The Panama Canal

Kelly Therese Pollock  0:00  
This is Unsung History, the podcast where we discuss people and events in American history that haven't always received a lot of attention. I'm your host, Kelly Therese Pollock. I'll start each episode with a brief introduction to the topic, and then talk to someone who knows a lot more than I do. Be sure to subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app, so you never miss an episode, and please tell your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, maybe even strangers to listen too. In the 1880s, the French attempted to build a sea level canal across the Isthmus of Panama, under the direction of Ferdinand de Lesseps, who had previously developed the Suez Canal. His Panama project, though, was a failure, as he was unable to overcome the effects of rampant diseases like malaria and yellow fever, and the company ran out of money within a decade. By 1902, the United States government was interested in taking over the work of building the canal on the same site where the French had previously attempted the work. However, at the time, Panama was a territory of Colombia, and the Colombian Senate failed to ratify the Hay-Herran Treaty. President Theodore Roosevelt and the United States government supported an independence movement in Panama, sending US warships to support their efforts. After Panama declared independence from Colombia, on November 3, 1903, the United States was the first country to publicly recognize the new nation. And Secretary of State, John Hay then negotiated a treaty with the new republic's Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary, Philippe Bunau- Varilla. Bunau-Varilla happened to be a major stockholder in the French New Panama Canal Company, from which the US purchased stocks and assets, and he made out handsomely in the deal. The Panamanians were less handsomely rewarded. The treaty gave the United States the rights to a canal zone which split the new Republic of Panama in two. The Canal Zone, which was governed by the United States, extended five miles on either side of the path of the canal itself. In exchange for this concession, which was originally set to last in perpetuity, Panama received a one time $10 million payment and an annual fee of just $250,000. In 1904, with the treaty signed and approved, President Roosevelt appointed John Finley Wallace as chief engineer of the project, with a whopping $25,000 annual salary. The threat of disease still loomed so large that Wallace arrived in Panama with his own metal coffin. The enormity of the task before him and the inefficiency of a system in which every decision had to go through a seven member Isthmian Canal Commission overwhelmed Wallace, and he resigned after just one year on the job. Roosevelt then turned to John Stevens, a railroad engineer. Recognizing the importance of rail to the canal project, Stevens had the Panama Railroad rebuilt and used it to transport both laborers and excavated dirt. Stevens' biggest contribution to the project was to discard the idea of a sea level canal, and instead lobby for a plan that would include locks, dams and an artificial lake, all of which would eventually be created. Stevens also supported the work of Chief Sanitary Officer William Crawford Gorgas, who fumigated homes, drained pools and standing water, and attached screens to windows and gutters to reduce mosquito borne diseases like yellow fever and malaria. Although Stevens resigned after 20 months, he was hugely influential on the shape of the project. Finally, in 1907, Roosevelt appointed as chief engineer, a military officer who couldn't resign, George Washington Goethals. Goethals was also named Chairman of the ICC and President of the Panama Railroad Company and its steamship line. Sometimes called the czar of Panama, he reported only to the Secretary of War and to the President. And his management of the project could sometimes be dictatorial, but he got the job done. Of course, the construction of the canal took more than just a chief engineer and a plan. It took a massive workforce. Some of those workers were white US citizens, who were generally skilled workers. They were paid in gold currency and had access to superior housing, food, and other facilities in the Canal Zone. Although their conditions were rough at the start of the canal project, some of them were eventually able to bring wives and families into the zone. A much larger number of laborers came from the West Indies. Between 1904 and 1914, 10s of 1000s of men and women traveled to Panama, from Barbados, Jamaica, St Lucia, Antigua, Bahamas, Grenada and to other Caribbean islands. These so called silver roll workers, because they were originally paid in silver coins, were paid significantly less than their gold roll counterpoints, but they were still largely paid more than they could make back home. Their working conditions were brutal, and their living conditions often weren't much better. Almost every aspect of life in the Canal Zone was segregated between gold and silver roll workers. There were smaller numbers of laborers from Europe and from Panama, as well as African Americans, and US officials often struggled with how to fit each of those groups into the gold and silver roll system. The official death toll during the US construction project was around 5600, with the majority of those who died being Afro-Caribbean workers, who were involved in much of the most dangerous work, but the actual death toll was almost certainly much higher, and many of the workers who survived still suffered serious illness or injury along the way. Finally, on August 15, 1914, the Panama Canal officially opened to great fanfare, although it was somewhat overshadowed by the beginning of the Great War in Europe, just weeks earlier. Decades later, in the early 1960s, Ruth C. Stuhl, the president of the Isthmian Historical Society, designed a competition to capture the stories of the non US workers of the canal project, as the 50th anniversary of the canals completion approached. The Historical Society advertised the competition in newspapers on the British Caribbean islands, and they received 112 responses. Albert Peters, originally from the Bahamas, won first prize, $50. The entries were part of the Canal Zone Library Museum until 1999, and are now housed in Box 25 in the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. In the mid 1960s Panamanians rioted in the Canal Zone over nationalist issues, including the refusal of US officials to fly the Panamanian flag there. A 1964 riot even briefly interrupted diplomatic relations between the two countries. After years of negotiations, in 1977, President Jimmy Carter and Panamanian dictator Omar Torrijos reached an agreement that abolished the Canal Zone and recognized Panama as the sovereign of the region, but gave the United States the right to operate the canal until December 31, 1999. The Torrijos-Carter Treaties were approved by a one vote margin in the United States Senate in September, 1978, and went into effect in October, 1979. As agreed, on December 31, 1999, control of the Panama Canal was turned over to the Panamanians. Joining me in this episode is Dr. Julie Greene, Professor of History at the University of Maryland, and author of, "Box 25: Archival Secrets, Caribbean Workers, and the Panama Canal."

