Panama fever (70 page)

he standard response of the black worker to bullying or abuse, according to virtually every American account of the construction period, was to “straighten himself up and say to the foreman ‘I wish you to understand, sir, that I am a British subject, and if we can not arrange this matter amicably we will talk to our Consul about it.’” In fact, Mallet had his work cut out caring for those denied wages or hospital care and utterly desperate. There was no way he could deal with complaints from over twenty thousand British citizens on the Isthmus, as he frequently pointed out to the unresponsive Foreign Office. Nevertheless, pride in being British seems to have sustained the self-respect of the West Indian workers in often very difficult circumstances. Guyanese novelist Eric Walrond, who moved to Panama as a fourteen-year-old in 1911, would write in 1935, by that stage a committed Garveyite, that the West Indians had “developed an excessive regard for the English.” But in his 1926 short story “Panama Gold,” the protagonist, returned from the Isthmus to Barbados, triumphantly explains how he came to be given compensation for a lost leg: “‘Pay me,’ I says, ‘or I'll stick de British bulldog on all yo’ Omer-icans!’… Man, I wuz ready to stick Nelson heself ‘pon dem … I let dem understand quick enough dat I wuz a Englishman and not a bleddy American nigger!”

“As British subjects,” William Karner wrote of the Barbadians he recruited, “they think they are close to royalty and quite superior to white laborers from the United States.” In fact, the West Indians
did
consider themselves superior to Americans. After all the British Empire was still the most powerful in the world, as they would point out, and they were as much a part of it as anyone. The Americans thought this was hilarious.

In other ways, too, the West Indians resisted the Commission's attempts to dehumanize and control them. In early 1907 there were nearly 12,500 workers in the ICC's austere, heavily regimented military-style barracks. Two years later there were less than 3,500. The others preferred to pay the exorbitant rents of the terminal cities or simply put up a hut of flattened tin cans and old dynamite boxes in the bush. Either way, the move reclaimed independence and dignity. In the same way the attendance at the ICC-run kitchens collapsed, with 80 percent making their own arrangements by the end of 1909.

In the workplace there was little point in complaining. “You couldn't talk back,” remembered Constantine Parkinson. “It would get you fired if you talked back.” Young Jules LeCurrieux, who had done a variety of jobs since starting work on dynamiting Gold Hill, protested on behalf of his gang when they found work unloading cement impossible because of the choking dust. He was promptly fired. So the workers simply voted with their feet, walking away from the worst jobs or the worst bosses. On other occasions, as in the French days, they would move about the line looking for the best pay or to be with their friends, taking on a new name each time so that they could be reemployed. In both cases it was bad news for the efficiency of the canal effort: the dispersal of the workforce in “private” accommodations made the control of malaria and other diseases much more difficult, and the moving about of the workers from job to job caused frequent delays to the construction program.

The Spanish workers were always treated better than the West Indians, but by the beginning of 1907 they too were beginning to cause difficulties for the authorities. For one thing, their impressive initial energy and zeal had not lasted. If they did not succumb to disease, they soon adjusted their work rate to a more realistic tropical pace. By the middle of 1907 a divisional engineer at Culebra was even requesting that his Spanish workers be replaced by West Indians. The Europeans, he argued, were “little better than the West Indian negro,” and as they were paid twice as much they were a waste of money. Even Stevens was forced to admit that while the introduction of the Europeans might have improved the work rate of the blacks, “the efficiency of the Spaniards did not hold up to the standard first developed.”

For another thing, they were breaking their contracts and leaving in large numbers, mainly to move on to better-paid railway or mining work in South America. The Chilean consul was among those actively recruiting among the ICC's Spaniards, to the fury of the American authorities. Consul Mallet estimated that nearly half of those recruited during 1906 were gone by the beginning of the following year. The main impetus was money—although the Spaniards accepted that they were well paid by the Commission, the cost of living in Panama was such that they would struggle to earn the steamer fare home, let alone the riches they had anticipated. Antonio Sanchez tells of how his group “were deeply disappointed when they realized they would not be able to save enough money for the return trip to the land of their birth.” And if any of them “became a victim of misfortune,” he says, they were in real trouble.

In late January 1907, the thousand or more Spaniards working in the Cut went on strike demanding an increase in pay from $1.60 to $2.50 a day. The West Indian workers were not supportive, however, and had to be protected by the police. After a tense standoff, fighting erupted that led to several deaths and serious injuries among Spaniards and Zone police. The strike's ringleaders were rounded up and the protest quelled. Stevens later ascribed the violence of the repression to the need to give a “severe lesson” to prevent future demands endangering the project. But clashes between Spaniards and police continued for the rest of the year.

