by Julie Greene
The evidence suggests a different reality: West Indians had solid ground for complaining about many aspects of their lives on and off the job. Mallet was certainly correct that conditions had improved since the days of French construction, particularly in terms of disease, but he shared with American officials many notions of West Indian inferiority that precluded him from seeing the necessity for humane treatment. West Indians’ grievances were numerous, and one of the major problems they perceived was Mallet’s neglectful behavior and reluctance to do more to improve their working and living conditions. Demanding that he be more helpful, West Indians appealed to the rights owed them by the British Commonwealth. When a laborer named Jacob Marsh lost his leg in 1911 and failed to receive a wooden replacement from the U.S. government, he pleaded with the British for assistance: “I know that my Mother Court will not for sake these few lines.” Another West Indian wrote more angrily in 1914 about what he perceived as Mallet’s dereliction of duty, and his unhappiness over the large numbers of laborers being imprisoned by the Panamanian government as construction neared completion and massive unemployment set in. He declared to Mallet that he knew the laws of England, and he knew West Indians legally deserved more help from their diplomatic representatives.33
Even back in Britain some worried that Mallet needed to do more. The socialist member of Parliament J. Keir Hardie declared his concern in 1908 at the high rate of disease (particularly tuberculosis) among West Indians, the fact that some were simply deported home to be cared for by impoverished family members, and the fact that the situation would now only worsen due to a recent order that the men continue working through the rain. He noted, “Surprise is expressed among American officials at the non-interference of the British government.” His superiors in London instructed Mallet to investigate and provide a report on the matters Hardie had raised.34
Sometimes West Indians appealed directly to ICC officials for improvements. One option was to pursue a grievance through their immediate supervisors. The silver brakemen of Pedro Miguel and Las Cascadas, for example, wrote officials a polite note in 1913 and pointed out that they regularly worked late into the evening, plus Sundays and holidays, and should receive overtime pay for that, as did gold roll employees. They signed themselves “your faithful Servants and workers.”35 Other West Indians showed up at Colonel Goethals’s office on Sunday morning to request help, and they tended to express very different concerns from white residents of the Zone. White workers and their families went to Goethals about a wide variety of problems, from troublesome coworkers to abusive or loud neighbors, while the majority of West Indian complaints focused on mistreatment by white police, foremen, or others in positions of authority. Haviland Nevers, for example, a West Indian fireman, complained to Goethals about a conflict with a conductor on the labor train as he headed from Empire to his job in Tabernilla. It began with a small act of rebellion on his part when he was either slow or unwilling to show his pass and pay the ten cents required for the trip. It ended with him getting hit in the head with a lantern, thrown off the train, and finally beaten by ten white workers seeking to assist the conductor and enforce his orders. Goethals’s investigator interviewed several witnesses and concluded the beating had been unnecessary, but suggested that the conductor be given only a mild punishment, since Nevers had helped cause the problem through his “bullheaded” behavior.36
West Indians not only possessed fewer resources than white workers; they also found themselves scrambling to adjust to different circumstances from those they were accustomed to back home. The work routine in the Canal Zone was highly mechanized and regimented; the U.S. government’s style was bureaucratic and more openly racist. A Jamaican carpenter who worked during both the French and the U.S. construction projects compared the two approaches. The United States, he said, was much more orderly. Zone policemen and harsher laws
had nearly put a stop to quarrels, cockfighting, drinking, and dancing in the streets, and he approved of this: if a man shoots off a gun now that the United States is in control, “the police catch him and jerk him up to the prison so fast that his feet don’t have a chance to touch the ground.” Yet he said also that the workers toiled much harder under the Americans, even though they worked fewer hours, and that they were more afraid of the Americans than they had been of the French. The Americans remained quiet until they got really vexed, he observed, and then there was trouble. Finally, he noted, “The Americans are too much of schemers to waste time or money. There are no loafing jobs now, such as there used to be. It is like running a race all the time. You don’t mind it for a day, but you can’t keep it up.”37
West Indians who had traveled to the isthmus found these new conditions and expectations challenging. Most of them had labored before coming to Panama on sugar or banana plantations, had cultivated small farms, or had worked in cities in small shops as craftsmen. British elites had encouraged workers’ ties to the British Empire as sources of control. The labor system of the Caribbean was profoundly paternalistic and based on thorough legal, economic, and political domination, yet planters nurtured laborers’ feelings of independence through piecework and sharecropping arrangements. Plantation laborers struggled, sometimes successfully, to save a bit of money so they could buy their own land. Despite the low pay and harsh conditions at home, many Caribbean workers looked back sentimentally at the way they had been treated there and found it distinctly superior to their treatment in the Zone.38
“YOU CAN NOT COERCE THEM VERY MUCH”
