Panama Canal (2012)

[bunniefuu]

NARRATOR: It's been called

one of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World--

a manmade waterway miles long

that forever altered the face of the earth.

OVIDIO DIAZ ESPINO: The Panama Canal exceeded any country's capacity.

If in you had asked me to put money,

I would have said, "No, it can not be built."

Nobody knew how this was going to be done.

CARLOS RUSSELL: The geographic location of Panama,

the Isthmus of Panama,

has always been coveted as a way of making the oceans meet.

With the building of the Panama Canal,

the realization of a dream

became an expression of the power, the strength,

the might of a growing nation.

NARRATOR: For nearly a hundred years,

the Panama Canal has stood for the triumph

of technology over nature.

But when it was built at the dawn of the th century,

it was simply an audacious gamble--

a colossal engineering project

the likes of which the world had never seen.

MARCO MASON: It's a story of inspiration.

It's a story of humanity.

What man can endure with a pick and shovel to dig the canal.

CAROL BYERLY: It used science and engineering and government

to improve the country and really improve the world.

But it has a dark side as well.

It is also a symbol of arrogance, authority and power.

[expl*si*n]

MATTHEW PARKER: The canal really announced the United States

as the leading country in the world.

It demonstrated an extraordinary will and determination.

They had succeeded in conquering nature

as no one had ever done before.

NARRATOR: In early July ,

an American steamship made its way

towards the Isthmus of Panama,

the narrow ribbon of land between North and South America

and the two largest oceans in the world.

Among the passengers on board was Jan van Hardeveld,

a -year-old engineer from Wyoming.

He'd read in the newspaper about a new government project--

an ambitious plan to link the Atlantic and the Pacific

with a canal-- and he was determined to be part of it.

A Dutchman by birth,

Jan was a newly minted citizen of the United States

and a fierce champion of his adopted country.

"In America," he liked to say, "anything is possible."

The building of the Panama Canal would be no exception.

[birds chirping, cawing]

JAN VAN HARDEVELD [dramatized]: A heavy suitcase in my hand, the sweat rolling down my face,

I stumbled along the wet, slippery track

which I had been told to follow

until I found a place to turn off.

In the deep darkness I seemed to have walked miles,

and I never dreamed there could be such unearthly noises.

[frogs croaking]

To me they sounded like the howling of demons.

[animals screeching]

Well, I decided that turning back looked almost as hard

as going on, so here I am.

NARRATOR: Jan van Hardeveld was just one of hundreds

of young Americans now living on the isthmus of Panama.

They'd been arriving for months from San Diego, Cincinnati,

Pittsburgh, Charlotte;

former railroad engineers and file clerks

and recent college graduates,

all of them eager to be part of what one observer called

America's "mighty march of progress."

[cheering]

JACKSON LEARS: At this particular moment,

there's a lot of positive thinking going on

in the United States.

There are these sort of iconic structures--

the transcontinental railroad, the Brooklyn Bridge--

all of them accomplishing feats

that naysayers had predicted could not be done.

So there is this fascination

with human triumph over adversity.

Americans feel that we are at the cutting edge.

PARKER: The idea of building a Panama canal seized the imagination

of the American public.

This was the great unfulfilled engineering challenge

of the world.

NARRATOR: For nearly years,

people had dreamed of building a canal

that would slice through the slender Isthmus of Panama

and make the world's great oceans meet.

The French had been the first to try.

The year was , and Ferdinand de Lesseps,

the legendary builder of the Suez Canal,

was looking for a second act.

FREDERICK ALLEN: Well, Ferdinand de Lesseps was a great national hero,

who had done this great, magnificent thing

of building the Suez Canal.

PARKER: He was called "Le Grand Français."

He was endlessly appearing in the magazines,

with his beautiful wife and his lovely children.

He was seen as incredibly virile.

And he was endlessly touring the country,

where he'd pull in huge crowds to come and see this...

the hero of Suez.

ALLEN: The thing about the Suez Canal

was that it was a flat, level passage through a dry desert.

It couldn't have been more different from the Panama Canal.

PARKER: If anything,

Panama was the most difficult place in the whole world

to build a canal.

You've got really thick jungles full of snakes

and, of course, mosquitoes that will give you malaria

or yellow fever.

And then you have deep, almost bottomless swamps.

You've got the thick, heavy mountain range.

And perhaps worst of all, you've got the Chagres River,

which is one of the most volatile rivers in the world.

NARRATOR: Despite the warnings of experts who said it could not be done,

de Lesseps directed his engineers to carve a canal

through the isthmus.

They spent the next eight-and-a-half years

locked in a losing battle against the jungle.

PARKER: Everything that could have gone wrong went wrong

for the French at Panama.

There were fires, there was flooding,

there was an earthquake.

There was continuous epidemic of yellow fever.

There was a huge amount of corruption.

NARRATOR: When the crash of de Lesseps' venture finally came,

in , it was thunderous.

In less than a decade, more than a billion francs--

about $ million-- had been all but squandered.

Meanwhile, accidents and disease had claimed

a staggering , lives, most of them West Indians

who had been imported to do the heavy labor.

De Lesseps, the one-time hero of France,

was bankrupted and only narrowly escaped prison.

WALTER LaFEBER: De Lesseps was broken.

In the last years of his life

he sat looking out a window

with a three-year-old newspaper by his side.

He had essentially been driven insane

by the whole experience in Panama.

NARRATOR: For ten years,

the spectacular failure of the French cast a pall

over the isthmus.

In the eyes of most of the world,

Panama was a miserable sinkhole,

a place synonymous with corruption, disease and death.

The Americans took a different view.

No nation on earth had more to gain from a canal

than the United States.

The close of the th century had been witness

to its astonishing rise--

the sudden, dramatic expansion of its industry,

its gathering economic might,

its surprising aggression against Spain

in the w*r of .

Now, on the threshold of the new century,

the brash young country, barely a hundred years in existence,

was poised to become one of the world's great powers.

[cheering]

To President Theodore Roosevelt, who took office in ,

the canal was the obvious path to America's future.

PARKER: Roosevelt wanted American power to be projected

outside of the North American continent,

really for the first time.

The key to this was, for him, the building of a Panama canal,

which could link the two oceans

and provide a conduit for sea power.

This was the crucial thing for him.

LaFEBER: He saw the canal, essentially,

as the way to protect American interests,

particularly American commerce.

The United States was the number one industrial power

in the world.

