Host congratulations. Your book is a major comp which meant. It is a significant scholarly work. I think it is fair to say you moved the seal. Guest thats a tremendous thing to hear coming from you david. Thank you so much. Host how does it feel . Guest like a big relief. Its been 10 years in the works to make this book and so its a relief than just a pleasure to be able to talk about it with you and other interesting people. Host three Major Writers spent their careers studying writing about tobacco and cigarettes Richard Kluger who won a Pulitzer Prize for ashes to ashes. Guest amazing. It was really a pageturner. Host allen grant the great medical scientific historian on the cigarette industry and the deception of the industry and in trepidation. When you started here had giant oaks out there and you took a risk. Guest yes but you know i really feel those three books ashes to ashes cigarette century and robber proctors whole corpus of work the biggest of which is called golden holocaust, i really feel as though im expanding on the shoulders of giants. These were fantastic works and my work is tremendously indebted to them but you know what i was thinking about writing about tobacco i wasnt approaching it the same way as they were. They were very much coming out this from the angle of industry and when i began this project in a much more humble state as a lowly graduate student i thought about agriculture and farmers which is probably not surprising i actually saw these works as a reason for my opening wedge to write about it differently and then of course the book and the project changed quite a bit in the past 10 years from when i began this low these many years ago. Host lets start with the bake it they see question, how does professor sarah milov view this book . Guest i think returning back to those three works that you mentioned returning to how we think about the cigarette in Popular Culture very much tends to associate a product release so with the deception of the major tobacco firm. It has a cinematic quality to it. The executive tobacco firms went in a hotel on a chilly december night and they hatched a plan to basically engage in what became a halfcentury long conspiracy to the manufactures doubt as a way to evade regulation. This is a tremendously important story and one that i think is continuing to apply to other strategies and corporate deception. If you picked up a wider angle view what becomes to focus is the presence of a cigarette in American Life was not simply produced by the industry itself. If you begin from seed to smoke you see the federal government specifically has had a really big hand in a betting the cigarette country to use allen grants phrase and what undermined the presence of the cigarette in American Life was not the fact that the feds finally got hit in 1964 or in the 1990s. It was the assiduous effort of activists in the 60s and 70s to really dislodge the hold of tobacco in American Life and they couldnt do it by operating at the federal level. It had to be the local and State Government that did so. If you think about the cigarette over the span of the 20th century you see a product and a behavior pattern and the culture that was made by federal action and was unmade by a social movement. That basically created a new character in america. Host i want to spend a lot of time talking about that. Lets just start, how does professor sarah milov to history . How do you do history . Guest i love this question. I think what you are trying to do in graduate school is read as much as possible what has been written in the first couple years of graduate school or to poke holes in every book that you read and think about what is missing or what kind of analysis they put forward and what does that paper over and hide and the whole point of asking these questions on these fabulous tomes is a graduate student basically figures out what their own voice can be and what their own con tradition to Novel Research can be. 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. So at the beginning of my time in graduate school there was a lively debate amongst historians of conservatism over the question, is the south still a unique region . Did it make sense to focus on the south is a region that was different from say the real south because a lot of historians looked at political life in the suburbs of phoenix and los angeles. The patterns, the political patterns that are happening here isnt really the Central Point of regional distinctiveness and what is not really operative anymore. In my reading and my quest for novelty i was interested in the persistence of southern agriculture and the persistence of an agricultural economy in the region that began to look in the postwar period even in the region that began to look more like other parts of the United States. I was kind of pushing back against this idea that the south was just like the rest of the United States. If you focus on this way that money is made in the south and the political economy of the south he might start to see a continuity between regional distinction in the 19th and early 20th century and the late 20th century. Host there was a fellowship you have around 2010 the Virginia Historical society. The university of virginia, the cigarette. You are not from the south. Actually you lived in florida and massachusetts. Is there something geographically about virginia, about the land, the cigarette . Guest yes. Going