A couple of weeks
ago I had a hankering for a particular kind of book. Since my day
job is satisfying such hankerings, it's pretty rare for me to
struggle with one for any length of time. Usually I know what I want
to read and have a stack of galleys that fit it. (New bookseller term
“galleylag: reading the galley of a book after it's come out in
paperback. Use it in a sentence today.) For reasons lost in the
mysteries of consciousness, I wanted to read a big dense book of
history that wasn't about war. You may or may not be surprised at
how few books that really is. (Another book that would have worked,
if I hadn't already read it would have been A Distant Mirror by
Barbara Tuchman). This hankering hung over me for a few days and its
solution was met with an inordinate amount of relief. I would read
Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal 1870-1914
by David McCullough. Here's what I learned.
His genius was in
promotion. De Lesseps, more than anyone else, convinced people, the
French government, the French people, the Egyptian royalty that a
canal could be built and would be built. He merely needed to show up
at a stock holder's meeting or something and somehow everyone left
believing not just that a sea level canal across the African isthmus
was possible, but that it was only a matter of time. Money poured
in. Morale stayed high. Personal conflicts were smoothed over in
service to the greater goal. De Lesseps was able to convince
everyone involved in the project that they were doing the great work
of human progress, that nothing more important was happening anywhere
on Earth, and that completion of the Suez Canal was a foregone
conclusion.
In short, he was a
genius at making people believe in him, and this skill is absolutely
vital in accomplishing tasks believed impossible. But there are
tasks that are actually impossible. And when faced with such tasks,
genius like that of de Lesseps leads to utter disaster. Which is
what happened when the French tried to build a seal-level canal in
Panama.
If there were
someone else leading the effort, really anyone besides de Lesseps, it
is very likely that a lock canal would have been built in Nicaragua.
But because de Lesseps believed in the sea level canal at Panama and
because de Lesseps could convince everyone to believe in him, and
through him, in the idea he represented, the French attempted an
impossible canal, millions of French citizens lost billions of
dollars, careers were destroyed, reputations tarnished, corruption
flourished, and Ferdinand de Lesseps, the emblem of modern humanity,
the hero of the French people, died in disgrace. For the important
tasks in humanity, genius is not enough; it has to be the right kind
of genius for the right kind of task. Otherwise at best some
mediocre result is reached and at worst thousands of people die of
malaria and yellow fever with nothing to show for their sacrifice.
If there is one
major difference between the French and American efforts to build the
Panama canal is that the Americans had enough foresight or luck, to
have the right kind of genius working on the problem at the right
time. The first was John Stevens, the chief engineer from 1905-1907.
Stevens was the first executive to realize that the primary
challenge of Panama was not engineering but infrastructure. In order
to dig a canal, you needed to move the dirt out of the way and keep
enough workers healthy to do the digging. So he authorized one of
the greatest health and sanitation efforts maybe the world has ever
seen and turned his vast experience in building railroads, to
building, well, railroads for dirt and debris. He solved problems of
transportation, efficiency, and disease. Everything else that
happened after his tenure rested on the structures he created. Work,
any kind of work, could happen because of his systems.
The next and final
chief engineer was a military man named George Washington Goethals.
He did two things that allowed the completion of the Panama Canal;
the first was that he followed the path set by Stevens and continued
to manage the digging systems as much as the digging itself, adding
in a level of military efficiency and commitment, and second, and
most important, he understood that a task of this scale needed an
entire society to complete it. Among other things a canal newspaper
was founded under his watch and he set aside several hours every
Sunday to hear and redress the grievances of anybody involved in the
canal. He incentivized marriage. A director of women's clubs was
hired. Essentially, he created a community whose identity was based
in the completion of the canal and so each and every employee (or at
least all the white American employees) was personally and completely
invested in the project. And so when tragedy did strike, whether it
was a landslide that undid months of effort or an accidental
explosion that killed dozens of men, moral was unshaken. No matter
what the condition, everyone got up for work the next day and gave it
their all.
But who knows what
would have happened if Americans had employed another de Lesseps.
(In a way, we did, in Theodore Roosevelt, but he wasn't in charge of
the actual building, so much as he was the force that ensured
building would happen.) The work could have continued for decades
and still ended in failure. Of course, John Stevens had been in
charge at Suez, there probably would have been a railroad instead of
a canal. Genius has its limitations and the wrong genius can
sometimes be more disastrous than incompetence. Which leads to a
strange, almost paradoxical conclusion. Perhaps the most vital
genius in any great project, is the genius of knowing which genius to
put in charge of what aspect at what time.
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