Transcripts For CSPAN2 After Words Sarah Milov The Cigarette

Host your book is a major accomplishment. Its a significant scholarly work. I think its fair to say you move the field. Guest that is tremendous to hear coming from you. Think you. Its been ten years in the work so it feels like a relief and it is a pleasure to be able to talk about it with you and other interesting people. Host writers spend their careers studying, writing about tobacco and cigarettes. Richard kruger won the pulitzer prize. The great medical scientific historian and robert proctor. Any trepidation when it started . You took a risk. Guest i feel with those books, the biggest is gold in holocaust i feel as though i was standing on shoulders of. My work is indebted to them. When i was thinking about writing about tobacco i wasnt approaching it in the same way. They were coming out of the aftf tobacco from the angle of the street. When i began the project in a much more humble state as a graduate student, i began thinking about agriculture and farmers which is probably not surprising to say there or not the tones of agriculture so i actually saw these works is the reason for my opening into the field to write about it in a different way and then of course the book and the project changed quite a bit from when i began over these many years ago. Host lets start with a basic question how do you view the cigarette . Guest turning back to those works you mentioned we talk about the Popular Culture and political life and we very much tend to associate the product with the deception of the major tobacco firms. It has a cinematic quality, the executives met in the hotel on a chilly december night in 1953 and he hatched a plan to basically engage in what became a halfcentury long conspiracy to avoid regulation. This is a tremendously important story and one that i think has been continuing to be fruitfully applied for other strategies of corporate deception. But if you take a wide angle view, what begins to focus is the presence wasnt simply produced by the industry itself. You see that the federal government specifically has had a really big hand in a leading debate co orbiting and was undermined wasnt the fact that they finally got hit in 1964 or the the 1990s. It was the assiduous effort of activists in the 60s and 70s to dislodge and they couldnt do it by operating at the federal level. They had to look at the local and state governments to do so so if you think about it for the span of the 20th century, you see a product that was in a behavior pattern a culture of life that was made by federal action and that was unmade by the social movements that basically created a new connector in america. Host people spend a lot of time talking about and unpacking that. Lets just start how do you do history . Guest i love this question. I think what you are trained to do in graduate school is read as much as possible. The first couple of years of graduate school are to poke holes in every book that you read and think about whats missing or what kind of analysis to be performed and how does the paper over and hide. The whole point of asking these questions and being so hard on these important and fabulous forms is that th said that the e students basically figured out their own voice can be and their own contribution to the novel and research can be. I was very interested in entirely different questions about the persistence of regionalism and the regional economies so there was a debate among the historians of the south and conservatism over the question is the south still a unique region. They looked at political life in the suburbs of atlanta and the suburbs of charlotte and phoenix and los angeles and said the patterns that are happening here look the same so maybe it isnt a Central Point of the regional distinctiveness isnt what is operative anymore. In my readin reading in a questr novelty, i was interested in the persistence of the southern agriculture and the persistence of an agricultural economy even in a region that began to look like other parts in the United States. So, i was kind of pushing back against this idea that they were just like the rest of the United States by saying if you focus on the way that money is made in the political economy of the south, you might actually start to see a continuity between the regional distinction and the 19th and early 20th century to the late 20th century. Host there was a fellowship that you have around 2010 but the dream you believe the in the Virginia Historical society. Its about virginia and the land guest i thought some of the literature gave a bit of short drift to the persistence of basically agricultural myths that the presence of undeveloped land or what appeared to be a developed hand in the south had a cultural hold on people and the land is also an important feature of southern agricultural economy and so it was very much a quest to understand that dave writes to this project because i was thinking what are the two crops that are most associated, theres coffee and tobacco. It seemed to me that it was a much more interesting commodity to focus on in the 20th century. Host if my Historical Research is right, i can trace this back to a debate co North Carolina you are waiting take me back to the early interest. Guest its so funny that you mentioned that. When i was beginning the proje project, i decided that im going to try to understand how and tobacco farmers related to big tobacco. That was my original question and to do that, i knew i would need t to look at archive across North Carolina and i selected North Carolina as the