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The Canal Builders

Page 46

by Julie Greene


  I ruminated over this turn of events the rest of that day while wandering through the cruise ship, which itself was a glorious spectacle of ­twenty-­first-­century decadence. I admired the display of food at the ­twenty-­four-­hour buffet, watched gamblers in the casino, and sat by the pool while couples around me chatted and sipped margaritas. Harry Franck, who had worked as a Zone policeman during the construction years, came to my mind. As he was leaving the isthmus, Franck had imagined the future: “Then blasé travelers lolling in their deck chairs will gaze about them and snort: ‘Huh! Is that all we got for nine years’ work and half a billion dollars?’ ” As the vegetation grew, he figured, the “scars of the ­steam-­shovel” would be healed, and ships would slip along through “what will seem almost a natural channel.”24

  Franck’s description of tourists in deck chairs was ­spot-­on, but he underestimated the value people would place on the canal and the connections they would sense between it and their own identity as a people and as a nation.

  The next day we woke up early. It was time to traverse the canal. Passengers, nearly nine hundred of them, hustled to the buffet for eggs, waffles, bacon, and blueberry blintzes. Filipino crew members maneuvered around the throngs of passengers, working to refill the buffet, stacking trays high with more papaya and pineapple. I grabbed a bit of breakfast, then raced up on deck as the ship crossed beneath the Bridge of the Americas and into the canal. It was a long but exhilarating day, watching the canal go by, gasping as the ship squeezed through the locks, entered Culebra Cut, and floated by Gold Hill, chatting with other passengers and answering their questions about the construction history. That evening we were exhausted after nearly eight hours of sightseeing. As the ship passed out of the final lock and into the Atlantic Ocean, and as darkness fell, I joined other passengers in the ship’s restaurant, where European waiters served us an impeccable ­five-­course meal.

  Then some passengers brought a final legacy of the canal’s construction to my attention. On board the Crystal Harmony there happened to be a large number of African American college alumni, many of them from Howard University. Several had heard my lecture, and I had gotten to know them. One, a New York businessman named Paul Ramsey, had seemed especially interested in the history of the construction and the role played by West Indians. He now approached my table and said, “Professor Greene, I want to tell you that the silver and gold system is still alive and well—and on this very ship!” I must have given him a curious look, because he continued, gesturing as he did so at the chic European waiter placing a plate of salmon on the table. He leaned over, speaking in a low voice, “Look around you! The dining staff is all European while the workers tending the buffet and cleaning our toilets are all Filipinos.”25

  Ramsey had done his homework. He had learned that the two groups received different contracts, with different working and living conditions, different amounts of leisure time, and different pay rates. He discovered that the Crystal Harmony, like most other cruise ships, was registered in small countries (like Panama) so its officers need not observe U.S. labor laws. He had talked with workers and learned how the two groups lived while on board the ship. He chatted with Filipinos who had not seen their children since their ­two-­year job contract began and who worked twelve to sixteen hours a day, seven days a week. They described their lives in the cramped and windowless quarters on the lower decks, where passengers were forbidden. Ramsey met with European waiters and learned how much more tip money they earned than did Filipinos who cleaned staterooms or washed dishes. He also observed, and it turned out that this particularly frustrated Ramsey and many other passengers traveling with the Howard University Alumni Association, that there was not a single person of African descent working on the ship. Ramsey and his friends ultimately demanded a meeting with the cruise ship’s hotel director to complain about this. As our ship continued on beyond the Panama Canal to visit several Caribbean islands, with populations predominantly of African origin, they believed it unacceptable that no black men or women were employed by the Crystal Harmony’s parent corporation. When they met with the hotel director, he seemed to empathize wholeheartedly with their concern. “We try to hire African people, we really do,” he confessed, “but when we recruit our laborers in Europe, we just ­don’t find any Africans able to do the job.”

