Sailing days for Panama were occasions remembered for years afterward, with thousands of women gathered at the wharf to bid the men farewell. “I never saw so many Negro women in my life,” wrote the correspondent. “All of them in their gayest Sunday clothes, and all wailing at the top of their voices.” Royal Mail steamers sailed with every inch of space occupied, the number on board generally averaging seven or eight hundred. The nearly twenty thousand men recruited at Barbados during the years of construction represented 10 percent of the island’s population and approximately 40 percent of all the adult males. Virtually every able-bodied man went off to build the Panama Canal and the money they sent home to the island was something over $300,000 a year.
For the average West Indian the initial weeks at Panama–the constant movement of men and equipment, the rules, schedules, the confusion and noise–were unlike anything in his experience, often frightening, often highly unpleasant. Most of these men, it must be remembered, had never before seen or heard a locomotive. They were cane-field workers, wholly unfamiliar with modern machinery of any kind. Once, in October 1905, several hundred men inbound from Martinique were so terrified by the prospect of being vaccinated that they refused to leave the ship when it docked at Colón and so had to be put ashore by force. Fifty years later in Barbados, Jamaica, St. Lucia, Trinidad, Antigua, Martinique, St. Vincent, old men would remember being herded aboard their first labor train (“. . . when saying train, I don’t mean passenger train; it was a boxcar train”); or being put directly to work while still wearing their best suit or a new derby purchased especially for the trip.
They were marched out by the hundreds to dig ditches, to cut brush, to carry lumber, to unload boxcars of dynamite. “I load cement, I unload cement,” remembered one of them. “I carry lumber until my shoulder peel.” Previous training or trade skills were generally ignored, former schoolteachers, and skilled craftsmen were made messengers and waiters, experienced carpenters were put to work cutting points on the ends of stakes for the engineers. Rarely did a black man ever rise to a supervisory level and never over white men.
At the camps each man was assigned to a tent or to one of the new barracks and was given a tin plate, tin cup and spoon, and a brass number tag. Fifty years later most of them would still be able to recite their number. The food provided would be recalled by some as sumptuous (“. . . corn beef, bread, coffee which We enjoyed . . . bread, sardines, and ice cream . . . and never forget our ice cream, I am saying here it was refreshing”). But most of such declarations date from a later time. In fact, the food from the mess kitchens in the labor camps appears to have been quite dreadful to begin with, or at least bad enough that in 1906 some sixteen thousand of the labor force preferred to fend for themselves, cooking their own meals in iron pots. Indeed, so little did the West Indians care for the food and the housing provided, so great was their distaste for the regimentation of barracks life, that not more than one in five would stay on in the camps, while the rest crowded into the slums of Colón and Panama City or put up their own ramshackle huts in the bush, exactly as in the days of the French canal.
Shortly after his own arrival on the Isthmus, John Stevens had watched three West Indians at work with a wheelbarrow. when the wheelbarrow was full, Two of them hoisted it onto the head of the third man who carried it away. The scene was one he would often use to depict the variety of problems he faced. But it was Stevens who also said the West Indian would learn rapidly if given the chance and who suggested that the West Indian’s diet might explain his comparative lassitude. On both counts Stevens was to prove correct. The West Indians did become increasingly proficient with tools and at working in unison and in association with heavy machinery, as many of them would recount afterward with pride. The replacement of their traditional high-starch, low-protein diet (chiefly rice and yams) with more nourishing meals did have an effect. Furthermore, while the output of the West Indians improved, that of the Spanish workers declined; they became gradually less industrious, less able to withstand the climate. In time there would be no appreciable difference in the efficiency of one group as compared to another. “The West Indian, while slow, has learned many of the trades and many of them have developed into first-class construction men,” Robert Wood was to write afterward in his final official report. “The bulk of the building work on the Canal has been done by West Indian carpenters, masons and painters . . . and toward the end of the construction period the West Indian remained on the job as steadily as the Spaniard or even the American.”
The racket of hammers and saws could be heard from one end of the line to the other. Stevens remarked that there was not a half mile between Colón and Panama City that did not show signs of the “tremendous activities” of his building department, a claim that if not literally true certainly agreed with everyone’s impression. Under the previous chief engineer, in the one year John Wallace was in charge, a total of 336 old French structures had been renovated, 150 new buildings put up. In one year under Stevens, 1,200 structures were renovated, 1,250 new ones built.
Mountains of supplies were gathered; the worst of the old French wreckage was hauled off for scrap or dumped into swamps for fill. And while much of what went on seemed perfectly bewildering, even to the trained eye–to Major Goethals, for example, it had all looked like utter chaos–one new community after another gradually took shape, and Stevens behaved always as if everything was progressing in the smoothest and most orderly fashion.
“In his office, his desk was always clear,” Frank Maltby wrote, “and apparently he had nothing to do.” Reporters described him as “the type who . . . always has time on his hands,” who was never a day behind in his correspondence.
Concerned greatly about the morale of the skilled American workers, disturbed by the continuing turnover among them as men gave up and left, he had clubhouses built, arranged for weekly band concerts, established a baseball league, with each settlement along the line organizing its own team. When a young clerk informed him that no funds had been allocated for building baseball fields, Stevens said to charge them to sanitary expenses.
