Roosevelt and the Renegade (Panama Disaster 2)

quit after barely a year. That was embarrassing for Roosevelt. The Panama Canal was his pet project, central to his vision of acting US naval power across the Atlantic and Pacific. The letter is long, six typewritten pages. I never sought this position, John Stephens, rights to Roosevelt. I accepted it against my better judgment. Oh oh, dear, it is true that Stevens never sought the position. When the first chief engineer quit, Roosevelt asked around, who is the best civil

engineer in the United States. John Stevens came the reply. Stephens had grown up poor. He'd worked through tough manual jobs in the harshest of wilderness. He'd studied in the evenings and worked his way up. Now aged fifty two, had built bridges and tunnels and the Great Northern Railroad. Stephens wasn't keen to go to Panama. Roosevelt persuaded him, But now Stephens writes on the whole I do not like he could be earning a lot more back in the United States. He complains, I am losing more than

one hundred thousand dollars yearly. Roosevelt bristles, it's not supposed to be about the money. A canal across Panamar is vital to the strategic interest to the United States. Does he not feel honored to have such an important job? Nope, Stephens couldn't care less to me. The canal is only a big ditch. With every sentence he reads, Roosevelt grows more furious from all of the above, writes Stephens. You will gather that I am not anxious to continue in

the service. Roosevelt has indeed gathered that you're listening to the second episode in a cautionary tale two parter on the building of the Panama Canal. If you haven't heard the first episode on the catastrophic French attempt in the eighteen eighties. You may want to do that now. In this episode, it's the American's turn to have a go. When Theodore Roosevelt persuaded the reluctant John Stephens to become his second chief engineer, he had said, see it through.

Don't quit on me like the last guy. Stephens replied carefully, I will stay until I have made its success certain or proved it to be a failure. That was just eighteen months ago. Roosevelt puts the letter from Stephens down on his desk. Send a telegraph to Panama, he says, Tell Stephens his resignation has been accepted. The canal is nowhere near completion. Stephens has broken his promise, or has he.

I'm Tim Harford, and you're listening to cautionary tales. It's nineteen oh four, the start of the American effort to build the Panama Canal. Sixteen years have passed since the dramatic collapse of the French Panama Canal Company indign The impossible, undignified collapse of the most expensive peacetime project the world had ever seen. It left hun breds of thousands of French investors financially ruined. In those sixteen years, some things

have changed. The French Company's remaining assets have been sold on to the United States. President Roosevelt has been elected, and he's keen for the US government to pick up where the failed French company left off. No single great material work, Roosevelt tells Congress, is of such consequence to the American people. Panama has a new government too. It had been part of Columbia. Then a revolution the people of the Isthmus rose up to declare their independence. That

was suspiciously convenient for Roosevelt's canal plans. What was it, the President liked to say about his foreign policy, speak softly and carry a big stick. No sooner had the Republic of Panama declared itself than Roosevelt's big stick arrived on the scene US warships to dissuade Columbia from trying to take the Isthmus back. Panama's new government gave the US control over a sizeable chunk of the country, a

zone that spanned from coast to coast. Roosevelt set up a seven man commission to oversee the canal work and gave his first chief engineer some clear instructions. Make the dirt fly. But when the Americans moved in, they found the last sixteen years had ravaged what the French had left behind. A camp for workers was marked on the maps that in reality gone. The jungle had completely taken over. Rusted locomotives were entwined with creeping vines on tracks overgrown

with brush. Dredging machines toppled over gears and axles strewn all around. Rotted buildings were infested with termites. Trees with ten inch trunks grew up through the roofs. The Americans found curious things in some of those buildings, a dozen unopened crates that turned out to be full of pen nibs. Thousands and thousands of pen nibs. Was that corruption mismanagement

The French in Panama had become notorious for both. It made the seven man American Commission determined to keep tighter hold of the purse strings, but that created problems of its own. If a carpenter wanted to cut a piece of wood that was longer than ten feet, he needed written permission. If a worker wanted to borrow a hand cart, he needed six approvals. Or suppose a worker's wife gave birth a hospital in the canal zone and the baby

needed a bottle. The nurse would ask her superior, who'd fill out a form and submit it to the Chief sanitary Officer. He'd stamp the form and parted on to the chief of the bureau from materials and supply, he'd dispatch a messenger to buy the bottle. Count up all the hours spent on these clerical tasks and the wages cost more than twenty times the price of the bottle, and bottles at least could be sourced locally. When supplies had to be ordered from the US, the bureaucracy was unfathomable.

