Panama fever (71 page)

But probably the greatest factor leading to Stevens's departure was mental and physical exhaustion. Stevens once said to Maltby “I know you pretty well now and without raising the question of your competence, if you were chief engineer you wouldn't last thirty minutes.” Working twelve to fourteen hours a day, suffering from insomnia, endlessly dragged to Washington to be hauled before “idiotic” congressmen, he had had enough.

On the Isthmus the news came as a severe blow—”astonishing” wrote the
Star and Herald on
February 28. Over the following weeks the paper traces the surprise, sadness, and then anger of the canal workforce. “Unless this step has been forced upon Mr. Stevens, a supposition which is scarcely likely,” the paper wrote on March 2, “his action in retiring from the canal work looks suspiciously like an abandonment of a trust, and unless it be his desire to lay himself open to the same scathing rebuke which was heaped on Mr. Wallace his obvious course is to at once withdraw his resignation … we think that in his place a strong sense of loyalty, we might even say of devotion to an ideal, should have outweighed mere personal considerations.” No one really knew what these “personal considerations” were. When asked, Stevens merely growled back, “Don't talk, dig.”

A petition was organized, begging him to stay, and promising to work even harder for him in the future, but to no avail. After numerous farewell functions, the chief engineer sailed from the Isthmus for the last time at noon on Sunday, April 1. There was a huge crowd on the wharf to see him off. Other vessels in the harbor, reported the
Star and Herald
, “whistled their salutes, the crowd waved hats and handkerchiefs, and many shed tears while the I.C.C. band played Auld Lang Syne. Mr. Stevens stood at the rail, and as long as he could be recognized his face was pale and sad.”

Roosevelt had rated Stevens highly—he was his sort of “strenuous man”—and he was grieved as well as angered by his departure. He also knew full well that the canal would never be built if it kept losing its chief engineers. So he now decided to place the work “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.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

“THE ARMY OF PANAMA”

To an extent, then, the project had come full circle. After all, the military needs of the United States had been of primary importance in starting the American canal. It was as a conduit for a sea power that the canal's supporters had successfully sold the idea to the U.S. Congress and public. But the all-new Isthmian Canal Commission, ordered to take over on April 1, 1907, was not entirely military. Its new chairman was Lieutenant Colonel (later Major General) George Washington Goethals, one of the army's finest engineers, with particular expertise in lock construction. There were two further Engineer Corps officers, a Navy man, and Colonel Gorgas was given a seat on the Commission for the first time. But there were also two civilians— an ex-senator from Kentucky and Jackson “Square-foot” Smith, like Gorgas promoted to the Commission. Furthermore, the military men were detached from their usual chains of command, reporting to Goethals, who himself dealt directly with Taft. All the Commission members were required to live on the Isthmus, where they would work as heads of departments.

There was no question, however, of the seven commissioners having equal say, as envisaged by the Spooner Act. Each man was summoned before Roosevelt and told in no uncertain terms that there would be only one boss. “Colonel Goethals here is to be chairman,” said the president. “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.” As well as chairman, Goethals was appointed chief engineer, head of the PRR, and would wield total control over the government of the Canal Zone. The new arrangement made Goethals, in the words of his biographer, “most absolute despot in the world… [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.” It was the “one-man proposition” demanded by Stevens, and there would be only one end in view. As Goethals himself explained: “It was asserted that the Department of Government, generally, regarded the construction of the canal as of secondary importance and seemed to consider that the main purpose and object of the work on the Isthmus was to set up a model of American government in the heart of Central America as an object lesson to the South and Central American republics.” Governor Magoon had left the Isthmus the previous September to help out with the crisis in Cuba and was now told that he would not be returning to Panama. Henceforth, as Goethals wrote, “everything should be subordinated to the construction of the canal, even the government.”

Goethals himself told a New York friend that his taking the job was “a case of just plain straight duty. I am ordered down—there was no alternative.” He landed on the Isthmus in mid-March, for a two-week handover period with John Stevens. It was an awkward time for the new man. Stevens's popularity was everywhere apparent, along with deep unease among the civilian engineers about the nature of the new army regime and the inevitable changes in personnel that the new leadership would bring. On March 18 there was a reception in Goethals's honor at Corozal. Stevens was not there, but every time his name was mentioned in a speech a loud cheer rang out. When it was Goethals's turn to speak, he tried to reassure the men. There would be no military uniforms or saluting on the Isthmus, he said. “I expect to be chief of the division of engineers, while the heads of the various departments are going to be the colonels, the foremen are going to be the captains, and the men who do the labour are going to be the privates … I am no longer a commander in the United States Army. I now consider that I am commanding the Army of Panama, and 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.”

Goethals had been on the Isthmus before. In November 1905, early in the Stevens regime, he had accompanied Taft to Panama as part of a group of army experts looking at the fortification requirements for the canal. At the time he had commented on the chaos and hysteria, but now, starting to look around, he was agreeably surprised. “The magnitude of the work grows and grows on me; it seems to get bigger all the time,” he wrote to his son on March 17. “But Mr. Stevens has perfected such an organization so far as the RR [railroad] part of the proposition is concerned, that there is nothing left for us to do but to just have the organization continue in the good work it has done and is doing.” The Stevens system was operating well. In March over 800,000 cubic yards had been excavated, and the following month would see this rise again to nearly 900,000, with five hundred trainloads of spoil being dumped every day. Eighty percent of the necessary machinery was in place, and, although there were still nearly four thousand men employed on building work, 70 percent of the required Gold Roll accommodations were completed. About a fifth of the workforce of nearly thirty thousand was off sick at any one time, but infection rates for malaria were falling as Gorgas's two thousand sanitarians continued and extended their campaign against the
Anopheles
mosquito, meticulously draining hundreds of square miles of swampland.

