The planned Panamanian revolution was brilliantly stage-managed from New York and Washington by the Frenchman Bunau-Varilla and the U.S. Panama lobby. Panama’s secessionist leaders were all prominent professionals employed by the American-owned Panamanian railroad. Bunau-Varilla provided virtually everything they needed—a declaration of independence, a military defense plan, a constitution, a national flag, secret communication codes, a payoff of $100,000 for expenses when the job was done, and most important of all, a promise that the U.S. military would back up the revolution. He even designated November 3 as the date for their revolution. His one condition was that he himself would be appointed by the new Panamanian government as its minister plenipotentiary in Washington to negotiate U.S. recognition and the canal treaty.
Bunau-Varilla had assured himself of Roosevelt’s military backing at a personal, informal meeting with the president at the White House on October 10, 1903. Within three weeks of the meeting, three American warships were ordered to sail toward the isthmus; on November 2 the commander of the first to arrive was instructed to prevent Colombian troops from landing in the event of turmoil. Early on November 3, before anything had happened on the ground, the State Department in Washington cabled its consul in Panama of reports about an uprising on the isthmus; the consul’s office cabled back that the uprising had not yet occurred and was to take place at 6:00 p.m. It did. A fire brigade was commissioned as the new Panamanian army. Marines disembarked from an American steam gunboat and bloodlessly confronted Colombian soldiers. Seeing the superior American vessels, one Colombian gunboat fired a few shells at Panama City—killing a sleeping Chinese shopkeeper and a donkey—and fled.
Independence was declared on November 4. Two days later, the United States formally recognized the Republic of Panama. A ceremony was conducted at the White House, entirely in English, between Roosevelt and the Frenchman Bunau-Varilla acting as Panama’s plenipotentiary. Treaty drafting began promptly, interrupted only by Bunau-Varilla’s quick visit to banker J. P. Morgan at his Wall Street headquarters to secure a loan for the $100,000 remuneration he’d promised the Panamanian leaders. With a Panamanian delegation rushing to Washington to try to reclaim the extraordinary powers they’d granted to Bunau-Varilla and the press clamoring about America’s high-handed involvement in the revolution, Bunau-Varilla and Secretary of State Hay hastily signed the canal treaty on November 18, 1903. The terms were the same as those previously offered to Colombia, with the addition of several clauses—inserted at Bunau-Varilla’s initiative—enhancing America’s sovereign rights in the Canal Zone and extending its lease into perpetuity. On the centennial of the Louisiana Purchase, another French-American deal had delivered the United States an extraordinary territory that would empower its expansion for much of the ensuing century. As soon as the treaty was ratified by the U.S. Senate in February 1904, and the French company guaranteed the $40 million payment for its canal assets, Bunau-Varilla resigned his Panamanian post and returned to Paris.
Roosevelt’s brazen use of naval force and his tortured legalistic justifications for intervening at the isthmus and recognizing Panama’s sovereignty ignited a torrent of resentment against U.S. imperialism. “Colombia was hit by the big stick, all Latin America trembled,” wrote historian Samuel Eliot Morison. The United States began aggressively policing the Caribbean as if it were an American lake, frequently intervening in basin countries’ financial and foreign affairs, and landing marines half a dozen times between 1900 and 1917. America’s growing, imperialistic tendencies were also projected by Roosevelt and his successors outside the Western Hemisphere, highlighted by Roosevelt’s swaggering display of sea power in sending a great American fleet around the world in 1907. Latin American resentment smoldered for decades. President Wilson tried to soothe Colombia’s outrage at the loss of Panama with a $25 million payment; Panamanian restiveness caused the canal treaty to be revised several times and effective control of the canal was surrendered in stages starting in 1979.
Teddy Roosevelt, however, was unapologetic for his actions in Panama. He viewed the canal as an invaluable advancement of civilization and vital to America’s defense and prosperity. While absolutely denying any role in making Panama’s revolution, retrospectively he wrote that it was “by far the most important action I took in foreign affairs,” and in a 1911 speech, declared with characteristic bravado, “I took the Isthmus, started the canal and then left Congress—not to debate the canal, but to debate me.” His most famous, instinctive response to his critics was issued shortly after U.S. government engineers took charge of the Canal Zone in May 1904: “Tell them that I am going to make the dirt fly!”
Building the canal was the most monumental, complex engineering challenge of the age, and one of the landmark technological achievements of human history. To complete it required the application of all the qualities underlying America’s rise as a great power—prolific industrial production, innovative ingenuity, government financial commitment, tenacity of purpose, and cultural optimism in its ultimate ability to succeed. Although construction lasted through the terms of three presidents, there was no doubt that it was Roosevelt who infused the guiding spirit and was the embodiment of the enterprise. Nothing exemplified this more than the three-day tour through the canal construction sites Roosevelt himself made in November 1906. Like a general inspecting the troops at the front, he trudged in the driving rain through muddy work camps, strode along the ties of the Panamanian railroad, climbed a hill to get a view of the future dam site, peppered everyone with questions, and most memorable of all, spontaneously stopped his touring train during a downpour to clamber into the control seat of one of the huge, workhorse steam shovels that could excavate eight tons of dirt in a single scoop—three times more than the shovels used previously by the French—and unload its contents into a departing railroad car every eight minutes. That no sitting president had ever before traveled abroad magnified the drama of his visit and his subsequent progress report to Congress on America’s stupendous endeavor.
