Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 September 2018
From 1931 until 1986, at the annual Texas Prison Rodeo, incarcerated people performed before massive crowds. In this negotiated space, prison officials, audience members, and imprisoned riders welded together a performance of violent range labor with a discourse of social rehabilitation. Responsible for funding all educational and recreational programs for the incarcerated population of Texas, the rodeo purported to save lives even as it risked them. Prisoner-led reforms in the 1960s and 1970s, however, helped expose the failures of Texas's labor regime, stripping the rodeo of its rehabilitative pretenses and contributing to the eventual demise of prison rodeo in Texas.
1 “Item Editor to Cover 88th Prison Rodeo Performance,” The Echo, rodeo edn, Sept. 1959, 2.
2 “30,000 Fan Present at Frist Show,” The Echo, Oct. 1940, 1.
3 See Blue, Ethan, Doing Time in the Depression: Everyday Life in Texas and California Prisons (New York: New York University Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Roth, Mitchel P., Convict Cowboys: The Untold History of the Texas Prison Rodeo (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2016)Google Scholar.
4 Schrift, Melissa, “The Angola Prison Rodeo: Inmate Cowboys and Institutional Tourism,” Ethnology, 43, 4 (Autumn 2004), 331–44, 331CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Also see Bergner, Daniel, God of the Rodeo: The Search for Hope, Faith, and a Six-Second Ride in Louisiana's Angola Prison (New York: Crown, 1998)Google Scholar.
5 Brown, Michelle, The Culture of Punishment: Prison, Society, and Spectacle (New York: NYU Press, 2009), 4Google Scholar. Gould, Mary Rachel, “Discipline and the Performance of Punishment: Welcome to ‘The Wildest Show in the South’,” Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies, 7, 4 (Dec. 2011), 3–31, 1, 12, 15Google Scholar.
6 For histories of the convict leasing system in Texas see Walker, Donald, Penology for Profit: A History of the Texas Prison System, 1867–1912 (College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 1988)Google Scholar; Myers, Martha, Race, Labor and Punishment in the New South (Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press, 1998)Google Scholar; Perkinson, Robert, Texas Tough: The Rise of America's Prison Empire (New York: Picador, 2010)Google Scholar.
7 “Courage,” The Echo, March 1934, 1.
8 Slotkin, Richard, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998), 350Google Scholar.
9 O. J. S. Ellingson, “Greetings,” rodeo program, 1939, 5, Box 1998/038-404, Programs and Related Materials, Texas Prison Rodeo Records, Texas Department of Criminal Justice, Archives and Information Services Division, Texas State Library and Archives Commission. Hereafter TPR records.
10 Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage), 109Google Scholar. Also see Garland, David, Punishment and Modern Society: A Study in Social Theory (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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12 Simmons, Lee, Assignment Huntsville: Memoirs of a Texas Prison Official (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1957), 91Google Scholar.
13 Ibid., 92.
14 After Radical Reconstruction, the Democratic Party worked to keep taxes low and government small. Walker, 172.
15 Perkinson, Texas Tough, 84–85.
16 Blue, Doing Time, 1. Also see Alder, Jeffrey, “Less Crime, More Punishment: Violence, Race, and Criminal Justice in Early Twentieth-Century America,” Journal of American History, 102, 1 (June 2015), 34–46Google Scholar.
17 Simmons, 62.
18 Ibid., 66–67.
19 Blue, 165.
20 Sabo, Don, “Doing Time, Doing Masculinity: Sports and Prison,” in Sabo, Don, Kupers, Terry, and London, Willie, eds., Prison Masculinities (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001), 61–66, 62Google Scholar. Over the past several decades, activists have also introduced more therapeutic theater programs into prisons, teaching self-reflection and bodily control. Shailor, Jonathan, ed., Performing New Lives: Prison Theater (Philadelphia: Jessica Kingsley, 2011), 7Google Scholar; Balfour, Michael, The Use of Drama in the Rehabilitation of Violent Male Offenders (New York: Edwin Mellon Press, 2003)Google Scholar.
