To give employees opportunity to air their grievances, Goethals next established his own court of appeal. Every Sunday morning, from about 7:30 until noon, he was at his desk to receive any and all who had what they believed to be a serious complaint or problem. He saw them personally, individually, on the basis of first come, first served, irrespective of rank, nationality, or color. By late 1907 there were thirty-two thousand people on the payroll, about eight thousand more than when he took over. By 1910 there would be nearly forty thou :
sand. Yet once a week, beginning in the fall of 1907, any of these people–employees or dependents–could “see the Colonel” and speak their minds.
The scene was unique in the American experience, unique and memorable in the eyes of all who saw it. Jules Jusserand, the French ambassador, likened it to the court of justice held by Saint Louis beneath the oak at Vincennes. “One sees the Colonel at his best in these Sunday morning hours,” wrote a reporter who had been greatly frustrated by what seemed a congenital inability on Goethals’ part to talk about himself. “You see the immensely varied nature of the things and issues which are his concern. Engineering in the technical sense seems almost the least of them.”
Some advance screening was done. Bishop saw the English-speaking workers, while the Italians, Spaniards, and other Europeans were seen by a multilingual interpreter, Giuseppe Garibaldi, grandson of the Italian liberator. And often these preliminary interviews were enough to resolve the problem–the mere process of free expression gave the needed relief–but if not, Goethals’ door stood open.
On an average Sunday he saw perhaps a hundred people and very few appear to have gone away thinking they had been denied justice. They came to the front of the tall, barnlike Administration Building, entered a broad hallway hung with maps and blueprints and there waited their turn. Their complaints included everything from the serious to the trivial: harsh treatment by a foreman, misunderstandings about pay, failure to get a promotion, dislike of the food or quarters, insufficient furniture. He listened to appeals for special privileges and financial dispensation. One request was for the transfer of a particular steam-shovel engineer to a different division where a particular baseball team needed a pitcher. (The request was granted.) He was given constructive ideas regarding the work and was made party to the private quarrels between husbands and wives or families in adjoining apartments. By all accounts he was a patient listener.
Many complaints could be settled at once with a simple yes or no or by a brief note sent down the line. A serious situation of any complexity was promptly investigated. “He was a combination of father confessor and Day of Judgment,” wrote Bishop. The vast majority who came before him were almost excessively respectful. Rarely would anyone challenge his authority and then to no avail. “If you decide against me, Colonel, I shall appeal,” one man declared. “To whom?” Goethals asked.
Some of the remaining officials from the Stevens regime had expressed vehement disapproval when these Sunday sessions were first announced. Jackson Smith, of the Labor Department, had been especially exercised, since his own policy in past years had been to tell anyone who had a complaint to feel free to leave on the next ship. And this, apart from Smith’s own rude manner, had been considered a perfectly appropriate policy. Stevens had been in full accord. The new approach was in fact wholly unorthodox by the standards of the day. In labor relations Goethals was way in advance of his time, and nothing that he did had so discernible an effect on the morale of the workers or their regard for him: “they were treated like human beings, not like brutes,” Bishop recalled, “and they responded by giving the best service within their power.”
In Goethals’ own estimate, expressed privately many years afterward, it was thus that he won “control of the force,” and control of the force was “the big, attractive thing of the job.”
When another delegation of congressmen, members of the House Appropriations Committee, arrived in November, they were impressed as much by Goethals as by the strides being made, a point of special satisfaction at the White House. “I was present at all the hearings . . .” Bishop wrote to Roosevelt. “Not only did he [Goethals] show that he knew his business thoroughly, had absolute grasp of the work as a whole, but that he had at his tongue’s end more knowledge of details than any of his immediate subordinates.”
Before leaving for Washington the chairman of the delegation, Congressman James A. Tawney, told Goethals privately not to worry about appropriations–he could count on whatever he wanted. The committee reported the situation in Panama to be in “excellent shape.” And as time went on, Goethals’ standing on Capitol Hill was to be a factor of the greatest importance. Money sufficient to do the job correctly was never to become an issue.
