Like a big relief, you know, its been 10 years in the work to make this book and so it feels like a relief and its just a pleasure to be able to talk about it, to talk about it with you and tons of other interesting people. Really a page turner. Outland, the great medical scientific historian on the cigarette century. Robert proctor at stanford about the deception of the industry. Any trepidation when you started . You had three giant box out there, and you took a risk. Guest yes, but but i really feel as though with those three books, ashes to ashes, cigarette century and Robert Proctor whole corpus of work, the biggest of which is called golden holocaust, i i really feel as though i was standing on the shoulders of giants. These are fantastic works and my work is tremendously indebted to them, but when i was thinking about writing about tobacco, i wasnt approaching the same way that they were. They were very much coming at the story of tobacco from the angle of industry and when i begin this project in a much more humble state, just as a lowly graduate student i really begin it from think that agriculture and farmers which its probably not surprising to say there are not three humongous tones about tobacco agriculture. I saw these big works as a reason for my little opening wedge into the field to write about it in a different way and then of course the book and the project changed quite a bit in the past ten years from when i began this many years ago. Host lets start with the basic question, how does come heady view the cigarette . Guest wyrick turning back to those three works that you mention and returning to how we think about the cigarettes in Popular Culture and political life. We very much tend to associate the product right so with the deception of the major tobacco firms. It has cinematic quality, the executive of tobacco firms met in the plaza hotel in the chilly december night in 1953 and they hatched a plan to basically engage in what became a halfcentury long conspiracy to manufacture doubt as a way to evade regulation. This isnt a singapore story and one that i think is continuing to be fruitfully mindful to reply to other corporate deception. If you take a wider angled view, what begins to come in focus is what the present of sigar American Life was not simply produced by the industry itself. What undermined the presence of the cigarette in American Life was not the fact that the feds finally got hit in 1964, or the 1990s, it was the assiduous efforts of activists in the 60s and 70s to really dislodge the hold of tobacco in American Life and he 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 use a product that was, a behavior pattern, a cultural way of life that was made by federal action and that was unmade by a social movement, the peso to create a new character in america, the character of the nonsmoker. Host we are going to spend a lot of time talking, unpacking that. Lets just start, how does, how do you do history . How do you do history . Guest i love this question. I think, you know, what you are trying to do in graduate school is read as much as possible thats been written and try to the first cup 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 the be put forward but whats that kind of paper over and hide . The whole point of asking these questions and being so hard on these important by those tomes is so the graduate student basically acres out what their own voice can become with her own contribution to Novel Research can be. And so when i was reading in graduate school i actually wasnt steeped in the tobacco debate at all. I was very interested in an entirely different question about the persistence of regionalism and regional economies. And regional difference. At the beginning of my time in graduate school, it was a lively debate amongst historians of conservatism. Over the question, is the south still a unique region . This was the 2000s. 2000s. It makes sense to focus on the south as a region that was different from the sun belt because a lot of historians looked at political life out in the suburbs of atlanta, in the suburbs of charlotte in phoenix and los angeles, and they said the political patterns that are happening here look the same. Maybe the south isnt really the Central Point of come regional distinctiveness is that which really operative anymore. In my reading and in my quest for novelty, i was interested in the persistence of southern agriculture and the persistence of an agricultural economy even in a region that begin to look in the postwar period, even in a region that begin to look more like other parts of the United States so i was kind of pushing back against this idea that the south was just the rest of the United States by saying if you focus on this way that money is made in the south, the political economy of the south, you might start to see a continuity between regional distinction and the 19th and early 20th century to the late 20th century. Host that was a fellowship you had around 2010, the Virginia Historical society, you are at the university of virginia. The cigarette, youre not from a the south. Actually youve lived like florida, massachusetts. Theres something geographically about virginia, about the land, the cigarette . Guest yeah, you know going back deep into my own reading and my own history, i thought some of the literature on the southern distinctiveness maybe gave a bit of short shrift to the persistence of basically agricultural meth, that 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 in the postworld war ii south the gave rise to this project because i was thinking what are the two props that are most associated that are most grown in