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This chapter discusses the neo-colonial bases established by the U.S. after World War II. In search of suitable overseas military bases after the war, the U.S. retained military facilities in other countries where it had enjoyed colonial or quasi-colonial rights. The Philippines and the Panama Canal Zone were high on their priority list. The U.S. also retained the naval base at Guantanamo in Cuba. The U.S. retained extensive military in both Panama and the Philippines throughout the Cold War period. By contrast, Great Britain retained no military facilities in Pakistan or India when these countries were granted independence in 1947.

The independence of Panama from Colombia and the construction of the Panama Canal created countless transatlantic movements of goods, peoples, information, and ideas, including a vibrant anarchist movement in the early twentieth century. Cuba played an important role in this network, as did Spain, and, in its efforts to contain working-class radicalism in the zone that it controlled, the United States. This chapter examines the influence not just of anarcho-communists, syndicalists, and individualists, but also of “anarcho-naturists” who advocated vegetarianism, alternative lifestyles, and resistance to urban capitalist development. Racial ideology, anti-clericalism, and the incidence of the Mexican Revolution are some of the topics covered, as well as the role of individual leaders in dividing and undermining the movement on the eve of the First World War.

To many, Theodore Roosevelt was an exemplar of manliness and “muscular Christianity” and an exceptional public servant who led a crusade for social justice. To others, the sage of Oyster Bay was a jingoist, a nativist, a hot-tempered, unpredictable manic, and an egomaniac who put his own interests above America’s good. Roosevelt highly valued biblical morality and considered it vital to personal and public life, including politics. He downplayed doctrine and theological differences and strongly stressed the importance of good works and character. Many contemporaries called him a preacher of righteousness, and he labeled the presidency a bully pulpit, which he used to trumpet the importance of social justice, civility, and virtue. Three religious issues caused considerable controversy during Roosevelt’s tenure in office: his attempt to remove “In God We Trust” from some coins, the “Dear Maria” affair, and concerns about William Howard Taft’s Unitarianism during the 1908 presidential campaign. Christianity, especially the version espoused by turn-of-the-century Social Gospelers, played a significant role in shaping his philosophy of government. Roosevelt’s role in mediating the 1902 anthracite coal strike, “taking” Panama to build an isthmus canal, and promoting conservation illustrate how his religious commitments helped shape his policies.

This chapter examines the history and politics of watershed management around the Panama Canal. It situates the emergence of canal-related water scarcity concerns and the new administrative response—watershed management—within the historical context of the development of forest hydrology science, institutional tensions between civil engineers and foresters around water management, and the global dissemination of “watershed” as a concept. Drawing on archival and ethnographic research, the chapter explores the sociopolitical challenges and conflicts around establishing a new administrative watershed region across a space where the Panamanian state had previously pursued development through agriculture. Tensions between canal authorities and rural people have turned on the different ways that environments have been incorporated into transportation and agricultural infrastructures. Using a political ecology approach, the chapter argues that Panamanian forests were transformed into naturalinfrastructure through the organizational work of linking rural landscapes with an engineered system and national and international institutions.

This chapter reorients the history of Panama Canal construction by focusing on water management rather than soil excavation.In addition to earth moving, the construction of the waterway involved transforming both physical and human geography across the Chagres River basin. As the volatile river and its tributaries were reorganized to create a manageable waterscape for navigation, the US government depopulated the Canal Zone to establish a sanitary andlegible governmental space.Water management linked imperial land and resource enclosures to more focused efforts to govern households and citizens. If earth was the element that represented the attitude of conquest that defined modern humans’ relationships with nature at the turn of the twentieth century, then water is the element that reveals how we live with the legacies of that era. Contemporary engineering challenges and environmental politics around the canal have been shaped by this history.

