 To give us a sense of Roosevelt's internationalism and his role in the creation of an American empire, we asked Julie Green of the University of Maryland to be our morning keynote today. She's a labor historian, she does work in immigration and political history and history of empire, and she's written the book, which is completely at her foe of today's discussion, the canal builders making America's empire at the Panama Canal. This is just one of her books. She's one of us. She's from Greenwood, Nebraska. She took her BA from the University of Michigan and her PhD in history from Yale in 1990. She's had fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned and Societies. She has a very distinguished career. In fact, this book, one of the organizations of American historians, 2009 James Rowley Prize, so we're delighted to have Julie let me introduce her by reading one passage from this wonderful book. And by the way, you can buy this book and she'll be happy to sign it in the course of the day. But you probably have seen that photograph of Roosevelt in Panama. He was the first American president to leave the United States during the course of his time in office, and he went in November of 1996 with his wife Edith to Korea to Panama. There he was able to be photographed in one of the desirous digging rigs that were actually creating the Panama Canal. It became a very famous photograph that Roosevelt studied. Here's what she said on page 17. Roosevelt could not resist the temptation to master one of the monstrous machines. He hoisted himself into the cab and posed for all the world to see in triumph as a steam shovel driver and engineer. And that famous photograph the president appears completely in control, efficiently and single-handedly directing the work himself. The machine that the president dominated the picture working together to destroy a mountain. Absent from the picture are the thousands of working men who actually dug the canal. The photograph represented to the world the value the U.S. officials sought to associate with the canal project, American efficiency, technological superiority, conquest over nature, and leadership. Roosevelt's journey to the isthmus and his fleeting moment aboard the steam shovel would prove a milestone in the history of the canal and a turning point in the effort to construct a triumphalist narrative of America's role in the world. It could not have come at a better moment for the canal project to become associated with scandal, corruption, and ineptitude in most Americans' minds. Perhaps only Theodore Roosevelt could have turned the situation around, for he brilliantly combined the great themes of the early 20th century, progressivism, optimism, masculinity, and a vivacious belief that America was destined to play a leadership role in world affairs. That's for the canal builders making America's empire at the Panama Canal. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Julie Green. Thank you so much for that play and good afternoon everybody. Thank you so much for being here. It's really exciting for me to be here. As Clay said, I hail from Nebraska and I still come back to Nebraska very often, so I almost feel like I'm nearly home being here. It's very exciting. Nice change from the craziness of Maryland. A special thanks to Clay Jenkinson for organizing this fabulous symposium and to Sharon Pilitzer and the entire staff so far. It's been a splendid event and I'm truly honored and excited to get to talk with you about President Roosevelt and world affairs. Thanks also to the entire staff at this university and to President McCallum for making all of us teachers feel so welcome. So I have to start by saying I begin with this slide just to give you a sense of my title. I have to admit this is a little crazy. My daughter, my 12-year-old a couple of nights ago just before I was getting ready for the week, she was looking at my PowerPoint show and she said, well mom, it's really tough at it. There's no color, it's great background, there's no words and so when I went and started packing she said, I'm just going to show you what you should do with it. I'll just do the first slide and so what she's done, it's kind of silly. There's my name and this is what she's really proud of. I wasn't sure if I should show you that that she thought, but I really did to forget the whole essence of the PowerPoint show. She thought that you ought to see that part as well. Alright, now with that we can get back to the great background and get serious a little bit. So I love this image. I'd like to begin with this image of Theodore Roosevelt and the Globe that speaks volumes about him. He, of course, entered the presidency a very cosmopolitan man, a very international outlook on things and determined, ferociously determined to make the United States a world power. He wanted to make himself and the presidency and the federal government into great powers in domestic politics as well as world politics, but sometimes he felt his hands were tied as Dr. Arnold explored last night when it came to domestic politics and with world politics he felt he had a freer hand. So I want to explore today what he believed, what he was trying to do, and what he achieved. Panama really is the keys. And of course it's what I work on so it's where my heart is, but Panama was the key to establishing the United States as a world power and it was a key to how Roosevelt saw his role as well. This image comes from a poster created to publicize the world's fair held in 1915 to celebrate the opening of the Panama