I can only feel disappointment and disgust with an educational system that has failed to teach children about the social and industrial history of their country. Why aren't children and their parents familiar with what was involved in picking a bale of cotton? Why don't they know "what I meant"?
Cotton was a large part of American (and English) history. Not only should we know about the field workers, black, white and aboriginal, but all those who worked in the mills and sweatshops and who turned the cotton into fibers and then into the clothes we wore, the cloths we put on our tables, the shelters used by our explorers, soldiers and recreationists, the cotton seed and oil used in feed and industry. Now much of the cotton industry has been passed to the so-called Third World, but that does not excuse ignorance about industries that involved hand labor.

Should we eliminate all song that accompanied hard, hand labor? A good letter, Cary. But the ignorance that you write about shouldn't exist.