And when you begin to look at the world in those terms,

then what you begin to think about was,

how do you get from New York to the markets of Asia?

This is the first time in American history

where we start to think globally.

LEARS: To Roosevelt, the notion of an isthmian canal

is a key piece of the puzzle of world empire

and a kind of providentially ordained

world domination that the United States is meant to enjoy.

Whoever could connect and have the two seas--

the Atlantic and the Pacific-- will be the global power.

[cheering]

NARRATOR: "If we are to hold our own in the struggle for supremacy,"

Roosevelt insisted, "we must build the canal."

But the rights to the land in Panama

proved difficult to negotiate.

JULIE GREENE: Panama was a small province of Colombia.

And once the United States decided

to build the canal in Panama,

they tried to reach an agreement with Colombia.

PARKER: Roosevelt insisted on a huge amount of control

over where the canal was to be built.

However, the Colombian constitution expressly forbids

any sovereignty to be given away for any part of the country.

And effectively this is what the Americans were demanding.

LaFEBER: So, the Colombians rejected the treaty.

They not only rejected it,

the Colombian legislature rejected it unanimously.

DIAZ ESPINO: Roosevelt thought,

"We have one objective, and we're not going to allow

this small little insignificant country get in our way."

Roosevelt felt that the United States should...

leading the way in improving the world,

even if bits of the world didn't necessarily want to be improved.

So he had an option.

Either he could just simply invade Panama and take it,

which he considered doing.

He sent spies to go and check out

the possibility of achieving that.

Or there was another option,

and that was for Panama to declare its independence

under the protection of the United States.

NARRATOR: As Roosevelt well knew,

Panamanian elites had been plotting revolution for years.

Now, with a nod from Washington, they made their move.

On the morning of November , ,

the rebels seized the isthmus.

Aided by the well-timed appearance

of an American gunboat in the harbor at Colón,

their revolution was over by sundown,

its sole casualties a foreign-born shopkeeper

and a luckless donkey.

Three days later, the United States formally recognized

the new Republic of Panama.

DIAZ ESPINO: The best part was the way they did it.

Instead of fight against the Colombia,

they just send bags of money

to pay off all the Colombian troops to go back to Colombia.

So this was a bloodless revolution.

MASON: Colombia, they didn't imagine the audacity of Teddy Roosevelt.

"We will make Panama into a new, independent country.

"They will sign us off this tract of land,

and then we will have a canal and they will have a nation."

And that was the birth of the nation of Panama.

EDWARD TENNER: It was arrogant,

but then again America was emerging

into an international order

where to be a self-respecting power, you had to be arrogant.

The British were arrogant, the Germans were arrogant.

God knows the French were arrogant.

So this self-assertion by America

was part of a certain kind of culture.

NARRATOR: The treaty later signed with the Panamanians

gave the United States effective sovereignty

over the so-called "canal zone"--

a -square-mile swath

that stretched clear across the isthmus

and cut the new nation in two.

PARKER: The Panamanian leadership was of course extremely grateful

to the Americans for their support in the revolution.

But the honeymoon period was incredibly short.

As soon as the Americans started actually laying out

the boundaries of the zone,

the Panamanians realized that they'd been sold out.

NARRATOR: What Roosevelt called

"one of the future highways of civilization"

was now America's to control.

All that was left to do was build it.

PARKER: When the news of the Panama revolution came through,

it was immediately apparent that it had been carried out

with the connivance and with the support of the United States.

And this left the public very confused and very divided.

There was a feeling

that the underhand and internationally ill*gal way

in which the Americans had contrived the revolution

had somehow sullied America's reputation.

There were headlines saying, "Might makes right."

You know, "We are just now like the Europeans, who are...

who grab land whenever they want."

And there was a feeling that something that had made

the United States different,

that had made it better than the other great powers,

had been lost.

[steam train whistling]

NARRATOR: On May , ,

the American effort in Panama officially got underway.

To oversee the project on the ground,

Roosevelt had selected a seasoned, seemingly unflappable

-year-old engineer from Chicago

named John Findley Wallace.

But real authority rested with the Isthmian Canal Commission,

a presidentially appointed panel charged with approving

virtually every decision made in the Canal Zone.

With the national treasury footing the bill

for the project,

the commission was determined that not a single penny

be misspent.

PARKER: Every time you wanted to do something,

every time you wanted to hire a cart,

you'd have to fill out a form in triplicate

and send it to Washington.

And this, of course, brought utter paralysis

to anything that Wallace was trying to do.

NARRATOR: As yet, the Americans had no real plan

other than to pick up where the French left off

and dig a massive ditch through the isthmus

some miles in length and about feet below sea level.

Slated to run from Colón, the harbor on the Caribbean,

all the way south to Panama City on the Pacific,

the canal would have to cut through dense jungle,

across the flood-prone Chagres River Valley,

and then through the steep mountain pass known as Culebra.

Wallace had only , men at his disposal--

, of them new recruits from the U.S.,

the rest West Indians left over from the French effort.

With such a token force,

and tons of machinery badly in need of repair,

he was uncertain how to proceed.

He wanted time-- at least a year, he said--

to experiment with equipment.

PARKER: And all of the time

there was this huge clamor from back at home

to make the dirt fly.

Roosevelt wanted action.

So of course Wallace had to start digging

the minute he got there.

NARRATOR: In November , under pressure from Washington,

Wallace ordered excavation to begin at Culebra.

To meet the challenge of the mountains,

he'd imported two Bucyrus steam shovels--

-ton behemoths that could dig up

roughly eight tons of rock and earth with a single scoop.

But there were not enough trains to haul the spoil away,

and what trains there were kept running off the tracks.

PARKER: It was an impossible situation

for him to deal with as chief engineer.

The key to the successful excavation of the canal

was about moving the spoil that was dug away from the site,

otherwise everything would stop.

If the shovel didn't have anything to load the earth onto,

the shovel would stop.

"Make the dirt fly" was a disastrous approach

to the huge engineering challenge

that Wallace was facing.

NARRATOR: The problems only multiplied.

Just weeks into the digging at Culebra,

three men on the isthmus contracted yellow fever.

In December, there were six more.

Yellow fever could cause internal bleeding,

bleeding from the gums,

and internal hemorrhaging that would cause the black vomit,

or <span tts:fontStyle="italic">vomito n*gro,</span> which was terrifying.

WILLIAM DONADIO: The yellow fever.

The fever attacking and k*lling everybody.