Your only hope of getting what you needed was to ask for far more than that, and far in advance what actually arrived, and when seemed essentially random. Pipes requested urgently in August turned up in January not on a steamboat but a sailing ship. An order for fifty fifteen thousand doors and pairs of hinges inexplicably yielded twelve thousand doors, but two hundred and forty thousand pairs of hinges. They

could store them with the pen nibs. The first Chief engineer was waiting for some new digging machines to arrive from America. But Roosevelt had said to make the dirt fly, so he found some old French excavators that could still be made to function. He got them digging a trench by a hillside. They dumped the dirt into old French railroad trucks to be carried away, but the trucks kept toppling off the rails. After a month of digging, the hillside slid into the trench and they were back where

they started. But the first chief engineer had another worry on his mind. He moved into a grand house once occupied by his French predecessor, Jule Donglais. Donglais old butler was still on the payroll, So the chief engineer heard in gruesome detail how Donglais wife, and son and daughter had all died from yellow fever. He conceived a mortal fear that he and his own wife were doomed. Rumor spread that had had two fancy metal caskets shipped over

in morbid preparation. But since the agonizing demise of the Donglais family, something important had changed, something that should have given hope to the Americans. We heard in another episode of cautionary tales. How a team of US Army doctors discovered the cause of yellow fever through an ingenious series of experiments in Cuba. He wasn't lack of hygiene or immorality, as the French had believed, but mosquitoes. The man in charge of sanitation in Cuba, William Gorgas, had put these

new discoveries to the test. He set about ridding Havana of every last bit of standing water where mosquitoes could breed. It was a painstaking, laborious task, with teams of workers going house to house, and it succeeded no more yellow fever. That discovery should have been a godsend for the US effort to build the canal, especially because the newly appointed chief sanitary officer for the canal project was none other than William Gorgas himself. He had wiped out yellow fever

in one country, he could do it in another. Corgas had an even more ambitious plan. He wanted to tackle malaria too. An English doctor had recently discovered that malaria is also spread by mosquito, but a different breed. This mosquito would be even harder to get rid of. It laid its eggs, not in standing water near where humans live, but in swamps in the countryside. Gorgas came up with a plan to drain the swamps by building dams and digging ditches. The English doctor came to Panama and said

to Gorgas, your plan is sound. But the Englishman had a warning for Gorgas. The world requires at least ten years to understand a new idea. He said, however important or simple it may be. He was right. The idea that Mosquito's spread disease was simple, important, and breezily dismissed by members of Roseves else Canal Commission. They watched Gorgas struggling to drain ponds and fumigate houses with nowhere near enough workers and wofully inadequate supplies. It was hopeless, and

they thought he was mad for trying. Shouldn't the chief sanitation officer be tackling the filth in the streets instead. I'm your friend, Gorgas, one told him, and I'm trying to set you right on the mosquito. You are simply wild. All who agree with you are wild. Get the idea out of your head. Then, in nineteen oh five, with Gorgas, still fighting a losing battle, a fresh wave of yellow

fever took hold. As the deaths mounted, Americans panicked, the steamships back home filled up with fleeing workers, including the first chief engineer, decided not to hang around and risk making use of those metal caskets. The Americans then had been in Panama for a year. They'd wrapped themselves up in red tape. They'd failed to back the man who could end the disease that terrified them. And as for making the dirt fly, what they'd achieved, as one engineer

put it, was little more than hen scratches. And yet the Panama Canal did get built. So what went right? Cautionary tales will be back after the break. John Stevens arrived in Panama in July nineteen oh five, Roosevelt's second chief engineer, who'd promised to stay on the job until success was guaranteed or failure was unavoidable. What Stephens found, he later wrote, was as discouraging a proposition as was

ever presented to a construction engineer. There was no organization worthy of the name, no cooperation between what might charitably be called the departments. The workers were all scared out of their boots, and nobody seemed to be doing much actual work, except, of course, for the endless form filling. The only busy ones here are ants and typists, said Stephens, was there anything positive to report? Why? Yes, Someone told him an improving safety record on the railroad. There'd been

no collisions for quite some time. Stephens's reply was acidic. A collision has its good points as well as its bad ones. It indicates there is something moving on the railroad. In his first few weeks, Stevens didn't say much. In the words of his biographer Clifford Faust, he pioneered a practice that business gurus would later call MBWA management by wandering around every day. He'd be somewhere on the canal route, trudging through the mud in his rubber boots and overalls,

puffing on a big cigar. He watched, he thought, He asked questions, and he saw something that nobody else had seen, something simple that would change everything. We'll come back to what that was later in the episode. In the first part of this Panama Canal two parter, we heard all about the charismatic, larger than life Frenchman ferdinandales Seppe, A man who seemed to think he could will the Panama

