“The Greatest Liberty Man Has Ever Taken with Nature”: Tropical Triumphalism and the Construction of the Panama Canal

When James Bryce, the British Ambassador to the United States from 1907-1913, referred to the Panama Canal as "the greatest liberty that man has ever taken with nature," he nicely captured a larger environmental discourse - what I call "tropical triumphalism" - that attended the U.S. construction of the Panama Canal (1904-1914).  While "wilderness" was the dominant environmental imaginary of westward expansion in the 19th century, "tropicality" served as the dominant environmental imaginary of extra-continental expansion.  And Panama is the perfect place to examine such rhetorics of tropical anxiety and tropical triumph, which characterized the canal-building era.  Beginning during the isthmian transit period (1848-1869), when hundreds of thousands of Americans crossed the isthmus on their way to the west coast, and culminating in the U.S. the canal-building effort in the early 20th century and its immediate aftermath, Americans consistently conceptualized the perils and potential of Panama in environmental terms.  My paper – part of a larger environmental and public health history of the Panama Canal’s construction – will provide a brief history of this discourse on tropicality and how it evolved over time, but it will also check that rhetoric against the material ecological and social dimensions of the canal-building project.  In particular, I will use the example of U.S. sanitary efforts to rid the isthmus of yellow fever and malaria as a case study for seeing how well tropical triumphalism mapped onto the material history of canal construction.  My major argument will be that the rhetoric of environmental conquest, evidenced in comments like Bryce’s, masked a series of environmental inequalities created by the canal-building enterprise.