George Washington Goethals

The name Colonel George Goethals will forever be etched in history as the daring civil engineer who accomplished one of the greatest feats of engineering and construction ever—the building of the gigantic Panama Canal. A project on the same scale and historic significance of the Egyptian pyramids and Great Wall of China, Goethals completed the Panama Canal more than six months ahead of schedule and $23 million under budget. Goethals’s lifetime achievements and his impact on the U.S. engineering community, however, extended far beyond this single project, even if it was named the “eighth wonder of the world” when completed.

To fully understand the magnitude of this first-generation American’s accomplishments, and how he reached the pinnacle of his profession against many odds, a trip back to the beginning is in order.

Although Goethals’s Flemish roots can be traced back to the early 1530s—to Egidius and Anna Goethals, with several notables within the family over the centuries—his upbringing was anything but upper class. His father, John Louis (Johannes Babtista) Goethals, a carpenter by trade, arrived in New York City as a thirty-two-year-old bachelor with little more than the clothes on his back. He came from Stekene, Belgium, along with the hordes of other European immigrants who came to the United States in 1848 looking to improve their lot in life.

Three years after he was in the country, John Louis married a fellow Belgium immigrant, Philippina Marie Le Barron, from Antwerpen. She was twelve years his junior. To the couple were born three children; so pleased were they with their adopted country, they named their second son after its first president, George Washington. Earlier they had given their oldest son the name John, but not John Louis, so he wouldn’t be saddled with the nickname “Junior.” The baby of the family, a daughter, was called Annie.

George Washington Goethals was born on June 29, 1858, in Brooklyn, New York. It was the same year a man who would play a major role in George’s life was also born—Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt. The two would be raised in completely different circumstances, but when teamed together later at the beginning of the twentieth century, they would amaze the world.

When George was eleven, the poor and struggling Goethals family moved to Manhattan, a block from the East River. Three years later, George was enrolled at City College of New York. Always big for his age, reaching his full six-foot height while still in his early teens, the second-born with his intense blue eyes was quiet, serious, someone not inclined to frivolity, and a dedicated reader with thoughts of becoming a physician.

While young Roosevelt was attending private schools and living a life of privilege, young Goethals was working at numerous menial jobs to make ends meet and pay his tuition to stay in school. Through it all, he remained faithful to his studies and earned good grades. When he was in his last year at City College, Lady Luck shined down on him. The candidate New York Congressman Samuel Cox had nominated for a West Point appointment had failed the necessary competitive examinations. Nathan Beer, principal of the grammar school George had attended, quickly proposed Goethals as a replacement.

After reviewing his grades and background, then interviewing him, Cox concurred with Beer’s glowing assessment of the young man’s high potential. Seemingly overnight the direction George was taking changed—his career path became firmly established, and key to it would be his coveted appointment to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. When he entered West Point in 1876, his privileged future Panama Canal boss/teammate was enrolled at Harvard—and the French were making grand plans for a massive project to connect the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans through Central America.

Their proposed construction project was the brainchild of the flamboyant Ferdinand de Lesseps (1805–1894), the French diplomat/promoter who had earlier successfully built the Suez Canal connecting the Mediterranean and the Gulf of Suez in northeastern Egypt (1859–1869). His proposed canal venture through the jungles of Panama, however, would prove to be a considerably more difficult proposition.

Although possessing an abrupt, somber, and no-nonsense persona, Goethals was well liked at West Point. He had a good tenor voice and was in demand for songfests and the like. He was elected class president and set a precedent by completing his four years at West Point without a demerit. When George received his bachelor’s degree in 1880, graduating second in his class, Teddy was graduating Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard, and the French were just beginning construction on their massive canal across the Isthmus of Panama. Later, when France gave up and the United States took over, it would be the project that would evermore link the West Pointer and the Harvard man in an awesome undertaking that would produce one of the greatest engineering feats the world had ever seen.

After graduating in 1880, Goethals and one other bright cadet from his class were selected to go to engineering school, an option reserved for top students only. Like most West Point graduates he felt a real sense of pride at being part of an honored tradition, and was excited to get about the business of building great structures. He was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the United States Army Corps of Engineers on June 12, 1880. He would be promoted to first lieutenant two years later.

During the summer and fall of 1880, he remained at West Point as an assistant instructor in astronomy. He then moved to Willets Point, New York, and the Army’s School of Application. In his two years there he learned the latest design theories about—and studied books on how to build—bridges, dams, harbor, canals, and other major civil works.

In 1882, he was sent west out into the field to the Department of the Columbia in what was still Washington Territory. General Nelson Miles was in command. Shortly after arriving, a flood washed out the bridge over the Spokane River, along the main road to Fort Spokane, and the inexperienced twenty-four-year-old was ordered to replace it posthaste. The result was to be a 120-foot clear-span wooden truss structure.

