At the end of August, Cromwell had arranged a special convocation of the Comité Technique International, a board of engineers established earlier by the Compagnie Nouvelle to evaluate the work accomplished on the Isthmus. It was a genuinely impressive body. The chairman was a retired inspector of the department of Ponts et Chaus-sées; General Henry Abbot had recently retired from the United States Army Corps of Engineers; there were a chief of the Manchester Canal, a noted Russian engineer, and a former technical director of the Kiel Canal. The year before, this same group had declared its unanimous confidence in the feasibility of completing the Panama canal.
To introduce the gentlemen of the Comité to the gentlemen from the United States, a luncheon was arranged at the sumptuous Pavilion Paillard, a restaurant in the park on the Champs Élysées directly across from the gardens of the Élysée Palace. Everything was done just so personalized menus with an engraved view of the Pavilion, four wines, six courses–“a very fine lunch & pleasant occasion,” noted George S. Morison in his diary, which for George S. Morison was a positively rhapsodic accolade.
General Abbot, who was well known to the commissioners and unquestionably able, told them he was so convinced of the soundness of the French company’s overall scheme for a lock canal that he was sure some other country or some combination of foreign capital would jump at the chance to carry on, should the United States be foolish enough to proceed at Nicaragua. For six years after the de Lesseps company failed, the canal had been idle, no digging, no work at all to speak of; but for the past four years, since 1895, things had begun to stir again on the Isthmus, since progress of a kind had to be shown by the new company in order to maintain the Colombian franchise. This was no mere token effort, Abbot assured them, however modest in scale. A long-needed railroad wharf had been built at Panama City; some excavation had been resumed at Culebra. The place was being tidied up, the jungle chopped back again, equipment looked after. This was phase one, he explained; phase two would be to go to “the great moneyed people of the world and show them it would be a good investment.”
The technical discussions that followed during the next several weeks were conducted as if “before a court of highest jurisdiction,” according to the dapper little attorney from New York, who by his own subsequent declaration was “in attendance” every moment. And afterward, back in Washington, before the commission left for its own firsthand inspection tours at Panama and Nicaragua, he had “kept in constant and personal communication with various members of this body, adding to their information, furnishing documents . . . overcoming their hesitations . . . etc.”
Yet his single most valuable service, Cromwell later avowed, was the personal conversion of one man, Mark Hanna. Just when Hanna saw the light is not clear in Cromwell’s account, but it was he, and no one else, Cromwell insisted, who had led the famous Senator to the truth; it was he who had made Hanna his specialty, from the time McKinley asked Hanna to post himself on the business and technical aspects of the canal project and Hanna had dutifully taken his place on Old Morgan’s committee.
II
Cromwell’s counterpart in the crusade, the former acting director general of the Compagnie Universelle, was no less passionately committed than in earlier years to The Great Adventure of Panama. Now in his mid-forties, he looked a little stouter than before, the hairline had receded considerably, and what hair there was he kept cut extremely close. He had also acquired a certain fixed look of fierce pride. In photographs from the time, he focuses directly on the camera; he is flawless, stiff-necked, and unflinching, the eyes steady and grave. As in earlier days the face is dominated by a large mustache, only now it has been waxed to fine spikes and looks ornamental, overdone. It might be something pasted on in jest were it not for the eyes, which are plainly those of a man who never did anything in jest. Roosevelt called it the look of a duelist.
Philippe Bunau-Varilla was to be greatly misunderstood in another generation. The tendency among historians would be to see him as an almost comic figure, a sort of road-show French schemer who, though colorful enough in his fashion, should not be taken altogether seriously. Possibly the mustache had a bearing on that judgment. But primarily it was Bunau-Varilla’s own account of all that happened, his obsession with the first person singular in everything he wrote, which to even the most tolerant modern reader seems so absurdly one-sided, so inflated by self-interest, as to be ludicrous. In his books, the most important of which is Panama: The Creation, Destruction, and Resurrection, his ideas are invariably brilliant, his actions invariably bold, inspired, pivotal. Anyone who opposed him or dared to disagree with his point of view is portrayed as stupid or villainous or mentally deranged. Those who see things as he does are gentlemen of the first magnitude, uncommonly intelligent and marked by a high sense of moral purpose.
