SPEAKER_02 0:01

Welcome back to Manifest Discography, the podcast in which we take a deep dive into the overlooked perspectives of the past and the often uncovered history that inspired their music. My name is Katarina.

SPEAKER_00 0:12

And I'm Sabrina. The songs we're going to be sharing tell the story of the South's greatest invader and the experiences of those who bore witness to its wrath. Welcome to today's episode, Sympathy for the Weevil.

SPEAKER_02 0:26

First up is Brooke Benton, one of the smoothest voices of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Known for blending pop, RB, and storytelling, Benton became one of the era's most successful black artists. Here's the Bull Weevil song.

SPEAKER_03 0:49

Let me tell you a story about a Bull Weevil. Now some of you may not know. But a Bull Weevil is an instinct. And it's found mostly what copy wrote. Now where do they come from? Nobody really knows. But this is the way. Story goes.

SPEAKER_00 1:19

Alright, so let's take a deeper look into these lyrics and the meaning behind them. So this song, written in 1961 and released by Benton, is obviously referring to a piece of the past.

SPEAKER_02 1:30

And just before we get into this analysis of the music, I want to paint a picture for you all of what the cotton bull weevil is, because I know that I, for one, didn't know what this was before doing the research for this episode. So the cotton bull weevil is a beetle-liked insect, typically not any larger than a fingernail, and it usually has this grayish-brown, reddish-brown color to it. It has six legs, wings, so it's able to fly depending on the circumstance. And really the most distinctive feature of the cotton bull weevil is its long curved snout that is called a rostrum. And it projects from the front of the bull weevil's head, and it is really part of the anatomy that allows the bull weevil to penetrate the cotton bull and be as destructive as it was, which we'll dive into a little bit more in the rest of the episode. So again, just to paint that picture of what we're dealing with and who this insect really was, the cotton bullweevil was small but mighty in a way.

SPEAKER_00 2:24

The first lyric we want to talk about is the first one where he starts off with, Let me tell you a story about the bull weevil. So this is in reference to oral history, which is just so important considering the time we are coming out of and coming into.

SPEAKER_02 2:38

Yeah, definitely. This is, like you mentioned, written in 1961, but referring to a time of the past. And that time of the past is this slavery era, post-slavery time. So when we're referring to oral history, when slaves arrived in the United States, they were really prohibited from speaking their mother tongue, engaging with any sort of literacy, barred from caring over their home practices and religions, reading, writing, all of that. So oral history was really the only way of passing down stories, heritage, and just any sort of means of survival through various lineages living in this time of slavery.

SPEAKER_00 3:10

Well, this isn't slave times. This is Jim Crow era, following the Civil War and the end of institutionalized slavery. The Thirteenth Amendment was ratified in 1865 and slavery was no longer legal in America. The ball weevil first entered Texas from Mexico in 1892 and quickly spread across the southern United States. So what we're looking at is a time when slavery is no longer legal, but the South isn't ready to let go of its most profitable labor force.

SPEAKER_02 3:35

Yeah, so this labor force was really integral to the way that the country worked at the time. And the way that people in power kept this alive was through tenant farming. So tenant farming was an agricultural system in which farmers rented land from a landowner and paid for its use with a portion of their crops. So after the Civil War, many black families in the South actually relied on tenant farming as one of the very few available ways to earn a living. And they oftentimes became economically dependent on the cotton economy and the landowners who controlled it.

SPEAKER_00 4:06

Yeah. So now we're setting the scene of what the bull weevil enters into. Alright, so now let's take a deeper look at some more of these lyrics. Now some of you may not know, but the bull weevil is an insect. He's found mostly where cotton grows. Now, where he comes from, nobody really knows.

SPEAKER_02 4:24

Looking at these lyrics, what we've really gathered, especially taken from that line of he's found mostly where cotton grows. And that really comes back to the fact that cotton was really the backbone of the southern economy at this time, and it really could be found anywhere. It was the region's most valuable cash crop. It generated a large share of the region's wealth, and this was really because of the fact that Great Britain was feeling the pressures and the high demand of textiles around the world. So Great Britain joined the race of industrialization and overseas trade and turned to countries like India, Egypt, and the United States, which all had these conditions that really favored cotton production. And they turned to these countries to supply the goods needed for this overseas trade. The United States, with the perfect soil, the perfect climate conditions, and that enslaved labor really earned the title of Great Britain's primary cotton supplier. And the country's economy really did become dependent on cotton production and overseas trade.

