The material taken from Culebra Cut alone, exclaimed one writer toward the completion of the work, would make a pyramid topping the Woolworth Building by 100 feet (the Woolworth, at 792 feet, was then the world’s tallest building), while the total spoil excavated in the Canal Zone would form a pyramid 4,200 feet high, or more than seven times the height of the Washington Monument.
If all the material from the canal were placed in one solid shaft with a base the dimension of a city block, it would tower nearly 100,000 feet–nineteen miles–in the air.
But who could imagine such things? Or how many could also take into account the smothering heat of Panama, the rains, the sucking mire of Culebra, none of which was less troublesome or demoralizing than in times past. For however radically systems or equipment were improved upon, however smoothly organized the labor army became, the overriding problem remained Panama itself–the climate, the land, the distance from all sources of supply. At the bottom of Culebra Cut at midday the temperature was seldom less than 100 degrees, more often it was 120 to 130 degrees. As Theodore Shonts once remarked, to have built the same canal in a developed country and a temperate climate would have posed no special difficulties.
More manageable–and more impressive–were the results of, say, a month’s or even a day’s work in Culebra Cut, or the relative effectiveness of the whole earth-digging, earth-moving system as compared to what the French had achieved at Suez or at Panama, these being the only prior efforts that were really analogous. When the work under Goethals was at its height, the United States was excavating at Panama the equivalent of a Suez Canal every three years. The 37,000,000 cubic yards of earth and rock removed in the one year of 1908 was nearly half as much as two successive French companies had succeeded in digging at Panama in a total of nearly seventeen years, and more than all that portion of excavation by the French that was useful to the present plan.
In any one day there were fifty to sixty steam shovels at work in the Cut, and with the dirt trains running in and out virtually without pause, the efficiency of each shovel was more than double what it had been. Along the entire line about five hundred trainloads a day were being hauled to the dumps. A carload of spoil was being removed every few seconds and the average daily total was considerably more than what the French had been digging in a month’s time the year John Wallace arrived on the scene. But all prior effort, American as well as French, was put in the shadows.
Perhaps as extraordinary as anything that can be said is that the work could not have been done any faster or more efficiently in our own day, despite all technological and mechanical advances in the time since, the reason being that no present system could possibly carry the spoil away any faster or more efficiently than the system employed. No motor trucks were used in the digging of the canal; everything ran on rails. And because of the mud and rain, no other method would have worked half so well.
But the canal builders were not merely achieving what others had failed at; they were doing more, much more, than they or anyone had foreseen, for every prior estimate of the size of the task had been woefully inaccurate. The American engineers had been no less naive in their reckoning of the total mass to be removed than had the French. On November 13, 1904, the day after the first Bucyrus shovel began digging in Culebra Cut there had been a small landslide which put that shovel out of commission for several days. Presently, in Stevens’ time, there had been further slides on the order of what the French had experienced. But no one had the remotest conception of what was to occur during the Goethals years. Rather, it was felt that the whole issue of slides had been overemphasized. Professor Burr, of Roosevelt’s international advisory board, had testified that there really need be no concern: “All that is necessary to remedy such a condition is simply to excavate the clay or to drain it to keep the water out. It is not a new problem. It is no formidable feature of the work.”
The advisory board in its 1906 study–that is, in the minority report for a lock canal–had placed the total volume of excavation still to be accomplished at not quite 54,000,000 cubic yards. But by 1908 that estimate had to be revised to about 78,000,000 cubic yards. In 1910 it was put at 84,000,000; in 1911, at 89,000,000. By 1913 the estimate had reached 100,000,000 cubic yards, or nearly equal to the figure initially given by the advisory board for a canal at sea level
As in the French time, the more digging that went on, the more digging there was to be done.
For the man who now bore the burden of responsibility for all that occurred, the initial hurdle had been primarily personal and as difficult as anything in his experience.
Goethals’ reception upon arrival had been pointedly cool. Plainly, neither he nor the Army was wanted by the rank and file of Americans on the job and everyone seemed eager to make a special point of Stevens’ tremendous popularity. Thousands of signatures had been gathered for a petition urging Stevens to withdraw his resignation and stay. No one, it seemed, had anything but the strongest praise for him and all he had done. Never in his career, Goethals remarked, had he seen so much affection displayed for one man.
Stevens and Dr. Gorgas were at the pier the morning Goethals and Major Gaillard landed. No real reception had been arranged; nothing had even been done about a place for Goethals or Gaillard to stay. Stevens still occupied the official residence of the chief engineer, a new six-bedroom house at Culebra that was to be Goethals’ once Stevens departed, but since Stevens “didn’t seem inclined to take us into his house” (as Goethals wrote to his son George), the two officers had moved in with Gorgas at Ancon, where there was little privacy, not even a desk at which Goethals could work. His letters to his family those first weeks were written on his lap as he sat in a straight-backed chair in one of the bedrooms.
To add to the spirit of gloom, the Star & Herald openly deplored the prospect of military rule. Probably no workers would have to wear uniforms, the paper presumed, but neither should anyone be surprised if he had to answer roll call in the morning or salute his new superiors.
