by Julie Greene
Months later an attempt at workplace organizing by boilermakers and machinists in the machine repair shop towns of Gorgona and Empire again demonstrated the difficulties involved. Since officials responded to strikes with such hostility, the workers began a movement to quit en masse instead. When they learned of rumors that police were going to surround the shops in response, the men grumbled that they were being treated like convicts even though they were obeying all the regulations regarding quitting. Their boss defused the situation by confirming that they had the right to quit and that he would not call the police. In the eyes of Goethals’s investigator this prevented an inevitable clash between police and “quitters.” The boilermakers wanted an increase in pay, saying they made little more than they did back home. Goethals refused their demands, and when push came to shove, the machinists refused to back them up. In the end, thirteen boilermakers quit and found their way to other jobs on the isthmus or headed back to the United States. Before it was over, T. B. Miskimon, Goethals’s investigator, reported on the men behind the organizing effort, indicating which one was “the worst agitator of the lot in this trouble” or “one of the first talkers but not strenous as it appears.” Miskimon concluded that they were all “like spoiled babies.”35
The government’s arsenal—police spies, vagrancy laws, powers of deportation, and, not least of all, the system of segregation—made it extremely difficult for skilled white male workers to organize on the basis of their workplace power. Gradually they shifted their focus and depended increasingly on their unions in the United States for efficient lobbying of Congress. They also relied more heavily on enunciating and defending their rights as American citizens, as white men, and as representatives of America’s empire. Indeed, these rights became inextricable from one another in the eyes of many workers and government officials.36
Because the government played such a dominant role in the construction project and intervened so thoroughly in workers’ lives, citizenship was perhaps destined to emerge as an important medium through which workers negotiated over the substance of their daily lives on and off the job. Their status as U.S. citizens gave skilled American workers an important source of strength, while noncitizens, by contrast, lacked such bargaining power. Congress oversaw affairs on the isthmus, conducting investigations into labor and housing conditions, sanitation, and health. This gave skilled workers a regular forum for expressing their views, and often they relied on patriotism and citizenship to make their case. As one worker declared, “We are American citizens and … proud to have a share in this great work.”37 Arguing on behalf of gold roll employees for a lengthier vacation with pay, the unionist Crawford Moore declared, “We are putting forth our best efforts. We are all patriotic American citizens. We will throw our hats up just as high in the air as anyone when this work is done.”38 Such arguments in the end proved more successful than workplace organizing efforts. Skilled workers maintained or sometimes improved upon the high wages and generous benefits they had won, much to the regret of officials, and in 1908 Congress granted them compensation for injuries on the job.39
“OUR CRAFT IS NEARLY TAKEN FROM US”
In early 1908 an executive order issued by President Roosevelt limited employment on the gold roll to U.S. citizens and began to transform life and work in the Canal Zone. It made citizenship vastly more important and began to reshape relations between workers and officials, and between skilled U.S. workers and noncitizens. The ICC immediately began a major transition in its employment policies. It purged the remaining noncitizens (most of them northern and western Europeans or West Indians) from the gold roll, either transferring them to the silver roll or, if that was not possible, eliminating their employment altogether. U.S. gold roll employees strongly supported the policy. Notably, they now began to oppose the presence on the gold roll of Europeans as well as West Indians. A Mrs. Flanagan (the documents suggest nothing else about her identity, but presumably she was married to a skilled American worker) wrote Goethals a few months after the executive order, for example, to report on aliens she had observed still working on the gold roll: “Mr. Hart, an Englishman in the commissary; Mr. Simmons, a Jamaican in the hardware department who served in the English army …” One man, she noted, “has got Negro Blood in his veins.” Mrs. Flanagan concluded, “As I am a true American I am going to see that all aliens are run out according to your official circular.” The records of the ICC contain numerous complaints by U.S. workers and their union representatives regarding aliens holding jobs that, they believed, should belong to Americans.40
Yet if Roosevelt’s order to purge aliens from the gold roll held the potential to strengthen the hand of skilled American workers, it coincided with a new ICC strategy that profoundly threatened their job security and hence the very basis of their power. In 1907 officials began systematically introducing West Indians and other noncitizens into jobs previously held only by white Americans. Such workers remained on the silver roll, but they began doing jobs once considered the territory of skilled workers. Usually it involved replacing a white man with a West Indian, and this profoundly intertwined the issues of race and citizenship. Supervisors found West Indians to be competent workers and easier to supervise—in part because they lacked union representation and in part because Congress and the American public cared little about their welfare. In many cases, officials argued, West Indians could perform the job more effectively than could white or black U.S. citizens. Officials believed that white men annoyingly pushed for promotion out of the lesser-skilled “helper” jobs, while African Americans, though performing better as workers, irritated supervisors by demanding the same perks and living conditions as their white counterparts. And West Indians always worked much more cheaply, a critical concern in the Zone when Congress was demanding maximal cost efficiency.41
