The last time I visited the Panama Canal it was closed, but the town was
wide open. Former streets called straight were crooked and some rescued
territory had relapsed. Just off the main street the scarlet woman
and the red light flourished and flaunted. Posing as bar-girls these
women came out boldly with the bar-sinister of their profession, came
with forbidden fruit from the “Cocoa Grove,” and exposed it for sale
on West Sixteenth street, contaminating the young. The groves may have
been God’s first temples, but not this Panama “Cocoa” one. Here Satan
conducts services every day of the year and passion-fruit is offered all
who walk its thoroughfares. One finds all colors, classes and conditions
of carnality. The U. S. soldiers are the police because the Panamanian
police hate our boys sober or drunk, and when our boys had a fight the
Panamanians beat them up. There are dens of high and low degree, full of
filth, profanity, drunkenness, disease and debauchery, I know, for I saw,
and I saw because I was there for local color and it was black enough.
Panama is famous for its canal, the wedlock of the oceans, but the
city Panama is infamous, knows little of the family word “wedlock” and
its red light “Cocoa Light” would make the fabled Daphne Grove wither
up with envy. From the first to the fifteenth of each month the U.
S. soldiers receive their pay and spend a large amount of it here in
wine, women and song. In this pandemonium of profligacy, one may see,
at any hour of the day or night, a brave soldier boy, intoxicated with
love or liquor, sitting in a doorway with a half-dressed, bare-legged
girl in his lap. These girls are o. k.’d by an M. D. twice a week and
pronounced all right. Our soldiers cannot leave camp and visit them
without a card certificate of good character. After they have made a
night of it the boys repair to the “House of Lords” in the district
and receive a bath and inoculation of anti-venereal dope. If they fail
to take this treatment and are contaminated, they suffer more ways than
one, being compelled to pay a fine. This is all too bad. Pleasures pure
and simple should be given them at camp or in barracks. As it is, many
of them are “shot to hell” before they ever go to war. If they have any
extra money, strength or inclination, they may hit the opium-pipe, buy
a get-rich-quick lottery ticket, or on Sunday attend a bullfight. A
modern St. Anthony would find it difficult to withstand the temptations
of this zone. More than one Pan-American religious conference is needed
to make the moral atmosphere as pure as the city streets are clean. It
is a bigger job to kill the devil than to exterminate the yellow-fever
mosquito.
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