An American History

738 ★ CHAPTER 19 Safe for Democracy: The United States and WWI

In his first major action in the

region, Roosevelt engineered the sepa-

ration of Panama from Colombia in

order to facilitate the construction

of a canal linking the Atlantic and

Pacific Oceans. The idea of a canal

across the fifty- one- mile- wide Isth-

mus of Panama had a long history. In

1879–1881, the French engineer Ferdi-

nand de Lesseps attempted to construct

such a waterway but failed because

of inadequate funding and the toll

exacted on his workers by yellow fever

and malaria. Roosevelt had long been

a proponent of American naval devel-

opment. He was convinced that a canal

would facilitate the movement of naval

and commercial vessels between the

two oceans. In 1903, when Colombia,

of which Panama was a part, refused to

cede land for the project, Roosevelt helped to set in motion an uprising by con-

spirators led by Philippe Bunau- Varilla, a representative of the Panama Canal

Company. An American gunboat prevented the Colombian army from sup-

pressing the rebellion.

Upon establishing Panama’s independence, Bunau- Varilla signed a treaty

giving the United States both the right to construct and operate a canal and sov-

ereignty over the Panama Canal Zone, a ten- mile- wide strip of land through

which the route would run. A remarkable feat of engineering, the canal was the

largest construction project in American history to that date. Like the build-

ing of the transcontinental railroad in the 1860s and much construction work

today, it involved the widespread use of immigrant labor. Most of the 60,000

workers came from the Caribbean islands of Barbados and Jamaica, but others

hailed from Europe, Asia, and the United States. In keeping with American seg-

regation policies, the best jobs were reserved for white Americans, who lived

in their own communities complete with schools, churches, and libraries. The

project also required a massive effort to eradicate the mosquitoes that carried

the tropical diseases responsible, in part, for the failure of earlier efforts. When

completed in 1914, the canal reduced the sea voyage between the East and West

Coasts of the United States by 8,000 miles. “I took the Canal Zone,” Roosevelt

exulted. But the manner in which the canal had been initiated, and the contin-

ued American rule over the Canal Zone, would long remain a source of tension.

In 1977, as a symbol of a new, noninterventionist U.S. attitude toward Latin

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THE PANAMA CANAL ZONE

Constructed in the first years of the twentieth
century, after Theodore Roosevelt helped engi-
neer Panama’s independence from Colombia,
the Panama Canal drastically reduced the time
it took for commercial and naval vessels to sail
from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean.