Panama fever (73 page)

There were now nearly forty families in Las Cascadas, a far cry from how it was when the van Hardevelds first arrived. Families had been encouraged, of course, to give stability to the workforce, and as a way of keeping the men on the straight and narrow. According to Rose, this was working. With the arrival of the wives, “attendance in the saloons fell off to a considerable degree, and normal social patterns became possible.”

“Our friendships with neighbours deepened,” Rose wrote. “We drew together in a sort of compact clique. How we worried together and laughed together.” The main meeting place was their old House Number One. This had been taken over by their friend Charley Swinehart. His father had died, and so his mother and two teenage sisters had come out to join him and his brother in Panama. Dakota, or “Cote,” Swinehart seems to have become something of a matriarch of the Las Cascadas community. Rose described her as “a fragile little person who suffered a great deal from the heat and humidity, but who maintained a cheerful outlook and a brisk efficiency that inspired and reassured us younger women.”

Jan remained obsessed with the canal and would spend his evenings talking to Charley Swinehart about yardage excavated, the best dynamiting techniques, and the challenges still ahead. The shared canal-building task—vast, historic, epic—united and inspired many of the Americans on the Zone. “Nothing else seemed quite so important as this immense project moving gradually and steadily to completion,” wrote Rose. “Nearly all the women and children felt the same way … This was our life. All other things were subordinate.”

But not everyone was so motivated. According to an official report it was “not until the business depression … in the United States, in the winter of 1907–1908, [that] was there a lessening of the numbers leaving the Isthmus for the States.” Even in 1909–10 the turnover of skilled workers was nearly 60 percent. “Anyone who stays here through a year of it becomes depressed,” wrote an engineer on the project, “and visions of the home country, with its bracing weather, its familiar scenes and its fond ties, begin to float out on the curling wreaths of smoke from pipe or cigarette.” A journalist who visited in early 1909 found a few Americans who unreservedly loved the country and climate, but in most he discovered “a certain pathetic note of exile from all that is dear.”

To address this homesickness, it was decided to try to keep the men occupied as much as possible. Two and a half million dollars were allocated each year to entertainments and recreation, some $750 per white employee. Churches and Sunday schools were constructed, and more playing fields laid out. Most important, however, were the Gold Roll clubs, run by the YMCA. By late 1907, there were four in operation, at Cristóbal, Culebra, Empire, and Gorgona. Each had bowling alleys, a billiard room, a library, and a gymnasium. They also provided the location or focus for a bewildering array of organized activities: sponsored hikes and horse rides through the jungle, amateur theatricals, boat trips to Portobelo, athletic competitions, sightseeing trips on labor trains to the Cut or the locks areas. Lecturers and professional entertainers were also brought in. There were numerous clubs for games including chess, checkers, and bridge. Orchestras, bands, and glee clubs were formed, and lessons offered in everything from Spanish to first aid to Bible study. Over two thousand books were provided in the libraries, where more than eighty U.S. newspapers and periodicals were also available. When the clubs were inspected in early 1908, the visitors were impressed, commending the clubs “without reservation.” “They fill a necessary place in the somewhat artificial life on the canal zone,” it was concluded, “where a body of loyal Americans, far removed from the uplifting influence of home and friends, are performing with genuine enthusiasm a work of great importance to their country, in a climate demoralizing to the white man.”

The white community also had its own ICC-produced newspaper, the
Canal Record
, first published in September 1907, and free to anyone on the Gold Roll. It was determined that this should not replicate the French
Bulletin
—praise of department heads was expressly forbidden—but the
Record
charted the excavation and building work week by week, keeping the community abreast of progress and making people feel involved. By printing the excavation figures of particular divisions or even steam shovels, the paper helped fuel competition among the shovel men and train drivers, thereby increasing productivity. But the
Record
was also the social “notice board” of the Gold Roll Americans, and as such offers a fascinating glimpse of community life. “Zonians” seem to have been, on the whole, great “joiners.” By this time there was a plethora of societies, many based on place of origin or trade. One issue in mid-September 1907 mentions a new baseball team organized at Culebra composed entirely of men from Georgia. There is a notice about a forthcoming entertainment “to be furnished by Sidney Landon, character delineator.” The results of a recent bowling competition between teams from Empire and Culebra are printed. Chess, checkers, and billiard tournaments were, it appears, in progress at two of the clubs.

It was all wonderfully wholesome, just as American domestic opinion demanded. To many it seemed that the impossible had been achieved—proper society had been created two thousand miles from home in the middle of jungle and depraved natives. In early 1909 Rose van Hardeveld's family moved to Empire. She was impressed. There was “a really active American community … Here were nicely dressed, pretty young teachers and office workers. Clean, fine-looking, bronze-faced young chaps escorted them in the evenings to a dance or to the band concerts.”

One such office worker was Courtney Lindsay, whose long and detailed letters home have survived and offer a picture of everyday life on the Isthmus during the Goethals era. Lindsay arrived at the beginning of June 1907, about a month after Goethals took over. He was just short of his twentieth birthday. He had been working in his hometown of Savannah, Georgia, for the local railway company when he met someone recently returned from the Isthmus on holiday. “He says it is not home, but on the order of a boarding school,” he wrote to his mother about the encounter. “The fare is not Del-monico's, but he says it is eatable and that if you want you can save half your salary.”

