George Washington Goethals

The Goethals family came out of Stekene in Flanders and settled in Brooklyn, where the father worked as a carpenter and there was never much money. George entered the College of the City of New York at 14, worked to pay his own way, and left after three years for an appointment to West Point. He graduated second in a class of 52 in 1880 and took his commission in the Corps of Engineers. Then came a quarter century of unglamorous water: surveys in Washington Territory, a bridge over the Spokane River, navigation work on the Cumberland and the Tennessee, and in 1891 the Muscle Shoals Canal, where he designed a single lock with a 26-foot lift and had to argue the Corps into letting him build it.

Two chief engineers quit before him — John Findley Wallace in 1905, John Frank Stevens in 1907 — and Roosevelt's answer was an Army officer, on the reasoning that a soldier under orders could not quit. The French had tried to cut a sea-level trench across the isthmus and lost to the flooding Chagres River and the collapsing walls of the Culebra Cut. Goethals built the alternative: dam the Chagres, make a lake of it 85 feet up, and use locks to raise ships onto the lake and lower them off. The canal opened on August 15, 1914, two years early.

The digging was done overwhelmingly by West Indians, recruited island by island, most of them from Barbados and Jamaica. They were paid on the silver roll, in silver coin — the gold roll, paid in American gold, was for white Americans. The two rolls meant two of everything: wages, housing, schools, medical care, even separate entrances at the post office. Roughly 5,600 workers died of disease and accident during the American construction, about 350 of them Americans and the great majority of the rest Black. Goethals administered that system for seven years. The reason the toll was not far worse was William Gorgas, whose mosquito campaign had broken yellow fever on the isthmus — work Goethals is reported to have thought too expensive before he came around to it.

Wilson made him the Canal Zone's first civil governor in 1914, and he ran it as he had run the dig until he resigned in 1916. The war pulled him back: state engineer of New Jersey, the Emergency Fleet Corporation, and then Acting Quartermaster General from December 19, 1917, after the Army's supply system broke down in the winter. He rebuilt it around businessmen and retired in 1919. Peyton March, the Army chief of staff, called him the greatest chief of supply any nation produced in the war. Lung cancer killed him at his Manhattan apartment on January 21, 1928. The bridge over the Arthur Kill opened five months later, on what would have been his 70th birthday.

George Washington Goethals's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Riverton Lock, Tennessee River building
  His design — a single lock with a 26-foot lift, the highest in the world when it opened 1911
• Gatun Locks building
  The Atlantic stairway that raises ships 85 feet to Gatun Lake 1913
• Panama Canal building
  Opened to commercial traffic on August 15, 1914, two years ahead of the target date 1914
• Purchase, Storage and Traffic Division other
  Army buying, storage and transport pulled under a single head 1918
• Port of New York Authority other
  He served as its first consulting engineer 1921

• June 29, 1858 aged 0 Born in Brooklyn to Flemish immigrants from Stekene, Belgium His father, John Louis Goethals, was a carpenter.
• June 1880 aged 21 Graduates second in a class of 52 at West Point He had entered the College of the City of New York at 14 and West Point in 1876. He took his commission in the Corps of Engineers.
• 1884 aged ~26 Marries Effie Rodman They had two sons.
• 1889 aged ~31 Tutors Charles Young, who becomes the third Black graduate of West Point Young had failed an engineering course. He passed and graduated in 1889.
• 1891 aged ~33 Takes charge of the Muscle Shoals Canal and designs the Riverton Lock Washington opposed a single lock with a 26-foot lift. He argued it through, and it set a world record.
• February 1907 aged 48 Roosevelt appoints him chief engineer of the Panama Canal The third man in the job, after John Findley Wallace and John Frank Stevens both resigned.
• August 15, 1914 aged 56 The canal opens to commercial traffic with the transit of the SS Ancon Two years ahead of the target date of June 10, 1916. War in Europe cancelled the celebrations.
• December 19, 1917 aged 59 Recalled to active duty as Acting Quartermaster General He accepted only after Secretary of War Newton Baker guaranteed him full authority.
• January 21, 1928 aged 69 Dies of lung cancer at his apartment on East 86th Street Buried at the cemetery of the United States Military Academy at West Point.

• Theodore Roosevelt 1858–1919
  26th President known for progressive reforms, conservation efforts, and assertive foreign policy. appointed by
• William Howard Taft 1857–1930
  Only person to serve as both president and Chief Justice of the United States. recommended by
• Walter Reed 1851–1902
  Army physician whose commission confirmed mosquito transmission of yellow fever and transformed disease control. built on the work of
• John A. Roebling 1806–1869
  Developed wire-rope suspension bridge design and planned the Brooklyn Bridge. engineering forerunner