It's been called one of the seven wonders of the modern world. Man-made waterway. 50
miles long that forever altered the face of the Earth. The Panama Canal exceeded any
countries capacity. If a 1904 you asked me to put money I would have said no, it cannot be
built. Nobody knew how this was going to be done. Did your graphic location of Panama the
Isthmus of Panama has always been coveted as a way of making the oceans meet, with the
building of the Panama Canal the realization of a dream. Became an expression. Of the
power, the strength. They might have a growing nation. Cornelia, 100 years the Panama
Canal has stood for the triumph of technology over nature. But when it was built at the
dawn of the 20th century, it was simply an audacious gamble. Colossal engineering project.
The likes of which the world had never seen. It's a story of inspiration. It's a story of
humanity. What man can ensure with the pick and shovel to dig the canal. It used science
and engineering and government to improve the country and really improve the world. But
it has a dark side as well. It is also a symbol of arrogance. Thor, Iti and power. The canal
really announced the United States as the leading country in the world. It demonstrated an
extraordinary will and determination. They had succeeded in conquering nature as no one
had ever done before. In early July 1905, and American Steamship made its way towards the
Isthmus of Panama. The narrow ribbon of land between North and South America and the
two largest oceans in the world. Among the passengers on board was John Van Hartevelt, a
30 year old engineer from Wyoming. He read in the newspaper about a new government
project. An ambitious plan to link the Atlantic and the Pacific with the canal. And he was
determined to be part of it. A Dutchman by birth, Jan was a newly minted citizen of the
United States and a fierce champion of his adopted country. In America, he liked to say,
anything is possible. The building of the Panama Canal would be no exception. A heavy
suitcase in my hand. The sweat rolling down my face. I stumbled along the wet slippery
track. Which I've been told to follow until I found a place to turn off. In the deep darkness I
seem to have walked miles. And I never dreamed there could be such unearthly noises. To
me, they sounded like the howling of demons. Well, I decided that turning back looked
almost as hard as going on. So here I am. Jan van Hartville was just one of hundreds of young
Americans now living on the Isthmus of Panama. They've been arriving for months from San
Diego, Cincinnati. Pittsburgh, Charlotte. Former railroad engineers then file clerks and recent
college graduates. All of them eager to be part of what one observer called. America's
mighty March of progress. At this particular moment, there's a lot of positive thinking going
on in the United States. There are these sort of iconic structures, the transcontinental
railroad, the Brooklyn Bridge, all of them accomplishing feats that naysayers had predicted
who could not be done. So there is this fascination with human triumph over adversity.
Americans feel that we are at the cutting edge. The idea of building a Panama Canal seized
the imagination of the American public. This was the great unfulfilled engineering challenge
of the world. For nearly 400 years, people had dreamed of building a canal that would slice
through the slender Isthmus of Panama and make the world great oceans meet. The French
had been the first to try. The year was 1880 and Ferdinand Delesseps, the legendary builder
of the Suez Canal. Was looking for a second act. Well, Ferdinand Delesseps was a great
national hero who done this great magnificent thing of building the Suez Canal. He was
called Lagrand Francais. He was endlessly appearing in the magazines and his beautiful wife
and his lovely children. He was seen as incredibly virile. He was endlessly touring the
country, where he'd pull in huge crowds to come and see this, the hero of sewers. The thing
about this Suez Canal was that it was a flat, level passage through a dry desert. It couldn't
have been more different from the Panama Canal. If anything, Panama was the most difficult
place in the whole world to build a canal. You've got really thick jungles full of snakes and of
course, mosquitoes that will give you malaria or yellow fever, and then you have deep,
almost bottomless swamps. You've got the thick, heavy mountain range. And perhaps worst
of all, you've got the Chagres River. Which is one of the most volatile rivers in the world.
Despite the warnings of experts who said it could not be done. The lessons directed his
engineers to carve a canal through the isthmus. They spent the next 8 1/2 years locked in a
losing battle against the jungle. Everything that could have gone wrong went wrong for the
French at Panama. There were fires, there was flooding, there was an earthquake. There
was continuous epidemic of yellow fever. There was a huge amount of corruption. When the
crash of Delesseps Venture finally came in 1888, it was thunderous. In less than a decade,
more than a billion francs, about $287 million, had been all but squandered. Meanwhile,
accidents and disease and claimed to staggering 20,000 lives, most of them W Indians, had
been imported to do the heavy labor. The Lesseps, the one time hero of France. Was
bankrupted and only narrowly escaped prison. Delesseps was broken in the last years of his
life. He sat looking out a window with a 3 year old newspaper by his side. He had especially
been driven insane. By the whole experience in Panama. For 10 years, the spectacular failure
of the French cast a pall over the isthmus. In the eyes of most of the world, Panama was a
miserable sinkhole, a place synonymous with corruption, disease and death. The Americans
took a different view. No nation on Earth had more to gain from a canal than the United
States. The close of the 19th century had been witnessed to it's astonishing rise. The sudden,
dramatic expansion of its industry. It's gathering economic might. It's surprising aggression
against Spain in the war of 1898. Now on the threshold of the new century, the brash young
country, barely 100 years in existence, was poised to become one of the world's great
powers. To President Theodore Roosevelt, who took office in 1901, the canal was the
obvious path to America's future. Rosa wanted American power to be projected outside of
the North American continent, really for the first time. The key to this was for him the
building of the Panama Canal, which could link the two oceans and provide a conduit for C
power. This was the crucial thing for him. He saw the canal essentially as Bill Wade, protect
American interests, particularly American commerce in the United States was the number
one industrial power in the world. And when you begin to look the world in those terms,
then what you begin to think about was how do you get from New York to the markets of
Asia? This is the first time in American history we start to think globally. To Roosevelt, the
notion of an Isthmian Canal. It's a key piece of the puzzle. Of world empire and a kind of
providentially ordained. World domination that the United States is meant to enjoy,
whoever could connect and have the two seed there, Lantic and the Pacific, will be the
global power. If we are to hold our own in the struggle for supremacy, Roosevelt insisted.