kind of case study because it was and is the leading producer of a particular kind of tobacco that is a primary constituent in americanstyle cigarettes and so i knew i would need to set up camps and to do research at North Carolina state and the university in greenville and the coastal plain but it would be very helpful and i would recommend this to any young historian whos thinking about getting a book dissertation or 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 tobacco basically statelevel tobacco lobby and he had produced a self published book. People who produce self published books are usually very happy to talk to you about their research so i just emailed him out of the blue and said im a graduate student and i would love to talk about your work and tobacco and he was more than happy to meet with the. He gave me a lot of information i otherwise wouldnt have known had it not been for meeting him. The interest was in agriculture in the south. I cant trace it back to your undergraduate days. The beginning of the book is about tobacco before you get into the cigarettes. So it wasnt cigarettes or health. Were you always a political historian . Guest i was interested in the late 19th and early 20th centuries there was tremendous tension between the big tobacco of the era that was then known as the tobacco trust and it was the monopoly controlled by Duke University she basically comes holiday this into one big company and because they essentially have monopoly power, it meant that American Tobacco co. To dictate prices but it would pay to the tobacco farme farmers. So, tobacco farmers for the late 19th and early part of the 20th century tended to be small, they grew on a small scale and in part that was due to the fact of the tremendous labor requireme requirement, it was known as the 13 month crop because planning for the subsequent season had to be an even before the current season was harvested. It relied on different strap ons within tobacco farming. They may have hired attendants were sharecroppers and there is a racial dimension to this. They were more frequently wait and sharecroppers were more often africanamerican. The difference was sharecroppers sometimes never saw cash in the course of what they did. They had to buy from the store where their debt was tallied up against what they brought in from the previous seasons of it was a perpetual cycle of an edit this. Even for the top of this system they were always so much weaker to Something Like the tobacco trust so you can see even among the elite farmers anger at the big tobacco of the day so what motivated me towards thinking about tobacco and the latter int of the century by question essentially was what happened to all of that antagonism and in a straight once tobacco and cigarettes began to be threatened from the health perspective. Did that outside threats still mean an alliance between the farmers and industry where before there had been antagoni antagonism, so that was kind of the quest i was on. Host in this movement from this angry opposition to business alliance, the death oft over . Guest to be large extent it did, but it didnt occur because tobacco farmers thought that the cigarette manufacturers or their friend. What happened that changed everything in american agriculture and writ large was the Great Depression but more importantly, the new deal and the new deal was tremendously consequential for tobacco because it instituted a very rigid and controlled system of regulations on the land. So when you think its just this unregulated crop, tobacco farmers have to abide by strict production controls and in fact they were not written with the main part of the farm bill, they were written separately with their own legislation so that the new deal did is basically institute a system of supply management that we are going to make sure mr. Tobacco farmer who by the way you cannot just declare yourself a tobacco farmer. You essentially have to have a license to grow, and allotment. He cannot produce more than x. Amount and this is good to be revised based on the yearly projections for what the manufacturers need but in exchange we will provide with a minimum price for the tobacco. Kind of akin to the minimum wae in the industry. And it was passed right around the same time so what the state is basically enabled the Agricultural Sector to be buffered from what you can think of as the old enough to Tobacco Industry. Were there differences . Guest the major difference with tobacco as the program of f the supply management was much more rigid. You talk about the phrase Iron Triangle. What is that . Guest its an old Political Science term that basically refers to an alliance or dynamic between a subcommittee in congress that oversees a Regulatory Agency and private industry. So the tobacco subcommittee, the usda and tobacco farmers. The most important tobacco Farm Organization for much of the story that i tell is the North Carolina farm bureau. Host give me a sense of this Iron Triangle what is the dynamic . Guest whats going on in terms of tobacco farming after say world war ii is that they are very empowered by congress and encouraged by the usda to basically write their own law. What do i mean by that . After the war, any producing group is anxious about readjusting productions to peacetime. Youre not going to have the same kind o of restaurant indusy that you would have during the war if theres a special reason to think about this cigarettes of course because the Armed Services which such important purveyors of cigarettes comes up after the first world war, farmers were not