Panama fever (61 page)

he following year, 1906, would be one of the most difficult for the project: even if the terrible fear caused by yellow fever had faded, the death rate among the workers and technicians—from malaria, pneumonia, typhoid, and accidents—would actually increase to its highest for the whole U.S. construction period. But at the end of 1905 the project's leaders could congratulate themselves on a number of achievements to add to Gorgas's yellow fever victory. Problems with the water supply for Panama City had been corrected, so that Mallet could write to his wife in September that at last “the strong smell of decomposed fish has gone.” Sewers were in operation and much of the city had been paved. In the six months since Stevens's arrival over six hundred of the old French buildings had been repaired, twice the number Wallace managed in a year. Stevens's other priority, food supply, although not solved, was certainly being addressed. Refrigerated trucks were now carrying ice and perishables along the line to the growing number of commissary stores, hotels, and messes. Several of the Panama Railroad's steamers had been fitted out with cold compartments, so that fresh food could arrive in pristine condition from the United States. At the end of the year Stevens started plans for a cold-storage plant and bakery at Cristóbal.

The white, largely American canal community was changing, and the project was beginning to lose its frontier town feel. When American journalist John Foster Carr visited the Isthmus at the beginning of 1906, six months after his first trip there, he found that “the day of the good-for-nothing tropical tramp had nearly passed.” Certainly Stevens had set about, as he put it, “weeding out the faint-hearted and incompetent,” but for Carr, the Isthmus itself had also carried out some sort of selection. “The men themselves,” he wrote, “have distinctive virtues as a body that are easily accounted for. Most of them are plucky, for it took pluck to come to the Isthmus and stay when yellow fever was in the land. They are mostly decent, healthy fellows, for the climate is severe on vices of over-indulgence in a northerner. Of those who will not heed the warning many are invalided home; a certain number die. Something like a real moral selection is the result.”

Six months before, Carr had found the young Americans on the project simply surviving. At the end of the day, “they were too tired to talk. They sat about silently and went to bed at nine o'clock. On Sunday there was nowhere to go, because the jungle hemmed them in as if it were a thousand leagues of ocean.” The one day off would be spent “on the hotel verandas, smoking, lazily watching the vultures floating high up in the air, ‘talking shop,’ and telling tales of Cuba and the Philippines, where scores of them have been.” But now some of the rough edges were disappearing. Food was plentiful and relatively cheap; screens on windows and doors meant that lights could be burned after dark; the shock of the climate and the work ahead wore off; the fear of “yellow jack” was gone. “The last six months have seen a great change,” wrote Carr at the beginning of 1906. “New habits are forming and life is rapidly approaching the normal.”

Carr was something of a drumbeater for the canal project; other journalists give a more nuanced view of the emerging new community. “Normal family life is becoming established and society is developing peculiar forms,” reported the
New York Independent
magazine in March 1906. “In some places it resembles official life in India. At the balls married women reign supreme, with abundance of admirers and no debutante rivals … After the novelty … wears off, life … is barren and dull for most of the men … It is more from ennui than from viciousness that many of the employees seek for solace in the cocktail and the jackpot.”

Some of the Americans did take things into their own hands. Frank Maltby still living in the old “De Lesseps Palace” where every room was now full of young engineers, used trips back to the United States to bring to Panama a pool table, card tables, and a piano. He also subscribed to every paper he could think of. So was established “Maltby's Mess,” a mini-community remembered fondly by many. Others started a baseball league and bridge clubs.

But for most, particularly the young bachelors, there was little more variety of diversion than had been available for Henri Cermoise twenty years before. “Most of the young men on the Isthmus have absolutely no places of amusement, recreation, and rendezvous except the saloons and gambling places,” complained a U.S. diplomat. For all Carr's “moral selection,” over six hundred bars were kept busy on the Isthmus, arrests for drunkenness far surpassed any other cause, and a huge number of prostitutes made a good living in the terminal cities.

The corrupting influence of life in the tropics, and of life in Panama in particular, on fine young upstanding Americans was of constant concern and interest to the public at home. Apart from anything else, it made for good copy. Thus the challenge for Stevens and Magoon in finding respectable diversion for their workers became a question not just of protecting the men from their worst impulses, but also, and perhaps more important, of nullifying dangerous domestic criticism. In early 1905, a YMCA representative, touring the Isthmus, had written, in a widely reproduced report, that “positive forces for evil” were “wide open in … Panama and Colón.” At fault was the legal lottery in the republic, “saloons and drinking places in large numbers … dispensing a most inferior and highly injurious quality of liquor,” the popular sports of bullfighting and cockfighting, and prostitution, which, he said, was “as bad as might be expected in a country of loose marriage relations, lax laws etc.” The solution to the moral crisis was identified as the creation of “libraries and reading rooms … reputable places of amusement, grounds for outdoor games … [and] clubs for mental, moral or physical culture.”

