by Julie Greene
U.S. officials acknowledged that trouble typically resulted whenever large numbers of military personnel or civilians gathered in the red-light district, but in this case they argued that the police were entirely to blame. In a letter to Panamanian government officials, the U.S. ambassador to Panama, Percival Dodge, summarized his government’s view of the incident in 1913, after the U.S. investigation was complete: “The police of Panama virtually ran amuck, shooting and stabbing indiscriminately.” Policemen shot at anyone in sight, but they targeted U.S. citizens in particular. A soldier “who knelt and begged for mercy was also ruthlessly beaten.”36 Witnesses interviewed by the ICC, the Marines, and the Army recited a litany of injustices committed that day by the Panamanian police. U.S. military personnel and canal employees shared a common grievance: they felt their clash with the Panamanian police jeopardized their standing as white men, as representatives of the United States, and as military personnel. If this was a world turned upside down, the Americans were left notably discomfited by their new position.
American soldiers and canal workers who testified expressed a common refrain of feeling vulnerable and victimized during the riot. Panama suddenly seemed to belong, powerfully and threateningly, to Panamanians. The Americans observed Panamanian police and civilians in large numbers “walking the streets armed with rifles and revolvers, shooting into cantinas and saloons and at any American that was in sight.” Private Thomas Howard reported, “I saw an army man on the ground all covered with blood. I went to help him. There were four policemen around him, kicking him and beating him with clubs.” Other soldiers related being cornered by Panamanians and “knowing we would be shot to death for resisting we had to submit to their clubbing.” A group of soldiers huddled in front of a building as policemen approached and were heard to say, “Let’s keep together, for God’s sake.” When they could, canal workers ran back into the Zone for refuge or hid in a saloon or brothel. Amid the violence, soldiers noticed even the smallest indignities: A policeman pushed one off the sidewalk and nearly knocked him over, related a soldier, while a “negress” pushed some marines out of her club. In at least one case, women threw bottles at Americans; in another incident a “negress” shouted names at marines. Another witness saw a crowd of Panamanian boys throwing rocks and using clubs against marines and soldiers. The civilian John McDaid testified that Panamanian police shot a U.S. flag out of his hand.37
As the riot escalated, the Marines and Army sent a backup force into Cocoa Grove, and then even officers found their authority challenged by Panamanians. When Marine captain Frank Halford drove into Cocoa Grove, Panamanian police, armed with rifles and bayonets fixed, stopped his car. “I was in a field uniform with Corps devices and rank marks properly placed, and was at first prevented by a policeman from entering the district. He slammed his rifle butt on the ground against my toes
and with his hand on the muzzle of his rifle pushed it into my chest.” After some tense moments the police allowed Captain Halford to
enter the district. He immediately went to a brothel where five marines had barricaded themselves for the last four hours, afraid to come out. Assisted by a Panamanian official, Captain Halford escorted the marines to safety.38
U.S. military personnel and canal workers felt particularly targeted because of their nationality. The canal employee Carl DeLeen left the bar where he’d been drinking when the conflict began and headed across the street. He was stopped by a group that included three or four policemen and an equal number of Panamanian civilians. They “asked if I was an American, to which I replied that I was; whereupon I was struck on the arm with a stick by one of the men in civilian clothes, and on the head with a rock by another.” Another canal worker, R. L. Swinehart, commented on his experience during the riot: “While the corner was crowded with natives, negroes, and Spaniards, they were unmolested. It was plain to be seen that it was Americans only that they wished to trouble.” Some heard the police shouting, “Kill the Americans!” while others heard
talk in the days leading up to the riot that police sought to attack Americans. During the riot a crowd of Panamanian police were overheard saying: “Hurry up to Pedro de Obarrio street, … we are going to kill gringos.”39
Dozens of military personnel and canal workers were arrested by Panamanian police and imprisoned, an experience they found humiliating. Private Henry Mitchell of the U.S. Marine Corps described how the police “handcuffed me and marched me through the streets without blouse or leggings to the Central Police Station where I was confined with 9or 10negroes.” The cell was filthy, he reported, and its floor was wet. Panamanian police arrested the canal employee Thomas Fuentes, a boilermaker in the Gorgona machine shops, and put him in a cell with other Americans, keeping him there until early the next morning. They refused to provide food, “but did state that we might purchase from a negro woman outside the jail some rice and fish, which is not considered a white man’s diet.” Fuentes asked the police if he and the other prisoners could go out to get some food, accompanied by a guard, and they would pay all expenses. This was also refused.40
