How to Hide an Empire by Daniel Immerwahr

Author:Daniel Immerwahr
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473545335
Publisher: Random House

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What this rotting empire needed was faster transportation. And that required seizing land. Captain Mahan had suggested opening a canal through the Central American isthmus, which divided the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, and Roosevelt agreed. He tried to buy territory from Colombia, without luck. He tried threatening and got no further. Finally, concluding that bargaining with Colombia’s leaders was liking trying to “nail currant jelly to a wall,”8 Roosevelt threw his support behind rebels, who declared Panama’s independence from Colombia. The newly established republic then leased to the United States a ten-mile-wide strip of land slicing through the middle of the country: the Panama Canal Zone.9

Still, more territory, more problems—problems of precisely the moving-things-and-people variety. The hot and rainy neck of land throbbed with disease-bearing mosquitoes. Panamanians who had lived with those mosquitoes their whole lives had acquired immunity to yellow fever and resistance to malaria.10 Outsiders, however, were fresh bait. Of the first batch of U.S. mainlanders to arrive in the Panama Canal Zone, nearly all were immediately laid low by malaria. Later officials came bringing their caskets with them.11

They weren’t being paranoid. Yellow fever, malaria, chronic diarrhea, dysentery, pneumonia, and bubonic plague tore through the zone. “I shall never forget the train loads of dead men being carted away daily as if they were just so much lumber,”12 remembered a carpenter. “There were days that we could only work a few hours because of the high fever racking our bodies—it was a living hell. Finally, typhoid fever got me.”

If not typhoid, malaria, or—Jesus—the plague, then perhaps a venereal disease? It was too much to hope that a construction project involving tens of thousands of workers wouldn’t also engender prostitution. The Panamanian cities bordering the zone were a “whirlpool of vice,”13 a New York editor declared. Still, canal workers seemed all too happy to visit them, passing syphilis and gonorrhea to one another in the process.

Those fit to work faced other challenges. The area to be dug out was a “dark and gloomy jungle,”14 one early arrival noted, “an apparently hopeless tangle of tropical vegetation, swamps whose bottoms the engineers had not discovered, black muddy soil, quicksands.” The ruins of a previous French effort to dig a canal—abandoned equipment rusted, sunken into the earth, and covered in vines—served as an ominous warning.

The canal’s managers understandably sought to escape from this morass by staying in Washington. But communication between Washington and Panama was limited to an expensive telegraphic trickle, making management from afar extremely difficult. Delays, pileups, and breakdowns ultimately provoked Roosevelt to fire the canal commission and install a new one willing to work from Panama.15

The point here is that, to open a canal, the United States had to exert colonial control. In fact, it transformed the Panama Canal Zone into one of the most intensively governed spots on the planet. Brigades marched forth to cut brush, drain swamps, and put up screens. They fumigated buildings with pyrethrum,16 an insecticide made from the petals of chrysanthemums—at peak they imported more than 120 tons a month.

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