The Canal Builders

by Julie Greene

  10.Speech as governor of New York to the Lincoln Club, Feb. 1899; excerpted in Mario DiNunzio, Theodore Roosevelt: An American Mind (New York: St. Martin’s, 1994), p. 182.

  11.This information and the quotation from John Hay are from Major, Prize Possession, pp. 28–31.

  12.Roosevelt’s quotation is cited in Dalton, Theodore Roosevelt, p. 254.

  13.Major, Prize Possession, pp. 34–42; Dalton, Theodore Roosevelt, pp. 254–57.

  14.Major, Prize Possession, p. 49.

  15.Gerstle Mack, The Land Divided: A History of the Panama Canal and Other Isthmian Canal Projects (New York: Knopf, 1944), pp. 471–72.

  16.The Hay–­Bunau-­Varilla Treaty of Nov. 18, 1903, at the Avalon Project at Yale Law School, Con-vention for the Construction of a Ship Canal, at http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/diplomacy/panama/pan001.htm (accessed Nov. 2, 2005). See also Major, Prize Possession, pp. 38–63.

  17.Rich sources on the history of Panama include Alfredo Castillero Calvo, ed., Historia general de Panamá (Panama City: Comité Nacional del Centenario de la República, 2004); Alfredo Castillero Calvo, La ruta interoceánica y el Canal de Panamá (Panama City: Colegio Panameño de Historiadores and Instituto del Canal de Panamá y Estudios Internacionales, 1999); Celestino Andrés Araúz, Panamá y sus relaciones internacionales (Panama City: Universitaria, 1994); Aims McGuinness, Path of Empire: Panama and the California Gold Rush (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2008); Michael L. Conniff, Panama and the United States: The Forced Alliance (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001); Alfredo Figueroa Navarro, Dominio y sociedad en el Panamá colombiano, 1821–1903 (Panama City: Universitaria, 1982); Marco Gandásegui, Alejandro Saavedra, Andrés Achong, and Iván Quintero, Las luchas obreras en Panamá, 1850–1978, 2nd ed. (Panama City: CELA, 1990); Luis Navas, El mo-vimiento obrero en Panamá, 1880–1914 (San José, Costa Rica: Universitaria Centroamericana, 1979); Steve C. Ropp, Panamanian Politics: From Guarded Nation to National Guard (New York: Praeger, 1982); Thomas Pearcy, We Answer Only to God: Politics and the Military in Panama, 1903–1947 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998); Jorge Turner, Raíz, historia, y perspectivas del movimiento obrero panameño (Mexico City: Signos, 1982); Peter A. Szok, “La Última Gaviota”: Liberalism and Nostalgia in Early Twentieth-Century Panamá (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2001).

  18.Szok, “La Última Gaviota,” pp. 5, 8, 22–23.

  19.Pearcy, We Answer Only to God, pp. 39–42; Major, Prize Possession, pp. 117–19.

  20.Moorfield Storey, The Recognition of Panama: Address Delivered at Massachusetts Reform Club, Dec. 5, 1903 (Boston: George H. Ellis, 1904), p. 19. The prominent Knights of Labor organizer George McNeill saw American imperialism as linked to, indeed generated by, the industrial system of the United States. Soon after Roosevelt enabled Panama to win independence from Colombia, McNeill declared at an anti-imperialist meeting, “My duty is, if possible, to stir you with some sense of the fact that we are not a free republican government—that we are monarchical, that we are imperialistic, despotic, and that you need not look upon this phenomenon in the Philippine Islands with astonishment—upon that war with Spain, upon the outrages perpetrated in Panama—but only see in these things the development of an industrial system founded in injustice and despotism.” George E. McNeill, “Remarks at the Annual Meeting of the New England ­Anti-­Imperialist League,” Report of the Fifth Annual Meeting of the New England Anti-Imperialist League (Boston: New England Anti-Imperialist League, 1903).

