Congratulations. Your book is a major accomplishment. It is a significant scholarly work. I think its fair to say you rule the field. Thank you thats tremendous hearing that coming from you. Thank you so much. How does it feel . A big relief it was ten years in the works to make the book and is just a pleasure to be able to talk about it with you and tons of other interesting people. The three major rivalries spent their careers studying writing about the cigarette from Richard Kruger the Pulitzer Prize ashes to ashes. An amazing book it is a page turner. The great medical scientific historian and and Robert Proctor at stanford for industry any trepidation and you took a risk i feel as though those books ashes to ashes and the biggest of which is called golden holocaust i felt like i was standing on the shoulders of giants indebted to them but when i was thinking about writing about tobacco i wasnt approaching at the same way that was from industry and when i began this project as a Little League graduate student i was thinking of agriculture and farmers which is probably not surprising to say so i saw these works as my opening wedge to write about it in a different way so the book and the project change quite a bit from all these years ago. Start with the basic question how do you view this. Turning back of how we think of cigarettes in Popular Culture with the deception of that major tobacco it has a cinematic quality from those in the plaza hotel and they hatched a plan to engage to manufacture doubt it is a tremendously important story to other strategies of corporate conception but if you look add a wider angle view what comes into focus the presence of cigarette in American Life isnt produced by the industry itself if you begin with the seed to smoke the federal government specifically has had a really big hand and why undermined the presence was not the fact the feds finally got hit in 1874 or 19 nineties but the outburst of activist in the sixties and seventies to dislodge though whole of tobacco and they could not do that by operating at the federal level they had to go local for the state governments to do so if you think about cigarettes over the span of the 20th century you see a behavior pattern that was made by a social movement that basically created a new character in america of the nonsmoker. We will spend a lot of time talking. So lets just start how do you do history . I love this question. What you try to do in graduate school is read as much as possible that has been written. The first couple years of graduate school is every book that you read and think about what is missing or why analysis to put forward and what does that paper over and hide. And the whole point of asking these questions to be so hard on these fabulous tones is that the graduate students figure out what their own voice can be in their own contribution to novels. So when i was reading in graduate school, i wasnt steeped in the tobacco debate at all. I was very interested in entirely different questions about regionalism and regional economies. So at the beginning of my time in graduate school there was a debate among historians of the south of conservativism. Is the south still a unique region quicks but it makes sense to focus on region that is different from the sunbelt because a lot of historians looked at political life from the suburbs of atlanta and charlotte in phoenix and los angeles in the political patterns that are happening look the same but not of what is operative so in my reading in my quest for novelty i was interested in the persistence of an agricultural economy in a region that looks in the post war. That looks more like other parts of the United States. I was pushing back against the idea the south was the rest of the United States but to focus on the way that money is made in the south that we could see a continuity between the regional distinction between the early and 20th century. It was a fellowship you had with the university of virginia. And florida and massachusetts geographically about virginia. What are the two crops t are most associated and grown in these, cotton and tobacco. It seemed t to need me tobacco a much more interesting commodity to focus on in the 20th century. My Historical Research i can trace this back to North Carolina when i was beginning to projects i decided im going too try to understand how tobacco farmers related to big tobacco. That was my original question and to do that, i knew i would need look. It was and is the leading producer of a tobacco that is a primary constituent in americanstyle cigarette and so i knew i would need to set up camp and do research and who is thinking abou about beginning ak or dissertation or the project. This gentle man has been involved in the tobacco economy in a statelevel tobacco lobby and they are happy to talk about the research. The interest was in agriculture in the south, tobacco. Where did it start . I cant trace it back to your undergraduate days. Where did the idea come from . Guest this didnt come from smoking. I can say that. It wasnt the cigarettes were the health. In the late 19th and early 20th century there was a tremendous tension between the big tobacco of the era that was then known as the tobacco trust and the tobacco trust was the monopoly controlled by james duke of Duke University and beginning in the 18 90s he basically bought up every type of smaller Tobacco Companies into one big Company Called the American Tobacco company and because the American Tobacco company had essentially monopoly power, it meant American Tobacco could dictate places that it would hate to tobacco farmers for what they grew, so there was tension, violence, anger on the part of tobacco farmers towards this big monopoly. For the late 19th and early part of the 20th century tended to grow on a small scale and in part that was due to the fact of the tremendous labor requirements. It was colloquially known because planning for the subsequent season and could begin even before the current season. There are different strands in tobacco farming so you had owners who may work the farms themselves with family labor or they may have hired tenets of sharecroppers and there is a racial dimension to this. Sharecroppers were more frequently africanamerican and the difference between those two is the sharecroppers sometimes never saw cash. They hav had to