Retracing an 1850s journey through the South
Most people who remember Frederick Law Olmsted credit him with two magnificent accomplishments: his role in the design and construction of Manhattan’s Central Park and Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. His legacy lives on in dozens of parks nationwide that he designed or inspired.
Olmsted was a complicated man; before he settled on creating parks, he was a farmer, a public health worker and, as a young man, a journalist. In the 1850s he set out to travel the length of the South, in search of the truth of the region and its stubborn embrace of slavery. His dispatches ran in the New-York Daily Times (today’s New York Times) and influenced the debate on abolition and, eventually, the war. By the end of his journey he had embraced the abolitionist movement, supporting an effort to settle West Texas with anti-slavery advocates.
Tony Horwitz, an accomplished journalist and author (“Confederates in the Attic,”
“Blue Latitudes”), set out to retrace Olmsted’s journey and record his own 21st century impressions. The result is “Spying on the South: An Odyssey Across the American Divide.” Readers will find many parallels between the journeys and perspectives of the two men. (Editor’s note: Horwitz died unexpectedly Monday. He was 60.)
Horwitz follows, as best he can, Olmsted’s meandering trajectory. Traveling by train, boat, car and mule through West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas, he drops in on a varied group of communities. He visits hollowedout West Virginia towns devastated by unemployment and the opioid epidemic, where hard times have turned longtime Democrats toward President Donald Trump. He finds the exuberant Cajuns of southern Louisiana following in their ancestors’dance steps; in one of many eerie historic parallels, one local offered Olmsted this description of the Cajun temperament: “habitually gay and careless, as well as kind-hearted, hospitable and dissolute.” Like Olmsted, Horwitz encounters intractable racism in East Texas.
Along the way, his literary companion, the “long-dead Fred,” makes for wonderful reading. Olmsted could write — humorous, opinionated and vivid, dropping gems of description everywhere. But Olmsted’s position as a well-situated Northerner occasionally blinkered his vision, and to some degree Horwitz follows suit. Olmsted complained about
the tacky villages he passed on his river journeys (it’s the frontier, mate), and on a quick visit to Nashville, Horwitz, who calls Martha’s Vineyard home, laments that “Music City felt like a themed, blocks-long mall anchored by familiar brands.” Fair enough, but he skips the city’s beautiful old neighborhoods, its extensive 3,100-acre Warner Parks system and its crown jewel, Vanderbilt University.
Both men are food snobs. Olmsted declaimed at length on his loathing of corn pone, missing the obvious fact that it was the staple of poor people who had nothing else to eat. Horwitz despairs of the unhealthy fare in Southern restaurants, apparently unaware of the regional food renaissance blooming across the South.
Horwitz doesn’t linger in multicultural Houston, the nation’s fourth-largest city, because it was “way too big and complicated to get my arms around as a blowthrough traveler.” There are few young adults in his telling, people in their 20s and 30s using their smarts and imaginations in politics, business and education. He loves the absurd, and he’s willing to venture anywhere in the service of a good story, but when a disaffected traveling companion calls him “the concierge of crap,” I couldn’t disagree.
Horwitz is a dedicated, imaginative reporter and a great raconteur, but this book is one man’s travelogue, not an indepth report from, as the subtitle puts it, “the other side of the American divide.” Read it for its humor, for Horwitz’s thorough excavation of Southern history and for the delights of Olmsted’s own dispatches. For the truth of today’s South, go and see for yourself.