Dan Snow's History Hit - The Panama Canal

Episode Date: January 24, 2025

What is the history of the Panama Canal and why does Trump think he can 'take it back'? Dan is joined by Professor Julie Greene to delve into the long backstory of this 50-mile waterway that changed the world. Its journey from concept to completion was fraught as many nations sought to build it over several centuries, with the US eventually taking up the costly task in the 1900s. During the decade-long construction, many workers, mostly from the Caribbean, suffered awful working conditions and were injured or died building it. Total control was handed over to Panama in the 1990s.Better understand the headlines with this deep dive into history.You can learn more in Julie's books 'Box 25: Archival Secrets, Caribbean Workers, and the Panama Canal' and 'The Canal Builders.'Produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Max CarreySign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. The English privateer, or pirate, or explorer, insert your preferred noun really, depending on your politics or nationality, was led to the spot by Africans. They had escaped from Spanish captivity and they now fought a guerrilla war against their erstwhile owners from camps deep in the jungles of Central America. The Englishmen and the formerly enslaved people had made common cause. They decided to fight the hated Spanish by severing the most important artery in the

mighty Spanish Empire. And that was the mule path that led from the Pacific to the Caribbean, across the Isthmus of Panama. That Englishman was Francis Drake. The year was 1572. Drake had realised pretty early on the importance of this overland route. Essentially, the Spanish Empire worked like this. Ships came north along the Pacific coast of South America from Peru. Those ships carried the treasure of the Inca, but also enormous amounts of silver mined from Mount Potosi in what is now Bolivia. Those arrived on the Pacific coast of Panama. That cargo then got loaded onto mules to make the short journey across to the other side of the Isthmus,

where it was loaded again onto ships and headed off to Spain to enrich his most Catholic majesty in Madrid. The idea of all that cargo going south from Peru, right the way around the bottom of South America, was just impossible. Savage conditions, very difficult navigation, contrary winds, vast distances. This was a much better solution. Now, at one point on this expedition, one of Drake's Afghan comrades took him to a lookout they carved into a great tree. And he climbed to the top and he for the first time in his life he gazed upon the pacific ocean a sight that only a handful of englishmen had ever seen before and that moment it seems that he hatched his mad dream of taking the first english ships onto that ocean and he turned the other way and he saw the gulf of mexico the carib, just over his other shoulder. He realised how

narrow that Isthmus really was. And he was not alone in realising that, because over the next centuries, it was obvious that trying to gouge a canal across that neck of land would speed up international trade. It would make it much easier to carry vast cargoes from sea to sea, with far less friction, and it would make it more secure as well. It would protect cargoes from angry former slaves or bands of English ruffians. And that dream finally became a reality in the 19th and early 20th century. The Americans made that dream happen after some false starts. And in this podcast, I tell that story. I'm lucky to be joined by Professor Julie Green. She's a historian of the United States transnational and global labour and immigration at the University of Maryland. She is the author of The Canal Builders, Making America's Empire at the Panama Canal.

And we're talking about this now because it's a fascinating piece of history, but also because President Donald Trump has reiterated his desire for the US to acquire the Panama Canal. I should say reacquire, as you'll hear in this podcast, alongside getting hold of Greenland, for example, as well, perhaps even Canada. He's talked about their importance for American national security. And as you'll hear, he's tapping into something deeper, something distinct in the history of American politics. This urge to control the canal when it goes all the way back to the decision to build the canal itself. This is the history of the Panama Canal. Enjoy.

T-minus 10. The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. No black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And lift off, and the shuttle has cleared the tower. Julie, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. My pleasure, Dan. Thanks for bringing me on.

Let's quickly get some geography here. But before we jump into the history, tell me about the Isthmus, this narrow, narrow stretch of land between two mighty oceans. Right. The Isthmus of Panama is such a fascinating spot where the North and South America meet. It has made it a geopolitical issue for centuries and remains so today. Before the idea of a canal, presumably communication between East and West Coast in an era when anything heavy old trade goods like ads go by sea. I mean, that's a long old sea, Jenny. Absolutely. The idea of building a canal goes back centuries because until we had that, ships had to go all the way down through the Cape Horn or the Drake Passage at the tip of South America. So from the 16th

century onwards, people realized that if they could build a canal, they'd be able to cut the distance by roughly 8,000 miles and save weeks and weeks of travel. So the economic, the geopolitical consequences of that were huge. Before we talk about the sort of American involvement, let's go all the way back. It was originally a vital artery of Spanish trade, the treasures of Peru, coming across up the Pacific coast, across the Isthmus, and then across the North Atlantic. It was obvious to people there could be prime real estate for a canal, I guess, stretching all the way back.

