Yellow-fever patient inside a portable isolation cage at Ancon Hospital
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
“The Man and the Machine”: Theodore Roosevelt strikes his famous pose at the controls of a ninety-five-ton Bucyrus shovel at Pedro Miguel.
COLLECTION OF J. W. D. COLLINS
Five unidentified American workers, one of whom holds an issue of the Canal Record, the weekly paper that began publication in 1907
FROM THE PANAMA GATEWAY, JOSEPH BUCKLIN BISHOP, CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS, 1913
Goethals and his high command on the steps of the Administration Building at Culebra. Left to right, Lieutenant Colonel William L. Sibert, Joseph C. S. Blackburn, Rear Admiral Harry H. Rousseau, Joseph Bucklin Bishop, Colonel George W. Goethals, Lieutenant Colonel Harry F. Hodges, Colonel William C. Gorgas, and Lieutenant Colonel David D. Gaillard
PANAMA CANAL COMPANY
ON PAGES 436–437, Culebra Cut
West Indian dynamite crew
Spanish track gang
PANAMA CANAL COMPANY
NATIONAL ARCHIVES
Motion-picture still of a mechanical track shifter in operation
* This was done “inasmuch as the war Department is the department which has always supervised the construction of the great civil works for improving the Rivers and Harbors of the country and the extended military works of public defense . . .”
* Publication of Carter’s vitally important observations had been delayed because the editor of a medical journal returned his paper saying it was too long.
16
Panic
I
You are going to have the fever,
Yellow eyes!
–JAMES STANLEY GILBERT
Later, in his own defense, Chief Engineer John Findley Wallace would say that he was denied the free hand promised at the time he accepted the job. He would complain of red tape–“System gone to seed”–and of the mad clamor to “make the dirt fly.”
How much autonomy, if any, he may have been assured is impossible to know. But the red tape was quite as horrendous as he said it was and in that regard he was wholly blameless. What began in Washington as a conscientious concern over possible misuse of funds, anything that might nurture graft, rapidly became an obsessive fear of the least extravagance. Each member of the seven-headed Isthmian Canal Commission considered himself personally responsible for every step taken, every dollar expended. An elaborate, insanely deliberate system of forms and regulations was handed down and every detail of procedure had to be cleared by the seven who sat two thousand miles from the scene. The well-meaning but intractable Walker and his commissioners had to pass with due formality on virtually every purchase voucher, irrespective of importance, with the inevitable result that delivery of equipment and material took months instead of weeks to reach Colon. One shipment of urgently needed water pipe ordered in August would not arrive until January, and then by sailing schooner. When Wallace, like Gorgas, cabled Washington in despair, he too was “delicately informed” of the high cost of telegraphic communication.
The appointment of any employee at a salary exceeding $1,800 required the approval of the full commission. The commissioners very often had trouble agreeing with one another, while Walker’s insistence on his prerogatives as chairman had an increasingly stultifying effect. When he departed from office later, no less than 160 requisitions would be found unopened in his desk, many of them months old.
On the Isthmus, to hire a single handcart for an hour required six separate vouchers. Carpenters were forbidden to saw boards over ten feet in length without a signed permit. The clerical work required for each fortnightly payroll was amazing: by September, with 1,800 workers on the books, payment took six and a half hours and involved the filling out of 7,500 separate sheets of paper weighing in all 103 pounds.
In anticipation of long delays in Washington, department heads would order material in excessive quantity and well in advance of need, only to see more shipments arrive than there were men enough to unload, or a staggering oversupply of some odd item for which there was no real or immediate demand. Wallace’s chief architect, as an illustration, determined that fifteen thousand new doors would be required eventually, for which he would need fifteen thousand pairs of hinges. Consequently, twelve thousand doors were shipped to Colón without delay, but because someone in the Washington office decided that fifteen thousand pairs of hinges would be insufficient, and because the architect’s original order appears also to have been inadvertently duplicated by someone else in Washington, the order of doors was accompanied by 240,000 pairs of hinges.
