by Julie Greene
When it came to problems of sexual assault and domestic violence, particularly if they involved U.S. citizens, the police and courts in the Canal Zone were at a loss for how to respond. This was comparable to treatment of such cases on the U.S. mainland at this time, where family violence was often ignored and few institutional resources existed for its victims. In the Canal Zone, notions of white American women’s roles as civilizers and the presence of canal employees’ families as a stabilizing and nurturing force made it especially difficult for state authorities to manage effectively—or even publicly acknowledge—the existence of turmoil and violence within a family. Nonetheless, Canal Zone residents complained frequently to Goethals about men who were verbally or physically cruel to their family members. Goethals tended to take little action, but if a man’s physical violence toward a woman became threatening to her health and to the public order, then the police and courts typically got involved. In 1905a woman named Frances Smith was beaten by her partner, Evan Barker. A neighbor got Smith to the hospital, where she received treatment by a doctor. The police were informed of the incident, and Evan Barker was convicted of assault by the circuit court.55
Each year thousands of people were arrested in the Canal Zone. The numbers of arrests increased from just over 2, 000during the 1905 fiscal year to more than 7, 000by fiscal year 1912. When one considers that the entire Canal Zone population stood at 62, 000according to the census of 1912, this is a high number of arrests—more than 10percent of all residents. The West Indian and southern European communities saw a disproportionately high number of arrests: nearly 3, 500West Indians were arrested that year and 538Spaniards. But U.S. citizens were not far behind, with 517arrests. Most often those arrested were laborers, but there were nearly 200each of carpenters and brakemen arrested and more than 100foremen, firemen, sailors, and teamsters. Nearly 500domestic servants were also arrested that year. The most common offenses in 1912were intoxication and/or disorderly conduct (nearly 2, 000people arrested), disturbing the peace (800), assault and battery (547), petit larceny (406), loitering (308), and vagrancy (289). Most of the arrests, in short, were related to the ICC’s efforts to keep a lid on the tumultuous labor camps and resulted in a fine or brief jail sentence. Crimes that landed a man or woman in the penitentiary with a sentence of hard labor included assault with a deadly weapon, grand larceny, burglary, manslaughter, murder, rape, trafficking in white slaves, and returning to the Zone after having been deported.56
Passions and conflicts in the Canal Zone occasionally erupted into violence, with murder sometimes resulting, and multiple factors help explain why this happened. Tensions in the labor camps and communities of the Zone ran high; men and women worked hard and sometimes drank harder; disagreements within families or between friends or strangers, often of different nationalities or races, could turn violent. A closer look at three murder cases sheds light onto social tensions that ran through life in the Canal Zone. Each case had a different cause and dynamic, but all three involved perceived threats to masculinity and manliness.57
One day in 1908Frank Houston, a skilled American worker, woke up early to prepare for work and went over to the stove in the home he shared with his wife. Taking the lids off the stove to start a fire, he noticed a partially burned letter inside and saw the words “my own wife.” He removed the letter, stuck it in his pocket, and read it later that day during a break on the job. The letter was written to his wife by Harry Stern, an assistant manager at the commissary, and it revealed that the two had been carrying on an affair for several months. That evening Houston asked his wife who had visited her the night before, and she said, “No one.” He asked her if Stern had visited her, and she said no. He told her about the letter and his discovery of the affair, and showed her the pieces. She tried to eat and swallow the letter, but he forced her to spit it out. She cried out, “If you let me go this time I will never do it again. I will pack up and take the next boat and never bother you again. I will never let another man come in the house.” Houston left the house, found Stern in front of the YMCA clubhouse, and asked Stern if he was having an affair with his wife; Stern neither confirmed nor denied it. Pulling out a gun, Houston shot Stern. As Stern fell to the ground, he murmured the words “It is all over.” Houston meanwhile walked calmly into the YMCA and said to those gathered, “That is all right. I have got my man.” The judge found Houston guilty of murder and sentenced him to ten years in the penitentiary.58