So government officials carefully identified those occupations that could be carried out by West Indians and then systematically began replacing white U.S. citizens. In machine shops across the Canal Zone by 1908, West Indians had begun working as machinists, boilermakers, ironworkers, shipwrights, shipfitters, blacksmiths, and blacksmith helpers; on dredges they worked as captains, mates, and engineers. The most widespread substitution occurred among firemen, who assisted the steam-shovel engineers, and among car builders and repairmen. The process of replacing white firemen began shortly after the 1907 strike by steam-shovel engineers, crane operators, and firemen, the most significant strike by skilled workers during the construction period. By the autumn of 1909 no more than a dozen white firemen were working in the central division of the Zone. Previously, a direct line of promotion had connected white firemen to crane operators and upward to steam-shovel engineers (this had been a right steam-shovel workers struggled to protect), so the strategy of substitution sent a strong signal: the boundaries around skill that white workers had jealously guarded were no longer impermeable. Black firemen reminded white workers on a daily basis that whites were dispensable. This was a triple blow, demonstrating the fragility of privileges based on race, citizenship, and skill.42
The process of substitution thus made citizenship a more important arena of conflict between skilled workers and the ICC. Union representatives pleaded with ICC officials in the Canal Zone, begged Congress to issue legislation against such substitutions, and petitioned successive presidents to issue executive orders. Skilled workers fought, sometimes successfully, for rules that would determine whether a gold or a silver man should do a certain job. In one case of West Indians working as railroad crew members in 1912, for example, Goethals gave in to the complaints of skilled workers, declaring, “The use of colored men has given rise to such contention among the men that I do not want them used.”43
In a very different case in 1910, U.S. machinists in the Zone organized a protest against a German named Frank Ertl who was employed as a machinist on the silver roll. He was doing work the gold workers believed belonged to them. The union official Harry Ragsdale argued on behalf
of U.S. workers and against Ertl: “He is practically filling the place of an American citizen. The condition of times in the States now is something awful for machinists and we are satisfied that there can be plenty of first-class machinists gotten to do this work.” Asked how they felt about West Indians working as machinists, Ragsdale replied: “We do not think that is right, Colonel, that these negroes should be used in there, and especially one case there of a man, he … blows it around that he is a machinist and would not work under any other conditions. That gives more or less excitement to the men, for a negroe, and especially a West Indian, for a man to go around and blow that way.” Asked if any American Negroes were working in the shops, Ragsdale admitted there were, but not as machinists. He added: “We do not kick against American negroes, if they are citizens; we are complaining against this foreign element.” As a result of this exchange, Goethals ordered that Frank Ertl be transferred to unskilled labor.44
Even while stressing their rights as citizens, U.S. workers clearly perceived those rights as partially a matter of race. Most often their efforts to establish boundaries around skills they perceived as their property targeted West Indians, and typically their arguments identified race with citizenship. In 1909 skilled workers angrily declared their opposition to the U.S. government’s employing “negro ‘so-called’ mechanics … in direct competition with white mechanics and citizens of the U.S.A. (the negroes being subjects of Great Britain and therefore aliens).” Such a policy, they proclaimed, was “Un-American” and “directly against the principles of the U.S. Government as it places the white man in competition with a class, who by their mode of living and habits are on an equal with the Chinese and Japanese, and in general intelligence and mechanical ability are far beneath the Chinese and Japanese.” In this way, white workers linked their protest against the hiring of West Indians to a long history of anti-Chinese movements in the United States—movements in which working-class agency helped deny citizenship to Chinese immigrants on the grounds of racial inferiority and simultaneously barred those immigrants from access to certain skills. Workers signing this statement included blacksmiths, boilermakers, machinists, molders, pattern makers, and railway car men. They sent copies of their protest statement to President Taft; the ICC; and the American Federation of Labor president, Samuel Gompers.45
Skilled workers’ understandings of citizenship were also closely linked to skill and control over certain jobs. Often the links were made in highly complex ways. Skilled workers might argue, for example, that they were betterbecause they were white, and therefore they should be given the monopoly over a job that their citizenship afforded them. One union official wrote to Goethals in 1908 and complained about the ICC’s employment of “negro engineers.” He and the other skilled white workers could understand, he conceded, the need to keep wages low. However, “should these negro engineers be displaced by competent white men … the difference in wages paid would be more than compensated for by the better service rendered.” The white man would ultimately save the government money by using his cool judgment to avert accidents, for example. Furthermore, and here he explicitly linked citizenship to skill, “as the Commission has shown the disposition to employ none but white American citizens as skilled laborers as far as possible, and as the negro engineers are all aliens with no interest whatever in the great task which brings us all here other than the payment we ask that white engineers be given this preference of the negro alien.” Using the same sort of reasoning, William Yates, president of the marine engineers’ union, wrote Goethals a year later: “Since American energy, progressiveness, and money have created decent living conditions on the isthmus, there is no question but what the government can secure in the States a number of regularly licensed and reliable masters [and] mates.”46
