And speak at the national archives. The other day, i saw a tweet about todays event, and as a historian, its kind of like having yourself name checked by beyonce. This is the mothership. Thank you so much for coming. My book, the cigarette a political history, seeks to understand tobacco in modern america, not through the lens of big tobacco in the machinations of industry, but through the efforts of Everyday Americans to get the government to intervene on their behalf. Big tobacco is still an important part of the story, but by focusing on other actors, farmers, government officials, politicians, activists, workers and labor unions, the story of tobacco in the 20th century begins to look a lot different than if we were to understand it through the actions of tobacco alone. By taking a wide angled approach, my book suggests that far from being the product of corporate deception that was ultimately exposed by science, the cigarette was a product of government intervention. What ultimately reduced tobaccos grip on American Society was not the discovery that smoking causes cancer and, of course, the Surgeon Generals warning to that effect, but the invention by activists of nonsmokers rights, the idea that people who do not smoke were entitled and able to achieve unpolluted air and shared public spaces. This idea that nonsmokers rights, so natural to us today that we dont even consider it really to rise to the level of a political claim, that this idea had to be invented and then had to be vindicated by decisionmaking bodies. Most frequently, these bodies were businesses and local governments. In the rise of the cigarette, we can see a product made by the federal government acting on behalf of of privileged constituencies, and in its unmaking, we can see a critique not only of cigarette consumption, but in a way of doing government. The smokefilled room, as it were, that gave rise to the cigarette in the first place. Today, im going to talk about one nonsmokers rights activist, a woman who had a big hand in the kind of smokefree world we live in today. Her story, i think, eliminates the surprising mix of social movement activism, legal innovation, and hardnosed business calculation that remade public space. In 1975, donnas morning routine looked rather unusual. The 42yearold Customer Service representative talked popped an antiemetic pill and drove from her home to the office of the Bell Telephone company. Depending how things looked inside, she might put on a gas mask, which she would lower when she had to speak by phone or in person with customers. Her model was made by the mine Safety Appliances Company by pittsburgh. It was designed to be used by miners. They were gas masks to protect them selves against toxic airborne pollutants they encounter on the dot on the job, and that is what donna did as well. More than half of her coworkers smoked and there were no prohibitions on smoking by customers who came into the office. The environment was crippling. Tobacco smoke nauseated her. Hence the daily antiemetic. It caused constant headaches and rashes on her face. Caused tearing and eye irritation that left her with corneal abrasions that would were not healed. And her office like in most american workplaces in the 1970s, there were no rules separating smokers from nonsmokers. The company reasoned that rearranging the layout of the office to separate smokers from nonsmokers would disrupt workflow, and the union, the communication workers of america, agreed smoking was a workplace right. The gas mask was not the first remedy that donna turned to for relief. Earlier that year, she had seen a Company Doctor who had told her it was a disgrace for any employee to have to work in such a smoky space. On his orders, she was not to return to work until her supervisors could find a way to ensure a smokefree environment. Donna thought she would be home for a few days as supervisors rearranged desks at work. The days turned into weeks, which turned into months. Her sabbatical extended the depth of bells unwillingness. Donna got to work. She was no antitobacco activist, but she soon became one. She made contact with the two primary antismoking groups of the era ash, action on smoking and health, and gas, group against smoke inhalation. She wrote to the new Jersey Department of health and labor, the Environmental Protection agency and all the major health voluntary associations. From her research, she learned she was in uncharted territory. In the 1970s, there were no laws governing workplace smoking on behalf of nonsmokers. Despite the fact the epa and osha had authority over air quality and workplace conditions respectively, no Regulatory Agency was authorized to Police Workplace conditions affected by tobacco smoke. For for other issues, she could expect the support of her union as unions across the country in the 1970s were beginning to venture jan wages and hours to address the health and quality and life concerns of members, but the communication workers of america was adamant that it would not support her in her quest for a smokefree work environment. In fact, her Union Steward smoked throughout the meeting as she discussed her need for smokefree air. The antipathy at work was palpable or, rather, inhalable. Finding no allies in government or labor, she tried to take her case directly to management. She delivered her proposal for smokefree workplace policy to bell. She said bell should ban smoke and workplace offices in the same way it is banned in the Central Office and switchboards, and if bell cannot bring itself to regulate smoking on behalf of nonsmoking employees, at least he could do so on behalf of the bottom line. Citing figures from the Public Health service, she pointed out that nonsmokers spend world 1 3 more time away from work because of disease. Bell did not take her advice. Donna decided the courtroom would be the only venue that could provide her relief, so she