November 9, 2006
TR Goes to Panama Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 05:10 PM EST One hundred years ago today, Theodore Roosevelt became the first sitting President of the United States to pay an official visit to a foreign country, when he traveled southward to inspect construction progress on the Panama Canal. It’s remarkable to think that for over a century before TR’s trip, America seemed so inconsequential to the rest of the world—and/or the rest of the world seemed to inconsequential to America—that no sitting President bothered to leave the country for official purposes. As Alexander Burns explains in today’s AmericanHeritage.com feature on the trip, TR was one of the first Presidents to take an active interest in foreign relations. True, other presidents including Jefferson and Lincoln had been greatly concerned with doings in Europe. But as Alex explains, TR “was an avid interventionist who supported an expanded military role for the United States in the Western Hemisphere. In that very same year, 1906, the twenty-sixth President was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for helping to conclude a peace between the warring nations of Russia and Japan.” Were I delivering a lecture on this topic a few years ago, I might well have attributed the shift toward globalism to the Civil War, which expedited the construction of the transcontinental railroad, spurred massive industrial development to fuel the Union war effort, and furthered the cause of paper money and centralized banking. All of these developments created an economically advanced nation that increasingly traded labor, capital, resources, and goods with the rest of the world. By the time TR became President, he couldn’t help but take a more international approach to governance than his predecessors. But Eric Rauchway’s recent book Blessed Among Nations: How the World Made America, which I reviewed for AmericanHeritage.com, raises a reciprocal issue. Not only was America selling to and poaching labor from the rest of the world; the world was investing its resources in America. Britain, for instance, was a major investor in American railroads. This meant that by the time TR became President, what foreign leaders thought mattered a great deal. Of course, TR’s trip to Panama was for a specific purpose. But it’s hard to imagine it occurring 30 years before. By 1906 the world had already become a smaller place, and America, so geographically expansive and economically robust, was finding itself a larger place in that smaller world.
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