Red, White and Blue Paradise
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Frank and Mary Knapp were two Midwestern intellectuals 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. Red, White and Blue Paradise: The American Canal in Panama is at once an intellectual history of the Canal Zone and its host Republic, and an account of the Knapps' own reluctant emergence from a fashionable contempt for the Zonians.
Like Isaac Singer's Yiddish ghetto, our extinct Canal Zone survives only on paper, and in the fading memories of a dwindling remnant of exiles. The Knapps debunk some of the more pernicious slanders against the Zonians, notably the accusation that they were racially bigoted and culturally disdainful of their neighbors in Panama. (There was, in fact, extensive intermarriage and robust cross-cultural activity.)
More interestingly, the authors re-interpret the Canal Zone enterprise as a communal workers' paradise, a creature of turn-of-the-century Progressivism. They employ Edward Bellamy's utopian novel Looking Backward as their heuristic for understanding Progressive ideology and how it both animated and limited the Canal Zone experiment.
Frank and Mary Knapp are no crusaders. Their most important contribution may have been to re-introduce a meek objectivity and intellectual integrity atop the scorched earth of Canal Zone polemics. This book is not a magnum opus, and will soon be forgotten unless it serves as a re-orienting force, a compass, for authors of more ambitious future works about our communal Progressive experiment on the banks of the Panama Canal that lasted almost exactly as long as the Soviet Union.
