Panama fever (69 page)

If accidents and disease were deemed to be the West Indians’ own fault, or as a result of their inherent weaknesses, this reflects deeply held ideas about race. These, in turn, would shape every aspect of life in the Canal Zone, and nowhere more so than in the division of the workforce into the Gold and Silver Rolls, described by one canal historian as a “notorious” example of “racial and ethnic discrimination by the U.S. Government.” Harry Franck, a travel writer who worked in the Zone as a policeman for three months in 1912, remembers his surprise at seeing notices everywhere stipulating whether a shop, railway car, toilet, or drinking fountain was for Gold or Silver Roll employees. But he quickly worked it out. “The ICC has very dexterously dodged the necessity of lining the Zone with the offensive signs ‘Black’ and ‘White,’” he wrote. “Hence the line has been drawn between ‘Gold’ and ‘Silver’ employees. The first division, paid in gold coin, is made up, with a few exceptions, of white American citizens. To the second belong any of the darker shade, and all common laborers of whatever color, these receiving their wages in Panamanian silver. ‘Tis a deep and sharp-drawn line.” For Franck, there was little doubt as to the model being followed. “Panama is below the Mason and Dixon Line,” he concluded.

It has often been noted that U.S. imperialist expansion went hand in hand with rising racism. Influential thinkers such as Alfred Mahan and politicians such as Senator Albert Beveridge of Indiana had used a social Darwinist doctrine of Anglo-Saxon superiority and the “civilizing mission” to justify U.S. imperialism in the Philippines, Hawaii, and Cuba. It was not long before people started applying this theory to race issues closer to home. “If the stronger and cleverer race is free to impose its will upon ‘new-caught sullen people’ on the other side of the globe,” asked the
Atlantic Monthly
, “why not in South Carolina and Mississippi?”

Indeed, the closing years of the nineteenth century saw the abandonment of the Southern blacks by Northern liberals, and as the “white man's burden” was shouldered overseas, the Southern states began a process of disenfranchisement and officially sanctioned discrimination against their black populations. In 1896 Louisiana had contained 130,000 black voters. Four years later, there were only 13,000. And what became known as Jim Crow laws spread across the South, officially segregating whites and blacks, with the best facilities always reserved for the former. What had previously been unspoken and unenforced was, by the time of the beginning of the U.S. canal effort, rigid and backed up by the law.

This system—with the euphemisms “Gold” for Anglo-Saxon whites and “Silver” for everyone else—was imported into the Canal Zone in Panama by the U.S. authorities and would survive in various forms for nearly a hundred years. But it was not imposed, as is often believed, en bloc, but was rather a gradual and complex process that parallels the other ways in which the Commission sought to impose itself on the lives of the canal builders of all backgrounds. It started with the decision made at the outset of the project to pay some workers in U.S. gold currency and others with local silver money. Attached to the Gold Roll from the beginning were privileges such as paid sick leave and holidays and better accommodation (basically the generous deal needed to lure workers from the United States). Who got what was decided by an amalgam of precedents—the PRR had always paid its U.S. workers in gold and the rest in silver, while the French companies had paid almost everyone in local currency but had divided its workers from all backgrounds into skilled and unskilled grades. The early Gold-Silver system merged these two approaches (a U.S. government report in 1908 would describe the distinction in terms of skills, but noted that the Gold Roll was “nearly all Americans”). Either way, white American citizens in the Zone, all in theory skilled workers, were almost always on the Gold Roll, and as the vast majority of the earliest unskilled workers were West Indians, the terms “Gold” and “Silver” quickly took on racial connotations.

Initially, however, it was not that simple—a relatively large number of West Indians, approaching a thousand, were put on the Gold Roll as skilled workers. These included foremen, office clerks, and teachers. This was considered a good way to co-opt potential leaders of the “Jamaican” community, and also to incentivize workers to train in useful skills and thus gain promotion to the higher-status Gold Roll.