The fever got everybody scared.

Nobody wants to come to the isthmus to work.

BYERLY: The fear.

Don't go down to that project because you may not come back.

GREENE: The horror that maybe death is stalking us

the same way it stalked the French.

BYERLY: Within three months, of the Americans flee.

NARRATOR: In January, as the epidemic spread,

Wallace tried to project confidence

and made a show of riding around the Canal Zone with his wife.

Then it became known that the couple had quietly imported

two metal coffins.

"I am thoroughly sick of this country

and everything to do with the canal,"

one American wrote his mother.

"Tell the boys at home to stay there,

even if they get no more than a dollar a day."

By June ,

nearly three-quarters of the American labor force

had fled the isthmus.

Overwhelmed and suffering from nervous strain,

Wallace soon resigned his post.

BYERLY: The project looks doomed.

The project comes to a standstill

and Theodore Roosevelt goes nuts.

LaFEBER: It looked as though

what was going to happen to the United States

had been exactly what happened to France.

And this is traumatic for Americans,

how dangerously close to failure the whole U.S. enterprise is.

[train chugging and whistling]

NARRATOR: The Americans had been in Panama for more than a year,

and $ million already had been spent.

But so far, only about million cubic yards of spoil

had been excavated,

which left hundreds of millions still to be removed.

At the rate things were going, one worker guessed,

the canal would not be finished for years.

[thunder]

VAN HARDEVELD [dramatized]: I'm convinced that there isn't a place in the world

that can beat this isthmus for rain.

It rains so much that, honest to goodness,

my hat is getting moldy on my head.

I haven't had on a dry pair of shoes in weeks.

NARRATOR: Jan van Hardeveld arrived in Panama

just as Chief Engineer Wallace was leaving,

and for the first few weeks,

it was hard not to wonder if he'd made a mistake.

He'd put more than , miles between himself and his family--

left his wife Rose alone with the children--

and all for a project that was floundering.

VAN HARDEVELD [dramatized]: Dear Rose, the food is awful and cooked in such a way

that no civilized white man can stand it

for more than a week or two.

I grew careless last week and before I realized it,

I was one sick hombre--

stomach out of order and my blood full of malaria bugs.

I'm taking no more chances than I can help

of being sent home wrapped in a wooden overcoat.

NARRATOR: Morale in the Canal Zone was at an all-time low

when, at the end of July ,

Wallace's replacement as chief engineer finally turned up.

His name was John Stevens and his reputation preceded him.

Some years before, as a surveyor for the Great Northern Railroad,

he'd trekked hundreds of miles through the Rockies

to plot out the line's passage over the Continental Divide.

Word had it that he'd since built more miles of railroad

than any other man alive.

Now, he'd been asked to rescue the largest government project

in American history.

PARKER: John Stevens was an absolutely brilliant railroad engineer.

Very much a frontiersman.

He'd fought wolves and Indians.

He had survived in incredibly harsh environments.

And he arrived in Panama,

and he took a look around

and he saw everywhere disillusionment and fear.

[train whistle blowing]

NARRATOR: "I believe," Stevens later wrote,

"that I faced about as discouraging a proposition

as was ever presented to a construction engineer."

PARKER: Stevens noticed straightaway that part of the problem

was what he called "the idiotic howl" to make dirt fly.

He had enough experience to realize

that on a project of this enormous, unprecedented scale

he would have to spend a very great amount of time

just getting the whole thing ready.

So, therefore, even though he knew that Roosevelt

and the press back in the United States would be horrified,

he ordered the digging to stop.

NARRATOR: For Stevens, the first order of business

was to retool the Panama railroad,

which had been built in the s

and was by now so decrepit that he once described it

as "two streaks of rust and a right-of-way."

ALLEN: Stevens realized that this was going to be

a huge exercise in logistics.

The job of building the canal would be

very much a job of just moving, removing, hauling out

thousands of carloads of dirt.

He understood that the railroad was going to be

the heart of the effort.

NARRATOR: In the system Stevens ultimately devised,

the railroad would function as a giant conveyor belt,

and its position would shift continuously

to accommodate the work as it progressed.

To speed the relocation along,

he seized on an ingenious innovation--

a swinging boom mounted on a flat car

that could lift and move yards of existing track

without first having to take it apart.

Then he traded the rail cars for open-sided flats

fitted with a plow,

which could empty a -car train in about ten minutes.

By Stevens' estimate,

the two rigs would do the labor of men working by hand.

PARKER: The cleverest little trick that he did

was to plan the work so that the digging would start

at either end of the nine-mile Culebra Cut

and move towards the middle, which was the highest point.

This meant that when the empty spoil trains

came into the Cut they would be climbing up to the shovels,

and when they were full

they would have the benefit of the gradient to take away

their enormous loads.

Engineering at its simplest and most brilliant.

NARRATOR: At first, the project's most formidable challenge

seemed to be the mountain pass at Culebra.

To dig the canal there,

the Americans would have to bore down as much as feet

through rock, gravel, clay and earth

along a corridor some nine miles in length.

As Stevens put it to a colleague, "At Culebra,

"we are facing a proposition greater than was ever undertaken

in the history of the world."

[thunder]

But after a few months on the isthmus,

at the height of the rainy season,

Stevens began to realize that the Chagres was an obstacle

every bit as daunting.

Throughout the summer and fall of ,

he watched as the swollen river surged over its banks

again and again,

flooding the works all up and down the line.

Gradually, it began to dawn on him:

if he and his men built a sea-level canal

as the French had attempted to do--

and Washington was now expecting--

the Chagres would menace its operation

for more than half of each year.

PARKER: Stevens realized building a sea-level canal

would almost certainly condemn the American canal to failure

just like the French.

Stevens was totally horrified by this.

He went to Washington.

He hated politicians, he hated going on a boat,

he got horribly seasick.

But he went to Washington and he talked face to face

with Roosevelt and convinced him, convinced the president,

that a sea-level canal would be total madness.

MASON: How can you get a boat to move from one side to the other side

and to cross the mountain?

Stevens and the rest of the American engineers

would need to find a new way to do it.

NARRATOR: The answer was a lock canal--

a highly engineered, mechanized waterway

that would solve the multiple problems of Panama all at once.

First, to control the Chagres,

a massive dam would be built at Gatun,

creating an artificial lake some feet above sea level,

roughly in the middle of the canal's planned route.

