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Early in January 1944 Aramco’s senior managers in Dhahran met with Vice President James Terry Duce to try to formulate policy for dealing with the influx of labor and supplies for the new refinery in Ras Tanura. Tensions were rising inside American Camp. Housing was unavailable for all the new recruits. In addition, “the subject of wives is becoming one of the big personnel problems of the camp.” The wartime American skeleton crew of a “hundred men” had rapidly grown to a thousand, they missed their families, and now were faced with the prospect of making room in their cramped homes for the construction crews. Recruiters had misled the new arrivals about when their own wives would be arriving in Dhahran—two years or more, rather than just two months, later. Outside the fences, meanwhile, the Arab workers were beginning to take matters in their own hands and settling their families alongside squatters living northeast of Saudi Camp, in a place they called Nahadin. Not surprisingly, therefore, the longest and most divisive debate among the planners concerned the inequities in the treatment of the Saudis and all other non-American employees.
Roy Lebkicher, who had come to Dhahran as Government Relations head, ought probably to be remembered as the first to question, however tentatively, the inequalities underpinning labor relations. In the January 5, 1944, meeting he argued against those who wanted Nahadin’s settlers removed to someplace like Thugba, a desolate spot miles away from American Camp. Instead, he said, the company ought to plan for a permanent Arab settlement in Dhahran. “If the idea of an Arab town for Ras Tanura is considered sound, the idea is equally sound in the Dhahran area.” The problem with Saudi Camp was that its existing palm-thatched huts or barastis could not accommodate all the new workers, Arab families were forbidden to live with the men inside the compound, and most of the workers were too poor to rent housing nearby. Lebkicher’s point was sharp. “As long as we provide free housing we are going to be faced, one of these days, with the question of why we furnish the Americans with better free housing than we do the Arabs.” Duce agreed that Arab workers had as much right as the Americans did to live with their families. So Lebkicher argued for a change in direction for housing policy. “The best way to avoid this problem is to discontinue free housing and to attempt to put housing on a more natural basis on which all have to pay for their housing and their type of housing will depend on income rather than nationality.”
Lebkicher had gone too far, apparently, and his comrades dragged him back with reminders of the enormous obstacles to any such dramatic alteration in the existing housing regime. British Petroleum had built native-worker housing in Iran in place of more rudimentary camps, but costs had grown enormous. If local Arabs had the right to live with their families, then the firm would ultimately have to pay for and accommodate the families of its higher-skill Indian and Hijazi clerks (“one point for which the Indians have been agitating for some time”).
Other pressing problems for which they had “been sort of marking time in the past two or three years” demanded attention, a decent Arab hospital for one. Another was a start on the education and training promised in the original concession in 1933 and reiterated in the 1942 Labor Law, the first major piece of legislation designed to secure some minimum standards in the oil industry, but ignored by the Americans. The depth of Aramco’s commitment to hierarchy meant Lebkicher had no answer to the question raised about his proposal to settle Arab workers and their families in the vicinity of American Camp. “If we were to build a modern Arab city with all conveniences at the Saudi Camp we would be faced with the problem of employees living in Dammam and Al Khobar wanting to come to live in such a city.”
We need to be clear, as well, therefore, about the distance even a relatively enlightened man such as Lebkicher still had to go. The only point about which there was no dispute, no dissent, and no doubt raised was that no Arab, whatever his skill level and seniority, should be permitted to reside inside American Camp itself. “The problem of importing Egyptians, Iranis [sic], Syrians, etc., as teachers brings up the question that if such a man is good enough to be a teacher he is probably high enough up the social scale so as to want to move into the staff camp. Such a thing would be undesirable and should be avoided at all costs.”
