by Julie Greene
In other words, contemporaries not only recognized but celebrated the value of American women’s domestic labor to the larger goals of the construction project.4
Like British and American women who made their homes in other sites of empire—in India, Indonesia, Puerto Rico, or the Philippines, for example—the housewives of the Canal Zone became willing participants in their nation’s civilizing mission. Their role differed profoundly from that of their husbands, however. Unlike male employees who left each day to work in the machine shops or construction sites of the canal, housewives were compelled to negotiate the tensions of empire in a supposedly private and intimate realm. Their main interactions with West Indians and Panamanians occurred in their own houses. The labor of West Indian and Panamanian women was indispensable to the canal project, and it often fell to white American housewives to manage them. Their own domesticating mission and their self-image as participants in the canal project were entirely dependent on the labor of these women who cleaned and cooked for them and cared for their children. To succeed at their jobs, however, housewives needed to try to make that labor unnoticed by others. The home therefore served not only as a place to build an “American civilization” in the tropics but also as the fulcrum in which white American housewives defined their identity through the distinctions they discerned between themselves and those who served them. Their reactions to those people—mostly women—were diverse and ranged over time from fear, anxiety, frustration, and dependency to occasional feelings of friendship, admiration, and romanticism.5
In important ways the Canal Zone differed from other U.S. expansionist sites around the world. Unlike the Philippines, Cuba, or Puerto Rico, where the United States also established a firm presence, the Canal Zone under U.S. occupation was purposely cut off and distinguished from the Republic of Panama in every possible way. Although the U.S. government was deeply involved in Panamanian affairs and American canal employees and military personnel regularly visited the entertainment districts of Panama City and Colón, the residents of the Canal Zone in their everyday lives remained isolated and insulated from the realities of the Republic of Panama. This was especially true for American women, who less frequently visited the port cities and the beaches of Panama. They mostly inhabited a women’s zone, one focused on their homes and neighborhoods and the ICC commissaries where they bought food and other necessities. The public world of work on the canal was unfamiliar to these housewives except when they visited as tourists or took their children to see Culebra Cut.
If the U.S. housewives inhabited in some senses a constrained world, however, it was nonetheless a large one, filled with many other women from the United States and their families, and this provided another contrast with sites like Cuba and the Philippines. Although some U.S. women traveled to the latter countries (most often as wives of government officials, or as teachers or nurses), their numbers were small relative to that of their counterparts in the Canal Zone. The prevalence and importance of skilled white U.S. workers in the Zone and the decision of officials to encourage their wives to accompany them made the demographics and the gender economy of the isthmus distinctive. By 1912 thousands of white American housewives had taken passage to the Canal Zone, accompanied by thousands more of their sons and daughters. The Canal Zone census of that year found nearly eighteen hundred married white women who had been born in the United States. The vast majority had moved to the Zone to provide a home for their husbands. Some were wives of senior officials (Mrs. George Goethals, Mrs. William Gorgas, and so on), engineers, and white-collar employees, but most were the wives of machinists, railroad engineers, carpenters, steam-shovel men, and other skilled workers.6
The white American women in the Canal Zone negotiated their lives and work amid an axis of demands. The racial and social hierarchies of the Zone pervaded the world of women as well as of men, and the rough environment of the Canal Zone clashed against many women’s desires for respectability. Amid the conflicts, tensions, and sometimes latent violence that resulted, Goethals’s staff members found themselves having to serve as social workers and peacekeepers, intervening to resolve white women’s quarrels when they had many other—seemingly more urgent—demands pressing on their time. Little did they know, when they encouraged wives to settle in the Zone, that the contributions made by the community of women to enhancing labor productivity would be offset by new sources of disorder and disharmony.
