Panama fever (56 page)

n Washington the wheels had been turning, albeit slowly. After his visit to Panama in November, Taft had reported to Roosevelt that the Commission under Walker and Davis seemed unwieldy and obstructive. As an engineer on the ground put it: “The military regime in Panama, in so far as the furtherance of engineering efficiency is concerned, is a failure; in so far as the maintenance of official orthodoxy is concerned, it is a great success.” This was backed up by Wallace, who requested that the Commission be reduced to three men: governor and chief engineer in Panama, with a chairman in Washington. In January the president requested that Congress amend the Spooner Act to make this possible, and the following month sent an eminent U.S. surgeon to investigate what was seen as Gorgas's failure to control disease on the Isthmus.

The surgeon, Dr. Charles A. L. Reed, toured the works during February, and his report was leaked to the U.S. press. One particular example he gave of the nightmare of red tape afflicting the medical department caught the eye and was reproduced across the country: a newborn baby needed a nursing bottle; the nurse applied to her superior, Major La Garde, who, finding the requisition of the previous September still unfulfilled, then made out another order, which had to be endorsed by Gorgas himself as well as the chief of the bureau for materials and supply, Mr. Tobey Then the order was copied and at last a messenger was permitted to go to a chemist and buy the nursing bottle, which finally reached the infant two days after the necessity for its use had arisen. The bottle should have cost no more than thirty cents, but counting the money value of the time of the nurse, of Major La Garde, of his clerical help, of Colonel Gorgas, of Mr. Tobey, of Mr. Tobey's clerks and of the messenger, the cost to the government of the United States, Reed calculated, was around $6.75. For all Walker's parsimony, it seemed the waste of the French canal period had never gone away.

Roosevelt was furious at the leak, but even angrier about the blow to the prestige of his canal project. When the Senate refused to agree to the change in the Commission, the president, acting by executive decree, demanded the resignation of Walker and his six colleagues. On April
i
he announced a new governing body for the canal, composed, as Wallace had suggested, of an executive committee of chief engineer, chairman, and governor, with four essentially sleeping partners added in to pretend compliance with the terms of the Spooner Act. Wallace, still highly thought of in the press, remained as chief engineer, and now had a seat on the Commission. Theodore Shonts, a “gruff, domineering” Pennsylvanian who had built, run, and owned a number of Midwestern railroads, was made chairman; and Charles Magoon the new governor. Magoon had made his name as a lawyer specializing in colonial administration and had served as legal counsel to the first Commission. He had helped Davis set up the Zone government, and had visited the Isthmus with Taft the previous November. While in Panama he had made a very favorable impression on the American chargé d'affaires William Sands, who had recommended him for the new dual role of governor and American minister to Panama.

Wallace was summoned to Washington for the first meeting of the new executive committee on April 10. Inevitably the recent yellow fever outbreak was discussed. It seems that there was little confidence in Gorgas. Shonts suggested that he be replaced with a friend of his, an osteopath with no experience of tropical medicine. Magoon agreed that a more “practical doctor” was required, one who would deal with the “smells and filth.” This suggestion was passed on to Taft, who approved it and sent it to the president.

But Roosevelt consulted medical authorities in the United States, all of whom backed Gorgas as the best man for the job. Finally the president sought the advice of a close friend and hunting companion, Dr. Alexander Lambert. The Commission and the secretary of war, Roosevelt told Lambert, were complaining that Gorgas spent all his time trying to kill mosquitoes while Colón and Panama were as dirty and stinking as ever. “Smells and filth, Mr. President,” Lambert replied, “have nothing to do with either malaria or yellow fever. You are facing one of the greatest decisions of your career. You must choose between Shonts and Gorgas. If you fall back on the old methods of sanitation, you will fail, just as the French failed. If you back up Gorgas and his ideas and let him pursue his campaign against the mosquitoes, you will get your canal.”

It was a bold step to go against the advice of his own Commission and secretary of war, but Roosevelt overruled their recommendation and ordered Magoon, who was about to leave for Panama, to give Gorgas all the backing he could.

Accompanied by Wallace, the new governor arrived at Colón on May 24, replacing Davis and Barrett, both of whom had already left the Isthmus, the former in the throes of severe malaria. Magoon was an immediate improvement on his predecessors. Sands described him as “huge in all three dimensions… and he had the gentle nature which so often accompanies vast bulk.” At 230 pounds, he was about as far from Roosevelt's vision of the new “strenuous” American as you could imagine. But he was immensely clubbable, from the very first ceremony in honor of his arrival, Magoon “displayed great interest in the people,” and, according to the
Star and Herald
, won the confidence of the Panamanians more than any other American had done so far. This helped immensely in his diplomatic task, defined by Sands as achieving “a truce among the personally jealous political leaders and between the racially hostile political parties long enough to get the Panamanian Republic in working order.”

In his role as governor of the Canal Zone, he had an even harder job ahead. Publicly he oozed confidence and optimism, but he reported in private that conditions were deplorable. Earlier that month the
Star and Herald
‘had written, “It would perhaps be difficult to find any spot on earth where discontent reigns so supreme as on the Isthmus of Panama.” Magoon wrote to Shonts back in Washington that he found the men working on the canal “ill-paid, over-worked, ill-housed, ill-fed, and subjected to the hazards of yellow fever, malarial fever,” and other diseases. Whatever exuberance had fired the first Americans in Panama, it was now long gone, replaced by bickering and demoralization.