Hi Julie, thanks so much for joining me today.

Dr. Julie Greene  11:47  
Hi Kelly. I'm very happy to be here. Thanks for bringing me on. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  11:49  
So, I'm interested in hearing, you have written a book just now about Box 25, but you had written a previous book about the Panama Canal. So I want to hear why you had decided to revisit the Panama Canal, and why now a book about Box 25?

Dr. Julie Greene  12:12  
Sure. Yeah. So my previous book, "The Canal Builders: Making America's Empire at the Panama Canal," was published in 2009, and it it really tells the complete story of the US construction of the Panama Canal, you know, kind of soup to nuts, with a focus, however, on the sort of labor, race and gender history of the actual working people who built the canal. When I was researching and writing that, I focused some attention on the Afro-Caribbeans who dominated the construction project. But because I was telling the whole story, they were just one part. And as I finished that book, I just I really wanted to spend more time thinking about the Caribbean workers. They're such an interesting group. They're one of the most cosmopolitan migrant groups in all of history, very politically organized, very literate, just super interesting and so important to the canal project, and, you know, celebrated in some ways, but misunderstood in in many other ways. So as time went by, I just found myself really wanting to think more about them and and also, to be honest, I really wanted to to think about ways to bring their individual stories to life, because they're often thought of as just this kind of homogenous mass of people, you know, the diggers, the dynamiters of the Panama Canal. And so I wanted to think about strategies that would allow me to go more deeply into some of the individual stories of the of the men and women who built the canal. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  14:09  
So could you talk some about this particular archive, and then what other sources you were drawing on in putting this book together?