  During the remaining days of the cruise, I talked more with Paul Ramsey and other alumni about the labor system on the cruise ship and how workers’ lives today compare with those of one hundred years ago. We talked about the vast distances Filipinos had traveled in order to work on the cruise ship, and about the difference their pay would make to the lives of family members waiting at home. We compared them to the workers who had built the Panama Canal and wondered if, like West Indians nearly a century earlier, the Filipino maids and cooks found ways to resist workplace discipline. Over coffee we discussed the nature of the ­twenty-­first-century world, when thousands of workers migrate from India or Indonesia to labor on cruise ships, and Mexicans and Central Americans travel to the United States for work—even as U.S. corporations outsource many jobs to other countries in search of cheaper labor. Across history people have moved around the world to improve their lives and seek better jobs. How and when did segregation prove an important means of control? When did governments’ powers of deportation emerge as decisive? As we sought answers to such questions, our talks ranged widely from ­present-­day conditions to hundreds of years ago, from Mexican workers fearing deportation in the ­twenty-­first-­century United States, to Japanese and Portuguese laborers working on ­nineteenth-­century Hawaiian plantations.

  In 1912, John Hall had praised the international working class on the Isthmus of Panama in his poem “The Canal Builders”:

  ­They’re the brawn of every nation!

  Nature’s best from every station: …

  For Empire they toil,

  In an alien soil.

  Unto the end their work will stand.26

  The labor Hall celebrated turned out to be invisible to many people, just as the efforts of workers today—on cruise ships, in private households, in retail stores—so often go unnoticed. Much has changed, of course, when we compare the Crystal Harmony with the canal that made its journey possible. While the canal workers toiled for empire, their labor also helped create the infrastructure for a global economy—and in the decades since then, the processes of globalization have transformed the world. Yet when we see today how race, ethnicity, gender, and class shape the international division of labor, we might think back to the construction of the Panama Canal and the ways it contributed to many present conditions. Strategies devised during the canal construction project have reached across the decades to the current day. We can see them in the increasing importance of transnational migrant labor and the rapid flow of capital around the globe, in the persistent notion that citizens deserve certain rights that are denied to aliens, and in the sentimental and idealistic ways Americans sometimes approach the exercise of U.S. power around the world. In a poem Bertolt Brecht had once queried, “Every ten years a great man / Who pays the piper?” Approaching the history and future of America’s relationship to the world with Brecht’s question in mind provides new perspectives. Who are the people toiling and digging today in the ditches of U.S. power abroad? They surely have stories to tell.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  _____________

  ONE HOT DAY in 2002 at the archives of Panama’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, I sat leafing through correspondence memos that told me nothing and led me nowhere. I had traveled to Panama City to search for primary sources that would help me understand the experiences of working people on the Isthmus of Panama during the construction era. I pinned most of my hopes on the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where documents might shed light on the relations between the United States and Panama—especially during the infamous riots that broke out in Panama City in 1912 and 1915. The director of the archives, Xiomara de Robletto, talked at
length with me about the holdings of her institution. She pointed me to several potential areas to explore, but her news overall was discouraging. Her archives held a great deal of information on the construction era and relations with the United States, but she warned that it was poorly organized and that tracking down what I needed might be impossible. For the next several hours I examined records of correspondence sent out from the ministry. Finding nothing of use, I wondered how I would spend the rest of my weeks in Panama City. Then one of the archives’ clerical employees walked up to my table and handed me a large volume filled with meticulously organized documents. Might this be useful to you? she asked. Indeed! The volume was filled with letters and testimony related to the riot of 1912. Moments later another employee brought me several more volumes. Soon the table on which I worked was covered with ­primary-­source materials, and as I read, a completely new picture of the riots arose before my eyes. The volumes documented the riots from the perspective of Panamanian officials, U.S. military personnel, canal employees, and the ordinary workingmen and -women of Panama City. Together they told a remarkably different story from the one I had learned in the archives of the United States, and enabled me to see relations between Panama and the United States from multiple perspectives. It turned out that students from the University of Panama had organized the documents related to the riots years before. The director of the archives ­hadn’t known they existed; only clerical workers knew where they were.

