The Panama Canal – Part 3: Make The Dirt Fly!

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Hello and welcome to Conflicted, the history podcast where we talk about the struggles that shaped us, the tough questions that they pose, and why we should care about any of it.

 

Conflicted is a member of the Evergreen Podcasts Network; and as always, I’m your host, Zach Cornwell.

 

You are listening to the third and final installment of a series on the construction of the Panama Canal. If you haven’t listened to Parts 1 and 2 yet, I’d definitely recommend checking those out before you jump into this one. But hey – if you prefer your history a little more non-linear, you do you.

 

However, before we dive back into the jungles of Central America, I’d like to do what we always do and take a few minutes to recap the major beats of the previous episode, so we have all that context fresh in our heads.

 

RECAP

 

Last time, in Part 2, we learned just how Panama came under American control in the first place. How, after the collapse of the French Syndicate, Uncle Sam stepped into that void, and pulled the isthmus into his imperial embrace, securing dominion over one of the most strategically valuable pieces of real estate on the planet. It was, like so many feats of foreign policy, legally and ethically questionable. / shady as hell.

 

American foreign policy has always been, shall we say, “adventurous”; And at the dawn of the 20^th century, one of the most adventurous Americans who ever lived just happened to be sitting in the White House. The one, the only, President Theodore Roosevelt.

 

Teddy Roosevelt was the kind of man who enjoyed being “first” in all things. And when he became President, he did everything he could to put the “First” in “First Family”. As David McCullough writes:

 

“He was the first President to call his official residence the White House (rather than the Executive Mansion), the first to be known by his initials, the first to take up tennis, which he played badly but with explosive verve, the first to be photographed jumping on horseback. (When the photographer missed his shot, the President gladly obliged by jumping several times again.)”

 

But then, in 1902, Teddy Roosevelt set his nearsighted eyes on yet another historic “first”. He decided the United States was going to be the first (and only) nation to construct an inter-ocean waterway through Central America, finally bridging the two great oceans of the Western Hemisphere. As McCullough continues:

 

To him [Roosevelt], first, last, and always, the canal was the vital—the indispensable—path to a global destiny for the United States of America. He had a vision of his country as the commanding power on two oceans, and these joined by a canal built, owned, operated, policed, and fortified by his country. The canal was to be the first step to American supremacy at sea.”

 

Not only would a Canal serve as a convenient shortcut between America’s Atlantic and Pacific coasts, ensuring the free flow of commerce and shoring up national security, it would be the realization of an idea that stretched back to the days of the conquistadors. For an avid trophy hunter like Teddy Roosevelt, it was too sweet a prize not to pursue. Many had dreamed, a few had tried, and all had failed – but now, it was America’s turn.

 

Having settled the question of “Why”, Roosevelt turned his attention to the “Where”, “When” and “How”.

 

The most pressing and fundamental concern was “Where.” The ill-fated French Syndicate had famously chosen the isthmus of Panama as the location for its construction efforts, and we all know how that turned out. Disease, bankruptcy, and 22,000 dead men. Why, many American politicians argued, should we rush to step on the same rake? Why should we bother with Ferdinand de Lesseps’ sloppy seconds?

 

“Even the word Panama was synonymous with failure and scandal,” writes Ovidio Diaz Espino, “Quel Panama! was a popular expression that meant “What a mess!”

 

So, let’s start fresh! Congress said. A nice clean slate in a nice clean country. It was common sense, really. When a house crashes to the ground, you don’t build it back up again on the same cracked foundation. The more responsible thing to do - the more American thing to do - was to profit from the mistakes of others, and avoid Panama like the plague. And lord knows, Panama had more than a few plagues festering in its black swamps.

 

Now, the country of Nicaragua, on the other hand, was a much better alternative. “Nicaragua was clean, fertile, relatively free of disease,” writes David McCullough, “it had great potential for development.”

 

Yes, for once in its long and troubled history, the United States electorate seemed to actually agree on something. Nicaragua, everyone concurred, was the place to build the American Canal.

 

But into this consensus, stepped a killer.

 

Clad in Parisian silk and dripping with panache, a French lobbyist named Phillipe Bunau-Varilla hopped off a train in Washington DC and proceeded to turn everything upside down. A veteran of the French construction project, saddled with debt and branded as a penalty shareholder, Bunau-Varilla’s sole mission in life was to convince the US government to purchase the French Syndicate’s assets and build the canal in Panama – not Nicaragua.

 

Like a 19^th century used car salesman, Bunau-Varilla slapped Panama’s hood and said, will ya look at this beauty! Sure, she’s a bit of a fixer-upper…a little rusty, not exactly the safest option, but at $40 million bucks? An absolute bargain.

 

Now, those con-artists/chiselers over in the Nicaragua faction/lot, they’re gonna tell you to buy NEW. They’re gonna try and sell you a fairy tale about “clean rivers” and “soft soil” and “pliable natives”. But what they won’t tell you – what they don’t want you to know – is that beneath that shiny new paint job, Nicaragua is a ticking time bomb. Just look at a map, gentlemen! The country is covered with active volcanoes. If you do build a Canal down there, you’re gonna spend half your time scraping lava off of it.

 

Well, geologically accurate or not, Bunau-Varilla’s arguments/prophecies made the right impression on the right people – including Teddy Roosevelt and his ever-obedient Republican Party. After a heated/loud, but brief debate in the US Senate, the matter was settled. The Nicaragua route had been, well, routed. And Panama was officially in. // [Nicaragua was officially out. Panama was officially in.]

 

But Bunau-Varilla had sold something that was not really his to sell. The French Syndicate owned the construction assets and infrastructure in Panama, sure; but not the land itself. That belonged to the nation of Colombia. And although America was buying, the Colombians were not selling. At least not for the price Washington was hoping for.

 

To Teddy Roosevelt’s irritation, the Colombians were proud and intractable negotiators, unwilling to accept what they considered an extremely bad deal from the United States. According to Roosevelt, haggling with Bogota was like “trying to nail jelly to a wall.”

 

So, when faced with the hard question of what to do when another country’s government won’t give you what you want, Teddy arrived at a simple answer: You change the government.

 

Panama was a loose jewel in Colombia’s tawdry little crown. With the right amount of pressure and leverage, it would pop free and drop into the waiting hands of Uncle Sam.

 

The Panamanians, of course, were not exactly the most enthusiastic subjects in Colombia’s domain. Given the opportunity, they would leap at the chance to rip down the yellow, red & blue stripes and raise up a flag of their very own. As Elias Marlowe writes:

 

Decades of neglect by Bogotá had culminated in an act [meaning the rejection of America’s offer] that seemed to condemn Panama to perpetual poverty. A small group of prominent citizens, who had long harbored separatist sentiments, decided that if Colombia would not bring the canal to Panama, then Panama would have to bring the canal to itself by leaving Colombia.”

 

To help the Panamanians disentangle themselves from the tyrannical tentacles of Colombia, President Roosevelt turned to his newest expert on the region, the lobbyist extraordinaire, Philippe Bunau-Varilla.

 

The slippery Frenchman was born unburdened by scruples, and he was not above engineering a potentially violent revolution to accomplish his ultimate goal of selling the French Company’s assets to the United States. If you want to make a quiche, you’ve gotta break some eggs. So, after arriving at an unspoken understanding with President Roosevelt, Bunau-Varilla made contact with the leaders of the separatist movement, assured them of America’s support for their cause, and set the wheels of sedition in motion.

 

All of this careful scheming culminated on November 3^rd, 1903, when Panama officially declared its independence from Colombia, tore down the old flag, and graciously accepted political recognition from the hemisphere’s major power, the United States of America. Back in Bogota, the Colombians were scarlet with rage, but what could they do against the guns, rockets and warships of the Americans? Teddy’s big stick had been brandished, and the fate of Panama was a fait accompli.

 

The situation was neatly summarized by a political cartoon published in the New York World, which showed a grinning Teddy Roosevelt, in full war gear, pointing a giant cannon at a Colombian soldier the size of a mouse. “Go Away, Little Man,” the caption said, “And Stop Bothering Me.”

 

The newly independent Panamanians, on the other hand, were happier than a dog with two tails. After 80-odd years of subservience and abuse, the isthmus was finally free. But they soon realized that they had made a grave mistake. And that mistake was putting their trust in the French lobbyist, Phillipe Bunau-Varilla. Empowered as their de facto Ambassador in Washington, Bunau-Varilla worked with the US State Department to craft a treaty that effectively turned Panama into colony of the United States. It was one of the worst deals in the history of bad deals:

 

According to the treaty, signed by Bunau-Varilla on Panama’s behalf, the Americans would build their Canal through the isthmus, and once it was complete, they would operate that Canal in perpetuity. The area of American control, called the Canal Zone or “The Zone” for short, would encompass a 500 square mile vertical rectangle that cut Panama in half. The Republic of Panama had no jurisdiction or authority inside the Zone, which just happened to include many of the ports, cities and harbors that the new nation depended on for trade. Basically, Panama was born with its balls in Uncle Sam’s grip.

 

To most observers with a functioning ethical compass, it was a miscarriage of diplomatic justice. As the American humorist Mark Twain wrote more generally about his country’s inexhaustible failings:

 

“The political and commercial morals of the United States are not merely food for laughter, they are an entire banquet.”

 

And yet, for most Americans, what was done was done. The San Francisco Chronicle spoke for many when it wrote:

 

“The world must move on. It is an age of power. The weak will be protected, but they will not be permitted to obstruct, whether upon the continent of America, the isthmus of Panama, the isles of the Pacific, the plains of Manchuria, or the valleys of the Ganges and the Indus. It is manifest destiny.”

 

The introspective journalists at the Houston Post concurred, writing: “The thing is done, there is no way of undoing it, and the least said about it the better.”

 

For his part, President Theodore Roosevelt was untroubled by the hemming and hawing from the press and the peanut gallery. Outcomes were all that mattered; And outcomes were the Teddy’s stock and trade. “He was someone,” writes David McCullough, “who would make things happen.”

 

After all the plotting, the planning, the scheming and the setbacks, they were going to do the thing. They were actually going to build a Canal through Panama. Of course, Roosevelt knew it would not be easy – nothing worth doing ever is.

 

Some things are meant to be hard, and in the end, we’re stronger for it. That was something Theodore Roosevelt of New York, New York knew more than a little about. When he was diagnosed with severe asthma as a child and confined to his bed for weeks at a time – that had been hard. When the two most important women in his life – his mother Martha and his 22-year-old wife Alice had died on the same day in the same house in 1884 – that had been hard. And when the Tammany Hall politicians in New York had tried to destroy his career for daring to suggest that policemen shouldn’t take bribes, that had been hard.

 

But every time, Roosevelt had dusted himself off, pressed forward, and lived to fight another day.

 

Panama would be hard too. [No,] Panama would a be a goddamn nightmare. But the worst thing to do, Teddy believed, the worst thing of all, was to not even try. To sit forever anchored in the warm, wave-less harbors of complacency. As Roosevelt wrote:

 

“Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory or defeat.”

 

And so, when the nitpickers and naysayers scoffed at the scope/scale of Roosevelt’s ambition, he had one answer:

 

         “Tell them I am going to make the dirt fly on the isthmus.”

 

In the year 1904, the American industrial complex descended upon Panama with pick & shovel in their hands, and piss & vinegar in their hearts. But beneath all their guts and gusto, the Yankees [Yanquis] were understandably apprehensive/nervous. The deep dark jungle was full of old ghosts, and the resentful locals delighted in reminding the Americans of all the other foreigners and white men who had died terrible deaths in pursuit of a canal.

 

Around crackling campfires and whiskey-soaked tables in Panama City, the newly-arrived Americans heard a lot of tall tales and legends and ghost stories. But there was one particularly chilling anecdote that they heard over and over again. Don’t you know? The locals asked. Haven’t you heard? What happened at the village of Matachin?

 

And so with that, folks, let’s start our finale with a good old-fashioned ghost story.

 

Welcome to The Panama Canal – Part 3: Make The Dirt Fly!

 

 

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THE GHOST STORY

 

It’s the spring of 1854.

Exactly 50 years before the United States began construction on the Panama Canal.

 

At this time, Panama is still a part of Colombia. At this time, Ferdinand de Lesseps has yet to break ground in Egypt on the Suez Canal. At this time, Teddy Roosevelt and Phillipe Bunau-Varilla have not even been born.

 

In the mid 1850s, the Panamanian isthmus is still a wild and untamed place, a choked ribbon of angry jungle (a scoliosis spine), with bone-white beaches and ramshackle villages. // destitute traces of human habitation.

 

Here, on the southern, Pacific-facing coast of Panama, the waves get very, very rough, chopping and churning and frothing under the shrieking gales. More than a few able-bodied crews, in fact, have been dashed across the rocks and reefs, fresh meat for the jagged coral, jutting up from the waves like grey teeth in blue gums.

 

And into these ominous waters, sails a lone ship, with an equally ominous name.

 

The Sea Witch, a jet-black clipper with fifteen sails and zero vacancy, has been traveling across the Pacific Ocean for 61 days straight. As the misty mountains of Panama come into view, raggedy sailors shout down from their perches in the rigging. Land ho – we have arrived at our final destination. We have arrived in Panama.

