The Path Between the Seas

by David McCullough

The primary issue, as stated both by Martínez Silva and Concha, was Colombian sovereignty over the proposed canal zone, and in the fall of 1902, just at the critical point in Hay’s conversations with Concha, Colombia’s seemingly interminable civil war had flared up anew on the Isthmus. To secure the Panama Railroad, Roosevelt sent American Marines ashore without first receiving the expressed consent of Colombian authorities—neither those on the Isthmus nor those in Washington—as had always been done before whenever American forces had been landed. The Marines were withdrawn eventually but the damage done to progress on the treaty seemed irreparable. Of particular aggravation to the Colombians was the decision of an American admiral to prevent any movement of Colombian troops on the Panama Railroad at one crucial stage. To Dr. Concha such use of American force had been not merely a violation of the 1846 treaty, but an inexcusable humiliation and the perfect expression of the underlying imperialistic ambitions of the United States. His hostility to Hay personally became such that he refused to see him for weeks. The fact that Hay cabled Bogotá his regret at the misunderstanding that had arisen, declaring there had been “no intention to infringe sovereignty or wound the dignity of Colombia,” did not improve matters.

The reaction in Washington was immensely favorable. To nearly everyone it seemed a solid, straightforward treaty, and in spite of the fiery, often brilliant, unyielding opposition of John Tyler Morgan, who proposed no less than sixty amendments, it was ratified by the Senate on March 17, without amendment and by an overwhelming margin (73 to 5). By the treaty the Compagnie Nouvelle was authorized to sell its “rights, privileges, properties, and concessions” to the United States, and Colombia granted the United States control of a canal zone six miles wide from Colón to Panama City, but not including either of those cities. The franchise was for a hundred years and was renewable at the option of the United States. In return the United States was to pay the Republic of Colombia the lump sum of $10,000,000 cash (gold) plus an annual rent of $250,000. Though Colombian sovereignty over the canal zone was specifically recognized in Article IV, the United States was permitted to establish its own courts of law within the zone and to enforce its own regulations concerning the canal, ports, and the railroad. Police protection for the canal and the railroad was to be provided by Colombia, but if Colombia was unable at any time to meet this obligation, the United States could act with Colombia’s consent, or in an emergency, without that consent.

Raúl Perez, in the pages of the North American Review. “Panama is bone of the bone and blood of the blood of Colombia, and has always been her cherished hope.”

Beaupré was to be the target of much criticism later. He would be blamed for his roughshod, amateurish handling of the situation, his disregard of Latin sensitivities. But the charges are at odds with the facts of his career (he had had six years’ experience in Guatemala, Honduras, and Colombia), his reputed “urbane, dignified manners and courtly demeanor,” and the perception apparent in his striking dispatches. That he was frequently blunt, even dictatorial, in his pronouncements to Colombian officials is also a matter of record, but in view of his orders from Washington he was left with little choice.

It was a highly unorthodox arrangement, to say the least, to have the attorney for the corporation most directly in line to benefit from the treaty, a man with no official title, no rightful business to be involved in any official capacity, operating at will at the highest diplomatic level, instrumental to a degree exceeded only by the Secretary and the President, and with full impunity. But such was this exceptional man’s influence over Hay and such it had been since the negotiations began. When Hay had at last put his large, legible signature to the treaty in January, it was to Cromwell that he turned and presented the pen.

A great deal would be written and said to refute accusations that the White House or the State Department was ever in any way party to the kind of scheme Cromwell had prophesied for the World in such amazing detail. And in fact the full story of what was transpiring behind the scenes will probably never be known. Cromwell, for example, for all that he would have to say for public consumption, appears to have purposefully created one of the larger gaps in the historical record. For in the otherwise complete file of his business dealings, still in the possession of the firm of Sullivan & Cromwell, there is not a paper relating to his Panama operations; all correspondence, cables, documents, expense vouchers, and the like are mysteriously missing.

The President and the Secretary had settled on three possible courses of action in view of the failure of the canal treaty. The first was to proceed to construct the canal under the treaty of 1846, and “fight Colombia if she objects.” (This, it was felt, would be a short and inexpensive war.) The second was for the President to move in accordance with the Spooner Act and turn to the Nicaragua route. The third course was to delay the great work “until something transpires to make Colombia see the light,” then negotiate another treaty. It will, doubtless, be a surprise to the public that a course which is sure to involve the country with war with a South American Republic is one of the methods of procedure being soberly contemplated by the United States. . . . Persons interested in getting the $40,000,000 for the Panama Canal Company are of course eager that this government shall go ahead and seize the property, even though it leads to war.

