The Democrats Atlanta: A City of Changing Slogans

By Calvin Trillin Calvin Trillin began his career in 1960 as a TIME correspondent in Atlanta. He has written twelve books, including If You Can''t Say Something Nice, Killings and Alice, Let''s Eat.

I spent a year in the Gate City to the South, which was then still known to some as the Dogwood City, around the time it was trying to become the City Too Busy to Hate. That's the way people in Atlanta might think of it, and that's the way I think of it. We share a weakness for slogans. This was at the beginning of the '60s, and I was a reporter covering the civil rights story. Those who traveled the South back then -- reporters or regional auditors or salesmen with the Southeast territory -- came to roost at the end of the week in Atlanta precisely because it was the Gate City to the South: we needed the airport. They used to say that someone who died in the South might go to heaven, but he'd have to change planes in Atlanta.

Even in those days, when Atlanta's stature was based on the access it afforded to places like Valdosta and Meridian and Demopolis, it had what you might call international aspirations. When I was in the company of civic boosters, they would begin by telling me about how many FORTUNE 500 companies were represented in the city and how much higher in altitude and more westerly in longitude it was than anyone might have imagined -- anyone, they must have meant, who had never met an Atlanta booster. Then, if there was a lull in the conversation, they would sometimes say, "You know, Atlanta is the fourth target on the Kremlin's map of nuclear destruction."

I usually found myself stuck for a reply. It was difficult enough to conjure up the picture of Soviet generals -- hefty, beetle-browed men in bulky overcoats -- leaning over a map while the Air Marshal for Nuclear War Contingency Planning says, "Then we'll get Atlanta and take out all the Southeastern branch offices in one swoop." Even if that were the Russians' plan, how would Atlanta people know about it? A Chamber of Commerce mole in the Kremlin? Even if they knew about it, why would they boast about it? Who wants to be up toward the front in a queue awaiting annihilation?

Sooner or later, I realized that Atlanta, which has always been preoccupied with its image, can view almost any event as just another opportunity to shine. Even General Sherman's burning of Atlanta has been a matter of pride, central to the saga of a great city rising from the ashes, although Sherman did not exactly "burn Atlanta." He did destroy whatever was of value to the Confederate war effort, but, according to Franklin Garrett, the city's official historian, Atlanta suffered less damage during the war than Columbia, S.C., or Richmond, Va. When was the last time you heard anything about Columbia, S.C., rising from the ashes?

Although the City Too Busy to Hate is a motto associated with the beginning of Atlanta's desegregation, the sentiment it expressed -- what I always thought of as Babbittry over Bigotry -- has been a dominating sentiment at least since 1886, when Henry Grady, one of the founding fathers of Atlanta boosterism, expressed his dreams for a New South. When I lived there, the tension built into its attempt to become the City Too Busy to Hate was apparent. Although what it had to sell was its connection to the South, its national ambitions called for a constant struggle to escape the South -- particularly the South's reputation for being backward and racist. In those days, the struggle did not always go well. A lot of Atlanta's residents were not, in fact, too busy to hate. Occasionally, they even found the time to toss dynamite in the direction of some of the people they hated.

Now, a quarter-century later, Atlanta, it is said, has finally shaken off the dust of Georgia. What had been Forrest Street -- named for General Nathan Bedford Forrest, Grand Wizard of the original Ku Klux Klan -- is now named in memory of Ralph McGill, the anti-racist newspaperman who was once derided as Rastus McGill by people who now speak reverentially of his contribution to the community. The city's best-known monument is not a statue to the Confederate fallen but the grave of Martin Luther King Jr. The civil rights activists who once used Atlanta's airports to travel the South, organizing the struggle, are now in City Hall: these days, they travel the world, organizing high-rise office building projects.

Atlanta now has the standard characteristics of a national city. Travelers arriving in its vast, ultra-modern airport are guided on what seems like an almost endless journey toward the outside world by a disembodied voice that speaks standard American English -- the Southern woman who recorded it having been instructed to purge her speech of any cornpone connotations. It can match just about any Northern city in the splendor of its high-rises or the poverty of those who are sometimes spoken of as living "in the shadow of the buildings." The white residents of most of its neighborhoods have fled to suburban counties, where they prefer traffic jams to participation in an underground transportation system that could bring black people out their way. When all is said and done, Atlanta's economy still has a lot to do with Atlanta's access to places like Valdosta and Meridian and Demopolis -- I have heard the city described as "a bunch of buildings and stuff next to the Atlanta airport" -- but I suspect no one has called it Gate City to the South for years.

In the South of the Gate City era, after all, a city's commercial health was measured in how many years had passed since it built an office building. Every time I return to Atlanta these days, an entire new neighborhood has been forested with high-rises. Twenty years ago, the Hyatt Regency, the prototype for the new boffo-lobby hotels that were in fashion for a while, was a tourist * attraction, drawing sightseers to look at its 23-story atrium and its glass elevators that went, as they said at the time, "clean through the roof" to a revolving restaurant in a giant blue dome. The Hyatt Regency became the symbol of the city, in the tradition of New York's Empire State Building and San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge -- so much so that people who wanted to commit suicide in a showy way started diving from its upper floors into the lobby. Today the Hyatt Regency can't even be seen from most parts of downtown. It's dwarfed by higher buildings. There is no longer much point in diving into its lobby.

