Speaker 1: Pushkin. President Theodore Roosevelt sits in the Oval Office reading
Speaker 1: his mail. It's early in nineteen oh seven. Roosevelt is
Speaker 1: a commanding figure, a reformer at home, a visionary in
Speaker 1: foreign policy, arguably the most popular and powerful president there
Speaker 1: had ever been. He's not expecting to be let down
Speaker 1: and insulted. He opens a letter from Panama. It's from
Speaker 1: the chief engineer on the Panama Canal project. John Stephens
Speaker 1: is the project's second chief engineer. The first one had
Speaker 1: quit after barely a year. That was embarrassing for Roosevelt.
Speaker 1: The Panama Canal was his pet project, central to his
Speaker 1: vision of acting US naval power across the Atlantic and Pacific.
Speaker 1: The letter is long, six typewritten pages. I never sought
Speaker 1: this position, John Stephens, rights to Roosevelt. I accepted it
Speaker 1: against my better judgment. Oh oh, dear, it is true
Speaker 1: that Stevens never sought the position. When the first chief
Speaker 1: engineer quit, Roosevelt asked around, who is the best civil
Speaker 1: engineer in the United States. John Stevens came the reply.
Speaker 1: Stephens had grown up poor. He'd worked through tough manual
Speaker 1: jobs in the harshest of wilderness. He'd studied in the
Speaker 1: evenings and worked his way up. Now aged fifty two,
Speaker 1: had built bridges and tunnels and the Great Northern Railroad.
Speaker 1: Stephens wasn't keen to go to Panama. Roosevelt persuaded him,
Speaker 1: But now Stephens writes on the whole I do not
Speaker 1: like he could be earning a lot more back in
Speaker 1: the United States. He complains, I am losing more than
Speaker 1: one hundred thousand dollars yearly. Roosevelt bristles, it's not supposed
Speaker 1: to be about the money. A canal across Panamar is
Speaker 1: vital to the strategic interest to the United States. Does
Speaker 1: he not feel honored to have such an important job? Nope,
Speaker 1: Stephens couldn't care less to me. The canal is only
Speaker 1: a big ditch. With every sentence he reads, Roosevelt grows
Speaker 1: more furious from all of the above, writes Stephens. You
Speaker 1: will gather that I am not anxious to continue in
Speaker 1: the service. Roosevelt has indeed gathered that you're listening to
Speaker 1: the second episode in a cautionary tale two parter on
Speaker 1: the building of the Panama Canal. If you haven't heard
Speaker 1: the first episode on the catastrophic French attempt in the
Speaker 1: eighteen eighties. You may want to do that now. In
Speaker 1: this episode, it's the American's turn to have a go.
Speaker 1: When Theodore Roosevelt persuaded the reluctant John Stephens to become
Speaker 1: his second chief engineer, he had said, see it through.
Speaker 1: Don't quit on me like the last guy. Stephens replied carefully,
Speaker 1: I will stay until I have made its success certain
Speaker 1: or proved it to be a failure. That was just
Speaker 1: eighteen months ago. Roosevelt puts the letter from Stephens down
Speaker 1: on his desk. Send a telegraph to Panama, he says,
Speaker 1: Tell Stephens his resignation has been accepted. The canal is
Speaker 1: nowhere near completion. Stephens has broken his promise, or has he.
