THE SALVATION OF HUMANITY

In 1959, the editor of the Huntsville Item praised the Texas Prison Rodeo as an uplifting, life-altering event for incarcerated men. The article recounted a story of a “rough and tough inmate” leaving the rodeo arena with “tears in his eyes.” The man sobbed, “Until today I thought no one cared if I lived or died.” The applause, however, made him feel as though “things are going to get better for me in the days ahead.” Sure enough, after a conditional pardon, this man was “making good” in the free world. Not only did the rodeo provide convict cowboys with a path to rehabilitation for themselves, the newspaper rejoiced, but also through their selfless cowboy performances imprisoned men ultimately delivered the “salvation of humanity.”Footnote ¹

This deliverance was found in the form of ticket receipts, which were donated to the Educational and Recreational (E & R) Fund to pay for all religious, leisure, and educational activities for the incarcerated population of Texas. Despite the often mocking tone of the spectacle, convict cowboys often found personal fulfillment through the cheers of the crowds at the rodeo. Prison officials and the public, however, used the rodeo to advertise the supposedly redemptive possibilities of an abusive labor regime. In the official narrative crafted through media stories, rodeo programs, and the inmate-written and prison-censored newspaper The Echo, prison officials defined the “salvation of humanity” as economic rehabilitation, self-sustenance, and profitability. At the rodeo, “making good” described a man's ability to earn money and to then feed that money back into the prison system in order to free themselves from taxpayer charity. Goodness did not mean a moral shift in character, but instead the reclaiming of men's labor for society. From the late 1930s until the late 1960s, the Texas Prison Rodeo staged Texas's exploitative and violent labor system as the path to social redemption.

Created in 1931, the rodeo became a Texas tradition for more than fifty years. The first and almost all subsequent rodeos took place within the system's main unit at Huntsville, Texas, referred to as “the Walls.” Within a decade, the rodeo drew upwards of 50,000 spectators over October with sold-out and ever-expanding grandstands. By the 1950s, 100,000 people trekked to the penitentiary every year to sit in the inmate-built stadium, be served by inmate concession sellers, and watch the spectacle of outlaw man against outlaw beast alongside an incarcerated audience.Footnote ²

Previous interpretations of the rodeo, such as Mitchel P. Roth's Convict Cowboys and Ethan Blue's Doing Time in the Depression, read the rodeo as both a straightforward fund-raising mechanism for an otherwise deprived system and an instrument for regulating the prison population.Footnote ³ Blue labels the rodeo, alongside other forms of prison recreation, a “technology of control,” teaching inmates discipline through gendered and racialized codes of sport. Beyond these fundamental aspects of the rodeo, the public came to see the rodeo precisely because it was not entirely controllable. As the story above displays, the spectacle of the rodeo catered to the desire to both celebrate and ridicule incarcerated men, to racialize and sexualize inmates in specific ways, to potentially see their bodies broken, and to pay an admission fee to hear a specific story about the successes of the prison's labor regime and its ability to save men from criminality and sloth.

Other states in the South and the West, from Oklahoma to Louisiana, drew inspiration from Texas and expanded their institutional tourism through rodeos, capitalizing, in anthropologist Melissa Schrift's words, “on the public's fascination with criminality through the spectacle of animalistic inmate others subdued by a progressive penal system.”Footnote ⁴ Over the twentieth century, film, literature, and prison tourism allowed the American public to construct particular narratives about the experience of prison and its potential for reforming social outcasts.Footnote ⁵ In her examination of the still-operating Angola prison rodeo in Louisiana, Mary Rachel Gould argues that prison rodeo creates a “spectacle of discipline.” This latter-day prison rodeo emphasizes inmate inexperience with stock, portraying the punitive pain of a just prison system with only superficial nods to “rehabilitation.” While Angola continues to promote its inexperienced riders as the stars of the “Wildest Show in the South,” Texas's rodeo at first promoted its supposedly experienced cowboys as the authentic products of rangeland prison farms, linking the rodeo directly to prison farm labor and the potential for inmates to produce food, goods, and funds for the prison system as a whole.

These stories were grounded in Texas's place in both the South and the West. In Texas, the prison system enforced ten-hour workdays for inmates on its remote assemblage of cotton plantations and cattle ranches. Built upon the South's plantation labor regime, and disproportionately caging men of color, man and beast alike felt the burn of the Texas sun, the weight of the cotton crop, and the crack of the whip.Footnote ⁶ The rodeo exhibited this southern labor system to the public by framing it as the taming of the “Old West.”Footnote ⁷ Unlike the prison and plantation, sites of carefully maintained control, the imagined frontier was a place of freedom, even lawlessness. Exemplifying Richard Slotkin's foundational notion of “regeneration through violence,” prison rodeoers embodied Americans’ belief in the civilizing abilities of wildness – by touching savagery, men can then choose to return to productive citizenship.Footnote ⁸ The 1939 rodeo program hailed the audience, “It is a love of clean, manly sport together with a benevolent interest in errant mankind that brings you here to witness the only show of its kind in the world.”Footnote ⁹ By attending a wild rodeo, audience members could assure themselves they were actually investing in civilization as their admission fares paid for vocational classes, eyeglasses, and baseball bats. Since the nineteenth century, American penitentiaries had attempted to inspire behavioral changes through bodily penitence, especially labor, increasingly hiding the violence of correction behind penitentiary walls.Footnote ¹⁰ Yet the rodeo, far from hiding the violent labor of incarceration, provided a thrilling spectacle of brutality which could redeem men previously lost to society by allowing them to “make crime pay.”

Rodeo mimicked the “breaking” of a wild horse into a productive working animal by ranch hands, allegedly saving the animal from uselessness and making it into a productive instrument of labor.Footnote ¹¹ This prison rodeo purported to use a socially sanctioned form of violence to help break bad men of bad habits, providing funding for them to learn how to be economically productive citizens through the programs offered by Texas's E & R Fund. Between the early 1930s and the late 1960s, prison officials, audience members, and imprisoned people used the Texas Prison Rodeo to transform the violence of prison life into a narrative of social uplift.

