You are going to have the fever,
Yellow eyes!
In about ten days from now
Iron bands will clamp your brow;
Your tongue resemble curdled cream,
A rusty streak the center seam;
Your mouth will taste of untold things,
With claws and horns and fins and wings;
Your head will weigh a ton or more, And forty gales within it roar
The poem “Yellow Eyes” and others of much the same vein had just appeared in a little volume with a burgundy-colored binding, Panama Pathwork, published by the Star & Herald. The author, James Stanley Gilbert, an American resident of Colón for many years, had done for Panama something comparable to what Robert Service was to do for the Yukon. His themes–in “Funeral Train,” “The Isthmian Way,” “King Fever,” “Beyond the Chagres”–were disease, alcoholism, everencroaching death, and the futility of any and all human endeavor associated with the valley of the Chagres River.
Beyond the Chagres River
’Tis said–the story’s old
Are paths that lead to mountains
Of purest virgin gold;
But ‘tis my firm conviction,
Whatever tales they tell,
That beyond the Chagres River
All paths lead straight to hell
Funeral processions were continually passing through the streets. Funeral trains ran daily to Monkey Hill, their bells clanging the length of Front Street in Colon–or “Coal-on,” as the Americans pronounced it. People feeling the least sign of illness were immediately certain that the end had come. Governor Magoon, seized with chills one afternoon, stood at his window at Ancon watching what he felt sure was his last sunset.
Then, at the very height of the panic, in mid-June, only three weeks after his return, Chief Engineer Wallace and wife packed and sailed for New York. To an editor of the Star & Herald and the others who came to see him off, Wallace would say only that he had “matters of importance” to take up with Secretary Taft. But almost from the moment the ship cast off, rumors were flying to the effect that even Wallace had now fled and that he had no intention of ever returning. The Star & Herald carried a prominent, if tentative, denial: “To say the least it does not seem plausible that a man of the type of Mr. Wallace would give up a position like the one he was occupying in the United States . . . to come to the Isthmus to engineer the canal . . . then leave . . . at this stage of the game, when the work was scarcely begun.”
On July 3, with as yet nothing further in the paper concerning Wallace, came the stunning news that a man had died at Ancon Hospital of bubonic plague. A Barbadian, a stevedore on the wharf at La Boca, had been brought to the hospital on June 20 with what looked alarmingly like plague, a diagnosis that was confirmed by the autopsy. Keeping the cause of death secret, Gorgas and his staff moved with all possible speed. The La Boca wharf was put under immediate quarantine. Hundreds of rat traps were set, poison was put out; the barracks where the man had taken ill was fumigated; two ships tied up at the wharf were towed into the bay and were fumigated–all in less than twenty-four hours. The following day La Boca was declared officially off-limits and a police cordon was positioned around the entire area, on land and water. Buildings were fumigated a second time. Walls, floors, and ceilings were sprayed with a solution of bichloride of mercury. Soiled clothes and dirty bedding were soaked in the same thing. Garbage was carried away. Chicken coops, animal pens, latrines, were torn down and burned, while in Panama City a bounty of ten cents was offered for all rats and mice. Among the hundreds of rats killed at La Boca–rats the size of guinea pigs, as one Panamanian recalled–several were found to be infected with plague.
In June, despite all Gorgas’ efforts, the incidence of yellow fever had been double what it was in May–62 known cases, 19 of which were fatal. There had been two or three cases of smallpox about which very little was said. For months malaria and pneumonia, tuberculosis and dysentery, had been taking a much heavier toll in life than had yellow fever, and especially among black workers, a fact no one had as yet faced up to. In all more than a thousand people had been admitted to the canal hospitals alone. But the news of one case of bubonic plague was like a scream in the night. In the language of one official report, the number of those who left the Isthmus was now “limited only by the ability of the outgoing boats to carry them away.” Chief Engineer Wallace had secured permission for his return to the United States, his third such trip in a year, by cabling Taft that he had “complicated business” to discuss which could not be handled by correspondence. He gave no further explanation, which greatly irritated the Secretary, but after conferring with Roosevelt and Shonts, Taft had reluctantly cabled his consent.
