The stories that many of us have never heard before. But the thing that i really like is tonights author is typical of the type of author that we have here. I encourage you about upcoming authors and 60 minutes correspondent scott kelly to talk about the stories he has done over the years i have read the book its fascinating but we have wonderful author programs i would encourage you to pick up a sheet i would also encourage you to come back to the museum. We have a fabulous exhibit call georgia on my screen. When carter was governor he established the Georgia Film Commission to bring movies to the state of georgia. Sweet home alabama, a whole bunch tyler perry stuff. The actual set from Stranger Things it is just really really good i would encourage you to come back for that but tonight is a special night tony horwitz is an awardwinning journalist from the graduate school of journalism and spent a decade overseas as a journalist over wars and conflicts into the wall street journal and in 1995 won the Pulitzer Prize for working conditions and also devoting full time to writing books he has now written seven books including confederates in the attic and one for the road but tonight is special with those stories that we dont know about. We are very fortunate to have the host of the podcast of literary atlanta and a former broadcast journalist so we are very fortunate to have her interviewing tony tonight. Please join me to welcome them tonight. [applause] its great to be here. First of all i want to thank tony clark and the bookseller talk about a cappella books and thank you for coming here on a monday night to talk about this book. What did you think of the final episode of game of thrones . [laughter] as on book tour you are only competing against something. Normally its a sports game. Normally was confederates in the attic and the first few nights people would show up. Against the Golden State Warriors and then last night to being up against the game of thrones which i also love. But remarkably we did discuss game of thrones but also other subjects. No spoilers here that things have a promising writing career. And then at the Biltmore Estate what was it in the late twenties or early thirties to pursue a career in writing . And to be attracted to this in the first place is the making of a peculiar genius. He does not have a typical path. Particularly on that day. Coming from a privileged family his father is a merchant in hartford his brother goes to yale and goes off as a merchant marine to china and the wonderful letters in the library of congress between friends and family they recognize he has some kind of genius if only they could get it together. Maybe he would make something of himself one day and with that Landscape Architecture even in his mid forties. So he is a bohemian figure in that way. So for those purposes olmsted has started writing in about his travel so what did he hope to accomplish to say i will travel to the American South and write about what is happening there . At this point he is 30 and a farmer on Staten Island and also has a hopeless lovelife. He has been jilted by his fiancee. He is a hugely romantic soul falling in love with everyone but cant find the right partner. And then he wants to escape the farm and his heartbreak but is also an aspiring writer and is a hardheaded connecticut yankee who wants to see the south himself. If there is Common Ground at the moment the nation is pulling apart. So that is the impetus for his trip. And we should talk about that time period of 1852 or 1854 so whats happening in our country at this time . It is long lead up to secession and civil war. But it is flareup and what will we do with New Territory . Uncle toms cabin is published just before he heads off. And it is getting increasingly tense with this. The kindling is added to a bonfire that will finally erupt. So it gets much worse so he takes that southern trip over the national crisis. Lets talk about especially in this region where olmsted is visiting what does gtt stand for . A wonderful phrase, and in that era and that olmsted popularized gone to texas. And it meant that other parts of the south were fled because of trouble with the law, or your spouse, or you could not pay your debt. You would write gtt on the door of your home or somebody else would put it there after you were gone and they were off to texas. At that point to the booming front tier was a second chance. And olmsted sees this and sentences this great migration he is also a farmer fleeing his life. And much of my book is about that Movement Across the south to this promise land or what it seems for many people. So he has pitched the story thinking it will be a quick judgment and as we mentioned taking about a decade of his life he takes a trip to the south. He sets off with the fairly vague notion and the New York Times has offered me as a former newspaper journalist and is loaning out his expense budget and he doesnt like the food and it is his word for writers block. [laughter] that the first trip he takes a traditional tour georgia and alabama and the gets on a boat to new orleans and sees a little bit of louisiana. That is the first trip that he is so possessed he sets off soon after for a much more ambitious trip through the upper south and down the Mississippi Valley and across louisiana and texas all the way into mexico. That was a destination for the slaves he went to interview and then ride back to virginia. So he takes a much more extensive trip and thats the one that i chose to follow. Because you know that is contentious when you say i will travel to the south. One of the nice things is that you have maps in here to see the different routes that he took so you can follow along. And all the you portray him as passionate perhaps to his detriment he did not consider himself an abolitionist at this time so what were his motives and how it transformed over the course of the journey . He writes very frankly about it because he has friends who are red hot abolitionists and wanted full citizenship he was much more in the moderate camp to track Abraham