But this was manifestly unfair. Closer to the truth was the picture he had implied in the letter to Roosevelt of an immense, complex task, a man-killing responsibility, extending for years to come. Goethals’ later tributes to Stevens, that Stevens was one of the greatest engineers who ever lived, that the canal was Stevens’ monument, were professional compliments of the highest order offered in all sincerity. But such remarks also say as much about Goethals as they do about Stevens.
Stevens’ railroad system would remain the fundamental operating procedure in the Cut until the excavation was finished. But excavation was only beginning in early 1907 and Stevens had not been confronted by major landslides. Surveys were still incomplete. The relocation of the Panama Railroad had not yet begun. The size of the locks had still to be determined. All the complex details of the locks had yet to be designed. Indeed, all the great construction work of the canal had still to begin–the building of Gatun Dam, the building of the locks–tasks of unprecedented magnitude requiring technical expertise that Stevens really did not possess.
Stevens’ primary tasks–the creation of a well-fed, well-housed, well-equipped, well-organized work force, the conception of a plan of attack–were over by 1907. As a railroad engineer he was inexperienced in the large-scale use of concrete; he knew very little about hydraulics; and these were the specialties of the Army engineers.
Stevens’ two-fisted, independent spirit had been exactly what was needed. The critical situation in 1905 had demanded, as he later said, “a kind of politic ‘roughneck,’ who did not possess too deep a veneration for the vagaries of constituted authority.” But ultimately the role called for a larger sense of mission than that.
For a long time now Roosevelt had spoken of building the canal as though it were a mighty battle in which the national honor was at stake, much as Ferdinand de Lesseps had so often spoken. Panama was a tumultuous assault for Progress, the only assault this most bellicose-sounding of American Presidents was ever to launch and lead. At the end of his last day at Cristobal, in an off-the-cuff speech to several hundred Americans, including John Stevens, he had said the canal was a larger, more important endeavor than anyone could as yet realize, and that by bringing it to successful completion they would stand like one of the famous armies of history. It was to be a long, arduous, uphill struggle, he said, one not unlike that of their fathers’ in the Civil War.(His own two-month Cuban war would never have served as an example.)
When your fathers were in the fighting, they thought a good deal of the fact that the blanket was too heavy by noon and not quite heavy enough by night, that the pork was not as good as it might be . . . and that they were not always satisfied with the way in which the regiments were led. . . . But when the war was done–when they came home, when they looked at what had been accomplished, all those things sank into insignificance, and the great fact remained that they had played their part like men among men; that they had borne themselves so that when people asked what they had done of worth in those great years all they had to say was that they had served decently and faithfully in the great armies. . . . I cannot overstate the intensity of the feeling I have . . . I feel that to each of you has come an opportunity such as is vouchsafed to but few in each generation. . . . Each man must have in him the feeling that, besides getting what he is rightfully entitled to for his work, that aside and above that must come the feeling of triumph at being associated in the work itself, must come the appreciation of what a tremendous work it is, of what a splendid opportunity is offered to any man who takes part in it.
By Roosevelt’s lights, Stevens had failed in the most profound and fundamental sense, scarcely less than Wallace had. To Roosevelt the triumph was in the task itself, in taking the dare; the test was in the capacity to keep “pegging away,” as he often stressed to his sons. Stevens was not merely giving up; Stevens saw it only as a “job”; there was no commitment of heart, not the slightest apparent sense of duty. To Roosevelt, Stevens was a commander abandoning his army.
He appears to have harbored no bitterness toward Stevens. (“You have done excellent work . . . and I am sorry to lose you, “he wrote a few days after receiving Stevens’ letter.) It was merely that if Stevens was the sort of man who looked upon the task as something to take or leave at will, then he was someone Roosevelt could quite readily do without and put from mind. In Roosevelt’s long essay On the canal in his Autobiography, there would be no mention of John Stevens.