PARKER: In order to get to this lake,

the ship would be raised by a series of locks.

ALLEN: These locks are each going to be these huge concrete structures

more than three football fields long.

They're going to hold tens of millions of gallons of water.

They're going to raise ships up over the American continent,

in effect.

MASON: What it was was to set up a steps, a series of steps,

hydraulically elevate the ship,

where the boats will go up a step, come across.

PARKER: It would sail across the artificial lake,

go through Culebra Cut, which, of course,

now didn't need to be cut out nearly so drastically,

and then would descend again in steps

down into the Pacific and away.

NARRATOR: To build the lock canal in Panama,

the Americans would not only have to dam

the turbulent Chagres

and create the largest artificial lake in the world,

they also would have to design locks nearly three times longer

than the longest ever constructed.

The plan was wildly ambitious.

But Roosevelt had backed it,

and Stevens was confident it could be done.

"There is no element of mystery involved in it,"

Stevens reported to Washington.

"The problem is one of magnitude, not miracles."

NARRATOR: To Jan van Hardeveld,

the Canal Zone now seemed infused with a sense of purpose.

Assigned to supervise a work g*ng in the Culebra Cut,

he spent his days building track for the spoil trains,

while all around him roads were being paved

and streetlights installed,

wharves and warehouses built,

dormitories and dining halls banged together.

The time had come, he decided, to send for his family.

VAN HARDEVELD [dramatized]: Dear Rose,

the slowness of work would be discouraging

if I were not certain that our government can and will

accomplish whatever it sets out to do.

That is why, since you have made no objection,

I have made my decision to stay.

And I am happy to be able to tell you

that the quartermaster has at last assigned me

to married quarters.

The house is an old one at Las Cascadas,

the village where I am now working.

It was the first house built here by the French,

and is marked "House Number One."

NARRATOR: It was late winter, ,

when Rose packed up her belongings,

said her goodbyes to Wyoming,

and set off with her children for Panama.

She hadn't laid eyes on her husband

in more than half a year.

She spent most of the voyage laid low by seasickness.

But as their destination neared,

she felt a sudden rush of enthusiasm.

"This will be our chance," she told her children,

"to be among those who make history."

ROSE [dramatized]: Your Papa is helping to build the big canal,

the waterway that has been in the minds of men for centuries.

It will unite the two oceans, the Atlantic and the Pacific,

and alter the course of the ships that sail upon them.

This canal, when it is finished,

will change the face of the earth.

[clanking of shovels hitting rock]

NARRATOR: Of all the challenges confronting John Stevens,

none was so urgent as the need for workers.

By his estimate, the canal project would generate

some , jobs in alone.

Of those, , were positions for skilled workers--

blacksmiths, carpenters, drill operators, plumbers--

and they were reserved for white U.S. citizens.

But the vast majority of the jobs

in the Canal Zone were unskilled.

Thousands of men were needed to cut brush, dig ditches,

load and unload equipment and supplies.

The French had relied on the West Indians for manual labor.

Stevens had other plans.

PARKER: Stevens, when he'd done

all his railway building in the United States,

had mainly used Chinese labor.

He considered that to be the best.

When he got to Panama,

he saw that the workforce was mainly West Indian

and he didn't like or trust the West Indians at all.

GREENE: John Stevens wasn't happy about relying on West Indians

because he, you know, sharing in the racial beliefs of the day,

he saw them as too lazy, not intelligent.

[train whistle blowing]

NARRATOR: Stevens kept up a continuous campaign to recruit elsewhere.

He experimented with workers from Spain and Greece and Italy.

But in the end, he had to take men wherever he could find them

and nowhere did he find more than in the nearby islands

of the West Indies.

EGBERT LESLIE: I landed here on the st of January, .

On the appearance of the place,

I felt like I'll go right back home

because everything looked so strange and...

you know, different to being brought up at home,

so I felt like I'd go back home,

but it wasn't so easy to do that.

NARRATOR: Recruitment proved especially successful

on the tiny island of Barbados,

where jobs were scarce, pay was low

and young men were an easy target for American advertising.

MASON: They created what was called the "Panama Man,"

which was to get someone that went to Panama

and bring him back and he will be the advertiser.

When he came back to Barbados from Panama,

he came back with white trousers, white jacket,

gold teeth, panama hat,

a big smile and money's in their pocket.

And all the other guys that's on the plantation take a look

and say, "Boy, I better go down to Panama and get mine, too."

I had some friends and they all was getting ready to go

and they wanted me to go, and I joined them.

And I left from St. Lucy,

went to Bridgetown to the transportation office

and I signed up there for a trip to the canal.

I had no recognition of what was going to happen.

I couldn't conceive.

I hadn't yet seen the canal,

I hadn't yet seen no part of the operation

until after I reached employment.

Then I begun to realize what a stupendous affair this would be.

RUSSELL: Panama was perceived as the way of getting riches,

but what they did not know was the price

that they had to pay to do that.

NARRATOR: The journey from Barbados took an average of eight to ten days.

Then came the shock of the Canal Zone.

GREENE: West Indians found as they got to the Canal Zone

that things were very different

from what they had known in Barbados.

The United States created a very regimented world.

MASON: They had shacks and they had bunk beds on all four walls.

All four walls had bunk beds, three layers of bunk beds.

Very harsh facilities.

That was part and parcel

of that type of society that was created.

NARRATOR: As the Barbadians soon learned,

everything in the Canal Zone came down to how you were paid.

Skilled workers-- invariably white--

received their wages in gold,

unskilled workers-- who were largely black-- in silver.

So-called "Gold Roll" employees enjoyed privileges

such as paid sick leave and laundry service

and holidays off.

For "Silver Roll" employees, there was nothing of the kind.

PARKER: From this emerged a system of segregation on the works

whereby everything was marked either "silver" or "gold"

whether it was the toilets, whether it was the post office,

whether it was a shop or a drinking fountain.

DONADIO: I remember my stepfather talking about it.

It was a kind of a polished-up segregation.

It didn't say black and white,

but you understood that if you weren't a gold roller

and you were a silver roller, that you were on the black side.

MASON: It worked exactly like it worked in the United States.

In the States, they called the system for black "colored."

In Panama, they call it "silver."

With the segregation, that was a whole dehumanizing strategy,

and that gave the moral justification for viewing them

as beasts of labor.

NARRATOR: In the West Indies, Stevens had found exactly what he needed--

a seemingly inexhaustible supply of men

willing to endure harsh treatment

and heavy physical labor

in exchange for as little as ten cents an hour.