This chapter studies the Panama Canal riots and its implication for both US–Panamanian relations and Plowshare. Roberto Chiari, Panama's president, severed diplomatic ties with the US, charging Washington with “aggression.” Current US President Lyndon B. Johnson and his aides blamed communist agents for inciting the unrest and charged Chiari with adding “fuel to the fire” by not using his National Guard to restore order. However, the White House could not ignore the fact that the turmoil was symptomatic of the long-brewing frustration within Panama over US control of the Canal Zone. As a result, the Johnson administration adopted a two-part response: first, it sought to negotiate a new treaty with Panama; second, it gave more serious consideration to building a sea-level canal, be it in Panama or elsewhere in the Central American isthmus.

This chapter analyzes debates around agricultural development, race, and sanitation in the Panama Canal Zone. When the waterway opened, the Zone was largely rural and roadless. US canal administrators’ plans for the hundreds of square miles of territory not immediately necessary for transportation or residential purposes became a point of political tension. The Zone’s rural question—how to manage landscapes depopulated by the US government—had implications beyond land use, per se. Among Panamanians, it raised concerns about the scope of US ambitions on the isthmus. Were administrators simply operating a canal or constructing an autonomous imperial enclave? The question of howto use rural lands implied a secondquestion: Who, if anyone, shouldusethem? The chapter examines a Canal Zone program that permitted former canal laborers—primarily black West Indian migrants—to leaseland for farming. The contentious policy precipitated abanana boom in the enclave.

In a similar manner to the United Nations, the Panama Canal was an image that represented a powerful reminder of America’s great historical legacy. However, a large number of Americans believed the international waterway symbolized much more. Those that supported the American Right saw President Jimmy Carter’s decision to return the canal in 1977 as another example of the decline of American power in the world. Conservatives were upset that the United States was acquiescing to the demands of another emerging Third World nation that, like those within the General Assembly, appeared unwilling to appreciate America’s past generosity. The loss of the canal also reverberated with the US defeat in Vietnam. In the wake of the loss of American military prestige, conservatives were irate that a significant reminder of the country’s industrial greatness was now on the verge of being given away.

This chapter examines long-term institutional changes in the Senate committee system that devalued committee work and negatively affected the total hearing activity of Armed Services and Foreign Relations. It begins with a review of expectations and measures regarding the influence of the shifting institutional context on Senate committee hearings in general and on Armed Services and Foreign Relations sessions in particular. It then analyzes the effects of various long-term changes on the frequency of public hearings first by Senate committees in the aggregate and then by the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees. It also considers the influences on the frequency of executive hearing days by the two national security committees. Finally, it looks at the Panama Canal to illustrate the confluence of trends that created a watershed moment for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Chapter 8 examines the era of U.S. control of the isthmus, the construction of the Panamá Canal, its impacts and fortification, the end of the American era, and the rise of modern Panamá and its maritime activities.

This chapter analyzes how President Johnson and President Robles of Panama reached agreement on three treaties related to the Panama Canal. The first two detailed arrangements for the neutrality, defense, and operation of the existing lock waterway. The third treaty permitted Washington to build a sea-level waterway in Panama. Since the US government selected Panama for such a canal, Panama had the right to reject the use of the atom as a means of construction, and to extend said construction. This was good news to the AEC, since an extension of the Canal Commission's reporting deadline meant more time for the AEC to complete the experiments it believed necessary to demonstrate whether nuclear excavation of a canal was possible. While the Panama Canal treaties still required ratification, they formalized the determination by both countries for a sea-level waterway—possibly built with the help of the atom—become a reality.

Chapter 3 explores TR’s decision in late 1903 to encourage and support Panama’s secession from Colombia, in order to secure a site for the future Panama Canal, and the subsequent debate regarding the Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty. It examines how he and his allies overcame substantial criticism to harness public support for the treaty, and the extent to which concerns about domestic political implications influenced his handling of relations with Bogotá. The intervention occurred against the backdrop of the upcoming 1904 election, with TR facing dissent from anti-imperialists, conservative Republicans, including the influential Ohio senator Mark Hanna, and Democrats who hoped that the controversy would damage the president’s political standing.