SPEAKER_00 5:21

Yeah, and cotton wasn't just important overseas. It was so important within the South region specifically. In terms of employment and labor, cotton cultivation provided work for a large portion of the southern population, especially black agricultural workers after Reconstruction or this era of transformation right after the Civil War and the end of slavery. It was the foundation of tenant farming because it allowed access to land, credit, and farming opportunities that were all directly tied to cotton production. And it was the source of local business activity. Banks, merchants, railroads, and cotton gins all relied on a successful cotton harvest to thrive.

SPEAKER_04 6:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 6:02

Moving on to our next little chunk of lyrics, the farmer said to the Bull Weevil, I see you're on the square. Bull Weevil said to the farmer, Say yep, my whole darn family's here. We gotta have a home, gotta have a home. So a square. Yeah, yeah. So when we're talking about a square here, it's really a cotton square. So just to give a quick rundown of how cotton itself develops and flowers. So we'll first start out with a cotton square. So that's kind of like that initial bud of the flower, which will then flower into what you might think of having white petals, just a stereotypical flower that you might expect. From there, those petals will die off and leave the plant as it is, and then it'll start to develop into the bowl phase. So this is a hard exterior that forms around the inner part that you might think of as the cotton fluffy part. And then after a certain amount of time, that bowl will open up and reveal the lint or that fluffy white section of the cotton. And then that'll be the way that the plant progresses through the whole process.

SPEAKER_00 7:05

And for bull weevil specifically, the eggs are laid inside the cotton square and the bowls. So these early stages, not on the actual surface of the cotton. Bull weevil larvae actually develop inside plant tissue protected from predators and pesticides. So we have some studies showing that bull weevils choose to burrow inside the cotton bowl, which is what you talked about, that hard shell, right? Preferring cotton closer to the bottom of the plant because it has more of these protections. So these are like ecological mechanisms that bull weevils have developed over time to avoid potential threats, such as predators like spiders or birds, or even pesticides.

SPEAKER_02 7:38

Yeah. So bull weevil damage is not apparent. No. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 7:42

Yeah. When bull weevils lay their eggs, it takes time for any damage to be visible. So once developed, the bull weevils will emerge and enter the outside world. And the cotton plant is actually exposed to external bacteria and toxins, making it like an echo chamber for disease and decay for the whole actual plant, not just the square or a bowl that it targeted. So cotton can be damaged either by changing color and experiencing internal damage to the fibers, or just falling off the stem altogether.

SPEAKER_02 8:09

Yeah, so one could imagine that the bull weevil would have certain preferences or certain affinities for various cotton varieties.

SPEAKER_00 8:16

Yeah. So some, like every species or plant, some strains of cotton have thicker tissue or defensive traits that make egg-laying harder. So bull weevils choose to use the plants that are more vulnerable and have a thinner or more penetrable bowl. This is what essentially made the bull weevil so destructive to cotton. And its full life cycle can take as little to two to four weeks in warm conditions.

SPEAKER_02 8:41

Well, actually, there is a lot more nuance to that, just two to four week life cycle. So the lifespan of a bull weevil is really dependent on the availability of cotton in accordance with the seasons. So female bull weevils that are alive during these warmer summer months will have really fast and rapid reproductive rates, and they'll typically die between two to four weeks of adulthood. So that's a really fast turnaround. Bull weevils that are alive when the seasons start to turn, they actually live a very different lifestyle from their summer counterparts. So if cotton starts to die out and the food and the shelter that it provides starts to dwindle, the bull weevil reproduction slows significantly. And at this time, the bull weevil actually enters this stage that's called diapause, which is comparable to hibernation, in which they hide in leftover shrubbery or leaf litter that is just left from the previous season. And then these bull weevils can actually live anywhere from six to eleven months. Oh wow. Um, but they will actually not have any offspring at all. So their role is really to maintain the population during these trying and cool conditions.

SPEAKER_00 9:43

Okay. And these cool conditions, in terms of the south, don't align with harvest, correct?

SPEAKER_02 9:49

Yeah, so they don't align with harvest at all because at this time there really is no cotton. But during these warmer months of the summer, the reproduction of the cotton bull weevil does really pick up. A single female can lay 100 to 300 eggs in her entire lifetime. That is a lot of eggs. Yeah. Yeah. So then going back to that point that we brought up during the summer months, a female bull weevil lives for two to four weeks. If you put that into context, a two to four week life cycle, 100 to 300 eggs in that lifetime, you can imagine that there are sometimes five to seven generations of cotton bull weevil living at the same time in a single season. So that really leads to this rapid population explosion.

