Red, White, and Blue Paradise: The American Canal Zone in Panama

This is a well-written,thoughtful and historically sound book. It covers a slice of the American experiment in the former Panama Canal Zone. Noble at times and flawed at other times as are all human endeavors the experience served the world well. Human shortcomings should not detract from the bottom line. There were many success stories created by Americans, Panamanians and others as they carved out an engineering masterpiece out of the veritable jungle. Much propaganda has been written about America's intent, mission and accomplishments in buildiing the canal and maintaining it everso effectively for so many years. Much of it is too critical and distorted. All in all, America's accomplishments are a proud and successful chapter in the history of the Americas. Indeed of the world. Some readers will cringe at what I just wrote because so much foolishness and so many falsehoods have been written that it is hard to know the truth. Luckily this book and others will serve as fodder when, in fifty years or such, the definitive books are written. The Canal Zone Museum at the University of Florida is collecting primary material that will help with that task. Meanwhile, this book a good read.

I lived in the Canal Zone and moved away 14 years before I happened onto this book in a Nevada library. It is a jewel! Frank and Mary Knapp were two intellectuals from the Midwest who went to the Canal Zone in 1964, on the eve of the pivotal Flag Riots, to teach at storied Balboa High School on the Pacific side of the Zone. This book is at once an intellectual history of the Canal Zone and the its host Republic, and an account of the Knapps' own reluctant emergence from knee-jerk Liberal contempt for the Zonians. Like Isaac Singer's Yiddish ghetto, our extinct Canal Zone contains stories worth extracting. There are lessons paid up but yet to be learned. I think, for example, that the State Department's collaboration with a military dictator to discredit the Zone community, with the eager assistance of purportedly objective American journalists, was a precursor to the Justice Department's recent villification of anti-Castro Cuban-Americans in Miami. Frank and Mary Knapp are no crusaders, no polemicists. Their most important contribution may have been to re-introduce a meek objectivity and intellectual integrity to the scorched earth of Canal Zone literature. This book is not a magnum opus. But I hope it can serve as a re-orienting force, a compass, for authors of more ambitious future works about our communal Progressive experiment on the banks of the Canal that lasted almost exactly as long as the Soviet Union.