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Spying on the South: Travels with Frederick Law Olmsted in a Fractured Land
Beloved best-selling author Tony Horwitz retraces Frederick Law Olmsted's epic journey across the American South in the 1850s, as he too searches for common ground in a dangerously riven nation.
On the eve of the Civil War, an up-and-coming newspaper, the New York Times, sent a young travel writer to explore the South, which was alien territory to the Connecticut Yankee correspondent and to his Northern readers. Identified in the paper as "Yeoman," to protect his identity, the writer roamed eleven states and six thousand miles, jolting the nation with his dispatches about slavery and the extremism of its defenders.
This extraordinary journey would also re-shape the nation's landscape, driving "Yeoman"--real name Frederick Law Olmsted--to embark on his career as America's first and foremost architect of urban parks and other public spaces.
Over a century and half later, there are echoes of the pre-Civil War in the angry ferment and fracturing of our own time. Is America still one country? Tony Horwitz, like Olmsted a Yankee and roving scribe, sets forth to find out by retracing Yeoman's journey through the South. Following his route and whenever possible his mode of transport--rail, riverboats, in the saddle--Horwitz travels Appalachia, down the Ohio and Mississippi, through Kentucky, Tennessee, Louisiana, and across Texas to the Rio Grande. Venturing, as Olmsted did, far off the beaten paths, Horwitz discovers colorful traces of an old weird America, shocking vestiges of the Cotton Kingdom, and strange new mutations that have sprung from its roots.
The result is a masterpiece in the tradition of Great Plains, Bad Land, and the author's own classic, Confederates in the Attic. Spying on the South is an intrepid, wise, and frequently hilarious expedition through an outsized landscape and its equally outsized state of mind. It is also a probing and poignant study of the young Olmsted, whose own life, and thinking about landscape and society, would be forever altered by his Southern odyssey.
On the eve of the Civil War, an up-and-coming newspaper, the New York Times, sent a young travel writer to explore the South, which was alien territory to the Connecticut Yankee correspondent and to his Northern readers. Identified in the paper as "Yeoman," to protect his identity, the writer roamed eleven states and six thousand miles, jolting the nation with his dispatches about slavery and the extremism of its defenders.
This extraordinary journey would also re-shape the nation's landscape, driving "Yeoman"--real name Frederick Law Olmsted--to embark on his career as America's first and foremost architect of urban parks and other public spaces.
Over a century and half later, there are echoes of the pre-Civil War in the angry ferment and fracturing of our own time. Is America still one country? Tony Horwitz, like Olmsted a Yankee and roving scribe, sets forth to find out by retracing Yeoman's journey through the South. Following his route and whenever possible his mode of transport--rail, riverboats, in the saddle--Horwitz travels Appalachia, down the Ohio and Mississippi, through Kentucky, Tennessee, Louisiana, and across Texas to the Rio Grande. Venturing, as Olmsted did, far off the beaten paths, Horwitz discovers colorful traces of an old weird America, shocking vestiges of the Cotton Kingdom, and strange new mutations that have sprung from its roots.
The result is a masterpiece in the tradition of Great Plains, Bad Land, and the author's own classic, Confederates in the Attic. Spying on the South is an intrepid, wise, and frequently hilarious expedition through an outsized landscape and its equally outsized state of mind. It is also a probing and poignant study of the young Olmsted, whose own life, and thinking about landscape and society, would be forever altered by his Southern odyssey.
Audio CD
First published May 14, 2019
About the author
Tony Horwitz
21 books799 followersDate of Birth: 1958
Tony Horwitz was a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author whose books include Blue Latitudes, Confederates In The Attic and Baghdad Without A Map. His most recent work, published in May 2019, is Spying on the South, which follows Frederick Law Olmsted's travels from the Potomac to the Rio Grande as an undercover correspondent in the 1850s.
Tony was also president of the Society of American Historians. He lived in Massachusetts with his wife, novelist Geraldine Brooks.
Tony Horwitz was a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author whose books include Blue Latitudes, Confederates In The Attic and Baghdad Without A Map. His most recent work, published in May 2019, is Spying on the South, which follows Frederick Law Olmsted's travels from the Potomac to the Rio Grande as an undercover correspondent in the 1850s.
Tony was also president of the Society of American Historians. He lived in Massachusetts with his wife, novelist Geraldine Brooks.
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September 1, 2019
Reading this last book by Horowitz was bittersweet, and since he narrated his own book it was even more special. Following a journey by Frederick Olmstead that he had undertaken between 1852 through 1857 through our southern states, Tony sets out to duplicate this journey as much as was possible. Olmstead took this journey to investigate the slave economy, dispatches he sent back to the Times.
So in-between quotes from Olmstead on his discoveries, we see how much of how little things have changed in the intervening years. As you can imagine much had changed, buildings gone or renovated, previous occupations no longer viable, but Tony dies a great job following his journey as he could. Traveling on the Ohio River by barge, visiting towns, Olmstead had visited, plantations or at least the land where they once stood, San Antonio and the Alamo, Arcadia Southern Louisiana, comparing Olmsteads reflections with his own.
It was the people he talked too, he has the knack of asking the right questions to elicit honest answers, that I most enjoyed. Needless to say in this country if our he ran into some real characters. A man who talked him into going out to the river/swamp at night to try to shoot bars with a crossbow. Hard can reach up to six feet and have huge, sharp teeth and an impaling protuberance on their face. The food he described and the effects of eating such was also humorous. There was much humor here, but none so both funny and frightening as the mule trip through the hill country in Texas that he took on mule with an irascible handler named Buck. Parts just had me giggling.
I also appreciated that he, for the most part, kept his personal opinions out of his discoveries, trusting that the reader was able to form their own opinions. That we are a nation divided by thoughts, beliefs, and the wanted role of our government, a nation of differing opinions is without doubt. After reading this I am more convinced of this than ever. A truly satisfying, informative and entertaining read.
ARC from Edelweiss.
So in-between quotes from Olmstead on his discoveries, we see how much of how little things have changed in the intervening years. As you can imagine much had changed, buildings gone or renovated, previous occupations no longer viable, but Tony dies a great job following his journey as he could. Traveling on the Ohio River by barge, visiting towns, Olmstead had visited, plantations or at least the land where they once stood, San Antonio and the Alamo, Arcadia Southern Louisiana, comparing Olmsteads reflections with his own.
It was the people he talked too, he has the knack of asking the right questions to elicit honest answers, that I most enjoyed. Needless to say in this country if our he ran into some real characters. A man who talked him into going out to the river/swamp at night to try to shoot bars with a crossbow. Hard can reach up to six feet and have huge, sharp teeth and an impaling protuberance on their face. The food he described and the effects of eating such was also humorous. There was much humor here, but none so both funny and frightening as the mule trip through the hill country in Texas that he took on mule with an irascible handler named Buck. Parts just had me giggling.
I also appreciated that he, for the most part, kept his personal opinions out of his discoveries, trusting that the reader was able to form their own opinions. That we are a nation divided by thoughts, beliefs, and the wanted role of our government, a nation of differing opinions is without doubt. After reading this I am more convinced of this than ever. A truly satisfying, informative and entertaining read.
ARC from Edelweiss.
May 5, 2023
Two weeks after Spying on the South was published on May 14, 2019, Tony Horwitz collapsed and died while walking on a street near his brother’s home in Chevy Chase, Maryland. He was in the area because he was scheduled the next evening to do a reading from the book at a popular Washington book store. He was 60.
******
On the second day on a road trip that would take Tony Horwitz all the way from Maryland to Texas and across the Rio Grande into Mexico, he stopped in Grafton, West Virginia for the evening. After registering at the only motel available (smashed in office door, window in room broken out, heat not working, etc.) he went into the pub next door.
He struck up a conversation with Ron, one of the bar’s few patrons:
This is one of the reasons that I admired Tony Horwitz. Here he was, a courageous former foreign correspondent who reported on the Balkan wars, the Iranian-Iraqi War, and conflicts in other hotspots in the Middle East, winner of a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting, who resided in Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts with his Australian born wife, Geraldine Brooks, a Pulitzer Prize winning novelist, and he walked into a bar and struck up conversations with some of its patrons, including Jess, whose appearance would have made me speechless.
Horwitz is one of my favorite writers. I have traveled around the globe with him and three times on journeys through the American South.
