Panama fever (72 page)

Early in his tenure, Goethals had set up a routine that he would hear complaints from Gold Roll employees every Sunday morning, just as Stevens had done. Silver Roll employees had the same chance to air their grievances, but only with Joseph Bucklin Bishop, the unctuous secretary to the Commission, who, among other things, acted as Roosevelt's eyes and ears on the Isthmus. Bishop recruited a Spanish-speaking Italian, Joseph Garibaldi, grandson of the famous independence leader, to deal with the southern Europeans. In a 1907 labor report Garibaldi explained the genesis of the problems the Spanish labor seemed to be presenting. “Supposed ill treatment in most cases was simply due to a misunderstanding between the men and the employees in charge, because of different languages,” he wrote. Hardly any of the Americans spoke Spanish. “In some cases the laborer,” Garibaldi continued, “failing to understand the order and not complying with it immediately, has been discharged. If the discharged man resented this action and made some comment in his native language, accompanying his remarks with gestures—as most Europeans do—the foreman, failing to understand the man, and thinking himself insulted, would in some cases use violence. The result of this would be a strike by the whole gang, and sometimes by the entire camp.”

Garibaldi tactfully pointed out that the foreman “was not always to blame, this owing to the rather turbulent character of the imported laborer,” but in July and August 1907 such small-scale strikes were happening all along the line among the European laborers. The ICC response was to try to identify the “ring-leaders” and swiftly deport them as “professional agitators.”

Although the measure brought success on the Isthmus—strikes fell away from the end of 1907—the reluctant returnees further fueled to the clamor in the Spanish press to outlaw the ICC recruitment agents. After a spate of newspaper stories detailing the violence of the “Yankee police,” the arrival of a liberal government in Madrid in early 1909 saw the representatives of the canal finally banned from Spain. The Italian government followed suit, even though their official investigator had found very few of his countrymen still at work on the Isthmus when he visited in late 1908.

Goethals was unconcerned. The attitude was: we do not want you anyway. “At the present time all of our superintendents and foremen are unanimously of the opinion that the efficiency of our 20-cent (40 cents silver) contract labor is much less now than it was a year ago,” he wrote to the Spanish chargé d'affaires in Panama City. “In addition, several instances have been reported to me which indicate that the conduct of our contract laborers, as a whole, verges on insubordination; that the orders of foremen and others in authority are not received with respect and executed as the necessities of the work require.” Thereafter, although there were still some twenty-five hundred Spaniards working on the canal at the end of the construction period, the numbers steadily dwindled. For various reasons, Stevens's experiment had failed. In the main, then, it would still be British West Indians who would do the bulk of the work building the American Panama Canal.

n spite of the problems with the Spanish laborers, the work continued steadily through 1907. Surveying parties were hacking through the jungle to map the contours of the new lake basin. In July work started on digging the lock basins on the Pacific side, and August saw a new, fresh record for excavation. By the end of the year, the workforce had grown by 15,000 to nearly 46,000, twice the peak number under de Lesseps. The year delivered a total excavation figure of nearly 16 million cubic yards, more than the entire American total up to December 1906.

Goethals divided the work into three divisions, as the French had done. The Atlantic Division stretched from Limón Bay to Gatún. To protect the entrance of the canal from “northers,” the French had dug their canal in the shelter of the bay's eastern shore. The Americans opted to head directly into the center of the bay, and protect the entrance to the waterway from storms and silting through the construction of breakwaters out into the harbor. While these were being planned, dredges were scooping and sucking out a channel 41 feet deep and 500 feet wide from deep water three and a half miles offshore to the site of the planned dam, three and a half miles inland. This key structure was also the responsibility of this division. By the end of the year the dam site was clear of vegetation and the lock basin excavation proceeding well.

The Central Division ran from Gatún to Pedro Miguel and included the preparation of the new lake basin as well as the excavation in the Cut. The Pacific Division ran from deep water in Panama Bay up the valley of the Río Grande to the foot of the mountains of the Continental Divide at Pedro Miguel. As on the Atlantic side, dredges and steam shovels worked their way upward from the coast.

Inevitably, there were some changes to the original plan. After 2 million cubic yards of spoil had already been removed from the site of the Sosa locks, it was decided in December 1907, for a variety of reasons, to move them three miles inland to Miraflores. For one thing, Miraflores offered a more stable site for locks and dam, but, most important, it was safe from naval bombardment.

