SOUTH OF CANADIAN, THE land is green, open, rising, and falling: idyllic, Western country. John Wayne and Gary Cooper could easily be out there, were it not for a rash of small circular storage tanks that intrude on a timeless pastoral scene like turds on a well-kept lawn. They are often in groups of three and many are painted black. Some of them sprout pipes and valves. This is Texas, so, of course, they contain oil.
A few miles on, the tanks disappear and the landscape seduces unhindered. This is the range—for me the realization of a vision that comes from The Waltons, the Ponderosa ranch in Bonanza, Oklahoma! and the song “The Surrey with the Fringe on Top,” and, indeed, “Home on the Range.” Once again the sky is blue, the clouds are puffy, and the air is warm. All is so suddenly well that, when I reach a town called Wheeler, I turn the car round and drive back three miles to take photographs in case the landscape changes again farther south.
83 goes straight through Wheeler. I see a grand building, a block away to the right, turn off, and park in front of it. It is roughly the shape and style of Buckingham Palace, though somewhat smaller and faced in part with deep-red brick, with four columns topped by Ionic capitals and a stone pediment. Written across the top in plain, widely spaced letters is WHEELER—COUNTY—COURT—HOUSE. I’ve seen several courthouses in towns along 83. They are always old and imposing. It seems that those early settlers, as soon as they had established even a small community, would set up the basic tools of law and order: a sheriff with deputies and a ramshackle office, a tiny jail, and, perhaps, a wooden courthouse. Then they relaxed, took time, and collected money for the raising of imposing, well-proportioned buildings of brick and stone, with a touch of the castle about them to reassure the law abiding and frighten the criminals.
HALF AN HOUR on I reach Shamrock, where 83 meets the old Route 66—now, unhappily, replaced by Interstate 40 which bypasses the town. Again 83 runs north–south through the town and doubles as Main Street. It’s a hard-boiled, run-down, dusty place with a handful of well-preserved showpiece buildings. At the junction of 83 and the old 66 is a huge and, in some ways, beautiful art deco building that once housed a filling station and a café called the U Drop Inn. This is the place that, back in Swan River, Wilbert Schoenrath, a friend of Stuart’s, told me I must see. It’s now a Visitors’ Bureau, though 1950s gas pumps, of the type immortalized by Edward Hopper, stand pristine under a portico outside. In a back street, a cream-painted wooden bench swings from chains over a wide veranda that fronts a Spanish-style, red-brick building with rounded arches. This is now a museum but was, according to a plaque attached to its front, “The Reynolds Hotel, built by attorney Marion Reynolds” between 1925 and 1928; it “was open for about fifty years and housed many a weary traveler.” Close by is another pristine art deco filling station, complete with pumps that once dispensed Magnolia gasoline. These are handsome buildings, perfectly preserved, but they are closed, no one is around, and there is a deadness about the town, brought about, I’m sure, by regular traffic no longer passing through en route from Chicago to L.A.
WILBERT SCHOENRATH ALSO told me to look out for the “Bonnie and Clyde bridge,” an old metal bridge south of Shamrock where the gangster couple had a spectacular crash.
I find it parallel to a concrete bridge that carries 83. It’s closed for repair but, when open, takes 83’s northbound traffic. It’s a steel-framed truss bridge, similar to the one north of Canadian but a lot shorter, just three trusses instead of twenty-one. I have seen these bridges in films; they used to be out there on country roads, all girders and geometry. To me they evoke both kids fishing in bright sunlight, and bootleggers on dark nights in the Prohibition era; I can imagine the roar and rumble as black whiskey eights driven by the likes of James Cagney and George Raft thunder across.
I look down, and see the Salt Fork of the Red River swirling, orange brown, not far below. On June 10, 1933, Clyde Barrow, driving fast, as he usually did, missed a sign warning that this bridge was being repaired—just as it is today—and shot down the bank into the water. A couple called Pritchard, who lived nearby, saw the accident, rescued him and Bonnie, whose leg was badly burned, and Clyde’s brother Buck—but didn’t recognize them. They took them to their home and called for help. A sheriff and a marshal arrived and were instantly disarmed by Bonnie. Buck Barrow shot the Pritchards’ daughter in the hand while shooting at their car to disable it to prevent pursuit. The trio then drove the two lawmen into Oklahoma, handcuffed them together, and tied them to a tree with barbed wire.
