Destination Dixie: Tourism & Southern History ed. by Karen L. Cox (review)

Since the end of the Civil War, southerners found a commodity as equally appealing to sell as their crops: their culture. Winter-weary northern tourists, eager for a reprieve, ventured to the South looking for the exotic, for an escape from the drudgery and repetition of industrial life, and maybe to learn about the nation’s history. But how truthful was the history that these visitors were absorbing, and what do these lessons underscore about the region? Destination Dixie’s thirteen essays seek to use tourism as a lens to “probe questions of southern identity—how it is shaped, interpreted, and presented for public consumption” (11). Editor Karen L. Cox chooses to divide the work into four thematic sections. Essays in the first and final sections concentrate on the commemoration of historic figures and landmarks. Sandwiched in between are six works; one examines the preservation of Yorktown while five others illustrate how southern attractions have interpreted the legacy of the Civil War and civil rights.

Many essays stand out in this engaging collection. John Walker Davis and Jennifer Lynn Gross, in “Calhoun County, Alabama: Confederate Iron Furnaces and the Remaking of History,” examine a little known festival known as Ohatcheefest. In the small rural Alabama city of Ohatchee, locals honor the creation of a Confederate iron furnace, built by slaves and destroyed before it produced even an ounce of iron, two facts lost on sponsors of the event. Reeking of “the good ole days” of the antebellum past, organizers produce two reenactments of a nearby Civil War skirmish, the Battle of Ten Islands (212). Although the Union won the battle quickly, organizers let the Confederates win one of the staged battles “in the spirit of fairness” (215). Ostensibly to educate, events like Ohatcheefest illustrate the perpetuity and resiliency of the Old South myth. Not all of the works, though, show such a static history.

The major strength of most of these works is in their analysis of the complexity and sometimes tortured reality faced by boosters of these attractions as they attempt to procure tourists in a new racial reality. In “‘Is It Okay to Talk about Slaves?’ Segregating the Past in Historic Charleston,” Ethan J. Kytle and Blain Roberts offer a compelling look at how tour guides in Charleston, South Carolina, have historically whitewashed the city’s past, in many cases purposefully neglecting any real mention of slavery in order to portray the city as one of Southern belles and mint juleps. In “History as Tourist Bait: Inventing Somerset Place State Historic Site, 1939–1969,” Alisa Y. Harrison discusses how first private groups and then the state of North Carolina attempted to preserve a plantation as an embodiment of a grand antebellum past devoid of any slavery conflicts. In these two attractions, like many described in the book, recent accusations of racism forced the sites to focus more on black life, but that comes at a cost; most visitors do not arrive looking for a nuanced version of history. Destination Dixie explains how Southern heritage sites are trying to create at least a veneer of racial inclusion without upsetting visitors looking for an idealic American past; it is not an easy fit.

Although a strong work and a definite contribution to the understanding of Southern identity, the collection does have one weakness. While the opportunity to tour battlefields and the former playgrounds of the famous draws tourists in droves, these sites collectively pale in comparison to the popularity of the region’s biggest attraction: its beaches. It would be interesting to examine what coastal locales reflect about southern identity and if the experiences there mirror those at historic sites. How have these tourist communities coped with the evolving role of race, and what do the lessons taught there reflect about culture? Are the coastal attractions quintessentially southern or something else? This one suggestion is only a minor complaint to an otherwise very strong collection...