In Spying on the South: An Odyssey across the American Divide, Horwitz, insofar as it was possible, retraced the second journey that Frederick Law Olmsted took throughout the South in the 1850s.
Olmsted had been contracted by The New York Daily Times, a brand new newspaper which would shortly drop Daily from its title, to travel undercover into the South writing dispatches for the paper.
Olmsted, a Connecticut Yankee, wrote that “traveling about, without definite aim, in an original but on the whole, very pleasant fashion … gives me an entirely new appreciation of the attachments of nomad tribes to their mode of life.”
Horwitz wrote that “those words stirred the nomad in myself.” However, since I have read six of his books I know that it didn’t take much to stir the nomad in him – and unlike Olmsted he did not travel undercover.
Olmsted made two journeys in the South: in 1852-53 and 1853-54. Those were troubling times in the United States which was only a few years from a breakup that resulted in the Civil War.
Horwitz wrote:
It isn’t all doom and gloom, however. It never was when Horwitz was guiding the reader. There is much humor, good-natured, and most of it self-deprecating.
Horwitz called his books “participatory history,” by which he inserted himself into the story he was telling, which became a “field trip in search of the truth.”
He wrote of the many southerners he encountered in researching Spying on the South:
I have no doubt that is how they do remember him.
******
On the second day on a road trip that would take Tony Horwitz all the way from Maryland to Texas and across the Rio Grande into Mexico, he stopped in Grafton, West Virginia for the evening. After registering at the only motel available (smashed in office door, window in room broken out, heat not working, etc.) he went into the pub next door.
He struck up a conversation with Ron, one of the bar’s few patrons:
Ron ordered us another round, and introduced me to a young woman named Jess, who wore a tank top, hot pants, fishnet stockings, thigh-high boots, and fake blood smeared across her neck and bare midriff. Jess worked on a road crew but was clad for Halloween as a member of a heavy metal band, the Butcher Babies ….
Jess looked up from her phone and studied my costume: jeans, work boots, plaid shirt, horn-rimmed glasses, dun Carhart jacket with a notebook and pen stuck in one pocket. 'Let me guess,' she said in an exaggerated drawl. 'Yankee boy, spyin’ on us hillbillies?'
This is one of the reasons that I admired Tony Horwitz. Here he was, a courageous former foreign correspondent who reported on the Balkan wars, the Iranian-Iraqi War, and conflicts in other hotspots in the Middle East, winner of a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting, who resided in Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts with his Australian born wife, Geraldine Brooks, a Pulitzer Prize winning novelist, and he walked into a bar and struck up conversations with some of its patrons, including Jess, whose appearance would have made me speechless.
Horwitz is one of my favorite writers. I have traveled around the globe with him and three times on journeys through the American South.
In Spying on the South: An Odyssey across the American Divide, Horwitz, insofar as it was possible, retraced the second journey that Frederick Law Olmsted took throughout the South in the 1850s.
Olmsted had been contracted by The New York Daily Times, a brand new newspaper which would shortly drop Daily from its title, to travel undercover into the South writing dispatches for the paper.
Olmsted, a Connecticut Yankee, wrote that “traveling about, without definite aim, in an original but on the whole, very pleasant fashion … gives me an entirely new appreciation of the attachments of nomad tribes to their mode of life.”
Horwitz wrote that “those words stirred the nomad in myself.” However, since I have read six of his books I know that it didn’t take much to stir the nomad in him – and unlike Olmsted he did not travel undercover.
Olmsted made two journeys in the South: in 1852-53 and 1853-54. Those were troubling times in the United States which was only a few years from a breakup that resulted in the Civil War.
Horwitz wrote:
The journey had also taken Olmsted across the nation’s enduring fault line – between free and slave states in his time, and red and blue states in mine …. [T]here were inescapable echoes of the 1850s: extreme polarization, racial strife, demonization of the other side, embrace of enflamed opinion over reasoned dialogue and debate.
It isn’t all doom and gloom, however. It never was when Horwitz was guiding the reader. There is much humor, good-natured, and most of it self-deprecating.
Horwitz called his books “participatory history,” by which he inserted himself into the story he was telling, which became a “field trip in search of the truth.”
He wrote of the many southerners he encountered in researching Spying on the South:
I hope they occasionally remember me, not as … one of those ‘coastal elites’ dripping with contempt and condescension toward Middle America. But rather, as that guy from ‘up North’ who appeared on the next bar stool one Friday after work, asked about their job and life and hopes for the future, and thought what they said was important enough to write down.
I have no doubt that is how they do remember him.
May 22, 2019
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.
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.
May 31, 2019
Tony Horowitz follows the path of Frederick Olmsted, who was a writer for the then, New York Daily Times, who wrote about his trips to the South, in the 1850's. Olmsted made 2 trips, of which Horowitz chose to follow the second journey that took place in 1853-4. This 2nd trip from Maryland through West Virginia, on the Mississippi River through Louisiana and finally to Texas, was the one that this book follows as the author manages to seek out, in some cases, the most idiosyncratic and eccentric people in his travels. He does treat everyone with respect, but does provide parallels from that time period to the divided nation of today. I enjoyed the book but wished he had followed Olmsted's first journey through the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama and through to Texas. I would have liked to have read of his adventures in these states.
May 29, 2019
I could have gone to a 4 but really, 3 means 'I liked it,' so I'll leave it like that. Horwitz is a fine companion as he follows in the pre-civil war footsteps of Frederick Law Olmstead through the South. Olmstead was archly anti-slavery. He traveled the south as a correspondent for what was then the New York Daily Times, trying to understand the people who defended slavery and seemed to live in such a different world than his. (Later, of course, he became the country's foremost landscape architect -- though he hated the term -- and became world-renowned as the creator of New York City's Central Park.) Horwitz has a similar objective as he makes his way through modern polarized America, trying to explore what has changed since Olmstead's days , what echoes, and what truly remains.
I enjoyed the book, as I have others Horwitz has written, but I felt him less than successful in shedding any light on the southern mind, new or old. Unsurprisingly, he encountered some truly interesting (another reader might prefer 'audacious,' 'idiosyncratic,' or 'odd,' or just plain 'truly f-ed up') characters. Several really stand out, but I think my favorite are the people he met at a monster truck mud course. That, I'm certain, will be an experience Horwitz will long remember (along with the ill-fated mule riding adventure). But the parallel treks never quite coalesce into a revealing depiction of southern culture, at least not for me. The book struck me as a bit too peripatetic. Nor was the integration of his own experiences with those of Olmstead as seamless and revealing as I would have hoped. I came away with a strong feeling that he learned a lot more in his travels than he was able to express. He recently had an article in the Times with the headline, "Can Bar-Stool Democracy Save America?" I hope to see more such pieces.
As I said, though, Horwitz is a fun guide, self-deprecating, smart, and adventurous. His adventures were fun to read. And I have to admit, he's a lot braver than I am.
Addendum: Sadly, Tony Horwitz passed away on May 27. He will be missed.
I enjoyed the book, as I have others Horwitz has written, but I felt him less than successful in shedding any light on the southern mind, new or old. Unsurprisingly, he encountered some truly interesting (another reader might prefer 'audacious,' 'idiosyncratic,' or 'odd,' or just plain 'truly f-ed up') characters. Several really stand out, but I think my favorite are the people he met at a monster truck mud course. That, I'm certain, will be an experience Horwitz will long remember (along with the ill-fated mule riding adventure). But the parallel treks never quite coalesce into a revealing depiction of southern culture, at least not for me. The book struck me as a bit too peripatetic. Nor was the integration of his own experiences with those of Olmstead as seamless and revealing as I would have hoped. I came away with a strong feeling that he learned a lot more in his travels than he was able to express. He recently had an article in the Times with the headline, "Can Bar-Stool Democracy Save America?" I hope to see more such pieces.
As I said, though, Horwitz is a fun guide, self-deprecating, smart, and adventurous. His adventures were fun to read. And I have to admit, he's a lot braver than I am.
Addendum: Sadly, Tony Horwitz passed away on May 27. He will be missed.
July 5, 2019
America lost something great when Tony Horowitz died in May 2019. When you read this book, you are made painfully aware of that fact. Horowitz possessed not only ability to get people to talk to and with him, but also to capture them on the page. Reading this book, you realize how rare and powerful that skill is.
Spying on the South is on one level a recreation of Frederick Olmstead’s journey to report on the South prior to the Civil War. Much of it was done during the 2016 election, and, therefore, the book also shows the divided country.