This measure had been backed by Wallace and other senior Americans on the Isthmus, but the Commission under Walker, although “heartily approving of the plan,” had not felt that the law gave them the authority to “use money appropriated for the construction of the Canal for the amusement of the Canal employees.” The forceful Stevens had more luck and in November 1905 the ICC decision was overruled by presidential decree, and work started on a clubhouse at Cristóbal, complete with dance hall, card room, bowling alleys, gymnasium, showers, and a writing room. Three more were earmarked for Empire, Gorgona, and Culebra. At the same time, sports pitches, “opportunities for wholesome open-air exercise,” were planned and started.

But women were considered the key. To break down the all-male, army-camp atmosphere in which “immoral” behavior was considered acceptable, Stevens, Magoon, and Shonts went out of their way to encourage men to bring their wives to the Isthmus. A heavily subsidized steamer fare was offered, along with superior accommodation and commissary rights. By autumn 1905 work was under way on a number of schools for Zone children, the first of which opened in January 1906.

All this municipal work occupied much of the labor force in Stevens's first six months, but there were important improvements on the engineering side as well. Deeper borings with state-of-the-art drills had at last found bedrock deep under Gatún; at Colón, the docks were overhauled and vast warehouses constructed. The backlog on the all-important railway was cleared by the end of the year. Maltby's coastal division had dug an underwater channel out to sea for large ships to use the port, and the old French canal had been dredged as far as Gatún so that supplies could be brought inland. All this, which involved the removal during 1905 of well over a million cubic yards of underwater material, was achieved by the old, inherited machinery. There would not be an American dredge at work until mid-1907.

In the Cut, a pipeline had been laid carrying compressed air to power the drills, and by December 1905 there were nineteen shovels at work in the “big ditch.” Not that “dirt” was “flying”—the floor of the French diggings had not been lowered by an inch. Instead, patience was still the watchword as the shovels carefully widened and prepared the site to Stevens's exact specifications. Terraces were built for further excavators to work on, as teams such as Jan van Hardeveld's laid miles of heavy track for the spoil trains to come.

All the while, the chief engineer took pains to remain visible and accessible. Mallet reported to his wife in September 1905 that “Stevens lives on the line.” The chief engineer also put aside three hours every Sunday morning to hear complaints from the workforce and continued to tour the works, dropping in unannounced for lunch with the shovel operators or engineers. According to William Sands, “Stevens’ sturdy, competent presence gradually put new heart” into the workforce.

But whatever public image he projected, Stevens had a number of grave concerns at the end of his first six months in charge, in particular with that selfsame workforce. Stevens had asked his recruiters in the United States to send south some five thousand technicians, mainly railroad men. They had managed to produce only a little more than three thousand, and clearly some barrels had been scraped. On one occasion a consignment of eighteen track foremen reported for work only for it to be discovered that only two had any sort of track experience at all. The rest were sent back on the next steamer. “I am not running a training school to teach boys engineering and construction,” wrote Stevens angrily to Commission chairman Theodore Shonts. “What I want is men who can go to work when they get here.” In Washington, Shonts had his own problems. For political reasons he was already trying to juggle the lucrative contracts for canal machinery around various states. Now he was being steadily lobbied by politicians on behalf of their constituents wanting jobs on the Panama gravy train.

This was immediately apparent to stenographer Mary Chatfield, a formidable looking spinster in her midforties, who arrived at Panama City from San Francisco on November 30, 1905. Chatfield would spend sixteen months on the Isthmus, during the course of which she wrote numerous letters to her ladies’ literary club in her home city of New York. One of her first letters sets the tone for her reports from Panama: “I am not running things. If I were there would be some changes, for I never saw such a state of affairs.”

Her most immediate complaint was about the quality of the “skilled” workforce. Starting her first job in the Hydrography Department, she soon discovered that it was almost impossible to find good recruits to man the gauging stations that measured the velocity and flow of the numerous streams in the canal's path. “So many men sent down here drink to excess,” she reported back to her literary society. “I am informed that the Isthmian Canal Commission send numbers of such people down here at the request of senators, congressmen and heads of departments.”

Her own boss, the chief clerk of the department, a Scotsman, comes in for particular criticism. “Like many other people here in positions of authority,” she wrote, he was “lacking in training and experience for such a position.” A young graduate engineer under the man ended up teaching him his job, “an everyday state of affairs on the Isthmus,” wrote Chatfield. An American journalist with far less of an ax to grind backs this up, recounting the story of a well-connected clerk starting work on a salary of $2,500, more than twice that of his overall supervisor. Good workmen were arriving, Chatfield writes, but “finding they have not a fair chance against the favourites,” they were leaving just as quickly.

appily for Stevens the beginning of 1906 saw the West Indian workers arriving far faster than they were departing. Much of this was due to Karner's renewed recruitment drive in Barbados, and the fact that the West Indians on the Isthmus could now report more regular wages and less police harassment. At the end of 1905, there had been about eighteen thousand on the payroll, compared to thirty-five hundred twelve months before. Of the fifteen thousand nonwhites, about half were Barbadians.