the south and, of course, theres cotton and tobacco crops. It seemed to me the back was a much more interesting commodity to focus on in the 20th century. Host my Historical Research is right, i mean, i can trace your interest back to a mcdonalds. Here in North Carolina. Youre waiting for take me back to the early interest. Guest thats so funny you mentioned that. Windows beginning this project, when i was begin this project, i was trying to understand how tobacco farmers related to big tobacco. That was my original question. To do that i knew i would need to look in archives across North Carolina and i selected North Carolina as kind of this case study because North Carolina was and is the leading producer of a particular kind of tobacco. That is a primary constituent in an americanstyle cigarette. And so i knew i would need to set up camp into research at unc, at duke, at North Carolina state, at East Carolina University in greenville and the coastal plain. But it would be very helpful and i would recommend this to any young historian who is thinking about beginning a book, a dissertation or book project, to find a local source thats a bit of a history buff this gentleman had been involved with the tobacco economy. He had worked for basically a statelevel tobacco lobby, and he had produced a self published book, and people who produce self published books are usually very happy to talk to you about their research. I just emailed him out of the blue and said im a a graduate student. I would love to talk to you about your work and tobacco, and he was more than happy to meet with me. He gave me a lot of information i wouldnt have otherwise known and would not have known where to look if and not been for meeting him. Host so the interest was in agriculture . Was it in the south . It was in tobacco. Where did it start . I cant trace it back to your undergraduate days. Where did the idea come from, your parents . Guest this did not come from smoking, i can say that. Host in fact, the beginning of the book, its really about tobacco before you get into the cigarette. It was at the cigarette. It wasnt the health. Were you always such a political historian . Guest i was really interested in so, in the early, 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, at the tobacco trust was the monopoly controlled by james b duke of Duke University fame. What duke did beginning in the 1890s was he basically bought up every type of tobacco concern around. He consolidated hundreds of smaller Tobacco Companies into one big Company Called the American Tobacco company. And because the American Tobacco company had essentially monopoly power, that meant that American Tobacco could dictate prices that it would pay to tobacco farmers for what they grew. There was tension. There was violence. There was anger on the part of tobacco farmers toward this big monopoly. Host give me a sense of the tobacco farmer. Who was the tobacco farmer . Guest so tobacco farmers in the, well, for the late 19th and early part of the 20th century tended to be small they grew on a smallscale and in part that that was due to the fact of the crops tremendous labor requirements. The crop was locally known as the 13 month crop because planning for the subsequent season had to begin even before the current season was harvested. It relied on there were different stratagems within tobacco farming. So you had land owners who may 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 frequently white. Sharecroppers were more frequently africanamerican, at the difference between those was that sharecroppers sometimes never saw cash in the course of what they did. They had to buy from the store where their debts were tallied against what they brought in on the previous season, so it was a perpetual cycle of indebtedness. Even for the top of this class system amongst tobacco farmers, there were always so much weaker relatives to afford Something Like the duke tobacco trust. Use even amongst elite farmers, anger at the big tobacco of its day. And so what motivated me towards thinking about tobacco the latter part of 20 century was, my question was essentially what happened to all of that antagonism within the industry once tobacco and cigarettes begin to be threatened from a Health Perspective . Did that outside threat fall meant an alliance foment an alliance between farms and industry were before the was antagonism . That was the quest i was on. Host this movement from this angry opposition, was businesslike alliance . Guest to a large extent it did occur, but it did not occur because tobacco farmers that the cigarette manufacturers were their friends. What happened that changed everything in american agriculture, in southern aquaculture especially but in american agriculture writ large was the great depression, but more important he the new deal. And the new deal was tremendously consequential for tobacco because it instituted a very rigid and very controlled system of regulations on the land. So when you think tobacco is this unregulated crop, in fact, more than any other crop grown in the United States, tobacco farmers had to abide by very strict production controls. And, in fact, tobacco was written, tobacco farm laws were not written with the main part of the farm bill. They were always written separately with their own legislation. What the new deal did was basically institute a system of, think of it as supply management, that we are going to make sure that mr. Tobacco farmer, by the way, you cannot just declare yourself a tobacco farmer. You essentially have to have a license to grow, and allotment, that mr. Tobacco farmer cannot produce more than x amount, in this is going to