Designing Dixie: Tourism, Memory, and Urban Space in the New South

By Reiko Hillyer

Although many white southerners chose to memorialize the Lost Cause in the aftermath of the Civil War, boosters, entrepreneurs, and architects in southern cities believed that economic development, rather than nostalgia, would foster reconciliation between North and South. In Designing Dixie, Reiko Hillyer shows how these boosters crafted distinctive local pasts designed to promote their economic futures and to attract northern tourists and investors.

Neither romanticizing the Old South nor appealing to Lost Cause ideology, promoters of New South industrialization used urban design to construct particular relationships to each city’s southern, slaveholding, and Confederate pasts. Drawing on the approaches of cultural history, landscape studies, and the history of memory, Hillyer shows how the southern tourist destinations of St. Augustine, Richmond, and Atlanta deployed historical imagery to attract northern investment. St. Augustine’s Spanish Renaissance Revival resorts muted the town’s Confederate past and linked northern investment in the city to the tradition of imperial expansion. Richmond boasted its colonial and Revolutionary heritage, depicting its industrial development as an outgrowth of national destiny. Atlanta’s use of northern architectural language displaced the southern identity of the city and substituted a narrative of long-standing allegiance to a modern industrial order. With its emphases on alternative southern pasts, architectural design, tourism, and political economy, Designing Dixie significantly revises our understandings of both southern historical memory and post–Civil War sectional reconciliation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Release date: Dec 29, 2014
• ISBN: 9780813936710

Book preview

The American South Series

Elizabeth R. Varon, Editor

Designing

Dixie

TOURISM, MEMORY,

AND URBAN SPACE IN

THE NEW SOUTH

REIKO HILLYER

University of Virginia Press

Charlottesville and London

© 2015 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

First published 2015

ISBN 978-0-8139-3670-3

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress.

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

ONE

Go South: Yankee Travel to the South and the Ruins of Reconstruction

TWO

From Old South to Old Spain: Flagler’s Resort Hotels and Sectional Reconciliation in St. Augustine

THREE

On to Richmond: Richmond and the New Dominion

FOUR

The Chicago of the South: Atlanta and the New South Creed

Conclusion: The Legacies of Southern Hospitality

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

Figure 1.Pierre Havens, Cordova Hotel, c. 1890s

Figure 2.Bird’s-eye view of Alcazar and Cordova hotels from the Ponce de Leon, St. Augustine, c. 1900

Figure 3.Charles Seaver, view of St. Augustine from the Florida House, n.d.

Figure 4.Florida House, St. Augustine, c. 1870s

Figure 5.Stanley Morrow, Hotel San Marco, c. 1882–87

Figure 6.Joseph John Kirkbride, Grand Hotel, Catskill Mountains, New York, c. 1884–91

Figure 7.Ponce de Leon Hotel, St. Augustine, n.d.

Figure 8.Waiters at the Ponce de Leon Hotel

Figure 9.Richmond, Chamber of Commerce building, c. 1910s

Figure 10.Richmond Opportunity, 1915

Figure 11.Hotel Jefferson, c. 1903

Figure 12.William Henry Jackson, rotunda, Jefferson Hotel, c. 1908

Figure 13.Jamestown Tercentennial Exposition, 1907

Figure 14.Kimball House, c. 1870s

Figure 15.W. A. Hemphill residence, Atlanta, 1890

Figure 16.View on Whitehall Street, Atlanta, c. 1895

Figure 17.Candler Building, c. 1910s, Atlanta

Figure 18.English-American Building, Atlanta

Figure 19.Prudential and Equitable buildings, 1907

Acknowledgments

It is difficult to find the words to express the debt that I owe others in the realization of this book. This project began as a doctoral dissertation at Columbia University, where I had the privilege of working with extraordinary teachers and colleagues. Eric Foner indelibly shaped my thinking as a scholar and mentor by challenging me to consider the fluid and fragile nature of human freedom. I thank William Leach for transcending the conventions of academic specialization and for the expansiveness of his imagination. I am grateful to Hillary Ballon and Jeannie Attie for serving on my dissertation committee and offering suggestions on how to strengthen the manuscript for publication.

