Control of the Chagres River–“the lion in the path,” Davis called it–could be easily attained.
A mountainous Report of the Consulting Engineers for the Panama Canal was delivered to the White House On January 10, 1906. The recommended sea-level canal was to cost $247,000,000 and to be completed in twelve to thirteen years, which was approximately $100,000,-000 more and three to four years longer than required for a lock canal of the kind proposed by the dissenting members.
This minority proposal was for a canal much like the one recommended by the Walker Commission; it was, that is, essentially the same canal for which the Spooner Act had been passed, a canal that would not divide the land, but bridge it with a high-level lake reached by flights of locks at either end. It had, however, one major difference. The site of the Chagres dam had been moved from Bohio downstream to Gatun, to within four miles of Limon Bay. What had been Lake Bohio in the earlier plan now became a much larger Gatun Lake. The span of the water bridge had been extended nine miles.
The elevation of the lake was to be eighty-five feet. At Gatun there would be a single flight of three locks built into the eastern end of the dam. A ship entering the locks would be lifted to the level of the lake, then proceed twenty-three miles across the lake, south to Culebra Cut, which, like the neck of a bottle, extended for nine miles through the divide and was capped by another small dam and one lock at Pedro Miguel. There the ship would be lowered thirty-one feet to a small terminal lake, another body of fresh water, this one being contained by a dam at La Boca, beside Sosa Hill, at the edge of the Pacific. Descending through two more locks, the ship would return to sea level and thus complete the ocean-to-ocean transit.
The model for the plan, its proponents stressed, was the Soo Canal, which for fifty years had been the gateway between Lake Superior and Lake Huron. There was no more heavily traveled canal in the world. By contrast to the 105-mile-long sea-level passage at Suez, the Soo was all of a mile and half from end to end. Yet the annual tonnage through the locks–44,000,000 tons in 1905–was more than three times that of the Suez Canal, even though the Soo was closed by ice during the winter. In season, huge Great Lakes ore boats moved through with an efficiency and safety that belied all the customary arguments against lock canals. No vessel had ever been seriously injured in the locks of the Soo, not in fifty years of constant traffic. “Danger to ships in a canal is not at the locks, where they are moving slowly and under control, but in the excavated channels . . . through which they pass at speed, and where if the width is insufficient, groundings are likely to happen.” The experience gained at the Soo was not only applicable to navigation at Panama, but of more value than any or all experience related to any other canal, according to the minority report, most of which was written by Alfred Noble, who in his earlier years had helped build the so-called Weitzel Lock on the Soo and who presently, at age sixty-one, was one of the two or three leading engineers in the country. (As chief engineer of the East River division of the Pennsylvania Railroad from 1902 to 1909, Noble was responsible for tunnel construction under the river and for the foundations of Pennsylvania Station in New York City.)
Yet in its essentials this latest high-level lake plan for Panama was no different from that proposed by Godin de Lépinay in Paris twenty-seven years before. Gatun, it will be recalled, was the site specified by de Lépinay for the Chagres dam.
There had been others in the interval who had also seen Gatun as the most suitable place to check the river. Two interested Americans, C. D. Ward and Ashbel Welch, had each presented papers on the subject before the American Society of Civil Engineers. But because the breadth of the valley was far greater at Gatun than at Bohio, a much larger dam would have to be built at Gatun, thus making it an even more controversial project than the one at Bohio had been. This “controlling feature” in the new proposal was to be a mountain of earth nearly a mile and a half long (7,700 feet) and more than 100 feet high. And while earth dams of nearly the same size had been built with success elsewhere, this would be the highest on record and the Gatun site appeared to offer little if any bedrock upon which to found such a structure.
