Panama fever (74 page)

American journalist Arthur Bullard, who had been in Barbados to watch Karner recruit laborers, actually tracked down a member of the U.S. Socialist Party among the Gold Roll workforce. He asked him whether he was living in his ideal state. “First of all, there ain't any democracy down here,” Bullard was told. “It's a Bureaucracy that's got Russia backed off the map … Government ownership don't mean anything to us working men unless we own the Government. We don't here—this is the sort of thing Bismarck dreamed of.”

The concentration of power in one man, the “Czar of Panama” George Goethals, had resulted, one journalist wrote, in “the establishment of an autocratic form of government for the Canal Zone … not in accord with the principles of democracy.” Zone policeman Harry Franck described the regime as “enlightened despotism.” According to him, it seems to have succeeded through the character of Goethals himself, whom he describes as “an Omnipotent, Omniscient, Omnipresent ruler.” This is echoed in many other accounts. Rose van Hardeveld also calls Goethals “omnipresent.” “The Old Man” as he became known, “was so constantly on the job that we never thought of him as being at home or eating or sleeping.” “Goethals dominates over everybody and everything,” Mallet reported to London. To anyone in Panama, this was unmistakable. “You can't realize what the Chief Engineer is until you live on the Isthmus,” wrote Courtney Lindsay home. “His power is as near absolute as any man's can get.”

Goethals himself was uneasy about the nature of his regime but believed it was the only way to get the canal built. But there is more than a hint of Big Brother in some of his methods. Officials, known as “spotters,” toured the works and the terminal cities in disguise, not only to punish “loafing,” but also to weed out potential troublemakers. The spotters had the power to deport “undesirables.” “The system is one that would be very repugnant to Englishmen,” reported a London journalist. “Employés dismissed are given no notice nor granted any compensation.” “The men complain of the savage rigor with which even petty misdemeanours are punished all along the Zone,” wrote an American journalist in an article published in April 1909. Two men who attacked the Zone government in a New Orleans newspaper made the mistake of remaining on the Isthmus. They were arrested, prosecuted for criminal libel, and imprisoned. A watching journalist described the sentences as “judicial terrorism … the kind of justice dealt out in some, if not most, of the courts is not the sort that would be tolerated long in a democracy.”

But on the whole, more subtle pressures were sufficient to keep criticism at bay. Those who complained were labeled “kickers.” As one perceptive American journalist explained: “there has grown up in Panama circles somewhat of a tendency to monopolize patriotism, and identify it with official designs, means, methods, and management. Dissent or a different viewpoint is too often hailed with cries of ‘Enemies of the Canal.’” To criticize the leadership, then, was un-American, as many Zonians believed. One of the first resolutions of the new Women's Club in Panama was “that every club-woman in the Canal Zone constitute herself a committee of one to foster favourable instead of adverse criticism of the conditions of the Zone and of the Isthmus of Panama.”

Goethals sat at the top of a rigid hierarchical structure. There was a racial “ladder,” of course, with the Americans and the hundred or so British at the top; next came the Panamanian and Spanish “almost-whites;” at the bottom were the blacks, with the West Indians beneath the locals in status. But within the small white community there was also an obvious pecking order. “Caste lines are as sharply drawn as in India,” wrote Harry Franck. “The Brahmins are the ‘gold’ employees … But—and herein we out-Hindu the Hindus—the Brahmin caste itself is divided and subdivided into infinitesimal gradations. Every rank and shade of man has a different salary, and exactly in accordance with that salary he is housed, furnished, and treated down to the least item,—number of electric lights, candle-power, size of bed, size of bookcase.” Such differences in status felt immensely important. “D, who is a quartermaster at $225, may be on ‘How-are-you-old-man?’ terms with G, who is a station agent and draws $175. But Mrs. D never thinks of calling on Mrs. G socially,” Franck continued.

But if the Zone had become, as the diplomat William Sands complained, a “drearily efficient state,” the terminal cities remained, in comparison, anarchic and chaotic. Panama City had more than 200 bars, Colón 131, including 40 in one street. Every Saturday night special trains were put into service, bringing in hundreds of canal workers. For Harry Franck, Panama and Colón acted “as a sort of safety valve, where a man can … blow off steam; get rid of the bad internal vapors that might cause explosion in a ventless society.”

It was, then, a less than ideal setting for the fostering of understanding and respect between Americans and their Panamanian hosts. The Americans “blowing off steam” seemed to the locals loud, rude, and drunk. Harry Franck describes an American “type” “grown so painfully prevalent”: “a chestless youth… whose proofs of manhood are cigarettes and impudence and discordant noise, and whose national superiority is demonstrated by the maltreating of all other races.” Clashes continued, often centered on the notorious Cocoa Grove brothel in Colón. In September 1908, in Panama City, an American was killed and another seriously wounded in an altercation between citizens and U.S. sailors. The Zone authorities demanded and received permission to patrol the terminal cities to prevent a recurrence of fighting, and the Panamanian government, protesting that the fault was with the drunkenness of the Americans, was forced to pay an indemnity of nearly half a million dollars to the United States.

Many Americans considered the Panamanians backward, deluded about their own importance, and lacking in gratitude for everything the United States had done for them. In March 1908 an article appeared in the Philadelphia
Saturday Evening Post
entitled “Life in Spigotty Land: The Cohorts of King Yardage.” Its author, Samuel G. Blythe, described the “scores of clear-eyed, broad-shouldered and hard-headed Americans who are carrying out their part of the work without hope of fame, but as Americans, doing an American job in an American way.” Little heed was paid to the Panamanians, he wrote, “who are funny little people, vainglorious and, thinking they achieved their own liberty, have an idea the canal is being dug for their especial benefit.” In fact, the truth was “the republic was made for our convenience and it is held up by the scruff of its neck by this Government.”

