Pica big relief. Its been ten years in the works to make this book so it feels like relief and its a pleasure to be able to talk about with you and other interesting people. Throughout our careers, studying, writing about tobacco and cigarettes, you one a surprise, ashes to ashes. Amazing book, a page turner. Medical scientific historian on cigarette century the deception of the industry, any trepidation on when you started . Its a giant book. You took a risk. But i feel as those three books, ashes to ashes and robert proctors whole corpus of work, its called golden holocaust, i feel as though i was standing on the shoulders of giants. Fantastic works and i work tremendously indebted to them but when i was thinking about writing about tobacco, i wasnt approaching it the same way they were. They were very much coming at the story of tobacco from the angle of industry and when i began this project in a much more humble state, as a lowly graduate student, i began thinking about agriculture and farmers, which probably is not surprising to say there are humongous tones about tobacco so i saw these big works as reasons for opening about it in a different way and of course in the book, in the project changed right a bit in the past ten years from when i began this road many years ago. Lets start with the basic question, how do you feel the cigarette . Returning back the three works that you mentioned and how we think about the cigarettes in Popular Culture and political life, very much tends to associate a product, rightly so, with the exception of the major tobacco farm. It has a cinematic quality to it, executive of tobacco firms in the plaza hotel in a chilly december night in 1953 and they hatched a plan to basically engage in what became a half centuries long conspiracy to manufacturing doubt. This is a tremendously important story and i think its been, its continuing to be applying to other strategies of corporate deception. But if you take up a wider angle view, or pecans to come and focus is the presence of the cigarette is not simply produced by the industry itself. If you begin from seed to smoke, use the of government, federal government specifically has had a big hand in the cigarette century and what undermined the presence of the cigarette in American Life was not the fact that they finally got hit in 1964 or the 1990s, it was the efforts of activists in the 60s and 70s to dislodge the hold of tobacco in American Life and they couldnt do it by operating at the federal level. They had to look to local and state governments to do so. If you think about the cigarette over the span of the 20th century, you see a product and a behavior pattern and cultural way of life made by federal action and it was unmade by emotional movement. That basically created a new character in america, the character of a nonsmoker. We could spend a lot of time talking and unpacking that. Lets just start, how do you do history . How do you do history . I love this question. I think what youre trying to do in graduate school is read as much as possible and the first couple of years in graduate school art to poke holes in every book you read and think about whats missing and what kind of analysis after they put forward . What does it hide . The whole point of asking these questions arent on these important fabulous tones, so the graduate student basically figures out what their own voice and contribution can be. So when i was reading in graduate school, i wasnt in the tobacco debate at all. I was very interested in an entirely different question about the persistence of regionalism and regional economies. So at the beginning of my time in graduate school, there was a lively debate amongst historians of conservatism. The question, is it still unique . So doesnt make sense to focus on a region different from the front . A lot of historians will get political life in the suburbs of atlanta and charlotte in phoenix and los angeles and they said the political patterns that are happening here look the same so maybe the south isnt really the central point, visual distinctiveness is not what reallyperative anymore. So in my reading and quest for novelty, i was interested in the persistence of southern agriculture and the persistence of an agricultural economy even in a region that looks over the inner culture region, it began to look more like other parts of the u. S. So i was pushing back against this idea at the south is just like the rest of the u. S. By saying if you focus on this way that money is made in the south, the political economy of the south, you might actually start to see a continuity in between regional distinction in the early 20th century to the late 20th century. It was a fellowship you had in 2010, a historical society, the university of virginia, the cigarette, you are not from the south. In like florida, massachusetts, something geographically about virginia, the long and, the cigarette yes, going back in my own reading and history, i thought the literature on southern distinctiveness gave a bit to a persistence of basically agricultural miss, the presence of undeveloped land in the south or what appeared to be undeveloped land in the south had a cultural hold on people and land is also an important feature of agriculture and economy so is very much a quest to understand the meaning of land and world war ii that gave ride to this project, one of the two props associated there was ground in the south and theres tobacco and it seemed to me tobacco was a much more interesting commodity to focus on in the 20th century. My Historical Research is right, i can see it back to mcdonald, in North Carolina, take me back early. Its so funny you mentioned that. When i was beginning this project, i had decided im going to try to understand, tobacco farmers related to tobacco. To do that, i knew id need to look in archives across america and i selected