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The Strange Career of the Convict Clause: US Prison Imperialism in the Panamá Canal Zone

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 November 2019

Benjamin D. Weber
Benjamin D. Weber*
Affiliation:
Watson Institute, Brown University
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Abstract

This article follows the “convict clause” in the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution – the exception for slavery and involuntary servitude to continue as punishment for crime – to the Panamá Canal Zone. It argues that US officials used the prison system not only to extract labor, but to structure racial hierarchy and justify expansionist claims to jurisdiction and sovereignty. It reveals how despite the purported “usefulness” of the Black bodies conscripted in this brutal labor regime, the prison system's operational modality was racial and gendered violence which exceeded the registers of political economy, penology, and state-building in which that usefulness was framed. The Canal Zone convict road building scheme then became a cornerstone from which Good Roads Movement boosters, who claimed the convict was a slave of the state, could push for the Pan-American Highway across the hemisphere. Afro-Panamanian and Caribbean workers, who were the majority of those forced into Canal Zone chain gangs, protested the racism and imperialism of the prison system by blending anti-colonial and anti-racist strategies and deploying a positive notion of blackness as solidarity and race pride. Their efforts and insight offer an understanding of the US carceral state's imperial dimensions as well as enduring lessons for movements struggling to broaden the meaning and experience of freedom in the face of slavery's recurrent afterlives.

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Articles
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International Labor and Working-Class History , Volume 96: Blackness and Labor in the Afterlives of Racial Slavery , Fall 2019 , pp. 79 - 102
Copyright
Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. 2019

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References

NOTES

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2. W. E. B. DuBois, “The Spawn of Slavery: The Convict-Lease System in the South,” The Missionary Review of the World XXIV(1901). See also, DuBois, “Black Toward Slavery,” in Black Reconstruction, 670–710.

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9. Ibid., 74–95. See also, Davis, “Racialized Punishment and Prison Abolition,” 96–110.

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22. Michael Conniff characterizes the situation of Silver Roll employees being made to pay taxes to support police, prisons, and schools as “institutions of social control paid for by the controlled” (Conniff, Black Labor, 39–40).

23. “Prison Labor on the Roads,” The Canal Record 1 (1908): 334Google Scholar.

24. The Canal Record, 1 (1908): 236Google Scholar.

25. Ibid., 242; 257. On Blackburn see, “Jos. C.S. Blackburn, Ex-Senator, is Dead,” (New York Times, September 13, 1918); “Senator Blackburn's Gun,” (The Nashville American, March 1, 1907), 9; Joseph C.S. Blackburn Papers MS, (The Filson Historical Society, Louisville, KY).

26. The Canal Record, 3, 91; 374.

27. The Canal Record, 4 (1910). The 19.7 mile road from Panama to Gorgona was completed by the end of that fiscal year. See, Annual Report of the Isthmian Canal Commission for 1910–1911, (Washington, DC: GPO, 1911), 421Google Scholar.

28. See the Annual Report of the Isthmian Canal Commission, (Washington, GPO, 1908–1914)Google Scholar.

29. The Canal Record, 1 (1908), 334. “In this expense is computed the cost of housing the prisoners, food, medical attendance, and guards.”

30. Ibid. One month's salary for 152 policemen was $16,045.48, while one month's work of 156 prisoners was calculated to be $1,606.65 total.

31. Ibid., 2 (1909): 363. Payroll for the total police force was well over $20,000 per month.

32. Ibid., 7 (1914): 489; Ibid., 8 (1915): 174.

33. The Daily Star and Herald, March 21, 1913.

34. The Canal Record, 1 (1908): 334Google Scholar; 379. For other references to portable camps see, Ibid., 3 (1909): 91; ibid., 4 (1910): 346; ibid., 5 (1911), 33–4; ibid., 6 (1913), n.23. For descriptions of prisoners being forced to provide their own food and shelter see, The Canal Record, 1: 257; 334; 379; 3: 91; 4: 346; 5: 33–34.

35. “Thatched Roof Native Home—Temporary Convicts’ Corral in the Background Near Old Panama, Canal Zone, 1913,” (New York, NY; London, Eng.; Sydney, Aus.: Keystone View Company, 1913). See also “Panama and Panama Canal Stereograph Collection,” George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida, accessed December 15, 2018, https://ufdc.ufl.edu/ps.

36. “Temporary Corral of Prisoners Employed in Road Work, Showing Mess Table, Near Old Panama, Canal Zone,” (New York, NY; London, Eng.; Sydney, Aus.: Keystone View Company, 1913). See also “Panama Canal Stereographs”.