  Telling the stories of the workingmen and -women who built the Panama Canal seemed, when I first began considering this project, as if it might be impossible because of the apparent absence of primary sources. Yet as I began digging around, I discovered a world more vast than anything ­I’d known, and this is due to the often hidden labors of students, staff members, archivists, curators, historians, and friends. Together they enriched this project in countless ways. Thanking them and making their many efforts and collaborations more visible is one of the sweetest labors this book has afforded.

  The greatest single repository of information regarding the Panama Canal’s construction is the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, where the records of the Isthmian Canal Commission are held. Navigating my way through the thousands of boxes in this collection was made much easier due to help from staff members, particularly the expert assistance of David Pfeiffer and Joseph Schwartz. For excellent detective work tracking down the judicial records of the Canal Zone, my thanks to Donald Ford and Martha Campos of the University of Colorado Law School Library, ­Marie-­Louise Bernal and Luis Acosta at the Library of Congress, and Robert Ellis of the National Archives. I am also grateful to staff members and archivists at the National Archives of the United Kingdom in Kew, England; the archives of Wichita State University in Wichita, Kansas; the New York Public Library; the University of California at Berkeley’s Bancroft Library; and the University of Colorado at Boulder. For their help identifying primary sources in Panama City I am indebted to staff members and archivists at the University of Panama; the Archives at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; and the National Archives of Panama, especially its director, Porfirio De Cruz.

  Fellowships granted by the American Council of Learned Societies and by the National Endowment for the Humanities made it possible for me to write this book and afforded me the luxury of focusing ­full-­time on the challenges it posed. The University of Colorado at Boulder supported the writing of this book, while CU’s Graduate Council on the Arts and Humanities made possible research trips to Panama City, London, and Washington, D.C., as well as a journey to present my work at a meeting of the Caribbean History Association in Havana, Cuba.

  Far-flung audiences listened as I presented parts of this project, and I am very grateful to those who organized such opportunities and who read and provided suggestions on my work: Nelson Lichtenstein at the University of California at Santa Barbara, Richard Greenwald at the United States Merchant Marine Academy, Howard Brick at Washington University, F. Tobias Higbie at the Newberry Library in Chicago, and Glenda Gilmore at Yale University. For their thoughtful commentaries and criticism I thank Laura Briggs, Alice O’Connor, Christopher McAuley, Charles Bright, Nicola Miller, Christopher Abel, Thomas Bender, Christopher Boyer, Rick Halpern, Aihwa Ong, Susan Levine, Susan Hirsch, Eileen Boris, Joseph McCartin, Paul Taillon, Sidney Mintz, Amy Kaplan, Harvey Neptune, Paul Kramer, Martha Hodes, Carl Nightingale, Robert Zieger, Diana Paton, James Sanders, William Jones, Willard Gingerich, Anne McPherson, Robert Ferry, Shelton Stromquist, Lynn Hollen Lees, Alexandra Minna Stern, Shelley Streeby, Lok Siu, Steve Striffler, and Sherene Razak. Many others read sections of this manuscript or discussed key issues with me. My hearty gratitude to Marcel van der Linden, Jana Lipman, Donna Gabaccia, Jaquelyn Hall, David Sicilia, Mary Kay Vaughan, Leslie Rowland, Sonya Michel, Daryle Williams, Patricia Limerick, Scott Nelson, Robyn Muncy, Dylan Tucker, William Pettit, Erika Doss, Sarah Greene, Alex Greene, Constance Clark, Dennis Greene, Martha Gimenez, Mervat Hatem, Jocelyn Olcott, Amanda Greene, and Michael Kazin. For aiding me with specific problems my hat is off to Paul Sutter, Abigail Markwyn, Mae Ngai, Nancy Cott, John French, Ronald Harpelle, Melvyn Dubofsky, Lee Chambers, Michael Honey, Shirley Gillespie, James Boylan, and Carol Byerly. My friend Bernard Coakley, a geophysicist at the University of Alaska, contributed geological history from the days when no canal was needed to connect the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. I owe a special debt to Heather Thompson, who suggested innovative ways of thinking about writing this book. Many friends kept their eyes out for references to the canal and then sent me wonderful gems of information. Thanks to Donna Stevens, Grace Palladino, Eric Arnesen, Susan Schulten, Geoffrey Klingsporn, Thomas Krainz, Mark Pittenger, John Enyeart, and Bryan Palmer for deepening my perspective on the work and workers of the canal. And I am very grateful to my fellow passengers on the Crystal Harmony’s cruise through the Panama Canal: Julia Mullican, William Strickland, Gale Strickland, Harold Freeman, and especially Paul Ramsey.

