The Canal Builders

by Julie Greene

  Roosevelt focused his investigation on the more technical aspects of the project and sites like Culebra Cut, where undoubtedly he hoped the American public would focus its attention. He described Culebra Cut to his son: “There the huge steam shovels are hard at it; scooping huge masses of rock and gravel and dirt previously loosened by the drillers and dynamite blasters, loading it on trains which take it away to some dump, either in the jungle or where the dams are to be built. They are eating steadily into the mountain, cutting it down and down.”36 Newspapers lavishly covered this aspect of his trip, describing how Roosevelt ignored warnings of landslides at one spot and insisted on leaving the observation platform, plodding through dirt and over rocks to climb into a steam shovel. Astonished at the machine’s power, Roosevelt sat for a few minutes silently watching the “intelligent monster” plunge again and again into the mountainside. Newspaper photographers were clicking shots of Roosevelt at this moment, creating the famous image of his presidency that brilliantly telegraphed to Americans the main values he wished associated with the canal.

  As he sat in the steam shovel, he peppered the engineer in charge, a Mr. Gray, with questions and got one surprising request back in response. Gray seized the opportunity to ask the president why steam-shovel engineers ­didn’t receive overtime pay, as the railroad engineers in the Canal Zone did. “Not paid enough?” Roosevelt said with a laugh. “Do you know, some intelligent persons have even said that the President is not paid enough for his work?” Nonetheless, he agreed he would consider the matter. Later, stopped at Culebra, Roosevelt saw a steam shovel at work and decorated with a banner that read, we will help you to cut it! Another workingman cried out as Roosevelt passed, ­“WE’RE GOING TO PUT IT THROUGH!” Roosevelt declared that such sentiments pleased him tremendously.37

  In speeches delivered to American workers and ICC officials, Roo­sevelt praised the work being done and associated the canal with the great virtues of the United States. He confessed he was going home a “prouder American.” “Stevens and his men are changing the face of the continent, are doing the greatest engineering feat of the ages, and the effect of their work will be felt while our civilization lasts.” Repeatedly striking a military tone, Roosevelt declared, “Whether you are here as superintendent, foreman, chief clerk, machinist, conductor, engineer, ­steam-­shovel man (and he is the American who is setting the mark for the rest of you to live up to, by the way), whoever you are, if you are doing your duty, you are putting your country under an obligation to you just as a soldier who does his work well in a great war puts the country under an obligation to him.” Work on the canal, he declared, should “confer the patent of nobility” upon a man, just as if he had fought valiantly in the Civil War. When someone in a crowd (who Chatfield believed was planted there by Roosevelt’s public relations people) shouted out, “What about Poultney Bigelow?” Roosevelt responded that people “should on no account pay attention to such criticisms, as the critics would sink out of sight, while the work the men were doing and had done would remain long after all criticism had been forgotten.” In a pointed rebuke to Bigelow’s statement that one would not want his son to work on the canal, the president declared he “was so impressed with the magnitude and greatness of this work” that “I wish that any one of my boys was old enough to take part in the work.”38

  Upon his return to the United States, Roosevelt culminated his public relations campaign by issuing a lengthy special message to Congress in which he assessed every aspect of the project and included, for the first time in U.S. history, a photographic supplement. In this message Roosevelt gave an emphatically cheerful appraisal of the work being done. Here and there one might find “some minor rascality” at work on the isthmus, he informed Congress. Yet, “after the most painstaking inquiry, I have been unable to find a single reputable person who had so much as heard of any serious accusations affecting the honesty of the Commission or of any responsible officer under it… . [T]he whole atmosphere of the Commission breathes honesty as it breathes efficiency and energy.” Furthermore, “the work has been kept absolutely clear of politics.” Roosevelt condemned the “immense amount of reckless slander,” especially that expressed by U.S. citizens: “I feel for them the heartiest contempt and indignation; because in a spirit of wanton dishonesty and malice, they are trying to interfere with … the greatest work of the kind ever attempted.” Roosevelt concluded his message powerfully with a final military metaphor: “Our fellow countrymen on the Isthmus are working for our interest and for the national renown in the same spirit and with the same efficiency that the men of the Army and Navy work in time of war. It behooves us in our turn to do all we can to hold up their hands and to aid them every way to bring their great work to a triumphant conclusion.”39

  The journalist William Inglis observed that Americans had greeted news about the canal with “a strange lack of conviction” before Roo­sevelt visited the isthmus. However, “now that the President has gone to Panama, has seen that the work is progressing, … the people are slowly awakening to the fact that our engineers and mechanics and laborers are making a success of the greatest and most difficult engineering feat in the world.” Examining articles and books published on the canal, the historian Michael Hogan found that before Roosevelt’s visit negative publicity dominated. Afterward, innumerable publications followed Roosevelt’s lead, stressing the grandeur of the project, its significance as a gift to world civilization, and especially the engineering and medical achievements that made it possible. One book appearing soon after Roosevelt visited, by Michael Delevante, acknowledged the power the president exerted. Roosevelt, Delevante declared, “has immortalized Panama and the Panama Canal.” Gradually the main narrative of the canal shifted from one of disease, inefficiency, and graft to one of national grandeur. Indeed, the ferocity of Roosevelt’s public relations campaign was so celebrated at the time that it became, to some people, a joking matter. In a satire published in the New YorkSunday World, a Mr. Blythe wrote about William Howard Taft’s visit to the Zone, which had preceded Roosevelt’s by several months: “What did he [Taft] discover there?” “He discovered that steam shovels make fine backgrounds for photographs, and told the President about it.” “Is there nothing permanent about the canal?” “Yes.” “What?” “The press agent.”40

