Red, white, and blue paradise: The American Canal Zone in Panama

Incidentally, although the book is out of print, the copy Amazon obtained for me was an ex-library copy in excellent shape.

Marshall S Thomas


Making Sense of the Canal Zone Experience   June 29, 2000
 7 out of 8 found this review helpful

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.