 

Down below, in the crowded cargo holds, the word “Panama” is a very welcome sound. For two long months, 705 Chinese laborers have huddled tight together in the belly of the Sea Witch, and although few of them speak a word of English, the cries of “Panama” carry a very clear meaning. It means they have arrived at their new place of employment.

 

Two months ago, each of these 705 Chinese men had signed a contract with an American construction company to help build a railroad across the Panamanian isthmus. In exchange for their services, they would receive 13 cents a day and all the opium they could smoke, provided they could still swing a hammer through the narcotic fog. Few of them could have anticipated the grim conditions waiting for them aboard the Sea Witch, which could be charitably described as “hellish”. 11 men died during the journey, but on March 30^th, 1854, after the world’s worst commute, the Chinese workers set eyes on their new home.

 

As they disembarked from the ship and shuffled down the dirt roads of Panama City, the 700 Chinese men heard the locals whispering. Pointing and staring at their strange hairstyle – the shaved forehead and 30-inch braid that was mandatory for all male subjects of the Qing Dynasty.

 

But still, the workers had not left their families in Southern China and sailed 8,000 nautical miles to be ridiculed. They came to Panama for one reason and one reason only: to get paid. So, they got to work. They swung pickaxes, hauled steel beams, and carried buckets of gravel through the jungle – all the unglamorous grunt work that goes into building a railroad. And at night, when their muscles ached and their bellies rumbled, they took comfort in the creamy fog of opium smoke.

 

For the first few weeks, it was bearable. Manual labor is a universal language, and so in theory, lifting heavy things in Panama should’ve been indistinguishable from lifting heavy things in southern China. But the isthmus felt different. The isolation of this place was almost unimaginable. “The jungle hemmed them in,” writesMatthew Parker, “as if it were a thousand leagues of ocean.”

 

Not even the wildlife was a source of comfort. To the Chinese, the creatures of Panama were strange, alien and unsettling. Glass frogs with skin so translucent, you could see their little hearts and organs beating inside. Howling packs of capuchin monkeys who, when one of their own babies died, would carry it around for weeks, grooming the decomposing corpse like a doll. And then of course, there were the bugs. The bugs were legion – especially at night. As one European worker remembered:

 

“With each step, one's foot crushed hundreds of them; with each movement of the hand, one picked up a fistful, and with each nod, one's face brushed swirls of them flying in the darkness. One breathed them in, as one went along! Moreover, the flame of a lamp was extinguished within minutes under the heaps of their small corpses … a monstrous buzzing filled the forest and rose all the way to the sky,”

 

The Chinese had come to Panama to build a better life for themselves, but all they found was disease, discomfort and hatred. The locals seemed to hate them, the white foremen seemed to hate them, even the jungle itself seemed to hate them. Before long, they began to hate themselves. Why had they come here? What madness had driven them to this awful place? And then, when their morale seemed to hang by a thread, the opium ran out.

 

+disease?

 

The executives of the American railroad company, wanting to cut costs, decided they would no longer subsidize the filthy addictions of their foreign workers.  But opium is a not a drug you can just quit ‘cold turkey’, and the symptoms of withdrawal transformed the Chinese workers from able-bodied men into shivering, sweating wretches. Unable to work or even lift a hammer, many Chinese resorted to begging in the streets. What else could they do? They were stranded far from home, deprived of the drug they had become addicted to, and without the financial means to return to China. So, those that could still walk retreated 20 miles inland to an isolated camp outside the village of Matachin.

 

Matachin [M-A-T-A-C-H-I-N] is a Spanish word that means “butcher” or “killer”, and it was not long before the tiny town earned that sinister connotation. One day, in June of 1854, about two months after the Chinese had first arrived, the American railroad workers made a grisly discovery. As one engineer, George Totten described:

 

“Should I live to be as old as Methuselah, I shall never forget the sight that met my eyes that morning. More than a hundred of the [workers] coolies hung from the trees, their loose pantaloons flapping in the wind. Some had hung themselves with bits of rope and tough vines. Most however, used their own hair, looping the long [braid] around their neck and tying the end to a tree limb.”

 

Unable to work, deprived of their opium, wracked by homesickness and seeing no way out, the Chinese laborers had committed mass suicide. 125 bodies hung from the trees, swaying like strange, ripe fruit. But that was only a fraction of the carnage. Below the hanged men, according to Totten’s account:

… Crumpled Chinese bodies were scattered about everywhere on the ground like broken dolls. Some had thrown themselves violently on their machetes. Others … had cut ugly crutch-shaped sticks, sharpened the ends to a point, and thrust their necks upon them … Others now were sitting in the shallow water, waiting for a freshet [stream] to come along and drown them.”

When all the dead had been counted, there were almost 500 Chinese bodies scattered across the outskirts of Matachin.

 

Despite the trauma of what became known as the “Chinese Disaster”, the trans-isthmian railroad was completed the very next year, in 1855. In the decades to come, those steel tracks carried a lot of men and for a lot of reasons. It was the same railroad that ferried French workers during the doomed De Lesseps project of the 1880s. The same railroad that carried the Colombian Generals to Panama City on the day of the revolution in November of 1903.

 

But the legend of the Chinese mass suicide always haunted the tracks. “It is said,” one French publication wrote: “that upon the railway of the isthmus, which is 75 kilometers in length, there is buried a Chinaman under each crosstie.”

 

THE AMERICANS

 

“That,” scoffed one of the American engineers sitting around a poker table in Panama City, “is a load/bunch of absolute horseshit.”

 

It’s May of 1904, exactly 50 years after the so-called Chinese disaster, and the American effort to build a canal across the isthmus is officially underway. Up in Washington DC, Teddy Roosevelt has promised to “make the dirt fly!” and so American engineers have traveled down to Central America in their hundreds and thousands to do as their President commands.

 

In the dive bars and saloons of Panama City, the incoming Americans were assailed with all kinds of ghost stories, urban legends and cautionary tales. And one of the most popular (and creepiest) yarns was the story of the Chinese laborers at Matachin, swaying from the trees like human wind chimes.

 

Was any of it true, the Americans wondered? Maybe.

Maybe some it. Maybe none of it. Maybe all of it.

 

More than a few unsettled Americans laughed off the story of the Chinese suicides as a “old tourist hoax.” But true or not, one thing was indisputable. Panama was lethal to outsiders. As Elias Marlowe writes:

 

“The isthmus was known to the world as the "white man's graveyard," a place that had swallowed a French fortune and the lives of over twenty thousand men.”

 

No one could dismiss or minimize the evidence of the first failed attempt at a canal. It was all around them. According to Matthew Parker:

 

“Panama was a gigantic scrap heap. All along the line of the old French canal, abandoned excavators and dredges, some of huge size, slumped lopsidedly, half submerged in swamp or stream. Over everything the voracious returning jungle had draped a thick web of vines. Discarded locomotives and spoil cars were piled in huge mounds of rust and twisted metal. Materials lay scattered everywhere, as if abandoned by a hastily retreating army. The buildings, which at one time had housed more than twenty thousand canal workers, had been reclaimed by termites, rot, or vegetation. Inside one building, where the rafters had decayed and the roof had collapsed, [they] Joseph Le Prince found several trees growing with trunks more than ten inches in diameter. In one place, an entire village had been completely buried by the returning jungle.”

 

As they prepared to build their Canal, many American bean-counters / planners and analysts assumed that a tremendous loss of life was unavoidable. Progress has its costs, they said with a regretful click of the tongue. And mass/heavy casualties were priced in. But there was at least one American, newly arrived in Panama, who was not prepared to accept such a pessimistic prognosis/diagnosis.

 

DR. GORGAS

 

Strolling the streets of Panama City in the summer of 1904, his high leather boots splashing through pools of stagnant water, a man named Dr. William Gorgas contemplates the Herculean task at hand. Unlike some of his more superstitious countrymen, the good doctor does not believe in ghost stories or haunted houses or the invisible hand of history. Dr. Gorgas is a man of science. And science says, that in the face of the impossible, there is always, always a way.  

 

William Gorgas (That’s G-O-R-G-A-S) is a relatively unsung figure in American history. You’d be hard-pressed to find any 9-year-old gluing on a bushy white mustache to portray “Dr. Gorgas” in a school play. And yet, he is one of the most pivotal figures in the saga of the Panama Canal. Without him, it is very possible that Teddy Roosevelt’s dream would have ended the same way Ferdinand de Lesseps’ did: disease, disgrace, and despair.

 

In May of 1904, Dr. Gorgas is 49 years old. With his drooping mustache, hound-dog eyes and lop-sided smile, he looks a bit like a young Donald Sutherland. He was, writes David McCullough, “a courtly, white-haired man with humorous eyes and a “sunny” Alabama manner. Everyone had a good word for him”

 

Despite his easy-going exterior, Dr. Gorgas is a military man – a Colonel in the US Army, and he has been sent down to Panama to defeat a very specific kind of enemy.

 

As he walks down the main roads of Panama City, the doctor tugs at his collar from the heat. Gorgas is a dyed-in-the-cotton Southerner. He knows HOT. But Panama is a whole different kind of HOT. It was, writes McCullough, “a country where a light shirt can feel heavy.”

 

But right now, Dr. Gorgas isn’t paying attention to the heat. / But right now, Dr. Gorgas isn’t thinking about the heat. He’s not thinking about the flotilla of ships in the harbor, or the huge construction equipment being unloaded; he’s not thinking about the women of negotiable affection waving and woo-hooing at him from the saloons.

 

No, right now, Dr. Gorgas is thinking about….puddles.

 

Everywhere he looks in Panama City, there is some kind of puddle, some kind of standing, stagnant water. There are ditches in the alleys, hoofprints in the streets, barrels on the docks. There are gutters, cisterns and countless buckets of water. To most residents, it all seemed innocent/harmless enough; An unavoidable reality of living in a place that gets more than 6 feet of rain a year.

 

But Dr. Gorgas sees something very different. All those little puddles are not just harmless bodies of water; they are pockets of enemy territory. Biological weapons planted at the heart of the Canal project. He stops to inspect one particular puddle, and as he peers down at it, he finds what he’s looking for: Tiny little eggs, floating on the water. Hundreds of them, hatching and wriggling and squirming in the tropical heat.

 

This is the enemy Dr. Gorgas has been tasked with defeating. If the American Canal Project is going to have any hope of success, he has to find a way to defeat the mosquitos. As Daniel Immerwahr writes:

 

“The hot and rainy neck of land throbbed with disease-bearing mosquitoes. Panamanians who had lived with those mosquitoes their whole lives had acquired immunity to yellow fever (or “yellow jack”, as it was called) and resistance to malaria. Outsiders, however, were fresh bait. Of the first batch of U.S. mainlanders to arrive in the Panama Canal Zone, nearly all were immediately laid low by malaria.”

 

In the modern day, the understanding that mosquitos are the main vector for these kinds of bloodborne diseases is settled fact. As indisputable as gravity. But at the turn of the 20^th century, the scientific community was a little more…divided. Most scientists from Mobile to Moscow would tell you that yellow fever and malaria were obviously caused by dead animals, swamp-like conditions, and “bad air”. In fact, that’s where the name “malaria” comes from: “Mala aria” or “bad air” in Italian.

 

But correlation is not causation, and in the early 1900s a wild and crazy new theory was starting to percolate in medical circles. Mosquitos, the theorists said, were the real culprits behind these debilitating diseases. It was all very simple, really. Female mosquitos require blood to produce eggs, so they fly around looking for something to bite. An animal, a monkey, a human, something with soft skin that’s easy to puncture. Well, occasionally, one of these two-legged buffets would be carrying the yellow fever virus. The mosquito sucks up the blood, wipes its chin, and sets off in search of the next meal. Then, when it bites another animal, the virus gestating in the mosquito’s belly is injected into the new host. Eventually, another mosquito comes along and bites the newly infected animal – and on and on and on. An infinite loop of infection and transmission.

 

But(!), the theorists said, that meant that if you could get rid of the mosquitos, you could get rid of yellow fever.

 

Like all new ideas, this theory had its critics. As the Washington Post wrote at the time:

 

“Of all the silly and nonsensical rigmarole about yellow fever that has yet found its way into print—and there has been enough of it to load a fleet—the silliest beyond compare is to be found in the mosquito hypothesis.”

 

With the benefit of hindsight, it’s very easy to roll our eyes at these Doubting Thomas’s. But as one British proponent of the mosquito theory shrugged at the time:

 

“The world requires at least ten years to understand a new idea, however important or simple it may be.”

 

But the Panama Canal did not have ten years. President Teddy Roosevelt had commanded his legions to “make the dirt fly”, and that could not happen until the isthmus was safe for American workers. “Safe” being a relative term, of course; but at least “disease-free”. Unless we want to end up like the French, the President said, we’ve got to keep our workers healthy. As Roosevelt confided to one of his Admirals:

 

“I feel that the sanitary and hygiene problems … on the Isthmus are those which are literally of the first importance, coming even before the engineering …”

 

“Unless something is done and done quickly,” one newspaper concurred, “all hopes of building a canal across the Isthmus of Panama may be set aside.”

