by Julie Greene
With the mortality rate vastly higher among West Indians than among white Americans, it becomes clear that death, like everything else in the Zone, was highly racialized. Poor sanitary conditions in West Indian communities—windows that lacked screens to bar mosquitoes, stagnant water near homes—would never have been tolerated in the white towns of the Zone. West Indians also were typically the ones victimized by landslides, dynamite explosions, or other industrial accidents. They worked through torrential rains, sometimes toiling for hours at digging or drilling in water up to their waists even after the rain subsided. Often they returned home from work with their clothes completely soaked. Most had only one set of clothes, particularly in the early years, and so they would get up the next day, put on wet clothes, and go back to work. “I came wet to my home and leave for work in rain,” wrote a West Indian man.17
Aaron Clarke arrived in the Canal Zone in December 1906 and poignantly described his life and work. He and the others left the ship and boarded a train for the Jamaicatown near Gatun. Aaron was lucky, he recalled, because he was among the first to be assigned rooms in houses built by the ICC. Their predecessors had all lived in tents. They traveled to a mess kitchen where each received a plate, cup, and spoon (the cost of which would be taken out of their first paychecks). Then they formed a line and received rice and red beans, beef with gravy, bread, and tea. However, “the meals was of very low standard as far cooking was concerned.” After eating, Aaron was put to work in the lumberyard. Over the years he held many different jobs. After six months in the lumberyard he cleaned railroad cars, then switched to the Sanitation Department. With the latter he performed several different jobs: “I dug ditches dropped mosquito oil made drains, dug graves acted as pallbearer and sometimes when we could afford the time I performed a short religious ceremony.” He found conditions very rough. As late as 1908, he recalled, during the rainy season often all his clothes would be wet, even though by this time he had saved up and managed to purchase two or three sets of clothes. “But the majority of us used a scheme to put on those wet clothes, that is we took the clothes to the bath room with us and immediately leaving the shower without drying our skin we put the wet clothes on, took our breakfast and was off to work for another day of hard toil.”
Life in the camps was difficult in other ways. At 7: 00 a.m., a watchman would come around and fine those he found, unless they were sick, for their failure to work. At 9: 00 p.m., officials would knock loudly on a metal bar to signal that lights must be turned out. The latrine or outhouse was a couple hundred feet away from the camp for sanitary reasons, and men were not allowed to use a basin in the camp to relieve themselves. And so, as Aaron Clarke put it, “you can imagine the hardship and difficulties that we encountered in those days especially on nights when the rain was falling.” Even this seemed like paradise compared with the conditions that confronted the earliest workers, who bedded down their first nights on chain-link bunks covered with a piece of canvas, with no sheets, blankets, or pillows, “just the cold chain bunk.”18
By 1907 conditions had greatly improved. However, visiting that year to investigate life and work in the Canal Zone, the reformer Gertrude Beeks still found a host of problems facing West Indian laborers. She complained about the small amount of space provided them in the dormitories, the metal bunks upon which many men slept, the lack of screens or mosquito netting, and the fact that some camps were built in low areas where the lack of drainage caused poor sanitary conditions. West Indians desperately needed warm showers, more blankets, better food, and sheds built near the heaviest construction areas for resting out of the rain and for keeping their clothes dry. But government officials countered that workers did not need sheds, and even if they did, the government lacked the money to build them. The rooms were large enough, the bunks comfortable enough, the food good enough, and protection from mosquitoes not necessary. Tellingly, Goethals responded to the request for netting by declaring it unnecessary because malaria was not a problem for West Indians: “It is generally admitted … that the colored people are immune.” Actually, he declared, the greatest death rate among Negroes was due to pneumonia, and so mosquito netting would not make a significant improvement.19 The government finally did take steps to control the rate of pneumonia, building some sheds where laborers might dry their clothes, selling flannel cloth (which West Indians bought for making undergarments), and making sure the men had blankets. Yet these measures never brought either malaria or pneumonia under control.