After a slow start and a flirtation with reviving de Lesseps’ plan to dig a deep trench at sea level across the isthmus, the Americans by 1906 settled on a workable design and methodology for building a lock canal. Dams would be erected to entrap the rain-fed swells of the Chagres River, creating an 85-foot-high artificial lake that bridged much of the isthmus. Ships would ascend the lake through a flight of giant locks at one end and descend through another at the other end. Near the Pacific side, they would pass through a narrow, nine-mile-long canyon that would be excavated through the rocky mountains and rainy forests of the continental divide. Success hinged on managing three main challenges—containing the tropical diseases that debilitated the French workforce, controlling the wildly rising and falling Chagres River, and, hardest of all, cutting through the massive, mudslide-prone mountains. When it was completed in 1914, America’s canal construction workforce, which averaged 33,000 to 40,000 annually between 1907 and 1914, had excavated over eight times more earth than their French predecessors.
The eradication of yellow fever and control of malaria attained early on in the Panama project alone merited renown as a notable achievement of the twentieth century. During the French period, the germ theory of disease had been in its infancy and the role of the mosquito in transmitting yellow fever and malaria was only beginning to be perceived. But at the start of the century, American doctors, led by Walter Reed, working in Havana, Cuba, learned how to curb both diseases by attacking the two different mosquito species that carried them. A similar, wider war was waged throughout the jungles and towns of Panama. The silvery, female mosquito transmitting the dreaded yellow fever, which would deposit her eggs only in a container of clean water, depended upon the close proximity to human society for breeding and feeding. By systematically screening all windows and doors, fumigating houses, covering water barrels, oiling cisterns and cesspools, and eliminating standing water everywhere, U.S. Army doctors virtually wiped out yellow fever from Pa
nama by the end of 1905. To attack the more wide-ranging malaria mosquito, sanitary teams also drained hundreds of miles of swamps, installed effective drainage channels, chopped down jungle vegetation, sprayed oil on standing water, and spread mosquito-larvae-eating minnows and mosquito-feeding spiders and lizards near human habitats. While never eradicated, malaria was sufficiently contained so that it didn’t interfere with constructing the canal. The success of the disease control program at Panama informed the global wars on yellow fever and malaria that were soon launched in the 1910s and 1920s by the Rockefeller Foundation and other humanitarian organizations.
The Chagres River was controlled by the construction of an immense, wide earthen dam filled with dirt excavated from the mountains. The dam created what was then the largest man-made lake on Earth. The concrete used in the flight of huge, steel-gated locks exceeded the volume of any project until the building of the Hoover Dam in the early 1930s. Some 26 million gallons of fresh lake water—roughly one-quarter of the daily water supply used by New York City in that era—were consumed in filling the innovative flight locks every time a ship was raised or lowered the 85 feet from the lake to the sea. A novel system of towing locomotives guided the ships into and out of the locks. All the tows, valves, culverts, lock gates, and other lock-regulating mechanisms were electrically powered by some 1,500 motors, which were hydropowered by the falling water on site. As a result, the functioning of the canal was centralized and entirely self-contained, requiring no external energy source.
During canal construction, tourists came from around the world to observe what was by far the canal’s most Herculean challenge—digging the nine-mile-long, neck-shaped water passage through the mountains of the continental divide. The Culebra Cut that had broken the French was often called the canal’s “special wonder.” For seven straight years American-managed work crews labored systematically day and night, except Sundays, in the sweltering heat and rain, blasting mountains, hauling away rock and dirt, and relentlessly digging out work equipment that became buried beneath the mountainside avalanches of mud that recurred time and again during the rainy season. The amount of dirt hauled out of the Cut defied imagination. The labor would have been simply overwhelming had not the engineers applied U.S. industrial assembly line methodology and technical ingenuity to the work. The lifeline of the system was the heavy-duty railroad network that operated on precise schedules at different levels within the Cut. Where heavy wheeled vehicles would have become mired in the soft ground, railroads were able to haul in equipment and remove excavated earth at regular intervals. Every day 50 to 60 massive, steam-powered shovels filled 500 trainloads of spoil. Newly invented mechanized excavation equipment that had been unavailable to the French, such as train unloaders and dirt spreaders, accomplished in minutes work that previously had consumed thousands of manual man-hours. Finally, in May 1913, two steam shovels working from opposite directions broke through the last mounds of earth. A few months later, in October 1913, President Woodrow Wilson pushed a signal button in Washington to blow the dike for the final filling of the canal. Ominously, a powerful earthquake had ripped through the Canal Zone some ten days earlier, cracking buildings in Panama City. But the canal passed the final test of nature totally unscathed. It had been finished on time at a total cost of $375 million to the U.S. government. The gala international celebration scheduled for the official opening on August 15, 1914, however, never came off—the start of World War I intervened. Teddy Roosevelt himself never visited the finished canal. He died in early 1919, at age sixty.
