Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [51]
HANNA Well, the President thinks it is worth waiting for.
MORGAN What do you mean by that?
HANNA I mean that the President has asked Admiral Walker to call the Canal Commission together so it can make a supplemental report for him, which he intends to send to Congress.
MORGAN Don’t believe anything of the kind.
HANNA Suppose you ask the President.
Morgan hurried to the White House. Roosevelt said that in view of France’s new offer, the Canal Commission should be given a chance to “reconsider” its original finding.
Shocked and depressed, Morgan tried to get Admiral Walker to appear before his Committee for an emergency briefing on Friday. But Walker said he was too busy. The President wanted a new, unanimous report, deliverable to the White House “not later than tomorrow evening.”
Experience had taught Roosevelt that a Saturday press release was sure of front-page treatment on Sunday or Monday morning—papers on those days being traditionally short of news. The supplemental report was delivered and released on schedule. Its impact was all that he could have desired. COMMISSION SAYS PANAMA IS BEST, proclaimed the New York Herald.
The commission thinks it has a good bargain.… [It] recites the advantages and the disadvantages of the two routes, showing that the Panama route would be 134.6 miles shorter than the Nicaragua route, with fewer locks and less curvature; that the time of transit through Panama would be twelve hours, against thirty-three hours at Nicaragua … that there is already a railroad at Panama which would be very servicable in building the canal; that two artificial harbors would have to be constructed at Nicaragua and only one would be necessary at Panama.
The commission … finds now that the reduced offer of the Panama company has made the estimated cost of construction of the Nicaraguan canal $45,630,704 greater than Panama, and the estimated cost of maintenance and operation $1,300,000 greater.
White House messengers transmitted the report to Congress on 20 January. A “Panama boom” began in the Senate, with Aldrich, Allison, and Platt joining Hanna, Spooner, and Lodge on the list of converts. But most of their colleagues awaited the recommendation of Senator Morgan’s committee. Morgan himself declared that Theodore Roosevelt was the true author of the new report. “I will strive to defeat it.”
For the rest of the week, tension prevailed on Capitol Hill. Groups of well-dressed, whispering men gathered in the byways of the Senate, their numbers increasing daily as trains from New York, Chicago, and the South brought fresh infusions of lobbying power. On Wall Street, Edward H. Harriman began to buy up Panama Canal bonds at 6 percent.
Meanwhile, the shock effect of the “boom” reached as far as Panama City. Separatists there panicked, realizing that an American decision to funnel the world’s commerce through their territory would bind them forever to Colombia. If they could only break from Bogotá in time, the golden waterway might be theirs in perpetuity.
OF ALL THE WELL-DRESSED whisperers who thronged the Capitol in the last weeks of January 1902, none wore finer cloth, or whispered more urgently, than William Nelson Cromwell of New York City, and Philippe Bunau-Varilla, of Paris. Although they were but newly acquainted (Bunau-Varilla was just off a transatlantic steamer), they lobbied for Panama like lifelong partners.
Cromwell was the more talkative of the two, at ease in an atmosphere of intrigue. Pop-eyed, cherubic, curly-haired, he had a cute dimple in his pink chin, and his speech fanned a soft, silvery mustache. If the silver was deceptive (he was only forty-seven), the gold elsewhere on his person was genuine, betokening a former Brooklyn boy. Cromwell had earned millions as a trust attorney and American counsel for the Compagnie Nouvelle. But these riches were nothing compared to the commissions and fees he hoped to earn, should Congress accept the Compagnie’s new offer. Even at the reduced price of forty million dollars, it would still be the biggest real-estate deal in history.
If Cromwell