In 1912, Gorgas testified regarding two of the biggest health threats among West Indians. The first was nephritis (liver disease), which he declared was due to West Indians’ consumption of large quantities of rum. The second was pneumonia, and he testified that it greatly concerned him and his medical staff. In 1906 the medical staff had faced an excessive problem with deaths from pneumonia. More workers died from it than from all other causes combined, and the vast majority of these were West Indians. Doctors carefully studied the situation and found the main cause was that laborers from Barbados and Jamaica generally had only one set of clothes: “They worked in the rain all day; a man would buy a few cents’ worth of food in the morning, cook it himself, eat it, and go to work… . At night he would go to bed in his wet clothes.” When Gorgas was asked what he had done about the high rates of pneumonia, he responded, “We have taken no particular measure,” and explained that his board of experts studied the situation and found that the highest rates of pneumonia existed among workers who had recently arrived and caught the influenza that pervaded the isthmus. He therefore recommended that the government’s sanitary measures focus not on preventing pneumonia or the spread of influenza but on treating those already ill. Meanwhile, he noted reassuringly, the government should expect that when the numbers of new workers declined, the rates of pneumonia would likewise decrease.20
Gorgas’s determination to aggressively study pneumonia while doing little to treat it reflects the concerns of an ambitious young medical establishment eager to analyze and tame the tropics in order to make them safe and comfortable—for whites. Gorgas and his staff studied every possible disease, writing up their findings for medical journals. Their overly zealous research is evident in the number of unfortunate West Indians diagnosed as insane. Hundreds of people were committed to the insane wards of Ancon and Colón hospitals. Virtually all of them, to judge from the judicial records of the Panama Canal Zone, were West Indian. The records indicate some of the symptoms laborers manifested. For example, Arthur Andersen from Jamaica, aged eighteen, was admitted to the hospital in June 1911. He developed delusions, believing he had lost some relatives and fearing that someone “desired to have his foot cut off, to which he strenuously objected.” He also had a tendency to engage in religious rants, “being obsessed with the idea that the end of the world is near,” which caused him to begin preaching to imaginary people. As a result, this young man was permanently committed to the insane ward of the hospital. Likewise, Mary Gowdy, from Bridgetown, Barbados, had lived in the Canal Zone for five years. Her husband, a laborer for Swift and Company in Colón, contacted the insane asylum, as she was acting odd, believing herself persecuted. She refused to let nurses care for her and prayed in a loud voice.21
According to official records, these delusions, hallucinations, paranoia, and religious rants were rarely manifested among other groups. The legal records of the Canal Zone include innumerable cases of West Indians committed to the asylum for weeks or sometimes years as a result of such symptoms, and often West Indians complained to the British consul about having been wrongly institutionalized. In 1907 the ICC’s annual report mentioned that an insanity ward and an asylum had been built at Ancon Hospital, but little detailed mention of the disease was made. By 1912 more than 550 people were being treated by the ICC for insanity; 9 were U.S. citizens, 43 were Europeans, and more than 500 were black West Indians. One might interpret the incidence of hospitalization for insanity as an unusual exercise in labor discipline,
but this seems unlikely. The U.S. government had unlimited powers of deportation; if a laborer or family member proved troublesome, it would be far easier and cheaper to deport him or her. Committing laborers to the hospital, especially for an extended period, cost the U.S. government a significant sum of money. It seems more likely that the burgeoning curiosity of a young medical establishment, combined with a tendency to medicalize certain social and economic problems among West Indians (which in turn reflected their treatment by the ICC), provides the best explanation for this remarkable outbreak of insanity among one specific group of workers.22