“There is only one man who should be heard at Washington on the Canal, and that is Goethals,” Bishop stressed to Roosevelt. “He has absolute knowledge, perfect manners, and can talk. . . . He says I am the man who should be spokesman rather than he, but don’t let him persuade you into such a belief. He is the man at the helm . . .”
Within less than a year after Goethals took charge, several major changes were made in the basic plan of the canal, and with a sweeping reorganization, beginning in early 1908, he installed his own entirely new regime. The widespread impression was that the plan was firm, that this at last was the canal that was to be built, and that these were the men who would build it. The widespread impression was correct.
The changes, each very important, were as follows: –The bottom width of the channel through Culebra Cut was to be made half again wider, from two hundred to three hundred feet. Thus it was to be more than four times as broad as the French canal would have been at that point.
–The width of the lock chambers was enlarged, primarily to satisfy the Navy. The locks would be 110 feet wide (rather than 95 feet) to accommodate the largest battleship then on the drawing boards, the Pennsylvania, which had a beam of 98 feet. (The largest commercial vessel then being built was the Titanic, with a beam of 94 feet.) So each lock chamber was to be 110 feet by 1,000 feet.
–On the Pacific side, where heavy silt-bearing currents threatened to clog the entrance to the canal, the engineers now planned a tremendous breakwater that would reach three miles across the tidal mud flats to Naos Island.
–When trestles began sinking in the mud at the site of the Sosa Dam, a major change had to be made in the placement of the Pacific locks. Previously, there was to have been one lock at the south end of Culebra Cut, at Pedro Miguel, then an intermediate-level lake and another set of two locks close to the Pacific shore, at Sosa Hill. In the new arrangement, the Pedro Miguel complex remained unchanged, but the dam and second set of locks were pulled back from Sosa Hill back from the Pacific–to a new site at Miraflores. Consequently the terminal lake (called Sosa Lake on the old plan) was greatly reduced in area and the first flight of locks at the Pacific end was now to be as far inland as were the Gatun Locks. From the military viewpoint this was regarded as a far better solution, since the Pacific locks would now be far less vulnerable to bombardment from the sea, a point Goethals had made to Taft as early as 1905, following their tour of the area. The possibility of bombardment from the air had not been considered then, nor was it now late in 1907, since the world had as yet to catch up to the achievements at Kitty Hawk.
With his reorganization Goethals did away with all the old departments first established by Wallace and carried on by Stevens. Under that system the work had been portioned off according to specific types of activity–excavation and dredging, labor and quarters, and so forth. Now everything was simply divided into three geographic units –an Atlantic Division, a Central Divison, and a Pacific Division–each run by one overall chief who was responsible for virtually everything within the district other than sanitary and police activities. It was a scheme very like that used by the French, with the fundamental difference that none of the work was to be done by contract, except for the lock gates. Stevens’ contract plan had been dropped at
the time Goethals took over.
The Atlantic Division included the four miles of sea-level approach from Limon Bay, Gatun Locks, and Gatun Dam. The Pacific Division included the sea-level entrance at that end, as well as the locks and dams. Everything in between, some thirty-two miles of canal and including Culebra Cut, comprised the Central Division.
The Atlantic side was to be run solely by Army men, with Major Sibert as division head assisted by several other engineering officers. Forty-seven years old, large, headstrong, full of ambition and good humor, William Sibert was cut from much the same pattern as John Stevens, with whom he was one day to collaborate on a book about the canal. Sibert’s civilian clothes fit him badly, he chewed on unlit cigars, and he spoke his mind. His relations with Goethals, strained from the start, were to become more and more unpleasant.
Born on a farm in Alabama, Sibert had finished at West Point in 1884, worked on the famous Poe Lock at the Soo Canal and ran a railroad in the Philippines. But for the past six years, assigned to river and harbor work at Pittsburgh, he had built more than a dozen locks and dams on the Allegheny, Monongahela, and Ohio rivers. His experience in such work was second to none, a point neither he nor Goethals would lose sight of.
The Central Division was assigned to Major Gaillard, but his highly competent executive officer was a civilian, a lean, red-haired Bostonian named Louis K. Rourke, who had been running things very well in Culebra Cut for nearly two years.
