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

Abstract

BOOK RE V IEWS Reiko Hillyer. Designing Dixie: Tourism, Memory, and Urban Space in the New South. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014. ISBN 978-0-8139-36 70-3 Paperback: 280 pages In Designing Dixie: Tourism, Memory, and Urban Space in theNew South, Reiko Hillyer investigates how the built environment in the Southern United States, following Reconstruction, evolved in response to local boosters enticing Northern capitalists and tourists to come to the South. The author's approach focuses on historical memory (or, sometimes rather amnesia), racial relations, and economic development. According to Hillyer, New South boosters sought to promote the potential of their labor and natural resources by portraying that the Reconstructed South was ripe for Northern venture capital and investment, turning a blind eye to Lost Cause proponents and a cold shoulder to antebellum romanticism. The innovation ofHillyer's scholarship is her analysis ofhistorical memory ofthe South in relationship to stereotypes and expectations of social relations and built environment aesthetics by Northerner travelers following the conclusion ofthe Civil War, who came for both leisure and business purposes. The purpose ofDesigning Dixie is to investigate how the Southern economy was transformed by the entrepreneurial capital from the North. Often the bolstering ofNorthern tourists to the South came at the expense of African American liberties, which galvanized Jim Crow discrimination policies that came about with the end of Reconstruction. Southerners wanted to demonstrate to Northern visitors, especiallypotential industrial and commercial capitalists, that African American workers were docile and subservient-and would not cause labor conflicts in comparison to immigrant workers in the urban and industrial Northeast and Midwest. Hillyer's scholarship also helps to fill a gap in contextualizing the formulation ofthe New South identity as expressed in material culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which Tara McPherson misses in Recon68 structing Dixie: Race, Gende1~ and Nostalgia in the Imagined South (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), since McPherson begins where Hillyer ends, in the 1930s. Within the first chapter of Designing Dixie, "Go South: Yankee Travel to the South and Ruins of Reconstruction," Hillyer contextualizes the state ofperceptions between North and South during the 1870s. Northerners viewed the South as having been physically laid waste by the ravages of the Civil War, and socially and politically backwards due to the institution ofslavery that adversely affected the labor market as well as created racial conflict in the post-emancipation era. According to Hillyer,enticing Northerners to come South was challenging. Organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan directed violence both to newly freed slaves and visiting white Northern "carpetbaggers :' Many Southerners, according to the perspective of Northern Yankees, were unrepentant following Appomattox, further fueling Radical Reconstruction policies. Transportation from North to South was also challenging since many Southern railroad lines had been decimated as part ofthe North's strategy for subduing the Confederates. Not until the 1880s had the situation in the South turned around where a tourist from the North could easily venture South and encounter an amicable reception and accommodations; however, even then Southern hospitality often came with the ulterior motive ofeconomic or political gain. The second, third, and fourth chapters ofDesigning Dixie are case studies, with the focus ofeach chapter on St. Augustine, Florida; Richmond, Virginia; and Atlanta, Ge~rgia, respectively . Chapter two, "From Old South to Old Spain: Flagler's Hotels and Sectional Reconciliation in St. Augustine" begins with the story of Henry Flagler's (1830-1913) interest in the Spanish heritage ofthe city. While Flagler was a Northerner by birth, he was enticed to invest in the New South, and did so significantly in Florida due to very cheap real estate prices and its potential for railroad development. This came about following a personal visit to Florida in 1879, following medical advice from Flager's doctor due to his first wife Mary's poor health. Flagler made a return visit to Florida in 1881, as part of his honeymoon with his second wife, Ida. Due to the poor accommodations the Flaglers encountered on their early trips, the experience also became an impetus for establishing resort hotels, which would also be linked to the railroad investments, bringing Northerners to the South for tourism...