The Canal Builders: Making America's Empire at the Panama Canal

Like preceding chronicles of the construction of the Panama Canal (Matthew Parker’s Panama Fever, 2008), Greene’s account focuses on its feats of engineering, but in this case, social engineering. Previously an author of a history about the American Federation of Labor, Greene includes the workers’ experience within the context of the creation of a community from scratch, and that, within the wider contexts of empire building and Progressivism. Many Progressives, Greene relates, visited the canal project; the encouragement some of them took from an American example of governmental socioeconomic intervention contrasts with the actual on-the-ground character of the canal zone until the completion of the canal in 1914. Greene portrays a complex web of regulations that authority applied to those drawn to the zone. Through many personal accounts, Greene covers conflicts that inevitably arose, centrally over labor rules and a pay structure that discriminated against black workers, among others means of enforcing segregation. Interests in social history and attitudes of the Progressive Era will be drawn to Greene’s perspective on the building of the Panama Canal.