Founded during the Great Depression, when administrators were seeking to find new ways to sustain an impoverished system of destitute men, the rodeo provided a new source of economic support. As the rodeo matured during the early Cold War, prison officials sutured their own plans for system modernization, meaning self-sustenance, to this celebration of violence, exposing how prison officials used cultural performances to depict exploitative violence as self-salvation to a paying audience. By the mid-1960s, however, the tone of the rodeo had changed. Introducing new forms of racialized and sexualized spectacle and increasingly emphasizing the individual, the rodeo at first enjoyed several years of sustained popularity, only to see a slow decline of interest. Through the 1970s and early 1980s, the prisoner rights’ movement began exposing prison labor as a system of horrific abuse and not a transformative process turning men from criminals into contributing citizens. The rodeo ended amid its own inability to tell a tale of social salvation. In reality, instead of redeeming men and the prison system into self-supporting entities, the rodeo consistently displayed incarcerated men, and at times women, as dehumanized objects of violence.

VIOLENCE AND PRODUCTIVITY

Lee Simmons, general manager of the Texas Prison System from 1930 to 1935, saw himself as a hardworking man, a fair-minded patriarch, and a true Texas cowboy. Having grown up on an East Texas farm, Simmons had had a lifelong obsession with rodeo since the day he sold his first pig to buy a saddle.Footnote ¹² At age seventy, Simmons boasted in his memoir, he broke a horse his farmhands had “spoiled.”Footnote ¹³ Pitching and bucking, the horse threw him twice. “I just naturally had to bust him to show him who was who.” He “crawled back on the critter” and “I busted him. I rode him. I rode him good and proper.” Bruised and sore, Simmons reveled in the knowledge that through his “one-man, one-armed rodeo,” he had redeemed an animal and rendered it profitable again. As the general manager of the Texas Prison System in the 1930s, an era defined by both financial desperation and local resistance to a burgeoning national welfare state, Simmons applied this same logic to the incarcerated population, seeking to make them profitable through the violence of the rodeo arena with the creation of “Texas's Fastest and Wildest Rodeo.”

After the Civil War, Texas's prison population grew steadily as people freed from slavery were increasingly imprisoned. By the 1870s, the state had begun leasing incarcerated men out to companies in order to save the expense of their upkeep.Footnote ¹⁴ Described by historian Robert Perkinson as “the most corrupt and murderous penal regime in American history,” convict leasing allowed predominantly African American groups of low-level offenders to be leased for railroad construction, mining, and iron smelting. They experienced dangerous and squalid conditions as companies cut costs by depriving men of adequate food, clothing, or medical attention. Inmates were sexually and physically abused by their keepers, with little oversight by the state.Footnote ¹⁵ By the early twentieth century, a combined lack of profitability, union complaints about unfair labor competition, and Progressive reformers’ concerns about the inhumanity of this system convinced state leaders to put their incarcerated population to work on state-owned prison land. For the next century, imprisoned people in Texas farmed sugarcane, picked cotton, and raised livestock for the state.

The idea for the rodeo emerged as part of a larger 1920s reform effort. After decades of scandal about prison living conditions on prison farms, the public began expressing concern for the well-being of inmates, especially as environmental factors overtook biological explanations for crime.Footnote ¹⁶ In the late 1920s, the prison management system restructured itself with the introduction of a nine-person Prison Board, of which Simmons was a member. When he became general manager in 1930 he had the care of 4,868 incarcerated people, more than 70,000 acres of land, and thirteen separate prison units.Footnote ¹⁷ Describing the state of the system upon his arrival, Simmons commented that “the conditions which confronted me were appalling,” lamenting that “the slave camps of olden times could not have been more unsanitary.”Footnote ¹⁸ The economic insecurity that millions of Texans encountered during the Great Depression simultaneously increased the inmate population and decreased the money available to the prison. Simmons worked to address living conditions at the Walls by installing additional toilets and showers, expanding the gardens to foster better nutrition, and encouraging a range of recreational activities. Men on the farms rarely benefited from these changes.

Far from wanting to promote leisure, Simmons used sport to enforce what historian Ethan Blue has called “key features of labor discipline.”Footnote ¹⁹ Simmons, and his eventual athletic and recreational director Albert Moore, provided inmates a place to express aggression, perform masculinity, and even assert national belonging. Masculinity scholars like Don Sabo have demonstrated how sports in prison help men “sustain sanity in an insane place” and provide inmates with important tools to craft self-identity.Footnote ²⁰ These activities provided incentives for good behavior alongside brutal punishments like whippings and starvation. While Moore worked to create diverse recreational opportunities for inmates, from boxing matches to minstrel shows, Simmons focussed on the idea of a rodeo: “that was ‘our’ rodeo, his and mine.”Footnote ²¹

1930s reforms focussed mainly on enforcing labor, not reducing it, and, for Simmons, reforming erring men did not differ much from reforming an errant horse: violence was key. Simmons portrayed himself as a man who did not tolerate guff from anyone, whether his children or the inmates in his prisons. In his memoir, he acknowledged the growing antiviolence sentiment in penology, saying, “I do not belittle the methods of correction advocated by the modern sciences, and I have made use of them, but I am a firm believer nonetheless in corporal punishment – in the home, in the schoolroom, in the reformatory, in the penitentiary.” While “sympathy and tender care” were praiseworthy traits for a patriarch, “the rod is needed.”Footnote ²² Faced with five thousand people imprisoned in a dysfunctional system, Simmons rationalized, “I had to make it perfectly clear to everybody that I could and would discipline them.”Footnote ²³ For Simmons, good horses and good men earned their own keep.

Violence was the bedrock of Simmons's leadership style. As Paul Lucko has argued, despite his well-crafted public persona as a benevolent and even reform-minded leader, much of Simmons's efforts worked against the reforms he was supposed to represent.Footnote ²⁴ When legislators sought to ban the use of the “bat,” a leather strap four inches wide and two feet long, Simmons compared this whip to spurs for the legislative committee: “you don't have to use the spurs, because all [the horse] needs is to know that the spurs are there.”Footnote ²⁵ Concerned about strikes and escapes, Simmons urged the spurs, supporting the use of devices like “the Horse.” Consisting of a beveled piece of wood affixed horizontally to vertical supports, inmates would be forced straddle “the horse” in excruciating pain for hours with their feet dangling.Footnote ²⁶ Simmons's logic in leading the prison system provided the guiding narrative of the rodeo: violence forged social good.