From Magoon, however, Taft heard what was on Wallace’s mind. Wallace had unburdened himself to Magoon in the course of two lengthy conversations, saying that he had been offered a high-paying position with a private engineering firm and that he intended to quit. He could be induced to stay on, Wallace also said, but only if he were put in as chairman (instead of Shonts), given authority over the entire work, and granted a salary of perhaps $60,000. He would insist also, Wallace said, that he be free to come to the Isthmus “when he sees fit and depart as his discretion determines.”
He made a further statement [Magoon continued], to which I attached grave significance–that he left the Illinois Central twice without telling them, directly, what he wanted, and was sent for and given three times as much as would have induced him to remain at the time he left.
Evidently he considers himself essential to this enterprise, and, for the immediate present, he is. He has never secured an assistant engineer competent to take his place or keep the work going at a decent pace for sufficient time to enable a new chief engineer to master the situation. . ..
Speaking of his desire to be the head of the enterprise, he told me that he figured from the first that Admiral Walker would not last more than two years and he had intended to have things in such shape by that time that he would be made chairman; but the old commission went to pieces too quickly for him. . . . I cannot escape the conviction that he is trying to “pull off” a carefully contrived coup d’état. . . . I hope I am doing him a grave injustice, for personally I like him . . . I can readily understand that from his point of view the action and motive I attribute to him are entirely justifiable. In railroad circles, as on the stock exchange, it is entirely justifiable and even commendable to “squeeze” friend or foe when you have the chance and can profit by it.
This letter from Magoon, dated June 11, was followed two days later by another, less harsh appraisal. As a result of talks with Wallace, Magoon now thought better of Wallace’s motives. “He seems to be fully prepared to quit, but willing to remain upon terms that seem to him justifiable . . . There is no difference in its effect on the public service, but there may be considerable difference between the two mental attitudes.” Taft cared not the slightest about Wallace’s mental attitudes. The genial Taft, the man known for “the most infectious chuckle in the history of politics,” was in a towering rage. The new commission had been tailored specifically to Wallace’s wishes. Wallace had expressed unequivocal approval of the arrangement on several occasions since April and in writing. Wallace had been profuse in his praise of Shonts, full of gratitude for being able to serve under such a man.
Taft felt betrayed. To Taft so self-serving an ethic as Magoon depicted was neither understandable nor tolerable. If Wallace deemed himself essential to the enterprise, Taft now quite emphatically did not. Though Magoon’s letters reached the war Department on the eve of an important trip to the Philippines, Taft went directly to New York to confront Wallace in person three days after Wallace arrived from Panama.
Wallace was told to be at Taft’s room at the Manhattan Hotel at ten o’clock the morning of June 25. To Wallace’s immediate annoyance, he was ushered into the room by William Nelson Cromwell, who showed no signs of leaving. Wallace said he prefe
rred to speak with the Secretary alone, but Taft, in what Wallace later described as a “rather peremptory manner,” told Cromwell to stay where he was. He wanted Cromwell present as a witness. “This action, of course, caused irritation and apprehension on my part that the interview would be unpleasant,” Wallace would recall, “. . . and the irritation under which the Secretary was evidently laboring had a tendency to prevent that calm and dignified consideration of the question in all its bearings which should have been given it.”
Taft, who had spent most of his career as a judge, wished first, he said, to know what possible “complicated business” could warrant Wallace’s absence from Panama at so inopportune a moment? Wallace replied that he had received an attractive offer from a private firm and explained at some length why he could “not afford” to turn it down. The income, with salary and various opportunities for investments, would be equivalent to $60,000 a year Wallace said. Life at Panama, he remarked, was lonely and “accompanied by risk” to his health and to that of his wife. He proposed that he spend the summer winding up his duties from his home in Illinois. In the future he would be glad to serve on the commission in an advisory capacity.
