The standard speech began with a profession of independence: he represented no private interests, which was to be taken as a guarantee that he had not come as a salesman for the new Panama company. His mission was purely to defend “a grand and noble conception which gave me many happy years of struggle and danger . . . during which I do not remember one hour of despair.”
That said, he would get to particulars. He stressed basically what was to be stressed by the revised report of the Walker Commission: a Panama canal would be a third the length of a canal at Nicaragua; it would have fewer curves; it would require less excavation in total, fewer locks; it would cost less.
He talked about the railroad at Panama, the harbors at Colón and Panama City. He referred to the Chagres as “this monster of the imagination.” He did not talk about the rains or the slides at Culebra. He did not talk about yellow fever or malaria. He did not mention the uprising of 1885 or How he had felt on seeing Colón burned to the ground. He did not describe the Chagres in flood. Nor did he bring in the fact that he was a stockholder in the Compagnie Nouvelle or the circum stances by which that had been brought about.
There was, however, a further element to the set speech that seemed almost incidental at first, but that quickly became its most important element.
Panama had no volcanoes. There was not a single volcano, active or inactive, Within 180 miles of the Panama line, he assured his listeners. In Nicaragua this was by no means the case. In Nicaragua in 1835 the eruption of the volcano known as Coseguina had lasted nearly Two days. The noise, he said, had been heard a thousand miles away and enough stone and ashes had been ejected every six minutes to fill a Nicaragua canal.
He was not the first to have raised the issue. Humboldt had cautioned that there was “no spot on the globe so full of volcanoes” as Nicaragua. John Lloyd Stephens, as will be recalled, had made much of Mount Masaya and its potential as a tourist attraction. At the Paris congress, Commander Selfridge had cautioned against Nicaragua for this very reason. But those who heard Bunau-Varilla lecture regarded it as a fascinating revelation.
Always “the force of things” had driven men to build at Panama, he would conclude; it had been the Spanish gold trail to begin with, then the American railroad, then the de Lesseps canal. At times men had thought otherwise and intended to build elsewhere, “But the force of things drives them to Panama and it will again.”
It was the volcano part of the speech, however, that had the greatest impact.
Among his Cincinnati hosts were several who were personally acquainted with Myron T. Herrick. Herrick was not just a friend of McKinley’s, Bunau-Varilla now learned, but of “a man far more important for my purpose,” Mark Hanna. A phone call was put through, letters of introduction were prepared, and Bunau-Varilla took the night train for Cleveland.
At a private lunch at a Cleveland business club, seated with the tall, inordinately handsome Herrick and some twenty other pillars of Cleveland enterprise, he held sway for three and a half hours, popping up every so often to illustrate a point on a blackboard that had been wheeled in. “Never did a more propitious occasion offer itself, nor a completer success crown my efforts. All who listened to me, and whom I had made sincere and deeply convinced believers in Panama, formed the circle of Senator Hanna’s intimate friends.”
From Cleveland he went to Boston where he spoke at a banquet at the New Algonquin Club the evening of January 25, 1901. “This French engineer,” observed the Boston Herald in a long, glowing editorial, “treated the matter [of a canal at Panama] from a distinctly professional point of view,” something quite novel in Boston. He was in Chicago a week later, accompanied by Asher Baker, who handled the advance arrangements. His host was James Deering, of the Deering Harvester Company, and the lecture this time was at the Central Music Hall, where he was introduced by the illustrious civil engineer William Sooy Smith.
“He lectured before 250 representative people,” Baker reported excitedly to Frank Pavey. “. . . Western Society Civil Engineers, members of the Nicaragua Canal Commission, most of the solid and very well known Chicago Clubmen were there. I introduced him to Marshall Field, Robert Lincoln and a lunch was given him at the Club . . . there was a dinner and theater every night. Coquelin and Bernhardt were in town, the whole trip was simply perfect.” Best of all, Baker went on, “I have arranged through most important people To HAVE HIM MEET SENATOR MORGAN in Washington (!!!!). . . in an intimate and friendly way. It would take pages to explain how this was brought about.”
