Most American employees work steadily and
take their work seriously. It is as if each were individually
proud of being one of the chosen people and builders of the
greatest work of modern times. Yet the far-famed "American rush"
is not especially prevalent. The Zone point of view seems to be
that no shoveling is so important, even that of digging a ditch
half the ships of the world are waiting to cross, that a man
should bring upon himself a premature funeral. The common
laborers, non-Americans, almost dawdle. There are no contractor's
Irish straw-bosses to keep them on the move. The answer to the
Socialist's scheme of having the government run all big building
enterprises is to go out and watch any city street gang for an
hour.
The bringing together into close contact of Americans from every
section of our broad land is tending to make a new amalgamated
type. Even New Englanders grow almost human here among their
broader-minded fellow-countrymen. Any northerner can say "nigger"
as glibly as a Carolinian, and growl if one of them steps on his
shadow. It is not easy to say just how much effect all this will
have when the canal is done and this handful of amalgamated and
humanized Americans is sprinkled back over all the States as a
leaven to the whole. They tell on the Zone of a man from Maine who
sat four high-school years on the same bench with two negro boys,
and returning home after three years on the Isthmus was so
horrified to find one of those boys an alderman that he packed his
traps and moved to Alabama, "where a nigger IS a nigger"--and if
there isn't the "makings" of a story in that I 'll leave it to the
postmaster of Miraflores.
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