“Mr. Wallace,” Taft began after a pause, “I am inexpressibly disappointed, not only because you have taken this step, but because you seem so utterly insensible of the significance of your conduct.”
There followed an angry but measured summation lasting half an hour. He reminded Wallace that when appointed by the commission the year before, his salary had been increased by $10,000 over what it had been under his former employer. He reminded Wallace that he had known of the risks when he accepted the position, that he had both recommended and approved the latest organizational changes made by the President. “For mere lucre you change your position overnight . . . You are influenced solely by your personal advantage. Great fame attached to your office, but also equal responsibility, and now you desert them in an hour.”
He demanded Wallace’s immediate resignation. When Wallace said that he would prefer to discuss the matter further, that perhaps some new and different arrangement might be worked out, Taft told him there could be no further talk.
“Mr. Secretary,” said Wallace, “while there is a difference between us as to the point of view we take concerning my duty, I consider that there can be no question that I have performed my full duty up to this hour.”
“Mr. Wallace,” Taft replied slowly, “I do not consider that any man can divide such a duty up to any one point where it suits him to stop . . . In my view a duty is an entirety, and is not fulfilled unless it is wholly fulfilled.”
The following day Taft took Wallace’s resignation to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Roosevelt was attending a Harvard reunion.. On June 28 the resignation was accepted by the President, to take effect immediately. On the twenty-ninth, back in Washington, Taft, as directed by Roosevelt, released to the press the full transcription of his exchange with Wallace, the text apparently being that recalled by Cromwell. John Wallace was finished.
The immediate response in the press was one of dire concern. Though a few papers suggested that it was now merely a question of finding somebody else, the majority saw the reputation of Roosevelt’s Administration suddenly at stake, not to mention that of the country, and found the outlook, in the words of the Louisville Courier-Journal, “not cheering.” In the London papers it was said that Roosevelt was paying the price for his rash “land-piracy” in Panama.
Wallace, who ultimately became president and chairman of the board of Westinghouse, Church, Kerr & Company, as well as a board member of several other industrial firms, would spend the rest of his life trying to repair the damage done to his reputation. Monetary considerations, he would insist, had never entered into the decision to “disconnect” himself from Panama. He denied any personal fear of disease, claiming he had actually had a light attack of yellow fever while on the Isthmus and so thereafter had considered himself immune.
Privately he said that he heartily disliked Shonts and knew they could not work together. And appearing before the Senate canal committee he would delight John Tyler Morgan with the further admission that it was really Cromwell whom he hated most of all. The tragedy, said Wallace again and again, was that Taft never gave him a chance to express his real reason for resigning, which was that he had “become convinced some other men in my place could render better service to the enterprise.”
John Stevens, reflecting on the episode, would remark simply and without scorn that Wallace had had a “thorough case of fright.”
*Chief sales representative for the Bucyrus Company, interestingly, was a young man named George A. Morison, who had left New England to join the Milwaukee firm on the advice of his Uncle George. For a young man interested in a business future, George S. Morison had said not long before his death, the then small steam-shovel manufacturer clearly had “possibilities.”
* The three others were Rear Admiral Mordecai T. Endicott and two Army officers from former commissions, Brigadier General Peter C. Hains and Colonel Oswald Ernst.
17
John Stevens
What we needed was a fighter. And we got one.
–FRANK MALTBY
I
John Stevens was picked to build the Panama Canal on the recommendation of James J. Hill–Hill, who had never had any use for the project and whose personal distaste for Theodore Roosevelt was monumental. Roosevelt, the “Empire Builder” once complained, had never done anything but “pose and draw a salary.”