Stevens was chief among those who now backed the Gatun plan. Recalled to Washington to give his views, he met with Shonts, Taft, and Roosevelt and made a memorable appearance before the Senate canal committee. Stevens, however, was not the “architect” of the lock plan, as later claimed by some of his more ardent admirers. As recently as October, when appearing before the advisory board in Colón, he had in fact quite stubbornly refused to endorse any plan for the canal, saying he was too new to the work. The present lock plan was the work of Alfred Noble and Joseph Ripley, and was based largely on their experience on the Soo. Stevens, whose background was in railroad construction only, had no knowledge of lock construction or hydraulics. The real “architect” of the present plan, if such is an appropriate designation, remained Godin de Lépinay.
Still, Stevens had experienced a revelation since October. He had seen the effect of the rains; he had seen the Chagres in flood. In conversations with Maltby and others who had served under Wallace, he had found none who favored a sea-level canal. Stevens had once believed like others that a sea-level canal “meant simply digging a little more dirt.” Now he saw that the issue was one of the most momentous consequence and he could not have been more partisan. To his mind any sea-level plan for Panama was “an entirely untenable proposition,” “an impracticable futility.” The sea-level passage advocated by the majority of the board was to be only 150 feet wide for nearly half its length–“a narrow, tortuous ditch.” He foresaw endless landslides, a precarious transit under the best of conditions. Whenever two ships passed in so narrow a channel, one would have to make fast to mooring posts, as at Suez. Even if there were no difference in cost or time of construction, he would still prefer the lock plan.
It will provide a safer and quicker pas sage for ships. . . . It will provide, beyond question, the best solution to the vital problem of how safely to care for the floodwaters of the Chagres. . . . Its cost of operation, maintenance and fixed charges will be much less than any sea-level canal.
The estimated time of completion for a lock canal was nine years. He thought it could be done in eight years, by January 1914. He doubted that a sea-level canal could be built in anything less than eighteen years, or not before 1924.
As a witness on Capitol Hill, he was particularly impressive, answering all questions with characteristic confidence. Predictably, much anxiety had been voiced in the press and in Congress over the prospect of risking everything on an earth dam. Still fresh was the memory of the Johnstown Flood of 1889, when an entire city had been wiped out and more than two thousand lives lost as a result of the failure of an earth dam.
Stevens assured the committee that if properly engineered an earth dam would serve perfectly and that such suggested reinforcements as a masonry core could be dispensed with.
“Yes, if it is absolutely safe,” one senator replied. “Here I suggest that that is a very positive opinion or conviction that you have.”
“Well, I am a positive man,” Stevens said.
His most persistent interrogator, and easily the most intelligent in his private opinion, was John Tyler Morgan, who at age eighty-one had a little more than a year to live, but who at this juncture was still going strong. At the close of the hearings, Morgan came up to Stevens and told him, “If we had [had] you on our side, the canal would be built at Nicaragua.”
In November, before Stevens reached Washington, the New York Tribune made front-page news with an unauthorized report that Roosevelt wanted a lock canal because that was Stevens’ choice. Ac cording to Stevens, however, it was only because he “talked to Teddy like a Dutch uncle” after arriving in Washington that Roosevelt swung around to favor the lock plan.
On February 5, in response to Stevens’ views, the Isthmian Canal Commission overrode the majority opinion of the advisory board and chose the lock canal. Two weeks later, when sub
mitting the reports to Congress, Roosevelt gave the lock canal Presidential sanction. It was, he said, the canal the chief engineer wanted and of all men the chief engineer had “a peculiar personal interest in judging aright.”
No sooner had Stevens returned to Panama than he learned that he might be needed again to lobby further on Capitol Hill. He protested to Shonts by cable declaring that he had said all he could. As Shonts also knew, Stevens suffered severely from seasickness and dreaded every trip to or from Panama. By April the issue was still tied up in committee and Stevens, infuriated over the “vexatious manner” in which things were being handled in Washington, kept cabling Taft to do something. Professor Burr, William B. Parsons, and John Wallace had appeared before the Senate committee and denounced with notable conviction virtually every feature in the lock proposal. So Stevens was called back to Washington.
