Morgan was chairman of the Senate Committee on Interoceanic Canals, the Morgan Committee, as it was more commonly known, which included several extremely interesting and influential figures: Spooner, of Wisconsin, who was as fine a speaker as anyone then in Congress; William Harris, a burly, imposing man, who had an engineering background and had actually seen something of Central America; and Senator Hanna, who was regarded, with reason, as the most important man in American politics, Roosevelt not necessarily excluded. But it was Morgan who ran the show; Old Morgan, of Alabama, who at age seventy-seven qualified as one of the most powerful and interesting figures in American politics.
Morgan did not look like much. He was small and frail, a dry little stick beside a man like Hanna. His hair and mustache were as white as paper, his scrawny neck several sizes too small for the inevitable wing collar. He was known as one of the old-time characters on the Hill. A lawyer from Selma, Alabama, he had led a cavalry charge at Chickamauga and survived to become a brigadier general. He had been elected to the Senate first in 1876 and had been serving without interruption ever since. Friend and foe considered him the most intellectual of Democrats (as Hoar was the most intellectual of Republicans), and to judge by performance, rather than appearance, his career was anything but in the decline. No member of the Senate, irrespective of age, worked harder.
Morgan’s efforts over the years had been largely constructive. He was watchful, uncompromising, fiercely independent, nearly always irritable. He was also scrupulously honest. Never had he been known to vote on anything for reasons other than his famous “principles” some of which, such as those concerning relations between the black and white races, were viewed as shamefully out of date. His handwriting, a savage, consistently illegible scrawl, was known all over town, as was his sense of humor, which was a bit like that of Mark Twain, whom he resembled to a degree. “A lie,” he was once heard to declare on the floor of the Senate, “is an abomination unto the Lord and an ever-present help in time of need.”
To cross him in any fashion was considered extremely dangerous. “Senator Morgan was an extraordinary man in many respects,” wrote Shelby Cullom, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. “He had a wonderful fund of information on every subject . . . He was one of the most delightful and agreeable of men if you agreed with him . . . but he was so intense on any subject in which he took an interest, particularly anything pertaining to the interoceanic canal, that he became almost vicious toward anyone who opposed him.”
The two greatest pleasures in Morgan’s life, it was commonly said, were work and a good fight.
The interest in the canal dated from his first years in the Senate. He knew the reports of every surveying expedition to Central America, the findings of the several successive canal commissions since the Grant Administration. It was John Tyler Morgan, everyone knew, who had worked longest and hardest for congressional support for the ill-fated Maritime Canal Company, who had been the author of several canal bills, who had done more to inform the public, heard more testimony, read more, asked more questions, and had more information on the entire subject of an interoceanic passage than any figure of either party. The canal was the dream of his life and he was as certain as he could possibly be that it must be a Nicaragua canal. Nicaragua, in the popular phrase, remained “the American route” and his long, frequently lonely fight to have the canal built there had made him a national figure.
The canal would be his monument, Morgan was often told by admiring colleagues. He, however, was not interested in prestige. He wanted no monuments, he wanted the Nicaragua canal.
Because of his strong expansionist sentiments, and the support he had lent to the Roosevelt-Lodge-Mahan doctrines, Morgan also had a unique kind of leverage. In most other respects he was a good Bryan Democrat and a Southerner to the core. Still he could usually count on support from the other side of the aisle when he needed it. And for several years now he had been more welcome at the White House than any Democrat in town.
Morgan wanted an American canal under American control no less than did Roosevelt. Nor had he ever been the slightest bit tentative about that, which was among the chief reasons for Roosevelt’s admiration. Several of his strongest arguments for a Nicaragua canal were, nonetheless, avowedly provincial. An ocean passage at Nicaragua would mean a return of prosperity to the South. A Nicaragua canal would be closer to any American port than would a canal at Panama, but a Nicaragua canal would also be seven to eight hundred miles closer to the Gulf ports of Mobile, New Orleans, and Galveston than to New York or Boston. He foresaw his native southland fronting on one of the world’s principal sea lanes and every Gulf port a major coaling station. World markets would open for southern lumber, southern iron, cotton, manufactured goods. It was a position that made him extremely popular at home.
But on top of this Morgan believed quite sincerely that Nicaragua was the superior choice from an engineering standpoint and in view of political considerations. His technical argument was much the same as that advanced by Grant’s canal commission or by Menocal and Ammen at the Paris congress: Nicaragua offered the lowest pass any-where on the Cordilleras from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego; Nicaragua provided fifty-odd miles of magnificent lake, perhaps as much as sixty miles of navigable river; the lake offered a limitless supply of water at the summit level of the canal. Politically, Nicaragua was a stable country in which to make so vast an investment of American capital and effort. A Nicaragua canal had already been the subject of six treaties between Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and the United States. Nicaragua was clean, fertile, relatively free of disease; it had great potential for development. And he could marshal impressive facts and figures, drawing from his prodigious memory, government reports, and such widely respected authorities as A. G. Menocal.
