Second Chances in the Canal Zone
But for a lot of people, life in Panama was a really bad deal.
If you don’t know about Joseph B. Grinder and he how he killed his son, I suggest reading this post and this post. Ten percent of the ten people who read those posts think that the writing is amazing.
A man kills, and for the rest of his life he has to live with it. The experience weighs on him, as heavy as concrete. It eats at him like maggots. So what does he do? He goes to Panama thirteen year later. That may be less causation and more correlation.
In 1906 Joseph Grinder, my great-great-grandfather, a white man in Washington, DC, was hired to work in the Panama Canal Zone, the place to be if you wanted yellow fever or malaria or to be buried in a landslide or blown apart by dynamite. Good times.
I sent away to the National Archives for Grinder’s Canal Zone records, and baby got back a digital file of almost two hundred pages that spans the years 1906 to 1931. Thank you, bureaucrats, for your well-documented bureaucracy. So I’ll tell you what I learned about Joseph Grinder but, first, history in brief.
The Panama Canal is in Panama, so good job to the people who named it. First France tried to build the canal, starting in 1881, but the project was plagued by mishap and injury and death, and the whole thing went bankrupt.
So then the United States swooped in and took over. I know it’s hard to imagine such a humble little country taking over anything. Try to suspend your disbelief.
The US built the canal between 1904 and 1914. There were military maneuvers and a treaty and politics and so on, but I won’t go into all that. You’re welcome. Feel as free as America to thank me in the comments.
Just keep in mind two important things. One is that the US turned a part of Panama into an American concession, or territory. The Canal Zone comprised about 550 square miles from the Caribbean Sea to the Pacific Ocean and was administered by the Isthmian Canal Commission, or ICC.
The second thing to know is that the US brought to Panama a unique flair for racism. Because of course it did.
Canal Zone workers were segregated into one of two categories: gold roll or silver roll. This designated whether a worker was paid in gold or silver coins but ended up being about more than remuneration.
Can you guess who was on the gold roll? For the most part, it was white Americans. Big surprise. People of color, including the many Black laborers and other “unskilled” workers from the West Indies, were almost exclusively on the silver roll.
Gold-roll workers got decent, or better-than-decent, housing and food. They enjoyed employment benefits like paid vacation and sick leave and life benefits like recreation facilities.
Workers on the silver roll were mistreated to separate towns, substandard accommodations, and no employment benefits. They did the most laborious and dangerous jobs.
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Bonus Data: During the American construction of the canal, 5,609 workers died. Only about six percent of those deaths were among white Americans.
So Joseph B. Grinder went down to Panama to work and live and (spoiler alert) not die, though he did emerge significantly scathed. Here’s what I learned from his records:
My imagination was not prescient. I pictured Grinder as a shambolic model of a man on the margins (regards to the thesaurus), someone like this:
But I was wrong. He looked more like a man who at least knew how to look respectable in a photo, a man whom a grand jury might decline to indict.
Plenty of people had good things to say about Mr. Grinder. Here’s to second chances, I guess. His employment references reveal, first of all, that he was a man. Done deal. You’re hired!
He was a good man, a “reliable and competent man,” and “a man of most excellent habits and character.” Speaking of good, he was a “good citizen.” Plus (missing-comma alert) he was “sober industrious and generally fit for his occupation.”
Grinder lied about his age. That was probably to get a job. His birth date on employment records is March 12, 1867, which would add up if on the 1860 census, he were negative-seven years old. He was actually born in 1857.
The ICC had age limits for many jobs, though flexibility may have been the rule. Grinder was too old for his first Canal Zone job, even at his pseudo age.
Grinder shared that anti-aging formula with his wife, Ida, who sailed to New York City from Panama in 1913 at age fifty-two and made the same trip on the SS Wormhole in 1918 as a forty-five year old. Ah, the restorative power of travel.
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He was hired as a trainman. That’s a man who works on trains. Would you believe I figured that out on my own? (I actually didn’t.) In less than a year Grinder was promoted to conductor.
Trains were vital to canal construction. In the Culebra Cut, for example, where workers made a molehill—or, really, a gorge—out of miles of mountain, trains hauled away excavated earth via an elaborate system of railroad technology that we’re still congratulating ourselves for today.
The Culebra Cut was declared an engineering marvel by people who didn’t actually have to construct it. Laborers in the cut referred to the place as Hell’s Gorge.
