A Patriot's History of the Modern World (11 page)

All the while, still more industry and infrastructure permeated Panama. Another railroad was built, along with a hydroelectric plant. The military began placing sixteen-inch guns, with a range of twenty miles, at Toro Point and on the islands in the Bay of Panama. In 1910, with the completion of the West Diversion channel, the lake began to take over the jungle. The mighty locks rose as structural marvels, all of which was reported with enthusiasm back home, and their massive size (about five blocks long and six stories high), if stood on end, would have exceeded the height of the Eiffel Tower. The entire project employed some five million sacks of cement
shipped from New York and made use of the newest concrete and toughest American steel, becoming the largest concrete structures built by Americans until the Boulder Dam was built in the 1930s. Despite what by modern standards would be considered primitive technology, the locks stood up amazingly well over time, and best of all, the plan called for the falling water of the Gatún spillway to furnish all the electrical power needed to open and close the locks. More impressive still, intermediate gates were built so that if a smaller vessel came through (at its maximum, a lock could hold the world's largest ship, the
Titanic
), a smaller chamber could be used to speed up the flooding or release process. To ensure that out-of-control ships didn't damage the locks, a massive chain “catch” device stood ready to restrain the vessel before it could do any damage.

On September 26, 1913, the Gatún locks underwent a test run with a tug, and in a painfully slow process (because the lake had not yet reached its highest level), the tug finally emerged through the locks onto Gatún Lake. The following month, in a clever publicity scene, President Woodrow Wilson, elected in 1912, transmitted the signal to Panama by telegraph wires that blew up the dike in the Culebra Cut, and the waterway was filled. When a crane boat, the
Alexander La Valley
, went from the Pacific to the Gulf side without fanfare in January, it marked the first actual transit of the isthmus. Seven months later, an equally undistinguished vessel, the cement boat
Christobal
, became the first oceangoing vessel to cross through the Panama Canal, draining all the pomp from the official opening on August 15, 1914. Yet the canal that would in theory unite the world was already a distraction from the real events in Europe, which would soon come apart in the Great War.

The Unpacific Pacific

Matching the American presence in the Caribbean was an expansion in the Pacific that came through the American presence in the Philippines and possession of other island territories, which threatened the British. England now faced potential opponents on both oceans, not the least from the rising empire of Japan, which posed a growing naval threat. With the Meiji constitution of 1890, Japan had adopted a constitutional monarchy model that resembled the government of Prussia, allowing power to be shared between the emperor and the parliament, called the Diet. Many quipped that Japan had a Prussian government, a British navy, and a French education system—an Occidental façade that nevertheless concealed a decidedly Oriental
mind-set. Japan intended to apply
Yamato-damashii
(“Japanese spirit”) to modernization.
Yamato-damashii
soon took on overtones of Bushido (a code of samurai warrior conduct), or military nobility propaganda. The emperor was a deity, and all Japanese were descended from the gods. Other races, however, were not, and were treated as distinctly inferior. All foreigners were
gaijin
—barbarians. Bushido stressed honor in its most extreme form—loyalty to the emperor, to family, and to Japan. Death was preferable to dishonor; “saving face” was a hallmark of all interactions, public and private. After the Japanese victories in the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese wars, Bushido took hold as a catchphrase for progress. It was the Japanese naval victories at Port Arthur and Tsushima that caught British (and American) attention, though, for here was a supposedly backward Asian nation defeating a theoretically superior Western power. Admittedly, Russia was viewed as barely ahead of the Ottoman Empire by Britain and France—its population had only recently emerged from serfdom, and still lagged far behind other European countries and America when it came to industrialization. Yet Japan defeated a “white” nation vastly larger than itself, and at sea no less.

When war broke out in 1904 over a Korean border dispute with Japan, Russians derided their enemies as “yellow monkeys,” the “Asiatic horde,” or the “yellow danger.” Dismissing both Japanese land and sea forces as inferior—despite their recent shellacking of China—the Russians learned firsthand how advanced the Imperial Navy was when one night a surprise torpedo attack by a squadron of Japanese destroyers disabled two battleships and a cruiser, eliminating Russia's superiority in battleships in the Far East. Admiral Heihachiro Togo foolishly followed up in daylight on February 9, engaging virtually the whole Russian fleet. After a few minutes of blasting away, Togo fortunately escaped with his fleet intact.
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Three months later, however, when the Russian Baltic Fleet arrived in the Pacific after a tedious voyage, having been dispatched on October 15, a much different outcome resulted. Possessing faster battleships with superior high-explosive shells, Togo “crossed the ‘T' ” of the Russian line (in which the Japanese fleet turned at a 90-degree angle to the oncoming line of Russian ships). This maneuver brought to bear most of his guns and rained shot on the Russians. The commander of the
Suvorov
recalled, “Shells seemed to be pouring upon us incessantly one after another. The steel plates and superstructure on the upper decks were torn to pieces…. Iron ladders were crumpled up into rings, and guns were literally hurled from their mountings.”
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Within hours, the Russian battleships were crippled or sunk; that night, Japanese torpedo boats and destroyers swarmed around the survivors, forcing the scuttling of four more battleships or heavy cruisers. In all, Russia lost twenty-one ships, including virtually all of her nineteen battleships and heavy cruisers, and her killed, wounded, or captured numbered almost 10,000, against 700 Japanese dead or wounded, the latter including a young officer named Isoroku Yamamoto who later was the architect of the Pearl Harbor attack and commanded the Combined Fleet in World War II. He lost two fingers and came within an ace of having his career terminated by the maiming.

