Labor Historian Highlights Workers Who Built Panama Canal

by aflcioblogger, Jul 14, 2009

University of Maryland labor historian Julie Greene will hold a book reading July 15 at the AFL-CIO in Washington, D.C., for The Canal Builders: Making America’s Empire at the Panama Canal. To RSVP, click here.

“One of the greatest engineering feats in history.” That’s how The New York Times has described the Panama Canal.

“It was our technology, our science and our leadership that had carried the day,” the Times said.

When it brought together the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, cut in half the shipping distance between New York and San Francisco, and made vast Asian markets suddenly accessible to businesses along the East Coast, the Panama Canal was considered a crown jewel of the American economic empire.

Since it started operating in 1914, the Panama Canal has been the subject of enough books to fill a small library. But until now, a key part of the story has been missing—the workers who built the canal. In The Canal Builders: Making America’s Empire at the Panama Canal, labor historian Julie Greene tells the story of these workers with great skill.

Further, she asks:

How does looking at the construction project from their perspective change our understanding of this moment in history?

Some 60,000 workers took part in the canal’s construction. As Greene writes:

Working people journeyed to the Canal Zone from all over the globe: from the United States and Canada, the Caribbean, northern and southern Europe, and India. Each group brought different strategies for responding to conditions and policies on the isthmus. Workingmen who repaired steam shovels, ran lathes, dug dirt or drilled dynamite had their own dreams and visions, as did workingwomen who washed laundry and cleaned houses.

She adds:

In the Republic of Panama, which provided critical support for the construction effort, everyone from politicians to sewer diggers, servants, prostitutes, bartenders and chauffeurs experienced the transformation of their cities as a result of the American occupation.

There was not even a pretense that these workers were treated equally in the Panama Canal Zone. At the top of the scale, U.S. white male workers did quite well. They “received pay 25 to 35 percent higher than anything at home plus free quarters, electricity, medical care and sick leave,” according to Greene. In contrast, tens of thousands of West Indians were usually paid a fraction of the wages white Americans received, and their treatment was appalling.

For example, “accidents, illness, and death, like everything else in the Zone, followed a color line,” Greene points out.

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.

And that wasn’t the worst of it. “West Indians also were typically the ones victimized by landslides, dynamite explosions, or other industrial accidents,” Greene writes. Government figures show that 350 U.S. whites died during canal construction—but an estimated 15,000 West Indians died. Small wonder that a song the West Indian workers regularly sang was, “Somebody Dying Every Day.”

All this is very different from the iconography of the Panama Canal when it was built. A popular lithograph of the time showed “Hercules thrusting apart a mountain range, his back pushing against one side while his arm forces away the far side. His mighty labor allows a gentle stream of water to pass by at his feet,” according to Greene. “Hercules shows no sweat; his muscles are poised but not straining.”

In fact, as The Canal Builders shows, there were tens of thousands of Herculeses. Unlike the image in the lithograph, these workers showed sweat. They lost limbs and lives. And they transformed the global economy forever.

Greene says their story is ultimately “about fortune and misfortune, about the making of America’s empire in all its idealism, enthusiasm, and tragedy.” So it is, and she honors their memory and does us a great service by telling it.

The book is available here.

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