CHAPTER VII
THE UNITED STATES BEGINS WORK
The probable failure of the French became apparent some years before the actual collapse occurred and public opinion in the United States was quite ready for the assumption of the work and its expense by our government. Of course that opinion was not wholly spontaneous—public opinion rarely is, notwithstanding the idealists. There were many parties in interest who found it profitable to enlist various agencies for awakening public opinion in this country to the point of buying the French property and saving something out of the wreck for the French stockholders. But, as a matter of fact, little artificial agitation was needful. The people of the United States readily agreed that a trans-isthmian canal should be built and owned by the United States government. There was honest difference of opinion as to the most practicable route and even today in the face of the victory over nature at Panama there are many who hold that the Nicaragua route would have been better.
Naturally the start made by the French had something to do with turning the decision in favor of the Isthmus, but it was not decisive. The French had no rights that they could sell except the right of veto conferred by their ownership of the Panama Railroad. Their franchise from Colombia expressly prohibited its transfer to any other government, so it was unsalable. But the charter of the Panama Railroad, which the French had acquired, provided that no interoceanic canal should be built in Colombia without the consent of the railroad corporation. This to some extent gave the French the whiphand. What they had to sell was the controlling stock of the railroad company, the land they had acquired in Colombia, the machinery on the spot and the work they had completed. But all of this was of little value without a franchise from Colombia and the one the French held could not be transferred to a government, and was of little worth anyway as it would expire in 1910, unless the canal were completed by that year—a physical impossibility.
Photo by Underwood & Underwood
PANAMA SOLDIERS GOING TO CHURCH
In 1898 the race of the battleship “Oregon” around Cape Horn to join the United States fleet off Cuba in the Spanish-American war offered just the graphic and specific argument necessary to fix the determination of the American people to dig that canal and to own it. That voyage of 10,000 miles which might have been avoided by a ditch fifty miles long revolted the common sense of the nation, and the demand for instant action on the canal question was universal. Accordingly in 1899 President McKinley appointed what was known as the Walker Commission, because headed by Admiral John G. Walker, to investigate all Central American routes. They had the data collected during almost a century at their disposal and very speedily settled down to the alternative between the Panama and the Nicaragua routes. Over this choice controversy raged long and noisily. While it was in progress the bullet of an assassin ended the life of President McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt succeeded him.
The Isthmian Canal was precisely the great, epoch-marking spectacular enterprise to enlist the utmost enthusiasm and energy of this peculiarly dynamic President. A man of strong convictions he favored the Panama route—and got it. He believed in a lock canal—and enforced his beliefs over the report of the engineers whose expert professional opinions he invited. Of a militant temperament he thought the canal should be dug by the army—and that is the way it was built. Not over tolerant of other people’s rights he thought the United States should have a free hand over the canal and adjacent territory—and when Colombia, which happened to own that territory, was slow in accepting this view he set up out of nothing over night the new Republic of Panama, recognized it as a sovereign state two days afterwards, concluded a treaty with it, giving the United States all he thought it should have, and years later, in a moment of frankness declared “I took Panama, and left Congress to debate it later.”