Canal. And if this speaks along with the preceding image of Roosevelt with the Globe, this speaks the key imagery that we associate with the Panama Canal across the 20th century, the artist titled this the 13th flavor of Hercules. And in it you see Hercules who is symbolizing the United States digging, pushing across through to create the canal of the city on the hill behind him. With this painting, the artist Herhan Hall is saying that the United States is godlike, is beneficent, is all-powerful, definitely very manly, very masculine. And with this gesture by referring to Hercules, gesturing back to Greek civilization is linking America as a world power with the greatest ideals of Western civilization. Well I think that to me one of the interesting things about Theodore Roosevelt is not only that he sees the land that made it possible to build the canal, but that he himself is really crucial for understanding how he came to see the canal in such a positive light and how it came to be such a triumphant symbol of America's relationship to the world. In my book I argue that that symbol, that the canal symbolizing the most positive ideals of America kind of hovered over the 20th century like a sort of a friendly ghost shaping how Americans perceive their nation's role in the world. We've become so accustomed to it, it may be hard to remember that there was a time when the canal was not associated with goodness or selflessness or beneficence. There was a time when it was associated with very negative symbols. And I think that Theodore Roosevelt's role in changing that is very, very important, very interesting. So let's look at that. You know the first step, the background begins in 1903. Before 1903 Panama had been a core and neglected province of Colombia. And in 1903 a group of rebels dissatisfied for seeking independence from Colombia, Roosevelt long had desire to build a canal. So he encouraged them, he set military aid to support what they did. And when they won independence he quickly negotiated a treaty with the young Republic of Panama which gave the United States complete and permanent controls over a broad stretch of land about 20 miles across that cut through the heart of the Republic of Panama. That became known as the Panama Canal Zone. And that made it possible to build the Panama Canal. Now people at the time, many people, politicians, the New York Times, average Americans were really shocked by Roosevelt's role in all this. He was called an imperialist, a land grabber, immoral. And so from the very beginning Roosevelt, his actions seemed mired in scandal a little bit and infamy. Nonetheless he pushes ahead and starts the canal construction. We move ahead a couple of years to 1906 and the canal construction is just not going well in these early years. I'll get into the details later, but it's in trouble. It's not moving ahead efficiently. It's linked to issues of disease, corruption. And so Roosevelt knew he had to do something. He had to use his own power, his own personal abilities of persuasion and he had to use the prestige of the presidency to save the situation. And so he became, as Clay Jameson said, he became the first president in U.S. history to lead U.S. territory as a city president. Amazing, unprecedented. You couldn't believe it. And so as you can imagine, the media coverage was incredible. Every step he took as he boarded the battleship was photographed and recorded and made it into newspapers across the country. So just for a minute, a black on the screen. And instead of a visual image on the screen, I want you to imagine President Roosevelt and his lovely wife Eden, as they step onto the battleship and spend six days moving through the Caribbean. Because I think if we imagine for a minute what he was doing on that ship, what he was thinking about, he gives us a window into how he saw where he wanted to take America as a world power. Luckily, Roosevelt wrote so much that we can pretty easily imagine. He was six days along the, through the Caribbean. Roosevelt wrote endless letters to his children. He said that he was, he was fascinated by the vision, especially a kind of, not just his battleship, the USS Louisiana, but the fleet of warships that followed along with him. He said he was sometimes bored. He would sift and read nothing. He would tag along with the officers as they took their tour inspecting the ship. At one point he got up, you know, Roosevelt rugged, strenuous sort of guy. He got up and shoveled coal, helped the lowly sailors shovel in their coal. And he shoveled the coal once. He shoveled it too hard and splattered coal over the officers in their white uniforms. They didn't like that so much. So they curtailed the strenuous activity that Roosevelt was trying to engage in. And so sometimes he, he just would sit, he said, and envision the history of the region he was passing through and his place in that history. He said as the battleship and the warships passed by Cuba and Haiti, he described them as two great, beautiful, venomous islands. He imagined Christopher Columbus and Spanish explorers. He imagined buccaneers and pilots, the rise of the slave trade and, quote, the churning of Haiti into a land of savage negroes who had reverted to brutalism and cannibalism. In contrast, he said Cuba and Puerto Rico, thanks to the wise leadership of the United States, were making steady steps toward Congress. He also found it fascinating to think about, to compare this current journey with that of eight years earlier when he had traveled through Cuba amidst another two warships to fight