Houston appealed on several grounds, including the fact that he had been denied a jury trial. One of the judges wrote regarding this part of his appeal that “there is not a State or Territory in the Union, or any civilized country in the world where he would have been denied a jury on such a charge. … The defendant was found guilty by a single judge, and sentenced to 10years’ penal servitude for shooting the destroyer of his home, under circumstances that would probably have resulted in his acquittal by any jury in any State of the Union.” But the lower court’s sentence was affirmed on the grounds that because he was not charged with murder in the first degree, he did not have the right to a jury trial.59
A very different case also involved perceived threats to manliness. Several Spanish workers were playing music, dancing, and drinking together when their party culminated in a fight between two men and, ultimately, manslaughter. Their party must have been a common sort of event in the labor towns of the Zone, particularly among West Indian and southern European workers who lacked other forms of entertainment. In this case the party continued for a while until one of the men decided to escort the women in attendance home since they had to rise especially early the next morning. A Spaniard named Desiderio Rodriguez protested the departure of the women and accused the man escorting them, Andres Oriza, of being a pimp. Their disagreement escalated into a contest over masculinity, with Rodriguez taunting Oriza, “I am a man—come outside here so that you can see.” Oriza responded, “You are not a man to fight with me.” Their fighting turned physical as Rodriguez pulled out a knife and stabbed Oriza in the neck. “Carajo, you have cut me,” Oriza said, groaning. He picked up a club and managed to strike Rodriguez with it before falling to the ground and muttering, “My mother,” as his final words. Rodriguez, a twenty-year-old canal worker, told a different story, saying that Oriza attacked him and he used his knife only in self-defense. He had always been afraid of Oriza, he argued. The judge in this case found the witnesses more credible. He convicted Rodriguez of manslaughter but sentenced him to only fifteen months in prison.60
A final example began in the red-light district of Panama City known as Cocoa Grove, and it suggests how fine the line between the “civilization” of the Canal Zone and the “disorder” of Panama City actually was. In November 1912, on a moonlit night, two young Panamanian prostitutes named Julia Vega and Petra Garcia were standing outside the cantina where they worked, talking. At about 3: 00a.m., they decided to hire a coach along with a male friend and go for a ride. They waved down a Jamaican driving a horse-pulled carriage and asked him to head out of town. Meanwhile, a man named Francisco Zaldivar was watching them. Zaldivar had arrived earlier that night at the cantina with a bunch of friends and had spent the night joking, singing, and kicking back about twelve beers. He and Vega had lived together for about a year. The day before, the two had quarreled over a man with whom Zaldivar had found Vega, and she had called the police on him. She had also told him that if he continued to threaten her, she would call the police again.
On the fateful night, Zaldivar was still extremely angry with Vega. He observed the two women leave in the coach and decided to hire one himself and follow them. As her coach sped out of town, Vega turned around and saw Zaldivar following her. Scared, she told her driver to speed up but also to turn around and head back to town. The driver urged the horses to go faster, but at some point his hat flew off his head, and he stopped the coach to get out and pick it up. Zaldivar caught up with them, climbed up onto their coach, and demanded to know why V
ega had called the police on him. He called her a whore and then shot three bullets into her chest. She gasped, “Aye, Mother,” and died. Zaldivar threatened to shoot the coach driver and Petra Garcia as well, but they successfully pleaded with him to spare their lives. A witness who had been with Zaldivar at the bar and had known him for fifteen years said Zaldivar had fought to win independence for the Republic of Panama. Another who knew him said, “Up to now I had always known Zaldivar to be a gentleman.”
