Panama fever (68 page)

During the weeks that followed, Rose spent her days with Martina, “helping her in any way I could to bear up under her grief and start planning her life anew.” But her nights she spent “pacing the floors of our little house atop the hill, wringing my hands and trying desperately, futilely, to unknot my nerves.” Martina was now no longer entitled to live in House Number Seven, and had to earn a living. For a couple of weeks she tried setting up a laundry, but then decided to return to Holland. “I went with her to the Dutch Consul in Panama,” wrote Rose, “to arrange for passport and passage. After a last sad pilgrimage to the damp grave of her husband, she went back across the ocean, a mournful figure in black.”
^*

With Martina no longer relying on her, Rose began to break down again. She talked with Jan about quitting Panama. He had been badly shaken, too, but responded by “hurling his energies with renewed determination into the job at hand.” Rose, however, found herself, she wrote, “drifting closer and closer to the yawning chasm of panic into which I had fallen once before, during the height of Sister's bout with the fever. And finally, much to my own disgust, I was put to bed with another spell of hysteria. The children haunted the bedside like frightened little shadows. I realized that I must pull myself together.”

Then there was a much-needed and very welcome boost: “news came to us of the expected arrival, soon, of a visitor who—-Jan triumphantly told us—had the welfare of all of us at heart: Theodore Roosevelt.” It appeared that the man for whom “anything was possible” was coming to see his canal.

*
Martina Milliery, née Korver, remarried and had another child in about 1912. This son emigrated to South Africa in 1930 but the rest of the family moved to Dutch-controlled Indonesia. During the Second World War they were interned by the Japanese. Jantje's son Jack died in the camp in 1945, shortly after his stepfather. Martina survived, but was blind from malnutrition. She returned to Holland and died in 1958, impoverished, in a home for the blind.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

SEGREGATION

Roosevelt's visit to the Isthmus can only really be compared with the two much-celebrated visits of “the Presiding Genius of the Nineteenth Century,” Ferdinand de Lesseps. The authorities in Panama had heard about the impending presidential descent back in July, and from that moment on thousands of workers had beavered away preparing the Isthmus for Roosevelt's November inspection. According to Mallet, Panama had never before been so thoroughly scrubbed, swept, and cleaned. A wing of the new hotel, the Tivoli, was rapidly completed to house the honored guest, and a new railway station built nearby. An elaborate schedule was prepared, replete with ceremonies, speeches, and dinners.

Roosevelt sailed on November 9 on board the 16,000-ton
Louisiana
, the largest battleship of the now rapidly growing U.S. fleet, with two cruisers in attendance. It was an unprecedented moment. Never before had a serving U.S. president left the country. Of course, there were some on the Isthmus who were cynical about the “momentous visit.” Mary Chatfield had written home in September: “There is much talk about the anticipated visit of the president. All agree that if he wants to find out how things are he will have to come in disguise.”

To be fair to Roosevelt, from the moment of his arrival he went to great pains to throw the canal leadership on the Isthmus off balance, to dig beneath the prepared façade. Frank Maltby wrote that Roosevelt “seemed obsessed with the idea that someone was trying to hide something from him.” For his landing on November 15, schoolchildren had been lined up to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” and a cannon procured for an official salute. But the president arrived onshore an hour early, much to the consternation of the official greeting party, which included the president of Panama, who were still at breakfast in the Washington Hotel.

On the first of his three days in Panama, Roosevelt excused himself after lunch at the new Tivoli Hotel, saying he was retiring to his room. “Instead,” writes Maltby, “he bolted out the back door, rushed up the hill to Ancón Hospital and into the wards, where he began talking to the patients as to their treatment and care.” Thereafter, Roosevelt continually evaded his official schedule to drop in on mess-rooms and kitchens, to interview passing workers, or to ferret around in ICC barracks and lodgings. Canal officials were thrown into confusion. Mary Chatfield reports that “when the president was at Cristóbal they were in a panic at the Cristóbal Hotel, hurrying off the filthy table clothes and replacing them with clean ones, fearful he might come bounding in.”

Roosevelt, in contrast to de Lesseps, deliberately came to Panama at the height of the rainy season. He wanted to see conditions at their worst. And it rained. On the second day of his visit, three inches fell in two hours, a new record even for Panama. Roosevelt took it all in his stride, rushing about or posing in a downpour sitting at the controls of one of the huge Bucyrus steam shovels, all the time making what a
Washington Post
headline called “A Strenuous Exhibition on the Isthmus.” “He was intensely energetic,” remembered Frank Maltby. “He seemed to be able to carry on a conversation with me and dictate a cablegram to his secretary at the same time. He reveled in the publicity and commotion his visit created. He would make a speech at the slightest opportunity and without any preliminaries.” Everywhere he went, addressing the white workers as “the pick of American manhood,” he urged them to “play their part like men among men.”

After two days, Stevens was exhausted. “I have blisters on both my feet and am worn out,” he told Maltby. “Shonts is knocked out completely.” On the last day, Maltby showed the president the site of the controversial Gatún dam. To get a better overall view it was suggested they climb a nearby hill. “We, together with three or four Secret Service men, charged up the hill as if we were taking a fort by storm,” Maltby reports.

On the evening of his departure, a mass reception for President Roosevelt was held in the great building that covered the largest wharf of the Commission at Cristóbal. Virtually the entire American canal force was present, crowding the immense structure, which was decorated with flags and lanterns. Roosevelt then made an impromptu speech, which captures the martial heroism of his vision of the great enterprise: “Whoever you are, if you are doing your duty, the balance of the country is placed under obligation to you, just as it is to a soldier in a great war,” he proclaimed. “As I have looked at you and seen you work, seen what you have done and are doing, I have felt just exactly as I would feel to see the big men of our country carrying on a great war.”

