by Julie Greene
Army, where they would be held “in the event of any occurrence which would make the use of them advisable in the opinion of both Governments.” President Porras pleaded in a telegram to President Woodrow Wilson: the weapons were needed to “defend our country and to preserve public order.” Porras declared: “This attitude towards a sovereign state which has given to the U.S. evident proofs of friendship and loyalty is incomprehensible to my Government.” He described the order as a humiliating violation of Panamanian sovereignty and begged President Wilson to intervene. U.S. secretary of state Robert Lansing quickly responded: “This Government expects immediate compliance with its demand for the complete disarmament of the Police of Panama … of high powered rifles.” Porras continued to resist, but finally, in May 1916, the police relinquished their weapons. Only a presidential guard of twenty-five men would be allowed to carry rifles. This was to Panamanians a pivotal moment of subjugation to the power of the United States that many still remember today, almost one hundred years later.53
THERE WERE numerous causes of the Cocoa Grove riot of 1912. Although many Panamanians initially embraced the canal construction project and hoped to benefit from the Americans’ energy, over the years resentment had grown as the promised fruits of the alliance proved sour. U.S. marines, soldiers, and canal workers looked to Cocoa Grove as a place where they could let loose. It helped them forget their position as cogs in Goethals’s wheel of labor discipline and productivity. As the months of canal construction turned into years, their sometimes belligerent behavior generated among Panamanians not only fear and suspicion of Americans but also a feeling of injury to their notions of national honor and sovereignty.
U.S. interventions into Panamanian politics further complicated the relationship between the countries and their citizens. The United States had supported and enabled not only the rise of the Conservative Party in Panama after independence was won in 1903but also its mutually dependent relationship with the Panamanian police force. At first opposed to Liberal rule by someone capable of allying with the working masses, the United States abruptly changed its position and allowed Belisario Porras to run for the presidency. Ironically, these actions by the United States helped ensure that its earlier allies, the Conservatives and policemen who supported them, would feel a powerful resurgence of anti-Americanism and nationalism. Even at the moment when it was helping a Liberal nationalist win power, when it was acting to ensure a fair election, the United States was seen as intervening in a corrupt way and as compromising Panamanian sovereignty. The actions of the United States intensified Panamanians’ notions of national honor and sovereignty, which then clashed with U.S. citizens’ ideas of their own and their nation’s superiority.
To British diplomatic officers observing from the wings, the affair demonstrated the fecklessness and inexperience of the United States. A diplomat commented caustically, “This incident will no doubt enhance the reputation already enjoyed by the USG among the Central American Republics.”54 For a day the Cocoa Grove riots had brought Goethals’s efficient machine to a standstill. The affair and its aftermath profoundly challenged the image of the United States as an effective, beneficent, and peaceful power on the Isthmus of Panama. As Americans began looking to the end of the canal construction project in 1913and 1914, these dynamics made it more imperative than ever to find effective ways of publicizing the canal project. A great world’s fair—the Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915—would provide the opportunity for seeking positive lessons from the construction project that could be applied back home. At the same time, it would broadcast notions of American power, idealism, and scientific and engineering know-how outward to an increasingly troubled world.
CHAPTER NINE
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HERCULES COMES HOME
EVEN AS the Cocoa Grove riot occurred and amid the difficult negotiations that unfolded in the following months, construction of the canal was moving rapidly toward completion. From 1912 onward the focus of the work shifted to completing the gigantic lock gates and building docks, mechanical shops, and a coaling station at the Pacific end of the canal. Culebra Cut—which had held such a grip on the fears and imaginations of workers and tourists—was nearly conquered. Steamshovel operators in the cut had been heading toward each other from different ends of the isthmus for years in a friendly competition, and now they began to close in on each other. Rose Van Hardeveld recalled the rivalry as workers and their families cheered for the steam shovel heading from her neighborhood in the central division or for the steam shovel coming from Culebra in the Pacific division. The steam shovels raced to be the first to break through the final barrier forty feet down at the bottom of the cut. Finally, one day in May 1913, Van Hardeveld recalled, “we heard the exultant shrieking and blasting of the whistles that told us the barrier had been penetrated.” She and her children ran outside to peer into Culebra Cut, where they saw men clapping each other on the back and shouting for joy. “We could see the two shovels with their booms raised and dippers almost touching… . All we could think of was the victory itself. The last barrier was down.” Canal workers and their families celebrated across the isthmus. Within several weeks all dry excavation was finished.1
Several crucial tasks remained for the ICC officials and their employees before the canal could be opened. Plans had to be made for maintaining and managing the completed canal and for governing the people who would remain in the Zone to carry out those duties. In 1912engineers began allowing the vast stretch in front of Gatun Dam to fill up. As the waters gradually rose into Gatun Lake, the ICC had to conduct a massive relocation of the area’s residents. Meanwhile, Goethals and his officers began efforts to reduce the working population of the Zone. At its peak the canal workforce had involved nearly fifty-seven thousand people; by 1921only fourteen thousand employees would remain. Sending thousands of laborers home or finding them new jobs in Central America or the Caribbean proved as difficult and complex a challenge as anything Goethals had previously encountered.2
