To his credit it can also be said that, as a result of his experiments, he had settled on the Bucyrus shovel as the machine to dig the canal. It was altogether a sound decision of far-reaching consequences. When in October, specifications for eleven shovels were put out for bids in Washington, they were those of the Bucyrus machine and Bucyrus, which was also low bidder, got the entire order. In the spring Wallace would order a dozen more.*
But it happens that Wallace was also stalling for time. He was in no rush to present a comprehensive plan because he had privately concluded that the canal as conceived by the earlier Walker Commission was a vast mistake. A series of recent test borings made along the site of the proposed Bohio dam indicated bedrock at not less than 168 feet below sea level, a revelation he kept to himself prior to the visit of Secretary Taft at the end of November.
Taft had been sent to straighten out certain complications with the new Republic of Panama, in particular the tariff policy and postal rates within the American Zone, and to convey the personal assurance of the President (now that he was embarking on his first full term in office) that the United States had no imperialistic designs on Panama, that the Americans were there for no purpose other than to build the canal. Taft, who weighed approximately three hundred pounds, was credited by one admiring reporter with “dominating the whole scene.” With the official entourage also was William Nelson Cromwell, the American counsel for the new republic, who kept very close to Taft the entire time, which had the effect of making Taft look even larger.
Taft stood with Mrs. Taft in receiving lines; he waltzed “light as a feather” with Señora Amador; he perspired mightily; and in the open, judicious manner that had made him so effective in the Philippines, he conferred at length with Amador and Arango. Panamanian goods, it was agreed, would enter the Zone duty-free; postage rates in the Zone and in Panama would be the same.
But Taft also returned to Washington convinced that the Isthmian Canal Commission must not continue as constituted, that virtually all problems with the work could be traced directly to the office of Admiral Walker, that the canal was a far larger, more bewildering task than anyone at home yet grasped, and that it must be a canal at sea level.
The futility of mounting the largest overseas effort in the country’s history, the largest public work ever attempted anywhere, by placing its fate in the hands of seven men in Washington had already occurred to Taft, as to Roosevelt. But not until Taft had been to Panama, not until he had listened to Wallace expound on his problems, was he sufficiently convinced to make a move. Like many men of decisive mind, Taft prided himself in recognizing the same quality in others. During their ten days on the Isthmus, he and Mrs. Taft stayed with Wallace and his wife. Wallace had impressed Taft with his “earnestness and interest in the work, his ability, his facility of expression. . . .” (Wallace, the engineer, had also had the forethought to have one large dining-room chair taken to a blacksmith shop and thoroughly bolted and braced to bear the weight of the distinguished visitor, a courtesy Taft particularly appreciated, since, as he told Wallace, it gave him a great feeling of security throughout his stay.)
Wallace had become a frequent correspondent thereafter and because of Roosevelt’s boundless respect for Taft the repercussions were not long in coming. On January 13, Roosevelt asked Congress to reduce the seven-man commission to a group of three, a solution specifically urged by Wallace. A sea-level passage became a common topic once again and an issue of controversy in the newspapers.
So while Congress debated what to do about the canal commission and Roosevelt toyed with the idea of still another blue-ribbon technical board to tell him which kind of canal it ought to be, Wallace continued with his “experiments” at Culebra. By January of the new year there were two Bucyrus shovels at work in the Cut and 1,500 men; but the shovels could not operate at even a quarter of their theoretical efficiency because there were too few trains to haul the spoil away and because what trains there were kept running off the tracks. And without an overall plan the whole effort was no less pointless than before.
The possibility of replacing Wallace had been considered, but not seriously. He was, Governor Davis reported, a “very superior man, and he ought to be retained,” thus confirming what Taft already knew.
John Wallace had one further problem. He lived in mortal terror of disease.
Detesting Panama–this “God-forsaken country” he called it in one letter to Taft–he appears to have been haunted by the fate of his French predecessors. The official residence of the chief engineer was the same as it had been for the French, the old Casa Dingler on the Avenida Central, where for the first several months, until the arrival of Mrs. Wallace, he lived with his assistant, William Karner. Even the servants were holdovers from the French regime–a French butler named Benoit, a French-speaking black cook from Martinique, a Panamanian houseboy, and a personal valet who apparently was descended from one of the Irish “navvies” who built the Panama Railroad. So Wallace had heard soon enough and in detail of all that had befallen the Dingler family. To the mental burden of unit costs and endless vouchers in triplicate, to the strange night sounds of the crumbling old city, was added a vision of stark tragedy within his own walls. Under such circumstances even a trained technical mind might begin to imagine things.
Before September and his return to Washington, he saw Karner taken ill with malaria and removed to Ancon Hospital. His valet was stricken and carried from the house, only to be followed by the cook. Wallace departed filled with morbid premonitions. When he returned in November, his wife came with him, a sign of confidence it appeared, but in no time the story was all over the Isthmus that he had also taken the precaution to bring back two expensive metal caskets.