From the beginning, organizers and participants sought to create a rodeo that surpassed all others in terms of sheer excitement. The first rodeo, held in 1931, boasted about a dozen inmate riders for the viewing pleasure of employees, their families, and an unexpected crowd of two hundred townspeople. Under Simmons, who oversaw the system until 1935, the rodeo featured events similar to those of mainstream rodeos, including roping, racing, and riding, often promoting their cowboys as experienced range hands.

Yet the intensity of the events set them apart from mainstream rodeos. The Mad Scramble, for instance, featured ten chutes swinging open at once, releasing ten brahma bulls with outlaw riders on their backs. “Cheering crowds rise to their feet” as each bull battles to unseat an incarcerated cowboy. The bulls, products of the correctional system's vast agricultural holdings, demonstrated the “lust to kill” in their “fiendish gyrations.” These animals used “every ounce of brutal energy within their mountainous hulks to unseat their riders.”Footnote ²⁷ Described as a contest “designed to make the blood turn to ice,” this moment of madness was used to “awaken the fans to the fact that this is a real rodeo.”Footnote ²⁸ While other rodeos banned such events as “too neck-breaking,” the media cheered as “Huntsville's bad men eat it up.”Footnote ²⁹ Broken inmate bodies demonstrated the authenticity of this “real rodeo” and made the show “worth the money.”Footnote ³⁰

Indeed, as the crowds grew over the first decade of the rodeo's existence, rodeo officials replaced standard rodeo competitions with rougher contests. Incarcerated clowns raced chariots harnessed to brahma bulls and cowboys rode in washtubs strapped to bucking broncos’ backs. Inmate writers found pride in their ability to garner public praise: “Without the least bit of faltering over superlatives that the show put on by ‘The Men in White’ is the roughest, toughest, wildest, high falutinest, and most stupendous coliseum of animation that could be wrapped up in three hours of entertainment.”Footnote ³¹ The Texas Prison Rodeo set itself apart as entertainment by proving that the riders were much more willing to endanger themselves than free-world cowboys. Instead of fulfilling the cowboy ideal of rugged individualism, a man who could simply walk away from exploitation, this wild rodeo demanded that participants submit to a hyper-violent public performance in order to prove their worth to society.

The violence of the rodeo was supposed to be matched by its life-changing potential. While the first rodeo was designed primarily as free entertainment for employees and their families, as public ticket sales soared, profits took center stage. Prior to the creation of the nine-person prison board in 1927, there was no system-wide recreational committee or funding apparatus, which undermined earlier attempts at reform.Footnote ³² The Prisoner Welfare Fund, later the E & R Fund, became the destination for the large amount of money flowing into the prison system from the rodeo.Footnote ³³ Wild performances drew increased tickets which funded “the opportunities of all inmates for a broadened education.”Footnote ³⁴ Audience members’ admission fares provided the money necessary for a discourse of “rehabilitation by rodeo.”Footnote ³⁵

Not only did the spectacle of riding, roping, and racing wild beasts produce plenty of thrills, but also the rodeo perpetuated specific racial visions of Texas's southern and western past. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, both formal and informal prison policies increasingly focussed on retraining white inmates for industrial jobs while relegating men of color to the farms.Footnote ³⁶ While the majority of cowboys were white, a growing number of African American riders dominated the top-hand prizes and also participated as singers, clowns, and riders. They performed in front of segregated stands that cheered for “their” cowboys. In this era, African American inmates were often featured in the rodeo as entertainers to help stage a Lost Cause spectacle. The Cotton Pickers Glee Club – Simmons's other personal initiative – was an all-black, all-male singing group. Often pulled in the rodeo parade on an ox-drawn wagon, they were to serve as happy “reminders of yesteryear.”Footnote ³⁷ Sitting at the nexus of the South and the West, the rodeo evoked the slave plantation as much as the cattle ranch.

Despite this pastoralized enactment of slavery, prison rodeo provided the opportunity for black prisoners to cross, or at least weaken, certain lines of racial order. In this Jim Crow state, prison rodeo was the only place a black cowboy could compete against white men. Other sporting events, like mainstream rodeo and prison baseball, remained segregated by rule or by practice until well into the post-war period. As 1978 prison rodeo champion Willie Craig explained, “I was riding before I got here. But it was always hard for a colored man to break into rodeo in those days. The white boys didn't want me.”Footnote ³⁸ Ebony magazine explained in 1953 that “because of the great number of Negro participants in the annual rodeo, Negro spectators come from all over Texas.”Footnote ³⁹ African American inmates and audience members used the rodeo as a singular place to compete directly against white men.

Even as men of color proved their skill and worked closely with stock, however, most cowboys were still imagined as white, an image supported by promotional materials. For instance, the 1939 program included two photographs portraying white men and black men conducting rodeo labor. One featured several white men in cowboy hats, leaning on a fence, and was captioned “outlaw wranglers watching an outlaw horse.” Immediately below this photograph, a group of black men held several horses still for the cameras. The caption merely read, “The system owns some fine brood mares.” The program failed to caption these black men, who actually wrangled stock, effectually erasing the black labor that produced the system's prize animals.Footnote ⁴⁰ Like the labor system they portrayed, black men served as romanticized memorials to Texas's slave past. For instance, O'Neal Browning would be the all-time winningest cowboy at the Texas State Prison rodeo with seven titles in three different decades. In 1955, the rodeo program featured cartoons of top-hand cowboys; Browning's photo appeared snuggled up to a drawing of a minstrel-style black woman, with racialized facial features.Footnote ⁴¹ White outlaws functioned as cowboys without racial justification, black prison rodeoers faced both a small measure of acceptance and persistent racism.

The image of black men as convict cowboys, moreover, always referred back to the ready acceptance of black men as criminals.Footnote ⁴² Having less access to legal protection and being barred from serving on juries, men of color had faced higher rates of incarceration since the end of slavery. By 1940, African Americans made up roughly 15 percent of Texas's population, but represented 40 percent of the prison population.Footnote ⁴³ White men were heavily underrepresented in the prison system and overrepresented in the first decades of the rodeo. As media scholar Peter Caster and others have noted, “the history of racial incarceration in the nation tacitly criminalizes black masculinity in the cultural imagination.”Footnote ⁴⁴ While the rodeo offered both black and white men the opportunity to construct themselves as heroic cowboys in these early years, the setting of the southern prison rodeo maintained boundaries of race through the performance of an encaged black masculinity, the erasure of unpaid labor, and nostalgic yearning for the slave plantation.