Arango, Amador, and Arosemena became the nucleus of the conspiracy, to be joined shortly by Federico Boyd, son of the founding editor of the Star & Herald. Amador insisted that Arango should become the first president of the projected new republic of Panama. Arango, out of courtesy, said it should be Amador, and Amador agreed.

Of additional interest is the fact that Amador departed from Colón with insufficient cash to meet even the most modest travel expenses. It was only as a result of several good days at the poker table during the voyage that he was able to make ends meet.

Unaware of what Duque had done, oblivious of the fact that he was being trailed by detectives, he saw only that Cromwell, the model of hospitality and enthusiasm on first meeting, had turned unexplainably rude and unreceptive. Amador appears to have made his first call on Cromwell on September 2, or the day after Cromwell saw Duque. Cromwell made “a thousand offers in the direction of assisting the revolution,” even promised Amador that he would finance the undertaking. “I was to go to Washington to see Mr. Hay,” Amador would recall. But by the time Amador returned for a second conference with the lawyer, Duque had been to see Herrán. Herrán had fired off his warning letters to New York and Paris, and Cromwell, determined to protect himself and safeguard the interests of his client, had decided to have no further ostensible dealings with conspirators from Panama.

Hay observed in early September that a revolution on the Isthmus was “altogether likely,” but advised caution and careful consideration. “It is for you to decide whether you will (1) await the result of that movement, or (2) take a hand in rescuing the Isthmus from anarchy, or (3) treat with Nicaragua.”

As Lieutenant Murphy would later confide, the prospects for a swift, neat, potentially lucrative revolution had struck them as so very certain that they were thinking of resigning their commissions forthwith and “assisting in its consummation.” Their plan was to approach J. P. Morgan for the necessary financing. For bringing the revolution off, their fee was to be $100,000 each, a fair cut they believed of the $10,000,000 the United States was to turn over to Panama. That their reconnaissance had been no chance or casual assignment is borne out by a subsequent written report, which includes such vital details for a military campaign as the best positions for artillery to command Colón and Panama City and the estimated number of mules that could be procured in remote interior villages. Nor is there much question that the word of such men would have carried great weight with Roosevelt. Probably theirs was the first account of the situation in Panama that he felt he could regard as trustworthy. However, the response they saw was such that they left the White House convinced the United States would play no part in any such revolution. They had been astonished at how much Roosevelt seemed already to know of the topography of the Isthmus and other such details, but their immediate mutual reaction was to scrap any further thought of seeing J. P. Morgan. “There goes our revolution,” Murphy said. “I sail for the Philippines.”

Without the military presence of the United States—had there been no American gunboats standing off shore at Colón and Panama City—the Republic of Panama probably would not have lasted a week. Rear Admiral Henry Glass, for example, would conclude after a careful appraisal of the republic’s capacity to defend itself that at the very most six hundred men might have been furnished with adequate arms. Taft, on his first visit to Panama a year later, would describe its army as “not much larger than the army on an opera stage.” Colombia, had it had free access from the sea, could have landed several thousand veteran troops on both sides of the Isthmus, just as the conspirators themselves had appreciated from the beginning. As it was, a Colombian force of some two thousand men did attempt an overland march through the Darien wilderness, but ravaged by fever, they gave up and turned back.

March 23, 1911, at Berkeley, California, at the climax of a speech before eight thousand people in the Greek Theater at the University of California, Roosevelt, in academic gown, was to make the remark that would undo virtually all of his other utterances concerning his “most important action” and that would be remembered afterward, by critic and admirer alike, as the simplest and best explanation of what the Panama revolution came down to. The speech, until that point, had been a heartfelt call to the youth of the Pacific slope to carry on with the high courage and purpose of the vanishing pioneers. And the audience had been profoundly stirred. Then his mood had shifted: The Panama Canal I naturally take special interest in because I started it. [Laughter and applause.] There are plenty of other things I started merely because the time had come that whoever was in power would have started them. But the Panama Canal would not have been started if I had not taken hold of it, because if I had followed the traditional or conservative method I should have submitted an admirable state paper occupying a couple of hundred pages detailing all of the facts to Congress and asking Congress’ consideration of it. In that case there would have been a number of excellent speeches made on the subject in Congress; the debate would be proceeding at this moment with great spirit and the beginning of work on the canal would be fifty years in the future. [Laughter and applause.] Fortunately th...

The ceremony was over. Panama, in the formal sense, had attained legal status in the family of nations. Not a Panamanian had been present; not a word had been spoken in Spanish. And as was understood by all who had participated, there remained only four days until the special commission from Panama was due in New York. To much of the press it had been a bit of barefaced comic opera. “Doubtless M. Bunau-Varilla, whirled along on the torrent of his own tropical eloquence, came almost to believe in it, and was too impassioned to wink,” wrote The New York Times. “Neither, we may be sure, did the President yield to his human impulse to drop the eyelid.” A cartoon in the Sunday Times, titled “The Man Behind the Egg,” portrayed the envoy extraordinary in top hat and spats clutching French canal stock in one hand and with the other applying a candle marked “intrigue” to hatch the Panama chick for Theodore Roosevelt.

