Northern lights, Southern Cross
Following Olmsted’s journey in the American South
“Spying on the South: An Odyssey Across the American Divide” is, in many ways, a tale of time travel.
Before Frederick Law Olmsted became the visionary 19th-century co-designer of Central Park and a pioneer of American landscape architecture, the Connecticut-born farmer turned to journalism at a pivotal time in American history.
In two excursions from 1852 to 1854, he explored the antebellum American South amid growing rancor with the North. Writing under the pseudonym of “Yeoman” for the newly launched New York Times (then the New-York Daily Times), he traversed regions below the Mason-Dixon line.
Solidly anti-slavery, his evocative, largely objective dispatches captured slavery’s horrors and life in the South, then a vast, largely agrarian region on an inexorable path to secession and the Civil War.
It’s no surprise, then, that Olmsted captured the interest of Tony Horwitz. A Pulitzer Prize winner and former Wall Street Journal reporter, his acclaimed 1998 book, “Confederates in the Attic,” chronicled his explorations of America’s (and his own) ongoing obsession with the Civil War. “Midnight Rising” of 2011 told the story of John Brown’s failed 1860 raid on Harper’s Ferry.
In 2015 and 2016, with America again deeply divided and a critical presidential election looming, Horwitz re-created parts of Olmsted’s journeys. Following the original routes, he used nearly identical transportation (on land and water) from Maryland to West Virginia, finally venturing deep into Texas.
Olmsted’s encounters occasionally took unexpected turns. Politely debating slavery and other issues with Nashville aristocrats, he found himself agreeing with some of their criticisms of Northerners. In the Texas hill country, he was thrilled to find a rural colony of free-thinking, liberal German immigrants. He was also beguiled by vast, unspoiled areas that left a lasting imprint.
Horwitz, too, met individuals of all classes and persuasions. He saw small West Virginia towns affected by the opioid crisis. In the panhandle of that increasingly red state, he met lifelong Democrats ambivalent over the coming election before booking passage on a towboat slowly pushing coal barges down the Ohio.
Horwitz’s Nashville aristocrat was colorful octogenarian John Jay Hooker, a businessman and maverick Democrat turned independent, still active and vital as he battled terminal cancer.
While once-pristine areas Olmsted traveled are now awash in urban sprawl, Horwitz found some disparities between red and blue state cultures strikingly similar to the fault lines of 160 years ago, when Southern pride faced off against Northern elitism.
That disconnect was particularly obvious in Louisiana, a state with drive-through daiquiri stands. On acreage once part of a plantation, he participated in “mudding,” a backcountry fusion of monster trucks, mud, reckless driving, debauchery and plenty of booze.
He found another small Louisiana town, Zwolle, so wary of outsiders it resembled something from “The Twilight Zone.”
Visiting ultraconservative, deeply religious east Texas, he stopped in Crockett, described by one local as “somewhere between Mayberry and ‘Deliverance.’”
Meeting friendly, if outspoken, residents, he found a bar serving drinks with pornographic names and served as timekeeper for a local Republican debate. At the U.S.-Mexican border, in Eagle Pass, Texas, where some locals doubt the effectiveness of a border wall, the author also found ample evidence of the cartel violence on the Mexican side.
Olmsted and Horwitz shared a few woes. Each grew sick of certain Southern delicacies. For Olmsted it was cornpone. Horwitz overdosed on Louisiana fried foods and heavy, sausage-laden German meals in Texas. Anxious to emulate Olmsted’s Texas horseback travels, he found only mules available and rode with “Buck,” a local guide whose flinty personality, initially endearing, turned repellent by the end.
A new chapter began as Olmsted’s Southern odyssey closed. He was soon conceiving Central Park with landscape designer Calvert Vaux. Inspired by his travels, he created a lavish enduring oasis from the stresses of urban life, laden with natural beauty.
Central Park’s meandering paths and vast meadows, contrasting with Manhattan’s grid-like streets, set a new standard he’d apply to other parks, to the U.S. Capitol grounds and the grounds of the Biltmore Estate in Asheville, N.C.
Olmsted’s early writings had farreaching repercussions. In 1947, 44 years after the author’s death, Malcolm Little, the future Malcolm X, incarcerated in Massachusetts, found in the prison library a book adaptation of Olmsted’s travels. Galvanized by Olmsted’s horrific descriptions of slave life, he later cited it among the books that sparked his metamorphosis.
Horwitz, who returned from Texas a week before the 2016 presidential election, later spoke to some of those he met on the road. Not surprisingly, he found Donald Trump was the choice of many, some reluctantly, others enthusiastically. While the president’s margin of victory included Pennsylvania and other Midwestern states, the South played a pivotal role. By retracing Olmsted’s adventures amid today’s upheaval, Horwitz compellingly reveals how much — and how little — has changed.