More correspondence followed and several meetings, and consequently a new executive order was prepared. The present three-man commission was to be abolished. Authority was to be vested in a single head, the chairman, and he in turn would report to the Secretary of War. On the Isthmus, heads of the major departments–engineering, sanitation, labor–would become members of the commission, reporting to and receiving instructions from the chairman. But since 90 percent of the employees on the Isthmus worked for the engineering department, it was really the chief engineer who had the power.
The chain of command had thus become a straight line, from Roosevelt to Taft to Shonts to Stevens. The office of governor of the Zone no longer existed. Stevens, the chief beneficiary of the change, was to be supreme commander in the field. Governor Magoon, never a favorite of either Shonts or Stevens, happened to be absent from the Isthmus on an emergency legal mission in Cuba. He would be quietly informed that he was not to return to Panama.
Since the administration of so large, complex, and distant an undertaking was a new experience for the United States government, or more specifically for the executive branch, this refinement of the com-mission was in itself something of a pioneering process, for which Roosevelt was ultimately responsible, although Stevens, perhaps justifiably, would later say he was the one who had mapped it all out. In less than three years’ time the commission had gone from a seven-headed board that oversaw all decisions, to the three-man executive body (wherein chairman, governor, and chief engineer each had his own specific responsibilities), to the present arrangement. Had Elihu Root or even Henry Clay Frick agreed to run things earlier, possibly something of the kind would have been arrived at in much less time. Shonts and Stevens had been given exactly the power they wanted.
The order, it was agreed, would be signed when Roosevelt got to Panama.
The trip to Panama to see the canal was one of those small, luminous events that light up an era. No President had ever before left the country during his time in office and so from the day of the first advance announcement in June the journey became the talk of the country. In much of the press, serious apprehensions were expressed, even though it had been stressed that he would be in constant communication with Washington by wireless and that every possible precaution would be taken to insure his physical safety. But by and large the idea of Teddy Roosevelt going personally to Panama, like a general to the front, had tremendous appeal, and on the eve of his departure in November, even the cautious Washington Star lent its support. Perhaps it was a good thing after all for a President to get out and see something of the world, the paper declared; conceivably future occupants of the office might even undertake European journeys. He sailed on November 9, 1906, on the new 16,000-ton Louisiana, largest battleship in the fleet, escorted by two cruisers, Tennessee and Washington. He took Mrs. Roosevelt with him, and Navy doctor Presley Rixey, his personal physician, and three Secret Service men, but no reporters. The ships traveled south at fourteen knots through quiet seas and by the time they reached the Caribbean the weather was ideal.
Mother and I walk briskly up and down the deck together or else sit aft under the awning or in the aftercabin, with the gun ports open and ready . . . [he wrote to their son Kermit]. Mother, very pretty and dainty in white summer clothes, came up on Sunday morning to see inspection and review, or whatever they call it . . . I usually spend half an hour on deck before Mother is dressed. Then we breakfast together alone . ..
Their quarters were those of the admiral of the fleet, only somewhat enlarged, several walls having been removed for the occasion. Pictures of the rooms, with their wicker chairs and big brass beds and Oriental rugs, had already appeared in the illustrated magazines.
It is a beautiful sight, these three great war vessels steaming southward in close column [his letter continued], and almost as beautiful at night when we see not only the lights but the loom through the darkness of the ships astern. . . . I have thought a good deal of the time over eight years ago when I was sailing to Santiago in the fleet of warships and transports. It seems a strange thing to think of my now being President, going to visit the work of the Panama Canal which I have made possible.
