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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