be revised based on yearly projections for what the manufacturers need. But in exchange will provide mr. Tobacco farmer with a minimum price for the tobacco. Kind of again to a minimum wage in industry and it was passed right around the same time. What this did was basically enabled the Agricultural Sector to be kind of buffered from what you can almost think of as the bullying of the Tobacco Industry. Host true in wheat and corn and tobacco or differences . Guest the major difference with tobacco was a program of supply management with much more rigid, that there was not buffers within the agricultural law to allow people to go way over one year and then under plan the next year. You simply were not allowed to market over your allotment. Host you talk about the phrase Iron Triangle. What is that . Guest and Iron Triangle is an old Political Science term that basically refers to an alliance between or a dynamic between a subcommittee in congress that oversees a Regulatory Agency and driving industry. So lets say the tobacco subcommittee, the usda and tobacco farmers organized tobacco farmers, and the most important tobacco Farm Organization for the cigarette, for much of the story i count is the North Carolina farm bureau. Host and to give me a sense of this Iron Triangle, the 50s 50s or so, whats the dynamic there . Guest the basic story with whats going on in terms of tobacco farming after say world war ii is that tobacco farmers are very empowered by congress and encourage by the usda to basically write their own laws. What do i mean by this . After war any producing group is anxious about readjusting production. You were not going to have the same kind of revved up industry that you would have during war, and theres a special reason to think about that with cigarettes because of course the Armed Services were such important purveyors of cigarettes. After the First World War, farmers were not organized. They had not been corralled by the new deal, and they experienced a really severe depression. All farmers did in agriculture for a lot of the 1920s. So during the cycle of war, tobacco farmers who have never become more organized by their interaction with the federal government and the federal government is literally organizing groups of farmers into committees so that they can plan how much tobacco they will produce in subsequent years. These elite tobacco farmers are coming together in various places across North Carolina and they are saying, what am going to do about the postwar readjustment . We cant let what happened after the First World War happen again after the second world war. And so what did tobacco farmers have now that they didnt have after world war i . What they have now is proximity to government, proximity to the levers of power. They have whole bureaucracy. Host the farmers in the proximity tressa yes, interest in their wellbeing in a way they had not been before. Host was it because of money . Guest because the new deal did, well, i would say for two reasons. One, a new deal did inaugurate a way of doing government that gave power in benefit to privileged groups. In this case it was producers, tobacco farmers. You can see this to a lesser extent perhaps less successful extent but also to organize labor. There was a theory about the economy should work, that if you could get producers to essentially form organizations to get the house in order, you could have more smooth functioning of the economy overall. But the second reason that tobacco becomes so strangely informed had to do with the power really of southern democrat. Like, who is important in the new Deal Coalition . Who is the glue that holds these districts in northeastern farm groups or northeastern Industry Groups together with southern farmers . Its southern democrats. They have outsized power in terms of the democratic party. Host now, its the farmers who had the power or was it the corporation, the Tobacco Corporation . Guest Tobacco Corporations have power this whole time. What is new is the interest of the federal government in shoring up farmers as well. In producing policy that ensures farmers have a standard of living that they had not been assured before. Host you talk about the federal government having interesting is that because the companies had interest . Is that because the tobacco farmers had power and they stimulated the interest . Guest right. I think theres like a political calculation on the part of seven democrats. They have these constituents that are important. They have many more constituents that are farmers than they had constituents and were tobacco executives. Host this is about votes. Guest in part its about votes but in part its about kind of an economic theory about how to empower different groups in the modern economy. If you had an imbalance between the Agricultural Sector and the industrial sector and the consumer sector, might lead to another depression. It was important for the federal government to basically show up these different groups of americans and make sure that there was economic harmony. Host let me give us implicit assertion a simplistic assertion. Tobacco is never good for the farmers. It was good for the big corporations. Guest well, its hard for me to wrap my mind around that with what i know about the experience of tobacco farming in the 20th century. Because of federal policy that was redirecting money directing money toward farmers, farming became a lot better. Was it perhaps many people at the same time left the farm when they could, but the experience of farming post 1930s was much better than it had been pre1930s. Tobacco farmers did relative to corporations, relative to big tobacco, they