by Julie Greene
11.Carla Burnett, “ ‘Are We Slaves or Free Men?’ Labor, Race, Garveyism, and the 1920 Panama Canal Strike” (Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois at Chicago, 2004), pp. 33–37; Edwin E. Slosson and Gardner Richardson, “Two Panama Life Stories,” Independent 60 (1906), pp. 918–23. Harry Franck, the American policeman and census taker who described life in the Canal Zone, noted how different Barbadians appeared as compared with Jamaicans. Revealing his distrust of West Indians, he declared, “Of the great divisions among [West Indians], Barbadians seemed more well-mannered than Jamaicans—or was it merely more subtle hypocrisy?” Harry A. Franck, Zone Policeman 88: A Close Range Study of the Panama Canal and Its Workers (New York: Century, 1913), p. 43.
12.Constantine Parkinson wrote his story and entered it in the “Isthmian Historical Society Competition.” The pages detailing Parkinson’s story all derive from this source.
13.Albert Peters, John Holligan, Mitchell Berisford, and Nehemiah Douglas, ibid. A letter submitted to this same competition by Clifford Hunt likewise recalled, “Men in my gang tell the Boss I am going out to ease my bowels and they die in the bush and nobody look for you.”
14.Leslie Carmichael, ibid.; interview notes taken by Bonham Richardson in Barbados during 1982. These interviews provided Richardson with a crucial source for his pathbreaking book, Panama Money in Barbados. I am very grateful to Dr. Richardson for allowing me to see his notes.
15.Conniff, Black Labor on a White Canal, pp. 30–31; David McCullough, The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870–1914 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1977), pp. 581–83, 610; William Gorgas, “The Conquest of the Tropics for the White Race: President’s Address at the Sixtieth Annual Session of the American Medical Association, June 9, 1909,” Journal of the American Medical Association 52, no. 25 (1909), pp. 1967–69.
16.On destitution during the early period, see Mallet to Charles Magoon, Jan. 17, 1906, Foreign Office Records, FO 371/101, The National Archives, Kew, U.K. Statistics on illness and treatment in hospitals are from “Report of Col. W. C. Gorgas, Head of the Department of Sanitation,” in Annual Report of the Isthmian Canal Commission for the Fiscal Year Ending June 30,1912 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1912), app. P, p. 544. For statistics on population, see Census of the Canal Zone, February 1, 1912, pp. 8–12.
17.Norton Brownie, “Isthmian Historical Society Competition.”
18.Slosson and Richardson, “Two Panama Life Stories”; “Isthmian Historical Society Competition,” see letters by Aaron Clarke and Thomas Gittens.
19.Gertrude Beeks’s report and the government’s response can be found in the Isthmian Canal Commission Records, RG 185, 28-A-5, National Archives, College Park, Md. (hereafter cited as ICC Records). See also Goethals to Beeks, Aug. 23, 1907, in the same collection. As late as Nov. 1907, Gertrude Beeks wrote that laborers still lacked mattresses or blankets, and were lying directly on canvas or metal cots. The floors of their quarters were also wood, which retains moisture, rather than the concrete used by the British government at Cape Town. See “Reply of Miss Gertrude Beeks,” Nov. 16, 1907, ICC Records, 28-A-5, p. 47.
20.Gorgas testifying in The Panama Canal: Hearings Before the Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, House of Representatives, 62nd Cong., 2nd sess. (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1912), pp. 275–76. For a similar opinion that West Indians were to blame for their illnesses, see Theodore Shonts, chairman of the ICC, testifying in U.S. Senate, Investigation of Panama Canal Matters: Hearings Before the Committee on Interoceanic Canals of the United States Senate, 59th Cong., 2nd sess., Doc. 401 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1907), serial set 5097, vol. 1, p. 478: “Our people [white Americans] have greater vitality, and they probably take better care of themselves.” For more on medical efforts in the Zone, consult J. Ewing Mears, The Triumph of American Medicine in the Construction of the Panama Canal (Philadelphia: Wm. J. Dornan, 1911); Gorgas, “Conquest of the Tropics for the White Race”; William Crawford Gorgas, Sanitation in Panama (New York: D. Appleton, 1915); Joseph A. Le Prince and A. J. Orenstein, eds., Mosquito Control in Panama: The Eradication of Malaria and Yellow Fever in Cuba and Panama (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1916).
