Panama fever (64 page)

“Never patient, Jan was now decidedly irritable,” remembered Rose. “His thin face grew thinner, his prominent nose larger, it seemed to me. His cheeks were gaunt and hollow. He ate very little, and I felt sure he had malaria … All he thought of night and day was the Canal.” Then, in mid-May 1906, Jantje “came bounding up the steps three at a time one evening, shouting that his wife and baby were coming on the boat tomorrow morning!” The next day, before they had even had a chance to unpack, Jantje, carrying his baby boy on his shoulder, brought the new arrivals to meet Rose, Jan, and the girls. It seems to have given Rose a great lift. “I looked upon her at once as a close friend—closer than I could ever hope to feel to any of the native women,” she wrote of Jantje's “pretty young wife,” Martina. The young couple, as they moved into Las Cascadas House Number Seven, were full of plans for saving their money, and moving to the United States, “so that their boy might grow up in America.” Above all, “they were very happy just to be together.”

All the while, everyday life seemed to be slowly improving for the white workforce, or at least for those who remained healthy. Las Cascadas was expanding as new homes were being erected nearby. There was ice aplenty, and better food was reaching the new commissaries. In late June, Jantje made a trip to Panama City and came back with “something wonderful.” In a wholesale importers he had found them unpacking the first consignment of Edison phonographs to arrive on the Isthmus. He bought two and a half dozen records for each. “We had not realized how starved we were for music and entertainment until we heard the first strains of ‘Silver Threads Among the Gold’ floating from the big tin horn,” remembered Rose. They all sat entranced, playing the records over and over, and then Jantje—or “Teddy” as he was called by his wife (his middle name, fittingly, was Theodore)—took his son Jack in his arms and danced around to the music of “Hungarian Rhapsody.” “Supper, rain, canal, everything was forgotten for the time being,” Rose remembered fondly.

ven after the decision on the canal finally came through, Stevens still had the majority of his workforce assembling and repairing buildings—quarters, clubhouses, hotels, warehouses, schools, churches, or commissaries. In two years, 85 million feet of board was used on new buildings, and by June 1906 over a thousand—nearly half—of the old French quarters were in use.

For John Meehan, who had arrived back in 1904, a turning point had been reached when, in late 1905, a new hotel opened that had different sections for those wearing coats and those not. “The rule,” he wrote, “marked the first definite break in the community of interest that had existed up to this time among construction men, engineers, artisans, and office men.”

In other ways, too, the white community became more stratified as the facilities improved. A policy was adopted by the new head of the Quarters and Labor Department, Jackson Smith, whereby white workers were assigned homes exactly linked to their position in the canal hierarchy—one square foot of floor space for each dollar of monthly salary. This, according to Stevens, “proved a strong incentive to encourage individual ambition. A promotion in rank meant not only a better wage, but more commodious living accommodations, and a certain rise in the social scale. Distinctive social lines were drawn on the Isthmus,” he went on, “as sharply as they are elsewhere.”

Not everyone was happy. It was widely believed that Jackson “Square-foot” Smith, as he became known, tended still to give the best accommodations to his own friends. Mary Chatfield was living in one of the resurrected French dwellings. She complained that the large verandas let the rain in, and, sleeping up near the roof, she would be awakened by the storms, which “sounded as though some one was throwing boulders and trying to tear the boards off of the roof.”

Her fiercest criticism was for the food served by the new ICC hotels. “The meat served is almost always beef, and such beef! It does not taste like anything,” she wrote to her literary ladies in June. “Tho’ the waters abound in fish, there is
never
any fish served … the vegetables are all canned and very poor quality. The soup always tasteless as hot water.” She concludes that part of the problem must be widespread pilfering. Her letters do, however, give evidence of the increasing amount of organized activity available to the U.S. workforce. For the July 4 celebrations, she reports, there were tug-of-wars, obstacle races, horse and mule races, pole vaulting, and dancing competitions, with first prizes of $25. There were a couple of sour notes, however. The food served “was
worse than usual
, which was only just possible,” and another incident upset her: “A few colored people tried to watch the games at Cristóbal and were chased off by mounted policemen. A very unpleasant sight.”

Mary Chatfield was also less than impressed with the typical American attitude to the Panamanians, whom many referred to dismissively as “Spiggoties,” from the familiar cry of Panama City peddlers and pimps: “Speak de English?” While working in the Hydrography Department, Chatfield actually had a Panamanian boss, a Mr. Arango, the only local to occupy a senior position in the canal setup. “I was angry at first to find that I had been placed under a Panamanian engineer,” she writes. “But presently discovered him to be a gentleman, and an educated man, which I hear cannot be said of many from the States.”

In the many bars and gambling dens of the terminal cities there was constant tension between locals and Americans, particularly the seemingly ever-present U.S. military personnel. In early June 1906, an incident in Colón's red-light district led to the arrest by Panamanian police of two U.S. Marine Corps officers and a midshipman from a gunboat in the bay. They were subsequently “severely manhandled” by the Panamanians. Magoon blamed both sides. The U.S. citizenry encountered by the Panamanians were largely from the South, he explained in a letter to Taft on June 5, “and [made] no distinction between Panamanians and negroes.” The Latin Americans, for their part, were “liable to these quick and furious exhibitions of uncontrollable rage.”

