The Path Between the Seas

by David McCullough

cars. In all official rules and documents, on signs in post offices and other public places, the color line was expressed in “gold” and “silver” rather than black and white, these designations having been derived from the pay system. Pay for the unskilled work force was in Panamanian silver—balboas, as the standard coins were called. Pay for Americans, on the other hand, was in gold, that still being the monetary standard of the United States. And since nearly all the unskilled workers were black and since virtually all the Americans recruited were skilled workers and white, the terms “gold roll” (gold payroll) and “silver roll” came to be used more or less synonymously for skilled whites from the United States (who might be anything from a steam-shovel engineer to a postal clerk to a nurse to a division engineer) and for black unskilled British subjects (most likely from Barbados and most likely illiterate; but who could also be an educated, French-speaking artisan from Martinique, a Swiss surveyor, or an illiterate Spaniard or Italian).