The nation’s commercial and military strength
The Panama Canal was the most expensive American public works project of its time in 1914 with an estimated cost of $302 million. The U.S. took over the project from France, which began it in 1881 and withdrew in 1889 due to engineering problems and high mortality rates from disease. It’s estimated that more than 22,000 people died during the French period.
While the unfinished canal sat idle, the Walker Commission under President McKinley favored a new canal in Nicaragua. But that all changed when McKinley was assassinated on September 14, 1901 and succeeded by Theodore Roosevelt.
President Roosevelt was a firm believer in the strategic vision of Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan, who expounded in his 1890 classic, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, that supremacy at sea was essential for the nation’s commercial and military strength. He had no doubt that, by completing the canal, the U.S. would have tactical superiority over the oceans surrounding its coastlines.
About 56,000 workers were employed by the U.S. from 1904 until August 15, 1914, when the canal opened. During the ten years of construction 5,609 workers died from accidents and disease, but the achievement of opening the 48-mile (77 km) canal through the Isthmus of Panama forever changed ocean transportation by eliminating the need to sail around Cape Horn to get from one ocean to the other.