The rodeo not only staged prison labor, it also ensured that men had a gender-appropriate space to purge their supposed criminal impulse for violence. As the Depression years created a surge in the prison population, overcrowding tested an already strained prison system. By the early 1940s, proponents commonly cited the concept of “venting,” or a release of passion in a socially appropriate manner, as a service the rodeo provided for the inmates. Performers could purge “any pent up feelings,” and use the “rodeos to let off steam and show the others how a man with ‘guts’ goes about doing difficult tricks.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Rodeo also served as a metaphor for self-control. One incarcerated man described the process of self-rehabilitation as an internal rodeo, wrestling the beast of “the criminal tendencies which crop up inside of us.”Footnote ⁴⁶ To successfully redeem himself, a convict had to embrace a form of heroic, violent masculinity by fighting his own internal beasts. These stories assured the public that the answer to prison violence was not reduced workloads or systemic overhauls but rather a space for men to purge their masculine frustration.

The promotion of racialized cowboy masculinities in the early rodeo also necessitated the construction of particular forms of incarcerated femininity. Incarcerated women were largely restricted to participating in the rodeo as spectators in racially and gender-segregated stands. The Goree Girls, an all-white string band of incarcerated women, performed at the rodeo and became a well-loved feature.Footnote ⁴⁷ The band portrayed a whitened vision of female decorum and happiness at the Goree farm, standing in stark contrast to the horrific conditions of the farm, which housed a population of primarily African American women. Beginning in the early twentieth century, a string of sexual scandals emerged from Goree as white male guards raped female inmates and held them in appalling living conditions.Footnote ⁴⁸ The black women who experienced some of the most isolating and intolerable injustices of the Texas Prison System were the people most unlikely to benefit from the rodeo in any way.

Rodeo supposedly offered incarcerated men social redemption, in part, because it staged inmates’ experience with rangeland labor. As the prison newspaper reiterated, “In our humble opinion the most important step in rehabilitating a convict is to engage him in creative or productive labor.”Footnote ⁴⁹ This brutal labor regime produced “expert cow-hands, rope-twirlers, trick-riders, cow-punchers, hired-hands and bronc-busters.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Harkening back to “the great ranches of the Old West,” and the sport that demonstrated “the cowboy's work-a-day world,” the prison rodeo aimed to provide “recreation” for the prisoners “after the principle work of our vast farmlands” was complete.Footnote ⁵¹ Even the prison-raised rodeo stock functioned as testaments to the authenticity of the rodeo and its connection to ranch labor on prison lands. Lee Simmons's successor, O. J. S. Ellingson, described the “inmate buckaroos, many of them real cowhands from the plains and hills of Texas, matching their skill and daring against the animal's brute strength and cunning.” These outlaw animals were herded from “the vast grazing lands of the prison system.”Footnote ⁵² By claiming that both the animals and the men were authentic in their portrayal of the cowboy way of life, rodeo officials assured audiences that they were seeing both a real rodeo and real criminals. Their entrance fee funded not only rehabilitative programs, but also rehabilitative labor. Despite this public narrative, in 1931 only eleven of five thousand inmates actually claimed to be cowboys prior to their incarceration, while seventeen described themselves as ballplayers.Footnote ⁵³

As fewer and fewer men identified as cowboys, promoters of the rodeo insisted that these men were real cowboys not only because of the labor they performed in prison, but also because of their criminality. In 1941, the “convict press agent” described convict cowboys as “stiff-walking outlaws on high heels, hard-eyed from peering over their shoulders while pounding down the trail with gun-slinging sheriffs in ten-gallon hats behind them.”Footnote ⁵⁴ As scholars of prison tourism have noted, “penal spectators” enjoyed the brush-with-danger sensation they received by mingling with criminals as much as cowboys.Footnote ⁵⁵

Faced with the physically and socially violent reality of the arena, prison officials crafted a system of inducements and punishments to promote participation. The emotional and financial realities of prison life certainly encouraged men to join the rodeo endeavor. Travis Brumbeau, a prison shoe shop worker who spent countless hours hand-stitching the leather equipment used in the rodeo, explained that “in the absence of old friends and dear ones,” imprisoned men's emotions were “keyed up so strongly with the urge to give their very best.”Footnote ⁵⁶ The loneliness and despair of the system invigorated the tireless effort that men dedicated to the rodeo. Also, during the financial instability of the 1930s, imprisoned people looked to the cowboy as a symbol of both freedom and bravery. Describing the allure of the rodeo, historian Ethan Blue observed, “In the thick of the Depression, the image of the independent cowboy roving the range embodied the freedom that so many white men (all men, really) desired, while in truth, they were financially dependent on wage-labor jobs.”Footnote ⁵⁷ The popular image of the cowboy distracted men from the realities of financial precarity and, as cowboys, outlaws could even be cultural heroes. One inmate crowed, “I have always heard that a criminal is a coward, but it would take a magnanimous prevaricator to say that those fellows who risk their lives out in the arena with that writhing, plummeting, murderous mass of flesh are cowards!”Footnote ⁵⁸ In the 1930s and 1940s, despite the racialized and sexualized objectification of the arena, convict cowboys used the rodeo to taste a bit of the love, freedom, and heroism they were denied as prisoners.

Monetary gain, however, was the most significant inducement. While inmates were not paid for their labor in the fields, if selected to perform in the rodeo they were guaranteed a small paycheck called “day money.” This increased from roughly two dollars in the 1930s to ten dollars in the 1980s. In the mid-century, a cowboy finishing in the top ten could take home several hundred dollars in prize money. The money was deposited into the inmate's commissary account to be used towards “luxuries” like snacks, coffee, stamps, and cigarettes that they were otherwise unable to afford.Footnote ⁵⁹

Anyone who did not participate in the rodeo faced distinct disadvantages. Not only were vocational programs and visiting hours suspended during October, but also the cotton harvest coincided with the rodeo and demanded additional labor.Footnote ⁶⁰ Men not needed for the rodeo were often shipped out to the farms to endure the backbreaking labor of picking cotton. As one official explained, “If he can't stick to the saddle [in tryouts] then he is tossed back to the cotton patch.”Footnote ⁶¹ Many prisoners deemed potential broken bones or ruptured organs in the rodeo worth the respite from deadly farm labor. The rodeo staged an idealized form of prison labor, as convict cowboys daringly wrestled prison stock, while the realities of the horrific work conditions ensured plenty of men willing to dare the arena.