II
The first case of yellow fever was brought into the Santo Tomas Hospital in Panama City on November 21. The patient, an unemployed Italian laborer, had been found in a restaurant near the center of town. He was isolated at once in a screened ward and he eventually recovered. Little was said of the matter.
Of six more cases in December none was a canal employee and none was fatal. In January eight more cases were reported, including three on board a steamship at Colón, of whom two died. But again the victims, members of a touring Italian opera company, had no connection with the canal enterprise. It was not until later in the month when the disease broke out on the cruiser Boston, anchored in Panama Bay, that official notice could no longer be avoided. The ship was immediately ordered north to Puget Sound and there was but one fatality, the ship’s doctor. The story, however, was out: YELLOW JACK in PANAMA.
The mosquito specialists, meantime, had divided Panama City into eleven districts. Inspectors were assigned and a record was kept on every house, exactly as at Havana. The objective was an inventory of every essential well, water tank, cistern, water barrel, or water jar in the city. All that were unessential would be disposed of. But progress was maddeningly slow and the influx of new population increased steadily. The inspectors, mostly local men, had to be taught what to do. Frequently careless or indifferent, they had to be checked and double-checked, and a large segment of the native populace saw it all as some kind of nonsensical Yankee game played chiefly for their inconvenience.
Anyone taken suddenly ill, whatever the cause, was rushed to the closest hospital, put immediately in isolation and watched. Frank Maltby, the division head at Cristobal, became violently sick in the middle of one night, but of common diarrhea only, with the result that he spent the next week in the old French hospital in Colon. “People came and looked at me through the screen as if I were a wild animal of some sort.”
A retired Army engineer, a Colonel Philip G. Eastwick, a popular figure in his hometown of Portland, Oregon, arrived in Panama City to visit his son, a member of Wallace’s staff. He died of yellow fever the second week. A carpenter named Thomas Clark had been on the Isthmus only ten days when he died.
Most of Wallace’s people, some three hundred technicians and off
ice help, worked in the headquarters building on the plaza where, during an earlier inspection, Gorgas had found mosquitoes breeding in almost every office, in certain small glass receptacles in which were kept the brushes used for copying letters. Yet even here his efforts were met with little or no cooperation. Wallace was “distrustful” of the mosquito program. He and his aides regarded Gorgas’ work as being largely experimental, like their own efforts at Culebra. The necessity for screening windows and doors in the building was brought repeatedly to Wallace’s attention and without effect. His chief architect, M. O. Johnson (the one who had ordered the doors and hinges), declared himself too busy with serious problems to start worrying about window screens. When Joseph Le Prince went to talk to him in his third-floor office, Johnson even joked about the fuss being made. He had, wrote Le Prince, “little faith in modern ideas pertaining to yellow fever transmission.”
To quell rumors about his own health, Wallace took time out to ride around town with his wife in an open carriage. Governor Davis cabled Washington to discount the stories in the press, which he categorized as “cruelly exaggerated.” Conditions were actually improving, Davis insisted. But then he also was suddenly so ill with malaria that he was unable to carry on with his duties.
Meantime, Congress having failed to do anything about the Spooner Act so that a more effective commission could be organized, Roosevelt simply asked for the resignations of the present commission, Admiral Walker as well, and the chief engineer was summoned to Washington to assist in organizing a new commission along the lines he had sketched for Secretary Taft.
Again seven members were appointed, since the Spooner Act still applied, but this time Roosevelt ingeniously arranged to have just three members serve as an executive committee. Control of the work was thus placed in the hands of three, not seven, and two of the three made a quorum. The other four, three of whom fulfilled the necessary military representation, were figureheads only. The new arrangement went into effect April 1, 1905.
So the first commission had lasted less than a year. Its members retired or returned to whatever they had been doing before, with the exception of Benjamin Harrod, who stayed on as one of the figure-heads.*
Under the new system the real power was not simply vested in three men, but each of the three was to head a particular administrative department. The chairman, based in Washington, would look after the purchase of supplies and serve as liaison between the commission and the government. The chief engineer, for the first time, was to have full charge of the actual work on the Isthmus, while the governor would oversee health and sanitary conditions, besides the political administration of the American Zone.
Roosevelt’s first choice for chairman was former Secretary of war Elihu Root, who had succeeded brilliantly–and against bitter opposition–in giving the Army the greatest shake-up in its history. Privately Roosevelt expressed a willingness to pay Root almost any salary to take charge of the canal. If not Root, then he wanted the steel baron Henry Clay Frick. But neither man was at all interested in Panama, which Root referred to as “that graveyard of reputations.”
So the man chosen to head the second Isthmian Canal Commission, or I.C.C., was Theodore Perry Shonts, an Iowa lawyer turned railroad executive. Wallace had been among those who recommended Shonts for the job. Wallace would stay on as chief engineer. The new governor was Charles E. Magoon, a portly war Department lawyer whose specialty was colonial administration.