SPEAKER_00 10:32

Yeah. Okay, wow. So these bull weevils are reproducing like crazy and they're reproducing at times when we need to plant cotton, essentially.

SPEAKER_02 10:39

Yeah, pretty much.

SPEAKER_00 10:40

Okay. But it wasn't just the reproductive biology that led to such massive destruction. It was also the cyclical practices of the economy and agriculture that led to create the perfect breeding ground for the bull weevil.

SPEAKER_02 10:53

Let's take a listen to our next song to get a better idea of the immediate impact of the bull weevil in the American South. Here is Bull Weevil Hawler, an African-American work song recorded by singer Vera Hall in 1959, which has passed down orally through generations and evolved over time as different singers added their own lyrics and styles. Let's listen in. Yeah, so in that song you can really feel this shift in tone, I would say. You can really feel the weight in the lyrics and also just in the tune itself. So just to look closely at these lyrics, we see she writes, Hey, farmer Aston, my child, buy some meat and meal. Ain't nothing done, old man. Bull weevils in your field. So kind of to pull away from that, um, we're seeing like, buy some meat and meal, ain't nothing done, old man, bull weevils in your field. Like these people can't afford to go buy basic food because they don't have any sort of income because of the bull weevil. The bull weevils in their field that's making for all of this economic devastation. So we can look closely more at this economic side of what the bull weevil did. So as we've mentioned, the bull weevil came to the United States from Mexico in 1892 and really spread all over the cotton belt and eventually infested nearly every major cotton growing state.

SPEAKER_00 12:47

Oh, okay. And when you say cotton belt, you're referring to just all the states that primarily grew cotton from Texas to essentially the Carolinas. So it's that region of the southern United States where cotton was a dominant crop and the foundation of these local economies. Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_02 13:00

So being the dominant crop of the region, the South practiced monocropping, which is essentially this agricultural technique of planting one crop over a large plot of land year after year after year. So agricultural landowners and these farmers really planted cotton like crazy. Lots of railroads and cotton shipments also allowed the bull beefle to travel long distances and spread rapidly across state lines. So they were essentially able to hitch a ride on these railway cars and cotton shipments that were traveling all around the cotton belt around these southern states. So all of these factors, the monocropping that we'd mentioned, the railroads and cotton shipments, as well as the warm and humid climate of the South, really created this ideal echo chamber and the ideal conditions for the bull weevil to expand and really take over the South in the way that it did and cause really a lot of economic devastation.

SPEAKER_00 13:52

Yeah, and looking back on to the bull weevil's immediate damage, all cotton damage by the bull weevils essentially became unusable. It was unsuitable for harvest and textile manufacturing, which just led to major financial losses across the South.

SPEAKER_02 14:06

Yeah, so this actually became known as the Bull Weevil Depression, this period of financial loss and economic and agricultural destruction. And it lasted from the 1910s to the 1920s. So this was really the height of that bull weevil infestation, and it was really a precursor to the Great Depression that came in the 1930s.

SPEAKER_00 14:23

And just to put in perspective the level of economic loss lasting from about 1892 to 2011, which is pretty recent, the bull weevil cost between 15 billion to 23 billion, adjusted for inflation, that'd be about 50 billion to 70 billion over the course of the century, losses in crop yield and cost invested towards the pest control and eradication. So it's not just this is the money they lost, it's adding alongside this is how much money we spent trying to get rid of it. So just to put in perspective of how much actual money that was for the economy. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 14:56

So with all of this loss in profit and just hit to the economy, there was, of course, this really big push to try to do something about it. So of course you're not just going to sit around and let the bull evil continue to spread and devastate all of the crop fields. So there were some tactics that were put into place at the time during the height of the crisis. So a lot of farmers and agricultural experts promoted early planting and faster maturing cotton varieties. So essentially they would plant crops earlier in the season in order to work around the bull weevil and their reproductive practices. So the bull weevil would tend to leave that diapausal state. So we'd mentioned earlier that hibernation like period as spring would come, so kind of in those earlier months like March, April, and they would reach their peak reproductive season between July and September.

SPEAKER_00 15:44

Yeah, and in an effort to avoid this peak season, farmers and agricultural experts promoted early planting of faster maturing cotton varieties. Like we talked about the bull weevil has different preferences for varieties. This is just another version of that. We tried to use cotton that would mature faster in an attempt to avoid that peak season.