The United States was empowered to construct a canal through a zone ten miles in width (in contrast to a zone of six miles in the Hay-Herrán pact). Colón and Panama City were not to be part of the zone, but the sanitation, sewerage, water supply, and maintenance of public order in these terminal cities were placed under United States control. Further, four little islands in the Bay of Panama—Perico, Naos, Culebra, and Flamenco—were granted to the United States and the United States had the right to expropriate any additional land or water areas “necessary and convenient” for the construction, operation, sanitation, or defense of the canal. In return the United States guaranteed the independence of Panama. The French canal company was granted the right to transfer its concessions and property (including the Panama Railroad) to the United States and the compensation to Panama was to be the same as offered earlier to Colombia—$10,000,000 on exchange of ratifications and an annual annuity of $250,000 that would commence nine years later. The most significant difference, however, between this and the earlier treaty was contained in Article III, which specified that Panama granted to the United States within the canal zone “all the rights, power and authority . . . which the United States would possess and exercise if it were the sovereign of the territory . . . to the entire exclusion of the exercise by the Republic of Panama of any such sovereign rights, power or authority.” T...

United Fruit Company, which at its inception was the world’s largest agricultural enterprise. To many on the Isthmus it had seemed that the banana was to be Panama’s economic salvation. But now construction of the canal promised the return of boom times, prosperity that would surely surpass even the French era. There would be all the commensurate demands for local goods and services, and payment this time in dollars. With the United States committed to the task, no one appeared in the least doubtful that it would be completed, that not very far off in the future, Panama was to be what Simon Bolívar had once prophesied, “the emporium of the universe.” As a physician, Amador foresaw sweeping advances in sanitation and an end to centuries of plague. Panama could become a model for all the tropics.

The purchase of the French holdings at Panama was the largest real-estate transaction in history until then. The Treasury warrant for $40,000,000 made out to “J. Pierpont Morgan & Company, New York City, Special Dispensing Agent,” was the largest yet issued by the government of the United States, the largest previous warrant having been for the $7,200,000 paid to Russia for Alaska in 1867. Participation by the house of Morgan had been agreed to by both the buyer and the seller and in late April, prior to receipt of the Treasury warrant, J. P. Morgan sailed for France to oversee the transaction personally. His bank shipped $18,000,000 in gold bullion to Paris, bought exchange on Paris for the balance, and paid the full sum into the Banque de France for the account of the Compagnie Nouvelle and the liquidator of the Compagnie Universelle. On May 2, at the offices of the Compagnie Nouvelle on the narrow, little Rue Louis-le-Grand, the deeds and bills of the sale were executed. On May 9 in New York the United States repaid the $40,000,000 to the house of Morgan. Morgan’s fee for services, charged to the Compagnie Nouvelle, was $35,000. With the $10,000,000 paid to Panama and the $40,000,000 to the Compagnie Nouvelle, the United States had spent more for the rights, privileges, and properties that went with the Canal Zone—an area roughly a third the size of Long Island—than for any actual territorial acquisition in its history, more than for the Louisiana Territory ($15,000,000...

The actual delivery of the canal works at Panama occurred early on the morning of May 4, 1904, and to the Panamanians, who adored ceremony and celebration, who remembered Cathedral Plaza festooned with palm branches and French flags, who remembered parades and banquets and Ferdinand de Lesseps prancing on horseback, it was a terrible disappointment and most unbecoming to the occasion. At 7:30 A.M. Lieutenant Mark Brooke met with half a dozen American officials and a duly authorized representative of the Compagnie Nouvelle at the company headquarters on the plaza, the old Grand Hotel. On being handed the keys to the storehouses and to the Ancon hospital, Lieutenant Brooke swiftly signed the receipt of the property and read aloud a brief proclamation. The transaction occupied no more than a few minutes. Scarcely anyone other than those present was aware of the event. Lieutenant Brooke had not even thought to invite President Amador. Having shaken hands with the Panamanians and the French officials, the young officer raised the Stars and Stripes to the top of the hotel flagpole.

The world requires at least ten years to understand a new idea, however important or simple it may be. —SIR RONALD ROSS

Climate change! Fertility crisis!