While the testimony provided by canal employees and soldiers during the U.S. investigations presented a picture of horrifying indignities aimed at them and their countrymen, the evidence provided to investigators in the Republic of Panama, not surprisingly, differed radically. Witnesses testifying to Panamanian officials, most of them Panamanian police and working people from around the world who lived in Cocoa Grove, stressed that the Americans had challenged their dignity. In these accounts, Americans were the aggressors while the Panamanian police had attempted in vain to restore order. Panama’s chief of police, Julio Quijano, reported that he had ordered the policemen not to interfere with the boisterous crowd: “The police allowed Americans to hire coaches and not to pay any fare, to knock down and beat natives and foreigners, to storm houses and ransack Canteens and to commit many other disturbances.” Americans forced their way into clubs, destroyed furniture, stole money, and attempted to throw prostitutes off balconies. The riot escalated when U.S. soldiers and civilians began to assault policemen violently and then attacked the police reserves at a substation. This forced policemen to open fire in order to protect the substation and their own lives. Most of the injuries occurred when U.S. citizens fired on Panamanians and the police felt compelled to interfere to defend them.41
Police chief Quijano’s account undoubtedly reflected his own self-interest. It simplified the nature of the clash and whitewashed his policemen’s role in it. Yet many other sources, including people testifying to U.S. investigators, noted that U.S. soldiers and civilians engaged in destructive, violent, and vindictive behavior. As the day started, groups of soldiers stood about on the streets, drinking and shouting, “Viva Porras!” in a way that seemed to bait the Panamanian police (who had generally favored the Conservative presidential candidate). Alice Ward described the escalation of the fight at her brothel: marines and soldiers entered through the balcony and then “started throwing and breaking everything, bags, cups, glasses, doors, a piano … some of them then moved towards the bar, where they started hitting the barman who had taken refuge behind it.” According to Ward, the soldiers told her they were trashing her place to prove that when they said they wanted to enter a place, they had better be allowed in. Many police testified that they had tried to remain friendly toward the drunken Americans, since there were so many of them. Luis Francisco Ramírez, a Colombian injured in the melee, reported that the riot began when a policeman abandoned his post after a group of marines attacked him. Ordered to return to his post, the policeman complied, only to be attacked again by more marines. One marine fired at him, and soon thereafter six or eight marines began beating any policemen they could find. As the sounds of the fighting reached the brothels, the marines and soldiers inside poured out onto the streets to assist their friends, eighty or a hundred of them at a time.42
Violence committed by U.S. military men and canal workers shocked
many, including other U.S. citizens. Many marines and soldiers bore arms and fired them at policemen and at district residents. A crowd of people rushed toward one policeman, yelling that the Americans had gone mad: “Los Americanos se habían vuelto locos.” A U.S. civilian heard American soldiers saying they would “rip their heads off” in reference to Panamanians. The soldiers brutally beat an older policeman, leaving him for dead on the floor of a saloon. Prostitutes from Nicaragua, Colombia, Panama, Russia, and the United States all reported incidents of destruction committed by the American soldiers and civilians; some reported being kicked or beaten by them. One U.S. soldier, dismayed by the events of the day, confessed to Panamanian investigators that no sober person would have acted as his compatriots had. Another U.S. soldier was so shocked by the behavior of his colleagues and by the Panamanian policemen’s inability to control them that he urged the latter, as the riot grew wilder, to call the Canal Zone police and request assistance.43
A Panamanian newspaper explained the violent behavior of the U.S. workers and soldiers by reference to race: “Any American, whether from Maine or Alabama, resents being arrested or interfered with in any way by a negro policeman; and the police of Panama are largely negro or mestizo. A large majority of the Americans feel themselves very superior to any Panamanian. This is inherent in their race, in any race of conquerors.” Indeed, marines and soldiers often expressed their reactions to Panamanians in racial terms, thereby unintentionally suggesting some of the tensions that existed during the riots. One private, who had participated in the trashing of a brothel, described the moment in this way: “A soldier struck at a coon (negro) when the coon ran out of the door, … every chair was thrown out of the door after him (the coon) including the piano stool.” The unfortunate man, most likely a West Indian or Panamanian, ended up shot by the soldiers.44 Yet while race certainly shaped the behavior and attitudes of U.S. marines, soldiers, and canal workers,
it alone cannot explain the violence. Americans watched as prostitutes, bartenders, saloon owners, policemen, and children of diverse races and nationalities seemed not to respect their authority. For very different reasons, American military personnel and canal workers as well as the Panamanian police felt themselves victimized and humiliated, and both groups wanted to reassert their authority as representatives of their respective nations. For the working-class residents of Cocoa Grove, caught between two governments, there was no easy path to neutrality.