Lincoln very closely its what was called free labor and anti slavery but we should contain it but constitutionally and practically its not feasible to just end it now. So thats one reason and the new york time views themselves as the moderate temperate paper of today but his views changed dramatically as he traveled to the south and later on right to the civil war and like lincoln by the middle of the civil war that the whole system must die. Its interesting to see it is quite representative for the northerners were. And olmsted like many others is the absolutist and moralistic and had an uncomfortable relationship with religion. He was not comfortable with christianity of the abolitionist movement. And he was traveling at a time that northerners in the south particularly northern reporter are often suspected of being abolitionist snoops and stirs. Wandering around the south with a reporters notebook and anyone can tell in two minutes im not from the south but in the opening episode of my own travels, i described a woman in a bar in West Virginia that essentially sees right through me and says i get it you are a yankee boy down here spying on us hillbillies and the title is also kind of a joke on myself. And that was a direct quote. The subtitle of the book is the odyssey across the american divide. Like mentioned, there are maps in the roots. What did he consider and what do you consider the american divide that you were approaching when you reach race to the steps . 2015, 16, and then a little bit in 2018. It was much more clearcut geographically we had the line that wasnt an absolute divide but it was the enslaved states entering what would become Enemy Territory for the north end for him its clearly harder to find today perhaps the polarization and ideological divide. The north and south defined part of that, but in my own mind certainly after the maturity i came to feel the coastal interior split in much more significance than looking at it anymore as some sort of a north and south although i would say many people in the north still view it that way. The south has become a sort of standin for what the northern progressives opposed and its kind of a convenient marker whether its alabama. The news of the day ther theres still an element of that but obviously not in the way that it was. In 1953 they published a single volume entitled the content kingdom. This is a book that you encounter at two different times in your life. How did you come across this and what inspired you to pursue that as your own work . The starting point for this book with previous books ive had something earnest and highminded to say about how i got the idea. My lifelong passion for the civil war and great discovery in the archives but at this tim tht happened while cleaning house. My wife who is also a writer and i lived in 18th century farmhouse in new england where everything sags and or overflowing books definitely do not help and we were fighting over shelf space. She said its finally time you recall them from college that youve been toting around the globe. For all these years claiming you are going to revisit them. They had been assigned in a southern history class i read a few pages and read a few more. And my curiosity is ho of how wt from there to central park and then also this mission im going to cross this divide and try and understand what is happening in this country at this moment it seemed a very relevant mission for our own talk. If to make notes about certain things in certain areas that you wanted to visit and see if those places still existed or how did you prepare for the trip. It led me to the others and he actually wrote three books that were then put together in the kingdom which has so its really an anthology back to the original dispatches at the time and personal letters and theres a lot of material and i decided to follow the path of the second trip. Partly because of the territory on the first trip, coastal virginia the sort of battlefield and quirky state. A lot of that was new to me including the entirety of texas that he was particularly fascinated with mankind as he saw it the struggle over slavery and for complicated reasons i had barely set foot into geographically did it quite closely. He was known to his friends and family and i came to think about it he goes through many different modes of transportation in the end. All very slow modes of transportation and yet on one of your first trips you managed to find the slowest mode of transportation possible. Could you tell us about your trip . Whenever possible i wanted to go not only where he went from about by the means of transport. I found one in kentucky and he would take me to a bourbon distillery. But often i had to improvise. He went down the river from virginia, West Virginia didnt yet exist to kentucky on a lavish steam boat of today. They are no longer steamboats on the part of the ohio, but he also wrote about all the barges full of cool floating down from pittsburgh and they are still there. On my way where they are stationed around the clock in these coalfired power plants around ohio. People that he knew or that his family knew were connections that they had. Im thinking of one gentleman that he knew that was in nashville and so the same went for you. You had some friends who hosted you when you were in the cities on the travels but it is a nashville that olmsted really seems class in a different way. When you talk about why this was kind of a turning point. Generally speaking i am weary of the epiphanies and they are very convenient for biographers and novelists. They are very rare but i think that he really has one about midway through his southern travels she set off as a kind of moderate openminded approach to the south where he has a vivid exchange with the aristocratic slaveholders one who wouldve been whod been aclassmate of ht yale. The leading men of the south as he called them completely intransigent on slavery they have utter contempt for the common man and democracy itself they truly believe that a Feudal Society is in every respect to the north because they are