Panama fever (48 page)

The $40 million converted to 206 million francs, of which 128 million went to the credit of the Old Company and 77.4 million to the New Company. None of the shareholders of the Old Company got anything. The 226,296 who put in a claim as bondholders got on average 650 francs, or $156, approximately ten cents on the dollar for their investment. The New Company shareholders received 129.78 francs per 100-franc share, which worked out at an interest rate of less than 3 percent per annum, but must have been much more than they expected. Thus not only had Bunau-Varilla got his name on the treaty, but he also got back the money he had forcibly invested more than ten years before.

The Frenchman had resigned as Panama's minister on March 2, 1904, his job, “The Resurrection of the Panama Canal,” complete. Cabling the decision to Panama City, he asked for his remuneration (which at $1,000 per month was in total less than $5,000) to be put toward the cost of erecting a statue of Ferdinand de Lesseps, “the great Frenchman, whose genius has consecrated the Isthmus to the progress of the world.” As he crossed the hotel lobby to take the message to the telegraph office, he reports, “somebody unexpectedly seized my hands to express to me his congratulations. It was the lawyer Cromwell.”

oosevelt, never one for self-doubt, conceded in a private letter that there was “great uneasiness caused among my friends by my action,” but in reality he had few qualms about the path taken. “The one thing for which I deserved most credit in my entire administration,” he would write, “was my action in seizing the psychological moment to get complete control of Panama.” “It was a good thing for Egypt and the Sudan, and for the world, when England took Egypt and the Sudan,” he wrote to his old friend Cecil Spring Rice at the British Foreign Office. “It is a good thing for India that England should control it. And so it is a good thing, a very good thing, for Cuba and for Panama and for the world that the United States has acted as it has actually done during the last six years. The people of the United States and the people of the Isthmus and the rest of mankind will all be the better because we dig the Panama canal and keep order in its neighborhood. And the politicians and revolutionists at Bogota are entitled to precisely the amount of sympathy we extend to other inefficient bandits.”

In the November 1904 election Roosevelt saw the canal as a benefit, rather than a hindrance to his campaign, even though Henry Davis, the Democratic vice-presidential candidate, criticized Roosevelt's actions over Panama as belonging “more to an empire than a Republic.” “Tell our speakers to dwell more on the Panama Canal,” Roosevelt told an aide during the campaign. “We have not a stronger card.” It had become a symbol for his active, vigorous leadership.

On November 8, 1904, Roosevelt got 7.5 million votes to his opponent's 5 million. The victory was attributed to Roosevelt's personal appeal, but also to the popularity of his activist Panama policies. A dismayed member of the New England Anti-Imperialist League commented, “We stand today, apparently in the shadow of a great defeat. Theodore Roosevelt represents today the temper and point of view of the American people, as to armies, navies, world power, Panama republics and American police duty on the Western Hemisphere.”

But in spite of this victory, some of the Panama mud stuck. More dirt would be dug up in the years to come, leading to continued press and congressional investigations. Most important, the events leading up to the start of the U.S. construction effort would put the canal on the defensive in terms of domestic politics. After all the intrigue and politicking, huge pressure would now be bearing down on the canal effort to “make the dirt fly,” with disastrous consequences.

Internationally, the secession and subsequent treaty locked the United States into a cycle of expansion in the region, and its long-range cost in bad feeling and ill will was immense. Had more attention been paid to the legitimacy of many of the Colombian concerns and to the reality of the political situation in Bogotá, rather than to the interests of a private, foreign-owned corporation, a deal could have been hammered out. Once this failed, it was poor diplomacy by Hay to sign a treaty with the new Republic of Panama so patently unfair that it was bound to store up trouble for the future. But as Roosevelt would later point out, while the arguments went on, at least now the canal was being built.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

“MAKE THE DIRT FLY”

In Afmerica, anything is possible,” Jan van Hardeveld would proclaim to his wife, Rose, and their two small daughters whenever he learned of some modern miracle of enterprise in his new country. The family lived on a homestead in a remote part of western Wyoming, where Jan worked as the foreman of a gang of largely Japanese workers on the Union Pacific Railroad. A recently naturalized Hollander, he had particular admiration for President Roosevelt's Dutch blood. When he heard about the start of the American canal, he was determined to be part of “the mighty march of progress.” “The French gave up …but we will finish!” Jan proclaimed. “With Teddy Roosevelt,
anything
is possible.”

