Spying on the South: An Odyssey Across the American Divide

by Tony Horwitz

Overview

The New York Times-bestselling final book by the beloved, Pulitzer-Prize winning historian Tony Horwitz.
 
With Spying on the South, the best-selling author of Confederates in the Attic returns to the South and the Civil War era for an epic adventure on the trail of America's greatest landscape architect. In the 1850s, the young Frederick Law Olmsted was adrift, a restless farmer and dreamer in search of a mission. He found it during an extraordinary journey, as an undercover correspondent in the South for the up-and-coming New York Times.

For the Connecticut Yankee, pen name "Yeoman," the South was alien, often hostile territory. Yet Olmsted traveled for 14 months, by horseback, steamboat, and stagecoach, seeking dialogue and common ground. His vivid dispatches about the lives and beliefs of Southerners were revelatory for readers of his day, and Yeoman's remarkable trek also reshaped the American landscape, as Olmsted sought to reform his own society by creating democratic spaces for the uplift of all. The result: Central Park and Olmsted's career as America's first and foremost landscape architect.

Tony Horwitz rediscovers Yeoman Olmsted amidst the discord and polarization of our own time. Is America still one country? In search of answers, and his own adventures, Horwitz follows Olmsted's tracks and often his mode of transport (including muleback): through Appalachia, down the Mississippi River, into bayou Louisiana, and across Texas to the contested Mexican borderland. Venturing far off beaten paths, Horwitz uncovers bracing vestiges and strange new mutations of the Cotton Kingdom. Horwitz's intrepid and often hilarious journey through an outsized American landscape is a masterpiece in the tradition of Great Plains, Bad Land, and the author's own classic, Confederates in the Attic.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781101980309
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	05/12/2020
Pages:	512
Sales rank:	189,195
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Tony Horwitz was a native of Washington, D.C., and a graduate of Brown University and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. As a newspaper reporter he spent a decade overseas, mainly covering wars and conflict in the Middle East, Africa, and the Balkans for The Wall Street Journal. Returning to the U.S., he won the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting and wrote for The New Yorker before becoming a full-time author. His books include the national and New York Timesbestsellers, Confederates in the Attic, Blue Latitudes, Baghdad Without a Map and A Voyage Long and Strange. Midnight Rising was named a New York Times Notable Book in 2011 and one of the year’s ten best books by Library Journal. Tony was also a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and the president of the Society of American Historians. He died in May 2019, and is survived by his wife Geraldine Brooks and their two sons, Nathaniel and Bizu.

Hometown:

Waterford, Virginia

Date of Birth:

1958

Date of Death:

May 27, 2019

Place of Birth:

Washington, D.C.

Place of Death:

Washington, D.C.

Education:

B.A., Brown University; M.A., Columbia University School of Journalism

Table of Contents

Prologue: American Nomad 1

Chapter 1 Yeoman Olmsted: "An Enthusiast by Nature" 11

Chapter 2 Over the Alleghenies: Gateway to the Rust Belt 22

Chapter 3 Ohio River: Mutants Making Tow 39

Chapter 4 Kentucky: "A Balance Sheet of Good Against Evil" 62

Chapter 5 To Tennessee and Back: A Thorough Aristocrat 82

Chapter 6 Mississippi River: Steamboat Blues 101

Chapter 7 Lower Mississippi: The Absolute South 122

Chapter 8 New Orleans: The Gumbo City 138

Chapter 9 Into the Bayou: "Dat's How We Roll" 154

Chapter 10 Central Louisiana: The Unreconstructed South 168

Chapter 11 The Red River: Heart of Mudness 187

Chapter 12 Across the Sabine: "Gwine to Texas" 201

Chapter 13 Gulf Coast: Oil and Water 222

Chapter 14 Crockett, Texas: "The Drift of Things" in Ruby-Red America 234

Chapter 15 Austin and Beyond: The Loon Star Republic 250

Chapter 16 San Antonio: High Holy Days at the Alamo 269

Chapter 17 German Texas: Olmsted in Arcadia 290

Chapter 18 The Hill Country: True to the Union 303

Chapter 19 Upper Guadalupe: And Absalom Rode Upon a Mule 320

Chapter 20 To the Rio Grande: Border Disorder 354

Chapter 21 La Frontera: Days of the Dead 377

Chapter 22 Central Park Ramble 390

Acknowledgments 415

Postscript 419

Note on Sources 429

Notes 430

Bibliography 465

Index 473

Editorial Reviews

One of the Washington Post’s Notable Nonfiction Books of 2019• One of NPR's Best Books of 2019