To the constant presence of death, disease, and crippling accidents was added the strikingly callous response of some Americans to the distressing conditions West Indians faced. Reginald Beckford worked as a salesman in the commissary at Colón, one of the better jobs available to a West Indian. Every day he would watch as the 4: 30 train pulled out for Panama City with an engineer named Billy at the throttle. Beckford remembered that Billy had a policy, “whether he is talking truth or not,” “that he will stop his train on the tracks for a horse, or a cow but not for a human.” One day while Beckford was waiting for the train, he discovered that Billy had not been joking. After Billy’s train roared by, Beckford saw people running toward the tracks. He followed and saw the “half body of a man laying on the tracks. The man had been cut clean across the abdomen. His hands untouched, his eyes opened. Where are his legs? His legs had been carried almost a city block.” The train had continued on its journey after killing the unfortunate West Indian, not stopping until reaching its destination at Mount Hope Cemetery.23
The testimonies of West Indians about construction days include many references to the indignities to which American officials exposed them. Alfred Dottin declared, “I shall never forget the train loads of dead men being carted away daily, as if they were just so much lumber.” Many spoke of feeling they were treated like animals. Jules Lecurrieux arrived on the isthmus and found “to our surprize we were unloaded off the train as animals and not men, and almost under strict guard to camps.”24 Marrigan Austin reached Colón after many days on a crowded ship with very little food. He and the other men were very hungry as they climbed off the ship, he said, after receiving scarce rations for days on end: “We saw … a pile of bags of brown sugar. And the whole crowd of us like ants fed ourselves on that sugar without questioning any one, and no one said any thing to us either.” Later Austin took a job drilling dynamite holes, and he found conditions harrowing. He concluded: “Life was some sort of semi slavery, and there was none to appeal to, for we were strangers and actually compelled to accept what we got, for in any case of an argument we would have to shut up, right or wrong. And the bosses or policemen or other officials right or wrong could be always winning the game.”25
Marrigan Austin was not the only one to compare conditions in the Canal Zone to slavery, and it’s true that West Indians had few sources of leverage against their new employer. They had neither unions lobbying for them nor representatives who might appear before congressional committees to speak their case. Their main governmental resource, diplomatic representatives from their mother countries of Britain or France, was only inconsistently helpful, and the American public felt indifferent about the conditions they confronted. The U.S. government deliberately kept a huge surplus of unskilled Caribbean laborers on the isthmus in order to forestall any ambitious strategies of collective organizing. The government had many tactics for maintaining discipline among West Indians, including deportation, vagrancy laws, policing, and prison sentences.26
The Zone police force, consisting of white Americans (first-class policemen) and West Indians (second-class policemen), played a central role in disciplining residents of labor camps. M. H. Thatcher, the head of civil administration in the Zone, noted that West Indians on the police force were “very useful in dealing with the black population. … We do not give them the same police powers that we give white policemen, but we give them sufficient powers to be very useful in their work.”27
The justice meted out by Zone policemen could be harsh. Harry Franck recalled being instructed as he left to patrol the town of Gatun one night: “New Gatun is pretty bad on Saturday nights… .The first time a nigger starts anything run him in, and take all the witnesses in sight along.” Likewise, the writer Poultney Bigelow described at length policemen’s reputation for petty extortion and harsh treatment of laborers: “I found on all sides among the poor, whether Jamaican negroes or Panamans, this dread of the big policeman who swaggered about as though it was his duty to club people in order to show his zeal for the canal.” Police constantly monitored the labor camps, arresting men for vagrancy, loitering, drunkenness, or disorderly conduct. West Indians feared harassment at the hands of policemen and learned to act in a way that would not draw attention. A St. Lucian laborer recalled, “Many get beat up get kill by Canal Zone Police it never happen to me when you are respectible law abiding person Uncle Sam stand by you remember the Laws must be at all cost respected.”28
