Panama and the Canal in Picture and Prose

by Willis J. Abbot

CHAPTER XVII
SOCIAL LIFE ON THE CANAL ZONE

From ocean to ocean the territory which is called the Canal Zone is about forty-three miles long, ten miles wide and contains about 436 square miles, about ninety-five of which are under the waters of the Canal, and Miraflores and Gatun Lakes. It is bounded on the north by the Caribbean Sea, on the south by the Pacific Ocean, and on the east and west by the Republic of Panama. It traverses the narrowest part of Panama, the waist so to speak, and has been taken out of that body politic by the diplomatic surgeons as neatly as though it had been an obnoxious vermiform appendix. Its territory does not terminate at low water-mark, but extends three marine miles out to sea, and, as I write, a question of jurisdiction has arisen between the two Republics—hardly twin Republics—of Panama and the United States concerning jurisdiction over three malefactors captured by the Zone police in a motor boat out at sea. It may be noted in passing that Panama is properly tenacious of its rights and dignity, and that cases of conflicting jurisdiction are continually arising when any offender has only to foot it a mile or two to be out of the territory in which his offense was committed. The police officials of the Zone affect to think that the Panama authorities are inclined to deal lightly with native offenders who commit robbery or murder on the Zone and then stroll across the line to be arrested in their native State.

A SQUAD OF CANAL ZONE POLICE OFFICERS

There was a quarrel on while I was on the Zone over the custody of a Panamanian who killed his wife, with attendant circumstances of peculiar brutality, and then balked the vengeance of the Zone criminal authorities by getting himself arrested in Panama. “We want to show these fellows”, remarked a high police official of the Zone, “that if they do murder in our territory we are going to do the hanging”. That seemed a laudable purpose—that is if hanging is ever laudable—but the Panama officials are quite as determined to keep the wheels of their criminal law moving. The proprietors of machines like to see them run—which is one of the reasons why too many battleships are not good for a nation.

A PRIMITIVE SUGAR MILL

To return, however, to the statistics of the Zone. Its population is shifting, of course, and varies somewhat in its size according to the extent to which labor is in demand. The completion of a part of the work occasionally reduces the force. In January, 1912, the total population of the Zone, according to the official census, was 62,810; at the same time, by the same authority, there were employed by the Canal Commission and the Panama Railroad 36,600 men. These figures emphasize the fact that the working force on the Zone is made up mainly of unmarried men, for a working population of 36,600 would, under the conditions existing in the ordinary American community, give a population of well over 100,000. Though statistics are not on hand, and would probably be impossible to compile among the foreign laborers, it is probable that not more than one man in four on the Zone is married. From this situation it results that the average maiden who visits the Zone for a brief holiday goes rushing home to get her trousseau ready before some young engineer’s next annual vacation shall give him time to go like a young Lochinvar in search of his bride. Indeed, the life of the Zone for many reasons has been singularly conducive to matrimony, and as a game preserve for the exciting sport of husband-hunting, it has been unexcelled.

VINE-CLAD FAMILY QUARTERS

QUARTERS OF A BACHELOR TEACHER

Perhaps it may be as well to turn aside from the orderly and informative discussion of the statistics of the Zone to expand a little further here upon the remarkable matrimonial phenomena it presented in its halcyon days—for it must be remembered that even as I am writing, that society, which I found so hospitable and so admirable, has begun to disintegrate. Marriage, it must be admitted, is a somewhat cosmopolitan passion. It attacks spiggotty and gringo alike. In an earlier chapter I have described how the low cost of living enabled Miguel of the Chagres country to set up a home of his own. Let us consider how the benevolent arrangements made by the Isthmian Canal Commission impelled a typical American boy to the same step.

Probably it was more a desire for experience and adventure than any idea of increased financial returns that led young Jack Maxon to seek a job in engineering on the Canal. Graduated from the engineering department of a State university, with two years or so of active experience in the field, Jack was a fair type of young American—clean, wholesome, healthy, technically trained, ambitious for his future but quite solicitious about the pleasures of the present, as becomes a youth of twenty-three.

MAIN STREET AT GORGONA

The job he obtained seemed at the outset quite ideal. In the States he could earn about $225 a month. The day he took his number on the Canal Zone he began to draw $250 a month. And that $250 was quite as good as $300 at home. To begin with he had no room-rent to pay, but was assigned comfortable if not elegant quarters, which he shared with one other man; carefully screened and protected from all insects by netting, lighted by electricity, with a shower-bath handy and all janitor or chambermaid service free. Instead of a boarding-house table or a cheap city restaurant, he took his meals at a Commission hotel at a charge of thirty cents a meal. People say that the fare could not be duplicated in the States for seventy-five cents, but I prefer to quote that statement rather than to make it on my own authority. By taking two meals a day and making the third of fruit, or a sandwich at a Y. M. C. A. clubhouse, he would cut his restaurant charges to $18 a month; the whole three meals would come to $27.80, so however voracious his appetite Bachelor Jack’s charges for food are light and for shelter nothing. Clothing troubles him little; his working clothes of khaki, and several suits of white cotton duck will cost him less than one woolen suit such as he must have “up home”. All seasons are alike on the Zone, and there is no need of various types of hats, overcoats and underwear.

