Adecade or so before the Civil War, an aimless young man accepted an assignment from the newly established New York Times. His task: to travel through the exotic hinterlands of the South and report on what he encountered. Frederick Law Olmsted, 30 years old and destined to become the nation's foremost landscape architect, had already tried his hand at a number of unrewarding occupations: apprentice seaman, merchant, author and farmer. With no definite itinerary and no idea what he might find, he wandered through Virginia, the Deep South, Texas and the borderlands separating the U.S. from Mexico. In the process, he wrote what remains one of the most perceptive accounts of the slaveholding South in our national literature, a collection of columns eventually published as “The Cotton Kingdom.”
More than a century and a half later, Tony Horwitz has followed in Olmsted's footsteps, traversing “the nation's enduring fault line—between free and slave states in his time, and red and blue states in mine.” Despite his steadfast efforts to remain both a neutral and charitable observer, his portrait of the South is even less flattering than Olmsted's.
Fans of Mr. Horwitz will find themselves in familiar territory in “Spying on the South.” The author of the best-selling “Confederates in the Attic” (1998) and “Midnight Rising” (2011), a fine account of John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry, this unreconstructed Northerner has always been fascinated by the quirks and arcana of Southern culture. Mr. Horwitz's journalistic approach is to remain open to experience and allow readers to form judgments for themselves. As in his previous works, his generosity of spirit enables him to strike up conversations with a broad cross section of Americans living and working below the Mason-Dixon Line.
Over the course of two years, Mr. Horwitz hitched a ride on a coal barge along the Ohio River and traveled down the Mississippi in an ersatz steamboat crowded with geriatric tourists. He toured the Creation Museum in Kentucky and visited former plantations whose tour guides still refer to the people once enslaved there as “servants.” He visited New Orleans and Austin and San Antonio, went “mudding” in a monster truck in Cajun country, was concussed by a stubborn mule, and ate enough fried foods to prompt serious concerns in cardiologists throughout the country.
But as with Olmsted's columns for the Times, it is the people Mr. Horwitz encounters that make his book a compelling report on the state of our present disunion. Speaking with a seemingly endless cast of perceptive, funny and welcoming Southerners, he debunks the preconceptions of his Northern neighbors who imagine “deep-red Texas” as little more than an “arid, alien, and hostile” territory. But a fair number of the people he interviews express despair at the nation's psyche. A scientist in Kentucky, for instance, laments that the “know-nothingness . . . just seems to be getting stronger. People are proud of their ignorance, and when you challenge it, they fall back on conspiracy theories and fake facts.” A history museum director in West Virginia agrees, saying: “Perversity is part of our character.” Just as often, ignorance and perversity are celebrated by the people Mr. Horwitz talks to. “It's a Southern thing,” says one Texan. “We take pride in whatever happened, even when it wasn't so good, like the Confederacy.” Or as another Texan puts it, “We're kind of proud of our scoundrels.”
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