The man chosen to actually dig the canal, John Frank Stevens, came at the recommendation of railroad genius James J. Hill, who called him the best construction engineer in the United States. Burly, rough, and handsome, Stevens was admired by Teddy Roosevelt as well; his approach to great projects resembled that of Andrew Carnegie, whose faith in ordinary men doing extraordinary things was a cornerstone of his empire. While working for Hill, Stevens had cut the Marias Pass through the Continental Divide, personally scouting the path alone, staying alive in the freezing cold only by marching back and forth at night. Likewise, he discovered another pass in the Cascades, named for him, and would eventually tunnel through that mountain range, cumulatively building over one thousand miles of railroad. He liked to work without interference, and expected his job would speak for itself. This classical American entrepreneurial attitude was exactly the kind Roosevelt liked, telling Stevens only “get busy and buttle like hell!”100 Arriving in Panama in 1905, Stevens found the project mired in indecision—no final plan had been drawn up yet, and indeed the review board hadn’t even convened!—and debt, having spent $120 million with little to show for it.
Stevens could be found on the work lines daily, noting that there were three diseases in Panama, yellow fever, malaria, and cold feet, the worst of which was cold feet. Told no collisions had occurred on the railroad line, he scoffed that it just meant nothing was moving. Perhaps Stevens’s most impressive act involved a general halt to all work on the Culebra Cut to organize a sensible plan of work. He even sent some steam shovel and crane men back to the United States.
A quick assessment revealed that, before any real work could be done, yellow fever needed to be dealt with. Stevens’s main ally in the war against the disease was Dr. William Gorgas, a devout and modest Christian who had learned from Dr. Walter Reed and Dr. Carlos Finlay in Cuba, who had already proven that mosquitoes transmitted yellow fever. Gorgas, and the prior Yellow Fever Commission, had issued reports and published their work, yet the Army and Congress ignored it, even after a scientific congress in Paris the following year declared Walter Reed’s conclusions about the transmission of the disease to be “scientifically determined fact.” “What’s that [mosquito] got to do with digging the canal?” Gorgas was asked.101 Nevertheless, with the patience of Job, Gorgas forged ahead, insisting that defeating the mosquito remained a key to a successful canal.
After his assessment, Stevens broke the Washington logjam and ensured that the doctor got everything he needed. Panama City and Colón were fumigated; soap, brooms, garbage cans, and other essentials were brought in by the thousands; oil was applied to cisterns and cesspools; and the major cities were all outfitted with running water. Stevens wisely didn’t get caught up in the squabbles over what caused yellow fever, and made no public endorsements of Gorgas’s positions. Rather, he simply de jure implemented Gorgas’s solutions. Theodore Shonts, the new head of the Panama Canal Commission, opposed Gorgas, and the issue finally landed in Roosevelt’s lap. “You must choose between Shonts and Gorgas,” Dr. Alexander Lambert, a hunting pal of TR’s, told the president.102
And so he did. Roosevelt sided with Gorgas, Shonts fell in line, and suddenly the Panama doctor had millions of dollars at his disposal to fight the disease. It took a year and a half to eradicate yellow fever in Panama, but as quickly as water supplies were cleaned up, the situation improved from area to area, enabling work to begin. By December 1906, the last death from yellow fever was reported in Panama. Next, Stevens—a railroader—decided the old Panama line was too light, some four times smaller than what he worked with on the Great Northern. Setting up new warehouses, telegraph lines, and shops along the route, Stevens replaced the existing track with new and heavier stock. He hired a whole new force of trainmasters, superintendents, dispatchers, and mechanics, all trained in the Great Northern’s techniques. Quickly, a healthy symmetry unfolded: as the tracks moved forward next to the cleaned-up, disease-free towns, fresh food arrived, and within six months the construction force had tripled. At one point, Stevens had 12,000 men constructing only buildings. Agents recruited in New York, New Orleans, and Caribbean islands, offering jobs for over 4,000 skilled workers available in the first year alone. Transportation to Panama was free, as was housing and medical, and the average pay for a skilled worker was $87 per month in an age when a men’s suit was only $10 and a steak dinner, at most, a quarter.