Right. Even before people began thinking about the canal, it was the site for a railroad. In the mid-19th century, literally the first transcontinental railroad built in the Americas was built across Panama. The gold rush in California generated interest in finding a way to speed up the traffic. So ships would come to the eastern side of what became Panama. At that time, it was still the Republic of Colombia. Unload their goods, travel by train across the isthmus to the Pacific Ocean, and then up to California. So that traffic really intensified the thinking that even better than a railroad would be a water canal for moving goods, for moving personnel, and for trade. So you talk about the gold rush in California. That is what is strange about the

Panama Canal. It's not in the US, but it seems to be very calibrated to what is happening in the United States. Is that right? Are these Americans having these ideas or is this perhaps the international community more generally or the Panamanians themselves? Well, certainly the dream of a canal on the isthmus of Panama was a global dream. The emperor of Spain was talking about it in the 16th century. The French made the first attempt, 1881 to 1889, under Ferdinand de Lesseps. That effort failed very dramatically. The French underestimated the challenges that would be involved. They were felled by massive disease, a huge cost in life. Finally, when the French effort

failed, the corruption and financial troubles of it all nearly brought down the French government. So yeah, there's been global interest in this. And of course, all of that global interest and the failure of the French only intensified the American interest in building the canal because it gave the U.S. under Theodore Roosevelt the opportunity to kind of use this as a way to prove that the United States was a remarkable global power, that it could do what Europe could not. Before we leave, Led de Lesseps behind, Ferdinand de Lesseps, extraordinary career. He struck the first pickaxe blow in the construction of the Suez Canal that joins the Mediterranean to the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. So that was in the 1850s. So he was on a bit of a roll. He thought he knew what he was doing, but for some reason, the jungles of Panama were just too much. Was it the tropical disease, the geology? Just not enough cash? What happened to the French? I think that the French failed for so many different reasons. De Lesseps himself,

by the time he tackled the canal in Panama, was a rather aged man. He actually did not have much of a hands-on role. Disease was a huge problem. The French really did not understand the cause of malaria and yellow fever. They thought it was caused by bad air, not by mosquitoes. So they took no measures. There was stagnant water everywhere that was breeding mosquitoes and spreading disease. People estimate that around 22,000 people died during the less than a decade the French worked to build the canal. In addition, there were just engineering problems. They tried to build a sea level canal rather than a lot canal. And that was just so immensely more difficult than a lot canal.

Having to dig through the continental divide to create a sea level canal across 40 miles would have been a huge and difficult thing for anybody. So rather than work sympathetically with the contours, with the height of the land, you just try and hack through. And the higher the ground, just a deep dig, and you try and keep it all at sea level. I can see the challenge there. Absolutely. So when the Americans have turned their attention to the Panama Canal, you've got Teddy Roosevelt, this extraordinary figure. Was it a pressing economic case or was this about America coming of age, American reputation, American power projection beyond its borders? How should we think about

the decision to do it? Well, absolutely. It was all of that. Theodore Roosevelt was an extremely ambitious man. He wanted, above all, to prove that America was a global power. This was, for him, something about national pride. It was also a kind of a masculinist thing. You know, we needed to take our rightful place. And having watched the French fail at this, there was nothing better than a project like the Panama Canal. It allowed him to project American power in a way that could be presented as a beneficent gift to world civilization, as a gift that rested upon U.S. technological and medical and scientific and engineering know-how. So it just was almost like custom made for what Theodore Roosevelt wanted the United States to become in the global eye.