North Carolina. North carolina was, and is the producer of a particular kind of tobacco. Its a primary constituent in americanstyle cigarette so i knew id need to set up camp and do research at North Carolina state and the coastal plain. But it was helpful and i would recommend this to any young historian whose thinking about getting a book project, find a local source that is a bit of a history buff and this gentleman had been involved in the tobacco economy, he worked for a state level tobacco lobby and he produced a self published book and people who self publish books are usually very happy to talk about their research. I emailed him inside im a graduate student, id love to talk about your work and he was white then happy to meet with the me and its information i wouldnt have otherwise known. So the interest was in agriculture . Where did it start . I cant trace it back to your undergraduate days, where did the idea come from . It did not come from smoking, i can say that. In the book, its about tobacco before you get into the cigarette so it wasnt the cigarette, it wasnt the health, were you always a political historian . I was really interested so. In the late 19th and early 20th century, there was a tremendous tension between the big tobacco of the era which was then known as the tobacco trust and the tobacco trust was the monopoly controlled and what duke did beginning in the 1890s was, he basically brought up every type of tobacco concern around, he consolidated hundreds of smaller Tobacco Companies into one big company on the American Tobacco company. Because the American Tobacco company had essentially monopoly power, it meant that American Tobacco would dictate prices, it would pay to tobacco farmers for what they grew. There was tension, there was violent and anger on the part of tobacco farmers toward this big monopoly. Who was the tobacco farmer . Tobacco farmers, for the late 19th an early part of the 20th century, tend to be small, they grew on a small scale and in part, that was due to the fact of the tremendous labor requirement, it was known as the 13 month crop because planning for the subsequent season had to be before the current season harvested. It relied on, there different stratagems within tobacco farming. You had land owners who make work the farms themselves with family labor or they may have hired tenants or sharecroppers and theres a racial dimension to this. Tenant farmers were more frequent right. Share robbers were typically africanamerican and those differences were sharecroppers sometimes never saw cash in the course of what they did. They had to buy from the store where they are against what they brought in from previous season so as a perpetual cycle of indebtedness. So even for the top of this class system amongst tobacco farmers, they were almost weaker than Something Like the duke tobacco trust. So you see even among elite farmers, anger, the big tobacco of its day. My question was a simply, what happened to all of that antagonism within the industry once tobacco and cigarette begin to be threatened from a Health Perspective . Did that outside threat ferment and alliance between farmers and industry went before the had been antagonism . That was kind of the quest i put on. And this movement from this angry opposition, was business Like Alliance . To a large extent, it did occur but it did not occur because tobacco farmers. The cigarette manufacturers were different so what happened that changed everything in american agriculture, american agriculture at large was the Great Depression but more importantly the new deal. The new deal was tremendously consequential but tobacco, because it instituted a very rigid and very controlled system of regulations on the land, tobacco is just this unregulated part but in fact more than any other crop grown in the u. S. , tobacco farmers had to abide by production controls and tobacco is written, tobacco farm laws were not written with the main farm bill, they were written separately with their own legislation so they basically institute a system of supply management but we will make sure mr. Tobacco farmer, who you cannot just declare yourself a tobacco farmer. You have to have a tobacco license to grow. Mr. Tobacco farmer cannot produced more than x amount and it will be revised based on production for what the manufacturers need. We will provide mr. Tobacco farmer with a minimum twice for the tobacco. Its a minimum wage and it was right around the same time. So it basically enabled the Agricultural Sector to be buffered from what you think of as a bully from Tobacco Industry. Wheat and tobacco or differences . Prime management was much more rigid, there was not buffers within the agricultural walk to allow people to go way over one year end under plaintiffs next year. You simply were not allowed to market over your allotment. Talk about the phrase iron tramp, what is that . And Iron Triangle is an old Political Science term that basically refers to an alliance between a dynamic between a subcommittee and progress that oversees a Regulatory Agency and private industry so tobacco subcommittee, the usda and tobacco farmers organized tobacco farmers and most important, Tobacco Organization for the cigarette, for much of the story i tell is the North Carolina farm bureau. Give me a sense of this Iron Triangle, whats that dynamics there . The basic story, whats going on in terms of tobacco farming after world war ii, tobacco farmers are very empowered by congress and encouraged by the usda to basically write their own laws so dry mean . After war, any produced group is anxious about readjusting production, youre not going to have the same revved up industry that you have, theres a special reason to think about that with cigarettes because the Armed Services were such important purveyors of the cigarette so after the First World War, they had not been