37. Ibid. Although some claimed the Panama road building project was the first time the federal government had used convict labor on this kind of public works project, it had done so in the Philippines and Puerto Rico directly after occupying the islands. On the Philippines, see Weber, Benjamin D., “Fearing the Flood: Transportation as Counterinsurgency in the US-Occupied Philippines,” International Review of Social History 63 (2018): 13–15CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also, for example, Kennon, L. W. V., “Report of the Office in Charge of the Construction of the Benguet Road,” Sixth Annual Report of the Philippine Commission (Washington, DC: GPO, 1905)Google Scholar; Reports of the Auditor of Porto Rico, United States Congressional Serial Set No.4830, House of Representatives, 58th Cong., 3rd Sess., Doc. No.143, (Washington, DC: GPO, 1906), 77; 106; 183.

38. Between 1904 and 1918 there were 74,702 arrests and the conviction rate averaged about 80 percent. The highest conviction rates and majority of the prison population were of “Black West Indians,” people from Barbados, Jamaica, and Martinique. See “Police and Wardens Report,” in Annual Report of the Governor of the Canal Zone, Washington, DC: GPO, 1918), 276–285. Of the nearly seven thousand arrests in 1912, over half were of Barbadians, Jamaicans, Martinicans, and Afro-Panamanians (Conniff, Black Labor 36). Of the arrests that year, thirty-five hundred arrests were of West Indians compared to five hundred of US citizens (Greene, The Canal Builders, 283; 298).

39. The Canal Record, “Zone Highways,” 1 (1908): 258. See also, “Prison Labor on the Roads,” The Canal Record, 1 (1908): 334Google Scholar.

40. The Daily Star and Herald, November 16, 1908.

41. The Daily Star and Herald, March 31, 1911.

42. Goethals, George W., Government of the Canal Zone, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1915), 65Google Scholar. Michael Conniff points out that Goethals believed it customary for white men in tropical countries to direct “negro work” and felt it was not compatible with white men's pride of race to do work “traditional for negroes to do” (Conniff, Black Labor, 43).

43. Goethals, Government of the Canal Zone, 64.

44. For more on the depopulation campaign, in which police evacuated and destroyed over 1,135 homes in 1915 alone see, Kessler, William F., History of the Canal Zone Police (Mount Hope, CZ: Panama Canal Zone Press, 1982)Google Scholar. For the path-breaking analysis of how certain categories of surplus (land, state capacity, capitol, and labor) drove the prison expansion boom in California, see Gilmore, Ruth Wilson, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007)Google Scholar.

45. Executive Office Record Bureau, Panama Canal Periodical Reference Form, Canal Record, October 28, 1914, in, NARA RG 185, Repatriation of Laborers, File 46-D-8, EA1 34B, B913.

46. Police Chief Mitchell to Mr. Copeland, April 1, 1917, in Panama Canal Zone Executive Office Memo, in NARA RG 185, Repatriation of Laborers, File 46-D-8, EA1 34B, B913, F-6.

47. Ibid. Emphasis added.

48. See, W. E. B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America, op. cit.; Hahn, Steven, A Nation Under our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003)Google Scholar; Hahn, , The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

49. “Attempt to Revive Slavery in Texas,” Weekly Louisianan, November 28, 1874.

50. Rowe, L. S., “The Larger Significance of the Pan American Highway,” BPAU LXIV (1930): 222Google Scholar.

51. James, E. W., “Plans for the Pan American Highway Project,” BPAU LXIX (1935): 383Google Scholar; “The Pan American Highway,” BPAU LXXV (1941): 393Google Scholar.

52. E. W. James, “Plans for the Pan American Highway,” 385. See also, E.W. James, “More Highways for the Americas—The Fourth Pan American Highway Congress, in ibid., 677; and E. W. James, “A Quarter Century of Road Building in the Americas,” in ibid., LXXIX (1945): 609–618.

53. James, “A Quarter Century of Road Building in the Americas,” 616. Others included A.F. Tschiffely's expedition from Buenos Aires to New York City in 1925–1926, a 1935 road trip by the Automobile Club of Southern California from Texas to San Salvador, and brothers Joe and Arthur Lyons’ from Nevada to Managua.

54. See “The Road and Street Exhibit at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition,” September 4, 1915; “The Pan-American Road Congress and the Organization under the Auspices of Which it was Held,” September 4, 1915, in Good Roads: Devoted to the Construction and Maintenance of Roads and Streets X,  (1915): 147. See also Durham, Henry Welles, “Road and Street Work in the City of Panama,” Good Roads X (1915): 144Google Scholar.