At the end of the day, only one decision had been taken, or at least registered in the minutes. Duce requested that a plan be drawn up for building barastis for employees residing in Nahadin “in order that this ‘sore eye’ on our treatment of non-staff employees may be removed.” Some months later, Aramco would begin to hire single American women for secretarial work, a solution that Duce and the others had considered for “the clerical problem,” by which they meant “the higher classed Hejazi, Syrian, Iraqi, etc.” worker, “the biggest troublemaker we have.” By troublemaking Duce meant a propensity to agitate for equality with the Americans. Down the road, following strikes in 1945 and 1947, these new “American girls” would complicate the otherwise neat change ordered by headquarters: American Camp was to be referred to as Senior Staff Camp, Indian Camp as Intermediate Camp, and Saudi Camp as General Camp, as if all along who lived where and with what degree of luxury had been a matter of skill and not race. The intermediate-skilled white women, all of whom lived in senior staff camp at a dorm (building 1225) known as “Hallowed Square,” were, well, an exception.
An additional strategy for reducing the troublemaking in the short term, one that had not come up for discussion in the January planning meeting, was in place by winter 1944, as Aramco imported approximately 1,700 Italians from Eritrea. [Senior staff member] Phil McConnell’s journal supplies key details. Negotiations with Saudi authorities over terms for the Italians would be complicated, he recorded in November, but it was assumed that they would live more or less as they had been accustomed to in Eritrea while filling multiple jobs in addition to master masons. “They will bring doctors, dentists, male nurses, kitchen help, cobblers, barbers, etc. The problem of wives coming too is still in the air. We would like to have them to wash, wait on tables, stenos, etc. The groups will want musical instruments and movies, which will take considerable negotiating with the Saudi Arabian Government.” The tricky part would be fending off objections if the disparities between the two races—Italians and Arabs—proved too glaringly unfair, but it is clear that privileges of some kinds were being contemplated.
One month later McConnell wrote that things had changed. “Their handling will be different. We don’t dare show them any considerations than those given the Arabs, as the Arabs already have protested to Sheikh Abdullah Suleiman that we are hiring men who take jobs from the Arabs.” The protestors were correct, of course. That was the point. McConnell continued with his account, for which we are indebted:
The king allowed the Italians to enter against his better judgment and he might kick them out over night, if he learned that they were getting better food or living conditions than his people. Hence, food must be simple and the housing poor. We plan to place floors in the tents of skilled Arabs first, then in the tents of the Italians. We must discourage, perhaps prohibit Americans from visiting the Italians. The Americans will start feeling sorry for the Italians and will give them articles. We cannot allow it. One of the first requirements is a high fence separating the Italians from both Arabs and Americans. At first, Italians will work separate from Arabs. Later, we may be able to combine them, with caution, depending on how the two races get along. The Arabs haven’t forgotten the atrocities of the Italians just across the Red Sea in Eritrea.
In this passage, the formulation of the problem facing managers—anticipating a king’s adverse reaction to learning of some kind of inequity—is quite different from what Aramco agents would soon begin to insist to workers and to prying outsiders. They would claim that their hands were tied by an explicit agreement with Ibn Saud barring improvements for any group of workers (except Americans!) while his own people were made to do without, say, running water, bare light bulbs, floors, decent food, water, and the like. Maybe some actually came to believe in the existence of such a strange compact. It is nonetheless extremely hard to believe that the Americans’ option for treating all with equal justice—“hence food must be simple and the housing poor”—is the one that any government official would accept as the best means for fulfilling a principle of just treatment for native Saudis. The reaction engendered generally by the workers’ protests, as we will see, supports our skepticism. By 1947, the U.S. consul had come to the same conclusion.
The company began repeating another, to be perfectly blunt about it, lie around this time. Managers insisted that Saudi law made it illegal to organize unions. They did so with at least as much conviction as the relations man aboard the SS Bellows who had announced that the law barred Negroes and Jews. Various U.S. embassy officials would repeat the claim about unions being outlawed when reporting on the strikes in the 1940s. A decade later, someone in Dhahran finally thought to dig up the statute in question, leading to a telegram to Washington reporting that there was in fact “no known basis for the belief.”