Taft announced the changes on April 3, but it was not until May 24 that Magoon and Wallace reached Colon. Taft, greatly concerned over increasingly grim accounts of sickness and chaos on the Isthmus, had urged Wallace to leave at once, not to wait for Magoon, who had other war Department affairs to wind up. But Wallace had wanted a vacation, and so spent another several weeks at his home in Illinois. His absence from the work was again stretched to nearly two months.
Newspapers around the country were carrying letters from embittered local citizens who had gone to Panama to build the canal. A file clerk from Cincinnati, Taft’s hometown, informed readers of the Enquirer that at the rate things were going the canal would not be finished for fifty years. A young man named Will Schaefer, declaring that he spoke for all the Americans in Panama, wrote to the New York Herald, “There is not a bit of amusement or pleasure of the remotest kind here. . . . It is a case of work, work, work, all day long, and infrequently all night long, with no reward in view.” Things were “altogether different” from what he had been led to believe.
“Tell the boys to stay home if they get only a dollar a day,” wrote Charles Carroll to his mother in McKeesport, Pennsylvania. He was sick to death of the Panama Canal, he said in a letter picked up by the Pittsburgh papers. “Everybody is afflicted with running sores. . . . The meals would sicken a dog.”
Wallace, in an interview in New York, assured reporters that conditions were no worse than to be expected. “Everything is now proceeding in harmony, with a well-defined general plan.” In an article for Harper’s Weekly, sounding very like Jules Dingler, he further observed that good health On the Isthmus was nothing more than a question of personal deportment. There were no climatic effects that a “clean, healthy, moral American” could not readily withstand.
In fact, the crisis was both real and very apparent. Charles Ma goon, soon after his arrival, made no effort to conceal his astonishment at the situation, reporting to Shonts of unrest and insecurity every-where he turned, of employees who were “ill-paid, over-worked, ill housed, ill-fed, and subjected to the hazards yellow fever, malaria.”
In Wallace’s absence, yellow fever had broken out in the Administration Building and among the first to be stricken and to die was the architect Johnson. Gorgas had personally attended to the case and could do little or nothing. The only known treatment for yellow fever was the same as it had always been–to keep the patient as quiet and as comfortable as possible and hope for the best. It had been over in a few days. Johnson, who was twenty-nine, had given up his job with the Illinois Central and had come to Panama at Wallace’s personal bidding. It was, wrote Governor Davis, like the “ending of many a bright young man I have seen on the battlefield.” Since Wallace had been away, Johnson was buried in Wallace’s metal casket.
Wallace’s auditor, Robert West, had died, leaving a wife and five children back in the States. J. J. Slattery, an executive secretary in the building, had suffered the same fate. Mrs. John Seager, wife of Wallace’s secretary, died. She had come to Panama as a bride only months before.
Young engineers and their families, some sixty people, had been hurriedly moved out of the City to a vacant building at Ancon Hospital. But in less than Two weeks some Two hundred employees had resigned, including several of the hospital staff. One nurse, upon reaching New York, told reporters that contrary to all declarations of the chief engineer–and much to her own amazement–yellow fever was taking the lives of “well set-up, clean boys with good principles.” One could be neither decadent nor French, apparently, and still succumb.” A white man’s a fool to go there and a bigger fool to stay,” declared another returning worker, Harry Brainard, of Albany.
“A feeling of alarm, almost amounting to panic, spread among the Americans on the Isthmus,” Magoon would write with total candor in his official report. “Many resigned their positions to return to the United States, while those who remained became possessed with a Orders were issued that all unscreened windows in the Administration Building be kept closed. The building was fumigated repeatedly. Houses in the immediate area were fumigated. Gorgas even had the holy water in the font at the cathedral changed daily after it was found that mosquitoes were breeding there, a gesture many Panamanians looked upon as possibly some subtle new form of religious persecution. But with his limited manpower and desperately limited supplies there was only so much that he could do. One critical shortage, for example, was ordinary newspaper–sufficient paper of any kind–for sealing buildings prior to fumigation. When he cabled Washington to send two ton
s of old newspapers on the next ship, Washington cabled back to question the request. It was thought that he was asking for reading matter for his hospital patients and that two tons seemed excessive. As a result, the ship sailed without the paper and further fumigation was delayed for ten days.
The fever wards were filling rapidly. The Star & Herald had introduced a regular yellow-fever report that included both obituaries and a listing of all new cases. In Colón, local undertakers, familiar with previous epidemics, had stacks of coffins standing ready in plain view at the depot.
It was the time of “The Great Scare,” during which fully three-quarters of the Americans on the Isthmus fled for home. It was an episode that need never have happened and that most people, whether they stayed or left, would prefer to forget when things quieted down again, since the level of panic was so out of proportion to the actual seriousness of the epidemic. Compared to past experiences with yellow fever on the Isthmus, this was really only a mild flare-up.
Older hands among the railroad staff, veterans of the French effort, urged others to stay calm, but then it was they who also provided lurid renditions of 1885 and ‘86, or of the epidemic of just three years earlier, in 1902, when more than two hundred had died. In one instance in June, thirty new recruits who landed at Colón heard enough of such talk in their first few hours ashore to get back on board ship and return to New York.
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