George W. Goethals

No two great public undertakings of a kindred sort ever presented so close a resemblance in circumstance or so striking a contrast in conception, history and personnel, as the Suez and Panama Canals. A melodramatic atmosphere surrounded the history of the Suez Canal, from the conference of 1854 between De Lesseps and Mohammed Said in the Libyan Desert to the celebration of the completed enterprise in 1869 with Verdi’s “Aida,” composed for the occasion, performed before the assembled celebrities at Alexandria. The Panama Canal was inaugurated and completed with total absence of international glamo[u]r. That, however, only emphasized the historically dramatic aspect of its construction by the United States army and its control by the United States government. Forty years ago it was a matter of common expectation that Panama would be a second edition of Suez, in nationality of inspiration as in ownership and operation. If the Isthmian fever had been understood when the French set out to build a Panama Canal, if the De Lesseps of 1880 had been the De Lesseps of 1860, and if the shareholders in his Panama Construction Company had subscribed the $435,000,000 which the undertaking subsequently cost the United States, France might today rule the Isthmus and our own interoceanic commerce might be passing, as England’s commerce between Liverpool and Bombay has to pass, through a waterway controlled by an international joint-stock company. But chance played the hand of the United States, as it has a way of doing.

The break-down of the French experiment did not end the atmosphere of failure. Even after the intervention of the Roosevelt administration and until construction was turned over to the army in 1907, with George Washington Goethals summoned to complete it, confusion of method, purpose and authority had prevailed. Then came a sudden change. This simple major in the service, abruptly commissioned chief engineer and governor of the Canal Zone, took his place at once among the great administrators. The problem which had baffled a dozen generations was envisaged in all its aspects, the plan of a lock canal asserted and the disputed possibility of its success established. A scientific and engineering staff of the highest capacity came into being. In 1880, fever had decimated the French workers and paralyzed construction work. Goethals and Gorgas began by exterminating the sources of the fever; the Isthmus became as healthful a winter resort as Southern California. The occasional news which drifted back thereafter to the United States was no longer made up of impossible obstacles and indefinite delays; it was a story of unremitting progress. When De Lesseps began to dig at Panama, the experts calculated twenty-six years as the term for its completion. Goethals opened the canal to ships seven years after he took the task in hand.

The builder of the Panama Canal never became, like De Lesseps, a popular idol and international celebrity. Nothing was more distasteful to our modest general than newspaper publicity; he could see no reason for it. Receiving his honorary degree from Columbia in 1912, and being cornered by the present urbane vice-president of the Century, at the sociable dinner which ensued, with request for a word about the achievement for which the University had honored him, Goethals said simply that he was a soldier who had carried out his commander’s orders. Why he should receive a degree for that, Columbia could perhaps judge better than he; for himself, he had only dug a ditch at Panama which might be found useful. But with Goethals, as with most of the great engineers of this engineering era, one practical problem of construction differed only in scope and magnitude from another. The principles were the same and success as much an incident of the day’s work in the larger commission as in the smaller.

It is a pleasing picture. The rise of a commanding personality from obscurity to grapple with a task that had baffled the world’s highest experts; the contemplation of disheartening obstacles as only a stimulus to the joy of surmounting them; the completion of a historic undertaking with no reward asked or expected except satisfaction in a problem solved; the quiet return to private life with no ambition save to apply the same constructive energies to other and lesser problems—the story is one in which Americans may take just pride, knowing that it probably could not be told of any other than American citizenship, but that it is typical rather than exceptional in the highest American achievement.

Alexander Dana Noyes
1929 Century Association Yearbook

Goethals was born in Brooklyn and, at 14, he entered the College of the City of New York. He won a cadetship to West Point where he graduated second in his class in 1880. He was commissioned as second lieutenant in the Army Corps of Engineers.

After four years working in the Northwest, he married Effie Rodman, and from 1885 to 1889 he taught at West Point. He then returned to the field, and in 1891 Goethals was placed in charge of the completion of the Muscle Shoals Canal along the Tennessee River near Chattanooga. This was his first independent command, and his responsibilities included the design and construction of the Riverton Lock at Colbert Shoals. Goethals’s recommendation of a single lock with an unprecedented lift of twenty-six feet was initially opposed by his superiors, but he persuaded the conservative army engineers of the merits of his design. The success of the Riverton Lock inspired the eventual adoption of high-lift locks elsewhere, including those for the Panama Canal.

During the Spanish-American War he was lieutenant colonel and chief of engineers of the U.S. Volunteers. In 1907, President Theodore Roosevelt appointed Goethals chief engineer of the daunting Panama Canal construction, a project that had defeated French efforts in 1880. While plagued with problems such as disease and landslides, the canal was opened in August 1914, almost two years ahead of the target date. A total of 27,500 workmen are estimated to have died in the French and American efforts, but Goethals received unstinted praise from visiting engineers and from the technical press. President Woodrow Wilson appointed him the first Civil Governor of the Panama Canal Zone.

In 1919, he requested his release from his active service. Later on, he headed an engineering and construction firm. The Goethals Bridge between New York and New Jersey was named for him.

James Charlton
“Centurions on Stamps,” Part I (Exhibition, 2010)