That was on Thursday, the sixteenth. By Saturday the papers were saying that Roosevelt had a new canal report in his hands. Walker, intercepted by reporters between the State Department and the White House, would say only that the report was likely to be a disappointment to the public. On Monday, January 20, the story was out. On the motion of George S. Morison, the commission had reversed its decision: Panama was now declared the unanimous choice for the canal.
A general inventory of the French property was provided for the first time. There were some thirty thousand acres of land, which, along with land belonging to the Panama Railroad, comprised nearly all the ground required for the canal itself. There was the railroad. There were more than two thousand buildings (offices, living quarters, storehouses, shops, stables) in addition to the large central headquarters in Panama City and the hospitals at Panama City and Colon. There was “an immense amount of machinery” (tugs, launches, dredges, excavators, pumps, cranes, locomotives, railroad cars), as well as surveying instruments and medical supplies. The excavation already accomplished, that excavation that would be of value according to the commission’s own plan, was figured to be 36,689,965 cubic yards.
Very few in Washington missed the point.
Assuming Theodore Roosevelt was as impatient to build the canal as he appeared, then his fastest, most expedient course would be to ignore the last-minute overtures of the French company and let John Tyler Morgan handle the rest. That way there would be no more time wasted. But Roosevelt quite obviously had chosen not to do that. In-stead he was flying head-on against the Senator in defiance of all the old man’s authority and power, not to mention the popular sentiment of the country. He was throwing all past faith in the Nicaragua route to the winds, and by so doing he was risking still further delays, more interminable debate, and very likely a personal defeat at the outset of his Presidency. Clearly something or somebody had caused him to conclude that Panama was not just the better alternative, but so much better as to be worth making a fight for.
Or possibly, it was being said, he was no less susceptible than his predecessor to the will of the Senator from Ohio. And if Mark Hanna was for Panama, there was no special mystery about that, since it was axiomatic that Mark Hanna spoke for the railroads.
Hanna could not “bamboozle”the American public like a lot of children, declared an irate press. The American people are not fools, said the New York Herald. National opinion was unanimous for Nicaragua and the lesson of democracy was to trust the public instinct:
All the objections shown have been admitted by competent scientific authorities, but their weight is nil compared with the instinctive conviction so deeply rooted in the American nation, that the Nicaragua canal project is a purely national affair, conceived by Americans, sustained by Americans, and (if, later on, constructed) operated by Americans according to American ideas and for American needs. In one word, it is a national enterprise.
Sentiment, the editors insisted, must be reckoned in national as in personal affairs. The fundamental question was whether the United States Senate would prove more “permeable to foreign influence” than the House had.
The Louisville Courier-Journal, in an editorial that was carefully clipped and saved by John Tyler Morgan, wrote of the “bare-faced comicality of the medicated steal: twenty millions to enable the thieves on this side to pass the bill; twenty millions for the insiders on the other side; a few rusty pots and pans and an international law suit for Uncle Sam.”
Morgan’s frequent assertions that the title of the property was in-valid, that Colombia would never willingly abandon its rights on the Isthmus, that political unrest was endemic in Panama, were all very much in evidence now. “Talk about buying a lawsuit,” wrote William Randolph Hearst in the New York Journal, “the purchase of the Panama Canal would be buying a revolution. Apparently the only way in which we could secure a satisfactory concession from Colombia would be to go down there, take the contending statesmen by the necks, and hold a batch of them in office long enough to get a contract signed.”
Meantime, the Colombian minister in Washington, Dr. Carlos Martinez Silva, assured the State Department and the press that his government was ready to deal liberally with the United States concerning Colombia’s isthmian province. The government in Bogotá would show “no mean nor grasping spirit. Everything in the way of a concession the United States needs to warrant it in undertaking to build the Panama Canal, Colombia is willing to grant.”
