The School of Experience: George W. Goethals and the U.S. Army, 1876–1907

At the end of a distinguished career, George W. Goethals completed the construction of the Panama Canal (1907–1914) and managed logistics for the U.S. Army in the final year of World War I. This article examines Goethals’s professional development prior to his arrival in Panama in 1907. It finds that Goethals was a product of an unsystematic developmental model that privileged experiential learning above all else, and that his successful development was more a function of talent, personal connections, and chance than of institutional design or formal training and education.