We must build the canal. But the rights to the land in Panama proved difficult to negotiate.
Panama was a small province of Colombia, and once the United States decided to build the
canal in Panama, they tried to reach an agreement with Columbia. Roosevelt insisted on
huge amount of control over where the canal was to be built, however. The Colombian
Constitution expressly forbids any sovereignty to be given away for any parts of the country,
and effectively this is what the Americans were demanding. So the Colombians rejected the
treaty. They not only rejected it, Colombian legislature rejected it unanimously. Roosevelt
thought we have. One objective, and we're not gonna allow this small, little insignificant
country get it get in our way. Roosevelt felt that the United States should leading the way in
improving the world, even if the bits of the world didn't necessarily want to be improved. So
he had an option. Either he could just simply invade Panama and take it, which he
considered doing, he sent spies to go and check out the possibility of achieving that, or there
was another option, and that was for Panama to declare its independence under the
protection of the United States. As Roosevelt well, new Panamanian elites had been plotting
revolution for years. Now, with a nod from Washington, they made their move. On the
morning of November 3rd, 1903, the rebels seized the isthmus. Aided by the well timed
appearance of an American gun boat in the harbor at Cologne. Their revolution was over by
Sunday. Is Soul casualties a foreign born shopkeeper and a luckless donkey? Three days
later, the United States formally recognized the New Republic of Panama. The best part was.
The way they did it is instead of fight against the Columbia, they just send bags of money to
pay off all the Colombian troops to go back to Colombia. So this was a bloodless revolution?
Columbia. They didn't imagine the audacity of Teddy Roosevelt. We will make Panama into a
new independent country. They will sign us off this track of land, and then we will have a
canal and they will have a nation. And that was the birth of the nation of Panama. It was
arrogant, but then again America was emerging into an international order where to be a
self respecting power, you had to be arrogant. The British were arrogant, the Germans were
arrogant. God knows the French were arrogant. So this self assertion by America. Was part
of a certain kind of culture. The treaty, later signed with the Panamanians gave the United
States effective sovereignty over the so-called canal so. A 500 square mile swath that
stretched clear across the isthmus and cut the new nation in two. The Panamanian
leadership was, of course, extremely grateful to the Americans for their support in the
revolution, but the honeymoon period was incredibly short. As soon as the American started
actually laying out the boundaries of the zone, Panamanians realized that they had been
sold out. When Roosevelt called, one of the future highways of civilization was now
America's to control. All that was left to do. Was build it. When the news of the Panama
Revolution came through, it was immediately apparent that it had carried out with the
connivance and with the support of the United States. And this left the the public very
confused and very divided. But there was a feeling that the underhand and internationally
illegal way in which the Americans had contrived the revolution had somehow sullied
America's reputation. There were headlines saying might makes right. You know, we are just
now like the Europeans who are, who grab land whenever they want. And there was a
feeling that something that had made at the United States different, that had made it better
than the other great powers had been lost. On May 4th, 1904. The American effort in
Panama officially got underway. To oversee the project on the ground, Roosevelt had
selected a seasoned, seemingly unflappable 51 year old engineer from Chicago named John
Finley Wallace. But the real authority rested with the Isthmian Canal Commission. A
presidentially appointed panel charged with approving virtually every decision made in the
canal zone. With the National Treasury footing the bill for the project, the Commission was
determined that not a single penny be misspent. Every time he wanted to do something,
every time he wanted to hire A cart, you'd have to fill out a form in triplicate and send it to
Washington. And this, of course, brought utter paralysis to any anything that Wallace was
trying to do. As yet, the Americans had no real plan. Going to pick up where the French left
off. And dig a massive ditch through the isthmus. Some 50 miles in length and about 30 feet
below sea level. Slated to run from Cologne, the harbor on the Caribbean. All the way South
to Panama City on the Pacific. The canal would have to cut through dense jungle. Across the
flood prone chug List River Valley and then through the steep mountain pass known as
Calibra. Wallace had only 3500 men at his disposal. 1500 of them new recruits from EU S the
rest W Indians leftover from the French effort was such a token force and tons of machinery
badly in need of repair. He was uncertain how to proceed. He wanted time, at least a year,
he said, to experiment with equipment. And all of the time there was this huge clamor back
from back at home to make the dirt fly. Roosevelt wanted action, so of course Wallace had
to start digging the minute he got there. In November 1904, under pressure from
Washington, Wallace ordered excavation to begin at Culebra to meet the challenge of the
mountains. He imported 2 Bucyrus steamshovel's 95 ton behemoth that could dig up
roughly 8 tons of rock and Earth with a single scoop. But there were not enough trains to
haul the spoil away, and what trains there were kept running off the tracks. It was an
impossible situation for him to deal with his chief engineer. The key to the successful
exploration of the canal was about moving the spoil that was dug away from the site
otherwise. Everything would stop if the shovel didn't have anything to load the earth onto.
