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19021776 Club

Congress buys France's failed canal for $40 million; Roosevelt is expected to sign tomorrow

The Spooner Act authorizes purchase of the Compagnie Nouvelle's rusting assets, down from a $110 million ask, contingent on securing a treaty with Colombia.

The French had already tried and failed to dig a canal across the Isthmus of Panama — beaten back by yellow fever, mudslides, and bankruptcy — leaving behind rusting machinery and a paper syndicate desperate to unload its assets. On June 28, 1902, Congress enacted the Spooner Act, authorizing President Theodore Roosevelt to purchase those assets from the Compagnie Nouvelle du Canal de Panama for $40 million — down from an asking price of $110 million — provided a treaty could be secured with Colombia. The syndicate's chief promoter, Philippe-Jean Bunau-Varilla, had lobbied furiously for the deal, and American lawyer William Nelson Cromwell had lobbied alongside him, ultimately walking away with $800,000 in commission. Roosevelt signed the bill the next day…

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More from June 28
1776

Parker's nine warships bombard Fort Sullivan; Moultrie's palmetto walls swallow the cannonballs

Clinton's land assault stalls at an unwadeable channel, one British ship sits grounded on a sandbar, and the fleet withdraws up the coast.
1776

Washington's own bodyguard hangs before 20,000 in New York

Thomas Hickey, an Irish-born private in the Life Guards, was caught passing counterfeit money, then talked too freely in prison about a far larger plot against the Commander-in-Chief.
1865

Meade stands down the Army of the Potomac; it ceases to exist, two years to the day after he took command

The army that bled at Bull Run, Antietam, Fredericksburg, Gettysburg, and the Wilderness is disbanded before summer is out.
17451776 Club
Four thousand New England volunteers with no British regulars have cracked the "American Dunkirk," the stone fortress France spent thirty million livres to make impregnable.
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More from Gilded Age & Progressive Era
1890

Harrison signs Wyoming into the Union; women's suffrage comes with it

The 44th state enters with its suffrage provision intact, approved by voters 6,272 to 1,903 last November, a condition Congress had to accept whole or not at all.
1914

USS Nevada slides into the Fore River; the Navy calls her armor scheme unlike anything built before

Eleanor Anne Seibert christens the oil-fueled battleship at Quincy, whose "all or nothing" plating packs 41 percent of the ship's weight over only the spaces that matter.
1881

Garrett fires in the dark, and Billy the Kid is dead at twenty-one

The outlaw walks into Pete Maxwell's bedroom at Fort Sumner asking "¿Quién es?"; Garrett's first shot strikes just above the heart.
1914

Congress creates an aviation section inside the Signal Corps; $250,000 to get it started

Public Law 143 gives the Army's handful of planes a formal home, but keeps aviation folded inside the Signal Corps rather than making it a branch of its own.
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