Even so, applications fell behind labor force requirements, with many of those who showed up being unsuitable for the necessary machinist and plumbing jobs. Barbados proved one of the major suppliers of laborers, particularly at the wages the Americans offered. At one point, 20 percent of the Barbadian population, and some 40 percent of the adult males, were employed in Panama, sending back nearly $300,000 a year. It was devilishly hard work, loading and unloading, pouring cement in the steamy Panamanian climate, cutting brush, cutting lumber, and above all, digging. Supposed “laziness” among the West Indians disappeared with better diets—particularly more meat—impressing even the skeptics. Above all, Stevens appreciated the need to create in Panama working conditions equal to those for industrial laborers and tradesmen in the United States. Yet throughout, he considered it a basic engineering calculation of moving dirt from one location to another, mostly via train.
Looming ahead, however, was the Culebra Cut, the most difficult engineering obstacle for the project. Stevens and his associates considered massive hydraulic mining via water blasts, or using compressed air that would send the dirt to the sea through giant pipes. Stevens ultimately preferred a simple assembly line of dirt, disposed of by the railroad, using the excavated soil to fill in for the locks. The most important aspect of the operation, as Stevens saw it, was not the distance from excavation to dumping, but rather that the dirt kept moving. He envisioned an endless chain of rail cars in constant motion. Devising a remarkable network of tracks, Stevens kept empty cars poised next to the massive shovels, while filled cars rolled out on a downgrade.
Stevens also had to wade into the political fray, helping swing the decision from a sea-level canal to one with locks, and in stark opposition to the report delivered to the White House in January 1906 called Report of the Consulting Engineers for the Panama Canal. A minority report called for a canal built with a series of locks, creating a larger Gatún Lake out of Lake Bohio, and in February, the Isthmian Canal Commission chose the lock design. Roosevelt personally visited the canal project in November, climbing into one of the massive steam shovels for a photo opportunity: it was classic TR, with a giant banner greeting him at the Culebra Cut reading, “WE’LL HELP YOU DIG IT.” But it would be dug without Stevens, who resigned in 1907 for reasons that were never disclosed. He was replaced by Major George Goethals, a silver-haired, messy chain smoker who “detested fat people.”103 But Goethals met with everyone, talked to everyone, and listened to virtually anyone, allowing private meetings on Sundays with workmen or any other person who had a gripe.
Work did not suffer under Stevens’s replacement. Goethels had the operation carving out the equivalent of the Suez Canal every three years, ultimately excavating a pile that would, if shaped as a pyramid, reach 4,200 feet high. About half of the workforce at the Culebra Cut was involved in dynamiting, with a single ship bringing in one million pounds of dynamite at a time. By March 1909, sixty-eight giant mechanized shovels chopped out two million cubic yards in a month, with a single shovel excavating 70,000 yards in a twenty-six-day period. More than seventy-five miles of railroad track was laid within the nine-mile canyon, not counting the Panama Railroad itself, allowing 160 trains a day to run in and out of the Culebra Cut.
An endless stream of visitors, many of them influential, toured Panama during construction of the canal, including the son of President John Quincy Adams, Charles Francis Adams, Jr. (then seventy-six years old). Adams expressed astonishment at the transformation of a handful of disease-ridden jungle outposts into “civilization.” Congressmen made regular junkets to “inspect�
�� the work, enjoying a tropical vacation most of the time. At its peak, the Panama workforce numbered over 45,000, including 2,500 women and children—the families of American workers who moved to the Canal Zone. Overwhelmingly, however, Panama was a region full of men, and as such, it featured 220 saloons in Panama City and another 131 in Colón. Incentives to get married (an immediate grant of a rent-free, four-room apartment) combined with the prevalence of brothels meant more than a few men married prostitutes. But the finer side of life was present, too. Cities sported bakeries, excellent shopping, libraries, restaurants; regular social events included dances, bowling clubs, dramatic and theater presentations, and a variety of exclusive men’s clubs. Taboga Island, in the Bay of Panama, could be reached through a three-hour boat trip, and offered a close vacation resort with sheltered beaches. Historians, scientists, and archeologists began to trickle into the Zone, conducting research.