III
With the appointment of George Washington Goethals, Roosevelt’s worries over the work at Panama came to an end. The canal would now be the “one-man proposition” John Stevens had called for, only the one man was to be an entirely different sort from Stevens.
At forty-eight Goethals was the same age as Roosevelt and of similar ancestry. His Flemish father and mother had arrived in New York with the great wave of immigration in 1848. The second of three children, he had been born in Brooklyn on June 29, 1858, and later, when he was eleven, moved with his family to a house on Avenue D in Manhattan, a block from the East River. But his family had been poor and struggling and unlike Roosevelt he had had to make his way “exclusively by his own exertions.” Starting at age fourteen he had worked his way through City College in New York, then went on to West Point, where he was elected president of his class and finished second in his class in 1880, the same year Roosevelt was graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard.
Goethals’ career in the Corps of Engineers had been exemplary. In the Department of the Columbia in 1884, William Tecumseh Sherman had singled him out as the finest young officer in his command and predicted a “brilliant future.” He had worked on “improvements” in the Ohio River valley (1884–1885); as an instructor of civil and military engineering at West Point (1885–1889); on improvements on the Cumberland and Tennessee rivers and particularly on the Muscle Shoals Canal (1889–1894), where he designed and built a lock with the record lift of twenty-six feet; as assistant to the Chief of Engineers (1894–1898); and harbor works from Block Island to Nantucket (1900–1903). In 1903, the year of Elihu Root’s reorganization of the Army, he had been picked to serve on the new General Staff, a corps of forty-four officers who were relieved of all duties in order to assist the new Chief of Staff. And it was thus, as a specialist in coastal defenses, that he had come to Taft’s attention.
He was a model officer, but a soldier like many in the Corps of Engineers who had never fought in a war, never fired a shot except on a rifle range, and who seems in fact to have had little affection for conventional “soldiering.” Once on a parade ground in Panama, while watching some troops pass in review on a broiling-hot drill field, he would mutter to a civilian companion, “What a hell of a life.”
Cool in manner, capable, very correct, he was a man of natural dignity and rigorously high, demanding standards. He had had no experience with notoriety, nor apparently any craving for it. And it would be hard to imagine him losing himself in Huckleberry Finn or anything other than his work. Asked years later how “the Colonel” had amused himself, a member of the family would respond, “He did not amuse himself.”
A reporter wrote that “above everything he looks alert and fit.” Six feet tall, he was in fine physical trim. The salient features were his intent, violet-blue eyes–“rather savage eyes,” Alice Roosevelt Long-worth would recall–and his close-cut, silvery hair, which he parted in the middle and washed daily. If a bit stiff socially, he was never pompous, largely because he was almost incapable of talking about himself. To pretty young women he could be especially gracious, in a rather fatherly fashion, and they considered him extremely attractive.
He was also a chain smoker and he detested fat people–with the one exception of William Howard Taft. Secretary Taft, Goethals was once heard to remark, was the only clean fat man he had ever known.
On the night that he was first summoned to the White House, Goethals and his wife had been entertaining an old friend, Colonel Gustav Fieberger, head of the enginee
ring department at West Point, at their home on S Street. A messenger arrived with a note from William Loeb, Roosevelt’s secretary, asking if Goethals would be free to come by the first thing in the morning. Goethals had immediately telephoned Loeb, who told him not to wait until morning but to come over that night at twenty minutes after ten. So Goethals had excused himself from his guest, changed into dress uniform, and left the house having no idea whatever as to why he was being sent for. Nor had he ever met Theodore Roosevelt.
“He entered at once upon the subject of the Canal,” Goethals would recall. The canal commission was again to be reorganized and for the final time. Goethals was to be both chairman and chief engineer. Jackson Smith and Dr. Gorgas were to be members of the commission, along with four new men: a former senator from Kentucky named Joseph C. S. Blackburn, Rear Admiral Harry Harwood Rousseau, and Major David Du Bose Gaillard and Major William Sibert, both of the Corps of Engineers. Gaillard was the only one on the list with whom Goethals was personally acquainted–Gaillard, too, had been a member of the first General Staff–but he knew Sibert and Rousseau by reputation and agreed to their appointments.