The carrier of yellow fever, it had been determined, was the small, quiet, silvery household mosquito known as Stegomyia fasciata, exactly as the Cuban physician Carlos Finlay had announced years earlier. As is presently known there are no fewer than 2,500 different species of mosquito (rather than 800-odd, as Finlay believed), and these belong to three important genera: Culex, Anopheles, and Aëdes. The Culex group includes the ordinary gray household mosquito found in northern latitudes (Culex pipiens pipiens). The Anopheles are the only known carriers of malaria and also transmit encephalitis, or sleeping sickness. The Aëdes aegypti is Stegomyia fasciata, as it was then called, the yellow-fever mosquito.

Not until the following year, however, was he able at last to prove the mosquito theory by locating the mosquito’s salivary gland and determining that the expanding parasite within the mosquito’s stomach eventually penetrates all parts of the mosquito’s body, including that gland. “The door is unlocked,” he wrote in an exultant letter to England, “and I am walking in and collecting the treasures.” The solution was this: Anopheles, comparatively large, brown mosquitoes with little black dots on their wings, transmitted malaria only after having bitten someone already infected with the disease. The mosquito drew the blood containing the parasite, the parasite multiplied in the stomach of the mosquito, then moved to the salivary gland whence the parasite was delivered to the bloodstream of whomever the mosquito bit next. The insect was not the source, in other words, only the agent of conveyance. But this particular insect was the only means of conveyance. Furthermore, it could cause damage only when there was infected blood to feed on, when there were people about who were sick with malaria. So the way to stamp out malaria was not simply to get rid of the Anopheles mosquito, but to make it as difficult as possible for the Anopheles mosquito to get at anyone who had the disease. The idea of preventing malarial epidemics by exterminating the Anopheles was first put forth in a letter addressed by Ross to the government of India on February 18, 1901.

Yet no yellow-fever cases had ever resulted for Finlay. His notion that the mosquito had to be the transmitting agent was perfectly correct and like Ross in India he had hit upon it alone. What he did not know, what Reed and his staff were to demonstrate, was that Stegomyia fasciata transmits the yellow-fever parasite only according to a very particular time pattern, that the development of the parasite within the insect requires what is known as the period of “extrinsic incubation.” For the mosquito to become infected it must suck the blood of the yellow-fever patient within the first three days after the patient has contracted the disease. Then once the mosquito has taken the blood, another twelve to twenty days must pass before the mosquito can transmit the infection. Finlay had simply been applying his infected mosquitoes too soon.

Associated with Reed were Dr. James Carroll, Dr. Aristides Agramonte, and Dr. Jesse W. Lazear. Late in August, a few days after he had allowed a mosquito to bite him, Dr. Carroll fell ill with yellow fever, and though he recovered, his health was so damaged that he died a few years later. In mid-September, while placing mosquitoes on patients in a fever ward, Lazear saw a free mosquito of undetermined species land on his hand and he also purposefully allowed the insect to take its feed of blood. Five days later Lazear had what Gorgas described as one of the most violent cases of yellow fever he had ever attended. On September 25, the day Lazear died, he was in such wild delirium that it took two men to hold him in bed. Convinced now of the truth of Finlay’s theory, Reed pressed on with further experiments proving conclusively that Stegomyia fasciata was the carrier, and that neither filth nor “fomites,” the term used for the soiled clothes or bedding of yellow-fever patients, had anything whatever to do with spreading the disease. For twenty nights, as part of one experiment, a doctor and three volunteer soldiers, confined to a one-room shack, slept in the soiled pajamas of yellow-fever patients, on beds reeking of black vomit and other excreta; and for all the discomfort of the experience, none of them suffered the least sign of illness.

“Men who achieve greatness,” the brothers Mayo were to write in an essay about Gorgas, “do not work more complexly than the average man, but more simply . . . . In dealing with complex problems, with the simplicity natural to him he went directly to the point, unaffected by the confusion of details in which a smaller man would have lost himself.”

Thousands of adult mosquitoes had been destroyed in Havana by systematic fumigation of houses wherein yellow-fever cases had been found. Doors and windows had been sealed off with newspaper, room by room, and pans full of sulphur or powdered pyrethrum (a dried flower used as an insecticide) had been burned for an hour or more. But the main attack had been on water jars, barrels, cisterns, any stray bucket, tin can, or broken dish in which rainwater might collect. A card file had been made on every house and building within city limits; the city had been divided into sections and inspectors had been sent out daily to report on the Stegomyia-producing status of households within their districts. Water kept indoors for household use had to be covered. It had been a laborious, often thankless task, yet extremely simple in concept, and the results had been amazingly rapid.