To more than a few West Indians, life and work in the Canal Zone seemed a step back from independence, and, perhaps fueled in part by nostalgia for the life left behind, they battled energetically with the U.S. government—especially over the conditions at work, and living and eating arrangements. They brought with them to Panama different work rhythms and attitudes from what the government officials and engineers desired. These latter groups hoped to see Caribbeans adopt industrial-style discipline, efficient work habits, and respect for authority. The contrasting expectations created profound tensions between the two groups, of the same sort that had played out so many times before around the world, for example, when Irish immigrants entered U.S. factories in the 1840s or when African American female sharecroppers moved to a nearby city and began working in domestic service. In such cases, just as in the Canal Zone, workers confronting a more regimented work environment resisted and found a way to assert their own priorities, while employers denounced them for their undisciplined approach.39
Government officials constantly compared Caribbeans with other groups and proclaimed that they provided inferior labor. Spaniards, Chinese, Panamanians—all, officials believed, would work harder and more efficiently than Barbadians or Jamaicans. Leading officials like John Stevens did comment on certain virtues of West Indians, describing them as surprisingly literate, gentlemanly, law-abiding, and unlikely to cause trouble. In the Canal Zone those workers arrested for rowdiness or excessive drinking were almost always U.S. citizens, not West Indians. Officials saw them as generally physically fit and strong, yet with some weaknesses. Theodore Shonts, the chairman of the ICC, declared them “strong on the jaw,” that is, excessively talkative. Like exaggerated versions of Negroes from the U.S. South, Shonts assessed, Jamaicans in particular “use very good English, and seem to be very proud of it, and they are rolling their words like a sweet morsel under the tongue most of the time.” According to Shonts, West Indians’ greatest weakness lay in their propensity to “work long enough during the week, for instance, to get enough to live upon and enjoy themselves in their own way, and then, instead of going on and attempting to add to their earnings, they will stop work and go to frolicking and resting.”40
Usually, officials portrayed the inefficiency of West Indians as proof of their inferiority, their lower development as a culture and as a race. West Indians’ laziness, they argued, derived from their vast ignorance and lack of ambition. John Stevens declared, “The Wes
t Indian negro is childlike in his disposition, and the ordinary white man, if he treated one of those negroes harshly, would feel … if he had any manly feelings, as he would feel toward a child.” Yet at times officials conceded that something else was involved. Stevens believed that West Indians willfully sought to control their work environment and resist the exhortations of foremen and supervisors: “Instead of obtaining a fairly continuous amount of labor, as we do from gangs here at home, one-half of the efficiency of this colored labor is lost owing to their deliberate, unceasing, and continuous effort to do as little work as possible.”41
Though they were powerless in many ways, West Indians forced the ICC to adapt to their needs and desires in certain key respects. They quit and changed their jobs regularly, often changing their names to facilitate the move. Mobility allowed them to seek better conditions, higher pay, a kinder foreman, or more opportunity or simply to resist the pace of the Americans’ job. Officials found controlling West Indians a huge challenge because of their constant mobility and the ways it enabled them to demand better working conditions. In late 1909, Goethals issued uniform rates of pay for silver workers that were henceforth to be applied across the entire Zone. His reason was that silver employees had, by changing their jobs, found it possible to force different divisions to pay more for their labor, which was gradually pushing up wages and depriving certain divisions of the requisite number of workers. It was a rare public admission that West Indians sometimes forced bosses at the ICC to adjust their policies in order to tighten management. Officials similarly found it hard to keep track of individual West Indian workers amid the changing of jobs, residences, and names. They pleaded with men not to change their names and asked the British consul to intervene on the issue, but to no avail.42
West Indians vexed ICC officials not only by changing jobs but also, frequently, by refusing to show up for work. In 1906 officials admitted they needed to maintain an active workforce of twenty-three thousand to twenty-five thousand West Indians, even though they needed only fourteen thousand to fifteen thousand workers on any given day. This allowed some nine thousand to eleven thousand workers to miss work each day and still left sufficient laborers to accomplish the required tasks. As Shonts put it, “They work two or three days and drop out, and another gang comes in and works. … [A]bout a third of them do not show up regularly.” Similarly, D. D. Gaillard, the engineer in charge of the central division (which included Culebra Cut), noted that he oversaw roughly fourteen thousand men, although only ten thousand showed up on a typical day. The absences proved especially common during the rainy season. Therefore, while officials found it useful to maintain a surplus in order to discipline workers and prevent strikes, West Indians had also forced them to recruit a much larger workforce simply so foremen would have enough laborers to get the required jobs done.43
Chief engineer John Stevens portrayed the situation graphically:
On Monday the labor ranks are fairly full, on Tuesday they are less so, and on Wednesday a decided shrinkage in the daily force account is shown, and tapering down until Saturday. The force has diminished to such an extent that many of the lines of work are paralyzed, which shows that the mental capacity of the average West Indian negro is limited to the extent that he can in most cases realize his necessities for earning a wage sufficient to cover his animal wants for seven days, and that owing to the high wage which the commission is paying, as soon as two or three days of the week have gone by and he can see five days ahead, his desire to work entirely leaves him.