RUSSELL: They knew that they had to send money home.

That was the reality.

Ten cents an hour was much more than they would make

in the Caribbean.

NARRATOR: By the close of ,

Stevens had a labor force of some , men at his disposal.

And though he'd never wanted them,

more than % were West Indians.

NARRATOR: Rose van Hardeveld had made her family whole again

by coming to Panama.

But she was one of very few American women

in the Canal Zone,

and she'd never been so lonely in her life.

Jan put in more hours on the job than he ever had in Wyoming,

leaving Rose to cope with the miseries of jungle living

all on her own.

In the local stores, she remembered,

"not one edible thing looked familiar,"

and she wound up feeding her children a steady diet of fruit,

beans and soggy crackers.

The house smelled of bat droppings,

and it was overrun with lizards and insects.

"Slowly but surely my natural fortitude was giving way,"

Rose later wrote,

"and I was becoming a nervous, fearful woman."

Then her youngest, whom the family called "Sister,"

came down with a fever.

ROSE [dramatized]: Her round face was pale,

and the cold sweat stood out in beads all over her body.

It was malaria and dysentery, and a dreary time we had of it.

She became a limp, feverish little bundle,

crying night and day.

All the time I was becoming lower and lower in spirits

and less able to cope.

NARRATOR: By the time Sister finally recovered,

Rose had been driven to the verge of collapse.

"I believe it was the consciousness

of what would happen to the children," she wrote,

"that kept me from going to pieces."

The story was the same all over the Canal Zone.

Malaria, dysentery, pneumonia--

but nothing was worse than yellow fever.

Each year, epidemics swept across the isthmus,

k*lling men by the hundreds,

inciting panic, utterly paralyzing the work.

PARKER: When the Americans arrived in Panama, it was obviously clear

that there had to be a medical officer.

And one of the leading yellow fever specialists

was an army doctor called Colonel William Gorgas.

Gorgas had made his name as a frontier doctor

in the United States.

And on one of his postings, he caught yellow fever.

And he recovered and thereafter he was immune.

And he decided to make it his life's work

to battle this terrible disease.

NARRATOR: For centuries,

yellow fever had been thought to be caused by filth,

and efforts to combat the disease

had revolved entirely around sanitation.

But during a posting in Havana,

Gorgas had developed a new protocol.

Working from an obscure theory in a Cuban medical journal

that blamed yellow fever transmission

on infected mosquitoes,

he had carried out an extensive eradication campaign in Havana.

Over the course of one year,

yellow fever cases there had fallen by more than %.

k*ll the mosquitoes, Gorgas argued,

and yellow fever would disappear.

PARKER: Gorgas arrived in Panama absolutely % convinced

that the mosquito theory of yellow fever transmission

was correct.

BYERLY: Gorgas put a proposal together

to implement a plan similar to that which he had done

in Havana.

His project was a lot bigger, though,

because in Havana he just had to clean up one city.

But in Panama he had to clean up two urban areas

separated by square miles of swamp and jungle.

Gorgas put together a $ million proposal

and submitted it to the Panama Canal Commission.

And they approved $,.

$,.

They just didn't get what he was trying to do.

PARKER: The gentlemen of the commission simply didn't believe

the mosquito theory.

They called it the "veriest balderdash."

There was a feeling that we needed a sensible doctor,

not this sort of crazy Gorgas with his wild mosquito theories.

And actually one of the leaders of the Canal Commission

tried to get him fired and replaced with a friend of his

who was actually an osteopath

with no experience of tropical medicine at all.

NARRATOR: On the eve of Gorgas's dismissal,

President Roosevelt received a visitor

at his home at Oyster Bay--

his personal physician, Dr. Alexander Lambert.

"You are facing one of the greatest decisions

of your career," Lambert told him.

"If you fall back on the old methods you will fail,

"just as the French failed.

If you back Gorgas, you will get your canal."

BYERLY: Lambert appeals to Roosevelt's ego

and he says, "This canal is your project and it's your choice."

And Roosevelt buys it.

He says, "Get behind Gorgas and give him the authority

and the resources he needs."

And so mosquito eradication can begin in earnest.

NARRATOR: With the blessing and backing of chief engineer Stevens,

Gorgas launched the most expensive public health campaign

in history.

BYERLY: William Gorgas is an army officer.

So the cleanup effort was conducted

with military discipline and precision.

[dog barking]

He spends $, on screening.

He goes about screening off patients

so that mosquitoes cannot bite them

and transmit their case of yellow fever.

And he goes about fumigating the houses throughout the Canal Zone

to k*ll adult mosquitoes.

And then the more extensive effort

is to find mosquito larvae in all of the water sources

in town and k*ll the larvae.

PARKER: Gorgas had discovered

that if you pour oil on top of the water,

you smother the mosquito larvae.

He called them wrigglers.

So he had to go through every single house,

every shack in Panama City and Colón--

all along the line of the canal--

and find every single water tank, every little puddle,

and get them covered with oil.

BYERLY: Gorgas's team is swarming all over the Panama Canal Zone.

They had to screen gutters.

They had to put lids on water cisterns.

Gorgas even got a law passed to make it a five dollar fine

to have a wiggler in your home.

He is at w*r against the mosquitoes.

And he's going to k*ll them to the last.

NARRATOR: By August , the monthly tally of new yellow fever cases

had fallen by nearly half, to .

A month later, the count was down to just seven.

Then, on November ,

Gorgas called his staff into an autopsy room

and told them to take a good look at the corpse

on the table.

It was, he rightly predicted,

the last yellow fever victim they would ever see.

ALLEN: The idea that Gorgas was able to conquer this problem

is still kind of unbelievable to me.

He ended up tracking down individual mosquitoes,

which is unbelievable in this... this jungle,

where it essentially never stops raining.

And it worked.

And it saved thousands of lives.

Really was a huge part

of what made the digging of the canal possible.

[explosions]

NARRATOR: By the fall of ,

Stevens' carefully designed excavation system

was running at peak efficiency.

It had taken him the better part

of an exhausting year to prepare.

He'd overseen the construction of thousands of buildings,

hired thousands of men,

spent thousands upon thousands on new equipment and supplies.

Finally, the real work of building the canal was underway.

Over the months and years to come,

millions of cubic yards of rock and earth

would have to be loosened and dug and loaded

and hauled away-- enough spoil, it was said,

to build a Great Wall like China's

clear across the United States.

