Southern Bookman

LSU historian Robert Mann's "Kingfish U" tells engrossing story of Huey Long's crushing love for LSU

LSU's band, football team and academic prestige rose under Huey Long's autocratic control of Louisiana during the dark years of the Depression.

After Long's assassination in 1935, the "Ole War Skule's" golden era crashed in scandal, leading to the imprisonment of LSU President James Monroe Smith and other university officials for a range of fraudulent schemes.

The wide-ranging federal and state investigations also led to the conviction of Gov. Richard Leche, for whom the university's law school had been named. His name was abruptly removed from the school's monumental building.

Long as governor and U.S. senator who still controlled the state embraced LSU like a smothering sugar daddy. He lavished money on school buildings, launched a medical school, and outrageously championed the school's band and football team.

LSU professor and noted historian Robert Mann entertainingly tells the story of Long and his proudest achievement in "Kingfish U: Huey Long and LSU," published by LSU Press.

An outlandish political showman, Long took trainloads of LSU students to football games in Nashville and Houston, leading the band on parades through the cities' downtowns. He also enjoyed giving pep talks to the football team, although Coach Biff Jones banned "the Kingfish" from the locker room before Long fired the former Army officer.

Rapidly increasing its student body and constructing new buildings after a move from downtown Baton Rouge to a bucolic new campus that had once been a plantation on the Mississippi River, LSU attracted nationally recognized professors, most prominently Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks, editors of the university's prestigious and ground=breaking Southern Review.

As Mann relates, Long generally kept his hands off academic matters. But he brought his beloved university national comdemnation for attempting to censor the Daily Reveille, the school's student newspaper, after it published a letter criticizing his iron-fisted control of the LSU Board of Supervisors.

Smith's expulsion of seven Reveille journalists brought an investigation by the Southern Association of  Colleges and Secondary Schools. The organization placed LSU on probation, then dropped its investigation when the school affirmed its commitment to academic independence following Long's death.

But Long's meddling with the LSU Law School led to censure by the Association of American Law Schools, a minor part of a ballooning scandal that engulfed the university and Long's machine following his assassination in a hallway of his soaring state Capitol in downtown Baton Rouge.

Mann gives a complete account of the scandals, especially the involvement of Leche, Smith and a number of LSU officials who used LSU material and state funds for personal projects.

Smith, who led the university's flourishing during the Depression and originated the Southern Review, ended up serving six years in the state penitentiary at Angola.

Long, one of the most divisive leaders in American history, gave his poverty-stricken state modern roads, schools and hospitals and propelled a small state university to national prominence.

Mocked by national writers for his clownish behavior and accumulation of power, Long before his death gained a national following for his "share our wealth" programs, which still appear radical.

Mann gives a balanced picture of a politician beloved by Louisiana's long-exploited poor. As Mann details, blacks gained little from his programs.

The book contains wonderful vintage photographs of Long, decked out in three-piece suits and fedoras, acting as chief cheerleader. He's shown with the band and students, or huddling with cronies. One picture shows Smith with several cows; rural students during the Depression could pay for their tuition with livestock or crops.

While Mann praises Long's accomplishments, he presents a disturbing picture of Long's schemes to acquire more power.

Long's flamboyant career was in the end tragic, as Robert Penn Warren mined in his classic novel"All the King's Men."

Warren found in Baton Rouge "a world of a sick yearning for elegance."

Louisiana's dreams of greatness come mixed with corruption and buffoonery.

 

 

 

 

Early days of baseball come alive in Lawrence S. Ritter's "The Glory of Their Times"

Lawrence S. Ritter's "The Glory of Their Times: The Story of the Early Days of Baseball Told by the Men Who Played It" is the former National Pastime's Old Testament or Illiad.

First published in 1966, the book collects first-person interviews of players from the early days of major league baseball, when each small town in America had its own team. The collection has been reprinted several times, the latest in 2010.

Ritter traveled around the country to track down baseball's pioneers from the early 20th century through the Depression era, when baseball was by far the national sport, drawing big crowds and intense interest across the country. 

Players like Rube Marquard, Sam Crawford, Fred Snodgrass, Chief Meyers, Babe Herman, Lefty O'Doul, Goose Goslin, Hank Greenberg and Paul Waner recall their brief years of stardom.