21 Simmons, 84.
22 Ibid., viii.
23 Ibid., vi.
24 Lucko, Paul M., “Counteracting Reform: Lee Simmons and the Texas Prison System, 1930–1935,” East Texas Historical Journal, 30, 2 (Oct 1992), 19–29Google Scholar.
25 Simmons, x.
26 Perkinson, Texas Tough, 94.
27 “Old West Lives Again in Big Arena,” The Echo, Sept. 1941, 1–2.
28 “New Rodeo Dates,” The Echo, Sept. 1942, 4.
29 Loring Schuler, Reader's Digest, Nov. 1941, reprinted in The Echo, Nov. 1941, 8.
30 See repeated concerns over audiences’ experience throughout The Echo, Sept. 1937.
31 “Inmates Eagerly Await Opening of Rodeo,” The Echo, Sept. 1940, 2.
32 Perkinson, 172.
33 For a detailed description of the development of this fund see Teagle, Charlotte A., History of Welfare Activities of the Texas Prison Board (Huntsville: Texas Prison Board, 1941)Google Scholar.
34 “The Hidden Value of the Rodeo,” The Echo, Sept. 1941, 4.
35 The Original Texas Prison Rodeo program, 1950, Box 1998/038-404, TPR records.
36 Blue, Doing Time, 10.
37 Photo captions, The Echo, Aug. 1938, 4. Also see Simmons, Assignment Huntsville, 108; Milton Tom Harris, “Spicy Dark Town Jumpin’ Jive,” The Echo, Sept. 1940, 13.
38 “‘Wildest Rodeo’ Is Behind Bars,” Hartford Currant, 23 Nov. 1978, 41A.
39 “Convict Riders Share $1,636 in Prize Money at Big Rodeo,” Ebony 8, 4 (1 Feb. 1953), 44Google Scholar.
40 Rodeo program, 1939, Box 1998/038-404, TPR records.
41 Rodeo program, 1955, Box 1998/038-404, TPR records.
42 See Muhammad, Khalil Gibran, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for a historical analysis of Progressive Era statistics that nurtured an association of blackness with criminality.
43 Blue, 38.
44 Caster, Peter, Prisons, Race, and Masculinity in Twentieth-Century Literature and Film (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2008), 3Google Scholar.
45 “New Rodeo Dates,” The Echo, Sept. 1942, 8.
46 “The Other Rodeo,” The Echo, Sept. 1940, 4.
47 “Goree's All-Girl String Band,” The Echo, Sept. 1940; rodeo program, 1939, Box 1998/038-404, TPR records. For discussions of the lives and portrayal of incarcerated women see LeFlouria, Talitha, Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Freedman, Estelle, “The Prison Lesbian: Race, Class, and the Construction of the Aggressive Female Homosexual, 1915–1965,” Feminist Studies, 22, 2 (Summer 1996), 397–423CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
48 See Perkinson, Texas Tough, 171.
49 Stuart Merritt, “Production for Use,” The Echo, Aug. 1938, 4.
50 “Roy White to Try for First Place in Rodeo,” The Echo, Aug. 1938, 10.
51 Ellingson, “Greetings.”
52 Ibid.
53 Roth, Convict Cowboys, 56–57.
54 “Within Prison Walls Texas’ Wildest Rodeo,” The Sun, 5 Oct. 1941.
55 Brown, The Culture of Punishment, 1.
56 Travis Brumbeau, “Shoe Shop Findings,” The Echo, Sept. 1940, 13.
57 Blue, Doing Time, 176.
58 Billie Burcalow, “Miscellany,” The Echo, Oct. 1940.
59 “45 Annual Texas Prison Rodeo Aim to Advantage Inmates’ Rehabilitation,” The Echo, Sept. 1976.