incapable of governing themselves for uplifting himself a end of this affects his sensibilities on every level that is in a new direction it ends up a central part. One he realizes as he puts it this is a dangerous class in america he sees seven years before the civil war. They are not listening anyway, and instead, reform by demonstrating the power and promise. Which at that time it did not exist. To the point of conflict and by other means soul of the american experiment. There should be places and times where the rich and the poor, the cultivated and the sturdy and selfmade people shall be attracted together and encouraged to assimilate. This is the notion that a not just in the south when he begins work at central park. Newspapers and others are saying this is a waste of time and money. It was a particularly rough part of manhattan in the day and then after it can share the same space. It is a genuine experiment and quite old and it worked. Unfortunately, it opens right before the civi civil war as a e of it is demonstrated to the south. You visited the parks. Its hard to go somewhere in the United States that has visions or the suburbs like the hills neighborhood in atlanta that his sons i believe were commissioned to do here. Do you think that this vision all these years later they are coming together and share public spaces it certainly worked in his time. The central park was an immediate hit and there was no friction. The only crime was people writing too fast on their horses. Generally speaking i think it was a success, that aspect, but there were things he couldnt possibly anticipate. So late in his career as a Landscape Architect he gets commissioned in the south where up to that point. At the very end of the career but with the parks his vision was partly undone by jim crow and segregation so for instance in louisville he decides what many considered his masterpiece in the entire park system but they then designate one part of it ended school black people from the other part and the same happens with this suburbs through redlining and other things that it really ran counter to his vision of bringing people together. Not only in the south all these things went on in the north as well bunorth aswell but perhapsn the south, his very democratic vision of people of all backgrounds coming together was undercut. You generally begin each chapter talking about the observations or what he wrote in different geographies and then you will come in and kind of parallel them anthen and you will eithere whats happening in each or the different issues. So maybe we can talk about a few examples. You mentioned earlier he wasnt a very religious person. Will you talk about what he did believe and then how you juxtapose that with your tour of some of its religious landmarks. He was a little unusual in his day because he was basically educated by country pastors in connecticut. His father was a very traditional puritanical congregationalist and it just didnt take so he becomes a quite profound religious skeptic whose scripture shouldnt be followed as the absolute truth. He is very spiritual in other ways but not when it comes to traditional observance. One of the interesting ties that i come to is what you are referring to as one of the biggest stands with Charles Darwin there is a lot of interesting intellectuals that ties into slavery. Its the view that people are shaped by their environment contrary to the common view of the date of africanamericans were genetically inferior molded by its environment abolitionists picked up on that right away and recognized the message as inherent. I talk about in the book partly in the context one of the places i stumbled across in my travels trying to travel as fred did wherever my curiosity led me into this the Creation Museum some of you may know about it. Its designed and caterers to the young earth creationists who believe the liberal dates in the bible which theyve calculated the creation of the earth and i believe it is 4,004 bc and have constructed a whole belief system about that including dinosaurs getting on the ark because the dinosaurs did not perceive humans etc. And yet i had a kind of interesting particularly when i talk to a minister and employee about where do i as a jew fit into this picture. I tried to ask for it because this particular museum, hundreds of thousands of visitors and certainly in kentucky and much of the area that i was traveling through, serious bible belt so that was an aspect of of travel. On his travel, fred was accompanied by his brother, john. You indicated your brother to come with you and he not so politely declined. [laughter] his second southern journey i think his brother kind of invites himself along. Hes gone to yale and is giving medical training that he has tuberculosis, late 20s, tragic and obviously in that they really no way to treat it and thought that a horseback ride in texas which was the ultimate destination of olmsteds second journey so he is along for the ride. I invited my brother that i knew wasnt going to come and you know, basically said i have a life. [laughter] dot weirdly, yes an australian friend but not a close friend was fascinated when i told him what i was doing and had never seen what he called had never seen what he called americas outbreaks. And a beer slapping, backslapping beer swilling type and a small, thick glasses, cerebral, wonderful guy, latenight tv personality in australia. John stuart. A similar sense of humor and i was a little worried about him and he appears and Companies Need from new orleans across louisiana, part of texas, i hope provides comic relief in john just commentary, killing him with heavy food. I love it but wont tell the end of this story. I want to talk about how to strike a balance to clean entertaining and funny stories in the comic relief that you and the people you need, how do you strike a balance with the things they say . Perpetuating stereotypes and coming up with one note flat characters . Just my personal thing, life is hard and the president enough that im always looking for the last was one could combine