  21.Major, Prize Possession, esp. pp. 60, 61, 62. While the criticism continued, some expressed praise for Roosevelt. His supporters included Jacob Riis, who declared, “I am not a jingo. But when some things happen I just have to get up and cheer.” Roosevelt also found unwelcome support from the Daughters of the Confederacy, who applauded the U.S. recognition of Panamanian independence as vindicating the cause of the South. Jacob Riis, Theodore Roosevelt, the Citizen (New York: Outlook, 1904), p. 385. Writing twenty years later, Roosevelt still felt compelled to defend and justify at great length his actions in seizing control of the isthmus. See Roosevelt, Autobiography, pp. 512–27. On Roosevelt’s civilizing mission, see also Ninkovich, United States and Imperialism, pp. 104–18; Frank Ninkovich, “Theodore Roosevelt: Civilization as Ideology,” Diplomatic History 10, no. 3 (1986), pp. 221–45; Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, pp. 170–215.

  22.Paul Taillon, “The American Federation of Labor and Expansionism, 1890–1910” (undergraduate honor’s thesis, Northwestern University, 1985), pp. 47–51.

  23.Daniel B. Schirmer, Republic or Empire: American Resistance to the Philippine War (Cambridge, Mass.: Schenkman, 1972), ch. 17; James’s quotation is in a letter to E. W. Ordway, Dec. 6, 1903, E. W. Ordway Papers, New York Public Library.

  24.Mack, Land Divided, pp. 377–404; McCullough, Path Between the Seas, pp. 222–35.

  25.John Wallace, “The Republic of Panama and the Canal Zone,” in America Across the Seas: Our Colonial Empire (New York: C. S. Hammond, 1909), p. 72; William D. Boyce, United States Colonies and Dependencies: The Travels and Investigations of a Chicago Publisher (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1914), p. 493.

  26.Kidd, The Control of the Tropics, quoted in Kristin Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the ­Spanish-­American and ­Philippine-­American Wars (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 181; Benjamin Kidd, “The Control of the Tropics by the U.S.,” Atlantic Monthly, Dec. 1898, pp. 721–22. On concerns about the tropics, see also Paul S. Sutter, “Nature’s Agents or Agents of Empire? Entomological Workers and Environmental Change During the Construction of the Panama Canal,” Isis 98, no. 4 (Dec. 2007), pp. 724–54; Nancy Stepan, Picturing Tropical Nature (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001); David Arnold, The Problem of Nature: Environment, Culture, and European Expansion (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996); David Arnold, The Tropics and the Traveling Gaze: India, Landscape, and Science, 1800–1856 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006).

  27.James Morton Callahan, An Introduction to American Expansion Policy (Morgantown: West Virginia University, 1908), p. 36. The many books published on empire in this period make for fascinating reading. See, for example, H. Addington Bruce, The Romance of American Expansion (New York: Moffat, Yard, 1909); Archibald Cary Coolidge, The United States as a World Power (New York: Macmillan, 1908); Jerome Bruce Crabtree, The Passing of Spain and the Ascendancy of America (Springfield: King Richardson, 1898); Hubert Howe Bancroft, The New Pacific (New York: Bancroft, 1900).

  28.Author’s conversation with Dr. Bernard Coakley, professor of geophysics, University of Alaska at Fairbanks (my thanks to Dr. Coakley); H. G. Cornthwaite, “Panama Rainfall,” Monthly Weather Review, May 1919, pp. 298–302; Froude is quoted in Joseph Bucklin Bishop, The Panama Gateway (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1913), p. 90.

  29.Marie D. Gorgas and Burton J. Hendrick, William Crawford Gorgas: His Life and Work (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page, 1924), pp. 140–41.

