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  Contents

  Introduction

  PART I: THE RAIL

  Chapter One: The Magnificent Conception

  Chapter Two: The Eagle and the Octopus

  Chapter Three: The Route of Volcanoes

  INTERLUDE

  Chapter Four: Out of the Muck

  PART II: THE ROAD

  Chapter Five: Good Roads Make Good Neighbors

  Chapter Six: The Far Western Front

  Chapter Seven: Freedom Road

  Chapter Eight: The Missing Link

  Conclusion

  Photographs

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Notes

  Sources

  Image and Map Credits

  Index

  For my sister

  Two panels in the Universalis Cosmographia Secundum (c. 1507) showing the first European depiction of the Americas. Note the gap between the two continents, signifying an initial belief that North and South America were unconnected.

  Introduction

  The highway unfolded before Sal Paradise. It was the spring of 1949, and Paradise, the narrator of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, had decided to head in a new direction. For the past several years, he had vagabonded across the United States in an endless chase of freedom, but now the road was leading him and his friend Dean Moriarty beyond the nation’s borders for the first time. “I couldn’t imagine this trip,” said Paradise. “It was the most fabulous of all. It was no longer east-west, but magic south. We saw a vision of the entire Western Hemisphere rockribbing clear down to Tierra del Fuego and us flying down the curve of the world into other tropics and other worlds.” The last word went to Moriarty: “Man, this will finally take us to IT!”

  Soon they entered Mexico on the Pan-American Highway.

  * * *

  The Pan-American Highway is the longest road in the world, running the length of the Western Hemisphere from Prudhoe Bay in Alaska to Tierra del Fuego in South America. It represents a dream of friendship, commerce, mobility, of the Americas united. Our collective imaginations have been forged along its path: Ernesto “Che” Guevara, the iconic Argentine revolutionary, traveled it northward in The Motorcycle Diaries; Kerouac, the voice of the beat generation, followed it southward in On the Road. Many adventurers have journeyed the highway’s distance, but the road itself still remains shrouded in mystery. Why was it built? And why does it remain unfinished, with a sixty-mile-long break, the famed Darien Gap, between Panama and Colombia?

  * * *

  I first encountered the Pan-American Highway a decade ago as a tourist traveling through Latin America. Like Paradise, I spent little time thinking about how the road came to be. It seemed as though it had always formed part of the landscape, carving a path to connect the hemisphere’s capitals, skirting volcanoes and coastal deserts and teeming jungles along the way. Life in the New World almost appeared to have arisen along the route of the ever-present highway. The road became easy to take for granted, an indelible fixture of the region.

  The Pan-American Highway only piqued my historical curiosity several years later, after I read in an obscure volume that its construction in Central America and Panama had once been the largest foreign development project attempted by the United States. This assertion surprised me, as I had never before heard that the United States had played any role in the Pan-American Highway, let alone such a significant one. Why, I wondered, did the United States seek to build a foreign highway through half a dozen sovereign nations?

  Soon I began searching through histories of US–Latin American relations for more information on the highway. But my early investigations proved unsatisfying. The road rarely received more than a passing mention in any of those works. And the more I searched, the more elusive the road seemed to become. While hundreds of histories have been written on the hemisphere’s other great infrastructure project, the Panama Canal, none has ever been published on the Pan-American Highway.

  * * *

  The terms “North America” and “South America” are fictions created by geographers and mapmakers. The United States may seem separated by an ocean from South America, but in truth they both form part of the same American supercontinent. The American landmass is shaped like an hourglass, with Central America as the connecting link. Overland travel is theoretically possible along the entirety of the Western Hemisphere.

  The historical relationship between the United States and Central and South America is rarely seen as one of overland neighbors. But this is a mistake. The shared dream of overland connectivity—originally as a Pan-American Railway and later as a Pan-American Highway—exerted a profound influence on hemispheric development and relations over the course of a century.

  The two infrastructure projects were the material embodiment of Pan-Americanism, an ideology birthed in the early 1800s and given modern form late that same century, insisting that the Americas shared a common destiny and mutual interests. For Pan-Americanists throughout the New World, no project better reflected their aspirations—and frustrations—than this monumental quest to link the Americas.

  Both hemispheric initiatives began through the efforts of the United States, where the ideals of Pan-Americanism intersected with an expansionist compulsion to reach new, foreign markets. And the United States—through both private and public measures—subsequently nurtured each massive project with direct, extraterritorial actions. The story of the United States and its quest to link the Americas, a forgotten drama that played out over the course of nearly one hundred years, is the subject of The Longest Line on the Map. It is a story of grand visions and fraught politics, of engineering marvels and unyielding nature. It is a story of remarkable perseverance and of eventual failure. It is a story of an imagined geography, Pan-America.