Then, with the arrival of Stevens and the building of Commission hotels, restaurants, additional hospital facilities, and shops, it was discovered that by limiting access to parts of these establishments to Gold Roll employees, it was possible to keep undesirables away from the elite white sector of the workforce. Supposedly, it all began with a pay car. When two separate windows were used, one marked “Silver” the other “Gold,” it was found to provide the “solution to troubles growing out of the intermingling of the races.” Thereafter this practice was widely adopted, and no commissary or post office was built without separate sections for Gold and Silver. In everything, there was a premium service for the Gold employees.

But with the distinction now being used to prevent “intermingling of the races” on the Zone, the blacks on the Gold Roll presented a problem. In September 1905 Stevens closed the door to the Gold Roll for West Indians by ending both direct recruitment to the Gold Roll and promotion from the Silver Roll. At the end of the following year he started removing blacks from the Gold Roll, even if they were skilled and valuable employees. There was the occasional protest. The manager of the commissary at Cristóbal wrote to Stevens, “It would, I think, be very impolitic to separate all of the Commissary employees by color putting all the colored men on the silver roll. They would naturally feel it to be in a measure a humiliation. We have a number of colored men in charge of Departments … We also have two or three colored clerks in our Shipping office, who are very valuable men and draw larger salaries than some of our white clerks.” Nevertheless by mid-1907 only a tiny handful of blacks, mainly postmasters and teachers, remained on the Gold Roll, and they would be gone by the following year.

The arrival of the Spanish and other southern European workers from mid-1906 onward might have had an unsettling effect on this rapidly solidifying racial system. But although southern Europeans were thought higher up the evolutionary pecking order than the blacks, they were certainly beneath the Anglo-Saxons and were in coloring, it was suggested, somewhere in between white and black. Thus they formed an intermediate layer—paid in Silver, but with better food, accommodation, and general treatment along with some Gold Roll privileges.

The education system in the Zone provides a microcosm of the development of this system of inequality based on race. Some of the earliest Canal Zone schools had a mixed intake of West Indians, Panamanians, and a few whites. As more families came out from the United States and the West Indies to live, the classrooms were segregated, and then the white and black children were separated into entirely different schools. Light-skinned Panamanian children from good families as well as the children of white European laborers enrolled in the white schools, the latter only under sufferance.

The white schools, housed in new buildings and well staffed and equipped, performed at a level at least equal to that back at home in the States. The nonwhite schools, however, were less than second-class. In 1909 there were about seventeen children per teacher in the white schools; in the others, it was 115 pupils per teacher, an astonishing disparity. Furthermore, the black schools were usually housed in dilapidated buildings, staffed by less well trained teachers and had to make do with textbooks discarded by the white schools. There was no question of pretending to provide separate but equal facilities.

The West Indian children were taught American history, discipline, orations, manners, the three Rs, and subjects such as carpentry and gardening that would equip them for unskilled work on the Zone. In 1911 a secondary school was opened for white children, but for the black students there were only advanced classes in agriculture, sewing, and domestic service.

This official sanction of racism nourished and legitimized racist behavior on a day-to-day basis. Harry Franck commented that a “new amalgamated” national “type” was being created in the Zone: “Any northerner can say ‘nigger’ as glibly as a Carolinian, and growl if any of them steps on his shadow,” he wrote. So prevalent were the attitudes associated with “South of the Mason-Dixon line” that newcomers assumed that most of the Americans were Southerners, although in fact Northerners were in the majority. Even the nursing staff, who mostly cared very well for their black patients, were not immune to prejudice. Among three nurses arriving in November 1905 was Miss Emma M. Jeffries, a black American. On the steamer from the States, Miss Jeffries, according to the
Colón Independent
, “was made to feel the prejudice against her color, as one of the white nurses refused to occupy the same state room with her.” It got worse when she was taken to Ancón hospital. “Miss Jeffries was informed at the nurses’ reception room that she had made a great mistake in coming here, as all of the other nurses were white and had decided to go on strike if forced to work with a Negro. They even refused to sit with her at the same table for meals.” Jeffries returned to New York in disgust.

