Panama, past and present/Chapter 15
CHAPTER XV
HOW GENERAL GOETHALS HAS MADE GOOD
THE task of building the Canal and governing the Canal Zone was placed, by an act of Congress in March, 1904, in the hands of the Isthmian Canal Commission, a board of seven men, appointed by the President, and responsible to him through the Secretary of War. Rear-Admiral John G. Walker, an officer on the retired list of the United States Navy, who had already been at the head of two earlier commissions appointed to study and compare the Panama and Nicaragua canal-routes, was made the chairman. Major-General George W. Davis was made the Governor of the Canal Zone. The other five members of the Commission were expert engineers, and, in July, John F. Wallace became the Chief Engineer.
The Walker Commission held office for a little more than a year. Under its leadership, law and order were firmly established in the Zone, many valuable surveys were made, a little dirt dug, the nucleus of an operating force collected, and the fight against fever begun by Dr. Gorgas. Under the circumstances, it was a very creditable year's work. For, instead of being given plenty of money and left undisturbed to organize its campaign against the jungle, the Isthmian Canal Commission was expected to make bricks, not only without straw, but almost without clay. Instead of realizing that millions of dollars' worth of machinery must be bought, the dirt and disease of four centuries scrubbed away, and a great army of men enlisted, drilled, housed, and fed, Congress could think of nothing but the danger of another scandal like that of the de Lesseps Company, and
CROSS-SECTION OF THE ISTHMUS ON CANAL ROUTE.
so doled out money in grudging driblets, while the American people kept crying, "Make the dirt fly!" with the same thoughtless impatience with which the people of the North cried, "On to Richmond!" before Bull Run. The Walker Commission gave it up in the spring of 1905.
The second Isthmian Canal Commission had for a chairman Mr. Theodore P. Shonts, a railroad president; but most of the active work was left to the Chief Engineer, Mr. John L. Stevens. To his skill as a practical, self-taught railroad-builder is due the scientific, labor-saving arrangement of the hundreds of miles of construction tracks over which the dirt-trains run to the dumps. Under Mr. Stevens—"Big Smoke Stevens" they called him, for he burned up cigars like Grant in the Wilderness—the record for a month's excavation was brought up to a million cubic yards, the type of canal was finally settled on, and General Gorgas finished his fight against yellow fever. But in the spring of 1907, Mr. Shonts and Mr. Stevens both resigned.
Handling a large working force, especially one doing rough work in the open, is very much like commanding an army in the field. And an army commanded by a commission of seven men has exactly six generals too many. Realizing this, President Roosevelt decided to make the head of the third Isthmian Canal Commission not only its chairman, but also the Chief Engineer, the President of the Panama Railroad and the Governor of the Canal Zone. One man was made commander-in-chief; to stay there until he had finished the job. That man was Lieutenant-Colonel George Washington Goethals,[1] United States Army Engineering Corps.
Born in Brooklyn, New York, June 29, 1858, of a family that had come from Holland to America only a few months before, he graduated second in his class from the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1880. This placed him among the honored few at the head of each class that are appointed to the engineering corps. Since then, General Goethals had spent his time in building locks, dams and irrigation ditches in the West, and coast-fortifications in the East, as instructor in engineering at West Point, chief engineer of the First Army Corps in the war with Spain, and as a member of the general staff in Washington, before he was sent to Panama.
The new commissioners were ordered to make their headquarters on the Isthmus and live there ten months in the year, instead of trying to dig the Canal from a comfortable office-building in Washington, D.C. There is no room here either for a full list of the many different commissioners—mostly officers of the engineering corps—who were appointed at this time or later, or for the barest outline of the good work that each has done. Colonel Sibert at Gatun, Colonel Gaillard in the Culebra Cut,[2] Civil Engineer Rousseau, U.S.N., Colonel Hodges, Colonel Devol, and Mr. Williamson are among the many who have made their names honored on the Isthmus and among the fellow-members of their profession. But the man whose name will go down to history as the builder of the Panama Canal is General Goethals.
