Steven Solomon

by Power;Civilization Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth

  In the 1840s and 1850s, the U.S. Navy also began to assert itself as a Western imperialist steam power in the Pacific. Trading right concessions were extracted by threat of force from China in 1844 paralleling those won by Britain in the Opium War. In 1853 and 1854, Commodore Matthew Perry steamed into Tokyo Bay with an armed squadron of frightening, smokestack-belching “black ships” that showed its overwhelming force through occasional practice gunnery to convince Japan’s leaders to open their nation to foreign trade after two centuries of virtual closure.

  America’s Civil War of 1861–1865 in which the industrialized North applied its decisive naval superiority over the agriculture-based South, provided further evidence that no major modern war, and few rebellions, had been won without the advantage of naval power. Union vessels blockaded Confederate seaports while steam gunboats took command of southern rivers. By 1862, the North controlled the vital points along the Ohio and Mississippi rivers all the way to the port of New Orleans.

  Yet by the 1880s, waning investment had caused America’s navy to slip far behind the rapid technical advancements in ship speed, and artillery accuracy, distance and power of leading European powers, notably England and rising industrial power, Germany. The defensive buffer provided in the age of sail by America’s ocean moats had visibly diminished. American officials grew alarmed when fellow hemispheric nations Peru and Chile in their War of the Pacific (1879–1883) both employed vessels superior to their U.S. Navy counterparts.

  America’s reaction—the application of its rising mass production industrial might to build a world-class, steel navy—was a decisive turning point that helped tip the balance of power in America’s favor and set the stage for the building of the Panama Canal. The gradual buildup of the steel navy from the mid–1880s was paralleled by a transformation in Americans’ outlook about the nation’s appropriate place in the world and the role of sea power in attaining it. Both, in turn, were spurred by the rapid growth in demand for U.S.-manufactured goods on world export markets. As American economic interests expanded outward, U.S. leaders became convinced that America should behave like a European global power and that a strong navy was a vital component of national prosperity and security.

  The most influential intellectual exponent of this view was Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan. His widely celebrated 1890 book, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, shaped the policy framework of a generation of leaders through World War I, not just in the United States but also in England and Germany, including Kaiser Wilhelm II personally. A career U.S. naval officer, historian, and president of the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, Mahan traced the rise and decline of maritime nations, most closely those in Europe from the mid-seventeenth to late eighteenth centuries, and concluded that supremacy at sea held the key to international commercial success, prosperity, and national greatness. To Mahan, a favorable seaborne position, properly exploited, provided a cheap, easy, and safe transport highway that advantaged seafaring states in the key commercial struggle to control traffic on the world’s sea-lanes and strategic passages. “The seaboard of a country is one of its frontiers,” Mahan wrote. “Numerous and deep harbors are a source of strength and wealth, and doubly so if they are the outlets of navigable streams, which facilitate the concentration in them of a country’s internal trade.” Conversely, Mahan argued, the failure to fully exploit favorable sea geography resources represented a potential national vulnerability. Mahan’s unabashed conclusion was that a great nation needed a strong standing navy, with bases at home and abroad, deployed in the interests of enhancing its sea commerce and worldwide influence. Regarding an interoceanic canal in Central America, Mahan held strongly that if built, “the Caribbean would be changed from a terminus…into one of the great highways of the world…The position of the United States with reference to this route will resemble that of England to the Channel, and of the Mediterranean countries to the Suez route.” He also speculated hopefully that such a canal might excite America’s “aggressive impulse” to exert its influence globally.

  By focusing his historical study on the mercantilist age of sail, Mahan’s study, in hindsight, suffered intellectually from myopic conclusions about the relationship between sea power, commerce, and international standing. In particular he underestimated the enormous national prosperity and military strength that could be derived from industrialized society and free trade. Nevertheless, many of his general observations about the advantages of sea power, from ancient times to the present, were germane, in varying degrees. But the historical significance of his views stemmed from the fact that leaders of the great nations pursued policies based upon them.