Their stories trace the game's progress from the dead ball era through the rise of the home run. In the early days, pitchers threw spitters and altered baseballs. Scuffed and misshapened balls remained in play.

Powerhouse teams like the New York Giants and Boston Red Sox drew large numbers of fans who were allowed to sit along the foul lines or in the outfield.

Several famous incidents receive repeated attention. Two involved the Giants: Fred Merkle's failure to touch second base in a game against the Chicago Cubs in 1908 that led to the Cubs winning the pennant over the Giants and Fred Snodgrass's dropping a fly ball in the 1912 World Series, a factor in the Red Sox' win over the Giants.

Bill Wambsganns entertainingly explains his unassisted triple play for the Cleveland Indians against the Brooklyn Robins, aka as the Dodgers, in the 1920 World Series.

The Indians won the American League pennant and World Series after the death of popular shortstop Ray Chapman, who died after a pitch struck him in the head. Wambsganns expresses his sorrow over his teammate, the only player who ever died from an injury received during a game.

Mythical heroes like Honus Wagner, John McGraw, Christy Mathewson, Ty Cobb,  Tris Speaker, Babe Ruth, Frank Chance and Joe Tinker keep recurring throughout the book.

"The Glory of Their Times" started the baseball nostalgia movement, leading to the appearance of later classics like Roger Kahn's "The Boys of Summer" and renewed interest in the Negro Leagues.

The book's photos show the old-timers as young men. Their voices sparkle with the energy of an era when baseball and America shared the same story.

 

New biographies give updated evaluations of Martin Luther King Jr., George Orwell

Martin Luther King Jr. and George Orwell both changed the world through language and ideas.

King and Orwell receive fresh evaluations in recently released major biographies.

Jonathan Eig's life of King presents the fullest portrait yet of the slain civil rights leader, according to reviews and articles. Eig was the first King biographer to examine recently released FBI files involving King.

Author D.J. Taylor gives a similar updated evaluation of the author of "1984," "Animal Farm" and classic essays.

Taylor investigated recently released documents for his "New Life" of Orwell, which updates his previous biography of the writer, published in 2003.

Eig, a former Wall Street Journal reporter who wrote acclaimed biographies of Muhammad Ali and Lou Gehrig, told the Guardian that he had access to thousands of FBI documents, which include the agency's recordings of King during extramarital affairs. J. Edgar Hoover's organization attempted to blackmail King with the recordings.

The biography also discloses tha King's often repeated criticism of Malcolm X was based on an inaccurate interview by author Alex Haley and that the two civil rights giants admired each other. The book shows King as more radical than the standard portrayal.

Orwell and King shared a belief in the truthful use of language and the advancement of human freedom.

The two major biographies affirm their continued relevance.

Farewell Martin Amis, prominent British novelist

Martin Amis' death last week at the age of 73 brought a shock of recognition.

I saw the British writer expatriated to the United States as perpetually youthful. In my mind, he had never changed from the brash novelist who shocked the literary world in the late 1980s and early '90s with his novels "Money," "Time's Arrow" and "London Fields."

That Amis was a only year older than me when he died at his home in Lake Worth,  Fla., was a memento mori.

Like his close friend and literary combatant Christopher Hitchens, Amis was a victim of esophageal cancer. All of those cigarettes, alcoholic binges, sarcastic jokes and literary battles took their toll on England's former literary outlaws.

As with Monty Python's comedy, Amis' novels were too smugly British for me. But "Experience," his 2000 memoir, was one of the best books of his generation, and I consumed the literary essays collected in Amis's  "The War Against Cliche" like a plate of fine oysters.

"Experience" warmly praised Amis's father, the lauded novelist Kingsley Amis, and Kingsley's contemporaries Philip Larkin and Saul Bellow. The book also presented a lively account of literary London in the 1970s and 1980s, including Hitchens and other then young stars.

Martin Amis showed a compassionate side with his expression of grief for his murdered cousin, Lucy Partington. Reading his heartbreaking lament for the young woman, I also felt deep sorrow and sense of loss.

Over the years, I read accounts of Amis and his circle in memoirs by Hitchens and noted biographer Claire Tomalin, one of Amis's paramours when they were both young literary celebrities.