 

Thankfully, the American Canal Board had selected as its Chief Sanitation Officer a man who not only embraced the controversial mosquito theory but was on the cutting-edge of its application in the field. Our new friend with the southern drawl and the snow-white hair, Dr. William Gorgas.

 

“Yellow fever,” McCullough writes, “was his specialty.”

 

In weird pattern of cosmic coincidence, Dr. Gorgas and Yellow Jack went way back. Like old comic book nemeses that always fight to a bloody stalemate/draw, there was a vendetta between the doctor and the disease. Unfinished business, you might say.   

 

In 1882, while working as a young Army doctor on the Texas-Mexico border, Gorgas contracted yellow fever during an outbreak near Brownsville. And there, he became intimately acquainted with the dreaded disease and its effects:

 

“A yellow-fever patient in the 1880’s had a less than fifty-fifty chance of survival,” writes McCullough,“The patient was seized first by fits of shivering, high fever, and insatiable thirst. But there were savage headaches as well, and severe pains in the back and the legs. The patient would become desperately restless. Then, in another day or so, the trouble would appear to subside and the patient would begin to turn yellow, noticeably in the face and in the eyes. In the terminal stages the patient would spit up mouthfuls of dark blood—the infamous, terrifying vómito negro, black vomit. The end usually came swiftly after that. The body temperature would drop, the pulse fade. The flesh would become cold to the touch—“almost as cold as stone and [the patient] continues in that state with a composed sedate mind.” Then, as a rule, in about eight to ten hours, the patient would die. And so great was the terror the disease generated that its victims were buried with all possible speed.”

 

Well, unlike so many others, Dr. Gorgas survived his brush with Yellow Jack, and although the experience was excruciating, contracting the disease did bestow one particular advantage: if you somehow manage to live through it, you are immune for the rest of your life. Thus, armored against the illness, Gorgas made it his personal mission to hunt down and eradicate the virus wherever it threatened American troops - even without really understanding the true nature of its transmission.

 

Almost twenty years later, in 1901, Gorgas and Yellow Jack met on the field of battle once again. This time, in Havana, the conquered capital of Cuba. In the aftermath of the Spanish-American War of 1898, the victorious US Army occupied the city, but instead of sun tans and mojitos, they found disease-bearing mosquitos. The island of Cuba was swarming with the insects, and before long, Dr. Gorgas’ medical ward was filled with dying men, vomiting the telltale black slime.

 

In their desperation, Gorgas and his staff tried everything to contain the virus. All the “traditional” methods of the time. They swept every street, disinfected every house, cleared away every dead rat, cat, and dog. But none of it worked. Yellow Fever still raged unabated across Havana. And so, in a leap of faith, Dr. Gorgas decided to try an experiment. He had heard of the oft-ridiculed “mosquito hypothesis”, and while he wasn’t entirely convinced either, it was at least worth a shot.

 

So, sanitary squads fanned out across the city of Havana, spraying layers of oil over every pool of stagnant water, fumigating every house, and systematically eliminating potential breeding grounds for the mosquitos. Most people thought it was a waste of time and resources, but then…the case numbers started dropping. And continued dropping. As Matthew Parker writes:

 

The results were truly spectacular—a dramatic reduction in yellow fever from 1,400 known cases in 1900, to only 37 in 1901, none of them after October. […] Havana had suffered some five hundred deaths a year from yellow fever for as long as anyone could remember. Now, quite suddenly, it was over. Furthermore, a controversial and important new theory had been proved correct, and the methods selected to exterminate the disease vector had worked. When the scale of the triumph began to sink in, Gorgas wrote to Reed (a colleague), “When I think of the absence of yellow fever from Havana for a period of fifty days, I begin to feel like rejoicing that I was ever born!”

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And so, three years later, in 1904, when Dr. William Gorgas was appointed Chief Sanitation Officer of the Panama Canal Project, and tasked with removing Yellow Fever from the isthmus, he knew exactly what to do. As one supporter of Gorgas said at the time:

 

“The medical board declares that not one mosquito shall survive.”

 

Well, tough talk aside, Dr. Gorgas had his work cut out for him. The island of Cuba had been an ideal breeding ground for mosquitos. But Panama? Panama was, in the words of one contemporary, “a mosquito paradise” As David McCullough writes:

 

“The temperature, scarcely changing the year around, allowed constant breeding of the insects. A first inspection of Panama City revealed an abundance of [mosquitos] in practically every building. […] By local custom, household drinking water was kept indoors in red earthenware jars, within which larvae abounded. Mosquito larvae, or “wrigglers,” swarmed in the open cisterns and rain barrels beside nearly every building. It was the rainy season and innumerable pockets of water, perfect for mosquito breeding, collected everywhere—in large quantities along the old French diggings, in small quantities in the impressions left where railroad ties had been pulled up or in the hoofprints of cattle that grazed in an open field on Ancon Hill.”

 

“It was,” writes Matthew Parker, “a massive, almost hopeless, task.”

 

Faced with such a monumental assignment, most administrators would have collapsed into a shivering ball of nerves and chemical/alcohol dependency. But William Gorgas was made of stronger stuff. According to those who knew him best, the Doctor was “imperturbable”. When things got tough, he didn’t panic, he didn’t lash out, and he didn’t make excuses. He just rolled up his sleeves and did his job.

 

Unfurling a map of the Canal Zone, Gorgas and his staff surveyed their new theatre of war. The Zone was 50 miles long and ten miles wide – bookended by the port cities of Colon and Panama City. In between were countless villages, hamlets, work camps and railroad stations, scattered across the jungle. These were the places that the workforce would have to live, and so they all needed to be methodically cleansed of the mosquito threat.

 

To succeed/do that, the Sanitation Department would need to deprive the mosquitos of their breeding grounds; They would need to build new housing for the workers, and smoke the insects out existing buildings with enough sulfuric fumigation to choke the plains of Tartarus. It would be hard, tedious, thankless work – but it had to be done.

 

And then, just as he was about to get started, Dr. Gorgas hit a snag. As many a government worker will tell you, sometimes the work itself isn’t the problem. Sometimes the biggest enemy is red tape. When Gorgas asked for the resources and operational funds necessary to kill every mosquito from Panama to Colon, his superiors on the Isthmian Canal Commission, the government body overseeing the project, flatly denied his requests. In the eyes of the ICC, Gorgas’ miraculous success in Cuba had been just that. A stroke of luck, a one-time aberration, a fluke. The mosquito theory – and all the expensive methods it entailed - was absolute hogwash. They had no need for his unconventional wisdom. As the Military Governor of the Zone, General Davis, told Gorgas:

 

“I'm your friend, Gorgas, and I'm trying to set you right. On the mosquito you are simply wild. All who agree with you are wild. Get the idea out of your head. Yellow fever, as we all know, is caused by filth.”

 

Straining the limits of his imperturbability, Gorgas clenched his teeth and nodded politely at his “friend”. But privately, he was furious. He had been sent to Panama to eliminate Yellow Fever, but unless he had the resources to destroy the mosquitos and their ubiquitous breeding grounds, the Americans were going to end up just like the French. As he scribbled angrily in a letter:

 

 “The Commission have their own ideas about sanitation, and do not seem much impressed with mine. I fear an epidemic is inevitable. If only we could convince them! If only they knew!”

 

Unfortunately, Gorgas’ instincts for disaster were correct. No sooner had American workers started landing in Panama than an outbreak of Yellow Fever burned through the new arrivals like kindling. The local mosquitos, all ten billion of them, were absolutely delighted at this new influx of fresh meat. All these new bodies, filled with warm blood, no protections, and no portion limits. It was paradise.

> 

Among the American workforce, fear quickly took hold, and it sparked an exodus. As Dr. Gorgas wife Marie recalled:

 

“The rush to get away, quickly assumed the proportions of a panic. The canal force—laborer’s, engineers and office men alike—seemed possessed of one single view: ‘Let's get out of this hell hole,’… and men arriving one day would take their departure the next, frequently on the same boat.”

 

The curse of the Sea Witch and the Chinese suicides and the ghosts in the trees – it didn’t all seem so laughable anymore. This place was death. As an eerie poem written by a resident of Colon went at the time:

 

You are going to have the fever, Yellow eyes! In about ten days from now Iron bands will clamp your brow; Your tongue resemble curdled cream, A rusty streak the center seam; Your mouth will taste of untold things, With claws and horns and fins and wings; Your head will weigh a ton or more, And forty gales within it roar!

 

2,000 miles to the north, in Washington D.C, President Teddy Roosevelt slapped the report from the ICC down on his desk. This, he tapped the paper with his forefinger, is not “making the dirt fly”. This is making us look like fools. We’ve been in control of the Zone for, what, six months, and we’ve already got a Yellow Fever outbreak? Who the hell is in charge of Sanitation down there, anyway? The administrators from the ICC shook their heads sadly and said that a certain Dr. William Gorgas, who had some achieved limited success against Yellow Fever in Cuba, was responsible for this failure. He had, they explained, become fixated with a strange and esoteric hypothesis. They threw up their hands and laughed. He believes that mosquitos are the cause of the disease. “The veriest balderdash”, one official sniffed.

 

Teddy Roosevelt’s eyes narrowed. He’d spent five years out West on a ranch, and his nose for bullshit was well honed. Over the next few weeks, the President consulted doctors from the across the country, as well as his personal physician, and discovered that Gorgas’ methods were not balderdash at all. It was a “scientifically sound” theory with broad support in Europe, and the results in Cuba spoke for themselves. Finally, Roosevelt’s physician, Alexander Lambert, told him:

 “Smells and filth, Mr. President, have nothing to do with either malaria or yellow fever. You are facing one of the greatest decisions of your career. You must choose between the ICC and Gorgas. If you fall back on the old methods of sanitation, you will fail, just as the French failed. If you back up Gorgas and his ideas and let him pursue his campaign against the mosquitoes, you will get your canal.”

 

A few days later, a cablegram arrived Panama City, directly from the President. It instructed the ICC to: "Get behind Gorgas and give him the authority and the resources he needs."

 

Thus began, writes David McCullough, “the most costly, concentrated health campaign the world had yet seen.”

 

According to Elias Marlowe: “With the president's mandate, Gorgas unleashed an all-out war on the mosquito. It was a military campaign unlike any other. He organized his sanitation army into brigades, deploying over 4,000 workers to attack the enemy in its breeding grounds. They systematically fumigated every building in Panama City and Colón, sealing rooms with paper and burning sulfur or pyrethrum powder to kill the adult insects. Teams went from house to house, inspecting water barrels and cisterns, either covering them, screening them, or putting a film of oil on the surface to kill the larvae. Swamps and pools of standing water were drained or oiled. An army of plumbers was put to work installing a modern water and sewage system for the terminal cities.”

 

“The fumigation campaign was so intense,” remembered one sanitary squad worker, “that there was a big, thick white cloud of smoke from the Sulphur hanging over the Zone and Panama City, and even the leaves on the trees curled up.”

 

“Gorgas,” writes Matthew Parker, “even had the holy water in the font of the cathedral changed every day once it was found that mosquitoes were breeding there.”

 

“The U.S. workforce now found itself thoroughly protected by metal screens,” continues Parker, “Because of the warm, salty, and damp climate of the Isthmus only very pure copper would resist rapid corrosion […]. It was all astronomically expensive. One order for high-grade copper screening, signed off by Stevens in the autumn of 1905, came to $90,000, nearly double the entire Sanitary Department budget for the previous year. Orders also went in for three thousand rubbish bins, four thousand buckets, a thousand brooms, and 5,000 pounds of common soap.”

 

“[…] In his first twelve months Gorgas had been allowed to spend $50,000. For the next year, his expenditure topped $2 million.”

 

To the penny-pinchers in Washington, this money was sorely missed, and officials from the ICC fumed that their coffers were being raided for the sake of killing bugs. As one high-ranking engineer sneered at Gorgas, “Do you know, Gorgas, that every mosquito you kill costs the United States Government ten dollars?” Gorgas replied, “But just think, one of those ten-dollar mosquitoes might bite you, and what a loss that would be to the country.”

 

But when a government can bear to spend money on the health of its citizens, it tends to have a positive effect. And such was the case in the Panama Canal Zone.

 

“The last death from yellow fever was reported in Panama City on November 11, 1905,” writes Parker, “as they gathered in the autopsy room, Gorgas instructed his staff to take a good look at the man: he was, said Gorgas, the last yellow fever corpse they would see. And so it proved. It may have taken twice the eight months required in Havana, but now Panama was free of yellow fever, for the first time, and forever. It was a massive breakthrough for the American canal.”

 

Free from the specter of disease, the Canal Project began to gather momentum. And for the first time in a long time, American workers looked out on the jungle scenery not with dread, but with admiration and hope. As one Zone police offer noted, before turning in for the evening:

 

“The sinking sun set the jungle afire in a spot that would have startled those who do not know that it rises in the Pacific at Panama, crude, glaring colors glowed, fading to gentler and more delicate tints, then the evening shadow that had climbed the hill with me spread like a great black veil over all the world.”

 

 

----- MUSIC BREAK -----

 

It’s November 15^th, 1906.

One year since the last Yellow Fever death in Panama City.

