Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [280]
HE HAD SEEN CULEBRA looming over the Louisiana’s white bow before he saw anything else of the Isthmus. Too low to be a cordillera, too high for any rock-splitters in the world—save those of the United States—it was already carved half open. Imaginations less vivid than his would have no difficulty picturing the day, perhaps no more than six or seven years off, when the continental spine would be snapped, and North and South America, paradoxically, brought closer together by a mutual highway of water. A new age of wealth and Pacific connections was coming to all those invisible Latin republics lying off to his left, while el Coloseo del Norte would be able to speed battleships as big as this one, and bigger and bigger, through her own secure conduit!
In the meantime, there was the vital question of yams.
Roosevelt heard about them in the cockpit of a Bucyrus steam shovel, which attracted him so irresistibly that he had stopped his open-sided train and clambered aboard, careless of mud. (Edith watched him seek out the driver’s seat, her expression veiled by what looked like a small meatsafe of mosquito netting.) While a cameraman snapped away, the President asked about workforce morale. The shovel operator said it was not good among the nineteen thousand black laborers, mostly British West Indians, who did most of the digging in the cut. No number of monster machines could compensate for the loss of these men, should discontent send them home. (American Negroes were deemed not strong enough to work in tropical heat.)
Food was part of the problem. Panama yams, sold in the labor-camp commissary, did not compare to those of Jamaica. There appeared to be a direct correlation between yam quality and productivity along the line, perilous to the future of world commerce.
Roosevelt proceeded through the cut in rain so torrential that the Mount Hope Reservoir, not yet ready for use, began to fill up. He stopped at the sump to observe the copulatory heavings and thrustings of an excavation plow, but food remained on his mind, and he kept asking workers about their diet. At Rio Grande, he heard that the government-issue vegetables tasted worse, and cost more, than those in private stores. Seizing one complainer, he escorted him into the camp commissary. The clerk remained stoic at the sight of a burly President in a white suit and mud-spattered canvas leggings.
“HE CLAMBERED ABOARD, CARELESS OF MUD.”
Roosevelt mounting a steam shovel, Panama Canal Zone, November 1906. (photo credit 27.3)
“Let me see your yams,” Roosevelt said, firing off monosyllables like a repeater rifle. “Here is a yam that does not look right to me. This man says you sell him rotten yams.”
“Yes, sir, and it’s not surprising,” the clerk replied. “Yams may go bad in a few hours in this climate.” He explained that yams were susceptible to spoilage in great heat. In Panama, as elsewhere around the globe, the doctrine of caveat emptor applied. If a customer found rot-specks on any purchased yam, he could always bring it back for exchange.
Roosevelt appealed to his informant. “Mr. President,” came the reply, in lilting Caribbean English, “I does not incline to demean my personal dignity by comporting myself with such bally, humiliating condescension.”
Taking the hint, Roosevelt got back on his train and headed south on the tracks that Colonel Shaler, three years before, had closed to the Colombian tiradores. He called halts so often en route that the fingers of Theodore P. Shonts, president of the Canal Zone’s governing commission, drummed with nervousness. By the time he got to Panama City, in a cacophony of steam whistles, Roosevelt had been touring sites and asking questions for almost ten hours. His cotton blouse was dark with sweat, and his leggings encrusted enough to make him waddle. But he exulted in everything he had seen and heard.
Much of it had been squalid, rather than magnificent. The black labor force was so disease-prone that Shonts was thinking of bringing in Chinese coolies. Perhaps