“He became gesticulatory,” Wells recalled, “and his straining voice a note higher in denying the pessimism of that book. . . .” Gripping the back of a garden chair with his left hand, Roosevelt had stabbed the air with his right, the familiar platform gesture.
“Suppose after all that should prove to be right, and it all ends in your butterflies and morlocks. That doesn’t matter now. The effort’s real. It’s worth going on with. It’s worth it–even then.”
“I can see him now,” Wells remembered, “. . . and the gesture of the clenched hand and the–how can I describe it? the friendly peering snarl of his face, like a man with the sun in his eyes. He sticks in my mind as that, as a very symbol of the creative will in man, in its limitations, its doubtful adequacy, its valiant persistence. . . .”
In the long letter to Kermit written on the homeward voyage, Roosevelt said the Panama wilderness had made him wish he had more time. “It is a real tropic forest, palms and bananas, breadfruit trees, bamboos, lofty ceibas, and gorgeous butterflies and brilliant colored birds fluttering among the orchids. . . . All my old enthusiasm for natural history seemed to revive, and I would have given a good deal to have stayed and tried to collect specimens.” But there was no apparent conflict between such splendors and what went on in Culebra Cut, between orchids and steam shovels. “Panama was a great sight,” he told his son Ted, by which he meant everything in Panama.
To the majority of those on the job his presence had been magical. Years afterward, the wife of one of the steam-shovel engineers, Mrs. Rose van Hardeveld, would recall, “We saw him . . . on the end of the train. Jan got small flags for the children, and told us about when the train would pass . . . Mr. Roosevelt flashed us one of his well-known toothy smiles and waved his hat at the children . . .” In an instant, she said, she understood her husband’s faith in the man. “And I was more certain than ever that we ourselves would not leave until it [the canal] was finished.” Two years before, they had been living in Wyoming on a lonely stop on the Union Pacific. When her husband heard of the work at Panama, he had immediately wanted to go, because, he told her, “With Teddy Roosevelt, anything is possible.” At the time neither of them had known quite where Panama was located.
II
His “Special message Concerning the Panama Canal,” the first message to Congress to be illustrated with photographs, was released on December 17, 1906. He sketched the progress being made. He praised the French for what they had achieved; he praised Congress for having had the sense to refuse to attempt a passage at sea level. He described the hospitals, living quarters, his meal in the mess hall at La Boca. He wrote of the rain. Only on the last morning had he caught a glimpse of the sun, and then only for a few minutes.
He did his best to depict the size of the work and urged Congress and the nation to take notice. “It is a stupendous work upon which our fellow countrymen are engaged in down there on the Isthmus,” he declared. At present, he could report, there were nearly six thousand Americans on the job. “No man can see these young, vigorous men energetically doing their duty without a thrill of pride. . . .”
A very large part of the message was given over to the progress made in health and sanitation and in praise for Gorgas. The message, Gorgas wrote privately, was “indeed a corker. I had not expected anything of the kind. I do not think that an army medical officer ever had such recognition in a Presidential message. It probably marks the acme of my career.”
Roosevelt called the medical progress astounding in view of Panama’s past; and yet, oddly, the statistical tables included at the conclusion of the report, transcriptions from the actual hospital records, gave a very different picture and a disquieting one. The specific strides he cited were quite unprecedented and indisputable: yellow fever had disappeared, there was no more cholera, there was no plague. Among the Americans, including dependents, there had not been a single death from disease in three months, an almost unbelievable record for Panama and very impressive, as Roosevelt stressed, even by North American standards.*
Medical care and services on the Isthmus were in fact “as good as that which could be obtained in our first-class hospitals at home.” The Sanitary Department was currently spending $2,000,000 a year; Ancon Hospital had a staff of 470. More than a dozen new hospitals and dispensaries had been built along the line. All hospital care was free for all employees, white and black.
Nearly a thousand laborers were kept constantly at work digging drainage ditches, cutting grass, burning brush, hauling garbage, pouring or spraying oil on streams and swamps.