21.Civil case files from the 3rd Judicial Circuit, Panama Canal Zone, National Archives, Washington, D.C.; see esp. case files 377, 380, and 446.
22.On West Indians complaining to the British consul, consider the case of Nataniel Brown, who complained he had been held against his will for seven months but never received any treatment for insanity. Brown to the Honorable Colonial Secretary of Jamaica, July 24, 1908, Foreign Office Records, FO 288/110; Annual Report of the Isthmian Canal Commission for the Fiscal Year Ending June 30, 1907 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1907), p. 31; Annual Report of the Isthmian Canal Commission for the Fiscal Year Ending June 30, 1912 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1912), p. 550. For more on such themes, see David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Warwick Anderson, The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health, and Racial Destiny in Australia (New York: Basic Books, 2003); Julyan Peard, Race, Place, and Medicine: The Idea of the Tropics in Nineteenth-Century Brazilian Medicine (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000).
23.Reginald Beckford, “Isthmian Historical Society Competition.”
24.Alfred Dottin and Jules Lecurrieux, ibid.
25.Marrigan Austin, ibid.
26.For evidence on officials’ determination to maintain a labor surplus, see William Burr’s testimony in U.S. Senate, Investigation of Panama Canal Matters: Hearings Before the Committee on Interoceanic Canals of the United States Senate, serial set 5098, vol. 2, p. 1574.
27.Thatcher’s testimony is in The Panama Canal: Hearings Before the Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, vol. 1, p. 320.
28.Franck, Zone Policeman 88, p. 167; Poultney Bigelow, “Panama—the Human Side,” pt. 3, Cosmopolitan Magazine 42 (1906), pp. 53–60; Fitz. A. Banister, “Isthmian Historical Society Competition.”
29.An ordinance allowed arrest for vagrancy, mendicancy, trespass, intoxication, and disorderly conduct. Any person found idle, begging, drunk, disorderly, or without visible means of support would be punished by a fine of no more than $25 or imprisonment for no more than thirty days, or both. This ordinance took effect on Jan. 1, 1908, and was added to the penal code of the Canal Zone by executive order of President Roosevelt on Jan. 9, 1908. See extracts from the minutes of meeting of the ICC, Dec. 9, 1907, and Roosevelt’s executive order: both ICC Records, 94-L-9. For the case of Charles Hamilton, see Inspector Miskimon to Goethals, Aug. 31, 1910, T. B. Miskimon Papers, MS 86-5, box 2, FF 39, Special Collections, Ablah Library, Wichita State University.
30.J. P. Fyffe, “In Re: Labor Conditions,” to M. H. Thatcher, July 29, 1911; “Persons Arrested for Loitering and Vagrancy in the Various Towns of the Canal Zone, and the Results of Their Trials, from 6:00 p.m., July 12, 1911, to 6:00 p.m., July 27, 1911”; Rousseau to George Shanton, Jan. 3, 1908: all ICC Records, 94-L-9. See also Thatcher’s testimony in The Panama Canal: Hearings Before the Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, vol. 1, p. 320. For accounts of West Indians alleging mistreatment by police, see the manuscripts of Miskimon, Goethals’s investigator, in Miskimon Papers. For example, see Miskimon’s memo to Goethals, Aug. 10, 1910, MS 86-5, box 2, FF 33. For more on prisons and prison labor, see chapter 7, below.
31.Mallet to Consul Cox, Dec. 8, 1910, Foreign Office Records, FO 371/944.
32.Mallet to Sir, marked confidential, Nov. 19, 1906, Foreign Office Records, FO 288/98.