David D “Bose Gaillard (pronounced Ge-yard) was a South Carolinian. He was a year older than William Sibert and a close friend. As cadets at the Military Academy they had been roommates and were known as David and Goliath. Still slim and youthful-looking, Gaillard had had a solid if unspectacular career in the Corps of Engineers and like Goethals had been singled out for the initial General Staff. “Sibert’s experience on locks and dams makes his assignment to that work very necessary,” Goethals explained to his West Point son, “. . . so Gaillard had to take the Cut.”
Like Goethals, these and the other engineering officers who were to serve in Panama considered themselves part of an honored tradition; and this, it should be emphasized, gave to their whole mode of operation a very different tone from that of the previous regime. It was not that they were necessarily superior technicians to the railroad people who preceded them, but that their entire training and experience had been directed toward large construction works in the national interest. They were engineers of the state, no less than those who had come out from France to build the de Lesseps canal. Even their training had been patterned after that of the École Polytechnique, from the time Sylvanus Thayer instituted the sweeping academic reforms at West Point that were to make him “Father of the Military Academy.” It was Thayer in the 1820’s who, after observing the program of the famous French school, made engineering the heart of the curriculum at West Point and instilled the mission to construct into the academic program. “We must get up early, for we have a large territory,” a cadet once explained to a visitor in the 1850’s; “we have to cut down the forests, dig canals, and make railroads all over the country.” And that had remained the prevailing spirit. Only the top men from each class qualified for the Engineers.
But the Goethals regime did not consist solely of Army people, the common view again notwithstanding. Indeed, the only division head that he personally appointed was a civilian, Sydney B. Williamson, who had been a young assistant at Muscle Shoals when Goethals constructed the high-lift lock. He and Williamson had worked well together then and on several subsequent projects, and their trust in each other was total. Williamson was put at the head of the Pacific Division and all his subordinate engineers were to be civilians. So naturally the lines were drawn: if the Army was to build the Atlantic locks and the civilians the Pacific locks, then it would be a test to see which group was the most resourceful and competent. A sharp rivalry ensued, just as Goethals anticipated.
Meantime, Rear Admiral Harry Harwood Rousseau, who at thirty-eight was the youngest member of the canal commission, was given responsibility for the design and construction of all terminals, wharves, coaling stations, dry docks, machine shops, and warehouses. Lieutenant Frederick Mears, aged twenty-nine, was put in charge of relocating the Panama Railroad, a large and very difficult task. To build the forty-odd miles of the new line would take five years and cost nearly $9,000,000.
Two further resignations were announced, those of Joseph Ripley, who had been Stevens’ choice for lock design, and Jackson Smith, whose competence Goethals recognized but whose manner had become more than Goethals was willing to tolerate. As a result Smith’s Department of Labor and Quarters was broken up and Major Carroll A. Devol was named Chief Quartermaster of the Zone, with responsibility for labor, quarters, and supplies. The personal choice of Secretary Taft, Devol had been in charge of the Army transport service in San Francisco in 1906 at the time of the earthquake and had managed the distribution of all supplies to the stricken city, an enormous and ably handled operation for which the Army was wholly responsible and for which the Army was to get too little credit.
Up until now all the design work on the locks had been handled in Washington, but with Ripley’s departure, Goethals transferred the design staff to the Isthmus and installed still another Army officer, Lieutenant Colonel Harry Foote Hodges, at its head.
Everything considered, Hodges was probably Goethals’ most valuable man, as well as the sort journalists and historians could readily overlook. Born in Boston, class of ‘81 at the Academy, he was small, fussy, humorless, quite unspectacular in manner and appearance. With his sharp little face and large, dark, intense eyes, he looked not unlike a bright mouse. Like Sibert, he had spent several valuable years working with Colonel Poe on the Soo, and like Sydney Williamson, he was Goethals’ personal choice. Hodges, henceforth, had overall responsibility for the design and erection of the lock gates, all the tremendous conduits and valves beneath the walls and floors of the locks, every intricate mechanism required. He had, that is, the most difficult technical responsibility in the entire project, upon which depended the canal’s success. When Goethals was away from the Isthmus, Hodges would serve as acting chief engineer. According to Goethals, the canal could not have been built without him.
