THE CANAL AND THE AMERICAS
The war with Spain revived U .S . interest in building a canal across the isthmus of Panama, uniting the two great oceans . The usefulness of such a canal for sea trade had long been recognized by the major com- mercial nations of the world; the French had begun digging one in the late 19th century but had been unable to overcome the engineering difficulties . Having become a power in both the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean, the United States saw a canal as both economically benefi- cial and a way of providing speedier transfer of warships from one ocean to the other .
At the turn of the century, what is now Panama was the rebellious northern province of Colombia . When the Colombian legislature in 1903 refused to ratify a treaty giv- ing the United States the right to build and manage a canal, a group of impatient Panamanians, with the support of U .S . Marines, rose in re- bellion and declared Panamanian independence . The breakaway coun- try was immediately recognized by President Theodore Roosevelt . Un- der the terms of a treaty signed that November, Panama granted the United States a perpetual lease to a
CHAPTER 8: GROWTH AND TRANSFORMATION
OUTLINE OF U.S. HISTORY
185
16-kilometer-wide strip of land (the Panama Canal Zone) between the Atlantic and the Pacific, in return for $10 million and a yearly fee of $250,000 . Colombia later received $25 million as partial compensation . Seventy-five years later, Panama and the United States negotiated a new treaty . It provided for Panamanian sovereignty in the Canal Zone and transfer of the canal to Panama on December 31, 1999 .
The completion of the Panama Canal in 1914, directed by Colonel George W . Goethals, was a major triumph of engineering . The simul- taneous conquest of malaria and yel- low fever made it possible and was one of the 20th century’s great feats in preventive medicine .
Elsewhere in Latin America, the United States fell into a pattern of fitful intervention . Between 1900 and 1920, the United States carried out sustained interventions in six Western Hemispheric nations — most notably Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Nicaragua . Washing- ton offered a variety of justifications for these interventions: to establish political stability and democratic government, to provide a favorable environment for U .S . investment (often called dollar diplomacy), to secure the sea lanes leading to the Panama Canal, and even to prevent European countries from forcibly collecting debts . The United States had pressured the French into re- moving troops from Mexico in 1867 . Half a century later, however, as part of an ill-starred campaign to influ-
ence the Mexican revolution and stop raids into American territory, President Woodrow Wilson sent 11,000 troops into the northern part of the country in a futile effort to capture the elusive rebel and outlaw Francisco “Pancho” Villa .
Exercising its role as the most powerful — and most liberal — of Western Hemisphere nations, the United States also worked to estab- lish an institutional basis for coop- eration among the nations of the Americas . In 1889 Secretary of State James G . Blaine proposed that the 21 independent nations of the Western Hemisphere join in an organization dedicated to the peaceful settlement of disputes and to closer econom- ic bonds . The result was the Pan- American Union, founded in 1890 and known today as the Organiza- tion of American States (OAS) .
The later administrations of Herbert Hoover (1929-33) and Franklin D . Roosevelt (1933-45) re- pudiated the right of U .S . interven- tion in Latin America . In particular, Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy of the 1930s, while not ending all tensions between the United States and Latin America, helped dissipate much of the ill-will engendered by earlier U .S . intervention and unilat- eral actions .