The critical decision, however, concerned Goethals. “He [Roosevelt] expressed regret that the law required the work to be placed in charge of a commission or executive body of seven men,” Goethals remembered, “but . . . his various efforts to work under the law . . . were so unsuccessful that he resolved to assume powers which the law did not give him but which it did not forbid him to exercise.”
So while all members of the commission were to be on the Isthmus henceforth, Goethals was to wield supreme authority, an authority that would be backed by another new executive order the following year. Goethals was to be a virtual dictator–“Czar of the Zone”–responsible only to the Secretary of war and the President. In the words of his biographer, Goethals at once became one of the world’s- absolute despots, who “could command the removal of a mountain from the landscape, or of a man from his dominions, or of a salt-cellar from that man’s table.”
This was a long way from the spirit of the Spooner Act, but by such means only, Roosevelt insisted, could the task ever be accomplished, a view with which Goethals concurred.
A common misconception later was that the canal was built by the Army, that it was the creation of the Corps of Engineers. It was not. Goethals and the other engineering officers were detached from the Army to serve in Panama. They did not report to the Chief of the Corps of Engineers; they, like the civilian engineers, reported to the canal commission–which was Goethals–and Goethals reported to Taft, exactly as Stevens had according to the previous reorganization.
The critical difference now was that an Army man could not and would not quit. For a West Point graduate to abandon his appointed task in the face of adversity or personal discomfort was all but inconceivable.
In the next several days, Blackburn, Rousseau, Gaillard, and Sibert appeared at the White House one by one to meet with the President and Goethals in the President’s office. The same scene was repeated in each instance. Having introduced Goethals, Roosevelt would ask the man to be seated, then would inform him that he was to be appointed to the commission. “It will be a position of ample remuneration and much honor,” Roosevelt said. “In appointing you I have only one qualification to make. Colonel Goethals here is to be chairman. He is to have complete authority. If at any time you do not agree with his policies, do not bother to tell me about it–your disagreement with him will constitute your resignation.”
Goethals’ salary, Roosevelt had decided, would be $15,000 a year, which was substantially more than he had been earning, but only half what Stevens had been paid.
A week or so after his new assignment had been announced in the papers, Goethals wrote in reply to the congratulations of a friend, “It’s a case of just plain straight duty. I am ordered down–there was no alternative.”
To a whole generation of Americans it was Theodore Roosevelt who built the Panama Canal. It was quite simply his personal creation. Yet the Panama Canal was built under three American Presidents, not one–Roosevelt, Taft, and Wilson–and in fact, of the three, it was really Taft who gave the project the most time and personal attention. Taft made five trips to Panama as Secretary of war and he went twice again during the time he was President. It was Taft who fired Wallace and hired John Stevens, Taft who first spotted Goethals. When Taft replaced Roosevelt in the White House in 1909, the canal was only about half finished.
None of this made much difference, however. Nor ought there ever be any question as to the legitimacy of the Roosevelt stamp on the canal. His own emphatic position was that it would never have been built but for him and it was a position no one tried to dispute. To Goethals, “The real builder of the Panama Canal was Theodore Roosevelt.” It could not have been more Roosevelt’s triumph, Goethals wrote, “if he had personally lifted every shovelful of earth in its construction. . . . “
The work had not simply begun anew while Roosevelt held office; his leadership had been decisive–in the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty, the choice of the Panama route, the creation of an independent Panama, the defense and support of William Gorgas, the choice of a lock-and-lake plan.
Even with his Panama visit, however brief, he achieved at a stroke something that had never been done before: he made the canal a popular success.
