The United States secured the right to build and operate the Panama Canal and control five miles of land on either side of the passage in 1904, after the French lost 20,000 lives bungling a similar effort. Over the next decade, tens of thousands of American men labored in the malarial heat, excavating nearly 240 million cubic yards of rock and dirt and setting 3.4 million cubic meters of concrete. For a price tag of $375 million and thousands of lives, the U.S. ended up with a historic, 51-mile marvel of engineering.
Democratic President Jimmy Carter signed away control of the canal in 1977. On the day of Carter’s funeral, Republican lawmakers introduced legislation that would set the stage for America possibly to reacquire the canal, which President-elect Donald Trump said in December was “a VITAL National Asset for the United States.”