  In telling this story, the book charts a course through more than a century of US–Latin American relations. The United States that emerges from this “Pan-American” history is a study in contradictions, torn between goodwill and self-interest, cooperation and control, pragmatism and paranoia. Indeed, Pan-Americanism was something of a paradox for the United States: while it elevated Latin American nations to stand as geopolitical equals and aimed at fraternal cooperation, it simultaneously cleared a path, through the explicit exclusion of Europe from the alliance, for the “Colossus of the North” to exert its dominion over the region.

  A second theme of the story, along with Pan-Americanism, concerns road building and its relationship to US visions of international development. Like Pan-Americanism, this subject has been the victim of scholarly neglect. The countless histories of US automobiles and roads that have been written tend to stop at the nation’s borders. The role of the US government in promoting highway development abroad is thus rarely considered. But the United States, the world’s largest producer of cars for much of the twentieth century, actually played quite an active role in exporting automobile highways, thereby creating an infrastructure that encircled the globe over the last hundred years and ushered in the world’s contemporary, oil-dependent transportation regime. The Longest Line on the Map traces how the US federal government grew to be a major road builder in the first place and then follows its evolution into an inter
national operation through the Pan-American Highway, a shift that marked the beginning of modern overseas development for the nation.

  The Pan-American Highway ultimately commanded the interest of every US president from Calvin Coolidge to Richard Nixon, though none was able to witness its completion. The highway’s enduring appeal spoke to a persistent—if not always paramount—strain of presidential sentiment favoring hemispheric connectivity, an imagined community forged in asphalt and concrete.

  The highway, however, is no longer the great hemispheric infrastructure project of the age for the United States. That distinction now rests with a planned wall to run along the US-Mexican border. The old dream of connectivity has ceded to a new one of separation, of a shielded fortress physically blockaded from the rest of the Americas. But the expansive history of the US quest to link the Americas—reconstructed here for the first time—reveals just how incongruous this recent vision of partition truly is.

  The Longest Line on the Map is driven by individuals more than unseen forces, by drama more than statistics, by storytelling more than analysis. The dream of connecting the hemisphere has captured the imagination of millions during the past century and a half. The Longest Line on the Map finally gives this dream a history.

  PART I

  The Rail

  An 1891 Intercontinental Railway Commission map, the first depiction of the route for a hemispheric railway.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Magnificent Conception

  “Why Not by Rail?”

  The swells of the southern Atlantic Ocean pummeled the sailing ship Lord Clarendon, splashing the decks and straining the riggings. Four days earlier, on November 26, 1866, the British-flagged passenger vessel had departed under calm skies from Buenos Aires, destined for New York City, but conditions had soured quickly once the Lord Clarendon veered into the path of an “unusually violent” Argentine pampero, a polar wind blowing off the fertile plains of lower South America. Belowdecks, supine in his bunk, thirty-six-year-old Hinton Rowan Helper, the outgoing US consul to Buenos Aires, contemplated his fate.

  Helper tossed and fretted, wracked by what he described as “the torture of seasickness” and “Neptunian nausea.” The physical distress mixed with feelings of impatience and disgust as he wondered how long the Lord Clarendon’s ceaseless rocking might endure and when he might reach the United States. Then, according to Helper, in the midst of the fourth day of punishment, “[at] about 2 o’clock in the afternoon, taxing my mind with redoubled duty to devise a means for others, if not for myself, to travel more pleasantly and expeditiously between far-distant points of our sister continents, the distinct answer to my mental inquiry, a sort of Yankee answer, came like a flash, ‘Why not by rail?’ ”1

  For an ordinary man, such an outlandish insight might have dissipated, along with the nausea, as soon as the pampero abated. But Helper was anything but ordinary. At the outbreak of the Civil War, shortly before he had departed for Buenos Aires, he was considered “the best known and most widely hated man in America.”2

  * * *

  Helper’s life had begun unremarkably enough in December 1829. He was the youngest of five children in a middle-class family of mixed English and German origin that had settled in the North Carolina Piedmont. His father had made cabinets and found enough success to afford four slaves but died from the mumps when Helper was barely nine months old. The surviving Helper clan avoided penury through the support of relatives. A teenaged Helper even spent several years at an elite local private school and was developing into what one admirer later described as “a very athletic man, above six feet in height, straight as an arrow, and broad-shouldered as a giant.” At seventeen, he started apprenticing as a store clerk but soon grew restless and, in a moment of desperation, stole $300 from his employer. The theft, which Helper eventually acknowledged and tried to repay, would haunt him for the rest of his life, though his crime likely provided the funds for his first great adventure outside of North Carolina.3

  In early 1851, Helper determined to set out for California, a land that the United States had wrested from Mexico three years earlier. A settlement rush had been sweeping California following the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill in 1848, and Helper had found this excitement irresistible. However, like the countless other easterners trying to get west, he faced a transportation dilemma: no developed overland route connected the settled portions of the United States with its new western holdings. One possible solution for Helper was to join a schooner caravan and risk his life crossing any of several continental trails with origins older than the nation. A second option combined ocean travel with shorter overland crossings through the malarial tropical lowlands of Mexico or Central America. The longest, but seemingly least precarious, itinerary involved an unbroken fifteen-thousand-mile ocean voyage around the entirety of South America.