Married men on the gold roll were encouraged to send for their wives and families as soon as housing became available, or if not married, to find a wife at the earliest opportunity. To avoid disputes or rivalry over accommodations, it was decided that each man should get one square foot for every dollar of his monthly pay. The rule applied to bachelor and married quarters alike, but wives were also entitled to a square foot per dollar earned by their husbands.* Devised and enforced by Jackson Smith, who was hence known thereafter as “Square- # For dependents other than wives the rule became a bit more complicated: each child qualified for 5 percent of the father’s base allotment for each year of the child’s age (a ten-year-old thus rated 50 percent of the base allotment), while all adult members of the family other than the wife rated 75 percent. foot” Smith, the rule established a standard understood by everybody. It also provided a strong incentive for advancement and especially with the arrival of increasing numbers of wives.
Most of the New houses were Two stories, with Two or four apartments each, and were enclosed completely with screened verandas. They were big, plain, pine-clapboard buildings that stood well up off the ground and were painted gray with white trim. Roofs were of corrugated iron. They were not the least fancy, but with their high ceilings and long windows On all sides, they were suited perfectly to the climate.
Each apartment was equipped with modern plumbing and was furnished at government expense. Coal for cooking, ice for the “icebox,” water, electricity, garbage disposal, maintenance, grounds keeping, were all provided free of cost. The bachelor “hotels,” big, rambling affairs that looked like any medium-priced summer hotel on the New Jersey shore, were kept clean by full-time janitors, but married employees were “obliged” to look after themselves.
In the eyes of a professional engineer such as Stevens, the canal in certain respects was a simpler undertaking than other l
ess conspicuous engineering projects of the era. There was plenty of space Within which to work. There were no property rights to worry about along the line of construction, no possibility of damage to existing buildings, no outside traffic to contend with. The labor force was at hand; only the steam-shovel and locomotive engineers were unionized; there were no contracts to live up to, and never any question about the money supply.
Nor were any radical or untried technical concepts necessary to handle the excavation. Most of what needed to be done had been done before.
What made the undertaking so exceptional was its overwhelming scale. “There is no element of mystery involved in it,” Stevens re ported to Washington, “. . . the problem is one of magnitude and not miracles.”
Greatly compounding this problem of magnitude was, of course, the enormous primary task of approximating the conditions of a modern industrial community in an equatorial wilderness Two thousand miles from the base of all supplies. when various of Stevens’ subordinates wrote afterward that he laid the foundations for the work, it was the startling advances in housing, health, supply, his dramatic marshaling of men and machines, that they had in mind.
In more abstract terms, in terms of pure professional problem solving, Stevens’ greatest contribution was the basic vision of the excavation of the canal as a large-scale problem in railroad freight. As conceived by Stevens, the Panama project was simply one of moving unprecedented tonnage–dirt–by railroad with the least possible wasted motion.
The “overshadowing” challenge would be Culebra Cut. In a letter to Shonts, with his own kind of blunt eloquence, Stevens said what no one had, but what had needed to be said for a very long time:
Yet we must reflect that at best, even with the backing and sentiment and finances of the most powerful nation on earth, that we are contending with Nature’s forces, and that while our wishes and ambition are of great assistance in a work of this magnitude, neither the inspiration of genius nor our optimism will build this canal. Nothing but dogged determination and steady, persistent, intelligent work will ever accomplish the result; and when we speak of a hundred million yards of a single cut not to exceed nine miles in length, we are facing a proposition greater than was ever undertaken in the engineering history of the world.
One recent proposal was to wash that whole section of the divide into the Pacific, using tremendous blasts of water, as in hydraulic mining. Another, equally fantastic, was to build a huge compressed-air plant in the Cut and blow all the spoil to the sea through vast pipes. Stevens’ objective was to create a system of dirt trains that would function like a colossal conveyor belt, rolling endlessly beside steam shovels working at several levels at once. And his success, he knew, would depend on how well things could be managed at the disposal end of the system.
He would haul the dirt to either coast, or to both, or to wherever it was needed for fill. If a high-lake lock canal was decided on, then Culebra could supply the material to build the necessary dams. By double-tracking the railroad he had provided open access in both directions without interrupting regular traffic on the line. The distance from the point of excavation to the dumping grounds was immaterial. It made no difference whether the dirt had to be moved ten feet or ten miles. The trick was to keep the dirt trains in constant motion in and out of the Cut, to and from the dumps.
As possibly no other engineer could have, he devised an elaborate, yet ingeniously elastic system of trackage within the Cut whereby loaded trains would roll out on a downgrade and trains of empty cars would be constantly available to serve the steam shovels. For a shovel to perform at maximum efficiency, the boom had to be swinging every possible minute; and this, as he stressed, could be accomplished only by maintaining a steady supply of empty cars.
By early 1906 he had his plans far enough along and had sufficient equipment in line to resume excavation. Day after day he trudged about among the men and machines, asking questions, observing, smoking cigars like Grant at the Wilderness, as a reporter noted. The men called him “Big Smoke.”
