The title of this essay comes from Nancy Stephan, “Imperialism and Sanitation.” In: The Cuba Reader: History, Culture, and Politics, eds. Aviva Chomsky, Barry Carr, Alfredo Prieto, and Pamela Maria Smorkaloff (Chapel Hill: Duke University Press, 2019), 147. Frederic J. Haskin, The Panama Canal (Garden City: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1913), 105, my emphasis. Haskin was a prolific journalist in his day.
Tulio Halperin Donghi, Historia contemporánea de América Latina (Buenos Aires: Alianza Editorial, 2005; Originally published in Italian by Giulio Einaudi Editore, 1967), 298–299.
The US Canal Zone continued to be legally part of the United States until October 1, 1979. There is an extensive bibliography on conditions in the US territory. See Marixa Lasso, Erased: The Untold Story of the Panama Canal (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2019); Julie Greene, The Canal Builders: Making America’s Empire at the Panama Canal (New York: Penguin Press, 2009); and Michael L. Conniff, Black Labor on a White Canal: Panama, 1904-1981 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985).
William Crawford Gorgas, Sanitation in Panama (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1915), 288–289.
Lasso, 17.
Alexander Missal, Seaway to the Future (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2008), 23–24.
Missal, 26.
Gorgas, 279
For a discussion of the European context see Andrea Bagnato, “Microscopic Colonialism,” Positions (e-flux Architecture, December 2017), ➝.
A dollar a day for hospital care at that time. Gorgas, 281.
Paul S. Sutter, “‘The First Mountain to Be Removed’: Yellow Fever Control and the Construction of the Panama Canal,” Environmental History 21, no. 2 (April 2016): 253.
Gorgas, 151.
Ibid., 258.
Conniff, 25.
Greene, The Canal Builders, 48. See Hearings Before the Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce of the House of Representatives, on the Isthmian Canal (Washington, DC, GPO, 1906), 33–35.
Greene, The Canal Builders, 47.
For an in-depth analysis of the racialized labor policies used during the construction of the canal, see Michael L. Conniff, Black Labor on a White Canal: Panama, 1904-1981 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985), 31–36.
Labor conditions during construction of the canal itself were a constant source of criticism in the US press. Additionally, the conditions of worker housing were often discussed and derided in the newspapers of the day. See Edith Crouch, Architecture of the Panama Canal Zone: Civic and Residential Structures & Townsites (Atglen, PA: Schiffer Publishing, Ltd.), 330.
Ibid., 191–225.
In addition, gold-roll employees paid no taxes, while silver-roll employees did. See Conniff, Black Labor on a White Canal, and Greene, The Canal Builders for more on the dual payment system of the gold and silver rolls.
The Panama Canal Retirement Association, The Canal Diggers in Panama 1904 to 1928 (Balboa Heights, Canal Zone, 1928), 9.
Conniff, 29.
Ibid.
Parker O. Wright, Jr., “What the French Did—Development of the American Type” Canal Record 1, no. 15 (December 11, 1907): 117.
Charles Davis has demonstrated that in early twentieth-century architectural discourse, prominent designers such as Louis Sullivan were also highly concerned with the relationship between architectural and national types. Charles L. Davis, Building Character: The Racial Politics of Modern Architectural Style (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019), 167.
Photographs of the housing built by the French canal company show little to no use of screened windows.
Wright emphasizes materials and construction details had to be considered to suit the “official status of employees, the cheapest methods of construction, and an effective method of screening.” Wright, Jr., “What the French Did—Development of the American Type”: 117.
Ibid.
Parker O. Wright, Jr., “Screening of Houses” Canal Record 1, no. 19 (January 8, 1908): 147, my emphasis.
Parker O. Wright, Jr., “Buildings Erected for Laborers and ‘Silver’ Employees,” Canal Record 1, no. 17 (December 25, 1907): 134.
Georges Teyssot, A Topology of Everyday Constellations (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), 69.
“Dwelling Houses in the Panama Canal Zone,” Carpentry and Building 30 (July, 1908): 234.
As Julie Greene argues, to “cover up this discrimination, malaria’s persistence was blamed on the West Indians’ presumed preference to live in the bush.” Missal, 61. On Strong and Fiske, see Walter LaFeber, The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860-1898 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967), 72–80, 99–100, and for a revisionist evaluation, Robert C. Bannister, Social Darwinism: Science and Myth in Anglo-American Social Thought (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010), 228–229.
The arduous work involved in initial sanitary engineering efforts, which were inseparable from the creation of basic infrastructure of the Canal Zone, like clearing brush, cutting trees, leveling the ground, draining swamps and marshes, and filling ditches, was accomplished through the forced labor of convict gangs. Benjamin D. Weber, “The Strange Career of the Convict Clause: US Prison Imperialism in the Panamá Canal Zone,” International Labor and Working Class History, 96 (Fall 2019), 84.
Greene, 135
Ibid., 133.
Paul S. Sutter, “Nature’s Agents or Agents of Empire?: Entomological Workers and Environmental Change during the Construction of the Panama Canal,” Isis 98, no. 4 (2007), 750–751.
Ibid.
Henry Home, The Engineer and the Prevention of Malaria (London: Chapman & Hall, 1926), 136.
Ibid., 137–138.
Ibid., 3.
David Arnold, “The place of ‘the tropics’ in Western medical ideas since 1750,” Tropical Medicine and International Health 2, no. 4 (April 1997): 309.
Nancy Stepan, Picturing Tropical Nature (London: Reaktion, 2002), 17.
Gorgas, 289.
Lasso, 2.