Because the coaches, in their journey, had crossed the border from Panama into the Canal Zone, the murder case was tried before a jury in the Zone’s circuit court. The jury found Zaldivar guilty of murder, and the court sentenced him to death by hanging. The Supreme Court of the Panama Canal Zone affirmed the lower court’s decision. One judge dissented, arguing that due to extenuating circumstances (intoxication and the presence of another man in the carriage with Vega), the sentence should be life in prison rather than death. Unfortunately for Francisco Zaldivar, the sentence stood. He was executed at the penitentiary in Culebra the following year.61
THE PROBLEM of law and order in the Zone demonstrates that Goethals’s machine of “benevolent despotism” generated more resistance than compliance. Officials had firm notions of acceptable moral and social behavior, but they also needed to allow canal employees and their families some latitude to throw off the regimentation of their workdays in order to relax and prepare for the next one. Officials used the police, the courts, the prisons, and the chief engineer’s personal investigator to intervene and set the boundaries of permitted behavior. Their efforts were often futile, however. Disorderly behavior, intoxication, loitering, and vagrancy were epidemic. As the courts grew busier, officials increasingly relied less on deportation and more on imprisonment as the ultimate punishment. And they got the word out: by requiring hard labor of all convicts, even the penal system was structured to serve the need for maximum labor productivity. Despite their best efforts at social engineering, the ICC officials’ most efficient machine for creating labor discipline involved a ball and chain and a striped uniform.
Ultimately, their efforts to achieve a balance between repression and permissiveness failed. The world of the Zone was simultaneously too regimented and too wild to serve as the orderly civilization officials hoped to create. The social tensions and pressures generated by the demands of construction and by Goethals’s attempt at social control sought an outlet beyond the controlled boundaries of the Canal Zone. The ICC officials tried over the years to insulate the Zone from what they perceived as the disorder and moral disease of Panama City and Colón. The reality was more complex. Even if they had tried, officials could not insulate the port cities of Panama from the social tensions, disorder, and subterranean protests they were generating among canal employees and their families in the Zone. The saloons and dance halls of Panama’s port cities tempted canal workers and U.S. troops by the multitude, putting the touted “civilization” of the United States on course to collide with the people of the Republic of Panama.
CHAPTER EIGHT
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THE RIOTS
OF COCOA GROVE
DURING THE years of the canal’s construction, the Fourth of July emerged as a day for hundreds of American soldiers, marines, canal employees, and their families to leave the Canal Zone and celebrate their nation’s independence in Panama City. Every year the Army and Marines hosted several hours of patriotic exercises, band playing, and athletic competitions. Afterward, as the crowds dispersed, many participants and spectators headed to the entertainment district of Panama City, a small area known as Cocoa Grove, where saloons and brothels lined the streets. Typically, the Americans’ carousing continued throughout the day and well into the night. Often on such occasions, Cocoa Grove became an explosive site, as long-simmering tensions between the Americans and the Panamanians, West Indians, and other immigrant workers residing there found an outlet in disagreements small or large. In 1912, however, the celebrations turned deadly and provoked a crisis in U.S.-Panamanian relations.