 

And in that short amount of time, quite a few things have changed on the isthmus. Someone who left Panama City in November 1905 and returned in November 1906 would barely recognize the place. The muddy roads are now dry and paved. A plumbing system delivers running water to every house. And the muggy air, once thick with mosquitos, is now clean and mostly disease-free.

 

And nowhere is this radical transformation more apparent than in the Ancon District of Panama City, where a brand-new establishment has recently opened its doors. The Hotel Tivoli (T-I-V-O-L-I) is a sprawling three-story building with white columns, wrap-around porches and a well-trimmed lawn. In photographs it looks like a tropical golf club or a very large beach house. In anticipation of America’s ongoing presence in Panama, the Zone authorities have constructed this luxurious hotel to host the many esteemed visitors they expect to receive. Foreign diplomats, journalists and politicians - anyone who wants to see the progress of the Panama Canal firsthand.

 

But today, despite the serene exterior, a feeling of mild panic reigns at the Hotel Tivoli. For almost an hour now, the staff has been frantically searching the grounds of the hotel. One of their guests is missing, you see. And not just any guest - a VIP, in fact. They’ve looked everywhere - in the dining rooms, the gazebos, the gardens. They’ve checked the ballrooms, the billiard rooms, even the bathrooms! And yet still, they cannot find him. When a maid, arriving for her afternoon shift asks what all the commotion is about, an exasperated concierge claps his hand over his forehead.

 

The President of the United States is missing.

We have lost Teddy Roosevelt.

 

He arrived yesterday, the concierge explains, aboard the biggest battleship in the American fleet, the USS Louisiana. Now that that canal project is officially on its feet, the President wants to personally inspect the Zone, and so he has come down here to see it for himself. The concierge nervously checks his watch. According to the President’s itinerary, Roosevelt is supposed to be in the dining hall at this very moment. The kitchen has been working all morning, preparing a full course spread – fried oysters, roast lamb, mashed sweet potatoes – even apple pie! But he’s not there, and we can’t find him. NO ONE can find him. Sometime around noon, he just slipped away. Disappeared!

 

Having no time for further explanations, the concierge throws up his hands, and continues the search.

 

Well, a few hundred yards away, up on a high hill overlooking the hotel, a 48-year-old man hikes through the pouring Panama rain. His white suit is drenched, his legs are aching and he’s puffing like a bellows, but he has a huge smile on his face. Now this, thinks Teddy Roosevelt, is what being alive feels like. No secret service, no sycophants and no schedules. Just a man, a pair of good boots, and God’s green earth. I’m only here for three days, God damn it; and while I’m here, I intend to see the REAL Panama. The Panama they don’t want me to see.

 

TEDDY’S VISIT

 

Theodore Roosevelt’s visit to Panama in November of 1906 is considered one of the most famous Presidential excursions in history. It added yet another historic ‘first’ to Roosevelt’s butterfly board of accomplishments. As Matthew Parker writes:

 

“It was an unprecedented moment. Never before had a serving U.S. president left the country.”

 

Months earlier, Roosevelt had made the goals of his upcoming trip plain to a feeding frenzy of reporters:

 

“I want to see how they are going to dig that ditch, how they are going to build that lock; how they are going to get through that cut.  It's a business trip. I want to be able to tell people as much as I can about the canal."

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But Roosevelt was no fool. With great power comes great pampering. He knew that any visit to the Canal Zone would be a heavily curated affair, meticulously crafted to show him the best possible version of the day-to-day operations. Well – he didn’t want to see the best Panama had to offer; he wanted to see the Zone at its worst. Back in the days of the French Syndicate, Old Ferdinand de Lesseps had only visited his workers during the dry season – when everything was sunny and green and beautiful. But Teddy Roosevelt was not going to make the same mistake. He wanted to see the soft white underbelly of the thing. As Matthew Parker writes:

 

“From the moment of his arrival, Roosevelt went to great pains to throw the canal leadership on the Isthmus off balance, to dig beneath the prepared façade. Frank Maltby (an engineer) wrote that Roosevelt “seemed obsessed with the idea that someone was trying to hide something from him […]

 

 On the first of his three days in Panama, Roosevelt excused himself after lunch at the new Tivoli Hotel, saying he was retiring to his room. “Instead,” writes Maltby, “he bolted out the back door, rushed up the hill to Ancón Hospital and into the wards, where he began talking to the patients as to their treatment and care.” Thereafter, Roosevelt continually evaded his official schedule to drop in on mess-rooms and kitchens, to interview passing workers, or to ferret around in ICC barracks and lodgings.”

 

He was continually pointing to some feature and asking, ‘What’s that?… Well, I want to see it.’… he was continuously stopping some black man and asking if he had any complaint or grievance.””

 

Roosevelt’s hosts could barely keep up with him, as one engineer complained:

 

“I have blisters on both my feet and am worn out […] “Shonts is knocked out completely.”.”

 

As David McCullough elaborates:

 

“He walked railroad ties in Culebra Cut, leaped ditches, splashed through work camps, made impromptu speeches in the driving rain. “You are doing the biggest thing of the kind that has ever been done,” he said, “and I wanted to see how you are doing it.”

 

“No one in the four hundred years of Panama’s history,” wrote one newspaper, “had ever seen so much in so little time.”

 

For the rank-and-file workers on the line, seeing their President out in the field was a morale boost beyond comprehension. As the wife of one worker recalled:

 

“We saw him once, on the end of a train,” [We] got hold of small flags for the children, and told them when the president would be passing their house, “so we were standing on the steps. Mr. Roosevelt flashed us one of his well-known toothy smiles and waved his hat at the children as though he wanted to come up the hill and say ‘Hello!’ I caught some my husband's confidence in the man. Maybe this ditch will get dug after all, I thought. And I was more certain than ever that we ourselves would not leave until it was finished.”

 

Another observer recalled: “He made the men that were building there feel like they were special people. Give them pride of what they were doing for the United States.” 

 

During his three-day trip to Panama, Teddy Roosevelt was a machine, a human combustion engine of genuine enthusiasm and tireless curiosity. And funnily enough, it was a machine that caught his eye one day and facilitated what one historian called “one of the most famous photo-ops in American history.”

 

“It was about eight in the morning and again the rain was coming down hard,” writes David McCullough, “At the site of the Pedro Miguel locks, Roosevelt spotted several shovels at work and ordered that the train be stopped. He jumped down, marched through the mud, and was soon sitting up in the driver’s seat (of a 95-ton steam shovel], engineer A. H. Grey having happily moved over to make a place for him. He was fascinated by the huge machine and insisted on knowing exactly how it worked; he asked that it be moved back and forth on its tracks. He had to see how everything was done. “All his questions, like his movements, were deliberate and emphatic to a noticeable degree,” a reporter noted; “he would stand for no ceremony….” He was at the controls for perhaps twenty minutes, during which a small crowd gathered and the photographers were extremely busy.

 

Presidents of the United States had been photographed at their desks and on the rear platforms of Pullman cars; Chester A. Arthur had consented once to pose in a canoe. But not in 117 years had a President posed on a steam shovel. He was wearing a big Panama hat and another of his white suits. And the marvelous incongruity of the outfit, the huge, homely machine and the rain pouring down, not to mention his own open delight in the moment, made it at once an event, an obvious and inevitable peak for the man who so adored having his picture taken and who so plainly intended to see success at Panama. One of the photographs would quickly become part of American folklore, and as an expression of a man and his era, there are few that can surpass it.

 

Teddy Roosevelt’s visit to the Canal Zone didn’t last long - barely 72 hours - but as the USS Louisiana steamed out of the harbor and a crowd waved goodbye on the beach, the impact the President had made was palpable. As one worker enthusiastically proclaimed: “The French gave up …but we will finish! With Teddy Roosevelt, anything is possible. In America, anything is possible.”

 

Aboard the USS Louisiana, Roosevelt reflected on what he had seen over the past 3 days. Generally, he was very impressed with the progress being made in the Zone. As he wrote in a letter to his son (?):

 

“We have taken hold of the job…. There the huge steam shovels are hard at it; scooping huge masses of rock and gravel and dirt previously loosened by the drillers and dynamite blasters, loading it on trains which take it away to some dump, either in the jungle or where the dams are to be built. They are eating steadily into the mountain cutting it down and down. Little tracks are laid on the side hills, rocks blasted out, and the great ninety-five ton steam shovels work up like mountain howitzers until they come to where they can with advantage begin their work of eating into and destroying the mountainside. 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 worthwhile to have machines do it. It is an epic feat, and one of immense significance.”

 

But there was one thing Roosevelt had seen that he was not impressed with at all. As he wrote:

 

 “The least satisfactory feature of the entire work to my mind was the arrangement for feeding the Negroes. Those cooking sheds with their muddy floors and with the unclean pot which each man had in which he cooked everything, are certainly not what they should be.” […] “the very large sick rates among the negroes, compared with the whites,” was alarming.”

 

After just 72 hours in Panama, Teddy Roosevelt had seized upon / scratched the surface of a fundamental inequity at the heart of the American project. For all its technology and manpower, there was a rot deep in the Zone, one that threatened to undermine and delay the entire effort.

 

THE “PANAMA MAN”

 

In the long, storied (and multi-storied) history of human engineering, we have created all sorts of structures for all sorts of reasons. Walls to keep people out. Walls to keep people in. High cathedrals and low catacombs, suspension bridges and irrigation ditches, amphitheaters, aqueducts and dungeons and dams. But all those marvels of masonry – from the Hagia Sophia to the Taj Mahal to the Brooklyn freakin’ Bridge – they all have one thing in common: They could not have been created without the sweat and toil of people. Lots and lots of people.

 

And the Panama Canal was no exception.

 

To build their waterway and make the dirt fly, the American project would need to employ tens of thousands of men and women. A workforce biblical in both its scale and diversity. And contrary to the flag flying over the Hotel Tivoli, most people working on the American Canal were not American at all.

 

If you were to walk from one coast of Panama to the other, down the 50 miles of railroad track that served as the spinal cord of the Zone, you would have heard no less than 20 languages in as many miles. According to a firsthand account by a census-taker named Harry Franck, you would’ve heard Spanish, Dutch, Russian, Mandarin, Turkish, Portuguese, Arabic, even Hindi and Punjabi. Not to mention English dialects from Scotland, Ireland, South Africa and Canada. In terms of its workforce, the Panama Canal was truly a global effort. “a chaos of nationalities,” Franck wrote.

 

But despite all this diversity, the vast majority of workers were black men from the Caribbean. As historian John-Lindsay Poland writes: “During construction of the canal from 1904 to 1914, Blacks made up at least three out of every four workers.”

 

They came from the British territories of Barbados, Jamaica and the Virgin Islands. Turks & Caicos and Trinidad & Tobago. It was a list that read like a Carnival Cruise itinerary, and yet it could be sampled at a fraction of the price. In that proud American tradition, when faced with a need for cheap, effective labor, the US government relied on legions of impoverished foreigners to do its dirtiest work.

 

To the Canal Zone administrators, black workers from the West Indies were prized above all others. They were tougher than the Chinese, more reliable than the Panamanians, more God-fearing than the Italians, and more law-abiding than the Spaniards. And best of all, the Zone authorities chuckled, you could pay them practically nothing.

 

The only problem, of course, was getting them here. How do you entice people to leave their homes, kiss their children goodbye, and board a rickety boat bound for a far-flung jungle? Well, you lie to them. And you do it with the most sophisticated form of deception that humanity has ever produced: commercial advertising.

 

In town squares all across the Caribbean, posters were nailed to the wall, depicting a handsome black man standing tall in a cream suit, a white hat, and pockets presumably filled with green dollar bills. This was the “Panama Man”, a vision of the future – YOUR future – if you would but lend those strong arms to the cause of the Canal. Working in Panama, the ads implied, would make you rich beyond your wildest dreams. But like all mascots, the” Panama Man” was a walking, talking, product-hawking hyperbole. A siren song meant to lure all the able-bodied sailors over the rail. It was, according to one historian, “one of the best advertising campaigns of the 20th century.” The centerpiece of the marketing effort was a series of carefully orchestrated testimonials. As a man named Marco Mason, a grandson of one of these black workers, explained:

 

“They created what was called the Panama Man, which was to get someone that went to Panama and bring him back and he will be the advertiser. And when he came back to Barbados from Panama, he came back with white trousers, white jacket, gold teeth, Panama hat, a big smile and monies in their pocket. And all the other guys in the plantation take a look and say, 'boy I better go down to Panama and get mine too.'”

 

“The Panama Man” was undoubtedly a gross exaggeration, but the pay in the Zone was undeniably good. To paraphrase David McCullough, a Canal worker could earn more money in two hours than he could earn in two months back on a plantation in Barbados.

 

The horrible thing about advertising of course, is that when it’s working – really working - you don’t even realize it’s working. You think you are making the decision; that you have arrived at the idea; rather than it being placed in your head and tickled into pink arousal by all those helpful gerunds and adjectives. When humans are plied with the right words, they’ll buy just about anything, from the kitchen gadget you use exactly once, to the online self-improvement course available for just 10 easy payments.