But to anyone who bothered to study the records at the back of the report it was at once apparent that the success of the health crusade was really quite relative. It depended on which segment of the work force one was talking about. The white worker and his family were indeed faring extremely well; otherwise, for the vast black majority, the picture was alarming.
For the first ten months of 1906 the actual death rate among white employees was seventeen per thousand. But among the black West Indians it was fifty-nine per thousand! Black laborers, those understood to be so ideally suited to withstand the poisonous climate, were dying three times as fast as the white workers. If Panama was no longer a white man’s graveyard, it was little less deadly than it had ever been for the black man. And since the black workers outnumbered the white workers by three to one, the disparity in the numbers of fatalities among the black workers was even more shocking.
In the previous ten months a total of thirty-four Americans had died, whereas the toll among men and women from Barbados alone was 362, ten times greater; 197 Jamaicans had died, 68 from Martinique, 29 from St. Lucia, 27 from Grenada.
The causes of death as listed–among all workers, irrespective of color–included everything from railroad accidents to alcoholism to dysentery, suicide, syphilis, and tuberculosis. The chief killer among black people, however, and therefore the most fatal disease on the Isthmus at the moment, was pneumonia. Since the start of the year 390 employees had died of pneumonia. of those, 375 were black. In October alone, as Roosevelt had been informed, 86 workers had died of pneumonia.
Malaria, the second worst killer, had taken 186 lives, all but 12 of whom were West Indian Negroes.
The problem was that much of the labor force was particularly vulnerable to viral pneumonia. On Barbados the disease was unknown. And since so many black workers lived where they pleased and as they pleased, often in the jungle, often ignorant of the simplest rules of hygiene, nearly always without the benefit of wire screening, the chances of their contracting almost anything, and malaria in particular, were extremely high.
The ditch-digging, brush-burning, swamp-draining activities carried on by the Anopheles brigades, as they were known, had been highly effective within specified areas. Those earlier studies that had shown the Anopheles mosquitoes to be susceptible to strong sunshine and wind had produced a calculated program to create as much unshaded, unprotected clear space, as little shade or shelter for the insect, as possible. And thus the new towns along the line stood on open ground, everything neatly clipped and trimmed. Anopheles mosquitoes were rarely seen in the immediate vicinity any longer. Roosevelt noted “the extraordinary absence of mosquitoes.” He and his party had seen exactly one in three days and it was “not of the dangerous species.”
But by no means had every swamp been drained, every breeding ground destroyed. A very large swamp at Miraflores, for example, was especially prolific; the usual catch in a mosquito trap overnight there was about a thousand. The jungle was never much more than a stone’s throw from any point along the line and in the jungle the Anopheles were as plentiful as always.
Malaria would continue to take more lives, as William Gorgas allowed in his own reports, and the “amount of incapacity” caused by the disease was, as he said, very much greater than that due to all other diseases combined.
Nearly all of the patients Roosevelt saw in the hospitals at Panama had been black men, as he acknowl
edged. And privately he had been appalled by some of the things he had seen, as we know from his correspondence with Shonts. “The least satisfactory feature of the entire work to my mind was the arrangement for feeding the negroes,” he wrote as soon as he reached Washington. “Those cooking sheds with their muddy floors and with the unclean pot which each man had in which he cooked everything, are certainly not what they should be. . . . Moreover, the very large sick rates among the negroes, compared with the whites, seems to me to show that a resolute effort should be made to teach the negro some of the principles of personal hygiene . . .” Could not something be done to provide better housing, better health for these workers? he asked.
Overall, the trip had made him more exuberant than ever on the subject of the canal. Of its ultimate success, he was as “convinced as one can be of any enterprise that is human.” His faith in Stevens was implicit throughout the message to Congress, as no one appreciated more than Stevens, who called it an “unqualified endorsement” of his conduct of affairs.
The executive order had been signed at a meeting in the old de Lesseps’ Palace at Cristobal on November 17, Roosevelt’s last day on the Isthmus. Stevens’ authority, therefore, was now firmly fixed.
