That is a tremendous thing to hear from you thank you very much. It feels like a big relief. Ten years in the works to make this book and so it feels like a relief and it is a pleasure to be able to talk about it with you and other interesting people. Host Major Writers spend their time studying, writing about tobacco and cigarettes, Richard Lugar won the Pulitzer Prize for ashes to ashes. Guest is a page turner. And about the deception of the industry. Any trepidation on when you start because you had a giant book out there and you took a risk. Guest i feel with those books, the biggest of which is called golden holocaust, i feel i was standing on the giants of shoulders and my work is tremendously indebted to them but when i was thinking about writing about tobacco, i wasnt approaching it the same way they were. There was so much coming at the story of tobacco from the angle of the industry and when i began the project in a much more humble state as a graduate student, i began by thinking about agriculture and farmers which it is probably not surprising to say there are not three poems about agriculture so i solve these as a reason 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 these many years ago. How do you view the severe . Guest returning to how we think about the culture we tend to associate a product with the major tobacco firm. It has a cinematic quality to it and be tobacco firms but in the hotel an in a chilly december 93 and they hatched a plan to engage a conspiracy to manufacture doubt as a way to evade regulations. This is a tremendously important story and one that is applied to other strategies of corporate but if you take a wideangle view was begun to debate begins to come into view. It was the work of the activists in the 60s and 70s to dislodge the hold of tobacco in American Life and they couldnt do it by operating at the federal level. You see a product that was in a behavior pattern and cultural way of life that was made by federal action and that was unmade by a social movement that basically created a new character. Its too kind of poke holes that anything you read and think about whats missing or what kind of analysis do they put forth into the whole point of asking the questions and being hard on these important fabulous tone is so that the graduate students basically pick yourself student basically figures out of their own voice can be. When i was reading in graduate school it wasnt in the tobacco debate at all. I was very interested in an entirely different question about the persistence of reach alisam and regional economies. And so, at the beginning of my time in graduate school, there was a lively debate among historians of the south end of conservatism. Over the question is this how did it go south still a unique region. Does it make sense to focus on it as a region that is different from say the sunbelt i sunbelt e they wouldve historianalot of t political life in the suburbs of charlotte and phoenix and los angeles. Maybe it isnt the Central Point of this operative anymore and so in my reading and request for novelty, i was interested in the persistence of southern agriculture and the persistence of the agricultural economy even in a region that began to look over the region that began to look more like other parts of the United States. So, i was kind of pushing back against the idea that the south was just like the rest of the United States by saying if you focus on the way that money is made in the south and the politicasouth and thepolitical , you might start to see a continuity between the regional distinction in the 19th and early 20th century to the late 20th century. In the university of virginia. Like florida, massachusetts, theres something geographically in the land, cigarettes going back deep into my own reading of the history, i thought that some of the literature on the southern distinctiveness gave a short bridge to the persistence of basically agricultural methods that the presence of undeveloped land and what appeared to be undeveloped land in the south had a cultural hold on people, and lan the land is also an important feature of the southern agricultural economy so it was very much in the quest to understand the meaning of land in the postworld war ii south that gave rise to this project because i was thinking what are the two that are most associated and grown in the south and of course theres cotton and tobacco and it seemed to me that it was a much more interesting commodity to focus on in the 20th century. If my Historical Research is great, i can trace this back to a mcdonalds you are in North Carolina, you are waiting. Take me back to the early interest. Guest its so funny that you mention. When i was beginning this project, i had no i decided im going to try to understand how tobacco farmers related to big tobacco. That was my original question. To do that, i knew that i would need to vote and archives across North Carolina and i selected North Carolina as a kind of case study because it was and is the leading producer of a particular kind of tobacco that is a primary constituent in the americanstyle cigarettes so i knew i would need to set up camp and do research at North Carolina state and East Carolina University in greenville and the coastal plain. But it would be very helpful, and i would recommend this to any historian who is thinking about beginning a book or dissertation or book project to find a local resource that is a bit of a history buff. This gentleman had been involved with the tobacco economy and had worked for basically the statelevel tobacco lobby and produced a self published book. People who produce self published books are usually very happy to talk to hugh about the research. You about the research. So i interviewed him out of the blue i said im a graduate student at love to talk about your work and tobacco and he was more than happy to meet with me and gave me a lot of other information i wouldnt have known or known where to look if it hadnt been for meeting him. Host said the interest was in agriculture, in the south, tobacco. Where did it start . I trace it back to your undergraduate days. Where did the idea come from . Guest it didnt come from smoking i can say that. Guest host the beginning of the book is about tobacco before you get into the cigarettes. So it wasnt a cigarette, it wasnt held. Were you always a political historian . Guest i was interested in in the late 19th and early 20th century, there was a tremendous tension between the tobacco of the era that was then known as the tobacco trust and it was the monopoly controlled by james duke and what they did in the 1890s as he basically blocked every type of tobacco around. He consolidated hundreds of smaller Tobacco Companies into one big Company Called the American Tobacco company and because of the American Tobacco co. They had essentially monopoly power, it meant that the tobacco could dictate prices that they wouldvtheprices thato the tobacco farmers for what they grew so there was tension, violence, anger on the part of tobacco farmers towards this big monopoly. Tobacco farmers for the late 19th and early part of the 20th century tended to be small scale and in part that was due to the tremendous labor requirements. It was known as the 13 month crop because planning for the subsequent season have to begin