Panama fever (52 page)

Meanwhile other Panamanians had taken the arguments, particularly about customs revenues, out into the open. A delegation was sent to Washington, and articles by prominent Isthmians started appearing in New York newspapers. Then, in October 1904 a leading Panamanian liberal, Dr. Eusabio Morales, secured a commission from the influential
North American Review
for an article critical of the Hay–Bunau-Varilla Treaty. When word of this got to the Republican Party, Morales was approached by men representing the treasurer of the party and offered a bribe to spike the piece. It was just before the presidential election and there was concern that revelations about Roosevelt's connection with the independence of Panama might come out. Morales declined the money but withdrew the article when Roosevelt publicly instructed Taft to go to Panama and settle the tolls question.

The secretary of war, accompanied by Cromwell, arrived in Colón at the end of November. The highest-ranking American to set foot on the Isthmus so far, Taft was a good choice to mollify the Panamanians, in spite of the fact that, privately, he referred to their country as “a kind of Opera Bouffe republic and nation.” At over three hundred pounds, Taft was hugely, disarmingly fat and jovial-looking Sands would call him “a cold man, despite the legend which grew up about him … his geniality was wholly of the surface,” but most people found Taft charming. On December 1 he used a speech at a welcoming banquet to assure his audience that the United States had no imperialistic designs on the republic, and then over the next ten days he combined touring the works with negotiating with the Panamanians over the points in dispute. Every evening there were banquets or balls, where Taft entered heartily into the spirit, amazing the Panamanians with his enthusiastic dancing. “Though the heaviest man, in weight, in the room,” remembered William Karner, “he was as buoyant and light on his feet as a feather or a rubber ball.”

Over the negotiating table, similarly light-footed, Taft managed to placate the Panamanians without actually conceding too much. A controversy over postage rates was settled in Panama's favor; imports from Panama to the Zone were to be duty-free; there was a pledge of money for a stretch of road and a new hospital in Panama City. Taft promised that only essentials for the canal would be imported tariff-free from the United States. Also included in what became known as the “Taft Agreement” was an assurance that employees of the ICC from tropical countries would not be allowed to purchase food from ICC shops. Loopholes in the deal ensured that canal business would not suffer from any of these concessions, but it was the spirit of the Taft Agreement that was important. In the Philippines, despite the defeat of the main pro-independence forces outside Manila in 1902, an insurgency had arisen in the Muslim south that was daily claiming American lives. For the moment at least, the United States felt that its best policy in Panama was to save the face of the incumbent, pro-American leadership and project a stance of compromise and respect.

aft's next stop was Jamaica. Taking consul Mallet with him as a go-between as well as Chief Engineer Wallace, the secretary met Governor Sir James Swettenham to ask permission to recruit workers for the canal.

The labor problem was among the most serious facing the first American canal builders. In spite of the stream of new arrivals, many soon left or turned out to be unsuitable, and by the autumn of 1904 departments had taken to offering inducements for men to leave one sector of the work to join another. One shipment of laborers was met by agents of the Municipal Engineering Division and others from the Building Department “and so keen a competition developed to obtain the men that there ensued a street fight and the subsequent arrest and jailing over night of the principals.” There was also a longer-term question: who was going to build the American Panama Canal?

The leaders of the project, of course, like the new machinery to be deployed, would be American. It was also “recognized” that “most of the superintendents, foremen, and the higher grades of skilled labor would have to be brought from the United States.” According to the canal's quartermaster, Major R. E. Wood, “there was no surplus throughout Central or South America” for this sort of work, and “in many classes there were no men at all available” locally.

It was initially hoped that the American canal effort would be characterized by machines rather than men. Early plans estimated that some eight to ten thousand workers would be required, and Wallace told Taft that he wanted to restrict the number to ten to fifteen thousand. A gross underestimate, as it turned out—at one point there would be more than fifty thousand on the payroll—but still a sizable force to be found.

White workers from the United States were ruled out from the unskilled jobs early on as too expensive, too unionized, and vulnerable to tropical diseases. It would be “useless to discuss the question of utilizing the white race for heavy out-of-door work with pick and shovel in the mud and rain,” wrote Governor Davis in November 1904. “American working men have no call to Panama,” suggested a U.S. commentator, “any more than English working men have to the plains of India.”

Characteristically for the time, the question was seen in terms of the fitness of different races for the job ahead. As chief recruiter William Karner would write, “It has been an interesting job—experimenting in racial types.” Brigadier Peter C. Hains, who served on the Walker Commission of 1899 and would become a canal commissioner in 1905, laid out official thinking on labor in a 1904 article for the
North American Review:
“Where will the labour come from? … The native Isthmian will not work. He is naturally indolent; not over strong; has no ambition; his wants are few in number and easily satisfied. He can live for a few cents a day, and he prefers to take it easy, swinging in a hammock and smoking cigarettes. The native population is wholly unavailable.” The “Chinese coolie,” who had built railroads all over the United States, was considered able to cope with the climate, “industrious,” and easy to manage, but could rarely speak English, and “as soon as he gets a few dollars,” wrote Hains, “he wants to keep a store.”