seriousness of purpose in dealing with big issues with levity of tone when appropriate. I hope readers will be entertained when educated. That is just my general approach. When i sit down to write, there is always a kind of tone i try to balance in that respect and as to your other question about a kind of tricky are one, as a nonsoutherner approaching the south. I have a historian friend with a wonderful phrase talking about all these northerners in the 19th century up to the present day going on southern safaris where the sultry, exotic south filled with all these strange creatures and proceeding olmstead there is a tradition of that and he makes fun of it. He is a hardheaded guy who makes fun of that and i certainly dont want to add to that. Yes, the south if we are going to generalize is a wonderfully colorful region and you meet wonderful characters and great talkers. I like to think one can write about that, perpetuating stereotypes. Other than one that i think is genuine, several, but one that comes to mind, just a general genealogy, new england where i am not from originally, a lot of cranky yankees, 12 years now i live in a very small community. I will be walking down the sidewalk in winter and so is coming the other way from 100 yards away and will avert their eyes. When i come south i have 2 adjusts, make eye contact, and acknowledge other human beings and i find myself saying yes, maam, no, sir. All of that that i think is genuine that makes it so much easier for me as a writer because a lot of what i do is wandering around assaulting strangers and saying help me out and because people acknowledge each other it gives you a little more andre. I know i have drifted far from your question. You perfectly segued into me letting loose this genial audience. I have plenty of questions and you do as well after our discussion. If you do have a question let us know so the mics come to you and give us a second. Anybody have a question for tony horwitz . The gentleman over here. I know that your friend andrew is not a friend of Southern Food and nor was Frederick Olmsted. Fred complains quite humorously, not that he is a food snob exactly but pork, what he regarded as very bad coffee was what he was being offered basically at every meal for months and it got old. And he writes quite amusingly about that. I enjoy your wifes books too. So the y. A pulitzer family. My wife is geraldine brooks, historical novelist and won a Pulitzer Prize for a novel about a civil war hero, march and our lives have been so interconnected, not just as spouses but as writers. We met in journalism school. We shared a computer and it is only recently that she kicked me out to the barn behind our house to get a little distance that we are not literally working in the same room. I would say it is very different now that she writes fiction because she began as a journalist and wrote some nonfiction books and she went to the dark side and started making stuff up. So i feel she is still a tremendous help to me because we edit each others work and she feels tremendously useful to me but i have never written fiction, not intentionally so i can read and work and say this works for me or this doesnt or i make this character stronger but dont know how to fix anything. It is pretty great. We have some quite complementary styles. I had to write a lot about landscape and to be honest, i am a Little Nature impaired in my writing. I struggle to identify plants and describe it physically. Geraldine was really helpful, shes great at that, you need to bring the landscape alive. I may be a little more of a dialogue and action guy in my writing and history and i like to think maybe i help her a little bit in those areas of her writing. I like that. That is something you are very honest about that you are not flora and fonda. I will say olmsted greatly improved me in that regard, spending a couple years with him on the road so i came home with all these great ideas how to improve untamed farmstead in massachusetts. My best idea is i should never mow it again because the great Frederick Olmsted hated lawnmowers and manicured lawns. That didnt go over too well but i am better. Olmsteads travels. Obviously 150 years later, what kind of differences did you encounter during your travels compared to when he went through the south. What were the things that changed him and what didnt change . Big topic, 400 pages, hard to boil down. On the landscape, he would be appalled by what we have done to our landscape. There is a phrase that colleagues had for him, that he was long hidden meaning he always looked far into the future to distant effect so that he would see, if we dont plan this carefully there will be no green space in this city, he saw where a landscape and American Society itself was headed and was a great planner and as he is traveling to the south he cast a critical eye on what he called mushroom development, these towns that were springing up along the mississippi or in texas with no real planning or any consideration other than economic, no aesthetic consideration. It was painful, some of the places he most loved, bluegrass, kentucky, he writes about it at length, one of his favorite landscapes and it is still quite beautiful but is covered in tract housing and bigbox malls and real lack of planning and suburbs generally, a real pioneer of suburban development and he saw them as sort of new england like villages each of them distinct from each other and linked to the city and said to say the more typical model was a suburb today, a cookiecutter development that often is noted off from the urban center by freeways so that was one take away. I can talk about many others. Was the union army able to use any of the information in his books and such . Interesting question. The civil war breaks out and olmsted is working in central park but like many northerners he recently shattered his leg in a carriage accident and is a little old to enlist anyway. He wants to be in the navy but cant do it so his first desire is to run an agency for slaves, at that point early in the war are fleeing, freeing themselves