So it was both puzzling and extremely annoying to Roosevelt when, at the very moment he released his message, Stevens began making trouble. In Washington for a brief visit in December, Stevens was strangely irritable and caustic. He seemed inexplicably resentful of Gorgas and talked of having Gorgas fired. Roosevelt found it “well-nigh impossible to get on with him.”
What went sour for Stevens is a mystery that Stevens chose never to explain. With the return of the dry season, the work was rolling ahead as never before. Excavation in Culebra Cut exceeded 500,000 cubic yards in January, more than double the best monthly record of the French. In February the figure was more than 600,000 cubic yards and Stevens’ own popularity reached a new high.
In any event, the crisis followed Shonts’s resignation on January 22. Shonts was leaving to head the Interborough Rapid Transit Company in New York City, a decision Roosevelt and Stevens knew of in advance and that Roosevelt accepted with none of the fireworks that had attended the Wallace incident. Stevens was formally apprised of the news two days later in a letter from I.C.C. Secretary Joseph Bucklin Bishop.
Then on January 30, at Culebra, Stevens sent a letter to Roosevelt that reached the White House on February 12.
It was six pages in length and as devoid of cant or circumlocution as all his correspondence. It also revealed a very different man from the John Stevens of the previous year, an exhausted and embittered man. He complained of “enemies in the rear” and of the discomforts of being “continually subject to attack by a lot of people . . . that I would not wipe my boots on in the United States.” While some “wise lawmakers” might think his salary excessive, he wanted it known that by staying on at Panama he was depriving himself of not less than $100,000 a year. His home life was disrupted; he was separated from his family much of the year. And at his age he had little enough time left “to enjoy the pleasures and comforts of a civilized life.”
He wrote of the tremendous responsibility and strain put upon the man in his position, saying he doubted that he could bear up under them for another eight years. Technical problems were not the issue; it was “the immense amount of detail” one had to keep constantly in mind.
If there was to be glory attached to his role, he was uninterested. Nor in the final analysis did he see any special romance or meaning in the canal itself:
The “honor” which is continually being held up as an incentive for being connected with this work, appeals to me but slightly. To me the canal is only a big ditch, and its great utility when completed, has never been so apparent to me, as it seems to be to others. Possibly I lack imagination. The work itself . . . on the whole, I do not like. . . . There has never been a day since my connection with this enterprise that I could not have gone back to the United States and occupied positions that to me, were far more satisfactory. Some of them, I would prefer to hold, if you will pardon my candor, than the Presidency of the United States.
This was the passage that settled his fate. The letter was not a formal resignation. He never said specifically that he wanted out, only that he was not “anxious to continue in service.” He wanted a rest, and having assured Roosevelt of his high personal regard for him, he asked for his “calm and dispassionate” consideration of the matter.
A reporter who talked to someone who was with Roosevelt at the time Roosevelt received the letter wrote, “To say that the President was amazed at the tone and character of the communication is to describe the feelings mildly.” The letter was sent immediately to Taft with a covering note: “Stevens must get out at once.” Even if Stevens were to change his mind, it would make no difference “in view of the tone of his letter.”
After a brief meeting with Taft, Roosevelt cabled Stevens that his resignation was accepted.
Taft again told Roosevelt that Major Goethals (who was about to become Lieutenant Colonel Goethals) was the best-equipped man for the job, so on the night of February 18 Goethals was summoned to the White House. The change, however, was kept secret until the twenty-sixth, when, with the announcement, Roosevelt issued his widely quoted declaration–a remark made as much for the benefit of the work force on the Isthmus as for the general public–that he would put the canal in the charge of “men who will stay on the job until I get tired of having them there, or till I say they may abandon it. I shall turn it over to the Army.”
But in the same breath, according to the New York Tribune, he also remarked, “Then if the man in charge suffers from an enlarged cranium or his nerves go to the bad, I can order him north for his health and fill his place without confusion.”
