Word: canal
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...bronze, bigger-than-life statue of Ferdinand de Lesseps. builder of the Suez Canal, stood for 60 years in Port Said. Last December, as Egyptian demonstrators celebrated the withdrawal of the Franco-British invasion force, they expressed their hatred of all things European by blowing up the statue. The great builder would have been neither surprised nor resentful. Irrational violence, betrayal and humiliation dogged him all his long life without dampening his boundless optimism or shaking his firm belief in the essential goodness of man and the basic harmony of nations...
Ferdinand de Lesseps was the ideal 19th century man, a living embodiment of the "poetry of capitalism." His cheerful cry. "Open the world to the people!'' was echoed by the industrialists and investors of his time. The Suez Canal was to be only a beginning: De Lesseps dreamed of making an inland sea in the Sahara Desert, and of uniting Paris, Moscow, Peking and Bombay with a vast intercontinental railway...
Overweight Heir. The idea for the Suez Canal fired De Lesseps' imagination when he was 27 years old. Born into a French diplomatic family in 1805, De Lesseps had arrived in Alexandria as a consular official, and read a memoir on the Suez project written by one of Napoleon's aides during the occupation of Egypt 34 years before. He became a close friend of Said, the overweight heir to the Egyptian throne, by giving him free access to the consulate kitchen while the boy's militant father was trying to starve him into a semblance...
...canal cost 453 million francs to build. More than a hundred million cubic feet of earth were moved in ten years. De Lesseps was accused of employing slave labor by using the corvée (impressment of workers), but when the practice was halted and the fellahin laid down their primitive picks and baskets, the work went on faster than before with free labor and the rapid development of steam-powered excavators. De Lesseps' real roadblocks lay not in the sand and rock of the Sinai desert but in the chancellories and salons of Europe. In France envious rivals...
...Lockless Canal. De Lesseps was a doer in private as well as public life. He married twice and fathered 17 children (the last when he was 80). At the age of 74 he eagerly met the challenge of Panama, and the result was a fiasco. Age had bred in him not mellowness but arrogance. Yellow fever, corruption and his own stubbornness (he insisted on building a canal without locks despite the mountains and rivers the waterway must cross) ruined the project after ten years of exhausting labor. De Lesseps was forced to admit defeat, and only the selfless courage...