“THIS ATTITUDE TOWARDS A SOVEREIGN
STATE … IS INCOMPREHENSIBLE”
After American soldiers and canal workers failed to reassert their nation’s authority on July 4, the full machinery of the U.S. government moved swiftly to accomplish the goal. U.S. government and military officials conducted three separate investigations into the rioting, then publicized their findings and portrayed the Panamanian investigation as completely illegitimate. The United States solicited affidavits from prostitutes who said the Panamanians only wrote down certain parts of their testimony. U.S. officials cited unnamed men who said unnamed prostitutes told the Panamanians whatever the latter ordered, “under threat of being sent to jail.”45 In a letter to Ernesto Lefevre, Panama’s secretary of state for foreign affairs, U.S. ambassador Percival Dodge declared that “such Panamanian testimony as was not given by interested policemen and other guilty participants in the affair was obtained through force and intimidation.” Your evidence, Dodge concluded, is “unworthy of credence.” Speaking on behalf of the president of Panama, Minister of Foreign Affairs Eduardo Chiari insisted that his investigation had relied only on the testimony of absolutely impartial witnesses and that the information gathered by the United States must be erroneous. The United States rejected this argument and demanded instead the firing of both the chief of police and his immediate subordinate, the paying of an indemnity to the United States, and a formal expression of regret and apology.46
A nineteen-year-old Panamanian policeman was put on trial in Panama City for the murder of Ralph Davis. Found guilty, the young man died in prison before he could be sentenced. The United States demanded that more prosecutions follow. U.S. minister Jennings Price angrily declared: “Every sincere effort, duly made, to fulfill the demands of outraged justice and to comply with the practices of civilization in this matter of moment, would elicit the real gratification of my Government. Reiteration is made that nothing less than the due and full satisfaction, insistently sought by my Government herein, can bring a termination to a matter of this character.”47
Month after month the tense negotiations continued, throughout 1913and well into 1914. A British diplomatic officer noted the difficulty placed on the Panamanian government: “The action of the US Government is certainly harsh, and if the Panama government yield they will sustain a great humiliation in the eyes of the people.” But there would be no backing away by the United States. U.S. officials painted a gradually more dramatic and innocent picture of their citizens’ role during the riot, declaring that the soldiers and marines, while in “frolicsome holiday spirit,” were “viciously wounded and shot down and bayoneted.” Finally, in June 1914, U.S. officials threatened that if Panama failed to make amends, the United States would exercise its right under the Hay–Bunau-Varilla Treaty to take over the policing of Colón and Panama City. Belisario Porras responded angrily. He refused to accept responsibility for the riot, noting that similar disturbances occurred throughout the United States near military encampments and describing as particularly far-fetched the idea that the United States would ever dare occupy Panamanian soil.48 In a private meeting with the Panamanian diplomat Eusebio Morales, Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan sympathized with Panama’s circumstances. He noted it was usually difficult to assign blame when such riots occurred, citing a case in Tampa, Florida, that had resulted in the death of an Italian.49 Yet American diplomats continued to insist on compensation. In the end, Panama and the United States agreed to let a neutral arbitrator set the price. In 1915, Panama paid an indemnity of $ 12, 350for the death of Ralph Davis and injuries to other American citizens, but explicitly refused to accept responsibility for the violence, declaring American soldiers had provoked it.50
Even as these negotiations continued, more conflicts involving the two nations occurred. In 1915two more riots took the lives of several Americans and Panamanians. Both involved American crowds, mostly soldiers, rioting against Panamanians, most of them police. In the first case, American soldiers had been granted a leave because of a carnival in Panama City. Once the rioting began, according to newspaper reports, working-class Panamanians joined their police in attacking the soldiers. Before the violence ended, three U.S. soldiers and five Panamanian policemen were dead.51
Two months later, in April 1915, another riot broke out. This one resulted in the deaths of an American soldier and a Panamanian citizen and injuries to more than one hundred others. The incident occurred on Good Friday, a national holiday in Panama, after thousands of soldiers came to a baseball game that would determine first place in the Canal League. The game ended in a fight at the baseball field when U.S. soldiers supporting the rival teams fought each other. Canal Zone policemen managed to stop the fight, but then soldiers headed into Colón’s red-light district and rioting soon began. Corporal Langdon of the U.S. Army was on patrol duty and attempting to maintain peace when he was shot to death by a Panamanian policeman. Rioting again continued for many hours. Windows throughout the city were smashed and many houses destroyed. Outraged Panamanians stoned the train taking soldiers back to their camps.52
The riot of April 1915, and particularly the destruction caused by American soldiers, led Panama’s leaders immediately to begin seeking legal action against the United States. They soon abandoned the effort as the United States furiously ordered Panamanian officials to disarm their police force of all rifles. Panama’s elected officials insisted that this riot, like the previous ones, had been provoked by U.S. soldiers, and they refused to accept the blame.
However, Ambassador Price firmly reminded the Panamanian government that the canal treaty of 1903gave his
government the right to intervene to maintain order in the port cities
at any time, and he dictated that all rifles be transported to the U.S.