All together, with the voyage down and back, he was away two weeks. The most memorable part of the visit was the rain. He had picked November because it was the height of the rainy season. He wished to see Panama at its absolute worst, he said, and he was not disappointed. “It would have been impossible to see the work going on under more unfavorable weather conditions,” he would report enthusiastically to Congress. It was raining the morning he landed. It was raining as he and President Amador rode through the streets of Panama City in an open carriage, Roosevelt waving a top hat to sodden but exuberant crowds. The deluge the second day was the worst in fifteen years. Three inches of rain fell in less than two hours. He saw the Chagres surge a hundred yards beyond its banks. The railroad was under water in several places. Villages were “knee-deep in water.” There was even a small landslide on the railroad cut at Paraíso. The contrast between the Panama he saw and the sunny, benign land toured by Ferdinand de Lesseps could not have been much greater. “I tramped everywhere through the mud,” he wrote with satisfaction.
Advance preparations had involved the efforts of thousands of people. As in de Lesseps’ day, streets were scrubbed, houses were painted or whitewashed, flags were hung from windows and balconies. Programs were printed; schoolchildren were rehearsed in patriotic airs. The Republic of Panama declared his day of arrival a national day of “joy and exalted enthusiasm” and instructed the populace to behave, since “all thinkers, sociologists and philosophers of the universe [will] have their eyes upon us in penetrating scrutiny.”
At Ancon, construction of a big three-story frame hotel called the Tivoli, a structure begun the year before but still far from finished, was rushed ahead with all speed as soon as Stevens learned of the visit. One wing of the building was finished and furnished in six weeks, because Roosevelt insisted upon living on shore and in the Zone.
Predictably, perhaps inevitably, Roosevelt did almost nothing by the comparatively relaxed schedule planned by Stevens. (In a cable from Washington, Taft had advised a full tour but without “overdoing matters.”) The white battleship appeared in Limon Bay on November 14, a day before she was supposed to. When Amador, Shonts, Stevens, and their wives rushed by train to Cristobal that afternoon, it was only to learn that Roosevelt would stay on board through the night so as not to disrupt any of their arrangements. At 7:30 the next morning, the appointed hour, as the official welcoming party stood at the end of the pier, all eyes searching for signs of life on the big ship, an amazing figure called “Good morning” from shore. He advanced into their midst. He was wearing a white suit and a seaman’s sou’ wester, the brim of which reached his shoulders. The pince-nez glistened with fine rain-drops. He had been rowed ashore two hours earlier, he explained, and had been having a grand time “exploring” the waterfront.
At Tivoli Crossing, a station stop built especially for his arrival at the new hotel, his immediate move was to disappear. Perhaps a hundred Zone police had been waiting to protect him. Their captain, a big, picturesque figure named George Shanton, was a former Rough Rider whom Roosevelt had personally recruited to organize the Panama force and the uniform Shanton had chosen was the same as that of the Rough Riders. So with Shanton and his men prancing about on horseback, the reception, when the train pulled in, looked very much like those staged during political campaigns.
In the confusion of the rain and the crowds, Roosevelt spotted William Gorgas and pulled him into a closed carriage. But when the carriage arrived at the hotel, escorted by the galloping Shanton, neither Roosevelt nor Gorgas was inside. Before leaving the station, they had slipped out the other door of the carriage and Roosevelt had Gorgas take him directly to Ancon Hospital for an inspection tour, two hours before he was expected.
By noon he had toured the bay in a seagoing tug and had walked unannounced i
nto one of the employees’ mess halls at La Boca, where, with several hundred “gold roll” men, he and Mrs. Roosevelt sat down to a 30-cent lunch of soup, beef, mashed potatoes, peas, beets, chili con carne, plum pudding, and coffee. According to the official schedule, he was supposed to have attended a large luncheon in his honor at the Tivoli Hotel.
The American President, said Manuel Amador in a speech from the steps of the cathedral that afternoon, was the commander in chief in the great struggle for progress. “To harmonize the various elements that had to be united . . . to reorganize the great work, to grasp, in a word, its immense magnitude, a superior man was necessary, and you were this man,” said Amador. Panama and the United States, Roosevelt responded, were partners in the “giant engineering feat of the ages.”
Meantime, some two hundred prominent, rain-soaked Panamanians had paraded by on horseback, all dressed as Rough Riders.
