Panama fever (62 page)

Such was the exodus of labor from Barbados that by early 1906 it was hardly possible to go ahead with the sugar crop in the St. James and St. Peter parishes because men “have returned [from Panama] with money which they are spending in sight of those who did not go,” who promptly took off themselves. But if Panama now drew in Barbadians in unprecedented numbers, Stevens was less than happy with the results. Although he applauded the West Indians’ “innate respect for authority,” the improved food supply seemed to have had little impact on their productivity or ability to resist diseases. So he started looking elsewhere, seeing the problem, as always, as one of racial characteristics. His first preference was for Japanese or Chinese labor, but a delegation from Tokyo had toured the works in May 1905 and described conditions as “unsatisfactory.” The Chinese were also unwilling to help, still stunned by the appalling treatment of “coolies” by the British in the Transvaal. Furthermore, Stevens was aware that the importation of thousands of Chinese would cause political problems at home in the United States, where indentured labor was frowned on by public opinion, and in Panama. One of the government's first new laws, introduced at the end of 1904, had been a measure to prevent Chinese immigration.

In Cuba the quality of the large influx of Spanish labor at the end of the war had impressed the Americans, and Stevens saw this as a possible answer to his problems. For him, they had the advantage, unlike the blacks, of “a capacity to develop into subforemen … they are white men, tractable, and capable of development and assimilation,” he wrote to Shonts in December 1905. Certainly something had to be done. “I have about made up my mind,” he went on, “that it is useless to think of building the Panama Canal with native West Indian labor … I do not believe that the average West Indian nigger is more than equivalent to one-third of an ordinary white northern laborer … I regard the situation as critical, as the success or failure of our plans rests wholly upon the labor proposition.”

It was all getting the best of John Stevens. He was now working eighteen hours a day and suffering from insomnia, so frustrations about the lack of expertise in his organization, the high rate of sickness, or delays in progress became ever more overwhelming. “No one will ever know,” he later wrote, “no one can realize, the call on mind and body which was made upon a few for weary months while all the necessary preliminary work was being planned and carried forward … and the only gleams of light and encouragement were the weekly arrivals of newspapers from the States, criticizing and complaining because the dirt was not flying.”

And it was not just the lack of visible, photogenic progress that fueled newspaper attacks on the canal. Still under scrutiny by the partisan Democratic press was Roosevelt's precise part in the “revolution” of November 1903. Then, as men returned from Panama sacked or otherwise embittered by the canal leadership, stories starting circulating of out-of-control extravagance and corruption on the Isthmus. The oil supply business, it was alleged, had been given to the Union Oil Company in controversial circumstances. Under the direction of Cromwell, the Panama Railroad had made an undoubtedly illegal bond issue, which afterward had to be recalled. Some higher-ups on the Isthmus were receiving inflated salaries, it was suggested.

But it was the secrets of “the lawyer Cromwell,” still ever present in Panama's affairs, that most interested the canal's enemies. Ever since the signing of the Hay–Bunau-Varilla Treaty, some sections of the press had put forward the theory that the entire revolution had been a ploy by a Wall Street syndicate, a “Stock Gambler's Plan to Make Millions!” as a
New York World
headline put it. Roosevelt's partners in the “theft” of the canal, the
New York Times
suggested, were “a group of canal promoters and speculators and lobbyists who came into their money through the rebellion we encouraged, made safe, and effectuated.” Soon after, the same paper reported that the president of a large French bank had said that roughly half the money paid to the New Company had stayed in the United States. Maurice Hutin, when interviewed, said that the payment had never reached French shareholders, “as the United States naively thought.” Instead, it was suggested, a syndicate set up by Cromwell had secretly bought up shares in the New Company at rock-bottom prices, and then, having persuaded the U.S. government to pay $40 million for them, had pocketed a huge profit.