Dr. Julie Greene  14:21  
Sure. So the the book is framed as a an exploration of one box held in the collection of the Isthmian History Society collection at the Library of Congress. And that box holds the first person testimonies of 112 canal workers, most of them male, most of them from the British Caribbean, especially Jamaica and Barbados. And they are, they're a really wonderful, really just gems of first person testimony. They are the best first person records we have written by ordinary Caribbean canal workers during the US construction period. And because they're a wonderful source, they've been used by many historians over the years. I didn't, I certainly didn't discover them, but as historians have used them, they've tended to just kind of cherry pick a dramatic story from them and plop it into their narrative. So my idea was that that that one box could be kind of a hook for opening into the world of Caribbean workers. And so while this book began really just as a simple exercise to try to bring to life the worlds of Caribbean workers, once I got into framing it around an archive, it also became really kind of a an exploration of the power relations that create archives. How is it that that some voices are amplified and other voices are silenced when archives are created? How does the way we use an archive shape how we understand the history? And so over time, the project became kind of this twofold thing, both using this archive to understand the workers lives, but also thinking about archives themselves, and how the creation of this one box of testimonies tells us something, not only about the authors, but also about the historical moment in which they were written, this moment in which, you know, Panama is kind of a neo-colony of the United States. It's dominated by the United States, shaped in every way. These are workers who are both responding to the United States officials, that's who their bosses are; but they're also workers who, in a sense, are moving amidst many different empires. They've come most of them from the British Empire, on islands across the Caribbean. They're responding to the US Empire. They're also, to some degree, living amidst the world of the Republic of Panama itself. So thinking about all these different historical currents that are shaping their lives. And then to the other part of your question, you know, what sources? What other sources did I use? The book is very much about putting this one box at the Library of Congress into dialog with other sources, the most important, of which were the personnel records of the Canal Zone government itself. The personnel records for Caribbean workers had never been accessible to historians, until fairly recently. When I was writing my previous book, "The Canal Builders," I was able to access then the personnel records for white US workers, and I realized they were such an interesting gold mine for understanding individual US workers' lives. And I just was itching to see what was in the personnel records for the Caribbean workers, the so called silver workers. So as I began this book, I was really intent on getting into those records there. They're housed at the National Personnel Records Center in St Louis, a branch of the US National Archives, which holds personnel records for millions and millions of government and military personnel across American history. So to my knowledge, I was the first and maybe the only historian ever to go to St Louis and spend weeks examining these records. And so the, in a way, my book is kind of plays off these two sources. The one source is written by the workers themselves, in their own voices. The personnel records, on the other hand, trace these men and women over the many decades that they worked for the Canal Zone government and and the personnel records then, of course, are very much about tracking and surveilling and disciplining these workers. So they tell a very, very different story from what's in the actual Box 25.

Kelly Therese Pollock  19:46  
One of the things that I found so interesting was how many different kinds of jobs many of these people held, that they didn't just come and do one job, and keep doing that. But they they moved around and moved around in ways that might seem kind of unexpected. Could you talk some about that, the the kinds of journeys that these people took once they got to the Canal Zone? 

Dr. Julie Greene  20:16  
Yes, indeed, that is such an interesting part of their story. These workers, you know, they came to the Canal Zone, typically as pretty, fairly young men or women, mostly men, typically aged 18 to 22, and they faced a very, very authoritarian government. The US controlled every aspect of their lives. If they didn't work productively, they could be deported or sentenced to prison labor. They, they couldn't really strike, because the US maintains such a surplus of workers that any any dissent or or active resistance could be handled just summarily by getting rid of the worker. So instead, workers tended to develop very careful, very nuanced strategies to improve their own lives, and mobility of different kinds became really the most important. I found in my research that they would change their residence, change their job, change their names, in order to improve their lives. They would constantly be looking for a better job with a kinder foreman or a job that suited their interests better, things like that. So they might go from working as a digger in the ditch to wanting a job indoors, but maybe indoors, working in the hospital or in a cafe, a government cafeteria, maybe would expose them to something they didn't like, so they'd shift back outside again. So in this way, they found I was just able to track that they changed their jobs constantly. The other really important part of this story about occupational mobility in particular is that often when we think of these workers who built the canal, we think of them as kind of the prototypical digger and dynamiter, but the other thing I found was that even though most of them began their time In the Canal Zone, working at relatively unskilled positions, diggers and dynamiters, for example, over time, they were able to acquire skills, most of them. Partly, this was because the US government wanted to save money. And so gradually, you know, the construction effort begins in 1904. It's more or less completed in 1914. By around 1909, 1910, the United States really has a policy of replacing the white US citizens who are doing skilled labor with Caribbeans whenever possible, and so they're training the Caribbeans to work as carpenters, as machinists, as lathe operators. They're not they're not referred to as a machinist or a lathe operator. They're referred to as machinist helper, or steam shovel engineer helper. But in fact, they're essentially doing jobs that had been done by the white US citizens. And in this way, the US is saving a lot of money. So for the Caribbeans, it's a good deal. They're making, they may not make as much money as the US white citizens did because of the character of racial segregation in the Canal Zone, but they're they've learned skills. They're in positions of relative authority and making more money as a result. And I found that in particular, the writers, in the writers who chose to submit these testimonies that became Box 25, as a rule, tended to be from this more skilled, more highly paid group of workers. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  24:36  
Let's talk about that a little bit. What are the ways that the people who wrote these testimonies do and do not reflect the larger population of Afro-Caribbean workers in the Canal Zone?