All in all Bachelor Jack thinks he has come in for a good thing. Moreover, he gets a vacation of forty-two days on pay, a sick leave of thirty days on pay—and the sanitarium on the Island of Taboga being a very pleasant resort few fail to have slight ailments requiring precisely thirty days’ rest—and nine holidays also with pay. All in all Jack is neither overworked nor underpaid. His letters to his chums at home tell no stories of adversity but rather indicate that he is enjoying exceedingly good times. With reasonable care he will have ample means for really lavish expenditures on his vacation. Indeed it would require rather unreasonable effort to spend an engineer’s salary on the zone unless it went in riotous living in Panama City or Colon.

But a vision of better things opens before him—is always spread out before his enraptured vision. His friend who came down a year or two before him and who is earning only a little bit more money sets a standard of living which arouses new ambitions in Jack’s mind. His friend is married. Instead of one room shared with one or more tired engineers subject to grouches, he has a four-room apartment with bath—really a five-room flat, for the broad sheltered balconies shaded by vines form the real living room. Instead of eating at the crowded, noisy hotels, he has his quiet dining-room, and menus dictated by individual taste instead of by the mechanical methods of a Chief of Subsistence. Practically everything that can be done for the household by official hands is done free by the Commission—free rent, free light, free janitor service, free distilled water, free fuel for cooking—the climate saves that bugbear of married life at home, the annual coal bill. Moreover the flat or house comes to its tenant freely furnished. The smallest equipment supplied consists of a range, two kitchen chairs, a double bed, a mosquito bar, two pillows, a chiffonier, a double dresser, a double mattress, a dining table, six dining chairs, a sideboard, a bed-room mat, two center tables and three wicker porch chairs. This equipment is for the moderately paid employees who live in four-family quarters. The outfit is made more comprehensive as salaries increase.

IN THE LOBBY OF A Y. M. C. A. CLUB

Housekeepers must buy their own tableware, bedclothes, light furniture and bric-à-brac. But here again the paternal Commission comes to the rescue, for these purchases, and all others needful for utility, comfort or beauty, are made at the Commissary stores, where goods are sold practically at cost. Moreover, there is no protective tariff collected on imported goods and it would take another article to relate the rhapsodies of the Zone women over the prices at which they can buy Boulton tableware, Irish linen, Swiss and Scandinavian delicatessen, and French products of all sorts. And finally, to round out the privileges of married life on the Zone, medical service is free and little Tommy’s slightest ill may be prescribed for without fear of the doctor’s bill—though, indeed, the children you see romping in the pleasant places do not look as though they ever needed a prescription or a pill.

So Jack looks from his bachelor quarters over toward Married Row and it looks good to him. His amusements are but limited and his life does verge on the monotonous. His only place of recreation is the Y. M. C. A., which, while filling the want admirably week days, is a bit solemn Sundays—his only day off. The only theaters on the Zone are at Colon and Panama, and those are in the main only exhibitions of “movies.” Moreover, the Panama Railroad has thoughtfully arranged its schedule so that no Zone employee can go to the theater save on Saturday or Sunday night without staying out all night. As Jack smokes in his half a room (perhaps only a quarter) or wrangles with his roommate for place at the table lighted by one electric light his mind naturally turns toward the comforts enjoyed by his married friends, and he sees himself greeted on his return from toil in the jungle or the “Cut” by a cool, trim divinity in white, instead of by a lumbering giant in muddy khaki, as weary, hungry and grouchy as he.

STREET SCENE IN CULEBRA

Were he at home prudence would compel the consideration of cost. Here the paternal Commission puts a premium on matrimony. Very often, so often, indeed, that it is almost the rule, Jack returns from his first vacation home with a wife, or else coming alone is followed by the girl, and all goes merry as a marriage bell. But the time comes when Jack, a bachelor no longer, but a husband and perhaps a father, must leave the Isthmus. That time must come for all of them when the work is done. Enough, however, have already gone home to tell sad tales of the difficulty of readjusting themselves to normal conditions. Down comes the salary at least twenty-five per cent, up go living expenses at least thirty per cent. Nothing at home is free—coal, light, rent, and medical service least of all. Where Jack used to be lordly, he must be parsimonious; where he once bought untaxed in the markets of the world, he must buy in the most expensive of all market places, the United States. He absolutely cannot maintain at home the standard of life he adopted here, and the change with the endless little economies and pettinesses it entails gets on the nerves of both husband and wife. To start life thriftily and learn to be free-handed as prosperity increases is the natural line of development and does not mar happiness. But to be forced to pinch after a long period of lavishness is wearing. Back to the Zone come so many stories of romances begun by the Canal and ended in the divorce courts that one wonders if the paternalism of the Commission has been good for those who enjoyed it.