  Mahan’s most important American adherent was Theodore (Teddy) Roosevelt. The future president, who would do more than anyone to turn Mahan’s prescriptions into reality, was thirty-one when Influence appeared and wrote a glowing review of it for the Atlantic Monthly. The two men had been friendly for several years since Roosevelt had lectured at the Naval War College on the topic of one of his own books, the naval history of the War of 1812. Mahan’s recommendation helped Roosevelt win appointment as assistant secretary of the Navy when Republican William McKinley won the presidency in 1896.

  As assistant secretary, Roosevelt agitated within the McKinley administration for an aggressive expansion of the U.S. naval fleet as well as for the construction of an isthmian canal. Like his mentor, Roosevelt viewed a strong navy as the “big stick” of a new, more assertive American global diplomacy and winning supremacy at sea. As Roosevelt would frame it in speeches as president, “There is a homely adage which runs: ‘Speak softly, and carry a big stick; you will go far.’”

  Assistant Secretary Roosevelt urged immediate administration of the “big stick” on February 15, 1898, when, amid the Cuban rebellion against Spanish rule, the U.S. battleship Maine blew up in Havana harbor from unknown causes, killing 260. In April McKinley yielded to the bellicose clamor of Roosevelt and other young Republicans inflaming public opinion to “Remember the Maine!” by declaring war on Spain and liberating Cuba. Working off a war plan previously developed by the Naval War College, Roosevelt successfully pushed for a strike on Spain’s fleet in the Philippines as well as the blockade of Havana. The U.S. Asiatic squadron promptly steamed into Manila Bay and decimated the antiquated Spanish fleet without a single American death. Roosevelt himself soon decamped with U.S. troops for Cuba and attained national war hero status by leading a charge of his personally recruited band of “Rough Riders” up San Juan Hill. In less than three months of fighting, the United States had seized control of Spain’s entire remaining American and Pacific empire.

  By seeming to validate Mahan’s arguments about the benefits of sea power, the Spanish-American War triggered a dramatic escalation in the U.S. buildup of the country’s steel navy. Naval investment that totaled 6.9 percent of federal government spending in 1890 soared to 19 percent of a much larger base by 1914. On the eve of World War I and the opening of the Panama Canal, America’s navy was the third mightiest on Earth, and was poised to soon overtake those of England and Germany.

  The Spanish-American War also infused unstoppable momentum to build the isthmian canal, which suddenly seemed indispensable to American national security, by unifying the strength of the Atlantic and Pacific fleets. The public case for the canal had been dramatically illustrated during the war by the long delay encountered by the Pacific warship Oregon in reaching the Caribbean theater because it had had to steam the additional 8,000 miles around South America’s Cape Horn. Two presidential interoceanic canal commissions, one organized in 1897 and a second in 1899, recommended building the passage through Nicaragua. Secretary of State John Hay prepared the diplomatic ground by negotiating an agreement with England to supersede an outstanding 1850 treaty affirming bilateral control over any interoceanic canal: England granted the United States the right to build and operate the canal subject only to the Suez Canal neutrality rules of being equally open in war and peacetime to all vessels.
The United States could police the route, but not build fortifications.

  It was Roosevelt who led the outraged howls of protests when the treaty was announced in early 1900. He did so from his new platform as Governor of New York, an office to which his war hero status had catapulted him in the 1898 elections. America must not compromise the sea power advantage of an American-built canal by relinquishing the right to fortify it against enemy warships, he insisted stridently. The public was swayed. Hay was forced to renegotiate the treaty. In mid-November 1901 the new Hay-Pauncefote Treaty, omitting the fortification restriction, was signed.

  By that time an unlikely set of circumstances had propelled party maverick Teddy Roosevelt himself to the presidency. Irked at Roosevelt’s zealous, progressive agenda against corrupt political machines and the big business trusts that dominated the heights of American industry, but eager to capitalize on his popularity, Republican establishment leaders had tried to isolate Roosevelt by persuading him to take the vice presidency in the 1900 elections. Their plans suddenly went awry, however, when McKinley was shot by an assassin at Buffalo, New York, on September 6, 1901.