Hollywood made Bonnie and Clyde into heroes or, at least, attractive villains. I saw the film in the late 1960s and was thrilled by a pair of gorgeous, beautifully dressed gangsters (Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty) rebelling against society and the police—and, at a stretch, against the failures of capitalism—during the Great Depression. But, like most Westerns, the film perpetuated—in this case, perhaps, created—a myth. Glamorizing psychotic thieves and murderers can’t be good—and the argument that one person’s glamor is another’s brutal realism doesn’t wash with Bonnie and Clyde because the film blatantly eschews the reality.
I STOP TO look at three fine chestnut horses. They line up and stare at me amiably from the farther side of a ditch filled with rushes. I walk up a grassy track beside their field. They follow slowly, showing mild interest as if my arrival is better than nothing happening at all.
Across the track, to the north, a field is planted with line upon line of plants that stretch up and over a low slope. They are about three feet high with green spiky leaves and red stalks. I can see a few white, pink, and puce flowers, dotted around the field. Cotton! Unobtrusive, tolerably pretty, and probably the most important crop plant in U.S. history, it caused slavery to continue for years longer than it might have otherwise—and was at the root of the American Civil War, in which seven hundred thousand Americans died. Not long after that war Frederick A.P. Barnard, an eminent scientist, chancellor of the University of Mississippi (1856–61), and president of Columbia College, New York (1864–89), wrote:
But for the increased and constantly increasing importance of cotton to the industry of the world, those of the American states which were fitted by soil and climate to the production of this plant would not have become rooted in the belief that compulsory labor was essential to their prosperity. And had it not been for this belief, and for the discordance of views which grew out of it between the cotton-producing states and the other members of the American Union upon matters, both political and moral, of vital importance, the terrible convulsion which has shaken the Union to its center could never have occurred.
Yet to its credit, cotton bolstered the fledgling U.S. economy around the turn of the nineteenth century—at a time when it needed to be bolstered—by responding to a surge in demand from Europe, especially from Britain where the Industrial Revolution was under way. When I learned about that revolution at school, it seemed as if it was caused by Kay’s flying shuttle, Arkwright’s water frame, Hargreaves’s spinning jenny, Crompton’s spinning mule, and Cartwright’s power loom—all inventions that, along with the power provided by Watt’s steam engine, brought the spinning of cotton and the weaving of cloth out of the cottages of English peasants and into factories—which were called cotton mills because, before the steam engine, they were powered, erratically, by mill wheels.
In 1787, the year when delegates from the first thirteen American states met in Philadelphia for the convention at which the U.S. Constitution was to be agreed and written, Britain imported no cotton from the U.S., getting it instead from other sources including its own colonies. Twenty years later, in 1807, it imported 60 percent of its cotton from the U.S. The factories, many of them in Lancashire, close to the port of Liverpool, didn’t just want more cotton; they wanted better quality. Cotton from India, for example, produced 20 percent less yarn than American cotton, and was more difficult to spin. By 1800 America was able to supply what Britain wanted—in part owing to a man called Eli Whitney.
In 1792 Whitney graduated with a mediocre degree from Yale at the age of twenty-eight, the oldest in his class. Unable to get a job in his native Connecticut, he went south to work as a tutor on a cotton plantation in Georgia—and there he watched as slaves spent whole days using only their hands to separate one pound of cotton lint from its seed. Whitney, who liked to tinker with machinery, had soon invented the cotton gin, a simple gadget with which one slave could “clean” fifty pounds of cotton in a day, just by turning a handle. In 1794 he obtained a patent and began to manufacture gins in a factory in New Hampshire. Despite his patent, others copied his machine and some of them improved on it. In the end Whitney made little money, but his invention revolutionized cotton and changed history.
But cotton growing and picking remained extremely labor intensive; the plants needed frequent weeding throughout their six months of growth and every cotton boll had to be picked by hand. There were few white laborers in the U.S. in 1800—most white men outside the cities were proud to be independent farmers, some of them with very small farms. But there were plenty of slaves. In fact, some people thought there were too many. George Washington had four hundred, many of them inherited. Only one-third of them could work in his fields. In Cotton and Race in the Making of America Gene Dattel writes, “Like other slaveholders, Washington was trapped in an economic system. He wanted to dispose of his slaves but abhorred the act of selling them. He and other slaveholders could not find replacements for their slave labor, hence they did nothing.”