His journey starts on Amtrak’s Capitol limited which follows the old B&O route. The reader is quickly treated to a wonderful conversation with Donald Handy, a salesman who not only is a good salesman but also compares writing to his work. In West Virginia, Horowitz examines the coal industry, and how coal, or perhaps the memory of coal, still runs the state. He includes as well the men who run the ships who move the coal. What Horowitz does in the book is capture what people say and think, but with a minimum of judgement. This is perfectly done in the section about coal where Horowitz represents the declining coal industry as well as the desperation of those who used to work in.
The great thing about Horowitz is that he is able to change the stereotype that many people have of the South (and of the North because he represents the North). He shows us a West Virginian who points out that coal is a legacy of exploitation and is a class issue. He is upset and worried that his state is ruled by coal, that in some ways they have given up their independence. There are Texans who point out the those at the Alamo were the illegal immigrants of their day and that it is something we should remember.
His even-handed approach is so prevalent that when the word bigoted is used to describe someone’s rhetoric, it stands out. It makes the description more powerful because it is used so sparingly.
One of the most interesting and telling aspects of Horowitz’s trip is when he boards the American Queen, a tourist cruise boat that goes down the Mississippi river. The cruise includes day trips to plantations and most strangely, disturbingly to Angola Prison. The reflection of how many, not all but many, of the stops gloss over slavery as well as the sense of a caste system on the boat take up much of this section and raise some very good points about how we cover history.
This conflict about reality and history also includes forgotten massacres that are remembered but not really, including people in Texas who were actually pro-Union and killed for it during the Civil War.
When you reach the end of this book, you are left wishing Horowitz was still alive to write more because while he records the bad, he also records the good and that gives us hope.
Spying on the South is on one level a recreation of Frederick Olmstead’s journey to report on the South prior to the Civil War. Much of it was done during the 2016 election, and, therefore, the book also shows the divided country.
His journey starts on Amtrak’s Capitol limited which follows the old B&O route. The reader is quickly treated to a wonderful conversation with Donald Handy, a salesman who not only is a good salesman but also compares writing to his work. In West Virginia, Horowitz examines the coal industry, and how coal, or perhaps the memory of coal, still runs the state. He includes as well the men who run the ships who move the coal. What Horowitz does in the book is capture what people say and think, but with a minimum of judgement. This is perfectly done in the section about coal where Horowitz represents the declining coal industry as well as the desperation of those who used to work in.
The great thing about Horowitz is that he is able to change the stereotype that many people have of the South (and of the North because he represents the North). He shows us a West Virginian who points out that coal is a legacy of exploitation and is a class issue. He is upset and worried that his state is ruled by coal, that in some ways they have given up their independence. There are Texans who point out the those at the Alamo were the illegal immigrants of their day and that it is something we should remember.
His even-handed approach is so prevalent that when the word bigoted is used to describe someone’s rhetoric, it stands out. It makes the description more powerful because it is used so sparingly.
One of the most interesting and telling aspects of Horowitz’s trip is when he boards the American Queen, a tourist cruise boat that goes down the Mississippi river. The cruise includes day trips to plantations and most strangely, disturbingly to Angola Prison. The reflection of how many, not all but many, of the stops gloss over slavery as well as the sense of a caste system on the boat take up much of this section and raise some very good points about how we cover history.
This conflict about reality and history also includes forgotten massacres that are remembered but not really, including people in Texas who were actually pro-Union and killed for it during the Civil War.
When you reach the end of this book, you are left wishing Horowitz was still alive to write more because while he records the bad, he also records the good and that gives us hope.
March 10, 2020
This beautiful book, Spying on the South: Travel with Frederick Law Olmsted in a Fractured Land by Tony Horowitz was a treasure to savor as the author followed the travels of Frederick Law Olmstead and his explorations in the deep South in the years prior to the Civil War. Sent as a correspondent for The New York Times, Olmsted sent dispatches back regarding the deep divisions in the country with the issue of slavery at its core. This experience would propel Olmsted later to become the nation's first landscape architect as he designed public spaces and parks throughout the country, often inspired by the beautiful landscape and architecture in the South. Most notable is New York City's Central Park, the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., and the famous Biltmore Estate in North Carolina. Horowitz, in exploring the divisions in our nation today, set out to retrace the epic journey of Olmsted following his route as closely as possible. Horowitz travelled through Appalachia, down the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers, and through the states of Kentucky, Tennessee, Louisiana and across Texas to the Rio Grande, exploring all of the hidden places off the beaten path and meeting some memorable characters. In the skillful hands of Tony Horowitz, many of the deep differences in the political landscape were quite apparent. It ends, however, on a bittersweet note, as Tony Horowitz died shortly after its publication while on tour in Washington, D.C. promoting the book. He will be missed.
"Frederick Law Olmsted is celebrated today as a visionary architect of New York's Central Park, among many other spaces: the US Capitol grounds, college campuses, residential neighborhoods, the Biltmore Estate in North Carolina. During the latter half of the nineteenth century, Olmsted helped create much of the urban and suburban landscape that Americans still inhabit.."
"But there were inescapable echoes of the 1850's: extreme polarization, racial strife, demonization of the other side, embrace of enflamed opinion over reasoned dialogue and debate."
"When the magnolia bloomed, its fragrance mixed with thee olive and banana 'to make a sweet, spicy scent that is so strong that you can barely stand it."
" Creole is the soul food of New Orleans."
"Olmsted may have turned away from the South and its inequities after the Civil War. But the central quest of his travels and writings endured in his landscape design."
"Frederick Law Olmsted is celebrated today as a visionary architect of New York's Central Park, among many other spaces: the US Capitol grounds, college campuses, residential neighborhoods, the Biltmore Estate in North Carolina. During the latter half of the nineteenth century, Olmsted helped create much of the urban and suburban landscape that Americans still inhabit.."
"But there were inescapable echoes of the 1850's: extreme polarization, racial strife, demonization of the other side, embrace of enflamed opinion over reasoned dialogue and debate."
"When the magnolia bloomed, its fragrance mixed with thee olive and banana 'to make a sweet, spicy scent that is so strong that you can barely stand it."
" Creole is the soul food of New Orleans."
"Olmsted may have turned away from the South and its inequities after the Civil War. But the central quest of his travels and writings endured in his landscape design."
April 29, 2020
I had read two of Tony Horwitz’s previous books, Confederates in the Attic and Blue Latitudes, and enjoyed them both, and so was interested when I learned that he had published Spying on the South, which followed in the footsteps of Frederick Law Olmstead’s journeys through the American South in the years just before the Civil War. Olmstead is remembered today as a landscape architect, most famously for his work designing New York City’s Central Park, but he was also a journalist and farmer in his younger days.
To ready myself for reading Spying on the South I found a copy of Olmstead’s 1856 book A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States at https://archive.org and read that (q.v.). I thought it was a remarkable look at antebellum society before the deluge, but it had too many digressions that detracted from the main narrative.
So, fully prepared for Horwitz, I started in on Spying on the South, only to discover that it follows Olmstead’s second excursion to the south, this one meandering down the Mississippi River and into Texas. He only makes occasional passing references to the book I had read. As Homer Simpson would say – “D’oh!” Nevertheless, I do not regret reading the other book, because I was able to understand why Horwitz described Olmstead the in the ways he did.
Spying on the South is actually more of a roadtrip book than a historical re-creation of the world that Olmstead visited. Horwitz had a remarkable talent for getting people to talk to him. He was an urban, educated, Jewish Yankee, but somehow he found a way to get men and women who were none of those things and who might have been suspicious, or even hostile, to open up to him.
He talked his way onto a towboat pushing barges along the river, meeting men who worked twelve hour shifts for twenty-one days straight, doing difficult, hard physical labor in all sorts of weather conditions, for $40,000-$50,000 a year, jobs which they were happy to have for their relative stability in a time when work in manufacturing and coal mining was fading fast.
He also looked at the regional politics, examining how the rural south has changed from solidly Democrat to almost total Republican domination, and he was mostly careful to let the people speak for themselves rather than air his own opinions. Only once, in a small Texas town, did he show despair at the arrogant ignorance he encountered; on learning that the locals believed that property owned by a Muslim was being used for terrorist training, Horwitz investigated, and even spoke to the local sheriff, who dismissed the idea. Nevertheless, these men “were intent on walling themselves off from any dissenting view or contrary information. No amount of ‘fact’ about the ‘Muslim compound,’ not even the word of a familiar sheriff, could penetrate their protective shell.” As another observer commented, ‘“The know-nothingness in this country just seems to be getting stronger,” he said. “People are proud of their ignorance, and when you challenge it, they fall back on conspiracy theories and fake facts.”’