capture a larger share of the price of the cigarette than they did before the 1930s, and indeed they did after the end of the federal Tobacco Program in 2004. Host something happen in the 1950s called science. Its called health. Leading up to the 1964 Surgeon Generals report. So these farmers get caught completely off guard. Guest so because, because of federal policy has encouraged the organization of some elite tobacco farmers, the industry seasonopening to make an alliance sees an opening to make an alliance with tobacco farmers during the 1950s through the present day. At that cinematic meeting in the new York Plaza Hotel in 1953, its not just the tobacco corporate executives, not just the executives of Philip Morris and r. J. Reynolds that are there. There are representatives of tobacco agricultural groups there as well. As part of the organization by big tobaccos conspiracy to doubt monger host the corporations. So the farmers guest the organized and agricultural offshoot of the big tobacco conspiracy. They organized a group called the Tobacco Growers Information Committee in the early 1950s thats intended to be basically translate industry propaganda for an agricultural audience with the idea that farmers who are this constituency beloved by politicians, imported to politicians because they are more numerous the course ban people who work for him a big corporation, that farmers may be in fact, a very downhome ally for the big Tobacco Companies as they try to make arguments against regulation of basis of that. Host by the 1950s, 1960s you have what, two, three different regimes circling from government you have now Government Department of agriculture, congressional appropriations, agriculture committees supporting the industry right and wanting to help the farmer . Guest and organizing farmers to go testify in congress against people in Public Health. So part of it is using farmers who are organized to basically be the mouthpiece of industry because they are more credible or likable. Downhome than the suit from Philip Morris. You see farmers going to testify against proposed cigarette regulation in the 1960s. Host and he was using them . Was it the industry . Was it fellow morris in putting the farmers of . With a habit of these farmers out there . Guest the industry was very happy to have this allies but farmers were not just pawns in this scheme. Farmers were, they believed that regulation on Health Grounds would be bad for them. They had seen their prosperity had been linked to obviously the rise of the cigarette in a really direct way. Also, many people might not realize that prior to really world war ii, prior to the late 1930s, the main way people consume tobacco was not even in a in a cigarette. The rise of the cigarette directly tracks the rise of prosperity for farmers, of a prosperity for farmers was due to demand but also due to government interventions. They were invested in people continuing to smoke. Host any disconnect in their heads . Did they want their kids to smoke . Guest i dont tobacco farmers smoke more than other people, and to this day you see greater rates of tobacco use in tobacco growing regions. So i think, you know, probably by the 80s they didnt want the kids to smoke. Host in 64 the Surgeon General, you also chronicle, the book shifts the little, right . You have the right of the publics interest. Guest right. 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. For Many Americans this is a huge event. Its splashed across the front pages of newspapers across the country. It had been in the works for a couple of years, in 1962, the World College of physicians basically the uks equivalent to the Surgeon General comes out with this report, with a report saying much the same thing. So the question for congress and for regulators becomes what are we going to do with this information . The report basically said government needed to do something with haste on the issue. So the ftc says all right, were going to use this, federal trade commission, as an opportunity to enhance the power of our agency to regulate on this most important of health host the power of guest as an opportunity for them to approach regulation in a new way, to approach regulation in a more muscular kind of way and they had before. Host this wasnt about Public Health for the traffic of course there was only about Public Health but basically the Surgeon Generals report gave them cover and an impetus to something that regulators on that committee had said they wanted to do before. It was absolutely about Public Health for the ftc, but this is 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. Host as you chronicle, the hill didnt like that . Guest the hill didnt like it. It turns out southern democrats continued to be very powerful in mid1960s washington. And so in response to more strongly worded warning labels proposed by the ftc, Congress Steps in and they do what becomes characteristic of Congress Acting at the behest of the Tobacco Industry, and offer up a watereddown warning label and it also basically say, hey, ftc, you cant regulate on this for a few more years. Host for big tobacco . Guest absolutely. They have, its yes. Host big tobacco pulling the strings . Guest yes. Host my sense is a book takes a sort of whole different level about this time, because you start telling the story of donna schamp from salem new jersey. Guest yes. Part of what is at play with a warning label issue is the paradigm of consent. If we put a warning label on a pack of cigarettes, it is the smokeless choice to do what he or she will with that information. Now, by the late 1960s, early 1970s, a number of americans begin to think that this consent