Indeed, neither of the republic's political parties could afford to antagonize Uncle Sam. The Conservatives, many still favoring annexation by the United States, saw American power as the best defense of their interests. The Liberals needed the Americans as well. Unless the forthcoming 1908 presidential elections were supervised by the United States, there would be an inevitable repeat of the fixed municipal and National Assembly votes of two years previously. The government candidate, backed by the outgoing Amador, was Ricardo Arias, brother of Tomás, and an ultrarightist. The Liberal Party, thinking its own candidate would never stand a chance, backed José de Obaldía for the presidency. Obaldía had been a popular vice president and was also close to the Americans, having served as ambassador in Washington.

It proved a shrewd move. Taft considered Arias corrupt and utterly lacking in scruples, while Obaldía was seen as the best guarantee of a smooth succession. Predicting that Arias, with Amador's help, would so blatantly fix the vote that an uprising would result, he decided to acquiesce in Liberal demands that the United States supervise the election. In the meantime, William Nelson Cromwell popped up again helping run Obaldía's campaign. Realizing he was fatally out of favor with the Americans, Arias withdrew and Obaldía was elected unopposed.

Clearly the Liberal Party no longer seemed a threat to American interests in Panama. Taft affirmed, “We have such control in Panama that no Government elected by them will feel a desire to antagonize the American Government.” Indebted to the United States for its 1908 election victory, the party under Obaldía's presidency would make no trouble for Goethals. But then, at the beginning of 1910, the president died. His successor as first designate was Carlos Mendoza, who had been a leader of the revolution in Colón back in November 1903. According to Mallet, Mendoza was “extremely tactful and friendly towards everybody,” but for the Americans there was a problem. Mendoza was a mulatto. Not only would having a nonwhite Panamanian president contrast a little too sharply with the racial hierarchy in the Zone, but Mendoza, according to Sands's replacement as U.S. chargé d'affaires, possessed “a racial inability to refrain long from abuse of power.”

Mallet reports that on the prompting of Goethals, a junior officer in the U.S. legation, Richard O. Marsh, “put it about to the most notorious babblers in the city that the United States Government would regard the election of Senor Mendoza as unconstitutional, and that if the National Assembly persisted in his election a military occupation of Panama would be the inevitable result.” Mendoza formally withdrew his candidacy and an elderly white Liberal patrician was installed as president. “It is really farcical to talk of Panama as an independent state,” wrote Mallet to the Foreign Office. “It is really simply an annex of the Canal Zone.” The United States’ grip on the republic would last until the end of the construction period (and, of course, beyond). Mallet reported in 1913, after the election the previous year of Belisario Porras, the erstwhile “notorious hater of foreigners,” that it was now impossible to be president without being “docile to American wishes.”

n the United States, the end of 1908 saw a presidential election campaign between Taft and William Jennings Bryan. Roosevelt had publicly backed his secretary of war. But then, a month before the vote, Panama was once again front-page news. The story had been reignited in September of the previous year when Cromwell's claim for payment from the New Company, being arbitrated in Paris, was leaked to the New York press. Undoubtedly the lawyer had put a favorable gloss on his description of work performed for his client, but the extent of influence he claimed in the heart of U.S. government was deeply unsettling. Then, in October 1908, the
New York World
published a story that accused Taft's influential brother Charles, and Roosevelt's brother-in-law, Douglas Robinson, of being members and beneficiaries of the syndicate supposedly set up to profit from the sale of the New Company to the U.S. government. Further allegations were made during the campaign as the Democrats saw a way to attack the Republicans. Cromwell, the
World
claimed, was “practically the Secretary of War as far as the Panama Canal was concerned,” and his “law offices at No. 41 Wall Street were even regarded by many as the real executive offices of the Panama Canal.”

Roosevelt, furious that what he considered to be the greatest foreign policy achievement of his administration was once again mired in scandal, brought a prosecution for criminal libel against Joseph Pulitzer, owner of the
World
, two of his editors, and two publishers of the
Indianapolis News
, which had picked up the story. To prepare his defense, Pulitzer sent two of his best investigative reporters to Washington, Paris, Panama, and Bogotá to get the “Untold Story of Panama.” Followed everywhere by Secret Service agents, they found obstruction at every turn. In Paris they were told that the details of shareholders were in a sealed vault. When their lawyers eventually got access, they found the records virtually nonexistent. The paper's British counsel commented, “I have never known in my lengthy experience in company matters any public corporation, much less one of such vast importance, having so completely disappeared and removed all traces of its existence as the New Panama Canal Company.” In Panama, the journalists found vital cable evidence destroyed and the “revolutionaries”—unwilling to lose the trust and support of the United States—good at keeping political secrets. They denied everything, even meeting Cromwell.

But by now the cases had become more about freedom of speech and federal versus state government than about specific allegations. When the trial started in 1909, it was deemed unconstitutional for the government to “drag citizens from distant States to the capital to be tried.” Judge Anderson dismissed the case, and the evidence of the syndicate and of United States collusion in the “revolution” was never put to the test. The judge did, however, have one final comment to make on the case: “There are many peculiar circumstances about the Panama canal business,” he said. “Rather suddenly it became known that it could be procured for $40,000,000. There were a number of people who thought there was something not just exactly right about that transaction, and I will say for myself that I have a curiosity to know what the real truth was … I am suspicious about it now.”