by Julie Greene
RESPECTABILITY, DIVORCE, AND DESERTION
While white American women struggled to civilize the Zone, there remained domestic and community problems they could neither contain nor resolve. Tensions emerged within and among the American communities in the Zone, along the pleasant tree-lined streets that provided a home to white gold workers and their wives. Notions of respectability and civilized behavior often clashed against a rougher, more raucous approach to life, resulting in frequent conflicts and disagreements among white American married couples.
To save money, the government constructed many of its married quarters in buildings that held four apartments. Single-dwelling quarters existed, but they were difficult to come by. Gertrude Beeks had criticized the four-unit buildings, noting how desperately families preferred the privacy of a home all to themselves. As Beeks put it, “There are so many different types and nationalities concerned. It is difficult to find four congenial families in that heterogeneous population.”43 Beeks’s critique is borne out by complaints that residents made to Goethals regarding their neighbors and that open a window for us into the lives of ordinary residents of the Canal Zone. Although the conflicts were sometimes dismissed by Goethals or his investigator as mere “women’s disagreements,” typically they were in fact infused with distinctions of class or race and issues of respectability. One ongoing battle involved a Mrs. Tucker and a Mrs. Sessions, who lived across the street from each other and disliked one another so intensely that neighbors felt compelled to side with one or the other. Mrs. Sessions complained to Goethals that whenever she went out on her porch, Mrs. Tucker would imitate her actions. One day, as Mrs. Sessions returned from the town of Empire, Mrs. Tucker could be heard remarking, “The swells have arrived… . Yes, I’m an old rubber neck, I came near missing seeing the swells come home this time, but I will be sure to be on the look out for them next time.”
The complaints seemed to Goethals to require investigation, so he sent his diligent assistant T. B. Miskimon to interview the women involved. Mrs. Tucker responded that the cutting remarks had begun with Mrs. Sessions, who had commented, “The very next time that old cat looks at me, I am going to ask her how I look.” In the end, Miskimon summed up the conflict as one involving class differences. Mrs. Sessions had recently moved into the neighborhood and treated Mrs. Tucker haughtily and arrogantly. She had begun with cutting comments and had a “more refined way” of getting under Mrs. Tucker’s skin. “Mrs. Tucker seeing she cannot meet her at that game goes after her on more personal and direct ways.” Miskimon recommended that Goethals either move Mrs. Sessions to another neighborhood or wait until she left for the United States, a trip she planned to make fairly soon.44
Many residents expressed concern that unruly neighbors would undermine the respectable standards of their community. Goethals often received complaints about people who used bad language, walked on their porch dressed in pajamas, failed to keep their homes clean, drank alcohol, or possessed noisy dogs or children. In one four-unit building, three families united to complain about the Atkins family, which included seven children under the age of fourteen. The children “kept up a regular bedlam both day and night,” racing a wagon over the upstairs floor at all hours (to the dismay of their downstairs neighbors), stealing kindling and coal from those who lived next door, and tearing clothes off the line. But in this case as in many others, such minor concerns accompanied more serious ones. Although none of the families complained to Goethals about domestic violence in the Atkins household, the investigator learned that the father regularly punished his children by locking them in a closet or beating them, and neighbors heard their moans and cries. Miskimon proposed that Goethals move the family to a different neighborhood and, hopefully, to a single-dwelling home so that neighbors would not be forced to listen to the verbal and physical battles.45
Neighbors who observed or overheard fighting between husband and wife, or between parents and children, routinely asked Goethals to intervene. Neighbors complained when a Mr. Baker cursed at his wife and allegedly choked her. Miskimon interviewed the husband and wife together, and the wife admitted that her husband had a bad temper and that he regularly cursed at her: “I do wish he would quit swearing; I don’t like for him to call me a ‘MUTT’; a mutt is a dog, and I don’t like to be called that.” Her husband interrupted her and demanded, “Well, for God’s sake, tell them I didn’t choke you.” Miskimon then asked Baker about neighbors’ complaints that his dog barked too much. His notes of the interview concluded: “Mrs. Baker interrupted at this point, and commenced telling the story of her life.” Mr. Baker grew impatient, jumped up, and left the room, shouting as he went, “My God! Shut up! I want a drink.” This brought an end to the interview. After Miskimon left, fighting commenced at the Baker household, and neighbors called the police. Miskimon suggested to Goethals that he inform Baker he would lose his job unless the “disorder” in his home ceased immediately.46
When a woman in the Zone experienced conflict with or violence from a husband or boyfriend, she—or, more commonly, a neighbor who overheard worrisome noises—might seek help from the police or Goethals. Goethals devoted some energy to assessing complaints of domestic violence, but the ICC included no trained social workers, and Goethals’s solutions were limited—most often a reprimand or moving the offending party to a different location. In one case an electrician named Louland allegedly acted violently toward his wife, and the police visited his house. Later that day the electrician contemplated who might have called the police on him, and someone overheard him concluding that it must have been a neighbor: “It was Mrs. Dawson or Mrs. Tew, the bitches.” Goethals ordered Louland investigated for his bad language, not for abusing his wife. In an interview Louland admitted having said, “If some of these old women bitches would keep out of what doesn’t concern them, the place would be worth living in.” Miskimon concluded that Louland was a good man, not quarrelsome, not a steady drinker, and thus he should not be reprimanded for his bad language or asked to leave: “He, no doubt, uses talk at times which is more or less rough, but this is due to the bossing of men to a certain degree, and is indulged in by the majority of the people on this street.”47