33.Marsh to the foreign secretary of state, United Kingdom, Jan. 7, 1911, FO 371/1176; no author to no one (but presumably to Mallet), Sept. 26, 1914, Foreign Office Records, FO 288/160.
34.Hardie to Colonel Seely (MP, Colonial Office), Nov. 24, 1908, and see also accompanying letters, document #42743, Foreign Office Records, FO 371/494. Available evidence suggests the French consul played a role simila
r to that of his British counterpart. In one case he took action when, in 1905, a group of Martinican laborers protested their treatment on board a ship and were forcibly ejected from it. The Panamanian police physically punished the Martinicans, and the French government became concerned about charges of cruelty. Consequently, the French consul conducted an investigation into living and working conditions for Martinicans, and requested several changes from the U.S. government. See G. Bonhenry, Vice Consulate of France in Colón, Panama, “Report,” Nov. 13, 1905; Bonhenry to the Department of Foreign Affairs, Nov. 16, 1905: ICC Records, 2-P-69, pt. 1, box 50.
35.Brakemen of Pedro Miguel and Las Cascadas to Goethals, April 13, 1913, ICC Records, 2-P-22, box 48.
36.Miskimon, memorandum for the chairman, n.d., Miskimon Papers, MS 86-5, box 2, FF 47.
37.Slosson and Richardson, “Two Panama Life Stories.”
38.See Richardson, Panama Money in Barbados, esp. ch. 2 and 3; Conniff, Black Labor on a White Canal, pp. 8–11; Lewis, West Indian in Panama, pp. 72–73; and George Westerman, “Historical Notes on West Indians on the Isthmus of Panama,” Phylon 22 (Winter 1961), p. 342.
39.On this common theme in history and anthropology, many examples abound. Among others, consult Herbert Gutman, Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America: Essays in American Working-Class and Social History (New York: Knopf, 1976); Tera Hunter, To ’Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labor After the Civil War (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997); and James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985).
40.U.S. Senate, Investigation of Panama Canal Matters, vol. 1, pp. 81, 55, 347, 485–86.
41.Stevens considers West Indians to be childlike in ibid., p. 81. Similarly, William Nelson Cromwell testified that the Caribbean laborers were “plain people” who were “densely ignorant.” See ibid., vol. 2, p. 1163; and Stevens notes West Indians’ deliberate efforts not to work in “Exhibit A,” in Message from the President of the United States Transmitting Certain Papers to Accompany His Message of January 8, 1906 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1906), p. 24.
42.Hearings Concerning Estimates for Construction of the Isthmian Canal for the Fiscal Year 1911, p. 66; on the changing of names, see, for example, Basil Blackman (acting governor of Jamaica) to the minister in Panama, Aug. 17, 1908, Foreign Office Records, FO 288/110.
43.Hearings Before the Subcommittee of the House Committee on Appropriations, in Charge of Sundry Civil Appropriation Bill for 1907 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1906), p. 9. See also on this point Hearings Before the Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce of the House of Representatives, on the Isthmian Canal (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1906), p. 38; Panama Canal—Skilled Labor: Extracts from Hearings of the Committees on Appropriations of the Senate and House of Representatives, Fiscal Years 1907 to 1915 Inclusive, 63rd Cong., 2nd sess. (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1914), p. 109; U.S. Senate, Investigation of Panama Canal Matters, vol. 3, p. 1574; Hearings Concerning Estimates for Construction of the Isthmian Canal for the Fiscal Year 1911, p. 327.
44.Stevens, “Exhibit A,” in Message from the President, p. 21; Slosson and Richardson, “Two Panama Life Stories.”
45.U.S. Senate, Investigation of Panama Canal Matters, vol. 3, p. 1296, vol. 1, p. 773.
46.Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 620–21.
47.Shanton to the governor of the Canal Zone, April 27, 1905, in Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, with the Annual Message of the President Transmitted to Congress, Dec. 5, 1905, House of Representatives, 59th Cong., 1st sess. (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1906), pp. 711–12.
