Panama fever (42 page)

atún Locks under construction, showing the overhead cableway and the huge, rail-mounted structures holding the steel shutters.

Workers at the base of the lower Gate of Gatún Locks.

he final joining of the oceans being accomplished by pick-and-shovel men digging a channel through the Cucaracha slide.

he opening of the canal: S.S.
Ancon
passes the remnants of the Cucaracha slide on August 15, 1914.

he U.S.S.
Texas
in Gatún Locks in July 1919, a sight that would have pleased Roosevelt enormously. The military requirements of the United States were instrumental in getting the canal built.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

“I TOOK THE ISTHMUS”

The first potential stumbling block was dealt with quickly. The U.S. attorney general sailed to Paris and exhaustively went through the available books and contracts before pronouncing that the deal with the New Company was legitimate. But on the second issue, of coming to a deal with Colombia, it was not to be so simple.

Since October 1899, Colombia had been in the throes of its longest and most devastating civil war since independence eighty years before. The “War of a Thousand Days,” fought between Conservative and Liberal factions, would claim the lives of between 150,000 and 250,000 Colombians.

With Liberal armies threatening Bogotá itself, the administration, led by the elderly Conservative José Manuel Marroquín, was showing signs of confusion, and was having great difficulty staying in contact with its representatives in Washington. Marroquín tried to delay the signing of any deal with the United States until his position was more secure, but amid calls from the Nicaragua party that the “reasonable time,” as stipulated by the Spooner Act, had run out, a treaty was signed with the Colombian legation's secretary, Tomás Herrán, on January 22, 1903 (the previous envoy had resigned in disgust at what he saw as the bullying tactics of the U.S. administration). Herrán himself had been concerned that further delays would lead Roosevelt, whom he described as “impetuous [with a] violent disposition,” simply to seize the Isthmus.

The terms of the treaty were that in return for an annuity of $250,000, with a $10 million gold onetime payment, the United States would receive a six-mile-wide Canal Zone on a hundred-year lease renewable at the sole option of the United States. Although Colombian sovereignty was specifically recognized, this was something of a fig leaf: the United States was to be allowed to establish its own courts within the proposed Zone and, in an emergency, to land its forces without Colombia's consent to protect the canal.

Morgan did his very best to wreck the treaty in the Senate, proposing a number of amendments, including anti-Catholic measures, which he knew would make the deal unacceptable to Colombia. Along the way, he described the treaty as a compact with “a crowd of French jail-birds, cleverly advised by a New York railroad wrecker… and a depraved, priest-ridden people.” The Alabama senator successfully filibustered into March, but overplayed his hand. Roosevelt pushed, Morgan broke down, and the treaty was ratified without amendments on March 17. Now the ball was firmly in Colombia's court.

n mid-March 1903, with the civil war at last over, and as the new Colombian Congress was being elected, the
Panama Star and Herald
commented, “Few of the members who will assemble in Bogotá, competent observers say, have ever seen the ocean… They are comparatively indifferent to the advantages of the project, while feeling great pride in their soil and sovereignty, and a corresponding fear of the gradual absorption of their territory by the United States. These things count against ratification.”