55. James, “A Quarter Century of Road Building in the Americas,” 609. The South American portion of the Pan-American Highway included some 4,147 miles of paved, 1,646 miles of dry-weather, and 289 miles of trails.

56. Ibid.

57. George Shanton to Commercial Club of Mobile, quoted in Greene, The Canal Builders, 284.

58. Samuel Fox, “Convict Labor for the Panama Canal,” July 19, 1905, quoted in Greene, Canal Builders, 437–8. The ICC ultimately rejected his proposal.

59. McKelvey, Blake, “Penology in the Westward Movement,” The Pacific Historical Review 1 (1933): 418–428, 420CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also McKelvey, , “The Prison Labor Problem: 1875–1900, Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 25 (1934): 254–270Google Scholar.

60. McKelvey, “Penology in the Westward Movement,” 428. See also, Gillin's, J. L.Taming the Criminal (New York: Macmillan Co., 1931)Google Scholar.

61. Ibid., 434.

62. Ibid., 418.

63. Tynan, “Prison Labor on Public Roads,” 58.

64. See Dylan Rodríguez, Forced Passages; Dennis Childs, Slaves of the State, op. cit.

65. “Police for Canal Strip,” (New York Times, July 4, 1904), 3.

66. “Porto Rico's Police Chief visits Gov. Cox: Col. Shanton Tells How He Changed the System There, Former Rough Rider Had Cleaned Up The Canal Zone Previously,” (Boston Globe, April 2, 1922), 11.

67. Jackson, William K., “The Administration of Justice in the Canal Zone,” (Virginia Law Review, 4 (1916): 1–20), 9CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Michael Conniff writes that Chief Canal Engineer John Stevens authorized the recruitment of some twenty thousand Barbadians and paid their passage to the Zone in 1904, and as many as two hundred thousand West Indians migrated there during the construction era, 1904–1914 (Conniff, Black Labor, 25).

68. Ibid., 14.

69. Taft to ICC Chairman Shonts, April 13, 1905, quoted in Conniff, Black Labor, 25. While William Taft officially registered his objection to “slavery by debt,” rather than by criminal conviction, he considered other forms of dependent and coerced labor—of women, children, colonial subjects—to be part of the natural order of things. See, for example, Taft, William H., The Philippines (New York: The Outlook Company, 1902)Google Scholar. Conniff notes that Chinese exclusion laws, which applied in the Canal Zone as well as the United States, also inhibited Steven's plan. For a comparative view of Taft and other colonial administrators’ views on the subject, see Salman, Michael, The Embarrassment of Slavery: Controversies over Bondage and Nationalism in the American Colonial Philippines (Berkley: University of California Press, 2003)Google Scholar.

70. Greene, The Canal Builders, 226–66; Joan Victoria Florez Villalobos, “West Indian Women in the Panama Canal Zone, 1904–1914,” honors thesis (Amherst, MA: Amherst College, 2010).

71. Magoon quoted in Greene, The Canal Builders, 259.

72. Greene, 258–260. See also US Senate, Investigation of Panama Canal Matters: Hearings before the Committee on Interoceanic Canals of the United States Senate, 59th Cong., 2nd Sess., Doc. No. 401 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1907).

73. Poultney Bigelow, “Our Mismanagement at Panama,” in Message from the President of the United States Transmitting Papers to Accompany his Message, January 8, 1906 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1906). See also US Senate, Investigation of Panama Canal Matters.

74. Robert Lamastus estimated that 90 percent of the police force were ex-army men. See, “Lamastus to his Family,” Cristobal, September 26, 1909, Lamastus-Crabb Family Papers MS, The Filson Historical Society, Louisville, KY; Franck, Harry A., Zone Policeman 88: A Close Range Study of the Panama Canal and its Workers (New York: The Century Co., 1913Google Scholar; London, Eng: Dodo Press reprint edition, 2012), 16; 59.

75. “Under the Stars and Bars,” New York Times, January 8, 1893, 17; “Charges Against Marshall,” The Washington Post, November 11, 1907, 2. See also, William F. Kessler's History of the Canal Zone Police, op. cit. Guy Johannes was the first civilian police chief and he took office in 1917.