The shovel would stop. Make the dirt fly, who's a disastrous approach to the huge
engineering challenge that Wallace was facing. The problems only multiplied. Just weeks
into the digging at Culebra, three men on the isthmus contracted yellow fever. In December
there were six more. Yellow fever could cause internal bleeding, bleeding from the gums and
internal hemorrhaging that would cause the black vomit or woman Tony grow, which was
terrifying. Yellow fever. The fever attacking and killing everybody. Fever got got everybody
scared. Nobody wants to come to the isthmus to work. The fear don't go down to that
project because you may not come back the horror that maybe death is stalking us the same
way it's stock the French. Within three months, 500 of the Americans flee in January as the
epidemic spread. Wallace tried to project confidence and made a show of riding around the
canal zone with his wife. Then it became known that the couple had quietly imported 2
metal coffins. I am thoroughly sick of this country and everything to do with the canal when
American, wrote his mother. Tell the boys at home to stay there. Even if they get no more
than a dollar a day. By June 1905, nearly 3/4 of the American labor force had fled the
essence. Overwhelmed and suffering from nervous strain. Wallace soon resigned his post.
The project looks doomed. With project comes to a standstill and Theodore Roosevelt goes
nuts. It looked as though what was going to happen to the United States had been exactly
what happened to France. And this is traumatic for Americans. And how? Dangerously close
to failure, the whole US enterprises. The Americans had been in Panama for more than a
year, and $78 million already had been spent. But so far only about 15 million cubic yards of
spoil had been excavated, which left hundreds of millions still to be removed. At the rate
things were going, one worker guest. The canal would not be finished for 50 years. I'm
convinced that there isn't a place in the world that can beat this is miss for rain. It rains so
much that, honest to goodness, my hat is getting moldy on my head. I haven't had a dry pair
of shoes in weeks. Jan van Hartevelt arrived in Panama just as chief engineer Wallace was
leaving. And for the first few weeks, it was hard not to wonder if he'd made a mistake. He
put more than 2000 miles between himself and his family, left his wife, Rose alone with the
children. And all for a project that was floundering. D rose the food is awful and cooked in
such a way that no civilized white man can stand it for more than a week or two. I grew
careless last week, and before I realized it, I was one sick hombre. Stomach out of order and
my blood full of malaria bugs. I'm taking no more chances than I can help with being sent
home wrapped in a wooden overcoat. Morale in the canal zone was at an all time low win.
At the end of July 1905, Wallace replacement as chief engineer finally turned up. His name
was John Stevens, and his reputation preceded him. Some years before, as a surveyor for
the Great Northern Railroad, he tricked hundreds of miles through the Rockies to plot out
the lines passage over the Continental divide. Word had it that he'd since built more miles of
railroad than any other man alive. Now he's been asked to rescue the largest government
project in American history. Stevens was an absolutely brilliant railroad engineer, very much
a frontiersman. It fought wolves and Indians. It survived in incredibly harsh environments.
And he arrived in Panama and he took a look around and he saw everywhere disillusionment
and fear. I believe Steven Slater wrote that I faced about as discouraging a proposition as
was ever presented to a construction engineer. Stevens notice straight away that part of the
problem was what he called the idiotic how to make dirt fly. He had enough experience to
realize that on a project of this enormous, unprecedented scale, he would have to spend a
very great amount of time just getting the whole thing ready. So therefore, even though he
knew that Roosevelt and the press back in the United States would be horrified, he ordered
that digging to stop. For Stevens, the first order of business was to retool the Panama
Railroad, which had been built in the 1850s and was by now so decrepit that he once
described it as two streaks of rust, and right away. Stevens realized that this was going to be
a huge exercise in logistics. The job of building the canal would be very much a job of just
moving, removing, hauling out. Thousands of carloads of dirt. He understood that the
railroad was gonna be the heart of the effort. In the system Stevens ultimately devised, the
railroad would function as a giant conveyor belt, and its position would shift continuously to
accommodate the work as it progressed. To speed the relocation along, he sees on an
ingenious innovation a swinging boom mounted on a flat. Car that could lift and move yards
of existing crack without first having to take it apart. Then he traded the railcars for open
sided flats fitted with a plow. Which could empty a 20 car train in about 10 minutes. Stevens
estimate the two rigs would do the labor of 900 men working by hand. The cleverest it'll
trick that he did was to plan the work so that the digging would start at either end of the
nine mile, collaborate, cut, and move towards the middle, which is the highest point. This
meant that when the empty spoil trains came into the cart, they will be climbing up to the
shovels, and when they were full they would have the benefit of the gradient to take away
their enormous loads. Engineering at its simplest and most brilliant. At first, the projects
most formidable challenge seem to be the mountain pass at Culebra. To dig the canal there,
the Americans would have to bore down as much as 300 feet. Through rock gravel. Clay on
earth? Along a court order some 9 miles in length. As Stevens put it to a colleague at
Culebra, we were facing a proposition greater than was ever undertaken in the history of the
world. But after a few months on the ispas at the height of the rainy season. Stevens began
to realize that the Chagres was an obstacle every bit as daunting. Throughout the summer
and fall of 1905, he watched as the swollen river surged over its banks again and again.
Flooding the works all up and down the line. Gradually it began to dawn on. If he and his
men built a sea level canal, as the French had attempted to do and Washington was now
expecting. The child was to administer operation for more than half of each year. Stevens
realized building a sea level canal would almost certainly condemn the American Canal to
failure. Just like the French, Stevens was totally horrified by this. He went to Washington. He
hated politicians. He hated going on on a boat. He got the horribly seasick. But he went to
Washington and he talked face to face with Roosevelt and convinced him, convinced the
president that a sea level canal would be total madness. How can you get a boat to move
from one side to the other side and to cross the mountain? Stevens and the rest of American
engineers. We need to find a new way to do it. The answer was a lock canal, a highly
engineered mechanized waterway. That would solve the multiple problems of Panama all at
once. First, to control the Chagas, a massive dam would be built in cartoon. Creating an
artificial lake some 85 feet above sea level. Roughly in the middle of the canals planned
route. In order to get to this lake, the ship would be raised by a series of locks. These locks
are each going to be these huge concrete structures, more than three football fields long.
