Back Roads and Better Angels

May 1, 2024
During the height of the COVID-19 lockdown, Barry and his new wife embarked on an ambitious, seven-month-long road trip across the U.S., following the original Lincoln Highway. The Bloomberg opinion columnist uses this sprawling venture to highlight historical patterns and collect diverging viewpoints to form a balanced comparison of past and current affairs. Visiting sites of celebration and tragedy across the country, Barry illustrates how voter suppression, wage disparity, racism, vigilantism, and anti-immigrant fervor have plagued America since its beginning. At each stop, the author asks what lessons in reunification can be adapted for surmounting corresponding issues in the present. Barry is an amiable tour guide, inserting comic interludes and personal commentary to buffer unflinching descriptions of everything from colonization to the Civil War to the pandemic and 2020 election. He cautions that collective memory is distorted by censoring dissenting viewpoints and by promoting sanitized, fabulist accounts. Barry calls for accepting civic responsibility for compromise and coexistence. While Barry's idealism is inspiring, its attainment relies upon history that is still being written, with outcomes unknown.

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May 15, 2024
A journey down a forgotten transcontinental route in search of "the character of the country." "The Lincoln Highway has always been more a vision than a road," writes Barry, a Bloomberg opinion columnist and member of the editorial board covering national affairs. "And like the Mississippi River it crosses, its path was never fixed. It shifted various times in the years following its inception, and it has continued to adapt to the changing landscape around it." The author decided to chase down that vision in 2020, "as Donald Trump's presidential candidacy enthralled conservatives, enraged liberals, and sent both into delirium." Piloting a 25-foot Winnebago, the author and his wife found people with much to say, some defying the expectations of both Democrats and Republicans, some speaking to "the beauty and the brutality of our shared heritage." Though the author is occasionally short on travelogue-standard description, he is a capable reporter and digester of history, with an eye for sidelong stories. For example, he turns up an incident, in which Confederate sympathizers set fire to a Manhattan hotel to avenge Sherman's torching of Atlanta, with an alarmed theater audience shushed by Edwin Booth, the noted Shakespearean actor, whose brother John Wilkes happened to be on hand. Barry found Philip K. Dick's grave in a tiny prairie town, talked to gun rights advocates and eyewitnesses to murder, and, abandoning the Lincoln Highway for a southern route home, looked at the Mexican border and visited the family of the model for pancake icon Aunt Jemima. Tom Zoellner's The National Road does much the same work more fluently and economically, but this is a readable, well-considered work of enterprise journalism all the same. Fans of road trips, blue highways, and backwater Americana will enjoy traveling vicariously with the author.

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