The Longest Line on the Map: The United States, the Pan-American Highway, and the Quest to Link the Americas by Eric Rutkow (review)

Eric Rutkow has written an engaging, well-researched, and timely book that follows on the critically acclaimed American Canopy: Trees, Forests, and the Making of a Nation (2012). It represents the most comprehensive history of the nearly 100-year project to build a land route, first rail and then paved highway, to link the hemisphere. As in Rutkow's first book, accessible prose and a penchant for sweeping narrative make the present work a refreshing and informative read for the academic historian and the interested general reader. It is particularly important as a historical counterpoint to attempts by the current US administration to build a physical wall to disrupt existing linkages.

Read alongside Greg Grandin's recent The End of the Myth, Rutkow offers a less damning and critical interpretation of US policy in Latin America from the end of the US Civil War to the present. As the author intended, it is an empirically driven case study and not an overarching argument driven by theoretical paradigms. Rutkow provides plentiful and optimistic quotations from US politicians and administrators and some of their Latin American counterparts, both before and after the advent of the Good Neighbor Policy, that pose hemispheric relations in idealistic terms of cooperation and mutual respect. Taken alone, these would portray an unrealistic account of the more realpolitik intentions behind much of the attempts to construct the highway. Rutkow tempers these public statements with a few of the belittling and racist accounts of Latin Americans that historians would expect in statements not meant for public consumption. In doing so, he succeeds in portraying complexity, ambiguity, and contingency.

As an international and institutional history, the book is most effective when contextualizing the linkages—often conflictual—between US domestic and international infrastructure policy during the period dominated by the construction of the Panama Canal. The book also gives compelling accounts of how geopolitical and commercial concerns often distorted the outwardly benevolent intentions of Pan Americanism. As an example, road construction proceeded most quickly when justified as anti-fascist, and later anti-Communist, and when its path did not threaten powerful interests such as those of the United Fruit Company. The book adheres to mainstream chronologies of US-Latin American relations, beginning with the advent of the New Diplomacy, and then into the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, the Good Neighbor policy, World War II, and, finally, the Cold War. Although there is little reevaluation of these periods in the book, the text engages the reader and asks the reader to consider how each affected the rail and road construction projects.

Readers seeking a history that gives equal weight to domestic politics and power relations within Latin American countries traversed by the Pan-American highway will have many questions. Each country or region warrants an in-depth dive into the archives to flesh out the tantalizing glimpses that Rutkow offers. For example, although he briefly mentions the Somoza regime's manipulation of US road-building funds in the context of the Cold War, there is little similar coverage of other Central American contexts, and most of South America, curiously, is absent from the second half of the book. This is a standard (and perhaps unfair) critique of such an ambitious transnational history, but it does not detract from Rutkow's important contributions to transnational and institutional history. In a few places, there are frustrating errors of fact, as when Rutkow has Francisco Villa invading Texas instead of New Mexico in 1916 (128). Overall, this is a well-crafted book that succeeds on many ambitious fronts.