Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 78-11(E), Section: A.

Advisers: Glenda Gilmore; Gil Joseph.

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The emergence of the United States as a global power is a story that has been told many times. In the standard narrative, mastery of the sea, and then the air, provided the logistical underpinnings of the nation's swift rise to international preeminence---support for a network that existed everywhere and almost nowhere simultaneously, yielding an unprecedented diffusion of culture, political-economic ideas, corporate penetration, and advanced weaponry. But this depiction of global integration and of U.S. "informal imperialism," which treats the nation as though it could physically be an island, obscures an historical and geographic process of vast scale taking place overland and in the Western Hemisphere. Ships and planes had scant capacity to open continental interiors compared to rails and automobile highways, novel technologies of the industrial era that fueled a transnational politics of interconnectivity. Moreover, the geography of the Americas---with a narrow isthmus in Panama connecting two continents---encouraged U.S. policymakers to dream of a hemispheric through-route, a backbone for a New World transportation network anchored in the United States.

This dissertation charts the U.S.'s transnational effort to construct such a hemispheric passage---known at various points as the Three Americas Railway, the Intercontinental Railway, the Pan-American Railway and, perhaps most consequentially, the Pan-American Highway. Never before has this dream of an overland transportation corridor been the subject of extended historical study. Indeed, while hundreds of histories have been written on the U.S.'s other great hemispheric infrastructure project, the Panama Canal (a lynchpin of the dominant globalizing sea power narrative), none has ever been published on the Pan-American Highway, once the largest foreign development project for the nation. Using archival research and oral histories from multiple countries, this dissertation reconstructs a forgotten U.S. "quest to link the Americas," restoring the importance of overland development and hemispheric strategy, both otherwise neglected in the globalization and "informal U.S. imperialism" narratives. In telling this story, the dissertation further analyzes the role of a "Pan-American paradox" in U.S. relations with Latin America, the nature of foreign road building as a missionary impulse, and the birth of external development initiatives as a means of conducting politics.

The quest at the center of this dissertation has been easy to overlook as it ultimately ended in failure, both in terms of the imagined hemispheric fraternalism it proposed and in a literal sense, with sixty miles remaining un-built today in the Darien Gap between Panama and Colombia (the subject of the dissertation's eighth and final chapter). But without understanding this quest, it is difficult, if not impossible, to fully understand how the United States conceptualized its relationship with Latin America in the twentieth century, or its geographic position relative to the rest of the globe, or its central role in exporting automobile roads abroad---to the New World and beyond. The planet's vast system of paved automobile roads represents one of the most profound environmental changes of the past century, an earth-spanning, fossil-fuel-dependent infrastructure that first colonized the industrialized countries before then being exported to the Global South. And snaking its way through the heart of this process was the Pan-American Highway, the longest line on the map.