By 1948, the rodeo had continued to evolve but concern for prison reform had stagnated. Oscar Byron Ellis, recently appointed prison director, had a plan to change that fact. After being criticized for “the worst” prison system in the nation, Governor Beauford Jester and the Prison Board selected Ellis because of his experience running an ostensibly self-sustaining and scandal-free penal farm near Memphis, Tennessee. Immediately, Ellis called for the comprehensive “rehabilitation of the Texas Prison System,” which could pay dividends in “reclaimed human lives.”Footnote ⁶² Ellis defined rehabilitation as modernizing the labor system, updating hiring procedures, and reinvesting in infrastructure. Mechanized farm equipment, a more qualified staff, and new dormitories would cut down on escapes, murders, and “abnormal sex practices,” Ellis argued.Footnote ⁶³ While taxpayers would initially need to invest four million dollars in this plan, it would reportedly pay for itself in the long run by creating a self-sustaining, modern, and just prison system that would return productive citizens to the national fold.

While Simmons had maintained that only violent punishments, like whippings, could maintain order, the Ellis plan reworked well-established systems of control, drawing on an expanded guard force and building tenders, or inmate guards, to implement his modern vision of coerced labor.Footnote ⁶⁴ In order to “modernize” Texas's agrarian plantations, Ellis created a new form of prisoner segregation which assigned jobs based on race, number of offenses, and sexual crimes, formalizing previously informal systems of discrimination. Caucasian first offenders were offered more opportunities to learn industrial work at Huntsville, while black and Mexican men continued to be sent to the farms, albeit with tractors instead of mules.Footnote ⁶⁵ As the prison population grew in postwar Texas, a growing set of liberal welfare programs invited policing of minority communities through the language of rehabilitation and recouping of lost productivity.Footnote ⁶⁶ In Ellis's vision, violence, whether through coerced labor in the fields or the arena, would forge not only industrious citizens but a new prison system that operated on internal profits.

The rodeo became the primary marketing apparatus for Ellis's plans. While the rehabilitative aspects of the rodeo had previously been attached directly to inmates’ contributions to the E & R Fund, now the audience was invited to save the prison system as a whole. The 1948 rodeo program featured detailed reform plans, explaining Ellis's desire to “protect society from the criminal and the criminals from each other.” In order for a man to be truly “rehabilitated,” Ellis explained, the state must first “punish” him for his crime and then also provide training so that he could “earn a living and live in peace” after release. Glossy photos of modernized equipment and new buildings worked to persuade readers that the system truly was experiencing a total reformation and producing healthy, happy inmates eager to earn their own keep. The Prison Board requested audience members to “see for yourself how your money is being spent to save human lives – besides making your Prison System self-supporting in its vast operations.”Footnote ⁶⁷ As Ellis attempted to rehabilitate the system's national image, one newspaper exclaimed, “With sufficient money in the E & R Fund, the Texas Prison System may someday take its place among the more enlightened penal institutions of the country.”Footnote ⁶⁸ The rodeo narrated for the public the experience of imprisonment and the improvements that officials were supposedly creating in the late 1940s and the 1950s. Focussed on inmate productivity, the rodeo and the inmates were expected to create profits for the benefit of all society.

As Ellis promoted his vision of a self-sustaining prison system, rodeo promoters reemphasized the need to make “crime pay” for prisoners as they relied on their own labor and not “charity” from the taxpayers or their families.Footnote ⁶⁹ While the violence was entertaining, it was also paying for “an ever expanding library, good movies, baseball, volleyball, horse-shoes, dominoes, special holiday meals, vocational training program, and a lot of other things … see how great things can be by a bunch of Convict Cowboys.”Footnote ⁷⁰ The well-organized and high-earning rodeo pumped resources into the prison system at no cost to taxpayers, rendering it necessary to the salvation of the entire system and the goal of self-sustenance. As the 1946 rodeo publicity director exclaimed, “Ever since they unveiled their first rodeo to the public, Texas convicts have been lifting themselves by their cowboy bootstraps.”Footnote ⁷¹ The 1950 rodeo reportedly netted the E & R Fund $100,403 through ticket and program sales.Footnote ⁷²

As modernization efforts progressed and the E & R Fund grew, so too did the imagined violence of the rodeo. Texas's Fastest and Wildest Rodeo shifted to become the World's Fastest and Wildest Rodeo.Footnote ⁷³ The 1950 chair of the Rodeo Committee greeted guests by saying, “do not be surprised or shocked at the viciousness of the untamed stock or the amazing lightheartedness of the untamed performers as they laugh at death in utter abandon.”Footnote ⁷⁴ The rodeo drew hundreds of thousands of viewers in the postwar period because of “its unrehearsed ruggedness and the complete disregard of inmate contestants for personal safety in opposing the brute strength and savagery of the wildest rodeo stock in the world.”Footnote ⁷⁵ The “show of shows” only continued to expand its reputation for violent entertainment.

As postwar westerns enshrined the white-hat cowboy as the protector of American progress, convict cowboys also symbolized bold outlaws fighting social inequalities. Richard Slotkin defines the Cold War gunfighter as using his “professionalism in the arts of violence” to battle “powerful institutions” that were both socially corrupt and producers of change, like railroads.Footnote ⁷⁶ In the rodeo, outlaw riders became all the more celebrated in the 1950s as “rough and reckless” and “a breed apart.”Footnote ⁷⁷ The very flaws that made men outlaws in society made them excellent cowboys, enabling them to save their fellow man and themselves: “The indefinable ‘something’ that makes some men react, as to a challenge, to the laws and the rules of society, is the same thing that makes them unable to resist the challenge of a snorting horse or bellowing bull that refuses to be ridden.”Footnote ⁷⁸ While the annual event took an immense amount of unremunerated and arduous labor, including printing programs in the print shop, tack repair in the leather shop, and stadium expansion by the construction crews, the cowboys represented the central characters in the culmination of the social-redemption narrative.Footnote ⁷⁹ Their performances could make or break the profitability of the rodeo, which could make or break the programs offered by the prison in any given year. Like the heroic, and often criminal, gunfighters, convict cowboys supposedly saved others through violence.