The visit went down well with the press at home, even among those papers that were most critical of the canal, and provided a significant morale boost on the Isthmus. Rose van Hardeveld remembers the effect it had on her. “We saw him once, on the end of a train,” she wrote. Jan had got hold of small flags for the children, and told them when the president would be passing their house, “so we were standing on the steps. Mr. Roosevelt flashed us one of his well-known toothy smiles and waved his hat at the children as though he wanted to come up the hill and say ‘Hello!’ I caught some of Jan's confidence in the man. Maybe this ditch will get dug after all, I thought. And I was more certain than ever that we ourselves would not leave until it was finished.” Two months later a visiting English journalist noted the “energy” and “optimistic spirit” of the Americans working on the canal. “Every man,” he wrote, “seems animated with the idea that he is doing a necessary part of the canal, and a feeling of pride prevails everywhere.”

Roosevelt reported back to Congress on December 17. There was impressive progress to outline. In spite of the rainy season, and the thousands of men still employed putting up buildings, the month before his visit had seen a new record for excavation—325,000 cubic yards. The long period of preparation was at last coming to an end, and the actual digging was under way. At Gatún over a hundred new borings had been made on the dam site and excavation had started on the lock basins. At Cristóbal he had seen the new bakery in action, churning out 24,000 loaves a day, as well as the nearly completed coal depot and cold storage plant. The workforce had topped twenty thousand, and the supply from the West Indies and Spain seemed secure.

But the bulk of his message to Congress concerned what he must have judged to be the two interlinked problems that posed the greatest threat to the success of the canal: the high turnover of skilled men (still running at nearly 100 percent a year) and negative publicity at home. A new reward for long service—the Roosevelt medal—was announced. And the canal effort was described in unmistakably patriotic terms—”something which will redound immeasurably to the credit of America.” The sanitation effort of Gorgas was praised to the rooftops. Among the Americans, including dependents, there had not been a single death from disease in three months, a very impressive record, Roosevelt pointed out, even by mainland United States standards. On numerous occasions direct reference was made to Poultney Bigelow and his report rubbished, which gives an indication of the great and lasting effect it had had. It was almost as though Roosevelt went to Panama specifically to erase the stain that his law school classmate had put on the enterprise. It was simply unpatriotic to criticize the canal effort, the president exclaimed. For detractors, he said, he felt “the heartiest contempt and indignation; because, in a spirit of wanton dishonesty and malice, they are trying to interfere with, and hamper the execution of, the greatest work of the kind ever attempted, and are seeking to bring to naught the efforts of their countrymen to put to the credit of America one of the giant feats of the ages.”

However, Roosevelt himself had seen that all was not rosy on the Isthmus. On his return to Washington he wrote to Shonts: “The least satisfactory feature of the entire work to my mind was the arrangement for feeding the Negroes. Those cooking sheds with their muddy floors and with the unclean pot which each man had in which he cooked everything, are certainly not what they should be.” And while the health of the white workers was indeed impressive, “the very large sick rates among the negroes, compared with the whites,” was alarming. In fact, as Roosevelt's own figures acknowledge, the black workers were three times as likely to die of disease. In the ten months of 1906 before the presidential visit, thirty-four white workers had died, compared with nearly seven hundred West Indians. Roosevelt suggested that “a resolute effort should be made to teach the negro some of the principles of personal hygiene.”

Gorgas had concluded, in his health report of July 1906, that the black workers were dying at three times the rate of the whites because, contrary to the earlier belief, their race could not stand the climate as well as their American employers. “We do not agree with the doctor,” countered the
Colón Independent
angrily. “The higher death rate is, in our opinion, due to circumstances. The white employers are better housed, better paid, and therefore live better; they do the bossing while the blacks do the actual labor, such as work in mud, and water and rain. Change conditions with the two races and see if there would not be triple the amount of deaths.”

Mary Chatfield, soon to leave the Isthmus having, she felt, “done one citizen's duty towards the building of the Panama Canal,” gives a vivid description of what conditions were like for the black workers. Riding on a train near Mount Hope, she spotted some laborers’ quarters near the railroad:

Wretched little houses rest on stilts, and now during the rainy season the water is constantly on the level with the floors … When I left the office at 5 o'clock the negro laborers were returning to their quarters and were getting their suppers on little charcoal braziers outdoors. It was a sad sight to me … How could they get their suppers with rain pouring in torrents for an hour? They are not allowed to cook in their quarters for fear of fire and no covered place is provided for them in which to cook, so these poor men exist under difficulties. Consider the brilliant criticisms some of the authors of magazine articles make on “The lazy, worthless, Jamaican laborer.” They sleep all night on a strip of canvas but little wider than their bodies, they must get up in the morning and cook their breakfasts out of doors in the tropical rain or shine, as it happens. They must be at work at 7 o'clock A.M., they get their noon meals under the same weather conditions as other meals. They receive the splendid wage of 10 cents, U.S. currency, an hour. They are obliged to pay at the government commissary as high prices for food as are charged at the grocery stores in the City of New York, whose proprietors have high rents to pay and are doing business for profit.

The West Indians, often unfamiliar with modern machinery, and given the most dangerous jobs, were also suffering from accidents at twice the rate of the white employees. At Ancón hospital, detailed autopsies were carried out on West Indians, which included the measurement of brain weight, skull thickness, and skull shape. The doctors’ conclusion was that the large number of accidents befalling the black workers indicated “a striking lack of appreciation for a dangerous environment [in] the negro's mental processes.”