Back in New York briefly, Bunau-Varilla dined with George S. Morison, who advised him to make less of the volcano issue. They made quite a pair. The stiff, tiny Frenchman with his waxed mustache and bullet head was often taken for a military attaché; Morison, a figure of vast bulk, ponderous double chins, and walrus mustache, looked like a German sausage maker. While Nicaragua was undoubtedly an area of volcanic activity, Morison did not believe that would have any serious effect on canal structures. From the engineering point of view, the issue was a phony. Through Cyrus McCormick, of Chicago, a speech was arranged at Princeton University, and it was followed by a half-hour appearance before the New York Chamber of Commerce, this being, in Bunau-Varilla’s private estimate the most important of all possible public plat-forms. The Chamber of Commerce audience was polite and unenthusiastic; still, the resulting publicity had great value. At Philadelphia, Bunau-Varilla told an especially large and attentive audience that to prefer Nicaragua over Panama was equivalent to preferring the stability of a pyramid resting on its point to one resting on its base; “. . . and to that stability is attached the prosperity and welfare of a whole continent.”
He stopped always at the best hotels. He was extended guest privileges at the best clubs. In return he was generous with theater tickets and fine cigars ($28 worth of “Segars” are included on one hotel bill). For the wives of his hosts there were enormous bouquets of roses and, invariably, a prompt, gracious thank-you note (for “one of the most grateful remembrances of this agreeable sojourn in America”). For the dutiful Asher Baker, there was a $100 clock from Tiffany.
Busy as a day might be, there was always time for a dozen or more letters–to people he had just met, or, more often, to friends of people he had just met–asking for doors to be opened, introductions arranged, contacts. He prepared a pamphlet entitled Panama or Nicaragua? and had thirteen thousand copies printed and mailed. Again, disregarding what Morison had said, he hammered away at his volcano story. Let those inclined to dismiss his warnings take note:
Open any dictionary of geography, any encyclopedia, and read the article entitled “Nicaragua.” I will say also: Look at the coat of arms of the Republic of Nicaragua; look at the Nicaraguan postage stamps. Young nations like to put on their coats of arms what best symbolizes their moral domain or characterizes their native soil. What have the Nicaraguans chosen to characterize their country on their coat of arms, on their postage stamps? Volcanoes
The mailing list for the pamphlet included every congressman, the governor of every state, a thousand bank presidents, some six hundred shipowners, two hundred merchants reputedly worth more than $100,000, the editors of four thousand newspapers and magazines, hundreds of boards of trade and chambers of commerce, plus all those names on the list he himself had compiled during his travels, a list that by now came to nearly a thousand names.
He had John Bigelow send copies to Secretary Hay and Admiral Walker, with covering letters explaining how he had first met the distinguished French engineer in Panama. Hay, who had once served as Bigelow’s aide in the Paris embassy, confided in response that of course there was “a good deal of searching of hearts” over the proper path for the canal, but reminded his old friend that the decision did not “lie in the discretion of the Executive.” Walker’s reply was that the Frenchman was making too much of the volcano matter.
Having been steadily on the move for close to three months, Bunau-Varilla talked privately in New York to Bigelow and others of
sailing for home. The interview with Senator Morgan remained on his schedule still, and he had not met Senator Hanna, but for pressing personal reasons he thought it time to wind things up. Once again, if his story is to be believed, Fate stepped in.
Towards midnight, as I was about to go out for a breath of fresh air before retiring, I met a party of people in evening dress entering the Waldorf Astoria. My surprise was great when I saw at the head of them Colonel Herrick with a lady on his arm, and behind them Mrs. Herrick, accompanied by a short stout gentleman who limped slightly.
His characteristic face, so frequently reproduced in the papers was familiar to me. . ..
It was Hanna, and Herrick happily made the introductions. “Ah!” Hanna said (recounts Bunau-Varilla). “Monsieur Bunau-Varilla, how glad I am to meet you!” More important, the Senator wished to have M. Bunau-Varilla call on him in Washington anytime that was convenient. “The ice was broken, under the best and most cordial conditions,” wrote the author of the scene.
