Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [67]
Senator Hanna sat listening, the stillest man in the room. Morgan pointed out that the Treaty of New Granada (1846) actually obligated the United States to hold Colombia together, in exchange for railroad rights across the Isthmus. A commitment was a commitment.
Storming on, the withered little Senator waxed prophetic. Should Washington show the least inclination to ignore the treaty, “There is no doubt that Panama would eagerly seek protection under the folds of the flag of the United States.” And should an American President be so rash as to extend that flag, “It would poison the minds of the people against us in every Spanish-American republic in the Western Hemisphere.”
As soon as Morgan sat down, Hanna was on his feet. “Mr. President, I desire to give notice that I will address the Senate tomorrow at two o’clock on the pending bill.”
WHEN SENATORS RECONVENED on 5 June, they were surprised to find the chamber festooned with maps and diagrams. One twenty-foot projection, hanging from the visitors’ gallery, showed red and black dots splotching Central America. The dots represented volcanoes, active and extinct. Those in red were lined up mainly with Nicaragua. Panama was dot-free.
Hanna entered to a whirring of press telephones. Latecomers hurried to their seats as he sorted a mass of books and papers. He began to speak in his customary lackluster style. “Mr. President, the question of transportation is one of the important items of the day.”
The chamber settled down to being informed rather than entertained. Not for Hanna the old-fashioned eloquence of Senator Hoar. He deemed it irrelevant to a new, statistical century. Of his eighty-eight listeners, forty-one were for Nicaragua, thirty-five for Panama, and twelve undecided. Data, not dramatics, would get him the ten further votes he needed. “I was once,” he admitted, “in favor of the Nicaragua Canal.” But after two years of reflection, “I have been forced by stubborn facts and conditions to change my mind.”
For the next one and a half hours, Hanna funneled his “stubborn facts” like wheat into the Senate granary. Every dry grain had its kernel of persuasion. “The Panama route is forty-nine miles long, as against one hundred eighty-three miles of the Nicaragua.… Trade winds blow every day in the year from sixteen to twenty knots across the Nicaragua route.… The annual cost of operating the Nicaragua Canal is one million, three hundred and fifty thousand dollars, or, say one million, three hundred—”
“Oh, do make him sit down,” came a woman’s voice from the gallery. It was a cry of concern more than boredom: Hanna’s arthritis was visibly tormenting him. He said that he would conclude his speech the next day.
Polls in smoke-filled rooms that night indicated that the majority of senators favoring Nicaragua had already diminished. Cromwell and Philippe Bunau-Varilla lobbied like men possessed, while Senator Morgan’s lieutenants tried to fight attrition with scandal. They whispered that French shareholders of the Compagnie Nouvelle would not see a dime of the forty-million-dollar transfer fee, and that President Roosevelt, Secretary Hay, and Senator Spooner were the likely beneficiaries, along with Hanna, Cromwell, and Bunau-Varilla. Even “Princess Alice” was rumored to be in on the deal.
HANNA RESUMED HIS speech as soon as the Senate reopened for business on Friday, 6 June. Pointing to the splotched volcanic map, he said he wished to discuss “the burning question” of igneous activity in the Caribbean region. Just the previous month, Mont Pelée in Martinique had erupted, killing forty thousand people. Panama was “exempt” from this kind of danger. Not so Nicaragua, which lay along an almost continuously volcanic tract extending northwest from Costa Rica. Senator Morgan’s canal would cut straight across that tract—“probably the most violently eruptive of any in the Western Hemisphere.” Mount Momotombo, a hundred miles from the proposed route, had blown up only two months prior to Pelée. Had it done