III
The summer before, when he first arrived in Panama, Stevens had assumed that he would be building a sea-level canal. He had come to the job, he later wrote, with a picture in mind of a “wide expanse of blue, rippling water and great ships plowing their way through it like the Straits of Magellan.” It was the age-old preconception, the dream of Columbus, the vision that had dominated at Paris in 1879 and that persisted still in both the popular and official imagination, irrespective of the French experience. Authorized by the previous commission to design an official seal for the Canal Zone, Tiffany & Company, after much historical research, had prepared a shield upon which a Spanish galleon under full sail could be seen traversing an open strait between steep embankments, on into the Pacific, the sky aglow with a tropical sunset. Beneath the shield was inscribed the motto: “The Land Divided–The World United.” And both design and inscription had been approved.
That the proper canal to build even remained an issue at so late a date was in itself a serious and immensely bothersome handicap for Stevens. In his position the French directors general had at least known what was wanted of them. There was of course much that he could do in the way of preparation, work that would be applicable regardless of the final decision, but only up to a point. As he would explain to John Tyler Morgan, it was “as though I had been told to build a house without being informed whether it was a tollhouse or a capitol.”
Now, in addition to everything else, he would be required to play a political role, a role he claimed to detest and for which he felt ill equipped. Yet in restrospect, it is hard to imagine anyone doing better than he did, and at the close of a long life, he himself would look back upon it as his greatest single service.
The special international board appointed by Roosevelt to consider the problem was composed of eight Americans and five Europeans. Chairman of the group was General Davis, the former Governor of the Canal Zone. Others included Professor Burr and William B. Parsons, from the first Isthmian Canal Commission; a former member of the Walker Commission, Alfred Noble; and General Henry Abbot, from the old Comité Technique. Joseph Ripley was chief engineer of the St. Marys Falls Ship Canal–the “Soo” Canal, as it was better known–at Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan. Frederic P. Stearns was chief engineer of Boston’s Metropolitan Water Board; Isham Randolph was chief engineer of the Sanitary District of Chicago.
The foreign members were a chef des Ponts et Chaussées, Adolphe Guérard; William Henry Hunter, chief engineer of the Manchester Canal, who also had served on the Comité Technique; a Prussian state engineer named Eugen Tincauzer; E. Quellenac, consulting engineer of the Suez Canal; and J. W. Welcker, director of all Dutch water-ways.
It was another distinguished panel drawn from an international, professional upper crust, which for Stevens, with his lack of education, was something of a world apart. At its first meeting in the I.C.C. offices in Washington, September 1, 1905, the board was presented with numerous past reports, volumes of current data, as well as assorted proposals deemed deserving of attention (including one from Philippe Bunau-Varilla, who insisted still that the surest approach was to build a lock canal and by means of dredges take it down to sea level). Roosevelt gave a lunch for the group at Oyster Bay and told them he hoped it might be a sea-level passage, but warned that time and practicality must be kept in mind. It was his vital interest to “secure a Panama waterway” in the shortest time possible. The plan must be one that would work.
John Findley Wallace returned to Washington to argue that no plan should be approved that might prevent the ultimate creation of the “Straits of Panama.” And at the end of September the board went to the Isthmus to tour the line under abnormally sunny skies. In Limon Bay, in a stateroom on their ship, they interviewed Stevens, Maltby, and others from Stevens’ staff. By the time of their twenty-fifth meeting in Washington, November 18, they were prepared to cast their vote. The decision, by a margin of eight to five, was for a s
ea-level canal. Without exception the European members wanted it that way and they were joined by Chairman Davis, Professor Burr, and William B. Parsons.
In language and logic the case as presented by the majority had a very familiar ring: the setting might have been the grande salle of the Société de Géographie in 1879. Speaking for the majority, Chairman Davis declared that he had known since boyhood that Suez and Panama would be “overcome” one day; a passage at Suez had been declared impossible, a passage like that at Suez must be built in Panama. Again the issue was one of national pride and honor. Only in this instance the spokesman was an American official who knew Panama from personal experience and who no less than any of the others, presumably, should have had little difficulty understanding what had happened to the French and why. But the model was not the French canal at Panama; the model–again–was the French canal at Suez. To those in opposition, to anyone familiar with the history of the French experience on the Isthmus, the views of Chairman Davis seemed like the return of a bad dream.
The task that confronted the private company [at Suez] . . . measured by the difficulties they had to encounter, was many times greater, it seems to me, than the task which, measured by the standard of engineering methods and capabilities that exist today, confronts the United States at Panama; but the French company carried that work to completion at Suez thirty-six years ago, and it has yielded enormous profits. The many difficulties were overcome and an open waterway was made 100 miles long, affording unobstructed navigation. . ..
We know that at Panama to make a waterway similar to the Suez Canal we must construct a channel less than half as long. . . . Should the United States withdraw from the attempt to make at the American Isthmus a channel as open, free, and safe as already existing at Suez? Should they climb over the hill or remove it? . . . I think the dignity and power of this great nation . . . require that we should treat this matter not in a provisional but in a final, masterly way.
David McCullough Library E-book Box Set Page 384