SPEAKER_02 16:03

Yeah. In addition to all of those tactics, authorities also encouraged farmers to destroy cotton stocks and infested bowls after that harvest actually did happen. So because the bull weevil was able to survive and reproduce in leftover cotton plants even after they had been taken for the important part, that fluffy cotton part, the landowners would have the farmers that worked in the fields cut down the remaining plant stocks, and they would even have them burn fields of crop residue to get rid of any lingering bull weevils, and they would have the farmers crush by hand seemingly infested cotton buds. So that was just a lot of manual labor that they put on the farmers as well. But it was just all really this desperate effort to make sure that the bull weevil wasn't present in the fields. And then in addition to that, this was pretty early on in the usage of chemicals in terms of agriculture. But there was this early form of pesticide called calcium arsenate, which is a form of arsenic actually, and it was used to kill off the bull weevil. And when you think of a pesticide, you think it's being sprayed onto a large planes. Yeah, exactly. But it actually was dusted in a powder form. And this was, again, often done by field workers. This was effective for a little bit, but it proved to be ineffective and inefficient because not only was it expensive at the time, but the bull weevil actually developed a resistance to it pretty early on in its usage. Wow.

SPEAKER_00 17:25

Very resilient bull weevil. But like you said, it wasn't sprayed by planes like we do now with pesticides. It was dusted in a powder form by hand by the field workers. So kind of makes you think about the possible negative health implications for the workers that were actually tasked with applying the calcium arsenate. And they had a higher risk of arsenic poisoning that they could bring home to their families, respiratory illness, nerve damage, and even increased cancer risk. And that just really highlights the weight that was put on these farmers to basically eradicate the Bull Weevil almost on their own without the intervention of any kind of government aid. But moving forward, this next song through humor and storytelling captures the struggles of farmers whose livelihood depended on cotton. Written in 1934 and performed by Hoodie William Ledbetter, better known by the stage name Ledbelly, this is the Bull Weevil song. Now let's take a deeper look at some more of these lyrics. The farmer takes the bull weevil and he put him on the sand. The bull weevil says to the farmer, You're treating me just like a man. I'll have a home. I'll have a home. So this promise of I'll have a home kind of differs to a lot of the lyrics we've seen so far, of he's looking for a home, he's looking for a home. In this case, by saying I'll have a home, it almost personifies the bull weevil akin to these black tenant farmers. It almost has this sense of solidarity between the weevil and the farmers, of this shared feeling of being displaced from your home or land and forced to adapt to survive, much like many African Americans were. By saying, I'll have a home, it shows this determination to find a place called home that mirrors that of the performers and the listeners to this song. The desperation and the want for these black tenant farmers to finally reach stability after decades of change and upheaval from the Civil War, from slavery to Jim Crow era. And we finally start to see a semblance of stability in some of the long-term changes in social behaviors and patterns after the Bull Weevil's arrival.

SPEAKER_02 19:46

Yeah, amidst this time of, as you just talked about, a lot of economic devastation. There were still many regions that felt the dramatic agricultural and economic effects despite those efforts to try to curb the spread of the Bull Weevil. And this really did cause black tenant farmers to lose their main source of income. This was a time when the really the only avenue for income was working in an agricultural setting. So without a stable way to make a living, many black folks turned to the north to look for more opportunities. So more job opportunity, living in a more welcoming environment. As you'd mentioned, these Jim Crow laws and segregation, along with this devastation that was brought about by the Bull Weevil, led to a mass exodus from the South to the North called the Great Migration. Around six million black Americans from the South moved to the North. And this whole movement lasted from the 1910s to the 1970s. And these communities moved in search of improved living conditions, increased job opportunities, and ultimately more freedom. So while the Bull Weevil didn't single-handedly cause the Great Migration to happen, it was a significant catalyst for change and also just the breaking down of the tenancy system. So before the Bullweevil landlords on these tenant farming plots of land, they often preferred married male-headed households as tenant farmers. So those would tend to be the people that they would hire. And this created the incentive for many young black adults to marry early. And as the tenant farming system weakened, this tendency to marry at such an early age became less and less economically necessary.