As a national city, Atlanta is now so removed from the rest of the state that you sometimes hear talk of "two Georgias" -- meaning modern prosperous Atlanta and backward, impoverished everything else. Atlanta is free at last. The traces of a Georgia town -- a big Georgia town, but still a Georgia town -- are gradually disappearing, as the suburban office parks fill up with Yankees. Even people who sound like they might be from Georgia seem to be disappearing. Atlanta magazine ran a story called The Vanishing Southerner -- a character who can be heard, as he fades away, grumbling that all the places that used to serve barbecue have been turned into places that serve sun-dried tomatoes.

In Atlanta, as in a lot of other national cities, the large commercial institutions have passed from the hands of home-grown proprietors into the hands of itinerant managers. The middle-management hordes in the suburban office parks don't seem to have much to do with the city of Atlanta; some of them have hardly ever been there. Doug Marlette, the editorial cartoonist of the Atlanta Constitution, has been one of those lamenting the gentrification and homogenization and suburbanization of the city. In his comic strip, Kudzu, Marlette sums up what is happening in one evocative word: Bubbacide.

What seems to be troubling the people who are concerned about Bubbacide is not a nostalgia for watery greens as a main course or for men wearing sheets; it's that they think there is nothing to replace what used to feel like Georgia. They wonder whether the point of being liberated from the South really was to live in someplace that isn't anywhere at all. Late in the evening, after a few drinks, they are likely to say that Atlanta has no soul. I asked the novelist Pat Conroy, who lives there, why there is no modern novel that portrays Atlanta in the way that The Moviegoer and A Confederacy of Dunces portray New Orleans. "It's hard to write 400 pages about white bread," he said.

If Atlanta does have a soul, some people think, it is the soul of black folks. When it comes to the black experience in this country, Atlanta has been a national city for a very long time -- not just the headquarters of the movement but a center of black education and place where black people amassed capital early on and developed a solid and prosperous middle class. Atlanta didn't make its progress in race relations because of any blissful absence of bigotry -- it has always had its full share of violent racism -- but because an organized and resourceful black community constantly pushed a white leadership that was at least pragmatic. Now it is said to be a land of opportunity for black managers -- who, during the day, mix easily with whites. It also has a huge black underclass reflected in a poverty rate that is the second highest of any American core city. When I lived in Atlanta, at the height of the struggle, the interests of poor black people and well-off black people seemed identical. To some extent, their interests still coincide. But a poor black person living in a crumbling slum may have good reason to feel that triumphs of well-off black people have nothing to do with his life. The well- off black people, after all, have their own suburbs.

I don't suppose a lot of white people in Atlanta spend much time talking about its underclass or its soul. They talk about what a splendid place it is to live and about how many people have dug in their heels when faced with transfer to the office parks and new suburbs of some other city. They find Atlanta relatively free of the dreaded insects of Southern summers (because it is higher in altitude than anyone might imagine) and conveniently located (because it is more westerly in longitude than anyone might imagine).

The boosters still talk about such advantages. But, with the Democratic Convention finally about to bring what they see as certification of Atlanta as a national city, they also have the next stage to worry about: becoming an international city. Actually, there was a period about ten years ago when Atlanta featured as its motto the World's Next Great City, but, an advertising man who had to work with the motto told me, "it had a credibility problem. If you told someone in some place like New York that Atlanta was the World's Next Great City, he'd say, 'Hey, gimme a break.' " Now it is said that reality has caught up to the motto.

"Atlanta's now a great city in one way only," Pat Conroy wrote in a letter to the Constitution last fall. "It's a fabulous city for business." The business statistics tossed off now are not about branch offices but about facilities of foreign companies. The airport is spoken of not as simply a place to catch a plane to Meridian but as a place to catch a plane to London. In the dreams of the boosters, the final certification of international-city status will come when Atlanta, which has the American designation in the competition for host city of the 1996 Olympic Games, emerges as the International Olympic Committee's choice. Then everyone will come and see that Atlanta is indeed the World's Next Great City.

That slogan presumably can't be featured a second time, though. In fact, Atlanta hasn't actually settled on a slogan for its next stage. In a Wall Street Journal piece last winter, John Helyar suggested that in the spirit of New York as the Big Apple and New Orleans as the Big Easy, Atlanta might be known as the Big Hustle, but the suggestion was not received warmly. The Chamber is temporarily using the slogan of the Convention and Visitors Bureau: "Look at Atlanta Now." It emphasizes the contemporary partly because a remarkable number of visitors, presumably oblivious to the century of hustling that has gone into transforming Atlanta into a modern national city, persist in envisioning it as it existed in Margaret Mitchell's antebellum fantasies: they stand in the shadow of Atlanta's great office towers and ask to see Tara. "Look at Atlanta Now" may be replaced in time, but there are no obvious candidates. "The Business of America is Business" has, of course, already been used.