Some residents were perceived by officials and other members of the community as disorderly in part because of their race. Miskimon classified one family in Culebra as white Jamaicans, by which he meant, he said, people known to be white but having “negro blood in their veins.” They disturbed the peace, several neighbors testified, by staggering about drunk and cursing each other. Miskimon recommended they be evicted from ICC housing. In another case two women took it upon themselves to police the racial boundaries of their neighborhood. They complained to Goethals that a locomotive engineer living near them should not have access to married housing because his wife was not a “pure Caucasian.” Miskimon explained to Goethals that she was from Ecuador. The complainants admitted they had seen no immoral or inappropriate behavior by anyone in the house. They felt worried, however, because the husband was leaving for the United States and his wife’s sister was going to visit her in the meantime. The complaining women, Miskimon noted, “seem to fear that wrongful practices may be indulged in during his absence, although they admit they have not seen anything in the conduct of the wife to warrant such a presumption.” Miskimon informed the women they were encouraged to report any inappropriate behavior but that he could do nothing about the fact that an Ecuadorian lived in married quarters.48
As white American housewives struggled to improve their own and their families’ living conditions, they often saw the Isthmian Canal Commission’s policies as a barrier to building a respectable and civilized environment, and they pushed government officials to make improvements. Women quarreled with officials over the size and location of quarters given to them, the amount and condition of furniture, the goods available to them at the commissaries, and the quality of meat and produce. Even after managers listened to early comp
laints and began carrying a wider array of consumer items, commissaries continued to be a source of discontent. Terribly long lines and insufficient help meant a trip there lasted forever. The time spent waiting was especially long after the workday had ended, when ICC employees rushed in. Then a large crowd of people, from West Indian laborers to white American officials, would stand in line with only two or three clerks to assist them. Women complained of receiving bad food and not bothering to return it because such a trip would require too much time. They also complained about exorbitant prices, and some sought to purchase food from other sources as a result, perhaps traveling into Panama or visiting Chinese shops.49
Then there was the sensitive issue of fair treatment. An incident at the commissary in the town of Empire reveals that a manager considered unfair by female customers might face an avalanche of criticism. One August morning in 1910 a housewife named Mrs. Bowers visited the Empire commissary and ordered, among other items, some celery and plums. The clerk told her they had no more of either. Later, however, standing on her porch and watching as other housewives returned from the commissary, Mrs. Bowers noticed women who had been behind her in line carrying the coveted celery and plums. She returned to the commissary and complained to Mr. Jensen, the manager. He informed her (rather loudly and sarcastically, she believed) that there had been no celery and plums available. She asked, “Do you mean to call me a liar?” The manager responded, “I don’t care what I call you.” Mrs. Bowers retorted, “Do you know what I think of you—you are a dirty cur!” Mr. Jensen replied, “I’d hate to tell you what I think you are—send a man down here and I’ll tell him.”
Jensen’s comment was unforgivable in the eyes of Mrs. Bowers. Even Goethals’s investigator seemed shocked by the exchange, and he confided to his boss that all of Empire was agitated over the incident. He interviewed many women and found that Mrs. Bowers’s story was essentially correct. Women made other charges as well, including allegations of receiving spoiled food or of being treated rudely by Jensen. One woman, Mrs. Rose of Empire, related how she bought a chicken from Jensen’s commissary that, she discovered later, was small and rotten on one side. She returned the chicken and asked for a bigger one. Jensen said it wasn’t his fault the chicken hadn’t been fattened properly, and he refused to take it back. Mrs. Rose angrily told him to keep the chicken: “He threw it under the counter and said he would have it fattened for me.” Several times since, she had been to the commissary, and Jensen would simply say that he was still fattening the chicken. She wondered aloud to her interviewer: “Now who could fatten a dead chicken?” Mrs. Rose believed that Jensen showed favoritism: “You can’t get nothing unless he loves you—those he loves gets what they want and those he don’t don’t get anything—WELL I don’t want him to love me.” Miskimon concluded that although Jensen’s commissary was one of the cleanest and most efficiently run, due to his unpopularity with housewives he should be transferred to another town. In this case housewives generated a change for the better in their basic work of consumption. Since shopping for the family was at the center of their labor, eliminating an unfair commissary manager was an important victory.50
Some wives of American canal workers struggled with a different sort of hardship. Men working in the Zone tried to convince their wives or sweethearts to come along, as we have seen, and often they succeeded. But many women insisted on remaining at their homes in the United States. Daunted by the idea of homemaking in the wild tropics, worried about stories they’d heard of disease, insects, and snakes, or perhaps simply unwilling to leave their familiar home, many women refused to join their husbands in the Canal Zone. Yet canal workers continued to pressure reluctant wives to come. When wives refused, their husbands often sued for divorce—usually on grounds of desertion—so they would be free to find a wife in the Canal Zone, perhaps marrying a single female working as a stenographer or nurse, or the daughter of another canal worker, or venturing into Panama City in search of a partner. Divorce cases in the judicial records of the Canal Zone shed light on the ways America’s new expansionist role in the world shaped even the most intimate aspects of a married couple’s relationship.