Like Hitchens, Amis moved to the United States and proved himself an acute observer of American politics and culture.

A longtime resident of Brooklyn with his second wife, Isabel Fonseca, and children, Amis was a leading figure in the borough's re-emergence.

While I didn't care for Amis' later books, including his last novel "Inside Story," I followed his career when he made news with comments perceived as anti-Islamic and through profiles in The New York Times and other publications.

Amis's death does mark the end of an era, to resort to one of his hated cliches. Amis was one of the few writers who still commanded attention on the international stage.

 

 

 

 

 

Michael Schulman's "Oscar Wars" gives history of Hollywood through Academy Awards

Big stars. Monumental deals. Gossip, intrigue, betrayal, sex, politics, racism, memorable performances.

Michael Schulman's "Oscar Wars: A History of Hollywood in Gold, Sweat and Tears" like one of those 1950s movie extravaganzas builds excitement with an all-star cast and amazing stories, engagingly told.

Schulman writes with dramatic power, propelled by the magnetism of Hollywood stars and creators ranging from Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks to Bette Davis, Gloria Swanson, Olivia de Havilland and her estranged sister Joan Fontaine to Hattie McDaniel, Dalton Trumbo, Harvey Weinstein, Steven Spielberg, Kirk Douglas, Jack Nicholson, Gwyneth Paltrow, Barry Jenkins and many others.

The New Yorker writer traces the history of the American movies through selected Academy Awards ceremonies through the years that he sees as especially significant.

From the awards' shows origins - shockingly a creation of MGM mogul Louis B. Mayer - through the Will Smith slap of Chris Rock, Schulman examines the fierce personality conflicts, media campaigns and controversies behind the Oscars.

The book details how Weinstein changed the movie landscape with his relentless Oscar campaigns for movies produced by his upstart company Miramax. Schulman also renders an appalling litany of Weinstein's sexual assaults against female actresses and Miramax staff members.

In another impressive display of reporting and writing, Schulman gives a comprehensive account of how the Best Picture Academy Award was at first mistakenly given to "La La Land" instead of "Moonlight" in 2017. Schulman uncovers the confusion, duplicity, human frailty and magnanimity surrounding the shocking mix-up.

"La La Land" producer Jordan Horowitz after wrongly receiving the Oscar gracefully announced that "Moonlight" was the real winner, allowing Jenkins' study of a black gay child growing up in a Miami ghetto to receive recognition before the TV broadcast ended.

"Oscar Wars" gives a comprehensive account of how the Academy Awards' declining popularity matches the movies' fall from their cultural dominance in the 1930s and 1940s to increasing irrelevance.

While streaming and the decline of box office audiences present a new threat, Schulman affirms Hollywood's resilience,  surviving the talkies, the Depression, television and right-wing and left-wing attacks.

"Oscar Wars" in its wealth of details, captivating stories and glowing personalities unveils a bigger theme: that Hollywood's history is also that of America.

 

Semicolon wars of Robert Caro, Robert Gottlieb blaze in documentary "Turn Every Page"

American history lovers anxiously await Robert Caro's completion of his monumental Lyndon Johnson biography.

At 86, Caro painstakingly works on the fifth volume of his life of Johnson, covering how the president's escalation of the Vietnam War wrecked his progressive administration.

Earlier volumes recounted Johnson's rise from Texas Hill Country poverty, his ironclad control of the U.S. Senate and his humiliating turn as John F. Kennedy's vice president before Kennedy's assassination in Dallas thrust Johnson into the White House.

The burning question of whether Caro will finish his work is a central theme of the documentary "Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb," available for streaming on Prime Video.

Gottlieb, the New York publishing titan, has edited Caro's ambitious work for 50 years, beginning with Caro's "The Power Broker," his exhaustive account of New York City Public Works executive Robert Moses' transformation of the city during the 20th century.

Produced by Gottlieb's daughter, Lizzie, the documentary looks at Caro and Gobblieb's contentious working relationship, in which they have fiercely battled over manuscript cuts and grammatical questions such as the proper use of semicolons.

The film, whose title comes from advice Caro's first managing editor gave him when he was a young investigative reporter for Newsday, shows the two Roberts' advancement from young men into aged literary lions still editing typewritten pages word by word and line by line with old-fashioned No. 2 pencils.