By the same token, his contempt for the Panama route was monumental, his utterances on the subject, if anything, even more notable. Earlier in the year, as the newly elected Vice President, Theodore Roosevelt, presided rather nervously over a Senate debate on the canal, Morgan had called the Panama plan “a job which has disgusted France . . . until she had shuddered like a sick baby at the enormity of the villainies perpetrated by her own people.” The entire affair had been “gangrene with corruption.” The Compagnie Nouvelle du Canal de Panama was the so-called New Panama Canal Company, the words spoken as though they had an unpleasant smell. The company’s assets and franchises were held to be virtually worthless, its stockholders little better than common thieves. Its officers were paid schemers and to be trusted under no conditions. These people, Morgan warned, had no intention of finishing the canal; their present efforts in Panama were a thin sham; their only objective, their only reason for existence, he insisted, was to sell their poisonous junk heap to the United States.
And since this was closely in tune with the opinion of the vast majority of Americans, his position seemed impregnable. The very dark cloud that hung over Panama in the popular mind appeared immovable, while Nicaragua, by stunning contrast, was seen as a sunny, hospitable land much favored by fortune. Nicaragua would be a fresh start. Those few Americans who had spoken out for Panama Morgan regarded as fools or, worse, stooges for the transcontinental railroads that were conspiring to defeat any waterway through Central America that they could not own or control. Morgan was a railroad fighter of long standing and the railroads, he insisted, were as much opposed to a canal at Panama as they were to one at Nicaragua. But by playing up Panama they hoped to stall a congressional decision on Nicaragua. He accused no one in particular, but there was no call to. At the heart of the “Panama Plot,” the public and most of the press assumed, were E. H. Harriman, J. P. Morgan, and James J. Hill. And quite possibly the assumption was correct, or at least partly so, although neither Morgan nor the newspapers were ever able to produce substantive proof.
In the place of proof were the frequent declarations of the railroad people themselves, and since the railroads had shown no prior aversion to political wirepulling, and s
ince their grip on the country as a whole had become a very live political issue, the specter Morgan raised of paid railroad agents scheming to wreck the canal was one nobody took lightly.
Speeches by others on the subject of the Nicaragua canal filled hundreds of pages of the Congressional Record. In the archives of the House and Senate were tens of thousands of pages of reports from special canal committees, testimony from explorers, engineers, sea captains, all supporting the fundamental wisdom of the Nicaragua route. (If pens were spades, remarked the Minneapolis Times, the canal would have been dug long since.) There were all the maps and surveys of the Grant expeditions, tabulations on weather and tides and annual rainfall gathered by still further Nicaragua expeditions in the 1880’s, when the French were busy at Panama. Most of the popular magazines– Harper’s Weekly, Atlantic Monthly, Munsey’s, Century–had carried major articles on the Nicaragua canal. The Maritime Canal Company, before it went bankrupt, had built a magnificent scale model of its canal, complete with running water and tiny locks that actually worked, and this had been exhibited in Washington and a dozen other cities. American boards of trade, state legislatures, scores of civic groups of one kind and another, had passed solemn resolutions for a Nicaragua canal. A Nicaragua canal had been a showpiece in both the Republican and Democratic platforms. But a clinching argument for Nicaragua heard repeatedly was that if Old Morgan, knowing all he did, having given the better part of a lifetime to the subject, said it was the place, then certainly that must be so. A Nicaragua canal bill would go before Congress, it was presumed, and Morgan would see it safely and speedily through. The one remaining piece of business was the release of a Presidential study on the “most practicable and feasible route” for the canal. The study had been ordered by William McKinley and authorized by Congress in 1899. It was the work of the Isthmian Canal Commission, the second such high-level commission established by McKinley (the first, the Nicaragua Canal Commission, had been organized in 1897), and it was to be the final word on the subject. Chairman of the commission was Rear Admiral John G. Walker, who had also headed the earlier study, and hence it was referred to as the Second Walker Commission, or more commonly as time passed as simply the Walker Commission. Besides Walker, eight others, most of them eminent civil or military engineers, composed the board. A million dollars had been appropriated. The field work had involved two years, hundreds of men–surveyors, engineers, naval officers, physicians, geologists–and it was in November, only a few days before Hay and Pauncefote met to sign their treaty, that Admiral Walker had marched up the steps to the State Department on his way to Hay’s office, two men trailing a few paces to the rear carrying the long-awaited report in two large wooden boxes.
The report was supposed to have remained secret until the President had read it and sent it on to Congress, but on November 21, three days after the Hay-Pauncefote signing, William Randolph Hearst broke the results in the New York Journal. One of the admiral’s stenographers had been bribed and Hearst had a carbon copy of the full text.
Having considered all factors of climate, health, legal rights, existing franchises, having arrived at probable figures for the cost of construction and operation of ship canals in both Panama and Nicaragua, the Walker Commission had again declared Nicaragua the preferred choice. The issue, it seemed, had been settled once and for all. The rest would be largely a matter of legislative formality.