Madeline and Brady Owen, for example, had been married in Fort Smith, Arkansas, where Brady worked as a railroad conductor, and the couple faced a difficult choice years later when he decided to take a job working on the canal. He moved to the town of Pedro Miguel and began working as a conductor foreman. Madeline meanwhile moved with their two teenage children, Genevieve and Gilbert, to Kansas City. In 1907, Brady requested married quarters, and after a few months the government notified him that a house would soon be ready for him and his family. Already by this point Brady had once been assigned married quarters but was forced to forfeit them when his wife did not arrive on the isthmus. This time he informed her sternly that she was to come, with their children, two weeks after his letter to her arrived.
Brady’s letter sent Madeline into a panic. She had struggled while he was away, working overtime to raise their children and find a source of income to supplement the money Brady sent. She worked temporarily as a stenographer in Kansas City but found it too difficult to continue. Instead, her seventeen-year-old daughter, who had attended a vocational school, took a job with theKansas City Journal. With that income and some money from Brady, Madeline struggled to equip their small apartment with nice things and provide a pleasant home for the children. Yet the stresses began to show. Fifteen-year-old Gilbert began skipping school. Finally, he missed so often he had to appear before the juvenile court for truancy, which greatly concerned his mother.
Letters she wrote suggest that Madeline loved and missed her husband dearly, and yet she found it impossible to contemplate leaving Kansas City for Panama. She reminded him of promises he had made to her when they talked one night in their front room: “You said, emphatically, that youwould do nothing more until you had a positive assertion from me that I was ready and willing to go … andwhat have you done with your usual impulsiveness.” She worried about whether the schools would be good enough, and she felt nervous about dragging the children all around the globe. She could not forgive her husband for acting recklessly and refusing her time to arrange their affairs. But most of all she simply couldn’t imagine herself in Panama. Her husband’s note had left her feeling “an utter wreck.” She wanted the family to be together, building a home, and, she wrote, “I would like the trip to Panama above all things—but I am horribly afraid of myself—you know my temperament and how places affect me and I am afraid after the novelty wore off that I would want to leave so badly that nothing could hold me there—these are my misgivings—perhaps you had them before you went down there.”
Thus, while Madeline declared that she hated to inflict the humiliation on Brady of having to turn down the government married quarters a second time, she felt she had no choice. She simply couldn’t arrange her affairs in order to go, and certainly not in a mere two weeks: “If I were a man—and alone—I might manage it that way.” But she was not, and she could not. Angry at this turn of events, Brady sued Madeline for divorce on the grounds that by refusing to travel to the Canal Zone, she had effectively deserted him. He charged that she was duty-bound to come and live with him and that she refused to do so for no reasonable cause whatsoever. When Brady produced Madeline’s letters documenting her unwillingness to travel to Panama, the court decided in his favor: divorce was granted to him on grounds of desertion.51
Women confronting divorce suits often testified to the financial and emotional difficulties their husbands’ absence had bestowed upon them. One can imagine the heartache faced by a married couple when the husband chose to take a job on the isthmus. Separation meant the wife became a single mother, sometimes for years at a time, raising children on her own and struggling to make some income to supplement the wages her husband sent home. Despite the relatively high wages canal workers earned, women often complained that men sent money home only irregu
larly, or that too little was in the envelope when it did arrive. Minnie Lyons of Elmira, New York, for example, testified she had received only $ 30 from her husband during the four years he’d been working on the canal. Her husband, Willis, undoubtedly expressed the views of many canal workers when he insisted she come and declared, “I have always contended that it is the husband’s place to select the home site, build the house, and say when, and where, his family should live. It is very natural for a man to select a home in a place where it will be pleasant, and where his family will have good advantages, and where he will be able to do the best, and where he can secure his best choice of work.”52
The case of Cora Gray of Toledo suggested the personal as well as financial toll a husband’s absence might take. Living as a single mother with two children and receiving little income from her husband, Jack, pushed her to the limits. To make a living, she went into the rooming-house business, scrubbing and cooking for boarders. She managed to rent a house with seven rooms and rented out four of them. Still she felt herself living on the very edge, unable to save any money. Her children, aged nine and fourteen, needed so many things: “The children are so big now it takes so much for clothes and they eat like pigs Clifton is so fat and so is Nellie they are both of them well.” Her letters to her husband were interspersed with comments about her exhaustion, her need to stop writing and go wash clothes or scrub floors. Like many working-class women in the United States, she had taken in boarders to supplement her small income, but this caused her more work and physical strain. A bad fall two years earlier seems to have sapped her strength for good.
