David McCullough Library E-book Box Set

by David McCullough

  Since General Tobar and his troops had already landed by the time Hubbard actually received the November 2 order, the United States, of course, had still done nothing out of line up to the moment when Hubbard took charge of the railroad. It was at that point, early on the morning of November 4, that American armed power had become an actual, rather than symbolic, factor in the plot, and at that point there was still no sign of trouble in Colon–no mobs gathered, no guns brandished–and nothing whatever had put the railroad or its operations in jeopardy. Neither had there been the least sign of an uprising in Colón even as Hubbard and his small force faced Colonel Torres from within their barricaded warehouse. No local patriots had rushed to help Hubbard, it should be further noted; the only violence threatening at Colón was between the Colombian troops and the American sailors.

  Hubbard had taken command of the railroad because those were his orders. Indeed, as would be revealed afterward, Washington had been so anxious that he understand this that on November 3 two cables ordering Hubbard to take the railroad and keep the Colombian troops bottled in at Colón were sent to Consul Malmros from Washington, and another to Vice-Consul Ehrman at Panama City. The first of these cables, signed by Acting Secretary of State Francis B. Loomis, had been sent at 8:45 in the morning–or nine hours before the uprising took place at Panama City. (In fact, Acting Secretary Loomis was so overly anxious about things in general that a little later that same morning he cabled Ehrman, “Uprising on Isthmus reported. Keep Department promptly and fully informed.” Ehrman replied, “No uprising yet. Reported will be in the night. Situation critical.”) What settled the fate of the infant republic, however, was the arrival of the Dixie followed, all within a week or so, by the Atlanta, Maine, Mayflower, and Prairie (at Colon), and the Boston, Marblehead, Concord, and Wyoming (at Panama City). The ships had come from Acapulco and Kingston; the Maine, among the last to arrive, had been on maneuvers at Martha’s Vineyard. In several public appearances Theodore Roosevelt by now had mentioned “an old adage which runs, ‘Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far.’ ” By the big stick he meant a strong Navy and he was wielding it for the first time. The latest orders from Washington were to prevent the landing of Colombian troops anywhere within the Department of Panama, not merely in the vicinity of the railroad. On the Pacific side the Boston and the Concord patroled as far east as the Gulf of San Miguel. More American troops were landed, some were sent into the interior. Rarely had there ever been so neat and effective a practice of all that Captain Mahan had preached.

  Without the military presence of the United States–had there been no American gunboats standing off shore at Colón and Panama City– the Republic of Panama probably would not have lasted a week. Rear Admiral Henry Glass, for example, would conclude after a careful appraisal of the republic’s capacity to defend itself that at the very most six hundred men might have been furnished with adequate arms. Taft, on his first visit to Panama a year later, would describe its army as “not much larger than the army on an opera stage.” Colombia, had it had free access from the sea, could have landed several thousand veteran troops on both sides of the Isthmus, just as the conspirators themselves had appreciated from the beginning. As it was, a Colombian force of some two thousand men did attempt an overland march through the Darien wilderness, but ravaged by fever, they gave up and turned back.

  The orders that sent Hubbard ashore at Colón, that secured the railroad, that started ten warships converging on Panama from points several thousands of miles off, had all emanated from the State, War, and Navy Building and were accredited to the Secretary of the Navy William H. Moody or to Acting Secretary Charles Darling and to Secretary of State Hay or to Acting Secretary Loomis. But the responsibility for “the dynamic solution of the Panama Question” (in the words of John Hay’s biographer) rested entirely with Theodore Roosevelt, as Roosevelt himself would proudly acknowledge. “I did not consult Hay, or Root [Secretary of war Elihu Root], or anyone else as to what I did, because a council of war does not fight; and I intended to do the job once for all.”

