To the Ends of the Earth

IT WAS SAVE OUR CANAL DAY. TWO UNITED STATES CONGRESSMEN had brought the news to the Canal Zone that New Hampshire was solidly behind them in their struggle to keep the Zone in American hands (reminding me of the self-mocking West Indian joke, “Go ahead, England, Barbados is behind you!”). The New Hampshire governor had declared a holiday in his state, to signify his support. One congressman, speaking at a noisy rally of Americans in Balboa, reported that 75 percent of the United States was against the Panama Canal Treaty. But all this was academic; and the noise—there was a demonstration, too—little more than the ventilation of jingoistic yawps. Within very few months the treaty would be ratified. I told this to a Zonian lady. She said she didn’t care. She had enjoyed the rally: “We’ve been feeling left out, as if everyone were against us.”

The Zonians, three thousand workers for the Panama Canal Company and their families, saw the treaty as a sellout; why should the canal be turned over to these undeserving Panamanian louts in twenty years? Why not, they argued simply, continue to run it as it had been for the past sixty-three years? At a certain point in every conversation I had with these doomed residents of Panama, the Zonian would bat the air with his arms and yell, It’s our canal!

“Want to know the trouble with these people?” said an American political officer at the embassy. “They can’t decide whether the canal is a government department or a company or an independent state.”

Whatever it was it was certainly a lost cause; but it was no less interesting for that. Few places in the world can match the Canal Zone in its complex origins, its unique geographical status, or in the cloudiness of its future. The canal itself is a marvel: into its making went all the energies of America, all her genius, and all her deceits. The Zone, too, is a paradox: it is a wonderful place, but a racket. The Panamanians hardly figure in the canal debate—they want the canal for nationalistic reasons; but Panama scarcely existed before the canal was dug. If justice were to be done, the whole isthmus should be handed back to the Colombians, from whom it was squeezed in 1903. The debate is between the Ratifiers and the Zonians, and though they sound (and behave) like people whom Gulliver might have encountered in Glubdubdrib, they are both Americans: they sail under the same flag. The Zonians, however—when they become especially frenzied—often burn their Stars and Stripes, and their children cut classes at Balboa High School to trample on its ashes. The Ratifiers, loud in their denunciation of Zonians when they are among friends, shrink from declaring themselves when they are in the Zone. A Ratifier from the embassy, who accompanied me to a lecture I was to give at Balboa High, flatly refused to introduce me to the Zonian students for fear that if he revealed himself they would riot and overturn his car. Two nights previously, vengeful Zonians had driven nails into the locks of the school gates in order to shut the place down. When a pestilential little squabble, I thought; and felt more than ever like Lemuel Gulliver.

It is, by common consent, a company town. There is little in the way of personal freedom in the Zone. I am not talking about the liberal guarantees of freedom of speech or assembly, which are soothing abstractions but seldom used; I mean, the Zonian has to ask permission before he may paint his house another color or even shellac the baseboard in his bathroom. If he wishes to asphalt his driveway he must apply in writing to the Company; but he will be turned down: only pebbles are permitted. The Zonian is living in a Company house; he drives on Company roads, sends his children to Company schools, banks at the Company bank, borrows money from the Company credit union, shops at the Company store (where the low prices are pegged to those in New Orleans), sails at the Company club, sees movies at the Company theater, and if he eats out, takes his family to the Company cafeteria in the middle of Balboa and eats Company steaks and Company ice cream. If a plumber or an electrician is needed, the Company will supply one. The system is maddening, but if the Zonian is driven crazy, there is a Company psychiatrist. The community is entirely self-contained. Children are born in the Company hospital; people are married in Company churches—there are many denominations, but Baptists predominate. And when the Zonian dies he is embalmed in the Company mortuary—a free casket and burial are part of every Company contract.