  Finding sources on an international topic like the Panama Canal required advice from a wide range of scholars. I am grateful to Bieito Alonso for providing me with information on consulate records in Spain. The intellectual camaraderie of Caribbeanists and Latin Americanists has been indispensable and enriching. Michael Conniff, Velma Newton, Bonham Richardson, and Lara Putnam each had written books that provided intellectual foundations for this project, and each one kindly provided me with advice on archival sources. Bonham Richardson particularly shaped my understanding of Barbadian workers’ experiences through conversations and by lending me his copy of a migrants’ registry from Barbados as well as his original notes from interviews he conducted in the 1980s with canal workers. His generosity and trust in this project was marvelous. Lara Putnam’s book on West Indians in Costa Rica inspired me to find the legal records of the Canal Zone and shaped the use I made of them; conversations with her about the riches I might find at the National Archives in Kew, England, convinced me to go there; finally, she provided essential advice about where to look for information. The Foreign Office Records at Kew became one of the crucial sources for this book. The friendship of Andrzej Krauze and Vite and Dalia Tracz enlivened my days in London. Thanks for befriending this footloose American.

  The key in so many ways, of course, was Panama. Aims McGuinness, the historian whose study of ­nineteenth-­century Panama opens a wide window into the country’s history, first exhorted me to go to Panama and influenced me in innumerable other ways—for example, urging me to take a taxicab ride across the isthmus to Colón in order to get a sense of ­working-­class life during the construction era. That trip changed the way I saw the canal. Once I got to Panama, Guillermo Castro discussed his country’s history with me at great length and kindly took me on a rousing tour of Panama City, Balboa, and the ­working-­class towns of what had once been the Canal Zone. Historian Alfredo Castillero Calvo shared with me his incomparable knowledge of Panama’s history and provided tips and advice that shaped my research a
nd helped me interpret my findings. Angeles Ramos Baquero, executive director and curator of the brilliant Museo del Canal Interoceánico de Panamá, illuminated my perspective on the canal in numerous ways. Alfredo and Angie did much to make my family feel at home in Panama City during our weeks there. Together they also located for me the most fabulous research assistant, Juana Campbell Cook, who shaped and expedited my work through Panama City’s archives, but also shared with me her keen perspective on Panamanian politics and ­working-­class culture.

  At the University of Colorado I was privileged to have assistance from excellent research assistants: Cailyn Plantico, Nicki Gonzales, and Gerald Ronning. They provided me with key insights and suggestions as did graduate students John Enyeart, R. Todd Laugen, Carol Byerly, Renee Johnson, John Grider, and Jon Shelton. Colleagues at the University of Colorado lived with this project for many years and found novel ways of providing encouragement. I am especially grateful to Peter Boag, Lucy Chester, Brian DeLay, Francisco Barbosa, Martha Hanna, Susan Kent, Timothy Weston, Eric Love, Marcia Yonemoto, and Virginia Anderson. I have only begun teaching at the University of Maryland, but I am already dependent on Richard Price and Ira Berlin for their wise counsel.

 

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