“HERE IN THE ZONE A WOMAN’S A PLEASURE, AND RICH UNCLE SAM FOOTS THE BIG BILL”
Rose Van Hardeveld found her entrance into the world of the Canal Zone in early 1906 a harrowing one. Her husband, Jan, greeted her and her daughters at the dock, and through the heat and humidity they made their way to the train station. After hours of waiting, they boarded a train headed for their new home in Las Cascadas, a construction town near the mouth of Culebra Cut. As the train steamed across the isthmus, she remembered, it would stop every few miles to allow a family to find their home “somewhere in the darkness.”7
Finally it was their turn. Disgorged by the train, they began walking along the tracks in “the blackest, darkest place I had ever been in.” When they reached the house, Jan had no matches, so he let his family rest on the porch while he went to find a light. Van Hardeveld sat clutching her children, with “fleeting mental pictures of the creeping horrors that might pounce on us out of the dark night.” Jan returned, and upon entering their new home, they saw bats and lizards scurrying for cover, and then, as they gained their bearings, a vile smell hit them. Jan explained the source of the stench: the house had been built and abandoned by the French. Left unoccupied for years and with double walls, the dwelling had provided a home for hundreds of bats, their nests and droppings now filling the house.8
Van Hardeveld believed it was her wifely duty to support and provide companionship to her husband. But like many women she saw her journey to the Canal Zone in larger terms. She and her husband were both Dutch Americans; they passionately supported Theodore Roosevelt and felt a patriotic pride in his canal project. “With Teddy Roosevelt,” Jan Van Hardeveld had proclaimed to his wife, “anything is possible!” Guided by Roosevelt’s vision, and supported by his wife’s housekeeping talents, Jan believed they would contribute to the canal construction and help civilization advance. Rose Van Hardeveld was confident that her government appreciated her labor: “The opinion had been expressed by our own Government that the wives and children were as necessary to the success of the job as the men were.”9
This statement reflected a change in officials’ thinking. Initially, in 1904 and 1905, they believed conditions too rough for women. As Rose Van Hardeveld described it, “There seemed to be a general air of Canal Digging first, and women and children are too much trouble.”10 Only rarely did women make the trip except for some nurses and wives of officials. Few comforts were available for wives, and more than one found herself living in a boxcar. In 1905, when hundreds of skilled workers fled the Zone to return to the United States, when disease, accidents, and discomfort made the isthmus seem as much a dreaded land of death as during the French era, it began to seem to officials that women might indeed be the key to success. U.S. officials needed to make the Canal Zone seem not a diseased construction camp but a civilized world—or, as Americans in the Zone described it, “a small bit of the United States, transplanted to alien soil.” By early 1906, as they got disease under control, officials began to urge women to come to the isthmus, and simultaneously they began working to make the Zone a more comfortable and hospitable place. They built housing for married couples and their families and provided workers whose wives joined them with double the amount of housing space. They paid wives’ way to the isthmus. They built ice plants, cold-storage warehouses, and commissaries, all things men would enjoy but women in particular would find necessary. And, very important, they added a female ward to ICC hospitals.11
The argument that women’s presence was not only feasible but desirable was forceful
ly articulated in 1907 by Gertrude Beeks. When she visited the Zone in June of that year, nine hundred families were already living there. Beeks declared the government must treat the Zone like a settled community rather than a construction camp, and toward that end it should build more family houses. ICC officials admitted they were facing hundreds more requests for houses that could accommodate families, but they demurred at spending the extra money, especially for single-family homes. Beeks rebutted, arguing that “the rapid construction of the Canal depends much upon a stable force of employs.” Any investment by the government, she noted, would be repaid by keeping workers from returning to the United States and by making those who remained happier: “Men with homes upon the Isthmus are able to have nutritious food tastefully prepared, now impossible at the Government messes… . [F]amily life is conducive to contentment, health and, therefore, stability.” By the end of 1907 theNew York Times was publicizing Beeks’s opinion that “Panama offers good chances to women.” The government proceeded to build more family housing, and by July 1912 a brief note in the ICC annual report curtly showed Beeks’s predictions to have been correct. Of the current employees, it declared, 48 percent of married men had been on the job prior to 1908, while only 20 percent of bachelors had been working for the ICC that long.12
For the workingmen and engineers in the Zone there were more prosaic reasons to encourage wives and sweethearts to join them. Single American men lived in dormitories, sharing their rooms with one or more others and eating in government cafeterias. Though their quarters were relatively palatial and the food much better than that provided for non-Americans, white workingmen considered conditions rough. The food served in government cafeterias was widely perceived as atrocious. Consequently, men tried whenever possible to marry or bring a wife from the States. This would allow them to apply for married housing, which would provide them with space all to themselves and their family. Their wives would not only provide companionship but also run the household, in turn hiring Caribbean or Panamanian women to cook and clean. As a poem written during the construction era declared:
Happy the lot of the man who is married,
With nice little house and furniture free;
Awful the lot of the chump who has tarried,
And turned from the road to fee-lici-tee.