From Washington, Theodore Roosevelt was watching.

Despite the progress in Panama,

his pet project lately had come under fire

with critics howling about alleged graft and corruption

and American boys supposedly ruined by prostitution

and drink.

What the president needed now was a new story

for the nation's front pages.

LaFEBER: He's got a very big P.R. problem.

But if anyone knew how to deal with a P.R. problem,

it was Theodore Roosevelt.

And Roosevelt decides that he'll go down to Panama

and see what's going on firsthand.

It's the first time an American president, while in office,

leaves the United States.

NARRATOR: "I want to see how they are going to dig that ditch,

"how they are going to build that lock,

how they are going to get through that cut,"

Roosevelt told the press.

"It's a business trip.

"I want to be able to tell people as much as I can

about the canal."

LEARS: T.R.'s trip to Panama tells you a lot

about his mastery of new media.

He knows that if he goes to Panama it will be a media event.

GREENE: Newspaper reporters are doing stories

on exactly what his stateroom looks like on the ship,

where he's going to stop along the way.

You know, even before he gets to Panama,

it has captured the attention of the country.

[seagulls cawing]

NARRATOR: The presidential vessel dropped anchor at Limón Bay

on November , , an entire day ahead of schedule.

PARKER: Everything had been scrubbed and whitewashed

and made ready for his visit.

There were choirs lined up, there were ba*ls and parties,

but even before the welcoming party started up their songs,

he was already on the isthmus.

He had snuck away from his boat

and was poking around in the hospitals

and in the barrack rooms.

Roosevelt was determined

that nothing would be hidden from him.

He deliberately went when Panama was at its wettest.

And it rained and rained and rained as it only can in Panama.

GREENE: The rains are coming down and he's, you know, saying,

"That's bully great" to have so much rain

because he wants to see Panama at its worst.

PARKER: Everywhere he went he would make impromptu speeches,

urging the workforce to be men

and to fight for this fantastic achievement

that would cover the United States with glory.

DONADIO: He made the men that were building there

feel like they were special people,

gave them pride of what they were doing

for the United States.

PARKER: He had this amazing energy.

The people who were designated to show him around

were totally exhausted after the first few hours.

NARRATOR: For Roosevelt, the biggest draw in the canal zone

was the Culebra Cut, where each month Stevens and his crew

set a new excavation record.

He got his look early on the second day.

With a flock of newspaper photographers hard on his heels,

he marched up to one of the mammoth Bucyrus steam shovels,

asked the operator to slide over, and hoisted himself

into the driver's seat.

GREENE: One of the most famous photographs ever taken

of a United States president.

It's a great photo that really announced the key themes

of the United States in the Canal Zone.

Peerless leadership, American industry, efficiency,

technology, science was going to master the canal project.

It was going to do what France never could have done.

NARRATOR: In all, the president spent days on the isthmus--

days that Rose van Hardeveld and many other Americans

would remember as the turning point for the canal.

ROSE [dramatized]: We saw him once, on the end of a train.

Jan got small flags for the children

and told us about when the train would pass,

so we were standing on the front steps.

Mr. Roosevelt flashed us one of his well-known toothy smiles

and waved his hat at the children

as though he wanted to come up the hill and say hello.

I caught some of Jan's confidence in the man.

"Maybe this ditch will get dug after all," I thought.

NARRATOR: Late on the night of January , ,

months into his tenure

and at the close of yet another -hour day,

John Stevens sat down at his desk in his office near Culebra

and composed a letter to Theodore Roosevelt.

"Mr. President," he wrote,

"you have been kind enough on several occasions

"to instruct me

"to address you directly and personally,

"and I will in this case.

"The 'honor' which is continually being held

"as an incentive for being connected with this work

"appeals to me but slightly.

To me, the canal is only a big ditch."

PARKER: It was an extraordinary thing to send to a president.

He said he didn't like Panama,

he never wanted the job in the first place,

he'd had enough and he wanted to go

and do something far more lucrative elsewhere.

Roosevelt looked at this letter and was absolutely furious.

He'd been in Panama talking to the workforces

that they were all martial, soldiers,

they must stick to their tasks.

And now the leader that he had backed was resigning.

But I think Stevens was utterly exhausted.

And the incredible scale

of the problems that he inherited from Wallace...

Really it's amazing that he lasted as long as he did.

ALLEN: Wallace had worn out and quit, Stevens had worn out and quit.

Roosevelt basically said, "I want a military man

who can't quit until I tell him he can quit."

Who has absolutely no choice.

That's how it's got to be from now on.

And that's what he got in Goethals.

NARRATOR: George Washington Goethals was , an expert in hydraulics,

and one of the finest engineers in the Army Corps.

He was also-- as Roosevelt now made plain--

the chief engineer who would see the canal through to completion.

As Goethals told a friend,

"It's a case of just plain straight duty."

He arrived on the isthmus in late March .

A month later, the steam shovel men--

the backbone of the entire excavation effort--

went out on strike, demanding a wage increase

of more than %.

PARKER: They were already the best paid people on the isthmus.

And Goethals basically pulled the plug on it.

He decided he was going

to gradually recruit strikebreakers.

NARRATOR: Hiring new crews would take time.

Meanwhile, the digging ground to a halt.

Two weeks passed, then four.

Still, Goethals refused to negotiate.

Instead, he sent the strikers packing.

None of them would be permitted to return to Panama.

PARKER: He could deport anyone from the isthmus

who was in any way causing any kind of trouble whatsoever.

Anyone who complained, asked for more money

would simply be got rid of.

NARRATOR: By the time the Bucyrus shovels finally went back to work

in July, manned by new operators,

Goethals had made his point.

As he later put it, "The outcome showed conclusively

"that defection by any one class of men

could not tie up the whole work."

PARKER: George Goethals became known as the Czar of Panama.

He not only ran the engineering effort,

he also ran the canal zone government, the post office...

Everything reported directly to him.

He had total power on the isthmus.

His express mission was that everything was subservient

to getting the canal made.

NARRATOR: By the time Goethals took over, the Americans had been in Panama

for three years, and the bulk of the work still lay ahead.

On both the Atlantic and Pacific sides of the isthmus,

the lock basins had yet to be dug

and the locks themselves constructed.

At Gatun, the site where the Chagres would be dammed

to form the lake, a foundation of solid rock had to be laid

before building could even begin.

