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MOVABLE EMPIRE: LABOR, MIGRATION, AND U.S. GLOBAL POWER DURING THE GILDED AGE AND PROGRESSIVE ERA

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 February 2016

Julie Greene
Julie Greene*
Affiliation:
University of Maryland at College Park
*
email: jmg@umd.edu
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Abstract

The acquisition of an empire that stretched across North America, the Caribbean, Central America, and the Pacific world transformed the United States during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. While scholars have examined many aspects of U.S. expansionism, a neglected issue involved the imperial labor migrations it required. From across North America, the Caribbean, southern Europe, and Asia, men and women were recruited to labor in the service of building U.S. global power at the turn of the twentieth century. Officials saw recruiting and moving laborers from far away as necessary to ensure productivity and discipline. This required U.S. government and corporate leaders to experiment with labor management in ways that shaped the “long twentieth century” of U.S. history. Mobility was not only central to the logic of the U.S. Empire; when possible, workers also deployed it for their own ends. Therefore migration became a terrain of struggle between workers and government officials. This paper looks in particular at documents generated by two migrating groups important in the making of U.S. global power. Afro-Caribbeans who traveled to construct the Panama Canal; and soldiers who served in the War of 1898 and the Philippine-American War.

Type
Presidential Address
Information
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 15 , Issue 1 , January 2016 , pp. 4 - 20
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2016 

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References

NOTES

1 Other works that connect labor and working-class history to the history of U.S. Empire include the essays in Daniel E. Bender and Jana K. Lipman, Making the Empire Work: Labor and United States Imperialism (New York: NYU Press, 2015); see, for example, the editors’ introduction, “Through the Looking Glass: U.S. Empire Through the Lens of Labor History”; and Julie Greene, “The Wages of Empire: Capitalism, Expansionism, and Working-Class Formation.” See also Kramer, Paul A., “Power and Connection: Imperial Histories of the United States in the World,” American Historical Review 116:5 (Dec. 2011): 1348–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Julie Greene, The Canal Builders: Making America's Empire at the Panama Canal (New York: Penguin Press, 2009); Jason Colby, The Business of Empire: United Fruit, Race, and U.S. Expansion in Central America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011); Jana Lipman, Guantanamo: A Working-Class History Between Empire and Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008).

2 Paul A. Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 157.

3 Stoler, Ann Laura, “On Degrees of Imperial Sovereignty,” Public Culture 18:1 (2006): 125–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The quotations are on pp. 127–28.

4 Emily Rosenberg, Financial Missionaries to the World: The Politics and Culture of Dollar Diplomacy, 1900–1930 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004); Ralph Eldin Minger, William Howard Taft and United States Foreign Policy (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1975).

5 William Howard Taft to the Secretary of War, Oct. 17, 1901, Bureau of Insular Affairs, RG 350, Entry 1–3 5-A, File 3037, General Classified Files, National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), College Park. See also Katherine Bjork, “Incorporating an Empire: From Deregulating Labor to Regulating Leisure in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, and the Philippines, 1898–1909” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1998).

6 “Report of the Commissioner of Labor on Hawaii,” Bulletin of the United States Bureau of Labor 8:47 (July 1903): 698–99Google Scholar.

7 Bjork, “Incorporating an Empire,” 32–43; “Report of the Commissioner of Labor on Hawaii,” Bulletin of the United States Bureau of Labor 8:47 (July 1903): 699Google Scholar, 703, 705, and 707–10; David R. Roediger and Elizabeth D. Esch, The Production of Difference: Race and the Management of Labor in U.S. History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Katherine Coman, History of Contract Labor in the Hawaiian Islands (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1908); Ronald Takaki, Pau Hana: Plantation Life in Hawaii, 1835–1920 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1983); Moon-Kie Jung, Reworking Race: The Making of Hawaii's Interracial Labor Movement (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006); Gary Okihiro, Cane Fires: The Anti-Japanese Movement in Hawaii, 1865–1945 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991); Edward D. Beechert, Working in Hawaii: A Labor History (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1985).

8 Mrs. William Howard Taft, Recollections of Full Years (New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1914), 284. On the transformation of global communications, see Dwayne R. Winseck and Robert M. Pike, Communication and Empire: Media, Markets, and Globalization, 1860–1930 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007).