In fact, West Indians calculated how best to manage life and work in the Canal Zone to their advantage, and with a sophistication Stevens could not imagine. They were eager to find respite from work—unsurprisingly, considering the way foremen drove them at a hard and rapid pace. They would go to great lengths to achieve a break, either staying away from the job for a day or two or, whenever possible, returning to their island homes for a visit. They also found it expensive to live in the Canal Zone because of the high cost of food. They planned carefully and sometimes sacrificed their own comfort in order to save money to send home. One West Indian declared that only by starving themselves could they save money to send home. Often they attempted to supplement their income and their food supply by living and growing sugarcane or bananas, or raising hens, outside the confines of ICC labor camps—and their absences from work sometimes resulted from such responsibilities.44
And so tensions between West Indians and government officials easily spilled over from work to food and housing. Food quality differed radically for gold and silver employees. The government spent little on food for the latter, and officials widely acknowledged the result was of poor quality. This proved especially problematic during the early years, when officials contracted the feeding of laborers out to men who organized food for different gangs. The temptation to make as much profit as possible led to shortchanging the laborers, and anger spread among West Indians. It also led to extreme labor mobility, as workers would seek a different gang in hopes of securing better food. As Jacob Markel, a food supplier from Omaha, described the food preparation in 1905 and 1906, cooks would pile whatever food they had for West Indians (yams or beans or bits of bone or meat) into huge kettles and cook it into one big slop: “Just the same as we do for our hogs out on the farm. The only difference I could see between the way they fed those negroes and the way I feed my hogs is that the food was put on a tin plate instead of in a trough.”45
Discontentment with such conditions during the early years increased, and protests mounted. Chief engineer John Wallace reported trouble with the workers handling freight on the wharves, “just one constant jangle right along between the negroes and their boarding-house keepers, and they were continually expressing dissatisfaction.”46 Undoubtedly, officials heard similar complaints all along the construction line. Matters reached a head in April 1905, when two hundred Jamaicans toiling in Panama City for the ICC’s Department of Waterworks and Sewers refused to return to work because they said they had not been properly or sufficiently fed. Their foreman ordered them back to work, but they refused. Unable to manage the situation, he called upon the Panamanian police for assistance.
Canal Zone chief of police George Shanton happened to be near the work site and described seeing sixty to seventy Jamaican laborers running up the street, greatly agitated. The Panamanian police had ordered them back to work, they said, and then used bayonets and beatings to coerce them. Six men had received bad injuries. Shanton declared he would escort the injured to the hospital and asked the others to return to work, but just then twenty-five Panamanian policemen arrived with rifles and fixed bayonets. Shanton informed the police that he had the situation under control, but as one of the wounded began to pass by the police and approach Shanton, the “commander of the detachment drew his saber and struck him over the head with it, knocking him down. I called out to them to ‘Hold! Hold!’ ” Yet the commander’s violence seemed a signal to the rest of the policemen, and, “some with drawn bayonets, others clubbing their guns, they charged into the Jamaicans, hitting right and left.” The laborers fled, with policemen in pursuit and swinging their clubs. Shanton commented that the Jamaicans had been peaceful and did not provoke the attack. Most ended up with a range of cuts and bruises, and many required treatment at the hospital.47
The whole affair, Canal Zone governor Charles Magoon noted, “could cause a serious complication—an injury to a British subject by Panamanian officers at a time when the men were working for the U.S.”48 The British consul was said to be “indignant” about the incident. John Barrett, the American minister to Panama, quickly maneuvered to placate British and Jamaican officials and demanded the Panamanian government investigate the actions of its police force and take steps so such a situation would not recur. He placed the blame on the Panamanian police, not the U.S. foreman or other officials. Barrett did meet with ICC officials to stress that “they must use the utmost care in the future in dea
ling with the Jamaican laborers and see that they were not treated harshly, that they received proper food,” and he asked that the ICC find a way to settle problems without calling in the Panamanian police. But he also cautioned British and Jamaican officials that the Jamaican laborers as a rule were “somewhat difficult to deal with and that they complain, no matter how good provision is made for them… . [C]onsequently there must be a certain amount of charity in judging stories about the treatment of laborers by their American employers.” He urged the British consul to remind authorities in Jamaica and Britain that “in the inauguration of a great work of this kind there must be a certain amount of difficulties and troubles… . [T]he future treatment of the laborers must not be judged by some unforeseen incident. … The desire of the Canal Commission is to make the Isthmus attractive for laborers.”49
During 1905 and early 1906, U.S. officials were especially desperate to keep West Indians on the job. However, the workers’ unhappiness with the chaotic conditions in the Canal Zone led to mass desertions. Increasingly, West Indians wanted their wives or sweethearts to join them, but initially officials refused. One account relates that a group of West Indians staged a sit-down strike, declaring, “No women, no work,” and government officials conceded their demand and allowed women to come to the Zone. It’s not possible to confirm this tale, but certainly ICC officials felt anxious during 1905 and early 1906 to acquire more Martinican laborers and to keep them working once they arrived. Toward this end officials imported several hundred Martinican women to the isthmus in the summer of 1905. By convincing officials to allow women, West Indians may have exerted a powerful influence on their own lives and on conditions across the isthmus.50