In line with the military requirements of the canal, and prompted by the U.S. Navy, the width of the locks was increased from 100 to 110 feet, in part because of the extra compartments around naval vessels’ hulls needed to combat the new threat of submarine attack. The largest Navy battleship on the drawing boards, the
Pennsylvanian
, had a beam of 98 feet. (The
Titanic
, then under construction, was 94 feet wide.) The locks designed by Eiffel, when de Lesseps finally conceded to the lock plan, were little more than half this size. The width of the rest of the canal was increased as well from 200 to 300 feet at the bottom, making it four times as broad as the projected French canal. It was becoming increasingly apparent that the de Lesseps canal, had it been completed, would have been almost immediately obsolete.

These changes obviously increased the massive excavation still ahead for Goethals and his army regime. But for now this held no fear. By the beginning of 1908, the majority of the workforce was at last engaged in actual excavation, rather than building or sanitation work. “The biggest boss is King Yardage,” wrote an American journalist who visited in February 1908. “A toiling, moiling, delving potentate to whom all make obeisance, and who imperiously demands results every minute of the day.” And the results were spectacular. In 1908, 37 million cubic yards were removed, more than double the previous record year and about half of what the two French companies had achieved in seventeen years. The era of the “solid inevitability” of the American canal seemed at last to have arrived.

ut the turnover of skilled American staff, still running at a rate of nearly 100 percent a year, remained a concern of the canal leadership. During 1907, more than three thousand new skilled workers had to be recruited in the States to keep up a Gold Roll force that in the middle of the year numbered only 4,400. The response was to accelerate the process, started by Stevens and Magoon, of providing for the white workers every possible convenience and luxury.

Each morning a supply train of twelve cars left Cristóbal for the line, containing five of ice and cold storage provisions, two of bread, one of vegetables, and four of staple commissary supplies. Starting in April 1908 the bakery started producing pies and pastry in huge quantities, and the cold storage facility was expanded to include an ice-cream factory and a coffee-grinding plant. Laundries and drying rooms were constructed for the Gold Roll employees. More and more stores were opened, to the dismay of the Panamanian merchants and the delight of house-and-home runners like Rose van Hardeveld. When a commissary at last opened in Las Cascadas the vegetables might have been thin on the ground, she reports, but the staples were plentiful. And if you got there at eight in the morning, as most tried to do, you might even find something new to break the monotony. Rose felt that a corner had been turned: “I realized… that the last vestige of fear and uncertainty seemed to have left us when our children were able to buy ice cream cones and soda pop at the clubhouse … we now felt thoroughly at home, truly, now, a transplanted bit of the United States.” Jessie Murdoch, the Ancón nurse who had arrived back in 1904, expressed a similar sentiment. By mid-1908, she wrote, “we were surrounded by all the modern comforts and conveniences. Telephones buzzed, electric lights were flashed on, and we recognized ourselves as a part of an ideal community.”

For Rose van Hardeveld, even more important than home comforts was the growing number of families in the Zone. Roosevelt's visit had helped improve the image of Panama, and the ICC offered strong inducements, mainly in the form of superior housing for married workers. By May 1908 there were well over a thousand families in the Zone, and a riot of weddings. On one steamer ten brides arrived from the United States and were all married on the dock within twelve minutes of disembarking. The bachelors on the Isthmus who could not persuade their sweethearts to join them had to look closer to home. This meant the nurses of Ancón hospital, who consequently could take their pick.

Once assigned married quarters, the young couples found that virtually everything was provided free by the ICC, including rent, light, janitor service, ice, distilled water, and fuel, as well as hospital and medical care. All the bride and groom need buy was bedclothes and china. As the Zone policeman Harry Franck pointed out, “It is doubtful, to be sure, whether one-fourth of the ‘Zoners’ of any class ever lived as well before or since. The shovelman's wife who gives five-o'clock teas and keeps two servants will find life different when the canal is opened and she moves back to the smoky little factory cottage and learns again to do her own washing.”

In the summer of 1908 the van Hardevelds were told that a new house was ready for them nearby. Before moving out of House Number One, they took a holiday back in Nebraska, returning in November with a new addition to the family, a son. Their new dwelling was “one of the brand new cottages over the hill… painted battleship grey.” Although the mold and insects soon moved in as well, Rose professed herself very pleased. The house had modern plumbing and electric light, and was “clean and comfortable, just about the type of home a man in the States would try to provide for his family.”