Caro, who still completes his pages with a typewriter after initially writing longhand on a legal pad, was reluctant to participate in the film, and remains skittish about Lizzie peering too closely into his working techniques.

Visibly aging during the film's five-year completion, Caroslowly reveals details such as how he persuaded Lyndon's brother, Sam, to express the truth about their harsh relationship with their father, demolishing sunny myths about their childhoods.

The author also tells how he tracked down an aged Johnson operative who reveals to Caro how he fixed Johnson's initial election to the U.S. Senate in 1949.

Gottlieb, the 91-year-old former chief of Simon & Schuster and Knoph, comes across as arrogant and self-satisfied. In a visit to the Strand Bookstore, the still spry Gottlieb shows his grandson the cornucopia of books he's edited.

Luminaries like superagent Lynn Nesbit, New Yorker editor David Remnick, writer Daniel Mendelsohn, New Yorker "Comma Queen" Mary Norris, actor Ethan Hawke and former President Bill Clinton reflect upon the careers of Caro and Gottlieb.

Caro's wife, Ina, whom Caro met when he was a Princeton student, receives well-deserved recognition. Ina has contributed to Caro's books as his sole researcher through the years.

Gottlieb's wife, the former Broadway star Maria Tucci, fondly recounts Gottlieb's personality quirks. She admits her dislike of his bizarre extensive collection of women's plastic handbags.

Caro insists that an editorial meeting between him and Gottlieb be shown without sound. 

At the end of the movie, they sit side by side, peering over Caro's typewritten manuscript, making changes with pencils, their voices unheard.

Perhaps one day Caro lovers will read those pages.

 

 

Returning to Philip Larkin's "The Trees"

This is the time of year when I return to Philip Larkin's "The Trees."

 

Larkin is a prominent example of a writer of dubious character who wrote wonderful poetry.

 

Like T.S. Eliot, Larkin expressed appalling anti-semitic, misogynistic and racist views. A number of his poems display a world-weary cynicism, etched with acidic humor.

 

But poems like "The Trees" reveal that Larkin's negative personality traits covered an exquisite sensitivity to beauty.

 

When my birthday approaches each May, I'm called to Larkin's poem, with its promise of renewal.

 

The Trees

 

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too,
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In full grown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

 

Charles Portis receives Library of America recognition

Charles Portis is the latest writer to receive canonization from the Library of America.

The chronicler of American literature has published a volume of Portis' collected works. Edited by Jay Jennings, the book includes Portis' celebrated "True Grit," as well as his lesser known novels "Norwood," "The Dog of the South," "Masters of Atlantis" and "Gringos." The collection also offers a selection of Portis' journalism.

Portis is one of those writers acclaimed by a passionate inner circle of readers. Like Mark Twain, Portis was a comic master who found literary gold in the American South's vernacular. 

The Library of America volume has brought new critical appreciation for Portis' off-beat characters, outlandish plots and droll dialogue. While "True Grit" remains in print, Portis' other work is difficult to find.

Praised by fellow New York Herald-Tribune writer Thomas Wolfe as a new journalism pioneer, Portis stepped away from his post as the newspaper's London correspondent in 1964 and returned to his native Arkansas to write novels. The success of "True Grit," made into two popular movies, stirred Wolfe's admiration.

Portis, who died in 2020 at the age of 86, deserves the wider recognition the Library of America volume will bring as one of his generation's most distinctive writers.

 

 

 

Adam Hochschild in examination of World War I-era political violence sees parallels to today

The United States' brief entry into World War I unleashed four years of extreme political violence and repression.

Author Adam Hochschild looks back on that still shocking era in "American Midnight, The Great War, a Violent Peace and Democracy's Forgotten Crisis."

Hochschild sees the horrifying events of 1917-21 as a precursor to today's political conflicts. As with today, disinformation, fears of immigration, labor unrest, racial violence and censorship fueled turmoil.

President Woodrow Wilson plays a central Shakespearean role in the book, heralding the U.S. entry into the war in 1917 as spreading global democracy and freedom while condoning his administration's suppression of groups painted as un-American.

Wilson's already tarnished reputation is further diminished by Hochschild's exposure of his racism, political rigidity, self-righteousness and authoritarian policies.

