Book Review: Tony Horwitz's Spying on the South

I heard Tony Horwitz interviewed by Mary Corrigan on NPRs Fresh Air earlier this year regarding his book Spying on the South. I was intrigued by the author and the story behind the book so I purchased a copy. You can imagine my shock when driving home about a week later I heard it announced on the radio that Horwitz had collapsed and died of a heart attack while in Washington DC on a book-promotion tour.

Horwitz was a Pulitzer-Prize-winning "... journalist, historian and author whose books have graced best-seller lists and college syllabuses." His books included One for the Road, A Voyage Long and Strange, and the acclaimed travelogue Confederates in the Attic.

In this, his final book, Horwitz describes retracing a portion of Fredrick Law Olmstead's journeys through the South between the years 1852 and 1854. Olmstead is best known as the landscape architect of Central Park, the US Capitol Grounds, Biltmore Estate, and many college campuses and residential neighborhoods across the country. Prior to his trips across the south, Olmstead's distant past included stints as a merchant seaman, an experimental farmer, and a European traveler.

Frederick Law Olmstead

Over the course of his travel through the South, Olmstead served as an undercover correspondent known as Yeoman, "a Connecticut Yankee exploring the Cotton Kingdom on the eve of secession and the Civil war." Olmstead was 30 years old when he undertook this assignment, --"restless on his farm" and "romantically adrift" -- and he hoped that a short sojourn in the South would both renew him and provide an avenue for success as a writer. Instead he made two major journeys to the area, resulting in numerous newspaper dispatches and three books about the South.

Prior to embarking on his journeys, Olmstead had held the belief that the residents of the South would be susceptible to reasoned discourse; by the end of his travels, he had been disabused of that notion. He found the South's leading men to be:

• Implacable
• Convinced of the superiority of their caste-bound society
• Intent on expanding it
• Utterly contemptuous of the North.

Writing about these leading men seven years before the Civil War, Olmstead described them as "a mischievous class."

In 1953 Olmstead's three books were abridged into a single volume called The Cotton Kingdom, a volume which Horwitz had used in a 1980s college class. Horwitz came into contact with his college copy a few years ago and, after reading a few passages, was hooked. After researching the original dispatches, he made the decision to follow Olmstead's path. As he described it, no bookings, no itinerary, "just a ramble across America with long-dead Fred as my guide."

Horowitz followed Olmstead's off-the-beaten-path journey "through Appalachia, down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, into bayou Louisiana, and across Texas to the contested Mexican badlands." In many cases he used similar modes of transportation as did Olmstead.

At this point the book settles into a somewhat regular rhythm of describing Olmstead's journey from point A to point B and his sojourn at point B followed by a description of Horowitz re-tracing the original steps. The description of Olmstead's journey would include the mode of transportation, the duration of the trip, the scenery, and when they (his brother accompanied him for a portion of the trip) ate and slept along the way. A significant portion of the trip was via horseback so many a night was spent camped out in the wilderness. Horowitz would then describe Olmstead's impression of the people, food, and conditions at point B.

Horowitz replication of the trip was rather challenging because of the changes that had occurred over the intervening years: some of the modes of transportation were no longer available between points; some of the towns no longer existed, or existed in a different frame; or there had been significant population change.

Horwitz had the option of using the Olmstead story as a frame and then making the book all about his travel but instead he chose to weave the two stories one into the other. This makes for a very long book and places some patience-demands upon the reader. As a mater of fact, the Olmstead story, as told herein, begins before the trip and ends well after its conclusion; he continues with Olmstead's transition to a landscape architect and his work on Central Park and the difficulties he had with work colleagues and his wife. This additional work appears to be beyond the stated scope of the book but the author would probably say that Olmstead's landscaping "chops" were gained and honed by his observations during his travels in the South and by his conviction that open spaces could bring Northerners together in a way that would be the antithesis of the South.

In a manner similar to Olmstead seeking to understand the perspective of the South in the years prior to the civil war, Horwitz explores political perceptions in the South in the runup to the 2016 election. He found extreme conservatism in East Texas. For example, folks in Houston County saw a 1992 UN Resolution promoting public health, environment, conservation and poverty reduction as being a move to create a Soviet-style uber government. A geologist in Kentucky spoke about his fellow-county-residents thusly: "The know-nothings in this county just seem to be getting stronger. People are proud of their ignorance, and when you challenge it, they fall back on conspiracy theories and fake facts."

At the end of his journeys, Olmstead came away with a new mission: "To fortify the nation against the South's slaveholding elite and feudal ideology, the North must uplift its own citizens to demonstrate the true promise of a free and democratic society." Central Park was his first stab at creating an environment which would advance that mission. Horwitz has no such aspirational experience at the end of his.


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