You mentioned gift. How does that work on the ground or on the waterway? Was it envisaged to be American controlled? There'd be like a toll that we pay, or is this kind of free navigation like the world's oceans and it's courtesy of Uncle Sam? How does that gift make itself known when you turn up and try and use this waterway? Right. Gift is an interesting word to use, especially given that we have President Trump today talking about how the US constructionS. construction of the canal was a magnanimous gesture. So it's important to think about how we actually acquired the canal zone. Panama at that time was a part of the Republic of Colombia. Theodore Roosevelt wanted to build the canal and tried to negotiate a treaty with Colombia that would give him the

right to do it. Colombia refused. They saw it as not a good deal for them, an attack on their sovereignty, so they refused. So in return, Theodore Roosevelt encouraged a group of Panamanians who, they were a sort of less well-off province of Colombia. They had long kind of bridled under the control of the government. So Roosevelt encouraged them to revolt and sent warships down to support their revolt. As soon as they succeeded in a quick revolt, it only took a few days, Roosevelt's administration negotiated the treaty that gave the United States complete and permanent control over the Canal Zone, a huge strip of land which pretty much cut away the heart of this new Republic of Panama. The interesting thing is that this treaty was negotiated not with the Panamanian. It was negotiated with the man who had taken over the French effort to try and build the canal. When the French government's effort failed in 1889, this man, Philippe Bunal-Tharia, created a private company that continued digging the canal.

created a private company that continued digging the canal. And his company stood to make a vast amount of money if the U.S. could acquire the canal zone. He had not been in Panama himself for 18 years. He negotiated this treaty with the United States. It was said that the new president of Panama nearly fainted when he learned what had just been given away the very heart of his young republic. So the New York Times, for example, called this a national disgrace, dishonorable. There was quite an outcry in Panama and in the United States at the sort of

brazen imperialism with which the United States acquired the Canal Zone. Wow, there's a lot to deal with there. So the United States encouraged the separation of this province of Colombia, no doubt sort of referring to, you know, seeing it as going through a process of self-determination, like the young American Republic, goes and sort of recognizes it, calls it a problem, and then buys this piece of paper, effectively, off this moribund French digging company. They kind of

owned the property, effectively. They owned the land rights through the heart of Panama. Yes, absolutely right. So the very origins of the U.S. Canal Project is mired in a pretty unethical and imperialistic land grab. It meant that at its very origin, the Republic of Panama had completely lost its sovereignty, had lost control over the heart of its own country. And the treaty that gave the United States permanent control over the canal zone also gave the United States the right to intervene militarily in the affairs of Panama, to intervene politically, to seize more land hamstrung, was almost like in a colonial relationship, we might say, with the United States. It's like an abusive relationship, because also this new republic, the only thing protecting it from reabsorption into Colombia is also the US, right? So they have to start putting a rock on the hard place. Okay.

Absolutely. Okay. So the Americans have secured this gigantic bit of real estate. They've got a puppet regime almost in this new country they've created. Now the engineering begins. You get the politics sorted. What about the engineering? So it was a spectacular project and the United States moves in aggressively

and very efficiently to build an entirely new world on the isthmus of Panama. The Panama Canal Zone becomes not only one of the most industrialized regions in the world in order to pull this off, but it does become very innovative medically, scientifically, technologically, and the United States really takes care to try to make it feel for the Americans who would play a key role as the skilled workers, the foremen, the officials, for them to try to make it feel like a civilized American world. So the United States has to build the entire infrastructure of civilization, hospitals, hotels, cafeterias, housing. And of course, the labor force itself is complex. You have 5,000 or 6,000 Americans and a few Europeans, Canadians, who are doing most of the management and the skilled labor. And then for the hard labor, for the really difficult and dangerous work, the United States imports tens of thousands of people of African descent from the Caribbean, especially the British Caribbean, Jamaica, and Barbados above all.

So at any time, you might have 40,000, 45,000 people working to dig this new locked canal. And this is paid for, is there what we now might call a public-private partnership here? Is there a canal company? Are they selling bonds? Or is this just the US government writing checks? This is entirely the United States government. The cost of building the canal, it takes officially 10 years. In fact, it takes more like 15 years to build this canal, to deal with continued landslides, etc. The cost is about $375 million, which was a huge amount back in the early 20th century. Translated into

the money of today, that would be about $19 billion. And it formed, you know, a huge amount of the US government's GDP, perhaps as much as 5 or 6%. Wow. And extraordinary water management. They do put a system of locks in, so you're controlling water levels in lakes. The idea is you could move these vast ships through some of the biggest locks i suppose ever created at the time yeah it wasn't an engineering marble to be sure locks at both ends of the canal raise the ships up have them move through gatun lake which is a human-made lake at the time. It was the largest human-made lake in the world. And then lower again down through locks to the other side of the canal.

You listen to Dan Snow's history. We're talking about the Panama Canal, all coming up. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans.

Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder. Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from from history hit wherever you get your podcasts i think i'm guessing i know the answer to this, but in terms of the health and safety of the

workers, the conditions, I guess different paying conditions for different people doing different jobs and different skin colors, I'm guessing. Yes, good guess. The canal was in terms of labor management, the United States relied upon a pretty rigid system of racial segregation. upon a pretty rigid system of racial segregation. It was the so-called silver and gold system. The white skilled workers, most of them Americans, were paid in gold. They received much better housing, better food. They received six weeks paid vacation every year, free medical care, etc. It was said to be at the time so wonderful for the white U.S. workers that people worried it would convert them to socialism, actually, because they would so learn the benefits of government ownership. For the silver workers, so-called silver workers, the Afro-Caribbeans, they were paid very little, like 10 cents an hour.

They received shabby housing, houses without screens on them, so that disease remained a huge problem, particularly malaria for the Caribbean workers because mosquitoes were still roaming about in their parts of the zone. And they were exposed to the most difficult work. They were, in the early stages especially, they were the diggers and dynamiters. So they were the ones exposed to premature dynamite explosions. In some cases, 40, 50 men might be killed with one premature explosion. One of the eyewitnesses said the flesh of men flew in the air like birds that day. They were exposed to railroad accidents and to disease.

Pretty much every Caribbean worker who went home had suffered from malaria at some point, some of them dying. had suffered from malaria at some point, some of them dying. Many of them went home missing a limb or a finger from accidents they had faced during their work. Extraordinary. The French, we think, lost somewhere like 20,000 men in their attempt. Do we have a figure for the American attempt? Yeah, the official U.S. estimate is 5,600 people killed during its construction effort. The number is probably higher because men moved so often, changed their name, moved out of government housing into Panama to get away from government surveillance.

But if we say 5,600, most of that was deaths of the Caribbean workers. Very, very few Americans died. The estimate is only 350. It's astonishing. It's probably a better mortality rate than in many industrial sites in the United States. The canal is finished in 1914. Does it have a measurable effect? Yeah, it's interesting. The official date of completion is 1914. In fact, just as World War I is breaking out in Europe. In America, there are many comparisons made to the difference between these two events.

There's a quote, I'm paraphrasing, somebody says, the lights are going out in Europe just as the United States opens this spectacular scientific achievement. benefited from it geopolitically. It absolutely did ensure that the United States would be seen as an important global power. Over the decades, by the second half of the 20th century, however, the United States was actually not paying a lot of attention to the canal. It didn't make the United States a lot of money. There continued to be safety issues with it. And so overall, it remained, of course, important for global trade. Anything that eliminates 8,000 miles of travel is going to be important. But in some ways, it didn't live up to the expectations the US had had for it. Yeah, I'm sure if you're trading from certain parts of the world to other parts of the world, the canal must have been a blessing. But by 1914, I mean, it's famously the era of the railroad in

North America. Surely, most goods from the Midwest or from New England going out to California and vice versa, they would now be on the railroads, right? So, did it have the kind of internal domestic effect in the US that maybe some politicians might have hoped? I think that it was very important. I mean, you're right about railroad travel, say, from the Midwest to California wouldn't be profoundly shaped. But we can see when we look at the conversations happening in the US at the time, that there was a very important, albeit subtle, rethinking of the entire geography of the United States because of the ways that the canal connected the U.S. to Asia now,

made trade with Asia and between Europe and Asia much easier. It made the western ports of the United States much more important. So yes, there was more than a negligible effect, to be sure. So it's being run by the U.S. government. Until when? Right. So the United States signs a new treaty finally in 1977, the Carter-Torrios Treaties, that sets up to give Panama complete control over the canal as of December 31st, 1999. And how this comes about is also interesting. You know, over the course of the decades that the United States controls the canal, there have been tensions with Panama over it, tensions which gradually grow more fierce. The Panama bridles increasingly, feeling like it's a subordinate player,

almost a colony of the United States. And so the U.S. makes a series of concessions to Panama, but in the 1960s, riots break out in January 1964 over the role of the United States in its domination of Panama. decolonization is happening around the world. The Suez Canal has been transferred to Egypt. There's a feeling that domination like the United States had over Panama for all of these years, the sacrificing of its sovereignty is unseemly and has to change. And so all of these things come together, the tensions, the riots, the sort of global wave of decolonization, to make it quite clear to American elites by the mid-1960s that the canal has to be transferred to Panama. negotiations. These are continued by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, and finally then completed by Jimmy Carter in 1977. Yeah, the USA does not want its own Suez Canal episode, like the one that finally brought the curtain down on the Brits in the 1950s, I guess. Is that relatively politically