On January 28, Senator John Coit Spooner introduced an amendment to the Hepburn Bill. It authorized the President to acquire the French company’s Panama property and concessions at a cost not to exceed $40,000,000; to acquire from Colombia perpetual control of a canal zone at least six miles wide across the Isthmus of Panama; and to build a Panama canal. If a clear title or a satisfactory agreement with Colombia could not be reached within “a reasonable time,” then the President was authorized to proceed with a canal at Nicaragua.
If passed, the proposal would obviously transform the House bill into an entirely new measure. It was the strongest evidence of all that Roosevelt had made up his mind that it must be a Panama canal. Spooner had shown no prior partiality for the Panama route. But Spooner was an able floor leader for Administration bills who would never have taken such a stand without full White House approval. So plainly the plan had emanated from the White House.
Theodore was still the spinner.
*One of many popular renditions of the story, “The Race of the Oregon,” by John James Meehan, went as follows:
Lights out! And a prow turned toward the South,
And a canvas hiding each cannon’s mouth,
And a ship like a silent ghost released
Is seeking her sister ships in the East. . ..
When your boys shall ask what the guns are for,
Then tell them the tale of the Spanish War,
And the breathless millions that looked upon
The matchless race of the Oregon.
10
The Lobby
In the course of a very active and very extended professional career . . . the firm of Sullivan & Cromwell had found itself placed in intimate relations, susceptible of being used to advantage with men possessing influence and power.
–WILLIAM NELSON CROMWELL
The first bugle-note had been heard. I hastened to settle up my business affairs and left France on the Champagne . . . for this crusade which was to result in the resurrection of Panama.
–PHILIPPE BUNAU-VARILLA
I
As Chairman John Tyler Morgan gathered his committee for the first hearings on the Hepburn Bill, the idea of building the American canal at Panama, of buying out the French and finishing what they had begun, was altogether devoid of popular appeal and without a single spokesman of national reputation. What open support there was for the Panama proposition was just barely discernible–a few newspapers (the New York Evening Post being the most persistent), a few Mid western business groups, perhaps a half-dozen prominent civil engineers. Political support appeared to be nonexistent. Extraordinary as it may seem in light of what was to transpire, by the start of 1902 not a single politician of importance had ever declared himself in favor of a Panama canal. The idea had no constituency, whereas the enthusiasm for Nicaragua, within Congress and without, appeared to be overwhelming.
Any ordinary citizen who dared even to suggest that perhaps the French had picked the best place after all, or that a Panama canal ought not be dismissed out of hand because it was a French idea or because it would be a Panama canal, spoke virtually alone. Old John Bigelow, for example, had become something of a curiosity for espousing such views, as well as something of a nuisance to such influential former colleagues as John Hay, who responded with due courtesy, but nothing more, to Bigelow’s lengthy, reflective letters on the matter.
As things stood, there was every reason to assume that the commerce of the world, not to mention the white ships of the United States Nav
y, would one day be plying the waters of beautiful Lake Nicaragua. And this is doubtless what would have occurred had it not been for certain unexpected events and a mere handful of extremely determined individuals, Two of whom comprised the main thrust of what the newspapers darkly referred to as the “Panama Lobby.” They were William Nelson Cromwell and Philippe Bunau-Varilla. Their activities to date require some explaining.
Both Cromwell and his French counterpart were small, aggressive, fatherless men who would each be compared to Napoleon. Only Cromwell, however, had made “influence” a profession. Cromwell was something New in the legal world, a corporation lawyer, a kind of mutation sprung forth in the Wall Street jungle during the rise of the railroads. An almost pretty little man, with thick, curly, prematurely white hair and white mustache, he had large, glittering blue eyes–“as clear as a baby’s,” according to one account–and a smooth, pink com plexion that “would not shame a maiden.” In striped trousers and morning coat he looked like a clever drama student dressed for the part of elder statesman. But the look he fancied, the role he cultivated, were those of the man with all the cards, and possibly several more up his sleeve. As one young protégé would recall, Cromwell delighted in being known as a mystery man, a puller of strings. An incensed con gressman was to call him “the most dangerous man the country has produced since the days of Aaron Burr,” which was extravagant, but exactly the sort of remark from which Cromwell took extreme satisfaction.
