A Man, A Plan, A Canal.
David McCullough wrote The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal: 1870-1914 (and isn't that a veritable Gatún Locks of subtitles, dear reader?) in time for the Bicentennial. My Francis Parkman Prize edition dates to 2002, during which time Ronald Reagan made an issue out of Jimmy Carter offering to return sovereignty over the Canal Zone to Panama, Panama regained that sovereignty, and Operation Just Cause ousted Manuel Noriega, all of which Peter Winn notes in his Parkman Prize foreword; and yet publication preceded the expansion of the canal with larger locks. He notes that Path, as written, provides sufficient background for someone interested in the more recent naval and geopolitical history.
I will open Book Review No. 5 with one spoiler. The man with the plan is not Theodore Roosevelt. Recall that the French first essayed a canal, and in their way (the French having perfected the Forms of Governance by Wise Experts long before Herbert Croly or Woodrow Wilson or Tony Fauci was born) they called a conference of a Technical Committee to do all the planning. To this meeting came Adolphe Godin de Lépinay of the Corps des Ponts et Chaussées and he observed that attempting to dig a sea-level canal through the flood-plain and watershed of the Chagres River, which meanders through a tropical rain-forest, with all that implies, on the Atlantic side, would come to all sorts of grief. Better, he suggested, to build a lock and dam, create a reservoir, make a cut through the top of the low cordillera at the continental divide, using that ridge as a natural levee, with another lock and dam along the Rio Grande leading to the Pacific side. The resulting freshwater lakes would also allow the port cities to have running water, although that gets ahead of my story, or rather the several stories, in Path, each of which merits several shelves in a proper library. Dear reader, with as many sea stories as follow, it might take as much time to read this post as it does to fill a lock.
The first such story is France itself in the closing decades of the Nineteenth Century. The Second Empire gives way to the Third Republic; Ferdinand de Lesseps manages the successful construction of the Suez Canal; the Prussians with steel cannon in World War II: The Prequel overwhelm the French with their bronze cannon and der Kaiser demands an indemnity he hopes will keep the French humble for a generation. The French pay off the indemnity in a short time, then launch the Panama Canal project, and decide to write the book on International Expositions (literally, the commission on world's fairs subsequently set up in Paris) complete with the Eiffel Tower. And somehow the Third Republic survived both an attempt at restoring the Empire and the Communists.
That history contributed mightily both to the hubris of launching the canal project and its subsequent failure. The funding scandals of the land-grant railroads of the United States had nothing on the rent-seeking, heck, let's call corruption corruption, in the financing and attempting to build the canal, and tempers flared to the extent that the French honor culture of dueling came into play. Among the people so involved, count George Clemenceau and Theodore Roosevelt. (Read the book for more, you've had your spoilers.) Toward the end, stock sales were by lottery, and the planners couldn't settle on whether to dig diversion channels for the Chagres or to build a lock and dam, and all the diversion digging, and all the lock machinery engineered by no less than Gustave Eiffel were so much sunk cost. Then the muckrakers discovered ... Jewish capital involved in the syndicates, and you can guess where that led.
The next story, I'm not sure if I've already told one, or two, is the machinations by which Panama becomes a country, and the United States secure a Canal Zone. Again, that's material for a section of library, Independence begets the Monroe Doctrine and the Bolivarian revolutions modelled on American Independence, and how many ways do things go sideways after that? First, People of Influence from France and the States collaborate with disaffected Panamanians to inspire a rebellion, leading to that independent Panamanian state that had to be invaded again late in the Twentieth Century, and to strained relations between the States and Colombia. Subsequently, efforts by the States to supply the work force in the Canal Zone shut out the local merchants who hoped to be in on the rent-seeking, and that strained relations between the States and Panama. There might be a second story, if the Critical Studies people choose to make it so, involving the use of Panamanians, either pre-Columbian or Hispanic, as well as West Indians, as laborers who did a lot of the heavy lifting, and the dying. So far, though, I have seen no proposals to "decolonize" the Canal Zone by allowing the canal to revert to jungle.