Others also found the way color dominated life in the Zone too odious to cope with. “My father read of Panama and thought it a wonderful place to come to because he saw progress in Panama,” an Antiguan lady told a researcher in the 1970s. But he did not work for long in the Zone. “He just could not take it—the life was so different. We were not accustomed to be told so much about your colour or to have to think about it often, black and white. He couldn't stand it so he left the Canal Zone and came to Panama [City].”

For black laborers out on the works, “some of the foremen were very polite, while some were very rough and impolite,” as one West Indian recalled. Edward White, from Jamaica, remembered being very lonely when he first reached Panama, but found himself made to feel part of a family by his American foreman and timekeeper. “The lonely feeling started to leave me, as these men treated me like their own. Mr Arthur, Mr Chambers, and I were so knitted together, I felt as if I was their own son.”

This tone tends to be the exception in the West Indian accounts, however. Most are at best mixed about their treatment. Jeremiah Waisome was born in Nicaragua, but had lived in Panama since he was a baby. When he was twelve or thirteen, proud of his ability to read and write, he applied for work on the canal: “Unknown to my mother one morning instead of going to school, I went to Balboa to look myself a job. I approach a boss one morning for a water boy job. ‘Good Morning, boss.’ I said. ‘Good morning, boy,’ he retorted. At this time he was chewing a big wad of tobacco. I ask him if he needs a water boy, he said yes. He ask me ‘What is your name?’ I told him. Then I noticed that my name did not spell correctly, so I said, ‘Excuse me, boss, my name do not spell that way.’ He gave me a cow look, and spit and big splash, and look back at me and said: ‘You little nigger! You need a job?’ ‘Yes, sir.’ ‘You never try to dictate to a white man.’”

An American journalist sympathetic to the U.S. canal authorities reported in 1906 that he had “often seen the threat of the slave-driver in the foreman's eye—the menace of brute force.” Occasionally, this was more than a threat. “Among the white employees on the ‘gold roll’ some times an employee would use his hands or foot on one of the ‘silver employees,’” admitted a steam shovel engineer. On March 23, 1906, the
Colón Independent
ran a story about how a man at Bas Matachín Machine Shop “by the name of Bryan was thoroughly clubbed and kicked by Master Mechanic Cummings because he refused to lift up a bucket of metal which was beyond his strength.” When the accusation was taken to court, it was the victim Bryan in the dock, with his attacker Cummings demanding that the West Indian be punished for insolence.

The very worst foremen were dismissed, and treatment improved as the Americans learned that shouting and hitting were not the best ways to get results from their gangs. However, actual physical aggression against the blacks continued. After the death of Jantje Milliery, Rose and Jan van Hardeveld had made a new best friend, Charles Swinehart, the mining engineer given a job through his father's connections with the local Republican Party at Steamboat Springs, Colorado. According to Rose, Swinehart was very much “the he-man type” and one evening at dinner a “troublesome” West Indian discharged from his gang “elected to place himself under the veranda and shout abuses at the house and Americans in general. He cursed and swore, while everyone at the table tried to act as though nothing were happening. Suddenly Charley, his lips set and his face white, politely excused himself. He left the table, went into the bedroom, and then we heard him go down the steps. In a moment there was silence below. We heard the young man coming back up the steps. He entered the bedroom, came out, and reseated himself at the table. The conversation and the meal continued. A few days later Charley was summoned to appear before the judge at Empire to answer the charge of knocking a British subject over the head with the butt of a revolver. He pleaded guilty, and was fined twenty-five dollars. ‘Was it worth the money?’ asked the judge with a twinkle in his eye. ‘Yes, indeed, sir,’ answered the aggressor gravely.”

A journalist visiting the Isthmus in 1908 was advised that “it cost twenty-five dollars to lick a Jamaican negro and if I did it be sure and get my money's worth.”