Single men think to be free is a pleasure,
And go and come as they will;
But here in the Zone a woman’s a pleasure,
And rich Uncle Sam foots the big bill.
Because of these circumstances, a gendered economy emerged in which women’s labor made the Zone feel like home to American men working on the canal, enhanced their comfort, and in this way helped solve the problem of rapid labor turnover that had nagged officials during the early years of construction.13
Plaintive letters traveled back and forth as machinists and steam-shovel men entreated their wives or sweethearts to come to Panama. When they failed to convince their sweethearts to make the trip, many men looked for women already living in the Zone, courting daughters of other workers or finding romance in Panama City. One housewife noted that many a bachelor, “after a dinner at a married friend’s home, would think longingly of Lucy or Jane, whom he had left behind in the States. The list for assignment to married quarters grew longer and longer and it was eagerly checked as names crept slowly to the top.” In one case a man had anxiously waited for married quarters and, when he received them, cabled his fianceé to come at once. Unfortunately, she had grown tired of waiting and married someone else. He went off to another American’s house and proposed to the man’s daughter. They married the following week and took up residence in his new married quarters.14
Housekeeping in the tropical conditions of the Isthmus of Panama was tremendously challenging, and for many housewives this provided a source of pride. As Van Hardeveld put it, “Among some of us first few families to arrive, it often seemed that the job of making a home was more difficult than the job of digging the big ditch.” The task facing a white American housewife, surrounded by damp jungle, seemed daunting. On her first morning on the isthmus, Van Hardeveld awoke to a kiss from her husband and the quick advice that she go find food for herself and the children at the “Chink shop” nearby. Then he was gone. At the Chinese shop Van Hardeveld found nothing edible except a few eggs of dubious quality and a handful of beans. She returned home and struggled to build a fire with damp wood so she might feed her hungry girls. Several days later the new commissary at Empire opened, but even then shopping required a hot two-mile walk each way, with Van Hardeveld carrying a basket and her two small daughters trailing behind. The family would walk along the tracks to get there, jumping off onto the slippery footpath whenever a train approached. A trip to the commissary and then lugging the groceries home again demanded an entire day. After a while she simply sent a boy with a note to shop for her, but there remained the tiresome lack of variety: “Day after day I found myself preparing the same meal, from necessity, not from choice: beans, soggy crackers, Danish butter, and fruit.”15
While her husband had the challenge of overseeing West Indians at work shifting tracks, Rose Van Hardeveld faced the challenge of housekeeping amid numerous pests. Screens and netting barred most mosquitoes, but little could be done to protect the family from roaches and ants. Van Hardeveld arrived home one day from a shopping trip in Empire to see her kitchen taken over by two monstrous streams of ants—each stream more than two inches wide—and hear her daughter calling out, “Look, Mama! They’re carrying away our dried apples!” One group of ants marched across the floor, up the wall, and into a can of dried apples. The other group headed back down the wall, each ant bearing a piece of apple and trudging quickly outside with its treasure. Van Hardeveld found oil to swab at the ants and clear her kitchen, tended to her horrified children, and then climbed down the hill again to Empire to inform the quartermaster’s office of her problem. Soon two men came to explode chemicals and destroy the ants’ nest.16