  At forty-three, Roosevelt was America’s youngest president ever and unlike any other. Possessed of boundless energy, a determination for action, an outsized vision of what America should be, and, despite personal arrogance and impetuosity, canny political and self-promotional skills, Roosevelt undertook several actions as president that transformed the course of twentieth-century America and water history. Above all, he mobilized the federal government as a strong, proactive agent of policy, whether as a progressive force to countervail big business trusts’ distortion of market forces, to undertake large public interest projects that were beyond the resources or risk appetite of private enterprise, to save wilderness areas, and to fulfill his conviction that the march of civilization demanded the artificial remolding and control of Earth’s resources, including indispensable water, to mankind’s needs.

  The isthmian canal was at the very top of Roosevelt’s agenda when he assumed the presidency. At the time nearly everyone, including Roosevelt himself, took for granted that the canal would be built at Nicaragua, which was widely viewed as the American route. Men had dreamed about building a Central American canal ever since the Spanish conquistador Vasco Nuñez de Balboa had marched across modern Panama in 1513 and became the first European to set eyes on the “South Sea,” as he called the Pacific Ocean. King Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor and Habsburg monarch, ordered the first canal survey as early as 1534. Modern interest in the canal began in earnest after 1821 with the end of Spanish rule in Latin America. Several locations were considered, including Nicaragua, Mexico, and Panama.

  More than anything else, it was the 1869 completion of the world-changing Suez Canal that finally galvanized action on an isthmian canal. Although U.S. president Ulysses S. Grant had sent seven expeditions to Central America starting in 1870 to thoroughly explore various canal routes and in 1876 chose in favor of Nicaragua, it was the renowned French impresario of the Suez Canal, Viscount Ferdinand de Lesseps, who stole the first march to action. In May 1879, de Lesseps unveiled his stealthily laid, private-sector plan to crown his Suez legacy with an isthmian canal at a grand congress in Paris attended by illustrious experts from around the world. The congress’s ostensible task was to select the route and technical nature of the canal. In fact, the event was entirely orchestrated, with a predetermined outcome, by de Lesseps. Although seventy-four years old at the time, he still possessed the charisma, vigor, diplomatic cunning, and grandiose self-confidence that had made him triumphant at Suez. While many engineering plans were presented, the final vote of the all-important technical committee endorsed de Lesseps’s favored proposal—a sea-level canal at Panama. In fact, de Lesseps had previously lined up an exclusive contract with Colombia through intermediaries to build the canal in its state of Panama.

  By being without locks at sea level, the Panama Canal would be a reprise of the canal engineering approach used at Suez—it was, in effect, Suez II. Yet, in reality, Panama was nothing at all like Suez. Suez had been cut through flat terrain in a hot, dry environment where the main problem was the dearth of water. Panama, by contrast, was a sweltering, tropical environment inundated with too much water, swelling rivers, mudslides, and deadly, disease-carrying mosquitoes. Part of the canal had to be cut through the rocky mountains of the continental divide. Although de Lesseps was a visionary entrepreneur and no engineer, he confidently assured the public that he could assemble the engineers, technology, and finances, and that at 50 miles or just half the length of Suez, the Panama Canal would be easier to build.

  Despite adoring press and a soaring share price that excited the whole French nation, the venture soon ran into formidable obstacles on the ground in Panama. Most unanticipated was the outbreak of disease epidemics. Malaria and yellow fever debilitated up to 80 percent of the workforce at any given time with shivering fevers, unquenchable thirst and, in the case of yellow fever, intense headaches, back and leg pain and finally the dark, bloody vomiting that preceded death. An estimated 20,000 workers and managers died of these mosquito-borne tropical diseases whose origins were as yet unknown. Nor was any satisfactory solution devised for containing the wild Chagres River, which could rise 30 feet after a day of torrential rain; the estimated size of the needed dam kept rising to be one of the largest on Earth. Most daunting of all were the incessant mountain mudslides and ever-expanding excavation to cut through the unstable mountain geology of the continental divide; simply disposing of so much dirt proved to be an overwhelming logistical challenge. By late 1886, French engineers realized that the existing excavation technology of the age was simply not up to the task of building a canal according to de Lesseps’s sea-level design. For too long, de Lesseps refused to consider any alternative—illustrating the fine line separating inspired vision from disastrous obduracy. By the time he relented to a modified plan, it was too late. The company’s financing was exhausted and by mid-1889 work at the isthmus terminated. Some $287 million had been spent—over three times more than the entire Suez Canal—on a glorious but failed dream that in the end proved to be too great for the private sector acting alone with the available technology of the age. With so many individuals and families having lost their life’s savings, and with French national pride wounded, government investigations into wrongdoing were launched. In the hunt for scapegoats, de Lesseps was convicted of fraud and maladministration and sentenced to prison. Ailing, broken, and partly senile, he died in 1894, at the age of eighty-nine.