  30.Bonham Richardson, Panama Money in Barbados, 1900–1920 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985); Bonham Richardson, notes from interviews conducted with Douglas Gay, Niles Corner, Barbados, June 9, 1982. Interviews conducted by Richardson provided him with a crucial source for his pathbreaking book. I am grateful to Dr. Richardson for generously sending me a copy of his notes. On West Indians and Panama, see also Lancelot S. Lewis, The West Indian in Panama: Black Labor in Panama, 1850–1914 (Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1980); Henry De Lisser’s account of his travels, Jamaicans in Colón and the Canal Zone (Kingston, 1906), p. 13; Velma Newton, The Silver Men: West Indian Labour Migration to Panama, 1850–1914 (Mona, Jamaica: University of the West Indies, 1984); Michael L. Conniff, Black Labor on a White Canal: Panama, 1904–1981 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985). For a fine discussion of the Panama Canal’s role in shaping the West Indian diaspora more generally, see also Lara Putnam, The Company They Kept: Migrants and the Politics of Gender in Caribb
ean Costa Rica, 1870–1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).

  31.Richardson, Panama Money in Barbados, p. 105.

  32.Dr. Carlos E. Russell, An Old Woman Remembers: The Recollected History of West Indians in Panama, 1855–1955 (Brooklyn: Caribbean Diaspora Press, 1995), pp. 3–4.

  33.Bonham Richardson, interview with Howard Skinner, March 23, 1982.

  34.Richardson, Panama Money in Barbados, p. 106.

  35.Mrs. Christine Alberta “Bea” Waldron, interview with Bonham Richardson, March 24, 1982. This is an unusual reaction. More often West Indians felt distant from, even disdainful of, Panamanians, proud of their English linguistic traditions, and reluctant to learn Spanish. See, for example, George Lamming’s novel In the Castle of My Skin (New York: ­McGraw-­Hill, 1954). On migration from various Caribbean islands, see Newton, Silver Men.

  36.Winifred James, The Mulberry Tree (London: Chapman and Hall, 1913), pp. 190–91. The diverse geographical origins of the people of the Caribbean in conjunction with the history of imperialism across the region generates a problem of terminology for historians. Although most often Afro-Caribbeans referred to themselves as coming from their specific island, they might also, as Lara Putnam has noted, refer to themselves as from a specific parish, town, estate, or even the British or French empire. I refer to specific islands of origin when appropriate throughout this book, but often it is necessary to refer to all Caribbeans as a single category. When doing so, I use the term West Indian, which peoples from the Caribbean sometimes used to refer to themselves. By this term I mean people of African descent from across the British, French, or Spanish Caribbean. Occasionally I refer to them also as Caribbeans or Afro-Caribbeans. On issues of terminology see Putnam, The Company They Kept, pp. 15-17; and Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), esp. pp. 113–16.

  37.On Indians and Chinese in the region, see Roger Sanjek, ed., Caribbean Asians: Chinese, Indian, and Japanese Experiences in Trinidad and the Dominican Republic (Flushing, N.Y.: Asian/American Center at Queens College, CUNY, 1990); Eustorgio Chong Ruiz, Los chinos en la sociedad panameña (Panama: Instituto Nacional de Cultura, 1993); Frank Birbalsingh, ed., Indenture and Exile: The Indo-Caribbean Experience (Toronto: TSAR, 1989); Luz Maria Martínez Montiel, Asiatic Migrations in Latin America (Mexico City: Colegio de México, 1981); Asiatic Exclusion League of San Francisco, Against Chinese Slavery on the Panama Canal (San Francisco, 1906); Lok C. D. Siu, Memories of a Future Home: Diasporic Citizenship of Chinese in Panama (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005); Patricia Alma Lee Chung de Lee, Los Lee Chong: Cinco generaciones de Panamá (Panama City: Lee Chung de Lee, 1999).

  38.The experiences of Ted Sherrard are related in William D. Pennington, “Life and Labor on the Panama Canal: An Oklahoman’s Personal Account,” Chronicles of Oklahoma 56, no. 3 (Fall 1978), pp. 265–73.