organized. They had been corralled by the new deal and they experienced a severe depression for the lot of the 1920s. So theyve now become more organized by their interaction in the federal government and the federal government is literally organizing groups of farmers into committees so that they can kind of plan how much tobacco they will produce an a subsequent years. So these elite to tobacco farmers are coming together in various places across North Carolina saying what are we going to do about the postwar readjustment . We cant let what happened after the first happen again after the second world war. So what do they have now but they didnt have after world war i, but they have now is proximity to government, proximity to power, they have a whole bureaucracy. They have a whole bureaucracy that is interested in their wellbeing that there hadnt been before. The new deal did inaugurate a way of giving government that gave power and benefits to privileged groups and in this case it was producers, tobacco farmers and you can see this in a lesser extent als but also to organized labor there was a theory of how the economy should work if you could get producers to essentially form organizations to get their house in order you could have more functioning of the economy overall. But the second reason that it comes so strangely important have to do with the power of southern democrats. Like whos important in the new Deal Coalition that holds the northeastern farm groups or Industry Groups together its southern democrats so they kind of deal of the outside power in terms of the democratic party. Guest to tobacco corporationguest co. To tobaccos whole time. What is new is the interest of the federal government in shoring up the farmers as well in producing policies that ensure theres a standard of living. Host is that because the companies of interest and they stimulated the interest of the government . Guest theres a political calculation on the part of the southern democrats that theyve got these constituents that are important. They have many more than there were tobacco executives. Its about a kind of economic theory about how to empower different groups in the modern economy. If you had an imbalance between sector and industrial sector and Consumer Sector then that might lead to another depression, so it was important for the federal government to basically shore up the different groups of americans and make sure that there was economic harmony. Host let me give a simplistic assertion that tobacco was never really good for the farmers, it was good for the Big Corporation. Guest its hard for me to wrap my mind around that with what i know about the experien experience. Because of the federal policy that was directing money towards farmers, farming became a lot better. Many people at the same time to your point left when they could, the left of the experience post1930s was much better than it had been and tobacco farmers did relative to the corporations and big tobacco, they capture a larger share of the price of the cigarettes than they did before the 1930s and after the end of the federal Tobacco Program in 2004. Host then something happens leading up to the 1964 Surgeon Generals report. To these farmers get completely caught off guard . Guest because the federal policy has encouraged the organization of some elite to tobacco farmers they see an opening to make an alliance during the 1950s through arguably the presentday so at that meeting in the new York Plaza Hotel in 1953 its not just a tobacco Corporate Executives Philip Morris and r. J. Reynolds, there are representatives of tobacco agricultural groups as well. Agricultural groups as well. That is intended to industry the propaganda for the audiences the idea that farmers more than those that work for a Big Corporation that they may be in fact a very downhome ally for Tobacco Companies as they try to make arguments against. By the fifties and sixties two or three different regime Governments Department of agriculture and appropriations wanting to help the farmer. Allowing them to go testify in congress against people in Public Health so part of that is using farmers who are organized to be the mouthpiece of industry to be more credible or likable so you see farmers going to testify against proposed cigarette regulations in the sixties for example. With the Phillip Morris of the world. That farmers were not just ponds they believe that regulation would be bad for them. They had seen that their prosperity was linked to the rise of the cigarette in a direct way and many people may not realize that prior to world war ii in the late thirties that made way that people consume tobacco was not even in the cigarette so the cigarette directly tracks the rise of prosperity for farmers also due to Government Intervention so they were invested of people continuing. And they wanted their kids to smoke crack. Tobacco farmers smoked more than other people and to this day you see greater rates of tobacco use in tobacco growing regions. Probably by the eighties they did not want their kids to smok smoke. And as the Surgeon General you chronicle the book shifts you have the rise of the Public Interest movement. Yes for go the Surgeon Generals report comes out 1964 and basically the first time the federal government says smoking causes cancer and Heart Disease for Many Americans this is a huge event splashed across the front pages across the country but it had been in the works a couple of years in 1862 the Royal College of physicians basically the equivalent of the Surgeon General comes out with this report so the