Tsushima enabled Japan to annex Korea in 1910 without opposition and served notice to the West that Japan was, if not its equal, a legitimate power in the Pacific. But neither the Japanese, nor the Russians, nor the Germans fully understood the new dynamic of naval power. Simply building ships wasn't enough. Sir John Fisher's radical new battleship, the
Dreadnought
(1906), with steam turbines and “all big gun” armament, seemed to confirm his unofficial title as the “genius incarnate of technical change.”
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Contrary to the notion that, because of its revolutionary design, the
Dreadnought
“leveled the playing field” for aspiring naval powers such as Germany (which embarked on its own version of the ship and widened the Kiel Canal to permit passage of larger vessels), Fisher's advances showed how once again true power came from culture. Britain's naval culture had produced Fisher, after all, not vice versa. As in any technology—and battleships were no different—the most significant changes come from incremental, relentless improvements possible only in a cultural milieu in which engineering and technology are fostered. The same principle kept the Chinese from turning gunpowder into a culture of volley-fire muskets, and prevented the Iranians from applying the stirrup to mounted shock combat horseback charges. Lacking a strong, innovative naval culture, none of the second-tier aspirants could really hope to compete at sea with England or America.

Poles Apart

A final, and fitting, event marked America's entrance onto the world stage when a naval officer, Commander Robert E. Peary, reached the North Pole in 1909 with a small expedition of Eskimos, dog sleds, and his sidekick Matthew Henson. Peary's claim to be the first at the Pole was initially controversial, mainly because yet another American, Dr. Frederick A. Cook, said he had reached the coveted 90-degree North latitude much earlier. (Cook's claims were later shown to be fraudulent.)
¹⁰⁷

Peary, a naval officer most frequently photographed in polar gear and sporting a massive, dense mustache, had been involved in polar exploration for years: in a 1906 expedition, he was separated from his companions by a storm and the warming of polar ice suddenly presented him with the possibility of becoming trapped without food. In a mad dash, he negotiated the ice and reunited with his party. Considered to be the best dead-reckoning navigator in history next to Christopher Columbus, Peary suffered his share of criticism, much of it by Cook supporters, and some of it brought on by his own sense of megalomania. But he accomplished more than any other polar explorer up to that time. His “Peary System” of traveling with dog sleds over the ice, establishing food caches, and using “icebreaker” teams to cut the trail ahead while the main party followed the somewhat easier route behind, constituted a major improvement over previous approaches to polar travel and would prove far superior to the British mish-mash of ponies and engine-driven devices used in the fatal Antarctic expedition of Robert Falcon Scott.
¹⁰⁸

After establishing a final base camp using the Peary System, Peary and
Henson set off with four Eskimos on the final dash for 90 degrees north on April 2, 1909, from an estimated distance of about 133 miles away. On April 6, they camped at a place that Peary calculated was at or near the Pole, and after remaining in the area for thirty hours making observations and taking pictures, the party returned to their ship, the
Roosevelt
, docked on Ellesmere Island at the edge of the polar ice cap on April 27. Although they made what many consider unrealistic speeds, Peary and Henson were traveling back over trails that had already been broken once and stayed in igloos already built. Peary's diary, released by his family in the 1980s for public examination for the first time since the early 1900s, revealed that Peary's daily observations of ice conditions, weather, speed, and distance covered correlated almost exactly with those of Matthew Henson, even though the two barely spoke after returning to the
Roosevelt
.
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Additional confirmation came when later explorers on similar expeditions reported similar conditions to Peary's and made comparable speeds.

When he planted the flag at the Pole on April 6, Peary staked America's place in the world of exploration, symbolically eclipsing the British, whose Robert Falcon Scott reached the South Pole in 1912 only to find that a party led by Norwegian Roald Amundsen had beaten him. Scott and his four comrades died in a freezing storm, eleven miles away from a food depot that was originally planned for a location twenty-four miles closer. Leaving his heart-wrenching “Message to the Public”—in which he avoided all personal blame—Scott in death temporarily snatched world attention away from Amundsen's remarkable achievement.
¹¹⁰
But even Amundsen could not overcome the contrast of images: the American flag flying victoriously, while Scott froze tragically, a victim of a society past its prime, and most of all, of his own ego, which itself had only recently come under scientific scrutiny.

The World of the Mind

At the turn of the century, exploration and investigation were not limited to the earth's physical and geographical expanses, but spread to the human mind. Psychology and the study of human behavior emerged before World War I as people sought to understand the functioning of normal and abnormal human personalities. The center of this new activity was Vienna, more specifically Sigmund Freud, who drew around him such notables as Alfred Adler, Carl Jung, Wilhelm Stekel, and Lou Andreas-Salomé, all impressive intellects, who over time went their separate ways like bees spreading pollen throughout the flowers of European medical practices and universities.

Originally trained to be a neurologist, Freud dabbled in hypnotism, but finding that ineffective in explaining and altering human behavior, developed a technique called “talking out” or “free association” wherein patients would talk themselves out of their problems. Freud's background lent itself to this aloof methodology, since being a Jew in an anti-Semitic society, he was already considered different and even strange. Freud capitalized on this factor, as it allowed him to be and remain on the outside looking in at his patient without being fettered by preconceived ideas concerning faith and spiritual interference. Employing a secular, scientific view, Freud developed theories heavily influenced by Ernst von Brücke, the director of the physiology laboratory at the University of Vienna, who believed that humans were living organisms in a dynamic system in which the laws of chemistry and physics applied.
¹¹¹
Freud applied this idea to personality, as affected by transformations and energy according to science as much as the human body. Later he wrote, “My life has been aimed at one goal only; to infer or to guess how the mental apparatus is constructed and what forces interpret and counteract in it.”
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