SPEAKER_00 21:25

It wasn't just not necessary. Researchers actually found that young marriages declined following the bullweevil infestation, particularly among black populations. So with younger people marrying less, this particular study by Deidra Bloom, published in PubMed, revealed that young people were able to actually pursue opportunities outside the traditional cotton economies, such as migrating elsewhere. And as the need for labor decreased with this bullweight devastation, the reliance on child labor also went down, meaning more black children were actually able to go to school and get education, and there wasn't as much pressure. On black farmers to have as many children. So they were able to focus more resources on the fewer children that they did have. A few decades into the crisis in the 1920s to 1940s, the educational attainment discrepancies between black and white children actually dropped from 18% to 3.8%. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 22:17

So basically, this means that there was a smaller gap in children that went to school as the bull weevil devastated the cotton industry. So essentially, more black children were able to go to school compared to prior years.

SPEAKER_00 22:30

Yeah, and this is very early on, but of course, education leads to more opportunity for upward mobility within the black community.

SPEAKER_02 22:37

So another change that we saw in kind of the height of this bull weevil infestation moment, less social, but more so agricultural, we see crop diversification. So as you mentioned, we have this practice of monocropping. And it was one of the central reasons why the bull weevil was able to spread so much. So there were lots of agricultural and scientific experts that came out at the time and said, hey, we need to have this crop diversification happening. So essentially what that means is really just planting a wider variety of crops beyond just cotton. And this allowed for an increased income for lots of farmers and lots of landowners in this time of devastation.

SPEAKER_00 23:14

Yeah, in some communities, even such as the small town of Enterprise Alabama, the bull weevil was actually praised as a source of resilience, even having a statue put up in the main square called the Herald of Prosperity in its honor. But looking back on the crop diversification efforts, author like James Gerson talks a lot about in his book, cotton acreage had actually dropped by 43%, and peanut anchorage had increased by 577% by 1919. So that's obviously a big win for crop diversification. But if you look at the whole picture, the diversification as a whole didn't last forever. Peanut acreage dropped back down, and cotton acreage had almost gotten back to its original number by 1929. So that was on a small scale of Coffee County, Alabama. But it leads us to think crop diversification was great and it seemed to work, but it wasn't permanent. And there's a lot of reasons for why it wasn't permanent. Many suggestions or demands of scientists wanting crop diversification just weren't tangible to average farmers. To completely shift towards diversification, it costs time, it costs money, it costs materials that our rich farmers just don't have on hand. And it almost feels like a slap in the face to farmers to be asked to make these drastic changes. And it certainly didn't help the racial tensions that have been building for decades. Also, as we mentioned before, the entire economy of the South was built around cotton. Banks saw more credibility with cotton, so there wasn't a ton of incentive pushing farmers towards anything else. We also have to think about what crop diversification looks like for different people. For rich white landowners, one failed harvest is a hit, but it won't be the end of the world. For a poor tenant farmer, a failed harvest means bankruptcy. You can't feed your family and you can lose your land. So it's no wonder why crop diversification failed. The South did not have the systematic architecture to allow it to thrive.

SPEAKER_02 25:00

So we can really see this return in reliance on such ingrained practices of monocropping, relying on this form of essentially enslaved labor, the shift from what we've been talking about in terms of the changes that it made. There actually, maybe there was not so much change going on. To investigate this topic a little bit further, we're gonna be hearing from a band called the Presidents of the United States of America. We'll be hearing their song called The Bull Weevil that takes a little bit of a more modern take on a lot of these folk songs. Here's the Bull Weevil.

SPEAKER_01 25:54

Stuff in his picture.

SPEAKER_00 25:58

Fast forward a little bit. First released in 1955 and then remastered in 2004. We can clearly see a shift in tone when it comes to the bull weevil.

SPEAKER_02 26:13

Right, yeah. Before we get into the implications of this modern song, let's take a look at the bull weevil landscape of this era and that we fast forwarded to. So right now we're circa the late 1970s, early 1980s, and the bull weevil prevalence is still strong across American cotton fields. And rather than continuing to use ineffective and almost crude insect control methods that we discussed earlier, there was this emergence of a concerted and organized effort to finally fully eradicate the bull weevil through what is called the Bull Weevil Eradication Program, also known as BWEP.

SPEAKER_00 26:48

Yeah, so started by the USDA, more specifically the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, the goal of the BWEP was to fully eradicate and eliminate the bull weevil from the entire United States, specifically targeting the heavy-hitting cotton-producing regions like Georgia and Mississippi.

SPEAKER_02 27:06

The program successfully got rid of the bull weevil in 98% of the United States with a small population still found in the lower Rio Grande Valley. So this program started in 1978 and lasted until 2011, even though there are still some control efforts going on to this day. The program successfully got rid of the bull weevil in 98% of the United States with a small population still found in the lower Rio Grande Valley in Texas. So just to give a little recap of the methods that were implemented, even still are implemented to this day for eradication, we can see that there was this pulling from earlier tactics of using calcium arsenate and seasonal cropping practices that were implemented once again. And there were also some new practices that were used.