Alongside the investigation of this story, reports of extravagance on the Isthmus became more and more common in the U.S. press, endlessly conjuring up the ghost of the famously wasteful French effort. At the end of 1905, therefore, a special Senate inquiry was authorized to carry out a full “investigation of salaries, supplies, contracts, and the general conduct of the commission.” The Senate Committee on Interoceanic Canals, the
Panama Star and Herald
reported on January 1, 1906, was going to “raise the canal lid.”

Three days later, on January 4, came the publication of Poultney Bigelow's report from his Colón trip in November. Carried by the prestigious
New York Independent
magazine, and provocatively titled “Our Mismanagement in Panama,” the article caused a sensation. As well as telling of his meetings with ill, disgruntled, and departing West Indian workers, Bigelow was scathing about the filthy state of Colón, faulty work on the sewers in Panama, and the shortcomings of the American workforce. “Our Panama patriots are kept busy,” he wrote, “finding occupation” for “flabby young men” with “political protection … who amuse themselves playing the doctor or the engineer.” In all, he found “jobbery flourishing” and the system in Panama showing “ominous signs of rottenness.”

The response in Panama was mixed. One engineer exclaimed, “I do not think there is a place on the face of the globe more lied about than the Isthmus of Panama. But the American people don't want to believe anything good of it, or of those who see fit to undertake the battles down here. However, we are going ahead regardless.” Others, like Mary Chatfield, found that Bigelow had echoed a lot of her own complaints. “I have heard all those things and many more since I have been on the Isthmus,” she wrote home about his criticisms. It could have been even worse; “he could not find out much,” she explained. “People were afraid to tell him.”

The reaction in Washington, however, was swift and ruthless. Bigelow was hauled before the Senate committee, but not before his report had been viciously rubbished by Taft and several of his sources uncovered and discredited (one, it emerged, had been the veteran American journalist and businessman Tracy Robinson). Bigelow had only been on the Isthmus twenty-eight hours, Taft pointed out, he hadn't left Colón, and the West Indians he saw leaving in “disgust” were simply going home for the Christmas holidays. The committee followed this line with Bigelow, but in other ways they were less sympathetic to the canal leadership. Magoon and Stevens were summoned from Panama to be interrogated. This particularly irked the chief engineer, who despised politicians and suffered terrible seasickness. Shonts was hauled in as well. Why was Colonel Gorgas, the senators asked, receiving $10,000 a year, far in excess of the salary due to his rank? The careful, diplomatic answers of Magoon alone to the barrage of questions stretch to nearly three hundred pages of published minutes.

Although no longer the committee chairman, Alabama senator John Tyler Morgan, now in his eighty-first year, was the driving force behind the questioning. And his main target was not so much the alleged extravagance, but the role of his archenemy, the man who now referred to Panama as “my canal,” William Nelson Cromwell. Determined to find out the truth of the lawyer's role in the Panama “revolution” and the rumored syndicate, Morgan summoned Cromwell before the committee. But Cromwell was saying nothing, refusing to answer questions that might affect the privacy of his ex-client, the New Company. Morgan, incensed, brought a resolution before Congress forcing Cromwell to testify. The measure passed, but Cromwell was out of the country in France at the time. Soon after, Morgan died, and without his leadership the Senate committee stuttered and then dropped the investigation. For now, the question of “Who Got the Money?” remained unanswered. But the story would not go away for long.

For its part, Bigelow's article would cast a long shadow over the next months on the Isthmus, dividing opinion while contributing to an air of uneasiness and crisis. In fact, while the piece contained justifiable criticism, its tone was undoubtedly slanted against the canal project. Although difficult, conditions were simply not as bad as he had made out. A British naval officer, Charles Townley, visited the Isthmus at the end of April 1906, and, considering the press coverage he had seen, was agreeably surprised by what had been achieved. “Many of the prominent American newspapers have sent representatives to Panama to inquire into the true state of affairs there,” he reported to the British Foreign Office. “Some of these men have been imbued with an honest desire to tell the truth, but the majority would seem to have realized that criticism of weak spots is more likely to attract readers and increase the demand for their paper than an impartial setting forth of all that has been accomplished. This carping newspaper attitude is beginning to make an impression on public opinion.”

