Don't Know Much About History, Anniversary Edition: Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never Learned (Don't Know Much About®) (48 page)

After the war in Cuba and the
Oregon
incident, the American appetite for a canal was reawakened. President McKinley authorized a commission to investigate the best route for the canal. When Roosevelt, the great apostle of American sea power, took the White House, the enthusiasm became that of a raging bull. Initially, Roosevelt tilted toward a Nicaraguan canal, a longer route but thought to be an easier dig. A Nicaraguan canal also offered the advantage of being closer to American ports on the Gulf of Mexico. An angry Senate debate followed, with Senator Mark Hanna leading the way for Panama. When the French company dropped the asking price for its assets from $109 million to $40 million, the Panama route became more attractive. Only one problem remained. The “dagos” in Colombia, in Roosevelt’s phrase, who still owned the territory, were asking too much.

The solution presented to Roosevelt was simple. If Colombia stood in the way, just make a new country that would be more agreeable. Led by a former director of the French canal company with U.S. Army assistance, Panamanians revolted against Colombia in November 1903. The American battleship
Nashville
steamed south and pointed its guns in Colombia’s direction, and Panama was born with the U.S. Navy for a midwife.

Recognized faster than any new government had ever been, Panama’s regime received $10 million, a yearly fee of $250,000, and guarantees of “independence.” In return the United States got rights to a ten-mile swath across the country—the Canal Zone—“in perpetuity.” Since the zone comprised most of Panama and would be guarded by American troops, the United States effectively controlled the country. Years afterward, Roosevelt would proudly say, “I took the Canal and let Congress debate.”

A few months later, Americans took over the remnants of the French project, and in 1904 the first Americans were in Panama. From day one, the work was plagued by the same problems the French met: tropical heat, the jungle, and the mosquitoes. One of the few positive results of America’s Cuban experience was the discovery that mosquitoes spread yellow fever, and the disease had been eliminated from Havana during the American occupation. But there were still plenty of people who thought the idea that mosquitoes carried disease was nonsense, and they kept U.S. Army doctor William Gorgas, the health officer in Panama, from carrying out a plan of effective mosquito control.

When railroad builder John Stevens came to Panama in 1905 as head of the project, to give the dig the organization it needed, he also gave Dr. Gorgas a free hand to eliminate malaria and yellow fever, a task accomplished with remarkable efficiency, given the circumstances of the environment and lack of scientific appreciation. Unfortunately, Jim Crow also came to Panama. Most of the laborers were blacks from the Caribbean. They were housed and fed separately, and paid in silver, while whites were paid in gold. According to David McCullough’s epic account of the creation of the canal,
The Path Between the Seas
, the death rate by accident and disease for blacks was about five times that of whites in Panama.

Without explanation, Stevens left the dig, replaced by army engineer George W. Goethals. Roosevelt put an army man in charge so he couldn’t quit as previous administrators had done in the face of the project’s overwhelming difficulties. Taking over in 1907 and building on the plan and reorganization left behind by Stevens, Goethals completed the canal ahead of schedule and under budget, despite the challenges the canal posed and the enormous changes the original plan had undergone as work proceeded. More remarkably, according to McCullough, it was completed without suspicion of corruption, graft, kickbacks, or bribery.

First planned under McKinley, aggressively begun by Roosevelt, and carried out by his successor, Taft, the Panama Canal was completed in 1914, under Woodrow Wilson. Ironically, the grand plans for a gala opening were canceled. War in Europe was looming, and news of the canal’s completion was lost in preparations for the coming hostilities.

Must Read:
The Path Between the Seas
:
The Creation of the Panama Canal
by David McCullough.

