GEORGE W. GOETHALS
By Bay Stannard Baker[1]
IT was not until Goethals, a state-minded man, was sent to Panama that the enterprise assumed the true measure of success. Goethals was not selected because he had at that time won any wide personal reputation, for he was almost unknown to the country. He was appointed as the ablest representative of a new point of view toward the work. Roosevelt had decided, at last, to go the full length, to take all the responsibility of building the canal as a public enterprise in its broadest sense. Taft, then Secretary of War, and General Mackenzie, chief of the corps of engineers, recommended Goethals as the one man, among fifteen or twenty in the army who might have been chosen, as best equipped to do the work. And Goethals went.
Now, Goethals had made no better record as an engineer in the army than a score of other men—it was sound rather than brilliant—but in talking with many men who have long known him it was significant that in every case I heard first of his loyalty to his work, his sturdy trustworthiness, his clear-headedness, his determination of character.
"Whatever I gave him to do," said Gen. John M. Wilson, once his superior in the corps of engineers, "I relieved my mind of it. I knew it would be done right."
An infallible test of the true leader is that his supreme interest shall not be in things, but in men. In whatever task he engages, no matter how humdrum, it will be found that he is forever seeing the human implications, forever translating his activities into terms of human welfare.
In the first talk I had with Colonel Goethals he said to me:
"My chief interest at Panama is not in engineering, but in the men. The canal will build itself if we can handle the men."
Two simple but highly important changes were made after
- ↑ From the American Magazine. Copyright by the Phillips Publishing Go.
