panama canal definition us history

panama canal definition us history

The Panama Canal in U.S. History: A Defining Moment of Global Connectivity

1. Introduction to the Panama Canal

Considering that historians concur nationalism and global influence did not blossom on the North American continent until well after the United States was a developed and independent country, newly minted leadership in a world of dominant European powers was a surprise. As a tale stretching from precious early cartographic explorations and blazing with precarious transisthmian land and merchant trading operations all the way to the phenomenal engineering and leadership experiences during U.S. construction, victory persevered via the Panama Canal. In previous non-Spanish ages of European conquest, the multinational hub of Isthmian relations had been the slim Nicaraguan segment, but at an unearthing pace, burgeoning global maritime concerns emphatically aligned their dreams with the Panamanian junction. Central America is continental terrain that logically severs the major isthmus of the Americas, yet persistent human and institutional contributions to crossing the confined space of land between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans cherished the hope materialized as the Panama Canal.

By the early twentieth century, the collective dreams of many nations for safe and efficient trade and global communication were united and personified in a pulsating connection that hewed its way through the Panamanian land mass, embraced two splendid, shining seaboard generations, and linked two great oceans. The completion and vigorous administration of the Panama Canal following the landmark U.S. determination to achieve that accomplishment stand as defining moments in global technological achievement and elite leadership influence.

2. The Construction of the Panama Canal: Technological Marvel and Human Cost

Find a jungle, remove campus squalor, and you end up in the jungles that served U.S. attacks on Spain in Santiago de Cuba in 1898 or more proximate to the point of the Panama Canal, Havana, that same year. By ending urban squalor, U.S. Army occupation of the jungles in Cuba ended outbreaks of yellow fever, but how could you remove malarious squalor? The best approach was to dig. During construction, water with its countless mosquito larvae was drained from cleared land into virtually every Panama Canal lock and eventually into the sea. Today, very much as depicted in some historic propaganda, although with different although still mosquito-encrusted fauna, water condenses on the locks, but there is very little standing water on the lock surfaces. If we now want to protect priceless reconstructions of historic renderings of health, we build massive octagonal display cases.

How could this massive feat of engineering have been completed in such a relatively short period of time and with a limited number of workers? The answer is both disturbing and well known to anyone familiar with canal history: basically, by ignoring human cost. A critical technological advantage of the Panama Canal was the manner in which U.S. Army Major General George W. Goethals conquered yellow fever and malaria, diseases (carried by mosquitoes) that had been a source of tremendous loss of life during the earlier French construction effort. Goethals adopted an earlier U.S. innovation from the construction of the Panama Railroad and then employed it with single-minded vengeance to rid the jungle of disease by making it inhospitable to mosquitoes. By the time Goethals assumed command, Carlos Finlay, the Cuban physician who first demonstrated the connection between mosquitoes and the transmission of yellow fever in 1881, had been lost to efforts to combat the disease which regularly left great swathes of the U.S. Army in static and often futile dispositions, but the awareness of the connection between mosquitoes and disease was widely accepted.

3. The Panama Canal’s Impact on U.S. Foreign Policy and Economic Power

Moreover, traditional Anglo-Saxon rights and freedoms would shape the Nicaraguan and Panamanian governments, which were kept on probation, even when they received vital U.S. support. The canny President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, as his cousin Theodore’s successor, would be forced to plan the future construction of the inferior but vital Nicaraguan route. Despite the imperial U.S. control required to protect the Pacific States and their commercial links with the North-East, the Panama Canal profoundly shaped U.S. aspirations. It transformed judicial and business diplomacy for the Americas and beyond. At the crossroads of international justice, politics, and power, the Panama Canal can justifiably appear as a shining and violent testimony to the United States’ chosen destiny.

Ever since the United States won independence from Great Britain, U.S. statesmen had understood the strategic importance of connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. To them, the construction of a canal would reinforce the protection of these states and would avoid interference in their commerce. Indeed, the Monroe Doctrine aimed to keep the Europeans away, no matter the cost. This justified U.S. intervention to ensure its implementation. The French had tried to dig the Canal without violence, but suffered acute financial and health problems. The Americans were determined not merely to avoid these deadly pitfalls, but also to resolve a number of legal and international claims.

As President Theodore Roosevelt eloquently described his goal, the Panama Canal became an “instrument for the promotion of peace, good will, and understanding among nations.” President Woodrow Wilson, who succeeded Roosevelt, firmly believed it would deliver international “beneficent justice.”

4. Controversies and Challenges: The Panama Canal Treaty and Its Aftermath

Basazi and many others have tried to summarize concepts critical to the process involved, but competing visions of the future and the belief in and perception of inherent rights tended to alienate North Americans and Panamanians. Although the treaties sought to address the narrow issue of canal rights and canal problems, each party reflected a “scepticism deriving from its distinct historical context,” and neither party could aim its critics “simultaneously at its own shortcomings.” Resentment surfaced despite the espionage, terrorism, abuses of spoils, and infighting. Optimists who hailed the treaties saw a model for addressing future conflicts in a rapidly changing world. Sceptics feared the problem would remain a cycle of disputes and crises.

The support of Torrijos and the political maneuvering of Kissinger, Romulo Betancourt of Venezuela, and other Western Hemisphere leaders led ultimately to the Torrijos-Carter treaties, and a 1978 plebiscite ensured a broad national debate. Early polls reflected majority opposition to these treaties, but the public debate, focusing on the Canal’s operational costs, the benefits it had brought the Isthmian republic, and the “rights” of the United States as opposed to the “sovereign rights” of Panama, raised consciousness to subtler issues. The ultimate debates in the Senate confirmed an understanding that a majority of the American people—though not a majority of Congress—did not reject the substance or compromises of the treaties, a conclusion validated by incoming returns on Election Day 1978. Yet the ultimate challenge to the pacification of the Canal came with the “Seabird affair” and last-minute questions in the Senate. Further problems occurred with the effort to ratify the treaties in Panama.

5. Legacy and Significance of the Panama Canal in Modern Global Relations

Today, the Panama Canal Authority (ACP) operates the Canal in a more modern way than when the U.S. Army-run Canal was high on the list of destinations for many worldwide travelers during the 1950s decade. Nowadays not a small part of the Canal’s current importance rests on cargo containers and the specific specialization of Panamax-sized ships and terminals, required to move growing global trade displacement increasingly in search of economies of scale. But the ways and instruments by which the U.S. and Panama would agree and actually carry out the feat of building the Canal with 20th-century technology would also be a collective lesson to be used in building a new future under circumstances where, certainly, the prospects now are more numerous and potentially less deadly, and undertaken with greater historical global awareness.

Some years after the Canal’s opening in 1914, except for wartime periods, the waterway would be an almost tangible symbol in all “handshakes” business news of the “connected” world economy. After World War II, and especially during the Cold War with the Soviet Union during the 20th century’s second half, the Panama Canal would become still more important by connecting the United States with the bleeding edge of defense technology. Military signals, radio, aviation, satellite, and other growing telecommunications connections gave both the U.S. and USSR considerable military advantages during the lengthy period of Cold War tensions. After the Canal’s handover to Panama, in the early morning of Dec. 31, 1999, the United States would still maintain the right to defend the waterway against military threats in an actual wartime situation.