  The American flag would “bring civilization into the waste places of the earth,” he had declared in one of his speeches earlier in the year. The burden of empire was to advance liberty and order and material progress. “We have no choice as to whether or not we shall play a great part in the world,” he had told another cheering crowd at San Francisco. “That has been determined for us by fate. . . .” They were popular words and very like those in a novel that was to appear less than a year after Panama became a republic– Nostromo, Joseph Conrad’s tale of a Latin-American revolution and of the self-deceptions men work with the words they summon to deceive others. “‘We shall run the world’s business whether the world likes it or not,’ ” a San Francisco financier remarks early in the story.” ‘The world can’t help it–and neither can we, I guess.’ ”

  On the morning of November 3, the morning General Tobar and his tiradores came ashore at Colón, Roosevelt, as expected, had been at Oyster Bay, having taken the night train from Washington in order to vote in his hometown. On the second floor of Fisher’s Hall on Main Street, over a Chinese laundry, with reporters and well-wishers crowding about, he had cast his ballot for two New York state judges and an assemblyman. He was back at the White House shortly after eight that night and from then on was caught up in “the Panama business.”

  Yet even as the crisis was still unfolding he had begun to plead his case, searching for exactly the right phrase or expression. In a letter to his fourteen-year-old son written the following night he explained that the United States had been policing the Isthmus for too long, that he had no intention “any longer to do for her work which is not merely profitless but brings no gratitude.” Two days later, the afternoon of the sixth, he was happily talking of a “covenant running with the land” on the Isthmus, an expression his friend Oscar Straus, author, lawyer, diplomat, had used over lunch to suggest a basis for an American claim on the canal zone. Vice-Consul Ehrman’s cable from Panama declaring the apparent success of the “Isthmian movement” had been delivered to the White House at 11:31 that morning; at 12:51, just seventy minutes later, Panama had been recognized by John Hay; and at virtually the same moment, Straus had produced what seemed the perfect legal ground. “Why that is splendid–just the idea,” Roosevelt exclaimed and he sent Straus straightaway from the table to “explain that to Hay.” On Roosevelt’s orders the following day, Hay assured reporters that “the action of the President is not only in the strictest accordance with the principles of justice . . . but it was the only course he could have taken in compliance with our treaty rights and obligations.”

  “It is reported we have made a revolution, it is not so,” Roosevelt confided to the French ambassador, Jules Jusserand. “. . . it is idle folly to speak of there having been a conspiracy with us,” he assured Dr. Albert Shaw, one of his kitchen cabinet.

  The faculty of Yale University was up in arms, meantime. The head of the American Bar Association spoke angrily of the “crime” committed. A torrent of outrage was unleashed in editorial columns.

  The first news of the revolt had been given very little play in the papers because of the election news. The front pages of the New York papers, for example, the morning the story broke, were taken up almost entirely by the triumph of George B. McClellan, Jr., the Democratic candidate for mayor. But Panama was the lead story everywhere in the days that followed, and many powerful papers immediately commenced a blistering attack on the Administration, holding Roosevelt strictly responsible for what had happened. The New York Times scarcely let a day pass without some new assault on the President and his “act of sordid conquest.” Cartoons in the World by the brilliant Charles Green Bush showed a brutish Rough Rider, armed to the teeth, pouncing on Panama or glowering down the barrel of an enormous cannon at a helpless little Colombia.

  But to the editor of The Northwestern Christian Adovcate Roosevelt wrote of the “oppression habitual” suffered by
the people of Panama and insisted that “our Government was bound by every consideration of honor and humanity . . . to take exactly the steps that it took.”

  The explaining, the affirmations of high purpose, would continue for weeks, months, indeed for years–in a special message to Congress, in private conversation and correspondence, in magazine articles, speeches, his memoirs.

  The United States had a mandate from civilization to build the canal, he told Congress on January 4, 1904, in a message devoted entirely to the subject. “The time . . . for permitting any government of anti-social and of imperfect development to bar the work, was past.” The fundamental purpose–“the great design”–of the treaty of 1846, he claimed, had been to secure the construction of an isthmian canal; so therefore Colombia was violating the treaty, “the full benefits of which she had enjoyed for over fifty years.” No American warships had been present, no American troops or sailors, when the revolution took place at Panama City. At Colón, Commander Hubbard had acted with “entire impartiality toward both sides, preventing any movement, whether by the Colombians or the Panamanians, which would tend to produce bloodshed. . . . Our action was for the peace both of Colombia and of Panama.”