On May 17, by a margin of one vote, the Senate committee reported for the sea-level plan. Stevens, who was never known to complain of the heat at Panama, would remember the rest of his life how “for two
blistering hot days” he “withstood the severest” questioning before the House Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce. Determined to make Congress and the country understand the nature of the problem, he kept hammering at the same fundamental idea that de Lépinay had failed to put across before the gathering in Paris. “The one great problem in the construction of any canal down there is the control of the Chagres River,” he insisted. “That overshadows everything else.”
He talked to congressmen, assembled statistics, and prepared a large map for display in the Senate. Most important, he drafted large sections of what was to be the major speech in the Senate, an address by the bantam-sized Philander Knox, Roosevelt’s former Attorney General, who had since become senator from Pennsylvania.
In the speech, as in the lock plan itself, Gatun Dam was the focal point. Knox assured the Senate that the dam was safe. Interestingly, Knox had once been part-owner of the ill-fated dam at Johnstown, a connection that somehow eluded notice in 1906. Knox happened also to live in Pittsburgh and his personal fortune, as well as the influence of his law firm, had been built on legal services in behalf of the Pittsburgh steel empire and its leaders. In the plan as it presently stood, a total of six double locks was called for and these would require gigantic gates–gates that would be built of steel. This was a point neither Knox nor anyone else happened to raise publicly, and how strenuously the steel interests may also have been lobbying for the lock plan is impossible to determine. But the great lock gates for the Panama Canal would in fact be fabricated in Pittsburgh one day and they would be erected by a Pittsburgh contractor.
Again, as in the “Battle of the Routes,” the issue was resolved in the Senate and by the narrowest of margins.
Knox spoke on June 19. Two days later the Senate voted 36 to 31 for a lock canal. A difference of three votes would have caused the United States to attempt a sea-level canal, which in all probability would have ended in terrible failure. As further experience would demonstrate, the advisory board had been no less naive than de Lesseps concerning the true cost of so vast an excavation in terms of both money and time. George Goethals was to remark at one critical point that there was not money enough in the world to construct a sea-level canal at Panama.
Still in the opinion of a very large number of people, including a great many technical and military specialists, a dreadful error had been committed. And it was a view that would persist for years to come. Roosevelt was to be told to his face by no less a figure of valor and resolution than Lord Kitchener that he had blundered shamefully, Kitchener’s contention–expressed in a very loud voice–being that a sea-level canal was the only proper canal, as any sensible person could perceive. When Roosevelt countered that there were too many technical difficulties involved, Kitchener answered, “I never regard difficulties, or pay heed to protests like that; all I would do in such a case would be to say, ‘I order that a sea-level canal be dug, and I wish to hear nothing more about it.’ ” Roosevelt responded by saying, “If you say so, I have no doubt you would have given such an order; but I wonder if you remember the conversation between Glendower and Hotspur, when Glendower says, ‘I can call spirits from the vasty deep,’ and Hotspur answers, ‘So can I, and so can any man; but will they come?”’
For the engineers on the Isthmus the decision was a great parting of the clouds. They knew at last the canal they were to build. Plans prepared in expectation of the decision could immediately be put into effect. Stevens had left specific instructions. Though he did not get back to Colón again until July 4, construction of a new town at Gatun was started within twenty-four hours after the Senate vote. Clearing the site for Gatun Dam was begun; tracks were laid for the dirt trains from Culebra.
Residents of the old village of Gatun, hearing that the dam was to be built where the village stood, refused to concern themselves, let alone move to the new site that had been provided for them. Such impossible things had been spoken of by the French some twenty-five years before, they said. So it was not until later, when actual construction began on the dam–and rock being dumped for the foundations crashed over several houses–that they agreed to move out.