Hochschild credits A. Scott Berg's monumental biography of Wilson for his portrait of the president who accepted Great Britain and France's harsh reparations imposed on Germany. Felled by a serious stroke, Wilson also suffered the severe disappointment of the U.S. Senate rejecting his grand ambitions for a League of Nations.

The United States' late intervention into the war to bolster the depleted French and British armies in their war against Germany  triggered the passage of the Espionage Act, which remains in force today, most recently leading to charges against Donald Trump for removing classified White House documents and Jack Teixeira for distributing secret reports over the Internet. Teixeira follows Daniel Ellsberg, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, Julian Assange and Reality Winner among those charged under the act.

After the U.S. entry into World War I, the Espionage Act and related sedition legislation led to widespread arrests of union members and Socialist Party followers. The overwhelmingly nonviolent radicals were sentenced to prison for giving speeches or writing articles opposing the American involvement in the war.

Imprisoned dissenters deemed unpatriotic included Socialist leader Eugene Debs, who had shown surprising political strength in a presidential campaign, and the spellbinding anarchist leader Emma Goldman.

Like a raging fever, the political paranoia and repression rose in a series of waves. After Wilson brought the nation into the war, political violence targeted German citizens and immigrants, many of whom were forced to change their names and sell their businesses.

The Bolshevik Revolution raised to a boiling point irrational fears of a Communist overthrow of the American government, a paranoia stoked by right-wing politicians. The deadly flu epidemic at the end of the war exacerbated tensions.

As the grand finale of the "red summer" of 1919, a series of raids under Wilson Attorney General A. Wilson Palmer, directed by the young J. Edgar Hoover, resulted in massive arrests and efforts to deport hundreds of Eastern European immigrants, many of them Jewish.

Hochschild in one of the memorable character studies that distinguish the book unveils the heroic action of Assistant Labor Secretary Louis E. Post to prevent many of the deportations.

Sadly, Ellis Island, the symbol of American openness to oppressed people from Europe, was used as the makeshift prison for those facing deportation. The anarchist Goldman, after several years in prison for expressing her ideas, was one of those expelled from the country that she had come to love.

In a memorable scene, Hochschild pictures Goldman encountering the young Hoover on a tugboat taking Goldman to the ship that would transport her to the Soviet Union, which she eventually hated because of its totalitarianism. She later traveled to Canada, but never again returned to the United States.

Hochschild's expansive examination of the era encompasses censorship of books and radical publications by the U.S. Postal Service, vigilante attacks against members of the International Workers of the World, whose members were known as "Wobblies," and increasing attacks against blacks, often veterans of the war.

Despite the right wing crackdowns against unions, violent strikes continued in the last years of Wilson's presidency, especially after he'd suffered the debilitating stroke during a courageous cross-country train trip to build support for his League of Nations. Wilson was incapacitated for the last 17 months of his presidency, during which his wife, Edith, carried out his duties.

Wilson's successor, the often maligned Warren G. Harding, is seen by Hochschild as almost heroic in curtailing the excessive violence, although outbreaks kept flaring up.

Harding freed Debs from prison, although he commuted his sentence rather than giving him a full pardon. Barely mentioned are the scandals of Harding's administration, uncovered after he died of a heart attack before completing his term.

Hochschild touches briefly upon the destruction of Tulsa's black business sector by white residents in 1921, and the growth of the Ku Klux Klan through the 1920s.

"American Midnight" ends with a warning that today's political conflicts could accelerate into a repeat of  rhe World War I-era's political violence, if the country's not already at that hour of darkness.

 

Published in the spring of 1925, "Mrs. Dalloway" and "The Great Gatsby" changed English literature

Virginia Woolf's "Mrs. Dalloway" and F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" were both published in the spring of 1925.

Tuesday marked the 98th anniversary of the arrival of Fitzgerald's lyrical novel about the doomed love of Jay Gatsby for Daisy Buchanan. Woolf's book, haunted like Fitzgerald's by World War I, came out in May of that year.

Both books examine social customs of the upper class, assailed by the arrival of new money. While Woolf's British hierarchy is more rigid and tradition-bound than Fitzgerald's, both exhibit a destructive snobbery and sense of impending doom.

