Caribbean Matters: Correcting Trump’s big lie about the Panama Canal

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Incompetent-elect Donald Trump made headlines last month with his ridiculous remarks about Panama and its Canal. Many news organizations focused on his bogus claims about Chinese troops controlling it, among other of his prevarications.

I’ve been following up on his recent huge lie that “38,000 Americans” died building the Canal, which even Fox called out as untrue. Historians agree that during the American-controlled construction phase from 1904 to 1914, the death toll was less than one-sixth of that—less than 6000. Records indicate just a small portion of those who died were white. Additionally, to claim only Americans died erases the enormous number of deaths of West Indians and other not-white workers who actually did the building and most of the dying during this period—as well as the roughly 22,000 workers who died during the French attempt during the 1880s.

The racism that was locked in place and practiced in the Canal Zone by U.S. overseers are a critical part of Canal history that should never be forgotten. Erasing Black history has long been a key part of the MAGA agenda, and we must continue to push back against it.

RELATED STORY: Trump's sudden fixation on Panama may be tied to his shady business

Georgia State University professor Lia T. Bascomb, writing for Picturing Black History, addressed the demographics of the Canal labor force after the U.S. took control of construction. 

Black Laborers on the Panama Canal
West Indian, especially Barbadian, migrant labor on the Panama Canal changed shipping routes, benefitted the U.S. economy, and affected immigration for decades afterward.

Between 1904-1916, over 45,000 Barbadians migrated to Panama to work on the canal, roughly a quarter of the island’s population.

Upon arrival, migrants lived mostly in the Canal Zone, a semiautonomous region that was technically part of Panama but operated and governed by the United States.

The earliest generation of migrants did the hardest work, literally digging out the space for large boats to cross the fifty miles between the coasts. Deaths from industrial accidents, falls from scaffolding, and disease were common.

Throughout the building of the canal and for decades after its completion, these migrants and their descendants worked on an unequal pay scale, where mostly white U.S. citizens were paid on the “gold roll,” and the mostly Black, mostly West Indian migrants were paid on the “silver roll.” The distinctions began a form of segregation within the Canal Zone that permeated clubs, schools, and housing as well as pay.

December wasn’t the first time Trump has bloviated about the Canal’s construction. I’ve covered Canal history here in the past, including some of Trump’s specious claims, most recently in August 2022, when I quoted a 2020 column from the New York Daily News’ Jared McCallister.

Mr. President, black Caribbean workers “dug out” the Panama Canal for America

Knowing about the major contributions made by Caribbean laborers in the construction of the monumental Panama Canal, I had to respond to a recent claim by President Trump, boasting that Americans “dug out” the water-filled passage that linked the Atlantic and Pacific oceans — revolutionizing international maritime travel.[...]

Yes, the U.S. paid for the successful construction, but in his recent speech at his Tulsa, Okla., campaign rally, Trump seemed to say Americans “dug out” the historic canal, when imported Caribbean workers worked and died while carving and blasting through more than 50 miles of sweltering, disease-ridden jungle to create  the important Atlantic-Pacific-linking waterway  — which made the time-consuming sea route around the southern tip of South America obsolete.

Reflecting on the prevalent racial discrimination in the U.S. at the time, all the black Caribbean and black American workers lived and labored under racially segregated designations — where whites were on the gold payroll and blacks were assigned to the silver payroll.

Trump ranted about the Canal to his lying pal Tucker Carlson two summers ago, as noted last month by The Washington Post.

Last year, in an interview with Tucker Carlson on X, the Elon Musk-owned social media site, Trump inaccurately said that China “controls” and runs the Panama Canal.

“If I’m president, they’ll get out, because I had a very good relationship with Xi,” Trump said in the August 2023 interview, referring to Chinese President Xi Jinping. “He respected this country. He respected me, and he’ll get out. We can’t let them run the Panama Canal. We built the Panama Canal. Should have never been given to Panama.”

On Christmas Day, Trump went on a huge rant of over three dozen posts on his Truth Social platform, where he made his false claim that the U.S. lost “38,000 Americans people” while building the Panama Canal. 

But let’s go back to that 2023 interview with Carlson. There, he claimed “we lost 35,000”—a different, yet still inaccurate, number from the most recent 38,000.

A BBC program called “Sounds” fact-checked Trump’s claim a month later, with host Tim Harford consulting Matthew Parker, who wrote the 2007 book “Hell’s Gorge: The Battle to Build the Panama Canal.”

