Building the Panama Canal, Essay Example

Why did America succeed in building the Panama Canal, where the French failed?

The construction of Panama Canal remains to be one of the most expensive private ventures of the ninth century. Even today, the Panama Canal is one of the most important artificial water way in the world. Although, it is widely know that the canal was constructed by America, the French made the first attempt. The story of the Panama Canal originated from the aegis of French; a Frenchman known as count de lasses under his company panama canal company initiated it. However, count de lasses failed and the construction was handed over to the United States. This paper highlights on the French’ failures and what contributed to United States’ success in the construction of the canal.

The French attempt to build the canal was designed to fail since the project fell on the hand of promoters and speculators. Some of the reason that led the French failure were the personality of the project leader, Lesseps. He had no technical and education background especially on financial matters. This led to mismanagement of capital, false estimation, and false economic and technical decision. Other reasons include the project cost estimation were too low, lack of support from the state. Some of the main contributors’ cause of failure was the climate condition, medical hygiene problem, lack of tropical experience by French engineers working in panama. This led to high sick and death rate among the French employee, which in turn soared the costs and of the project and resulted to unstable labor. Many of the French workers who moved to work in the project either died or left. This forced the company to pay high wages to convince workers to work (Julie 2012).

When the United States took over the French canal franchise in 1903, it approached the project with vigor and confidence. They treated it as an enormous railway road-engineering project. By 1907, the various problem led the America engineers to redesign the project, by 1908 the control of the project went to army corps engineers who completed the project in 1914.

United States was successful in building the canal was largely because it avoided the mistakes made by the French. First unlike the French leader who had proofed to be inflexible, the US leaders were a bit flexible. America success largely came from their ability to employ third party oversight. In addition, the America has tried to bring innovative solutions to a number of un foreseen challenges. For instance, most of the new commissioner chosen after taking over was engineers (technical knowhow) and they had previous experience. Some of the president of the project such as Stevens brought innovative solution such as construction of temporary bridge across the exaction to ensure that faster transportation of workers. Furthermore, Stevens encouraged high ring of Caribbean native as project laborers whom he believed were capable of working harder in the tropical climate. Moreover, US also encouraged the high ring of Spaniards as laborers who were stronger “but dissatisfaction with Caribbean fueled their interest with south Europeans, especially Spaniards who become the second largest source of laborers” (Julie 2012). In addition, Panamanians, Africans and worker from England and Germany also formed a small percentage of the laborers. This worked very well for the use government, as workers from different race could compete against one another for higher status.  This is supported by Julie (2012), “Hiring workers from many different race and nationalities was an effective way to control labor”

Another contribution to America success was in the arena of sanitation and public health through the army medical corps. This enabled mitigation of the transmission of the yellow fever and malaria, which was the cause of the death of many workers. In addition, America was able to employ innovative solution to tackle the massive landslide, which caused loss of life and delayed the project. For instance, Colonel Goethals ordered the excavation to be flooded so water could provide the lateral support for the falling slopes. In conclusion, the America was able to succeed in building the Panama Canal because it avoided the mistake made by French

Work Cited

Julie Greene “Spaniards on the Silver Roll: Labor Troublesand Liminality in the Panama Canal Zone” International Labor and Working-Class, (2012) 6:2012