by Julie Greene
So this is a book about empire, and yet, following the canal’s own strange career, it is also about a project that does not fit easily into our notions of imperialism. It is about the ways diverse visions, expectations, hopes, dreams, and realities clashed against one another. It is about how a scandalous moment in the history of the United States became transformed into one widely seen as profound, idealistic, and triumphant. It is about how the world became larger and smaller at the same time. It is about the movement of tens of thousands of people, who left jobs in Mississippi or New Jersey, who departed plantations in Barbados or Antigua or rocky fields in Galicia, Spain, to work on the Americans’ canal. It is about the creation of a global infrastructure that enhanced the flow of commerce and military personnel in order to assert U.S. economic, military, and diplomatic power. It is about struggles over the meaning and significance of the construction project, how it was received and how it transformed American history at home and in the world. It is, ultimately, a story about fortune and misfortune, about the making of America’s empire in all its idealism, enthusiasm, and tragedy.
PROLOGUE
_________________
PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT’S STEAM SHOVEL
IN THE AUTUMN of 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt and his wife boarded the battleship USS Louisiana for a trip to the Panama Canal Zone. The president wanted to inspect the construction sites of the canal, a project he would forever consider his greatest achievement. Never before had a president of the United States left the country while in office. During the six days they spent on the ship, Roosevelt, rather bored, read Milton, tagged along as officers inspected the ship, or, as he wrote in letters to his children, sat and envisioned the history of the region he was passing through—and his place in that history. As the battleship and its accompanying warships passed by Cuba and Haiti, “two great, beautiful, venomous islands,” as Roosevelt described them, his thoughts turned to Columbus, Spanish explorers, buccaneers and pirates, the rise of the slave trade, and “the turning of Hayti into a land of savage negroes, who have reverted to voodooism and cannibalism.” Roosevelt believed by contrast that Cuba and Puerto Rico, thanks to the wise leadership of the United States, were making steady steps toward progress. He found it fascinating to compare his current journey with the trip he took eight years earlier to Santiago, Cuba, amid a fleet of warships, to fight in the Spanish-American War: “It seems a strange thing to think of my now being President, going to visit the work of the Panama Canal, which I have made possible.”1
How much had changed in eight years, and how impressed the president felt at all he and his nation had achieved: “It is a beautiful sight, these three great warships standing southward in close column, and almost as beautiful at night when we see not only the lights but the loom through the darkness of the ships astern.” He proudly described the Navy officers and crew: “The men are such splendid-looking fellows, Americans of the best type, young, active, vigorous, with lots of intelligence.” The names given to the guns of the battleship also charmed Roosevelt: among them, Invincible, Peacemaker, Tedd, and The Big Stick.2
His wife, Edith, “pretty and dainty in white summer clothes,” enjoyed the days at sea. Roosevelt himself could barely wait to hit the shores of Panama. He paced impatiently, and to pass the time, he retreated into more dreams of history. He saw centuries of “wild and bloody romance” as Vasco Núñez de Balboa crossed the isthmus, Spaniards conquered the indigenous peoples, and lonely tradespeople carried gold and silver across the isthmus to waiting ships. He imagined the wars of rebellion against Spanish domination and then the heroic Panamanians, aided by their friends in the United States, winning their independence from Colombia. In his mind’s eye Roosevelt saw the building of the Panama Railroad with its “appalling loss of life,” and finally the efforts of the French canal company, doomed to failure because of inefficiency and greed.3
At long last Roosevelt saw on the horizon the shore. He shook himself out of his reverie and waited eagerly as the mountains and jungles of Panama inched closer. When the ship docked, the president wanted to begin his explorations right away, though a ferocious storm hit during his first two days in the Zone and the Chagres River swelled higher than it had in years. Nonetheless, Roosevelt was elated. He toured the newly built villages of the Canal Zone, now knee-deep in water; observed the rivers flooding through the jungle; examined the machine shops, cafeterias, and dormitories; and spent a day in the awesome waste of Culebra Cut, where thousands of workers struggled to dig through the Continental Divide.
Nothing seems to have impressed Roosevelt more than the ninety-five-ton Bucyrus steam shovels. He watched as the gigantic machines dug into the mountainside, shaking as they pulled out to dump tremendous piles of rock and dirt into waiting train cars: “With intense energy men and machines do their task, the white men supervising matters and handling the machines, while the tens of thousands of black men do the rough manual labor where it is not worth while to have machines do it. It is an epic feat, and one of immense significance.”4
Roosevelt could not resist the temptation to master one of the monstrous machines. He hoisted himself into the cab and posed for all the world to see, in triumph, as a steam-shovel driver and engineer. In that famous photograph, the president appears completely in control, efficiently and single-handedly directing the work himself. The machine and the president dominate the picture, working together to destroy a mountain. Absent from the picture are the thousands of workingmen who actually dug the canal.5
The photograph represented to the world the values U.S. officials sought to associate with the canal project: American efficiency, technological superiority, conquest over nature, and leadership. Roosevelt’s journey to the isthmus, and his fleeting moment aboard the steam shovel, would prove a milestone in the history of the canal—and a turning point in the effort to construct a triumphalist narrative of America’s role in the world. It could not have come at a better moment, for the canal project had become associated with scandal, corruption, and ineptitude in most Americans’ minds. Perhaps only Roosevelt could have turned the situation around, for he brilliantly combined the great themes of the early twentieth century: progressivism, optimism, masculinity, and a vivacious belief that America was destined to play a leadership role in world affairs.