60 “Voc Ed. to Remain Active during Rodeo,” The Echo, special rodeo edn, 1959, 3. “Notice,” The Echo, special rodeo edn, 1953, 16. In 1951 The Echo announced the transfer of all able-bodied men to the farms to pick cotton, shutting down the shoe shop, tag plant, and textile mill for next 30 days. “Million Dollar Cotton Crop Shuts down Walls Industries,” The Echo, special rodeo edn, 1951, 1; “21st Rodeo Tops All Former Records,” and “Another New Record: Prison's 1952 Cotton Crop Worth 2.3 Million,” The Echo, Nov. 1952, 1.
61 C. C. Springfield, “Underworld Rodeo,” The Echo, Sept. 1946, 1.
62 “Board Unanimously Approves Mr. Ellis’ $4,200,000 Prison Modernization Program,” The Echo, Feb. 1948.
63 Rodeo program, 1948, Box 1998/038-404, TPR records. Ellis's success in raising money for these reforms was due to the prosperity of postwar Texas and Governor Jester's support. Ellis himself delivered 250 speeches in one year to drum up support. Perkinson, Texas Tough, 226–31.
64 Perkinson, 229.
65 Detailed in “Board Unanimously Approves,” 1948. The new form of segregation was thought to protect “rehabilitative” prisoners by isolating non-rehabilitative prisoners.
66 The influence of 1970s drug laws on mass incarceration has been well documented. See Garland, David, The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Alexander, Michelle, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2010)Google Scholar. These policies drew on racially coded “color-blind” campaigns to urge for a reduction in welfare aid. See Lassiter, Mathew, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006)Google Scholar; and Fornter, Michael Javen, The Black Silent Majority: The Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Politics of Punishment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015)Google Scholar. Who should be entitled to welfare was a significant debate of the twentieth century. Klein, Jennifer, in For All These Rights: Business, Labor, and the Shaping of America's Public–Private Welfare State (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, examines the New Deal foundation for these debates in the mixture of public and private welfare policy. The gendered, racialized, and sexualized aspects of these debates are detailed in Gordon's, Linda “Social Insurance and Public Assistance: The Influence of Gender in Welfare Thought in the U.S., 1890–1935,” American Historical Review, 97 (Feb. 1992), 19–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Canaday's, Margot The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
67 “The 18th Annual Prison Rodeo,” Huntsville Item, 29 Sept. 1949, clippings about the rodeo, 1931-19862-1, Box 1998/038-404, TPR records.
68 “Biggest Prison Show on Earth,” c.1948, clippings about the rodeo, 1931-1986-2, Box 1998/038-404, TPR records.
69 “Echoing the Penal Press,” The Echo, special rodeo edn, 1951, 2.
70 Ibid.
71 C. C. Springfield, “The Dang'dest Show on Earth,” American Legion Magazine, reprinted in The Echo, Sept. 1946, 1.
72 “Echoing the Penal Press,” The Echo, special rodeo edn, 1951, 2.
73 “Seen by Thousands Who Attended the Annual Prison Rodeo,” The Echo, Aug. 1938, 4; “Convicts Ride Em,” The Sun, 2 Nov. 1947, FA23. The rodeo was referred to as the fastest and wildest “on earth” by the 1940s, “Rodeo's First Press Day a Huge Success,” The Echo, Nov. 1940, 8.
74 The Original Texas Prison Rodeo program, 1950, clippings about the rodeo, 1931-1986-1, Box 1998/038-404, TPR records.
75 “30th Anniversary,” rodeo program, 1961, Box 1998/038-404, TPR records.
76 Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, 379.
77 “Outlaw vs. Outlaw No Mere Figure of Speech,” The Echo, prison rodeo special edn, Sept. 1956, 1.
78 “The Prison Rodeo … Its Reasons,” The Echo, second special rodeo edn, 1952, 1.
79 “Around the Yard,” The Echo, Sept. 1940, 6;“The Unremembered,” The Echo, second special rodeo edn, 1953, 6.