question for congress and regulators so what will we do with this information the report basically said that government needed to do something that was the case on the issue. Then the stc says we will use this as an opportunity to enhance the power of our agency to regulate. It is an opportunity for them to approach regulation in a new muscular way. It wasnt about Popular Culture<\/a> and political life and we very much tend to associate the product with the deception of the major tobacco firms. It has a cinematic quality, the executives met in the hotel on a chilly december night in 1953 and he hatched a plan to basically engage in what became a halfcentury long conspiracy to avoid regulation. This is a tremendously important story and one that i think has been continuing to be fruitfully applied for other strategies of corporate deception. But if you take a wide angle view, what begins to focus is the presence wasnt simply produced by the industry itself. You see that the federal government specifically has had a really big hand in a leading debate co orbiting and was undermined wasnt the fact that they finally got hit in 1964 or the the 1990s. It was the assiduous effort of activists in the 60s and 70s to dislodge and they couldnt do it by operating at the federal level. They had to look at the local and state governments to do so so if you think about it for the span of the 20th century, you see a product that was in a behavior pattern a culture of life that was made by federal action and that was unmade by the social movements that basically created a new connector in america. Host people spend a lot of time talking about and unpacking that. Lets just start how do you do history . Guest i love this question. I think what you are trained to do in graduate school is read as much as possible. The first couple of years of graduate school are to poke holes in every book that you read and think about whats missing or what kind of analysis to be performed and how does the paper over and hide. The whole point of asking these questions and being so hard on these important and fabulous forms is that th said that the e students basically figured out their own voice can be and their own contribution to the novel and research can be. I was very interested in entirely different questions about the persistence of regionalism and the regional economies so there was a debate among the historians of the south and conservatism over the question is the south still a unique region. They looked at political life in the suburbs of atlanta and the suburbs of charlotte and phoenix and los angeles and said the patterns that are happening here look the same so maybe it isnt a Central Point<\/a> of the regional distinctiveness isnt what is operative anymore. In my readin reading in a questr novelty, i was interested in the persistence of the southern agriculture and the persistence of an agricultural economy even in a region that began to look like other parts in the United States<\/a>. So, i was kind of pushing back against this idea that they were just like the rest of the United States<\/a> by saying if you focus on the way that money is made in the political economy of the south, you might actually start to see a continuity between the regional distinction and the 19th and early 20th century to the late 20th century. Host there was a fellowship that you have around 2010 but the dream you believe the in the Virginia Historical<\/a> society. Its about virginia and the land guest i thought some of the literature gave a bit of short drift to the persistence of basically agricultural myths that the presence of undeveloped land or what appeared to be a developed hand in the south had a cultural hold on people and the land is also an important feature of southern agricultural economy and so it was very much a quest to understand that dave writes to this project because i was thinking what are the two crops that are most associated, theres coffee and tobacco. It seemed to me that it was a much more interesting commodity to focus on in the 20th century. Host if my Historical Research<\/a> is right, i can trace this back to a debate co North Carolina<\/a> you are waiting take me back to the early interest. Guest its so funny that you mentioned that. When i was beginning the proje project, i decided that im going to try to understand how and tobacco farmers related to big tobacco. That was my original question and to do that, i knew i would need t to look at archive across North Carolina<\/a> and i selected North Carolina<\/a> as the kind of case study because it was and is the leading producer of a particular kind of tobacco that is a primary constituent in americanstyle cigarettes and so i knew i would need to set up camps and to do research at North Carolina<\/a> state and the university in greenville and the coastal plain but it would be very helpful and i would recommend this to any young historian whos thinking about getting a book dissertation or 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 tobacco basically statelevel tobacco lobby and he had produced a self published book. People who produce self published books are usually very happy to talk to you about their research so i just emailed him out of the blue and said im a graduate student and i would love to talk about your work and tobacco and he was more than happy to meet with the. He gave me a lot of information i otherwise wouldnt have known had it not been for meeting him. The interest was in agriculture in the south. I cant trace it back to your undergraduate days. The beginning of the book is about tobacco