But it has been good for the supreme purpose of digging the Canal and that was the one end sought.

YOUNG AMERICA AT PLAY

Let me return from this excursion into the domain of matrimonial philosophy and take up once again the account of the population of the Zone and its characteristics. It must be remembered that a very large part of the unskilled labor on the Canal is done by negroes from Jamaica and Barbadoes. But not all of it. The cleavage was not so distinct that the skilled labor could be classed as white, and the unskilled black, for among the latter were many Spaniards, Portuguese, Italians and the peoples of Southwestern Europe. The brilliant idea occurred to someone in the early days of the American campaign that as the West Indians, Panamanians and Latin-Americans generally were accustomed to do their monetary thinking in terms of silver all day labor might be put on the silver pay roll; the more highly paid workers on a gold pay roll. Thenceforward the metal line rather than the color line was drawn. The latter indeed would have been difficult as the Latin-American peoples never drew it very definitely in their marital relations, with the result that a sort of twilight zone made any very positive differentiation between whites and blacks practically impossible. So despite Bobby Burns’ historic dictum—

“the gowd is but the guinea’s stamp
The man’s the man for a’ that”,

on the Zone the man is silver or gold according to the nature of his work and the size of his wages. Of gold employees there were in 1913, 5362, of silver 31,298, so it is easy to see which pay roll bore the names of the aristocracy.

Photo by Underwood & Underwood

HINDOO MERCHANTS AT A ZONE TOWN

Practically all of the gold force are Americans. It is for them, in the main, that the cool, dark green houses with white trimmings, and all carefully screened in, are built. For them the buyers of the Commissary ransack the markets of the world, buying only the best. For them the Hotel Tivoli at Ancon and the Washington Hotel at Colon were built, though it is true that tourist trade rather than the patronage of the Canal workers supports them. For them are eighteen hotels, so-called—really only eating houses—scattered along the line, serving excellent meals for thirty cents each. Indeed, most of the features of Isthmian life which catch the eye of the tourist and make him think existence there quite ideal are planned to make the place attractive enough to keep the gold employees on the job. To him that hath shall be given, and it required greater inducements to anchor to a desk in Panama the man capable of earning a good salary at home than it did to hold the negro from Jamaica or Martinique, or the Spaniard or Italian steady to his job.

THE NATIVE MILLS GRIND SLOWLY

In endeavoring to make things pleasant and easy for the gold employee the Isthmian Commission has made so many provisions for his comfort that many timid souls at home raised the cry of “socialism” and professed to discern in the system perfected by Col. Goethals the entering wedge that would split in pieces the ancient system of free competition and the contract system for public work. While I was on the Zone a very distinguished financier of New York, a banker of the modern type with fingers in a host of industrial enterprises, delivered himself of this interesting forecast of the results of the education in collectivism which the United States government is giving to some thousands of men upon the Isthmus:

“The big thing is the spirit of paternalism, of modern socialism, of governmental parenthood, if you will, which is being engendered and nursed to full strength by Federal control of the Canal. This is no idle dream, and within five years, yes, within three years, it will begin to be felt in the United States.

COMMISSION ROAD NEAR EMPIRE

“Quietly large corporations are studying this feature of the unloading of the skilled, highly intelligent Canal workers on the industries of the United States. There are thousands of trained employees of the Panama Canal Commission—which is to say of the United States government. When these well paid, lightly worked, well and cheaply fed men return to their native land they will form a powerful addition to the Socialist party.

“These workmen will take up tasks for private corporations. They will find lower salaries, longer hours and a greatly increased cost of living. The conveniences and amusements which they have found either free or very cheap in the Canal Zone will be beyond the reach of many of them, and they are going to chafe under the changed conditions.

“They will compare private or corporate ownership with government control as manifested in the Canal works, and the comparison will inevitably result to the detriment of the methods followed in the United States. This will be in no sense an array of capital against labor. It will be a psychological and political movement for the betterment of the conditions of the trained worker irrespective of party or class or union affiliations. That is one reason that it will be so powerful.

“These men will be engaged in industries subject to strikes and other industrial and sociological disturbances. They will give their fellow workmen, who have always been employed in the United States, a new and logical idea of the value of government ownership and its advantages to the workingman as shown on the Canal Zone.

“Around them will gather the socialists, the union men who think for themselves and all other upper class workingmen. Do not mistake my meaning. This will be no Coxey’s army movement, no gathering of the riffraff of failures seeking to rob the toiler of his gains or the investor of his dollars, but earnest men, whose weapon will not be the torch and the dynamite bomb, but the ballot. By their votes and the enormous following they can rally to their standard they will force the government to take over the public utilities, if not all the large corporations, of the country. They will force the adoption of government standards of work, wages and cost of living as exemplified in the work on the Canal. In other words the influx of workers will lead directly to paternalism”.