This project would not have been possible without the help of many generous archivists and librarians. I am indebted to the librarians at the Virginia Historical Society, the Atlanta History Center, the Special Collections at the University of Florida, and the Dibner Library at the Smithsonian Institution. I offer especial thanks for the patience and expertise of Charles Tingley and Robert Nawrocki at the St. Augustine Historical Society. They showed genuine interest in my work and shared the gems of their archives and knowledge. I am also appreciative of the financial support I have received from Columbia University, the Mellon Foundation, and the Baird Foundation at the Smithsonian. Thanks to the Consortium for a Strong Minority Presence at Liberal Arts Colleges, I was lucky enough to be able to work on my dissertation while being nourished by the wonderful students and faculty at Lewis and Clark College and at Colorado College.

I am deeply grateful for those who generously offered comments on earlier iterations of this work in the form of conference papers, in particular, Catherine Cocks. Thank-you to Molly Berger and Leslie Sternlieb for editing my essay, The New South in the Ancient City: Tourism, Flagler’s St. Augustine Hotels, and Sectional Reconciliation, for publication in the Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts 25. The opportunity to write that article, aided by their supportive counsel, was a crucial step in convincing me that this project was possible. Working on that article also put me in the company of wonderful scholars, including Daniel Levinson Wilk, who was extremely generous in sharing his research on hotels with me.

This project rests on the shoulders of countless others. At Columbia, the dissertation workshop Take Two provided hilarity and intellectual camaraderie. In particular, I would like to thank my dear friends Monica Gisolfi and Jeffrey Trask, who have become my family. Their collaboration, support, editing, humor, perspective, and love have sustained me since the beginning of this journey. During my year at Colorado College, I was unexpectedly blessed with the companionship of James Reid and Rick Furtak. Our conversations and karaoke provided essential nourishment that year. The entire History Department at Lewis and Clark College deserves my gratitude for their unwavering support during some challenging times. I am particularly grateful to Andrew Bernstein, who eased me through difficult transitions. His suggestions on my work were indispensible, and his genius for powerful opening sentences is an inspiration. I am also indebted to my colleagues and friends Dawn Odell and Mo Healy, who read various portions of the manuscript and offered exacting and supportive criticism. Members of the women’s history reading group in Portland also commented on sections of this manuscript, and their encouragement and perspective were integral to this project. I am deeply appreciative of anonymous readers at University of Virginia Press whose rigorous and thoughtful comments made this a better book. I extend special gratitude to Dick Holway at the University of Virginia Press for his guidance at every step of the process and for showing such confidence in this project when I needed it most. Robert Burchfield deserves thanks for his careful copyediting. My experiences at the Tepoztlán Institute for the Transnational History of the Americas has provided brilliance and burlesque in equal measure. Thank-you to David Menschel, who offered encouragement and insightful commentary since the earliest stages of this work, and helped me learn how to read landscapes. Thank-you to my siblings, Linda and Jonathan, and to my dear friend Eden Wurmfeld for their interest in this project and their investment in its success. I am grateful that my mother, Kazuko, has always given me the freedom to pursue my heart’s desire. I thank my father, Raphael, for always asking what books I am reading and then reading those books himself. His unquenchable curiosity has been a model for my own. I thank Yuko Ito for her unconditional love and only wish that my Japanese were good enough to explain this project to her. I thank all of my students, past and present, who nourish me every day.

I could not have completed this project without the love and partnership of Elliott Young. Elliott’s activism and intellect have both fed and humbled me in enduring ways. An extraordinary comerade and companion, Elliott has taught me how to cross borders, and has helped me recover both lost files and lost confidence. Elliott’s ability to find thirty-five hours in a day and attain excellence in so many things at once is an inspiration. Zulema has grown up alongside this project, and I am full of thanks for her patience. Elliott and Zulema have allowed me to imagine a world beyond this book, and for that I am eternally grateful.