before you get into the cigarettes. So it wasnt cigarettes or health. Were you always a political historian . Guest i was interested in the late 19th and early 20th centuries there was tremendous tension between the big tobacco of the era that was then known as the tobacco trust and it was the monopoly controlled by Duke University<\/a> she basically comes holiday this into one big company and because they essentially have monopoly power, it meant that American Tobacco<\/a> co. To dictate prices but it would pay to the tobacco farme farmers. So, tobacco farmers for the late 19th and early part of the 20th century tended to be small, they grew on a small scale and in part that was due to the fact of the tremendous labor requireme requirement, it was known as the 13 month crop because planning for the subsequent season had to be an even before the current season was harvested. It relied on different strap ons within tobacco farming. They may have hired attendants were sharecroppers and there is a racial dimension to this. They were more frequently wait and sharecroppers were more often africanamerican. The difference was sharecroppers sometimes never saw cash in the course of what they did. They had to buy from the store where their debt was tallied up against what they brought in from the previous seasons of it was a perpetual cycle of an edit this. Even for the top of this system they were always so much weaker to Something Like<\/a> the tobacco trust so you can see even among the elite farmers anger at the big tobacco of the day so what motivated me towards thinking about tobacco and the latter int of the century by question essentially was what happened to all of that antagonism and in a straight once tobacco and cigarettes began to be threatened from the health perspective. Did that outside threats still mean an alliance between the farmers and industry where before there had been antagoni antagonism, so that was kind of the quest i was on. Host in this movement from this angry opposition to business alliance, the death oft over . Guest to be large extent it did, but it didnt occur because tobacco farmers thought that the cigarette manufacturers or their friend. What happened that changed everything in american agriculture and writ large was the Great Depression<\/a> but more importantly, the new deal and the new deal was tremendously consequential for tobacco because it instituted a very rigid and controlled system of regulations on the land. So when you think its just this unregulated crop, tobacco farmers have to abide by strict production controls and in fact they were not written with the main part of the farm bill, they were written separately with their own legislation so that the new deal did is basically institute a system of supply management that we are going to make sure mr. Tobacco farmer who by the way you cannot just declare yourself a tobacco farmer. You essentially have to have a license to grow, and allotment. He cannot produce more than x. Amount and this is good to be revised based on the yearly projections for what the manufacturers need but in exchange we will provide with a minimum price for the tobacco. Kind of akin to the minimum wae in the industry. And it was passed right around the same time so what the state is basically enabled the Agricultural Sector<\/a> to be buffered from what you can think of as the old enough to Tobacco Industry<\/a>. Were there differences . Guest the major difference with tobacco as the program of f the supply management was much more rigid. You talk about the phrase Iron Triangle<\/a>. What is that . Guest its an old Political Science<\/a> term that basically refers to an alliance or dynamic between a subcommittee in congress that oversees a Regulatory Agency<\/a> and private industry. So the tobacco subcommittee, the usda and tobacco farmers. The most important tobacco Farm Organization<\/a> for much of the story that i tell is the North Carolina<\/a> farm bureau. Host give me a sense of this Iron Triangle<\/a> what is the dynamic . Guest whats going on in terms of tobacco farming after say world war ii is that they are very empowered by congress and encouraged by the usda to basically write their own law. What do i mean by that . After the war, any producing group is anxious about readjusting productions to peacetime. Youre not going to have the same kind o of restaurant indusy that you would have during the war if theres a special reason to think about this cigarettes of course because the Armed Services<\/a> which such important purveyors of cigarettes comes up after the first world war, farmers were not organized. They had been corralled by the new deal and they experienced a severe depression for the lot of the 1920s. So theyve now become more organized by their interaction in the federal government and the federal government is literally organizing groups of farmers into committees so that they can kind of plan how much tobacco they will produce an a subsequent years. So these elite to tobacco farmers are coming together in various places across North Carolina<\/a> saying what are we going to do about the postwar readjustment . We cant let what happened after the first happen again after the second world war. So what do they have now but they didnt have after world war i, but they have now is proximity to government, proximity to power, they have a whole bureaucracy. They have a whole bureaucracy that is interested in their wellbeing that there hadnt been before. The new deal did inaugurate a way of giving government that gave power and benefits to privileged groups and in this case