Let us, however, consider this bogy of socialism fairly. Before proceeding to a more detailed account of the manner of life upon the Canal Zone let me outline hastily the conditions which regarded superficially seem socialistic, and with a line or two show why they are not so at all.

THE FIRE FORCE OF CRISTOBAL

Our Uncle Sam owns and manages a line of steamships plying between New York and Panama, carrying both passengers and freight and competing successfully with several lines of foreign-built ships. The largest vessels are of ten thousand tons and would rank well with the lesser transatlantic liners. On them Congressmen and Panama Zone officials are carried free, while employees of the Isthmian Canal Commission get an exceedingly low rate for themselves and their families. The government also owns and conducts the Panama Railroad, which crosses in less than three hours from the Atlantic to the Pacific, while the privately owned railroads of the United States take about seven days to pass from one ocean to the other. This sounds like a mighty good argument for government ownership and it is not much more fallacious than some others drawn from Isthmian conditions. The President of the Panama Railroad is Col. George W. Goethals. The government caught him young, educated him at its excellent West Point school, paying him a salary while he was learning to be useful, and has been employing and paying him ever since. Like a citizen of the ideal Co-operative Commonwealth he has never had to worry about a job. The State has always employed him and paid him. While he has done his work better than others of equal rank, he has only recently begun to draw any more pay than other colonels. Sounds very socialistic, doesn’t it? And he seems to make a very good railroad president too, though the shuffling of shares in Wall Street had nothing to do with his appointment, and he hasn’t got a director on his board interlocked with J. P. Morgan & Co., or the City National Bank.

ORCHIDS ON GOV. THATCHER’S PORCH

The government which runs this railroad and steamship line doesn’t confine its activity to big things. It will wash a shirt for one of its Canal employees at about half the price that John Chinaman doing business nearby would charge, press his clothing, or it will send a man into your home—if you live in the Zone—to chloroform any stray mosquitoes lurking there and convey them away in a bottle. It will house in an electric-lighted, wire-screened tenement, a Jamaica negro who at home lived in a basket-work shack, plastered with mud and thatched with palmetto leaves. It is very democratic too, this government, for it won’t issue to Mrs. Highflyer more than three wicker arm-chairs, even if she does entertain every day, while her neighbor Mrs. Domus who gets just exactly as many never entertains at all. It can be just too mean for anything, like socialism, which we are so often told “puts everybody on a dead level.”

The dream of the late Edward Bellamy is given actuality on the Zone where we find a great central authority, buying everything imaginable in all the markets of the world, at the moment when prices are lowest—an authority big enough to snap its fingers at any trust—and selling again without profit to the ultimate consumers. There are no trust profits, no middleman’s profits included in prices of things bought at the Commissary stores. There are eighteen such stores in the Zone. The total business of the Commissary stores amounts to about $6,000,000 annually. Everything is sold at prices materially less than it can be bought in the United States, yet the department shows an actual profit, which is at once put back into the business. A Zone housewife told me that a steak for her family that would cost at least ninety cents in her home in Brooklyn cost her forty here. Shoddy or merely “cheap” goods are not carried and the United States pure food law is strictly observed. That terrible problem of the “higher cost of living” hardly presents itself to Zone dwellers except purchasers of purely native products; those, thanks to the tourists, have doubled in price several times in the last five years. But articles purveyed by Uncle Sam are furnished to his nephews and nieces here for about one-third less than the luckless ones must pay who are sticking to the old homestead instead of faring forth to the tropics.

I have already enumerated the valuable privileges, like free quarters, light, furniture, medical service, etc., supplied to the Zone worker without charge. If all these apparent gratuities were accompanied by a rate of pay lower than that in force for like occupations in the States it might be fair to say, as one of the most careful writers on Isthmian topics says, “these form part of the contract the employee makes with the government, and are just as much part of his pay as his monthly salary”. But that pay averages twenty-five per cent higher than at home. The things enumerated are looked upon by those who receive them as gratuities, and rightly so. They are, in fact, extra inducements offered by Uncle Sam to persuade men to come and work on his Canal and to keep them happy and contented while doing so.

Now the chief material argument for the socialistic state, the co-operative commonwealth, is that it will secure for every citizen comfort and contentment, so far as contentment is possible to restless human minds; that it will abolish at a stroke monopoly and privilege, purge society of parasites, add to the efficiency of labor and proportionately increase its rewards. All of which is measurably accomplished on the Canal Zone and the less cautious socialists—the well-grounded ones see the difference—are excusable for hailing the government there as an evidence of the practicability of socialism.

But it isn’t—at least not quite. The incarnation of the difference between this and socialism is Col. George W. Goethals. Nobody on the Zone had part in electing Goethals; nobody can say him nay, or abate or hinder in any degree his complete personal control of all that is done here. This is not the co-operative commonwealth we long have sought. Rather is it like the commonwealth of old with Oliver Cromwell as Lord Protector—and at that Goethals has no parliament to purge.