To Roosevelt, expansionism was a virtuous and necessary course for any great nation. National virtue and duty demanded that the United States play a vigorous role in the world. Roosevelt grew up in a wealthy New York family, a young man who adored his father but who was aware of the great disappointment of his father’s life—that he had not fought in the Civil War. Roosevelt’s struggle against physical frailty, especially asthma, and his campaign to transform himself into a robust and physically active young man have been noted by many historians. A Victorian code of manliness was part of the culture in which Roosevelt grew up, and a projection of masculinity was essential to his success as a man and as a politician.6
As a college student, young Theodore had already demonstrated an intense interest in sea power and the fate of the nation. He majored in history and wrote his senior thesis on the naval war of 1812. In the next decade and a half, as he entered politics, he began advocating an aggressive policy of expansionism. By the 1890s, when Roosevelt secured a series of government positions, a persuasive group of men had joined him in arguing that the United States must build up its military and acquire new territory in order to become a great and influential nation in the twentieth century. These included Alfred T. Mahan, whoseInfluence of Sea Power upon History reinforced Roosevelt’s arguments that a strong navy was essential for any nation aspiring to greatness, and Henry Cabot Lodge, Roosevelt’s mentor and friend.7
When making his case for an expansionist policy in these years, Roosevelt relied on a vocabulary quite different from that used by the anti-imperialists—the men and women who opposed empire on constitutional, economic, moral, and racial grounds.8 Roosevelt eschewe
d the term “empire” in describing the United States. Instead, he talked about national greatness and the virtues and responsibilities of the Anglo-Saxon race. Speaking before the Naval War College in 1897, just weeks after having won appointment as assistant secretary of the Navy, Roosevelt argued that preparing for war would be the best way to ensure peace. America had never manifested a warlike spirit, so no one should worry that a strong military would lead to war. To the contrary, he claimed, “an unmanly desire to avoid a quarrel is often the surest way to precipitate one; and utter unreadiness to fight is even surer.”9 Expansionists like Roosevelt observed the drive toward empire being made by European powers and vowed that the United States must stand up, demonstrate its greatness, and keep the Old World out of the Western Hemisphere. Roosevelt fervently believed that the United States should not let Europeans dominate and carve up the Americas as they had Africa.
Even as Roosevelt addressed these naval students, the nation was watching events in Cuba with greater urgency. While William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer galvanized Americans’ humanitarian concern for the plight of Cuban citizens with sensational tales of Spanish concentration camps on the island, the true expansionists, people like Roosevelt and Lodge, focused more on the opportunity Cuba’s war afforded for realizing their expansionist dreams. Although President William McKinley shared their desire to see his nation play a more assertive role in the world, he initially hesitated to fight Spain. When the USSMaine exploded in Havana harbor in February 1898, he at last obliged them. Roosevelt’s famous Rough Riders volunteer regiment—made up of cowboys, Indian fighters, and Ivy League athletes—his mythic charge up San Juan Hill, and his own remarkable skills at self-promotion made him a media darling and paved his way to political stardom. His vigorous posturing and military record helped him win the coveted vice presidential nomination in 1900. Then, in the autumn of 1901, President McKinley’s assassination at the hands of an anarchist catapulted Roosevelt to the presidency.
At the young age of forty-three Roosevelt had achieved a major goal—even he may have been impressed by his precociousness. Meanwhile, the United States had easily bested the Spanish Empire in the War of 1898, thereby acquiring Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines, as well as decisive control over Cuba. For years American plantation owners in Hawaii had been demanding that their nation annex the islands, and in 1898 McKinley finally agreed and added Hawaii to the list of new U.S. possessions. Now it remained to build up and manage this empire, consolidate American citizens’ support for expansionism, and turn the United States at last into a great world power.
ROOSEVELT FREQUENTLY demonstrated his concern for such matters in his speeches in these years. His believed the United Statesmust take its place among the world’s great powers. It was the only possible course for a strong and virile race. “If we refrain from doing our part of the world’s work, it will not alter the fact that work has got to be done, only it will have to be done by some stronger race, because we will have shown ourselves weaklings. I do not speak merely from the standpoint of American interests, but from the standpoint of civilization and humanity.”10 No one, he stressed, would advocate that the nation enter rashly into international relationships or acquire a colonial empire. Yet neither could Americans neglect their international duties, even if those duties required strenuous effort. America must act to make the world a better place.