Goethals's main concern was the more technical parts of the project, the locks and dams, areas outside Stevens's expertise. “The hydraulic part of the propositions is not so good and is a way behind,” he wrote to his son on March 22. Goethals quickly judged that some of the department heads did not have the necessary experience for the new tasks ahead. Maltby for instance, although “an excellent man at dredging,” “had no work on foundations and locks and is therefore of no account.” Reorganization was needed, “and yet not to demoralize the other branches of the work we have to be careful in making changes.” Such was the new man's confidence in Stevens's system for the Cut that he judged that the canal's completion date now depended not on
la grande tranchée
as everybody had always assumed, but on the creation of Gatún Dam and Lake, and the necessary prior relocation of large parts of the railway. That said, excavation in the Cut was still in its infancy—it had been widened by over a hundred feet but hardly lowered at all. The terrible setbacks that would accompany deeper excavation were still, for now, in the future and unanticipated.

Goethals took official charge on April 1, 1907. He immediately threw himself into the job, spending the mornings on office work and the afternoons inspecting the line, propelled along the railroad in a gasoline-driven railway car, known as the “brain wagon” or the “Yellow Peril.” He would frequently dismount to talk to a foreman or manager. He was, a contemporary writes, “a tall, long-legged man with a rounded, bronzed face and snow-white hair. His moustache was also white, but stained with nicotine, for he smoked many cigarettes … He wore civilian clothes with the usual awkwardness of a man who has spent most of his lifetime clothed in the uniform of his country.” Every day the role of “Czar of Panama,” which included leadership of civil government, courts, schools, post offices, the police, and the battalion of U.S. marines in addition to the canal work, seemed to grow in size. “The strenuous existence of the past seems like mere child's play to the 5 past days,” he wrote to his son on April 4.

There was no mass purging of the Railroad-era men, but changes were inevitable. Soon after Goethals's arrival, Frank Maltby left Panama, although he would return as a private contractor later. The excellent head of the railway, W G. Bierd, the inventor of the track-shifter, resigned as well, supposedly because of ill health, but, Goethals noticed, he cropped up soon after working for Stevens in the latter's new job as head of the New Haven Railroad. Then, at the beginning of May, the steam-shovel men decided to test out their new boss, requesting a steep pay increase with the threat of a strike if their demands were not met. As one of the new commissioners, Major William Sibert commented, “the President, in his talks, praised the men for their patriotism and enlarged upon their hardships to such an extent that… after the visit the steam-shovel men asked for a rise in wages.”

Goethals, still finding his feet and assessing the extent of his power on the Isthmus, acted cautiously, referring the matter to Taft, who was paying a visit to the Isthmus. Taft heard the men's demands, and then consulted with Roosevelt in Washington. “Things are unsettled here,” wrote Goethals in a private letter on May 7. In Washington, it was decided that as the steam-shovel men, on $210 a month, were already the best paid of the mechanics, their hoped-for $300 a month could not be granted. Instead Taft offered a 5 percent pay increase. But the steam-shovel men remained determined. The increase was rejected and the men came out. The next day all but thirteen of the sixty-eight shovels were idle. It was the most serious strike on the canal so far.

But Goethals did not panic, even as the stoppage continued, reducing excavation to a quarter of its previous level. Handling it slowly, he gradually recruited strikebreakers until he had replaced the original workers. When the strikers gave in and asked for their jobs back, they were told that they would have to start again at the most junior level. By July, all the shovels were back in action, and excavation was once again at full tilt, with just over a million cubic yards extracted, a new record. It was an unmistakable victory for Goethals, and for the rest of the construction period there would be no stoppage on anything like the same scale. And the “Czar of Panama” had not even had to use the most potent weapon at his disposal. Under the original terms of Roosevelt's Executive Order setting up the first Commission, the chairman had the right to expel from the Zone anybody, who, in his opinion, “was not necessary to the work of building the canal, or was objectionable for any reason.” With his power enhanced by his defeat of the steam-shovel men, Goethals dealt ruthlessly with a small stoppage in November by boilermakers at two large machine shops. Replacement workers were quickly in place and the strikers found themselves deported on steamers back to the United States. Thereafter, his response to any strike threat was simple: be back at work tomorrow morning or be expelled instantly from the country.

The European Silver Roll workers were dealt with even more firmly. They were continuing to leave the Isthmus for better work opportunities elsewhere, thus depriving the ICC of the repayment of their steamer fare. In response, Goethals banned the solicitation of labor within the Zone, and placed guards at the ports to prevent contracted workers from leaving. “I have no complaint of any kind against the Isthmian Canal Commission,” stated Spanish worker F. Olario when hauled off a Chile-bound steamer in May 1907. “I was always well treated, liked the wages I used to get, but could not understand the orders of the foreman, and besides, I was most of the time sick, out of the four months that I have been a laborer on the Isthmus.”