Photo by H. Pittier

Courtesy National Geographic Magazine

THE CATASETUM SCURRA
A curiously shaped orchid rediscovered by Mrs. H. H. Rousseau

This is a benevolent despotism, the sort of government that philosophers agree would be ideal if the benevolence of the despot could only be assured invariably and eternally. The Czar of Russia could do what is being done down there were he vested with Goethals’ intolerance of bureaucracies, red-tape, parasites, grafters, disobedience and delay. But Goethals is equally intolerant of opposition, argument, even advice from below. His is the military method of personal command and personal responsibility. I don’t believe he is over-fond even of the council of war. In a socialistic community, where every man had a voice in the government, he would last only long enough for a new election to be called. Though his popularity there is universal, it would not withstand the attacks of demagogues were there field for demagogy.

Photo by Underwood & Underwood

MARRIED QUARTERS AT COROZAL

But what has been done, and is still doing, on the Zone is not socialistic, because it is done from the top, by the orders of an autocrat, instead of by an act of a town meeting. One might as well say that the patience, prudence, attention to detail, insistence on proper sanitation which enabled Japan’s great General Nogi to keep his army in the field with the minimum loss from preventable sickness was all socialistic. Col. Goethals commanded an army. The Isthmus was the enemy. The army must be fed and clothed, hence the Commissary. Its communications must be kept open, hence the steamship line and the railroad. The soldiers must be housed, and as it became early apparent that the siege was to be a long one the camps were built of timber instead of tents. There is nothing new about that. Back in the fifteenth century Queen Isabella, concluding that it would take a long time to starve the Moors out of Granada, kept her soldiers busy building a city of stone and mortar before the walls of the beleaguered town. Culebra has been a more stubborn fortress than was ever Granada.

FIGHTING THE INDUSTRIOUS ANT

No. The organization of the Zone has been purely military, not socialistic. It was created for a purpose and it will vanish when that purpose has been attained. Admirably adapted to its end it had many elements of charm to those living under it. The Zone villages, even those like Culebra and Gorgona which are to be abandoned, were beautiful in appearance, delightful in social refinement. Culebra with its winding streets, bordered by tropical shrubbery in which nestled the cool and commodious houses of the engineers and higher employees, leading up to the hill crested by the residence of the Colonel—of course there were five colonels on the Commission, but only one “The Colonel”—Culebra was a delight to the visitor and must have been a joy to the resident.

FOLIAGE ON THE ZONE

Try to figure to yourself the home of a young engineer as I saw it. The house is two storeys with a pent-house roof, painted dark green, with the window frames, door casings and posts of the broad verandas, by which it is nearly surrounded, done in shining white. Between the posts is wire netting and behind is a piazza probably twelve feet wide which in that climate is as good as a room for living, eating or sleeping purposes. The main body of the house is oblong, about fifty feet long by thirty to forty feet deep. A living-room and dining-room fill the entire front. The hall, instead of running from the front to the back of the house, as is customary with us, runs across the house, back of these two rooms. It is in no sense an entry, though it has a door opening from the garden, but separates the living-rooms from the kitchen and other working rooms. The stairway ascends from this hall to the second floor where two large bed-rooms fill the front of the house, a big bath-room, a bed-room and the dry-room being in the rear. About that last apartment let me go into some detail. The climate of the Zone is always rather humid, and in the rainy season you can wring water out of everything that can absorb it. So in each house is a room kept tightly closed with two electric lights in it burning day and night. Therein are kept all clothes, shoes, etc., not in actual use, and the combined heat and light keep damp and mold out of the goods thus stored. Mold is one of the chief pests of the Panama housekeeper. You will see few books in even the most tastefully furnished houses, because the mold attacks their bindings. Every piano has an electric light inserted within its case and kept burning constantly to dispel the damp. By way of quieting the alarm of readers it may be mentioned again that electric light is furnished free to Isthmian Commission employees. “We always laugh”, said a hostess one night, as she looked back at my darkened room in her house from the walk outside, “at the care people from the States take to turn out the lights. We enjoy being extravagant and let them burn all day if we feel like it”.

Photo by Underwood & Underwood

THE CHIEF COMMISSARY AT CRISTOBAL

In such a house there is no plaster. From within you see the entire frame of the house—uprights, joists, stanchions, floor beams, all—and the interior is painted as a rule precisely like the exterior without the white trimming. You don’t notice this at first. Then it fascinates you. You think it amusing and improper to see a house’s underpinning so indecently exposed. All that we cover with laths, plaster, calcimine and wall paper is here naked to the eye. Only a skin of half-inch lumber intervenes between you and the outer world, or the people in the next room. You notice the windows look strange. There is no sash. To a house of the sort I am describing four or six glass windows are allotted to be put in the orifices the housekeeper may select. The other windows are unclosed except at night, when you may, if you wish, swing heavy board shutters across them.

