Americans tend to look on the Panama Canal as a marvelous achievement for our society, and to be uneasy that we turned it over to the Panama government. Julie Greene, a history professor at the University of Maryland, is less interested in the engineering feat than in the human dimension, the workers who built the Canal.

She states that “this book explores the ways working people interacted with one another and with a U.S. government determined to build the canal quickly and efficiently.”

The French had begun trying to build the canal in 1880. That effort ended in failure in 1889, because of “mismanagement, devastating disease, financial problems, and engineering mistakes.” President Theodore Roosevelt saw an opportunity to expand American influence in the world. Not everyone agreed that the Panama project was a worthy one, especially given the way Roosevelt acquired the territory.

Panama was certainly not an earthly paradise. It was described in 1885 as a “damp tropical jungle, intensely hot, swarming with mosquitoes, snakes, alligators, scorpions, and centipedes. . . .” Roosevelt and his supporters hoped to transplant the culture and politics of Americans to the place, but climate, the huge construction project, rampant disease, and tens of thousands of workers and their families from all over the world presented a massive challenge to the officials who tried to govern and manage the isthmus.

Even getting there was a challenge for the workers. The skilled white workers from the States might arrive by ship in some comfort, but the West Indians who were recruited were not even provided with food on the voyage. Their living and working conditions were also often dreadful.

Most of us have heard of the heroic attempt to control yellow fever that made the project possible, though many died before the mosquitoes were contained by draining ditches, clearing brush, using chemicals, and providing screens. Malaria and pneumonia still plagued the workers. It was some time before sanitation measures took hold.

Most non-whites and non-Americans were “silver workers,” paid in Panamanian silver, while skilled Americans -- accountants, steamshovel operators, locomotive engineers -- were paid in American gold currency, “gold workers,” who had other privileges, too. Life in the Zone required fire departments, post offices, a police force, hospitals, schools, churches, jails. All that was in addition, of course, to roads, bridges, piers, docks, and warehouses. It was not just the Canal itself that had to be constructed.

Greene writes about the leaders, many of whom became famous. Her interest, though, is in the thousands of “little people” who lived and worked there, and often died, and made the Panama Canal a reality. Americans can be proud of the ingenuity and industry that built the Canal, but we should not forget the complexity and tragedy that its construction included.

The Canal Builders is available at the Mary Willis Library.