He saw himself as the gallant crusader—“a soldier of the ‘Idea of the Canal’ ”–going forth to battle Prejudice in the cause of Scientific Truth. He was still the central figure in a spacious romance. He would, he had resolved, restore the honor of France, an honor tarnished By Panama and by the Dreyfus case. Single-handedly, if necessary, he would salvage “The Great Idea of Panama.”
Things happened to him, he writes, as if they were occurring in a work of fiction. Fortune “smiled” on him as it did on very few. “At every turn of My steps it seemed as if I were accompanied by a protecting divinity.”
Yet in view of what in fact did happen, considering the romantic tradition he was a product of, there is little wonder he felt as he did. The shame is that he also felt compelled to unfold it all in such high-blown fashion. He never seems to have understood how much more readily his story would have been accepted—especially in a less posturing, more skeptical age—how much more impressive it would have been, had he only told it straight. Moreover, there is ample evidence that the man himself bore little resemblance to the character he becomes in his books. In truth he was a hardheaded, practical, personable, exceptionally intelligent, almost unbelievably energetic individual who made an impression on people that they would remember all their days.
If anyone failed to take him seriously at the time, there is no evidence of it. Edward P. Mitchell, of the New York Sun, among the ablest newspapermen of the day, later wrote: “When I came to know him well I found him to be in mind and will one of the most surprising dualities it was ever my privilege to encounter; Napoleonic, indeed, in his practical energy and resourcefulness, yet an idealist of the first grade in disinterested devotion to a patriotic sentiment.” John Hay, who was to have more direct dealings with him than anyone in Washington, was astounded by the man’s diversity and by the uncommon speed with which he could accomplish things. George Morison, appraising him purely on professional grounds, declared him “brilliant,” a tribute George Morison seldom conferred on any man.
Even those who were instinctively suspicious of his motives never seem to have discounted his ability. It would be a grave mistake to underrate this man, the Chicago engineer Alfred Noble warned Senator Morgan in confidence at the time Bunau-Varilla arrived in the United States to begin his campaign.
His English was excellent and spoken with marked precision. There were bows for the ladies; his table manners were impeccable. He was the cultivated, upper-class European par excellence and he knew exactly how to gain attention wherever he went. “He didn’t just come into a room, he made an entrance” recalled Alice Roosevelt Long-worth admiringly. It was he, rather than the theatrical-looking Cromwell, who had the actor’s timing, the intuitive feel for the dramatic gesture. The engineer was the evangelist of the pair, oddly enough, and it was he who became “the peripatetic spellbinder” (as John Tyler Morgan would say), carrying his campaign cross-country much as de Lesseps had done twenty years before.
The impact of his whirlwind tour was unmistakable. He was a novelty. American audiences had simply not encountered an authority on Panama before, let alone an engineer who had had the experience of actually attempting to dig a c
anal there. And the engineering argument for building at Panama rather than at Nicaragua had never been set forth publicly and with conviction.
“Every phase of the canal question was at tongue’s end with this envoy of the Panama idea,” wrote Mitchell. But most appealing, one gathers, was the capacity to invigorate others with his vision, to light the imagination with the possibilities of a Panama canal. It was a capacity many of his listeners thought quite remarkable in a Frenchman. He had, the newspapers said, “a sort of resourceful energy which some people are accustomed to regard as peculiarly American.” He was “the Frenchman who is like an American.”