That the railroad men around Stevens had scant regard for Army engineers seemed also abundantly plain to Goethals. “Army engineers, as a rule, were said to be, from their very training dictatorial and many of them martinets,” he would write, “and it was predicted that if they . . . were placed in charge of actual construction the canal project was doomed to failure.” The Army men had only technical training, it was said; they had never “made a success as executive heads of great enterprises.”
His own private estimate of the state of the work was entirely favorable. The difference between what he saw now and what he had seen in 1905, during the visit with Taft, was extraordinary. As he wrote to his son, “Mr. Stevens has done an amount of work for which he will never get any credit, or, if he gets any, will not get enough. . . .”
Several days passed before he was granted a more or less official welcome–a Saturday-night “smoker” given as much to entertain a party of visiting congressmen. John Stevens declined to attend and Goethals, at the head table, sat listening without expression as the toastmaster extolled Stevens at length and made several cutting remarks about the military. It was an evening he would never forget. With each mention of Stevens’ name there was a resounding cheer, while the few obligatory references to Stevens’ successor were met with silence. Goethals was furious at what he regarded as “slurs” on the Army, but kept still until it was his turn. He had come to the affair not in uniform but in a white civilian suit. In fact, he had brought no uniforms to the Isthmus and never in the years to come would he be seen in one.
He was, he told the assembled guests, as appreciative as they of the work Stevens had accomplished and he had no intention of instigating a military regimen. “I am no longer a commander in the United States Army. I now consider that I am commanding the Army of Panama, and that the enemy we are going to combat is the Culebra Cut and the locks and dams at both ends of the Canal, and any man here on the work who does his duty will never have any cause to complain
of militarism.”
He took over from Stevens officially at midnight, March 31, 1907, and a week later Stevens sailed for home. One of the largest crowds ever seen on the Isthmus jammed the pier at Cristobal to see him off, everyone cheering, waving, and singing “Auld Lang Syne.” Stevens was noticeably amazed and touched by the outpouring of affection. This time it was Goethals’ turn not to attend.
Having none of Stevens’ colorful mannerisms or easy way with people, Goethals impressed many at first as abrupt and arbitrary, a cold fish. The word “goethals” in Flemish, it was soon being said, meant “stiff neck.”
He hated to have his picture taken. He found the visiting congressmen rude, tiresome, terribly time-consuming. Callers were “an awful nuisance.” It was expected that he appear at every dance and social function at the Tivoli or the Culebra Club. He would “brace up” and go “out of a sense of duty” and spend the evening sitting on a porch listening to the music, waiting only for the time when he could politely withdraw.
Stevens’ former secretary, having agreed to stay and help with the transition, suddenly resigned. William Bierd, the railroad boss, made a surprise announcement that he was retiring because of his health, but then Goethals learned that Bierd was taking a job with Stevens on the New Haven Railroad. Frank Maltby decided no civilian engineer had a future any longer at Panama and so he too quit. Then the steam-shovel engineers, sensing the time was at last right for a show of strength, threatened to strike unless their demands were met. Goethals refused and they walked off the job. It was the first serious strike since the work had begun. Of sixty-eight shovels, only thirteen were still in operation. He recruited new crews.
Even the newly arrived Major Sibert was proving “cantankerous and hard to hold” in meetings. Mrs. Sibert, Goethals learned, was “disgusted” with the Panama weather.
From surviving letters written to his son George, then in his senior year at the Military Academy, it is apparent that he was also extremely lonely. Mrs. Goethals was still in Washington “doing society at a great rate”; another, younger son, Thomas, was at Harvard. He felt very out of touch, he wrote; there was not time even to read the paper. His sole source of amusement was the French butler, Benoit, who still spoke practically no English but went with the official residence at Culebra, Goethals being his seventh chief engineer.
The day began at first light. At 6:30, with Benoit standing stiffly in attendance, “the Colonel” had his breakfast–one peeled native orange stuck on the end of a fork, two eggs, bacon, one cup of coffee. By seven he had walked down to Culebra Station to catch either the No. 2, northbound, at 7:10, or the No. 3, southbound, at 7:19. The morning was spent inspecting the line. He carried a black umbrella and customarily wore white. Invariably he looked spotless; invariably he was smoking a cigarette.
Back at the house again, immediately upon finishing a light lunch, he would rest for half an hour, then walk to his large, square corner office on the first floor at the Administration Building. There he would receive people until dinner at seven. In the evening, unless otherwise engaged, he would return to the office to concentrate on his paper work until about ten.