They're gonna hold 10s of millions of gallons of water then to the race ships up over the
American continent, in effect. What it was was to set up a step so series of steps
hydraulically elevate the ship. Word of boats will go up at step, come across it would sail
across the artificial lake, go through Calabro, cut, which of course now didn't need to be cut
out nearly so drastically. And then would descend again in steps down into the Pacific and
away. To build the lock canal in Panama, the Americans would not only have to damn the
turbulent Chagas and create the largest artificial lake in the world. They also would have to
design locks nearly three times longer than the longest ever constructed. The plan was
wildly ambitious. But Roosevelt had backed it, and Stevens was confident it could be done.
There is no element of mystery involved in it, Stevens reported to Washington. The problem
is one of magnitude, not miracles. To Jan van Hartevelt, the canal zone now seemed infused
with a sense of purpose. A scientist, supervisor, work gang in the caliber cut, he spent his
days building track for the spoil trains. All around him, roads were being paved. Streetlights
installed, orbs and warehouses built, dormitories and dining halls banged together. But I'ma
come. He decided to send for his family. Dear Rose, the slowness of work would be
discouraging if I were not certain that our government can and will accomplish whatever it
sets out to do. That is why, since you have made no objection, I have made my decision to
stay. And I am happy to be able to tell you that the quartermaster has at last assigned me to
marry quarters. The house is an old one at Laskas, the village where I'm not working. It was
the first house built here by the French and is marked House #1. It was late winter 1906
when rose packed up her belongings, said her goodbyes to Wyoming and set off with her
children for Panama. She hadn't laid eyes on her husband in more than half a year. She
spent most of the voyage laid low by seasickness. But as their destination neared, she felt a
sudden rush of enthusiasm. This will be our chance, she told her children. To be among
those who make history. Your Papa is helping to build the big canal, the waterway that has
been in the minds of men for centuries. It will unite the two oceans, the Atlantic and the
Pacific. And alter the course of the ships that sail upon them. This canal, when it is finished,
will change the face of the Earth. Of all the challenges confronting John Stevens, none was
so urgent as the need for workers. By his estimate, the canal project would generate some
20,000 jobs in 1906 alone. Of those, 5000 were positions for skilled workers, blacksmiths,
carpenters, drill operators, plumbers, and they were reserved for white U.S. citizens. But the
vast majority of the jobs in the canal zone were unskilled. Thousands of men were needed to
cut, brush, dig, ditch is, load and unload equipment and supplies. The French had relied on
the West Indians for manual labor. Stevens had other plans. Stevens, when he done all his
railway building in the United States, had mainly used Chinese labor. He considered that to
be the best. When he got to Panama, he saw that the workforce is mainly West Indian and
he didn't like or trust the West Indians at all. John Stevens wasn't happy about relying on
West Indians. Because he, you know, sharing in the racial beliefs of the day. He saw them as
too lazy, not intelligent. Stevens kept up a continuous campaign to recruit elsewhere. He
experimented with workers from Spain and Greece and Italy. But in the end, he had to take
men wherever he could find them. Nowhere did he find more than in the nearby islands of
the West Indies. Landed here. On the 21st of January. 1907. On their parents of the place, I
felt like I'll go right back home because everything looked so strange and. Different to being
brought up home or so I felt like I'd go back home, but I'm so easy to do that. Recruitment
proved especially successful on the tiny island of Barbados, where jobs were scarce, pay was
low and young men were an easy target for American advertising. They created what was
called the Panama man. Which is to get someone that went to Panama and bring him back
and he will be the advertiser. When he came back to Barbados from Panama, he came back
with a white trousers, white jacket, gold teeth. Panama had 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 the
Panama and get mine too. Where I had some friends and they all were getting ready to go
and they wanted me to go and I joined them and I left from Saint Lucie went to Bridgetown
to the Transportation office, and I signed up there for a clip to the canal. I had no recognition
of what was going to happen. I couldn't conceive. I haven't yet seen the cloud. I hadn't yet
seen no part of the operation. Until after I reached a employment. Then I began to realize
what a stupendous of fear this would be. Panama was perceived as the way of getting
riches. But what they did not know was the price that they had to pay to do that. The
journey from Barbados took an average of eight to 10 days. Then came the shock of the
canal zone. West Indians found as they got to the canal zone that things were very different
from what they had known in Barbados. the United States created a very regimented world.
They had shacks. And they had bunk beds on all four walls. All four walls had bunk bed,
three layers of bunk bed. Very hard facility that was part and parcel that type of society that
was created. As the Barbadians soon learned, everything in the canal zone came down to
how you were paid. Skilled workers, invariably white. Received their wages and gold.
Unskilled workers who were largely black and silver. So-called Gold Roll employees enjoyed
privileges such as paid sick leave and laundry service and holidays off. For Silver Row
employees, there was nothing of the kind. From this emerged the system of segregation on
the works, whereby everything was marked either silver or gold, whether it's a toilet,
whether it was a post office, whether it was a shop or a drinking fountain. I remember my
my stepfather talking about it. It was a kind of a Polish stop segregation. It didn't say black
and white. Like you understood that if you weren't a Cold War and you were a silver war,
that you were on a black side. It worked exactly like it worked in the United States and the
states they call the system for black colored. In Panama they call it silver. What is Terra
gation? That was the whole the humanizing strategy, and that gave them moral justification
for viewing them as a beast of Labor. In the West Indies, Stevenson found exactly what he
needed, a seemingly inexhaustible supply of men willing to endure harsh treatment and
heavy physical labor in exchange for as little as $0.10 an hour. They knew that they had to
send money home. That was the reality, $0.10 an hour was much more than they would
make in in the Caribbean. By the close of 1906, Stevens had a labor force of some 24,000
men at his disposal, and though he never wanted them, more than 70% were W Indians.