A house of the type I have described is known as Type 10, and is assigned to employees drawing from $300 to $400 a month. Those getting from $200 to $300 a month are assigned either to quarters in a two-family house, or to a small cottage of six or seven rooms, though, as the supply of the latter is limited, they are greatly prized. Employees drawing less than $200 a month have four-room flats in buildings accommodating four families. Those who receive more than $400 a month are given large houses of a type distinguished by spaciousness and artistic design.

When you come to analyze it such houses are only large shacks, and yet their proportions and coloring, coupled with their obvious fitness for the climate, make them, when tastefully furnished and decorated, thoroughly artistic homes. For these homes the Commission furnishes all the bare essentials. With mechanical precision it furnishes the number of tables, chairs, beds and dressers which the Commission in its sovereign wisdom has decided to be proper for a gentleman of the station in life to which that house is fitted. For the merely æsthetic the Commission cares nothing, though it is fair to say that the furniture it supplies, though commonplace, is not in bad taste. But for decoration the Zone dwellers must go down into their own pockets and to a greater or less degree all do so. The authorities have not gone to the extent of prohibiting this rivalry as at West Point and Annapolis where the cadets are not permitted to decorate their rooms lest inequality and mortification result. But in Panama the climate enforces such a prohibition to some extent. Luxury there would be positive discomfort. Costly rugs and hangings, richly upholstered furniture are out of place. Air space is the greatest luxury, and a room cluttered with objects of priceless art would be scarcely habitable.

Photo by Underwood & Underwood

WHAT THE SLIDE DID TO THE RAILROAD
The pernicious activity of slides occasionally creates this novel condition in railroad construction

Within their limitations, however, the hostesses of the Zone have made their homes thoroughly charming. The visitor was, I think, most impressed by those who frankly used the trimmings of the tropics for their chief decorations. The orchid-lined porches of Mrs. M. H. Thatcher, wife of the civil commissioner, or Mrs. H. H. Rousseau, wife of the naval representative on the Commission, were a veritable fairyland when the swift tropic night had fallen and the colored lights began to glow among the rustling palms and delicately tinted orchids. No more beautiful apartment could possibly be imagined.

NOT FROM JAMAICA BUT THE Y. M. C. A.

Housekeeping is vastly simplified by the Commissary. When there is but one place to shop, and only one quality of goods to select from—namely the best, for that is all the Commissary carries—the shopping tasks of the housekeeper are reduced to a minimum. Nevertheless they grumble—perhaps because women like to shop, more probably because this situation creates a dull and monotonous sameness amongst the families. “What’s the good of giving a dinner party”, asked a hostess plaintively, “when your guests all know exactly what everything on your table costs, and they can guess just what you are going to serve? They say, ‘I wish she’d bought lamb at the Commissary, it costs just the same as turkey’. Or ‘the Commissary had new asparagus today. Wonder why she took cauliflower’? They get the Commissary list just as I do and know exactly to what I am limited, as we can only buy at the Commissary. There is no chance for the little surprises that make an interesting dinner party”.

A BACHELOR’S QUARTERS

That is perhaps a trifle disquieting to the adventurous housekeeper, but, except for the purpose of entertaining, the Commissary must be a great boon. Its selection of household necessities is sufficiently varied to meet every need; the quality the best and its prices are uniformly lower than in the United States. This comparative cheapness in prices is, of course, due to the elimination of the middlemen, the buying by the commissary in large quantities and the disregard of profit as an element in the business. There is but one step between the Beef Trust, or other manufacturers, and the ultimate consumers on the Zone. The one intermediary is the Commissary. It buys in such quantities that it can be sure of the lowest prices. It buys in markets 3,000 miles or more away from its stores, but it gets the lowest freight rates and an all-water carriage from New York. Finally it pays no rent and seeks no profit, hence its prices should be the lowest. Here is a selection from the printed list issued in April, 1913, from which any house-keeper can judge of Zone prices:

Veal Cutlets, per pound	17	c
Lamb Chops, per pound	24	c
Corned Beef, No. 1	14	c
Sirloin Steak, per pound	19	c
Halibut, fresh, per pound	15	c
Chickens, fancy roasting, 51⁄2 pounds each	$1.25
Ducks, blackhead, pair	60	c
Pork, salt, family	14	c
Eggs, fresh, dozen	25	c
Butter, creamery, special	41	c
American Cheese, per pound	22	c
Celery, per head	11	c
Cabbage, per pound	3	c
Onions, per pound	3	c
Potatoes, white, per pound	3	c
Turnips, per pound	3	c
Grapefruit, each	4	c
Oranges, Jamaica, per dozen	12	c