buy from the ste where they were tallied against what they brought in from the previous season so it was a perpetual cycle of indebtedness to even for the top of the class system tobacco farmers, there were always relative to Something Like the duke tobacco trust. You see the tobacco of its day and so what motivated me to work thinking about tobacco in the latter part of the 20th century is my question was essentially a lookup intwhat happened to the m in the history of tobacco and cigarettes began to be threatened from the health perspective. Did it form an alliance between farmers and industries where before there had been antagonism so that was kind of the quest that i was on. And the movement from this angry opposition. To a large extent it did occur but it didnt occur because tobacco farmers thought the cigarette manufacturers were there from the so what happened in american agriculture at large was the Great Depression but more importantly, the new deal and it was tremendous but consequential for tobacco because it instituted a very rigid and very controlled system of regulation on the land. Tobacco farmers have to abide by very strict production controls and tobacco is written separately with their own legislation so with the new deal did is basically institute a system think of it as supply management we are going to make sure mr. Tobacco farmer who by the way you cannot just declare your self a tobacco farmer you essentially have to have a license to grow, and allotment and he cannot produce more than x. Amount and its going to be revised on the yearly projection for what the manufacturers need but in exchange with a minimum price for the tobacco kind of akin to a minimum wage and it was past right around the same time. So, what the state is basically enabled the Agricultural Sector to be buffered to what you could almost think of as the bullying of the Tobacco Industry. The management was much more rigid. There were not buffers within the agricultural wall to allow people to go way over one year in under plant next year. You simply were not allowed to market over. You talk about the phrase Iron Triangle. What is that . Its an old Political Science term that basically refers to an alliance between or dynamic between congress that oversees a Regulatory Agency and private industry. Given a sense of this Iron Triangle that is the dynamic . The back of farmers arimpacted e their own laws. After the war from any groups anxious about readjusting to peacetime. There is a special reason to think about that with cigarettes because of course the Armed Services were such an important purveyor of cigarettes. After the First World War, farmers were not organized. They havent been corralled by the new deal. They become more organized by the federal government and the federal government is organizing groups of farmers into the committees so they can plan how much tobacco they will produce subsequent years. So these elite tobacco farmers were 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 World War happen after the second world war. They have now its proximity to government, proximity to the power. They have a whole bureaucracy. The new deal did inaugurate a way of government that gives power and benefits privileged groups and in this case it was producers, tobacco farmers and you can see this to a lesser extent to organized labor. There was a theory of how the economy should work that you could get producers to essentially form organizations to get their house in order you could have more functioning of the economy overall. It has to do with the power of southern democrats. What is important in the new deal. Who is the group that holds these farm groups and Industry Groups together with southern farmers. But tobacco corporations have power this whole time. What is new is the interest of the federal government in shoring up the farmers as well. Its a standard of living that hasnt been assured before. They stimulated the interests of the governments . Its a political calculation on the part of southern democrats but theyve got these constituents that are important in part i part because of the is that in part its also about an economic theory abou of how to d for different groups. It may lead to another depression so its important for the federal government to basically shore up the different groups. Its hard to wrap my mind around that with what i know about the experience of tobacco farming in the 20th century. The money directed towards farmers became a lot better. Many people left the farm when they could. The tobacco farmers did relative to the big tobacco they capture a larger share of the price of a cigarette than they did before the 1930s and after the end of the federal Tobacco Program in 2004. Host and something happened in the 1950s. The guest because federal policy has encouraged the organization of some elite tobacco farmers they make an alliance with tobacco farmers through arguably the present d day. For 1953 its not just the tobacco corporate executives. There are representatives of tobacco agricultural groups as well as well as the organizations and the conspiracy did not longer. The organized in agricultural offshoot of the big tobacco conspiracy. The organized group callethey od the Tobacco Growers Information Committee it is to basically translate the propaganda for an agricultural audience with the idea that farmers are this constituency beloved by politicians important to politicians because they are more numerous of course. Farmers may be in fact a downhome ally for the big Tobacco Company as they try to make arguments against regulation on the basis of health. You have now government from congressional appropriations supporting the industry wanting to help the farmer to testify in congress against people in Public Health and using farmers who basically are in the mouthpiece of the industry because they are more credible or likable dim from Phillip Morris. And who was using them . Was at the Phillip Morris of the world, they were happy to have the farmers out there . The industry was happy to have this alliance they wer bute not just pawns in the game. They believe that regulation would be bad for them. They had seen that their prosperity had been linked to the rise in a really direct way than other people may not realize prior to world war ii and to the late 1930s the main way people