Speaker 1: I'm Tim Harford, and you're listening to cautionary tales. It's
Speaker 1: nineteen oh four, the start of the American effort to
Speaker 1: build the Panama Canal. Sixteen years have passed since the
Speaker 1: dramatic collapse of the French Panama Canal Company indign The impossible,
Speaker 1: undignified collapse of the most expensive peacetime project the world
Speaker 1: had ever seen. It left hun breds of thousands of
Speaker 1: French investors financially ruined. In those sixteen years, some things
Speaker 1: have changed. The French Company's remaining assets have been sold
Speaker 1: on to the United States. President Roosevelt has been elected,
Speaker 1: and he's keen for the US government to pick up
Speaker 1: where the failed French company left off. No single great
Speaker 1: material work, Roosevelt tells Congress, is of such consequence to
Speaker 1: the American people. Panama has a new government too. It
Speaker 1: had been part of Columbia. Then a revolution the people
Speaker 1: of the Isthmus rose up to declare their independence. That
Speaker 1: was suspiciously convenient for Roosevelt's canal plans. What was it,
Speaker 1: the President liked to say about his foreign policy, speak
Speaker 1: softly and carry a big stick. No sooner had the
Speaker 1: Republic of Panama declared itself than Roosevelt's big stick arrived
Speaker 1: on the scene US warships to dissuade Columbia from trying
Speaker 1: to take the Isthmus back. Panama's new government gave the
Speaker 1: US control over a sizeable chunk of the country, a
Speaker 1: zone that spanned from coast to coast. Roosevelt set up
Speaker 1: a seven man commission to oversee the canal work and
Speaker 1: gave his first chief engineer some clear instructions. Make the
Speaker 1: dirt fly. But when the Americans moved in, they found
Speaker 1: the last sixteen years had ravaged what the French had
Speaker 1: left behind. A camp for workers was marked on the
Speaker 1: maps that in reality gone. The jungle had completely taken over.
Speaker 1: Rusted locomotives were entwined with creeping vines on tracks overgrown
Speaker 1: with brush. Dredging machines toppled over gears and axles strewn
Speaker 1: all around. Rotted buildings were infested with termites. Trees with
Speaker 1: ten inch trunks grew up through the roofs. The Americans
Speaker 1: found curious things in some of those buildings, a dozen
Speaker 1: unopened crates that turned out to be full of pen nibs.
Speaker 1: Thousands and thousands of pen nibs. Was that corruption mismanagement
Speaker 1: The French in Panama had become notorious for both. It
Speaker 1: made the seven man American Commission determined to keep tighter
Speaker 1: hold of the purse strings, but that created problems of
Speaker 1: its own. If a carpenter wanted to cut a piece
Speaker 1: of wood that was longer than ten feet, he needed
Speaker 1: written permission. If a worker wanted to borrow a hand cart,
Speaker 1: he needed six approvals. Or suppose a worker's wife gave
Speaker 1: birth a hospital in the canal zone and the baby
Speaker 1: needed a bottle. The nurse would ask her superior, who'd
Speaker 1: fill out a form and submit it to the Chief
Speaker 1: sanitary Officer. He'd stamp the form and parted on to
Speaker 1: the chief of the bureau from materials and supply, he'd
Speaker 1: dispatch a messenger to buy the bottle. Count up all
Speaker 1: the hours spent on these clerical tasks and the wages
Speaker 1: cost more than twenty times the price of the bottle,
Speaker 1: and bottles at least could be sourced locally. When supplies
Speaker 1: had to be ordered from the US, the bureaucracy was unfathomable.
Speaker 1: Your only hope of getting what you needed was to
Speaker 1: ask for far more than that, and far in advance
Speaker 1: what actually arrived, and when seemed essentially random. Pipes requested
Speaker 1: urgently in August turned up in January not on a
Speaker 1: steamboat but a sailing ship. An order for fifty fifteen
Speaker 1: thousand doors and pairs of hinges inexplicably yielded twelve thousand doors,
Speaker 1: but two hundred and forty thousand pairs of hinges. They
Speaker 1: could store them with the pen nibs. The first Chief
Speaker 1: engineer was waiting for some new digging machines to arrive
Speaker 1: from America. But Roosevelt had said to make the dirt fly,
Speaker 1: so he found some old French excavators that could still
Speaker 1: be made to function. He got them digging a trench
Speaker 1: by a hillside. They dumped the dirt into old French
Speaker 1: railroad trucks to be carried away, but the trucks kept
Speaker 1: toppling off the rails. After a month of digging, the
Speaker 1: hillside slid into the trench and they were back where
Speaker 1: they started. But the first chief engineer had another worry
Speaker 1: on his mind. He moved into a grand house once
Speaker 1: occupied by his French predecessor, Jule Donglais. Donglais old butler
Speaker 1: was still on the payroll, So the chief engineer heard
Speaker 1: in gruesome detail how Donglais wife, and son and daughter
Speaker 1: had all died from yellow fever. He conceived a mortal
Speaker 1: fear that he and his own wife were doomed. Rumor
Speaker 1: spread that had had two fancy metal caskets shipped over
Speaker 1: in morbid preparation. But since the agonizing demise of the
Speaker 1: Donglais family, something important had changed, something that should have
Speaker 1: given hope to the Americans. We heard in another episode
Speaker 1: of cautionary tales. How a team of US Army doctors
Speaker 1: discovered the cause of yellow fever through an ingenious series
Speaker 1: of experiments in Cuba. He wasn't lack of hygiene or immorality,
Speaker 1: as the French had believed, but mosquitoes. The man in
Speaker 1: charge of sanitation in Cuba, William Gorgas, had put these
Speaker 1: new discoveries to the test. He set about ridding Havana
Speaker 1: of every last bit of standing water where mosquitoes could breed.