If Philippe Bunau-Varilla, as he told his admiring American audiences, never knew a single day of despair in Panama despite the most crushing setbacks, John Findley Wallace seems to have known little else but despair. From the time of his initial reconnaissance in July, he had been openly incredulous and discouraged. He had seen only “jungle and chaos from one end of the Isthmus to the other.” Yet in fact there was comparatively little jungle to face along the actual canal line; in contrast to the French in 1880, he and his engineers began with the decided advantage of being able to see the problems before them along the length of the fifty-mile corridor. The only chaos, when Wallace first arrived, was in the forlorn wreckage left in the path–the millions of dollars’ worth of French equipment lying in huge scrap heaps, the silent lines of rusted locomotives overgrown with vines and brush. Within a mile radius of Cristobal (the former Christophe-Colomb) there were eighty French dredging machines toppled over or sunk in the shallows. Shiploads of beautifully machined and tooled castings for the Eiffel locks had been dumped in the same vicinity, and for miles along the canal line the discarded rails and pipes, the enormous gears and axles and hundreds of nameless parts and pieces strewn everywhere, gave the look of bitterly contested ground in some titanic battle of machines.
Most of the French buildings, unoccupied for years, were in sad disrepair. Floor joists and roof beams had rotted; mold, rats, and termites had all taken their toll. Some of the work camps had become so overgrown by vines and bamboo scrub as to be nearly impossible to find. Several years later, while studying one of the old French maps, George Goethals would note a camp marked Caimito Mulato that did not appear on the American maps. He sent some men to look into it and they found an entire village built by the French completely buried in the jungle.
The Panama Railroad was also in deplorable condition, service slow and unpredictable, equipment worn out, coaches ramshackle and filthy, freight cars in short supply and ridiculously undersized. The entire line was virtually without signals or siding. Bridges were in dangerously poor repair.
But the French had left their successors a canal, a navigable water passage upward of twenty-five feet deep and seventy feet wide, running inland from Colón to Bohio, a distance of eleven miles. At Bohio, across the river from the railroad, was a vast excavation in solid rock, where the Eiffel locks were to have been built. For the next thirty miles, as far as Miraflores, there was evidence of excavation along the entire route, except for one seven-mile stretch just before the summit at Culebra. At Culebra itself the ground had been cut to a depth of 163 feet below its original surface; and beyond Miraflores, through the salt marshes of the lower Rio Grande on out to the Bay of Panama, ran another open channel. Indeed, to most new arrivals “the first surprise” of Panama was the “magnificence of the French failure.” “One cannot spend much time on the Isthmus without discovering in himself a mighty respect for the French” was the grudging conclusion of a writer for Everybody’s magazine. “They showed skill in every part of their work,” wrote a correspondent in The Outlook, “and the excellence of all their material is the wonder of every practical man who tests it.” A third man declared, “One appreciated more and more the wonderful amount those French had really accomplished. It is vastly more than the popular impression . . . It touches from ocean to ocean.”
To be sure, there was much that could deceive the novice.
The channel at the Pacific end was scarcely a third as deep as it would have to be; even the terraced cut at Culebra, by far the most dramatic evidence of the French assault, was a bare beginning compared to the canyon that would have to be created before a ship passed through.
What is more, a large part, something over half of the French work, would be of little or no use to a canal of the kind planned by the Walker Commission, as had been pointed out in the commission’s own report. For instance, the huge network of diversion channels built by the French as a last-resort answer to the problem of the Chagres River would be of only marginal value to a lock-and-lake canal, and those channels alone ran to more than thirty-three miles.
Still, the useful portions of the French work amounted to approximately 30,000,000 cubic yards of excavation; that was 30,000,000 cubic yards of Panama that no longer stood in the path of the canal, a volume equal to about a third of the excavation of the Suez Canal.