When the original canal company went bankrupt in 1889, Bunau-Varilla’s first impulse, he afterward explained, was to rally his countrymen to carry on with the work. To this end he had plunged into politics and campaigned for election to the Chamber of Deputies–“to lash slander with the whip of truth.” Discouraged after a narrow defeat, he had come to New York to look up John Bigelow and get his advice. This friendship between the older man and the brilliant youth “ripened into almost a father-son relationship,” as Bigelow’s biographer would write. Bigelow told him to go home and put his case in writing, with the result that in 1892 he produced a book, Panama: Past, Present, and Future, in which the Panama and Nicaragua routes were compared on purely technical grounds, something that had not been done before other than in government reports of the kind produced in the 1870’s.
But the idea of getting the United States to take over at Panama had either not dawned on him as yet or was still too much at odds with his vision of French destiny. So he had gone first to see the Russians.
There had been a chance meeting with a Russian prince on a train in 1894, after which Bunau-Varilla rushed to St. Petersburg to try to convince Tsar Alexander III that Russia should provide the capital to finish the canal. He never saw the Tsar, only the Tsar’s powerful Minister of Finance, Count Sergei Witte. He told Witte that a Panama canal and the Trans-Siberian Railroad, then under construction, could be the perfect Franco-Russian counterpart to the Anglo-American combination of the Suez Canal and the transcontinental railroads. A lock canal at Panama, Bunau-Varilla said, could be finished in four more years if the Russian sovereign would give a guarantee of 3 percent to the necessary capital, which he put at $140,000,000. Witte promised to present the plan to the Tsar and Bunau-Varilla returned to Paris bursting with expectations. The French government was astonished by what he had to report, and highly interested, according to Bunau-Varilla, whose word is all we have to go by. The government fell shortly afterward, however, and Alexander II was assassinated. Moreover, the liquidator of the defunct Panama company, furious over Bunau-Varilla’s meddling, saw to it that he would have no more say in company matters. What the consequences might have been had the Russian scheme gone any further is interesting to speculate on.
Not for five more years was his American crusade launched, in Paris, the summer of 1899, when the Isthmian Canal Commission arrived.
“Everybody, the world over, then supposed that the Nicaragua Canal–the old American solution of the problem–would be carried out. I determined thenceforth to center my efforts toward the adoption of Panama by the United States. The task seemed impossible of achievement!”
There had been a letter from John Bigelow, an amazingly well-timed, plot-turning letter just like those in novels. What was urgently needed was “someone competent to persuade our engineers,” wrote the dignified old New Yorker. “I shall be eighty-one years old the 25th of this month,” Bigelow wrote, “and of course am not of much use in a fight except perhaps to beat the drum.” He had sent one of the engineers on the commission, Colonel Oswald Ernst, to see Bunau-Varilla first thing on arriving in Paris, and a neat, scrubbed-looking Yale man and lawyer named Frank D. Pavey, who was in Bunau-Varilla’s pay later, if not then, was also instrumental in arranging the first meetings.
The little Frenchman applied himself in the tradition of his former leader and idol, Ferdinand de Lesseps. But while Cromwell was devoting his energies to the entire commission, Bunau-Varilla, who at this stage had still to meet Cromwell, concentrated on just three of the group–Colonel Ernst, Professor William Burr, of Columbia University, and George S. Morison, the three who, with the concurrence of Admiral Walker, had agreed to make Panama their particular concern. And of the three, Morison was the primary target, Morison having the greatest professional eminence and a reputation for being a highly independent and persuasive individual in his own right.
“Our conferences were long and frequent,” wrote Bunau-Varilla, among the few understatements he ever permitted himself. They met at one of his favorite restaurants or at his palatial gray stone hotel particulier, on the Avenue d’léna, near the Arc de Triomphe, then, as later, the most fashionable of Paris addresses. “Dinner with him meant half past eight,” Frank Pavey would recount, “and after dinner we settled down in his library, and he never let go of an American victim when he got one in that library until he thought he had converted him . . . the first time I dined in his house I stayed until two o’clock the next morning, listening to his picturesque and fascinating argument.”