The book also had encounters with people whose lives are very different from those who read reviews on goodreads.com. Down on the bayou, where everyone owns a four-wheel drive pickup and all food is fried, and then perhaps fried again, Horwitz encounters the embodiments of the good-ole boys. The people he meets are friendly, charming, generous (at least, if you are white), and apparently completely insane. The description of a “Mudder” festival sounded like a cross between Mad Max and Deliverance, combining families out camping and picnicking with the kids along with things like a school bus modified to be debauchery on wheels, complete with a stripper pole. In addition to the main event, which was watching trucks run through deep mud until they got stuck and had to be pulled out, the other pastime seemed to be heavy and continuous drinking, as if it were a competition to see how fast they could become commode-hugging drunk. I had to find videos of Mudder events online to believe that people actually do this. It’s a different world from the one I live in.
Olmstead had been an ardent abolitionist. In his first book, the one I read, he still believed that it might be possible to reform and then eliminate slavery. By his second book, he started realizing that it was so deeply embedded in the political, economic, and social lives of white southerners that they would never give it up voluntarily. His talks with southerners “extinguished Olmsted’s faith that middle ground could be found, or that Southerners had the ‘justice’ and ‘good sense’ to recognize the evils of slavery and gradually work toward ending them. ‘They do not seem to have a fundamental sense of right.’”
The end of Reconstruction was disastrous for black Americans, who were systematically deprived of their dignity and their rights. Horwitz does not shy away from this period, and his book recounts some appalling and disgraceful events, including a massacre of dozens of blacks, an event commemorated today with a plaque that honors their killers. An attempt to have it removed and replaced with something more honest met fierce resistance and obstruction until the matter was dropped. The plaque is still there.
There are plenty of grand mansions of the Old South that are open for tours and events. In many of them you can take a tour and never hear the word “slavery,” as if a genteel and aristocratic society simply morphed itself into existence, rather than having been built on the backs of brutally exploited human beings. For part of his trip Horwitz traveled with a friend from Australia, who saw Antebellum society in ways that I, as an American, had never managed to do. ‘“I somehow hadn’t grasped that these were gulags,” he said as we passed the estate of a planter who had amassed one hundred thousand acres of cane, four sugar mills, and more than 750 slaves. “Stalin would have felt right at home here.”’ That observation is spot-on.
Following Olmstead’s route, Horwitz headed over to Texas. Olmstead’s description of the terrible trip from Louisiana into East Texas is memorable and a reminder that our word “travel” is etymologically related to “travail.” For Olmstead it was a miserable trip over almost impassible trails that could only optimistically be called roads.
Once in Texas he traveled widely, and found a charming community of German expatriates, including scholars who had fled after the 1848 revolutions. He so enjoyed his time that he considered ending his journey and settling down there. Horwitz updates their story and its unhappy end. Like most Europeans, they abhorred slavery, which made them deeply suspicious in a state which “would vote overwhelmingly to secede in 1861, with their leaders condemning ‘the debasing doctrine of the equality of all men, irrespective of race or color’ and declaring that the ‘beneficent and patriarchal system of African slavery’ should ‘exist in all future time.’” When conscription was instituted in Texas many of the Germans refused to enlist. One party of several dozen of them attempted to reach Mexico but was betrayed, ambushed, and massacred. These days there is very little German influence remaining, and what exists is used to add faux-quaintness to the names of bars and shops.
Olmstead’s books are worth reading because they provide what is perhaps the best depiction of life in the South in the years just before the Civil War. Horwitz’s book is worth reading because it shows that for many Southerners the war never ended, and has shaped their political and racial views ever since. I enjoyed this book, and was sad to hear that Tony Horwitz died suddenly in May 2019. He will be missed, because I’m sure he had more fine books to write.
To ready myself for reading Spying on the South I found a copy of Olmstead’s 1856 book A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States at https://archive.org and read that (q.v.). I thought it was a remarkable look at antebellum society before the deluge, but it had too many digressions that detracted from the main narrative.
So, fully prepared for Horwitz, I started in on Spying on the South, only to discover that it follows Olmstead’s second excursion to the south, this one meandering down the Mississippi River and into Texas. He only makes occasional passing references to the book I had read. As Homer Simpson would say – “D’oh!” Nevertheless, I do not regret reading the other book, because I was able to understand why Horwitz described Olmstead the in the ways he did.
Spying on the South is actually more of a roadtrip book than a historical re-creation of the world that Olmstead visited. Horwitz had a remarkable talent for getting people to talk to him. He was an urban, educated, Jewish Yankee, but somehow he found a way to get men and women who were none of those things and who might have been suspicious, or even hostile, to open up to him.
He talked his way onto a towboat pushing barges along the river, meeting men who worked twelve hour shifts for twenty-one days straight, doing difficult, hard physical labor in all sorts of weather conditions, for $40,000-$50,000 a year, jobs which they were happy to have for their relative stability in a time when work in manufacturing and coal mining was fading fast.
He also looked at the regional politics, examining how the rural south has changed from solidly Democrat to almost total Republican domination, and he was mostly careful to let the people speak for themselves rather than air his own opinions. Only once, in a small Texas town, did he show despair at the arrogant ignorance he encountered; on learning that the locals believed that property owned by a Muslim was being used for terrorist training, Horwitz investigated, and even spoke to the local sheriff, who dismissed the idea. Nevertheless, these men “were intent on walling themselves off from any dissenting view or contrary information. No amount of ‘fact’ about the ‘Muslim compound,’ not even the word of a familiar sheriff, could penetrate their protective shell.” As another observer commented, ‘“The know-nothingness in this country just seems to be getting stronger,” he said. “People are proud of their ignorance, and when you challenge it, they fall back on conspiracy theories and fake facts.”’
The book also had encounters with people whose lives are very different from those who read reviews on goodreads.com. Down on the bayou, where everyone owns a four-wheel drive pickup and all food is fried, and then perhaps fried again, Horwitz encounters the embodiments of the good-ole boys. The people he meets are friendly, charming, generous (at least, if you are white), and apparently completely insane. The description of a “Mudder” festival sounded like a cross between Mad Max and Deliverance, combining families out camping and picnicking with the kids along with things like a school bus modified to be debauchery on wheels, complete with a stripper pole. In addition to the main event, which was watching trucks run through deep mud until they got stuck and had to be pulled out, the other pastime seemed to be heavy and continuous drinking, as if it were a competition to see how fast they could become commode-hugging drunk. I had to find videos of Mudder events online to believe that people actually do this. It’s a different world from the one I live in.
Olmstead had been an ardent abolitionist. In his first book, the one I read, he still believed that it might be possible to reform and then eliminate slavery. By his second book, he started realizing that it was so deeply embedded in the political, economic, and social lives of white southerners that they would never give it up voluntarily. His talks with southerners “extinguished Olmsted’s faith that middle ground could be found, or that Southerners had the ‘justice’ and ‘good sense’ to recognize the evils of slavery and gradually work toward ending them. ‘They do not seem to have a fundamental sense of right.’”
The end of Reconstruction was disastrous for black Americans, who were systematically deprived of their dignity and their rights. Horwitz does not shy away from this period, and his book recounts some appalling and disgraceful events, including a massacre of dozens of blacks, an event commemorated today with a plaque that honors their killers. An attempt to have it removed and replaced with something more honest met fierce resistance and obstruction until the matter was dropped. The plaque is still there.
There are plenty of grand mansions of the Old South that are open for tours and events. In many of them you can take a tour and never hear the word “slavery,” as if a genteel and aristocratic society simply morphed itself into existence, rather than having been built on the backs of brutally exploited human beings. For part of his trip Horwitz traveled with a friend from Australia, who saw Antebellum society in ways that I, as an American, had never managed to do. ‘“I somehow hadn’t grasped that these were gulags,” he said as we passed the estate of a planter who had amassed one hundred thousand acres of cane, four sugar mills, and more than 750 slaves. “Stalin would have felt right at home here.”’ That observation is spot-on.