The visit lasted all of three days, which, he later stressed to Congress, was insufficient time for an “exhaustive investigation of the minutiae of the work . . . still less to pass judgment on the engineering problems.” But according to the Star & Herald, no one in the four hundred years of Panama’s history had ever seen so much in so little time.
“He seemed obsessed with the idea that someone was trying to hide something from him,” Frank Maltby would recall. “. . . He was continually pointing to some feature and asking, ‘What’s that? . . . Well, I want to see it.’. . . he was continuously stopping some black man and asking if he had any complaint or grievance.”
Everyone who tried to maintain his pace wound up exhausted and half-drowned.
He walked railroad ties in Culebra Cut, leaped ditches, splashed through work camps, made impromptu speeches in the driving rain. “You are doing the biggest thing of the kind that has ever been done,” he said, “and I wanted to see how you are doing it.”
He inspected the quarters for both white and black workers, poked about in kitchens and meat lockers. On the morning of the third day, John Stevens told Maltby that it was his turn to lead the procession. “I have blisters on both feet and am worn out,” Stevens said. At Gatun, Roosevelt said he needed an overall view of the dam site and pointed to a nearby hill. In Maltby’s recollection, “. . . we, together with three or four secret service men, charged up the hill as if we were taking a fort by storm.”
At home the papers reported his every move. “ROOSEVELT IS THERE” proclaimed the Washington Post. “A STRENUOUS EXHIBITION ON THE ISTHMUS” read another headline. “THE PRESIDENT CLIMBS A CANAL STEAM-SHOVEL” The New York Times announced on its front page.
The famous moment on the steam shovel occurred early on his second day, en route to the Cut. It was about eight in the morning and again the rain was coming down hard. At the site of the Pedro Miguel locks, Roosevelt spotted several shovels at work and ordered that the train be stopped. He jumped down, marched through the mud, and was soon sitting up in the driver’s seat, engineer A. H. Grey having happily moved over to make a place for him.
He was fascinated by the huge machine and insisted on knowing exactly how it worked; he asked that it be moved back and forth on its tracks. He had to see how everything was done. “All his questions, like his movements, were deliberate and emphatic to a noticeable degree,” a reporter noted; “he would stand for no ceremony. . . .”
He was at the controls for perhaps twenty minutes, during which a small crowd gathered and the photographers were extremely busy. Presidents of the United States had been photographed at their desks and on the rear platforms of Pullman cars; Chester A. Arthur had consented once to pose in a canoe. But not in 117 years had a President posed on a steam shovel. He was wearing a big Panama hat and another of his white suits. And the marvelous incongruity of the outfit, the huge, homely machine and the rain pouring down, not to mention his own open delight in the moment, made it at once an event, an obvious and inevitable peak for the man who so adored having his picture taken and who so plainly intended to see success at Panama. One of the photographs would quickly become part of American folklore, and as an expression of a man and his era, there are few that can surpass it.
The shovel was a ninety-five-ton Bucyrus, mainstay of the work. Going at full capacity it could dig three to five times as much as one of the old French excavators, none of which was any longer in use. It could take up five cubic yards–roughly eight tons of rock and earth– with a single scoop. Under ideal conditions it could load a dirt car in about eight minutes.
Ten men were needed to run such a machine. In addition to the engineer, there was a craneman, who handled the dumping, two coal stokers, and a “move-up” crew of six whose job it was to level the ground and place the track so that the shovel could be advanced as it worked, always keeping its nose to the bank. The engineer earned $210 a month, which was as much as the best-paid office workers received, more even than some doctors. But unlike the locomotive engineers, they got no overtime, as engineer Grey told Roosevelt in no uncertain terms.
The rain was descending in wild silver sheets when Roosevelt entered Culebra Cut for the first time, riding along the bottom of the Cut in a special train. Water was pouring from the red clay slopes in “regular rivers.” But there was a great blowing of locomotive whistles and cheering as he came into view. On the side of one shovel was stretched a big, hand-lettered banner that pleased him enormously: “WE’LL HELP YOU DIGIT.”