Speaker 1: It was a painstaking, laborious task, with teams of workers
Speaker 1: going house to house, and it succeeded no more yellow fever.
Speaker 1: That discovery should have been a godsend for the US
Speaker 1: effort to build the canal, especially because the newly appointed
Speaker 1: chief sanitary officer for the canal project was none other
Speaker 1: than William Gorgas himself. He had wiped out yellow fever
Speaker 1: in one country, he could do it in another. Corgas
Speaker 1: had an even more ambitious plan. He wanted to tackle
Speaker 1: malaria too. An English doctor had recently discovered that malaria
Speaker 1: is also spread by mosquito, but a different breed. This
Speaker 1: mosquito would be even harder to get rid of. It
Speaker 1: laid its eggs, not in standing water near where humans live,
Speaker 1: but in swamps in the countryside. Gorgas came up with
Speaker 1: a plan to drain the swamps by building dams and
Speaker 1: digging ditches. The English doctor came to Panama and said
Speaker 1: to Gorgas, your plan is sound. But the Englishman had
Speaker 1: a warning for Gorgas. The world requires at least ten
Speaker 1: years to understand a new idea. He said, however important
Speaker 1: or simple it may be. He was right. The idea
Speaker 1: that Mosquito's spread disease was simple, important, and breezily dismissed
Speaker 1: by members of Roseves else Canal Commission. They watched Gorgas
Speaker 1: struggling to drain ponds and fumigate houses with nowhere near
Speaker 1: enough workers and wofully inadequate supplies. It was hopeless, and
Speaker 1: they thought he was mad for trying. Shouldn't the chief
Speaker 1: sanitation officer be tackling the filth in the streets instead.
Speaker 1: I'm your friend, Gorgas, one told him, and I'm trying
Speaker 1: to set you right on the mosquito. You are simply wild.
Speaker 1: All who agree with you are wild. Get the idea
Speaker 1: out of your head. Then, in nineteen oh five, with Gorgas,
Speaker 1: still fighting a losing battle, a fresh wave of yellow
Speaker 1: fever took hold. As the deaths mounted, Americans panicked, the
Speaker 1: steamships back home filled up with fleeing workers, including the
Speaker 1: first chief engineer, decided not to hang around and risk
Speaker 1: making use of those metal caskets. The Americans then had
Speaker 1: been in Panama for a year. They'd wrapped themselves up
Speaker 1: in red tape. They'd failed to back the man who
Speaker 1: could end the disease that terrified them. And as for
Speaker 1: making the dirt fly, what they'd achieved, as one engineer
Speaker 1: put it, was little more than hen scratches. And yet
Speaker 1: the Panama Canal did get built. So what went right?
Speaker 1: Cautionary tales will be back after the break. John Stevens
Speaker 1: arrived in Panama in July nineteen oh five, Roosevelt's second
Speaker 1: chief engineer, who'd promised to stay on the job until
Speaker 1: success was guaranteed or failure was unavoidable. What Stephens found,
Speaker 1: he later wrote, was as discouraging a proposition as was
Speaker 1: ever presented to a construction engineer. There was no organization
Speaker 1: worthy of the name, no cooperation between what might charitably
Speaker 1: be called the departments. The workers were all scared out
Speaker 1: of their boots, and nobody seemed to be doing much
Speaker 1: actual work, except, of course, for the endless form filling.
Speaker 1: The only busy ones here are ants and typists, said Stephens,
Speaker 1: was there anything positive to report? Why? Yes, Someone told
Speaker 1: him an improving safety record on the railroad. There'd been
Speaker 1: no collisions for quite some time. Stephens's reply was acidic.
Speaker 1: A collision has its good points as well as its
Speaker 1: bad ones. It indicates there is something moving on the railroad.
Speaker 1: In his first few weeks, Stevens didn't say much. In
Speaker 1: the words of his biographer Clifford Faust, he pioneered a
Speaker 1: practice that business gurus would later call MBWA management by
Speaker 1: wandering around every day. He'd be somewhere on the canal route,
Speaker 1: trudging through the mud in his rubber boots and overalls,
Speaker 1: puffing on a big cigar. He watched, he thought, He
Speaker 1: asked questions, and he saw something that nobody else had seen,
Speaker 1: something simple that would change everything. We'll come back to
Speaker 1: what that was later in the episode. In the first
Speaker 1: part of this Panama Canal two parter, we heard all
Speaker 1: about the charismatic, larger than life Frenchman ferdinandales Seppe, A
Speaker 1: man who seemed to think he could will the Panama
Speaker 1: Canal into being through sheer force of personality. We heard
Speaker 1: how de Lesseppe refused to entertain any negative news about
Speaker 1: his Panama project. The canal will be built, he said,
Speaker 1: again and again. Ferdinandales Seppe and Theodore Roosevelt were remarkably
Speaker 1: similar characters, a point made by the historian David McCulloch
Speaker 1: in his book The Path between the Seas. Both, he says,
Speaker 1: were the products of cultivated worldly families. Both loved riding
Speaker 1: horses and being out of doors. They shared a boundless
Speaker 1: love of life, an animal vitality. Both had a great
Speaker 1: capacity for self glorification and self deception. It was self
Speaker 1: deception that did for Ferdinand Lesseepe. The experts warned that
Speaker 1: his plan to build a sea level canal through Panama
Speaker 1: was never going to work. They'd have to slice through
Speaker 1: too many hills, There'd be landslides when the storms brought floods.
Speaker 1: The mighty River Chaglis would pummel the passing ships. Instead,
Speaker 1: the canal needed locks, a system of gates controlling the
Speaker 1: flow of water that would raise ships up from one
Speaker 1: ocean across the hills in the middle of the Isthmus
Speaker 1: and down again on the other side. The Lesppe would
Speaker 1: not listen. He hated locks. Roosevelt initially assumed that America
Speaker 1: would build the canal de Leseppe had envisaged. He asked
Speaker 1: a committee to sense check that assumption. The committee couldn't agree.
Speaker 1: Some insisted on the same romantic vision that had captivated
Speaker 1: the less sepe An open free passage from ocean to ocean.
Speaker 1: The dignity and power of this great nation demanded it.
Speaker 1: Others said, it's clearly crazy. The canal needs locks. Roosevelt
Speaker 1: had to decide, so he called John Stephens back to
Speaker 1: Washington to ask his advice. Stephens had been in Panama
Speaker 1: for just a few months, but he had lived through
Speaker 1: a rainy season. He'd seen enough. I talked to Teddy
Speaker 1: like a Dutch uncle. He said it had to be
Speaker 1: a canal with locks. He explained to the President, and
Speaker 1: Roosevelt listened as Ferdinand A. Lesseeppe never had a canal
Speaker 1: with locks. It would be Roosevelt had another decision to
Speaker 1: make about William Gorgas, that crank of a chief sanitation
Speaker 1: officer who was weirdly obsessed with mosquitoes. Get rid of
Speaker 1: Gorgas said, members of his Canal Commission appoint someone else,
Speaker 1: someone practical, who'd get on with the important stuff. Dealing
Speaker 1: with the smells and the filth. Roosevelt called in an
Speaker 1: old friend, a doctor who was up to speed with
Speaker 1: the medical research, smells and filth. Mister President, the doctor
Speaker 1: friend told him, have nothing to do with either malaria
Speaker 1: or yellow fever. You are facing one of the greatest
Speaker 1: decisions of your career. Again, Roosevelt listened to the expert.
Speaker 1: Gorgas stays, he said, and you must give him all
Speaker 1: the workers and supplies he needs. Roosevelt streamlined his commission
Speaker 1: so things could actually get done. Gorgas attacked every source
Speaker 1: of standing water he could find, even and the font
Speaker 1: in the cathedral in Panama City. Before long, yellow fever
Speaker 1: was gone. There were other problems too, of course, sensationally
Speaker 1: reported in The New York Independent by a journalist who
Speaker 1: went to Panama late in nineteen oh five, black workers
Speaker 1: from Jamaica were quitting en mass in disgust at how
Speaker 1: their American bosses were treating them. The food was exorbitant
Speaker 1: and inedible. The housing would disgrace the most unworthy sections
Speaker 1: of a shanty town. Was it true? It certainly had
Speaker 1: been true in the early days, but as nineteen oh
Speaker 1: six went by, other reports reached Roosevelt that the situation
Speaker 1: in Panama was improving. John Stephens was turning things around.
Speaker 1: And again the American newspapers complained that Stephens wasn't making
Speaker 1: the dirt fly. It apparently stopped digging what was really happening.
Speaker 1: Roosevelt decided there was only one way to find out.
Speaker 1: He'd go to Panama to see for himself. In November
Speaker 1: nineteen oh six, the biggest warship in the US fleet
Speaker 1: docked off the coast of Panama, with Theodore Roosevelt on board.
Speaker 1: It was the first time a sitting president had ever
Speaker 1: traveled outside the United States, and American newspapers debated what
Speaker 1: to make of it. Was this wise, could he be safe?
Speaker 1: Or was this a sign of things to come? Perhaps
Speaker 1: in the future, mused the Washington Star President Smike. Even
Speaker 1: visit Europe, Roosevelt had timed his visit deliberately. He wanted
Speaker 1: to see Panama at the height of the rainy season,
Speaker 1: with conditions that they're most challenging, a far cry from
Speaker 1: Ferdinand de Lesseppe, who had only ever visited Panama in
Speaker 1: the dry season, when the sun shone and the work
Speaker 1: looked easy. Lesseppe had come to Panama to drink champagne
Speaker 1: and go to parties. Roosevelt had come to investigate. At
Speaker 1: seven point thirty in the morning, the welcome committee assembled
Speaker 1: at the end of the pier, the President of Panama,
Speaker 1: John Stevens, a choir of Panamanian school children. They looked
Speaker 1: expectantly at the great warship. But where was President Roosevelt?
Speaker 1: Good morning? The voice came not from the ship, from
Speaker 1: the shore. They turned to see Roosevelt, in a white
Speaker 1: suit and a souwester hat, striding towards them. He had
Speaker 1: been rowed ashore two hours ago, he explained, he'd been exploring.
Speaker 1: They put him in a car bridge to his hotel,
Speaker 1: but when the carriage arrived he was empty. Where was Roosevelt.
Speaker 1: He'd slipped out, grabbed William Gorgas, and got Gorgas to
Speaker 1: take him to a hospital where they weren't expecting him.
Speaker 1: The hotel put on a sumptuous lunch in Roosevelt's honor,
Speaker 1: but where had he gone? The President and first Lady,
Speaker 1: it transpired, had snuck off into an employee's mess hall
Speaker 1: and were tucking into the same thirty cent meal as
Speaker 1: the American workers. He seemed obsessed with the idea that
Speaker 1: someone was trying to hide something from him, said one
Speaker 1: exasperated Canal official. He was continually stopping some black man
Speaker 1: and asking if he had any complaint or grievance. The
Speaker 1: next day saw Panama's worst reign in years, three inches
Speaker 1: in two hours. Roosevelt was thrilled. It would have been
Speaker 1: impossible to see the work going on under more unfavorable
Speaker 1: weather conditions. They put him on a train which chugged
Speaker 1: past one of the new ninety five ton steam powered
Speaker 1: shovels that John Stevens had ordered in they could dig
Speaker 1: up eight tons in a single scoop. Stop the train,
Speaker 1: Roosevelt jumped off, tramped through the mud, and clambered up
Speaker 1: onto the huge machine. Move over, He said to the
Speaker 1: man at the controls now, show me how it works.
Speaker 1: For the next twenty minutes, the President happily learned how
Speaker 1: to operate the steam shovel while photographers snapped away below.
Speaker 1: The pictures became iconic. But if this was an image
Speaker 1: savvy politician's cynical photo op it wasn't just that Roosevelt
Speaker 1: had come to Panama with a genuine desire to understand.
Speaker 1: Where Ferdinando Lesseepe had always tried to wish problems away,
Speaker 1: Roosevelt sought out hard truths and changed course when needed.
Speaker 1: That difference between the two boosterish characters is one big
Speaker 1: reason the US succeeded where the French had failed, but
Speaker 1: it's not the only reason. Cautionary tales will be back
Speaker 1: in a moment. In nineteen eighty one, the psychologists Daniel
Speaker 1: Carneman and Amos Twirsky discovered a quirk of the human mind.
Speaker 1: Our decisions changed depending on how a problem is presented
Speaker 1: to us. Would you prefer a treatment for a disease
Speaker 1: that will save a third of pagat or a treatment
Speaker 1: that will result in the death of two thirds of
Speaker 1: the same thing, of course, but we see them differently.
Speaker 1: Carneman and Tibirsky called this the framing effect. It's a
Speaker 1: metaphor that draws on how a photographer composes a shot,
Speaker 1: what to have in focus and what to leave blurred,
Speaker 1: what should be in the center of the scene, and
Speaker 1: what at its margins. In twenty twenty one, the authors
Speaker 1: Ken Koukie, Victor Meyer, Schuenberger, and Francis de Verdicor took
Speaker 1: the idea further in a book called Framers. This isn't
Speaker 1: just a quirk of the human mind, they said, it's
Speaker 1: a powerful feature. We can choose how we frame a problem,
Speaker 1: just as a photographer can rotate their lens to bring
Speaker 1: a different part of the scene into focus, or move
Speaker 1: to another spot to get a different angle. Reframe a problem,
Speaker 1: and sometimes the solution jumps right out at you. I
Speaker 1: said earlier that when John Stevens arrived in Panama, he
Speaker 1: saw something nobody else had seen, something simple that would
Speaker 1: change everything. This is what he saw. The problem is
Speaker 1: simply one of transportation. Make the dirt fly, Roosevelt had said,
Speaker 1: But what do you do with that dirt once you've
Speaker 1: dug it up? If you dump it next to the
Speaker 1: ditch the next door and will wash it back in again,
Speaker 1: you have to move it somewhere. Stevens had watched the
Speaker 1: excavation efforts as they'd been organized by his predecessor, the
Speaker 1: first chief engineer. The diggers put spoil in trucks, which
Speaker 1: often toppled off the tracks. The railroad was primitive. The
Speaker 1: trucks were old, and there weren't enough of them. The
Speaker 1: diggers were often stood idle because they had no trucks
Speaker 1: to take the boil away. The problem was simply one
Speaker 1: of transportation. It's an obvious insight, yet Stephens was the
Speaker 1: first to have it. The French in the eighteen eighties
Speaker 1: and America's first chief engineer had all framed the canal
Speaker 1: as a digging stuff up problem, and try as they might,
Speaker 1: they'd never been able to dig it anywhere near the
Speaker 1: rate required. Stephens reframed it as a moving stuff around problem.
Speaker 1: Once he'd done that, it was clear what had to change.
Speaker 1: Stop digging, said Stephens, until I've figured out the transport problem.
Speaker 1: Ignore the idiotic howl of the newspapers. There's an old
Speaker 1: proverb about a woodcutter. Given five minutes to fell a tree,
Speaker 1: he spends the first three minutes sharpening his axe. Stephens
Speaker 1: wanted to sharpen his axe. He gave the workers other
Speaker 1: tasks to keep them busy. Helping gorgas attack the mosquitoes,
Speaker 1: laying water pipes, sewage systems, storm drains, constructing better houses
Speaker 1: for themselves, building kitchens, bakeries, mess halls, even baseball fields,
Speaker 1: life in Panama slowly got better. Stephens meanwhile designed a
Speaker 1: whole new railroad system. In his book Hell's Gorge, the
Speaker 1: author Matthew Parker described that system as fantastically skillful and intricate,
Speaker 1: like the assembly line in one of the new mechanized
Speaker 1: US factories, but also engineering at its simplest and most brilliant.
Speaker 1: We should start to dig, said Stephens, on either side
Speaker 1: of the hills in the middle of the route, and
Speaker 1: work upwards to the highest point. That way, it would
Speaker 1: always be the empty trains chugging up the hill. The
Speaker 1: trains full of spoil would have gravity to help them
Speaker 1: down when they got to a place to dump the spoil.
Speaker 1: Another simple but brilliant idea. The new trucks were open ended,
Speaker 1: bridged by flat panels with only one side, so they
Speaker 1: formed a single long surface on which the mud was piled.
Speaker 1: The steam engine then dragged a three ton plow along
Speaker 1: that flat surface, sweeping all the mud off the open side.
Speaker 1: It took just ten minutes to empty a twenty truck train,
Speaker 1: far quicker than the old French system of men shoveling
Speaker 1: mud from each truck by hand. The problem was simply
Speaker 1: one of transportation, and Stephens had solved it. By the
Speaker 1: end of nineteen oh six, when Roosevelt came to visit,
Speaker 1: the new railroad was up and running and the dirt
Speaker 1: was beginning to fly again. It would take another eight years,
Speaker 1: Stephens reckoned to finish the canal, an estimate that proved
Speaker 1: exactly right. The canal would eventually open in nineteen fourteen.
Speaker 1: By then, Stephens was long gone. Two months after Roosevelt
Speaker 1: had gone back to Washington in January nineteen oh seven,
Speaker 1: Stephens sat down in his office in Panama to write
Speaker 1: the President that fateful six page letter. Mister President, you
Speaker 1: have been kind enough to instruct me to address you
Speaker 1: directly and personally, as man to man, and I will
Speaker 1: do so even at the risk of incurring your displeasure.
Speaker 1: Historians debate to this day what Stephens was thinking. Some
Speaker 1: reckon He didn't actually intend to resign. He never said
Speaker 1: I quit in as many words, just I am not
Speaker 1: anxious to continue in the service. Was he merely letting
Speaker 1: off steam angling for a pay rise. Perhaps, But Stephens
Speaker 1: must have known how Roosevelt would react. The President had
Speaker 1: just been in Panama making stirring speeches to the workers
Speaker 1: about duty and honor, comparing them to soldiers in a
Speaker 1: patriotic war. Stephens had evidently been completely unmoved. The honor
Speaker 1: which is continually being held up as an incentive for
Speaker 1: this work appeals to me, but slightly. Neither do I
Speaker 1: consider patriotism can compensate for the necessary sacrifice. Roosevelt insisted
Speaker 1: in his speeches that the canal was critical to America's
Speaker 1: long term strategic interests. Stephens dismissed that too. To me,
Speaker 1: the canal is only a big ditch. Its great utility,
Speaker 1: when completed, has never been so apparent to me as
Speaker 1: it seems to be to others. Stephens must have known
Speaker 1: that Roosevelt would reply, your resignation has been accepted. When
Speaker 1: news reached the Isthmus, nobody could understand it. Things were
Speaker 1: going well. Stephens was popular. Why would he walk away
Speaker 1: had he had some bitter disagreement, uncovered a scandal? There
Speaker 1: must be something else going on. Speculation ran riot, and
Speaker 1: all Stephens would say was don't talk dig But when
Speaker 1: you read Stephens's letter, it's hard to see any mystery.