decided to sue. But how . How could a Customer Service representative living in rural new jersey find a lawyer with expertise in Employment Law and perhaps even a sympathy for nonsmokers plight . The answer to this question should warm the hearts of booklovers everywhere. Donna schempp called a librarian. [laughter] [applause] she called the reference librarian at rutgers university, and that librarian happened to know about a law professor teaching a course on employment discrimination. Alford blue rose and had been a lawyer and the johnson administration, and an important one at that. He had been an architect of the equal employment commission, the organization charged with banning discrimination at work. Donna, it turned out, had a realworld need for the series bloom was developing in his law class. He agreed to take on her case pro bono. This was her first stroke of good fortune. The second and third were the and surprisingly so responsys she received from two medical sources to whom she wrote soliciting advice on her behalf. The Surgeon General who oversaw the publication of the famous 1964 report on smoking and health agreed to provide an affidavit affirming that tobacco smoke in the workplace could be a hazard to a significant number of workers and an irritation to an even larger number. Dr. Jesse seinfeld was also no ordinary doctor. He had served as nixons Surgeon General before he was canned, in his opinion, for denouncing the Tobacco Industry too forcefully. He also submitted testimony. The judge presiding over the case at the new Jersey Superior Court was moved by this celebrity testimony, but he was also moved by the argument that donna herself had made to bells corporate brass, that if the switchboard equipment was precious enough to merit a smokefree environment, then surely, so, too, were the bodies of employees themselves. A company which has demonstrated such concern for mechanical components should have at least as much concern for human beings, the judge wrote. New jersey bell had a common law duty to provide employees a safe and healthy work environment, which for donna meant an environment free of tobacco smoke. In wresting the right to a smokefree environment from her employee, donna was at the vanguard that i read about in my book. Cigarettes were a testament to federal regulation upon behalf of tobacco, specifically on behalf of organized tobacco producers. So activists did more than try to create tolerable conditions to work, congregate, dine, and exist in public. They asserted an alternative way of thinking about the value of citizenship and the obligations of government. The idea of nonsmokers rights, that in individual by virtue of not partaking in a habit can dictate where that habit is expressed, this idea cut against the producercentered politics that undergird smokers supremacy and shared spaces. Donna soon realized she was part of a young but emboldened new social movement, the nonsmokers Rights Movement. These were a very particular kind of tobacco activist. Their goal is not to get people to quit smoking but to get people to quit smoking in public. In effect, their intention was to subvert the paradigm that both the Tobacco Industry and federal government had used to govern tobacco. This paradigm was in your face every time you picked up a pack of cigarettes. It was right there on the warning label that read, cigarette smoking may be hazardous to your health. Having been warned, it was the consumers choice. But the majority of americans never did experience cigarettes as smokers. They experienced tobacco smoke as part of shared public space except for when tobacco smoke may have kept them home. Clara was one such exile. In 1971, the housewife, and her words, and mother of two young daughters decided she had had enough of bending her life around tobacco smoke. Her youngest daughter had a tobacco allergy that kept the family from enjoying one of the central pleasures of middleclass life going out to dinner. She and some girlfriends made a pact of sorts. Their First Political action. They would remove ashtrays in their homes, ashtrays that neither they nor their husbands used but were there is a room fixture for the convenience of guests. That this small gesture required premeditation and the kind of confidence that only can be shored up by a group of the likeminded suggests the degree of anxiety clara faced when she considered claiming an exclusively nonsmoking space, even when that space was her own home. She started group against smoking pollution or gasp from this action. Using 50 of her grocery money, she produced the first batch of buttons that would become a standard symbol in the nonsmokers Rights Movement. Gasp nonsmokers have rights, too. She also published a newsletter called the ventilator, which got off the ground thanks to the Prince Georges County tuberculosis and respiratory disease association, which allowed her to use its mimeograph machine, and it mailed the ventilators to surrounding counties, sharing with hundreds of state and local affiliates across the united states. Piggybacking on this, gasp quickly reached a big audience. A year after its founding, it had assembled and mailed over 500 new chapter kits, literature that helps fledgling activists conceive of themselves as possessing both a legitimate grievance and the means to do something about it. Gasp drew energy from contemporary social movements. At times, activist spoke the heavy language of civil rights and emancipation. Drawing comparisons between the nonsmokers Rights Movement and the africanamerican struggle. Here is an image of endocyte saved lincoln who proclaim the emancipation of nonsmokers heres an image of an ersatz abe lincoln who proclaimed the emancipation of nonsmokers. The cofounder of the berkeley chapter of gasp put it this way although i would not suggest that nonsmokers rights are trampled on to the same extent as have been the rights of