And finally, he had entrusted command of the work to one extremely well-chosen man. “I believe in a strong executive,” he once wrote to a correspondent, “I believe in power. . . .”
NATIONAL ARCHIVES
High tea at Culebra (Colonel and Mrs. David D. Gaillard)
Typical housing at Ancon for upper-echelon employees
FROM THE MAKERS OF THE PANAMA CANAL, 1911
NATIONAL ARCHIVES
Typical dining room in middle-echelon dwelling
Momentary pause at a Saturday-night dance at the Tivoli Hotel
BOTH PHOTOS:
COLLECTION OF J. W. D. COLLINS
Bathers en route to Toro Point
BOTH PHOTOS: PANAMA CANAL COMPANY
Bachelor quarters (bottle on the dresser is bay rum)
Culebra Station as it looked in 1911
FROM THE MAKERS OF THE PANAMA CANAL, 1911
Billiard room at one of the Y.M.C.A. clubhouses. Dues were $10 a year.
PANAMA CANAL COMPANY
The steamer Ancon arriving at Cristobal from Barbados with 1,500 laborers
BOTH PHOTOS: NATIONAL ARCHIVES
West Indian wedding party
Typical housing for West Indian laborers
COLLECTION OF D. P. GAILLARD
President and Mrs. William Howard Taft with Colonel Gaillard at Culebra
PANAMA CANAL COMPANY
Aftermath of a slide in Culebra Cut
“Headquarters” at Mount Hope
Interior of the pay car, which delivered 1,600 pounds of gold, 48,000 pounds of silver coin monthly
ALL PHOTOS: NATIONAL ARCHIVES
Movie still of labor train
The rise of Gatun Locks. Aerial tramway delivers buckets of concrete to steel forms.
PANAMA CANAL COMPANY
Giant bull wheel that opens and shuts a lock gate.
Gate leaves (double gates in foreground, intermediate gates beyond) near completion, 1912.
The Approaches to Gatun Locks by Joseph Pennell
BOTH PHOTOS: PANAMA CANAL COMPANY
Shovel No. 222 and shovel No. 230 meet nose to nose on the bottom of the Cut, May 20, 1913.
A party of tourists views Culebra Cut and the Cucaracha slide early in 1914, after Goethals had filled the Cut with water and continued the work with dredges.
The tug Gatun approaches Gatun Locks for the first trial lockage.
Steamer Ancon starts into Culebra Cut on the official opening transit of the canal, August 15, 1914.
* In an average city in the United States in 1906 the death toll from disease among an equal number of people would have been about thir
ty.
19
The Chief Point of Attack
The chief point of attack was, of course, the Culebra Cut, then, as always, the most formidable obstacle to be fought and overcome. How much more formidable it really was than had been suspected was soon to be revealed.
–JOSEPH BUCKLIN BISHOP
I
For anyone to picture the volume of earth that had to be removed to build the Panama Canal was an all but hopeless proposition. Statistics were broadcast–15,700,000 cubic yards in 1907, an incredible 37,000,-000 cubic yards in 1908–but such figures were really beyond comprehension. What was 1,000,000 cubic yards of dirt? In weight? In volume? In effort?
The illustrative analogies offered by editors and writers were of little help, since they were seldom any less fantastic. The spoil from the canal prism, it was said, would be enough to build a Great Wall of China from San Francisco to New York. If the United States were perfectly flat, the amount of digging required for a canal ten feet deep by fifty-five feet wide from coast to coast would be no greater than what was required at Panama within fifty miles. A train of dirt cars carrying the total excavation at Panama would circle the world four times at the equator. The spoil would be enough to build sixty-three pyramids the size of the Great Pyramid of Cheops. (To help its readers imagine what this might look like, Scientific American commissioned an artist to draw Manhattan with giant pyramids lining the length of Broadway from the Battery to Harlem.)
David McCullough Library E-book Box Set Page 388