Soon after the General came to the Isthmus, an employee complained that almost no work was being done on his new house, although it was very far from completed, and he had been promised that it would be ready for his family in six weeks. Next morning General Goethals went there himself, and spoke to the carpenter-foreman in charge.
"You will have this house ready for use in six weeks."
"I'll try my best, sir, but—"
"That was not my order. You will have this house ready, for use, in six weeks. Do you understand?"
Six weeks later the family moved in.
This is General Goethal's way, both in big things and little. He goes to the spot, sees what is needed, gives a plain, direct order, and gets results instead of excuses. Every morning in the week he goes out on the line, not as his French predecessor did, in a private car drawn by a locomotive, but in a swift automobile mounted on flanged wheels, that looks like a taxicab disguised as a switch-engine. This motor-car is painted the regulation light yellow of Panama Railroad passenger-coaches, and you can scare a shirker out of a wet-season's growth by yelling, "Here comes the Yellow Peril!" But when the
THE BRAIN WAGON.
Also known as the "Yellow Peril" to the canal employees.
From a photograph, copyright, by Pach.
MAJOR-GENERAL GEORGE WASHINGTON GOETHALS.
splintered rock. In the afternoon he does his office work, and it is often late at night when he switches off the light over his desk.
The time to see General Goethals at his best is on Sunday morning, when he sits in his dingy office at Culebra to give justice to all who come and ask for it. It is a scene as simple and as impressive as that of the good King Haroun-al-Raschid hearing his people's troubles, and judging between them, by the gate of Bagdad. Every man or woman who has a complaint of ill-treatment, or a suggestion for the improvement of the work, can walk in and tell it to the man at the top. Where else in the world could a laborer's wife, who is tired of getting tough meat from the butcher, say so to the head of a great business—a business so great that its monthly pay-roll is over $2,000,000—and have him not only listen to her courteously, but also attend to the matter himself?
General Goethals considers it part of his duty to make sixty-five thousand men, women and children satisfied with their houses, the furniture and plumbing therein, their food as supplied by the commissary or served at the hotels and messes, their washing as done by the government laundry, their amusements at the baseball parks, club-houses and band concerts, their chapels and lodges, the railroad and steamship service, the electric-light meters, the dentists, and even the icemen,—in the tropics at that. Everything, from the building and fortifying of the Canal, to explaining to Mrs. Jones why Mrs. Smith, whose husband gets twenty dollars less salary a month than hers, has received two more salt-cellars and an extra rocking-chair from the district quartermaster, rests on his shoulders, and he bears it all with a smile.
He watches and cares for his men as a trainer cares for his athletes, he has coached and drilled them till the forty thousand move together with the smooth team-play of a champion team; and he has breathed into the whole great organization the fighting spirit of its captain. He has proved himself a born fighter and leader of men, not by the number of lives he has taken—for he has never been to war—but by the battles he has won against the desert and the jungle. He has not worn his uniform since he came to Panama. But in spite of snow-white hair and civilian clothes, and more than thirty years' absence from the parade-ground, General Goethals is no shapeless, desk-chair warrior, but a man to inspire the words of Bret Harte's priest:
'Now, by the firm grip of the hand on the bridle,
By the straight line from the heel to the shoulder,
By the curt speech,—nay, nay, no offense, son,—
You are a soldier.
President Lowell, of Harvard University, in conferring on General Goethals the honorary degree of doctor of laws, spoke of him as follows:
"George Washington Goethals, a soldier who has set a standard for the conduct of civic works; an administrator who has maintained security and order among a multitude of workmen in the tropics; an engineer who is completing the vast design of uniting two oceans through a peak in Darien."
STEAM SHOVEL LOADING FLAT CARS.
STEAM SHOVEL HANDLING A LARGE BOULDER.