According to testimony given later to U.S. and Panamanian investigators, U.S. military personnel and canal employees had entered Cocoa Grove shouting patriotic slogans. Many of them had been drinking throughout the day. They celebrated late into the night, growing steadily more unruly and throwing lit firecrackers into saloon windows and carriages passing by. As the Americans’ revelry became more boisterous, residents and business owners of the district began to complain, until at last the Panamanian police felt compelled to restore order. The police attempted to subdue the crowd, but when many Americans resisted their authority, the conflict intensified into a full-blown riot, with Panamanian civilians sometimes stepping in to assist their nation’s police. When the violence subsided, Ralph Davis, a U.S. citizen who had been working in Cocoa Grove as a bartender, was dead from a bayonet wound. Many other Americans received serious wounds that required hospitalization, while others were thrown in Panamanian jails, an indignity they considered unacceptable for U.S. citizens.1
The United States and the Republic of Panama interpreted the riot in very different ways. Their conflicting perspectives generated a ferocious battle not only over the immediate events but also, ultimately, over each nation’s relative power. How did this particular riot, more than any previous conflict, come to both epitomize and exacerbate the hostilities between the two countries? From 1904to 1914, Colón and Panama City often served as escapes from the regimented world of the Canal Zone, places to engage in activities prohibited in the Zone, and often such behaviors escalated into hostile interactions with Panamanians who resented the presence of the United States and the accommodations their leaders had made to the Americans’ power. Rival claims for power by Panamanian police versus Zone police often provoked tensions and violence. The port cities of Panama also served over the years as crucial staging grounds for America’s empire, providing not only entertainment districts but also housing and supplies for thousands of canal laborers who chose not to live in the Zone. The Zone itself had been a pressure cooker, creating resentments that had little to do with the Republic of Panama yet could not easily be released or resolved amid the U.S. government’s disciplined world. In 1912hostilities in the Zone and in the Republic of Panama expressed themselves through rival visions of honor, nationalism, and sovereignty. U.S. citizens saw themselves as expressing their patriotism, while residents of Panama City reacted with a sense of injured pride and indignation. It was hardly coincidental, then, that the breakdown of chief engineer Goethals’s machine, crafted so carefully to ensure social peace and labor discipline, expressed itself through a deadly conflict between Panamanians and Zone residents.
“THE COUNTRY WAS BEING FOREIGNIZED”
Although the young Republic of Panama faced criticism from many who saw it as a corrupt product of American imperialism, in fact there were striking parallels between the situation of Panama and that of its Latin American neighbors. Panama’s leaders had lobbied Colombia for decades for more independence so they could pursue their commercial and economic fortunes. Well-to-do Panamanians felt neglected by Colombia, and so the revolution of 1903 grew out of overlapping ambitions on the part of Panamanian and American elites. When Colombia rejected the treaty that would have granted to the United States the right to build the canal, American leaders and their counterparts in Panama felt angry. United both in their portrayal of Colombian politicians as self-interested barbarians denying commercial progress to the isthmus and in their vision of the canal construction as a civilizing force that would benefit the entire world, the Americans and some Panamanian leaders joined together to work toward independence. Once on its own, the new nation-state of Panama moved to fulfill its destiny and bring progress and Western civilizing forces to the isthmus. Its leaders adopted as the nation’s motto a phrase that must have pleased President Roosevelt: “For the Benefit of the World.”2 Yet its alliance with the United States brought tumultuous social a
nd economic change to Panama and profound challenges to its sovereignty. In 1910, James Bryce, the British ambassador to the United States, visited the isthmus and observed the control exerted by the United States over Panama. He declared that the Republic of Panama “is so absolutely at its [America’s] mercy, created and existing solely by its favour, that the United States can treat the region as its own property, and do just what it likes.”3
Their partnership with Panamanian leaders was certainly a great boon for U.S. officials, who needed the independent republic to play a variety of roles in support of their empire. Building the canal required efforts to rule over men and women not only in the Canal Zone but also in Panama. Few of Panama’s affairs would remain untouched by the United States in the years that followed. The vast rebuilding of Panama’s port cities by the United States—for example, the building of roads, streets, sewers, and water lines—sometimes generated problems that required intervention by both the U.S. and the Panamanian governments. Fumigation work by the ICC Sanitation Department during the early years of construction led to small armies of men sweeping through urban neighborhoods. In February 1905alone, nearly 350homes in Panama City were fumigated, with gas bombs of pyrethrum set off to kill any mosquitoes or germs. The fumigation work repeatedly caused fires, and then the United States typically assumed responsibility and agreed to compensate owners. A more difficult challenge lay in deciding the value of the property. In 1906a major fire in Panama City attributed to U.S. fumigation efforts led to the creation of a joint commission with representatives from both the United States and Panama to decide the property value involved. The two could not agree. Finally, the commission disbanded, and a neutral umpire assessed the damages instead.4