paradigm makes no sense. Not for the reasons that a a become nonsensical later, the addiction issue, at the paradigm of consent makes no sense because most americans, and this is true even at americas smokey is, never experienced smoking as focused Bank Experience it as nonsmokers. And so what becomes critical in the 1970s is the invention of the idea, the creation of the idea of nonsmokers rights. Host you go back to the early 1900s, was that dr. Charles, new york subway, i think there was an oped in the New York Times that oppose any restrictions on smoking back at the turn of the century. People were comfortable, the times said, people smoking in subway cars. So nonsmokers rights, what was different in the 1970s than early 1900s . Guest so the idea of a movement for smoking restriction had an antecedent in the early 20th 20th century. It might surprise a lot of people to know that a handful of states actually banned the sale of cigarettes in the early 20th century. It was a part of, it was basically a cigarette version of prohibition. Host you didnt have the modern cigarette. People rolled their own cigarettes, and somewhat, jed the inverse right, in the early 1900s were smokers were fighting for the right to smoke because most people did smoke at the turn of the previous smoke century. Guest most people didnt spoke at the turnofthecentury the people who did smoke at the turn of the 20th century tended to be immigrants. They tended to live in cities. They tended to be young men. They tended to be portrayed as juvenile delinquents. So smoking at the turn of the 20th century in the early 1900s was considered something almost unamerican. It was a right of the foreignborn. The antismoking movement of the first two decades of the 20th century kind of road that, a wave of nativism in thinking about what type of behavior is appropriate for nativeborn, healthy americans. Host go back, 1970, to donna shimp. Tell me about her. Tell me about the case. Guest donna shimp was this fascinating woman. So she was a Customer Service representative working for new jersey bell, and she had a terrible tobacco allergy. And where she worked in new jersey, more than half of her coworker smelled, which is actually more smoking environment than most people offices. Because at this time only about 40 of the American Population smoked. So she was exposed to smoke on a daily basis. She had complained to her supervisors and had not gotten very far, and it really affected her quality of life. Every day she would pop in appeal because she would throw up. Sometimes, as she began to wear a gas mask to work, which to me just host at the telephone guest yes. She had to lower it but did not remove completely when she spoke to people on the phone or with people who came in to the office. Host this was the little bells before we had verizon. Guest yes. At t, yes. She went, she was a member of the communication workers of america and she went to her Union Steward and she said this is a Workplace Health issue. Can you help me . Throughout the meeting he smoking, which must have given her an indication of how she would not get very far in talking to him. She went to the Company Doctor, its a big company so she went to the Company Doctor and the Company Doctor said this is ridiculous. I come you were ill. Your workplace is making no. You need to stay home until the Company Works out an arrangement so that you could return to work in a safe and healthy environment. So she says okay. She tells her supervisors and she thinks shell be home a couple of days until they rejigger the office to accommodate her. Days turned into months which in her mind and must event alarm bells going off, what the heck is going on . Are the 25 a . Why are they so devoted to this . And so while shes at home, shes basically on a sabbatical. As an academic i understand that, by being on sabbatical should actually get some work done and she basically immerses herself in a burgeoning world of antitobacco activism. She makes contact with the group called ash, action on Smoking Health which was a legal arm of the antitobacco movement. She contacts a local social movement called gaskin against smoking pollution. So they sources she basically learns shes in uncharted territory, that there are no state, to say nothing of federal laws, that govern the presence or absence or regulation of smoking at work. And so she basically realizes that the only way that this will get resolved is to pursue legal action. And so she decides shes going to serve her sue her employer. Thats also a really daunting thing to consider. She isnt totally uncharted territory here. Host did she have a safe workplace . Where did that legal theory come from . Guest i think that was a very well established commonlaw idea about the responsibility of an employer to an employee. What was novel was smoking constituted an unsafe Work Environment for donna shimp. Host legal innovation . Guest yes, judicial activism . Guest legal innovation married to a judge is understanding of science and the need of the worker. So donna shimp takes on this tremendous, kind of almost in aa world of Public Health, celebrity dimension. Its 1975. Shes going shes going to sue her employer. She really doesnt know where to turn. Back before the days of wikipedia, she did what any kind of motivated informed citizen would do. She calls up a Reference Library at rutgers to ask who should have talked of a want to talk to somebody about this . Is anybody working at the law school . This is what historians called contingency, the idea if one little thing couldve been different maybe history as a whole wouldve been different. It just so happened the contingent