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.
Best Books for Regional Special Interests, selected by the
American Association of School Librarians, and Best Books for
General Audiences, selected by the Public Library Association
"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"
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