For those few who bothered to read the commission’s report, however, it was obvious that the important news was not the concluding decision for Nicaragua–a decision that had been expected all along– but the exceedingly strong case being made for Panama. There was no need to read between the lines. All one had to do was to look at the technical arguments being presented, none of which was very technical or complicated.
The deciding factor had been the price put by the French company on its Panama holdings. Nicaragua was the “most practicable and feasible” route “after considering all the facts developed by the investigations . . . and having in view the terms offered by the New Panama Canal Company,” which were “so unreasonable that its acceptance cannot be recommended by this commission.” Yet with amazingly few exceptions the editorial writers and politicians chose to pay no attention to that. The commission’s findings were hailed as the ultimate confirmation of the American route.
The Journal followed its great scoop with an article on a minority report (also provided by the obliging stenographer) in which the virtues of the Panama route were stressed in further detail by the most eminent civil engineer on the commission, George Shattuck Morison. The New York Times and one or two other papers had also made mention of a “Panama Lobby” stepping up its “gumshoe campaign” in Washington and of a “powerful coterie” in the Senate working secretly for the Panama route, irrespective of the commission’s conclusions. But the stories were generally discounted. Asked by reporters if he had any knowledge of Panama sentiment among his colleagues, John Tyler Morgan drawled, “I haven’t heard a brush crack in the woods about it.”
When Congress convened in the first week in December, a House bill for a Nicaragua canal was pushed through committee without a hitch. Its author, William Peters Hepburn, of Iowa, was a Republican with a large streak of vanity who had once blocked a similar bill because it was then called the Morgan Bill. He had decided that if any one individual or party was to be immortalized by the canal legislation it was to be Congressman Hepburn and the Republicans. Morgan had since assured Hepburn that he would not respond in kind, that he would be quite happy to see it be a Hepburn Bill, and so it was expected to pass quite handily.
On December 10, a formal diplomatic convention was signed in Managua “with a view to the construction of a Nicaragua canal by the United States.” On December 16, to nobody’s surprise, the Senate ratified the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty. Three days later the House of Representatives, by unanimous consent, placed the Hepburn Bill on the calendar for immediate consideration following the Christmas holidays.
Then just before Christmas came reports from Paris that the president of the Compagnie Nouvelle had suddenly resigned. A stock-holders’ meeting on December 21 had become so tumultuous that the police had to be called in. The gist of the speeches had been to get the United States to buy the canal at any price.
To date, technically speaking, the French company had never really fixed a price for its holdings. Admiral Walker had been informed only as to what the company considered the Panama property, equipment, and franchises to be worth–which was $109,000,000. Having nothing else to go by, Walker and his commissioners had taken that to be the price and had based their decision on it.
The new price, the first price actually quoted from Paris, was presented to Walker by representatives of the company early on January 4, 1902, the morning most of Washington was absorbed in accounts of Alice Roosevelt’s coming-out party at the White House the night before. Walker and his eight-man commission had concluded in their report that what the French company had to sell was worth considerably less than $109,000,000. The useful portions of the French excavations they valued at $27,400,000. They were willing to include $2,000,000 for the French maps, surveys, drawings, and records. The Panama Railroad they judged to be worth nearly $7,000,000, and another $3,000,000-plus had been added to cover possible oversights. So the total estimated value came to $40,000,000, which, interestingly, was the precise figure the French were now offering to sell for.
Walker had hurried over to the State Department at noon and from there the news had been taken next door to the White House. The French had not only slashed their price, they had cut it by more than 60 percent. As Admiral Walker was to tell the Morgan Committee in his deadpan fashion, “It put things on a very different footing.”
But when the House took up the Hepburn Bill, the debate, if it can be called that, lasted all of two days. On January 9, the House voted all but unanimously–308 to 2–to proceed with the Nicaragua canal. As Mark Hanna observed, probably not one congressman in four
had even read the report of the Walker Commission. Morgan, who had read it, and closely, announced that he would commence hearings and see that the bill reached the Senate with all dispatch.
The Administration all this while had been keeping silent, the implicit understanding being that the choice was the prerogative of Congress and that Roosevelt remained a Nicaragua man. But no sooner had the House acted than Roosevelt called the members of the Walker Commission to the White House, one by one, for private consultation. He wished their own personal views, freely expressed, one man at a time. A meeting of the full commission followed, a closed, secret meeting in the President’s office, during which Walker and the others were told to get together and issue a supplementary report. Roosevelt wanted the French offer to be accepted. The conclusion of the commission, he said, was to be unanimous.
Morgan was incredulous when Mark Hanna confronted him with the news. “Go ahead and ask the President if you do not believe it,” Hanna replied, and Morgan went down to the White House that same day. What sort of exchange he and Roosevelt had neither man ever disclosed.
David McCullough Library E-book Box Set Page 359