event, that a law professor, by the name of alfred bloom rosen was on faculty. He was teaching at rutgers law. And he had spent the previous decade serving in the equal Employment Opportunity commission which was the federal agency created to enforce the Civil Rights Act at work. So he thought a lot about the responsibility of employers to not discriminate on various axes, his teaching a class in law and he was eager to take up her case pro bono and use it as a teaching tool for his students. To me thats just amazing because the rosen was the kind of blumrosen was a kind of figured that thought a lot about the relationship between agencies and employers can sometimes agencies want to be sued so that they can fulfill the mandate. Host he was the legal architect . Guest for her case he was crucial in preparing the initial documents, yes. Host i have a sense you were captured, you enormously interested in her. Guest she did so much work on her own. I just think about what you wouldve taken to be her in this Work Environment that its a hostile Work Environment. She is throwing up from smoke and people are smoking interface, right . Her employer doesnt want her there. While shes at home making these phone calls, she also drops a very expensive suggestion for a corporate policy that she delivers to the headquarters of at t about how they could reasonably accommodate nonsmoking employees and ally, inns of being very consequential in her case was that if you can have a nonsmoking section for the operators at the switchboard, you clearly have the power to tell employees not to smoke in certain areas. Host she died early this year. Due to interview her . Guest no. I wanted to talk to her and i reached out, but i did not hear back. She was pretty aged. Host she left her papers at the University University o. With a helpful . Guest tremendously. Yes, and so im glad that you noticed that i seemed captivated by her because i really was. So when the course of this document that shes written to at t, she also pioneers what becomes an important argument to the rest of the 70s and in the 80s where she says smokers are expensive employees. They take breaks. They destroyed equipment. They are sick more often if she basically presents a Business Case for restricting and then later it comes taking up as banning tobacco at work. Although this was not the point that the judge who ruled in favor picked up upon, it becos an important argument that she makes later on as she continues antitobacco advocacy. Host she won her case, but there was limited press. Other jurisdictions didnt guest did not side with nonsmoking employees, no. Host did that make a difference . Was it really about the law, the case . What really was the difference . Guest so that such a good question. So there are some of the cases that bring up spring up in the late 80s where employees are making similar types of claims. They dont succeed. What i think made the difference or what made the difference overall to the antitobacco movement as it proceeded to the next decades was this Business Case. So donna shimp, and heres another reason i was so captivated by her, she continued to work at bell what also basically starting her own business, her own consultancy that she ran out of her basement. Her consultancy basically made the case the businesses that would be good for your bottom line to protect nonsmokers at work. Her argument was basically twofold. One, smokers were expensive employees. An two, hey, look at my case if you are creating potential liability for. That part was a little fudgy because her case was rather unique. But the idea that this is an inexpensive way to potentially save money for employers, inns of being very attractive to businesses that take up smoking restrictions through the 19 with increasing speed in the 1980s. Host my sense is you circle, the book is about life, the rights of the smoker, rights of the nonsmoker, the rights, the right to make a living. So these are Political Rights . These are legal rights . How do you think about it . Guest i think about, i think about rights talk is being increasingly salient for nonsmokers in the post 1960s era. Its its a way of communicating their claims that really had not existed prior to the 1960s. And i think that for nonsmokers this rights talk is really coming from three sources. One is the influence of course of the civil rights movement. And nonsmokers Rights Groups like gas, there are these decentralized advocacy groups all over the country, in their literature and in speeches made by organizers, they sometimes stretch the analogy between claiming nonsmokers rights and participate in the africanamerican freedom of movement. They stretch this a bit far but they say things along the lines of his or any difference between asking for the right to sit at a lunch counter and the right to sit at a lunch counter and enjoy ones lunch . A difference between what were asking for and what africanamericans were demanding in the 1950s and 1960s. So the borrowed the moral half of the civil rights movement. The second sort of stream of thought i think is really shaping the rights talk of nonsmokers is like the feminist movement. Specifically, the idea of consciousness raising. For nonsmokers, advocates, one thing they have to do is make it safe to say im a a nonsmoker, and i think should determine what the space is like. They have to basically make people realize that they share, make nonsmokers relies that they share a common experience together, a common experience being oppressed, if you will, by the presence of tobacco smoke. There is some are linked idea of feminist consciousness raising that by sharing a private indignity with other