This form of redemptive labor allowed the few to suffer for the many. Injuries, including broken bones, concussions, and ruptured organs, occurred frequently at the rodeo and at least one man was killed.Footnote ⁸⁰ Promotions of the rodeo continued to extoll the “Rip-roaring spectacle” of “bronc-busting, cow-wrestling, bone-smashing buffoonery that is wild to the eye and wilder beneath the surface.”Footnote ⁸¹ Bordering on bloodsport, the rodeo provided a specific form of entertainment: “the cowboys in stripes risk their criminal necks in a hilarious show of unshirted violence.”Footnote ⁸² Audiences both laughed at and praised convicts’ efforts to earn money to redeem themselves and others through bodily injury.

Increasingly, prison officials argued that the rodeo was not only saving criminals, it was saving society. The “Social Gospel” of the New Deal era, which proclaimed a social need to care for the collective community, began to erode under pressure from corporate leaders who instead supported the “salvation of the individual” through economic independence.Footnote ⁸³ Rehabilitation, in Texas, meant “returning to good citizenship hundreds of men who are now a total loss to the state and to society.”Footnote ⁸⁴ Both the arena itself and the programs it paid for offered inmates a sense of masculine productivity, instead of effeminate dependency, providing skills that society had failed to offer. The Echo explained, “Many whose inability to get by in society could be traced to improper education and downright illiteracy are now returning to society, literate, and often with a special trade or skill.”Footnote ⁸⁵ A group of concerned citizens even thanked Ellis for his reforms in the 1949 programs, lauding his efforts to provide men “who deserve an opportunity of remolding their lives to become useful citizens.”Footnote ⁸⁶ The value of prison reform lay in training deserving white men in particular trades and thereby reclaiming their labor for society.

Like the need to break horses for labor, the rodeo performed the prison's need to break men to be useful to society. Like Simmons's commitment to corporal punishment, Ellis remained dedicated to the narrative that coerced labor could produce productive citizens. Prior to Ellis's arrival, imprisoned men often resorted to self-harm, such as “heel-stringing” or cutting one's own heel tendon with a smuggled razor, in order to protest the harsh working conditions on the farms.Footnote ⁸⁷ Ellis met these forms of resistance with equal force. Heel-stringers were bandaged and sent back to their farms and able-bodied men refusing to work were denied food rations. Under Ellis's tightly controlled system, inmates continued to pick cotton under the scrutiny of armed masters on horseback.Footnote ⁸⁸ Most importantly, inmates continued to be guarded by armed prisoner “trustees.” These men were given authority by prison officials to enforce the labor regime through physical and sexual violence, as well as maintain strict racial hierarchies.Footnote ⁸⁹ Ellis spouted that “idle men cannot be rehabilitated,” and neither could an idle prison system.Footnote ⁹⁰ The 1959 rodeo edition of The Echo assured readers that the reform had been achieved: “I have ample food, adequate shelter … And work, of course … productive, organized, and regulated work.”Footnote ⁹¹ The modernized labor system indeed produced an economical system: in 1951 it could cost up to $3.59 per day in other states to maintain one federal prisoner; in Texas it only cost forty-nine cents.Footnote ⁹² In Ellis's vision of reform, sweat and toil could transform both men and the system into productive self-earners.

Yet, even as Ellis publicly touted the rehabilitative prospects that the rodeo provided for prisoners, he and his staff used the ever-increasing funds to pad employee salaries. In the late 1950s, media and political scrutiny revealed that as much as 40 percent of the fund was used to give top rodeo officials, like Ellis and Moore, bonuses and pay full salaries for employees like the band director and craft shop supervisor. Over five years, Ellis received $20,000 from the Education and Recreational Fund. The Houston Post reported that of the $314,236 available in 1959, at least $100,085 was used on payroll. While inmates risked actual physical harm, perhaps earning a couple of hundred dollars in the process, Ellis defended the bonuses by saying that the state would have lost key employees if he had not be able to pay them more money.Footnote ⁹³ For Ellis, the proceeds of rodeo were not solely meant to benefit inmates, but also to strengthen the system as a whole.

For over a decade, prison officials harnessed the rodeo to solidify a prison reform discourse that used violence to offer productivity-driven social salvation. In 1959, O. B. Ellis died just as the New Frontier and Great Society began to pump federal money into state programs aimed at lifting people out of poverty. This federal money came with consequences, however. As scholars like Elizabeth Hinton and Naomi Murakawa have demonstrated, 1960s liberal programs, like those launched under the simultaneous War on Poverty and War on Crime, actually helped increase local forms of surveillance and fuel the growth of incarceration rates even before the 1970s drug laws.Footnote ⁹⁴ Ellis's successor George Beto continued to ruthlessly enforce the labor regime, using the rodeo program to assure the public that prisoners no longer suffered at the hands of an antiquated prison system.Footnote ⁹⁵ Texas's prison rodeo exemplified the paradox central to notions of uplift promoted by the federal government during the Cold War: social redemption was possible, but you had to do it yourself with the smallest possible amount of help from the federal government. In Texas, Beto maintained that prisons were worthy of small investments because it enabled prisoners to achieve their own social rehabilitation through programs like the rodeo.

Lyndon B. Johnson, himself a Texas rancher and New Deal Democrat, used the nostalgic image of the cowboy to symbolize the need to balance community commitment with a dedication to individualism. In his presidential foreword to a classic history of the Texas Rangers, Johnson urged an urbanized America to “preserve the equality of opportunity, the dignity of the individual, the commitment to justice for all that derive from the spirit of the Frontier era. Our affluence, our abundance, our strength and power have not dulled the values experience taught us through the challenge of opening the Frontier.”Footnote ⁹⁶ As civil rights activists staged mass demonstrations and Congress passed major pieces of legislation meant to create a more equal society, Johnson also helped ensure the rapid expansion of the incarceration state as he sought to stamp out social disorder. Likewise, as historian Robert Chase argues, just as Texas earned high national praise “as a harbinger of modernity, the internal prison society bristled under the authoritarian grasp of a brutal and violent labor regime.”Footnote ⁹⁷ In the 1960s, the rodeo began to change its programing. Over the next twenty-five years, as mass incarceration blossomed and imprisoned peoples demanded new rights, the narrative of the convict cowboy's ability to save anyone except himself rapidly dissipated.