in the Spanish-American War. He wrote, quote, it seems a strange thing to think of my now being president going to visit the work of the panel of denouncing which I have made possible. I think this image speaks to me because it captures really well as a pinnacle of his influence, shaping world events like few individuals ever have. But also in it, I think we can see all the key elements of this approach to making the United States a world power. First, you see a strong sense in him of moral vision. What's interesting to me about Theodore Roosevelt is that he not only wanted to expand U.S. power in the world, but he very purposely tried to intertwine that power with a moral vision. He tried to connect American expansionism, in other words, to national identity and linked it to great American ideals. Selflessness, contributions to world civilization, like that image we saw of Hercules. Science, industry, progress. Secondly, though, I think we see in that, that those images leading through his mind of the ship, we see that his was also a vision deeply informed by his understanding of race. This was a time of social gardenism. He thought very much in terms of superior and inferior races. And so in his mind, expansionism was a good thing, partly because Americans as a race were the superior race, and they had an obligation to rule over the inferior races of the world. Thirdly, it really suggests, and I think this is a historian, very interesting, it suggests how important to Roosevelt was his connection to history. He thought always very much about the history that had gone before, and his place in it, and the way he saw himself setting himself as an individual and his country up to play a wonderful role in the future of history as well. All of these elements we see in what he was thinking about on that ship. And finally, the trip itself suggests a really important, distinctive characteristic of what Roosevelt did to make the US a world power. And that is that he was very skillful at employing the prestige of the presidency and his own incredible talents at public relations, media savvy, that sort of thing in order to convince the American public that expansionism was not only necessary, but that it could be a reflection of the greatest aspects of our country. And in a sense, this references back to some of what we discussed last night in the Q&A session after Dr. Arnold's really interesting talk about part of the distinctiveness that Roosevelt is his use of media, technologies, new forms of communication. All right, so let me step back to the big picture for a minute and talk a little bit about not just Panama, but what Roosevelt did, particularly in terms of Latin America and the Caribbean, in order to push the United States to a top-ranking position as a world power. This image comes from a book published in 1899, and it shows the United States, as it says, 10,000 miles from tip to tip. This was a consequence of the Spanish-American War of 1898. Of course, the United States acquired what historians ever since and people at the time referred to as America's new empire. Possessions, colonies, and informal possessions that stretched from Puerto Rico to the Philippines. Now, we know that Roosevelt was one of the most important advocates for expansions for America, entering into a new and more dominant position with relationships with the world for a long time before he became president in 1901. He had engaged in lots of activity in the 1890s to encourage it. President McKinley actually hesitated to appoint Roosevelt as assistant secretary of the Navy in 1897 for fear that Roosevelt was too pugnacious, too bellicose. But, of course, McKinley did go ahead nonetheless. And from that position, Roosevelt played a key role in encouraging war against Spain, the taking of Hawaii, etc. And then, of course, during the Spanish-American War, Roosevelt volunteered to form the Rough Riders Regiment, and became not only a war hero but immediate darling, leading directly to McKinley choosing him as his vice-presidential candidate for the 1900s presidential race. So long before he became president of the United States, Roosevelt was proving himself an important architect of America's new empire. As president, Roosevelt was determined to strengthen and expand U.S. power, both in Asia and across the Caribbean and Latin America. His vision was a straightforward one, but the United States as the dominant power in the Western Hemisphere had a right and responsibility to act as kind of a policeman to guarantee stability and to help the interior groups around the United States and the Caribbean and Central America, especially, help them evolve and become, you might say, less inferior. He had another goal, too, and this was really important to Roosevelt. He wanted Europe to stay out of the Western Hemisphere. As early as the 1890s, he had begun to state that teaching Europe it must play no role in the Western Hemisphere had become one of his top priorities, and now as president, he was in position to build all this down. So he took a number of steps. He oversaw the successful completion of the war that had been done when he was only vice president against the Filipino nationalists rising up against the U.S. occupation and then established a far-reaching colonial government there. He established a government in Puerto Rico, gave limited freedom to Puerto Ricans, but the U.S. remained in control of most of the political and economic system of Puerto Rico. He oversaw government and rebuilding Cuba, including repeated military interventions, created