Aside from cultural or racial friction, there were also political and economic issues that were giving the locals cause for complaint. Panamanians remained wary of American intentions, particularly toward the anarchic terminal cities, seen by Zone authorities as a threat to the increasingly orderly nature of life in the U.S. enclave. Local merchants, who had hoped for a return of the glory days of the de Lesseps era, were furious about the rapid expansion of ICC commissaries and restaurants.

The Americans, for their part, were concerned above all with political stability and the rule of law. The volatile history of the Isthmus had been a powerful argument against Panama being selected as the canal's location. The project's backers, such as Roosevelt and Cromwell, did not need telling how damaging headlines in U.S. newspapers about political violence in Panama would be to the canal effort.

This was all about to get much more difficult. In July there were to be two important elections in the new Republic—for the municipal councils and the National Assembly. Tension between the two opposing parties, the incumbent Conservatives and the opposition Liberals, had been growing for some months. In October 1905, Ma-goon, at the request of Amador, had put marines and Zone police on alert when a Liberal rally in Panama City had threatened to turn violent. The following month, when Taft was on the Isthmus, the Liberals had presented him with a “Memorial.” In it they asked whether during the forthcoming elections U.S. forces would be used to “guarantee public order and constitutional succession in the Republic.” If so, did this include supervising the polling stations and ensuring a fair election?

The role that the United States would play was of vital importance to the opposition. They knew that without American intervention in the polling process, government leaders, who controlled all the electoral machinery, would not allow themselves to lose a national vote, however small their real popular support. This was, of course, long established: the way real political change came to Panama was through intrigue or revolution, rarely the ballot box. So if the poll was going to go ahead without U.S. supervision, wondered the Liberals, and thus deliver an inevitable Conservative victory, how would the United States react if they took the traditional step and tried to gain power through a coup?

The response from Elihu Root, now U.S. secretary of state, communicated to Magoon at the beginning of December, was a careful exercise in tact. The United States earnestly wished for “fair, free and honest” elections, he said, but would not take direct control of the voting process. Root knew how that would look to other already fearful Latin American countries and he had his hands full dealing with problems in Cuba. The United States, said Root, would exercise its rights to maintain order in the terminal cities and the Zone, or “in that territory [in] which [disorder] can be prevented by the exercise of its treaty rights, and will not go beyond those treaty rights.”

The Liberals pronounced themselves satisfied, but interpreting Root's response to mean that U.S. troops would not intervene in Panama's rural areas (in fact, treaty rights and the Constitution permitted intervention anywhere), they started preparing for an armed uprising in the countryside, their traditional stronghold.

Two days after the receipt of the Root reply, Amador reported to Magoon that armed bands were assembling in the interior, with red ribbons around their hats, the traditional symbol of revolution, warning that without U.S. intervention he would be forced to re-form the army, something neither man wanted. Magoon reported to Washington that “party feeling is very bitter, and serious disorder during the elections in June and July should constitute no cause for surprise.” The Conservatives were accused by their domestic enemies of being traitors and sellouts. The official Liberal newspaper the
Diario de Panama
described the choice for the voters as between electing the Liberal Party or seeing Panama being annexed by the United States. In reply, a senior Conservative declared that he would sooner see the nation under U.S. control than have it fall into the hands of the “niggers.”

On the urging of Magoon, at the end of April came the clarification of Root's reply: the United States would move to “suppress any insurrection in any part of the Republic.” The uprising was dead in the water, and the continuance of the rule of Amador and the Conservatives was assured. As Mallet explained to his superiors in London, because it was “customary” for government candidates to win elections, the defeat of the opposition was a safe prediction. At the same time he passed on a report from the
Star and Herald
that “explicit directions have been given to the police to prevent by every means in their power the success of the Liberals, who, in a fair election, would overthrow the Amador government by one hundred to one.”

Thus by refusing to supervise the elections and at the same time banning revolution from the Isthmus, the United States’ actions were decisive in maintaining in power an unrepresentative, undemocratic government. Mallet put this down to American dislike for the Liberals’ racially mixed constituency. Certainly, for now, the United States felt more at ease with the Conservative faction. Taft had reported to Roosevelt after his trip to the Isthmus that the Liberals were much less trustworthy and that if they came to power they would bring an injection of unwanted “Negro influence” into Panamanian politics.

Amador's party, as predicted, won both elections with ease, but not before requesting, and receiving, a cache of arms from the Americans, as well as the deployment of three hundred marines just outside Panama City. During the municipal voting on June 24 there was sporadic violence leading to four dead and over twenty injured. Widespread fraud was evident: thousands of Liberals arrived to vote only to find that their names had disappeared from the list. William Sands, the U.S. chargé d'affaires, reported, “The police [who owed their jobs to the ruling government] voted the first time in uniform and the second time in civilian clothing, returning again to the polls with their rifles ‘to preserve order.’” There was a week until the National Assembly elections, during which Magoon hauled the party leaders before him and appealed for calm. With the Marine presence and U.S. gunboats in the harbors at both ends of the line, the election went off peacefully with the result never in doubt. Therefore, as in the defeat of the Huertas coup plot, Amador was in power thanks to American support, and the United States found itself by the end of 1906, as much through events as by design, in almost complete control of Panamanian affairs.