Canal into being through sheer force of personality. We heard how de Lesseppe refused to entertain any negative news about his Panama project. The canal will be built, he said, again and again. Ferdinandales Seppe and Theodore Roosevelt were remarkably similar characters, a point made by the historian David McCulloch in his book The Path between the Seas. Both, he says, were the products of cultivated worldly families. Both loved riding horses and being out of doors. They shared a boundless

love of life, an animal vitality. Both had a great capacity for self glorification and self deception. It was self deception that did for Ferdinand Lesseepe. The experts warned that his plan to build a sea level canal through Panama was never going to work. They'd have to slice through too many hills, There'd be landslides when the storms brought floods.

The mighty River Chaglis would pummel the passing ships. Instead, the canal needed locks, a system of gates controlling the flow of water that would raise ships up from one ocean across the hills in the middle of the Isthmus and down again on the other side. The Lesppe would not listen. He hated locks. Roosevelt initially assumed that America would build the canal de Leseppe had envisaged. He asked a committee to sense check that assumption. The committee couldn't agree.

Some insisted on the same romantic vision that had captivated the less sepe An open free passage from ocean to ocean. The dignity and power of this great nation demanded it. Others said, it's clearly crazy. The canal needs locks. Roosevelt had to decide, so he called John Stephens back to Washington to ask his advice. Stephens had been in Panama for just a few months, but he had lived through a rainy season. He'd seen enough. I talked to Teddy like a Dutch uncle. He said it had to be

a canal with locks. He explained to the President, and Roosevelt listened as Ferdinand A. Lesseeppe never had a canal with locks. It would be Roosevelt had another decision to make about William Gorgas, that crank of a chief sanitation officer who was weirdly obsessed with mosquitoes. Get rid of Gorgas said, members of his Canal Commission appoint someone else, someone practical, who'd get on with the important stuff. Dealing

with the smells and the filth. Roosevelt called in an old friend, a doctor who was up to speed with the medical research, smells and filth. Mister President, the doctor friend told him, have nothing to do with either malaria or yellow fever. You are facing one of the greatest decisions of your career. Again, Roosevelt listened to the expert. Gorgas stays, he said, and you must give him all the workers and supplies he needs. Roosevelt streamlined his commission

so things could actually get done. Gorgas attacked every source of standing water he could find, even and the font in the cathedral in Panama City. Before long, yellow fever was gone. There were other problems too, of course, sensationally reported in The New York Independent by a journalist who went to Panama late in nineteen oh five, black workers from Jamaica were quitting en mass in disgust at how their American bosses were treating them. The food was exorbitant

and inedible. The housing would disgrace the most unworthy sections of a shanty town. Was it true? It certainly had been true in the early days, but as nineteen oh six went by, other reports reached Roosevelt that the situation in Panama was improving. John Stephens was turning things around. And again the American newspapers complained that Stephens wasn't making the dirt fly. It apparently stopped digging what was really happening. Roosevelt decided there was only one way to find out.

He'd go to Panama to see for himself. In November nineteen oh six, the biggest warship in the US fleet docked off the coast of Panama, with Theodore Roosevelt on board. It was the first time a sitting president had ever traveled outside the United States, and American newspapers debated what to make of it. Was this wise, could he be safe? Or was this a sign of things to come? Perhaps in the future, mused the Washington Star President Smike. Even

visit Europe, Roosevelt had timed his visit deliberately. He wanted to see Panama at the height of the rainy season, with conditions that they're most challenging, a far cry from Ferdinand de Lesseppe, who had only ever visited Panama in the dry season, when the sun shone and the work looked easy. Lesseppe had come to Panama to drink champagne

and go to parties. Roosevelt had come to investigate. At seven point thirty in the morning, the welcome committee assembled at the end of the pier, the President of Panama, John Stevens, a choir of Panamanian school children. They looked expectantly at the great warship. But where was President Roosevelt? Good morning? The voice came not from the ship, from the shore. They turned to see Roosevelt, in a white

suit and a souwester hat, striding towards them. He had been rowed ashore two hours ago, he explained, he'd been exploring. They put him in a car bridge to his hotel, but when the carriage arrived he was empty. Where was Roosevelt. He'd slipped out, grabbed William Gorgas, and got Gorgas to take him to a hospital where they weren't expecting him. The hotel put on a sumptuous lunch in Roosevelt's honor,

but where had he gone? The President and first Lady, it transpired, had snuck off into an employee's mess hall and were tucking into the same thirty cent meal as the American workers. He seemed obsessed with the idea that someone was trying to hide something from him, said one exasperated Canal official. He was continually stopping some black man and asking if he had any complaint or grievance. The next day saw Panama's worst reign in years, three inches

in two hours. Roosevelt was thrilled. It would have been impossible to see the work going on under more unfavorable weather conditions. They put him on a train which chugged past one of the new ninety five ton steam powered shovels that John Stevens had ordered in they could dig up eight tons in a single scoop. Stop the train, Roosevelt jumped off, tramped through the mud, and clambered up onto the huge machine. Move over, He said to the man at the controls now, show me how it works.