He had no interest in sensational trial work, never courted publicity. He was a talker man to man. “No life insurance agent could beat him,” a reporter for the World wrote after a long interview. “He talks fast, and when he wishes to, never to the point.” His great genius was for “arranging” things, for planning every move in advance. “Accidents don’t happen” he would admonish young associates, “they are permitted to happen by fools who take no thought of misadventure.”
William Nelson Cromwell–he preferred the use of all three names –was the good, eager, poor diminutive boy from Brooklyn, the son of a Civil war widow, “a lad of delicate health,” who had once played the organ in the Church of the Pilgrims and went to work first as an accountant in a railroad office. He was the model of Ambition Rewarded who began each day at first light and advised others: “A successful man never forgets his work. He gets up in the morning with it, he works all day with it, he takes it home with him, he lives with it.” He had worked his way through Columbia Law School in his off-hours, was graduated in 1876, and three years later, with an older, well-established trial lawyer named Algernon Sullivan, founded the Wall Street firm of Sullivan & Cromwell. When Sullivan died in 1887, Cromwell became the senior partner at age thirty-three.
He hired equally promising young men (one of whom was John Foster Dulles) and busily cultivated his own legend. To his more staid peers he seemed a touch vulgar. His “training in finance and accounts,” an associate would explain, had “developed in him valuable skills unusual to lawyers of that day who were generally trained in literature, logic, rhetoric, philosophy, and the classics.”
Cromwell’s fees for straightening out the affairs of troubled corporations or arranging giant mergers were the largest of their kind up until that time. Still in his early forties, he was already a millionaire many times over. When the New York firm of Decker, Howell & Company failed in 1891, with debts of $10,000,000, Cromwell, who had been named assignee, had the company’s affairs straightened out in six weeks–creditors paid, operations resumed–and his fee was an unheard-of $250,000. By 1901 he had reorganized the Northern Pacific Railroad and assisted J. P. Morgan in founding the United States Steel Corporation. (He was also among those privileged to participate in the stock syndicate that made the giant steel combine possible, along with such “Lords of Creation” as H. H. Rogers, W. K. Vanderbilt, and John “Bet-a-Million” Gates. Cromwell’s share was for $2,000,000, for which he had been required to put up a bare 12½ percent.) He was adviser to and confidant of several of the most powerful men in America, whom he admired and flattered to the skies. Once, speaking before a Wells, Fargo stockholders’ meeting, he declared, “Mr. Harriman is the one man to be thanked for what this company has gained through the favor of the railroads. He cannot be replaced, for he moves in a higher world which we cannot hope to enter.” Nor had he the slightest compunction about trading openly on such friendships.
In 1894, the year the New Panama Canal Company was organized, Cromwell had become general counsel for the Panama Railroad, a stockholder, and a director. This had come about because he was at the time involved with C. P. Huntington and the Southern Pacific, which by then virtually controlled the Panama Railroad as the result of a traffic agreement. Presently he had started looking after the “interests” of the New Panama Canal Company, promising its officers an “open, audacious, aggressive” campaign of “publicity, enlightenment, and opposition” all planned with “Napoleonic strategy.” He was to profess most earnestly later on that his underlying purpose at all times had been to give the United States the best possible canal. But from other things he said and did it is clear that his fundamental objective was to sell the French company to the United States government, or, that failing, to some other government or combination of foreign capital. And for such efforts he expected to be well paid. His fee for services rendered when finally submitted to the Compagnie Nouvelle would be for $800,000.
Few lobbyists had ever gone about their task with such intensity or imagination. He made lobbying one of the lively arts, as someone said. No opportunity was missed. Editors and congressmen were supplied with reams of material on Panama, the French company, the drawbacks of the Nicaragua route. He was in Washington again and again, often for weeks at a time, seeing people on the Hill, negotiating with the Colombians. He had some help from a lawyer named William Curtis and a newspaperman, Roger Farnham, whom he had hired away from the World. But he was the spearhead. It was he who counted Hann a and Spooner among his “intimate” friends. It was he who called at the White House.
