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  • Builders and Dreamers
  • Robert H. Zieger (bio)
Julie Greene . The Canal Builders: Making America's Empire at the Panama Canal. New York: Penguin Press, 2009. 475 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $40.00.

Julie Greene's excellent book The Canal Builders addresses several significant themes. They are: the role of working people in the building of the Panama Canal and the efforts of canal officials to manage a diverse labor force; the relationship between domestic progressivism and twentieth-century U.S. imperialism; and the ways in which Americans have understood the acquisition of the Canal Zone and the building of the canal, both contemporarily and subsequently. With respect to labor, Greene stresses the theme of workers' agency. When considering the canal project's broader impact and meaning, in her introduction Greene invokes recent post-colonial scholarship. In the body of the book, however, she relies largely on traditional historical narrative. She is little concerned with the diplomatic and financial machinations with which Americans supplanted the French and acquired the Canal Zone, and she leaves most of the geological and engineering details to David McCullough in his 1977 The Path between the Seas.1

The canal project was an enormous undertaking. The seaway took more than ten years to build and, during peak operations around 1910, employed almost 60,000 people. At most, only about 10 percent of these workers were American citizens, the majority of them white men. Americans filled skilled positions on the rail lines that fed the Zone and nearby Panamanian port cities and served as skilled construction workers. The most visible Americans were the operators of the massive steam shovels, which, specially designed and built for the project, became the visual emblem of the enterprise. Americans also performed much of the clerical work and provided most of the medical personnel, including about 100 female nurses.

From whence would the vast majority of the men needed to perform the heavy lifting in this stupendous undertaking be recruited? The Chinese option was quickly ruled out, despite the critical role Chinese laborers had played in the building of the transcontinental railroads. Labor agents in Europe recruited Spanish, Italian, and Greek workers, all of whom maintained a small, but [End Page 513] distinct, presence in the Zone. But project directors soon turned to the British and French West Indies for black workers, who constituted the only viable long-term source of labor.

Canal officials were initially reluctant to rely on these men. The doomed French construction effort had employed thousands of West Indians, and they had been labeled as lazy and feckless. But under chief engineers John Stevens (1904-7) and, especially, George Goethals (1907-14), authorities came to perceive the employment of West Indians in a more positive light. It turned out that many of them were relatively skilled and could be used to supplant white workers at lower wages. Europeans, especially the Spaniards, brought troubling traditions of militant radicalism with them. Moreover, they resented the role assigned to them in the Zone's complex and ever-shifting scheme of social and job-site racial segregation. Thus, in the end, with European workers proving obstreperous and American-citizen workers proving replaceable, it was left to West Indians to supply the bulk of the heavy labor and, eventually, to fill an increasing proportion of skilled construction positions.

In managing this diverse and at times disputatious labor force, Goethals and other canal officials devised a system of labor control that mixed segregation, inequality, harsh discipline, and paternalism. At its heart was the "Gold and Silver" scheme of payment. Employees were classified according to the partially overlapping categories of "race" and job assignment. "Gold" status, which carried with it wage rates about 30 percent higher than in the U.S., relatively good housing, and generous home leave provisions, was reserved for white American citizens. "Silver" status was conferred on all others, including, eventually, the 200 or so African American citizens who found their way to the Zone.

The officials who designed and implemented this system regarded it as an ingenious and progressive method of classifying and compensating a heterogeneous labor force. In fact, the Gold-Silver system proved awkward, inconsistent, and conflict-ridden...

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