48.Magoon, testimony in U.S. Senate, Investigation of Panama Canal Matters, vol. 1, p. 773.
49.Barrett to the minister of government and foreign affairs, May 8, 1905, and Barrett to the British consul, May 8, 1905: both in Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, pp. 710–11. See also George Davis to Wallace, May 3, 1905, in U.S. Senate, Investigation of Panama Canal Matters, vol. 3, pp. 2500–2505, 2665. Lewis discusses this incident in West Indian in Panama, pp. 46–49. The Panamanian police would be a recurring source of trouble for West Indian laborers in the Canal Zone. On this subject a useful source is Anguizola, “Negroes in the Building of the Panama Canal.”
50.Eyra Marcela Reyes Rivas, El trabajo de las mujeres en la historia de la construcción del Canal de Panamá, 1881–1914 (Panama: Universidad de Panamá, Instituto de la Mujer, 2000), p. 103; Fannie P. Hernandez, “Men Dug the Canal . . . but Women Played a Vital Role,” Panama Canal Review (Spring 1976), cited in the richly documented dissertation by Paul W. Morgan Jr., “The Role of North American Women in U.S. Cultural Chauvinism in the Panama Canal Zone, 1904–1945” (Ph.D. diss., Florida State University, 2000), pp. 40, 51–52. Many works cite this tale of a sit-down strike by West Indian workers declaring “No women, no work,” but the only direct evidence I’ve found for this is the 1976 reminiscence, cited above, by Fannie Hernandez. On the importation of Martinican women, see Poultney Bigelow, “Our Mismanagement at Panama,” Independent, Jan. 4, 1906, reprinted in Message from the President, pp. 79–91; and U.S. Senate, Investigation of Panama Canal Matters, vol. 1, pp. 56–57, 931–82. Many West Indians began sending money home so women might join them on the isthmus, but this also complicated the housing situation. The U.S. government provided some married housing to laborers, but required that only legally married couples might make use of it. In 1907 the ICC stopped building married housing for the laborers on the ground that it cost too much money. See Newton, Silver Men, pp. 148–49.
51.On Beeks’s charge about food and the government’s response, see R. E. Wood (acting manager, Department of Labor, Quarters, and Subsistence) to Goethals, Aug. 23, 1907, ICC Records, 28-A-5, p. 10. For sample menus supplied to gold versus silver employees, see U.S. Senate, Investigation of Panama Canal Matters, vol. 2, p. 1330. On the importing of food from Barbados, England, and other places, see Hearings Before the Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce of the House of Representatives on Panama Canal (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1909), pp. 83–86. Also useful is the discussion in The Panama Canal: Hearings Before the Committee on Interoceanic Canals, U.S. Senate, 62nd Cong. (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1912), pp. 162–63.
52.The comment by the representative of the Bible Society of Barbados is in Hearings Concerning Estimates for Construction of the Isthmian Canal for the Fiscal Year 1911, p. 76. For John Butcher’s opinion, see “Isthmian Historical Society Competition.”
53.Wallace’s comment is in U.S. Senate, Investigation of Panama Canal Matters, vol. 1, p. 624. Thus gradually the government shifted its strategy to a looser approach. Whereas initially officials believed it essential to make West Indians consume more meat so as to improve their efficiency, they soon discovered they would need to let laborers decide for themselves what and how they would eat.
54.The descriptions of how men spent their time come from Henry De Lisser’s account of his travels: Jamaicans in Colón and the Canal Zone (Kingston, 1906), p. 13. See Newton, Silver Men, for her very useful discussion of food and housing and West Indians’ complaints regarding both.
55.See comments by the Jamaican carpenter interviewed in Slosson and Richardson, “Two Panama Life Stories.”
