David mccullough library.., p.395
David McCullough Library E-book Box Set, page 395
Yet little official notice would ever be paid to such contributions. In that official journal of Zone life, the Canal Record– a reliable, admirable publication in most other respects–the black employee went unrecognized, except in death, and then only in a line or two, his tag number invariably appended, as if he were not quite human. It would be reported that Joshua Steele, of Barbados, Number 23646, was killed in an explosion in the Cut or that Samuel Thomas, of Montserrat, Number 456185, was crushed to death in the pulleys of a mud scow. But no obituaries appeared in the paper, any more than notices of black weddings, social affairs, or the birth of a black child.
As a consequence, the popular mental picture of what life was like in the Canal Zone, and popular pride in the kind of society that had been created there, were founded on a very limited and erroneous view of reality. The measure of Utopia achieved through American know-How and largess was again relative, like the success of the medical crusade. And as a consequence of such distortion, most all of what would be written in the way of a social history of these years contains but part of the story.
In truth, the color line, of which almost nothing was said in print, cut through every facet of daily life in the Zone, and it was as clearly drawn and as closely observed as anywhere in the Deep South or the most rigid colonial enclaves in Africa. This, some observers later speculated, was the fault of the many Southerners among the skilled workers and among the military officers. Others, including the Southerners, attributed the practices to the upper-class Panamanians, who were notably color conscious, and to the long-established policies of the Panama Railroad. Harry Franck, who as census taker spent the better part of his time among the black workers, wrote acidly, “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.”
The “gold” and “silver” system had become the established practice throughout the Zone; it applied everywhere and nobody misunderstood its purpose. Black West Indians and white North Americans not only stood in different lines when the pay train arrived, but at the post office and the commissary. There were black wards at the hospitals (on the side away from the best views and breezes) and black schools for black children. (Although the number of black children enrolled in Zone schools was twice that of the white children, there were less than half as many black teachers employed.) Black men served on the Zone police force–ninety some out of a force of three hundred were West Indians–but they drew half pay and were not eligible for promotion.
The Y.M.C.A. clubhouses, gold-roll hotels and churches, were all off limits to a West Indian, unless he or she was employed there. “As for the man whose skin is a bit dull,” recalled Harry Franck, “he might sit on the steps of an I.C.C. hotel with dollars dribbling out of his pockets until he starved to death–and he would be duly buried in the particular grave to which his color entitled him.”
Most conspicuous was the contrast between the black and white living quarters. To much of the white populace–employees, tourists–it was easier not to think about such things, easier to put the black people out of mind except for the services they performed. But in fact the living conditions for the black people were deplorable and the I.C.C. did practically nothing to set things right.
The greatest source of discontent and despair in the early years, for black and white workers alike, had not been the difficulty of the work or the unpleasant climate so much as the prospect of a life almost wholly devoid of women; and just as the I.C.C. had initiated a campaign to bring American women to Panama and thereby establish something approaching normal domestic life within the white community, so it also took steps to bring in large numbers of black women, from all over the West Indies. The first black women to arrive were from Martinique and were listed officially as laundresses; and while some may have been prostitutes, as charged, the accusation that they were all prostitutes, or that they were being shipped in at government expense solely for purposes of prostitution, was absurd and manifestly unfair.* As time went on, as the laborers sent word back to all the islands, several thousand black women came to Panama to join their husbands, a brother, a father, to find a husband, but mainly to find what the men had come for: steady work at better pay than they could ever hope to get at home. “Most of us came from our homelands in search of work and improvements,” said John Butcher, of Barbados. “We turned out to be pioneers in a foreign land.”
The I.C.C, however, made no provision for housing black women. Only a few crude quarters were provided for black workers who were married. The rest of the quarters available to black workers were the same as they had been at the time of Theodore Roosevelt’s visit–the roughest kind of barracks with canvas transport bunks packed in as closely as in steerage. Many hundreds of laborers lived in converted boxcars that were shifted back and forth along the line, according to where the men were most needed. To the single men such accommodations appealed no more than they ever had, while men with wives and families had no choice but to fend for themselves. Furthermore, Gorgas, for several years now, had officially encouraged such dispersal as a way to reduce the spread of pneumonia.
As a result, no fewer than four out of five West Indians paid rent for wretched tenements in Colón or Panama City, where one room usually served an entire family. Or, more often, they settled in the jungle, building whole villages of dynamite boxes, flattened tin cans, any odd scraps of lumber or corrugated iron that could be scavenged. They lived where they pleased, as best they could, without benefit of screen doors or janitor service, growing small gardens, always a great many chickens pecking about their small shacks, and nobody of official importance cared very much about them one way or the other.
So it was not that the I.C.C. was providing its black labor force-that is, the overwhelming majority of its workers–with substandard quarters; the I.C.C. was providing them with no quarters at all. And in almost nothing that was published for popular consumption was this point ever made explicit; or if touched on at all, it was expressed as another act of generosity on the part of the canal officials, in that they were allowing the Negroes to live the way they were happiest. Yet as one observer did write, no visitor had to search very far to see what a wholly different life these people were subjected to. “The visitor who saw first the trim and really attractive houses and bachelor quarters assigned to the gold employees could hardly avoid a certain revulsion of opinion as to the sweetness and light of Isthmian life when he wandered into the Negro quarters across the railroad in front of the Tivoli Hotel . . . or in some of the back streets of Empire or Gorgona.”
