A Will and A Way
Against all odds, a headstrong president and an unflappable Army engineer combined forces to join the Atlantic and the Pacific
As far as Teddy Roosevelt was concerned, George Washington Goethals was the ideal solution to a big problem. In an age of empire building and international commerce, the dream of joining the Atlantic to the Pacific inspired politicians across the world. But making that dream into a reality was a challenge that had defeated engineers for decades.
Goethals was 48 when Roosevelt asked him to take over the Panama canal project. He was an Army engineer, a quiet, competent veteran of construction projects across America. But his primary qualification in the eyes of the headstrong president was that he wouldn't be able to quit. Indeed, Goethals told a friend at the time: "It's a case of just plain straight duty. I am ordered down--there was no alternative."
The dutiful civil servant found himself in charge of the world's largest engineering endeavor ever. By the time it was completed in 1913, it had set scores of records--for everything from the amount of earth moved to the amount of concrete poured to the number of workers killed on a job site. It was a symbol of both American power and American spirit. "It put all the resources of American ingenuity and the industrial force of the 19th century to work in an incredibly remote location," says David Shayt, a curator at the National Museum of American History.
When Goethals arrived in Panama, he was well aware of the project's problematic past. The tropical heat and humidity of Panama had proved to be the downfall of a French attempt to conquer the isthmus two decades before. Indeed, the French effort was a catastrophe all around. Rampant corruption plagued the efforts to raise money in France; yellow fever, malaria, typhoid fever, smallpox, and other tropical diseases decimated the workers struggling to carve a sea-level canal out of the jungle. Yellow fever and malaria alone claimed thousands of lives in the decades before doctors understood that the diseases were carried by mosquitoes. "It's estimated that a whole generation of French engineers died before yellow fever was conquered," says Luis Alfaro, the Panama Canal's current chief engineer. "Learning to control yellow fever was a key element."
American planners were undaunted by the French failure. On the contrary: "We were encouraged," says Rhodes College historian Michael LaRosa. "We decided we could do it better." As a result of the French experience, the American effort tackled the yellow fever problem right off the bat. Medicine had made significant strides since the French were stymied by the dread disease, and the idea that mosquitoes carried malaria and yellow fever--though still controversial--at least gave American planners a tangible enemy.
The challenge they faced was in many ways the public-health equivalent of the massive engineering project to come-- "the most costly, concentrated health campaign the world had yet seen," writes David McCullough in his history The Path Between the Seas. Hundreds of tons of chemicals and kerosene oil were applied to the cities and towns of the isthmus in a concerted fumigation campaign. Running water was made available in major settlements. Within a year and a half, yellow fever had been wiped out.
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