 

Well, it works now, and it worked then, and it wasn’t long before hundreds of boats were clogging the Caribbean, bound for the shores of Panama. As a man named Benjamin Jordan, who left his home in Barbados at the age of 19 to go work on the Canal remembered:

 

“I wanted to go. And do you know the reason why? In Barbados they wasn't paying you nothing. Even getting ten cents an hour to come to Panama was better than staying in Barbados.”

 

Well, unfortunately for Mr. Jordan and tens of thousands of other Caribbean workers, the reality of life in Panama was a far cry from the gold-toothed mascot on the poster.

 

SILVER & GOLD

 

New arrivals to the Canal Zone quickly realized that its colonial society had been meticulously organized into a very rigid structure of segregation. In fact, “segregation” is kind of a soft word for what this was. Terms like “apartheid” and “caste system” are frequently used by historians. As David McCullough writes:

 

“The color line, of which almost nothing was said in print, cut through every facet of daily life in the Zone, and it was as clearly drawn and as closely observed as anywhere in the Deep South or the most rigid colonial enclaves in Africa.”

 

But instead of signs that said “Whites Only” or “Colored”, as you might find in Birmingham, Alabama or Baton Rouge, Louisiana under Jim Crow laws, the signs in the American Canal Zone read “Silver” and “Gold”. And you can probably guess who was who.

 

In the employment ledgers of the US Canal Authority, there were technically two types of labor. “Skilled” and “Unskilled”. Skilled workers were the people who possessed some specialized technical expertise. Everything from carpenters and coppersmiths, to machinists, engineers and steam-shovel operators. Because their skills were considered harder to replace and thus more valuable, these men were paid in US gold-backed currency.

 

Then there were the “unskilled” workers. The men of the “pico y pala” – the pick & shovel. The ones who hauled the buckets, dug the ditches, chopped the trees, cleared the rubble, laid the track and mixed the concrete – the kind of manual labor that will make your back ache just reading about it. Those men, because they were easily replaceable, were paid in local silver t currency.

 

These two kinds of workers were not only paid differently, but treated differently. Gold employees were given the best lodgings, the best food, and the best medical care.  Silver employees were lucky if they could get a cup of lumpy soup and a doctor to examine a broken arm.

 

Now on the surface, from an accountant’s point of view, that all sounds fairly logical. It was, according to David McCullough, “a simple problem of supply and demand […] Experienced technicians (men to run and repair the machines), doctors, and competent clerical people were always in short supply and had to be kept satisfied if the canal was to be built; common unskilled laborers from the impoverished islands of the Caribbean were always available in abundance and expected no better than what they got, which for the most part was better than what they had known at home.”

 

So, in the beginning, this began as a logical, if not compassionate, delineation between two tiers of workers. But then, something started to happen.

 

The Gold employees just happened to be mostly white. And the Silver employees just happened to be mostly black. And so, inevitably, like the slow drift of a glacier or the slip of a tectonic plate, this rational system began to take on racial undertones – and overtones, if you were on the wrong side of it. As a man named William Donadio, who was the son of a canal worker said:

 

“I remember my stepfather talking about it. It was a kind of a polished-up segregation. It didn't say black and white, but you understood that if you weren't a gold roller and you were a silver roller that you were on the black side.”

 

“Before long,” wrote one historian, “the Canal Zone developed its own unique form of racism, one based on the currency in which one was paid.”

 

“Caste lines are as sharply drawn as in India,” observed the census-taker Harry Franck. “The Brahmins are the ‘gold’ employees … But—and herein we out-Hindu the Hindus—the Brahmin caste itself is divided and subdivided into infinitesimal gradations. Every rank and shade of man has a different salary, and exactly in accordance with that salary he is housed, furnished, and treated down to the least item,—number of electric lights, candle-power, size of bed, size of bookcase.”

 

“Segregation came to shape every aspect of life in the Zone,” elaborates historian Julie Greene, “from work to housing, leisure activities, sexual relationships, and shopping. One would see, for example, large signs at the commissaries denoting the silver and gold entrances. The government paid silver employees far less, fed them unappetizing food, and housed them in substandard shacks. Gold workers earned very high wages and terrific benefits, including six weeks of paid vacation leave every year, one month of paid sick leave every year, and a free pass for travel within the Zone once each month.”

 

Showered with high pay and privileges, even the most enlightened white man started to enjoy his position in this hierarchy a little too much. As one American journalist wrote in 1906:

 

“I have often seen the threat of the slave-driver in the foreman's eye—the menace of brute force. Among the white employees on the ‘gold roll’ sometimes an employee would use his hands or foot on one of the ‘silver employees.”

 

The census-taker Harry Franck also noted this phenomenon (very sarcastically):

 

“Even New Englanders grow almost human here among their broader-minded fellow-countrymen. (What he’s saying is that the usually sanctimonious northerners started to exhibit the same narrow-minded racism as southerners) Any northerner can say [the N-word] ‘nigger’ as glibly as a Carolinian, and growl if one of them (a black man) steps on his shadow.”

 

All this scalding hot racism was a bit perplexing to the tens of thousands of black workers in the Zone. Being from the West Indies, they were technically British subjects. Many of them had never experienced that uniquely American flavor of racial bigotry, and they were more than a little resentful of these crude impositions. As Matthew Parker writes:

 

The standard response of the black worker to bullying or abuse, according to virtually every American account of the construction period, was to “straighten himself up and say to the foreman ‘I wish you to understand, sir, that I am a British subject, and if we cannot arrange this matter amicably we will talk to our Consul about it.’” […] In fact, the West Indians did consider themselves superior to Americans. After all the British Empire was still the most powerful in the world, as they would point out, and they were as much a part of it as anyone.

 

The Americans thought this was hilarious.”

 

Well, the Silver employees may not have commanded much respect, but the Zone simply could not have functioned without them. As McCullough writes:

 

Official visitors, congressmen on so-called tours of inspection, writers gathering material for books, could not help but be amazed, even astounded, at the degree to which the entire system, not simply the construction, depended on black labor. There were not only thousands of West Indians down amid the turmoil of Culebra Cut or at the lock sites but black waiters in every hotel, black stevedores, teamsters, porters, hospital orderlies, cooks, laundresses, nursemaids, janitors, delivery boys, coachmen, icemen, garbage men, yardmen, mail clerks, police, plumbers, house painters, gravediggers. A black man walking along spraying oil on still water, a metal tank on his back, was one of the most familiar of all sights in the Canal Zone. Whenever a mosquito was seen in a white household, the Sanitary Department was notified and immediately a black man came with chloroform and a glass vial to catch the insect and take it back to a laboratory for analysis.”

 

In a cruel twist of irony, it was the Silver employees who ended up being truly indispensable to the Canal project, even if on an individual level they were all but forgotten by history.

 

Even the heroic Dr. William Gorgas, who had rid the isthmus of Yellow Fever, was an ardent enabler of the Silver & Gold system, and the racial prejudices therein. As John Lindsey-Poland writes:

 

“The Army's tropical doctors were obsessed with racial classification. Gorgas's annual reports, published by the Isthmian Canal Commission, listed the names of each White U.S. employee who had died in the preceding year, but the many more West Indians who had perished were not named in the record. Instead, they were anonymous to history, reaffirming the notion that White U.S. workers built the canal.”

 

Aside from entrenching a strict racial hierarchy, the Silver & Gold system also had another, more subtle purpose. As the project gathered steam, one very scary thought haunted the imaginations of the Zone authorities, and that was the possibility of a mass strike.

 

In a punishing environment like Panama, workers would be much more likely to rise up and demand better conditions, better pay, better everything. If black workers and white workers started fraternizing, and realized they had more in common with each other than the men who told them what to do…the Zone authorities might have a serious problem. Thankfully, the Silver & Gold system helped smother any dangerous cross-collaboration.

 

By keeping black workers and white workers separated by what Harry Franck called “the awful gulf”, the Canal authorities were able to ensure that these two groups could not effectively organize or unionize across racial divides. This “divide and rule” strategy was aided by the fact that even among the non-white workers, there were multiple subgroups, nationalities and cultures, which very often did not mix well.  As Matthew Parker writes:

 

“Even among the British West Indians, as opposed to those from French-, Dutch-, or Spanish-speaking areas, there was little fellow feeling among the nationals from the various islands; instead there was competitiveness and distrust. One of the complaints of [a] “Jamaican Carpenter” about the ICC barracks was the mixing they had to put up with: “There is no sense in putting so many different races together—Jamaicans and Bims [Barbadians] and Martiniques in the same room. It is not right.”

 

It's all just another reminder that “race” truly is a social construct.

 

Despite the fragmentation of the workforce, and the divide & rule policy that governed it, there were occasional labor strikes and attempts to unionize.

> 

In the summer of 1907, a group of steam shovel operators banded together and asked for a pay increase - from $210 a month to $300 a month. In August, several groups of European laborers threw down their tools and went on strike as well. Then, in November, boiler workers in the machine shops told their bosses they wouldn’t lift a finger until certain demands were met.

 

But the Zone authorities would not indulge these disruptive tactics in the slightest. Nothing – and I meannothing - would be allowed to slow down work on the Canal; neither wind nor rain nor uppity employees. As a result, these nascent labor movements were quickly and ruthlessly crushed. The steam shovel operators were fired, replaced and told if they ever wanted their jobs back, they’d be starting at junior positions at lower salaries. The European troublemakers were pacified with batons and paid strikebreakers. And as for the boiler workers in the machine shop? They were simply deported.

 

In the minds of the Canal authorities, it wasn’t malicious; it was just math. As one administrator sniffed: “Defection by any one class of men cannot tie up the whole work.” 

 

“Thereafter,” writes Matthew Parker, “the response to any strike threat was simple: be back at work tomorrow morning or be expelled instantly from the country”.

 

With most of the labor problems easily defused, work on the Canal continued at a relentless pace. The dirt was really flying now. Every day, more cubic tons of earth were excavated, more infrastructure was built, and more fresh workers stepped off the boats.

 

“Entire communities were to be planned and built from scratch,” writes McCullough,”—houses, mess halls, barracks, more hospitals, a visitors’ hotel, schools, churches, clubhouses, cold-storage facilities, laundries, sewage systems, reservoirs.”

 

Slowly but surely, the Canal Zone was looking less like a dilapidated jungle outpost and more like any developed city in the continental United States. It was transforming into a little slice of civilization right before their eyes. According to one historian, the Zone Authorities had managed to “approximate the conditions of a modern industrial community in an equatorial wilderness two thousand miles from the base of all supplies.” As a nurse named Jessie Murdoch wrote in 1908:

 

“We were surrounded by all the modern comforts and conveniences. Telephones buzzed, electric lights were flashed on, and we recognized ourselves as a part of an ideal community.”

 

“Refrigerated trucks were now carrying ice and perishables along the line to the growing number of commissary stores, hotels, and messes,” writes Matthew Parker,“ Several of the Panama Railroad's steamers had been fitted out with cold compartments, so that fresh food could arrive in pristine condition from the United States. At the end of the year, they started plans for a cold-storage plant and bakery at Cristóbal.”

 

The wife of one worker, a woman named Rose van Hardeveld remembered:

 

“I realized… that the last vestige of fear and uncertainty seemed to have left us when our children were able to buy ice cream cones and soda pop at the clubhouse … we now felt thoroughly at home, truly, now, a transplanted bit of the United States.”

 

“To many it seemed that the impossible had been achieved,” continues Matthew Parker —"proper society had been created two thousand miles from home in the middle of jungle.”

 

And yet, there was still so much work to do. The jungle had been tamed, but not conquered; and as the so-called “ditch” got longer and deeper and wider, the engineers eventually came face-to-face with the final boss of Panamanian geology. The same notorious rock formation that had defeated the French two decades earlier.

 

The spine of the world. The Culebra Cut. 

 

 

 

---- MUSIC BREAK ----

 

It’s December 12^th, 1908.

 

About two years after President Teddy Roosevelt’s famous and photogenic visit to the Canal Zone.

 

In that short amount of time, millions of tons of soil and rock and water have been removed from the Panamanian landscape. Tens of thousands of men working at every waking (and non-waking hour) with picks, shovels, drills and dynamite. As David McCullough writes:

 

“For anyone to picture the volume of earth that had to be removed to build the Panama Canal was an all but hopeless proposition. Statistics were broadcast—15,700,000 cubic yards in 1907, an incredible 37,000,000 cubic yards in 1908—but such figures were really beyond comprehension. What was 1,000,000 cubic yards of dirt? In weight? In volume? In effort?”

 

It was true, no single statistic or photograph could capture the scale of what was happening down in Panama.

 

“The canal enterprise,” writes John Lindsay-Poland, “became the largest single human alteration of a tropical environment in history.”

 

The American engineers had no illusions about the enormity of their task, of course. The sheer brutal audacity of it. As John Stevens, chief engineer of the project from 1905-1908(?) wrote:

 

“The problem is one of magnitude, not miracles […]“We must reflect that at best, even with the backing and sentiment and finances of the most powerful nation on earth, that we are contending with Nature’s forces, and that while our wishes and ambition are for great assistance in a work of this magnitude, neither the inspiration of genius nor our optimism will build this canal.  Nothing but dogged determination and steady, persistent, intelligent work will ever accomplish the result; […] we are facing a proposition greater than was ever undertaken in the engineering history of the world.”