around by the new deal, they experienced a severe depression and all farmers did for a lot of the 1920s. During the second world war, tobacco farmers who had now become more organized by the interaction with the federal government and the federal government is literally organizing groups of farmers into committees so they have a plan on how much tobacco they will produce, phase elite tobacco farmers are coming together in various places across North Carolina and they are saying, what are we going to do about the post war readjustment . We cant let what happened after the First World War happened again after the second world war. So what do tobacco farmers have now asked what they have now proximity to government, they have a whole bureaucracy. In their proximity. They have a whole bureaucracy interested in their wellbeing in a way they had not been before. Because of money . Because the new deal did i would say two reasons. They did a way of doing government that gave power and benefit to privileged group. In this case, it was producers. You can see this to a lesser extent organized labor, there was a theory of the economy should work, if you could get producers to essentially form organizations to get their house in order, you have could have more functioning of the economy overall but the second reason that tobacco becomes so important, it has to do with the power of southern democrats. Whos important in the new deal coalition, whose the glue that holds it together . The Industry Groups together with southern farmers, it southern democrats. So they have outside power in terms of the democratic party. Its the farmers who had the power or the Tobacco Corporation . The corporation had power this whole time. What is new is the interest the federal government in shoring up government as well. In producing policy that ensures farmers have a standard of living that they had not been assured before. Whose leading who . Is it because the companies had interest . They stimulated interest . I think theres a political calculation on the part of southern democrat. These constituents that are important, theres many more constituents that are farmers and they had constituents that were tobacco farmers. In part, its about both button part its about an economic theory about how to empower different groups in modern economy. If you have an imbalance between Agricultural Sector and industrial sector in consumer sectors, it might lead to another depression. Its important for the federal government to shore up these different groups of americans and make sure there was economic harmony. Let me give an assertion, tobacco really was never good for the farmers, it was good for the corporation. Its hard to wrap my mind about what i know. So because of federal policy that was directing money toward farmers, farming became a lot better. Many people left the farm when they could but the experience of farming post 1930s was much better than it had been pre1930s and tobacco farmers, relative to corporations and big tobacco, they captured a larger share of the price of a cigarette than they did before. Something happened in the 1950s. Leading up to the 1964 Surgeon Generals report, these farmers get completely off guard . So because federal policy has encouraged the organization of tobacco farmers, the industry is an opening to make an alliance with tobacco farmers during the 1950s through, arguably the private thing. So at that pneumatic meeting in the plaza hotel in 1953, its not just the tobacco corporate executive, not just the executive, their representative of tobacco, agricultural groups as well. As part of the organization owned by big tobaccos conspiracy. Big tobacco being a corporation so the farmers they organize in agricultural shoot of the big tobacco conspiracy. Tobacco growers Information Committee in the early 1950s, intended to basically translate industry propaganda for an agricultural audience with the idea that farmers were of this constituency beloved by politicians, imported to politicians because there were numerous than people who work for a big corporation, that farmers may be a very downhome ally for big Tobacco Companies as they try to make arguments against regulation on the basis of that. In the 1960s, you have, what, two or three different governments . You have now government of agricultural congressional appropriations and committees supporting the industry, to help the farmer . Organizing farmers to grow testify in congress against people in Public Health so part of it is using farmers were organized to basically be the mouthpiece because they are more credible or likable. Downhome so you see farmers to testify against proposed cigarette regulations in the 60s. And who was using them . Was at the industry . They were happy to have the farmers out there . The industry was very happy to have this alliance but farmers not just in this game. Farmers who were left, they believed regulation on Health Grounds would be bad for them. Their prosperity had been linked to the rise of the cigarette in a really direct way. Also, many people might not realize that prior to world war two, the late 1930s, the main way people consumed tobacco was not even enough cigarettes. The rise of the cigarette directly tracks the rise of prosperity for farmers, due to demand and also government intervention. They were invested in people continuing to smoke. Any disconnect in their head that they want their kids to smoke . Tobacco farmers smoked more than other people and to this day, you see greater rates of tobacco use in tobacco growing regions so i think no, probably by the 80s they didnt want their kids to smoke. You had the Surgeon General and chronicle the book, shift. The rise of the public interest. Yes so the Surgeon General support comes out in 1964 and its basically the first time the federal government says smoking causes cancer and Heart D