Panama fever (35 page)

While Bunau-Varilla provided the high notes, Cromwell got down to business on his return to Washington. The key man to get on side, Cromwell decided, was Mark Alonzo Hanna, who had been the chairman of the Republican National Committe during the 1896 election. Hanna was very close to McKinley and was considered the most powerful man in Washington. He also had a long interest in canals, had recently been tasked by the president with getting on top of the Isthmian canal question, and had therefore joined Morgan's Senate Committee on Interoceanic Canals. Cromwell got an introduction from Hanna's banker, who was a client of Sullivan and Cromwell. The meeting opened with Cromwell slapping down on Hanna's desk a $60,000 donation to the party, compliments of the Compagnie Nouvelle. It was an outrageous move—not only was it a vast amount of money, but also no one in Paris had authorized such a payment on the New Company's behalf.

Cromwell's efforts seemed to be paying off when the Republican Party Convention in June 1900 changed its call for a “Nicaraguan” canal to an “Isthmian” one, but on other fronts Panama was stalling. In spite of the lavish hospitality, the Walker Commission had returned from their Paris trip disappointed by the New Company's inability to state either a firm price for their venture, or that they had the legal right to sell to the United States government. Maurice Hutin, who had briefly been
Directeur Général
of the de Lesseps Company back in 1885 before being invalided off the Isthmus with yellow fever, was now in charge of the New Company. In April, Walker had again asked him to name a price. Hutin did not reply for ten weeks, but on April 26 he took the precaution of buying for 5 million francs in gold an extension to the Colombian concession up to 1910. But he still stalled on Walker's demands. Hutin's long-standing and traumatic involvement with the French canal project led him to hope that the United States would somehow be taken on as a partner, rather than simply buying the French out. The result was that Walker, in a preliminary report issued in November 1900, indicated that because of “all the difficulties of obtaining the necessary rights … on the Panama route” Nicaragua presented “the most practicable and feasible route.” The Panama lobby was in crisis.

A few days later, according to his own account, Bunau-Varilla received an invitation to speak to the Cincinnati Chamber of Commerce, from a U.S. businessman he had met and converted to the Great Idea in Paris earlier in the year. “The bugle-note had been heard,” Bunau-Varilla wrote, and set sail straightaway for the United States, arriving at the beginning of January 1901. By a coincidence or not, it was exactly the time it would have taken for Cromwell to summon him after the preliminary report by the Walker Commission.

Bunau-Varilla's whirlwind three-month tour of the United States, reminiscent of those undertaken by Ferdinand de Lesseps in the 1880s, began in Cincinnati on the evening of January 16, 1901, in a large hall decked with the flags of France and the United States. It was an unqualified success. The Frenchman seemed a strange, exotic creature, with his theatrically impeccable manners, grandiloquent gestures, large head, and moustache waxed to two fine points, but his passion for Panama was plain. It was the “intensity of conviction which inspired all your utterances,” one of the guests wrote to him, that gave what he said so much impact. “I love a man,” the American went on, “who loves a great cause.”

In his own account of the tour, Bunau-Varilla maintains that it was “Fate” that ensured he met the key U.S. decision makers. “Every time I was in need of a man he appeared,” he writes. In truth, Bunau-Varilla left little to chance. Several of his converted American friends were working for him at his expense, setting up meetings and opening doors. After Cincinnati, he headed to a business club in Cleveland, supposedly thanks to a “chance encounter” with a friend of a businessman there he had met on the boat over. Again he spoke about the advantages of the Panama over the Nicaragua route—the railroad, the superior harbors, the shorter length and lower cost. He also warmed to a new theme that had made a considerable impact during his first speech, the suggestion that, unlike Panama, the Nicaragua route was bestridden by volcanoes. The Cleveland audience was particularly important as it included key friends of McKinley and Hanna.

At every meeting, Bunau-Varilla, or his friends working behind the scenes, came away with a new invitation. After Cleveland, he headed for Boston, then Chicago. In New York, he dined again with the Walker Commission's George Morison, and then addressed the city's chamber of commerce, thanks to the influence of his old friend John Bigelow Those present included J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, and Andrew Carnegie. All the time, Bunau-Varilla was liberally spraying around gifts of cigars, flowers, and theater tickets, giving dinners and writing countless letters seeking introductions or just pushing the case for Panama.

Now Bunau-Varilla considered heading for home, but there then occurred another of the “chance encounters” that he had made his specialty. Reading between the lines of his own account, it was a setup. Bunau-Varilla was staying in the Waldorf-Astoria, as were several key Washington politicians. “Towards midnight,” Bunau-Varilla wrote, “as I was about to go out for a breath of fresh air before retiring, I met a party of people in evening dress entering the Waldorf-Astoria. My surprise was great when I saw at the head of them Colonel Herrick [a contact from Cleveland] with a lady on his arm, and behind them a short, stout gentleman who limped slightly. His characteristic face, so frequently reproduced in the newspapers, was familiar to me.”

It was Mark Hanna, identified by Cromwell as the key man to get on side. Herrick feigned surprise as he made the introductions, and Bunau-Varilla came away with a pressing invitation to call on the senator in Washington. Not content with this priceless coup, Bunau-Varilla continued to loiter in the lobby of the hotel until another friend, this time one of the “converted” Cincinnati businessmen, happened to come past in the company of the U.S. comptroller of currency. Through him, the Frenchman secured an interview with McKinley himself.