a military government in Cuba to prepare Cubans for self-government, worked to stabilize Cuba and engage in public health efforts and sanitation. Through all of this, he kept a watchful eye on Europe, determined to keep Europe from playing an important role in the Western Hemisphere. And so in the Dominican Republic came one of the important flashpoints. That country, very unsteady because of political turbulence and economic troubles, led to fears that when the nation couldn't pay its debts, there were fears that the European government might get involved militarily to force payment. He feared that some European nation might seize control of the country's finances. To Roosevelt, this would have not only been a violation of the Dominican Republic's integrity, but it also would have violated the Monroe Doctrine, the Monroe Doctrine from 1823 which stated that further efforts by European countries to colonize land or interfere with states in the Americas would not be accepted by the United States. So these events led Roosevelt to a sweeping policy declaration in December of 1904, which became known as the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. In it, Roosevelt basically reaffirmed the power of the Monroe Doctrine that the European government should stay out of the Western Hemisphere. But he also went further. He stated that the U.S. would in effect act as policemen over the Hemisphere, including that it would intervene when they needed to stabilize other countries economically or politically. Now, of course, in his speech that announced this policy, he talked a lot about how the U.S. would never intervene unless necessary that most nations to the South have things under control and the U.S. would need to do it. Yet the underlining point was that he was justifying intervention, military intervention by the United States throughout the Western Hemisphere. And this policy statement, one reason why you probably run into the Roosevelt Corollary here and there, is that it became something that future presidents would lean on to justify military interventions in Latin America and the Caribbean. Here's a cartoon that depicts the events around the Roosevelt Corollary. You see Roosevelt with this big step marching through the Caribbean. One of many ways that Roosevelt established and articulated the power of the United States in a much more ferocious, much more powerful way than had been done before. So one other part of the big picture I want to mention is how do we understand what motivated Roosevelt? What shaped his thinking? And there are two things very important about that. As I said, he was deeply committed to expansionism, but as powerfully as he was committed to expansionism, he completely rejected the idea that this, that any of his actions constituted imperialism. He was devoted of any anti-imperialist whether it was William Jennings Bryan or Mark Twain or Andrew Permanente. He rejected the anti-imperialist critique of what he was doing. And yet in ways that might have shaped his thinking, I think the anti-imperialists who were very vocal, very powerful, very forceful, I think they might have pushed him to stress the moral vision involved in his expansionist vision. His idea was that America had risen to power, to greatness as an economic power, industrial, scientific, technological. Now that it had done all of this, it needed to take its place among the great nations of the world and it could do this only by becoming a major player on the world stage by expanding its power and assisting itself in world affairs. But it could only do this and do it well if it had a moral vision. Roosevelt took morality seriously and he wanted America's role in the world to be a moral one. So basic moral virtues, honesty, duty, courageousness, a willingness to fight and struggle and challenge oneself. The U.S., like any individual, should see all these virtues reflected in its behavior. And as I mentioned before, very important in this is how the social garden is in this today which posed a kind of scientific legitimacy to racial thinking shaped his beliefs as well. Roosevelt really believed that European Americans like himself were the best that the human species had to offer and they owed it to the world to expand and help other nations. He saw the world as kind of a battle, in other words between savagery and civilization. And if there were groups in Puerto Rico or Panama or the Philippines that resisted the United States, Roosevelt wasn't too concerned. He would write that off as inferior groups or savages who were not civilized enough to accept the moral vision of the United States. And so in a nutshell, there was kind of a dark side to Roosevelt's expansionism. It was built upon this notion of our superiority as a white race, as a manly race, as a civilized race with great ideals, all of which demanded expansionism. At one point, it brings us back to history itself. He believes that under his vision, he believed that history demanded it too. Just like an individual man should struggle or challenge himself, a nation must do. Here's how he put it. Quote, Trice Happy is the nation that has a great and glorious history, a history of glorious achievement for itself and for the race of man and company. All of that brings us back to the perfect canvas, allowing Roosevelt to illustrate, realize and popularize his vision of US expansionism. This quick image shows us how people like Roosevelt explained and motivated the importance of building a canal across Central America. This was a kind of drawing that would