Download PDF Spying on the South: An Odyssey Across the American Divide By Tony Horwitz
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Ebook About The New York Times-bestselling final book by the beloved, Pulitzer-Prize winning historian Tony Horwitz. With Spying on the South, the best-selling author of Confederates in the Attic returns to the South and the Civil War era for an epic adventure on the trail of America's greatest landscape architect. In the 1850s, the young Frederick Law Olmsted was adrift, a restless farmer and dreamer in search of a mission. He found it during an extraordinary journey, as an undercover correspondent in the South for the up-and-coming New York Times.For the Connecticut Yankee, pen name "Yeoman," the South was alien, often hostile territory. Yet Olmsted traveled for 14 months, by horseback, steamboat, and stagecoach, seeking dialogue and common ground. His vivid dispatches about the lives and beliefs of Southerners were revelatory for readers of his day, and Yeoman's remarkable trek also reshaped the American landscape, as Olmsted sought to reform his own society by creating democratic spaces for the uplift of all. The result: Central Park and Olmsted's career as America's first and foremost landscape architect.Tony Horwitz rediscovers Yeoman Olmsted amidst the discord and polarization of our own time. Is America still one country? In search of answers, and his own adventures, Horwitz follows Olmsted's tracks and often his mode of transport (including muleback): through Appalachia, down the Mississippi River, into bayou Louisiana, and across Texas to the contested Mexican borderland. Venturing far off beaten paths, Horwitz uncovers bracing vestiges and strange new mutations of the Cotton Kingdom. Horwitz's intrepid and often hilarious journey through an outsized American landscape is a masterpiece in the tradition of Great Plains, Bad Land, and the author's own classic, Confederates in the Attic.Book Spying on the South: An Odyssey Across the American Divide Review :
I love Tony Horwitz’s nonfiction. He has a simple formula: he picks some interesting, underappreciated bit of history, then explores the modern day geography. The result is a mix of travelogue and history as Horwitz interweaves his own adventures with the history. His best known work is Confederates in the Attic, and I was beyond overjoyed when I saw that he was returning to the South.Spying on the South retraces the steps of Frederick Olmstead on a pre-Civil War trip through the South. (It wasn’t my focus or his, but Horwitz’s portrait of a young Olmstead, well before his days as a famed landscape artists, is delightful.) Horwitz alternates historical tidbits with his own misadventures. I said travelogue, but that undersells it. How many travelogues include one leg by coal barge and another by mule? The real joy of these sections are the people Horwitz meets along the way. He treats them with dignity and humanity, and their disparate stories will do far more to flesh out hillbillies and white working class Americans for the person who entry to the field was Hillbilly Elegy than a work like, say, Appalachian Reckoning.I should make clear, though, that this is not a work that primarily focuses on hillbillies. Horwitz starts in West Virginia, but he also spends time in Kentucky, Tennessee, along the Mississippi, in Louisiana, Texas, and on the Texas-Mexico border. I was disappointed to learn that Horwitz only covers the “there” (not the “back again”) of Olmstead’s second trip. He leaves out, then, stops in Chattanooga, Asheville, and Abingdon that would have been of particular interest to me. And I loved the book, but the West Virginia chapter makes me really wish Horwitz had written a book on Appalachia and the Rust Belt instead.Olmstead made his journeys through the South a mere decade before the Civil War. It wasn’t a pleasure trip: he sent regular dispatches back to New York for newspaper publication, and he collected and edited those dispatches into a three-volume book (since Horwitz skips the return journey with its long leg through Appalachia, I’m going to pick up the third volume, A Journey in the Back Country). Olmstead intended to foster dialogue in a country sharply divided; instead he came to see the South as intransigent and became radicalized (he would later moderate and arguably betray his principles by designed segregated spaces in the South).As the subtitle suggests, Horwitz also takes an odyssey across the American divide. His experience writing Confederates in the Attic notwithstanding, Horwitz is open about how little he knows about the territory he covers, especially Texas. The people he meets are very much foreign to him—culturally, politically, and economically.Spying on the South seems well-timed, and it is, but it isn’t directly a response to Trump. Horwitz sets off on his journey in West Virginia before the 2016 primaries even started. As the narrative and timeline progress, Trump begins to intrude, but Horwitz does an admirable job not using him as a crutch.This is Horwitz’s most political and most pessimistic book, but it still has everything that makes his other books so special. The coal barge highlights “a good living for country boys” where they “can still work from the neck down.” A sojourn at a weekend devoted to mudding and Horwitz’s misadventures on a mule are enormously entertaining. Horwitz humanizes the people of the Red States he crosses throughout. Among other things, Horwitz’s narrative highlights the cultural diversity of the Red States. West Virginia is very different than Cajun Louisiana is very different than rural east Texas is very different from the Texas-Mexico border. The focus is rural, with cities like Nashville and Houston getting short shrift. The economic contrast between the rural Appalachia and South and the cities of Texas is stark.Horwitz works hard to see the best in people, but the South has an ugly history with race, in a place where “the past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Horwitz goes on plantation tours that somehow manage to avoid any mention of slavery in Mississippi and is subjected to racial slurs by Texans who insist there is a camp of Muslim insurgents in their rural county (Horwitz, who worked extensively in the Middle East as a journalist, offers to go check it out). His story of a slaveholder who attempted to join in political reform after the Civil War ends in the slaughter of dozens of African-Americans.Spying on the South may not be Horwitz’s most enjoyable book, but it is his most relevant to what I am doing here. It is the sort of book that the working class-curious neophyte ought to read, and early. Even if you aren’t so culturally conscious, you are sure to learn something from the history side. This book is not what you think