After all that come the stories that might have happy endings. First comes the work to contain the mosquitoes that a great deal of field work, and a great deal of the usual learning-progresses-one-funeral-at-a-time, understood to be the vectors of disease. The ancients had the right idea when they came up with "malaria," bad air, as a description of malaria. It was the proximity of people to stinky swamps, indeed, but the fix was to, well, drain the swamps, or failing that, provide open spaces and build housing with the prevailing winds in mind, because Anopheles couldn't go far against a headwind and didn't like sunlight. Yellow fever was much more interesting to the researcher. Apparently in Africa, mosquitoes carried it between other primates and humans; in Latin America most of the contagion was among humans, and the evolutionary strategies of both mosquito and virus (there is now a yellow fever vaccine, useful for tourists to know!) are grist for future generations of virologists and parasitologists. The Stegomyia mosquito came to live only in close proximity to humans, with nearby cisterns and flower-pots being particularly handy, while the virus could only be transmitted from a recently-sick human to another human after first undergoing "extrinsic incubation" in the mosquito for two to three weeks. Could a faster-incubating virus have deprived the relatively small Stegomyia of a chance to incubate its clutch of eggs? And researcher Henry R. Carter, who worked out the anomaly of people contracting yellow fever after the body of a victim they were attending had been removed and buried, had the paper with the findings of extrinsic incubation initially rejected by a journal editor, because the paper was too long. That's an occupational hazard of research, no matter how great the contribution might be.
Next comes what might be the Origin Story of American Exceptionalism, or perhaps of Technocratic Can-Do. Once the mosquitoes had been pushed back from the settlements and the running water brought in, the Stateside contractors went to work, and those tract houses made of ticky-tacky, with the Chevys or Buicks in the garages signifying the social status, foreshadowed (see page 557) in the furniture and hammocks of the (screened) back porches. But was the regimented order some kind of socialist experiment (a socialist on the payroll who knew his "Abolition of the Wages System" thought not, page 567) or the sort of partnership of Government with Industry that later made possible the Manhattan Project, as Mr McCullough suggests? The absent referent, pace the Critical Studies scholars, is the Panamanians and West Indians who returned to their more modest houses after doing the work with machetes and shovels. And I wonder if there weren't people who mused, "If we can dig the Panama Canal, we can ..." the way they later did, wrongly, with "If we can put a man on the Moon."
The concluding story, though, is that the building of the Panama Canal is a railroad story. Once the United States got the diplomatic dirty work done, and released the boffins to drain the swamps, not in a metaphorical sense, mind you, President Roosevelt prevailed on Great Northern engineer John Stevens, who found the easiest crossings of the Montana Rockies and the Washington Cascades, to supervise the construction. When Mr Stevens arrived, he did not know whether he was digging a sea level canal or a lock canal, but he understood that either way that ridge at the Continental Divide had to be brought down, and providing enough dump cars and locomotives to haul away the spoil faster than the demoralized rock could roll back in was of the second importance. Once the bureaucrats in Washington realized that M. Godin de Lépinay had the right idea thirty years previously, a proper railroad would make moving the fill for the dams and the materials for the concrete much simpler.
Moreover, the Panama Canal operates like a railroad. Mr McCullough marvelled over the model board and tappet-and-dog interlocking machinery that might still control the original locks. Think of it as moving a parcel of water with a ship floating on it, rather than moving a train. The operator makes the line-up toward the approaching ship: lock chamber closed, water level in lock is that of the approaching ship, all valves closed, lock gates immediately in front of the approaching ship open; only then can the guard chain be lowered, and once the ship is in that lock, the guard chain (these have been removed, except at the top of the Gatun and Pedro Miguel locks) must be raised again, think of restoring a home signal to normal, before the gate can be closed behind the ship and any valves operated. Within a flight of locks, the water level on both sides of the gate to be opened must be the same, and the relevant valves closed, before the gate between those locks is opened. No different in concept from lining a crossover. Taken together, those safeguards on ship movement also preclude anybody maliciously attempting to turn a lock into a mill-race or the connecting culverts into a penstock.