  The people of the Isthmus, he said, “rose literally as one man.” (“Yes, and the one man was Roosevelt,” remarked Senator Edward Carmack, of Tennessee.) “I think proper to say, therefore, that no one connected with this Government had any part in preparing, inciting, or encouraging the late revolution on the Isthmus of Panama, and that save from the reports of our military officers . . . no one connected with this Government had any previous knowledge of the revolution except such as was accessible to any person of ordinary intelligence who reads the newspapers. . . .”

  “We did our duty, we did our duty by the people of Panama, we did our duty by ourselves,” he wrote in one of his several magazine pieces. “We did harm to no one save as harm is done to a bandit by a policeman who deprives him of his chance of blackmail.” To talk of Colombia as a responsible power–“to be dealt with as we would deal with Holland or Belgium or Switzerland or Denmark”–was a mere absurdity, he informed a correspondent. “If they [the people of Panama] had not revolted, I should have recommended Congress to take possession of the Isthmus by force of arms . . .”

  His action had been the farthest thing from impulsive, he would stress in a long chapter in his Autobiography. Nine-tenths of wisdom was to be wise at the right time; his whole foreign policy, he wrote, had been based on “the exercise of intelligent forethought and of decisive action sufficiently far in advance of any likely crisis” and Panama was “by far the most important action I took in foreign affairs.” Colombia had proved itself utterly incapable of keeping order on the Isthmus; Colombia had no right to block a passageway so vital to the interests of civilization. For reasons of national defense no further delays could be tolerated. He had been prepared to act; no blood-shed had resulted. “From the beginning to the end our course was straight-forward and in absolute accord with the highest standards of international morality. Criticism of it can come only from misinformation, or else from a sentimentality which represents both mental weakness and a moral twist.”

  John Hay lent his support, sounding more and more like Theodore Roosevelt. “Some of our greatest scholars, in their criticisms of public life, suffer from the defect of arguing from pure reason, and taking no account of circumstances,” he wrote to a member of the Yale faculty. “It was a time to act and not to theorize . . .” An attempt would be made by Hay’s admirers to establish that he had been “disgusted” with all that went on and that on the pretense of poor health he had taken no active part; but the claim was without support and Hay himself, publicly and in private, remained “as emphatic and free from doubt about our Government’s course” as the President.

  Others in the Cabinet fell into line, without apparent qualm, nor with anything approaching Roosevelt’s solemn air of righteousness. Attorney General Knox, having been asked by Roosevelt to construct a defense, is said to have remarked, “Oh, Mr. President, do not let so great an achievement suffer from any taint of legality.” At another point, during a Cabinet meeting, Roosevelt talked of the bitter denunciations in the press, then entered into a long, formal statement of his position. When he had finished, the story goes, he looked about the table, finally fixing his eye on Elihu Root. “Well,” he demanded, “have I answered the charges? Have I defended myself?”

  “You certainly have, Mr. President,” replied Root, who was known for his wit. “You have shown that you were accused of seduction and you have conclusively proved that you were guilty of rape.”

  But years later, on March 23, 1911, at Berkeley, California, at the climax of a speech before eight thousand people in the Greek Theater at the University of California, Roosevelt, in academic gown, was to make the remark that would undo virtually all of his other utterances concerning his “most important action” and that would be remembered afterward, by critic and admirer alike, as the simplest and best explanation of what the Panama revolution came down to. The speech, until that point, had been a heartfelt call to the youth of the Pacific slope to carry on with the high courage and purpose of the vanishing pioneers. And the audience had been profoundly stirred. Then his mood had shifted:

  The Panama Canal I naturally take special interest in because I started it. [Laughter and applause.’]

  There are plenty of other things I started merely because the time had come that whoever was in power would have started them.