So while Stegomyia mosquitoes were always readily within range, their breeding grounds closely, neatly defined, Anopheles were literally everywhere, and in fantastic numbers, since the female deposits as many as two hundred eggs every ten days. The sanitary measures taken at Havana—the clearing away of garbage and refuse, the installation of proper drainage systems plus the campaign on Stegomyia’s breeding grounds had had the effect of giving no mosquito, Anopheles included, much chance to propagate within the city limits. But what chance would there be at Colón with its swamps or along the canal line? Malaria, not yellow fever, Gorgas stressed to his associates, was the problem upon which their success would ride or fall. Malaria, he emphasized, had accounted for the greatest loss of life during the French years. “If we can control malaria, I feel very little anxiety about other diseases. If we do not control malaria our mortality is going to be heavy.” Knowledge of the kind gathered at Havana on Stegomyia would now have to be gathered on Anopheles.

Unchecked, the disease would flare into a monstrous geometrical progression of death, taking hundreds, possibly thousands, of lives. Were conditions on the Isthmus to remain as they were, and were upwards of twenty to thirty thousand men to be brought to Panama, as planned, then, Gorgas calculated, the annual death toll from yellow fever alone could run to three or four thousand.

That the minds of men in such positions could be so closed in the face of all that had been learned and demonstrated in Cuba, not to mention the insistent warnings from Roosevelt and Welch, may seem inconceivable. In the conventional understanding of history, human advancement is marked by specific momentous steps: on December 17, 1903, at Kitty Hawk, the Wright brothers fly in a heavier-than-air machine and at once a new age dawns; in a hospital ward outside Havana Dr. Jesse Lazear dies a martyr’s death and the baffling horror of yellow jack is at last resolved. But seldom does it happen that way. Ideas too have their period of extrinsic incubation, and particularly if they run contrary to what has always seemed common sense. In the case of the Wright brothers, it was five years after Kitty Hawk before the world accepted the idea that their machine could fly.

From Gorgas’ private secretary it would also be learned years later that the kindly doctor, seemingly as imperturbable as ever, could also become so incensed over red tape and bureaucrats in Washington that he would sweep the papers from his desk, lock them in a drawer, and storm out of the office, not to be seen again for a day or more. He rose early, cared little about his clothes, his customary ensemble a rumpled three-piece civilian suit, stiff detachable collar, black tie with stickpin. His main pleasures were food—virtually anything set before him—horseback riding, a glass of beer, conversation, and books, his reading being done according to a lifelong routine. He always kept three books at hand—one scientific, one of classical literature or history, one light fiction—which he took up in turn, giving each exactly twenty minutes according to a pocket watch placed on the table beside his chair. In this fashion, he said, he was able to remember what he read.

The real problem, as much nearly as with the bureaucracy in Washington, was with Wallace himself. Wallace was a competent enough technician and someone who worked well with men of large affairs. The son of a Presbyterian clergyman, equable and intelligent-looking, he had built railroads, and a number of impressive terminals for the Illinois Central (at Chicago, New Orleans, Memphis); he had devised the system for transporting the crowds in and out of the Columbian Exposition at Chicago in 1893 and few American engineers had attained such professional honors. At fifty-one, he was a past president of the Western Society of Engineers, past president of the American Railway Engineering and Maintenance-of-Way Association, and a member of the Institute of Civil Engineers of Great Britain. But at Panama he never displayed the least enthusiasm for the work. He was tentative, withdrawn, wholly uninspirational. Men who served under him would have nothing particularly derogatory to say about him afterward, nor anything very complimentary. Most seriously he appeared to have no clear idea how he would build the canal.

Wallace was not oblivious to the situation. He had decided at the outset, for example, to provide Panama City and Colón with their own water system (which was the reason for the order of pipe) and to install sewage facilities in both cities. There is even in his organizational headings a basic appreciation of the diversity of tasks to be met other than digging dirt: Supplies, Personnel and Quarters, Buildings and Architecture, Machinery, Maps and Printing, Climatic Conditions and River Hydraulics, Communications. His thoughts, nonetheless, were tied up with the work at Culebra. Only by digging could he train the men, only by digging could he determine his unit cost—“the cost of explosives, cost of loosening and excavating material, cost of loading, cost of transportation, cost of disposition, and the cost of all the various elements of supervision and the maintenance of equipment, track and appliances, on the basis of the cubic yard.” Only by digging could he satisfy Washington with monthly progress reports.