By every measure, the canal was a stupendous success. Within a decade, some 5,000 vessels were passing through it every year, as many as through Suez. By 1970, over 15,000 ships made the ten- to twelve-hour journey, paying annual tolls of over $100 million. Periodic enlargements and improvements permitted the passage of large warships and the growing fleet of oil supertankers and giant container ships that formed the backbone of the shipping revolution underpinning the rapid integration of the global economy in the late twentieth century. The canal represented the culmination of the historical transformation of the world’s oceans from restrictive boundaries into integrated superhighways that had begun with the European Voyages of Discovery four centuries earlier.
“The fifty miles between the oceans were among the hardest ever won by human effort and ingenuity, and no statistics on tonnage or tolls can begin to convey the grandeur of what was accomplished,” summed up David McCullough in his sweeping history of the canal. “Primarily the canal is an expression of that old and noble desire to bridge the divide, to bring people together. It is a work of civilization.”
For America, the Panama Canal stood as a beacon of the nation’s arrival as a star among world civilizations. It was a national historic turning point when many of the society’s dynamic forces coalesced to open a new era. At last, America was in a position to fulfill its continental promise of marrying the maritime resources of its two ocean frontiers. U.S. exports and investment abroad soared after the canal’s opening. Overseas markets and raw materials were immediately drawn into the productive circuit of America’s prolific industrial economy. By 1929 the United States was producing nearly half the world’s total industrial output.
Likewise, the Panama Canal marked the transition between the first and second of American naval history’s three eras. It ended the long period when America’s navy was focused chiefly on defending the young country’s borders and waterways, protecting free trade and market access for its seafaring merchants while opportunistically promoting continental expansion. After Panama, naval orientation projected American power outward to arbitrate affairs within Europe and Asia, while expanding American commercial and military access throughout the world. The United States entered World War I to make the world safe for democracy, as President Woodrow Wilson explained, when German submarines began sinking U.S. and other formally neutral merchant and passenger ships in its effort to break Britain’s control of the seas and blockade of its ports. Throughout the third era dating from World War II, the mighty U.S. Navy patrolled the globe’s oceans and strategic passages, peerless and rarely challenged, to uphold the international free world order of which America itself was the undisputed leader. American aircraft carriers were the state-of-the-art naval weapon of World War II. Most famously, aircraft carriers played the decisive role in the pivotal Battle of Midway (June 1942) that determined control of the Pacific Ocean. The Japanese navy that had inflicted such a terrible, surprise first strike on the Americans six months earlier at Pearl Harbor never recovered from its Midway defeat; Midway was the first sea battle in history in which the engaging fleets never saw each other and remained from 80 to 170 miles apart throughout. Control of the seas likewise enabled America to carry out the Normandy D-day landings that ultimately reclaimed continental tEurope from Nazi Germany.
America’s central position on the world’s ocean superhighways, its plethora of good, all-weather seaports, and its naval dominance remained critical advantages in its winning the Cold War against its mostly land-bound Soviet adversary. The USSR’s military fleets and supply ships constantly labored against the geographic disadvantages of long distances, bad climates, and confinement imposed by the West’s control of key naval passages, such as those in exiting the Black Sea. America’s early twenty-first-century capability to project its influence as civilization’s unchallenged military superpower continued to hinge upon its worldwide deployment of its dozen world-class, nuclear-powered aircraft carrier task forces. Its dominance was roughly equal to the combined power of the world’s next nine leading military nations, and unmatched in Western history since ancient Rome ruled over the Mediterranean world.
By creating an inexpensive, fast water linkage between the Atlantic and the Pacific, the Panama Canal also pointed the direction arrow toward America’s next economic boom region—its underdeveloped, arid Far West, whose store of potential mineral and agricultural wealth suddenly came within easier reach of the exp
anding industries and markets of the East. As a successful federal government-financed and -run enterprise, the canal, moreover, inspired a ready model for undertaking the large, state-run water projects that developed the Far West into America’s twentieth-century growth engine. In contrast to the more orthodox, laissez-faire market economy attitudes prevailing in latter-nineteenth-century England and France, the United States had always been governed by a distinctive “American system” that regarded government as an active agent to assist the private development of the nation’s resources. The New York State financing of the Erie Canal, the federal government’s early policy of promoting internal improvements, and its incentives to the transcontinental railroads and small farmers who homesteaded lands west of the Mississippi after 1862 exemplified how this mixed economic model had worked in the nineteenth century. With the Panama Canal, a fuller, more activist iteration of this mixed system was inaugurated to meet the gargantuan scale of the challenges and opportunities of the industrial age. Teddy Roosevelt himself was the prime mover of the government-led policies that later in the century, under the presidency of his younger distant cousin Franklin Roosevelt, came to fruition in the giant, multipurpose dams that spectacularly transformed America’s scantly populated, arid western landscape with cheap irrigation for farming and hydroelectricity for mining and industry. The publicly built dams, in turn, reinforced the general trajectory of the large, state-led governance that characterized so many leading societies of the twentieth century.
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