back into my own reading and my own history i thought that some of the literature may be gave a bit of short shrift to the persistence of basically agricultural myth. The president of underdeveloped land or what appears to be undeveloped land in the south has a cultural role and land is also important feature of southern agricultural economy. It was very much a quest to understand the meaning of land and the world war ii south that gave rise to this project. I was thinking what does it do with crops that are the most grown in the south and of course there is cotton and there is tobacco. It seemed to me tobacco was a much more interesting commodity to focus on in the 20th century. Host my Historical Research is right, i can take it back to a mcdonalds in North Carolina. Take me back to the early days. Guest im glad you mentioned that. When i was beginning this project i have no, it decided i was going to try to understand how tobacco farmers related to big tobacco. That was my original question and to do that i knew i needed to look at archive across North Carolina and i use North Carolina as the city because North Carolina was and is the biggest purchaser of a reticular kind of tobacco that is the primary constituent in an americanstyle cigarette. I knew i needed to set up camp and check with unc and duke at North Carolina state and North Carolina university in greenville but it would be very helpful and i would recommend this to any young historian who is thinking about getting a book project to find a local source who is a bit of a history buff. This gentleman had been involved in the tobacco economy. He had worked for a statelevel tobacco lobby and he had produced a selfpublished book. People who produce selfpublished books are usually very happy to talk to you about their research. Im a graduate student and i would love to talk to you about your work in tobacco and could he meet with me and he gave me a lot of information i otherwise wouldnt have known and would have known where to look had it not been for him. Host the interest was in agriculture and tobacco. Where did it start . I cant trace it back to your undergraduate days but where did the idea come from . Guest this did not come from smoking, i can say that. But who in fact in the beginning of the book its really about tobacco before you get in to the cigarette. It wasnt the cigarette and it wasnt health. Were you always political . Guest i was really interested. In the late 19th and early 20th century there was a tremendous tension between the big tobacco of that era which was then known as the tobacco truck in the tobacco truck was the monopoly controlled by james b. Duke of Duke University fame. What duke did again in the 1890s was he basically bought up every type of tobacco to consolidated hundreds of smaller Tobacco Companies into one big Company Called the American Tobacco company. Because the American Tobacco company had essentially monopoly power that meant American Tobacco could dictate prices that it would pay to tobacco farmers for what they grew. There was tension, there was violence and anger on the part of tobacco farmers towards this big monopoly. Host give me a sense of the tobacco farmer. Who was the tobacco farmer . Guest tobacco farmers, well in the late 19th and early part of the 20th century tended to be small. They grew on a small scale and impart that was due to the fact of the crops tremendous labor requirement. The crops were colin fully known as the 13 month crop. It had to begin even before the current season was harvested. It lied on their difference datums within tobacco farming so you had landowners who may work the farms themselves as family labor or they may have higher tenants or sharecroppers and theres a racial dimension to this. Sharecroppers are more frequently africanamerican and the difference between the two is sharecroppers sometimes never saw cash in the course of what they did. They have to buy from the store which was tallied against what they brought in from the season so a perpetual cycle of indebtedness. At the top of this class of some amongst tobacco farmers they were so much weaker relative to Something Like the duke tobacco truck. You see even amongst elite farmers angered at the big tobacco so what motivated me toward thinking about tobacco in the latter part of the 20th century was my question was essentially what happened to all of that antagonism within the industry once tobacco and cigarettes began to be threatened from a health perspective. Did that outside threat foment an alliance between farmers and industry before there had been antagonism so that was the quest. Host and there is movement from this angry opposition to an alliance. Guest to a large extent it did occur but it did not occur because tobacco farmers thought cigarette manufactures were their friends. What happened that changed everything in american agriculture in southern agriculture especially that american agriculture writ large was the Great Depression and more importantly the new deal. The new deal was tremendously consequential for tobacco because it instituted a very rigid and very controlled system of regulations on land. Tobacco is this unregulated crop and in fact more than any other crop grown in the United States tobacco farmers had to abide by production controls and in fact tobacco farm laws were not written to be made part of the farm bill. They were written separately with their own