The Canal Builders: Making America's Empire at the Panama Canal by Julie Greene (review)

The main attraction at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, a world fair held in San Francisco in 1915 to commemorate the recent opening of the Panama Canal, was a scale model of the waterway that covered nearly five acres. Hundreds of thousands of attendees marveled at its assemblage of locks, ships, trains, administrative buildings, towns, and forested hills from a moving walkway. But the people who actually built the canal were not represented in the model. Historian Julie Green suggests that this particular absence is emblematic of a larger discursive erasure of the massive labor force that built the canal. The dominant canal narrative, she suggests, is that the triumphant opening of the waterway was an outcome of the political will, engineering prowess, and scientific achievement embodied, respectively, by a small group of white North American protagonists. Greene argues that this story about Panama Canal construction—now mythological—has served as an "ideological lynchpin" for the United States, linking and justifying a set of ideals about the role of the country in the world over the past century. Her point of departure is to pluralize the construction narrative by focusing on the lives and perspectives of thousands of "other" canal builders whose experiences have largely been absent from canal history, including: West Indian laborers, Spanish workers, white U.S. crane operators, white U.S. housewives and their black servants, and various Panamanian groups.

The standard Panama Canal history, epitomized by David McCullough's definitive The Path Between the Seas (1977), is chronological and hierarchical: it begins with colonial dreams of an interoceanic canal, chronicles the construction of the Panama Railroad in the 1850s, and explains the failure of the French canal project in the 1880s in a manner that sets the stage for the ultimate triumph of U.S. leaders. Greene is, refreshingly, not interested in retracing the well-trodden path of Euro-American politicians, engineers, and capitalists to and from the isthmus. Instead, she examines the relationship between governance and labor—two critical and understudied dimensions of the project— focusing specifically on the charged, complex relations between U.S. administrators and their non-white, female, and working-class contemporaries. Greene shows that engineering challenges paled in comparison to managing the canal's culturally, economically, racially, and linguistically heterogeneous labor force. Thus, the U.S. government sought to exercise disciplinary power in a manner that would subsume everyday life to the construction project, an approach that encountered diverse forms of resistance—some overt, some subtle—by workers themselves, their friends and families, and Panamanians whose lives were disrupted.

The book's nine chapters focus on the relationship between governance and everyday life across different, but intersecting social worlds organized around class, gender, race, and nationality. Chapters 1, 5, and 7 examine the theme of governance. Chapter 1 focuses on the role of the government in shaping the lives of workers. Greene argues that the scale of the project precipitated "benevolent despotism" and forms of labor discipline that dominated all aspects of life. Chapter 5 focuses on the Zone as a "testing ground" or "living laboratory" to experiment with the form, extent, and virtues of state intervention. Greene shows how Theodore Roosevelt and others successfully reframed the canal project in the progressive language of efficiency, order, and civilization at a time when Americans were increasingly troubled by the nation's role as a rising imperial power. Chapter 7 focuses on the Zone government's use of police, courts, and prisons to regulate behavior, particularly drinking, gambling, and sexuality. She argues that officials tried to insulate the enclave from the perceived disorder and moral disease of Panama, but, ultimately, their efforts to create an orderly civilization failed as the tensions and pressures generated by the demands of construction sought an outlet beyond the Zone.

Chapters 2, 3, 4, and 6 explore the capacity—and limits—of...