Locomotives and dump cars and Two French excavators were still in service at Culebra, where the Compagnie Nouvelle had been scratching away, however slowly, since 1895. Quantities of French tools, machines, stationary engines, carloads of spare parts, were still safely under cover. Six large machine shops and a power plant were in working order. Furthermore, a surprising percentage of the equipment abandoned by the wayside, despite its appearance, could be put back in running order, as Wallace would soon determine. By December of 1904 there would be six of the old French excavators in use in Culebra Cut. By 1905 a hundred of the boxy little Belgian locomotives would be in service and Two thousand French dump cars. Wrecked dredges and sunken tugboats would be raised, floated, rebuilt. of the 2,149 buildings left by the French, a total of 1,500 would be refurbished as time went on.
The real problem, as much nearly as with the bureaucracy in Washington, was with Wallace himself.
Wallace was a competent enough technician and someone who worked well with men of large affairs. The son of a Presbyterian clergyman, equable and intelligent-looking, he had built railroads, and a number of impressive terminals for the Illinois Central (at Chicago, New Orleans, Memphis); he had devised the system for transporting the crowds in and out of the Columbian Exposition at Chicago in 1893 and few American engineers had attained such professional honors. At fifty-one, he was a past president of the Western Society of Engineers, past president of the American Railway Engineering and Maintenance-of-Way Association, and a member of the Institute of Civil Engineers of Great Britain. But at Panama he never displayed the least enthusiasm for the work. He was tentative, withdrawn, wholly uninspirational. Men who served under him would have nothing particularly derogatory to say about him afterward, nor anything very complimentary. Most seriously he appeared to have no clear idea how he would build the canal.
He said he wanted a year at least to experiment with the French equipment–to test it against modern American equipment–and to experiment with various kinds of American equipment. And though he would insist later on that he had a “regular system” in mind the whole while, his assistants were never given the slightest hint as to what it might be.
He had started digging at Culebra without delay, or rather he simply continued on with the machines and token force of the Compagnie Nouvelle. By early November he had managed to install a new American steam shovel–a ninety-five-ton Bucyrus, a machine three times the size of the American shovels used by the French–and on November 12 it clanked into motion and began gouging away at the brick-red slope of Gold Hill, on the east bank of the Cut. The impression at home was that the American canal was under way. It was one of the year’s outstanding developments, in company with the Russo-Japanese war and Theodore Roosevelt’s victory over the hapless Democratic candidate for President, Judge Alton B. Parker. But the effort at Culebra was entirely random. For all practical purposes it meant nothing. The laborers who had to put down the track for the new shovel and dirt trains did not even have the right tools. Railroad spikes were being driven with axes.
Like those in Washington with whom he felt at such cross-purposes, Wallace insisted on putting second things first. Had George Morison been alive and serving as head of the Isthmian Canal Commission or as chief engineer, this would not have happened. (“It is a piece of work that reminds me of what a teacher said . . . that if he had five minutes in which to solve a problem he would spend three deciding the best way to do it.”) Wallace failed to see that his primary responsibility, the priority task, was not to dig but to prepare the way–to formulate a comprehensive plan, to assemble the necessary equipment, to provide facilities for feeding and housing the army of laborers who would do the work, to put the railroad in order, to settle the problems of yellow fever and malaria in the quickest, most effective manner possible. And he failed to see that it was his duty to make all this plain to the commission. The call to make the dirt fly was as naive and misguided as the cry of “On to Richmond” before the First Battle of Bull Run, and would look equally silly in the light of subsequent events.
A charitable assessment of Wallace by his successor, John Stevens, was that he failed because he was not sufficiently aggressive, that a more demanding approach with his superiors would have straightened things out. (There were times, Stevens wrote, “when fighting becomes a righteous duty.”) When the commissioners came on their inspection tour in August, daily conferences were held at Ancon for nearly a month. In September Wallace returned to Washington to confer at still greater length. So it was not that he had no opportunity to make his case.