I have saved my greatest debts for last. Elizabeth Blackmar often had a better understanding of, and more faith in, my project than I. She showed me how to interpret the landscape, and, in so doing, helped me find an intellectual home that engages all the parts of who I am. In short, she has taught me how to see. Finally, I cannot thank my dissertation adviser, Barbara J. Fields, enough. Her insistence on and appreciation for elegance and precision in language, her commitment to the humanity of all historical subjects, and her devotion to justice and beauty have forever moved me to be a better writer, historian, and human being. Though I might presume to count Betsy and Barbara among my dearest friends, they will always be my teachers.

Introduction

At the height of Reconstruction, N. H. Hotchkiss, the traveling agent for the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad, led a group of northern journalists on a typical tour of the defeated South. Hotchkiss believed that if only journalists from the North could be brought face-to-face with their white brethren in the South, sectional hatred would fade away like the mists of the morning.¹ After several weeks of touring battlefields and mineral springs and carousing at lavish meals, the northern journalists were ready to spread their positive impressions about the South. At the excursion’s farewell banquet in Richmond, Virginia, one New York journalist promised his hosts that he would tell his thousands of readers of the warm handclasps he received in the South, and assured that northern investment would follow. He exclaimed, You want our money, our industry, our energy. It is possible that you may have somewhat of each, as the result of our visit to this place.² The Yankees raised their glasses to Virginia governor Gilbert Walker and toasted, We are sprung from the same glorious Anglo-Saxon stock; we speak a common language; we have a thousand common ties. Had we known each other better in the past, they mused, the fields of Virginia would not be drenched with blood, or her hills be covered with the bleaching bones of a patriotic soldiery.³ The toast implied that estrangement between white citizens, not slavery, had been the cause of the Civil War, and suggested that racism and economic development would provide a basis for postwar reconciliation.

The northern visitors, so wooed by their hosts, dismissed reports of terrorism in the region and believed themselves to have been humbugged by rumors of Ku Klux Klan violence. As the orchestra first played Dixie then Yankee-Doodle, wine, camaraderie, hospitality, and business deals consolidated the peace between the northern guests and their southern hosts. One guest claimed that such banquets held a significance of more importance than the Confederate Victory at Chancellorsville, or the triumph of Federal arms at Vicksburg.⁴

The Civil War had constituted a social, economic, and political revolution, and at its end, Americans faced fundamental questions: How should the nation be put back together? Who is a citizen? What does freedom mean? Would former slaves work without coercion? While Radical Republicans deliberated the meaning of democracy, another, more lasting process had begun: as racism, economic depression, and labor unrest eviscerated Republicans’ commitment to Reconstruction and as the South’s Redeemers took swift control of the region’s governments, southern boosters and their northern allies adopted economic progress and white supremacy as the basis of sectional reconciliation.⁵ This agreement required not only burying the emancipationist goals of the Civil War and Reconstruction but also creating a new past that could explain and expedite the radical economic changes of the present.⁶

These radical changes constituted what both boosters and historians refer to as the New South. Though the term began as a propagandistic slogan wielded by business-oriented southern leaders and their northern allies in the decades following the end of Reconstruction, historians have come to use the term New South to refer to a time period (roughly 1877–1913) and to describe a particular shift in the South’s politics, economy, and society. In the New South, the fate of the southern economy was in the hands of northern capitalists—empire builders—who, with the help of a new entrepreneurial leadership class in the South, exploited the South’s raw materials and cheap labor and maintained control of the region’s profits. This period is also distinguished by the rise of Jim Crow legislation and racist violence and their acceptance by the federal government.⁷

