Big Tex and the State Fair of Texas

Big Tex first appeared at the State Fair of Texas in nineteen fifty-two: a fifty-two-foot-tall animatronic cowboy with a motorized head, a recorded voice, and boots so large that a grown man could stand inside one. He became, over the following decades, something like an icon of Texas self-mythology, the biggest man in Texas standing at the entrance of the biggest state fair in the country, wearing boots and saying "Howdy, folks" in a voice that could be heard across the fairgrounds.

He burned on October nineteenth, twenty twelve. An electrical fire started in his chest. He burned in front of thousands of State Fair visitors over the course of several minutes. Within months, the State Fair had rebuilt him, taller by three feet than the original, with an improved fire-suppression system.

The Texas State Fair has been held at Fair Park each October since eighteen eighty-six, making it one of the longest-running state fairs in the country. It draws well over two million visitors in a typical year. The exhibits include livestock competition, agricultural displays, auto shows, competitive cooking, and the famous fried-food competition that has produced, over the years, fried butter, fried beer, fried Kool-Aid, and fried Thanksgiving dinner.

The Fair is the moment each year when Texas self-mythology becomes fully performative, when the state gets to assert that it is a distinct civilization with distinct traditions. The Art Deco campus beneath the midway rides and the turkey legs carries its own contested history. The Fair has been held on the same grounds as the nineteen thirty-six Centennial Exposition, the segregated celebration where the Hall of Negro Life was added under political pressure and then demolished when the Exposition ended. Texas knows how to put on a show.