To Panama and Back: The Record of an Experience

Those who wish to go to Panama should start from Chicago, which is the most direct route to Panama. In order to get there all one has to do is to go south; to return all one has to do is to come north. Chicago is at one end, Panama at the other.

But Chicago is not only the natural starting place for Panama, it is the natural business center of the Panama Canal. Chicago sent a Chicago man to build the canal, another Chicago man to boss it, others to plan it and others to provision it; and when the time comes will be ready with schemes to run it. Chicago believes that the canal must be constructed and conducted on a dual plan, the interoceanic and the alimentary—one for water and one for food. And she not only has the courage of her convictions, but the ability to assert them.

Unjust reflections have been cast upon the food which Chicago kills, cures and puts up in cans for the canal, and a word of explanation is necessary. It has been intimated that packing-house boys and butchers sometimes lose their footing and disappear so quickly that they can not be recovered or recognized, or even indicated on the labels. But these facts lack confirmation and the packers deny them. They are things of the past. Indeed, it was a Chicago man who demonstrated to Congress that the food from all parts of the country was fit neither for us nor for Panama. Thanks to his demonstrativeness, everybody now knows that until then pepper berries were made of tapioca kernels colored with lamp black; that preserved cherries were bleached with acid, colored with poisonous aniline, and used to contaminate the cocktails of our fathers and dye the hair and habits of our mothers; that the honey of our childhood was made of dead bees embalmed in sulphurous glucose; that Arabian coffee came from Brazil, and Italian olive oil from Mississippi cotton fields; that fancy liquors were made of ethyl alcohol and a chemical filler; and that breakfast foods were underweight in the package and overweight in the stomach. We now know that there was neither a sneeze in the peppers nor a stomach ache in the berries, and that the only genuine full weight articles were the tin cans and pasteboard boxes. We have learned that lamp black, mineral acids, sulphite of soda, coal tar and other embalmatives were used in the manufacture of our popular delicatessen, that the manufacturers bought them at forty dollars per ton in five-ton lots, and that the United States supports from five to fifty times as many doctors per capita as other countries do. All this has become history, and a Chicago man made it.

And now that Chicago has built her own canal, she is ready to give Uncle Sam the benefit of her unique experience. She has made water flow uphill once, and is ready to do it again. Chicago is always ready. She was ready with Wallace and Shonts. When Bigelow tried to paint the White House red, she was ready with Stevens. But what was the use? Her ways and the ways of Congress were different. Congress and the people who trust Congress have been bent upon finding fault and raising difficulties. Canal dirt and critical difficulties have been raised in equal quantities, but not with equal facility. Well-meaning foreigners, who work for the future and live in the past, advised a sea-level canal, knowing that Americans are good at making money and dirt fly, and that Chicago could use the dirt to fill up Lake Michigan. Chicago has known better all the time. The obviating of difficulties and doubts is a Chicago idea. But Chicago is not as yet appreciated; she must make herself heard. However, she has the modesty of youth, and can wait. She who talks last, talks best. In the meantime she is deepening her own canal, and will soon have navigable water between Chicago and Panama, and the world is bound to know it. Her motto is, Know Thyself!—and she lives up to it.