Designing Dixie helps to explain how this shift took place by examining how southern entrepreneurs used tourism to lure capital from the North. Progress requires a selective use of the past, and the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century boosters of the New South advertised their interpretations of the past and their aspirations for the future through tourism. This book considers how slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and industrial development have been remembered in the modern South, and examines how selective memory, codified and made tangible through tourism, contributed to the making of the modern South. Tourism and industry were closely entwined in the American South long before tourism became an important industry in its own right in the twentieth century.⁸ In the aftermath of Reconstruction, emerging southern entrepreneurs, acolytes of free enterprise who aspired to become southern captains of industry, believed that rebuilding the South required luring northern tourists. By hosting northern visitors and showing them the advantages of their region, they sought to attract the goodwill and investment needed to make southern economic development possible. For their part, northern capitalists were eager to learn about economic possibilities in the conquered South and restless to take advantage of the South’s promise of abundant raw materials and exploit the cheap labor of both white and black people. In the 1870s, as northern guests and southern hosts agreed to remake the South along the lines of industrial capitalism, southern boosters sought to convince their former enemies that their region was abundant in natural resources and tractable labor, politically and economically stable, and open to development on northern terms. In other words, southern hospitality and white supremacy would heal the wounds of the Civil War and assure the North that the South was open for business. The catechism of progress, not only reactionary retreat, sealed the fate of Reconstruction.

Though many Americans are aware of how the southern economy has boomed since World War II, most would not consider the skyscrapers and office parks of the Sun Belt to be the region’s most distinctive or appealing tourist destinations. Indeed, when one thinks of the tourist South, plantations are more likely to come to mind than pavement. The South’s tourist economy has long cashed in on the appetite for the plantation romance, and historians remain preoccupied with explaining the roots and nature of its appeal. Nina Silber, for example, in her The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865–1900, demonstrates how northerners’ sympathy for the pastoral and aristocratic world of the plantation South reflected their ambivalence about industrialization and facilitated the process of reunion. More recently, Karen L. Cox’s Dreaming of Dixie: How the South Was Created in American Popular Culture argues that northern consumers were instrumental in establishing the image of a romantic, premodern South as a means of soothing their own anxieties about modernity.⁹ Also concerned with the theme of romance and reconciliation is David Blight’s monumental Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Blight argues that northern whites did not only become sympathetic to the myth of the pastoral Old South but that veterans in both blue and gray came to pastoralize the war itself, articulating a sentimental view of military valor on both sides that disregarded the causes of the war. By constructing a narrative of a brothers’ war characterized by mutual sacrifice, Blight argues, Yankees accepted the myth of the Lost Cause and surrendered the promise of emancipation on the altar of reunion.¹⁰ In short, much convincing scholarship has been written about the cultural production that constituted the mythic Old South, helping us not only to look more critically at its origins and implications but also to appreciate northerners’ complicity in its popularity.¹¹

In the aftermath of the Civil War, however, those who took charge of rebuilding the South did not rely solely upon an agrarian landscape of aristocratic leisure or valiant war stories to court the North. Between the end of Reconstruction and World War I, southern boosters, with the help of northern testifiers, attempted to rewrite the past in ways that would promote both sectional reconciliation and economic development. In the decades after the Civil War, winning Yankee sympathy and economic progress required boasting smokestacks rather than white pillars. If, as we have come to realize, the Old South was nothing more than a fairy tale, it was not the only tale that was told in the New South.

My analysis of how southern capitalists strategically selected and emphasized various regional pasts to attract and facilitate northern investment provides fresh insight into the curious relationship between the myth of the Old South and the development of the New South. As C. Vann Woodward explained the advance of the New South, the bitter mixture of recantation and heresy could never have been swallowed so readily had it not been dissolved in the syrup of romanticism.¹² But concentrating solely on the romanticization of the Old South obscures a full view of public memory in the New South, risks reproducing the same stereotypes that scholars seek to challenge, and contributes to an erasure of southern industrialization. Scholars in the fields of anthropology, geography, literature, and public history have provided an essential corrective by exposing how white cultural producers, from the late nineteenth century to the present day, have whitewashed the history of slavery, particularly in the context of tourism.¹³ However, these exposés stop short of addressing how some white southerners in the modern South not only evaded the history of slavery but also eschewed the plantation myth altogether.