Following Olmstead’s route, Horwitz headed over to Texas. Olmstead’s description of the terrible trip from Louisiana into East Texas is memorable and a reminder that our word “travel” is etymologically related to “travail.” For Olmstead it was a miserable trip over almost impassible trails that could only optimistically be called roads.
Once in Texas he traveled widely, and found a charming community of German expatriates, including scholars who had fled after the 1848 revolutions. He so enjoyed his time that he considered ending his journey and settling down there. Horwitz updates their story and its unhappy end. Like most Europeans, they abhorred slavery, which made them deeply suspicious in a state which “would vote overwhelmingly to secede in 1861, with their leaders condemning ‘the debasing doctrine of the equality of all men, irrespective of race or color’ and declaring that the ‘beneficent and patriarchal system of African slavery’ should ‘exist in all future time.’” When conscription was instituted in Texas many of the Germans refused to enlist. One party of several dozen of them attempted to reach Mexico but was betrayed, ambushed, and massacred. These days there is very little German influence remaining, and what exists is used to add faux-quaintness to the names of bars and shops.
Olmstead’s books are worth reading because they provide what is perhaps the best depiction of life in the South in the years just before the Civil War. Horwitz’s book is worth reading because it shows that for many Southerners the war never ended, and has shaped their political and racial views ever since. I enjoyed this book, and was sad to hear that Tony Horwitz died suddenly in May 2019. He will be missed, because I’m sure he had more fine books to write.
November 8, 2023
I'm a kind of foreign correspondent of the past. The past is a foreign country and I take the toolbox I developed as a roving reporter in the Middle East and other lands to discover how the past bleeds into the present and how the present informs our understanding of the past. Sometimes, I feel like a water diviner, going out with a forked stick and searching for underground springs, traces of the past I can draw to the surface.
This description of Horwitz's process appears in the book talk notes that his wife, author Geraldine Brooks, cleaned up and included in her postscript to the paperback edition, after he died unexpectedly two weeks into the publicity tour for this, his final book. Spying on the South serves as a suitable coda to an impressive body of work that reflects his journalistic roots, fascination with history, and ability to find and engage with interesting people everywhere he went.
The best-selling Confederates in the Attic explored the living legacy of the Civil War in the South and there is inevitably some overlap. But Horwitz's focus here is to follow the route that then New York Times correspondent Frederick Law Olmsted took through the Southern states in 1852-1854, as the nation tore apart, and compare Olmsted's observations with his own as the presidential election of 2016 approached. Both men spent additional time and attention on Texas and Horwitz also relates Olmsted's early life and later career as America's great landscape designer.
This description of Horwitz's process appears in the book talk notes that his wife, author Geraldine Brooks, cleaned up and included in her postscript to the paperback edition, after he died unexpectedly two weeks into the publicity tour for this, his final book. Spying on the South serves as a suitable coda to an impressive body of work that reflects his journalistic roots, fascination with history, and ability to find and engage with interesting people everywhere he went.
The best-selling Confederates in the Attic explored the living legacy of the Civil War in the South and there is inevitably some overlap. But Horwitz's focus here is to follow the route that then New York Times correspondent Frederick Law Olmsted took through the Southern states in 1852-1854, as the nation tore apart, and compare Olmsted's observations with his own as the presidential election of 2016 approached. Both men spent additional time and attention on Texas and Horwitz also relates Olmsted's early life and later career as America's great landscape designer.
May 30, 2019
I had 12 pages to go in Spying on the South when my best friend texted me that Tony Horwitz had died.
"I'm so sorry. I know you loved him. I loved him too." I was going to lend her the pre-publication copy I'd gotten through goodreads. I'll still send it to her but she will have to give it back. It's marked up and underlined with stars and exclamation points in the margins. I circled places Olmstead had passed through where I'd lived before and places I want to go to some day. I'd scribbled in the margins comments about what made the book such a joy - it has something to do with Horwitz teaching us how to be curious and truly listen for clues about what it means to be a community, what it means to be a country of United States.
"I'm so sorry. I know you loved him. I loved him too." I was going to lend her the pre-publication copy I'd gotten through goodreads. I'll still send it to her but she will have to give it back. It's marked up and underlined with stars and exclamation points in the margins. I circled places Olmstead had passed through where I'd lived before and places I want to go to some day. I'd scribbled in the margins comments about what made the book such a joy - it has something to do with Horwitz teaching us how to be curious and truly listen for clues about what it means to be a community, what it means to be a country of United States.
August 9, 2019
Spying on The South is a wonderful journey following the steps of Frederick Olmsted as he traveled in the South on the eve of the Civil War. Reporting for the New York Times he sought dialogue from slaveowners and slaves, hoping that through conversation secession could be averted. This quest to end slavery, as well as his appreciation for the natural beauty he encountered, had a great impact on his yet unknown career as a world famous landscape designer.
Tony Horwitz replicates Olmsted's trek through Appalachia, down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, and into Louisiana and Texas. As Olmsted had, he interviews people from all walks of life with compassion and an open mind. I gained understanding and insights into why these people think so differently from me. Yet, it was sad to realize that the political and cultural divide is as great now as it was during Olmsted's travels.
Frederick Olmsted was a good example of the adage, We are a sum total of all our experiences." From his belief in freedom for all to his expansive landscape designs that allowed freedom of movement and a "venue to elevate and assimilate the masses and force into contact the rich and the powerful, the highbrow and low" his message resonates. His appreciation for the terrain he saw would also be seen in his later park designs. As the author meandered through The Ramble, a section of Central Park well-loved by Olmsted, elements of the Southern landscape were visible. "Its lush and aromatic density felt more like Louisiana or the Carolina Low Country than the mid-Atlantic, and the plantings included swamp magnolia, a tree he admired on his journey. The rustic benches and bridges were made of Alabama cedar." In other areas of the park lagoon-like water features and allees have the feel of the plantations he visited.
This is an amazing book that anyone who loves great writing, a humorous travelogue of the U.S., political parallels, or adventures of a famous architect would enjoy. I am saddened to know that the author died shortly after the publication of this book. I came to know him as a witty and intelligent friend.
Tony Horwitz replicates Olmsted's trek through Appalachia, down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, and into Louisiana and Texas. As Olmsted had, he interviews people from all walks of life with compassion and an open mind. I gained understanding and insights into why these people think so differently from me. Yet, it was sad to realize that the political and cultural divide is as great now as it was during Olmsted's travels.
Frederick Olmsted was a good example of the adage, We are a sum total of all our experiences." From his belief in freedom for all to his expansive landscape designs that allowed freedom of movement and a "venue to elevate and assimilate the masses and force into contact the rich and the powerful, the highbrow and low" his message resonates. His appreciation for the terrain he saw would also be seen in his later park designs. As the author meandered through The Ramble, a section of Central Park well-loved by Olmsted, elements of the Southern landscape were visible. "Its lush and aromatic density felt more like Louisiana or the Carolina Low Country than the mid-Atlantic, and the plantings included swamp magnolia, a tree he admired on his journey. The rustic benches and bridges were made of Alabama cedar." In other areas of the park lagoon-like water features and allees have the feel of the plantations he visited.
This is an amazing book that anyone who loves great writing, a humorous travelogue of the U.S., political parallels, or adventures of a famous architect would enjoy. I am saddened to know that the author died shortly after the publication of this book. I came to know him as a witty and intelligent friend.
October 11, 2021
Tony Horwitz's final book, Spying on the South details the historian's attempts to retrace the route of Frederick Law Olmsted through the former Confederacy. Olmsted was a polymath writer-architect-artist, most famous as the designer of New York's Central Park, whose published account of his journey (abridged as The Cotton Kingdom) remains a classic chronicle of the antebellum South. Horwitz, as he earlier explored the Civil War's legacy in the classic Confederates in the Attic, tries to reckon how much the divisions of modern America echo those of the years leading up the Civil War. Most of the book is excellent travel writing, with Horwitz detailing strange journeys and colorful personalities from West Virginia to the Mexican border: here a failed search for Mothman, there a journey to Kentucky's Creation Museum, a pilgrimage to the Alamo and a gourmand's progress through the deep-fried restaurants of New Orleans. Horwitz, a Jewish Yankee, shows more empathy towards the eccentric, usually-conservative denizens of the South in their economic frustration, regional customs and occasional bigotry than all the New York Times "Cletus safaris" of the Trump era combined. The book's connective tissue is a bit strained, though; we don't learn more than a Wikipedia article's amount about Olmsted himself, and the author's attempts to draw parallels between the Age of Buchanan and the Age of Trump feel as forced as his encomiums that, however bitterly divided America seems, it's still united in a way it wasn't in the 19th Century. This observation is too much a truism to be useful, and one wonders if Horwitz would have drawn this conclusion had he lived to see the 2020 election and its aftermath. Despite these shortcomings, it's a fine conclusion to a prolific, if tragically short career.
