Joining the Waters

The Panama Canal, an engineering feat dreamed of for centuries, officially opened on this date in 1914.

After a French attempt to build a canal across the Isthmus of Panama failed, the United States undertook the challenge. President Theodore Roosevelt settled the canal route and signed a treaty creating a ten-mile-wide U.S. territory around the waterway.

In 1904, American construction began in earnest. Ten years, thousands of fatalities, and $375 million later, the fifty-mile canal linked the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Ships traveling between New York and San Francisco saved about 8,000 nautical miles.

Edward Laning's painting T.R. in Panama depicts the 1906 visit of President Theodore Roosevelt to the canal construction zone. Painted in 1939, the work highlights the physical strength of the workers, the technological prowess of the nation, and the crowning achievement of Teddy Roosevelt's popular presidency.

To find out more about the construction of the Panama Canal, check out the Smithsonian Institution Libraries' online exhibition Make the Dirt Fly.

American sovereignty over the canal zone ended on December 31, 1999, when Panama assumed full responsibility for its operation.

Pictured top: Edward Laning, 1906–81, T.R. in Panama, 1939, oil on fiberboard, 33 x 40 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Mrs. Mary Fife Laning.

Pictured bottom: Edward Laning, 1906–81, T.R. in Panama (detail).