On Stevens’ return, after careful study of core samples, after much tramping back and forth, he and Maltby fixed the center line of the Gatun locks. Responsibility for the design of the locks and of the dam was put in the hands of Joseph Ripley, the chief engineer of the Soo Canal, whom Stevens had managed to recruit before leaving Washington. As Stevens wrote, “Things began to quicken everywhere.”
Surveying parties were sent into the jungle to map and locate the contour line–the perimeter–of what was to be the largest artificial lake in the world. Eventually five such parties were in the field and their work was carried on almost entirely through unbroken jungle. Nearly every foot of the way had to be cleared by heavy cutting by hand. Progress was extremely slow; some parties were out for a year.
The creation of Gatun Lake would mean that approximately 164 square miles of jungle, an area as large as the island of Barbados, would vanish under water. Every village between Gatun and Matachín would be covered over, a prospect that the native populace found impossible to imagine. Mile after mile of the Chagres River, the Panama Railroad, nearly everything along the path of the French, not to mention most of the new towns being built, would be lost beneath the lake. A new railroad would have to be built on higher ground to skirt the eastern shore of the projected lake.
The preparatory period was over. Stevens’ headquarters, the entire engineering department, had been moved from Panama City to Culebra, to a steep green bluff looking directly down into the Cut. It had been a year and three months since John Stevens had taken charge.
18
The Man with the Sun in His Eyes
And never did a President before so reflect the quality of his time.
–H. G. WELLS
I Theodore Roosevelt had taken a great liking to John Stevens. Stevens, in addition to his other attributes, was a reader of books, Roosevelt had discovered–“and . . . he has the same trick that I have of reading over and over again books for which he really cares.” Stevens’ favorite of all was Huckleberry Finn, which he read “continually,” and this to Roosevelt was the mark of the finest literary discernment.
Roosevelt’s one reservation about Stevens was his obvious insensitivity to the fact that the canal was an undertaking of the United States government. Stevens, Roosevelt complained to Taft, seemed incapable of understanding that he was no longer working for James J. Hill. Stevens had painfully little patience with congressmen, or with the Panamanians, and none at all with labor unions. When a delegation of steam-shovel engineers came to his office threatening to strike unless paid more, Stevens reportedly told them: “You all know damn well that strikes do not get you anywhere. Now, get the hell out of this office and back to work . . .” The men had returned to their machines and the story, when it got around,
raised Stevens’ standing even higher in the eyes of most other Americans on the Isthmus. But the steam-shovel men had sent angry protests to their Union leaders at home, who very quickly took the matter to Washington where it wound up on Roosevelt’s desk.
But it was the technical executive ability of Stevens and Shonts that Roosevelt valued most. They were “the very best men we could get for actually digging the canal,” he told Taft; their administrative abilities were “phenomenal.” And so it was in that spirit in the summer of 1906 that Roosevelt addressed himself to two propositions that would greatly change the execution of the work.
Stevens and Shonts wanted to build the canal by contract, as the French had tried, and as the transcontinental railroads had been built. It was the system to which they, as railroad men, were accustomed. Stevens envisioned a powerful syndicate of railroad contractors who “by combining their strength and influence” could bring to Panama the best people in the world to do the job. Taft was certain the plan meant trouble, and especially if selection of the contractors was to be determined by Stevens, which was what Stevens wanted, rather than by open bidding. Stevens was insistent, but Taft held his ground, and in the end Roosevelt agreed to put the work out to contract on a trial basis but only on the condition that there be open bidding.
The second and more important proposition concerned the manner in which the work was being administered. Shonts and Stevens wanted things greatly streamlined. To Shonts it would be “suicidal” to continue with the work without a “clear-cut organization with centralized power.” Stevens, in a long letter from Panama dated August 5, 1906, told Roosevelt that “from now on, everything should be made subordinate to construction . . . “
“I believe that the power and responsibility should be concentrated,” Stevens wrote, “. . . that the commission, constituted in whatever way it may be . . . must resolve itself into what will amount to a one-man proposition.”
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