Loiterers were either fined anywhere from $ 5 to $ 25 or sentenced to time in jail, and since the vast majority of West Indians could not afford such a fine, they typically faced prison. The Jamaican Charles Hamilton, for example, was standing on the porch of his room in Pedro Miguel when policemen came through asking men why they were not working. Hamilton said he had worked twenty-two days already that month and was taking the day off. The police arrested him and, upon checking his record, found he had worked only eight hours that month. Hamilton was tried, convicted of vagrancy, and, because he had also lied to police, given an unusually harsh sentence: thirty days in prison, a $ 25 fine, and all court costs. Occasionally, men sentenced to the penitentiary would try to escape to Cuba before being transferred to prison, and sometimes they succeeded. Cuba was seen as their refuge, as one man put it.29
In one two-week period during the summer of 1911, police sweeping through the labor camps and towns of the Canal Zone arrested thirty people for vagrancy, drunkenness, and such. The number of workers questioned for possible offenses was much higher. In one town alone, police detained and questioned some sixty men. All but five managed to provide a satisfactory explanation for their idleness. They typically declared they worked night jobs or were recovering from an accident or illness. Of the thirty arrested in towns across the Zone and taken to court, more than half were West Indians; the others were mainly Spaniards, Britons, Colombians, and Panamanians. The courts dismissed seven cases of the thirty, including the only two pressed against white Americans (a foreman and a sailor). All others received sentences ranging from five to thirty days in prison and fines from $ 5 to $ 20 . The ICC records are filled with grievances by West Indians about police mistreatment. They complained of being arrested and imprisoned unjustly, of brutal beatings during the arrest, and sometimes of insulting comments made by policemen. If such an intimidating police presence combined with arrests and possible time in jail proved insufficient to eliminate idleness among canal workers, there was always the threat that serious offenders would be sent to the Zone penitentiary at Culebra, which housed 150 convicts as of 1912, the vast majority of them West Indians. Prisoners at the penitentiary were required to work at hard labor, which consisted most often of road construction. The acting head of civil administration, H. H. Rousseau, also instructed the chief of police to get the word out: “I think that if it becomes generally known that all prisoners in the Canal Zone are required to perform hard labor, it will have a very beneficial influence.”30
“IF THEY DO NOT WORK THEY WILL STARVE”
Government officials’ focus on vagrancy laws, deportation, and hard labor for convicts reflects the central fact that the vast army of West Indians was difficult to manage. The ICC couldn’t construct the canal without these workers, yet disciplining them proved a major preoccupation. ICC officials looked to the British and French diplomatic representatives for help in managing West Indians and ensuring efficie
nt labor; yet simultaneously, West Indians looked to the British and French governments for help in protecting their rights. This put the consuls from Britain and France in a complex position. Consider the case of the British consul in Panama, Claude Mallet. Mallet had begun his tenure on the isthmus when the French attempted to build the canal. During the U.S. construction decade he received regular complaints from West Indians regarding problems that ranged from harsh treatment by the Canal Zone or Panamanian police to unjust incarceration in insanity wards or jails, cruel foremen, or destitution when pay from the U.S. government came late. Mallet attended to some complaints, but he generally empathized with U.S. officials and shared their negative opinion of West Indians. Mallet reflected once upon the many strikes he had handled during the French and U.S. construction projects: “What I have always done has been to get the employer to do what is just towards the men and then tell them in unmistakable language to work, and if they do not work they will starve, and that if they disturb public order the government counts upon enough force to keep the peace, and their acts be upon their own heads if they suffer in consequence of defying armed forces.”31
Throughout his years of service Mallet repeatedly proclaimed himself terribly impressed with American policies. President Roosevelt met with Mallet during his visit to the isthmus and asked him how he thought they were faring. Mallet began by noting that West Indians now lived far better than they had during the French era. Questioned more closely, the consul admitted that he had never personally inspected either the housing or the food supplied to them. Yet he confidently concluded that the complaints coming from them “were so few and trivial I generally found upon investigation that they had no foundation and therefore was convinced the labourers must be well treated and well cared for by the Commission.”32