minority groups, i would suggest certain parallels. After all, he wondered, is there any real difference between saying to a person you cannot eat at this lunch counter and saying you cannot eat at this lunch counter if you are concerned about your health or if you want to enjoy your lunch . Consciousness raising was yet another tool for increasing nonsmokers sense of grievance. As powerfully expressed by contemporary feminists, consciousnessraising brought the hidden indignities of private experience out into the open where they could be located in a structural critique of power and patriarchy. For a long time, many nonsmokers had felt individually annoyed by smoking but had suffered in silence, gouin explained in a 1972 profile. People are more likely to speak out when they know that others feel the same way. The fact that nonsmokers comprise the majority of the population made speaking out a lower risk proposition than minority activism, but physical suffering itself ennobled the nonsmokers cause, opening up avenues for analogies to the liberation struggles of other oppressed peoples, and ask for suggested by the very name, the nonsmokers rights inspiration drew energy from the environmental Rights Movement, pointing out that some of the chemical compounds present in ambient tobacco smoke would fall under the epas regulatory ambit had they been emitted from actual smokestacks. Unbeknownst to donna at the time, these nonsmokers rights activists were beginning to achieve their first successes. By the time the new Jersey Superior Court ruled on her case, just over 100 cities had passed some of the first ordinances that restricted where people could smoke mostly in public buildings. Nonsmokers rights activists had, by the mid1970s developed a vocabulary of entitlement and a theory of harm, and they have found venues within the american political system that allowed them to assert what they deemed to be there rights. In inventing the nonsmoker, social activism, not scientific pronouncement, began to clear the air. In fact, substantial epidemiological evidence about their physical harms brought to nonsmokers by other peoples smoke by other peoples smoke would not emerge until the 1980s. They would not run through law and public policy, at least not at first, but through the private sector. After her courtroom victory, not much changed for anybody but her. Her ruling applied only to her and only over the next few years when nonsmoking employees brought suit against their employers, courts repeatedly failed to rule in their favor. Where do donnas case served as president , donna herself failed as president , donna herself was determined to change the way people work. She began an afterhours career as a workplace consultant. In the 1970s, the field of Management Consulting was not yet perceived as launching pad for the young and i be educated and donna jumped right in. She called her business Environmental Associates incorporated. It was dedicated to improving the indoor work environment, and her firm aimed to create demand for the services that only it could provide. That is, and trying to convince a business to take seriously the issue of workplace smoking and thereby to hire the firm, donna shimp pointed to the legal liabilities created by her case. Environmental provement associates pointed to the costs arising from potential nonsmoker litigation as a reason for employers to consider voluntarily adopting workplace smoking rules. Shimps case for smokefree workplaces converged on a single argument smoking, and quite often smokers, cost too much. They were bad employees. They destroyed equipment. They took frequent breaks to feed their habit, and they were sidelined with sickness. Shimp had broached this argument in her unsolicited proposal to bell, but she would hone it over the upcoming years. Nonsmoking activist did not so much convince employees employers to eliminate smoking in the name of health as they convince them to eliminate smoking employees and the liability created in the name of the corporate ledger. As shimp wrote, is there any better way to interest management and restricting smoking them through the bottom line . The promise of corporate health, not employee health, encouraged as an assist to adopt smoking restrictions and bands, even when there was no law forcing them to do so. Official government channels adopted this line as well. The introduction to the 1979 Surgeon Generals report argued that steps of action on cigarettes was necessary because an individuals smoking habits and located every taxpayer. Lost productivity, wages, absenteeism caused by smoking related illness put the tally close to 12 billion. Within a decade, the Business Case for nonsmoking had begun to bear fruit. A nationwide Business Survey found that 54 of responding businesses had adopted workplace smoking restrictions and 85 percent had adopted them within the past three years. Such restrictions gathered their own momentum. Workplace smoking restrictions not only decreased nonsmokers exposure to tobacco, they also create more nonsmokers because they help people quit smoking. Nonsmokers rights activism did not simply clear smokefilled rooms. It created new chambers of power where new tobacco rules were made. The new Jersey Superior Court, the Human Resources departments of large companies, state and legislative houses, city councils, and thousands of cities across the united states, all of these places have done more to vindicate the right to smokefree air than the federal government. If donna shimp brought suit today, she would find is still the case that osha and the epa do not regulate indoor smoking. The patchwork system that exists in the country is a vastly uneven one. Smokers are poorer and less educated than nonsmokers, and poor nonsmokers are more likely to suffer from tobaccorelated disease that nonsmokers with more money. Bluecollar workers are more likely to go to work at w