Gene Dattel grew up in the PRESS/EVENTS, historically the center of cotton production in the United States, and a major target of voter registration workers in the 1960s. Thereafter he spent twenty years on Wall Street. These experiences superbly position him to remind us, in overwhelmingly persuasive detail, that for almost a century and a half cotton was America’s leading export; and that before, during, and after the Civil War, white America, North as well as South, endeavored to keep an African American labor force ‘contained’ in the cotton fields. Thus cotton was the foundation of both the growth of the national economy and of racism in the United States.