Around this time letters and articles started appearing in Madrid newspapers reporting that all was not well on the Isthmus for the expatriate workers. A letter from three workers, printed in
El Socialista
at the end of December 1906, complains about the high expenses in Panama, the retention of a proportion of their wages to repay their outward fare, and poor food and accommodations. Furthermore, the letter said, “People are falling ill the whole time … Many are leaving.” The letter ended by warning others not to be deceived by the “siren songs.” A Spanish journalist sent out to Panama noted, “The labourers’ lives are not highly valued, so there are frequent accidents.”

Toward the end of 1906 worrying news also began to reach Italy about the fate of the thousand or so workers recruited to work in Panama. It was said they had to labor eight hours a day in a swamp with water up to their knees, under the sun in torrid heat, exposed to torrential rain, and suffering from dreadful illnesses. A Naples paper claimed that most of the workers had died, and there were thousands of corpses on the streets. In both countries, the governments began to come under pressure to prevent further migration to the Isthmus.

To Stevens this was simply petulance. “My own private opinion,” he wrote to Shonts in mid-January 1907, “is that no European nation is favourable to the building of the Panama Canal: that they do not want it built; will do anything they can possibly short of open hostility in the shape of force to prevent the consummation of the project, and will, if the movement of laborers from their countries assumes large proportions, take steps directly or indirectly, to prevent such movements.” Stevens, however, was about to become yesterday's man.

he chief engineer was in Washington in December 1906 and those who saw him were shocked at how weary and sour he had become. It appears he had fallen out with Gorgas, whose starring role in Roosevelt's congressional message would have irked Stevens. The following month ICC chairman Theodore Shonts resigned to take up a lucrative post in New York, about which the president could have no complaint. Shonts had told Roosevelt that he would depart the project once the preparatory phase was completed. This resignation should have pleased Stevens. Relations between the two men, never good, had deteriorated of late, and Shonts's departure also cleared the way for Stevens to take absolute control over the project, on the Isthmus at least, as he had requested for so long.

In other ways Stevens had no cause for gloom. The heavy rains experienced by Roosevelt had continued, leading to flooding of the works in December, but in January, with the return of dry weather and the deployment of no less than sixty-three Bucyrus shovels, over half a million cubic yards had been excavated. This monthly figure would grow steadily thereafter, proving that Stevens's machine was working well.

But at the end of January, Stevens sat down and wrote an extraordinary letter to Roosevelt. Six pages long, it revealed the depths of his exhaustion and bitterness. Although he appreciated the support the president had given him, Stevens wrote, he had never sought the Panama job and did not like it. The “honour” of being the canal's builder meant nothing to him. He had been endlessly attacked by “enemies in the rear.” Even the level of his salary had been questioned, when, in fact, he could have returned to the States and secured any of a number of far more lucrative and less stressful jobs, some of which, he wrote, “I would prefer to hold, if you pardon my candor, than the Presidency of the United States.”

Roosevelt received the letter on February 12. He did not “pardon the candor.” Only two months before, he had told the canal workforce that they were like an army in the field. Now their general, to whom Roosevelt had given almost unqualified backing, was looking to desert his troops in a most unmartial way. The letter was sent on to Taft with a note from the president attached: “Stevens must get out at once.” Then he telegraphed Stevens to tell him that his resignation had been accepted, effective April 1.

Stevens never spoke or wrote about his real reasons for quitting, leaving the field open for a miasma of speculation. He had fallen out with the president, it was alleged; he had found that the Gatún dam plan was unworkable; he had discovered something about the role of Cromwell in the sale of the New Company so explosive that it would “blow up the Republican Party.”

Many felt that he had not actually meant to resign, but was either letting off steam or flexing his muscles. Mallet reported to London that Stevens's resignation was never formally tendered and that “an immoderate amount of adulation over the success of Mr. Stevens’ organization and management led him to imagine his services were indispensable to the successful prosecution of the works.”

Stevens, like Shonts, had secured on his hiring the promise that he would be allowed to leave the project once it was up and running. His career before and after Panama shows a succession of departures to take on new challenges, and perhaps Stevens felt that his job was done on the Isthmus. By his own reckoning he handed on a “well-planned and well-built machine.” Whoever came after him would merely have to “turn the crank,” he said. But perhaps he also realized that the nature of the task had fundamentally changed with the firm adoption of the lock-canal plan. From being an unprecedented but essentially low-tech canal, it had become an equally huge, but also technically complex project. There is little doubt that Stevens was the best man to design and build the transportation system for the excavation of the canal, but he had little experience of hydraulics, lock design, or dam construction. Perhaps he understood that it was time for a man with different skills to step up to the plate.