Theodore Roosevelt and chief engineer George Goethals flank a ship steaming through the canal, twenty-five years after it opened.

TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS

• Catalog Number: Scott #856

• Denomination: 3 cents (3¢)

• Date of Issue: August 15, 1939

• Printing Method: Flat Plate, Engraved (Intaglio)

• Perforation: 11

• Color: Deep Red Violet

• Subject: Portraits of Theodore Roosevelt and General George W. Goethals, with a ship in the canal, marking 25 years of the Panama Canal

• Format: Commemorative single

CONDITION ANALYSIS (Seller-Assessed)

• Status: Used

• Grading: Fine

• Postmark: Faint postmark is visible within the bottom left of design.

• Obverse: The portraits of Roosevelt and Goethals and the central canal scene with a steamship are all identifiable.

• Reverse: No original gum present, as expected for a used stamp. The paper shows moderate toning and foxing with faint design show-through, minimal hinge remnants, and a light diagonal crease at the upper-left corner. No tears or thinning otherwise visible.

• Centering / Margins: The design sits comfortably within the frame, with clear margins present on all four sides.

• Perforations: Intact on all four sides.

HISTORY

The Panama Canal was one of the great engineering feats of the age, and when it opened in 1914 it changed the map of world trade, letting ships pass between the Atlantic and Pacific without the long and dangerous voyage around the tip of South America. This stamp marks the canal's twenty-fifth anniversary by honoring the two men most associated with the American effort.

On the left is Theodore Roosevelt, whose determination as president drove the United States to take on the project after an earlier French attempt had collapsed in disease and financial ruin. "I took the Isthmus," he later boasted, and his aggressive diplomacy made the canal possible, if not always by admirable means. On the right is General George Washington Goethals, the Army engineer who took charge of construction and saw the enormous job through to completion, managing the locks, the excavation, and the vast workforce that finally finished the canal.

Issued August 15, 1939, in deep red violet, the stamp arrived just as another world war was breaking out, a reminder of the canal's strategic value as well as its commercial importance. It is a flat-plate printing that pairs the visionary and the builder, the politician who willed the canal into being and the engineer who actually dug it.

STEVEN SAYS

The design is smart: Roosevelt, who bulldozed the politics to make the canal happen, on one side, and Goethals, the engineer who actually built it, on the other. The visionary and the builder. It came out in 1939, right as another war started, when that shortcut between two oceans suddenly mattered a great deal again.