There was one more serious problem identified by Townley, however. In January 1906 Stevens had complained to Morgan about how his efforts were being held back by the lack of a definite plan for the canal. The “principal elements of uncertainty” in the “project as a whole,” complained of by Wallace over a year earlier, were still painfully unresolved. It was as if, Stevens explained, “I had been told to build a house without being informed whether it was a tollhouse or a capital.” As Townley reported on May 3, 1906, “At the present moment the hesitation of Congress to finally decide upon the type of canal to be constructed is hampering the entire labour organization on the isthmus.” Before Ferdinand de Lesseps had even been to Panama, his 1879 Congress had opted for a sea-level canal, with disastrous consequences. Two years into their canal building effort, it was now time for the Americans, in turn, to make their own “fatal decision.”

CHAPTER TWENTY

THE DIGGING MACHINE

For a long while the momentum was with the proponents of an American sea-level canal. In June 1905 Roosevelt had appointed a board of consulting engineers, composed, as in the old French days, of international engineers of undisputed eminence. Of the thirteen members of the board, five were European. The eight Americans included General Davis, erstwhile governor of the Canal Zone (between attacks of malaria), along with old hands from the various U.S. canal bodies, and one engineer who had helped draft the New Company plans of 1898. The most significant of the three newcomers was Joseph Ripley who was then working as chief engineer of the Sault Sainte Marie Canals, better known as the Soo Canals.

The board did not meet until September 1905, when they were entertained by Roosevelt at Oyster Bay. “I hope that ultimately it will prove possible to build a sea-level canal,” the president told the assembled engineering grandees. “Such a canal would undoubtedly be the best in the end if feasible; and I feel,” he added, echoing the late Mark Hanna's arguments during the “Battle of the Routes,” “that one of the chief advantages of the Panama route is that ultimately a sea-level canal will be a possibility.” But at the same time the president demanded a canal “in the shortest possible time.”

In the meantime, the engineering leadership on the canal could only speculate about what would be decided. There were plenty of proposals, however, to fill the official vacuum of ideas. According to Stevens, all sorts of plans were “showered” on him during 1905: “One genius proposed to wash the entire cut into the oceans by forcing water from a plant on Panama Bay; another to erect a big compressed air plant at Culebra to blow all the material through pipes out to sea [both technologies were seen, at the time, as the coming thing] … such schemes provided plenty of amusement to afford relaxation,” Stevens wrote.

There were blasts, as it were, from the past as well. Soon after the Oyster Bay meeting, Roosevelt received a letter from Philippe Bunau-Varilla, who, like Cromwell, had clearly been unable to let go of his Panama baby. The great Frenchman announced to the president that he had “discovered an unknown way through this mysterious labyrinth” that was the finding of the best plan for the canal. It was a repetition of his much-cherished “excavating in the wet” theory, whereby the canal could be operative on a locks basis while being lowered to an open, sea-level channel, the old de Lesseps dream. The sending of the letter coincided with Bunau-Varilla's usual careful attention to publicity.

Getting nothing but polite brush-offs from the president, Bunau-Varilla focused his attention on one of the newcomers among the Board's experts, Isham Randolph, who had been chief engineer of the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, completed in 1900. But Bunau-Varilla's plan came with estimates of cost and time whose optimism rated with the finest moments of the old de Lesseps propaganda sheet, the
Bulletin.
Bunau-Varilla continued to pester away in his own inimitable style, but on November 7 he received back from Randolph his latest missive with the following note attached: “Mr. Randolph … advises M. P. Buneau Varilla [sic] that he is not seeking professional advice from him: and further that he deprecates the persistent generosity with which that advice is being urged. He returns herewith unread, the treatise which accompanied M. Varilla's note of the 6th inst.”