With the canal nearly completed, Americans’ attention shifted to interpreting and comprehending the project’s immense significance. Millions traveled to San Francisco in 1915for a spectacular world’s fair held to commemorate the canal’s opening. One newspaper declared the fair, known as the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, to be a “monument built to the Panama Canal by San Francisco.” One hundred fifty thousand people entered the fair as the gates opened the first day. “Six abreast, singing, cheering, laughing, their hearts lifted and their faces shining with the glory of it all,” Americans paraded in to celebrate a great world’s fair and the canal that stood at its symbolic heart. “Rich in line with poor,” declared the San Francisco Examiner. “It was a parade of triumph, a parade of true democracy.”3 It was the first world’s fair celebrating, as the exposition’s president, Charles Moore, put it, the “vital living, pulsing, present” rather than commemorating a historical triumph, and it would stand as the largest, most successful, most advertised, and most profitable for many years to come. The palaces, arches, murals, sculptures, and gardens honored the same values the canal builders had broadcast: a newly powerful United States, a young nation made into a world power by technology, science, and individuals of genius and able now to contribute more powerfully than ever to human progress, peace, and beauty. The fair signified an important moment in making the canal a symbol of U.S. power, civilization, and beneficence and provides a window into the myriad connections between the exercise of that power domestically and abroad.4
Many observers proclaimed the fair to be most splendid at night, when it was illuminated with a force and beauty unlike anything they had ever seen. General Electric contributed thousands of dollars and assigned its best engineer to design the lighting. Nearly four hundred searchlights flooded monuments like the Fine Arts Palace and the Tower of Jewels, while five hundred open projectors and untold numbers of colored lanterns and underwater lights add
ed a further note of spectacle. Several times a week stunning fireworks shows lit up the dark San Francisco night. A special effect known as the Scintillator combined lighting equal to four billion candles with the city’s famous fog to produce an effect considered more beautiful than the aurora borealis. After observing the illuminated city, the poet Edwin Markham declared: “I have seen beauty that will give the world new standards of art, and a joy in loveliness never before reached. This is what I have seen—the courts and buildings of the Panama-Pacific Exposition illuminated at night.” The novelist Laura Ingalls Wilder (of Little House on the Prairie fame) traveled from her home in the Ozarks to San Francisco for the event and noted, “The lights of the Exposition made it look like fairyland and the lights of the city rising on the hills, row after row behind, linked it all with the stars until one could not tell where the lights stopped and the stars began.”5
The fair’s creators were surely aware that their celebration of the Panama Canal coincided with a dark moment in world history, and that its significance derived in part from that larger context. In the summer of 1914, even as the canal was being flooded with water and preparations had begun for the first ship to cross through from ocean to ocean, World War I broke out. Soon the horrific conflict overtook Europe, seemingly threatening the foundations of civilization. “The lamps are going out all over Europe,” British foreign minister Sir Edward Grey famously declared; “we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.”6 Many who felt trepidation over the events in Europe found in the Panama-Pacific International Exposition a source of optimism about the world’s future. As the psychologist G. Stanley Hall reflected after visiting the fair: “The fact that this great Exposition … was held in the midst of this awful war, which was the psychological moment for emphasizing the sympathy of nations, will forever give it a unique, pre-eminent character in the history of international expositions.”7
The war, which began almost precisely as the canal builders completed their work, cast many celebratory plans into disarray. U.S. officials had hoped to mark the opening with a parade of ships through the canal, carefully designing it to be grander than the one that had marked the end of the Suez Canal’s construction decades before. President Woodrow Wilson planned to traverse the canal on a battleship en route to the Panama-Pacific International Exposition. World War I made all such ideas unfeasible. After Britain and Germany both refused to participate in the world’s fair in San Francisco, some worried about whether it could still be held, but its organizers prevailed, and the fair began as scheduled.8
If the war initially dashed many hopes for marking the canal’s completion in spectacular ways, in the long run the distant, dark shadow it cast heightened the symbolic importance of the canal and U.S. power in the world more generally. One editor declared in the summer of 1914that the canal was “the silver lining in the clouds of war,” for the serendipitous timing of the canal’s opening and the beginning of war in Europe would enhance the ability of the United States to take over a great deal of the world’s trade. Others saw in the timing of events a symbol of America’s contribution to world civilization. The Chicago Daily Tribune noted that the Panama Canal constituted a great constructive project which had united North and South America, while the European war signaled a great work of destruction tearing the Continent apart: “For ten years we have worked with the dredge. For ten years Europe has worked with the cannon. The workers are now in the harvest.” More bluntly yet, an article in Current Opinion contrasted World War I with the Panama-Pacific International Exposition: “In one case, all the reserves of science and invention are brought into play for the destruction of human life, its comforts and necessities, its works of art, its temples of worship. In the other case, all these reserves are marshaled to enhance human life, augment its comforts, nourish its sense of beauty, and increase its consciousness of human brotherhood. Did the world ever show a more massive and monumental contrast than this—the greatest war of history on one side, on the other the greatest exhibition ever seen of the triumphs of peace and international intercourse?”9 Like the Panama-Pacific International Exposition itself, World War I gave Americans a signal opportunity to interpret and comprehend the meanings of the canal to their lives and the future of their nation.