A
MERICAN
V
OICES

O
RVILLE
W
RIGHT,
describing the first flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina (December 17, 1903):

The machine lifted from the truck just as it was entering on the fourth rail. Mr. Daniels took a picture just as it left the tracks. I found the control of front rudder quite difficult on account of its being balanced too near the center and thus had a tendency to turn itself when started so that the rudder was turned too far on one side and then too far on the other. As a result the machine would rise suddenly to about 10 ft. and then as suddenly, on turning the rudder, dart for the ground. A sudden dart when about 100 feet from the end of the tracks ended the flight. Time about 12 seconds (not known exactly as watch was not promptly stopped).

What happened at Kitty Hawk?

On December 17, 1903, two self-taught engineer-inventors named Wilbur and Orville Wright did something that other people had only dreamed of for centuries. In a 750-pound plane powered by a twelvehorsepower motor and launched from a railroad track laid in the sand dunes of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, they flew the first heavier-than-air craft. Surprisingly, their initial success didn’t cause much of a stir. Many people, including the members of the press, initially did not believe them. Even the U.S. Army was dubious and refused to offer the Wrights a contract for more than three years.

But their first flights launched a revolutionary era of aviation heroics. It is astonishing to think that those brief flights would lead to a moon landing only sixty-six years later, while also creating a huge industry in wheeled luggage and small bags of roasted nuts.

In September 1908, Orville Wright took the first passengers on a flight. One passenger, Thomas Selfridge, holds an unfortunate distinction. He was the first man to die in a plane crash from injuries suffered on September 17, 1908.

What was the “big stick”?

That he would start a revolution to suit his needs came as no surprise to anyone who knew Theodore Roosevelt. His record to that point—as cattle rancher, New York State legislator, civil service commissioner, New York City police commissioner, Navy secretary, soldier, governor of New York, and then president—had been to act forcefully and leave questions of law, propriety, and good sense for others. His favorite saying, used often in public and private, was an old African proverb: “Speak softly, and carry a big stick; you will go far.”

Although he rarely spoke softly himself, he was always ready to use a big stick, abroad and at home. His first chance to use the big stick came when 140,000 mine workers went on strike in May 1902. Underpaid, forced to buy overpriced supplies in company stores and to live in company-owned houses, the miners were kept in perpetual debt and had organized as the United Mine Workers (UMW) under John Mitchell. The mine companies, owned almost exclusively by the railroads (meaning, for the most part, J. P. Morgan), refused to recognize the union or to negotiate. As the work stoppage threatened to cripple an economy largely run on coal power, Roosevelt stepped in and threatened to use troops. But unlike in the past, when they had been used as deadly strikebreakers to force workers back into the mines, these troops would operate the mines in the “public interest.” With this “big stick” over their heads, the mine owners agreed to accept the ruling of an Arbitration Commission, which ruled favorably for the miners. The victory was more Roosevelt’s than the union’s, but it allowed the cowboy president to carve another notch on his six-shooter.

Using the strengthened Sherman law, Roosevelt went after other selected targets, subjectively labeled “bad trusts,” such as the “beef trust” (
Swift & Co. v. United States
, 1905) and the American Tobacco Company. Roosevelt was hardly a radical; he believed that monopoly was fine as long as it could be regulated, and that there were benevolent trusts, such as International Harvester. But his tenure produced reforms that were significant and long-lasting, such as the strengthening of the Interstate Commerce Commission, the creation of a cabinet-level Department of Labor and Commerce (later separated into two departments), and the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act, a law inspired by a bunch of “muckrakers” (see below).

In foreign affairs, Roosevelt was even more willing to wield his big stick, especially in the Caribbean and the Philippines. In 1904, he sent troops into the Dominican Republic, which had reneged on debts to Great Britain. Roosevelt put Americans in charge of Dominican revenues until the debt problem was solved. This was an example of what was called the Roosevelt Corollary, which added to the Monroe Doctrine and said the United States had “international police power” to correct wrongs within its “sphere of influence.” Though effective, Roosevelt’s overbearing treatment of nations he viewed as racially inferior won America no friends in Latin America, which had been reduced to a collection of vassal states.