THE TIVOLI HOTEL

THE GRAPE FRUIT OF PANAMA

If, however, the Commissary system reduces life to something of a general uniformity and destroys shopping as a subject of conversation, the ladies of the Zone still have the eternal servant problem of which to talk. De Amicis, the travel writer, said that servants formed the one universal topic for conversation and that he bid a hasty farewell to his mother in Naples after a monologue on the sins of servants, only to find, at his first dinner in Amsterdam, whither he had traveled with all possible speed, that the same topic engrossed the mind of his hostess there. In Panama the matter is somewhat simplified by the fact that only one type of servant is obtainable, namely the Jamaica negress. It is complicated by the complete lack of intelligence offices. If a housekeeper wants a maid she asks her friends to spread the tidings to their servants, and then waits, supine, until the treasure comes to the door. Servants out of employment seek it by trudging from house to house and from village to village. Once hired they do what they have to do and no more. Among them is none of the spirit of loyalty which makes the “old Southern mammy” a figure in our fiction, nor any of the energy which in the Northern States Bridget contributes to household life—though, indeed, Bridget is disappearing from domestic service before the flood of Scandinavians and Germans.

The only wail I heard on the Isthmus about the increasing cost of living had to do with the wages of servants. “In the earlier days”, said one of my hostesses reminiscently, “it was possible to get servants for very low wages. They were accustomed to doing little and getting little, as in Jamaica and other West Indian islands, where many servants are employed by one family, each with a particular ‘line’. People say that in Panama City servants can still be found who will work for $5 silver ($2.50) per month, and that Americans have spoiled them by paying too much. But I think they have developed a capacity for work and management equal to that of servants in the States and deserve their increased wages. I pay $15, gold, a month to my one capable servant. Occasionally you will find one who will work for $10, but many get $20 if they are good cooks and help with baby. Probably $12 to $15 is an average price.

“These Jamaica servants speak very English English—you can’t call it Cockney, for they don’t drop their h’s, but it differs greatly from our American English. They are very fond of big words, which they usually use incorrectly, especially the men. A Commissary salesman, to whom I sent a note asking for five pounds of salt meat, sent back the child who carried it to ‘ask her mother to differentiate’, meaning what kind of salt meat. A cook asked me once ‘the potatoes to crush, ma’am’? meaning to ask if they were to be mashed. Another after seizing time to air a blanket between showers reported exultantly, ‘the rain did let it sun, mum’. And always when they wish to know if you want hot water they inquire, ‘the water to hot, mum’?

PURE PANAMA, PURE INDIAN AND ALL BETWEEN

“Their names are usually elaborate. Celeste, Geraldine, Katherine, Eugenie, are some that I recall. My own maid is Susannah, which reminds me—without reflecting on this particular one—that as a class they are hopelessly unmoral, though extremely religious withal. I have known them to be clean and efficient, but as a rule they are quite the reverse. Some are woefully ignorant of modern utensils. One for example, being new to kitchen ranges, built a fire in the oven on the first day of her service. Another, having been carefully instructed always to take a visitor’s card on a tray, neglected the trim salver provided for that purpose and extended to the astonished caller a huge lacquered tin tray used for carrying dishes from the kitchen.

COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY F. E. WRIGHT

OLD LANDING AT TABOGA
The concrete walls leading from the beach up to the level of the street were built as a memorial of the successful revolution of 1905.

“I’ll never forget”, concluded my hostess between smiles, and sorrow, “how I felt when I saw that lonesome little card reposing on the broad black and battered expanse of that nasty old tray”!

Photo by Underwood & Underwood

INTERIOR OF GATUN Y. M. C. A. CLUB

Social life on the Zone is rather complex. At the apex, of course, are the Commissioners and their families. The presence of an Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary of the United States in Panama City adds another factor to the always vexed question of precedence, while the maintenance of a military post with a full regiment, and a marine camp with a battalion does not help to simplify matters. Social affiliations among those not in the Commission or the Army set are based with primitive simplicity upon the amount of the husband’s earnings. One advantage of this system is that it is based upon perfectly accurate information, for everybody on the Zone works for the Commission and the payrolls are periodically published. But it jars the ingenuous outsider to have a woman, apparently without a trace of snobbery, remark casually of another, “well, we don’t see much of her. Her husband is in the $2000 class you know”.

Y. M. C. A. CLUB AT GATUN
These clubs are the true centers of the social life of the zone

Social life is further complicated by the fact that the people of the Zone came from all parts of the United States, with a few from Europe. They have no common home associations. When the settlement of the Zone first began the women were dismally lonely, and the Commission called in a professional organizer of women’s clubs to get them together. Clubs were organized from Ancon to Cristobal and federated with Mrs. Goethals for President and Mrs. Gorgas for Vice-President. Culebra entertained Gorgona with tea and Tolstoi, and Empire challenged Corozal to an interchange of views on eugenics over the coffee cups and wafers. In a recent number of The Canal Record, the official paper of the Zone, I find nearly a page given over to an account of the activities of the women’s societies and church work. It appears that there were in April, 1913, twenty-five societies of various sorts existing among the women on the Zone. The Canal Zone Federation of Women’s Clubs had five subsidiary clubs with a membership of fifty-eight. There were twelve church organizations with a membership of 239. Nearly 290 women were enrolled in auxiliaries to men’s organizations. But these organizations were rapidly breaking up even then and the completion of the Canal will witness their general disintegration. They served their purpose. Only a mind that could mix the ideal with the practical could have foreseen that discussions of the Baconian Cipher, or the philosophy of Nietzsche might have a bearing on the job of digging a canal, but whoever conceived the idea was right.