The immediate response in the press was one of dire concern. Though a few papers suggested that it was now merely a question of finding somebody else, the majority saw the reputation of Roosevelt’s Administration suddenly at stake, not to mention that of the country, and found the outlook, in the words of the Louisville Courier-Journal, “not cheering.” In the London papers it was said that Roosevelt was paying the price for his rash “land-piracy” in Panama. Wallace, who ultimately became president and chairman of the board of Westinghouse, Church, Kerr & Company, as well as a board member of several other industrial firms, would spend the rest of his life trying to repair the damage done to his reputation. Monetary considerations, he would insist, had never entered into the decision to “disconnect” himself from Panama. He denied any personal fear of disease, claiming he had actually had a light attack of yellow fever while on the Isthmus and so thereafter had considered himself immune. Privately he said that he heartily disliked Shonts and knew they could not work together. And appearing before the Senate canal committee he would delight John Tyler Morgan with the further admission that it was really Cromwell whom he hated most of all. The tragedy, said Wallace again and again, was that Taft never gave him a chance to express his real reason for resigning, which was that he had “become convinced some other men in my place could render better service to the enterprise.”

What we needed was a fighter. And we got one. —FRANK MALTBY

While the public and the press at home speculated on what progress the new chief might effect, Stevens, on August 1, ordered a complete stop of all work in Culebra Cut. Excavation would not be resumed, he informed his staff, until he had everything ready. Steam-shovel engineers and cranemen were sent back to the United States. They would hear from him later. “The digging is the least thing of all,” he declared. Starting at once, Dr. Gorgas was to have whatever men and supplies he needed. Panama City and Colón were to be cleaned up and paved. Warehouses, machine shops, and piers were to be built. Entire communities were to be planned and built from scratch—houses, mess halls, barracks, more hospitals, a visitors’ hotel, schools, churches, clubhouses, cold-storage facilities, laundries, sewage systems, reservoirs. He was determined, as he said in a letter to Taft, to prepare well before beginning construction, “regardless of clamor of criticism . . . as long as I am in charge of the work . . . and I am confident that if this policy is adhered to, the future will show its absolute wisdom.”

But the real hero, in Gorgas’ view, was Stevens. “The moral effect of so high an official taking such a stand at this period . . . was very great,” Gorgas wrote, “and it is hard to estimate how much sanitation on the Isthmus owes to this gentleman for its subsequent success.” To Stevens, years later, he wrote privately, “The fact is that you are the only one of the higher officials on the Isthmus who always supported the Sanitary Department . . . both before and after your time. So you can understand that our relations, yours and mine, stand out in my memory . . . as a green and pleasant oasis.” The eradication of yellow fever at Havana had taken eight months. At Panama it took nearly a year and a half. But had it not been for Stevens it would have taken considerably longer. Had Stevens been chief engineer from the beginning, doubtless many lives would have been spared; there would have been far less grief and no panic. Once Gorgas’ program was under way, incidence of yellow fever fell off with the same dramatic suddenness as at Havana. The epidemic was over by September, when there were only seven cases and four deaths. On an afternoon some weeks later, Gorgas and several of his staff gathered in the dissecting room at Ancon to perform an autopsy. Gorgas told them to “take a good look at this man,” for he was the last yellow-fever cadaver they would see. By December the disease had disappeared from the Isthmus.

Wallace fiasco seemed questionable at first. Losses from disease, the pell-mell rush to get away, the very serious difficulty in recruiting replacements, had inevitably meant the advancement to key positions of young men who under normal conditions would probably never have been considered. “Personally, I have always felt grateful to the yellow fever for my first great opportunity in life,” wrote Robert E. Wood nearly sixty years later. As a twenty-five-year-old lieutenant he had had “no idea of getting the fever, and did not . . . Anyone who stayed was promoted.” Straight, clean-shaven, as square-jawed and forthright as a Charles Dana Gibson hero, Wood was among the first spotted by Stevens as part of his reorganization. Assigned to the Department of Labor and Quarters, Wood was later to become Chief Quartermaster of the Zone; later still he would become General Wood and ultimately the commanding genius of Sears, Roebuck and Company. Frank Maltby, Wallace’s division head at Colón, was summoned to Panama City soon after Stevens got settled. “We sat on the veranda under a full tropical moon . . . . Everyone else disappeared,” Maltby would write, recalling the interview. “Mr. Stevens did not talk much but asked questions—and could that man ask questions! He found out everything I knew. He turned me inside out and shook out the last drop of information . . . . At 1 A.M. we retired.” The following day Stevens cabled Washington to say that the man he had in mind for the positio...

The decision, by a margin of eight to five, was for a sea-level canal. Without exception the European members wanted it that way and they were joined by Chairman Davis, Professor Burr, and William B. Parsons. In language and logic the case as presented by the majority had a very familiar ring: the setting might have been the grande salle of the Société de Géographie in 1879. Speaking for the majority, Chairman Davis declared that he had known since boyhood that Suez and Panama would be “overcome” one day; a passage at Suez had been declared impossible, a passage like that at Suez must be built in Panama. Again the issue was one of national pride and honor. Only in this instance the spokesman was an American official who knew Panama from personal experience and who no less than any of the others, presumably, should have had little difficulty understanding what had happened to the French and why. But the model was not the French canal at Panama; the model—again—was the French canal at Suez.