To most observers he seemed wholly oblivious of his surroundings, intent only on his work. One employee, relaxing on his own porch one particularly beautiful moonlit evening, witnessed the following scene:
“There were only a few lights here and there in the Administration Building. One by one they went out, all except that in the old man’s office. It was getting on toward ten when his window went dark. . . . A full moon, as big as a dining-room table, was hanging down about a foot and a half above the flagstaff–a gorgeous night. The old man came out and walked across the grass to his house. He didn’t stop to look up at the moon; he just pegged along, his head a little forward, still thinking. And he hadn’t been in his own house ten minutes before all the lights were out there. He’d turned in, getting ready to catch that early train. . . .” To his elder son, Goethals wrote that he was better off occupied, since there was nothing else to do. He confessed to working so hard that he would often end the day in a kind of daze. He was not the “clean-desk” man Stevens had been. His “IN” and “OUT” baskets were always jammed. Papers were piled wherever there was room on his desk–correspondence, folded maps, specifications, plans, half a dozen black notebooks, reports in heavy dark-blue bindings. The bit of clear desk surface he managed to maintain directly in front of him was soon peppered with cigarette burns.
He liked things on paper. If during his morning excursions along the line a department head or engineer urged some new approach or improvement, the inevitable response was “Write it down.”
It was not in him to court popularity. He wanted loyalty first, not to him but to the work, that above all. He abhorred waste and inefficiency and he was determined to weed out incompetents. Nor was there ever to be any doubt as to his own authority. “What the Colonel said he meant,” a steam-shovel engineer remembered. “What he asked for he got. It didn’t take us long to find that out.” Requests or directives from his office were not to be regarded as subjects for discussion. When the head of the Commissary Department, a popular and influential figure, informed Goethals that he would resign if Goethals persisted in certain changes in the purchasing procedure, Goethals at once informed him that his resignation was accepted and refused to listen when he came to retract the threat. “It will help bring the outfit into line,” Goethals noted privately. “I can stand it if they can.” He put Lieutenant Wood in as a replacement. “. . . I just put it up to him to make good . . .” he wrote.
“Executive ability,” he observed on another occasion, “is nothing more or less than letting the other fellow do the work for you.” But to some he gave every appearance of wishing only to dominate everything himself. Marie Gorgas, in particular, found him “grim, self-sufficing.” He was much too abrupt for her liking. “His conversation and his manners, like his acts, had no finesse and no spirit of accommodation.” She grew to dislike him heartily. Even Robert Wood, who admired his “iron will and terrific energy,” found him “stern and unbending–you might say a typical Prussian. . . . I was his assistant for seven years,” Wood recalled long afterward, “and I might say that everything in my life since has seemed comparatively easy.”
But if the manner was occasionally severe, the standards demanding, he was invariably fair and gave to the job a dignity it had not had before. “I never knew him to be small about anything,” recalled an electrical engineer named Richard Whitehead, who joined the force that same summer of 1907. Goethals knew how to pick men. He knew how to instill determination, to get people to want to measure up. He was not loved, not then or later, but he was impressive. And by late summer he had “the outfit in line.”
“Another week of observation has confirmed my view . . . that the discontent and uneasiness which followed the departure of Stevens have nearly passed away . . .” wrote Joseph Bucklin Bishop to Theodore Roosevelt in mid-August. Undersized and grouchy-looking, with a little, pointed gray beard and a shiny bald head, Bishop was another new addition. He had been transferred from the Washington office on Roosevelt’s orders and was to be at Goethals’ side from then on, as secretary of the commission, ghost writer, policy adviser, alter ego. And not incidentally he was to feed confidential reports to the White House on how things were going.
Goethals, reported Bishop, was “worn and tired and says that he has had a veritable ‘hell of a time,’ but I believe he has won out. When I told him so, he said, ‘Well, I don’t know.’ ”
Mrs. Goethals had arrived and departed meantime. So his marriage, characterized years afterward by members of the family as “difficult,” became still another topic for local speculation as the lights in his office burned on into the night.
At Bishop’s suggestion, Goethals started a weekly newspaper, the Canal Record, the first such publication since de Lesseps’ Bulletin du Canal Inter océanique and very similar in format. Goethals insisted that the paper
be neither a rehash of news from the United States nor a means for trumpeting the reputation of anyone on the canal commission. Indeed, quite unlike the de Lesseps’ paper, its editorial policy specifically forbade praise of any official. The objective was to provide the American force–as well as Congress–with an accurate, up-to-date picture of the progress being made, something hitherto unavailable in any form, as well as reports on social life within the Zone, ship sailings, sports, any activities “thought to be of general interest.”
With Bishop as editor, the first edition appeared September 4, 1907. The style was direct and factual and so it would remain, except for occasional letters from employees. Still it was an amazing morale builder. It did for its readers much what Stars and Stripes would do for the A.E.F. in France. It brought the strung-out settlements in closer touch, made the Zone more of a community. In addition, it had an almost instant effect on productivity.
Bishop began publishing weekly excavation statistics for individual steam shovels and dredges, and at once a fierce rivalry resulted, the gain in output becoming apparent almost immediately. “It wasn’t so hard before they began printing the Canal Record” a steam-shovel man explained to a writer for The Saturday Evening Post. “We were going along, doing what we thought was a fair day’s work . . . [but then] away we went like a pack of idiots trying to get records for ourselves.”
David McCullough Library E-book Box Set Page 389