His love of the chance encounter, of famous figures in elegant attire, of fateful exchanges between men of power made in a suitably grand setting, was very great. Perhaps this is the way it happened, perhaps it is not. But he did go directly to Washington “to attack the political fortress.” He saw Hanna at the Arlington Hotel, then the Senator’s Washington residence, and Hanna smoked and listened, his large cigar poised in a surprisingly delicate hand. According to Bunau-Varilla, the interview was decisive, which makes a mockery of Cromwell’s subsequent claims. “Monsieur Bunau-Varilla, you have convinced me,” Hanna is said to have exclaimed when it was over. He naturally wanted to find out what Panama specialists on the commission thought, but: “If, as you assert, they think as you do, I shall go over to your side.”
A few days later Bunau-Varilla was at the White House, chatting pleasantly with William McKinley. The introduction this time had been made by Charles G. Dawes, Comptroller of the Currency, whose friendship Bunau-Varilla had acquired in New York and again as a result of another chance encounter in the Waldorf lobby. He did no more than pay his respects at the White House. As he later explained, he did not wish to “inflict” a long lecture On the President, knowing the value of his time and “that the opinion of Senator Hann a would be his [McKinley’s]own.” In other words, he had already spoken to the head man.
There was another, final encounter in Washington and it must have been a memorable one.
A little after dark he rode up Pennsylvania Avenue toward the Capitol and turned left at John Marshall Place to a tall brick row house, Number 315, the home of John Tyler Morgan–“the Lion’s cage.” He went convinced that the old man was a dangerous paranoid. “The fanatical and almost demented state of mind of the old Senator, after twenty years’ uninterrupted efforts for Nicaragua, prompted him to see conspirators everywhere.” That Morgan might be a man of keen intelligence, whose motives, by his own lights, were quite as noble and patriotic as his own, apparently never occurred to him. Again Bunau-Varilla’s account is the only one available.
“My visit produced a deep impression on him. In spite of his apparent courtesy I saw he was trembling with passion.” Morgan insisted on doing all the talking and this it seems was more than Bunau-Varilla could endure. “But the volcanoes of Nicaragua–” he blurted in desperation, cutting Morgan off in mid-sentence. Morgan would hear none of it. “Now, between ourselves,” he thundered, “You would not put one dollar of your own money in this absurd project–in this rotten project–of Panama!”
Apparently they were both on their feet by this time and Bunau-Varilla, unable to contain himself, lifted his hand to strike Morgan across the face. But the hand stopped in midair; he had a sudden vision of giant newspaper headlines-FRENCH ADVENTURER ASSAULTS DEFENDER OF NICARAGUA DREAM. Morgan had deliberately provoked him, he now saw in a flash; the whole encounter had been arranged to trap and destroy him. “I lowered My half-raised hand, and extending it solemnly toward the Senator, I said: ‘You have just inflicted upon me, sir, a gratuitous and cruel insult. But I am under your roof, and it is impossible for me to show you My resentment without violating, as you do, the laws of hospitality.’ ” And having delivered that little speech, the Bonaparte of Engineers turned on his heel and strode out the door.
He sailed for France on April 11, 1901.
What had it all cost? And who had paid for it?
Philippe Bunau-Varilla would say only that he had met all his expenses himself, out of a private source that also remains something of a mystery and that had been the subject of resentful, unpleasant talk in Paris.
The situation was this. Years before, at Panama, when he resigned his position with the canal company and went to work as a private contractor at Culebra, he had been able to take only a government salary because of a rule requiring all French government engineers to remain in service, accepting no pay or fees from private sources, for a minimum of five years. However, he had seen to it that his brother, Maurice, was put into the Paris office of the contracting firm as its financial manager, and he and his brother had made a secret agreement. A salary would simply be put aside for him until the required five years were up. It was a maneuver that evoked no little disdain when revealed later, but Bunau-Varilla maintained that the money was rightfully his and, furthermore, that it enabled him to “consecrate” his life to the Panama canal, “to save the noble conception of French genius through its adoption by America.” How much money was involved, how much of it he may have used, if any, has never been determined.