VIOLENCE AND SPECTACLE

In 1963, a new prison rodeo event dubbed “Hard Money” debuted. A Bull Durham loose-leaf tobacco sack was filled with fifty dollars and tied between “the horns of the meanest, mangiest, orneriest Brahma bull in the System.” Cowboys were then invited to flood the arena and “walk up to the bull, friendly-like, say a few kinds words, and remove the sack from the bull's horns.” The attempts to snatch the bag of money from the bull induced hilarity. In its inaugural year, “when time was called on this event, the big, 2,000-pound monster was still trotting around the arena, observing the fallen heroes, with the sack still dangling securely between those horns!”Footnote ⁹⁸ As Hard Money became a beloved feature of the rodeo over the next two decades, the narrative path of the rodeo shifted away from a fairy tale of community uplift towards a story of individualistic gain, in many ways accurately capturing the reality of the rodeo. The rodeo increasingly invested in different forms of racialized and sexualized violence, grounded in the humorous spectacle of the economically desperate inmate.

First appearing in a moment of civil rights protest, the shift away from the prison's “rehabilitation-through-rodeo” narrative accelerated in the 1970s as the prisoners’ rights movement publicly contested the notion of rehabilitative labor. Indeed, even as the individual took center stage in the rodeo narrative, collective protest by incarcerated people demonstrated to the larger public that Texas's system of unpaid prison labor harmed instead of helped.Footnote ⁹⁹ Changes like Hard Money, the subsequent creation of the Redshirts, and the short-lived introduction of female contestants defined the rodeo's final stages of development. While these changes continued to draw in large crowds initially, by the 1980s the rodeo was foundering amid financial scandal, public scrutiny, and its own inability to frame itself as improving life for incarcerated Texans.

Events like Hard Money began capitalizing on the display of ineptitude. By the mid-1970s, the inexperience that would come to define rodeos like Angola replaced an insistence on authenticity in Texas. While rodeo officials used to encourage inexperienced riders to “stick to the grandstands,” in 1973 the New York Times expounded, “The seriousness of most spectators at regular rodeos is replaced here by laughter” as men “cling desperately to their mounts before they are usually sent sprawling to the ground.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ In 1975, the Wall Street Journal noted that one did not attend prison rodeo to “see riding” but instead to “see the convicts get kicked, and thrown and everything else.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ As the population of Texas rapidly urbanized in the postwar period, the rural state population dropped to 20 percent by 1980. The vast majority of inmates in the 1970s were inexperienced with animals. Rodeo programs explained, “Unlike the freeworld cowboys, prison cowboys are not always men with a great deal of experience.” These “rookies” ride through “sheer determination.”Footnote ¹⁰² The Texas Department of Corrections itself touted its move away from agrarian labor, labeling their inmates experienced stockmen therefore no longer seemed reasonable or even desirable.Footnote ¹⁰³

The rodeo also increasingly staged the violence of prison life for the humor of the audience beyond simply breaking bones. For instance, in 1966, two inmates paraded a sign through the arena reading: “Would you believe we like girls?” This banner, presumably created by inmates, exposed the brutal reality of prison rape as a public joke. In 1945, based upon the growing public and prison concern for situational homosexuality in prison, the Texas Board of Criminal Justice listed prison rape as the third-greatest concern created by crowded housing, alongside stabbings.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Yet the prison system also ignored the extensive internal sex trade that inmate “trustee” guards used to assert power over their peers.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ By the late 1960s, these inmates used the arena to address prison rape. By rendering it a joke, however, they were exposed to public mockery instead of a compassionate crowd.

Money often sat at the center of these forms of malicious humor. In 1939, the rodeo program assured readers that “the prizes are not held before the prisoners as an inducement to join the rodeo; rather they are given as reward for courageous and cooperative service.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ While most men had always participated for financial reasons, to the public, the convict cowboy was a daredevil inspired by the challenge of unbeatable odds, not a desperate man lured into the arena by the prospect of a small amount of money to make life more bearable. Hard Money erased this particular narrative. Glen Gustafson, a man who would become one of the greatest proponents of the rodeo, was asked why someone would risk his life for fifty dollars. A self-proclaimed “poor misdirected city boy,” Gustafson responded, “I'm not a hero … But, right now, I'm broke, so I guess I'll be out there again trying my luck for the money.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Violence out of economic desperation was also portrayed as “all part of the fun at the prison rodeo.” In 1985, the Wall Street Journal recounted the triumphs and woes of a man who “grabbed the cash and won $400 prize” the week before, but fails the following week when “his feet aren't quite fast enough.” Instead, “he ends up flat on his back with a broken jaw.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Hard Money exposed men's reasons for risking their lives in much starker terms than the thrill of the challenge.

The purely monetary nature of this event also solidified the racialization of the bumbling, greedy inmate in contrast to the talented convict cowboy. Between 1963 and 1972 the population swelled from 12,850 to almost 16,000. Over the 1970s it ballooned to 36,000.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ While African Americans and Mexican Americans comprised 32 percent of the general population in 1975, they made up 62 percent of the prison population.Footnote ¹¹⁰ While racialized violence and laughter had always been part of the rodeo, men of color had previously participated in the same events as white men. As the rodeo continued to change in the 1960s, Redshirts, a group of roughly forty men who only participated in non-standard and highly dangerous events, took a greater role in the action. Unlike the convict cowboys, still predominately white men, Redshirts were almost exclusively African or Mexican American men. Their inexperience with stock was lauded as they were described as “Yankees, who have never been to a rodeo before.”Footnote ¹¹¹ Unlike the cowboys who had “earned” their cowboy stripes through individual efforts, news reports portrayed Redshirts as an indistinguishable mass who gave pleasure through their antics of chasing and being chased by enraged animals for the sake of money. This spectacle of the desperate inmate was amplified in 1979 when the rules changed to allow the audience to donate money to the tobacco sack.Footnote ¹¹² When first introduced in the 1960s, a certain amount of work would guarantee a certain amount of money, but by the 1980s it was the luck of the draw. One might strike it rich with over a thousand dollars, or one might have risked life and limb only to be left holding ten dollars.Footnote ¹¹³ The spectacle of desperation, and often disappointment, became key aspects of the entertainment.