legislation, so what the new deal did was basically institute a system. Think of it as 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. Host and allotment. Guest and allotment exactly. Mr. Tobacco farmer couldnt make worth an x amount and this is revised based on yearly projections are with the manufactures need but it will provide mr. Tobacco farmer with a minimum price for tobacco. Kind of akin to a minimum wage and industry and it was past right around the same time. What they did was to basically enable the Agricultural Sector to be kind of buffered from what you can almost think of the bullying is the Tobacco Industry. Host was acorn and tobacco or were there differences . Guest the major difference with tobacco was the management was much more rigid. We are going to break away from her booktv program for few minutes to look at the 40 plus year commitment to live coverage. The u. S. Senate is going to gavel in for a short pro forma session. We will return to booktv. We take you live to the senate floor on cspan2. The presiding officer the senate will come to order. The parliamentarian will read a communication to the senate. The parliamentarian washington, d. C, april 23, 2020. To the senate under the provisions of rule 1, paragraph 3, of the standing rules of the senate, i hereby appoint the honorable rick scott, a senator from the state of florida, to perform the duties of the chair. Signed chuck grassley, president pro tempore. The presiding officer under the previous order, the Senate Stands adjourned until 8 00 a. M. On monday, 8 00 a. M. On monday, the senate is currently scheduled to meet for legislative work on monday may 4 at 3 00 p. M. With debate expected on the nomination of the next Inspector General of the Nuclear RegulatoryCommission Ready to watch the senate life on cspan2. The house today working on more economic aid with nearly 500 billion for small businesses, hospitals and further testing. You can watch the house live over on cspan. We now return to our booktv program already in progress. You arent going to have the same kind of revved up industry that you would have 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 and all farmers didnt agricultural for a lot of the 1920s. During the Second World War tobacco farmers who have now become more organized by their interaction with the federal government and the federal government is literally organizing the farmers into committees so they can plan how much tobacco they will produce in subsequent years tobacco farmers are coming together in various places across North Carolina and they are saying you know what we going to do about the postwar readjustment . Cant let what happened after the First World War happen again after the Second World War. And so what do tobacco farmers have not that they didnt have after world war i . What they have now is proximity to government, proximity to the leverage of power. They have a whole bureaucracy. Host the farmers in their proximity. Guest they have a whole bureaucracy thats interested in them as they havent been before. Host was it a coast of the money . Guest i would say for two reasons. One, the new deal did inaugurate a way of doing government that gave power and benefit to privileged groups and in this case it was producers, tobacco farmers and you can see this to a lesser extent in organized labor. There is a theory of how the economy should work and if he can get producers to essentially form organizations to get their house in order you would have more smooth functioning of the economy overall. The second reason tobacco become so strangely important had to do with the power really of southern democrats like who is important in the new Deal Coalition . Who is the glue that holds these disparate northeastern farnborough is farm groups or northeastern farm groups together with southern farmers. Its a southern democrats and so they kind of wheeled outsize power in terms of this democratic party. Host is the farmers who have the power or it was the corporations, the tobacco corporations . Guest tobacco corporations had power this whole time. What is new is the interest of the federal government ensuring farmers as well and producing policy that ensures that farmers have a standard of living that they had not been assured before. Postcode you talk about the federal government having interest. Is that because companies did art tobacco always had power . Guest i think theres a political calculation on the part of southern democrats. They have constituents that are important. They have many more constituents who are farmers than they have constituents who were tobacco executives. Host is in part about votes . Guest its an part about votes but its part of an economic theory about how to empower different groups in the modern economy. If you had an imbalance between the Agricultural Sector in the Industries Sector in the Consumer Sector that might lead to another depression and so it was important for the federal government to basically shore up these different groups of americans and make sure that there was economic harmony. Host let me give you a simplistic assertion. Tobacco really was never good for the farmers. It was good for the dash 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 directing money toward farmers, farming he came a lot better. Many people at the same time to your point left the farm when they could but the experience of farming post 1930s was much better