For the next twenty minutes, the President happily learned how to operate the steam shovel while photographers snapped away below. The pictures became iconic. But if this was an image savvy politician's cynical photo op it wasn't just that Roosevelt had come to Panama with a genuine desire to understand. Where Ferdinando Lesseepe had always tried to wish problems away, Roosevelt sought out hard truths and changed course when needed.

That difference between the two boosterish characters is one big reason the US succeeded where the French had failed, but it's not the only reason. Cautionary tales will be back in a moment. In nineteen eighty one, the psychologists Daniel Carneman and Amos Twirsky discovered a quirk of the human mind. Our decisions changed depending on how a problem is presented

to us. Would you prefer a treatment for a disease that will save a third of pagat or a treatment that will result in the death of two thirds of the same thing, of course, but we see them differently. Carneman and Tibirsky called this the framing effect. It's a metaphor that draws on how a photographer composes a shot, what to have in focus and what to leave blurred, what should be in the center of the scene, and

what at its margins. In twenty twenty one, the authors Ken Koukie, Victor Meyer, Schuenberger, and Francis de Verdicor took the idea further in a book called Framers. This isn't just a quirk of the human mind, they said, it's a powerful feature. We can choose how we frame a problem, just as a photographer can rotate their lens to bring a different part of the scene into focus, or move to another spot to get a different angle. Reframe a problem,

and sometimes the solution jumps right out at you. I said earlier that when John Stevens arrived in Panama, he saw something nobody else had seen, something simple that would change everything. This is what he saw. The problem is simply one of transportation. Make the dirt fly, Roosevelt had said, But what do you do with that dirt once you've dug it up? If you dump it next to the ditch the next door and will wash it back in again,

you have to move it somewhere. Stevens had watched the excavation efforts as they'd been organized by his predecessor, the first chief engineer. The diggers put spoil in trucks, which often toppled off the tracks. The railroad was primitive. The trucks were old, and there weren't enough of them. The diggers were often stood idle because they had no trucks to take the boil away. The problem was simply one of transportation. It's an obvious insight, yet Stephens was the

first to have it. The French in the eighteen eighties and America's first chief engineer had all framed the canal as a digging stuff up problem, and try as they might, they'd never been able to dig it anywhere near the rate required. Stephens reframed it as a moving stuff around problem. Once he'd done that, it was clear what had to change. Stop digging, said Stephens, until I've figured out the transport problem. Ignore the idiotic howl of the newspapers. There's an old

proverb about a woodcutter. Given five minutes to fell a tree, he spends the first three minutes sharpening his axe. Stephens wanted to sharpen his axe. He gave the workers other tasks to keep them busy. Helping gorgas attack the mosquitoes, laying water pipes, sewage systems, storm drains, constructing better houses for themselves, building kitchens, bakeries, mess halls, even baseball fields, life in Panama slowly got better. Stephens meanwhile designed a

whole new railroad system. In his book Hell's Gorge, the author Matthew Parker described that system as fantastically skillful and intricate, like the assembly line in one of the new mechanized US factories, but also engineering at its simplest and most brilliant. We should start to dig, said Stephens, on either side of the hills in the middle of the route, and work upwards to the highest point. That way, it would

always be the empty trains chugging up the hill. The trains full of spoil would have gravity to help them down when they got to a place to dump the spoil. Another simple but brilliant idea. The new trucks were open ended, bridged by flat panels with only one side, so they formed a single long surface on which the mud was piled. The steam engine then dragged a three ton plow along that flat surface, sweeping all the mud off the open side.

It took just ten minutes to empty a twenty truck train, far quicker than the old French system of men shoveling mud from each truck by hand. The problem was simply one of transportation, and Stephens had solved it. By the end of nineteen oh six, when Roosevelt came to visit, the new railroad was up and running and the dirt was beginning to fly again. It would take another eight years, Stephens reckoned to finish the canal, an estimate that proved

exactly right. The canal would eventually open in nineteen fourteen. By then, Stephens was long gone. Two months after Roosevelt had gone back to Washington in January nineteen oh seven, Stephens sat down in his office in Panama to write the President that fateful six page letter. Mister President, you have been kind enough to instruct me to address you directly and personally, as man to man, and I will do so even at the risk of incurring your displeasure.

