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Book Review
| Super-Scenic Motorway: A Blue Ridge Parkway History. By Anne Mitchell Whisnant. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. xviii + 434 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. Cloth $34.95.
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| Every magazine in the Southeast includes an annual travel story about the beautiful Blue Ridge Parkway, a scenic highway that stretches from the Shenandoah National Park in Virginia to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in North Carolina. These effusive articles inevitably refer to a triumphant past, when "proud, but poor" mountain men received needed jobs to build the 469 miles of mountaintop road under President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. Anne Mitchell Whisnant dispels this comfortable mythology by untangling the complex political jockeying over the fifty-two years that it took to construct the Parkway. "Its creation required the arbitration of many significant disputes over substantial issues across boundaries of power," she writes (p. 4). |
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Whisnant describes how the Parkway grew out of early twentieth century state and national park movements as well as the organized pressure for good roads. Because an early proposal took the elongated park through Tennessee, pressure from tourism developers in Asheville as well as the North Carolina state highway commission courted the federal agencies involved. R. Getty Browning, chief locating engineer for the state, lobbied influential people, sent photos and personal mementos to federal representatives, and promoted the project as a panacea for the region's ailing economy. The resulting Parkway, while "stunningly beautiful," in Whisnant's words, minimally benefited small farmers because of the wide swath of land taken, the limited access, and the exclusion of commercial traffic. |
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After fifteen years of exhaustive research, Whisnant commands an impressive analysis of how individual resort developers along the route, such as Heriot Clarkson of Little Switzerland and Hugh Morton of Grandfather Mountain, manipulated the Parkway rules and location for their own gain. Whisnant also uncovers the complex politics of the Eastern Band of Cherokees, which initially opposed the Parkway and ultimately rerouted it. Her best work can be seen in this careful and methodical understanding of private and public motivations, rinsed clear of the veneer of democratic or environmental mythmaking. She joins Appalachian scholars who have noted the stereotyped interpretations of local culture manufactured by the National Park Service to entertain visitors with a quaint view of history. One visitor to the Johnson Farmhouse won a prize for her photograph of a barefoot woman in a rocker stringing beans from her garden—described by the interpreter as a "woman from yesteryear, still living the traditional lifestyle in her ramshackle house." In truth, the living history participant had a degree in mathematics and worked the rest of the year as a computer programmer (pp. 253–54). |
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Missing from Whisnant's impressive analysis is the environmental impact of a huge construction project on the fragile spruce-fir ecosystem. Rangers there today have to be traffic cops, yet are charged with considerable resource management—they're also game wardens, air pollution experts, and interpreters of local history. But perhaps I complain of the book she didn't write, while this one makes a significant and nuanced contribution to our understanding of how the National Park Service manages to protect scenery and preserve history in a capitalist society. |
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Margaret Lynn Brown is the author of The Wild East: A Biography of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park (Florida, 2001). She lived three summers on the Blue Ridge Parkway and currently teaches at Brevard College. |
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