Hains's preference was for black workers from the British West Indies, whom he characterized as “fairly industrious; not addicted to drink; can speak English … he is willing to work, [and] not deficient in intelligence.” There were other advantages: the islands were reasonably nearby and well served by steamer services; education levels were relatively high; the Antilleans had some immunity to some tropical diseases. But more than anything else they were cheap—wages and conditions on the islands were such that virtually anything the Americans offered would be an improvement. To Taft, there was another great advantage to the West Indian worker. Despite his being “lazy,” he had been taught by the British respect for discipline and authority. “He does loaf about a good deal,” the secretary of state wrote, “but he is amenable to law, and it does not take a large police force to keep him in order.”

Thus Taft chose Jamaica as the nearest and largest of these “natural markets for unskilled labor” to visit in person. But the meeting with the governor did not go according to plan for the Americans. Swettenham remained immune to Taft's charm; in fact, he seemed rather anti-American. The United States party got the distinct impression that he would quite happily see the U.S. canal effort fail. It probably did not help that Admiral Walker, chairman of the ICC, had been musing, according to Mallet, that Jamaica should be taken over by the United States as part of the canal's outer defenses.

To the Americans Swettenham stressed the negatives of the Jamaican experience in Panama during the French period: the “able-bodied emigrants returned enfeebled, sick, infirm, or maimed [who] had to be kept alive at the expense of the parish;” the huge cost to the Jamaican government of repatriating workers after the de Lesseps Company failed. He may have also had in mind the destablizing effects of mass migration—serious worker unrest had been bloodily suppressed only two years before. Then there were the powerful planter interests on the island, ever reluctant to see their pool of cheap labor reduced. The upshot was that the governor announced he would only give permission for recruiting if the U.S. government deposited in the Jamaican Treasury £5 for each laborer shipped to Colón, against the possible costs of repatriating him. Taft, as expected, was appalled at these terms. He called the meetings to a close and returned to the United States.

Wallace arrived back on the Isthmus and, after his customary two days of prostration from seasickness, summoned William Karner and ordered him to get on the next boat to Barbados and to set up a recruiting office there as quickly as possible.

Barbados, although the most distant of the “natural markets for unskilled labor,” had several advantages over the other British West Indian islands. The Windwards and Leewards had relatively low populations and were considered to be ruled directly from the Colonial Office. Barbados, though, seemed to have more sympathetic and independent officials and was massively overpopulated, with two hundred thousand people living on just two hundred square miles. With the economy utterly dependent on a near-worthless sugar crop, there was desperate poverty and malnutrition among the black population. “The island has always been and still is run for the whites,” wrote an American journalist who visited Barbados at this time. “It is a heavenly place to live for the white man who can ignore the frightful misery of the negroes.” It looked like fertile recruiting ground for the Americans.

Karner arrived at Carlisle Bay, near Bridgetown, on December 31 and soon after was introduced by the U.S. consul to the colonial secretary, who told him that the government had been looking at setting up an agency themselves to aid work abroad, as there was a “large surplus” of laborers on the island. In turn, the secretary took Karner to meet the governor, Sir Gilbert Carter. Carter was keen that there should not be a repetition of the situation two years earlier when Barbadians working on a railroad project in Brazil had become stranded and had to be brought home at the government's expense, but otherwise he was far more open to the ICC than had been Swettenham. Karner reckoned that the fact that Lady Carter was an American was helpful.

Karner then arranged for transportation through the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company, which had a large office on the island, employed a local agent, S. E. Brewster, and had medical and contract forms printed up. The contract, agreed with the government, was that each laborer would be employed for five hundred days at a rate of ten cents U.S. an hour. This was about half the minimum that would have been acceptable to a North American laborer but generous by the standards of Barbados, where wages had fallen to as low as a shilling (25 cents) a day. Work was ten hours a day, six days a week, with time and a half paid for overtime and Sundays. Passage to Colón was paid for—with food for the voyage provided—and “medical attendance, medicine, and quarters without furniture, [were] to be furnished free to the laborer, while in the employ of the Commission.” At the end of the contract, or if the worker was incapacitated while employed by the ICC, repatriation would be free.

Eventually some twenty thousand Barbadians—the engine room of the canal effort—would be employed under this same contract, with only small modifications. The initial results were disappointing, however. It seems that the memories of the French period, when over a thousand Barbadians had traveled to Panama, the bad political reputation of Central America generally, and the recent experience in Brazil combined to create suspicion of the new canal project. These fears were fanned by stories of unemployment and hardship on the Isthmus spread by planters and managers not keen to see their all-important labor surplus disappearing.

“There was no rush and on the steamer sailing for Colón, January 26th 1905,” wrote Karner, “I shipped only sixteen laborers.” It would have been seventeen, but at the last moment “one man got stage fright, shouted that I was sending him into slavery and that he would rather kill himself there than to go to the Isthmus and die in slavery.” The next shipment had a few more after Brewster “did some hustling in the adjoining parish.” But Karner was hindered in his efforts by a loss of contact with Wallace in Panama due to a broken cable. When he did receive a message from his boss his orders were vague. Then there was a problem cashing the ICC's checks and further administrative hurdles. Karner estimated that he needed a full-time employee just to fill out his myriad requisition and expenses forms. The frustration was similar to that being suffered on the Isthmus.