Spying on the South: An Odyssey Across the American Divide

by Tony Horwitz

There were echoes in this of Olmsted’s opus, The Cotton Kingdom, which took its title from the infamous boast of a South Carolina senator and planter three years before the Civil War. Defending slavery, James Henry Hammond mocked Northerners as “our factors,” or brokers, in a cotton trade that was indispensable to the national and global economy. “No, you dare not make war on cotton,” he defiantly proclaimed. “No power on earth dares make war upon it. Cotton is king.” At Spindletop, ground zero of the Texas oil industry, and close to the world’s largest concentration of refineries, it was easy to regard oil as an unassailable monarch, too. But even in Texas, oil’s century-long reign was under challenge from the state’s many wind farms and from growing environmental concerns. Rhea acknowledged that the end might be coming.