Perhaps an even greater challenge to Van Hardeveld’s domesticating efforts, however, resulted from encounters with the West Indians and Panamanians among whom she lived. Van Hardeveld and her family lived atop a hill. Directly below them was a labor camp filled with Jamaicans, Barbadians, and Martinicans. Every day Van Hardeveld listened to their sounds and smelled the scent of their cooking, worrying more than once when she saw people from the camp advancing up the hill toward her home. The nighttime bothered her the most: “With the darkness came noises so weird and uncanny as to make the flesh creep with the strangeness of it all.” She grew accustomed to the sounds of alligators, lizards, insects, and birds, but the sounds of humans at night never ceased to rattle her. Just as Van Hardeveld and her husband settled into bedtime rituals, they would hear the “chattering” of the West Indian gang arriving to empty their septic pails: “They seemed like ghouls.” Van Hardeveld rarely saw them unless a bright moon showed them “weaving like ponderous shadows … down the tracks.”17
The sounds made by these supposed ghouls, however, were nothing compared to the wailing that rose up out of the labor camp below them when friends and family of West Indians killed by disease or industrial accidents gathered to mourn them: “All night long they would drink rum and wail, and sing Old English Gospel hymns in the flattest, most unmusical way imaginable. No matter how fast asleep I might be, when the first sound of that eerie screeching slapped the air, I was wide awake and out of bed.” It was unearthly, she declared, the sound swaying in the air “like the dance of witches.” The sound would grow wilder over the course of the night, and then, at the first crack of dawn, the labor camp would suddenly grow quiet. “A night like that interspersed with the squealing of young bats and the distant howling of dogs would leave me utterly unnerved and filled with a vague, mounting dread.”18
The young housewife had little more friendly regard for West Indians she observed in the daylight. That first day in the Chinese shop, two West I
ndian women in “ragged dirty dresses” came to her assistance. Speaking Spanish as well as English, they helped her communicate with the Chinese merchant. To make sense of these women, Van Hardeveld drew upon her readings of the great poet of imperialism Rudyard Kipling. With their hair in a “stiff fuzzy brush,” the West Indians reminded her of Kipling’s poem about the Fuzzy-Wuzzy tribe, and throughout her stay she would refer to West Indians by that title. Van Hardeveld unaccountably found herself despising a Panamanian woman who ran a cantina near her home: “She reminded me of a fat spider waiting for someone to devour. She often smiled and nodded at me in a friendly way, but I hated her.”19
The Van Hardevelds could not build themselves a comfortable home without assistance from West Indians, no matter how odd, uncivilized, or unreliable they perceived them to be. The family was able to move out of their bat-infested home and into a more agreeable one, but not until a group of West Indians finished fixing the roof on the latter dwelling. The job took forever, according to the Van Hardevelds, because West Indians lacked the work ethic of ambitious Americans. When Rose Van Hardeveld got a West Indian to help her in the house, she perceived the girl, named Miriam, as another burden to shoulder. A St. Lucian who had lived for some years on the isthmus, Miriam seemed to require constant supervision, which drained Van Hardeveld. She and her servant had very different ways of doing basic household tasks, and Miriam would not easily adopt her mistress’s approach. Although the historical record provides no hints as to how Miriam perceived the situation, one can imagine that she not only had her own perspective on the white Americans rapidly moving into the new family houses of the Zone but found ways of asserting her ideas and preferred practices. Van Hardeveld’s dependence on Miriam’s labor and her vulnerability amid the difficulties of tropical housekeeping limited her ability to assert authority over her servant. As in the United States, in the Canal Zone private households as places of work and supervision generated conflicts that were not easily resolved.20