Rose van Hartevelt had made her family hold again by coming to Panama. But she was one
of very few American women in the canal zone, and she'd never been so lonely in her life.
Jan put in more hours on the job than he ever had in Wyoming. Leaving Rose to cope with
the miseries of jungle living all on her own. In the local stores, she remembered not one
edible thing with familiar. And she wound up feeding her children a steady diet of fruit,
beans and soggy crackers. The house smelled of bat droppings, and it was overrun with
lizards and insects. Slowly but surely, my natural fortitude was giving way, Rose later wrote. I
was becoming a nervous, fearful woman. Then her youngest, whom the family called Sister,
came down with a fever. Her round face was pale, and the cold sweat stood out in beads all
over her body. It was malaria and dysentery, and a dreary time we had of it. She became a
limp, feverish little bundle, crying night and day. All the time I was becoming lower and
lower in spirits. And less able to cope. By the time sister finally recovered, Rose had been
driven to the verge of collapse. I believe it was the consciousness of what would happen to
the children, she wrote. It kept me from going to pieces. The story was the same all over the
canal zone. Malaria, dysentery, pneumonia. But nothing was worse than yellow fever. Each
year, epidemic swept across the isthmus, killing men by the hundreds, inciting panic, utterly
paralyzing the word. When the Americans arrived in Panama, it was obviously clear that
there had to be a medical officer, and one of the leading yellow fever specialists was an
army doctor called Colonel William Gorgas. Gorgeous had made his name as a frontier
doctor in the United States, and on one of his postings he caught yellow fever and he
recovered, and thereafter he was immune and he decided to make it his life's work to battle
this terrible disease. For centuries, yellow fever had been thought to be caused by filth, and
efforts to combat the disease, add, revolved entirely around sanitation. But during a posting
in Havana, Gorgas had developed a new protocol. Working from an obscure theory in a
Cuban medical journal that blamed yellow fever transmission on infected mosquitoes. He
carried out an extensive eradication campaign in Havana. Over the course of one year,
yellow fever cases there had fallen by more than 95%. Kill the mosquitoes, Kirgis argued, and
yellow fever would disappear. Go get strived in Panama. Absolutely 100% convinced that the
mosquito theory of yellow fever transmission was correct. Or go to proposal together to
implement a plan similar to that which he had done in Havana. His project was a lot bigger
though, because in Havana he just had to clean up one city, but in Panama he had to clean
up two urban areas. Separated by 500 square miles of swamp and jungle. Gorgeous put
together a $1,000,000 proposal and submitted it to the Panama Canal Commission, and they
approved $50,000. $50,000 they just didn't get what he was trying to do. The gentlemen of
the Commission simply didn't believe the mosquito theory. They called it the various boulder
dash. There was a feeling that we needed a sensible Dr not this sort of crazy Gorgas with his
wild mosquito theories. And actually, one of the leaders of the Canal Commission tried to
get him fired and replaced with a friend of his who was actually an osteopath. With no
experience of Tropical Medicine at all. On the eve of Gorgas dismissal. President Roosevelt
received a visitor at his home at Oyster Bay. His personal physician, Dr Alexander Lambert.
You are facing one of the greatest decisions of your career, Lambert told him. If you fall back
on the old methods, you will fail, just as the French fail. If you back gorgeous, you will get
your canal. Lambert appeals to Roosevelt Ego, and he says this canal is your project and it's
your choice. And Roosevelt buys it. He says get behind Gorgas and give him the authority
and the resources he needs and so mosquito eradication can begin in earnest. With the
blessing and backing of chief engineer Stevens. Gorgas launched the most expensive public
health campaign in history. William Gorgas is an army officer, so the cleanup effort was
conducted with military discipline and precision. He spends $90,000 on screening. He goes
about screening off patients so that mosquitoes cannot bite them and transmit their case of
yellow fever. And he goes about fumigate, Ng the houses throughout the canal zone to kill
adult mosquitoes. And then the more extensive effort is to find mosquito larvae and all of
the water sources in town and kill the larvae. He discovered that if you pull oil on top of the
water, you smother the mosquito larva. He called them wrigglers. So he had to go through
every single house, every shack in Panama City and Cologne, all along the line of the canal,
and find every single water tank, every little puddle. And get them covered with oil.
Gorgeous teen is swarming all over the Panama Canal zone. They had to screen gutters. They
had to put lids on water cisterns. Gorgeous even got a law passed to make it a $5 fine to
have a wiggler in your home. He is at war against the mosquitoes. And he's going to kill them
to the last. By August 1906. The monthly tally of new yellow fever cases had fallen by nearly
half, to 27. A month later, the count was down to just 7. Then on November 11th, Gorgas
called his staff into an autopsy room. And told him to take a good look at the corpse on the
table. It was, he rightly predicted, the last yellow fever victim they would ever see. The idea
that gorgeous was able to conquer this problem is still kind of unbelievable to me. He ended
up tracking down individual mosquitoes, which is unbelievable in this this jungle where it
essentially never stops raining. And it worked and it saved thousands of lives. Really was a
huge part of what made the digging of the canal possible. By the fall of 1906, Stevens
carefully designed excavation. System was running at peak efficiency. It had taken him the
better part of an exhausting year to prepare. He'd overseen the construction of thousands of
buildings. Hired thousands of men, spent thousands upon thousands on new equipment and
supplies. Finally, the real work of building the canal was underway. Over the months and
years to come, millions of cubic yards of rock and Earth would have to be loosened and Doug
and loaded hauled away. Enough spoil. It was said to build a Great Wall like Chinas clear
across the United States. From Washington, Theodore Roosevelt was watching. Despite the
progress in Panama, his pet project lately had come under fire. With critics howling about
alleged graft, corruption and American boys supposedly ruined by prostitution and drink.