Historians debate to this day what Stephens was thinking. Some reckon He didn't actually intend to resign. He never said I quit in as many words, just I am not anxious to continue in the service. Was he merely letting off steam angling for a pay rise. Perhaps, But Stephens must have known how Roosevelt would react. The President had just been in Panama making stirring speeches to the workers about duty and honor, comparing them to soldiers in a

patriotic war. Stephens had evidently been completely unmoved. The honor which is continually being held up as an incentive for this work appeals to me, but slightly. Neither do I consider patriotism can compensate for the necessary sacrifice. Roosevelt insisted in his speeches that the canal was critical to America's long term strategic interests. Stephens dismissed that too. To me, the canal is only a big ditch. Its great utility, when completed, has never been so apparent to me as

it seems to be to others. Stephens must have known that Roosevelt would reply, your resignation has been accepted. When news reached the Isthmus, nobody could understand it. Things were going well. Stephens was popular. Why would he walk away had he had some bitter disagreement, uncovered a scandal? There must be something else going on. Speculation ran riot, and all Stephens would say was don't talk dig But when you read Stephens's letter, it's hard to see any mystery.

This is a man who's been working eighteen hour days and has a sense of his own limits. I feel I would not be able to bear up under the strain for the next eight years. My desire is to take a rest. This is a a man who really doesn't care what people think. I am not a seeker after notoriety. Being constantly before the public, whether in a favorable or unfavorable light, is extremely distasteful to me. And this is a man with a keen sense of his

own worth. He knows what he's done in Panama. I am proud of what we've accomplished, and confident from now on the prospects of speedy completion of the canal will become brighter and brighter. As Stevens later put it, in eighteen months, he'd built a machine. All it needed now was someone to turn the crank. Roosevelt decided to put the army in charge. It had two civilian chief engineers walk out on him in just three years. He needed an actual soldier, someone who understood the meaning of duty

would stick it out till the end. When Colonel George Gerthals arrived in Panama as the new Chief engineer, his impressions were very different to those of Stephens when he had first arrived in the country. Mister Stevens has perfected such an organization. Girthals reported that there is nothing left for us to do but just have the organization continue in the good work it is doing. Girthals did indeed understand the concept of duty. He saw the job through.

In his autobiography, Theodore Roosevelt was fulsome in his praise. Colonel Girthals proved to be the man of all others to do the job. It would be impossible to overstate what he has done. William Gorgas gets a shout out too. Dr Gorgas performed an inestimable service by making the Isthmus as safe as a health resort. And John Stephens Roosevelt doesn't mention him once. It's quite the snub. Stephens doesn't seem to have minded much. After Roosevelt died, he kept

a photo of the President on his mantelpiece. One of the only men, he said, who'd ever influenced my life. Stephens built more railroads, the Trans Siberian the Chinese Eastern. He became president of the American Society of Civil Engineers in the nineteen thirties. As an old man, Stephens took a boat to Panama for a vacation with his teenage granddaughter. They got on a plane, the first flight for both of them, the Isthmian Airlines Company, flew them along the

length of the completed canal. Stephens was captivated. He looked down on the twelve locks, shuffling great ships up and down between the oceans, and the vast artificial lake in the Panamanian Hills, a lake that created by damming the river Chagriise, with earth dug up from the ditch and transported by Stephens railroad. I will stay, Stevens had said until I have made its success certain or proved it to be a failure. Stephens had been true to his word,

even if Roosevelt didn't realize it. By the time he left, success was certain. And if Roosevelt didn't give him the credit, well, John Stephens never did care much about that. For a full list of our sources, see the show notes at Timharford dot com. Cautionary Tales is written by me Tim Harford with Andrew Wright. It's produced by Alice Fines with support from Marilyn Rust. The sound design and original music is the work of Pascal Wise. Sarah Nix edited the scripts.

It features the voice talents of Ben Crowe, Melanie Guttridge, Stella Harford, Jemmy Saunders and rufus Wright. The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Ryan Dilly, Greta Cohene, Eric's handler, Carrie Brody and Christina Sullivan. Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. It's recorded

at Wardoor Studios in London by Tom Berry. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate and review, tell your friends, and if you want to hear the show ad free, sign up for Pushkin Plus on the show page in Apple Podcasts or at pushkin dot fm, slash plus