  39.Personnel records for Henry Williams, Isthmian Canal Commission Records, box 575, National Archives, College Park, Md.; information on lynchings in Texas can be found in Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States, 1889–1918 (New York: National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, 1919), pp. 97–98.

  40.Elizabeth Kittredge Parker, Panama Canal Bride: A Story of Construction Days (New York: Exposition, 1955), pp. 9–10.

  41.Ibid., pp. 9–10, 13–14, 18.

  42.William D. Donadio, The Thorns of the Rose: Memoirs of a Tailor of Panama (Colón, Republic of Panama: Dovesa S.A., 1999), p. 112.

  43.John Foster Carr, “The Panama Canal: History—Conditions—Prospects,” Outlook, April 28, 1906, p. 953.

  CHAPTER ONE: A MODERN STATE IN THE TROPICS

  1.John Foster Carr, “The Panama Canal: History—Conditions—Prospects,” Outlook, April 28, 1906, p. 963; and John Foster Carr, “Building a State,” Outlook, June 23, 1906, p. 440. Carr went on to argue, rather unconvincingly, that government at the municipal level of the Zone was less Euro-pean and more in the style of American democracy. In the latter article he similarly wrote: “We are new at the imperial business of creating republics and dependencies, but our success here has been so great …the most striking and significant work we are doing on the Isthmus is not the completion of a vast and comprehensive scheme for canal digging, but the creation of a state” (p. 436).

  2.Marie D. Gorgas and Burton J. Hendrick, William Crawford Gorgas: His Life and Work (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page, 1924), p. 144.

  3.Ibid., pp. 152–55.

  4.Among the other passengers on this early ship to Panama were the chief engineer John Wallace, William J. Karner, and four nurses. See William J. Karner, More Recollections (Boston: Thomas Todd, 1921), p. 9.

  5.Paul Sutter has noted that much of the disease was in fact caused by human impact on the tropics. See Paul S. Sutter, “Nature’s Agents or Agents of Empire? Entomological Workers and Environmental Change During the Construction of the Panama Canal,” Isis 98, no. 4 (Dec. 2007), pp. 724–54; see also David Arnold, The Problem of Nature: Environment, Culture, and European Expansion (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996); David Arnold, The Tropics and the Traveling Gaze: India, Landscape, and Science, 1800–1856 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006); Nancy Stepan, Picturing Tropical Nature (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001); Stephen Frenkel, “Jungle Stories: North American Representations of Panama,” Geographical Review 86, no. 3 (2002), pp. 317–33; Stephen Frenkel, “Geographical Representations of the ‘Other’: The Landscape of the Panama Canal Zone,” Journal of Historical Geography 28, no. 1 (2002), pp. 85–99.

  6.William Gorgas, “The Conquest of the Tropics for the White Race: President’s Address at the Sixtieth Annual Session of the American Medical Association, June 9, 1909,” Journal of the American Medical Association 52, no. 25 (1909), pp. 1967–69.

  7.“Report of the Head of the Department of Municipal Engineering,” in Annual Report of the Isthmian Canal Commission for the Fiscal Year Ending June 30, 1907 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1907), app. C, p. 60. For more information, see the annual reports of the ICC and W. C. Gorgas, Report of the Dept. of Health of the Isthmian Canal Commission for the Month of January 1905 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1905).

  8.Willis John Abbot, Panama and the Canal in Picture and Prose (New York: Syndicate, 1914), pp. 145–49; Gerstle Mack, The Land Divided: A History of the Panama Canal and Other Isthmian Canal Projects (New York: Knopf, 1944), pp. 486–95; Wallace to Sir, Feb. 9, 1905, Isthmian Canal Commission Records, RG 185, 2-­P-­51, box 49, National Archives, College Park, Md. (hereafter cited as ICC Records).

  9.David McCullough, The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870–1914 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1977), p. 452; John Foster Carr, “The Panama Canal—the Commission’s White Workers,” Outlook, May 5, 1906, p. 24.

  10.Carr, “Panama Canal—the Commission’s White Workers,” p. 24.