KISSING THE ZONE GOOD-BYE
The geography of the Canal Zone was radically transformed as the construction project neared completion. The enormous lock gates rose up as mountains of steel on the landscape. Water began collecting in the spillway of Gatun Dam. Once the canal was filled with water, everything on the farther, northwestern side would become inaccessible. The railroad had already been rebuilt so that it ran from Panama City to Colón along the eastern rim of the canal. Some of the largest settlements in the Zone were abandoned as a result. Empire, the great city of machine shops with a population of more than seven thousand, became a ghost town almost overnight, as did Culebra, where two thousand ICC officials, engineers, and supervisors had lived. The rising waters caused landslides near labor camps presumed to be safe, forcing even more people to flee. Many other towns, including Gorgona (as the industrial heart of the project, it was called the “Pittsburgh of the Canal Zone”), Las Cruces, Frijoles, and Matachin, were obliterated when officials allowed the waters of Gatun Lake to rise in 1912.
In most cases people went willingly, but others were forcibly moved as the floodwaters began licking at their front doors. Zone policemen patrolled the area to prevent people from returning to their homes. Buildings were disassembled by the thousands and moved to towns on the other side of the ditch, most often to the new town of Balboa, built from the spoils of excavation on land reclaimed from the Pacific Ocean. A workforce of approximately five thousand would be required to run and maintain the canal operations, plus their family members, and as many as nine thousand soldiers and marines would be housed on military bases across the Zone. A town of neat landscapes and imperial architecture, Balboa became home for many of the workers and officials who would remain in the Zone after construction ended to maintain the canal.10
Elizabeth Parker, who had traveled to the Canal Zone to marry her fiancé in 1907, described Balboa’s emergence from muddy swamps along the Pacific. High atop the hills arose spacious homes for Colonel Goethals and other leading officials. Houses salvaged from Empire and other towns were reconstructed for more lowly canal employees. A large administration building, also housing a library and post office, took over a grand hill, with manicured tree-lined avenues leading to it from every direction. Parker warmly welcomed her family’s move to Balboa: “There was an air of permanency now. Cement living quarters were being tried out. Roads were built, trees planted, grounds landscaped. Gone were the ugly black stoves, the lone electric bulb dangling from the ceiling on a cord. Electric stoves were being installed in some quarters. We even had telephones!” Parker happily greeted the new social opportunities that came with proximity to Panama City: “We joined the University Club, where we met friendly Panamanians at the weekly dances. There were official receptions and lawn parties. There were teas at the American Embassy, private cocktail parties, and afternoon bridge.”11
American housewives like Parker may have found that the completion of the canal brought new comforts to their lives, but for many others the transformation sweeping the Zone during the final years brought chaos and displacement. As towns across the Zone were evacuated and jobs eliminated, tens of thousands of West Indians, southern Europeans, and Americans—some of whom had lived on the isthmus for ten years or more—were expected to leave. Officials began to break up Jamaicatowns and other West Indian labor camps throughout the Zone and to develop strategies for removing their army of labor. Even as they worked toward this end in 1912and 1913, however, workers seeking jobs continued to arrive from across the Caribbean and from India. Goethals complained to the British consul in 1913that his officials had recruited no new laborers for the last six months and he anticipated no further demand, yet boatloads of
West Indians continued to arrive. “In order to avoid the objectionable conditions which would no doubt arise through the presence … of a large body of unemployed men,” he asked Claude Mallet to inform all Caribbean governments that he desired no more men. Unscrupulous agents in India were likewise continuing to send men, and ICC officials complained because the laborers could find no jobs and were penniless. Even U.S. citizens found themselves searching for work. Some white Americans headed to Costa Rica as the ICC eliminated their jobs, but there they found little work that paid adequate wages. Many American men were ending up, according to the Canal Record, in “destitute and desperate situation[s].”12
British colonial officials throughout the Caribbean braced themselves for the return of emigrants. As repatriation of thousands of laborers got under way, the Jamaican and Barbadian governments expressed concern about the “disposal” of too many West Indians on their islands, and Barbados passed a law to penalize captains who so overloaded ships as to endanger the health of passengers. On most islands officials anticipated there would be jobs for the returning canal workers, because there had been pervasive labor shortages since the construction project began. The government in Barbados, however, was concerned about the influx of workers, as there were not sufficient jobs and an ongoing drought promised to keep agricultural employment at a minimum for the time being. Colonial officials generally worried about distress among emigrants and potential burdens on their governments if employment was scarce or if the ICC refused to pay the cost of sending men home. The ICC was obligated to pay for contract laborers’ repatriation, but the thousands of West Indians who had come on their own had to pay for their return voyage. Thus British officials worked to convince the ICC to pay for repatriating all its laborers.13