The wives of the visiting Americans were often included in such evenings and their host could not have been more charming. He had a fund of fascinating conversation on all manner of subjects, but the great dominating topic that summer was the Dreyfus trial and to their amazement they learned that he personally had played a critical part in the drama. Among his interests since returning from Panama had been the newspaper Le Matin, which he had purchased and put under the charge of his brother, Maurice. It was Maurice who had obtained a photograph of the incriminating letter that Captain Dreyfus had allegedly written to the German attaché. Philippe had known Dreyfus years before at the École Polytechnique, where they had been friends and classmates, and upon seeing the photograph he had hunted up an old letter from Dreyfus. The difference in the handwriting was not merely obvious, but astounding. So, convinced of Dreyfus’ innocence, the brothers had published pictures of both letters in Le Matin, a sensational bit of journalism that led to the reopening of the case and a story that held the American guests spellbound.
Before their departure that September, the three engineers had been given a copy of Panama: Past, Present, and Future and instructed by the author to throw it away if a single mistake in fact or logic could be found. “When my three eminent new friends left Paris a large hole had been made in the dam of prejudice then existing against Panama in their minds–as in everybody’s.”
It was not quite large enough, however. The following year, in the autumn of 1900, the commission issued a preliminary report recommending Nicaragua. “The fight to a finish was now to begin,” wrote Bunau-Varilla and from this point on, by his own account, he was accompanied by deep mystical feelings of Fate taking charge. It was as though everything that happened had been prearranged.
An unexpected cable arrived, an invitation from some Cincinnati business people who wanted him to come to their city as soon as possible to lecture on the comparative values of the Panama and Nicaragua routes. They too had met him during a summer sojourn in Paris. “We have not forgotten the presentation with which you favored us,” they wrote in a follow-up letter, “–so vivid, so comprehensive, and so convincing–and we are anxious to have it reach our American public in the most effective manner we can devise.”
The “bugle-note had been heard.” He sailed on a ship called Champagne. There was little chance of his influencing public opinion in America, he had decided, but he was bound to “conquer for the Panama side” those who could.
Strolling the deck he struck up a friendship with a French priest who after hearing him expound on his favorite subject suggested that he look up an American whom he, the priest, had met in Rome. The man’s name was Myron T. Herrick. He was a Cleveland banker, a friend of President McKinley’s, explained the priest, who, as Bunau-Varilla tells the story, had now become part of the great puzzle Fate was piec
ing together. “Every time I was in need of a man he appeared, of an event it took place.”
But a letter written by Lieutenant Commander Asher Baker, an American naval officer and another of those Americans Bunau-Varilla had managed to cultivate in recent years, suggests that Bunau-Varilla had more than Fate working for him. “Everything has been done for Philippe,” Baker informed the lawyer Pavey. Baker, who met the Frenchman at the ship, was being reimbursed for his expenses and services by Pavey, who himself was serving as Bunau-Varilla’s “man” in New York.
The historic whirlwind crusade began with an after-dinner speech before the Cincinnati Commercial Club in a large room bedecked with French and American flags the evening of January 16, 1901. The speech, the first Bunau-Varilla had ever attempted in English, was an unqualified success. He said approximately what he would say wherever he went thereafter and with such winsome conviction that he held everyone’s attention. Included in the large collection of his papers on file in the Library of Congress is an affectionate little note from his young daughter back in Paris, who had enclosed a tiny map of Central America that she had drawn most carefully with pen and crayons. Hovering over Nicaragua is a black devil brandishing a pitchfork, while above Panama sails a winged angel. The conception was the very same as that of her Papa adoré and it was precisely that kind of partiality, as much as the barrage of facts he had at his command, that so held his audience. It was “the intensity of conviction which inspired all your utterances” that had the most telling effect, wrote one of his hosts, adding, “I love a man who loves a great cause.”
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