than it had been pre1930s and tobacco farmers did relative to big tobacco they captured a larger share of the price of the cigarette than they did before the 1930s after the end of the federal tobacco program. Host something happened in the 1950s leading up to the 1964 Surgeon Generals report and farmers get caught completely off guard. Guest so, because of federal policy has encouraged the organization of these tobacco farmers, the industry saved an opening to make an alliance with tobacco farmers during the 1950s through arguably the president day. At that cinematic meeting in the new York Plaza Hotel in 1953 its not just the tobacco corporate executive, not just the executive. There are representatives of tobacco, agricultural groups there as well. Part of the organization by big tobaccos to doubt monger. They organized an agricultural option of the big tobacco conspiracy. They organized a group called the Tobacco Growers Information Committee in the early 1950s that intended to basically translate industry propaganda for an agricultural audience with the idea that farmers who are this constituency run by politicians and run by politicians because they are more numerous than people who work for big corporations that farmers may be in fact a very downhome ally for the big Tobacco Companies that they try to make arguments against regulation on the basis of health. Host by the 1950s and 1960s you have two or three different meetings from government and you have government on the agricultural committees supporting the industry and wanting to help the farmer . Organizing farmers to testify in congress against people and Public Health so part of it is using farmers who were organized to basically be the mouthpiece of industry because they are more credible or more likeable and downhome than Philip Morris. You see farmers going to testify against proposed regulations in the 1960s for example. Host who is using them . Guest what do you mean . Host was that the industry or the Philip Morris of the world and were they happy to have that . Guest the industry was very happy to have an alliance that farmers were not just pawns in this game. Farmers they believed that regulation on Health Grounds would be bad for that. They had seen their prosperity had been linked to obviously the rise of the cigarette and a really direct away. Also many people might not realize that prior to world war ii, prior to the late 1930s the main way that people consume tobacco was not even in the cigarette. The rise of the cigarette tracks the rise of prosperity for farmers and the prosperity for farmers is due to demand that also government intervention. They were invested in people continuing to smoke. Host was there a disconnect in their heads . That they want their kids to smoke . Guest tobacco farmers spoke more than other people into this gray day you see greater rates of tobacco use in tobacco growing the regions. Probably by the 80s they didnt want their kids to smoke. Host and 64 you have the Surgeon General and you chronicled the rise of the public interest. Guest yes. The Surgeon Generals report comes out in 1964 and its basically the first time the federal government says you know smoking causes cancer and heart disease. For Many Americans this is a huge event across the front ages of the newspapers across the country but it had been in the works for a couple of years in 1962. The World College of physicians equivalent to the Surgeon General comes out with a report saying much the same thing so the questions for congress and for regulators to become what are we going to do with this because the report basically said that government needed to do something with haste on the issue. The federal trade Commission Said we are going to use this as an opportunity to enhance the power of our agency to regulate on this. Its an opportunity for them to approach regulation in a new way, to approach regulation and a more muscular kind of way than they had before. Host was it about Public Health . Guest ultimately was about Public Health but the Surgeon General did something that regulators on the committee had wanted to do before. It was absolutely about Public Health but this was an opportunity to say we are crafting these regulations which were supposed to be warning labels in response to this report in the name of Public Health. Host as you chronicled the hill . Guest it turns out southern democrats continued to be very powerful in the mid1960s in washington and so in response to more strongly worded warning labels proposed by the ftc congress stepped in and they do what becomes characteristic of Congress Acting at the behest of the Tobacco Industry and they offer watereddown warning label and they basically say hey the ftc you cant regulate on this for a few more years. Host is tobacco pulling the strings . Guest i guess. Host the book takes it to a whole ever level about this time because you start telling the story of madonna from salem new jersey. Guest part of what is a 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 smokers choice to do what he or she will with that information. By the late 1960s and early 1970s another a number of americans begin to think. We are going to break away from our booktv programming to take you live to the white house for todays briefing with President Trump on the coronavirus response. Youre watching live coverage on cspan2. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations]