The fair's full name gave its reason for being. Congress authorized it "to celebrate the completion and opening of the Panama Canal, and also the four hundredth anniversary of the discovery of the Pacific Ocean." The two events were four centuries apart. San Francisco claimed both as its own, and the Exposition's architecture, sculpture, music and most profitable amusement ride were built around them.
Two anniversaries, one port
When R. B. Hale first proposed a San Francisco world's fair in January 1904, the canal was only a likelihood. The United States had not yet ratified its treaty with Panama. There was a general notion that it might be finished in 1913, the four hundredth anniversary of Vasco Núñez de Balboa's sighting of the Pacific. Todd's official history spells out why that pairing appealed. San Francisco "had the finest port on the ocean Balboa discovered," and more to gain from the canal than any other American city. In December 1906 the first exposition company wrote both anniversaries into its articles of incorporation, and the 1911 act of Congress kept them. The history page tells how the city won the right to hold the celebration.
The canal was also, very directly, a San Francisco story. Todd traces the public demand for it to the battleship Oregon, which was built in San Francisco and launched in October 1893. In 1898, when war with Spain came, she steamed some 14,000 miles around South America to Jupiter Inlet, Florida, a run of a little over two months. For the rest of Todd's generation that voyage was the standing argument for a canal. The Oregon came back to the Exposition anchorage in 1915, and she was the last warship to leave it, on December 6.
Balboa and the South Sea
Todd opens his five-volume history with Balboa, and he tells the story with evident enjoyment. Balboa had failed as a planter on Hispaniola and escaped his creditors by hiding in a barrel aboard an expedition ship. On September 1, 1513, he set out across the isthmus with about 190 Spaniards, some Indians and a pack of hounds. One of the dogs, Todd notes, drew a captain's pay. On September 25 (Old Style), from a hilltop, he saw what the Spaniards called the Mar del Sur, the South Sea. Four days later, with twenty-six Spaniards, he waded into the bay of San Miguel in armor, carrying a sword and banner, and claimed the sea and all its shores for the Spanish crown.
"And he took it all; every pebble and every potentate, every kingdom and every clam."
Todd, The Story of the Exposition, vol. 1 (1921)
Todd corrects two popular errors along the way. Keats's sonnet has "stout Cortez" on the peak in Darién, but Cortez was farming in Cuba that year. And Balboa did not follow the future canal line: his route crossed more than 125 miles away. Balboa was later beheaded at Acla on the orders of Pedrarias (Pedro Arias de Ávila), who was also his father-in-law. The Exposition remembered him in the inscriptions on the Tower of Jewels, which begin with 1513 and Balboa's discovery. His portrait appeared on the 1-cent stamp of the Post Office's Panama-Pacific issue. Modern references give the hilltop sighting as September 25 or 27 and the wading-in as September 29, 1513. The Exposition marked the anniversary but did not hold a festival on those dates.
Four centuries of digging
The idea was nearly as old as Balboa's discovery. In 1534 the Emperor Charles V ordered a survey for a waterway across the isthmus, and the report came back that it could not be done. Todd counts this as the first formal step toward a canal on record. The Panama Railroad crossed the isthmus in 1855. In May 1879 an international congress in Paris voted for a sea-level canal under Ferdinand de Lesseps. French work began in 1883, and the company went into receivership in 1889. By Todd's figures the French spent about $300 million to excavate 80 million cubic yards, of which only 27,708,000 turned out to be useful. He quotes George W. Goethals's verdict that the French failed "purely and simply" through maladministration.
The United States bought the French rights and property for $40 million under the Spooner Act of 1902. A photograph of the $40 million voucher was exhibited in the fair's Palace of Liberal Arts. Panama broke away from Colombia in November 1903, and the treaty that followed gave the United States a zone ten miles wide in exchange for $10 million and $250,000 a year. The treaty was ratified on February 23, 1904. The first American commission began work that May. Congress chose a lock canal in 1906, and the Army took over the job under Goethals in 1907. Meanwhile William C. Gorgas fought the mosquitoes. By Todd's account there had not been a case of yellow fever in the Canal Zone since 1906.
"The Canal is a water-bridge, a pair of fish-ladders for ships, a liquid stile over which vessels are shuttled across the Isthmus on rain water from the Chagres River."
Todd, The Story of the Exposition, vol. 1 (1921)
Todd's figures for the finished canal are these. Twelve locks in pairs, with chambers 110 feet wide and 1,000 feet long, lift ships as much as 32 feet at a time. The locks took 4,500,000 cubic yards of concrete and 92 gate leaves weighing 57,000 tons. Gatun Lake, created by damming the Chagres River, covers 167 square miles. The canal is 49.35 miles long counting its harbor channels, or 41 miles shore to shore. The Official Guide rounds this to "almost exactly fifty miles." Todd puts the cost at $373 million plus $14.5 million for fortifications. The Exposition's own Condensed Facts pamphlet gives $375 million. On April 27, 1915, while the fair was open, the Culebra Cut was renamed Gaillard Cut for Gaillard, a member of the canal commission who had died during the work.
An opening without fanfare
The canal was ready before the fair, but not by much, and the moment passed quietly. The steamer Cristobal made a trial transit on August 3, 1914. The formal opening came on Saturday, August 15, 1914, two weeks after war broke out in Europe. The 10,000-ton Ancon left Cristobal at 7 a.m., cleared the Gatun locks in seventy minutes, and reached Balboa on the Pacific side at 4 p.m.
"There was a creditable absence of fuss about it in the Zone itself, where scientific thoroughness had eliminated every risk, reduced the process to a cold mathematical certainty and made it an old story before it happened."
Todd, The Story of the Exposition, vol. 1 (1921)
The first merchant ship through, on the next day, was the Pleiades. She was bound from San Francisco to New York with 5,000 tons of lumber and merchandise and made the trip in 30 days, against 60 to 70 by way of the Strait of Magellan. Todd gives the canal's effect on the voyage from San Francisco to New York as a cut from 13,107 miles to 5,289. The war cancelled the celebration that was meant to tie canal and fair together: a naval pageant of 160 warships pledged by the powers, which was to have steamed through the canal and in through the Golden Gate. Nature then undercut the rest. Landslides in the Gaillard Cut closed the canal from mid-September 1915 to mid-April 1916, so for the last months of the fair the waterway it celebrated was blocked.
Goethals himself came to the fair. On Goethals Day, September 7, 1915, he admitted that the Exposition had driven the builders on.
"The Exposition was an inspiration to us in our work … as the slides increased at Panama we feared the celebration would begin before the thing it celebrated was ready; so we bent every effort to keep pace with you."
George W. Goethals, September 7, 1915, in Todd, The Story of the Exposition, vol. 3 (1921)
The canal in the fair's design
The canal appears throughout the fair's program. The first thing visitors met at the main gate was A. Stirling Calder's Fountain of Energy. Todd calls its horseman "the Lord of the Isthmian Way," with trumpeting figures on his shoulders and groups representing the oceans in the pool below. Inside the arch of the Tower of Jewels, William de Leftwich Dodge's murals showed the Atlantic and Pacific joined (see Sculpture and Murals). At the opening ceremony a chorus of 250 sang a "Panama Hymn." It was written by Justice Wendell Phillips Stafford and set to music by Mrs. H. H. A. Beach (Amy Beach), and it treated the canal as a marriage of the oceans:
"We join to-day the East and West,
Wendell Phillips Stafford, "The Panama Hymn," sung February 20, 1915; printed in Todd, vol. 2 (1921)
The stormy and the tranquil seas."
The Republic of Panama had less to show. It appropriated $50,000 and put up a pavilion, but it was busy with an exposition of its own, and according to Todd the Panama pavilion "remained empty and closed throughout the season" (see Nations and States).
The canal model on the Zone
For most visitors, seeing the canal meant riding past it on the Zone. The concession called simply "The Panama Canal" was the first large concession the Exposition let, in December 1912. It became one of the few Zone shows that Todd praised without reservation. It covered almost five acres just east of the Palace of Machinery. Building it took 2 million feet of lumber, 217 tons of cement, and 225 men working for seven months, plus 60 women who spent five months making its trees, shrubs and grass. It cost about $250,000. At the Exposition's insistence the outside was finished in the fair's imitation travertine instead of plain white.
The concession was originally meant to take visitors through the canal in boats. Instead they rode around it on a moving platform. It was 1,440 feet long, jointed to turn corners, and made up of 144 cars with two tiers of seats each, driven by electric motors. It carried 1,200 people at a time, and a circuit took 23 minutes. Todd compares each car to "a little traveling opera box." The model represented roughly 1,000 square miles of the isthmus, and a painted panorama on the walls added 4,000 more. Model steamers, trains, lighthouses and electric towing "mules" worked as they did in Panama. The ships were timed to pass through the locks at the same relative pace as real ones, which took 104 motors and 85 miles of copper wire. An awning shut out the open sky to keep the illusion.
Riders held telephone receivers to their ears as they went. Forty-five phonographs, with fifteen spares, played a recorded lecture into telephone transmitters, switched on and off to match the part of the model passing below. Todd notes that the details of this system were worked out in Thomas A. Edison's laboratory, and he lists the moving platform with its phonograph lectures among the fair's firsts. The show was conceived by a Chicago manufacturer of public-utility equipment. Todd gives his name as Louis Meyers in one volume and L. E. Meyers in another. Major F. C. Boggs of the Canal's Washington office wrote an endorsement saying the model would "in half an hour impart to anyone a more complete knowledge of the Canal than a visit of several days to the waterway itself." It won a Grand Prize.
It also paid. The canal model charged 50 cents from opening to closing and never cut its price. It took in $338,227.55, seventh among all the Exposition's 455 concessions. The six ahead of it were the Inside Inn hotel, the Desmond Supply Company, the Union Pacific's Yellowstone exhibit with its Old Faithful Inn restaurant, the Fadgl auto train, the Old Nuremburg restaurant and the YWCA cafeteria. Todd concludes that it "survived a great many less meritorious Zone features." See The Panama Canal (operating model) for the entry on the concession, and The Zone for the street it stood on.
Sources
- Frank Morton Todd, The Story of the Exposition, 5 vols. (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1921): vol. 1, chs. I–VII (Balboa; Panama; the Oregon; construction, locks, sanitation; opening; Hale's letter), LXXIX (first concession let); vol. 2, chs. XXVIII (the canal concession), XLVIII (opening day and the Panama Hymn), LXIV; vol. 3, ch. XXIII (Goethals Day), ch. XLIII (Panama Pavilion); vol. 5, ch. XXIV (concession revenue), ch. XXXV (the Oregon departs).
- Official Guide of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition (San Francisco: Wahlgreen, 1915), introduction (canal length; first excavation).
- Condensed Facts Concerning the Panama-Pacific International Exposition (PPIE, c. 1914) (canal cost; official purpose).
- John D. Barry, The City of Domes (1915), on the Tower of Jewels inscriptions.
- Modern context for Balboa's dates: Encyclopædia Britannica, "Vasco Núñez de Balboa"; Smithsonian National Museum of American History, "It's your birthday, Panama Canal!"