9 On women's role in making sites of empire feel like home, see, for example, George, Rosemary Marangoly, “Homes in the Empire, Empires in the Home,” Cultural Critique 27 (Winter 1993–1994): 95–127CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Rafael, Vicente L., “Colonial Domesticity: White Women and United States Rule in the Philippines,” American Literature 67:4 (Dec. 1995): 630–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 For more on these topics, see Greene, The Canal Builders.

11 Greene, The Canal Builders; Greene, “Spaniards on the Silver Roll: Liminality and Labor Troubles in the Panama Canal Zone, 1904 to 1914,” International Labor and Working-Class History 66 (Fall 2004): 78–98Google Scholar.

12 Isthmian Historical Society Competition for the Best True Stories of Life and Work on the Isthmus of Panama During the Construction of the Panama Canal,” Panama Collection of the Canal Zone Library-Museum, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, Box 25, Folders 3–4. The entries are also available online via the George A. Smathers Library at the University of Florida: http://ufdc.ufl.edu/AA00016037/00115/allvolumes. They have been used by many historians as primary sources on the lives of Caribbean workers. See, for example, Greene, The Canal Builders.

13 Isthmian Historical Society Competition for the Best True Stories, Submissions by George Martin and Albert Peters.

14 Isthmian Historical Society Competition for the Best True Stories, Submission by Constantine Parkinson.

15 Lara Putnam, The Company They Kept: Migrants and the Politics of Gender in Caribbean Costa Rica, 1870–1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); and Radical Moves: Caribbean Migrants and the Politics of Race in the Jazz Age (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013); Winston James, Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in Early Twentieth-Century America (London: Verso Books, 1998); Bonham Richardson, Panama Money in Barbados, 1900–1920 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985); Olive Senior, Dying to Better Themselves: West Indians and the Building of the Panama Canal (Kingston, Jamaica: The University of the West Indies Press, 2014).

16 See, in particular, the following documents: Application for Photo Metal Check; W. B. Potter, Governor, to Harold Rerrie, Chairman Local 900, AFSCME, AFL-CIO, Sept. 13, 1957; Newspaper Clipping from Star and Herald, Dec. 5, 1957; all from Constantine Parkinson File, 107274, Death Files, National Personnel Records Center, St. Louis, Missouri.

17 See the Death Files, National Personnel Records Center, for each of the individuals named in this paragraph.

18 Mrs. Fred A. Giari to Don Rickey Jr., assistant director, U.S. Army Military History Research Collection, Apr. 1, 1969, Spanish American War Veterans Survey Collection, Box 1 Folder 30, U.S. Military Heritage and Education Center (USMHEC), Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

19 For more on military service as labor see Greene, “The Wages of Empire”; Peter Way, “‘Black Service … White Money’: The Peculiar Institution of Military Labor in the British Army during the Seven Years’ War” in Leon Fink, ed. (with associate editors Eileen Boris, John French, Julie Greene, Joan Sangster, and Shelton Stromquist), Workers Across the Americas: The Transnational Turn in Labor History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 57–80; Edward M. Coffman, The Regulars: The American Army, 1898–1941 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2004).

20 Edward Dunbar Narrative, Apr. 1, 1969, Spanish American War Veterans Survey Collection, Box 1 Folder 30, USMHEC.

21 News clipping, “Sickness and Suffering of the 3d Regiment: A Change in the People Since the Advent of the Yankees”; News clipping, “Kankakee Boys in Puerto Rico”; both George Tronjo Papers, Spanish American War Veterans Survey Collection, Box 4 Folder 40, USMHEC.

22 Edward Dunbar Narrative, Apr. 1, 1969, Spanish American War Veterans Survey Collection, Box 1 Folder 30, USMHEC.

23 Frederick Carpenter File, Box 8 Folder 4; George Haworth to Grandma, Mrs. J. B. Atkins, written from Cavite, Philippine Islands, Mar. 8, 1899, Box 7 Folder 37: both Spanish American War Veterans Survey Collection, USMHEC. For more on these themes, see also Julie Greene, “The Wages of Empire.”

24 John Albright, “A Vignette of Imperialism: The 11th Cavalry in the Philippines, 1901–1904,” 1970, in Thomas Speer Files, Box 43 Folder 41; Charles Buchanan to Dear Folks, Feb. 21, 1899, Box 5 Folder 3; both Spanish American War Veterans Survey Collection, USMHEC.

25 Typed manuscript by Ruth Kennybrook Ferrell, daughter of David Kennybrook, Mar. 1, 1969, Box 58 Folder 16, Spanish American War Veterans Survey Collection, USMHEC.