5.03 - The Republic of Cotton

"Young Texas in Repose" available online from Yale University Library. 

When they hosted the Texas Centennial Exposition in 1936, Dallas boosters had good reason to rename their football stadium and associated bowl game based on a bad pun. The "Cotton Bowl" was a nod to the unmatched roll that "King Cotton" had played in shaping the demographics and politics of Texas, where it constituted as much as 90% of the output of the state for parts of the nineteenth century. But it’s a legacy that Texans have become increasingly uncomfortable with in recent decades, favoring the image of the cowboy and cattle drives. There is something far more romantic about a man on a horse than a man with a hoe…particularly when that man with the hoe is enslaved.