 

Maps hanging on the walls in countless offices across the Zone illustrated the complex geological puzzle that the engineers had to solve. To connect the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, the Americans were going to have to build what is called a “lock canal”.

 

Because of the isthmus’ unique geography, this type of canal was really their only option. As the aforementioned chief engineer John Stevens wrote:

 

“I went to the Isthmus with a fairly open mind on the subject of type -- if anything, rather inclined in favor of the sea level.  But it did not take me long to realize that however rich and powerful in men and resources the United States might be, the idea of a sea-level canal, such as proposed, was absurd; that a practical one could not be built in any admissible length of time, or without the expenditure of a totally unjustifiable amount of money -- enough to stagger even the financial ability of the nation.  So I became an earnest advocate of the [..] lock-type.”

 

>> 

Unlike the Suez Canal in Egypt, which is basically a very large river cut through the terrain at sea-level, the Panama Canal was going to literally lift ships over the isthmus. Ships would arrive at either entrance to the Canal and then proceed through a series of “locks” – or chambers - that would fill up with water. As Julie Greene helpfully explains:

 

“The complex operation was as one might imagine a child playing in a bathtub. A ship would enter a first lock chamber with water at a low level, and the lock gates would swing shut behind it. The chamber would then flood with water, and the ship would rise naturally with the water. Once the ship rose sufficiently, the lock gates in front of it would swing open, and it would enter the next chamber, where the same process would be repeated.”

 

At the top of this enormous water staircase, would be a man-made lake, created by damming powerful Chagres River and flooding the surrounding valley. Incoming ships would move across the lake, then proceed down the “stair steps” to the opposite ocean. On a good day, the entire process – shore to shore. – would take no more than 10 hours / tops.

 

That was the theory, anyway. Right now, in the winter of 1908, it’s just blueprints and whole lotta red tape. To make this thing real, the Army Corps of Engineers is going to have to terraform an entire ecosystem – one that has no interest in being altered.

 

And the epicenter of this undertaking - the front line in the war against nature - is here, at a place called Culebra. Located about ten miles inland from the Pacific shore, Culebra (C-U-L-E-B-R-A) is a formidable 300-foot ridge composed of 17 different kinds or rock and clay and volcanic compression. “Culebra” is a Spanish word for ‘snake’, although most workers in the Zone just call this place The Cut, aptly-named because the Americans are quite literally “cutting” through the rock in hopes of forming of channel that ships can eventually pass through.

 

Standing at the entrance to the Culebra Cut, if you squinted a little and used your imagination, you could almost see ships gliding along a placid waterway between two towering cliffs. But right now, there’s no water, and no ships – at least not yet. Right now, the Cut just looks like hell on wheels - a churning mass of people and machinery.

 

“The full fury of American industrial might was unleashed on the isthmus,” writes Elias Marlowe, “The construction effort was a symphony of men and machines on an unprecedented scale. The centerpiece of the work was the Culebra Cut, the nine-mile-long trench that had to be carved through the rock and shale of the Continental Divide. Here, dozens of Bucyrus [byoo-sai-rus) steam shovels, some capable of lifting five cubic yards of rock in a single scoop, clawed away at the mountainside. The spoil was loaded onto thousands of railroad flatcars, which ran on a complex system of tracks at different levels of the cut. An army of over 6,000 men worked in the Cut, drilling holes for dynamite, laying track, and coordinating the endless parade of dirt trains.”

 

“… It is an army that knows no rest, no armistices, no flags of truce,” wrote the contemporary journalist Harding Davis.

 

And one of those many thousands of workers is a man named John J. Reidy. [R-E-I-D-Y, Reidy]

 

Truth be told, we don’t know much about John Reidy. We don’t have a date of birth, a photograph, or even an ethnicity. All we have is a cause of death. Mr. Reidy is one of those unfortunate people in history who is known not for how he lived, but for how he died.

 

And today, December 12^th, 1908, is the last day of John’s life.  

 

But mercifully, John doesn’t know that yet. This morning, he is focused on the task at hand. Another day, another dollar. This morning, like every morning, he rubs the sleep out of his eyes, pulls on his boots, and washes down a plate of bacon & eggs, with a cup of charcoal-black coffee. Then he heads out the door, joins his work crew and hops on a train car bound for the Culebra Cut.

 

There are many different jobs in the Culebra Cut. Cooks and diggers and debris haulers. Mechanics and geologists and steam-shovel operators, controlling some the same titanic machines that provided the famous photo-op for President Teddy Roosevelt.

 

But John is a what they call a “powderman”.  As in ‘gunpowder’. As in “explosions”. As in what happens when you set off a stick dynamite. And on his shoulder, John is balancing a very large box of dynamite, filled with 8-inch sticks wrapped in brown paper, each one capable of putting a 3-foot crater in the earth. But John tries not dwell on that particular piece of trivia. He has found that when carrying enough explosives to turn you into human salad dressing, it’s better to think them as powerful fireworks.

 

And as John staggers deeper into the Cut, he cannot help but be struck by the sight of it – the scale of it. It is a sight/experience that never truly gets old. As one first-time visitor to the work site recalled:

 

“Only gradually did the eye gather details out of the mass. […]

 

[…] High above us rose the jagged walls of the “cut” with towns hanging by their fingernails all along its edge, and ahead in the abysmal, smoky distance the great channel gashed through Culebra mountain.

 

“Before and beyond were pounding rock drills, belching locomotives, there arose the rattle and bump of long trains of flat-cars on many tracks, the crash of falling boulders, the snort of the straining steam-shovels heaping the cars high with earth and rock, everywhere were groups of little men, some working leisurely, some scrambling down into the rocky bed of the canal or dodging the clanging trains, all far below and stretching endless in either direction, while over all the scene hovered a veritable Pittsburg of smoke.”

 

“Over the face of everything crawls a swarm of little ants that might be men or men that might be little ants,”one British tourist marveled, “One feels like Gulliver in Lilliput.”

 

The noise produced by all this activity put even the more resilient eardrums to the test. As one observer wrote:

 

There was “strident clink, clink, clink of the drills … the shrill whistles of the locomotives … the constant and uninterrupted rumble” of the ever-moving dirt trains, the “clanking of chains” of the shovels, “the cries of men, and the booming of blasts. Collectively the sounds were harsh, deafening, brutal such as we might fancy would arise from hell.”

 

Not only were the sounds were hellish, but so were the smells. As the Americans dug deeper into the earth, foul fissures split and opened up. As Matthew Parker write, there were“cracks that appeared at the bottom of the Cut, spewing out stinking sulphurous fumes or boiling water. Blasts hot enough to char wood were emitted from the ground, caused by the oxidation of iron pyrites in the soil or by the vaporization of water in the intense heat of friction as the despoiled ground writhed and slipped.”

 

These infernal cracks contributed to the nickname that the men soon bestowed upon the Culebra Cut. “Hell’s Gorge”, they called it.

 

> 

Holding his nose and cursing under his breath, the powderman John J. Reidy shifts the heavy box of dynamite to his other shoulder and continues deeper into the Cut, carefully watching his footing. Not only is it a loud and smelly place, you can’t even trust the ground you’re walking on half the time. As David McCullough writes:

 

The most uncanny of all effects, however, was the rising of the floor of the Cut. Not merely would the walls of the canal come crashing down, but the bottom would rise ten, fifteen, even thirty feet in the air, often quite dramatically. Gaillard [an engineer] on one occasion grew concerned as a steam shovel appeared to be sinking before his eyes, but looking again he realized it was not that the shovel was descending, but that the ground where he stood was steadily rising—about six feet in five minutes, “and so smoothly and with so little jar as to make the movement scarcely appreciable.”

 

Naturally all this movement made the excavation efforts…unpredictable. As one Zone administrator commented:

 

“No one could say when the sun went down at night what the condition of the Cut would be when the sun arose the next morning. The work of months or even years might be blotted out by an avalanche of earth.”

 

But even with all fumes and noise and shifting earth, there was a sort of strange, kaleidoscopic beauty to Culebra. It was place, writes McCullough, of “vibrant color. The columns of coal smoke that towered above the shovels and locomotives—“a veritable Pittsburgh of smoke”—were blue-black turning to warm gray; exposed clays were pale ocher, yellow, bright orange, slate blue, or a crimson like that of the soil of Virginia; and the vibrant green of the near hills was broken by cloud shadow into great patchworks of sea blue and lavender.”

 

But the only colors that John J. Reidy is thinking about right now are the red of steak, the amber of beer, and the beige of a soft pillow. After his midday shift is done, he’ll get to head back to camp and catch his 40 winks. Then wake up and do it all over again.

 

The box of dynamite is feeling heavier now, in more ways than one. As John approaches the blasting site, where he will deposit the dynamite, he has to be very careful not to trip on the tangle of red wires that covers the ground like a bed of snakes. In the Culebra Cut, dynamite blasts are triggered electrically. The machines drill deep (10-foot) holes in the rock; then, dynamite charges are inserted into those holes. Next, the charges are connected to copper wires, and when the powdermen have retreated back to a safe distance, an engineer uses a hand-crank generator to blow the charges and turn big rocks into little rocks.

 

With steady hands and a clear head, John J. Reidy carefully inserts multiple sticks of dynamite into a 10-foot bore hole in a wall of Panamanian basalt. There are roughly 51 of these holes, each filled by another powderman, bringing the total explosive force to about 25 tons of dynamite - enough to vaporize anyone within the immediate vicinity. But John isn’t all that worried. These sticks of dynamite aren’t even wired yet. In fact, today’s detonation isn’t scheduled until the end of the day. No, when all these little babies off, he’s going to be far, far away – deep in a pint of cold beer and the arms of more pleasurable company.

 

And that, is the last thought that John J. Reidy ever thinks.

 

Up on the high slopes of the Cut, the workers see the explosion before they hear it. There is a colossal plume of grey smoke that floods the valley, sending ripples into nearby water glasses and chattering teeth to their roots. A fraction of a second later, the sound waves of the concussion climb the walls of the Cut, roaring into the eardrums and shredding the nervous systems of anyone unfortunate enough to be in the vicinity.

 

Down below, foremen stumble to their feet, coughing and patting the atomized rock off their overalls. Their ears are ringing, but their eyes are working. And what they see, is horrifying. Something that will live in their memories for a long, long time. As a West Indian worker named Amos Clarke recalled: “It was something terrible and awful to look at. There was flesh hanging on the faraway trees.”

 

And somewhere among those scraps of skin, and bone shrapnel is the former powderman John J. Reidy. Although he is more powder than man at this point. About two weeks later, in a news article published by the Richmond Planet of Virginia, the American public learned of “the most serious accident in connection with the building of the Panama Canal since the United States took control.”

 

“The dead now total fourteen,” the paper wrote, “Many bodies have been recovered, but it is believed that a score or more are still under the masses or rocks and earth that were thrown up. The death list would have been appalling had a train conveying 500 laborers, passed a few minutes later. This train steamed through the cut and was barely out of view when the explosion occurred. For a distance of 800 feet in length and 400 feet in width the Bas Obispo cut present a graphic picture of the terrible effect of the explosion. The whole hillside had been devastated, the dynamite rending the earth in twain and tossing huge boulders in all directions. A ninety-ton steam shovel lies a complete wreck, crushed under the weight of falling rocks. Every one of the crew was killed. All the tracks in this section were torn to pieces and are now covered with tons of debris. Hundreds of men are on the scene working heroically to find the bodies of their dead comrades. Many evidences are come across of the terrible force of the blast, as here and there pieces of human flesh and bone are turned over with pick or shovel. The charge consisted of fifty-one holes, sixty feet deep and spread out over a large section of territory. The last hole was being charged by John J. Reidy, an experienced powderman, when it exploded. The others were exploded by the concussion. Reidy was blown to pieces.”

 

>> 

As John J. Reidy and many other workers found out, the Panama Canal was not a bloodless endeavor, and accidental dynamite explosions in the Culebra Cut were only one item on the menu of mutilation, disfigurement and death. For Gold and Silver employees alike, it was a working environment that would make an OSHA representative’s toes curl. As one American politician pointed out: “There were no safety guidelines. There was no labor guidelines. Every day men died.”

 

Things happen quickly on the Zone,” wrote census-taker Harry Franck, “and he whom the fates have picked to go generally shows no hesitation in his exit. You needed eyes and ears both in front and behind, for a hundred hidden and unknown dangers kept the nerves taut.”

 

Aside from getting blown apart dynamite, workers had to avoid speeding trains, swinging beams, falling cargo, and a thousand metal object moving at fatal velocity. “There were so many engines at a time in the Cut,”remembered a worker named Rufus Forde, “that most every month, a man lost his leg or was badly damaged.”

 

One day in the Cut, writes Matthew Parker, “a Spanish track layer [was] hit by a locomotive and pushed for about twenty feet along the track. “He was still alive,” a witness said, “with mostly all his skin was stripped off like a piece of ham bone. All I could hear him say was ‘Mi madre, mi madre!’”