uncontroversial within the US at that point? It sounds like it was bipartisan, different parties both pursuing this project. It's interesting. At the elite level, there was bipartisan consensus that this needed to happen, but politically was very different. Ronald Reagan began campaigning and he, somewhat without even realizing what he was doing, I think, he raised the issue that we were about to lose the canal if steps weren't taken to halt negotiations. And he found, to his surprise, this massive public response to what he was saying. And so he made it into a huge part of his campaign. I think what was happening was that Theodore Roosevelt's boosterism back in the early 20th century had really helped to make the Panama Canal

into this everlasting symbol of American greatness. America was not a selfish, land-grabbing imperial power. It was a magnanimous power that used its scientific and engineering might to give gifts to the world. That mythology was so powerful that Reagan was able to tap into it. So, at a political level, it was controversial and has remained so, as we can see in President-elect Trump's recent comments. So Reagan campaigns on it, criticizes it, stirs it up. It's a useful issue for him. Does he actually do anything about it once he's in office, Or is it too late? The treaty's been signed. I mean, I think that the issue helps Reagan defeat Carter for re-election,

helps Reagan win the presidency. But of course, by the time he becomes president, the Carter-Torrio treaties have been signed. And so the issue then kind of falls away. The process of transfer begins immediately. The United States begin training Panamanians to manage the canal. The canal zone slowly starts to be dismantled. And so preparations are made so that in 1999,

Panama will be ready to take control of the canal. And of course, as you can imagine, that moment, December 31st, 1999, is a huge moment in Panama's history, a huge celebration when for literally the first time in its history, it has achieved full sovereignty, full control over the Panama Canal. And in the years since, the Republic of Panama has proven itself to be, in fact, a fantastic manager of the canal. The Panama Canal, under Panamanian management, makes more money and has a better safety record than it did under the United States. The canal itself began to be made obsolete as ships grew larger, and so in the 21st century, Panama, with overwhelming support from its population, created a special tax to build an expansion of the canal, an expansion that was carefully designed to be more environmentally useful. The expanded canal works by literally

recycling water. So overall, the Panama Canal has become a very important symbol of national pride in Panama and a big part of its economic success. Why do you think this issue has bubbled to the surface again now? I mean, it seems to Mr. Trump that his sort of formative political experiences were in the 70s and 80s. He seems to talk a lot about influences and the zeitgeist in that period. Is that what you think is going on, or is there a genuine new strategic challenge in the canal zone from competitor nations? That's such an important question. I mean, I think that ever since the canal was transferred to Panama, there have been anxieties in the United States about other global powers having

influence there, particularly China. And so I think Trump is able to kind of instinctively build on that anxiety. The fact is that the Chinese do play a role in supporting the canal. There are some Hong Kong subsidiaries that are managing some of the ports and China is funding the building of a new bridge, but certainly the Chinese government is not integrally involved in managing or has any power over the canal whatsoever. You know, I think some of it goes back to this sort of boosterism around the canal and its symbol as a tremendous gift of the United States to world civilization. It allows politicians like Trump to tap into people's anxieties about what it meant that we lost the canal and what it could mean if another power had control there as well. I mean, I've been surprised at Trump's new rhetoric, because I

always thought that one of his characteristics was that he tended to be more isolationist and refused to engage in foreign policy adventures. And I wonder if this new talk about Greenland and Panama is partly coming from realizing that the domestic problems he said he would solve will in fact be difficult to solve. As he himself has said, it turns out it's hard to lower the price of eggs. And if he's thinking to shift attention to some of these global issues. We've seen that before plenty of times, foreign policy adventures to shift the tension from what's going on domestically. Well, watch this Space Spokes. It's going to be interesting. Professor Julie Green, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Tell us the name

of your book. Right. I've just published a book titled Box 25, Archival Secrets, Caribbean Workers and the Panama Canal, published by the University of North Carolina Press. I expect the publicity department were not expecting such a serendipitous publication date. That's right. Well, good luck with the book. I'm sure it'll be a bestseller. Thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Thank you. I enjoyed talking with you, Dan. Thanks a lot.