  But the Panama Canal would not have been started if I had not taken hold of it, because if I had followed the traditional or conservative method I should have submitted an admirable state paper occupying a couple of hundred pages detailing all of the facts to Congress and asking Congress’ consideration of it. In that case there would have been a number of excellent speeches made on the subject in Congress; the debate would be proceeding at this moment with great spirit and the beginning of work on the canal would be fifty years in the future. [Laughter and applause.]

  Fortunately the crisis came at a period when I could act unhampered. Accordingly I took the Isthmus, started the canal and then left Congress not to debate the canal, but to debate me. [Laughter and applause.]

  “I took the Isthmus” was an expression of the kind that came naturally to him, “the kind of exaggeration that he liked to make,” as Root observed. It was what Hay called “a concise impropriety,” like “We want either Perdicaris alive or Raisuli dead,” the famous declaration made during the Moroccan kidnapping incident in 1904 (a statement Hay himself had actually written). It was also, in its fashion, as misleading and as self-congratulatory as some of the other things he said in his defense, since it seemed to dismiss out of hand the contributions of Amador and his fellow revolutionaries, not to mention the railroad personnel, or Cromwell, or General Esteban Huertas and his garrison, or Philippe Bunau-Varilla. “I took Panama because Bunau-Varilla brought it to me on a silver platter,” Roosevelt is supposed to have remarked privately, which would be a more accurate summation.

  But primarily, questions of morality aside, it was a mistake to have implied a deliberate, master strategy conceived and directed from the Oval Office. Tremendous effort would be made by newspaper reporters and latter-day historians to prove that Roosevelt had told Bunau-Varilla what to do, that Amador too had actually gone to Washington in secret and had been briefed by both Roosevelt and John Hay, that the money for the junta had been supplied, as Amador believed to be the case, from Washington. But no solid evidence, no evidence of any kind, was ever found to support these charges. And in fact one need only review the steps by which the plot unfolded to see how very tenuous it all had been and how many critical turns were determined by the individual responses of people about whom Theodore Roosevelt knew nothing.

  Had James Shaler not pulled the signal cord when he did, had Señora Amador failed to fire her husband’s flagging resolve, had the Colombian general Tobar been less concern
ed over his injured dignity, had he gone peacefully to Colón and merely remained there quietly with Torres and the troops, had any of a dozen small but critical developments gone differently, Theodore Roosevelt’s ships would have arrived to find a wholly different situation and in all probability there would have been no new Republic of Panama either to proclaim or to protect. If American sea power had settled the issue on the instant, made Panama an immediate fait accompli, it is equally obvious that belief in an American involvement far in excess of reality was for the actual conspirators the vital sustaining force: what Amador and his compatriots believed the situation to be–their mistaken impressions as a result of the arrival of the Nashville–was far more important than were the facts of the situation. An enormous gamble with far-reaching, immensely vital consequences was made by a variety of participants, and by all ordinary rules of chance the story should never have come out as it did. But as Conrad also observed in Nostromo, “Men of affairs venture sometimes on acts that the common judgment of the world would pronounce absurd; they take their decisions on apparently impulsive and human grounds.”

  Roosevelt’s haste, his refusal–his inability–to see the Colombian position on the treaty as anything other than a “holdup,” were tragically mistaken and inexcusable. It seems certain that with a modest amount of good will and patience the issue with Bogotá could have been resolved to the satisfaction of both sides; another six months’ delay would have mattered little. In truth he was doing no more than to guarantee that the Compagnie Nouvelle received its full $40,000,000 –which would lead to the charge that he was protecting the French investment because certain of his friends and relatives were secret stockholders, a charge that would later precipitate a sensational lawsuit. In 1908 Roosevelt had the government prosecute Joseph Pulitzer, owner of the World, for libel, but the court found that though there were “many very peculiar circumstances about . . . this Panama Canal business,” Roosevelt had no case against the World. And since there was not a shred of evidence to support the charge against Roosevelt, the whole furor came to nothing.