76. Franck, Zone Policeman 88, 134.

77. Robert Lamastus to his brother, Fort Flagler, Alaska, March 11, 1904.

78. Lamastus to his family, Culebra, Panama Canal Zone, March 15, 1910.

79. Lamastus to family, Culebra, January 1, 1911.

80. See Horn, Gerald, “Confederates to Brazil,” The Deepest South: The United States, Brazil, and the African Slave Trade (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 198–221Google Scholar; Horn, Gerald, The White Pacific: U.S. Imperialism and Black Slavery in the South Seas after the Civil War (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2007)Google Scholar.

81. See, Lamastus-Crabb Family Papers MS, The Filson Historical Society, Louisville, KY. On the coffee plantation see, The Lamastus Family Estates, accessed September 5, 2018, http://www.boquetecoffee.net/.

82. Garvey, Marcus, “Conditions in Panamá,” The Negro World, June 28, 1919, in Hill, Robert A., ed., The Marcus Garvey and UNIA Papers, Volume XI: The Caribbean Diaspora, 1910–1920 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 224–227Google Scholar.

83. Blain, Keisha N., Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), 14Google Scholar. She later took the name Amy Ashwood Garvey after agreeing to marry Marcus Garvey.

84. Convict ships also invoked the ghost of slave-ships. On the Middle Passage as carceral model for the US prison regime, see Dylan Rodríguez, Forced Passages.

85. See, for example, Newton, The Silver Men; Donohue, Borderland on the Isthmus; Roediger and Esch, The Production of Difference; and Burnett, Carla, “‘Unity is Strength’: Labor, Race, Garveyism and the Panama Canal Strike,” The Global South 6 (2012): 39–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

86. Burnett, “‘Unity is Strength,’”; Greene, The Canal Builders, 369–370.

87. Ibid., 49–50.

88. Stoute to Garvey, July 8, 1919, quoted in Burnett, 49.

89. Donoghue, Borderland on the Isthmus, 107–112.

90. For other examples of border-crossing police and private agents during this period, see Unterman, Katherine, Uncle Sam's Policemen: The Pursuit of Fugitives Across Borders (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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92. “Son of a bitch… Halt… Ei, You! Los gringos levantaron sus rifles, apuntando. No se moviieron. No tienen otra casa que hacer sino cumplir el reglamento. Pero ya Atá está ganando el camino de oro. Lentamente, como el gato perezoso que cruza la carretera. Nadie lo podrá detener. Nada lo detendrá… Los rifles siguen apuntándolo. […] Y, orta vez, de la soleada villa de los brujos vino la voz del guardia… HALTTT…!!! Atá no se ha detenide. Sigue caminando. Está en medio del trillo y el camino cuando se oyen tres detonaciones. Sus piernas se estremecen… entra por aquel trillo. Los guardias se pegan de Nuevo los rifles a sus hombros [214] y vuelven a disparar. Ahora, Atá se estremece todo. Su camisa se va impregnando de sangre. No cae al suelo. Da tumbos. Abre los brazos, y trastabillea lentamente por el camino, moribundo. Beleño, Los forzados de Gamboa/Gamboa Road Gang, 214–215.

93. La sangre le asoma en la boca. Y su voz está llena de sangre cuando dice.—At last… I am safe! Safe! Safe! Y cayó para siempre sobre su camino de oro. ¡Adiós Atá! ¡Al fin eres libre! ¡Estás a salvo!” Beleño, 215.

94. Judy, Ronald, “Provisional Note on Formations of Planetary Violence,” boundary 2 33, (2006): 141CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

95. Beleño, los forzados de Gamboa, / Gamboa Road Gang, 36.

96. Césaire, Aimé, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Pinkham, Joan [1955] (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972; 2000), 42–3; 77Google Scholar.

97. Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 42.

98. Ibid.

99. On this definition of colonialism and the commonalities between modes of governance, see Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, 2010).

100. Denise Ferreira da Silva, for example, distinguishes the “Category of Blackness” seen as a commodity or object from the “Poethics of Blackness,” which represents a range of possibility for knowing, doing, and existing. See da Silva, Denise Ferreira, “Toward a Black Feminist Poethics: The Quest(ion) of Blackness Toward the End of the World,” The Black Scholar: Journal of Black Studies and Research 44 (2014): 81–97, 81CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also, Silva, da, Toward a Global Idea of Race (Minnesota, MN: University of Minneapolis Press, 2007)Google Scholar.

101. Alliance for Global Justice, “Prison Imperialism,”accessed April 15, 2019, https://afgj.org/prison-imperialism; Alliance for Global Justice, “Prisoners of US Empire,” accessed April 15, 2019, https://afgj.org/prisoners-of-us-empire.