 

In another incident, continues Parker, a man named “Teddy Milliery {mill-yair-ee] had lunch at home as usual, before returning to his work site […] . He stepped over the first two tracks across his route, but then, just as he reached a third track, he turned to wave to his wife and baby son watching him from the doorway of their house. At that moment he was hit by ICC Locomotive No. 215, an empty spoil train that was reversing without the customary lookout in place on the end car. According to his official file, his “pelvis and both lower extremities [were] completely crushed.” “I saw the accident and reached Jantje [him] before he died,” [a coworker said]. “I tried to tell him we would look after his wife and baby. I hope he understood me. He had such an awful time dying …”

 

SORTA SOCIALISM

 

And yet, despite all the horrific injuries at the Culebra Cut and hundreds of other construction sites across the Zone, work on the Canal progressed with unmitigated intensity.

 

Understandably, some workers felt that all this effort was more Sisyphean than Herculean. That, for all their digging and dredging, no real progress was being made. As one cynic observed: “My children would come and have children, and their children would come and do the same, before you would see water in the Cut, and most all of us agree on the same.”

 

Others were much more optimistic. As a man named Robert Wood said: “It is hard for me to transmit to you the feeling we all possessed toward the work. Rarely can man see his own work, but we saw it physically… year by year…”

 

“Every day was a story for the grandchildren,” writes David McCullough.

 

In fact, all across the Zone, from Colon to Panama City, daily life seemed to be getting better and better. Gone were the bad ‘ol days of yellow fever, rotten food and unpaved roads. At least to workers on the Gold Roll, when they weren’t within shrapnel distance of a dynamite blast, life in the Zone seemed nothing short of idyllic. As one journalist wrote:

 

“On the train, one finds himself in thoroughly up-to-date coaches, seated among his own race, and altogether it is as if one were taking a summer ride through suburbs of Chicago on trains of the Northwestern or Illinois Central. Only when one looks out of the windows and sees the tropical, luxuriant foliage and thatched cabins of natives perched on the hills is he made to realize that he is in the tropics 2000 miles from home.”

 

Yes, the Zone authorities understood that good worker is a happy worker, and so they spent a lot of money to keep their most valuable employees entertained and content.

 

“Two and a half million dollars were allocated each year to entertainments and recreation, some $750 per white employee,” writes Matthew Parker, “Churches and Sunday schools were constructed, and more playing fields laid out. Most important, however, were the Gold Roll clubs, run by the YMCA. By late 1907, there were four in operation, at Cristóbal, Culebra, Empire, and Gorgona. Each had bowling alleys, a billiard room, a library, and a gymnasium. They also provided the location or focus for a bewildering array of organized activities: sponsored hikes and horse rides through the jungle, amateur theatricals, boat trips to Portobelo, athletic competitions, sightseeing trips on labor trains to the Cut or the locks areas. Lecturers and professional entertainers were also brought in. There were numerous clubs for games including chess, checkers, and bridge. Orchestras, bands, and glee clubs were formed, and lessons offered in everything from Spanish to first aid to Bible study. Over two thousand books were provided in the libraries, where more than eighty U.S. newspapers and periodicals were also available.”

 

And all of these lovely amenities came pretty much free of charge. All courtesy of the ICC, the US government, and by extension, the American taxpayer. As the census-taker Harry Franck observed:

 

“The Canal Zone is the best governed district in the United States. It is worth any American’s time and sea-sickness to run down there, if only to assure himself that Americans really can govern.”

 

In their single-minded determination to build the Panama Canal, the Zone Authorities and the US Army had installed a form of government that most Americans at home would not have recognized, or even approved of. As Matthew Parker writes:

 

Everything, all the essentials of life, were supplied by the “state.” What was this system? they asked. Was it some form of “military paternalism”? Or “welfare socialism”? Certainly, life in the Zone had little in common with the ideas of the capitalist democracy at home. No one was allowed to own meaningful property or vote for the Zone government. And it seemed to work. “The commissary is an assured success,” reported one journalist in early 1909. “It has shown the absurdity of the ancient superstition that organized society, the state, cannot attend to the needs of a people as economically and with as efficient service as can an individual or a corporation.”

 

With all basic needs met by an autocratic government, it was essentially a weird blend of military order, benevolent dictatorship, and socialism. Harry Franck called it “enlightened despotism,” and he was quick to point out the wicked irony of it all:

> 

“A word about socialism on the Canal Zone. To begin with, there isn’t any of course. No man would dream of looking for socialism in an undertaking set in motion by the Republican party and kept on the move by the regular army. But there are a number of little points in the management of this private government strip of earth that savors more or less faintly of the Socialist’s program.”

 

To the more democratically minded, there were obvious downsides to this system. As a resident of the Canal Zone, you could not vote or picket or make demands. And as we have seen, you certainly couldn’t unionize. As one worker commented:

 

“First of all, there ain't any democracy down here. It's a Bureaucracy that's got Russia backed off the map … Government ownership don't mean anything to us working men unless we own the Government. We don't here—this is the sort of thing Bismarck dreamed of.”

 

Others were more sanguine about the situation. After all, when all the necessities of life are met, and entertainment is always just around the corner, what was there to debate about? As one worker wrote:

 

“We are really one of the happiest bunches of workingmen in the world. Most of us would like to stay forever. We feel as though we had temporarily escaped the driving lash of Capitalism and the Profit-System and are enjoying a fore-taste of what life will be for all the workers in the Wonderful Days A-Coming.”

 

As another worker wrote in a dreamy letter back home:

 

“It seems to me, that a dry season night down here, with a moon, is about as near perfection as this world ever gets.”

 

Everyone knew it couldn’t last, of course. When the Canal was finished, and that day was rapidly approaching, this weird little experimental society would roll up like a carpet and be stripped down to its barest bones. A lonely guard-tower where a raging carnival once stood. But for now, for this brief blip of an era, the privileged men and women of the Zone enjoyed their unique status as well-cared-for guinea pigs in a socialist utopia.

 

But the end of this journey, long and arduous as it had been, was rapidly approaching.

 

 

---MUSIC BREAK---

 

 

It’s the summer of 1913.

 

About five years after the regrettable (and combustible) death of the powderman John. J Reidy and the devastating explosion at the Culebra Cut.

 

As most of us are painfully aware, a lot can happen in five years. And a lot has happened in five years. And not just in Panama. In 1910, the country of Mexico descended into a violent revolution. / In 1910, the Japanese empire colonized the Korean peninsula. 1911 marked the end of Imperial rule in China after some 2000 years. In 1912, a little passenger ship called the Titanic hit an iceberg in the North Atlantic and took 1,500 souls with it.

 

Yes, all over the world, things are ending and beginning.

And so it was in Panama.

 

Tonight, on this balmy tropical evening, we are in a small village deep in the Canal Zone. With its thatched roofs, machine shops and grazing fields for cattle, it looks like any of the hundreds of little settlements spackled across the jungle interior. If orbital satellites had existed in 1913, and could zoom their lenses in on Panama, the villages of the isthmus might have looked like so many fireflies on a field of black.

 

Many of these native villages and the people in them have been here for hundreds of years. Their fathers traded with the French. Their grandfathers laid railroad tracks with the Americans. And their great-great-great grandfathers bartered with Spanish conquistadors. In short, these people have been here for a very, very long time; and change is their only constant. These were, notes historian Marixa Lasso, “people who had seen their land survive four different nation-states during the previous 100 years.” In that brief time, they had been residents of the Spanish Empire, then Colombian Republic, then Panama, then that odd colonial entity known as the American Canal Zone.

 

And in this particular village, on this particular night, the rhythms of life are accompanied by the sound of music. In the village tavern, or saloon as the Americans might call it, some local musicians are giving a performance. Nothing fancy, of course. There are no stage lights or microphones – just a handful of talented people plucking on strings, tapping on drums, and raising their voices into the warm night air.

 

And that song might’ve sounded something like this:

[AUDIO]

 

If – like me – you don’t speak Spanish / suffer from monolinguism, that song might sound like a pretty happy tune. Something you’d hear at a wedding or a celebration. But in reality, it is a very sad song. And to those who know, the lyrics are overflowing with frustration, rage and righteous indignation. Here’s a translation/portion:

 

Take the kite before it flies away.

It flies away, it flies away.

Let’s leave Panama soon.

If we don’t, they’ll throw us out.

Because those children of Uncle Sam

Do not have enough with the Canal

They want to seize it all

And the natives of Panama

We can’t even breathe anymore

They demand everything with Liberty.

Uncle Sam’s little Sheep

From our home, they’ll throw us out.

Take the kite before it flies away,

Flying it comes, and flying it goes.

 

Anger has always been a reliable catalyst for good art, and tonight, this song is a way for the native Panamanians to process some of the anger they are feeling. And frankly, they have a lot to be angry about. Because they’re about to lose their homes, their property and their livelihoods. They are being kicked off their land by the Zone Authorities.

 

A year earlier, in 1912, notices had been nailed to walls all over Panama. By order of the President of the United States, it said, the interior of the Canal Zone will be systematically “depopulated”. Across an area half the size of Rhode Island, towns that had stood for centuries would be emptied of their 40,000 native inhabitants, disassembled and destroyed.

 

Ripping these notices off the walls and waving them in the faces of the khaki-clad policemen, the indigenous residents of the Zone wanted to know why they were being evicted from their homes. If they didn’t receive a smack across the jaw with a wooden baton, the Panamanians received a very unsatisfactory answer in its place.

 

Let me put this in terms you can understand, you little savage, the policemen said. We are building a canal, a waterway through your patch of jungle. But that big river – the Chagres River, or whatever you call it – is in the way. It’s like a big blue snake, and it winds through the jungle, blocking our path. So, we are damming the river. Do you understand that word? “Damming?” It means building a big wall of dirt and stone that stops the river. But all that water has to go somewhere, right? Well, the policeman taps his foot on the ground. It’s going to go right here. Your home, and your neighbor’s homes, and their neighbor’s homes…it’s all going to disappear beneath a lake. A lake upon which ships with civilized people from civilized places will move back and forth, up and down the locks of the Canal.

 

So, pack your bags and say goodbye. This is not your home anymore.

> 

By 1913, the Panama Canal was almost complete. The final stage of the terraforming effort was to dam the Chagres River and create the man-made lake that would serve as the bridge between the two staircases of locks. It was the waterway within the waterway. As Elias Marlowe elaborates:

 

At Gatún [G-A-T-U-N], they built the largest earth dam the world had ever seen, a half-mile-thick behemoth that was a mile and a half long. Slowly, the dam rose, and behind it, the waters of the Chagres began to back up, spreading out to form Gatún Lake. The lake, covering 164 square miles, became the world's largest artificial body of water, providing the central highway for the canal and the water needed to operate the locks.”

 

The only problem was, those 164 square miles were occupied by about [thousands] 40,000 people – native Panamanians who needed to be pacified, paid off, and cleared out, and relocated.

 

“An area as large as the island of Barbados, would vanish under water,” writes David McCullough, “Every village between Gatun and Matachín would be covered over, a prospect that the native populace found impossible to imagine. Mile after mile of the Chagres River, the Panama Railroad, nearly everything along the path of the French, not to mention most of the new towns being built, would be lost beneath the lake.”

 

As Harry Franck put it at the time: “Villages older than the days of Pizarro will be forever wiped out by the rising waters.”

 

The Panamanians were understandably…frustrated. They had always been extremely resentful of the American presence on their isthmus. As one British journalist wrote:

 

“the people of Panama look upon Americans as noisy, grabbing bullies.”

 

And it with this new Depopulation Order, it was easy to understand why. Some Americans did attempt to empathize with the plight of the Panamanians. As census-taker Harry Franck wrote at the time:

 

It is not hard to realize why the bush native does not love the American. Put yourself in his breechclout. Suppose a throng of unsympathetic foreigners suddenly appeared resolved to turn all the world you knew into a lake, just because that absurd outside world wanted to float steamers you never knew the use of, from somewhere you never heard of, to somewhere you did not know. Suppose a representative of that unsympathetic government came snorting down upon you one day in a wild fearful invention they called a motor-boat, as you were lolling under the thatch roof your grandfather built, and cried: “Come on! Get out of here! We’re going to burn your house and turn this country into a lake.” Flood the land which was your great-grand-father’s, the spot where you used to play leap-frog under the banana trees, the jungle lane where your mother’s courtship days were passed and the ceiga tree under which she was wedded.”

 

“What though this foreign nation gave you a bag of peculiar pieces of metal for your trouble, when you had never seen a score of such coins in your life and barely knew the use of them, being acquainted with life only as it is picked from a mango-tree? The foreigners had cried, “Take this money and go buy a farm somewhere else,” and you looked around you and saw all the world you had ever really known the existence of sinking beneath the rising waters. Where would you go, think you, to buy that new farm? Even if you fled and found another unknown land high and dry, or a town, what could you do, having not the remotest idea how to live in a town with only pieces of metal to get food out of instead of the mango-tree that had stood behind the house your grandfather built ever since you were born and dropped mangoes whenever you were hungry? To say the least you would be some peeved.”