Privately Roosevelt was “utterly at sea” over Stevens’ behavior. When a friend who was visiting the Isthmus wrote in confidence that Stevens suffered from insomnia, Roosevelt seemed much relieved. “If he were a drinking man or one addicted to the use of drugs, the answer would be simple,” he wrote in reply. “As it is, I am inclined to think that it must have been insomnia or something of the kind, due to his tropical surroundings . . .” Then he added: “He has done admirably.”
On the Isthmus the announcement had a shattering effect. The Star & Herald, standing firmly behind Stevens, declared the top-heavy craniums were all in Washington and that the French must be laughing up their sleeves.
When Stevens’ own men appealed to him for some word of explanation, he answered, “Don’t talk, dig.”
As time passed, numerous theories were put forth. It was said that he had found the Gatun Dam plans to be unsound; that he was angry over a contract that had been agreed to in Washington without his say; that his wife did not like the looks of the contractor; that he had been offered another job; that he was crazy. One editor, exasperated by the absurdity of all that was appearing in print, declared that in fact the problem of green mold on his books was what finally broke the spirit of John Stevens.
The most common and in retrospect the most plausible explanation was that he was overworked and verging on a breakdown, which is what his own letter plainly implied. It was the explanation Taft gave to Congress in the course of later testimony and the conclusion Goethals would reach once he got to the Isthmus. “. . . I think he has broken down with the responsibilities and an evident desire to look after too many details himself,” Goethals wrote privately.
“He was not a quitter,” Frank Maltby would insist. “He could not have been driven off the canal with a club, if it was a question of fighting for what he thought was the right thing. . . . My own personal opinion . . . is that he disliked notoriety very much.”
A more intriguing but wholly unsubstantiated theory was offered some years later by Woodrow Wilson’s Secretary of the Navy, Josephus Daniels. According to Daniels, Stevens had inadvertently come upon certain incriminating information concerning the activities of William Nelson Cromw
ell at the time of the sale of the Compagnie Nouvelle and its franchises. It was information, Daniels wrote, that if revealed “would blow up the Republican Party and disclose the most scandalous piece of corruption in the history of the country.”
An explanation that carried great weight on the Isthmus was that Stevens had been merely letting off steam in his letter to Roosevelt and he was as startled as anyone by the reaction it produced. A canal employee who claimed to have been with Stevens in his office when the letter was written said Stevens handed him a carbon, remarking jovially, “I’ve just been easing my mind to T.R. It’s a hot one, isn’t it?” When the man told Stevens it was a letter of resignation, Stevens laughed and said Roosevelt would know perfectly well that he did not mean to quit. But if Stevens truly understood Roosevelt, as he claimed, it is inconceivable that he could so misjudge the inevitable effect of belittling remarks concerning the canal, not to mention the decidedly unpleasant edge to his remark about the Presidency.
Stevens had thrived on change his whole career. He left Hill twice because he needed a change. He had accepted the Philippines assignment in 1905 because he was worn out and needed a change. Change, he was to write in an appeal to young men to enter engineering, was for him among the prime attractions of the profession. So possibly a resignation was bound to come sooner or later.
He himself was to assert that all alleged reasons for his sudden departure were alike in one respect: they were all false. “The reasons for the resignation were purely personal . . .” he wrote. “I have never declared these reasons, and probably never will. . . .” He never did.
His work had been outstanding. His railroad scheme in Culebra Cut was, according to George Goethals, beyond the competence of any Army engineer of the day. Others would contend–indeed argue passionately–that in fact it was Stevens who should go down in history as the builder of the canal. Never a modest man, Stevens had his own view about this. He had handed over to the Army engineers, he later said, a “well-planned and well-built machine,” which apart perhaps from a squeak or two would run perfectly. His replacement (Goethals) merely “turned the crank,” he wrote. “The hardest problems were solved, the Rubicon was crossed, the canal was being built. . . . Only gross mismanagement or a failure to supply the necessary funds, could militate against its triumphant accomplishment.”
David McCullough Library E-book Box Set Page 387