It is quite certain, nonetheless, that he did have a direct monetary interest in the fortunes of the new canal company, since he and his brother were what were known as “penalty stockholders.”
The founding of the Compagnie Nouvelle had been arranged in a most ingenious fashion, which was the chief reason why Senator Morgan and others viewed that whole organization as no better than an assembly of crooks. The court-appointed liquidator of the old de Lesseps company, in the interests of the stockholders in the old company, had devised a very direct and effective means of capitalizing the risky new company.
Those French contractors who had worked on the canal–and who were still solvent–were simply told that they could either invest in the new company or face prosecution for fraud and breach of contract. The rush to buy stock was pronounced. Two-thirds of the new company’s capital, some $8,000,000, was raised in this fashion. In plain fact there would have been no new company had the liquidator not resorted to this bit of blackmail, a point Morgan had made more than once on the floor of the Senate.
The largest of these “penalty stockholders” was Gustave Eiffel, and so ostensibly he stood to gain the most were the company’s holdings sold to the United States. Threatened with an 18,000,000-franc breach-of-contract suit, Eiffel had put 10,000,000 francs ($2,000,000) into the new company. The investment of the Bunau-Varilla firm was 2,200,000 francs.
So one theory is that Bunau-Varilla had come to the United States representing not only his own and his brother’s interests, but those of Eiffel and the other penalty stockholders, none of whom was permitted to have any say in the management of the company, and few of whom had much respect for the way in which the new company was being managed.
Another intriguing theory is that Bunau-Varilla had been “discovered” and subsidized by the Seligmans, the great Jewish financiers of New York, whose reputation for the strictest integrity had been badly stained by their prior role in Ferdinand de Lesseps’ Comité Américain. The late Jesse Seligman had been vigorously interrogated before a congressional committee at the time of the Panama Affair. Nothing very serious had been turned up by the committee, other than the obvious fact that the Seligman firm had been paid an exorbitant amount to do no more than lend its name to the de Lesseps scheme. Nonetheless, the Seligmans were eager to see the legitimacy of the Panama idea restored and thereby justify their prior involvement. And so, the theory goes, it was they who invented “The Man who Invented Panama,” Philippe Bunau-Varilla,
who had initially caught their attention through his role in the Dreyfus case.
That Bunau-Varilla knew the Seligmans quite well, and Isaac Seligman in particular, that the family took a keen interest in his lobbying activities in Washington, are matters of record. Isaac Seligman, for example, wrote letters of introduction in his behalf, including one to Mark Hanna, and went out of his way to speak to Hanna privately about Bunau-Varilla’s engineering credentials. But if Bunau-Varilla was actually the creature of the Seligmans, or in their pay, there is no solid evidence of it, and to his dying day he would angrily denounce any suggestion that he had ever been anyone’s agent or taken money for anything he ever said or did about Panama.*
But the puzzle the man presents is made still more complex by the very existence of the private, personal sources from which, by his own account, he drew his expenses, as well as still larger outlays to come. Where, how had he acquired all the money? How could he afford the enormous house on the Avenue d’léna, a house in which there were “servants to wait on the servants,” as one member of the family would recall. No one knew, or at least no one said. The son of an unwed mother of no apparent wealth, a scholarship student at the École Poly-technique, he had gone to Panama, where theoretically he had earned only a modest government salary, then returned to Paris to dabble unsuccessfully in politics, buy a newspaper, and write books about the inherent Genius of the Idea of Panama. Yet somewhere along the line he had become an extremely wealthy man. His wife, a semi-recluse who took her meals alone in her room for fear of catching some disease, was not a wealthy woman. To his own descendants the origins of the family fortune would remain a mystery.
The only hireling, the only mercenary in the crusade, according to his version of the story, was Cromwell, whom he had come to detest and whom he customarily referred to as “the lawyer Cromwell,” the word “lawyer” to be taken as an epithet. The most Bunau-Varilla could ever bring himself to say for Cromwell was to call him “an active and useful messenger between important men,” but then added on another occasion: “An active go-between will easily think he is the author of the messages he has to carry.”
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