Dr. Julie Greene  24:54  
Right, yes, that's a very important issue. In many ways, these are atypical workers. So if we think about the entire canal construction project, we're talking about a huge tidal wave of human migration. Scholars estimate that it was likely as many as 200,000 people of African descent, who moved to the Isthmus of Panama to work on the canal. Now, of those 200,000 or so, at any given time, there'd probably be about 30,000 of them working on the canal, but by the time the canal project ends, most, the vast majority of those 200,000 people leave the Isthmus of Panama, and in fact, it's a really interesting and important part of the larger story of the Western Hemisphere. This massive demographic wave involves people leaving Panama, and many of them go back to their home islands across the Caribbean, but many of them go onward to plantations in Central America, or to Cuba, or if they can manage it, they go onward to New York City. And so in fact, the really the origins of a sizable Caribbean American population in the US is the Panama Canal project, because many, many 1000s end up settling in New York City by the late teens and early 20s. So so that's the first really important thing about how the 112 people who wrote for this who entered testimonies for this competition differ from the workforce as a whole, because most of the people who wrote in Box 25 stayed in Panama for the rest of their lives, either in the Canal Zone or in the Republic of Panama. These are mostly men who ended up working for the Canal Zone government for the next 40 or 50 years. It's interesting, and it's a really important distinction, of course, because that Caribbean diaspora is so vast. As I said, it's it's in Panama, but it moves onward back home to the Caribbean, to Central America, to the US. And when they were seeking testimonies for this competition, they advertised in newspapers all over the Caribbean, and to some degree in Central America, but they didn't advertise in New York City, and in any case, the submissions they got were almost all from people who still lived in Panama. So this makes the 112 people who wrote the testimonies in Box 25 a pretty atypical group, right there. Another way in which they're atypical is, as I mentioned, they tended to be people who were quite literate. Most of the testimonies were written by the authors themselves and and I should say that in general, Caribbean migrants are a fairly literate group, um, but in this case, even even more so than the typical group as a whole. And they also were workers who had acquired some level of skill, relatively high paid jobs. They came from the same islands, generally speaking, as the larger workforce. In other words, they were especially, most often from Jamaica or Barbados, with a sprinkling from many of the smaller islands, like Antigua, St Lucia, but they were unusual then, and in staying on the Isthmus of Panama, working for the US government all of these years, and in having acquired some degree of skill. The most typical occupation of the 112 was carpenter or a carpenter helper, for example. I might add that why it matters that they were atypical in staying in Panama is that it just means that they remain part of the Canal Zone government's world and the Republic of Panama's world. They continued working for the United States, typically until the late 1950s or early 1960s. On the one hand, that also meant that I was able to track them down and find them in the personnel records and get a sense of their entire lives and how they kind of struggled with aging issues, retirement, impoverishment in their older age. But certainly if, if the writers in Box 25 came from a larger sampling of the larger Caribbean diaspora, say, if many of them were from New York City, then we would probably have a very different sense of their experiences and their their socio-economic status, for example. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  30:38  
You note in the book that there's a shockingly small number of submissions from women, but there were actually quite a lot of women living and working in the Canal Zone. Could you talk about the kinds of things that women were doing on the canal project?

