re: #47 Nyet

Cotton?

Yeah, amongst other products. The climate in the agrarian south lent itself to cash crops that required large amounts of unskilled manual labor. That, couple with patterns of settlement - the South was colonized during a wave of Scots-Irish borderlander immigration. These immigrants were poor, formerly the debt-peons of the “lairds” in their homelands, and brought with them the burning anger from that socioeconomic system.

Like many abused, they mostly wanted to turn the system upside-down, with themselves on the top as the abusers. Which they did. They also brought with them the hair-trigger violence and outsized emphasis on “personal honor” from the Old Country, which you see in the parking lots around cheap-ass roadhouse bars across the Deep South, where the descendants of these immigrants batter each other with Lucky Lager bottles over minor slights to the mudflaps on Ford pickup trucks.