it is. Horowitz goes South looking for examples that reinforce his biases against the South. Southerners are familiar with that smug sense of superiority. The result is unbalanced, prejudicial and, contrary to the opinion of some, poorly researched. Essentially, the book is a collection of stereotypes and cliches strung together to reinforce the political agenda of Horowitz.Frederick Law Olmsted traveled through the South in the 1850s. He wrote a book telling his experiences and opining about the South and Southerners. Horowitz took his book, his chronology and his itinerary and wrote his contemporary observations. In other words, he wrote half a book; the other half of this book is really Olmsted’s. That’s not bad work if you can get it. You get credit for a whole book by only writing half a book.Southerners are never given a chance. The author’s smugness and preconceptions are front and center from the start. The minute a waitress calls him “hon”, or someone mentions “our way of life” Horowitz can not contain himself, and becomes very condescending. Southerners are immoral, backward, undereducated and dirty, just about the lowest life form known to man. This is even before he gets to the Deep South. Horowitz admits he knows nothing of Huntington, W.Va. However, he tells his readers that the town holds the record for obesity and opioid deaths. Oh, he never visits Huntington, after gratuitously defaming it. His total “research” was probably two clicks on Google.All the towns that he visits are dying. If he finds a Southern town that is growing, he focuses on how man is making a mess of everything with urban sprawl. He has an agenda. He wants to find an example of every character that will support his list of cliches that will denigrate the South. Kentucky is attacked for Darwinism and being a Bible Belt state. He is horrified when he discovers that the Democrats of the region are turning Republican. That kills any chance for objectivity.Once in Tennessee, the title of the book should be “Slavery and Tony Horwitz’s Misconceptions.” He creates the impression that the antebellum South was awash in slaves. If he had done his research, he would have learned that only 5% of Southern households owned a single slave. Contemporary academics will often say that 25% of Southerners owned slaves. The number is the product of multiplying the 5% of the households by the average size of a Southern family, which was five. Of course, this creates a legal problem. Women generally did not own property and children to this day can not own property. There is no discussion of the concentration of slaves and the fact that 75% of them were worked in groups of 25 or more. The spatial aspects are ignored.The author wants you to believe that antebellum Northerners were totally committed to the immediate and uncompensated emancipation of slaves. William L. Garrison’s paper, “The Liberator” never had more than 2000 subscribers. I am certain millions of Northerners intended to subscribe.Horowitz comes dangerously close to the truth. He says that in 1860 Southern cotton was 60% of the Nation’s exports. There was no income tax and tariffs made up most of the national revenue. When tobacco, rice, sugar and indigo are added in, the South generated 85% of the national revenue. If you have ever wondered why the North just did not let that troublesome South go, just reread those figures. The industrious North contributed 15%. They were generous though. Before the war they spent $100,000,000 on railroads for the North and $5,000,000 for railroads in the South.On a riverboat ride, he meets a couple of liberals from California. What a love Fest! They get into a contest to see who could out liberal the other. Each evening they met to express their moral outrage over slavery and, in the process establish their superiority over every thing Southerner. Their conversations are contrived and artificial. Howitz does not take the excursions to plantations. He visits a pawn shop. If you want to get a sense of a place, pawn shops are his answer. This is much akin to me doing a travelogue of the North by visiting Detroit.The rich plantation homes of Natchez offend him. Do the mansions in the harbor towns of New England provoke the same response. They were built by mercantile families, trading slaves and supported, dare I say enriched, by the same plantation system.He happens upon a plantation bought by a liberal businessman, who has turned it into a slave holocaust museum. The author’s “research” should have revealed that 12,000,000 slaves came to N&S. America. 1,000,000 went to the South and grew to 4,000,000 by the Civil War. Only in the South did slaves reproduce themselves. 11,000,0000 slaves went to S. America to die in the silver mines. He mentions that some slaves died of yellow fever but drops it quickly. Many more whites died than slaves. That would not have been good for his narrative.When he gets to Texas, my state, I was prepared for the usual criticism being braggarts, loud, obnoxious etc. Nope, that was not political enough. Gun rights were his focus. Please note that he travelled the entire South and no one took a shot at him. Undoubtedly, he would have felt safer in Chicago where they have some real gun laws.Having heard his descriptions of racial hate, lynchings, the Klan, he comes to Houston. He admits that it is a very diverse city. I hoped for some balance in the “well researched “ book. He could have mentioned that it was the only town, north or south, with a population greater than 100,000 that integrated its entire school system without incident. Or he might have mentioned that the 8-F Group, a collection of now dead, rich white guys, TOLD, the Houston media not to cover the integration of the lunch counters.Their belief was that the citizens could work through the process if left alone. It would not have advanced his agenda. Instead he expressed his disgust at franchise stores. There are no franchises up North?Horowitz admits he puts on his roving reporter face when he is going to meet and interview someone. In every instance, no matter how vivid or colorful the character, and we have our share, he was met with every hospitality possible. He was befriended. Southerners answered his questions directly, openly and honestly. Yet, Horowitz thinks he has to adopt some two-faced facade to extract information. That approach might be needed up North. We are who we are. The sad part is that this smug elitist from Massachusetts thinks that he has outwitted we unwashed Southerners. We have seen your type before; we know what you think of us. We knew what you were going to write. The cliches are not new. Still none of the interviewees compromised themselves. They remained true to themselves and their home place. 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