Cross-posted to Cold Spring Shops.
I will open Book Review No. 5 with one spoiler. The man with the plan is not Theodore Roosevelt. Recall that the French first essayed a canal, and in their way (the French having perfected the Forms of Governance by Wise Experts long before Herbert Croly or Woodrow Wilson or Tony Fauci was born) they called a conference of a Technical Committee to do all the planning. To this meeting came Adolphe Godin de Lépinay of the Corps des Ponts et Chaussées and he observed that attempting to dig a sea-level canal through the flood-plain and watershed of the Chagres River, which meanders through a tropical rain-forest, with all that implies, on the Atlantic side, would come to all sorts of grief. Better, he suggested, to build a lock and dam, create a reservoir, make a cut through the top of the low cordillera at the continental divide, using that ridge as a natural levee, with another lock and dam along the Rio Grande leading to the Pacific side. The resulting freshwater lakes would also allow the port cities to have running water, although that gets ahead of my story, or rather the several stories, in Path, each of which merits several shelves in a proper library. Dear reader, with as many sea stories as follow, it might take as much time to read this post as it does to fill a lock.
The first such story is France itself in the closing decades of the Nineteenth Century. The Second Empire gives way to the Third Republic; Ferdinand de Lesseps manages the successful construction of the Suez Canal; the Prussians with steel cannon in World War II: The Prequel overwhelm the French with their bronze cannon and der Kaiser demands an indemnity he hopes will keep the French humble for a generation. The French pay off the indemnity in a short time, then launch the Panama Canal project, and decide to write the book on International Expositions (literally, the commission on world's fairs subsequently set up in Paris) complete with the Eiffel Tower. And somehow the Third Republic survived both an attempt at restoring the Empire and the Communists.
That history contributed mightily both to the hubris of launching the canal project and its subsequent failure. The funding scandals of the land-grant railroads of the United States had nothing on the rent-seeking, heck, let's call corruption corruption, in the financing and attempting to build the canal, and tempers flared to the extent that the French honor culture of dueling came into play. Among the people so involved, count George Clemenceau and Theodore Roosevelt. (Read the book for more, you've had your spoilers.) Toward the end, stock sales were by lottery, and the planners couldn't settle on whether to dig diversion channels for the Chagres or to build a lock and dam, and all the diversion digging, and all the lock machinery engineered by no less than Gustave Eiffel were so much sunk cost. Then the muckrakers discovered ... Jewish capital involved in the syndicates, and you can guess where that led.
The next story, I'm not sure if I've already told one, or two, is the machinations by which Panama becomes a country, and the United States secure a Canal Zone. Again, that's material for a section of library, Independence begets the Monroe Doctrine and the Bolivarian revolutions modelled on American Independence, and how many ways do things go sideways after that? First, People of Influence from France and the States collaborate with disaffected Panamanians to inspire a rebellion, leading to that independent Panamanian state that had to be invaded again late in the Twentieth Century, and to strained relations between the States and Colombia. Subsequently, efforts by the States to supply the work force in the Canal Zone shut out the local merchants who hoped to be in on the rent-seeking, and that strained relations between the States and Panama. There might be a second story, if the Critical Studies people choose to make it so, involving the use of Panamanians, either pre-Columbian or Hispanic, as well as West Indians, as laborers who did a lot of the heavy lifting, and the dying. So far, though, I have seen no proposals to "decolonize" the Canal Zone by allowing the canal to revert to jungle.
