1912, April 3: (Knox’s Visit and the Shadow of the Panama Canal): On April 3, 1912, U.S.S.

1912, April 3: (Knox’s Visit and the Shadow of the Panama Canal): On April 3, 1912, U.S.S. Washington, a new armored cruiser, brought an important visitor to Port-au-Prince: Philander C. Knox, first Secretary of State to visit Haiti since Seward, bore a message he had been delivering in Costa Rica, Cuba, Santo Domingo, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, and Venezuela — with the impending opening of the Panama Canal, the time had come for the Caribbean republics to quiet down and behave. Knox told Leconte that the fullest success of America’s work in creating a highway for international commerce was, to a notable degree, dependent on the peace and stability of its neighbors, that a community liable to be torn by internal dissension or checked in its progress by the consequences of nonfulfillment of international obligations was not in a good position to deserve and reap the benefits certain to come with the opening of the canal. Knox’s words were attuned to the hour, for in Leconte Haiti seemed to have a president determined to rise to the challenges of stability and progress — yet the Secretary’s formulation, with its casual assumption that Caribbean sovereignty existed to serve the commercial interests of the canal, performed the same epistemic operation that Roosevelt’s Corollary had encoded a decade earlier: the transformation of the neighboring republics from sovereign nations into auxiliary infrastructure for American commerce, their internal politics evaluated not by the standards of self-determination but by the metric of how effectively they facilitated the transit of American goods.