He made liberal use of his own and his client’s money. He brought people together. Once he had even arranged a meeting between his client’s representative and William McKinley. On the Hill his strategy was to do everything possible to dampen the Nicaragua ardor and he was as “ubiquitous and ever present” as John Tyler Morgan said he was. Indeed, the hatred he engendered in the old Senator is probably the clearest proof of his effectiveness.
His most demonstrable achievement was the establishment of the Isthmian Canal Commission, at least such was to be his lifelong claim. To bring this off he had concentrated on House Speaker Thomas B. Reed and Congressman Joseph (“Uncle Joe”) Cannon, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, both Republicans who quickly saw, he later said, “the wisdom, the justice, and the advantages” of one conclusive, grandiose scientific study and gave it their backing, which was all that was needed. It was an inspired delaying tactic–and a critical one, as things turned out–but it was also an enormous gamble, since a verdict by the commission in favor of Nicaragua would utterly demolish his client’s already slim prospects.
Once the idea was in motion he had moved quickly to influence the selection of the nine men who were to serve on the commission. He urged McKinley not to reappoint Admiral Walker. A Corps of Engineers officer, Colonel Peter Hains, and a professor of civil engineering from the University of Pennsylvania, Lewis Haupt, were also unacceptable in his view, since, like Walker, they had served on the earlier Nicaragua Canal Commission and were therefore not without Nicaragua bias. (Professor Haupt was actually on record as saying that nothing could change his mind about the superiority of the Nicaragua route.) A fourth man, Alfred Noble, a noted Chicago engineer, had also been compromised, Cromwell argued, by service on a still-earlier, short-lived Nicaragua canal board. Among the Army engineers, nearly all of whom were strongly, if privately, behind the Nicaragua plan, Cromwell’s influence with McKinley was described as “too powerful for ordinary mortals to counterac
t.”
Cromwell failed to block the appointments of Hains, Haupt, Noble, and Walker, but the three other civil engineers chosen were from Cromwell’s acceptable list, and among them was the Olympian Morison, whose reputation among Cromwell’s railroad friends was second to none.
Once the new commission was set up for business in the Corcoran Building, it was the “silver-tongued” Cromwell who convinced Admiral Walker that the place to commence his studies was in Paris, not Central America. And so it was to France that the nine commissioners and several of their wives had sailed in August 1899, Cromwell, meantime, having hastily departed on an earlier ship.
The final report issued by the commission contains no mention of Cromwell. It is stated only that in Paris the officers of the Compagnie Nouvelle “received the commissioners with great courtesy and were ready at all times to assist them in making a study of this [Panama] route in all its aspects.” The most important and attentive of those officers, however, had been the American lawyer. It was Cromwell who turned up at the Continental Hotel to greet the commissioners the morning after their arrival. It was Cromwell who served as master of ceremonies throughout their five-week stay, and who came to bid them each farewell the day they left.
A staggering quantity of material had been gotten up for display, its value far exceeding any Panama data then available in Washington or anything the commission could possibly have assembled on its own in the time available, as Cromwell appreciated perfectly well and as his guests quickly saw for themselves.
They gathered at the company’s offices at Number 7 Rue Louis-le-Grand. There were maps, engineers’ reports, hydrographic studies of the Chagres River, geologic profiles, reports on test borings along projected dam and lock sites, plans for dams, plans for locks, records of tidal observations on the Pacific, reports on excavation expenses at Culebra, a detailed inventory of the company’s equipment and property. Everything was beautifully arranged. Printed copies of the most important documents, a total of 340 different items, had been prepared for each member of the commission, the documents contained in fifteen neatly labeled cream-colored folders and these secured with dark-green ribbons.
David McCullough Library E-book Box Set Page 360