The work of cutting through mountains was noisy and dangerous, and often deadly, thanks to dynamite, excavation equipment, and unpredictable landslides. That sounds really marvelous. The climate was hot; rain fell in torrents. Snakes and mosquitos were ubiquitous threats. Workers in the cut endured long hours for low pay.
Grinder was a bachelor in the Canal Zone. That’s because he’d gone down to Panama without his family. He first lived in Las Cascadas, near the Culebra Cut.
The ICC provided him with so-called bachelors’ quarters—a private furnished room in a shared house. Men who brought their families to the Canal Zone were given entire houses or apartments.
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Unless they were on the silver roll. In that case, the ICC gave each single man a single cot inside a large barrack or a cramped shack that slept seventy-two men. Silver-roll families were crowded into small residences.
He was promoted, then demoted. When he started as a trainman, Grinder drew a monthly salary of a hundred dollars on the gold roll. That doesn’t sound like much, but it was almost double what he’d earned working for the Southern Railroad in Washington, DC.
In Panama, Grinder went full steam ahead (sorry); his promotion to conductor brought a monthly pay increase of sixty dollars. Then he rode a series of salary hikes to relative prosperity: $210.90 a month in June 1909.
But a failure to pass an exam on railroad rules earned him a demotion to $166.50 a month in 1912. Maybe he just didn’t test well? In April, Grinder transferred from the ICC to the Panama Railroad Company in Cristobal, at the north end of the Canal Zone, at the same salary.
Still. That $166.50 a month was $1,998 a year, or about $65,000 today. Not bad for a man with an eighth-grade education.
He sustained a horrible injury. What’s worse than two left feet? No left foot. Grinder “unfortunately met with an accident” that “necessitated the amputation of [his] left foot” in July 1912. That’s the official account from officials, who make no claims about liability. Call it a marvel of lexical engineering.
Fault lay with a defective train-car step. Grinder earned one year’s injury leave, with pay, then resigned from the Panama Railroad in July 1913.
Back in DC, he worked really hard to find work. He even went to the White House.
By the end of 1913, Grinder was in Washington. He had four children and a wife at home, and his hunt for a job was a dead end. How many employers were looking for a one-footed man? My wild guess is none.
Grinder wanted a civil-service job with the Panama Canal office in Washington. But he didn’t have civil-service status, and his injury earned him no special standing.
The good news was that Major F. C. Boggs, of the Army Corps of Engineers, was promoting the passage of an executive order that would allow men injured on the job in the Canal Zone to transfer to the civil service without taking an exam.
A whole drama played out in a series of letters that put the civil in civil service. Whether the men of yesteryear were more congenial people I don’t know. They sure knew how to write a friendly letter.
Here’s to the power of men with typewriters. The epistolary is as least as mighty as the sword. It came to pass that the executive order was passed at the beginning of 1915. In April the Washington Office of the Panama Canal hired Grinder as a watchman and fireman.
Two years later, he was doing Ida wrong. Grinder held the money, and Ida needed more. So she wrote to Ray Smith, her husband’s boss, and asked Smith to ask Grinder to give her sixteen more dollars each month; the forty dollars that Grinder gave his wife didn’t cover expenses.
In fact, every fall, Ida was borrowing money on the family’s house, on Seventh Street NE. She wrote to Smith, “I tell my husband if we keep that up we soon will not have any home. I have decided to rent my home until the mortgage is paid off.”
The outcome of this inquiry is unknown. But maybe Ida kicked her husband out. Three years later, she’d taken in a boarder at the Seventh Street house. Her marital status on the 1920 census is widowed. Wishful thinking? Grinder was living with his daughter Alice and her family.
Then in 1926 Ida ran a classified ad in the Evening Star: “Household Furniture for sale: am abandoning housekeeping.” Me too, Ida. Every day. By 1930, she’d moved in with her son Millard and his wife and mother-in-law.
There you go. Joseph Grinder went down to Panama to work in the Canal Zone. He returned a little hobbled, at least in body if not in spirit. He was luckier than people who didn’t return at all.
Next Time: Mystery solved!
“'Household Furniture for sale: am abandoning housekeeping.' Me too, Ida. Every day."
As one of those ten people I still think the writing is amazing. Looking forward to the next chapter in Joseph Grinder.