Tropical stations drew hundreds of U.S. biologists, few of whom would have attempted a rigorous tropical expedition on their own. In the 1920s through 1940s, Barro Colorado Island (BCI) in particular became a model tropical forest. Chapter 3 demonstrates how the station’s location on an island nature reserve within the Panama Canal Zone enabled unprecedented control over space and scientific labor. BCI was transformed into a scientific site by the removal of Panamanian settlers and through descriptions of the site as undisturbed and representative of tropical nature. It was maintained for science by the labor of Panamanian workers and through the development of a host of new techniques and technologies for the prolonged observation of tropical life. There, biologists were able to develop practices to monitor and census living tropical organisms as part of a complex, dynamic ecological community. BCI became increasingly accessible and observable—but only in certain ways and only to certain classes of people.

This chapter explores U.S. relations with Central America during the Kissinger years. In the 1980s, civil wars in El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Guatemala frightened the Reagan administration into reasoning that the Cold War had come to the doorstep of the United States. The civil wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua erupted during Henry Kissinger's tenure (in 1972 and 1974, respectively). Wholesale political violence carried out by “death squads” continued to characterize life in Guatemala in the 1970s. Examining the U.S. response to the mounting right-wing oppression in Central America provides historical background to the crisis of the 1980s and deepens an understanding of Kissinger's worldviews. Whereas Kissinger may have been impervious to Central American violence, he acted boldly toward Panama, pushing both of his presidents to renegotiate U.S. control of the canal and the Canal Zone.

Jorge Rodríguez Beruff discusses the intensification of U.S. strategic debate war planning related to the Caribbean between 1938 and 1941, in the face of European and Japanese expansionism. During this time an intense strategic debate took place in civilian and military circles regarding the defense policies the US should adopt in view of impending (and, later, actual) war in Europe and Japanese expansionism in the Asia-Pacific region. This debate was, to a large extent, conducted in public. It signified the gradual waning of the pacifist and neutralist consensus of the pre-1938 period, during which intellectual and political critics of US participation in World War I had been extremely influential.

This chapter explores the role of cartography in stabilizing new regions as coherent geographic units with recognizable environmental problems.Focusing on narratives of deforestation in the Panama Canal watershed, itexamines howthe use and interpretation of historical land cover maps shapescontemporary environmental management.Even though thecanal watershed’s boundaries basically followed the physical contours of the Chagres River basin, the watershed region never existed as a social or political spacebefore the late twentieth century. Frank Robinson, an employee of the Panama Canal Section of Meteorology and Hydrology, created a watershed forest map in 1952 thatbecame the baseline for subsequent analyses of regional deforestationand management interventions. The chapter analyses how administrators’ use of the map as a baseline encouragedmisreadings of environmental history by separating the watershed from its political, geographical, and historical context andsimplifying nonlinear processes of land cover changein the transit zone.

This chapter focuses on invasive water hyacinth in the Panama Canal. For a century, the plant has been controlled, but not eliminated because the canal’s locks and dams produce an environment conducive to its reproduction. By transforming rapid rivers into sluggish lake water, the creation of a lock canal produced hydroecologies ripe for invasion. As water hyacinth spread around the edge of Gatun Lake and across its feeder rivers, it changed the environment in a manner that became a social and political problem, limiting regional circulation and raising questions about uneven development. Water hyacinth is an indicator of how infrastructures are embedded in political ecologies, redistributing burdens and benefits across communities. The questions of infrastructure, ecology, and social responsibility around water hyacinth speak to long-running tensions at the heart of the canal project.

Thisfinal chapter argues that infrastructures like the Panama Canal have given rise to highly demanding environments. Technological marvels have not universally freed humans from the environment, but bound people more tightly and contentiously to landscapes and waterscapes of our own making. Without constant maintenance, infrastructures crack, rust, and crumble and the political projects, promises, and aspirations they carried dissipate. Places once connected can be disconnected and landscapes that once appeared developed can revert to nature and be redeployed in newprojects. The transformation of the environment through infrastructure construction, maintenance, and decay has uneven consequences—both winners and losers. Thus, depending on who, where, and when you are, global infrastructures may produce experiences of environmental control or vulnerability.