Malaria would continue to take more lives, as William Gorgas allowed in his own reports, and the “amount of incapacity” caused by the disease was, as he said, very much greater than that due to all other diseases combined. Nearly all of the patients Roosevelt saw in the hospitals at Panama had been black men, as he acknowledged. And privately he had been appalled by some of the things he had seen, as we know from his correspondence with Shonts. “The least satisfactory feature of the entire work to my mind was the arrangement for feeding the negroes,” he wrote as soon as he reached Washington. “Those cooking sheds with their muddy floors and with the unclean pot which each man had in which he cooked everything, are certainly not what they should be . . . . Moreover, the very large sick rates among the negroes, compared with the whites, seems to me to show that a resolute effort should be made to teach the negro some of the principles of personal hygiene . . .” Could not something be done to provide better housing, better health for these workers? he asked.

Privately Roosevelt was “utterly at sea” over Stevens’ behavior. When a friend who was visiting the Isthmus wrote in confidence that Stevens suffered from insomnia, Roosevelt seemed much relieved. “If he were a drinking man or one addicted to the use of drugs, the answer would be simple,” he wrote in reply. “As it is, I am inclined to think that it must have been insomnia or something of the kind, due to his tropical surroundings . . .” Then he added: “He has done admirably.” On the Isthmus the announcement had a shattering effect. The Star & Herald, standing firmly behind Stevens, declared the top-heavy craniums were all in Washington and that the French must be laughing up their sleeves. When Stevens’ own men appealed to him for some word of explanation, he answered, “Don’t talk, dig.” As time passed, numerous theories were put forth. It was said that he had found the Gatun Dam plans to be unsound; that he was angry over a contract that had been agreed to in Washington without his say; that his wife did not like the looks of the contractor; that he had been offered another job; that he was crazy. One editor, exasperated by the absurdity of all that was appearing in print, declared that in fact the problem of green mold on his books was what finally broke the spirit of John Stevens.

To a whole generation of Americans it was Theodore Roosevelt who built the Panama Canal. It was quite simply his personal creation. Yet the Panama Canal was built under three American Presidents, not one—Roosevelt, Taft, and Wilson—and in fact, of the three, it was really Taft who gave the project the most time and personal attention. Taft made five trips to Panama as Secretary of War and he went twice again during the time he was President. It was Taft who fired Wallace and hired John Stevens, Taft who first spotted Goethals. When Taft replaced Roosevelt in the White House in 1909, the canal was only about half finished. None of this made much difference, however. Nor ought there ever be any question as to the legitimacy of the Roosevelt stamp on the canal. His own emphatic position was that it would never have been built but for him and it was a position no one tried to dispute. To Goethals, “The real builder of the Panama Canal was Theodore Roosevelt.” It could not have been more Roosevelt’s triumph, Goethals wrote, “if he had personally lifted every shovelful of earth in its construction. . . .” The work had not simply begun anew while Roosevelt held office; his leadership had been decisive—in the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty, the choice of the Panama route, the creation of an independent Panama, the defense and support of William Gorgas, the choice of a lock-and-lake plan. Even with his Panama visit, however brief, he achieved at a stroke something that had never been done b...

High tea at Culebra (Colonel and Mrs. David D. Gaillard)

Girls got a black eye and a bruise on her arm

Steamer Ancon starts into Culebra Cut on the official opening transit of the canal, August 15, 1914.

The worst single disaster occurred on December 12, 1908, at Bas Obispo. More than fifty holes had been drilled in the solid rock on the west bank of the Cut and these had been loaded with some twenty-two tons of dynamite. The charges had been tamped, the fuses set, but none of the holes had been wired since the blast was not scheduled until the end of the day. As the foreman and one helper were tamping the final charge, the whole blast went off, by what cause no one was ever able to determine. Twenty-three men were killed, forty injured. As time went on the men became extremely proficient and accidents became comparatively rare considering the volume of explosives being used and the numbers of laborers involved. Still, more men would be killed, and very often, as at Bas Obispo, there would be too little left of them to determine who they were.

12/12

Fifteen thousand tourists came to watch the show in 1911 and in 1912 there were nearly twenty thousand. “You are now overlooking the world-famous Culebra Cut,” exclaimed the tour guides at the start of their standard spiel. There was more tonnage per mile moving on the tracks below, the visitors were informed, than on any railroad in the world. But meanwhile a big clubhouse at the town of Culebra was being dismantled and removed (“in order to lighten the weight upon the west bank of the canal at this point”), and on January 19 Cucaracha broke loose once again. It was one of the worst slides on record. It spilled the whole way across the Cut and up the other side. All traffic was blocked at that end; for the sixth or seventh time, the slide had wiped out months of work. Gaillard was practically in shock, according to one account, and Goethals was hurriedly called to the scene. “What are we to do now?” Gaillard asked. Goethals lit a cigarette. “Hell,” he said, “dig it out again.”