80 In 1946, advertising director C. C. Springfield bragged that “despite the speed and recklessness of the show, injuries are few and deaths are practically nil.” “Underworld Rodeo,” 1. But death was a possibility. “Few Get Bad Hurts in Rodeo Here,” The Echo, Aug. 1954, 2, stated, “Only one death is recorded in the rodeo's 23-year history. In 1932 a Negro contestant got his foot hung in a stirrup and was kicked in the head by a bucking horse.” Roth, “Convict Cowboys,” 66–67, cites this as the only verifiable death, though prison medical records are difficult to access. Another man was reported to have died from his injuries in 1977. See Peter Applebome, “Last Roundup Feared at Texas Prison Rodeo,” New York Times, 19 March 1987, A18. In 1985, 39 of the 100 cowboys were treated for some kind of injury. Mark Zieman, “At the Prison Rodeo, Texas Outlaws Earn Loot the Hard Way,” Wall Street Journal, 21 Oct. 1985, 1.
81 Springfield, “The Dang'dest.”
82 Lewis Nordyke, “These Convicts Make Fun of Themselves,” Saturday Evening Post, 3 Jan. 1953, 24.
83 Kruse, Kevin, One Nation under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (New York: Basic Books, 2015)Google Scholar.
84 “Kilgore Jaycees Back Ellis Plan,” The Echo, special rodeo edn, 1948, 3. Also see “Prison Reform Battle, Victory,” The Echo, 21 March 1949, 1.
85 “Your Rodeo Dollar,” The Echo, second special rodeo edn, 1953, 8.
86 “Huntsville is Proud of the Accomplishments of Mr. O. B. Ellis, General Manager, and the Texas Prison Board,” and “The 18th Annual Prison Rodeo,” Huntsville Item, 29 Sept. 1949, clippings about the rodeo, 1931-1986-1, Box 1998/038-404, TPR records.
87 The reported numbers of heel-stringing only increased after Simmons's tenure, rising from 174 in the late 1930s to 341 in the mid-1940s, Perkinson, Texas Tough, 215.
88 Ibid., 229.
89 Chase, Robert, “‘Slaves of the State’ Revolt: Southern Prison Labor and the Prisoners’ Rights Movement in Texas, 1945–1980,” in Zieger, Robert, ed., Life and Labor in the New, New South: Essays in Southern Labor History since 1950 (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2012), 177–213, 179CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
90 Rodeo program, 1948, Box 1998/038-404, TPR records.
91 e.m.m., “This Is My home,” The Echo, rodeo edn, Sept. 1959, 2.
92 Chase, 186. Chase notes the costliness of rehabilitative programs in other states, which the rodeo paid for in Texas.
93 Roth, Convict Cowboys, 219–29. Also see “Prison Rodeo Profits Used to Hike Income of Officials,” Houston Post, 27 Dec. 1959, 11; and “Not Right Way to Raise Prison Salaries,” Houston Post, 29 Nov. 1959.
94 Hinton, Elizabeth, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Murakawa, Naomi, The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014)Google Scholar; and Kohler-Hausmann, Julilly, “Guns and Butter: The Welfare State, the Carceral State, and the Politics of Exclusion in the Postwar United States,” Journal of American History, 102, 1 (June 2015), 87–99, 89CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
95 Perkinson, 231–35.
96 Johnson, Lyndon B., “Forward,” in Webb, Walter Prescott, The Texas Rangers: A Century of Frontier Defense, 2nd edn (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1965), ix–xGoogle Scholar.
97 Chase, 187.
98 “Thrills, Chills, and Spills,” The Echo, special rodeo edn, Sept.–Oct. 1964, 3.
99 Kohler-Hausmann, 89. Chase, Robert, “We Are Not Slaves: Rethinking the Rise of Carceral States through the Lens of the Prisoners’ Rights Movement,” Journal of American History, 102, 1 (June 2015), 73–86, 74CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
100 “Rider Applications Now Being Accepted,” The Echo, special rodeo edn, 1959, 2; and “Prison Rodeo Rated with Best, 47 Stiches for Winner,” New York Times, 22 Oct. 1973, 51.