Hill considered Stevens the best construction engineer in the country, if not the world, and apparently he told Roosevelt as much during a visit to Washington in June 1905. “Mr. Hill told the President that he knew a man who could build the Panama Canal,” Stevens’ son would recall, “and when the President showed much interest he spoke of my father . . . and said he would see him in Chicago and report the President’s interest in him. He did so, talking the matter over in detail. . . .”
As it also happens, Stevens was about to leave with Secretary Taft for the Philippines, as a new special adviser on railroad construction. So Taft too called Stevens in Chicago about taking the Panama post instead, just as soon as he, Taft, discovered why Wallace was coming on from Colon. The Monday following the Sunday of Taft’s confrontation with Wallace, Stevens was told the job was his if he wanted it. The salary was $30,000.
His immediate impulse, he later wrote, was to say no. Wallace by then was back at his home outside Chicago. Stevens sent a note asking him to meet him at the Union League Club and discuss the matter, but Wallace refused. So Stevens boarded a night train to New York, where he met with Cromwell, who persuaded him to accept. And all things considered, this was probably the most valuable service yet rendered by the clever, “silver-tongued” attorney. More active than ever as an all-purpose troubleshooter for the Republican Party, Cromwell had become greatly concerned–as had others–over what a failure at Panama might mean to the party’s fortunes.
At home again in Chicago, Stevens talked things over with his wife, who told him his whole career had been in preparation for this greatest of engineering projects and that of course he should go. “. . . I allowed arguments as to what was my duty to override my own feelings, and . . . my better judgment,” Stevens remembered. He wired his acceptance on June 30. Roosevelt and Taft had little time to give the matter further attention. John Hay was ill and Taft, in addition to everything else, was looking after the State Department. Roosevelt was absorbed in preparations for the historic meeting at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, at which he would bring an end to the Russo-Japanese War. On July 1, John Hay suddenly died; there was a funeral to be attended, a new Secretary of State (Elihu Root) to be installed; and the Russian and Japanese delegations were arriving meantime. When Stevens and Shonts went to Oyster Bay so that Roosevelt could meet his new chief engineer, one of the other guests at lunch was the Japanese minister.
Stevens was fifty-two years old, powerfully built, hea
vy-shouldered, five foot ten, with black hair and black mustache and a hard, weather-beaten, handsome face. Roosevelt wrote of him admiringly as a “backwoods boy,” “a rough and tumble westerner,” “a big fellow, a man of daring and good sense, and burly power.”
Like Gorgas–and unlike Wallace–he had spent most of his life surviving frontier conditions. Born on a small farm in Maine, he had had little formal education, but learned surveying, and in 1873, at the age of twenty, went west to work on surveys for the new city of Minneapolis. He had come up the hard way since–as a track hand in Texas, as a junior engineer locating and building railroads in New Mexico, Minnesota, and British Columbia. In 1886, at thirty-three, as principal assistant engineer for the Duluth, South Shore and Atlantic Railway, he had been charged with building a line of nearly four hundred miles through the swamp and pine forests of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, from Duluth to Sault Ste. Marie. By the time he went to work for James J. Hill in 1889, he had survived Mexican fevers, Indian attack, Upper Michigan mosquitoes, and Canadian blizzards. He had been treed by wolves on one occasion; he had learned to sleep sitting up while crossing the prairie in a buckboard; with surveying gear, tent, and provisions packed on his back he had traveled hundreds of miles into the Rockies on snowshoes. “. . . I became tough and hard physically,” he would write. “I learned to sleep under wet skies . . . rolled only in a single blanket . . . to adapt myself . . . under the most primitive conditions. And I loved it!”
His personal faith was in the strides ordinary men might achieve. “With respect to supermen, it has probably been my misfortune, but I have never chanced to meet any of them.” Hard work, he often said, was the only “open sesame” he had had any experience with. By studying on his own at night, he learned mathematics, physics, chemistry. And for all his rather rough, often profane, frontier manner, his exceptional ability was unmistakable.
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