Speaker 1: This is a man who's been working eighteen hour days
Speaker 1: and has a sense of his own limits. I feel
Speaker 1: I would not be able to bear up under the
Speaker 1: strain for the next eight years. My desire is to
Speaker 1: take a rest. This is a a man who really
Speaker 1: doesn't care what people think. I am not a seeker
Speaker 1: after notoriety. Being constantly before the public, whether in a
Speaker 1: favorable or unfavorable light, is extremely distasteful to me. And
Speaker 1: this is a man with a keen sense of his
Speaker 1: own worth. He knows what he's done in Panama. I
Speaker 1: am proud of what we've accomplished, and confident from now
Speaker 1: on the prospects of speedy completion of the canal will
Speaker 1: become brighter and brighter. As Stevens later put it, in
Speaker 1: eighteen months, he'd built a machine. All it needed now
Speaker 1: was someone to turn the crank. Roosevelt decided to put
Speaker 1: the army in charge. It had two civilian chief engineers
Speaker 1: walk out on him in just three years. He needed
Speaker 1: an actual soldier, someone who understood the meaning of duty
Speaker 1: would stick it out till the end. When Colonel George
Speaker 1: Gerthals arrived in Panama as the new Chief engineer, his
Speaker 1: impressions were very different to those of Stephens when he
Speaker 1: had first arrived in the country. Mister Stevens has perfected
Speaker 1: such an organization. Girthals reported that there is nothing left
Speaker 1: for us to do but just have the organization continue
Speaker 1: in the good work it is doing. Girthals did indeed
Speaker 1: understand the concept of duty. He saw the job through.
Speaker 1: In his autobiography, Theodore Roosevelt was fulsome in his praise.
Speaker 1: Colonel Girthals proved to be the man of all others
Speaker 1: to do the job. It would be impossible to overstate
Speaker 1: what he has done. William Gorgas gets a shout out too.
Speaker 1: Dr Gorgas performed an inestimable service by making the Isthmus
Speaker 1: as safe as a health resort. And John Stephens Roosevelt
Speaker 1: doesn't mention him once. It's quite the snub. Stephens doesn't
Speaker 1: seem to have minded much. After Roosevelt died, he kept
Speaker 1: a photo of the President on his mantelpiece. One of
Speaker 1: the only men, he said, who'd ever influenced my life.
Speaker 1: Stephens built more railroads, the Trans Siberian the Chinese Eastern.
Speaker 1: He became president of the American Society of Civil Engineers
Speaker 1: in the nineteen thirties. As an old man, Stephens took
Speaker 1: a boat to Panama for a vacation with his teenage granddaughter.
Speaker 1: They got on a plane, the first flight for both
Speaker 1: of them, the Isthmian Airlines Company, flew them along the
Speaker 1: length of the completed canal. Stephens was captivated. He looked
Speaker 1: down on the twelve locks, shuffling great ships up and
Speaker 1: down between the oceans, and the vast artificial lake in
Speaker 1: the Panamanian Hills, a lake that created by damming the
Speaker 1: river Chagriise, with earth dug up from the ditch and
Speaker 1: transported by Stephens railroad. I will stay, Stevens had said
Speaker 1: until I have made its success certain or proved it
Speaker 1: to be a failure. Stephens had been true to his word,
Speaker 1: even if Roosevelt didn't realize it. By the time he left,
Speaker 1: success was certain. And if Roosevelt didn't give him the credit, well,
Speaker 1: John Stephens never did care much about that. For a
Speaker 1: full list of our sources, see the show notes at
Speaker 1: Timharford dot com. Cautionary Tales is written by me Tim
Speaker 1: Harford with Andrew Wright. It's produced by Alice Fines with
Speaker 1: support from Marilyn Rust. The sound design and original music
Speaker 1: is the work of Pascal Wise. Sarah Nix edited the scripts.
Speaker 1: It features the voice talents of Ben Crowe, Melanie Guttridge,
Speaker 1: Stella Harford, Jemmy Saunders and rufus Wright. The show also
Speaker 1: wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg,
Speaker 1: Ryan Dilly, Greta Cohene, Eric's handler, Carrie Brody and Christina Sullivan.
Speaker 1: Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. It's recorded
Speaker 1: at Wardoor Studios in London by Tom Berry. If you
Speaker 1: like the show, please remember to share, rate and review,
Speaker 1: tell your friends, and if you want to hear the
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Speaker 1: show page in Apple Podcasts or at pushkin dot fm,
Speaker 1: slash plus