Meanwhile, to keep the river

from continually flooding the works at Culebra,

a massive dike had to be put up at Gamboa.

And then, there was the Cut itself.

Excavation had so far managed to widen it by over a hundred feet,

but the immense task of digging down had barely begun.

With Goethals in charge, the Culebra Cut would become

a round-the-clock operation,

with as many as , men at work at any given time.

PARKER: If we arrived there now,

I think the first thing would strike us would be the noise.

[loud chugging]

There would be maybe drills going.

There would be or shovels, each with three or four trains.

There were constant explosions.

And all of this noise would reverberate off the walls.

As well as the noise, it was immensely hot,

up to as much as degrees.

Very soon it became known as Hell's Gorge.

And more than anything, it was incredibly dangerous.

ALLEN: The Culebra Cut was the most challenging part to dig

because you had to get down through so much earth

that became so much mud when it rained

as it did almost nonstop for nine months out of the year.

And there were just constant landslides.

They'd hear this tooting of the whistles...

[whistle blows]

...blaring out, and they'd know

that something went wrong, a slide.

So they had to use pick and shovels to dig them out.

They knew that the next slide could come down on them too

and bury them too.

The mountain didn't want to be crushed the way they did it,

and the mountain fought back.

NARRATOR: The slides came without warning, again and again,

wiping out months of work in an instant,

twisting track and machinery beyond recognition,

literally burying men alive.

Nearly all of the victims were West Indians.

MARCO MASON: There were no safety guidelines.

There was no labor guidelines.

Every day, men died.

It was a regular situation.

So now they have to bring in more men and more men

and more men.

NARRATOR: Assigned to the most punishing and hazardous work in the Cut,

the West Indians were the ones on the ground,

hauling lumber and ties, shoveling earth,

laying the dynamite that was used to blast

through the mountains.

EUSTACE TABOIS: They had to drill these holes, you know, through the rock.

And after they get down to a certain depth,

they fill it with dynamite.

Then, when they are ready, they give you warning

so that you go and take shelter.

[expl*si*n]

GRANVILLE CLARKE: Three, four, five places start to blast.

Big rocks going up in the air.

What happens,

sometimes somebody make a mistake

and touch the wire,

and that guy is gone up too.

[expl*si*n]

BOWEN: It happened a Sunday morning

when the pay car was there paying men.

Pay car and all was in the expl*si*n.

A couple of hundred men in that, a couple of hundred men.

You see bits of men here, and the head yonder,

and all those-- picking it up for days.

Boy, that wasn't an easy day, I tell you, Sunday morning.

MASON: My grandfather told me

the guys that go up front with the dynamite,

that they would leave with their buddies their belongings,

because they never know if they are coming back up.

It was a daily situation

that today, this morning, you have breakfast,

and somebody at that table having breakfast

may not be there for that evening,

so it's that type of situation.

Now that I am old and sometimes I sit down there,

and these things are recollection, you know.

And what I went through on the Panama Canal

and I'm still alive.

I raise my hands to God.

I say, "Thank God, thank Him."

Because I could have been...

I could have been dead several times.

NARRATOR: As the weeks went by, the death toll rose.

Eventually, Goethals had the railroad tracks extended

all the way out to Mount Hope Cemetery

so that the bodies could be buried more easily.

Meanwhile, with each passing month,

the cut at Culebra grew deeper.

[insects and frogs chirruping]

ROSE [dramatized]: With the darkness came noises so weird and uncanny

as to make the flesh creep with the strangeness of it all.

The very worst was the wailing for the dead

that came from the labor camp below us.

When one of their number died,

the friends and kindred of the deceased would drink rum

and wail, and sing Old English gospel hymns.

No matter how fast asleep I might be,

when the first sound of that eerie screeching

slapped the air, I was wide awake and out of bed.

It was like the dance of the witches.

NARRATOR: Looking back later, Rose van Hardeveld would marvel

that she and Jan had ever gotten used to living in Panama.

More than once, she recalled,

their commitment to the project had wavered.

And after Jan's closest friend was k*lled,

they actually had considered going home.

"Why should we stay any longer?" Rose remembered thinking.

"The canal could get built eventually without us."

PARKER: The Americans had

a very serious problem in that the white workforce

were largely arriving and pretty much leaving straightaway.

They didn't like working in Panama.

And right up until ,

there was something like % turnover in white staff.

This was a potentially deal-breaking problem.

And the answer to it was

to provide every single home comfort that they could.

NARRATOR: For Rose and Jan,

the inducement to stay came in the summer of

in the form of a newly built cottage

on a pretty, tree-lined street.

"The house was clean and comfortable," Rose remembered,

"just about the type of home

a man in the States would try to provide for his family."

As time passed, there were other improvements as well:

ice boxes and electricity and YMCA clubhouses,

built by the government and outfitted with card rooms,

pool tables and libraries.

[bat cracks, crowd cheers]

There were dances on Saturday nights

and baseball games on Sunday,

more than three dozen churches

and scores of clubs and fraternal organizations--

the Brotherhood of Railroad Train Men and the Odd Fellows,

Sojourner's Lodge and the Knights of Pythias.

[bowling pins clattering]

As Rose remembered it, all the perks had their desired effect.

American men stayed in Panama longer,

their wives and children came to join them,

and friendships in the Canal Zone deepened.

"We drew together in a sort of compact clique," Rose recalled.

"And nothing else seemed quite so important

"as this immense project

"moving gradually and steadily to completion.

This was our life."

GREENE: The canal project increasingly became looked upon by Americans

as kind of a utopian representation

of the United States.

There are these glowing journalistic accounts of it--

the workers are happy, everyone is well fed, contented.

The reality was that it was a very autocratic state.

No freedom of speech, no rights to a union,

more power being asserted at every step.

The United States government was creating

an efficient factory workforce

for this incredible earth-shifting project

on the Isthmus of Panama.

PARKER: There was no democracy at all.

But at the same time, things got done.

Mountains were moved.

It worked.

NARRATOR: By , the Americans were finally making real progress

on the canal... and headlines all over the world.

Suddenly now, tourists from everywhere were flocking

to Panama to see the engineering marvel of the age.

What the Americans were doing with the canal,

said one awed visitor,

was "the greatest liberty ever taken with nature."

No aspect of the construction compelled such fascination

as the gargantuan locks--

the so-called "mighty portals to the Panama Gateway."

ALLEN: These locks are these huge concrete structures

with these incredibly elaborate culverts.