The shovels were working along the sides of the Cut on extended terraces, or benches, as in surface mining. They were advancing from either end of the Cut toward the middle, or summit, all of them digging on the upgrade, and it was thus that the loaded dirt trains rolled out of the Cut–north and south–on the downgrade. The spur tracks for the shovels ran side by side with those for the trains, the shovels working on the lower level. The area to be excavated was drilled and blasted, then the shovel moved up to begin the heavy work of swinging the debris, much of it rock, into the dirt cars. As each shovel progressed, it made a cut approximately fifty feet wide by twelve feet deep.
Very few of the old French dump cars were in use in the Cut any longer. The spoil was being hauled out on long trains of much larger American-built cars pulled by full-sized American-built locomotives. Most of the cars Roosevelt saw were wooden flat cars that were used in conjunction with a rather crude but amazingly effective unloading device, the Lidgerwood system, as it was called. The cars had only one side and steel aprons bridged the spaces between them. The dirt was piled on, high up against the one side; then at the dumping grounds a three-ton steel plow was brought up to the last car and hitched by a long cable to a huge winchlike device mounted on a flatcar at the head of the train. The winch took its power from the locomotive. At a signal the plow was hauled rapidly forward and the whole twenty-car train was unloaded with a single sweep, all in about ten minutes. One such machine, Stevens told Roosevelt, could do the work of three hundred men under the old method of unloading by hand.
In another letter to his son Kermit, written on the Louisiana on the way home, Roosevelt would give this description of Culebra Cut:
Now we have taken hold of the job. . . . There the huge steam shovels are hard at it; scooping huge masses of rock and gravel and dirt previously loosened by the drillers and dynamite blasters, loading it on trains which take it away to some dump, either in the jungle or where the dams are to be built. They are eating steadily into the mountain cutting it down and down. Little tracks are laid on the side hills, rocks blasted out, and the great ninety-five ton steam shovels work up like mountain howitzers until they come to where they can with advantage begin their work of eating into and destroying the mountainside. With intense energy men and machines do their task, the white men supervising matters and handling the machines, while the tens of thousands of black men do the rough manual labor where it is not worthwhile to have machines do it. It is an epic feat, and one of immense significance.
He had seen the Cut from above, from the rim, following lunch and a change of clot
hes at John Stevens’ house. The excavation was still only in its early stages and because of the rain there were only about twenty-five shovels at work. Even so, it was the largest cavern yet made in the earth’s surface and the noise and commotion from below were like nothing to be experienced anywhere. It was a scene, we are told in other accounts, that might only have come from the mind of H. G. Wells.
Once, earlier in the year, H. G. Wells had called at the White House. It was a bright spring afternoon and he and Roosevelt had talked at length in the garden, much as Jules Verne and Ferdinand de Lesseps had conversed in the library of the Société de Geographic Wells was in America, he said, to search for the future and “question the certitudes of progress,” for unlike Verne, he had grave misgivings about the long-range human consequences of science and technology.
Whether Roosevelt had any such thoughts as he looked down into Culebra Cut for the first and only time in his life is impossible to say. More likely it was a supreme and ineffable moment. Wells, in his travels, had seen a hall of dynamos at the Niagara Falls Power Company that evoked something verging on religious awe. They were, he wrote, the creations of “serene and speculative, foreseeing and endeavoring minds.” The hall itself was a sanctuary; there had been no clatter, no dirt, no tumult, still the outer rim of the big generators traveled at the speed of 100,000 miles an hour. He had been moved to the depths of his soul by the vision of such vast power in the hands of man.
For Roosevelt at Culebra, with the rain hammering down, there had to have been something of the same sensation, though for him the noise and tumult would be the better part of it.
In their talk in the White House garden Wells had asked if the creative energies of modern civilization had any permanent value, and Roosevelt’s answer had been immediate. He had no way of disproving a pessimistic interpretation of the future, Roosevelt declared. But he chose not to live as if that was so. He referred specifically to The Time Machine, Wells’s most despairing vision of the future.
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