it was producers, tobacco farmers and you can see this in a lesser extent als but also to organized labor there was a theory of how the economy should work if you could get producers to essentially form organizations to get their house in order you could have more functioning of the economy overall. But the second reason that it comes so strangely important have to do with the power of southern democrats. Like whos important in the new Deal Coalition<\/a> that holds the northeastern farm groups or Industry Groups<\/a> together its southern democrats so they kind of deal of the outside power in terms of the democratic party. Guest to tobacco corporationguest co. To tobaccos whole time. What is new is the interest of the federal government in shoring up the farmers as well in producing policies that ensure theres a standard of living. Host is that because the companies of interest and they stimulated the interest of the government . Guest theres a political calculation on the part of the southern democrats that theyve got these constituents that are important. They have many more than there were tobacco executives. Its about a kind of economic theory about how to empower different groups in the modern economy. If you had an imbalance between sector and industrial sector and Consumer Sector<\/a> then that might lead to another depression, so it was important for the federal government to basically shore up the different groups of americans and make sure that there was economic harmony. Host let me give a simplistic assertion that tobacco was never really good for the farmers, it was good for the Big Corporation<\/a>. Guest its hard for me to wrap my mind around that with what i know about the experien experience. Because of the federal policy that was directing money towards farmers, farming became a lot better. Many people at the same time to your point left when they could, the left of the experience post1930s was much better than it had been and tobacco farmers did relative to the corporations and big tobacco, they capture a larger share of the price of the cigarettes than they did before the 1930s and after the end of the federal Tobacco Program<\/a> in 2004. Host then something happens leading up to the 1964 Surgeon Generals<\/a> report. To these farmers get completely caught off guard . Guest because the federal policy has encouraged the organization of some elite to tobacco farmers they see an opening to make an alliance during the 1950s through arguably the presentday so at that meeting in the new York Plaza Hotel<\/a> in 1953 its not just a tobacco Corporate Executives<\/a> Philip Morris<\/a> and r. J. Reynolds, there are representatives of tobacco agricultural groups as well. Agricultural groups as well. That is intended to industry the propaganda for the audiences the idea that farmers more than those that work for a Big Corporation<\/a> that they may be in fact a very downhome ally for Tobacco Companies<\/a> as they try to make arguments against. By the fifties and sixties two or three different regime Governments Department<\/a> of agriculture and appropriations wanting to help the farmer. Allowing them to go testify in congress against people in Public Health<\/a> so part of that is using farmers who are organized to be the mouthpiece of industry to be more credible or likable so you see farmers going to testify against proposed cigarette regulations in the sixties for example. With the Phillip Morris<\/a> of the world. That farmers were not just ponds they believe that regulation would be bad for them. They had seen that their prosperity was linked to the rise of the cigarette in a direct way and many people may not realize that prior to world war ii in the late thirties that made way that people consume tobacco was not even in the cigarette so the cigarette directly tracks the rise of prosperity for farmers also due to Government Intervention<\/a> so they were invested of people continuing. And they wanted their kids to smoke crack. Tobacco farmers smoked more than other people and to this day you see greater rates of tobacco use in tobacco growing regions. Probably by the eighties they did not want their kids to smok smoke. And as the Surgeon General<\/a> you chronicle the book shifts you have the rise of the Public Interest<\/a> movement. Yes for go the Surgeon Generals<\/a> report comes out 1964 and basically the first time the federal government says smoking causes cancer and Heart Disease<\/a> for Many Americans<\/a> this is a huge event splashed across the front pages across the country but it had been in the works a couple of years in 1862 the Royal College<\/a> of physicians basically the equivalent of the Surgeon General<\/a> comes out with this report so the question for congress and regulators so what will we do with this information the report basically said that government needed to do something that was the case on the issue. Then the stc says we will use this as an opportunity to enhance the power of our agency to regulate. It is an opportunity for them to approach regulation in a new muscular way. It wasnt about Public Health<\/a> . Ultimately it was but the Surgeon General<\/a> had the impetus to do something that regulators had said they wanted to do before. Absolutely it was about Public Health<\/a> for the ftc but was an opportunity that as they were crafting these regulations to be a response to the report. As you chronicle. So it turns out southern democrats continued to be very powerful in 19 sixties washington so more strongly worded warning labels from the ftc to step in and do what is characteristic of Congress