Having never designed or built an actual bridge at the time, Goethals later admitted it was the hardest task he faced: “I had never built a bridge and I didn’t know much about bridge building. The bridge site was a long distance from the sources of supply of everything excepting wood, and I was expected to do my work in a hurry.” It would have been a straightforward assignment for an experienced bridge engineer, but for the greenhorn it was a real challenge. “I had to find out as we went along. I read books all night and gave orders all day.” In the end, the bridge got built on time. To Goethals, “No job since then ever seemed so hard as that one.”

In reflecting about engineering, he allowed: “It’s scarcely ever the big, spectacular things that really count with an engineer. Mere size sometimes matters. More often it does not. It’s the difficulties overcome that make for greatness.” He added: “Nothing is hard if you know what you’re doing. What makes my first bridge stick out in my memory is that I didn’t know what I was doing. The man [or woman] who is entitled to the most credit is the man [or woman] who does something, no matter how crudely, for the first time. Those who come after him [or her] are directors or administrators—not originators.”

Stationed along with Goethals during his time in Washington was Lieutenant Samuel Rodman, a member of an old New Bedford, Massachusetts, whaling family. When Rodman had his sister Effie came out west for an extended visit, every eligible man at the post called to pay his respects, Goethals included. He made a much bigger impression than the rest.

The romance that developed between Effie and George ended with the tall pair getting married on December 3, 1884, in New Bedford. Their oldest son George, born in 1885, would follow in his father’s footsteps by going to West Point and becoming an engineer. Their second born, Thomas, would arrive in 1890 and become a doctor after earning his degree from Harvard, the alma mater of the man who would select his father to finish building the Panama Canal.

When his two-year stint on the West Coast ended, Lieutenant Goethals was assigned to the Ohio River Improvements Project, which included channel dredging and improvements, and construction of dikes, levees, and locks. When his work on the Ohio was over, the newly married New Yorker was detailed back to West Point to teach civil and military engineering, an assignment that extended from 1885 to 1889. In his last year at West Point, in 1888, Goethals’s seventy-two-year-old father died in San Diego; his mother would survive her husband for another eleven years.

In 1889, after nine years of struggle, and expenditure of $287 million and over 25,000 lives, the French pulled out of the Isthmus of Panama, giving up on Lesseps’s ambitious dream to create a water passage between the Atlantic and Pacific. It was the same year Goethals went back into the field, to build locks and dams along the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers.

The Muscle Shoals Canal on the Tennessee was being completed and a great lock planned at Colbert Shoals, and Goethals, now a captain, was placed in charge of both. To facilitate the construction work, he built a fourteen-mile-long railroad. And he conceived a twenty-six-foot high lift lock—the biggest ever at the time. His experience with it and railroading would very much prepare him for his greatest project, now less than fifteen years away.

From 1894 until 1898, Goethals served in Washington, D.C., in the Army Engineering Department as the assistant to the Chief of Engineers, Brig. General John Wilson. When the United States went to war with Spain in 1898 over control of Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippine Islands, and the liberation of Cuba, Goethals accepted an appointment as lieutenant colonel and chief engineer with Major General John Brooke’s First Army Corps. He never saw battlefield action mainly because the Spanish-American War only lasted a year. His future commander-in-chief Teddy Roosevelt, however, gained significant fame as the hero of the Rough Riders in their charge up San Juan Hill.

After the brief war, the forty-year-old Goethals was back at West Point teaching engineering. Within short order, he was commissioned as a major in the regular Army and placed in charge of the U.S. Engineer Department District at Newport, Rhode Island. The post put him at the head of all river and harbor work from Block Island to Nantucket, but his main job was to complete the seacoast defenses at Fort Wetherell and Fort Greble in Rhode Island and Fort Rodman in Massachusetts. Building railroads to haul supplies was a major part of the assignment.

In 1903 he became a member of the General Staff of the Army and, in 1905, Secretary of the Taft Fortification Board, where he worked directly under U.S. Secretary of War William Taft, who would see to it that the then President Roosevelt was made fully aware of his many engineering skills and leadership abilities.

Beginning in the first part of 1904, the United States took over the work started by the French to build a water path through the Isthmus of Panama, changing it from a sea-level concept to one using a series of locks and manmade inland lakes. The first U.S. engineer hired to head up the undertaking was John Wallace (1852–1920), a prominent railroad engineer. He resigned after just one year on the job.

His replacement, John Stevens (1853–1943), was also one of the foremost railroad engineers in the world. A major accomplishment during Stevens’s tenure was that the dreaded Yellow Fever disease was brought under control. However, less than two years after he took over, he too resigned. In less than three years, from 1904 to 1907, the project had claimed two chief engineers, and the never-give-up, never-back-down Roosevelt was steaming. He was more convinced than ever the project needed a headman who not only understood, as he did, that the canal was vital and indispensable to the global destiny of the United States of America, but who would also stay the course. Once found he was prepared to give his chief engineer supreme power to get the job done. Said Roosevelt, “I believe in a strong executive, and I believe in power.”