Dr. Julie Greene  30:57  
Yeah, women played an extremely important role. And there's a recent book by Joan Flores-Villalobos, which I would direct your audience to. Her book is called, "The Silver Women," which is really a fact breaking look at the world of Caribbean women. Many 1000s of Caribbean women migrated to the Isthmus of Panama. To some degree they they came to support and join their men folk. To some degree also, they came for the same reason that Caribbean men came. They were fleeing the colonialism of the of the British Empire. They were fleeing impoverishment. Life on all of the Anglo Caribbean Islands was extremely difficult, varying degrees, of course. They were they had grown up, as as the men in their communities had, experiencing people leaving the islands, migrating for better employment opportunities elsewhere over the last many decades, and so they they probably looked to work in Panama with kind of a mixture of wanting liberation from their tough lives on their home islands, wanting to make more money, maybe a little bit even, of wanting an adventure, going to see what this great project the Yankees were doing on the Isthmus of Panama was all about. So they they migrate to Panama, and they really create a female Caribbean world there. They work most often as domestic servants, as laundresses. They have a whole other kind of relationship to the official US, white US world in the Canal Zone, because so many of them work as domestic servants in the homes of wealthier white officials or white skilled workers. So if you were a white family in the Canal Zone, whether you were a steam shovel engineer's family, or whether you were a foreman or a paper pusher or one of the top officials, anyone of that sort would have hired a Caribbean or in some cases, a Panamanian woman to cook and clean the house. And so these Caribbean women had, you know, their own relationship with the white US world in the Canal Zone. They were there every day interacting with the white housewife, having to kind of help her create a sense of civilized American life in the Canal Zone, having to find their own strategies of improving their lives or and or resistance as they faced the the rules of white Canal Zone life. In addition, you know, there were these women, along with their men folk are also building families. There are many Caribbean children born in the Canal Zone. And so the Caribbean social life itself becomes, over the years, more and more complex. Leisure activities develop, and women are, of course, playing a central role in that as well. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  34:54  
 For these workers who stayed on and continued to work in the Canal Zone after the completion, after the canal actually opens, what's the kind of employment that they have there? What does it take to keep the canal operating once it's actually completed and open?

Dr. Julie Greene  35:14  
Right? So the canal itself is it's officially finished in 1914, almost exactly as World War I is breaking out in Europe. It actually takes us, I'd say, five or so more years before the canal is 100% functional. They continued to have problems with landslides and such. But one of the dramatic parts of the history of the canal is that moment, as the canal is finished, and suddenly the workforce has to be diminished from a force of maybe as many as 35-40,000 people down to fewer than 8000. So in terms of your question of, what does it take to maintain the canal? The workforce on the canal itself will be somewhere around eight to 10,000. That means maintaining the canal, continuous work to deal with landslides. Dredging is necessary throughout to keep the canal going. Small improvements need to be made. Carpenters are needed. Machinists. It's a, you know, it's an important industrial site, so all of those kinds of jobs as well as, you know, security guards, janitors, waiters for the official Canal Zone cafeterias, things like that. And so for these workers, for the 112 workers who wrote the testimonies in Box 25, these are, these are men who continue working for the Canal Zone government throughout the decades and and it's interesting to just imagine, you know what they're experiencing in those years. They're experiencing both continued racial segregation from the Canal Zone government itself, the so called silver and gold system, which continues in place until the mid 1950s. They're also experiencing, and, you know, watching and maybe participating in, to some degree, a growing resentment in Panama towards the United States about the sort of neo-colonialism that exists in its relationship with Panama. But they're also facing, in addition to confronting racism in the Canal Zone, they also face a great degree of xenophobia and racism in the Republic of Panama itself. And so they're they're, to what degree they're actively fighting or just observing, we don't know for sure. The testimonies don't tell us this, but they're certainly in a world where fighting for the rights of Afro-Caribbean Panamanians is happening both within the Canal Zone and in the Republic of Panama. They're fighting for basic civil rights and labor rights. In the Canal Zone, the right to a union. They're resisting racial segregation. And in Panama itself, they're fighting for full constitutional rights as citizens as well.

Kelly Therese Pollock  38:42  
So you touched some in the beginning about archives and how archives are constructed, and the silences in the archives. Could you just reflect a little bit on what we're still missing from this story, whose voices we're still not hearing about the construction of the canal?