  Helper selected this last alternative. His decision appeared wise until midway through the journey, with his ship rounding Cape Horn, when a violent storm struck and, according to Helper, “for seven successive days and nights kept us almost completely submerged.” A weary Helper finally disembarked at his destination in May 1851, nearly four months after his departure.4

  Life in the newly settled lands of California, where ethnicities mixed and licentious behavior flourished, differed radically from that of North Carolina. For Helper, who possessed a healthy dose of both southern propriety and racism, moral offense quickly proved easier to find than gold. Moreover, the hard work of prospecting suited his tastes less than the joys of literary pomposity and self-promotion. He returned to North Carolina in 1854, choosing this time to risk an overland crossing in Nicaragua rather than face the potential fury of Cape Horn once more.

  Helper arrived home short of funds and soon authored a critique of California, Land of Gold: Reality Versus Fiction. The book sold poorly, but the experience left Helper determined to find success as an author, and soon his focus turned to the defining issue of his age, the “peculiar institution” of slavery, which Helper had recently begun to question. He feared that the forced labor of blacks had both undercut the economic prospects of poor southern whites and impeded the South’s ability to industrialize. The dehumanizing treatment of the actual slaves, however, mattered little to Helper, whose racism equaled that of any plantation master.5

  By the spring of 1857, he had drafted a polemic over four hundred pages long built around data drawn from the last national census. The manuscript, titled The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It, sought to provide an economic counterweight to the moral case put forth five years earlier in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Or, in Helper’s words, “it is all well enough for women to give the fictions of slavery; men should give the facts.” Helper’s approach blended abolitionism with racism and used economic reasoning to discard with the ethical and religious argument against slavery popular in New England. Others had previously discussed some of the economic criticisms that Helper employed, but never so systematically and almost never when the author was a proud southerner. The twenty-seven-year-old Helper, a bona fide son of Dixie, child of a slaveholder, had dared to challenge the central institution of his homeland in print.6

  * * *

  The northern publishing establishment, worried about offending southern readers, shut out Helper entirely until a minor New York book agent agreed to publish The Impending Crisis for an upfront fee.

  When the book finally appeared in the summer of 1857, scandals came as fast as sales. Across the South, rumors spread of people being lynched or imprisoned on mere suspicion of ownership, and the Dixie press pilloried both the book and its author. One writer even managed to discover Helper’s juvenile theft of $300 and painted him as an untrustworthy vagrant.

  Soon the fracas over Helper spilled into Congress. The controversy there began when a group of nearly seventy northern Republican congressmen signed a petition of support for the beleaguered Helper. This pro-Helper document predictably enraged
many southern legislators, who viewed their colleagues’ action as an unpardonable capitulation to radical sentiments. In late 1859, one of the petition’s signatories, Representative John Sherman of Ohio, lost his leading campaign for House Speaker after southerners disqualified anyone who had endorsed Helper’s work.7

  During the subsequent presidential campaign of 1860, an abridged version of Helper’s Impending Crisis flooded hotly contested counties throughout the border states. Election results suggested that Lincoln, whose early views on slavery shared more with Helper than with Harriet Beecher Stowe, did particularly well in areas that saw heavy distribution of this abridgment. By the close of 1860, Helper’s book had sold over 140,000 copies, and his name had become among the best-known and most divisive in the nation.8

  For Helper, however, fame brought little success. He earned virtually nothing from The Impending Crisis, and his pariah status left him unemployable throughout the South. He soon appealed directly to Lincoln, seeking a patronage position as reward for his role in the president’s victory. Lincoln balked at first, likely fearing the repercussions of a Helper appointment among southern politicians, but in November 1861, seven months after the shelling of Fort Sumter and the outbreak of the Civil War, Helper received a minor appointment as US consul to Buenos Aires, Argentina, then a city of about a hundred thousand people.9

  * * *

  Only two US-flagged sailing ships at the time offered passenger service from New York to Buenos Aires. The few easterners who traveled to South America typically detoured first through Europe upon foreign-flagged steamers. The Old World powers—Great Britain especially—controlled commercial and passenger shipping throughout the Western Hemisphere and had created a sort of hub-and-spoke system anchored on the far side of the Atlantic. The patriotic Helper nonetheless insisted that as consul he ought to travel on a US-flagged vessel, even if that meant forgoing the faster and more reliable European steamers.