Ironically, in the wake of policing the Caribbean and overseeing the subjugation of the Philippines, Roosevelt won the Nobel Peace Prize by mediating an end to the Russo-Japanese War in 1905 at Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Divvying up substantial chunks of Asia, the treaty may have created more trouble than it solved. Japan got Korea and guaranteed that it would leave its hands off the Philippines, now in the American “sphere of influence.” But the high-handedness of Roosevelt’s dealings left a bitter taste in Japanese mouths.

To prove to the Japanese that he meant business, Roosevelt sent forth the big stick in the form of the Great White Fleet. The result of a modernization and overhaul of the navy, this armada of sixteen ships cruised around the world in 1907, an impressive display of American naval power that also pointed up to the Navy its shortcomings in being too dependent on foreign supplies at sea.

Must Read:
Mornings on Horseback
by David McCullough;
The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt
by Edmund Morris;
Theodore Rex
by Edmund Morris.

Who were the muckrakers?

“Big stick” was only one of Roosevelt’s frequent expressions that became enshrined in the language. Among presidents, he had a singular ear for a turn of phrase. A voracious reader with an astonishing sense of recall, he could quote at will from a wide range of sources, from African proverbs to obscure military dissertations or, in another famous case, John Bunyan’s allegory
Pilgrim’s Progress
. In 1907, exasperated by the work of a growing number of journalists who concentrated on exposing graft and corruption, Roosevelt compared them to Bunyan’s “man with the Muck-Rake,” a character so preoccupied with the filth at his feet that he fails to grasp for the “celestial crown.”

The appellation “muckraker” stuck and was happily accepted by a new breed of American journalist best represented by Ida M. Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens, and Upton Sinclair. In newspapers, magazines such as
McClure’s
and
Atlantic Monthly
, and books—both nonfiction and fiction—a generation of writers had begun to attack the widespread abuses that abounded in American business and politics. In a sense, the trend began with Twain and Warner in
The Gilded Age
. But muckraking reached its heights in the early twentieth century. In 1903,
McClure’s
began to serialize the articles written by Ida M. Tarbell (1857–1944) about Standard Oil. The result was her landmark investigation of the company,
History of Standard Oil Company
. At the same time,
McClure’s
was running a series by Lincoln Steffens (1866–1936) about urban corruption, collected in the book
The Shame of the Cities
(1904).
McClure’s
also ran early portions of social reformer Jane Addams’s book
Twenty Years at Hull-House
(1910). Addams founded Hull-House with Ellen Gates Starr as a settlement house to assist immigrants in adjusting to American life, and more than four hundred of these sprang up in cities around America, inspired by Addams’s example. At first culturally high-minded, the settlement houses eventually provided basic educational and health care that could not be found elsewhere for hundreds of thousands of immigrants in the sprawling tenements of the inner cities. But Addams and her colleagues were fighting an impossible battle in an era when government assistance to the poor was considered blasphemous and communistic.

In New York, the plight of immigrants also emerged through the reports and photographs of Jacob Riis, himself an immigrant. In his 1890 book,
How the Other Half Lives
, Riis exposed the crime, disease, and squalor of the urban slums.

A new generation of novelists was adapting these journalistic techniques to fiction as well: Stephen Crane in
Maggie, a Girl of the Streets
; William Dean Howells in
The Rise of Silas Lapham
; Frank Norris in
The Octopus
. Perhaps most famous of all was Upton Sinclair’s
The Jungle
, a novel that blisteringly exposed the disgusting conditions in the meatpacking industry in Chicago. (Read the book even today, and you may swear off sausage!) Publication of
The Jungle
in 1906 cut American meat sales overnight and immediately forced the industry to accept federal meat inspection as well as passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act. These were the first toddling steps in modern consumerism, and the muckrakers were the ancestors of consumer advocates such as Ralph Nader, unsparing critics of fraud, abuse, and industrial and political corruption.