This broad context helped revive for Roosevelt and like-minded expansionists the old dream of an Isthmian canal. A canal would demonstrate to Americans and to the world the beneficent potential of American power. A canal would shift attention away from America’s suppression of Filipino hopes for independence and focus it instead on a seemingly more innocent conquest over nature. A canal would allow Roosevelt to enhance the nation’s new identity as a world power while consolidating U.S. might throughout the Caribbean and Central America. A canal would tie images of a triumphant nation-state to notions of engineering prowess and industrial and economic superiority.
And what could be better than a construction project that would slice the continents in two, creating a spectacular waterway that would make military and commercial movements alike cheaper and more efficient? Sea power was integral to Roosevelt’s visions of America’s future. The War of 1898 won for the United States an empire that stretched halfway around the world, but it simultaneously demonstrated the weakness of the U.S. Navy and the need for a canal. All eyes were on the USSOregon as it made the nearly fifteen-thousand-mile journey from Seattle to Florida, forced to go around Cape Horn in order to join the forces in Cuba. It took the battleship more than two months to arrive, a perilously slow transit during a time of war. An Isthmian canal would cut the distance a ship needed to traverse by more than eight thousand miles and consequently place the United States in a bigger league in terms of sea power as well as commercial might.
Roosevelt decided the canal should be built across the Isthmus of Panama rather than in Nicaragua. The United States had already been involved in building the railroad across Panama in the 1850s, and in the 1880s the French effort to construct a canal there had made some headway before failing altogether. The United States could benefit from France’s work if it chose Panama as the construction site. U.S. diplomats urged Colombia to accept a treaty that would effectively eliminate its sovereignty over the isthmus, granting to the United States complete control over the Canal Zone. Roosevelt’s administration offered what seemed to the Colombian government only a paltry sum of money in return. When Colombia expressed dismay over the deal, the U.S. secretary of state, John Hay, resorted to threats, warning that if the Colombian senate rejected the treaty, “action might be taken by the Congress next winter which every friend of Colombia would regret.” Perhaps unable to grasp the determination of U.S. officials to have their canal—and assert their hegemony over the region—at any cost, the Colombian senate rejected the offer.11
Outraged, Roosevelt argued Colombia must not be allowed to “bar one of the future highways of civilization.” He and his advisers seriously considered taking the isthmus by military force. But they knew Colombia would resist and the war that ensued would doubtlessly be attacked at home as imperialistic. With a political election coming up, Roosevelt did not want a major war on his hands. Thus he sought another way to acquire rights to build the canal. This led him to engage with the independence movement that had existed in Panama for some years.12
Roosevelt had little motivation to take the independence movement seriously until Colombia rejected the deal he offered. Then the insurgents suddenly appeared as a surrogate way to acquire control over the isthmus. When leading representatives of the New Panama Canal Company became involved as well, especially the Frenchman Philippe Bunau-Varilla, Roosevelt began to trust that the movement for independence could succeed. Without declaring any explicit intentions, he signaled to Bunau-Varilla that the United States would support a coup attempt and ordered four battleships to Panama. The coup took place in the evening of November 3, 1903. Colombians fled Panama City on November 4, and on November 6 the United States gave its recognition to the new Republic of Panama. That morning, a member of the U.S. Army raised the flag of Panama over the city of Colón.13
All that was left to do was to negotiate terms with the new Republic of Panama. Its government appointed Bunau-Varilla as diplomat in charge of negotiations with Secretary of State Hay. The Hay–Bunau-Varilla Treaty of 1903 gave astonishing rights to the United States while it virtually eliminated any sovereignty the Republic of Panama might have possessed. Bunau-Varilla’s New Panama Canal Company made $ 40 million from the sale of the rights and equipment to the United States. Nervous after the horse had left the stable about what Bunau-Varilla was negotiating, Panamanian Manuel Amador Guerrero (who, months later, would become Panama’s first president) rushed to Washington, D.C., but the treaty had already been signed when he arrived. His horror over the rights Bunau-Varilla had given away was pla
inly visible.14 The U.S. Senate fiercely debated the Hay–Bunau-Varilla Treaty, with opponents arguing that it was the child of conspiratorial machinations by Roosevelt and Bunau-Varilla and that it violated Colombian sovereignty. In the end, however, the Senate ratified the treaty by a strong majority.15
The United States had won not only a monopoly over construction of the canal but also complete and perpetual control (as “if it were sovereign”) over the Canal Zone, a ten-mile-wide territory that stretched across the isthmus, effectively splitting the Republic of Panama in two, and the right to purchase or otherwise control any land or buildings in the cities of Panama and Colón deemed necessary for constructing the canal or for sanitation work; and in the notorious Article 7 of the treaty, the United States gained the right to intervene in the cities of Panama and adjacent territory to maintain or restore public order “in case the Republic of Panama should not be, in the judgment of the United States, able to maintain such order.” In return the United States agreed to guarantee the independence of the Republic of Panama and to pay the republic $ 10 million plus an annual sum of $250,000.16 Roosevelt finally had control over the isthmus he coveted and could build a waterway to provide quick transit between the oceans, give the United States ready access to its new empire in Hawaii and the Philippines, and provide the rationale for a strenuous policing effort and military intervention by the United States throughout the Caribbean.