One of Magoon's first acts was to listen to Gorgas about the problems he had been having with requisitions. The governor then cabled through to Washington the doctor's demands, and within forty-eight hours long-denied supplies were on their way. It looked as if Gorgas would at last have the tools he needed to complete the job. Magoon also made speeches promising that schools and churches would be built, and families encouraged to move out to the Isthmus.

Then, after only two weeks back in Panama, Wallace applied for urgent leave to attend to personal affairs in the United States. He also requested a private interview with Taft. Although Wallace had professed himself pleased with the recent changes to the Commission, it appears that it irked him that he had to answer to Shonts. He believed that the canal effort would be best served by concentrating all power in one man, namely himself. He also confided to Magoon that he had been offered a job with a salary of some $ 50,000 to 60,000 back in the United States. Wallace told Magoon that as he considered himself essential to the canal effort, he was going to try to squeeze Taft for a higher salary. In fact he wanted to be both chairman and chief engineer with the right to come and go between Washington and Panama as he wished. Failing this, he would be happy to leave the “godforsaken” yellow-fever-ridden Isthmus for good and take the money offered at home. All of this Magoon promptly cabled to Taft.

So the usually genial secretary of war was in a black temper when Wallace arrived to meet him at the Manhattan Hotel in New York on June 25. At the request of Taft, William Nelson Cromwell was present as a witness, much to Wallace's annoyance—one of the complaints he wanted to make was against the lawyer's disproportionate influence on canal affairs. Taft bluntly asked Wallace what could be so important to cause him to leave the Isthmus again at such a crucial time. Wallace replied that he wanted to resign as he had been offered another job with none of the risks of living in Panama. Perhaps Wallace expected Taft to offer him the top job to keep him in the organization, but if so he misjudged the secretary of war. Taft exploded: “For mere lucre you change your position overnight without thought of the embarrassing position in which you place your government by this action. By every principle of honour and duty you were bound to treat this subject differently… Great fame attached to your office, but also equal responsibility, and now you desert them in an hour … I am exceedingly sorry that you cannot see what a dreadful, dreadful mistake you are making. It pains me more than I can tell.” Wallace offered to stay on in some capacity to minimize the upset to the construction effort, but Taft ordered him to resign and have nothing more to do with the canal.

Wallace's resignation sparked fresh panic in Panama. “We felt like an army deserted by its general,” Frank Maltby would write. The rainy season had started, and yellow fever cases in June had nearly doubled over the month before. Men started frantically checking themselves every morning for signs of the illness. According to Marie Gorgas, “the effect [of Wallace's resignation] upon the workers at the Isthmus was deplorable. It seemed to inspire the labouring and the executive forces with one ambition: a determination to scuttle. There was only one reason why they did not get away en masse, and that was the lack of shipping space to carry them.”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

RESTART

The arrival, in July 1905, of Wallace's replacement, the rugged and ingenious John Stevens, marks a turn in fortunes for the beleaguered canal. Stevens had built the Great Northern Railroad across the Pacific Northwest. The foremost railway man of his day, he had proven his tenacity in rough territory from Canada to Mexico, surviving attacks by wolves and hostile Indians along the way. Although he would leave under a cloud two years later, his new plan of action would ultimately save the canal.

Initially Stevens, who had been about to leave for the Philippines for a railway construction job, turned down the offer to become chief engineer in Panama. “Then I was asked to meet… Cromwell,” Stevens wrote. The lawyer “seemed to have a deep and heartfelt interest in the success of the proposed work … after listening an hour or two to his silver-tongued arguments I consented… with conditions.” Stevens laid these out when he met President Roosevelt. There could be no interference from above or below, and he could not promise to stay on the job beyond the time “I had made its success certain, or had proved it to be a failure.”

Stevens sailed from New York accompanied by Theodore Shonts, the new Commission chairman. Shonts remembers being shocked at discovering that there were more canal employees booked on the steamer's return journey than were on the outward trip. Little fanfare greeted their arrival on July 24, and Stevens straightaway started assessing the situation. For all his experience, what he discovered was profoundly shocking. “The condition of affairs on the Isthmus,” he would later write, “can truly be described as desperate; even by many well-wishers it was regarded as hopeless.” Hungry men were foraging the swamps for sugarcane and the jungle for bananas, and in the faces of office workers and laborers alike he saw fear and disillusion. According to Stevens they were “scared out of their boots, afraid of yellow fever and afraid of everything.” Many believed the “history of the Americans on the Isthmus would be a repetition of the De Lesseps failure.” It was widely rumored that Shonts had been sent down to tell them to pack up and go home.

Stevens found “no organization worthy of the name,” he said, and “no cooperation existing between what might charitably be called the departments.” In the Culebra Cut, Wallace had been pushing the work ahead in order to satisfy what Stevens would call “the idiotic howl about ‘making the dirt fly.’” But when Stevens surveyed the work from a hill above
la grande tranchée
, he saw all seven steam shovels idle for want of spoil trains. There were seven locomotives, but they were all derailed. “I believe I faced about as discouraging a proposition as was ever presented to a construction engineer,” Stevens would write.