The Panama Canal i Part 2: Building The Canal

Introduction: The French Construction

Long before the U.S. took over construction of the Panama Canal in 1904, workers from around the world had been coming to the isthmus. In the 1800s, the French were trying to build a canal, and had imported thousands of African and Chinese workers to lay the tracks for the railway lines that would make the construction of the Panama Canal possible. Most of these men would die from malaria or suicide.

Throughout the building of the Panama Canal, workers from Jamaica were recruited to come over as workers. In 1881, French recruiters ran advertisements in Jamaica, offering wages much higher than they could earn at home. The campaign showed “The Colòn Man,” a Jamaican who had gone to work in Panama to become rich and prosperous before returning home. This idea caught on quickly in the largely working class country, and many Jamaican men went to Panama to work on the canal. But the promise of riches was an empty one. In reality, Jamaicans earned 10¢ an hour and the work was dangerous. During the eight-year French excavation, most of the

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20,000 workers who died were West Indians. Strikes were unsuccessful because there were always new recruits eager to take their jobs. Despite so many workers moving to Panama from the West Indies, Colombia, and Cuba, only one in five workers stayed on the job longer than a year.

The U.S. Takes Over

When the United States announced its plan to take over digging the canal, new promises breathed fresh life into the workers recruited to the area. “You here who are doing your work well in bringing to completion this great enterprise are standing exactly as a soldier of the few great wars of the world’s history,” Teddy Roosevelt announced to workers during his trip to Panama in 1906. “This is one of the great works of the world.”

Two years into the project, there were already more than 24,000 men working on the Panama Canal. Within five years, the number had grown to 45,000. These workers were not all from the United States, but from Panama, Europe, and Asia.

Most of the work force, however, once again came from the West Indies. (The West Indies is a large group of islands that separate the Caribbean Sea

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from the Atlantic Ocean.) West Indian labor was cheaper than American or European labor, and a West Indian worker was eager to believe the rags to riches tales spawned by the recruiters. The Colòn Man was reborn as representatives from Panama boasted of a rewarding work contract that included free passage to Panama and an option to return home after only 500 working days. After experiencing the empty promises of the French in the 1880’s, most Jamaican workers weren’t willing to try their luck on the American canal project, so in 1905 recruiters turned their attention to the island of Barbados. By the end of the year, 20% of the 17,000 canal workers were Barbadian.

Life for the Canal Workers

West Indian workers were recruited with promises of wealth and success, but they confronted a very different reality after arriving in Panama. The dense and untamed jungle that covered the fifty miles between coasts was filled with deadly snakes. The venom of the coral snake attacked the nervous system, and a bite from the 10-foot mapana snake caused internal bleeding and made their organs shut down. The rainy season, which lasted from May to November, kept workers perpetually wet and coated in mud.

Initially, accommodations for canal employees provided little protection against the wet weather or jungle life. The Isthmian Canal Commission (The ICC) housed most workers in old run down barracks (military housing) built twenty years earlier by the French. Some employees chose instead to pay for rent in one of the two coastal cities, although the options there were not much better. Others could not find housing near the worksite, and pitched tents or lived in empty boxcars.

The decrepit living conditions caused the poor hygiene, and newcomers quickly learned about the serious threat of disease. The threat of illness was so great that the Panamanians nicknamed the area “Fever coast.” Smallpox, pneumonia, typhoid, dysentery, hookworm, and even the bubonic plague

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infected workers throughout the American excavation period. But yellow fever was the most treacherous illness, both physically and mentally. Just the mention of an outbreak caused such panic that they lost more workers because they quit their jobs and returned home than they lost from the disease itself. Experts predicted the yellow fever would kill hundreds of workers each year. Malaria, while less lethal, was more common. As strain of the disease called Chagres Fever lead to jaundice, coma, and severe internal bleeding. Even more damaging was its ability to return even after a patient had recovered. Statistics on illness among workers were staggering: in 1906 alone, 80% of the total work force was hospitalized for malaria.

As work on the canal entered its second year, the death toll for laborers was 4% and 22,000 were hospitalized. Every evening a train traveled to Mount Hope Cemetery by the city of Colòn, its cars brimming with coffins, forcing

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the men to confront the possibility that they themselves might not make it out alive.

Unequal treatment

U.S. citizens were used sparingly in Panama because they were both disease prone and demanded higher wages. In North America however the transcontinental railroad had been completed in 1869 and produce many skilled U.S. workers. Americans came to the canal with the promise of a generous pay package that included free benefits and services, 42 paid vacation days and 30 days paid sick leave, much more than the West Indian Canal workers could expect.

The local Panamanian citizens were initially used as a cheap source of unskilled labor. Though more resistant to yellow fever than the foreign workers, locals prove to be equally susceptible to malaria and pneumonia. Worse, local workers, suspicious of America’s power grab, were not the most enthusiastic workers, and had a reputation of being lazy and irresponsible. Open hostility between workers and ultimately added to Panamanians unhappiness, and they did not make up a large percentage of the work force.