August 21, 2019
This is a typical Tony Horwitz book (and his last; I was sad to learn that he died while on tour for this book). He travels! He chats with people! (He must have been the foremost chatter of our time.) He draws conclusions!
This one, since it is about both Fredrick Law Olmstead’s travels in the South right before the Civil War, and Horwitz’s own travels along the same route right before the election of Donald Trump, is, in places, really painful to read. Horwitz quotes extensively from Olmstead’s books, including some descriptions of the treatment of enslaved people that are exactly as distressing as you’d expect, and also quite a lot of racism. The views Horwitz documents from the people he encounters are also ... extremely painful to read, and super, super racist, Islamophobic, antisemitic, homophobic, anti-immigrant, basically the complete run of hatreds and slurs.
But I still, overall, am glad I read this book.
This one, since it is about both Fredrick Law Olmstead’s travels in the South right before the Civil War, and Horwitz’s own travels along the same route right before the election of Donald Trump, is, in places, really painful to read. Horwitz quotes extensively from Olmstead’s books, including some descriptions of the treatment of enslaved people that are exactly as distressing as you’d expect, and also quite a lot of racism. The views Horwitz documents from the people he encounters are also ... extremely painful to read, and super, super racist, Islamophobic, antisemitic, homophobic, anti-immigrant, basically the complete run of hatreds and slurs.
But I still, overall, am glad I read this book.
May 2, 2019
Olmsted on one side, 2016 on the other, and Horwitz in the middle. I’ve read four of his other works and this is a much more immediate view of history and the United States than the other books. It is view of many things: the legacy of the Alamo, the struggling coal industry, modern tourism, and a man who changed the way cities and recreation spaces are built in this country. But the narrative kept going back to the way history endures through many people’s eyes.
4.5 out of 5 stars
For my full review: https://paulspicks.blog/2019/04/27/sp...
For all my reviews: https://paulspicks.blog
4.5 out of 5 stars
For my full review: https://paulspicks.blog/2019/04/27/sp...
For all my reviews: https://paulspicks.blog
June 7, 2019
Another really great read. Two in a row. Delves into the underlying psyche and current of the Southern culture. Similarities and differences between the present and the time of the Civil War. Demonstrates how some things, ideas, and ethics within the culture show very little progress from the attitudes that existed during the Civil War. Horwitz shadows Olmsted’s trek through the South in the 1850s. It’s expected how much has changed and it’s telling how much hasn’t.
August 14, 2023
Back again for round four (I think?) with the great Tony Horwitz, a journalist and fantastic writer of non-fiction historical travelogues (calling them this seems to cheapen what his does, but I can’t think of a better term) in a unique style that I have absolutely latched onto in the last few months. I just can’t get enough of this man’s books, it’s as if he knew exactly what some guy from rural Pennsylvania wanted to read, and wrote that. Yeah, I’m sure that’s exactly what happened.
This entry was, unfortunately, his last book before his sudden death a few months after publishing it. In typical Horwitzian style, he chose something, or in this case someone, out of history and followed in their footsteps. Frederick Law Olmsted is the subject here, the time is the 1850s, and the place is the antebellum South, USA. Olmsted was a true-blue abolitionist Yankee from New England, who attempted a journey through the South to explore their differences culturally as well as to find some common ground, on the eve of the US Civil War. He traveled by all means available at the time—horseback, steamboat, stagecoach, etc. through the mountains of Kentucky and Tennessee, down through the bayous of Louisiana and Piney Woods of East Texas, to the borderlands of the western desert. Horwitz follows in this path, meeting quite the group of interesting folks along the way.
Without a doubt, this book contains all the humor and insight I’ve come to expect from Tony Horwitz. I listened on audio for the first time (also why it took me much longer to get through), and I think it suited this style book well. The narrator’s reading was a fine, if pretty vanilla. My favorite parts were his time in Louisiana Cajun country, Crockett, Texas and the Texas Hill Country. As is always the case, this book is filled with entertainment, history, and an insight into our own times; what makes us different, and most importantly, what brings us together. Tony floated down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, rode an ornery mule with an even more crotchety man named Buck in Texas, and hung out with some very interesting Cajuns. It was simply a fantastic journey.
I did give this one four stars as opposed to five, as I gave a few of his other books, simply because I thought the other ones contained slightly more interesting history and bigger revelations; one can also not help but think that some of this book is familiar ground to what is arguably Horowitz’s finest piece of work, Confederates in the Attic, (though my personal favorite is probably A Voyage Long and Strange, so far anyways). While it does have some similarities with the former, I do need to stress that it’s still a much different book. Confederates in the Attic focuses on The Civil War and it’s repercussions that can still be felt today, as well as CW re-enacting and the lifestyle that comes with it. This one touches on Civil War-related things for sure, as it would be hard not to, but he also looks into many other cultural aspects of the mostly Deep South and a lot of Texas, some of which were quite surprising, even if they should not have been.
So overall we’re going 4/5 for this one, but I still highly recommend it if you’re into this kind of thing. It has all the hallmarks of a great Horwitz book, and it is never boring. A solid final entry from a great journalist, writer, and human being. RIP Tony Horwitz
This entry was, unfortunately, his last book before his sudden death a few months after publishing it. In typical Horwitzian style, he chose something, or in this case someone, out of history and followed in their footsteps. Frederick Law Olmsted is the subject here, the time is the 1850s, and the place is the antebellum South, USA. Olmsted was a true-blue abolitionist Yankee from New England, who attempted a journey through the South to explore their differences culturally as well as to find some common ground, on the eve of the US Civil War. He traveled by all means available at the time—horseback, steamboat, stagecoach, etc. through the mountains of Kentucky and Tennessee, down through the bayous of Louisiana and Piney Woods of East Texas, to the borderlands of the western desert. Horwitz follows in this path, meeting quite the group of interesting folks along the way.
Without a doubt, this book contains all the humor and insight I’ve come to expect from Tony Horwitz. I listened on audio for the first time (also why it took me much longer to get through), and I think it suited this style book well. The narrator’s reading was a fine, if pretty vanilla. My favorite parts were his time in Louisiana Cajun country, Crockett, Texas and the Texas Hill Country. As is always the case, this book is filled with entertainment, history, and an insight into our own times; what makes us different, and most importantly, what brings us together. Tony floated down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, rode an ornery mule with an even more crotchety man named Buck in Texas, and hung out with some very interesting Cajuns. It was simply a fantastic journey.
I did give this one four stars as opposed to five, as I gave a few of his other books, simply because I thought the other ones contained slightly more interesting history and bigger revelations; one can also not help but think that some of this book is familiar ground to what is arguably Horowitz’s finest piece of work, Confederates in the Attic, (though my personal favorite is probably A Voyage Long and Strange, so far anyways). While it does have some similarities with the former, I do need to stress that it’s still a much different book. Confederates in the Attic focuses on The Civil War and it’s repercussions that can still be felt today, as well as CW re-enacting and the lifestyle that comes with it. This one touches on Civil War-related things for sure, as it would be hard not to, but he also looks into many other cultural aspects of the mostly Deep South and a lot of Texas, some of which were quite surprising, even if they should not have been.
So overall we’re going 4/5 for this one, but I still highly recommend it if you’re into this kind of thing. It has all the hallmarks of a great Horwitz book, and it is never boring. A solid final entry from a great journalist, writer, and human being. RIP Tony Horwitz
July 2, 2019
I received a copy of this book in a Goodreads Giveaway in exchange for a fair review.
I first found Tony Horwitz a few years back, when my book club read Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War. I quickly became a huge fan of Mr. Horwitz, and have collected/read several other books by him since then. I was devastated when Mr. Horwitz died suddenly on his tour for this book. This, and life in general, slowed my progress with this book, but I am happy to report that I have finally finished it.