“Timely . . . A valuable work that combines biography, history and travelogue. . . . Horwitz is a smooth writer and an even better reporter (hardly surprising, given that he won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting at The Wall Street Journal), and he recounts his travels with insight interspersed with humor, as well as with an intermittent raising of the eyebrows at numerous oddities and occasional evils.” —The New York Times Book Review

“In Horwitz’s writing, past and present collide and march together on almost every page, prying our minds open with the absurdity, hilarity and humanity we encounter. Olmsted spent nine months traveling 4,000 miles and then wrote hundreds of pages about it; Horwitz spent two years revisiting his paths, his ideas and his psyche, capturing the story in 414 pages of sparkling prose.” —David Blight, The Washington Post

“A compelling report on the state of our present disunion.” —Wall Street Journal
 
“I've been waiting for Tony Horwitz to write another big on-the-road book that crisscrosses the American cultural divide . . . Spying on the South is every bit as enlightening and alive with detail, absurdity and colorful characters as Confederates in the Attic was.” —NPR

“He was the rare historian—the only historian I can think of—equally at home in the archive and in an interview, a dedicated scholar, a devoted journalist.” —Jill Lepore, The New Yorker

“Horwitz’s excellence as a writer and reporter unearths forgotten chapters of history while making fascinating present-day discoveries.” —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“Horwitz is an amiable narrator who marries a journalist’s knack for scene-setting and chatting folks up with the ability to tell a good historical tale.” —BookPage

“A tour is only as good as its guide, and Horwitz is a seasoned one—inquisitive, open-minded, and opting for observation over judgment, whether at a dive bar, monster truck rally, the Creation Museum, or a historical plantation. The book will appeal to fans of travelogue, Civil War–era history, and current events by way of Southern sensibilities.” —Booklist
 
“Horwitz brings humor, curiosity, and care to capturing the voices of the larger-than-life characters he encounters. A huge canvas of intricate details, this thoughtful and observant work delicately navigates the long shadow of America’s history.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“With the keen eye and deft pen that he's long brought to telling the odd and wonderful and fascinating story of America, Tony Horwitz has returned to familiar territory—the South—to give us a unique piece of reportage from a region that tells us a whole lot more about the country than the country sometimes wants to admit. Like his classic Confederates in the Attic, this book will be read, remembered, and treasured.” —Jon Meacham, Pulitzer-Prize-winning historian and author of The Soul of America

“Tony Horwitz’s reporting is fearless and persistent and inspired—and it produces views of America like no one else’s. Spying on the South kept me turning the pages to see what frightening and funny revelation was coming next. An important book for our almost unprecedented moment in history.” —Ian Frazier, author of Great Plains and Travels in Siberia

“In the long dark years before the Civil War, Frederick Law Olmsted toured the South by stage, by boat, by train, and by foot, reporting on a nation unraveling. Tony Horwitz does much more than follow in Olmsted’s footsteps in this searching travel narrative: he chronicles an American agony, the pain of division, the anguish of uncertainty. But he finds, too, an enduring American spirit of generosity, and commonweal, and curiosity.” —Jill Lepore, author of These Truths: A History of the United States

“Two journeys, a hundred and sixty years apart, remind us that history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme. In the midst of our country’s long-overdue reckoning with symbols of white supremacy, Tony Horwitz retraces the steps of America’s greatest landscape architect, Frederick Law Olmsted, whose encounters with slavery forced him to rethink the role of civic spaces in the American experiment. Horwitz brings home a magnificent account of who we have been and what we might still become.” —Henry Louis Gates, Jr., author of Stony the Road

“Having grown up amidst the Emerald Necklace, having lived off the northern fringes of Central Park and later the western edge of its rangier cousin, Prospect, and having read Devil In the White City, I truly did not know there were any more astonishments left in the life of Frederick Law Olmsted. Leave it to the incomparable Tony Horwitz to reveal Olmsted’s secret life as a journalistic super-spy, peering not merely into the burgeoning Confederacy, but, as Horowitz poignantly observes, a cultural divide with which we are still reckoning.” —John Hodgman, author of Vacationland