In no time, Bunau-Varilla was in Washington, to “attack the political fortress.” He had a number of meetings with Hanna, which, apparently, culminated in the senator from Ohio pronouncing, “Mr. Bunau-Varilla, you have convinced me.” The interview with the president was briefer. Bunau-Varilla did not wish to “inflict” a lecture on him. Besides, he knew “that the opinion of Senator Hanna would be his [McKinley's] own.” On April
n
, Bunau-Varilla sailed for Paris, confident that he had made a significant dent in U.S. public and official opinion in favor of Panama.

How Bunau-Varilla came to be summoned to the United States, and who paid for the lavish trip, remains a mystery. But certainly Cromwell had not been idle in the meantime. On the news that the provisional Walker report would favor Nicaragua, he was on to the Colombians, warning them that the future of their canal was in jeopardy Bogotá responded by sending a senior politician and close friend of the Colombian president to Washington to press the case for Panama. The envoy met U.S. secretary of state John Hay on March 13, 1901, and early exploratory negotiations between the Colombian envoy, Walker, and Cromwell representing the New Company, went well. Apart from anything else, the Colombian's presence in Washington indicated to Cromwell and his clients that Bogotá was happy for the New Company to sell out to the United States, despite the terms of the Wyse concession forbidding its handing over to a foreign government.

But there were potentially fatal problems and distractions. The Colombians were convinced that the Nicaragua option was a red herring designed to get better terms for the United States, and that Panama was the only serious option from a technical point of view. The United States, for its part, was still involved with the complicated negotiations, initiated in 1898, to change or abrogate the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty with Great Britain, which continued to stand in the way of any unilateral action by the United States on the canal issue. Worst of all was that the New Company still refused to set a price for its assets—demanding instead independent arbitration to settle the issue—or to confirm that it had the right to sell. Utterly frustrated, Walker went to Cromwell in July 1901 to demand that the directors in Paris name a price. Cromwell, equally annoyed, pressed Hutin for an answer in the most direct terms.

For the New Company directors, enough was enough. Not only had Cromwell made free and easy with their money, often in questionable ways, but now he was adopting an unacceptably aggressive tone. In July 1901, he was sacked.

So while the other distractions continued through the summer, the New Company now had no representation in the United States. Naturally, Walker's Commission had to consider the political aspects of the choice of canal location as well as the purely engineering issues, and it did not look good for Panama. On the Isthmus itself, hopeful rumors swirled about, but to those in the know it was clear that the preliminary verdict in favor of Nicaragua was not about to be reversed when the Commission submitted its final report in November 1901.

Then, on September 6, there happened a combination of two of the recurring events of the end of the nineteenth century—expositions and anarchist violence. President McKinley was attending the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, when a lone anarchist called Leon Czolgosz fired two shots from a .32-caliber revolver into the president's upper body. McKinley died eight nights later.

On the same day, September 14, 1901, a new chief executive was inaugurated, the former vice president, Theodore Roosevelt. And with his arrival, everything would change for the canal.

n his first address to Congress, the new president promised an American-built and controlled trans-Isthmian canal. “No single great material work which remains to be undertaken on this continent,” he declared, “is of such consequence to the American people.”

Roosevelt, who was actually descended on his mother's side from one of the survivors of the Scottish “Darién Disaster,” had already, while New York State governor, intervened in the canal debate, or, more specifically, the negotiations with Britain for the abrogation or alteration of the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty. Hay's discussions with the British had been slow and laborious, but in February 1900 he had at last signed an agreement with British ambassador Sir Julian Pauncefote that abrogated the restraining treaty that had prevented the United States from building a canal on its own. But its replacement, which forbade fortification, stipulated that the waterway should be “free and open in time of war as in time of peace, to vessels of commerce and of war of all nations,” and looked to an international guarantee, found no favor among the Roosevelt circle. While some press commentators applauded the lack of aggression inherent in the neutrality clause, which gave the United States’ neighbors less “cause for suspicion,” Roosevelt, a great admirer of Mahan's theory of the importance of naval power, wrote directly to Hay complaining that the “international guarantee” would flout the Monroe Doctrine and took direct issue with the ban on fortification. “If that canal is open to the warships of an enemy,” he wrote, “it is a menace to us in time of war; it is an added burden, an additional strategic point to be guarded by our fleet. If fortified by us, it becomes one of the most potent sources of our possible sea strength.”

Hay was shocked by these criticisms and sniffily told Roosevelt that such matters of Great Power diplomacy were outside the remit of a mere state governor. But opposition in the Senate, led by Morgan and Roosevelt's friend Henry Cabot Lodge, forced Hay back to the negotiating table. Happily, he found Great Britain in an obliging mood. Embroiled in a costly and internationally unpopular struggle with the South African Boers, and worried about Russian expansionism toward India and the German naval program, the British were keen to nurture an informal détente with the United States. Senior British politicians believed, like Arthur Balfour, that a U.S.-controlled canal would “strengthen our position enormously and… with England at Suez and the U.S. at Panama we should hold the world in a pretty strong grip.” Soon after the revised treaty was signed, Britain started reducing her costly garrisons and naval squadrons in the Caribbean. The British were beginning to learn how to use American power to their advantage.