  Roosevelt’s visit certainly triggered the public’s favorable new attitude toward the canal, but many others helped transform the project into a proud symbol for Americans. A veritable parade of congressmen, ­high-­ranking government officials, labor representatives, social reformers, and businessmen visited the Zone in these years, using the isthmus as a staging ground to present their vision of American expansionism and the proper form of American government. Each visit provided journalists with another opportunity to broadcast the virtues of construction to the American public back home. TheChicago Daily Tribune wrote of this collective project that was “popularizing the canal” in early 1907, soon after a group of Chicago businessmen returned from the isthmus. TheTribune editors wrote approvingly, “Such testimony as has been given the country during the last few months is bound to make the average citizen much more sanguine of the early completion of the canal. That means an increasing enthusiasm and pride in American achievement as the day of realization of the world’s long dream approaches.”41

  Speaker of the House Joseph Cannon likewise led a group of congressmen to the Zone soon after Roosevelt and declared himself well pleased with the construction effort. Cannon noted, “I ­don’t know whether it’s sanitation or civilization. But I know ­we’ve introduced here the white man’s civilization. ­We’re just as comfortable here as in Illinois.” Several times congressmen and senators who served on committees charged with overseeing the construction work visited. Likewise William Howard Taft, who, as secretary of war and, after 1908, as president of the United States, bore responsibility for seeing the construction through to successful completion, traveled to the Canal Zone seven times between 1904 an
d 1913. His wife, who had frequently visited the Philippines when her husband served as ­governor-­general of that new American colony, wrote when she traveled to Panama that it “seemed more like ‘getting home’ than like getting to a strange place. The whole atmosphere and surroundings, the people, the language they spoke, the houses and streets, the rank earth odours and the very feel of the air reminded me so strongly of the Philippines as to give me immediately a delightful sense of friendly familiarity with everything and everybody.”42

  Negative publicity declined but did not end after Roosevelt’s visit. Poultney Bigelow repeatedly attempted to revive his original charges, and over the years he was joined by others who decried the existence in the Zone variously of white slavery, government corruption, ineptitude, favoritism, mismanagement, bad food, and unfair treatment of U.S. citizens. Congressman Henry T. Rainey of Illinois raised serious accusations in 1907, arguing that the commissary system in the Zone was corrupt and that rotten meat was being served. He declared it a scandal in management “second only to the bum beef scandal of the ­Spanish-­American war.” In 1908, Rainey made more serious charges of graft and corruption, alleging that prominent Americans (including William Nelson Cromwell and Charles P. Taft), in their roles as managers of the U.S. government–owned Panama Railroad, were robbing the treasuries of both Panama and the United States. Further, Rainey claimed that both Roosevelt and the incumbent president, William Howard Taft, were aiding their corrupt scheme. The accusation soon faded away, but not before generating bitter arguments in the House of Representatives and significant negative publicity in the newspapers.43

  BRINGING PROGRESSIVISM TO THE ZONE

  Roosevelt’s personal charisma and the prestige of the presidency made the canal into headline news and improved public relations, yet even he failed to banish critics, and the government’s policies in the Canal Zone remained controversial. As Roosevelt and his administration sought to silence criticisms and ensure that the Canal Zone’s government was effective, they increasingly turned to a final weapon: progressivism. By linking U.S. expansionism to progressive ideals—in particular by showing that the government could operate in the Zone in an efficient, orderly, and just fashion—Roosevelt’s administration would generate positive publicity about the canal construction project and demonstrate its legitimacy. Yet the goal of bringing progressivism to the Canal Zone took on a life of its own and raised questions about who exactly should benefit from the progressivism of the United States.

  The reformer Gertrude Beeks of the National Civic Federation, or NCF, personified the connections between progressivism and the canal project and the complications that resulted. The story of this pioneer in corporate welfare activities also demonstrates how intertwined the worlds of labor activism, settlement houses, corporate welfare, government intervention, and American empire became during this period. Born in Tennessee soon after the Civil War, in 1867, Beeks grew up in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and in Chicago. By the end of the 1890s she had become an active participant in the Chicago Civic Federation, an ally of Jane Addams’s at Hull House, and president of the National Association of Women Stenographers. In 1901, International Harvester hired her as its first welfare secretary, with a special request that she develop policies to enhance the comfort of female employees. Beeks quickly made a name for herself by creating a lunchroom so women would have healthy meals, buying a piano so they could dance a bit after lunch each day, and installing additional mirrors in the washroom. Those in charge made a startling discovery, it was said:“Efficiency was being increased.” Beeks went on to develop policies to improve health and sanitation for male as well as female employees and organized weekend boat trips and baseball games for the “labor element,” plus more elaborate trips to resorts for foremen and ­white-­collar workers.44