In contrast to other scholars, I suggest that after the Civil War, southern promoters did not attract northern visitors simply by depicting their region as a bucolic Old South.¹⁴ It is true that the leaders of the New South created the myth of the Old South in part to burnish [their] claim to antiquity.¹⁵ In Natchez, for example, garden club women claimed that in their town, the Old South Still Lives, and, significantly, created this image by omitting the city’s entrepreneurial history. The historian David Goldfield has suggested that the New South marched forward to modernity, while looking to the past for its inspiration and guidance.¹⁶ However, the Old South idyll was not always a safe instrument for attracting former enemies, nor was it the only past available to the promoters of the New South. To assume it was flattens out regional variation and mutes local dialects. Examining several different New Souths, we arrive at a broader picture that highlights the distinctiveness and historicity of the plantation myth. While New South boosters developed a repertoire of stock promises—of natural resources for profit, openness to capitalist development, social stability and cheap labor, and a version of history that made the present seem natural and inevitable—southern boosters in different places created distinctive images depending on the particularities of their local histories and landscapes. To fully understand how southern leaders used historical memory to serve the New South, then, one must look at how southern boosters created usable historical pasts in locally varying ways.

Therefore, rather than emphasize the movement to promote the mythic Old South or Civil War battlefields as tourist attractions, as other scholars have successfully done, this book focuses on destinations that had a more ambiguous, even evasive relationship to the Confederate past. To be sure, there were cities, such as Natchez, Charleston, and Savannah, that attracted tourists with their associations to the colonial and antebellum heritage of the Old South.¹⁷ The appeal of these cities was precisely their purported insulation from industrial development, their distinctiveness from the North, and their evocations of a pastoral, aristocratic past.¹⁸ New Orleans might also come to mind as a quintessential southern tourist city, but, as Anthony J. Stanonis has shown, for most of the nineteenth century, outsiders regarded New Orleans as unremarkable except for its reputation as a immoral cesspool whose vice districts were its most popular destination. Stanonis shows that local business leaders were concerned that the image of the city as being in a perpetual state of Bacchanalia would deter investors, and that by the interwar years, the Chamber of Commerce worked vigorously to construct and promote a modern, efficient city. It was not until the late 1920s that boosters began to seize upon the image of New Orleans as a leisurely, exotic oasis to attract vacationers. In Stanonis’s analysis of New Orleans, the development of commerce and industry was distinct from the development of a tourist economy, and, like Charleston and Natchez, the city’s main allure eventually became its claim as a site of Old World romance untouched by modernization.¹⁹

But looking at other southern cities equally popular with tourists allows us to appreciate the multiple strategies southern boosters used to attract northerners and the multiple Souths that constituted the New South. This book examines three New South destinations—St. Augustine, Florida; Richmond, Virginia; and Atlanta, Georgia—and analyzes how civic leaders, boosters, and architects edited, ignored, or revised their past and etched the result onto the New South landscape in order to attract northern visitors and investors. In the first decades of the New South, St. Augustine’s Spanish Renaissance Revival resorts muted the town’s recent Confederate past and linked northern investment in the city to the tradition of European imperial expansion. Richmond boasted its colonial and Revolutionary heritage, depicting its industrial development as an outgrowth of its original destiny rather than as a departure from the past. Atlanta’s identification as a frontier town and its use of northern architectural language displaced the southern identity of Atlanta and substituted a narrative of long-standing allegiance to a modern industrialism. These cities were both representative of and exceptions to their respective states: St. Augustine was Florida’s first major tourist destination and helped to secure the state’s Spanish rather than southern image; Richmond drew upon Virginia’s role in the American Revolution to eclipse the city’s associations with the Confederacy and, in emphasizing its industrial prowess, distinguished itself from the pastoral image of Virginia as a whole; Atlanta differentiated itself from the Old South by touting its wartime destruction as an opportunity to remake itself in the image of the North. Each of these three cities fashioned a particular relationship to its southern, slaveholding, and Confederate past and put forward a history that could appeal to northern visitors and assure northerners of the region’s stability and loyalty to the new order. Far from perpetuating a moonlight and magnolias image for northern consumption, these cities distinguished themselves by rejecting the plantation past to highlight their openness to the future. By World War I, through guidebooks, promotional pamphlets, and architecture, these cities succeeded in promoting an image of a modern South in step with Yankee entrepreneurialism.