“In the 1850s, Yankees saw the South as a foreign country and the New York Times sent Frederick Law Olmsted on an undercover mission to interpret it for readers. It was a daring and inspired move, and so is Tony Horwitz’s retracing of Olmsted’s path from the Potomac to the Rio Grande. Spoiler alert, things don’t always go well for our dauntless guide, but they sure do for the reader. This is one of the smartest, funniest, and most illuminating books about the South and Texas, and about our own divided times, I’ve had the pleasure to read.” —Bryan Burrough, author of Forget the Alamo and Days of Rage, The Big Rich and Public Enemies

From the Publisher

★ 03/25/2019

Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Horwitz (Confederates in the Attic) follows the trail of Frederick Law Olmsted, 19th-century reporter and legendary landscape architect, across the American South in this expansive and generously conceived travelogue . His pursuit of Olmsted, “a Connecticut Yankee exploring the Cotton Kingdom on the eve of secession and civil war” for the New York Daily Times, takes Horwitz by train, boat, car, and mule through West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas, as he documents the “diversity and capaciousness of America.” Horwitz observes general challenges throughout the region—a “heartland hollowed out by economic and social decay,” disappearing rural towns, toxic industries, jobs moving from manufacture to tourism, obesity, and drugs—and allegiances, especially to evangelical Christianity and guns, but also discerns a unique character in each region, among them the Cajun identity of south Louisiana and the history of German radicals in Texas. Horwitz delights in the absurd and easily interlaces history with his many adventures—among them cruises on a coal tow and a steamboat, mudding in Louisiana, a re-enactment at the Alamo—where he encounters generous hospitality, warm intelligence, and, occasionally, bald bigotry. Throughout, Horwitz brings humor, curiosity, and care to capturing the voices of the larger-than-life characters he encounters. A huge canvas of intricate details, this thoughtful and observant work delicately navigates the long shadow of America’s history. Photos. Agent: Kris Dahl, ICM. (May)

Publishers Weekly

This literary road trip translates well to audio, as it relies heavily on description and anecdote. The twin travelogue recounts Frederick Law Olmsted’s journey through the pre-Civil War South and writer Tony Horwitz’s 21st-century attempt to re-create that journey. At the time, Olmsted was working as a journalist for the NEW YORK TIMES. Mark Deakins offers an engaging narration. His conversational tone and pacing suit the material well, and he hints at regional dialects just enough to set those speakers apart. He captures Olmsted’s and Horwitz’s wonder at America’s natural beauty. He also renders Horwitz’s sense of humor as he describes some of the oddities he encounters and voices his disappointment at finding vestiges of the prewar South in the current day. R.C.G. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine

MAY 2019 - AudioFile

2019-03-03

The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist wanders Dixie in search of what makes it so intractably un-American.

Picking up, in a sense, where Confederates in the Attic (1998) left off, Horwitz (Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid that Sparked the Civil War, 2011, etc.) follows a fruitful trail in the footsteps of one-time journalist Frederick Law Olmsted, who traveled through the South reporting on the region for the precursor to the New York Times before reinventing himself as "a visionary architect of New York's Central Park, among many other spaces." Olmsted found a land bent on racial suppression, even as blacks and whites lived side by side, as well as one on the brink of civil war; Horwitz wonders how much things have changed since then. He discovered plenty of difference. For example, in West Virginia, a state that seceded from secession to rejoin the Union, the author passed time with coal miners who have been perfectly happy to destroy their almost-heaven while complaining that federal environmental scientists "find a puddle in your yard and call it a wetland." Like Olmsted, Horwitz's circuitous path took him along the Mississippi River and into Texas, perhaps the most schizophrenic of states today. As the resident of one East Texas town told him, after the author witnessed one scene after another of casual racism punctuated by an oddly easy mixing of black and white residents, the place is "somewhere between Mayberry and Deliverance." Horwitz seldom reaches deep; his book is casually observed and travelogue-ish ("Eagle Pass was no longer a mud-and-whiskey bedlam at the edge of the American frontier"), more Paul Theroux than de Tocqueville. Still, one can't help but notice that the things that occupied Olmsted's attention haven't changed much in the years since the earlier traveler toured a region that sometimes defies description.

Not as sprightly as some of the author's past reports from the fringes but provocative and well worth reading.

Kirkus Reviews