Dr. Julie Greene  39:04  
The testimonies in in Box 25 are such a fascinating and complex blend of different sentiments, right. On the one hand, if you read them, and they're all available online at the the University of Florida's website, and I encourage people to go and take a look at them. There's such an interesting blend of pride in the role these workers played in this spectacular achievement, building the Panama Canal, but also definitely some awareness of their own mistreatment, the racism they experienced from the US, their drive to get better jobs, their efforts to create some autonomous space for themselves. So all of these things come through. When I think about, you know, what are, what do the archives tell us,the first thing to understand is that the sort of the positionality of the 112 authors, as I mentioned. The ways in which they were typical or atypical is really important, I think, to putting these sources in context, and then to look at, not just at what they say and the sentiments they express, but also really interesting to think about the things they don't talk about. You know, they were writing in 1963, so most of them were older. Most of them were struggling with health issues. They generally felt like they were struggling economically, and they wanted to win the prize money. The prize money, the number one prize was $50 which, in today's money would be, you know, a lot of money for people who were struggling economically. And so they're writing for an audience. They're writing for the judges of this competition, and it's shaping what they're saying. They they often talk about, they praise the United States, these God bless America, did this wonderful job. But they also often point out their the aging issues they're facing, the poverty they're facing, it becomes clear that winning this prize money would mean a lot to them. So thinking about that, you know what, why they were writing and what they were inclined to talk about, then it's interesting to think also about what they don't say. They don't talk very much about their lives off the job, they don't talk hardly at all. They barely mentioned the Republic of Panama. Everything is very much about what they did during the canal construction years on the job, what their relationship was like with their bosses, with their fellow workers, with the US government. And so Panama itself is the tremendous silence, and another pretty major silence is women. They don't talk that much about their families, their the loves of their life. When they do reference women, it's usually to note an absence. They'll talk about how, in the early years, before there were many women there, they felt like they were animals. How much better it was when women came. Who would women would do the laundry? And you know, it's, it's fairly generic kinds of references like that and so. So when we think about this as a source, it's important to think about not only what it tells us, but what it leaves out, and how important it is then to go to other sources for a full picture.

Kelly Therese Pollock  43:23  
Can you please tell listeners how they can get a copy of "Box 25?"

Dr. Julie Greene  43:29  
Sure, yeah, my pleasure. "Box 25" is published by the University of North Carolina Press, and it's available at your favorite bookstore, or by going directly to the UNC website.

Kelly Therese Pollock  43:47  
Is there anything else that you wanted to make sure we talk about?

Dr. Julie Greene  43:52  
So when we think about archives, it's also important to reflect on what could be happening today to create new archives. And so one of the fun things I discovered as I was writing this book was that for descendants of the original canal builders, the issue of having an archive that really reflects the experiences of their community is very, very important. And so as I, as I developed the book, I connected with people, archivists at the University of Florida, on the one hand, but then also members of the descendant community in Panama and in the United States, who are working to to build archives, new archives, that reflect their experiences. So I think for readers who care about these issues, that's a very important part of the history of the canal. There's an organization called the Pan Caribbean Sankofa, led by a woman whose, whose ancestors worked on the canal. She actually now lives in Florida. Her name is Frances Williams- Yearwood, and she, along with archivists at the University of Florida, has really been doing terrific work to to generate new oral history testimonies about life in the Canal Zone, as well as in the construction project. And she's worked closely with Arcelio Hartley, who's the president of the museum in Panama City dedicated to Afro-Caribbean people, called the Society of Friends of the Afro- Antillean Museum of Panama. So it's really exciting to see the work that they're doing to generate new archives. They've reached out to people across the diaspora, doing oral histories, but also seeing what documents or journals might exist in people's attics that can be added to the larger archive at the University of Florida.

Kelly Therese Pollock  46:12  
Julie, thank you so much. It has been a pleasure to speak with you, and I have really enjoyed learning more about the construction of the canal.

Dr. Julie Greene  46:22  
My great pleasure, Kelly. Thank you so much for your interest and for the work you do on this great podcast. 

Unknown Speaker  47:08  
music.

Teddy  47:33  
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