 

Not only were the Panamanians peeved, they were proactive. Despite the patronizing characterization of them as “bush natives”, these were savvy, intelligent land-holders who did everything they could to resist the encroachment of the Depopulation Order. They organized and appealed and signed petitions. They desperately aired their grievances not only to the Zone authorities but to the government of greater Panama. Unfortunately, they were barking up the wrong ciega tree. Their appeals were denied, and they were told to get off the land immediately, or else be swallowed up by the rising waters of Lake Gatun.

 

 

 

For the Americans, the flooding of the Gatun region and creation of the artificial lake was not only an engineering imperative, it was a convenient excuse to empty the Zone of people they considered undesirable. George Goethals, the Canal’s chief engineer at this final stage, said that he “did not care to see a population of Panamanian or West Indian negroes occupying the land, for these are non-productive, thriftless and indolent.”

 

By depopulating the Zone, they could rid themselves, in the words of one Zone official, of “an undesirable black population, which would deteriorate, be a menace to the welfare of the community, require expensive government and policing system, and be detrimental to the best interests in operating the canal.”

 

There could be “no greater curse to a military post,” said another engineer, “than having squalid native villages or slums adjacent to it.”

 

“Some villagers refused to move out and had to be forcibly evicted,” writes Matthew Parker, “For many of them the drowning of the Chagres valley was like a biblical flood. A way of life based on the river, which long predated Columbus's first voyage, was coming to an end. – Parker

 

Well, by the end of 1913, the interior of the Zone had been cleared, the river had been dammed, and slowly but surely the waters began to rise at 2 inches a day. It wasn’t long before the entire valley, once filled with villages and farms and thriving towns, was completely underwater. Harry Franck gives us a very poetic eyewitness description:

 

“Under the brilliant blue sky it looked like some vast unruffled mirror [..]. “Through a Forest in a Motor-boat” we might have dubbed the trip. We had soon crossed the unbroken expanse of the lake and were moving through a submerged forest. Splendid royal palms stood up to their necks in the water, century-old giants of the jungle stood on tip-toe with their jagged noses just above the surface, gasping their last. Great mango-trees laden with fruit were descending into the flood. The lake was so mirror-like we could see the heads of drowning palm-trees and the blue sky with its wisps of snow-white feathery clouds as plainly below as above.”

 

Back in Panama City, the American engineers shook hands, congratulated each other on a valley well-flooded, and prepared for the final stage of the construction of the Canal. After almost ten years of ceaseless toil, it was time to put the finishing touches on the waterway. It was time to build and install the “locks” – the great chambers that would fill with water and ferry ships across the isthmus like a colossal staircase.

 

2,000 miles away, in the smelters and steel factories of Pittsburgh, private contractors had been hard at work for months, forging and fashioning the massive gates that would serve as the doorways to each chamber. Broken down into components that could be fitted together like gigantic steel LEGOS, the mechanical gates were shipped down to Panama and assembled on site. As Elias Marlowe writes:

 

“Workers poured millions of cubic yards of concrete to form the massive lock chambers.[…] Inside the hollow concrete walls, a labyrinth of culverts, some large enough to drive a train through, was constructed to channel water from the lake to fill and empty the chambers by gravity.”

 

And as with all things related to the Panama Canal, it is truly difficult to put the size and complexity of these things into words. Thankfully, more intelligent people than me have done just that. Here’s David McCullough:

 

“Visitors who stood on the dry floor of a single lock chamber when all of it was still open to the light felt as though they had suddenly lost their sense of scale. Each individual chamber was a tremendous concrete basin closed at both ends with steel gates. The walls, one thousand feet long, rose to eighty-one feet, or higher than a six-story building. The impression was of looking down a broad, level street nearly five blocks long with a solid wall of six-story buildings on either side; only here there were no windows or doorways, nothing to give human scale. The gates at the ends, standing partly open to the sky, were like something in a dream. [….] A single lock if stood on end would have been the tallest structure in the world (at the time), taller even than the Eiffel Tower.”

 

Yet they were something much more than monumental; they did not, like a bridge or a cathedral, simply stand there; they worked. They were made […] of literally thousands of moving parts. […]  In a very real sense they were colossal machines, the largest yet conceived, and in their final, finished form they would function quite as smoothly as a Swiss watch. They were truly one of the engineering triumphs of all time.”

 

Seeing the locks take shape, and rise above the jungle like monoliths must have been an intensely powerful experience for the workers, engineers and administrators who had sacrificed so much time and sweat to bring them to fruition. The locks were, in the words of one observer, “concrete cathedrals” – temples to mankind’s tenacity and ingenuity.

 

Once the locks were complete, any dazed photographers or sentimental onlookers were ushered out of the cavernous chambers. Yes, they were very big. Yes, they were very beautiful, in a brutalist sort of way. But there was a deadline to meet, and now it was time to fill these puppies up and connect a couple of oceans.

 

FINALE

 

It is traditional, when a very large construction project has been completed, to mark the occasion with some symbolic, celebratory gesture. When a library is opened, they cut a ribbon. When a ship is put out to sea, they smash a champagne bottle against the hull. And when a skyscraper is finished, the workers put their signatures on the final beam.

 

But the Panama Canal was not just any old construction project, so to celebrate its completion, the Public Relations operatives in Washington D.C. orchestrated an elaborate and iconic event. Something as daring and fantastic as the Canal itself.

 

On October 10^th, 1913, a mob of reporters and photographers converged on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The dream of an American Panama Canal had started at the White House, so it was only fitting that it ended there / came to fruition there too. Since ground had broken on the isthmus in the summer of 1904, three different Presidents had reigned over the project. Teddy Roosevelt, the man who breathed Promethean fire into the Canal, has long since left office. He was succeeded by his Secretary of War, William Taft. And by 1913, the title of Commander-in-Chief has passed to a fussy beanpole of a man named Woodrow Wilson.

 

At about 2 o’clock in the afternoon, President Woodrow Wilson sits down at a small desk. In front of him is a telegraph machine. Wooden base, brass knobs and a single black button the size of a newly minted quarter.

 

To bring the story of the Panama Canal to a close, President Wilson isn’t going to make a speech or cut a ribbon. He isn’t going to give an address or pose for a picture. He’s going to do what all Presidents deep in their secret hearts want to do. He’s going to blow something up. Just after 2pm eastern standard time, at a nod from his staff, President Wilson extends a gangly forefinger and pushes the little black button.

 

Almost instantaneously, an electrical signal leaps out from the telegraph machine and begins its journey. Zigzagging at half the speed of light down a copper highway of underground wires, the signal travels to Galveston, then to Mexico, then to Nicaragua. It speeds overland and underwater, across jungles and plains and beneath the seas. Just four seconds after President Woodrow Wilson pressed the button in Washington, DC, the telegraph signal arrives at its final destination in Panama.

 

Assembled along the shores of the artificial Lake Gatun, roughly halfway between the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of Panama, a large crowd of spectators holds its breath. The crowd is full of workers and engineers, their wives and children – thousands of people who have been toiling towards this particular day for a very long time. Without saying a word, all of their eyes are fixed on a point in the distance – an earthen dike or barrier, wired with explosives. It is the last barrier separating the waters of the Atlantic from the waters of the Pacific. When that dike blows, millions of gallons of water from Lake Gatun would surge into the Culebra Cut, and flow south toward the Pacific, completing a dream hundreds of years in the making.

 

At 2:02pm, in Washington DC, President Woodrow Wilson presses the button that will ignite the charges. And four seconds later, the dike explodes. As one eyewitness in the crowd recalled:

 

“There was a reverent silence. No one spoke at all. There was a low rumble, a dull muffled B-O-O-M! A triple column shot high in the center, turned, and gracefully fell to both sides like a fountain. From the multitude came a spontaneous long, loud roar of such joy and relief that I felt sure I would remember the sound all my life. As the water poured out of the lake into the Cut, hats came off. We saw Jan, my husband, and the engineer in charge of the Cut shake hands. They were both crying. We were crying, too.” 

 

According to the New York Times:

 

“Intrepid canal workers, who had been hovering about the lake in canoes, turned the noses of their canoes and launched into the rapids caused by the rushing of the water into the cut, while a great throng on the bank cheered wildly and the whistles of locomotives and dredges shrieked a long, piercing salute as the first vessels to make the passage passed through in safety.”

 

If you were making a movie about the Panama Canal, something that surprisingly no one has done yet, this would be the moment where the triumphant score would kick in, blaring over a wide shot of thousands of spectators cheering and crying and hugging.  

 

It would, of course, be some time before the Canal officially opened to international ship traffic, eventually opening its gates on August 15^th, 1914 – but for the people who built it, the men and women who huddled over blueprints and toiled under pouring rain – October 10^th was its own special sort of finale.

 

Like all great victories, the construction and completion of the Panama Canal had come at a terrible cost. In financial terms, the effort had cost the United States roughly 375 million dollars – about 11 billion dollars in today’s money. But in human terms, the cost had been much steeper. From 1904-1913, the Zone authorities recorded 5,855 deaths – and there were likely many more that likely went unrecorded.

 

The complicated relationship between the United States and the Republic of Panama did not end with the completion of Canal, of course. The Americans would rule over the Zone for the next six decades, and full operational control of the waterway would not pass to the Panamanian government until the year 1999, under very contentious circumstances. That, however, is a story for another time.

 

On that triumphant day in October of 1913, many of the men and women standing together on the shores of Lake Gatun would’ve keenly felt the absence of those who were *not* there, standing beside them. People who did not live to see the climax of all their hard work. As one engineer named Jan van Hardeveld wrote:

 

“I couldn't help thinking of those who worked beside me who lost their lives. I thought of the many times when I nearly gave in to doubts that the Canal could ever be completed, that it was ever meant to be. But most of all, I was remembering how my answer to my own doubts, every time, was my faith in my country. I have always believed America could accomplish anything she set out to do.”

 

It was undoubtedly, a remarkable achievement, as Matthew Parker writes:

 

The completion of the canal was at the time history's greatest engineering marvel and a victory of man over nature that would not be matched until the moon landings. When one considers that this world record–breaking construction was carried out in tropical conditions, in a previously disease-ridden area with endemic political unrest, with no local workforce and two thousand miles from home base, the achievement becomes even more impressive.”

 

“It was one of the supreme human achievements of all time,” writes David McCullough, “the culmination of a heroic dream of four hundred years and of more than twenty years of phenomenal effort and sacrifice. 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. 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.”

 

But even the greatest achievements, no matter how massive or awe-inspiring, lose their luster with time. The newspapers stop writing about it. People stop talking about it. The world moves on.  And so it was with the Panama Canal. In fact, no sooner had the waterway opened, than a larger, much more interesting news story rocketed to the top of the front page.

 

In the summer of 1914, something else happened on the global stage. After a certain Austro-Hungarian Archduke was assassinated in Sarajevo, an infernal Rube Goldberg machine of alliances and counter-alliances began clicking and whirring into place, and soon Europe found itself sliding down a muddy bank into one of the most destructive conflicts in human history – World War 1. Yes, the celebratory whistles in Panama were drowned out by the Guns of August.

 

Our old friend Phillipe Bunau-Varilla, the French lobbyist who had orchestrated so much of the diplomacy that facilitated the Canal’s construction, could not resist commenting on the historic overlap: “The two consuming ambitions of my life are fulfilled[…]. The first, to see an ocean liner sail through the Panama Canal: the second, to see France and Germany at war.”

 

In one particularly bitter twist, many of the West Indian laborers who had carried picks and shovels in the Cut, would soon be carrying rifles and spades in the trenches of France as part of the British Army. They had survived Panama, only to be tossed into the meatgrinders of the Ypres and Verdun and Gallipoli. /  / Ypres, the Somme, and Jaffa

 

But for most of the people who had built the Canal, suffered and bled and died for it, no amount of trench warfare in faraway Europe could diminish the scale of what they had accomplished, even though the world would soon forget their individual contributions to it. As Harry Franck, census-taker, travel writer and eyewitness to the Canal’s construction reflected during his time there:

 

Here as in the world at large generations of us may come and pass away, but the tearing of the shovels at the rocky earth, the racing of dirt-laden trains for the Pacific goes unbrokenly on, as the world and its work will continue without a pause when we are gone indeed.

 

Soon the water will be turned in and nine-tenths of all this labor will be submerged and forever hidden from view. The swift growth of the tropics will quickly heal the scars of the steam-shovels, and palm-trees will wave the steamer on its way through what will seem almost a natural channel. Then blase travelers lolling in their deck chairs will gaze about them and snort: “Huh! Is that all we got for nine years’ work and half a billion dollars?” They will have forgotten the scrubbing of Panama and Colon, forgotten the vast hospitals with great surgeons and graduate nurses, the building of hundreds of houses and the furnishing of them down to the last center table, they will not recall the rebuilding of the entire Panama Railway., nor scores of little items like $43,000 a year merely for oil and men to pump it on the pestilent mosquito, the thousand and one little things so essential to the success of the enterprise yet that leave not a trace behind.”

 

In the end, that was the essential lesson of the Canal. As individuals, people are so small and frail and fleeting, but when we combine our talents and passion and resources, and turn them loose upon an impossible task, we [human beings] can do just about anything. As Harry Frank put it on the very last page of his memoir:

 

“Although the world is large, it is also small.”

 

This has been Conflicted. Thanks for listening.

 

 

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