The men on the line seldom ever saw him. To his office staff in the old French headquarters on Cathedral Plaza, it seemed his strongest views too often centered on trifles. When an assistant, William Karner, kept him posted with weekly reports during his time in Washington, reports that Karner wrote in longhand by lamplight after hours and amid swarms of flying insects, Wallace, in one reply dated October 16, commended him for the penmanship but added peevishly that he did not like to read reports written in longhand.
Instructions were constantly changed. Men were abruptly shifted from one job to another, seldom with explanation.
“Send forth the best ye breed” Kipling wrote in his ironic poem “The White Man’s Burden.” But those being sent forth by Washington were seldom even second-best. “One young man came down with an appointment as a rodman,” William Karner recalled. “On the supposition that he was a graduate of some technical school, I asked him where he graduated. He said he was not a graduate. I then asked him where he got his engineering education. He replied he had none. I then asked him if he knew the difference between a level and a transit and he frankly replied he did not. . . . He lived in one of the southern states and said his member of Congress wrote him if he wanted a position on the work he could get him appointed.”
Of some two dozen supposedly experienced track hands recruited by the Washington office none had ever worked on a railroad. Lieu-tenant Robert E. Wood, one of the few Army officers sent by the Isthmian Canal Commission, would recall, “The beginnings of the force recruited in 1904 . . . were largely Americans who had left the United States for this country’s good–railroad men who were black-listed on the American railroads, drunks, and what we called tropical tramps, American drifters in Latin America.”
Even the best of the new men were young and inexperienced as a rule, and yet often found themselves thrust into positions of critical importance knowing little or nothing of what was expected of them. Frank B. Maltby, an engineer from Pittsburgh, was told on arrival to report to Wallace, who, after the usual observations concerning the heat and rain, plunged into the subject of what was being done and what should be done in the immediate future.
Nothing was said as to how I came to be there [Maltby wrote afterward], my appointment, my rank or salary, and I do not recall that anything was said about dredging, except in a very general way. He then said, “I want you to take charge of the Atlantic and Pacific divisions. You will make your headquarters at Cristobal, as that is the much more
important end of the canal at present. You can live in house No. 1 [the old de Lesseps’ Palace]. There is a resident engineer in charge there now, who will give you information as to what is to be done. I want you to build up an organization so complete and efficient that you won’t have to do anything but sit on the veranda and smoke good cigars.”
By November there were 3,500 men at work. New recruits from the States who had been promised clean, furnished quarters were fortunate to find space to put a canvas cot in an unfurnished, often miserably small room with five or six others. Many of the old French quarters were put in service before repairs had been made. While two new “hotels” were under construction, the majority of the men were left to find what they could in Colón or Panama City, where decent rooms rented for three to four times what they would have at home. For unskilled black workers–that is, for about two out of every three-there was practically nothing to choose from, with the result that they crowded into the foul native side of Colón or whatever shacks could be found or improvised in villages beside the railroad.
The food available was meager, monotonous, high-priced, and as detrimental to morale as nearly all other troubles combined. There was no ice, no fresh milk, rarely a fresh vegetable; the local bread was tasteless and dirty. No one dared trust the water. Men went for weeks on a diet of canned sardines, canned Danish butter, and crackers. Nearly everyone was disheartened; a few had already packed up and left for home. Wallace was not oblivious to the situation. He had decided at the outset, for example, to provide Panama City and Colón with their own water system (which was the reason for the order of pipe) and to install sewage facilities in both cities. There is even in his organizational headings a basic appreciation of the diversity of tasks to be met other than digging dirt: Supplies, Personnel and Quarters, Buildings and Architecture, Machinery, Maps and Printing, Climatic Conditions and River Hydraulics, Communications. His thoughts, nonetheless, were tied up with the work at Culebra. Only by digging could he train the men, only by digging could he determine his unit cost– “the cost of explosives, cost of loosening and excavating material, cost of loading, cost of transportation, cost of disposition, and the cost of all the various elements of supervision and the maintenance of equipment, track and appliances, on the basis of the cubic yard.” Only by digging could he satisfy Washington with monthly progress reports.
David McCullough Library E-book Box Set Page 379