women, that you can basically make that into a public claim. And the final strain of thought that is forming the thought is in via movement of the late 1960s, early 1970s as nonsmokers rights activists framed indoor smoking as an environmental hazard. Host does the book have a hypothesis you start with a hypothesis . You start with a thesis . Guest no. To return to our earlier conversation i just started with a question, which was what happened to the antagonism between tobacco farmers and the Tobacco Industry as both became threatened by knowledge that smoking causes cancer . I started with the question, not with an answer. Host i have heard you say the following, what ultimately reduce tobaccos grip on American Society was not the discovery that smoking causes cancer and, of course, the Surgeon Generals warning to that effect it was the invention activists of nonsmokers right, the idea that people who do not smoke were entitled and able to achieve unpolluted air in shared public spaces. Guest i stand by it. Host can i push back a little . Guest yes. Host i see the history of tobacco as one of chapters. When they came to washington in 1990, there was a lot of progress on Secondhand Smoke. We finally were able to get on planes and not breathe polluted air. But there was, the industry use this word, accommodation that was made, right . Thats what he wanted to talk about, accommodation. But the issue has somewhat plateaued, right . And the progress of the antitobacco community, they were sort of, they were a little bit lost. When we started looking at a different question of whether nicotine was a drug, we focused on was industry manipulating nicotine . Was it to keep people smoking . Then we focused on kids. So i see these as chapters. You see this as the key determinant. Guest i agree that there are chapters. I think what my book suggest is that an important chapter that weve overlooked was the rise of a true social movement around the idea of nonsmokers. And that chapter perhaps enabled the subsequent chapters. Host absolutely. That rings very true to me. Whats the implications . If you are right, right, that my rights as a nonsmoker, that doesnt portend well on the vaping issue because at least for now the baking industry says well, that isnt secondhand consequences. Well see. But thats not been the same kind of tool thats available, right . Guest yeah, the vaping issue is different than the tobacco issue, though to return to the idea of tobacco unfolding in chapters. We are at a chapter where we can look back over the whole of the past 100 years and ask, what do we know . One thing that we know is we should not take the Tobacco Industry at its word, and we should not assume that just because we dont have proof of the harmful consequences, the proof of the epidemiological consequences of vaping right now or secondhand vaping baby righw that the would be. Also what this history suggest is social movements can really make a difference and if that social movement is around the idea of Secondhand Smoke or if that social movement is around idea that jewell shouldnt market to kids, but that can be an impetus for action and what my story also shows that action doesnt have to be at the federal level to be meaningful. So activists can try to implement laws at the local level or at the state level and those have tremendous success in history of the cigarette at changing attitudes towards the presence of tobacco smoke in society at large. Host how did the cover, about . Guest the cover is the Property Harvard University press. Host talk about the moment or two left tobacco was a model for taking on big hard challenges, societal issues. Guest idc lessons in this pic may be im just an optimist, not that many people read about tobacco and feel optimistic. But i think a key take away of this book is that the federal government for a lot of the 20th century has been organized around interests of industry and producers. And you can see that with Climate Change, you can see that with tobacco. You might be able to see that with guns as well. But laws are not just made by the federal government. And so one lesson of antitobacco activism is the power of local laws to change the way people experience their daytoday life. So by achieving scores of victories at the local level in the 80s and 90s, antitobacco activists made more nonsmokers and a bigger constituency for the kind of future they wanted to see. I think theres a lesson in that for Climate Change activists that might be frustrated at federal inaction. Host guns . Guest there, too. One trademark of the antitobacco movement with these was kind of a visual vernacular. Thank you for not smoking. I have noticed in more places that ive been to, signs that say no guns on these premises. And the wonder if that visual vernacular just raising awareness of the presence or absence of guns in place to make people more aware of their stance on an issue. Host i want to thank someone, doctor Cynthia Quinn yaris is an associate editor of the journal of American History for helping me prepare for todays interview. I have one last question do you love doing history traffic absolutely. I have my dream job. I love researching and most days i also love writing. Host and you did it very, very well. Congratulations. A major, major scholarly achievement. Guest thank you so much. A wonderful conversation. Host take you for being here. 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Because you have a short we have to rotate you out. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] we are going to have you up here until the end. Thank you so much. [inaudible conversations] reserve numbers. I thank everyone