They are this enormous engineering challenge,

the biggest engineering project there has been

in the history of the earth until then.

NARRATOR: In all, some five million bags and barrels of concrete

went into the building of the locks, dams and spillways.

Mixed on site and deposited into enormous six-ton buckets,

the concrete was then hoisted by crane, delivered by cableway

and poured from above.

The amount poured at Gatun alone--

some two million cubic yards--

could have built a wall feet high

and long enough to encircle the island of Manhattan

more than four times.

PARKER: This was far bigger locks

than had ever been constructed before.

And really it was about...

it was about just doing everything much bigger.

There were a couple of very clever ideas,

one of which was to have the lock gates hollow

and watertight, so therefore buoyant,

which meant that far less of the weight had to be carried

by the locks' hinges.

ALLEN: Although they were -some feet high,

they were so precisely balanced,

they could be operated by a single -horsepower motor.

PARKER: The whole operation was powered by electricity.

And this was in very early days for...

This was before many factories were electrified.

And this electricity was generated nearby

by the water from the spillway, by hydroelectric,

and this powered all of the systems

that made the locks work.

The locks were the mechanical marvel of the canal.

NARRATOR: "These locks are more than just tons of concrete,"

said one observer.

"They are the answer of courage and faith to doubt and unbelief.

"In them are the blood and sinew of a great and hopeful nation,

"the fulfillment of ancient ideals

and the promise of larger growth to come."

In the spring of , nine years almost to the day

after the Americans started work on the Panama Canal,

they began at last to finish it.

[explosions]

In May, steam shovels number and dumped their last loads

and met in the center of Culebra Cut.

In June, the last spillway at Gatun Dam was sealed,

allowing the waters of Gatun Lake to rise

to their full height.

In August, the dikes at either end of the line were blown,

and the oceans rushed inland to the gates of the locks.

In September, the first trial lockage was made--

from the Atlantic harbor at Colón

all the way up to the lake.

By summer's end, there was only one remaining dry span

in the channel-- the nine-mile stretch of Culebra Cut--

and that was to be flooded on Monday, October .

Early that afternoon, a crowd began to gather at Gamboa,

on the edge of Gatun Lake--

workers and their families,

visiting dignitaries from the United States,

tourists from as far away as Europe and East Asia.

At : p.m., in a stunt devised by a newspaperman,

President Woodrow Wilson was scheduled to push a button

at his desk in the White House, releasing by telegraph

a current that would blow up the Gamboa dike

and send the waters of Gatun Lake rushing into the Cut.

ROSE [dramatized]: We could easily see the dike

with men still working around it.

Not many yards to one side was the gash of the Cut,

not very deep here.

The small waves lapped eagerly at the edge,

as though the lake was also waiting to let go

of its overload of water.

Tension mounted.

NARRATOR: As Jan van Hardeveld put it to Rose,

the event would either be

"a historic success or a historic failure.

No one knows."

At Gamboa, the clock struck two.

ROSE: There was a reverent silence.

No one spoke at all.

There was a low rumble, a dull, muffled "boom!"

[expl*si*n]

A triple column shot high in the center, turned,

and gracefully fell to both sides like a fountain.

From the multitude came a spontaneous long, loud roar

of such joy and relief

that I felt sure I would remember the sound all my life.

As the water poured out of the lake into the Cut,

hats came off.

We saw Jan and the engineer in charge of the Cut shake hands.

They were both crying.

We were crying, too.

NARRATOR: The canal's official opening was scheduled for August , .

days before, a ship called the <span tts:fontStyle="italic">Cristobal</span>

made a final practice run

and became the first seagoing vessel

ever to successfully cross from the Atlantic Ocean

to the Pacific through the Panama Canal.

ALLEN: It's pretty amazing going through the locks.

You nose forward into this space.

Then million gallons of water pour by gravity

through underground culverts into that lock

and raise you up feet or so.

It's an amazing, beautiful, dramatic experience.

MASON: And when you're on the ship

and you feel it rising up

and you move, you feel it rising up

and you're witnessing what's happening--

the ship climbing a mountain.

I mean, that is mind boggling.

NARRATOR: It had taken ten years of ceaseless, grinding toil,

an outlay of more than $ million--

the largest single federal expenditure in history

to that time--

and the loss of more than , lives.

But the successful completion of the Panama Canal

had defined the United States to the world

and announced the arrival of a new power for the new century.

LEARS: It was a symbol to Americans.

This is what American power, technological know-how,

determination, managerial organization,

all of those things that Americans prided themselves on--

and still do to a certain extent--

this is what it can do for the whole world.

DIAZ ESPINO: After years of people dreaming, now it was done.

Atlantic and Pacific oceans were forever united.

The United States was now firmly established

as the most powerful nation on earth.

PARKER: It all occurred at such a pivotal moment in our history.

The failure of the French effort was very much

the sort of the dying gasp of the Victorian age

that had been dominated by Europe.

With the opening of the American canal,

the power in the world had shifted irrevocably

and the American century effectively could begin.

NARRATOR: Though the Panama Canal was arguably his greatest legacy,

Theodore Roosevelt never saw it once it was finished.

An expedition to South America kept him from attending

the canal's official opening,

and he never again visited the isthmus.

Of the tens of thousands of West Indians who had come to Panama

to build the canal, most simply returned home again--

quite often with not much more money in their pockets

than they'd had when they left.

MASON: The building of it was a harsh nightmare for the diggers.

But it's one of the wonders of the world,

and it's with pride that my grandfather

and his contemporaries look across at that,

knowing that it's one of the biggest enterprise

that the world had ever seen

and that they have participated in that.

They did it.

NARRATOR: For Jan and Rose van Hardeveld,

the years in Panama had been an epic adventure.

Of all the Americans who had been employed on the isthmus,

Jan was one of the very few who had been there

since the beginning.

And, as Rose remembered,

the award he'd earned for long service, the Roosevelt Medal,

was always in his pocket.

Sometimes in the evening,

she would find him staring off into the distance,

turning the tiny scrap of metal over and over in his hand.

VAN HARDEVELD [dramatized]: I couldn't help thinking

of those who worked beside me who lost their lives.

I thought of the many times when I nearly gave in to doubts

that the canal could ever be completed,

that it was ever meant to be.

But most of all, I was remembering

how my answer to my own doubts, every time,

was my faith in my country.

I have always believed that America could accomplish

anything she set out to do.