The 100th Anniversary of the Opening of the Panama Canal—History Countdown—Resurrection of a Scandal

From "The Daily Capital Journal," Salem Oregon (reprint from the Salt Lake Tribune) July 25, 1914 “Story Told of How the Panama Zone Was Assassinated by Col. Roosevelt.”

From "TR in Cartoon, by Raymond Gros, 1910

 Under this somewhat curious title, "The Daily Capital Journal" nonetheless aptly described the ongoing investigation begun by Joseph Pulitzer's "World" newspaper in 1908 to uncover fraud, kickbacks, and conspiracy in the purchase of the Panama Canal.

“The New York World continues its revelations concerning the conspiracy which lead to Roosevelt’s “taking” of the Isthmus. Letters and testimony reveal that when president, Mr. Roosevelt was urged… to foment a revolution in Panama… After reading the detailed disclosure, one is amazed that President Roosevelt should ever have bragged about acquiring the canal zone in the way he did.”

After T.R had publicly boasted that he “took the Isthmus,” President Woodrow Wilson wanted to repair the tattered relationship between the two countries by offering the Colombians $25,000,000 in compensation for the losses they incurred at the hands of Roosevelt and his associates. This one gesture toward Colombia might shift the dominant perception in all of Central and South America that the United States was greedily gobbling up control of the entire hemisphere.

Details about the role Roosevelt played in the in the affair again surfaced in the news. “We did our neighbor a grievous wrong,” wrote The Daily Capital Journal in June of 1914, “and it is the manly thing on our part to do since we are strong and she [Colombia] is so weak to make proper restitution… Being decent and acting the part of a gentleman compels us to this course.”

With all the media attention on Wilson’s conciliatory position toward Columbia, newspapers were dredging up credible evidence that the Colonel did, as the Colombians accused, play an unseemly part in fomenting Panama’s revolt. Roosevelt blasted Wilson, charging his with bending to the will of the “blackmailers,” a term he used liberally in 1903 to describe the Colombians. Now in 1914, editorials dismissed the classic Roosevelt vitriol and bombast against Wilson and the proposed treaty as “unimportant rants.”

Slowly and steadily, stories began to reappear after years of relative quiet about the fastidious French speculator Philippe Bunau-Varilla, the high-powered New York attorney, William Nelson Cromwell and his “gang of rich Americans,” —which included Roosevelt’s family among other millionaires—exercised an unseemly influence over Roosevelt’s sudden and astounding decision to abandon the strongly supported Nicaragua canal plan in favor of Panama. In broad political terms, in the year the great Panama Canal would be completed, wrote the Virginia Times Dispatch, “The great Roosevelt myth has faded.”

Learn more about Theodore Roosevelt and the Panama Canal.

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