Parker asserted that the number of white Americans lost was about 300. This is similar to the findings of other historians; as a digital exhibit about the Canal at Missouri’s Linda Hall Library of Science, Engineering and Technology notes:

Records from the American period of construction document 5,600 deaths, of those, 350 were white Americans and 4,500 were non-white, mostly West Indians. However, the number of West Indian deaths is likely underreported because many lived in the cities outside the Canal Zone and some causes, typhoid fever for example, were not always included in the statistics.

Historian David McCullough provides just a small snapshot—less than a year’s worth of data—on page 501 of in his 1978 National Book Award in History winner, “The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870–1914“:

… for the first 10 months of 1906, the actual death rate among white employees was seventeen per thousand, but among the black West Indians was  fifty nine per thousand! Black laborers, those understood to be so ideally suited to withstand the poisonous climate were dying three times as fast as the white workers. If Panama was no longer a white man’s graveyard it was little less deadly than it had ever been for the black man. And since the black workers outnumbered the white workers by three to one the disparity in the number of fatalities was even more shocking.

In the previous 10 months, a total of 34 Americans had died, whereas the total among men and women from Barbados alone was 362, ten times greater; 197 Jamaicans had died,  68 from Martinique, 29 from St. Lucia, 27 from Grenada.

The U.S. Canal Zone health authorities kept meticulous records, many of which are available online. They note the race and national origin of those people who got sick and of those who died.

From the 1913 Annual Report of the Department of Sanitation:

From the October 1914 Report of the Department of Health of the Panama Canal:

The plight of non-workers is often overlooked when discussing the Canal’s construction and its high toll of deaths. Infants and

children died in the Canal Zone as well. This notation on children’s deaths by race comes from a report for the month of May 1915.

The erasure of dead Black children and the women who bore them has begun to be corrected, most notably in Joan Flores-Villalobos’ 2023 book “The Silver Women: How Black Women’s Labor Made the Panama Canal.” Nicolle Alzamora reviewed it for the Los Angeles Review of Books. 

THE PANAMA CANAL is the stuff of stories, many of them contradictory. Triumphalist narratives from the United States historically recount the canal’s construction as both a feat of American genius and an example of imperialist power, accounts bolstered by a French company’s earlier unsuccessful attempt to forge the waterway in the late 19th century. For the US, the opening of the canal in 1914 represented triumph where its European counterparts had failed and symbolized the greatness of American modernity—an achievement wrought by the country’s white engineers and scientists.

In Panama, by contrast, the seaway and the US-controlled Canal Zone around it were seen as part of a history of colonialism that prompted the country’s long struggle to reclaim its sovereignty. Yet, as divergent as these two narratives might be, both disguise the labor of the more than 150,000 workers who migrated from many parts of the world, especially from the islands of the Caribbean, to work on the canal’s construction. These workers, whose toil brought the waterway into existence, were subjected not only to the perils of the labor itself but also to a distinct regime of racism that US officials exported to the isthmus. A variation of the Jim Crow laws in place in the US South established a segregated payroll system in the Canal Zone: skilled workers, largely white and from the United States, were part of the “gold roll”; unskilled workers from the West Indies and elsewhere, including the neighboring Republic of Panama, were on the “silver roll,” and therefore received lower wages and an overall lower standard of living.

In her new book The Silver Women: How Black Women’s Labor Made the Panama Canal, historian Joan Flores-Villalobos focuses on the often-overlooked stories of women who migrated from the Caribbean to the Panamanian isthmus during the construction period. The title of the book is a nod to the segregation system in place in the Canal Zone, as well as a reference to Velma Newton’s seminal work, The Silver Men: West Indian Labour Migration to Panama, 1850–1914, first published in 1984. Newton and others have explored the migration, dangerous work conditions, and racism that Black workers endured while constructing the Panama Canal. With The Silver Women, Flores-Villalobos takes this body of research one step further, examining the ways that Black West Indian women’s labor aided and sustained the canal project. While they built the canal, these women also worked to preserve their cultures and communities on the Panamanian isthmus, across the West Indian archipelago, and throughout the hemisphere’s growing West Indian diaspora.

In memory of all those who died as part of the effort to build the Canal, let us ensure that their sacrifice is never forgotten. Join me below to discuss, and for the weekly Caribbean News Roundup.