Acting<\/a> at the behest of the Tobacco Industry<\/a> then they have a watereddown warning label and say you cannot regulate on this. Which was bad for big tobacco. Absolutely. My sense is the book starts telling the story. Part of what is at play is the warning label issue is the paradigm of consent if you put a warning label on a pack of cigarettes it is the smokers choice to do what they will with that information. That now by the late sixties and seventies a number of americans begin to think it makes no sens sense. But the paradigm of consent makes no sense because most americans never experience smoking is smokers but as nonsmokers. So what becomes critical in the seventies is the invention of the idea the creation of the idea of nonsmokers. But then back through the 19 hundreds in new yorks subways there was an oped in the New York Times<\/a> that opposed any restriction due to the prior century they say people smoke in subway cars with nonsmokers rights different in the seventies and in the twenties. Yes. The idea of a movement for smoking restriction had the antecedent in the 20th century but a handful of states banned the sale of cigarettes in the early 20th century basically a cigarette version of prohibitio prohibition. But not the modern cigarette that in the 19 hundreds they were fighting for their right to smoke. Most did not smoke at the turn of the previous century and thats what the Prohibition Movement<\/a> that people did smoke at the turn of the 20th they tended to live in cities and be young man and portrayed as juvenile delinquents so at the turn of the 20th century it was something almost unamerican so it was the foreignborn so the first two decades they rode the wave of nativism thinking what type of behavior is appropriate. And then you go back to 1970. Donna was this fascinating woman she was a Customer Service<\/a> representative working for new jersey bell and had a temp terrible tobacco allergy where she worked in new jersey more than half of her coworkers smoked it was actually more than others because only 3 percent of the American Population<\/a> smoked so she was exposed on a daily basis she had complained to supervisors that had not gotten very far and it really affected her quality of life. Every day she would be popping pills because she would throw up and she began to wear a gas mask to work she had to lower it when she spoke with people on the phone but did not remove it completely for those who came into the office. This is at t. She was a member of the communication workers of america went to her Union Steward<\/a> and said this is a Workplace Health<\/a> issue can you help me and throughout the meeting he was smoking to give an indication she would not get very far she went to the Company Doctor<\/a> he said this is ridiculous. You are ill your workplace is making you ill you need to stay home until they work out an arrangement so you can return to work in a safe and healthy environment. So she says okay so she think shell be home a couple days until they can accommodate her but days turn into months so now alarm bells are going off in my going to lose my job why are they so devoted to the smoking office. So while shes at home basically on sabbatical i understand she actually gets work done and immerses herself of the tobacco activism and makes can tap with contact with the group name dash which is a legal arm of the Anti Tobacco Movement<\/a> contacts local social movements and then she basically learns she is in unchartered territory there are no laws that govern the regulation of smoking at work. So basically she realizes the only way this is to be resolved is to pursue legal action so she decided to sue her employer which is also amazing to consider she is in unchartered territory. Where did that legal theory come from to sue the workplace. A very wellestablished law but smoking constituted an unsafe work environment. Legal innovation are judicial activism . Legal innovation married to a judges understanding of science and the need of the worker so taking on this tremendous Public Health<\/a> celebrity production is 1975 she doesnt know where to turn thats before the days of wikipedia so she does what eddie motivated or informed citizen would do evolution i talked to about this. Is anybody working at the law school . This is what historians call contingency if one thing could have been different so it just so happens law professor was on faculty and teaching at rutgers and has spent the previous decade serving the equal Opportunity Employment Commission<\/a> the federal agency created to enforce the Civil Rights Act<\/a> at work. So he had thought a lot about the responsibility of employers to not discriminate and he was eager to take on her case and use it as a teaching tool for his students. To me thats just amazing because that thought a lot about the relationship between agency and lawyers sometimes they want to be sued so they can fulfill their mandate. For that case he was crucial in preparing the initial documents yes. So you were interested in he her. She did much of that on her own. I was thinking of what it would take to be her but its a hostile work environment. People are smoking in her face. Her employer doesnt want her there while she is at home making phone calls he also drops a very expensive suggestion for a corporate policy she delivered to the headquarters of at t how they could reasonably accommodate nonsmoking employees and then it tends to be inconsequential if they have a nonsmoking section at the switchboard you can tell them not to smoke in certain areas. Did you interview her . Know i wanted to but she was pretty aged. She left her papers at the university of california was that helpful . Tremendously. That i was captivated by her glad you could notice with that document she wrote to at t she also pioneered so smokers they are expensive they take breaks they destroy equipment, they are sick more often, and she presents a Business Case<\/a> its an important argument as she goes after antitobacco. She won the case but other jurisdictions did not side with nonsmoking employees. But what about the law in the case whats the difference . That such a good question. There are other cases from the late seventies and early eighties that make similar types of claims and they dont succeed but what made the difference with the Tobacco Movement<\/a> as it proceeded was the Business Case<\/a>. So donna and heres another reason im so captivated by her she continued to work well basically starting her own Consulting Company<\/a> working out of her basement and made the case its good for your bottom line to protect your nonsmokers at work because smokers were expensive and look at my case you are creating a liability now that part was a little fudgy because her case was weak but that this was an expensive way to save money for employers said that being very attractive to take up smoking restrictions. It with the smoker rights and the right to make a living these are legal rights. So talking to be increasingly salient for nonsmokers it is a way of communicating their claim and prior to the 19 sixties. Coming from three sources. Those with the smokers pollutants should and that advocacy groups all over the country and in their literature sometimes they stretch the analogy to claim nonsmokers rights to participate and then they see this along the lines of asking the right to sit at a lunch cover and then to enjoy ones lunch. And what africanamericans are demanding. And then following the civil rights movement. And that stream of thought which is shaping is the feminist movement. So one thing they have to do is say im a nonsmoker how i want to be in this space should determine what the space looks like. Makes people realize that they share a common experience to gather to be oppressed and then to share that private dignity and basically you can make that into a public claim. The final thought is the Environmental Movement<\/a> framing indoor smoking is environmental hazard. Did you start the pieces . Know i started with a question what happened to the antagonism with the tobacco farmers in Tobacco Industry<\/a> as they both became threatened by knowledge that smoking causes cancer. And this isnt the discovery that it causes cancer in the Surgeon General<\/a> it was the invention by activism and the idea those who do not smoke could achieve unpolluted air in shared public spaces. Can i push back. A view the history of tobacco when i think washington in 1890 a lot of progress on Secondhand Smoke<\/a> and not breathe polluted air. About the process of the anti Tobacco Community<\/a> and then it was a different question so i see these as chapters you see a key determinant. I agree there are chapters. And what we have overlooked it with those nonsmokers. That readings very true. And my rights as a nonsmoker that does not portend well on the issue but that is not the same kind that is available. It is different than the tobacco issue so with the tobacco unfolding in chapters looking back the whole one or three years. That we should not take the Tobacco Industry<\/a> at its word and we should not assume that that epidemiological right now that the chances that social movements can really make a difference around Secondhand Smoke<\/a> or that they shouldnt market to kids that could be an impetus for action and it also shows action has to be at the federal level. And then try to implement laws at the state level and those had tremendous success to change attitudes and society at large. The cover is the property of Harvard University<\/a> press. And you take on that challenge. I do see maybe im just an optimist not that many feel optimistic but that key take away of the book is the federal government has been organized around industry and you can see that with Climate Change<\/a> in tobacco and one of the activist so by achieving scores at the local level in the eighties and nineties they made more nonsmokers in the bigger constituency for the future they wanted so theres a lesson in that for Climate Change<\/a> activism that are frustrated at federal interaction. One trademark was thank you for not smoking. More places that i have been to signs that say no guns on this premises and i wonder if that visual awareness of the presence or absence can make people more aware of their stance on an issue thank you to the associate editor of the journal to help prepare for todays interview i have on this question do you love doing history . Absolutely. My dream job i love researching and i love writing. You did a very very well. Congratulations it is a major scholarly achievement. Thank you so much. Wonderful conversation","publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"archive.org","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","width":"800","height":"600","url":"\/\/ia803102.us.archive.org\/6\/items\/CSPAN2_20191202_050100_After_Words_Sarah_Milov_The_Cigarette\/CSPAN2_20191202_050100_After_Words_Sarah_Milov_The_Cigarette.thumbs\/CSPAN2_20191202_050100_After_Words_Sarah_Milov_The_Cigarette_000001.jpg"}},"autauthor":{"@type":"Organization"},"author":{"sameAs":"archive.org","name":"archive.org"}}],"coverageEndTime":"20240716T12:35:10+00:00"}