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Panamanian Apartheid

The racially divided system controlled every aspect of a worker’s life. The distinction began as a division between skilled and unskilled laborers. As time passed it evolved into a purely racial divide. Skilled employees went on the gold roll and were paid in gold coins. These workers earned paid sick leave and vacation time, and lived in nicer homes than their unskilled counterparts. Those on the silver roll, the unskilled workers, were paid in Balboas, or local Panamanian silver. West Indian workers, plentiful in numbers and eager to work, would be paid 10¢ an hour, half of the salary of the European or white U.S. worker. Over time, the gold roll became comprised of white U.S. citizens exclusively, while the workers on the silver roll, by far the majority of the work force, were largely nonwhites.

Discrimination extended to living quarters made available to each group of workers. Barracks for West Indians were more crowded and run down than those for whites. As many as 72 West Indian men lived in a 50 by 30 foot hut. Mess halls for black workers had no tables are chairs and fed up to 8000 men each day with unappealing, simple food. Inadequate housing and malnutrition and made West Indian workers more vulnerable to injury in

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disease. Hospitals on the isthmus routinely located their black wards in the worst parts of the buildings. While the average death rate in 1906 with around 4% of the whole labor force, the rate for west Indian workers was closer to 5%.

Conditions for White American Workers

In stark contrast, white workers had a luxurious life and the canal zone. The ICC a realized they needed to create incentives for Americans to stay on the isthmus. One of the first projects was building a new cold storage unit to keep fresh, perishable foods. Then, the ICC improved the living conditions by building new, modern houses for the white workers. In 1906, 2500 structures were either renovated or build new, including two story family homes that featured screens in verandas, modern plumbing, and electricity.

A year later, American workers celebrated Independence Day on July 4, 1906 with games, athletic competitions, and dancing. This was the beginning of recreation and the canal zone. Baseball leagues and social clubs sprang up to fill lazy Sundays. By that winter the canal zone had paved roads, warehouses, dormitories, and dining halls.

Attractive enticements to keep white workers on the isthmus became the norm. New cottage homes, public schools, churches and bakeries opened in

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towns along the route of the canal. Bachelor hotels built to house single workers turned into social gathering places filled with noise and smoke.

YMCA clubhouses charged gold role employees $10.00 a year for access to bowling lanes, pool tables, chessboards, and a host of organized social events. In 1911 workers published a yearbook titled The Makers of the Panama Canal that contained biographies of selected employees and pictures of clubs and brotherhoods on the isthmus. By 1913, there were dances and band concerts every Sunday, and nine women’s clubs.

Unlike the West Indian workers, White workers were encouraged to bring their wives and families to the isthmus with extravagant incentives. Housing for married workers was provided for free and homes increased in luxury according to the worker’s place on the pay scale. In 1908, over 1000 American families were living on the isthmus and the ICC was spending $2.5 million a year for entertainment and games for white workers.

The ICC provided nothing, on the other hand, for the accommodation, provisions, or entertainment of the West Indian silver roll employees.

Working on the Canal

Work on the Panama Canal could be dull and monotonous or deafening and treacherous. Laborers could be assigned to virtually any project in the canal zone, each with unique dangers and each requiring its own set of skills.

The most dangerous job, one to which almost all West Indians were assigned at some point, was dynamiting. The dynamite was incredible unstable. It could blow up at any moment or malfunction upon detonation, remaining unignited until exploding later by accident. Workers headed out for dynamite duty frequently carried all their belongings with them, understanding their relatively low odds of returning safely to the barracks.

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The worst accidents to occur during the canal’s construction, in fact, was caused by the premature explosion of dynamite in the Bas Obispo cut on December 12, 1908, causing the death of 23 workers and injuring 40 others.

The most difficult physical labor was in the excavation of the Culebra cuts. Each day workers move miles of railroad track and filled 160 train cars that ran in and out of the cut. Landslides occurred in the cut with little or no warning, often burying workers and equipment within seconds and wiping out months of progress.

In 1909, construction of the locks brought a new host of potentially lethal dangers. Eight stories up the riveter is worked without safety harnesses on unstable scaffolding, which could become unhooked with any sudden movement. Falling materials would hit others sets of scaffolding on the way down, causing dozens of deaths and injuries. A job on the railroad was no easier. Due to the number of train cars running from multiple directions around the clock, working on the rail track required constant vigilance so as to avoid getting run over or hit by a swinging boom. In 1914, 44 employees were killed by railroad accidents.

Although the ICC made significant improvements in the second half of the U.S. construction period, treacherous construction methods and deadly

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disease took their toll: at least 25,000 workers died during the combined French and U.S. construction periods of the Panama Canal.

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i Adapted from the PBS Website. "American Experience: TV's Most-watched History Series." PBS. PBS, n.d. Web. 28 July 2016. <http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/panama/>.