Similarly, in 1972, incarcerated cowgirls were finally given an opportunity to compete. The women's events operated as pieces of sexualized humiliation. Dressed in tennis skirts utterly unsuited to the muddy arena, they caught greased pigs, chased calves, and rode donkeys. Most of the women in the rodeo were African American, though promotional materials still routinely portrayed “Goree cowgirls” as white. Women had often petitioned to be included in previous rodeos, especially women who rode in free-world rodeos.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Yet, like the erasure of black men's labor, cowgirl labor remained largely invisible until the 1970s. In 1973, the program chuckled that the new programing was a score for “Women's Lib.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ This shift from erasure to hyper-visibility characterized both a desire to keep audiences engaged with new forms of entertainment and a mockery of the rights-based language of “inclusion.” By serving as expendable fodder for unnecessary injuries, men and women of color, often hailing from urban areas, became the backbone of the entertainment juggernaut of the Texas Prison Rodeo in the last stage of its development. While many people enjoyed the “slapstick humor” of women chasing slippery pigs and men chasing angry bulls, the narrative of social salvation dissipated.Footnote ¹¹⁶

As the rodeo changed form, rodeo officials and the media also focussed greater attention on the performance of the individual instead of the outcome for the larger imprisoned community. Previously, the rodeo had been the means to build a “model prison system” that could “rehabilitate its inmates so that they become law-abiding, honest citizens after they are released from prison.”Footnote ¹¹⁷ By 1978, however, the rodeo program announced, “Individualism seems to be the name of the game – an age old western frontier ethic still prevails. It's as if the prison rodeo cowboy is saying to himself and the world, ‘I'm an individual; I am what I can show people I can do.’”Footnote ¹¹⁸ Hard Money was described by one rodeo press release as “Every man for himself.”Footnote ¹¹⁹ By the end of the 1970s, prison officials no longer celebrated the commodification of inmate labor as serving the greater community.

Ultimately, the failure of the communal narrative of the rodeo solidified because imprisoned people reclaimed their labor from an exploitative system. During the 1960s and 1970s the War on Crime and then the War on Drugs offered law enforcement an expanded toolkit that ranged from military-grade weapons to mass arrests. Instead of ending the social disorder of the 1960s, these aggressive police tactics merely created new forms of distrust and fear between communities and police departments, often creating a cycle of brutality.Footnote ¹²⁰ During the 1970s, draconian drug laws increased nationwide and harsh sentencing practices led to an ever-increasing prison population. The worsening of prison conditions from crowded living spaces to unimaginable violence, combined with the activist traditions of the 1960s, created the prisoners’ rights movement in Texas.Footnote ¹²¹ While national leaders focussed on “law-and-order” programs to control urban riots like those in Watts and Detroit, Texas prison officials worked unsuccessfully to inhibit prison populations from revolting against the labor regime.

In 1972, David Resendez Ruiz submitted a handwritten petition stating that the abuses of the Texas Department of Corrections, including physical assaults by guards, overcrowded housing, lack of medical care, and unsafe labor conditions, violated his Constitutional rights. By 1974, Ruiz had gathered enough support from other racially diverse incarcerated men to file a class-action suit against the department. In particular, these men hoped to expose to the public's attention both the larger labor regime and especially the internal prison economy based in sexual and physical violence. Drawing on the civil rights and labor rights experience of many of their leaders, in 1978 they organized a ten-day, nonviolent labor strike in order to gain public sympathy for the lawsuit.Footnote ¹²² The testimony of over a hundred inmates who had been brutalized beyond comprehension swayed public opinion and helped shape the course of reform.

In 1979, the US District Court for the Southern District of Texas ruled that the department practiced cruel and unusual punishment. Ruiz v. Estelle would go on to have far-reaching effects for the everyday lives of imprisoned Texans. It mandated the hiring of an expanded guard force, the building of more housing structures, and an end to the use of trustee guards. Particularly, Ruiz threatened to move Texas Prisons completely away from isolated plantations and towards more urban, industrialized areas with treatment-focussed programs.Footnote ¹²³ The prisoner-led agitation of the late twentieth century exposed the disjuncture between the realities of prison violence and rhetoric of prison reform. Unlike officials, inmates argued that the abuses they suffered did not render them productive citizens.

As the public scrutinized the system as a whole, the prison rodeo in Texas ended amid criticisms and scandal, seen as a vestige of a prison past best forgotten. The rodeo drew in fewer spectators due to declining interest, fewer prominent celebrities, persistent bad weather, and high gas prices.Footnote ¹²⁴ Throughout the 1980s, the rodeo also garnered extensive criticism for its inappropriate use of funds and its exploitation of prisoners, especially as injury rates were more widely publicized. In 1985, the same Wall Street Journal article that noted the humor in an inmate's broken jaw also informed the public that thirty-nine of the one hundred participants were treated in the prison emergency room. The article went on to quote Harry Whittington, a former corrections board member, who explained that inmates “will take any kind of risk, from getting their eye punched out to death, to get that tobacco sack off the bull – while the crowd laughs and eggs them on.”Footnote ¹²⁵ With growing public criticism for the prison labor regime and the rodeo that had once advertised its supposed successes, by 1987 the Texas Department of Corrections did not have the money, the support, or the unpaid labor force to tear down and rebuild its condemned rodeo stadium.

The disappearance of a moral impetus for the rodeo ultimately rendered the gladiatorial spectacle of the Texas Prison Rodeo void and the heroics of the convict cowboy impotent. As the prison population grew, cowboy convicts represented a shrinking proportion of incarcerated men and could no longer be glorified as real cowboys. Civil rights and the black power movement condemned the pastoralized vision of slavery that the rodeo had once portrayed. When prison officials turned instead to an image of the bumbling urban convict, desperate for money, it was the officials’ desperation that became visible.

While prison rodeo ended in Texas, it did not die out nationally. As ethnographers have shown, today prison rodeo audiences express less interest in the violence of the arena producing rehabilitated and productive men and more interest in inmate riders as “inept objects deserving of punishment.”Footnote ¹²⁶ Louisiana State Penitentiary, or Angola, created its rodeo during the final decades of the Texas Prison Rodeo. Staging events similar to Hard Money which emphasize rider inexperience, current performances of punishment demonstrate the widespread embrace of the spectacle of the desperate inmate and the rejection of mid-century beliefs about redemptive prison labor. Pioneered in Texas, prison rodeo continues to allow prison officials to use socially sanctioned violence to brutalize incarcerated people.