see a more primitive version of it in magazines across the country after the Spanish-American War. Because during that war, when ships needed to move from one ocean to the other, they needed to go all the way down around the tip of South America. A canal would save so many lives. And there you have, in a nutshell, the military reason behind it. A canal would consolidate America's noodle hygienic with over two oceans. It would make it much more possible to keep Europe out of the Western Hemisphere. And it would lead to much more economic governance of the United States as well. And so, in all of this, in the building of the canal, the canal would be not only economically and militarily useful, but in Roosevelt's eyes, it could be used to demonstrate the greatness of America in all of its ideals. Here's a shot of the canal as it's being constructed. And to think about what goes about this doing in the Panama Canal Zone, it's important to get a visual sense of what a vast undertaking it was. It was incredibly difficult. On a human scale, it was an amazing, amazing job that had to be completed. And in the early years, it seemed as if it might not be completed. The Panama Canal involved digging through across the Isthmus of Panama through the Continental Divide. This image is taken in the heart of the canal project. The most difficult, the most dangerous part, was through labor cut, where the canal had to cut through the Continental Divide. That in itself, the labor cut was a stretch about eight miles long. And avalanches, premature dynamite explosions, well row of accidents, and the constant torrential rains that would come down. All of that made it extremely difficult and dangerous. It was also a big job because there were so many people involved. There were 50 to 60,000 people in the Panama Canal Zone. The U.S. government needed to create a civilized, quote unquote, civilized lifestyle with people building dormitories, cafeterias, hospitals, hotels, firehouses, a judicial system. All of that was needed. People needed to be brought in. Here's another shot of Kulipra Cut. This was taken in 1913 near the completion of the canal when avalanches are creating a great deal of trouble. And here you see workers working in water almost up to their waist trying to dig out this avalanche. These are the immense and critical blocks being built. Another huge part of the undertaking. Some of the largest industrial establishments in the world were the Panama Canal Zone. This is a gigantic blacksmith shop. Massive trains. Kulipra Cut I showed you would have about eight layers of train tracks in order to haul out the dirt and carrying workers back and forth. Workers came from all over the world to build the canal. It was said more than 100 different countries, but most of them came from the Caribbean, from islands like Barbados and Jamaica. This is a shipload full of workers from Barbados arriving to work on the canal. They performed most of the unskilled labor of the actual digging, the shifting of tracks, whereas the skilled labor was done mostly by white U.S. citizens who went to the zone. This is a hotel that was built to feed white U.S. workers only. You see Caribbean workers waiting by the side to serve them to work as waiters. As this kind of suggests, I don't really have time to get into it maybe later today. We can talk about this. Race played an important role in how labor was managed in the construction of the canal. The U.S. used kind of the Jim Crow segregation system in order to manage the delivery. If the last shot you saw was a hotel cafeteria for the white U.S. workers, this is where the Caribbean workers would eat their meals. Their food was just stitched out to them. There was no place to sit. So when the many torrential rains would come down and pan them off, these workers would try to sit underneath the building or underneath the tree to get out of the rain. Especially in those early years, before 1906, so many problems associated with the construction led to damaging, very damaging public opinion. First chief engineer John Wallace resigned and Roseau had to find a second one, John Stevens. John Stevens did a better job. He made more progress. But there were already signs by 1906 that Stevens was growing discontented as well. There was a massive later turnover as workers worried about disease or accidents and mortality rates would come to the zone and work for a little while and head out as inmates and return to the U.S. or return to the Caribbean. In addition, there were, you know, this was a progressive era. There's lots of month-breaking articles being written. And a number of month-breaking exposures start being written about what conditions are like in the canal zone. And so as Roseau looked out at what was happening around 1906, he began to see that the public opinion around the canal was turning very sour. And it felt to him as if not only was the canal project endangered, but America's image in the world, his presidency even, all of that was an issue. All these things came to the head with a man with the rather unusual name of Holtney Digilum. This is not a very good picture, but I want you to have a little mental image of this guy because he plays a big role in the canal story. Bigelow was a journalist and a professor of political scientists. He traveled a lot, wrote a lot of books about Africa, about Latin America. In 1905, Bigelow, who actually knew and had met Rosa Bells, was also a friend of Kaiser Wilhelm's in Germany, a very colorful personal history this guy had. In 1905, Bigelow stopped from the