  11.Stevens to Theodore Shonts (chairman, ICC), Dec. 14, 1905, in ICC Records, 2-­E-­1, Labor Recruiting.

  12.For more on the “Great Scare” of 1904 and 1905, see Edwin E. Slosson and Gardner Richardson, “Life on the Canal Zone,” Independent, March 22, 1906, p. 653; John Foster Carr, “The Panama Canal: The Work of the Sanitary Force,” Outlook, May 12, 1906, pp. 69–72; “Men in Action,” World’s Work 21 (Dec. 1910), pp. 13809–10.

  13.McCullough, Path Between the Seas, pp. 459–67; Mack, Land Divided, pp. 493–95; C. H. ­Forbes-­Lindsay, Panama and the Canal ­To-­Day (Boston: L. C. Page, 1910), pp. 103–20; Harry A. Franck, Zone Policeman 88: A Close Range Study of the Panama Canal and Its Workers (New York: Century, 1913), pp. 98–99.

  14.Franck, Zone Policeman 88, pp. 112, 117; Charlotte Cameron, A Woman’s Winter in South America (London: Stanley Paul, 1911), pp. 215–16; Joseph Bucklin Bishop and Farnham Bishop, Goethals, Genius of the Panama Canal: A Biography (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1930), pp. 208, 211.

  15.Winifred James, The Mulberry Tree (London: Chapman and Hall, 1913), pp. 235–36; Mich
ael Delevante, Panama Pictures: Nature and Life in the Land of the Great Canal (New York: Alden Brothers, 1907), p. 63; Arthur Bullard, Panama: The Canal, the Country, and the People (New York: Macmillan, 1911), pp. 47–48; Franck, Zone Policeman 88, pp. 119–20; H. H. Rousseau, The Isthmian Canal (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1910), p. 29. According to the official site of the Panama Canal Authority of the Republic of Panama, Culebra Cut was 8.75 miles long, and the lowest point in the mountains above the cut was 333.5 feet above sea level. See http://www.pancanal.com/eng.history/index.html (accessed July 28, 2007).

  16.Franck, Zone Policeman 88, pp. 119–20.

  17.Ibid., p. 100.

  18.See, for example, ibid., pp. 105–6; Bullard, Panama, pp. 546–59.

  19.The anxieties so many people felt about whether a dam would function safely on the isthmus can be traced to the disastrous flood in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, in 1889, in which the South Fork Dam collapsed and killed approximately ­twenty-­two hundred people. On the flood, see David McCullough, The Johnstown Flood (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987). On sea-level and lock canals, see Edwin E. Slosson and Gardner Richardson, “The ­Sea-­Level Versus the Lock Canal,” Independent, March 29, 1906, pp. 709–16; McCullough, Path Between the Seas, pp. 481–89; William L. Sibert and John F. Stevens, The Construction of the Panama Canal (New York: D. Appleton, 1915); for further reflections by John Stevens, especially his taking credit for the decision to build a lock canal, see John Stevens, An Engineer’s Recollections (reprinted from Engineering ­News-­Record, 1935; New York: ­McGraw-­Hill, 1936), pp. 40–42. For Theodore Roosevelt’s claim that he deserved the credit, see his Autobiography (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1924), pp. 527–28.

  20.U.S. Senate, Investigation of Panama Canal Matters: Hearings Before the Committee on Interoceanic Canals of the United States Senate in the Matter of the Senate Resolution Adopted January 9, 1906, Providing for an Investigation of Matters Relating to the Panama Canal, Etc., 59th Cong., 2nd sess., Doc. 401 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1907), vol. 1, p. 47. I have seen no clear evidence that Stevens quit because of the labor problem; however, we may speculate that it was a likely cause. Stevens railed constantly about the need to find a decent source of labor and pushed aggressively to be allowed to import Chinese workers. About one month after it was finally settled that he would not have access to Chinese labor, Stevens resigned.