"Making of an American Imperial Class: An Empirical Study of Ruling Class Consciousness at the Canal Zone"

One of the foundational debates of political sociology revolved around the typology of the state and its relationship to capitalist interests. Midcentury Marxists debated whether the state advanced the interests of capital because it was occupied by members of the ruling class (Miliband) or whether it was a fundamental feature of capitalism, necessary to support and enforce the accumulation process (Poulantzas). Further work has disaggregated the ruling class into a capitalist class and a separate, though related, class of state managers, thereby challenging the Marxist-Weberian imaginary of a monolithic bloc of state agents, homogeneously driven to preserve social order.
Scholarship in this space, however, has not examined the imperial state and its agents. The Marxist conceptualization of a state pitted against the proletariat is complicated in the imperial setting, where class and national divisions amplify the separations between state managers and those they govern. I take as a case study an oft-neglected site of US imperialism—the Canal Zone—and study two administrators: George Goethals and William Gorgas. By studying these two figures, I argue that class consciousness among state managers must be studied with the same rigor that historians and sociologists have applied to working class consciousness.
The chief engineer and the chief sanitary officer brought different approaches to exercising imperial state capacity vis-à-vis the Isthmian Canal Commission. A major rift between the two leaders regarding the responsibility and objective of grass-cutting represents the problem of homogenizing the administrative experience. Whether instances such as this represent a breakdown in class formation, or simply divergent policy preferences, is the object of this paper. By analyzing Goethals and Gorgas’s interpersonal relationship and their perceived connection to the Commission government, this paper offers an empirical evaluation of Marxist theories of the state and explores the way imperialism inflects those theories.