After all that come the stories that might have happy endings. First comes the work to contain the mosquitoes that a great deal of field work, and a great deal of the usual learning-progresses-one-funeral-at-a-time, understood to be the vectors of disease. The ancients had the right idea when they came up with "malaria," bad air, as a description of malaria. It was the proximity of people to stinky swamps, indeed, but the fix was to, well, drain the swamps, or failing that, provide open spaces and build housing with the prevailing winds in mind, because Anopheles couldn't go far against a headwind and didn't like sunlight. Yellow fever was much more interesting to the researcher. Apparently in Africa, mosquitoes carried it between other primates and humans; in Latin America most of the contagion was among humans, and the evolutionary strategies of both mosquito and virus (there is now a yellow fever vaccine, useful for tourists to know!) are grist for future generations of virologists and parasitologists. The Stegomyia mosquito came to live only in close proximity to humans, with nearby cisterns and flower-pots being particularly handy, while the virus could only be transmitted from a recently-sick human to another human after first undergoing "extrinsic incubation" in the mosquito for two to three weeks. Could a faster-incubating virus have deprived the relatively small Stegomyia of a chance to incubate its clutch of eggs? And researcher Henry R. Carter, who worked out the anomaly of people contracting yellow fever after the body of a victim they were attending had been removed and buried, had the paper with the findings of extrinsic incubation initially rejected by a journal editor, because the paper was too long. That's an occupational hazard of research, no matter how great the contribution might be.
Next comes what might be the Origin Story of American Exceptionalism, or perhaps of Technocratic Can-Do. Once the mosquitoes had been pushed back from the settlements and the running water brought in, the Stateside contractors went to work, and those tract houses made of ticky-tacky, with the Chevys or Buicks in the garages signifying the social status, foreshadowed (see page 557) in the furniture and hammocks of the (screened) back porches. But was the regimented order some kind of socialist experiment (a socialist on the payroll who knew his "Abolition of the Wages System" thought not, page 567) or the sort of partnership of Government with Industry that later made possible the Manhattan Project, as Mr McCullough suggests? The absent referent, pace the Critical Studies scholars, is the Panamanians and West Indians who returned to their more modest houses after doing the work with machetes and shovels. And I wonder if there weren't people who mused, "If we can dig the Panama Canal, we can ..." the way they later did, wrongly, with "If we can put a man on the Moon."
The concluding story, though, is that the building of the Panama Canal is a railroad story. Once the United States got the diplomatic dirty work done, and released the boffins to drain the swamps, not in a metaphorical sense, mind you, President Roosevelt prevailed on Great Northern engineer John Stevens, who found the easiest crossings of the Montana Rockies and the Washington Cascades, to supervise the construction. When Mr Stevens arrived, he did not know whether he was digging a sea level canal or a lock canal, but he understood that either way that ridge at the Continental Divide had to be brought down, and providing enough dump cars and locomotives to haul away the spoil faster than the demoralized rock could roll back in was of the second importance. Once the bureaucrats in Washington realized that M. Godin de Lépinay had the right idea thirty years previously, a proper railroad would make moving the fill for the dams and the materials for the concrete much simpler.
Moreover, the Panama Canal operates like a railroad. Mr McCullough marvelled over the model board and tappet-and-dog interlocking machinery that might still control the original locks. Think of it as moving a parcel of water with a ship floating on it, rather than moving a train. The operator makes the line-up toward the approaching ship: lock chamber closed, water level in lock is that of the approaching ship, all valves closed, lock gates immediately in front of the approaching ship open; only then can the guard chain be lowered, and once the ship is in that lock, the guard chain (these have been removed, except at the top of the Gatun and Pedro Miguel locks) must be raised again, think of restoring a home signal to normal, before the gate can be closed behind the ship and any valves operated. Within a flight of locks, the water level on both sides of the gate to be opened must be the same, and the relevant valves closed, before the gate between those locks is opened. No different in concept from lining a crossover. Taken together, those safeguards on ship movement also preclude anybody maliciously attempting to turn a lock into a mill-race or the connecting culverts into a penstock.
Cross-posted to Cold Spring Shops.