Urban boosterism was not unique to the South. Throughout the United States, but especially in the West, hucksters throughout the nineteenth century made extravagant claims about their towns to encourage investment and settlement and to increase real estate values. The practice of humbuggery was so prevalent that even promoters lampooned their own activities; in the midst of one land boom in California, one real estate office issued a circular that read: boom! boom! boom! The newest town out! Balderdash! Watch for it! . . . To accommodate the inquisitive who are afraid to invest without inspecting the property a fast balloon line will be started in the near future. Parties will be permitted to return on the superb toboggan slide to be built in the sweet bye and bye.²⁰ But in the American South, where boosters attempted to lure visitors and migrants not just to uncharted virgin land but to long-established places inhabited by former enemies and stunted by a backward labor system, promoters had the burden of dispelling prejudices and reinventing their region’s image.²¹ Edwin L. Godkin, the northern journalist and founder of the Nation magazine, captured the concerns of northerners when he declared, The conversion of the southern whites to the ways and ideas of what is called the industrial stage in social progress, which is really what has to be done to make the South peaceful, is not a more formidable task than that which the anti-slavery men had before them fifty years ago. Believing that the American South differed as much from the North as Ireland does, or Hungary, or Turkey, Godkin expressed the skepticism and sense of superiority of his fellow northerners and the South’s need to abandon the shibboleths of an earlier era.²²

Evangelists of the South’s new industrialism took many forms. The most well known of these New South publicists were Henry Watterson, of the Louisville Courier-Journal; Walter Hines Page, a journalist from North Carolina; Henry Grady, of Atlanta; Richard H. Edmonds, of the Manufacturer’s Record; and Daniel A. Tompkins, an engineer of North Carolina. These figures were joined by countless southern guidebook authors, entrepreneurs, politicians, local historians, and chambers of commerce. Southern boosters found collaborators among railroad companies and travel agents as well as northern capitalists, journalists, reformers, and transplants, who testified to the economic opportunities in the South with equal fervor. In other words, not all of those who boosted the South were southern, but all such voices cheered the untapped bounties in the South and linked economic development to cheap, unorganized labor. To borrow from a historian of postbellum Florida, whether he or she was a Democrat, Republican, Wall Street financier, or state guidebook writer, the [booster’s] emphasis was on low wages, high profits, and white domination.²³

Focusing on the output and outlook of boosters means that I am relying on sources that are by nature hyperbolic—sources that, in the words of a nineteenth-century observer of boosterism, sometimes represented things that had not yet gone through the formality of taking place.²⁴ But by drawing upon promotional materials, I do not take their puffery at face value. Instead, my purpose is to examine how the discourse of economic progress came to shape the tourist landscape of the South, and how boosters reinterpreted, represented, and reshaped the southern past in service of an entrepreneurial future. If much of the rhetoric of New South boosters is more hortatory than descriptive, the triumph of industrial capitalism on the ashes of Reconstruction reminds us that such rhetoric was as prophetic as it was wishful.

Regardless of whether the pristine, leisurely world of the Old South had ever existed to the extent alleged by southern propagandists, the New South’s embrace of industrialism and laissez-faire capitalism was a dramatic departure from the Old South.²⁵ The businessman replaced the planter as the region’s guiding light, and the pecuniary replaced the paternalistic as its dominant ethos.²⁶ Across the South, coalitions of business leaders from the North and South championed the construction of mines and factories and heralded the resulting expansion of the commercial economy. Railroads, financed largely by northern and foreign capital, cut through the southern landscape, their mileage increasing in the South at a rate faster than the rest of the nation.²⁷ By 1900, the South had developed hundreds of textile mills, led the world in coal production, and had become a major producer of iron, steel, turpentine, and lumber. Cities such as Atlanta, Birmingham, Nashville, and Charlotte rose to prominence throughout the New South; during the 1880s, the rate of urban growth in the South was almost twice that of the national average.²⁸ Southern cities competed with each other for investment with hyperbolic claims about their future promise.

