Tony Horwitz. Spying on the South. Penguin, 2019.

Tony Horwitz’s Confederates in the Attic really had an impact on us. We heard that he passed away around the same time his new book came out. It has echoes of the other book because once again he traveled through parts of the United States to get a sense of people’s sentiments.

This time, however, he was not tracking what people thought of the American Civil War. He was literally traveling in the tracks a famous American from Connecticut who “spied” on the South the decade before the war began.

Frederick Law Olmsted was at loose ends through much of his early life until his late thirties when he discovered what became known as landscape architecture. Of course, he is most famous today for designing New York’s Central Park, but he and his partners also had a hand in numerous other parks and estates. But before that, he tried his hand at a number of things.

He came from a wealthy Yankee family, attended Yale, and from 1852 to 1854 traveled through the American South, reporting back in dispatches to Northern newspapers, mostly the New-York Daily Times (later the paper would shed both the hyphen and the Daily). He would eventually compile three books from his notes. They shed a lot of light on the ante-bellum South. Horwitz, then, attempted to follow Olmsted’s routes to see how things had changed, or if they had.

About forty percent of Spying on the South is about Olmsted and his adventures and what he observed. Olmsted was especially interested in how Southerners viewed slavery and abolition. Olmsted himself was a free-soil Democrat, like Hawthorne or Whitman. As he traveled it seems he became more of an abolitionist. He perrceived that slavery was not the benign institution that many rich Southerners claimed it was.

He also noted people, especially in what would become West Virginia and in the Texas Hill Country, who were really opposed to slavery. Olmsted noted that the institution was mainly supported by the wealthy. He also was convinced, as was Frederick Douglass in his autobiography, that the South would be better off economically by freeing the slaves and having everyone work for pay. With everyone working to make a living, there is more diligence and more creativity.

The other sixty percent of the book contains Horwitz’s observations on the current state of the areas he visited in 2016. He started, as did Olmsted, in Baltimore, traveled West through Maryland to West Virginia, then down the Ohio River. He toured the Cumberland River to Nashville, then the Mississippi. Olmsted, naturally, took riverboats down the rivers. Horwitz hitched a ride on a towboat pushing barges on the Ohio, but he did manage to find a replica riverboat for part of the Mississippi tour.

He then went from the Mississippi Delta region to New Orleans and through the bayou areas of Louisiana and East Texas. Like Olmsted, Horwitz spent quite a bit of time in the Texas Hill Country, then eventually went to Eagle Pass and to a few cities south of the Mexican border.

The first part of his travels seems somewhat melancholy. Much of what he describes in the rural Appalachians and the Ohio River Valley are areas that seem to have been passed over. People often work for near minimum wages. Drugs are a big problem. Traditionally Democratic, they feel the party and the federal government in general now despises them. Horwitz reminds us several times of President Obama’s characterization of those who bitterly cling to guns and religion and candidate Clinton speaking of the basket of deplorables in flyover country.

This would contrast later with the descriptions of central Texas around Houston, Austin, and San Antonio. People in these places, except for some in Austin, are equally conservative, but they are prospering. Horwitz does not think Olmsted would approve of the prosperity, though, because the growing population has not taken the natural surroundings into account the way Olmsted would have.

Horwitz devotes quite a bit of time describing his experiences in the Texas Hill Country. Olmsted had discovered that this was largely being settled by recent immigrants from Germany. One town, Sisterdale, caught Horwitz’s attention because it was originally settled by revolutionaries who had escaped the reaction of various European governments after the 1848 revolutions. Many were socialists—people whom Horwitz seemed to identify with.

While there was little to indicate any socialism nowadays among the people he met, many rural Texans were to Horwitz strikingly independent. They do not like anyone telling them what to do. Horwitz attempted to duplicate some of Olmsted’s travels by horse and mule. The mule experience in particular did not go especially well for Horwitz.

At one point someone kiddingly said Horwitz was a Yankee spying on the South. In a sense, that is what he was doing. Horwitz was a successful writer who himself often wrote for the New York Times. He calls himself a secular Jew and a blue-stater. He does note that the more religious people, nearly all Christians, had respect for Jews who observed their religion. In some ways this hearkens back to the America of the 1950s typified in the famous sociological treatise by Will Herberg titled Protestant, Catholic, Jew. Back then nearly every American identified with one of those three. Now, not so much, at least on the coasts.

Though Horwitz’s preferences and politics come through a lot, as he was with Confederates in the Attic, he is pretty evenhanded and mostly lets the people speak for themselves, even those he clearly disagrees with.

There was one recurring image. It seemed whenever he met someone who was left-wing or socialist, they would be listening to NPR (National Public Radio). I confess, I used to listen to NPR more than I do now. I would sometimes listen to the music, but now that Car Talk and Prairie Home Companion have departed, I have little reason to listen much nowadays. Sure, Garrison Keillor sometimes would get political, but he still loved America.

If he did not love America, Horwitz was at least fascinated with it. Most of his travels were during the 2016 elections. It seemed that most of the people he quoted supported Trump, but nearly everyone thought Clinton would win, including Horwitz. By the time he wrote the book, though, Horwitz seems to have at least accepted the fact, unlike certain opponents who started talking impeachment three days after the inauguration. Like most of the people in his book, Horwitz may have been surprised, but he does not come across as a sore loser. He was still a lover.