All the while, still more industry and infrastructure permeated Panama. Another railroad was built, along with a hydroelectric plant. The military began placing sixteen-inch guns, with a range of twenty miles, at Toro Point and on the islands in the Bay of Panama. In 1910, with the completion of the West Diversion channel, the lake began to take over the jungle. The mighty locks rose as structural marvels, all of which was reported with enthusiasm back home, and their massive size (about five blocks long and six stories high), if stood on end, would have exceeded the height of the Eiffel Tower. The entire project employed some five million sacks of cement shipped from New York and made use of the newest concrete and toughest American steel, becoming the largest concrete structures built by Americans until the Boulder Dam was built in the 1930s. Despite what by modern standards would be considered primitive technology, the locks stood up amazingly well over time, and best of all, the plan called for the falling water of the Gatún spillway to furnish all the electrical power needed to open and close the locks. More impressive still, intermediate gates were built so that if a smaller vessel came through (at its maximum, a lock could hold the world’s largest ship, the Titanic), a smaller chamber could be used to speed up the flooding or release process. To ensure that out-of-control ships didn’t damage the locks, a massive chain “catch” device stood ready to restrain the vessel before it could do any damage.
On September 26, 1913, the Gatún locks underwent a test run with a tug, and in a painfully slow process (because the lake had not yet reached its highest level), the tug finally emerged through the locks onto Gatún Lake. The following month, in a clever publicity scene, President Woodrow Wilson, elected in 1912, transmitted the signal to Panama by telegraph wires that blew up the dike in the Culebra Cut, and the waterway was filled. When a crane boat, the Alexander La Valley, went from the Pacific to the Gulf side without fanfare in January, it marked the first actual transit of the isthmus. Seven months later, an equally undistinguished vessel, the cement boat Christobal, became the first oceangoing vessel to cross through the Panama Canal, draining all the pomp from the official opening on August 15, 1914. Yet the canal that would in theory unite the world was already a distraction from the real events in Europe, which would soon come apart in the Great War.
The Unpacific Pacific
Matching the American presence in the Caribbean was an expansion in the Pacific that came through the American presence in the Philippines and possession of other island territories, which threatened the British. England now faced potential opponents on both oceans, not the least from the rising empire of Japan, which posed a growing naval threat. With the Meiji constitution of 1890, Japan had adopted a constitutional monarchy model that resembled the government of Prussia, allowing power to be shared between the emperor and the parliament, called the Diet. Many quipped that Japan had a Prussian government, a British navy, and a French education system—an Occidental façade that nevertheless concealed a decidedly Oriental mind-set. Japan intended to apply Yamato-damashii (“Japanese spirit”) to modernization. Yamato-damashii soon took on overtones of Bushido (a code of samurai warrior conduct), or military nobility propaganda. The emperor was a deity, and all Japanese were descended from the gods. Other races, however, were not, and were treated as distinctly inferior. All foreigners were gaijin—barbarians. Bushido stressed honor in its most extreme form—loyalty to the emperor, to family, and to Japan. Death was preferable to dishonor; “saving face” was a hallmark of all interactions, public and private. After the Japanese victories in the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese wars, Bushido took hold as a catchphrase for progress. It was the Japanese naval victories at Port Arthur and Tsushima that caught British (and American) attention, though, for here was a supposedly backward Asian nation defeating a theoretically superior Western power. Admittedly, Russia was viewed as barely ahead of the Ottoman Empire by Britain and France—its population had only recently emerged from serfdom, and still lagged far behind other European countries and America when it came to industrialization. Yet Japan defeated a “white” nation vastly larger than itself, and at sea no less.