Taft convinced Roosevelt his man was forty-nine-year-old George Washington Goethals. Roosevelt concurred, and Goethals took over as chief engineer from Stevens at midnight on March 31, 1907. He wasted little time establishing himself as the “Czar of the Zone,” a virtual dictator as demanded by the president. In addition to making Goethals chief engineer, Roosevelt appointed him chairman of the Isthmian Canal Commission (ICC), telling the other members of the commission that Goethals’s word on all major decisions was to be final.

Much to the president’s liking, upon taking over, Goethals approached the project much as he had—not merely as an awesome construction project but as a major history-altering military engagement to be won at all costs—saying, “The enemy we are going to combat is the Culebra Cut and the locks and dams at both ends of the canal.”

The three of the most daunting construction tasks he faced were: (1) cutting down to a much lower level several sizeable mountains near the center of the Isthmus in order to minimize the elevation of the canal itself; (2) damming the powerful and erratic Chagres River with the Gatun Dam, and the formation of Gatun Lake; and (3) building the huge concrete locks with efficient water-filling and emptying systems, and great steel gates with cutting-edge opening and closing devices. Feeding, housing, and controlling thirty thousand employees added to the ICC chairman’s concerns.

Many times the building plans were changed during construction as unexpected events—manmade and natural—occurred and caused havoc on progress. Over 260 million cubic yards of earth were moved, and two million cubic yards of concrete were placed. And three presidents were commanders-in-chief: Roosevelt left office in 1909, followed by President Taft, then Woodrow Wilson in 1913. Through it all construction marched on like a locust through an unsuspecting wheat field.

When the project was completed in August of 1914, Goethals was fifty-six. He had taken only one vacation from the project—a trip to Germany to visit the new locks on the Kiel Canal in the spring of 1912. While there, he was the guest of the Kaiser, whom he described as “Roosevelt toned down.” As part of the trip he stopped off at the nation’s capital where he received standing ovations from every congressional committee he appeared before. There was even talk of him as a dark horse candidate for the presidency.

When the canal was fully operational in 1915, Goethals received the full thanks of Congress “for distinguished service in constructing the Panama Canal,” and overwhelming praise from engineers everywhere, not to mention from the technical press around the world. By then World War I was in full swing, and the canal was quickly pressed into war-service action, allowing American warships to move efficiently and rapidly between its East and West Coasts. It helped fulfill Roosevelt’s vision for the United States becoming a major sea power in the world.

After his building work on the canal was completed, President Wilson appointed Goethals the first Civil Governor of the Panama Canal Zone, a position he held from 1914 until his resignation on January 17, 1917. Later in the spring of 1917, he served as General Manager of the Emergency Fleet Corporation and, on December 18, 1917, was recalled to active duty and appointed Acting Quartermaster General of the U.S. Army. From 1918 to 1919, he was Chief of the U.S. Army Division of Purchase, Storage, and Traffic. By then World War I was over.

In March of 1919, he requested his release from active service and went back home where he founded George W. Goethals and Company, a New York City-based engineering firm. Prominent among his firm’s wide-ranging assignments was one that had the man himself performing as advisor and chief consulting engineer to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. A major Port Authority project completed during this time was the Holland Tunnel, which, like Goethals’s Panama project, was labeled “the eighth wonder of the world” when it was completed in 1927. Goethals’s company also served as chief consultant for developing the inner harbor of New Orleans and the Columbia Basin irrigation project.

Throughout his fascinating career, Goethals was a member of numerous professional societies and received countless honors, among them the Fritz Medal from the American Association of Engineering Societies, the Washington Award from the Western Society of Engineers, and medals from the National Geographic Society, National Academy of Sciences, and National Institute of Social Sciences. Universities bestowing on him honorary doctorate degrees included Yale, Rutgers, Princeton, Pennsylvania, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Dartmouth, and Columbia.

In 1918, the president of the French Republic presented him with its Commander of the Legion of Honor Award and, one year later, the U.S. government awarded him with the Distinguished Service Medal. In 1928, the Goethals Bridge between New York City and Elizabeth, New Jersey, was named in his honor and, during World War II, a U.S. liberty ship was commissioned in his name—the S.S. G. W. Goethals.

About awards, Goethals said: “The plaudits of our fellows may be flattering to our vanity, but they are not lasting. By the next turn of the wheel they may be changed into abuse and condemnation. It all amounts to this: Whatever your hands find to do, [do it] with all the might that is in you. Face every task with a determination to conquer its difficulties and never to let them conquer you. No task is too small to be done well. For the man [or woman] who is worthy, who is fit to perform the deeds of the world, even the greatest, sooner or later the opportunity to do them will come.”

Concerning the significance of Goethals’s input toward the success of the Panama Canal, it would be impossible to overstate what he did. It was the greatest manmade project in the world and, while accomplishing it, Goethals instilled in the men and women under him a true spirit of purpose and sacrifice—an esprit de corps normally found only within the ranks of highly victorious armies who changed history.

The Colonel died of cancer on January 21, 1928, in New York City, five months before his seventieth birthday. At his request, he was buried at West Point.