and that didnt yet exist and he becomes head of the Us Sanitary Commission which was kind of soldiers, medical relief kind of red cross type agency and is quite brilliant at it but was known that they were not interested anywhere in washington in what he feels are all his insights about slavery and he is very intent on giving assistance to freed slaves, this is not going to be an easy process, one reason he was not an abolitionist earlier. Has a great line in a piece of his writing, simply removing the bullet does not necessarily repair the wound that he recognized this was going to be a very hard process and innocence he foresaw the failure of reconstruction. He testified before various commissions, was strongly in support of enlisting black soldiers. He had some influence on the basis of his southern writing during the war but certainly not to the degree that he would have liked. You seem like you can talk to anybody and have a positive view of life but i wonder if you found any reason for optimism in talking with people, any Common Ground . I think it is a time not to be optimistic. I wonder how you ended. It is hard to generalize about 1000 encounters over two years across the region depending where you draw the lines, 100 million people, i am a bit wary of generalizing. On the worrisome side i was channeling olmsted, echoes of the 1850s, extreme polarization in the way we demonize those we dont agree with in a government that seems paralyzed by its divisions and unable to deal with serious issues, general loss of faith and institutions. I saw a lot of that which could make the not so optimistic. In a more positive frame i do think americans on an individual level are more different than they are in the craziness of social media or viewing each other through the prism of fox or msnbc. If you are the guy at the next barstool or visiting their church or their home or their workplace, i am very conspicuously northern journalist we could sit and discuss our differences in a very civil way and lower the temperature on that. We all need to do that but i think our media which i have long been a proud part and our political discourse exaggerates our differences at times. I guess i came away less pessimistic on that note. I could mention other areas particularly young people as it concerns race in the south and for instance the whole debate about monuments etc. Which i looked at a lot, sort of watching as i was following a different story this time. I was struck by how younger people are much less invested in the confederacy and its symbols and the whole debate and really wants to move on in a way that older generations were marinated in this and imprisoned by it in some way depending on where you are. I dont mean to suggest the south is a monolith but i felt there was a lot of change their. Any sense for how he maintained his anonymity . Im assuming his accent gave him away but was there a cover story . Olmstead traveling undercover and how he did it, he is a little core in his writing, i was trying to figure that out. He was very good at certainly not standing out and he writes at one point there was nothing first approached that would distinguish him from a southern gentleman, reasonably well dressed, very good at mimicking southern manners and speech. He was a farmer, could talk about agriculture, a veteran rider so he had a capacity to sit in. There were instances where he was carrying a letter of introduction but he often just seems to present himself as a traveler and sometimes he relates dialogue and he will say new york and new yorker and he will have fun with that, the differences between north and south in their manner and how inquisitive southerners are, sometimes it annoys him. And in texas, couldnt get him to say a bad thing about texas. Earlier in the day, has a lot of fun with these differences. Sometimes he was genuinely undercover and other times it was more, not a journalist, just a northern traveler if that answers the question. One more question. You find differences in texas from the rest of the south when you were there . Did he find texas being different from the rest of the south as well . The question is about texas . Many people wouldnt regard texas as even part of the south. In his day it absolutely was. The future of the south, it was settled overwhelmingly by people coming from other Southern States and if you look at the 4 instance when Southern States seceded and they explained themselves and those documents, causes for secession texas is proconfederate as any, stating bluntly that we believe slavery should last forever. Texas in a rather selfconscious way, 50 or so years later tried to recast itself more in the way we still see it, stereotypically as cowboy culture and all of that. Today it is such a diverse state and it is growing rapidly and changing so rapidly. In eastern texas, that i would say remains very southern in dialect, diet, racial dynamics, ways good and bad you feel you are in the south. Texans actually debate where does the south end in texas . Huntsville, ends in huntsville. If you were in south texas where it is heavily hispanic or west or north texas in the oil fields the southern this is much more attenuated. It is a tricky one to defined. A little like florida. Northern parts of florida to me feel very southern. The rest of florida which was also a member of the confederacy, geographically clearly in the south, not at all. There is an interesting discussion about what is the south . Likewise that can be in parts of southern ohio or indiana that feel quite southern. It is a question. I see a number of you have copies of spying on the south an odyssey across the american divide. Tony will be signing them in front but after hearing this delightful conversation you will want to get a copy of this, some of his other books for sale and he will be signing them. Let us thank tony and allison for a wonderful conversation. [applause] thank you both and join us in the lobby. Thank you all very much. [inaudible conversations] the house will be in order. 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