A less dramatic but more specific index to the relative inequality of the system was the difference in benefits derived by white and black workers from the $2,500,000 being spent annually on employee entertainment and recreation. To the average skilled (white) worker who was married, this one I.C.C. expenditure meant in plain monetary value about $750 a year. But to the average unskilled (black) worker who was married, it meant $50. In other words, as the system was designed, the white American, who represented about one-fifth of the population, was being treated fifteen times better in the way of free social facilities, sports, and amusements than was the black West Indian, who represented as much as three-quarters of the population.
It could be very naturally assumed that this was all the most blatant kind of racial injustice. And in a very large measure, of course, it was; but not entirely. Simple problems of supply and demand also entered in, that is, experienced technicians (men to run and repair the machines), doctors, and competent clerical people were always in short supply and had to be kept satisfied if the canal was to be built; common unskilled laborers from the impoverished islands of the Caribbean were always available in abundance and expected no better than what they got, which for the most part was better than what they had known at home. And besides, there was the political factor: the labor force was not merely black, it was foreign; these were not United States citizens and in Washington therefore they represented no constituency.
Whether a West Indian working on the Panama Canal was better or worse off than a miner in the coal fields of Kentucky or an immigrant mill hand in Homestead, Pennsylvania, during these same years is debatable. But no coal miner or mill hand of the day received free medical care. As extremely hazardous as the work in Panama was for the black laborer, the safety regulations set down by the I.C.C. were far in advance of those of American industry. No company store could ever compare to the I.C.C. commissaries. Further, it can be said with certainty that no one in Panama went hungry.
The frequent claim was that no labor army in history had ever been so well paid, well fed, well cared for; and this, on balance, was unquestionably true, despite all the obvious inequities of the system, however one-sided or hypocritical other claims made for it may have been. Certainly the fellahin who built the Suez Canal or the West Indians who came to Panama during the French era had been far worse off than any black employee of the I.C.C.
Generally speaking, the West Indian worker on the Panama Canal was soft-spoken, courteous, sober, very religious, as nearly everyone associated with the work came to appreciate. John Stevens once remarked that he never knew such law-abiding people and the records show the crime rate, as well as the incidence of alcoholism and venereal disease, among the black employees to have been abnormally low throughout the construction years.
Approximately 80 percent of the black workers were illiterate. While it was official I.C.C. policy in Washington to hire no one under age twenty, a good many black workers were also little more than children. Joseph Brewster, of Barbados, went to work as a track hand, as he later wrote, at age sixteen; H. B. Clayton, a West Indian born and raised at Gorgona, began as “a young boy,” probably fifteen; Jules LeCurrieux, from French Guiana, had just turned seventeen; Alfred Mitchel, who had come from Jamaica with his mother, began as a water boy at fourteen; Jeremiah Waisome, who also had come to Panama with his mother, was twelve or thirteen and proud of his ability to both read and write. His account of the day he first applied for work reads as follows: Unknown to my mother one morning instead of going to school, I went to Balboa to look myself a job. . . . I approach a boss . . . I said good morning boss, he retorted good morning boy. At this time he had a big wad of tobacco chewing. I ask him if he needs a water boy, he said yes, he ask what is your name, I told him. I notice that my name did not spell correctly as Jeremiah Waisome, so I said excuse me boss, my name do not spell that way. He gave me a cow look, and spit a big splash, and look back at me and said you little nigger you need a job? I said yes sir, he said you never try to dictate to a white man, take that bucket over there and bring water for those men over there.
Whatever his first job the black worker was not likely to stay with it very long, largely since the steady turnover or some chance turn in his own circumstances seemed always to lead to something more attractive elsewhere along the line. The experience of Clifford St. John was not exceptional. He began at age seventeen working with a steam-shovel gang in the Cut at Gold Hill. Injured by falling rock, he was sent to Ancon Hospital, where he was offered a job he liked better and so stayed there for two years. Next he strung telephone wire on the Panama Railroad, until stricken with typhoid fever. Then after a month of recovery in the hospital at Colón, he returned to the railroad, this time as a watchman. Presently he changed again, to work as a longshoreman at Cristobal, then again, to drive piles at Gatun Dam. When construction of the lock gates began, he was hired to bore holes for the rivets. This made seven different jobs in less than seven years.