With the president, needed now was a news story for the nation's front pages. He's got a
very big PR problem, but if anyone knew how to deal with a PR problem, it would save her.
Roosevelt and Roosevelt decides that he'll go down to Panama and see what's going on first
hand. And it's the first time an American president, while in office, leaves the United States. I
want to see how they're going to dig that ditch, how they're going to build that lock, how
they're gonna get through that cut, Roosevelt told the press. It's a business trip. I want to be
able to tell people as much as I can about the canal. TR's trip to Panama. Tells you a lot
about his mastery of new media. He knows that if he goes to Panama, it will be a media
event. Newspaper reporters are doing stories on exactly what his stateroom looks like on
the ship, where he's going to stop along the way. You know, even before he gets to Panama,
it has captured the attention of the country. The presidential vessel dropped anchor at
Lemon Bay on November 14th, 1906. An entire day ahead of schedule. Everything had been
scrubbed and whitewashed and made ready for his visit, and they work, wires lined up. They
were balls and parties. But even before the welcoming party started up their their songs, he
was already on on the isthmus. He'd snuck away from his boat and was poking around in the
hospitals and in the barrack rooms. Roosevelt was determined that nothing would be hidden
from him. 8 The delivery went when the Panama was at its wettest. And it rained and rained
and rained as it only kind in Panama. The rains are coming down. He's, you know, saying
that's fully great to have so much rain because he wants to see Panama at its worst.
Everywhere he went, he was making promptly speeches urging the workforce to be men and
to fight for the for this fantastic achievement that would cover the United States with glory.
He made the man that were building the earth feel like they were special people. Give them
pride what they were doing for the United States. He had this amazing energy. The people
who were designated showing around were totally exhausted after the first few hours. For
Roosevelt, the biggest draw in the canal zone was the Culebra cut. For each month, Stevens
and his crew set a new excavation record. He got his look early on the second day. With a
flock of newspaper photographers hard on his heels. He marched up to one of the
mammoth beast, Cyrus steam shovels. Ask the operator to slide over and hoisted himself
into the drivers seat. One of the most famous photographs ever taken of a United States
President. That's a great photo that that really announced the the key themes of the United
States in the canal zone, Peerless leadership, American industry, efficiency, technology,
science. Was going to master the canal project that was going to do what France never could
have done. In all, the president spent 12 days on the isthmus. 12 days that rose, van Haar
deviled, and many other Americans would remember as the turning point for the canal. We
saw him once on the end of a train. Jan got small flags for the children and told us about
when the train would pass, so we were standing on the front 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 of yawns confidence in the man. Maybe this
ditch will get dug after all, I thought. Late on the night of January 30th, 1907. 18 months into
his tenure and at the close of yet another 14 hour day. John Stevens sat down at his desk in
his office near Culebra. And composed a letter to Theodore Roosevelt. Mr. President, he
wrote. You've been kind enough on several occasions to instruct me to address you directly
and personally, and I will in this case. The honor, which is continually being held as an
incentive for being connected with this work appeals to me, but slightly. To me, the canal is
only a big ditch. It was an extraordinary thing to send to a president, he said. He didn't like
Panama. He never wanted the job in the first place. It had enough. And he wanted to go and
do something far more lucrative elsewhere. Look at this letter. And was absolutely furious
he'd been in Panama talking to the workforce is that they were all martial soldiers. They
must stick to their tasks. And now the leader that he had backed was resigning. But I think
Stevens was utterly exhausted and the incredible scale of the problems that he inherited
from Wallace. Really. It's amazing that he laughed as long as he did. Wallace had worn out
and quit. Stevens had worn out and quit. Roosevelt basically said, I want a military man who
can't quit until I tell him he can quit. Who has absolutely no choice. That's that's how it's
gonna be from now on, and that's what he got in in Goethals. George Washington Goethals
was 48. An expert in hydraulics and one of the finest engineers in the Army core, he was
also, as Roosevelt now made plain. The chief engineer who would see the canal through to
completion. As Goethals told a friend, it's a case of just plain straight duty. He arrived on the
isthmus in late March 1907. A month later, the Steam Shovel Man, the backbone of the
entire excavation effort, went out on strike, demanding a wage increase of more than 40%.
They've already the best paid people on the Isthmus and growth was basically pulled the
plug on it and he decided he was going to gradually recruit strike Breakers. Hiring new crews
would take time. Meanwhile, the digging ground to a halt. Two weeks passed, then four.
Still, Goethals refused to negotiate. Instead, he sent the strikers packing. None of them
would be permitted to return to Panama. He could deport anyone from the isthmus who it
was in any way causing any kind of trouble whatsoever. Anyone who complained, asked for
more money would simply be got rid of. By the time that you, Cyrus shovels, finally went
back to work in July, manned by new operators, Goethals had made his point. As he later put
it, the outcome showed conclusively that defection by any one class of men could not tie up
the whole work. Truth became known as the Czar of Panama. He not only ran the
engineering effort, he also ran the canal, zone, government, the post office, everything
reported directly to him. He had total power on the isthmus. His express mission was that
everything was subservient to getting the canal made. By the time Goethals took over, the
Americans had been in Panama for three years, and the bulk of the work still lay ahead. On
both the Atlantic and Pacific sides of the isthmus, the lock basins had yet to be dug. And the
locks themselves constructed. At cartoon the site where the Chagas would be damned to
form the lake, a foundation of solid rock had to be laid before building could even begin.