Both look at changing sexual relationships as women gain more independence and economic freedom.

"Mrs. Dalloway" is haunted by the dying old world, shattered by the war. "The Great Gatsby" takes place in the new American society of money, sex and celebrity.

Fitzgerald's book is narrated by Nick Carraway, while Woolf employs an omniscient third-person narrator. However, the last chapter of Woolf's book is told from the point of view of Clarissa Dalloway, her voice approaching the stream of consciousness of James Joyce's "Ulysses," published in 1922.

"The Great Gatsby" and "Mrs. Dalloway" share a fresh, inventive language that marked a turning point for English literature, along with another book published in 1925, Ernest Hemingway's short story collection "In Our Time."

Like Nick Carraway and Clarissa Dalloway, Hemingway's Nick Adams is a new, 20th century archetype.

I've imagined the characters of "Mrs. Dalloway" and "The Great Gatsby" attending a huge party together. Imagine their conversations, flirtations, costumes. Perhaps jazz would play, at least if the occasion were hosted by Jay Gatsby.

"Mrs. Dalloway" and "The Great Gatsby" arrived two months apart, literary siblings in a changing world.

Atlanta Beltline creator Ryan Gravel's "Where We Want to Live" presents inspiring urban vision

Intown communities along the Atlanta Beltline's eastside trail now boom with new development, restaurants, supermarkets and young residents walking, biking, and riding scooters along the corridor.

As work moves forward to complete the ambitious project, the original ideals of affordable housing and rail transit linking neighborhoods around the city look more and more elusive.

Ryan Gravel, whose 1999 Georgia Tech master's thesis called for the redevelopment of the abandoned railroad tracks that generated Atlanta's first industrial growth, remains committed to his affordable housing and mass transit goals, as does Atlanta Beltline Inc., the nonprofit developing the trails.

I recently discovered Gravel's 2016 book "Where We Want to Live, Reclaiming Infrastructure for a New Generation of Cities" at the Museum of Design Atlanta, one of the city's little known treasures.

Located on Peachtree Street across from the Woodruff Arts Center, the design museum offers imaginative exhibits such as the current display on hip-hop architecture and a shop full of distinctive books and gifts.

Gravel in the book presents an invaluable history of Atlanta's early days, when several railroad companies built tracks that circled the city, bringing materials to factories that once dominated its economy. Over the years, trucks and highways supplanted rail, and the abandoned tracks turned into overgrown sites of urban squalor.

Giving credit to earlier proposals to redevelop the Beltline, Gravel gives a detailed account of the political process that led to the transformational undertaking. He credits former Atlanta City Council President Cathy Woolard for bringing the plan to reality.

Partially a memoir, "Where We Want to Live" recalls Gravel's visits to other cities, beginning with a sojourn in Paris that inspired his Beltline concept.

Gravel examines projects such as New York City's High Line, Los Angeles' Los Angeles River reclamation, Houston's Bufffalo Bayou Greenway and projects in New Orleans, Detroit and Minneapolis.

While he has pleasant memories of his childhood in an Atlanta suburb, he censures the uncontrolled sprawl of urban areas like Atlanta. He advocates for the development of inner city neighborhoods through reclamation of older infrastructure, such as the Beltline project.

Gravel sees the danger of the Beltline causing "gentrification" and driving out lower-income residents, a process that has accelerated since publication of his book. In a mystifying shortcoming, he here and throughout the book avoids Atlanta's racial history.

Nor does he discuss Atlanta's airport and its importance to Atlanta's economy, or the role played by Delta Air Lines, Coca-Cola and other Fortune 500 companies.

Gravel's call for political action to develop vital city neighborhoods drifts into theoretical generalizations rather than concrete proposals. Conservative politicians will castigate him as a spokesman for city elites over rural voters.

Rail transit, the major proponent of Gravel's original thesis, appears more and more unlikely. The popularity of the trails leaves little room for rail lines, and MARTA has recently turned away from rail to rapid buses.

A proposal to extend MARTA's under-used downtown streetcar line to the Beltline's Ponce City Market is supported by Mayor Andre Dickens, but neighborhood opposition is brewing.

As the Beltline brings a new era to Atlanta, Gravel will be there to fight for his conception's highest ideals.