Like others who were to reminisce in later life, recalling their “times on the canal,” black workers would talk repeatedly of incredible rains and “working all wet,” of bugs and mud and the smothering heat. (A waiter at the Tivoli Hotel recalled having to change his suit three times a day, so badly did he perspire.) They remembered the low cost of food and the trains rolling out of the Cut (“It was something marvelous to see”), a particular foreman or engineering officer, or even Goethals (“a great man . . . calm, principled, dignified”). But recurring again and again through all such accounts are memories of tremendous physical exertion and of the constant fear of being killed. “I tell you it was no bed of roses.” “It would not be surprising to say those were very rough days.” “We had to work very hard.” “I worked very hard . . . much danger . . . constant danger.” “I had a narrow escape of death.” “I had to jump for my life.” “I feel blessed to be still alive.” “You had to pray every day for God to carry you safe, and bring you back. Those days were horrible days to remember. Those were the times you go to bed at nights and the next day you may be a dead man.”
One extremely dangerous task in the last years of the work, for example, was the demolition of the giant trees that stood in what was to be the main channel through Gatun Lake. After the trees were cut down, dynamite crews–hundreds of West Indians–chopped holes in the huge trunks, sometimes as many as fifteen holes in a single tree. Two or three sticks of dynamite were put in each hole, with cap and fuse, then plastered over with mud. The blasting began once the workday had ended and the area was clear, just as dark came on.
“After the 5:15 passenger train pass for Panama, we start lighting”, remembered Edgar Simmons, another Barbadian. “Some of us has up to 65 or 72 holes to light and find our way out. So . . . you can judge the situation. . . .” Each man, torches in both hands, dashed from tree to tree, lighting fuses as fast as possible, then ran for cover. “Then it’s like Hell. Excuse me of this assertion, but it’s a fact . . . it was something to watch and see the pieces of trees flying in the air.” Afterward, the pieces were gathered up and piled and burned, a task that went on for months. Gigantic heaps of trees were doused with crude oil, then touched off–and “another Hell roar again.”
Sickness among the laborers remained a problem to the very end, the popular impression notwithstanding. Though the incidence of death from malaria and pneumonia was reduced dramatically from the level at the time of Roosevelt’s tour, both diseases persisted. Also, typhoid and tuberculosis were on the rise. The much-publicized picture of the Canal Zone as a veritable health resort was genuine so far as it applied to the white community, and medical progress over all in the Zone was far beyond anything ever before achieved in a tropical wilderness. But the hospital records show the situation to have been anything but ideal. And again, as in earlier years, it was the nonwhite, non-American labor force that suffered.
Reports for the fiscal year 1907–1908, the point at which Goethals replaced Stevens, show that 1,273 employees died of all causes. At the end of the construction era, that is, in fiscal year 1913–1914, deaths from all causes totaled 414, a phenomenal reduction. In 1907–1908 there had been 205 deaths from malaria; in the final year of construction, there were only 14. Deaths from pneumonia dropped from 466 to 50. As remarkable as any statistic was the average death rate in the final year among all employees–7.92 per thousand, which was much lower than the general death rate in the United States. Not even in Washington, Montana, or Nebraska, then the healthiest states in the country, was the death rate lower than it was in the Canal Zone.
However, in the 1907–1908 records typhoid fever was not even listed among causes of death, while in 1913–1914 typhoid killed 4 people. Tuberculosis, which in 1907–1908 took 7 lives, took 63 lives in 1913–1914. More astonishing is the fact that during the final year of construction not less than 24,723 employees were treated for illness or accidents, this is to say that nearly half of the work force had been in the hospital at one point during those twelve months. In the earlier report the number treated was 11,000. And while only 14 employees died of malaria in 1913–1914, more than 2,200 were hospitalized for the same disease.
Of the total 414 deaths for the final year, 30 were white Americans, 31 were white employees of other nationalities. All the rest, 353, were black. The death rate among all white employees from the United States was actually a mere 2.06 per thousand, an almost unbelievably low figure and deserving all the acclaim that ensued, but the death rate among black workers was 8.23. So, in fact, for all the medical progress that had been made, Panama was still four times more deadly for the black man than it was for the white.
Nor, it must also be emphasized, was the incidence of violent death any less than in years past. In 1907–1908 there were 104 such fatalities; in the final year of construction there were 138. Gorgas, in the earlier report, had called the number of violent fatalities “very excessive” and expressed particular concern that so many were caused by railroad accidents. In 1913–1914 there were 44 people killed in railroad accidents, more than in the earlier year.
Of the 138 who died by violence in the last year, 106 were listed as “colored.”
The black laborer who had not spent time in the hospital was the exception. Many were in and out three, four, five times. Nor do the records show the numbers of men who were permanently maimed. “Some of the costs of the canal are here,” wrote Harry Franck of the black hospital wards, “sturdy black men in a sort of bed-tick pajamas sitting on the verandas or in wheel chairs, some with one leg gone, some with both. One could not help but wonder how it feels to be hopelessly ruined in body early in life for helping to dig a ditch for a foreign power that, however well it may treat you materially, cares not a whistle-blast more for you than for its old worn-out locomotives rusting away in the jungle.” Very few laborers had ever been inside a hospital until they came to Panama. Most of them had never in their lives been treated by a doctor, let alone a white doctor or a white nurse. So it was usually in a state of abject fear that sick or injured black workers arrived at the hospital the first time, fear, as much as anything, of what might befall them next, inside. To judge by available first-person accounts nothing in their experience made quite so lasting an impression.