When war broke out in 1904 over a Korean border dispute with Japan, Russians derided their enemies as “yellow monkeys,” the “Asiatic horde,” or the “yellow danger.” Dismissing both Japanese land and sea forces as inferior—despite their recent shellacking of China—the Russians learned firsthand how advanced the Imperial Navy was when one night a surprise torpedo attack by a squadron of Japanese destroyers disabled two battleships and a cruiser, eliminating Russia’s superiority in battleships in the Far East. Admiral Heihachiro Togo foolishly followed up in daylight on February 9, engaging virtually the whole Russian fleet. After a few minutes of blasting away, Togo fortunately escaped with his fleet intact.104 Three months later, however, when the Russian Baltic Fleet arrived in the Pacific after a tedious voyage, having been dispatched on October 15, a much different outcome resulted. Possessing faster battleships with superior high-explosive shells, Togo “crossed the ‘T’ ” of the Russian line (in which the Japanese fleet turned at a 90-degree angle to the oncoming line of Russian ships). This maneuver brought to bear most of his guns and rained shot on the Russians. The commander of the Suvorov recalled, “Shells seemed to be pouring upon us incessantly one after another. The steel plates and superstructure on the upper decks were torn to pieces…. Iron ladders were crumpled up into rings, and guns were literally hurled from their mountings.”105 Within hours, the Russian battleships were crippled or sunk; that night, Japanese torpedo boats and destroyers swarmed around the survivors, forcing the scuttling of four more battleships or heavy cruisers. In all, Russia lost twenty-one ships, including virtually all of her nineteen battleships and heavy cruisers, and her killed, wounded, or captured numbered almost 10,000, against 700 Japanese dead or wounded, the latter including a young officer named Isoroku Yamamoto who later was the architect of the Pearl Harbor attack and commanded the Combined Fleet in World War II. He lost two fingers and came within an ace of having his career terminated by the maiming.
Tsushima enabled Japan to annex Korea in 1910 without opposition and served notice to the West that Japan was, if not its equal, a legitimate power in the Pacific. But neither the Japanese, nor the Russians, nor the Germans fully understood the new dynamic of naval power. Simply building ships wasn’t enough. Sir John Fisher’s radical new battleship, the Dreadnought (1906), with steam turbines and “all big gun” armament, seemed to confirm his unofficial title as the “genius incarnate of technical change.”106 Contrary to the notion that, because of its revolutionary design, the Dreadnought “leveled the playing field” for aspiring naval powers such as Germany (which embarked on its own version of the ship and widened the Kiel Canal to permit passage of larger vessels), Fisher’s advances showed how once again true power came from culture. Britain’s naval culture had produced Fisher, after all, not vice versa. As in any technology—and battleships were no different—the most significant changes come from incremental, relentless improvements possible only in a cultural milieu in which engineering and technology are fos
tered. The same principle kept the Chinese from turning gunpowder into a culture of volley-fire muskets, and prevented the Iranians from applying the stirrup to mounted shock combat horseback charges. Lacking a strong, innovative naval culture, none of the second-tier aspirants could really hope to compete at sea with England or America.
Poles Apart
A final, and fitting, event marked America’s entrance onto the world stage when a naval officer, Commander Robert E. Peary, reached the North Pole in 1909 with a small expedition of Eskimos, dog sleds, and his sidekick Matthew Henson. Peary’s claim to be the first at the Pole was initially controversial, mainly because yet another American, Dr. Frederick A. Cook, said he had reached the coveted 90-degree North latitude much earlier. (Cook’s claims were later shown to be fraudulent.)107
Peary, a naval officer most frequently photographed in polar gear and sporting a massive, dense mustache, had been involved in polar exploration for years: in a 1906 expedition, he was separated from his companions by a storm and the warming of polar ice suddenly presented him with the possibility of becoming trapped without food. In a mad dash, he negotiated the ice and reunited with his party. Considered to be the best dead-reckoning navigator in history next to Christopher Columbus, Peary suffered his share of criticism, much of it by Cook supporters, and some of it brought on by his own sense of megalomania. But he accomplished more than any other polar explorer up to that time. His “Peary System” of traveling with dog sleds over the ice, establishing food caches, and using “icebreaker” teams to cut the trail ahead while the main party followed the somewhat easier route behind, constituted a major improvement over previous approaches to polar travel and would prove far superior to the British mish-mash of ponies and engine-driven devices used in the fatal Antarctic expedition of Robert Falcon Scott.108
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