The enormous discrepancy between white and black society along this same jungle corridor, the point that the Canal Zone was in actuality a rigid caste society, was barely even implied by such observers (which, of course, was in itself another facet of the life and times). And neither did any but a very few question the kind of white community that had evolved, other than to point out, somewhat apologetically, that it was indeed “a sort of socialism.” The statement that the Canal Zone was “a narrow ribbon of standardized buildings and standardized men working at standardized jobs” stands almost alone in all to be found in published or private accounts. To William Franklin Sands, an American diplomat, this new civilization created by his countrymen was simply awful, “a drearily efficient state,” “a mechanization of human society.” “Every American looked and behaved exactly like every other—to the vast bewilderment of the natives, who had previously thought of us as a race of extreme individualists. . . .”

The whole system was in fact quite intentionally designed to favor the married employee, to provide every inducement for matrimony, to bring stability to the skilled white segment of the community. Books from the best-seller list and recordings of the newest hit tunes were no less current than at home. Indeed, with several ships a week arriving from New York, with thousands of tourists pouring through full of news and wearing the latest fashions, many residents of the Zone felt more in touch and up to date than ever before in their lives.

In the popular picture of life in the Canal Zone as it emerged in hundreds of magazine and newspaper articles, that vast force of black men and women who were doing the heaviest, most difficult physical labor—some twenty-five thousand to thirty thousand human beings—could be but very faintly seen. As individuals they had no delineation whatsoever. They were there only as part of the workaday landscape. That they too were making a new life in an alien land, that they too were raising families, experiencing homesickness, fear, illness, or exhilaration in the success of the work, was almost never even inferred. In the United States the public had little if any conception of the part played in Panama by “pioneers” who were neither American nor white, or how very small numerically the white American force was by contrast. To judge by many published accounts, the whole enormous black underside of the caste system simply did not exist. Cartoons in the newspapers depicted the canal being dug by cheerful white Americans with picks and shovels and many came to Panama expecting to see just that. Harry Franck would write that he had arrived actually believing he could take up a shovel and descend into the canal with other workmen, “that I might someday solemnly raise my hand and boast, ‘I helped dig IT.’ But that was in the callow days before I . . . learned the awful gulf that separates the sacred white American from the rest of the Canal Zone world.”

Yet little official notice would ever be paid to such contributions. In that official journal of Zone life, the Canal Record—-a reliable, admirable publication in most other respects—the black employee went unrecognized, except in death, and then only in a line or two, his tag number invariably appended, as if he were not quite human. It would be reported that Joshua Steele, of Barbados, Number 23646, was killed in an explosion in the Cut or that Samuel Thomas, of Montserrat, Number 456185, was crushed to death in the pulleys of a mud scow. But no obituaries appeared in the paper, any more than notices of black weddings, social affairs, or the birth of a black child. As a consequence, the popular mental picture of what life was like in the Canal Zone, and popular pride in the kind of society that had been created there, were founded on a very limited and erroneous view of reality. The measure of Utopia achieved through American know-how and largess was again relative, like the success of the medical crusade. And as a consequence of such distortion, most all of what would be written in the way of a social history of these years contains but part of the story.

As a result, no fewer than four out of five West Indians paid rent for wretched tenements in Colón or Panama City, where one room usually served an entire family. Or, more often, they settled in the jungle, building whole villages of dynamite boxes, flattened tin cans, any odd scraps of lumber or corrugated iron that could be scavenged. They lived where they pleased, as best they could, without benefit of screen doors or janitor service, growing small gardens, always a great many chickens pecking about their small shacks, and nobody of official importance cared very much about them one way or the other. So it was not that the I.C.C. was providing its black labor force—that is, the overwhelming majority of its workers—with substandard quarters; the I.C.C. was providing them with no quarters at all. And in almost nothing that was published for popular consumption was this point ever made explicit; or if touched on at all, it was expressed as another act of generosity on the part of the canal officials, in that they were allowing the Negroes to live the way they were happiest. Yet as one observer did write, no visitor had to search very far to see what a wholly different life these people were subjected to. “The visitor who saw first the trim and really attractive houses and bachelor quarters assigned to the gold employees could hardly avoid a certain revulsion of opinion as to the sweetness and light of Isthmian life when he wandered into the Negro quarters across the railro...