The changes of the New South transformed labor relations as well as economic outlook. Denied property of their own or recognition of the common rights that had made a semisubsistence way of life possible, and burdened by the pressure to grow more cash crops instead of food, large numbers of landless freedpeople and white farmers began to work other men’s land as sharecroppers and tenants, or flooded southern cities to sell their labor for wages. Despite the ballyhooed commercial growth of the South, the region remained impoverished; most of its industries were extractive, and most of their profits landed in the hands of northern firms; and its surfeit of cheap labor ensured low wages.²⁹ During this jarring social and cultural transformation, white southerners created a myth of the Old South: to raise the self-esteem of humiliated ex-Confederates, to appeal to northern consumers, to provide a psychological balm to ease and justify the transition from Old South to New, or conversely, to criticize the New South.³⁰

Perhaps because historians have been intrigued by the persistence of the Old South myth and its power to justify the demise of Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow, they imply that southern promoters relied exclusively on the Old South for the South’s public image. Such scholars argue that the alleged heroism of the Lost Cause brought former enemies together, suggesting that exoticism, restfulness, and the stable hierarchy of plantation life provided a soothing refuge from the chaos and class conflict of the industrializing North.³¹ Other historians have argued that the general efflorescence of interest in history and tourism to historical sites in this era was a conservative reaction to the social and economic upheavals of the Gilded Age.³² Following that logic, northerners’ sympathy with the South, manifested and strengthened through tourism, was an expression of antimodernism, antimaterialism, and anticommercialism. Such interpretations conclude that tourism during and after the Reconstruction period established a peaceable and mutually beneficial social relationship between former enemies, and that a sentimental discourse—reunion from the heart, not the pocketbook—was paramount.³³

But, as I illustrate, reconciliation was not solely based on sentimentality, nostalgia, or romance, but on hard-nosed economic calculations. And, the development and dissemination of historical memory in the South during this period, like tourism itself, was neither a simple reaction against nor a mere escape from the commercialism of the era. When elite northern visitors met with southern hosts, money, industry, and enterprise were as important as war stories and mint juleps. And indeed, boosters explicitly appealed to the pocketbooks of their visitors. Both northern capitalists and southern boosters considered northern travel to the South a vehicle for introducing industrial expansion to an undeveloped, defeated region. For the recently conquered South—a region that northerners considered traitorous and backward—to win money and political leniency from the North, southern promoters attempted to change northern capitalists’ perceptions of the South and strove to convey an impression of economic progress in their home states. Southern leaders promised not just fulfilling experiences but lucrative ones.

Historians of the New South, beginning with C. Vann Woodward, have written about the dramatic transformations in the political economy of the region. These historians demonstrate that the fate of the southern economy was in the hands of northern capitalists who, with the help of a new entrepreneurial leadership class in the South, exploited the South’s raw materials and cheap labor and maintained control of the region’s profits. As a result, the South became a colony of the North and became increasingly poor and underdeveloped in comparison to the North.³⁴ More recently, historians of memory and cultural historians of the Reconstruction and New South periods, interested in examining what some have termed reunion culture, have suggested that sectional reconciliation was based on sentimentality and selective memory. Further, they imply that this culture’s insulation from the bald materialism of the era was the key to its appeal.³⁵ In addition, historians of tourism, while recognizing that the tourism industry has been an engine of modern industrial capitalism, generally argue that the motives and experiences of tourists—self-actualization, edification, and escape—served as an antidote to the capitalist economies in which tourists lived. Though tourists were full participants in the development of consumer capitalism, many historians suggest that tourists were nonetheless duped into thinking that manufactured destinations offer an authentic world untainted by capitalism.³⁶

This book reinterprets the framework established by this