The longest line on the map: the United States, the Pan-American Highway, and the quest to link the Americas

Abstract

In The longest line on the map, Eric Rutkow recounts in lively fashion—and with a predominant emphasis on the role of personalities rather than impersonal factors—the slowly maturing US ambition in the nineteenth century to forge a hemisphere-long transport corridor for self-serving commercial and geopolitical reasons. This ambition was partially fulfilled by means of a variety of privately built railroads between the 1880s and 1920s, and subsequently almost completely in the form of the Pan-American Highway that today runs—with the exception of a sixty-mile gap in Darien on the Panama–Colombia border—from Prudhoe Bay in Alaska to Tierra del Fuego. US-driven construction and majority funding of the Inter-American Highway between Guatemala and Panama, Rutkow avers, constitutes the largest foreign development project ever undertaken by the United States—aside from the Panama Canal—and represents, along with the earlier Pan-American Railway, ‘the material embodiment of Pan-Americanism’ (p. 3). The idea of an intercontinental railway as a concrete objective was born at the inaugural Pan-American conference in Washington in 1889–90, the resolution calling for the establishment of an Intercontinental Railway Commission being one of the few tangible results of the conference. Rutkow goes so far as to describe this body as ‘the pioneer organization for international relations in the hemisphere’ (p. 27). The work of the commission—and the hopes of its various proponents, such as philanthropist Andrew Carnegie—runs like a thread through the ensuing narrative, until the commission itself was finally wound up in 1950 by the Pan-American Union's successor organization. This part of the book, however, is mainly a tale of US railway tycoons vying to construct lines from the US border into Mexico and central America from the 1880s onwards, a logical extension of railroad development in the western United States. Latin American leaders intermittently strut this particular stage as either facilitators or spoilers. By 1918, the author notes, the United States had by default established its hegemony in the western hemisphere without the need for completing an intercontinental railway that was envisaged by its US progenitors for this very purpose. The railway was also, by this time, giving way to the automobile as the favoured mode of transport for people and goods.