101 “Cowboys at Rodeo All Belong in Prison, and That's Where They Are,” Wall Street Journal, 20 Oct. 1975, 1.
102 Benjamin Lach, “Ride Em Cowboy,” rodeo program, 1980, Box 1998/038-405, TPR records.
103 “Growth of Prison Industry,” The Echo, Jan. 1965, 7.
104 Department of Corrections Administrative Correspondence, Board of Criminal Justice Minutes and Meeting Minutes, March 1944–July 1945, Box 1998/038-8, Texas Department of Criminal Justice, Archives and Information Services Division, Texas State Library and Archives Commission. Also see Kunzel, Regina, Criminal Intimacy: Prison and the Uneven History of American Sexuality (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2008)Google Scholar.
105 Chase, “‘Slaves of the State’ Revolt,” 188.
106 “Rodeo Performers,” rodeo program, 1939, Box 1998/038-404, TPR records.
107 “Leadership Comes Natural for Lala Markovich,” The Echo, Sept.–Oct., 1966, 2. “Hard Money,” rodeo program, 1965, Box 1998/038-404, TPR records. Schrift, “The Angola Prison Rodeo,” 334, also notes how money operates as a key inducement at Angola.
108 Zieman, “At the Prison Rodeo.”
109 “Historical Statistics on Prisoners in State and Federal Institutions, Yearend 1925–86,” US Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, May 1988.
110 See Lamare, James, Texas Politics: Economics, Power, and Policy (St. Paul, MN: West Publishing, 1981)Google Scholar. Originally from Texas Department of Corrections, 1975 Annual Statistical Report (Huntsville: Texas Department of Corrections).
111 Joseph Weshifesky, “Redshirts,” rodeo program, 1980, 16, Box 1998/038-405, TPR records.
112 “Redshirts,” rodeo program, 1979, 21, Box 1998/038-405, TPR records.
113 Rodeo program, 1973, 26, Box 1998/035-405, TPR records.
114 See “Woman Inmate May Take Part in 1938 Rodeo,” The Echo, Aug. 1938, 1.
115 Rodeo program, 1973, 22, Box 1998/038-405, TPR records.
116 “Prison Rodeo,” 51.
117 “We're Going Places,” Huntsville Item, 29 Sept. 1949, clippings about the rodeo, 1931-1986-1, Box 1998/038-404, TPR records.
118 Fred Burke, “The Cowboys,” rodeo program, 1978, Box 1998/038-405, TPR records.
119 “Texas Prison Rodeo,” undated press release, c.1975–79, clippings about the rodeo, 1931-1986-2, Box 1998/038-404, TPR records.
120 Hinton, From the War on Poverty, 65.
121 Chase, “We Are Not Slaves,” 75. Perkinson argues that Ellis's reforms in education, though limited in scope, provided incarcerated men the opportunity to create a prison intelligentsia, providing the center of this movement. See Perkinson, Texas Tough, 224.
122 Chase, “‘Slaves of the State’ Revolt,” 179, 193.
123 See Marquart, James and Crouch, Ben, “Judicial Reform and Prison Control: The Impact of Ruiz v. Estelle on a Texas Penitentiary,” Law and Society Review, 19, 4 (1 Jan. 1985), 557–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a discussion of TDC's failure to implement the changes see Perkinson, 270–87; and Martin, Steve, Texas Prisons: The Walls Came Tumbling Down (Austin: Texas Monthly Press, 1987)Google Scholar.
124 “A Look Back at a Texas Tradition,” Clock Wise, Nov. 1986, clippings about the rodeo, 1931-1986-2, Box 1998/038-404, TPR records.
125 Zieman, “At the Prison Rodeo.” Applebome, “Last Roundup Feared at Texas Prison Rodeo.”
126 Gould, “Discipline,” 24.