II
The “special wonder of the canal” was Culebra Cut. It was the great focus of attention, regardless of whatever else was happening at Panama. The building of Gatun Dam or the construction of the locks, projects of colossal scale and expense, were always of secondary interest so long as the battle raged in that nine-mile stretch between Bas Obispo and Pedro Miguel. The struggle lasted seven years, from 1907 through 1913, when the rest of the world was still at peace, and in the dry seasons, the tourists came by the hundreds, by the thousands as time went on, to stand and watch from grassy vantage points hundreds of feet above it all. Special trains had to be arranged to bring them out from Colón and Panama City, tour guides provided, and they looked no different from the Sunday crowds on the Boardwalk at Atlantic City. Gentlemen wore white shoes and pale straw hats; ladies stepped along over the grass in ankle-length skirts and carried small, white umbrellas as protection from the sun. A few were celebrities: Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Lord Bryce, President Taft, and William Jennings Bryan (who “evinced more general excitement than anyone since T.R.”). “He who did not see the Culebra Cut during the mighty work of excavation,” declared an author of the day, “missed one of the great spectacles of the ages–a sight that no other time, or place was, or will be, given to man to see.” Lord Bryce called it the greatest liberty ever taken with nature.
A spellbound public read of cracks opening in the ground, of heart-breaking landslides, of the bottom of the canal mysteriously rising. Whole sides of mountains were being brought down with thunderous blasts of dynamite. A visiting reporter engaged in conversation at a tea party felt his chair jump half an inch and spilled a bit of scalding tea on himself.
To Joseph Bucklin Bishop, writing of “The Wonderful
Culebra Cut,” the most miraculous element was the prevailing sense of organization one felt. “It was organization reduced to a science–the endless-chain system of activity in perfect operation.” On either side were the grim, forbidding, perpendicular walls of rock, and in the steadily widening and deepening chasm between–the first man-made canyon in the world–a swarming mass of men and rushing railway trains, monster-like machines, all working with ceaseless activity, all animated seemingly by human intelligence, without confusion or conflict anywhere. . . . The rock walls gave place here and there to ragged sloping banks of rock and earth left by the great slides, covering many acres and reaching far back into the hills, but the ceaseless human activity prevailed everywhere. Everybody knew what he was to do and was doing it, apparently without verbal orders and without getting in the way of anybody else. . ..
Generally, the more the observer knew of engineering and construction work, the higher and warmer was his appreciation.
Panoramic photographs made at the height of the work gave an idea of how tremendous that canyon had become. But the actual spectacle, of course, was in vibrant color. The columns of coal smoke that towered above the shovels and locomotives–“a veritable Pittsburgh of smoke”–were blue-black turning to warm gray; exposed clays were pale ocher, yellow, bright orange, slate blue, or a crimson like that of the soil of Virginia; and the vibrant green of the near hills was broken by cloud shadow into great patchworks of sea blue and lavender.
The noise level was beyond belief. On a typical day there would be more than three hundred rock drills in use and their racket alone– apart from the steam shovels, the trains, the blasting–could be heard for miles. In the crevice between Gold Hill and Contractors Hill, where the walls were chiefly rock, the uproar, reverberating from wall to wall, was horrible, head-splitting.
For seven years Culebra Cut was never silent, not even for an hour. Labor trains carrying some six thousand men began rolling in shortly after dawn every morning except Sunday. Then promptly at seven the regular work resumed until five. But it was during the midday break and again after five o’clock that the dynamite crews took over and began blasting. At night came the repair crews, men by the hundreds, to tend the shovels, which were now being worked to the limit and taking a heavy beating. Night track crews set off surface charges of dynamite to make way for new spurs for the shovels, while coal trains servicing the shovels rumbled in, their headlights playing steadily and eerily up and down the Cut until dawn. And though it was official I.C.C. policy that the Sabbath be observed as a day of rest, there was always some vital piece of business in the Cut that could not wait until Monday.
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