In his 3rd foray in to the historical South, Mr. Horwitz retraces the journey of famed landscape architect Frederic Law Olmsted. Before he found the calling he is known for, Mr. Olmsted traveled the pre Civil War South as a corespondent for a Northern newspaper, sending back his observations of life in the South, the people, and slavery. Over 150 years later Horwitz retraces Olmsted's route to Texas, with the 2016 Presidential election looming in the background of his travels. The country is very divided again, and while race plays a major part in these differences it is far from the only divisive issue.
When I remove my emotional response to the fact that this is Mr. Horwitz's last book I can recognize that it is not his best. It didn't flow easily for me, like Confederates In the Attic. And while I admire Olmsted, he doesn't have the historical significance of John Brown's raid, which he covered in Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War. I still enjoyed the book, especially the bits about Texas. I think it is still worth a read, and is a good addition to his now complete body of work. I will sorely miss Tony Horwitz, his sense of adventure, and the compassionate eye through which he showed us the world.
I first found Tony Horwitz a few years back, when my book club read Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War. I quickly became a huge fan of Mr. Horwitz, and have collected/read several other books by him since then. I was devastated when Mr. Horwitz died suddenly on his tour for this book. This, and life in general, slowed my progress with this book, but I am happy to report that I have finally finished it.
In his 3rd foray in to the historical South, Mr. Horwitz retraces the journey of famed landscape architect Frederic Law Olmsted. Before he found the calling he is known for, Mr. Olmsted traveled the pre Civil War South as a corespondent for a Northern newspaper, sending back his observations of life in the South, the people, and slavery. Over 150 years later Horwitz retraces Olmsted's route to Texas, with the 2016 Presidential election looming in the background of his travels. The country is very divided again, and while race plays a major part in these differences it is far from the only divisive issue.
When I remove my emotional response to the fact that this is Mr. Horwitz's last book I can recognize that it is not his best. It didn't flow easily for me, like Confederates In the Attic. And while I admire Olmsted, he doesn't have the historical significance of John Brown's raid, which he covered in Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War. I still enjoyed the book, especially the bits about Texas. I think it is still worth a read, and is a good addition to his now complete body of work. I will sorely miss Tony Horwitz, his sense of adventure, and the compassionate eye through which he showed us the world.
August 26, 2023
The writer Tony Horwitz follows the travelogue of Frederick Law Olmstead who, in the late 1850s, traveled from Maryland to Texas to report back to what is now The New York Times on the people of the South and obviously, slavery.
I am an admirer of Olmsted and that’s what drew me to the book and I think Horwitz does a good job writing about this multilayered and talented man from his youth to his work on Central Park, leaving out the sad final
chapter of his life.
He also provides some incredible history, with stories I knew nothing about but appreciated learning.
I think overall it’s a good book that provides insight into the problems facing America and the people who cause them.
Horwitz travels down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers before making his way through Texas on the cusp of Trump winning the 2016 election.
In many ways not much has changed in the minds of Southerners since the mid-nineteenth century, and that’s awful in my opinion. And not much has changed since this book was published, except maybe it’s worse. As Horwitz travels through Texas he ends up in the town of Uvalde. This would not mean much to most of the readers at the time but now will always be known by the horror that happened there. Horwitz writes of a sign he sees posted in a Uvalde gym, “Never Retreat, Just Reload.” What else is there to say?
I am an admirer of Olmsted and that’s what drew me to the book and I think Horwitz does a good job writing about this multilayered and talented man from his youth to his work on Central Park, leaving out the sad final
chapter of his life.
He also provides some incredible history, with stories I knew nothing about but appreciated learning.
I think overall it’s a good book that provides insight into the problems facing America and the people who cause them.
Horwitz travels down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers before making his way through Texas on the cusp of Trump winning the 2016 election.
In many ways not much has changed in the minds of Southerners since the mid-nineteenth century, and that’s awful in my opinion. And not much has changed since this book was published, except maybe it’s worse. As Horwitz travels through Texas he ends up in the town of Uvalde. This would not mean much to most of the readers at the time but now will always be known by the horror that happened there. Horwitz writes of a sign he sees posted in a Uvalde gym, “Never Retreat, Just Reload.” What else is there to say?
February 3, 2020
I read the first part, set it aside, read some more, set it aside. Maybe I was savoring it, in a way, knowing it's the last we'll hear from Tony Horowitz, who died suddenly after "Spying on the South" was released. A true loss. (If you've never read "Confederates in the Attic," you MUST.)
I also think "Spying on the South" is just kind of a slow read; not especially revealing, given the heap of books and journalism we've seen in the past few years about the great American divide, the flyover territories, the resentful forgotten masses. A pretty good idea -- retrace Olmstead's mid-19th-century journeys into the American South, a decade before the Civil War, and discover, lo and behold, a 21st-century American South that is once more deeply antagonized (and pissed off) over ... well, you name it. Horowtiz sort of steers clear of naming it directly (he prefers to show, not tell), but mostly it can be winnowed down to -- you guessed it -- racism. (It's 2016, the hideous election year, and white conservative Southerners are ready for revenge for the Obama years.) It's also insecurity, dramatic economic and demographic shifts, etc. I loved Horowitz's account of his time on the ersatz-Americana paddleboat cruise down the Mississippi River (and its almost exclusively white, exclusively elderly passengers); also, having spent quite a bit of time in Texas myself (reporting and writing), I found that his accounts of the Texans and their attitudes to be spot-on.
This combination of travelogue and journalism really tends to get people's hackles up these days -- how _dare_ an outsider come here for a few days and try to write this way about US? The nerve! -- but I still believe in it, when it's done well, like this.
RIP Tony. You are missed already.
I also think "Spying on the South" is just kind of a slow read; not especially revealing, given the heap of books and journalism we've seen in the past few years about the great American divide, the flyover territories, the resentful forgotten masses. A pretty good idea -- retrace Olmstead's mid-19th-century journeys into the American South, a decade before the Civil War, and discover, lo and behold, a 21st-century American South that is once more deeply antagonized (and pissed off) over ... well, you name it. Horowtiz sort of steers clear of naming it directly (he prefers to show, not tell), but mostly it can be winnowed down to -- you guessed it -- racism. (It's 2016, the hideous election year, and white conservative Southerners are ready for revenge for the Obama years.) It's also insecurity, dramatic economic and demographic shifts, etc. I loved Horowitz's account of his time on the ersatz-Americana paddleboat cruise down the Mississippi River (and its almost exclusively white, exclusively elderly passengers); also, having spent quite a bit of time in Texas myself (reporting and writing), I found that his accounts of the Texans and their attitudes to be spot-on.
This combination of travelogue and journalism really tends to get people's hackles up these days -- how _dare_ an outsider come here for a few days and try to write this way about US? The nerve! -- but I still believe in it, when it's done well, like this.
RIP Tony. You are missed already.
June 23, 2019
Such a fun, witty, entertaining, and informative book - but also a very bittersweet read with the author's recent, unexpected death. Mostly a travelogue, partly a biography of Frederick Olmsted (designer of Central Park) - it really didn't veer into politics as often as you might think from the title, and never comes across as snide or condescending. Sharing the author's political leanings, it was very enjoyable for me to read Horwitz's "reports" from the part of the world where I live, surrounded mostly by people who see our country very differently from me. Unlike Horwitz, I live here full time - this book made me appreciate to some degree my own version of "bar-stool democracy" (Horwitz's term from an excellent NY Times article he wrote) and makes me hope my friendships with people of such different political and social views than my own might help in some small way to bridge the divide that engulfs our nation.
June 14, 2020
Horowitz stayed true to Olmsted’s style of narrating the details. I enjoyed his use of Olmested’s writing as a reference point. The most enjoyable chapters were with his Australian friend as a travel companion who added much needed humor. The book is timely and like his last one provides perspectives on rural and political revanchism of red America. I could have done with less roaming the Texas ranges.
There were some new insights for me like the link between anti-evolution beliefs and racism, some fun stories of Louisiana muding, and some fascinating accounts of overlooked history like German immigrants to Texas, Kickapoo reservation, and the Calhoun/Colfax massacre of black residents (which profoundly highlighted the normalcy of white supremacy in every pocket of American history). Similarly, the ironic history of enslaved people crossing the rio grande to find sanctuary in Mexico was new to me.