  Efforts to revive the French canal project during the 1890s failed. As U.S. government action to build a canal at Nicaragua grew imminent in late 1901 when Roosevelt acceded to the presidency, French shareholders became frantic to salvage something of their Panamanian investments. They replaced company management and signaled the Americans they’d sell their assets on work already done for only $40 million—a 60 percent discount on their previous $109 million asking price. Although the U.S. interoceanic canal commission had recently endorsed Nicaragua, it had decided against Panama not on technical grounds but chiefly on the exorbitant cost of buying the French company’s assets. Roosevelt, who to this point had stayed publicly aloof from the debate, summoned each commissioner to the White House individually for a consultation on his private views. He then called a secret meeting of the entire commission in his office. With characteristic boldness, he told the commissioners he wanted a supplemental report favoring Panama—and he wanted it to be unanimous. The combination of factors that caused the new president to challenge the powerful Nicaragua lobby is not definitively known. Clearly, he had become convinced that Panama was indeed the superior technical route and that all the causes of the French failure could be overcome. He may also have found it an opportune means to curry favor with the powerful domestic political interests supporting Panama. Another motivation may have been concern that Germany or another competitive foreign power might buy the French asset
s if the United States did not.

  Roosevelt’s intervention reignited the ferocious lobbying clash over the canal route between men of influence at the apex of American society. While most senators and the general public initially supported Nicaragua, the Panamanian route was backed by powerful Wall Street bankers, railroad barons, and Republican senator Mark Hanna, McKinley’s key political benefactor and the era’s towering national power broker. Although canal commission members were grilled at Senate hearings about why they flipped to endorse Panama after talking to Roosevelt, they insisted that both routes were viable and that the economic value of the work already done by the French made the difference. Ultimately, the tight Senate vote in June 1902 to give preference to Roosevelt’s Panamanian route tipped on tremors from a visceral but not technically significant factor—seismic activity in the region. Emotional sensitivities had been heightened by a devastating volcanic eruption that had recently struck the Caribbean island of Martinique. Then just prior to the senate vote, there was a rare, minor eruption in Nicaragua itself. The Nicaraguan government tried to head off any propaganda damage by denying, falsely, that the eruption had occurred at all. But Philippe Bunau-Varilla, a former French canal company engineer and project manager under de Lesseps who had come to America to spearhead the Panamanian lobby, trumped them with a deal-clinching theatrical response: On the eve of the vote he sent each senator an irrefutable, dramatic visual reminder of Nicaragua’s seismic peril in the form of that nation’s own one centavo stamp—featuring a smoking volcano rising from the middle of Lake Nicaragua. The final vote for Panama was 42 to 34.

  In January 1903, after months of stalled negotiations, Colombia’s head diplomat in Washington reluctantly yielded to Roosevelt’s imperious treaty terms when the U.S. administration threatened to abandon Panama and open negotiations with Nicaragua: the United States would receive a 100-year renewable lease for effective sovereignty over the Canal Zone in exchange for $10 million plus $250,000 in annual rent. However the Colombian Senate, bridling at the loss of sovereignty, and insulted by the fact that the French company would get four times more upfront for its Panamanian assets, rejected the treaty in the summer. Roosevelt was furious. Privately referring to the Colombians as “jackrabbits,” “bandits,” and extortionists impeding a vital highway of human civilization, Roosevelt tacitly signaled his support for a secret plan for Panama to secede from Colombia and then sign the canal treaty with the United States.