SPEAKER_00 27:49

Moving into these new practices, as we know, some of these older pesticides that were used before the BWEP had to be abandoned because of their huge adverse health effects, like calcium arsenate. But also this DDT that was developed during World War II for disease control, which seemed to cause neurological damage, reproductive complications, and endocrine disruption. So all these things really begged for a new form of eradication that weren't so dangerous. That leads us to the creation of melathian, which is an organophosphate that was heavily used over the course of the BWEP. So this was found to be a very effective method because it didn't have as many adverse health effects as the pesticides that were used in earlier control tactics, but melathian was still able to kill the bull weevil without killing off any other forms necessary to biodiversity. You also saw pheromone trapping. So pheromone trapping is essentially where the pheromones of the bull weevil are extracted and reproduced, and the scent is placed onto traps to attract female bull weevils. This allows farmers to see the number of existing bull weevils and prepare accordingly for the next harvest season. This isn't a direct eradication method where you're killing the creature. It's more used to track and monitor the bull weevil populations and allow for ample preparation of potential infestations.

SPEAKER_02 29:07

And with all of these eradication methods that were implemented, the crop yields actually did increase by 10 to 40% towards the end of the program when the bull weevil crisis was calming down. To this day, there is actually still a minor bull weevil presence. As we mentioned earlier, 98% of the country was declared to be bull weevil-free. So that remaining 2% comes from the lower Rio Grande Valley that we mentioned a little bit earlier, where the bull weevil actually originally crossed from Mexico into the United States. This area is directly along the Mexican border, and insects don't really follow country border lines. So the insects can easily cross from Mexico into the US, even in today's day.

SPEAKER_00 29:53

Rather than sinking more and more money into eradication efforts when the insect will just come back every single time, they choose to monitor these regions and just make sure the population stays at a low controlled level. Today we still see the bullweevil and efforts to eradicate it working simultaneously, but just on a much smaller scale than when they first arrived.

SPEAKER_02 30:13

And going back to the song that we just heard from the presidents of the United States of America, we can really see the change in tone here. Previous songs we've seen are coming from lots of black artists who have lived through these experiences or have had this passing down of oral histories of what it was like to live through the whole bullweevil time, taking on this folk and blues genre. But we're seeing here with the presidents of the United States of America, there's this more upbeat vibe and tone to it. And there's also this change in who these artists are. So these are three white men that are coming from a bit more of a 90s perspective. There are also connotations that come with that in and of itself.

SPEAKER_00 30:50

Yeah, I honestly feel like it can be compared to the BWEP and how that organization is now celebrated for the long-awaited eradication of the bull weevil, right? This government agency with all this funding sweeps in and eradicates the pest once and for all. But in the same way, it can feel like the erasure of the black farmers who were bearing the burden of the control tactics of the time, the ones actually in the fields spraying the pesticides, the ones crushing the beetles with their thumb. It can almost seem like they're being erased from history, similarly to how their music is almost being overshadowed by newer songs like this.

SPEAKER_02 31:31

Yeah. And to draw parallel to that, there is this return and reliance on enslaved, cheap labor. So we saw that during kind of slavery in this post-Gim Crow era, but even translating into today, there is this continuation of that in the modern world. Even with this legislation and constitutional change that came from the ratification of the 13th Amendment, there was really no change in the agricultural practices that the country relies on.

SPEAKER_00 31:58

And this principle is essentially what allowed the bull weevil to reach such levels of havoc. The bull weevil is a pest, but you can say that about almost any living organism. That's not where it's supposed to be. What defines our ability to survive or any species' ability to survive is the ability to adapt. And the South was just not willing to do that. The bull weevil didn't just prey off the South's abundance of cotton. It thrived off of its stubbornness and reliance on archaic and racist labor practices. We relied on cheap and exploitable labor back then, and we still do now, from the tenant farmers of the 1900s to the migrant workers of today. America's economy is intrinsically bound to the exploitation of vulnerable populations.

SPEAKER_02 32:42

So that begs the question: if the bull weevil couldn't do it, then what will? What's it gonna take to not just bend the system, but finally break it? That was your weekly dose of manifest discography. We hope you enjoyed today's episode Sympathy for the Weevil, and we'll see you next time.