At least the whole Crisco thing only started as a way to do... something with all the cottonseeds left from all the cotton they were were growing and producing before there were any synthetic textiles.

Cottonseed oil has a much longer history than what was mentioned in that article - it was used as lamp oil (substitute for whale oil), soap making (produced in the US so far more readily available than coconut or palm oil), candle making (more abundant and readily available than beeswax, and burned much brighter and reliably than tallow candles), and machine lubricant.

I'm not defending Crisco being so evasive about what it was made from, but I can understand that it would have been quite difficult to promote a product that had been used to "cut" olive oil. And even though cottonseed oil had been used for things like lamp oil, soap making and candle making, it was a plant product - not saying they were thinking in terms of plant based diet, but I suspect they simply weren't seeing it as being any different from something like olive oil, which is also from a plant, and had been used for thousands of years as a food.

I don't imagine they were thinking at all about the fact that the cotton itself wasn't edible, whereas olives are edible.

Besides, cottonseed oil was already being used in products that combined it with beef fat or lard before Crisco was first invented. The advantage was that lard/beef fat substitute made from pure cottonseed oil didn't taste like meat, which made it much more desirable for desserts and other non-meat cooking purposes.

It had already been on the market for several decades before research determined that hydrogenation of any oil was not healthy.

Would that research have ever been done without Keyes attack on dietary fat?

If he hadn't done that study, we might never have had all this push for plat based diets - but we might still not recognize any problems with hydrogenated oils either.