consume tobacco isnt even in the sector. So it was due to demand that it was also due to government intervention. So, they were invested in people continuing to smoke. Any disconnect ask tobacco farmers spoke more than other people and you see greater rates of tobacco use and tobacco growing regions. So probably by the 80s. You also comical and have devised of the public interest. Guest yes. So, the Surgeon Generals report comes out in 1964 and its basically the first time the federal government says smoking causes cancer and heart disease. And for many americans, this is a huge event launched across the front pages of newspapers across the country. But it had been in the works for a couple of years. The college of physicians basically the uk equivalent to the Surgeon General comes out with this report. We are going to use this as an opportunity to enhance the power of our agency to regulate on the most important. This wasnt about Public Health . Guest of course it was ultimately about Public Health, but the Surgeon Generals report covered the impetus to do something. It was about the ftc that this was an opportunity to say we are crafting these regulations which were proposed to be warning labels in response to this report in the name of Public Health. Guest and that hell didnt like that . Guest no. It turns out southern democrats continued to be very powerful in the mid1960s and so in response to the warning labels proposed by the ftc, Congress Steps in and they do what becomes acting at the behest of the industry and have an up or down warning label and say you cant regulate on this for a few more years. Host big tobacco pulling the strings . Is a whole different level about this kind because you start telling the story from salem new jersey. Guest part of what is at play with the warning label issue is the paradigm for consent. If we put a warning label on a pack of cigarettes, it is the smokers choice to do what he or she will with that information. By the late 1960s to 70s, a number of americans are beginning to think that this paradigm makes no sense. The paradigm of consent makes no sense because most americans, and this is true, they never experience smoking smokers, they experience it as nonsmokers and so what becomes critical in the 1970s was the invention of the idea, the creation of idea of nonsmokers rights. Host doctor charles i. Think there was an oped in the New York Times that opposed restrictions on smoking deck of thback atthe turn of the prior. Nonsmokers rights, what was different in the 1970s tha thenn the early 19 hundreds . Hundreds . Guest the idea for the movement had and antecedents so it might surprise a lot of people to know a handful of states actually banned the sales of cigarettes in the early 20th century. It was basically a prohibition. Host you didnt have the modern spirit. Most didnt smoke at the turn of the previous century and here is the link to the Temperance Movement for the prohibition movement. The people that didnt smoke at the turn of the 20th century tended to be immigrants. They tended to be young men portrayed as juvenile delinquents. So at the turn of the century in the 1and the 19 hundreds it was considered something almost unamerican. It was a rite of the foreign so the first two decades of the century kind of rode that wave of nativism and thinking about what type of behavior is appropriate for healthy americans. Host go back 1970. Tell me about her and her case. Guest she was this Customer Service representative working for new jersey and she had a tobacco allergy. Where she worked in new jersey more than half of her coworkers smoked, which is a more smoking environment in most offices because at this time only about 40 of the American Population smokes. So, she was exposed on a daily basis and she had complained to her supervisor and havent gotten very far and it really affected her quality of life every day that she would pop a pill because she would throw up. You need to stay home and tell the Company Works out an arrangement so that you can return to work in a safe and healthy environment per cow so she tells her supervisor she figured she would be home a couple days until they configure the office to accommodate her which days turn into months so in her mind alarm bells are going off. Are they going to fire me why are they so devoted to the smoking office . While shes at home basically she is on a sabbatical that means she actually gets work done and basically immerses herself in the burgeoning world of activism to make contact with the group of ash which is the legal arm of the Anti Tobacco Movement contacts local social movement who talks about smoking pollution so basically she learns that she is in unchartered territory there are no states or federal laws that govern the presence or regulation of smoking at work. So she realizes the only way this will get resolved is to pursue legal action so she decided she will sue her employer which is also daunting to consider she is in unchartered territory. The duty to have a safe workplace. I think it is wellestablished common law idea of the responsibility of an employer to the employee what was novel is that smoking constituted an unsafe Work Environment. Judicial activism married to a judges understanding of science and the worker so it takes on a celebrity dimension. 1975 she will sue her employer thats before the days of wikipedia so she calls bay Reference Library to ask who should i talk to somebody about this is anybody at the law school . So the idea if one little thing could have been different bb history would be different so it just so happens the contingent event a law professor by the name of alfred was on faculty teaching at rutgers and spent the previous decade serving in the equal Employment Opportunity commission the agency created to enforce the Civil Rights Act at work. He had thought of a lot about the responsibility of employers to not discriminate he was teaching a case of Employment Law and was excited to take it pro bono and to me thats amazing because hes the kind of figure that thought a lot about the relationship between agencies and lawyers. He was the legal architect . He was crucial in preparing the initial documents, yes. I have a sense you were enormously interested in her. She did so much work on her own i think about what it would have taken to be her in this Work Environment