of the government from testifying), damning evidence nonetheless horrified the public and led to demands that the United States reform its policy.16

  The Senate investigating committee learned, for example, that the ­highest-­ranking officer in the Army had protested against the severe methods being employed on the Filipinos. The American governor of the province of Tayabas likewise reported that Army methods included “the extensive burning of barrios in trying to lay waste the country so that the insurgents cannot occupy it,” as well as various forms of torture. An Army major accused of killing unarmed Filipinos testified at his trial that he was following orders given him by General Jacob Smith: “Gen. Smith instructed him to kill and burn, and said that the more he killed and burned the better pleased he would be; that it was no time to take prisoners, and that he was to make Samar a howling wilderness.”17 Public outrage grew as the tales of a military seemingly out of control flowed freely. Some newspapers questioned the leadership of President Roo­sevelt and his secretary of war, Elihu Root. U.S. military officials found themselves compared to their corrupt predecessors in Spain. ­Anti-­imperialists in the United States gained in the Philippines debacle much ammunition for arguing that empire was sapping the manhood of American youth, not energizing it. The arguments put forward by defenders of the military seemed to threaten American respectability even more. Some argued that savage tactics must be used by Americans when they confronted savages, or that the atrocities were committed by Filipinos collaborating with the United States. Still others declared that atrocities carried out by U.S. soldiers derived from a sort of “degeneration” caused by the surrounding environment, culture, and society that lacked civilizing virtu
es. An article by the writer Poultney Bigelow, titled “How to Convert a White Man into a Savage,” described the horrors of warfare in the Philippines he had learned about by interviewing a U.S. soldier who served there. Bigelow concluded that we should be teaching schoolchildren “not merely the gaudy and glorious side of warfare, but at the same time the dark and monotonous murder which is sometimes an ally in imperial progress.” An adventure that had seemed an opportunity to bring civilization to the Philippines now was believed to be undermining the very ideals upon which the American Republic had been built.18

  In this atmosphere of increasing disillusionment with the war, President Theodore Roosevelt launched one of his many brilliant offensives to shape and control public opinion. After meeting with his cabinet, Roosevelt ordered the ­court-­martial of General Smith. This was immediately followed by a series of speeches by cabinet members, by Henry Cabot Lodge, chairman of the ­pro-­war Senate Committee on Insular Affairs, by Army officers, and by Roosevelt himself. Together they articulated a forceful defense of the government’s policies in the Philippines. Roosevelt’s own intervention occurred during an acclaimed speech on Memorial Day at Arlington National Cemetery. Roosevelt reiterated the reasons for fighting while attacking both Filipino insurgents and American critics of the war. The war in the Philippines, he emphasized, turned on “not only the honor of the flag but the triumph of civilization over forces which stand for the black chaos of savagery and barbarism.” He admitted that U.S. troops had committed atrocities but argued that they had “received terrible provocation from a very cruel and very treacherous enemy,” and that enemy had committed more—and more savage —atrocities. He attacked domestic critics as men who “walk delicately and live in the soft places of the earth” and accused them of inconsistency for failing to condemn cruel lynchings at home even as they dishonored men nobly bringing freedom and “the light of civilization” to the Philippines.19 Soon thereafter, on July 4, 1902, Roosevelt famously declared the war in the Philippines won. Clearly he had won the battle for favorable public opinion. Americans’ attention to the war faded even as guerrilla resistance in the Philippines continued for several more years.