  In 1903, Beeks became director of the NCF’s Welfare Department. The NCF sought to improve relations between workers and employers by rejecting both socialism and the ­anti-­unionism of employers organizations like the National Association of Manufacturers. At a time of tremendous change in the powers of the federal government, the NCF advocated limited state intervention and preferred to remedy the ills of modern industrial society through a combination of responsible corporate policies and a moderate union movement. Composed of representatives from the worlds of labor, business, and the public, the NCF became a powerful player in progressive America, persuasively presenting its case against socialism and in favor of limited state intervention, moderate unionism, and paternalistic corporate welfare. The NCF’s antisocialist philosophy and its warm relationship with corporations also generated biting criticism from ­left-­wing labor activists.45

  As director of the NCF’s Welfare Department, Beeks became a nationally visible leader in the corporate welfare movement. She traveled across the country, working with employers in a range of settings, from factories to mines to department stores, helping them overhaul their welfare policies and seeking ways to make workers more contented and loyal. She organized conferences and symposiums on welfare, published books, and gave lectures. Beeks was a dignified sort of woman, a handsome, ­gray-­eyed figure dressed in the fine businesswoman’s fashions of the day. She worked closely with her boss, Ralph Easley, in the ­day-­to-­day affairs of the NCF and joined enthusiastically in his antisocialist and antisuffrage activities. Sincerely devoted to improving conditions for workingmen and workingwomen, and striving to nudge employers toward that end, Beeks also disdained the idea of workers contributing to the design of welfare policies. She believed welfare policies should not involve condescension to employees, but neither should they be based on “the ­so-­called democratic idea.” Although committees of employees might be useful in implementing policies, their role should go no further: “The chief purpose of committees of employees is advisory and to enlist interest rather than to initiate or execute welfare plans.” Beeks seemed to enjoy the power and authority her work afforded in a business world composed mostly of men. Writing Easley about her work for International Harvester in 1903, she exulted: “They say here I should have been a man!”46

  After Roosevelt visited the Canal Zone in 1906, the NCF announced that Beeks had created a new department devoted to welfare policies for government employees. This signaled the state’s rising importance as a force in American political life and as an employer. Despite the NCF’s emphasis on voluntary reform by individual corporations, its officers could not ignore the increasing centrality of the state. If only to serve as a model employer, the government itself had to be reformed. According to theNational Civic Federation Review, many government departments had recently doubled in size, and employees desperately needed improvements in their working conditions. New buildings, like the Library of Congress, were equipped with modern washrooms, good lighting, and ventilated workrooms, but others lacked such conveniences. Patent office employees worked in a building where dust had been gathering “since the time of Lincoln,” causing eye irritations and pulmonary problems. The Bureau of Engraving and Printing was said to be a “­first-­class sweatshop.” Why should government employees be forced to tolerate conditions that would not be allowed in private companies? The NCF’s new department vowed to survey conditions throughout the government and military and announce its findings at a conference to be held later that year.47

  There was no better symbol of the government’s new power and the importance of its role as employer than the canal project. “Nowhere,” declared theNational Civic Federation Review, “does the Federal Government employ so large a number of persons under circumstances which impose upon it so great a responsibility for providing proper conditions of life as in the Canal Zone.” Thus it was hardly surprising that the NCF’s new department would be led by Secretary of War William Howard Taft, the man overseeing work on the canal, or that President Roosevelt and Secretary Taft asked Beeks to investigate conditions in the Canal Zone in her capacity as welfare director for the NCF. Taft sent with her a letter of introduction for
Goethals: “She has the confidence of the President and of the friends of the President who know her work, and what she reports will be much relied on by the authorities here.” Goethals, Taft stressed, should give Beeks every opportunity to explore conditions in the Zone. “She does not come as a spy, or for the purpose of making sensational reports to the newspapers,” but rather seeks only to remedy any problems she may find. Taft also noted that because Beeks was tied closely to the trade unions, her suggestions for improving employees’ lives would be useful.48

  And so on a cool, damp day in June 1907, Gertrude Beeks boarded a ship for the long journey to Panama. She spent ­twenty-­three days on the isthmus and examined virtually every inch of the construction project. She toured dormitories, cafeterias, married housing, YMCA clubhouses, and hospitals, and spent time questioning everyone from Colonel ­Goethals and his top officials to the engineers and foremen, and onward to the skilled and unskilled workers and their wives. She assessed labor conditions, wages, hours, holidays and vacations, housing, sanitary arrangements, water supply, food, commodities for purchase, medical policies, conditions for women and children, and rest and recreation. Beeks was known, a journalist related, for the constant questions she asked: “How could the laborers be happy … in dormitories of 60 to 84 cots and less air space than tenement laws require? Why ­shouldn’t they have pneumonia when they were without blankets? Why should families like to live in a camp where there were no schools for the children? Why not organize clubs to make the women content?”49