The first slaves in what would become the U.S. were brought from Africa to Virginia in 1619. By 1780, 287,000 had been brought across the Atlantic—many of them by British slave traders. The children of slaves were born into slavery, so by 1790 there were seven hundred thousand slaves in the U.S. (out of a total population of 3.9 million)—who, had it not been for the sudden demand for cotton, might well have been freed in the early years of the nineteenth century. In most of the thirteen states that formed the fledgling U.S., slaves worked as house servants and on farms. Only in Virginia and Maryland did vast numbers labor on tobacco plantations, and in South Carolina on rice and indigo plantations.
In 1787 it was conceivable that the U.S. Constitution would mention slavery—and perhaps put in place a plan for its abolition. Several of the delegates in Philadelphia were in favor of abolition, even though many of them, such as the future presidents Washington, Jefferson, and Madison, owned slaves. At that time slavery entailed a moral conflict for many wealthy Americans. On the one hand, they owned slaves. On the other, they disapproved of slavery. Madison called slavery “a deep-rooted abuse,” yet he inherited 108 slaves from his father and owned 130 at his death. Jefferson called slavery “an execrable commerce... this assemblage of horrors” and while drafting the Declaration of Independence in 1776 wrote the immortal words “All men are created equal,” yet he inherited slaves from his father and father-in-law, and over his lifetime owned 650.
The founding fathers’ hesitation seems to have had several sources. One was a fear of what would happen if slaves were suddenly freed. Jefferson feared a race war and believed that emancipation should happen slowly: that first, the conditions in which slaves lived and worked should be improved, and the transatlantic trade abolished. And he thought that freedom, when it came, should be combined with deportation, to Africa or the West Indies.
Another difficulty arose with the large slave owners, often called “the planter elite” and defined as those who owned more than twenty slaves—and used them to work their plantations. The abolitionists accepted that emancipation would happen only with their agreement—and that it wouldn’t be forthcoming.
Third, the point of the convention in Philadelphia was to create a constitution that would unite the thirteen states of the new country and protect the freedoms gained by the War of Independence. That meant an effective government, legitimized by regular elections (many feared anarchy if the existing system, of one vote per state with unanimity required to make decisions, continued), a strong economy, and a federal tax system which would fund investment and an army. Those aims were more important than abolishing slavery. And they knew that some of the delegates from the southern states would walk away from the convention if abolition was on the agenda. And some from the north would walk too; Newport, Rhode Island—home to large numbers of Quakers, many of whom profited from the slave trade—was the principal port of entry for slaves from Africa.
So slavery was not mentioned in the U.S. Constitution. And abolitionists comforted themselves by reasoning that more and more Americans now saw it as an unhelpful embarrassment, that tobacco farming—the biggest user of slave labor—was in decline, and that therefore slavery would soon die a death.
Had it not been for the sudden boom in cotton, they might well have been right. Indeed, slavery was banned in the northern states by 1804, and an act banning the import of slaves was passed in 1807. But, of course, that didn’t end the trade in slaves who were already there, or as yet unborn. In fact, the trade intensified as slaves from the north were sold to cotton planters in the south and in the new, cotton-planting territories—Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas—to which settlers rushed to set up new plantations. Only two of the original thirteen states—Georgia and South Carolina—had the weather for cotton.
The north-to-south trade increased the slaves’ misery: husbands were separated from wives, children from parents and siblings, as many, not all, slave owners took the highest prices they could get while disregarding basic principles of humanity and morality.
After abolition, in 1865, many freed slaves—by then there were four and a half million—continued to work in the cotton fields as sharecroppers; there was little else for them to do. They were still poorly rewarded and treated badly, but not as badly as before, unless they happened to be assaulted or murdered by the Ku Klux Klan, which was founded on Christmas Eve 1865. And they were, in effect, subject to segregation—a system that became law in the southern states in 1896. Not until 1947, when cotton picking at last became widely mechanized, did their lives substantially change. Then, in the wake of World War II, during which Americans had grown used to migration, millions left the land and headed for the cities.
I looked at the cotton in front of me, and imagined it being harvested in a couple of months’ time by a man—probably a white man—listening to music through headphones while driving something large and painted green.