Meanwhile, to keep the river from continually flooding the works at Culebra. A massive ****
had to be put up at Gamboa. And then there was the cut itself. Excavation had so far
managed to widen it by over 100 feet. But the immense task of digging down had barely
begun. With Goethals and charge, the Culebra cut would become around the clock
operation with as many as 6000 Men At Work at any given time. If we arrive there now, but I
think the first thing would strike us would be the noise. There would be maybe 300 drills
going. There would be 60 or 70 shovels each with three or four trains. There were constant
explosions. And all of this noise with reverberate off the walls as well as the noise was
immensely hot, up to as much as 120 degrees. Very soon it became known as Hell's Gorge.
And more than anything, it was incredibly dangerous. The cut was the most challenging part
to dig because you had to get down through so much earth that became so much mud when
it rained as it did almost nonstop for nine months out of the year. And there were just
constant landslides. That here is 2 team after whistles. Bring out and they know that
something went wrong. The slide. So they have to use pick and shovel some dig them out.
They knew that next slide could come down on them two and better them too. The
mountain didn't want to be. Crushed the way they did it. In the mountains fall back. The
slides came without warning again and again. Wiping out months of work in an instant,
twisting track and machinery beyond recognition. Literally burying men a lot. Nearly all the
victims were W Indians. There were no safety guidelines. There was no labor guideline every
day. Men die and with a regular situation, so now they have to bring in more men and more
men and more men. Assigned to the most punishing and hazardous work in the cut. The
West Indians were the ones on the ground, hauling lumber and ties, shoveling Earth. Laying
the dynamite that was used to blast through the mountains. They haven't really these holes,
you know? I don't feel that. The fillet with Doctor Mark Brenda. So that's going to shut
down. 345 places start to class. Big Rock spring open here. What happened? Sometimes
somebody. Mega mistake. And touched you in the wire. And that guy is gone up to. It
happened a Sunday morning when they picao was their payment. Picard always in the
explosion. In a couple hundred men and got a couple hundred men. Like you see bits of men
here in The Hague, Yonder and although picking it up for days. Boy, that was that wasn't an
easy day Sunday morning. My grandfather told me the guys that go up front with the
dynamite, that they will leave. With their buddies. Do you belonging? God never know if
they're coming back up. With a daily situation that today, this morning you have breakfast
and somebody in that table having breakfast may not be there for that evening. So it's that
type of situation. Now that I am old and sometimes I sit down there and these things, every
collection, you know, and what I went through. I'm still alive. I raised my hands. I said. Thank
God, because. Awkward about our could have been dead several times. As the weeks went
by, the death toll rose. Eventually, Goethals had the railroad tracks extended all the way out
to Mount Hope Cemetery so the bodies could be buried more easily. Meanwhile with each
passing month. The cut at Calabra grew deeper. With the darkness came noises so weird and
uncanny as to make the flesh creep with the strangeness of it all. The very worst was the
wailing for the dead that came from the labor camp below us. When one of their numbered,
I'd, the friends and kindred of the deceased word, drink rum and wail and saying Old English
gospel hymns. No matter how fast asleep I might be when the first sound of that eerie
screeching slapped the air. I was wide awake and out of bed. It was like the dance of the
witches. Looking back later, Rose van Hartevelt would marvel, but she and Jan had ever
gotten used to living in Panama. More than once, she recalled. Their commitment to the
project and wavered. And after Jan's closest friend was killed, they actually had considered
going home. Why should we stay any longer? Rose remembered thinking. The canal could
get built eventually without us. The Americans had a very serious problem in that the white
workforce were largely arriving and pretty much leaving straight away. They didn't like
working in Panama and right up until 1907 there was something like 100% turnover in white
staff. This was a potentially deal breaking problem, and the answer to it was to provide
every single home comfort that they could. Frozen Jan the inducement to stay came in the
summer of 1908 in the form of a newly built cottage on a pretty tree lined St. The house was
clean and comfortable. Rose remembered just about the type of home a man in the states
would try to provide for his family. As time passed, there were other improvements as well.
Ice boxes and electricity and YMCA club houses built by the government and outfitted with
cardrooms, pool tables and libraries. There were dances on Saturday nights and baseball
games on Sunday, more than three dozen churches and scores of clubs and fraternal
organizations. The Brotherhood of Railroad trainmen and the Odd Fellows. Sojourners lodge.
In the Knights of Pythias. As Rose remembered it, all the perks had their desired effect.
American men stayed in Panama longer. Their wives and children came to join them. And
friendships in the canal zone deepened. He drew together in a sort of compact click rose
recall, and nothing else seemed quite so important as this immense project, moving
gradually and steadily to completion. This was our life. The canal project increasingly
became looked upon by Americans as as kind of a utopian representation of the United
States. There are these glowing journalistic accounts of it. The workers are happy. Everyone
is well fed, contented. The reality was that it was a very autocratic state. No freedom of
speech, no rights to a union. More power being asserted at every step. The United States
government was creating an efficient factory workforce. Forward this incredible Earth
shifting project on the Isthmus of Panama. There was no democracy at all. But at the same
time, things got done. Mountains were moved. It worked. By 1911, the Americans were
finally making real progress on the canal and headlines all over the world. Suddenly now,
tourists from everywhere were flocking to Panama to see the engineering marvel of the age.
