Word: canals
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...month cruise around the world. Here was showing the flag, indeed. Almost a century later, that voyage is still regarded as the apotheosis of Roosevelt's belief in naval power as an instrument of national policy. The stately procession across the Pacific and then through the Indian Ocean, Suez Canal and Mediterranean before returning to the Atlantic seaboard was an impressive logistical feat, even if it confirmed to the U.S. Navy the limited endurance of the older battleships and produced a remarkable number of desertions in Australian ports. But the world public was not to know of that. A million...
...Great White Fleet's return, Roosevelt relinquished the presidency. To his successor, William Howard Taft, he had one message: Do not divide the fleet. The Mahanian principle of concentrating the main battle fleet in one theater remained in place. It would still be there in 1914 when the Panama Canal, instigated by T.R., finally opened. Only during the Second World War, when the U.S. Navy became the largest in the world, would the U.S. possess a two-ocean fleet...
Panama was a province of Colombia when Theodore Roosevelt took up the idea of building a canal after a failed attempt by France. When the Colombian government rejected a new treaty allowing the U.S. to build a canal, Roosevelt became enraged. Soon after, a group of Panamanian separatist leaders declared a revolution. That same day, U.S. gunboats appeared off the coast to keep Colombia from reclaiming its territory. Roosevelt vigorously denied that the U.S. had fomented the revolution but defended his actions in characteristic terms: "To have acted otherwise ... would have been betrayal of the interests of the United States...
...rain forests and squalid towns of Panama were rife with diseases like malaria and yellow fever. As many as 20,000 people died during the French effort to build a canal in the late 1800s. But as a result of his work in Cuba after the Spanish-American War, a tireless American doctor named William Gorgas came to believe strongly in the new discovery that a specific mosquito spread yellow fever. Overcoming doubters, he began a widespread campaign of mosquito eradication and sanitation improvements. The death rate among canal workers plummeted...
Initially, Congress created a seven-person commission to oversee construction. After the first chief engineer broke down under the stress of the job, Roosevelt sidestepped the panel and gave total power to one man, Army Colonel George Goethals. As absolute ruler of the Canal Zone, Goethals oversaw every detail, from digging and building to resolving personal disputes among workers...