I was very sorry to learn of the death of the author when I went to check this book out. His confederates in the attic was a revelation to me and I enjoyed voyage long and strange, midnight rising and blue latitudes as well.
This time he is tracing the journeys of Frederick Olmsted in the south. It was interesting and I learned a few things ( the patron Saint of drug dealers, for instance.)
Horwitz does a good job of trying to elucidate why seemingly normal people come to have some fairly extreme views, though it’s not as stark and surprising as confederates was ( )

If you knew nothing about Americans south of the Mason-Dixon Line and Tony Horwitz’ “Spying on the South: An Odyssey Across the American Divide” was your introduction to these peoples, you’d probably conclude that southerners revel in their ignorance, relish the most juvenile forms of entertainment, and stuff themselves with the worst food and beverages on the planet.

Was Horwitz really “spying on the South?”

Yup. But for whom was he spying and why?

Ostensibly, the narrative runs along two tracks:

1. Along the first track we are reading the history of Frederick Law Olmsted who as a young man made two lengthy trips to the South for this very purpose. He was writing for then new New York Daily Times about a decade or so before the Civil War tore the country apart. His dispatches were later collected into three books.

2. The second narrative is a satire of the first in which Horwitz follows the earlier journey using mostly modern travel methods to reenact Olmsted’s earlier journey. He later mounts a mule to reenact Olmsted’s journey, a segment in which it goes something like this: Mule 10, Horwitz 0.

The significance of Olmsted’s trek was that the landscapes and flora he found informed or perhaps inspired his later work as America’s first professional landscape architect. He designed New York’s Central Park, Montreal’s Mont Royal, and the capacious Biltmore estate in North Carolina among many others.

Olmsted was a virulent anti-slaver, a “free-soiler” in the parlance of the time. He graphically documented conditions on the plantations. To his credit, Horwitz fills out Olmstead’s observations and the local history after Olmsted went home.

For me the most interesting discussion was the history of freethinking German settlers to Texas. Mexico outlawed slavery before Texans declared their independence. For years land speculators and cotton growers had been flooding into the territory to expand the land under cultivation, as cotton was a tremendously profitable business at the time.

Texans later voted to join the United States as a slave state.

This didn’t sit well with the industrious Germans and Alsatians who legally immigrated to West Texas. But sympathies in the state were largely pro-slavery and though some fought a rearguard action during the Civil War to undermine the Confederate cause, most clammed up and kept their opinions to themselves.

Olmsted not only sympathized with the freethinkers, he promoted their cause once he returned to New York.

Horwitz obviously also sympathizes with the sympathizer and this is where the two stories cross. Because in America today all is not finished between the races. There is the matter of racial profiling. Gerrymandered voting districts. Voter ID cards. Belligerent immigration policy. Pandering to white supremacists. Racially-motivated shooting sprees.

Need I go on?

Horwitz sheds light on and helps correct the score where early Texans stood on the matter of personal freedoms and notes the layers of irony for today’s Texans who go on ad-nauseam about how little they want Washington to interfere with their personal freedoms. Ditto with Louisianans. And West Virginians.

My own readers will roll their eyes as I repeat my observation about how the very people who complain about their personal freedoms being jeopardized with attacks on the Second Amendment right to bear arms vote against anybody who believes women ought to have final say about processes in their own bodies.

Once the Civil War broke out Olmsted took a very active role in prosecuting the war for the Union. He was undoubtedly one of the unsung heroes behind the lines.

And his park designs inspire us to this day, making cities more liveable and encouraging better behaviour among its warring factions.

Tony, thank you for this entertaining look at America today.

RIP. ( )

Landscape architect Olmstead toured the south and west in 1850 period. The author followed the path in 2018.
His book compares the mores and folkways of then and now. It also explores the thinking of people then and now, economic and political.
A good book about politics and history. ( )

We have lost a great interpreter of the relationship between past and present. Sadly, Tony Horowitz died of a heart attack on Monday, May 27th, 2019 in Chevy Chase, MD. Your fans will miss your wit, insights, and your ability to interpret the stranger parts of America in a kind and humorous way.

Through his many books, Tony told fascinating stories that mixed humor with social criticism. Although this book was somewhat uneven in places (especially Louisiana), his trip down the Ohio was fascinating, while the trip down the Mississippi was somewhat less so. Nevertheless, Horowitz’s premise of following in the steps of Frederick Law Olmstead, whose pre-Civil War trip he retraces, is a fine idea. And it reminds us again of what a prolific and fine landscape architect Olmstead was. The beauty of this book is in the interweaving of Olmstead’s work and the legacy that he left for everyone who has the pleasure of exploring his love of nature.

The book also shares some similarities with Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi and Jonathan Raban’s Old Glory: An American Voyage. ( )

3 1/2 stars. Horwitz, who passed away not long after this book was published, begins researching noted 19th century landscape architect Frederick Law Olmstead, and discovers that Olmstead made several journeys to the South in the mid-1850's. Olmstead was highlighting the social and political differences he encountered between North and South, while trying to remain neutral. Horwitz decides he will attempt to retrace Olmstead's path in the months leading up to the 2016 election, rationalizing that the US has once again become a polarized society. Horwitz also tries to remain neutral, but for both authors, their prejudices come through rather forcefully. Certainly most Southerners don't come out looking very good. Horwitz does an awful lot of talking about Olmstead's travels and quotes liberally, which wasn't why I was reading the book. I also felt like the major differences between the 1850's and 2010's made the initial question invalid. Perhaps a book simply about present day attitudes on a variety of subjects, with comparisons in the text to pre-Civil War America (North and South) would have been a more interesting book to me. ( )