Thus encouraged, Lindsay secured a position in Panama paying $125 a month. His mother was a friend of Major David Gaillard, ICC commissioner and head of the Central Division, so this might have helped. Lindsay's job was the same as Mary Chatfield's first position—stenographer in Arango's department of meteorology and river hydraulics, based in Panama City. So like Chatfield, Lindsay would be part of the “B-echelon” of canal personnel, working far from the construction and excavation “front line.” He wouldn't even see the canal, apart from the view from the train, until eighteen months after his arrival. His letters show none of the heroic motivation of someone like Jan van Hardeveld.

His first impressions were favorable, however. “Every day I am better pleased that I came,” he wrote to his mother a week after his landing. He had quickly judged the ICC-provided food—”things are not always very clean”—and made alternative arrangements, eating lunch at the house of a Jamaican woman. “I have adapted myself pretty well to the climate and conditions,” he wrote home a week later. He had even put on weight, and was, he reported, taking three grains of quinine every morning.

He was also agreeably surprised by the social life in the city. His boss tended to hand on invitations to gala occasions to his employees. “The Tivoli is giving a reception and dance tonight to the Vice-President,” he wrote home excitedly at the beginning of July. “So I am having my dress suit pressed for the occasion. This is the second time I had used it in the month I have been here. I never wore it once in Savannah.” His younger sister wrote to him, asking about the pineapples and her brother's romantic prospects.

Pineapples are only fifteen cents “spickity,” he wrote back. “Yes, there are a great many American ladies, not so many girls. This is a very ‘marrying’ place, and nearly all the good looking girls are Mrs. There are a few exception among the nurses however.”

But it did not take long for Lindsay to adopt some of Chatfield's cynicism about the actual work. Less than a month in, he wrote that as the department boss was away, “things have already begun to slack up. This job is like plenty of Gov't places in the States. There are one and a half men to do one man's work.” His immediate superior was an Englishman, Vince, “who seems to have caught the ‘manana fever.’” He was dismissive, too, of the endless congressional committes visiting the Isthmus, assessing the works while being treated to a round of dances and parties. “Now what can they tell about it?” he asked in a letter in November. “Seems to me it is a trip on Uncle Sam.” The following month he reported that “the novelty has worn off and nothing ever happens.” There was a friend of his, Hugh Wills, due out soon to join him, but for now he felt homesick, left out of his life at home (“I'm doomed to bachelor hood”), and sad about being away for Christmas.

His first Christmas Day on the Isthmus turned out to be all right. He went fishing in the Bay of Panama, had dinner at the Tivoli, and then went to a party at the Corrozal Club, where there was singing, stories, music, and boxing bouts. Soon after, he took a week's sick leave at the sanatorium on beautiful Taboga. All Gold Roll employees were entitled to fifteen days’ paid sick leave per six months of work. For many, this was just a nice extra holiday. Lindsay says that while he was on Taboga “I've never felt better in my life.” In the New Year his hometown friend arrived and Lindsay began to feel settled in. His bachelor residence was refurbished and electric lighting installed. There were trips to Portobelo and to Old Panama, the city up the coast destroyed by Sir Henry Morgan back in 1671, now a picturesque ruin. In March he reported that a show he had attended, the “Empire Lady Minstrels” was “the best amateur entertainment I've seen in a long while.” All the while he was learning Spanish, and was proud to report that he could now say, “I have neither one nor the other but I have the trunk which the sailor from the ship of the Captain gave me.”

In August 1908 he returned home for his annual leave, and when he came back he found himself posted to Culebra. It was a bit of a comedown after Panama City. “Nothing ever happens here,” he complained in a letter to his father. “The only thing worth mentioning since I came on the 20th of last month has been the repair of the YMCA phonograph.” But he soon adjusted. “Am beginning to like Culebra better,” he wrote home the following month. “The YMCA is an oasis in the desert. I enjoy the bowling, indoor baseball and gymnasium very much.” In January, he reported, he “broke into Culebra society” by attending a dance at the club. “The hall is small, and the floor not near so good. Still it is rather livelier than the Tivoli,—it's more like a country town where everybody knows everybody else.”

His only health scare came at the end of this year. He spent Christmas in the hospital, thinking he had malaria. But no “bugs” were found in his blood, and although he was given quinine “steadily,” he was discharged after a week. The following year saw the young American acting in a farce called
Facing the Music
and learning bridge; there were moments when he really felt in love with Panama. “It seems to me,” he wrote to his mother in October 1910, “that a dry season night down here, with a moon, is about as near perfection as this world ever gets.”

The following year, it would get even better. In May his friend Hugh became engaged to one of the Ancón nurses, a Miss Dequine. Before the end of the year, Lindsay had followed suit, having met an English nurse, Olive. “She's just about the nicest thing in the girl line there is,” he told his parents. As soon as family quarters became available, they married at the small Colón Episcopal Church, Christchurch-by-the-Sea, built back in the 1860s by the Panama Railroad.

he majority of Gold Roll employees accepted the way in which the canal authorities dominated and organized their lives. Visiting journalists, however, were fascinated by the white society that had been created. Everything, all the essentials of life, were supplied by the “state.” What was this system? they asked. Was it some form of “military paternalism”? Or “welfare socialism”? Certainly life in the Zone had little in common with the ideas of the capitalist democracy at home. No one was allowed to own meaningful property or vote for the Zone government. And it seemed to work. “The commissary is an assured success,” reported one journalist in early 1909. “It has shown the absurdity of the ancient superstition that organized society, the state, cannot attend to the needs of a people as economically and with as efficient service as can an individual or a corporation.”