By 1913, as the construction project moved toward completion, the building trades had grown more important. Homes had to be moved out of towns that were about to be submerged. They were mostly rebuilt in the new American town of Balboa near Ancon, just outside Panama City, joining a great many new houses and public buildings. More plasterers, carpenters, plumbers, tile setters, copper- and tinsmiths, and electricians now headed from the United States to the Zone. The same dynamic of West Indians taking over jobs that had been worked previously by whites reshaped their trades as well. A U.S. plasterer who had traveled to the Zone for work along with dozens of others in 1914 wrote to the official magazine of his union, the Operative Plasterers’ International Association, to say that “English negroes” had infiltrated his trade. They were working alongside him on the new administration building in Balboa. He urged his union to make a fight against West Indian infiltration and declared, “Other trades have let the negro get such a hold that it seems useless for them to try and do anything.” He noted, “The plumber is the only trade here which is not hampered by the negro. They had men come here who were good union men and they refused to show the negro anything at all about their craft.” This man, who remained anonymous, argued that there seemed to be nothing the men could do while in the Zone. Only union men in the United States could solve the problem. He ended by stressing what he saw as a crucial point: “In order to come down here you MUST be a citizen of the United States, either born or naturalized; no others need apply. Now if that is so, why are they allowed to bring these negroes here, who are subjects of foreign powers, and who knows nothing of the trade at which he is working, while there are thousands of men in the States who are good mechanics, but not citizens, will not be allowed to come here? What is the difference between the two of them? Can you Brothers see any difference? I can’t—only in color.”47
Soon an African American union member criticized the above writer’s viewpoint, providing a window into how conditions on the canal were generating debates among both black and white U.S. workers. The African American declared that his white brother had forgotten his “union principles.” If the white brother’s real concern was foreigners infiltrating the trade, he should focus on conditions in the United States, because the same problem existed. One had only to look around in cities like New York and Newark to see how employers were using foreigners to control their U.S. workforce. Thus he revealed the true point of the white unionist’s complaint. Despite his effort to cloak his concerns with issues of citizenship, in fact “the brother’s fight is based entirely on the negro question.” He concluded, “It would seem to me a more reasonable fight were it aimed at incompetence, in whatever creed, color or nationality it be found.”48
Ignoring such counterarguments, white trade unionists continued to mobilize against “negro infiltration” and took their complaints to Congress. In 1914 a union man representing the car builders in the Zone testified before Congress and unintentionally shed light on the connections white unionists perceived between race and citizenship. Mr. L. T. Sanders protested, as he put it, against “the way our craft is imposed on here by British subjects; negro laborers, to be plain about it. Our craft is nearly taken from us.” A congressman asked: You are protesting on behalf of your union? “No, on an American citizen’s rights. … We do not feel inclined to work on a level basis with a negro; that is the way it is. As an American citizen, I do not. And what would one of you gentlemen feel like sitting up in Congress even with one of our American negroes?” The chairman demurred, saying that he had sat with Negroes, and that in any case it was up to the American people to elect whomever they wished. Sanders retorted: “It would be different if American negroes were here. The taxpayers are not getting the benefit of it.” He concluded, “We are willing to use the negro as a helper, but as far as ‘Mr. Negro’ being on a job with me, as my equal—” Sanders saw the substitution of blacks for whites as integral to the government’s effort to control and cheapen labor on the canal, and he believed this violated his rights as a citizen: “Because they can get the negro at 10 cents an hour, and they lay ‘Mr. White Man’ off and send him back to the states.”49 Sanders’s view of his rights a
s a citizen thus involved assumptions of his own worth as a producer, his skill and competence, and his racial superiority.
Goethals and his staff saw things very differently. They denied that skilled workers’ race, citizenship, or skills afforded them a monopoly over certain jobs. They found placing silver men, mostly West Indians, in jobs formerly held by skilled white U.S. citizens to be an indispensable tactic. Silver men not only worked competently, but they saved money and provided a goad that made skilled white workers perform better and more quickly. In 1912 the socialist Victor Berger wrote Goethals to complain that “negroes” were being hired as blacksmith helpers, and Goethals’s response was revealing. He disagreed, he declared, that whites should be hired for this job: “American citizenship entitles a man to preference in employment on the Panama Canal, but not color.” In Goethals’s view, “white men cannot long withstand heavy muscular exertion in the tropics; that black men can and do withstand the effects of a climate of this kind is a fact which needs no argument. White men do not want these jobs after they get here, as we know from experience; the black men are reasonably contented.”50