canal zone for a couple of days to see what was going on and wrote about what he saw there for an American magazine called The Independent. This essay described alarming conditions and it shook up America. It shook up popular opinion and it shook up officialdom in Washington, D.C. because Bigelow attacked every aspect of what the government was doing in the canal zone. He described cities so filthy as to be uninhabitable. He described massive disease, he described accidents, he described racism in the canal zone. But finally, he made two charges that really hurt, that really ticked off Rosa Bell in particular. First of all, Bigelow argued that the canal was in effect being built through grafts and bribes and corruption. Rosa Bell did not like that. And second pulled me charged that the U.S. government had imported several hundred Caribbean women to work as prostitutes. He said in his article in his kind of pithy way of writing, he said, that prostitutes are not needed on the Isthmus and if they were, there's no call to send for them at the expense of the taxpayer. Rosa Bell acted aggressively to respond to Bigelow's charges. He issued a special message to Congress, attacking what he called were sensation bombers. He included reports by a secretary of war. But this wasn't enough. Rosa Bell saw that something more was needed. And so this brings us back to Rosa Bell on that ship, going to the Panama Canal Zone. He knew that nothing else would save the canal project and save America's image in the world. So he took the unprecedented step of leaving the U.S. Finally after the six days of reading and thinking about plumbas and pilots, finally the ship landed. It turned out that torrential rains were coming down worse than Panamanians had seen in years, but Rosa Bell declared himself happy. He said, I want to see conditions at their worst. I want to see things as they really are. So he marched off the ship and then followed about by an army of journalists and declaring to them early on that he felt like, quote, the commander of a great unsuccessful army. Rosa Bell toured the Zone. He enjoyed constant photo opportunities. He worked hard. This is a rugged guy. Remember, he worked hard touring everything. Workers' housing, cafeterias, hospitals, machine shops. He spoke with American workers. He spoke with Caribbean workers. He examined where the dams and the locks would be built. He dramatically slipped away. This guy had an amazing flair for music. He slipped away dramatically from the schedule several times, saying he wanted to see things as they really were. One day he dropped, supposedly dropped into the lunch room where canal employees ate and lunched with a, this is according to the Chicago newspaper, when he lunched with a grinding motley crew of shutters, his conquest of Panama was complete. But as he toured it, he focused most of his attention on the technology, the science, the industry that was making its way through the canal. He focused, and he made sure to focus the photographer's attention on things like this, on the 95-ton steam shutters. As Clay Jenkinson described, he decided to jump into one and the result was possibly the most famous photograph of a U.S. president ever taken. This photograph showed up in newspapers and magazines across the country. And with that photograph and with this trip, Roosevelt was able to telegraph the images he wanted associated. In a speech to the American workers in the canal zone, Roosevelt stressed exactly the kind of images and ideas and themes he wanted people to associate with the canal, the great virtues of the American nation. He said, you men are changing the face of the continent. You are doing the greatest engineering feat of the ages and the effect of your work will be felt while our civilization lasts. The work you have done here, he said, will remain through the ages a sense of history again and a sense of military. He said, the work you are doing puts your country under obligation to you if you can one on the battlefields of war. Upon his return to the U.S., Roosevelt culminated his public relations campaign by issuing a special message to Congress, which included the first time in history of a large lengthy photographic supplement. And years after, Roosevelt took other steps to bring his vision of progressivism to the canal zone, sending investigators down, trying to ensure that progressive policies were followed. These are also topics that might come up later today. But I think the most important thing he did of all was that simple trip there, using his own power as a person and the power of the presidency to identify and articulate the things he wanted connected with the Panama Canal. The U.S. would and did expand. It became the world's leader in the 20th century. In the end, I want to just wrap up with a few reflections on what this all amounts to, Roosevelt had played a key role in creating not just the expansionism, but a certain idealism associated with America's power in the world, America's power in his vision as the nemeson selfless seeking only to advance civilization. That idealistic narrative has stretched down across the 20th century into the 21st, motivating and justifying the great military and economic actions by the U.S. government. So when we think of Roosevelt and world politics, we need to think, I'd argue, of him as someone who not only built the U.S. into a world power but intertwined America's notion of that power with a sense of morality and idealism that for good or bad and often both profoundly shaped the 20th century. Thanks, Barry.