Photo by Underwood & Underwood

MARINE POST AT CAMP ELLIOTT
A force of about 500 marines will be kept permanently on the Zone

Photo by Underwood & Underwood

TOURISTS IN THE CULEBRA CUT

The same clear foresight that led the Commission to encourage the establishment of women’s clubs caused the installation of the Y. M. C. A. on the Isthmus, where it has become perhaps the dominating social force. With a host of young bachelors employed far away from home there was need of social meeting places other than the saloons of Panama and Colon. Many schemes were suggested before it was determined to turn over the whole organization of social clubs to the governing body of the Y. M. C. A. There were at the period of the greatest activity on the Zone seven Y. M. C. A. clubs located at Cristobal, Gatun, Porto Bello, Gorgona, Empire, Culebra and Corozal. The buildings are spacious, and, as shown by the illustrations, of pleasing architectural style. On the first floor are a lobby, reading-room and library, pool and billiard room, bowling alley, a business-like bar which serves only soft drinks, a quick lunch counter, and in some cases a barber shop and baths. On the second floor is always a large assembly-room used for entertainments and dances. This matter of dancing was at first embarrassing to the Y. M. C. A., for at home this organization does not encourage the dreamy mazes of the waltz, and I am quite sure frowns disapprovingly on the swaying tango and terrible turkey trot. But conditions on the Isthmus were different and though the organization does not itself give dances, it permits the use of its halls by other clubs which do. The halls also are used for moving picture shows, concerts and lectures. The Superintendent of Club Houses, Mr. A. B. Dickson, acts as a sort of impressario, but the task of filling dates with desirable attractions is rather a complicated one 2000 miles away from the lyceum bureaus of New York.

The service of the Y. M. C. A. is not gratuitous. Members pay an annual fee of $10 each. This, however, does not wholly meet the cost of maintenance and the deficit is taken care of by the Commission, which built the club houses at the outset. That the service of the organization is useful is shown by the fact that Col. Goethals has recommended the erection of a concrete club house to cost $52,500 in the permanent town of Balboa.

Photo by Underwood & Underwood

LOBBY IN TIVOLI HOTEL

Social intercourse on the Zone is further impeded by the fact that the few thousand “gold” employees are scattered over a strip of territory 43 miles long traversed by a railroad which runs but three passenger trains daily in each direction. Dances are held on alternate Saturday nights at the Tivoli and Washington Hotels and guests cross from the Atlantic to the Pacific or vice-versa to attend them, but on these nights a special train takes the merrymakers home. If, however, a lady living at Culebra desires to have guests from Cristobal to dinner, she must keep them all night, while a popular bachelor with half a dozen dinner or party calls to make needs about three uninterrupted days to cover his list.

Church work, too, has been fostered by the Commission. Twenty-six of the churches are owned by it, and all but two are on land it owns. In 1912 there were forty churches on the Zone—seven Roman Catholic, thirteen Episcopal, seven Baptist, two Wesleyan and eight undenominational. Fifteen chaplains are maintained by the government, apportioned among the denominations in proportion to their numbers. Much good work is done by the churches, but one scarcely feels that the church spirit is as strong as it would be among the same group of people in the States. The changed order of life, due to the need of deferring to tropical conditions, has something to do with this. The stroll home from church at midday is not so pleasant a Sunday function under a glaring tropical sun. Moreover no one town can support churches of every denomination, the railroad is at least impartial in that it does not encourage one to go down the line to church any more than to a dance or the theater.

Photo by Underwood & Underwood

ALTAR IN GATUN CATHOLIC CHURCH

Even as I write the disintegration of this society has begun. On the tables of the Zone dwellers you find books about South America or Alaska—the widely separated points at which opportunity for engineering activity seems to be most promising. Alaska particularly was at the time engaging the speculative thought of the young engineers in view of the discussion in Congress of the advisability of building two government railroads in that territory. The preparation of moving thither the Canal organization was highly pleasing to the younger men who seemed to think that working over glacial moraines and running lines over snow fields would form a pleasing sequel to several years in the tropical jungles and swamps. You will see on the Isthmus bronzed and swarthy men who are pointed out to you as “T T’s” which is to say tropical tramps who served first in the Philippines. Just what appellation will be given those who go from the tropics to the arctic is yet to be discovered. In the Canal Record I read of the final dissolution of the Federation of Women’s Clubs. Stories of the ambitions of individual commissioners for new employment are appearing in the public prints. Only the pernicious activity of the slides at Culebra and Cucaracha can much longer delay the dissolution of the social life that has so pleasingly flourished under the benevolent despotism of Col. Goethals.

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