Seaway to the Future: American Social Visions and the Construction of the Panama Canal

by Alexander Missal

Overview

Realizing the century-old dream of a passage to India, the building of the Panama Canal was an engineering feat of colossal dimensions, a construction site filled not only with mud and water but with interpretations, meanings, and social visions. Alexander Missal’s Seaway to the Future unfolds a cultural history of the Panama Canal project, revealed in the texts and images of the era’s policymakers and commentators. Observing its creation, journalists, travel writers, and officials interpreted the Canal and its environs as a perfect society under an efficient, authoritarian management featuring innovations in technology, work, health, and consumption. For their middle-class audience in the United States, the writers depicted a foreign yet familiar place, a showcase for the future—images reinforced in the exhibits of the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition that celebrated the Canal’s completion. Through these depictions, the building of the Panama Canal became a powerful symbol in a broader search for order as Americans looked to the modern age with both anxiety and anticipation.
            Like most utopian visions, this one aspired to perfection at the price of exclusion. Overlooking the West Indian laborers who built the Canal, its admirers praised the white elite that supervised and administered it. Inspired by the masculine ideal personified by President Theodore Roosevelt, writers depicted the Canal Zone as an emphatically male enterprise and Chief Engineer George W. Goethals as the emblem of a new type of social leader, the engineer-soldier, the benevolent despot. Examining these and other images of the Panama Canal project, Seaway to the Future shows how they reflected popular attitudes toward an evolving modern world and, no less important, helped shape those perceptions.

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“Provide[s] a useful vantage on the world bequeathed to us by the forces that set out to put America astride the globe nearly a century ago.”—Chris Rasmussen, Bookforum

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780299229405
Publisher:	University of Wisconsin Press
Publication date:	11/30/2008
Series:	Studies in American Thought and Culture
Edition description:	1
Pages:	280
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Alexander Missal, a journalist in Germany, earned his Ph.D. in Anglo-American history from the University of Cologne.

Table of Contents

Contents
 
List of Illustrations                    
Acknowledgments                   
 
Approaching the Panama Canal: An Introduction                      
1. Logistics of Expansion: The Long Road to Realization                       
2. American Triumph: Explaining the Canal Project                   
3. The Engineered View: The Panama Canal in Pictures            
4. Ideal Community: The Canal Zone as an American Utopia                
5. Canal Celebration: The Panama-Pacific International Exposition                    
Conclusion: Visiting a Construction Site            
 
Notes              
Index               

Editorial Reviews

In the idealized space of the Canal, imperialism seemed benign, scientists banished disease, engineers conquered nature, and the United States imposed a middle-class social order.”—David Nye, author of Technology Matters



“Missal forcefully demonstrates that the construction of the Panama Canal was a multifaceted physical and cultural process, freighted with rich ideological meanings at the dawning of America’s Century.”—Janet Davis, University of Texas at Austin, author of The Circus Age: Culture and Society under the American Big Top


“Missal’s eloquent mission to open the Canal’s cultural locks [is] a work worthy of its new era as a thoroughly Latin American asset.”—Gavin O’Toole, Latin American Review of Books

“Provide[s] a useful vantage on the world bequeathed to us by the forces that set out to put America astride the globe nearly a century ago.”—Chris Rasmussen, Bookforum

“The utopian visions that Missal explores so well can be seen as extending far beyond the United States to the future of the world under U.S. leadership.”—Kristin Hoganson, American Historical Review

“Missal takes his readers on an evocative and illuminating journey through the world of the Panama Canal’s construction. The book is filled with ideas and insights, and it is insightfully in dialogue with the methodology of cultural history and with the (relatively) new historiography on U.S. empire building. . . . Seaway to the Future will surely interest scholars and students concerned with the history of the United States in the world.” —Julie Greene, Journal of World History

From the Publisher

With the centennial of the opening of the Panama Canal coming in five years, interest has resurfaced in a topic that has already prompted study, most notably David McCullough's best-selling The Path Between the Seas(1977). Whereas McCullough told the classic tale of the first major American engineering feat of the 20th century, these two new books recount only parts of the story. Nonetheless, The Canal Builders is more than a footnote. Greene, a labor historian (Univ. of Maryland, College Park; Pure and Simple Politics: The American Federation of Labor and Political Activism, 1881-1917) is well qualified to tell the story, from the bottom up, of the canal's construction. She interweaves newly unearthed documentary records in a social history linked to the emerging "American empire" and its Bull Moose Progressives, racial segregation, and labor movements. An exceptional writer, Greene has produced a narrative that ranges from the canal's inception up to the current political situation regarding Panama and the United States.

By comparison, Seaway to the Future, a revision of Missal's dissertation from the University of Cologne, is a methodological footnote aimed at justifying a "cultural history of empire." Though he is a journalist in Germany, Missal's work here relies more on neo-Marxist theory and speculation than on uncovering new facts. Readers are bombarded with the word empire throughout the text. Yet arrogance and hubris explain as much as empire: the author might have been more to the point if he'd noted that this huge governmental task was an invitation to trouble owing to how labor and racial conditions prevailed inthe United States then. Most libraries will suffice with McCullough's classic; larger ones may find interest in The Canal Builders. Only academic libraries with cultural history collections are likely to find interest in Seaway to the Future.
—William D. Pederson

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