But the Americans were doing with the canal, said one odd visitor, was the greatest liberty
ever taken with nature. No aspect of the construction compelled such fascination as the
gargantuan locks. The so-called mighty portals to the Panama Gateway. These locks are
these huge concrete structures with these incredibly elaborate culverts. They are this
enormous engineering challenge. The biggest engineering project there's been in the history
of the Earth until then? In all, some 5,000,000 bags and barrels of concrete went into the
building of the locks, dams, and spillways. Mixed on site and deposited into enormous 6 ton
buckets. The concrete was then hoisted by Crane, delivered by cable way. And poured from
above. The amount portica tune alone, some 2,000,000 cubic yards, could have built a wall
12 feet high and long enough to encircle the island of Manhattan more than four times. This
was a far bigger locks and ever been constructed before and really it was about it was about
just doing everything much bigger. There were couple of very clever ideas, one of which was
to have the lock Gates hollow and water tight, so therefore buoyant, which meant that far
less of the weight had to be carried by the locks hinges. Although they were 80 some feet
high, they were so precisely balanced. They could be operated by a single 40 horsepower
motor. Full operation with power BI electricity, and this was in the very early days, for this
was before many factories were electrified and this electricity was generated nearby by the
water from the spillway by hydroelectric and this powered all of the systems that made the
locks work. The locks with the mechanical marvel of the canal. These locks are more than
just tons of concrete, said one observer. They are the answer of courage and faith to doubt
and unbelief. In them are the blood and sinew have a great and hopeful nation. The
fulfillment of ancient ideals. And the promise of larger growth to come. In the spring of
1913. Nine years almost to the day after the Americans started work on the Panama Canal.
They began at last, to finish it. In May, steam shovels #222 and 2:30 dumped their last loads
and met in the centre of Calabra cut. In June, the last spillway at Cartoon Dam was sealed.
Allowing the waters of Gatun Lake to rise to their full height. In August, the ***** at either
end of the line were blown and the oceans rushed inland to the gates of the locks. In
September, the first trial Lockage was made. From the Atlantic Harbor at Cologne all the way
up to the lake. By summer's end, there was only one remaining dry span in the channel. The
nine mile stretch of Culebra cut. And that was to be flooded on Monday, October 10th. Early
that afternoon, a crowd began to gather at Gamboa on the edge of Gatun Lake. Workers and
their families visiting dignitaries from the United States. Tourists from as far away as Europe
and East Asia. At 2:00 PM, in a stunt devised by a newspaperman, President Woodrow
Wilson was scheduled to push a button at his desk in the White House, releasing by
Telegraph a current that would blow up the Gamboa ****. And send the waters of Gatun
Lake rushing into the cut. We could easily see the **** with men still working around it. Not
many yards to one side was the gash of the cut. Not very deep here. The small waves lapped
eagerly at the edge, as though the lake was also waiting to let go of its overload of water.
Tension mounted. Jean van Hartevelt put it to Rose. The event would either be a historic
success or a historic failure. No one knows. At Gamboa, the clock struck 2. There was a
reverent silence. No one spoke at all. There was a low rumble, a dull, muffled boom. Triple
column Shanghai 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 yarn and the engineer in charge of the cut shake hands. They were both
crying. We were crying too. The canal's official opening was scheduled for Aug 15th 1914. 12
days before. A ship called the Crystal Ball made a final practice run. And became the first
seagoing vessel ever to successfully crossed from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific through
the Panama Canal. It's pretty amazing going through the locks. You nose forward into this
space. Then 26 million gallons of water pour by gravity through underground culverts into
that lock and raise you up 30 feet or so. It's an amazing, beautiful, dramatic experience. And
when you're on the ship and you feel it rising up and you move, you feel it rising up and
you're witnessing what's happening, your ship climbing a mountain. I mean, that is mind
boggling. It had taken 10 years of ceaseless grinding, toil and outlay of more than $350
million, the largest single federal expenditure in history, to that time. And the loss of more
than 5000 lives. But the successful completion of the Panama Canal had defined the United
States to the world. And announced the arrival of a new power. For the new century, it was
a symbol two Americans. This is what American power technological know how.
Determination, managerial organization, all of those things that Americans prided
themselves on and still do. To a certain extent, this is what it can do for the whole world.
After 500 years, people dreaming. Now it was done on Atlantic and Pacific Oceans were
forever United. The United States word now firmly established as the most powerful nation
on Earth. It all occurred at such a pivotal moment in our history. The failure of the French
effort was very much the the sort of the dying gasp of the Victorian age that had been
dominated by Europe. With the opening of the American Canal. The power in the world has
shifted irrevocably, and the American Century effectively could begin. Though the Panama
Canal was arguably his greatest legacy. Theodore Roosevelt never saw it once it was
finished. An expedition to South America kept him from attending the canals official
opening. And he never again visited the isthmus. Of the 10s of thousands of West Indians
who'd come to Panama to build the canal. Most simply returned home again. Quite often
with not much more money in their pockets than they'd had when they left. The building of
it was a harsh nightmare for diggers. But it's one of the wonders of the world, and it with
pride that my grandfather with contemporary look across at that. Knowing that it's one of
the biggest enterprise that the world has ever seen. And that they have participated in that.
They did it. For Jan and Rose van Hartevelt, the years in Panama had been an epic
adventure. Of all the Americans who had been employed on the isthmus. Jan was one of the
very few who'd been there since the beginning. And this rose remembered the award he'd
earned for long service. The Roosevelt Medal was always in his pocket. Sometimes in the
evening, she would find him staring off into the distance. Turning the tiny scrap of metal
over and over in his hand. I couldn't help thinking of those who worked beside me, who lost
their lives. I thought of many times when I nearly gave into doubts. But 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've always believed that
America could accomplish anything she set out to do.