56.U.S. Senate, Investigation of Panama Canal Matters, pp. 3087, 596; Hearings Concerning Estimates for Construction of the Isthmian Canal for the Fiscal Year 1911, pp. 74, 76; “Labor Problems: Laborers Who Prefer ‘the Bush’ to Commission Quarters,” Canal Record, Jan. 13, 1909, p. 157; Newton, Silver Men, pp. 150–51.
57.By the summer of 1915, fewer than five thousand West Indian men were living in government housing. See U.S. Senate, Investigation of Panama Canal Matters, vol. 4, p. 3087, vol. 1, p. 596; Hearings Concerning Estimates for Construction of the Isthmian Canal for the Fiscal Year 1911, pp. 74, 76; Canal Record, Aug. 11, 1915, p. 445; “Report of the Quartermaster,” in Annual Report of the Isthmian Canal Commission for
the Year Ending June 30, 1910 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1910), p. 312; Canal Record, Sept. 2, 1914, p. 1; “Labor Problems,” p. 157. See also Newton, Silver Men, pp. 150–51.
58.The Jamaican newspaper the Daily Gleaner reported that in 1907 alone, Barbadians had sent home nearly $300,000 through the Canal Zone post office, while Jamaicans had sent home nearly $125,000, and Grenadians had sent $30,000. See “Canal Work,” Daily Gleaner, March 30, 1908; Richardson, Panama Money in Barbados; and interview notes taken by Bonham Richardson in Barbados during 1982, in author’s possession. Another excellent discussion of the Panama Canal’s impact on international migration by Caribbeans is Lara Putnam, The Company They Kept: Migrants and the Politics of Gender in Caribbean Costa Rica, 1870–1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).
59.John Wallace, testimony in U.S. Senate, Investigation of Panama Canal Matters, vol. 1, p. 373. Albert Banister in “Isthmian Historical Society Competition.”
60.See Canal Zone v. Thomas F. B. Davis, filed Jan. 27, 1909, cases 629–32, Judicial Records of the Canal Zone, Criminal Cases, 2nd District, National Archives, Washington, D.C.
61.Prince George Green and Reginald Beckford, “Isthmian Historical Society Competition.”
62.Louise Cramer, “Songs of West Indian Negroes in the Canal Zone,” California Folklore Quarterly 5, no. 3 (July 1946), pp. 243–72. For a useful approach to folk songs as sources, see Scott Reynolds Nelson, Steel Drivin’ Man: John Henry, The Untold Story of an American Legend (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).
63.Newton, Silver Men, pp. 156–57; Lewis, West Indian in Panama, pp. 76–77.
64.Westerman, “Historical Notes on West Indians on the Isthmus of Panama,” pp. 342–43; Amos Parks’s recollection is in “Isthmian Historical Society Competition.”
CHAPTER FOUR: LAY DOWN YOUR SHOVELS
1.J. P. Cooper (sergeant, Zone policeman) to George Shanton, March 13, 1907; Shanton to H. D. Reed, March 14, 1907: both Isthmian Canal Commission Records, RG 185, 2-P-59, National Archives, College Park, Md. (hereafter cited as ICC Records). For the broader context of southern European immigration to the Americas during the early twentieth century, consult Yolanda Marco Serra, Los obreros españoles en la construcción del Canal de Panamá: La emigración española hacia Panamá vista a través de la prensa española (Panamá: Portobelo, 1997); William D. Donadio, The Thorns of the Rose: Memoirs of a Tailor of Panama (Colón, Republic of Panama: Dovesa, 1999); James R. Barrett and David Roediger, “Inbetween Peoples: Race, Nationality, and the ‘New Immigrant’ Working Class,” Journal of American Ethnic History (Spring 1997), pp. 3–44; Thomas Guglielmo, White on Arrival: Italians, Race, Color, and Power in Chicago, 1890–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); Jose C. Moya, Cousins and Strangers: Spanish Immigrants in Buenos Aires, 1850–1930 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Louis A. Pérez, Cuba: Between Reform and Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Ada Ferrer, Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868–1898 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999).