There were some new insights for me like the link between anti-evolution beliefs and racism, some fun stories of Louisiana muding, and some fascinating accounts of overlooked history like German immigrants to Texas, Kickapoo reservation, and the Calhoun/Colfax massacre of black residents (which profoundly highlighted the normalcy of white supremacy in every pocket of American history). Similarly, the ironic history of enslaved people crossing the rio grande to find sanctuary in Mexico was new to me.
December 22, 2019
In his last book before his untimely passing, Horwitz traces the routes Olmsted traveled in the 1850s as a reporter for a New York newspaper. He was probing the Southern slave culture with his ailing brother, and they engaged the local populace with curiosity and some astonishment. A hundred and sixty years later, Horwitz tries to follow the route as closely as possible, including some adventurous segments taken on a barge as well as on horseback. Horwitz has a remarkable ability to draw out people while exploring local history. His trip is taken through the South in the runup to the 2016 election. While generally open and generous, a few of his interviews are eerily reminiscent of plantation attitudes brought forward into today's political climate. Although a little overlong, the book exposes a lesser known dimension of Olmsted's remarkable life, which extended far beyond his most notable legacy of the landscape of New York's Central Park.
May 20, 2019
A truly human tour of the south, guided by a historical journey. Tony Horwitz applies his historically astute writing to a modern picture of various regions of the south. He crafts a whole cloth out of a hugely varied cast of characters, and somehow tells an engrossing and cohesive story.
July 19, 2019
I finished this compelling travelogue weeks ago, but put off writing a review as I didn't want to acknowledge that this would be the last journey I'd ever get to take with the late Tony Horwitz as my guide. My enjoyment of this crazy, wild ride through the contemporary south was tinged with sadness that this kind, compassionate, and talented writer passed away so early and unexpectedly.
March 29, 2020
My heart wants to give this book 5 stars because it had only just been published when Tony Horwitz died unexpectedly last year, but I'll try to put my sentimental feelings to one side and comment on the books's actual contents.
As you'd expect from Horwitz, this is part travelogue, part history lesson, and part social commentary, in this case focused on his attempts to retrace the journeys of Central Park landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted. (In the 1850s, Olmsted made a series of journeys across the US South, describing what he saw in a series of letters published in the New York Times in the rather optimistic hope that his nonpartisan firsthand reporting would "promote the mutual understanding of North and South".)
Sections of this are highly amusing, such as Horwitz's ill-fated mule expedition in Texas Hill Country, or his experiences at the 'Louisiana Mudfest' (a family festival of ATVs, mud, and moonshine). Others are more reflective and somber - I was particularly struck by a passage about Angola, the country's largest maximum-security prison ("a plantation that still relied on forced labor, much of it performed by the descendants of slaves."), and by Horwitz's visit to Colfax, Louisiana, whose cemetary contains a monument to three "heroes" who fell "fighting for white supremacy" in a vicious massacre of black men that the official state historical marker still labels a "Riot" which "marked the end of carpetbag misrule". Although I've mentioned Louisiana repeatedly, much of the book focuses on Texas, an area that even in Olmsted's time was "a crucible of the nation's escalating conflicts: over immigration, gun rights, religion, the environment, and other hot-button issues."
I did thoroughly enjoy reading this book, but - perhaps because I came to it with greater prior knowledge of the US and its history? - it didn't have as much impact on me as Confederates in the Attic. (Here's a blog post I wrote after Tony Horwitz's death about the way that book shaped my thinking.)
As you'd expect from Horwitz, this is part travelogue, part history lesson, and part social commentary, in this case focused on his attempts to retrace the journeys of Central Park landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted. (In the 1850s, Olmsted made a series of journeys across the US South, describing what he saw in a series of letters published in the New York Times in the rather optimistic hope that his nonpartisan firsthand reporting would "promote the mutual understanding of North and South".)
Sections of this are highly amusing, such as Horwitz's ill-fated mule expedition in Texas Hill Country, or his experiences at the 'Louisiana Mudfest' (a family festival of ATVs, mud, and moonshine). Others are more reflective and somber - I was particularly struck by a passage about Angola, the country's largest maximum-security prison ("a plantation that still relied on forced labor, much of it performed by the descendants of slaves."), and by Horwitz's visit to Colfax, Louisiana, whose cemetary contains a monument to three "heroes" who fell "fighting for white supremacy" in a vicious massacre of black men that the official state historical marker still labels a "Riot" which "marked the end of carpetbag misrule". Although I've mentioned Louisiana repeatedly, much of the book focuses on Texas, an area that even in Olmsted's time was "a crucible of the nation's escalating conflicts: over immigration, gun rights, religion, the environment, and other hot-button issues."
I did thoroughly enjoy reading this book, but - perhaps because I came to it with greater prior knowledge of the US and its history? - it didn't have as much impact on me as Confederates in the Attic. (Here's a blog post I wrote after Tony Horwitz's death about the way that book shaped my thinking.)
July 8, 2019
I found this book to be a combination of two books in one, both of which were written more poorly than I would have liked. First, I read it hoping to learn about Olmsted's experiences and observations. If the author had merely summarized Yeoman's writings, I would have gained more than his actual approach of weaving Olmsted's experiences in with the author's own. The historical context the author provides from other sources were fascinating and a terrific addition, yet both this and Olmsted's story were too fragmented with the second book. Woven together with this first book is a second book, in which the author provides a retelling of his own journey retracing Olmsted's path. This was a very poor anecdotal description of the South. I much preferred reading "Stranger In Their Land" by Arlie Russell Hochschild, which does a far superb job exploring the modern South, and without relying on a haphazardly planned roadtrip to do so.
May 12, 2021
There were parts of this book where the ethnography shined and I really enjoyed hearing Tony Horwitz's perspective. Then there was the other 90% of the book where Horwitz tried and tried and tried to make this random man from the 1800s relevant.
STOP TRYING TO MAKE OLMSTEAD HAPPEN! IT'S NEVER GOING TO HAPPEN!
Mr. Olmstead (I forget his first name) was the man who designed Central Park. But, like most famous or influential people from pre-2000 (and honestly still now) HE WAS JUST A MEDIOCRE WHITE GUY WHO GOT UNDESERVED OPPORTUNITIES FOR SUCCESS. The entire book is based around Horwitz recreating Olmstead's adventures through the southern United States. But at its core this is a bad idea. I cannot rate this book higher than 1 star or recommend to anyone. There is MUCH BETTER nonfiction ethnography based books out there. NEXT!
STOP TRYING TO MAKE OLMSTEAD HAPPEN! IT'S NEVER GOING TO HAPPEN!
Mr. Olmstead (I forget his first name) was the man who designed Central Park. But, like most famous or influential people from pre-2000 (and honestly still now) HE WAS JUST A MEDIOCRE WHITE GUY WHO GOT UNDESERVED OPPORTUNITIES FOR SUCCESS. The entire book is based around Horwitz recreating Olmstead's adventures through the southern United States. But at its core this is a bad idea. I cannot rate this book higher than 1 star or recommend to anyone. There is MUCH BETTER nonfiction ethnography based books out there. NEXT!
July 12, 2019
This was a recommended book in a recent issue of Garden & Guns. I purchased it out of curiosity, could a journalist whose home is in Martha’s Vineyard capture the essence of my beloved south? No he could not. I have no doubt Frederick Olmsted captured it accurately in his travels before the Civil War. Slavery was a blight on our entire country. Horwitz followed Olmsted's journey, but more often than not , he was making fun of us. I can take criticism from someone not of the south, in fact I’ve come to expect it. I despise the writer who samples a minuscule part of our population making it seem we all have a “ monster truck”!
October 2, 2019
This was a terrific book and I am so sorry that it was his last. I love travel books like "Travels with Charley" by Steinbeck and "Blue Highways" by William Heat Moon and this book was similar to those. However the addition of his travels tracing the journey made by Frederick Law Olmsted as an undercover correspondent for the New York Tmes 160 years previously made a wonderful contrast and added a lot of history. I learned a lot as an armchair traveler! I fortunately still have books to read by Mr Horwitz and I look forward to them.
September 7, 2020
I cannot recommend this journalist's books highly enough. There's a lot of details in this one, but the way he blends his parallel travels through the South/Southwest to Olmsted's in the mid-19th century is fascinating. His insights reveal a lot about what has and hasn't changed regarding culture, class, race, geography, climate. Not elitist in the least (well, not VERY) Tony Horwitz (R.I.P. 2019) deserves to be on every serious U.S. historian's reading list.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
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