Seaway to the Future: American Social Visions and the Construction of the Panama Canal

2. American Triumph: Explaining the Canal Project

2 O American Triumph Explaining the Canal Project When most of the Panama authors were writing their books and articles, the Canal had almost become a reality. But could the average American actually comprehend what had been achieved in the Isthmian jungle, thousands of miles away, employing technological and logistical innovations on a scale never seen before? For this task, the storytellers had to construct the Panama Canal all over again through their writings and images. They had to explain to the readers in the United States why it was relevant. Their writings, along with other travel accounts , photographs, and exhibitions at world’s fairs depicting the new and often exotic dependencies of the United States, constituted what the historian Ricardo Salvatore has called the “soft machinery of empire .”1 President Roosevelt had envisioned the Canal as a national endeavor, charged with meanings far beyond the commercial benefits that an interoceanic waterway had promised for centuries. With Roosevelt ’s and the other expansionists’ ideas in mind and well aware of the challenges facing the American middle class—their readership—at the beginning of the twentieth century, the Panama authors embarked on their mission. As a result, they interpreted the Canal project as a defining moment in the history of the nation, and as a utopian model for its future. 55 From Pest Hole to Health Resort: The Containment of Disease In the early years of the Canal construction, tropical diseases were perhaps the most threatening aspect of life and work on the Isthmus and powerful enough to let the project fail. The resident poet James Stanley Gilbert expressed no doubts regarding the unhealthy nature of the Panamanian jungle. In one of his most frequently quoted works, he exclaimed: Beyond the Chagres River Are paths that lead to death— To the fever’s deadly breezes, To malaria’s poisonous breath! Beyond the tropic foliage, Where the alligator waits, Are the mansions of the Devil— His original estates!2 Only a few years later, historian Charles Francis Adams, brother of Brooks and Henry Adams, noted that the Canal Zone was “to all appearance an agreeable winter health-resort.”3 How was this radical change in perception possible? Adams continued: “Thus the Canal Zone is an object lesson, and the Canal itself a monument; for the last was, humanly speaking, made possible by a medical triumph, the like of which in importance to mankind has not been equalled since the discoveries of anæsthetics and antiseptics.”4 The defeat of yellow fever and, to a lesser extent, malaria became the opening chapter in the success story written by the Panama authors. Throughout the nineteenth century, medical science made important advances, and yet the origin of many diseases remained a mystery. The most significant drop in death rates in the British military at home and around the world, historian Philip Curtin argues, occurred during the midcentury decades and was achieved by empirical measures (such as preventive medicine and improved water supply) unrelated to specific medical research.5 During the American Civil War, the centralized logistics of sanitation, applying everywhere the same kind of general measures , had proven successful. Faced with recurring health crises such as the yellow fever epidemic in Memphis in 1873 and in the Mississippi Valley in 1878, more and more cities decided to establish municipal health boards authorized to carry out vigorous measures.6 It was widely 56 American Triumph O believed that most infectious diseases were transmitted by filth, touch, and poisonous gases (miasmas, or bad air). Politicians were convinced that “massive cleanup campaigns” in the industrialized cities were the best response.7 From the 1880s on, the revolutionary but slow success of the germ theory, stating that infections such as cholera and typhoid fever were caused by bacteria, demonstrated the need for sewage systems and the regulation of food suppliers. Beyond disease containment, health propaganda also became part of the middle-class leaders’ attempt to control the life of the urban lower classes. The instructions regarding hygiene regulations given to immigrants from Europe upon arrival in the United States may serve as an example.8 “Miasmatism” continued to serve as an explanation for the spread of yellow fever and malaria, even though scientists had expressed doubts about the theory for many years. Mosquitoes had long been named as the possible transmitters: in 1848 by a physician from Alabama and again in 1882 by a professor of obstetrics...