it is hostile. She is throwing up in people are smoking in her face her employer does not want her there while she is at home making his phone calls shes also drafting a very strong policy how can they could reasonably accommodate nonsmoking employees the line is that if you can have a nonsmoking section for the operators at the switchboard you clearly have the power to tell them not to smoke in certain areas. Did you interview her . No. I reached out that id did not hear back. Was university of california helpful . Tremendously. Yes. I am glad that you noticed that i am captivated by her because i was. In the course of this document she has written to at t she also pioneers an important document where she says smokers are expensive they take breaks they are sick more often, and basically presents a Business Case for restricting to ban tobacco at work broke although this is not the point the judge who ruled in her favor picked up upon it is an important argument she makes later as she continues anti tobacco advocacy. She won her case. But there is precedent not with a nonsmoking employees. That bad is such a good question but where the employees are basically making similar types of claims and they dont succeed. But what is the difference of the Anti Tobacco Movement as it proceeded they won the Business Case but donna, heres the reason i was so captivated she continued while also basically starting her own consultancy business and that basically made the case to protect nonsmokers that work. That smokers were expensive and look at my case. So now that part was a little edgy because her case that was the inexpensive way to take up smoking restrictions. But the rights of the nonsmoker. And the right so these are political rights. But for those nonsmokers in that era its a way of communicating their claims prior to the 19 sixties. And with that Civil Rights Movement and to be the decentralized Advocacy Group and their literature they stretch that analogy for those participating in ads along the lines of is a really any different between asking for the right to sit at lunch counter or enjoy ones lunch thats over asking for it would African Americans were demanding. But what i think is shaping the rights of nonsmokers is the feminist movement. So for nonsmoker advocates we have to make it safe to say i nonsmoker and how i want to be in the space should determine what the space is like. To make people realize that they share a common experience together to be oppressed by the presence of tobacco smoke so there is feminist consciousness raising by sharing that dignity by other women you can basically make that into a public claim. And the final strand is the Environmental Movement of the late sixties and early seventies as activist waived indoor smoking as an environmental hazard. Host does the book have a thesis . No. I just started with a question of what happened to the antagonism between the tobacco farmers and Tobacco Industry as both became threatened by knowledge that smoking causes cancer. I started with a question not and answer. Host i heard you say the following with tobaccos grip on American Society its not that smoking causes cancer with the Surgeon Generals warning but it was an invention of activist of nonsmokers the idea that people who do not smoke that could achieve unpolluted air in shares public spaces. Can i push back . Ac the history of tobacco as a chapter. When i came to washington in 1990 there was a lot of progress on Secondhand Smoke that you could get on the plane and not breathe polluted air but but thats what they wanted to talk about a combination and then a little bit at a loss. Minimize the industry manipulating clicks and with these chapters is the key determinant but as the book suggest an important chapter that we overlook is the rise of a true social movement around the idea of nonsmokers and that chapter enables this. That rings true so what is the implication . That my rights as a nonsmoker does not portend well on the vaping issue because the industry says the secondhand consequences that is the same kind of tool thats available. But to return to the idea that we are adding a chapter to look back over the whole of the past. And one thing we should know is not take that Tobacco Industry at its word into have proof of that epidemiological consequences that there wouldnt be bad also what the history the suggest is social movements can really make a difference and if dad is Secondhand Smoke for that you should not market to kids but action doesnt have to be at that level. So to implement laws at the local level. That has tremendous success in the history. Our did the cover come about . The cover is the property of Harvard University press. And the societal issue. Id give lessons in this but im just an optimist not that people read about tobacco and feel optimistic. But the federal government of the 20th century is organized around industry. You can see that with Climate Change and tobacco and guns as well. The laws are not just made by the federal government with those local laws the way they experience their daytoday life scores victories in the eighties and nineties and a bigger constituency for the future they wanted to see and with the Climate Change activists that is that federal inaction. Guns . That is the one trademark of the Anti Tobacco Movement of thank you for not smoking. I have noticed more places that i have been to says no guns on this premises i wonder if that raises awareness of the absence of a gun makes them more aware of their stance on the issue. With the journey on the journal of american history. Do you love doing history . Absolutely. I have my dream job i love researching and you did a very well. It is a major scholarly achievement. Thank you for the wonderful conversation. Team of helicopters and it had to be done to rescue the men so they went down and he hovered on the ground for four minutes which is in a battle condition is an eternity. To see the Reconnaissance Team and then to pull the helicopter up from the tree line im coming out join us every weekend on cspan2. Next, david discusses the history of americans 1890 today. In his book, the heartbeat. Good evening, everyone. Welcome to politics and prose. Good evening welcome to politics and prose. For those of you that are not familiar with this
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