George Martin, a carpenter's apprentice living in Barbados, was eighteen when he wrote, “A voice from a great people” invited him to help build the Panama Canal. “With the others I accepted … so I leave father and mother, brothers and relatives, away in the land of the Indies, in the west, and came to this strange land…”

As early as January 1904, while the Senate was still debating the Hay–Bunau-Varilla Treaty, journalists from the “great people” were on the Isthmus reporting back that there “is nothing in the nature of the work … to daunt an American. The building of the canal will be a comparatively easy task for knowing, enterprising and energetic Americans.” Many were confident that it would be a splendid showcase of the ever-growing industrial and technological might of the United States, and the country's new superiority over the old powers of Europe.

With hindsight, the American project might seem to have a “solid inevitability” compared to the tragically doomed de Lesseps adventure. In fact, the construction was beset by very serious difficulties throughout, but particularly in the first three years, and on several occasions came close to disaster. When the Americans started work they replicated almost all the mistakes made by the de Lesseps company: they favored a sea-level canal; they split authority for the job, as the French had done up until the arrival of Dingler in 1883; their initial site investigation was patchy, leading to unpleasant surprises later on; and more than anything, they understimated or misunderstood the dangers of disease and the simply vast scale of the construction challenge.

On March 3, 1904, a week after the formal exchange of treaties with Panama, Roosevelt appointed a seven-man Isthmian Canal Commission (ICC). Their order from the president was simply that “the results be achieved.” The chairman was the veteran Admiral Walker, known to many as the “Old Man of the Sea,” who had led previous canal bodies. Although in this respect experienced, he was an old-fashioned figure and had not overseen any really large construction projects. The next most senior appointee, and the only member of the Commission who would actually reside on the Isthmus, was another military man, Major General George W Davis, who was to be governor of the Canal Zone. The emphasis for the other five appointments was on engineering experience, rather than familiarity with heading up such an immense logistical project. Davis, for his part, had been involved with one of the Nicaragua private canal companies, but was first and foremost a colonial administrator—he had played a part in the organization of the U.S. military governments of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. As in the other newly acquired territories, the government of the Canal Zone, indeed, the entire commission and canal effort, would report to the new secretary of war, William Howard Taft.

Before the Isthmian Canal Commission was appointed, Roosevelt had been lobbied by delegations of prominent U.S. doctors urging him to give the medical challenge in Panama top priority. They seem to have been preaching to the converted. Roosevelt had been shocked by the death rate from yellow fever among U.S. soldiers in Cuba—five times more men had been killed by illness than by enemy action—and had himself, before he became president, publicized these terrible statistics in Washington. As early as February 1904 he wrote to Admiral Walker, “I feel that the sanitary and hygiene problems … on the Isthmus are those which are literally of the first importance, coming even before the engineering …”

Nevertheless, there was no medical representation on the first Commission, effectively the board of directors of the canal effort. But the American Society of Doctors did get their recommended man, Colonel William Crawford Gorgas, appointed chief medical officer. Gorgas was well respected for his work attacking the yellow fever epidemic in Cuba and was the country's leading expert on tropical diseases.

In early April the grandees of the Commission descended on Panama, accompanied by Gorgas and another sanitary officer and fellow veteran of Cuba, Louis La Garde. The doctors wasted no time in diagnosing malaria as an even greater threat to the canal builders than the dreaded yellow fever. Gorgas visited the marine barracks at Bas Obispo, a seemingly healthy, breezy spot, and was told that 170 of the 450 men had caught malaria since the beginning of the year. The source of the infection was not difficult to find. When Gorgas and La Garde examined the inhabitants of the nearby “native” village, they discovered that some 70 percent had the enlarged spleen of the malaria carrier.

The engineers of the ICC were accompanied by Roger Farnham, the press agent of the ubiquitous William Nelson Cromwell. As well as getting himself appointed Panama's U.S. counsel, Cromwell had become an “all-purpose trouble-shooter for the Republican Party.” He did not need to be told what failure in Panama would do to the party's fortunes in the forthcoming presidential elections and was determined to keep an eye on the canal effort. Mallet did his best during the Commission's two-week stay to discover what he could about the Americans’ plans. One of the commissioners told him that “he was sure every member of the Commission hoped that a sea-level canal would be built if it be practicable.”

In fact, nothing concrete was decided by the trip. The question of the design of the canal hinged on the suitability of a variety of sites for the construction of dams and/or locks, namely Gamboa, Bohío, and Gatún. Until proper, deep borings were made, all the engineers could propose in the meantime in the way of “making the dirt fly” were harbor improvements at Colón and designs for waterworks for the two terminal cities.

On May 6, two days after the official handing over of the French properties to the United States and the raising of the Stars and Stripes on Ancón Hill, John Findlay Wallace was appointed to the job of chief engineer, in charge of all canal construction work, although without a seat on the Commission. Wallace, a Midwestern-railroad veteran and first-rate engineer, had been tempted to Panama by $25,000 a year, a salary larger than that of any other government employee except the president.