even before the current season was harvested. It relied on different stratums in tobacco farming so you had land owners who may work the farms themselves with family labor or they may have hired tenants were sharecroppers and there is a racial dimension to this. A tenant farmers were more white and sharecroppers were more frequently africanamerican and the difference between the two was the sharecroppers sometimes never saw cash in the course of what they did. They had to buy from the store where their debts were tallied up against what they brought in from the previous seasons of it wawhichwas a cycle of embedded. Even for the top of the system among the tobacco farmers, they were always so much weaker to Something Like the duke tobacco trust so you see even among the elite farmers anger at the big tobacco of the day so what motivated me towards thinking about tobacco and the latter part of the 20th century and my question is essentially was what happened to all of that antagonism in the industry once tobacco and cigarettes began to be threatened from the health perspective. Did the outside threat still mean an alliance between farmers and Industry Player before there had been antagonism so that was kind of the quest that i was on. Host and the movement from an angry opposition to a more businesslike alliance . Guest to a large extent it did occur but not because tobacco farmers thought the cigarette manufacturers were their friends. What happened that changed everything in american agriculture into southern agricultural especially that american agriculture at 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 the land so when you think tobacco is an unregulated crop, in fact more than any other in the United States, tobacco farmers had to abide by the strict production controls and it was written with the main part of the farm bill that was separate with their own legislation so the new deal basically institutes a system think of it as supply management we are going to make sure by the way you cannot just declare yourself a tobacco farmer you essentially have to have a license to grow, and allotment that they cannot produce more than x. Amount and this will be revised based on the yearly projections for what the manufacturethe manufactureis nel provide a minimum price for the tobacco. Kind of akin to a minimum wage in the industry and it was right around the same time so what this data is basically enabled the Agricultural Sector to be buffered from what you can almost think of as the bullying of the Tobacco Industry. Sorghum, wheat and tobacco are differences . Guest difference of tobacco is the program of supply management was much more rigid. There were not buffers within the agricultural law to allow people to go over one year and then under the next year. You were not allowed to market over your allotment. Host you talk about the phrase iron triangle. What is that . Guest it is an old Political Science term that basically refers to an alliance or dynamic between a subcommittee in congress that oversees a Regulatory Agency and private industry. The tobacco subcommittee, the usda and tobacco farmers, organized tobacco farmers and the most important tobacco farm organizations for the cigarettes for much of the story i tell is the North Carolina farm bureau. Host to give me a sense of the iron triangle, but the dynamic . Guest after say world war ii, tobacco farmers are very empowered by congress and encouraged by the usda to basically write their own wall. What do i mean by that . Any producing groups interested in the production peacetime. They experienced a severe depression in agriculture for a lot of the 1920s. And so, during the second world war, tobacco farmers that have now become more organized by their interaction with the federal government and the federal government is literally organizing groups of farmers into the committees so they can plan how much tobacco they will produce in subsequent years, these elite tobacco farmers are coming together in various places in North Carolina saying what are we 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 the tobacco farmers have now tha but they didnt hae after world war i, but they have now is proximity to government, to the levers of power a bureaucracy interested in their wellbeing in a way that they hadnt been before. Host because of money . Guest because the new deal for two reasons, the new deal did inaugurate in a way of doing government that gave cover and benefits to privileged groups and in this case it was producers and you can see this in a lesser extent to the organized labor there was a theory how the economy should work but if you could get producers to essentially formal organizations you could have more functioning of the economy overall, but the second reason it becomes so important have to do with the power of southern democrats. Like who is important in the new deal coalition, who is the glue that holds them together. So they have painted outside power in the democratic party. And its the farmers that have the power or the corporations . Stomach the tobacco corporations have powered this whole time. What is new is the interest of the federal government in shoring up the farmers as well and producing policy that ensures farmers have a standard of living that they havent been assured before. Host is that because they stimulated the interest of the government . Guest i think that there is a political calculation on the part of southern democrat that theyve got these constituents that are important. They have many more that are farmers than they have constituents that were tobacco executives. Guest in part its about kind of an economic theory about how to empower different groups in the modern economy. If you have an imbalance in the Agricultural Sector and the Consumer Sector that might lead to another depression so it was important for the federal government to basically shore up the different groups and make sure that there was economic harmony. Host let me give a simplistic assertion. A tobacco was never good for the farmers. It was good for the corporatio corporations. Guest its hard for me to wrap my mind around that with what i know that the experience of tobacco farming in the 20th century. Because of the federal policy that was directing money towards farmers come it became a lot better. Was it perhaps many people at the same time left the farm when they could, but the experience was much better and they did relative to the corporations and big tobacco, they capture a larger share of the price of the sicker than they did before the 1930s and after the end of the federal Tobacco Program in 2004. Host and then something happens in the 1950s. Leading up to the 1964 Surgeon Generals report do these farmers get caught completely off guard . Guest because federal policy encouraged the organization of some elite to tobacco farmers, the industry sees an opening to make an alliance with tobacco farmers during the 1950s through the present day so at that meeting in the plaza hote hotel in 1953s not just the tobacco Corporate Executives of Philip Morris and r. J. Reynolds, they are representatives of tobacco agricultural groups as well and as part of the organizations on the conspiracy. Guest host being the corporatio corporation. Guest they organize an offshoot of the big tobacco conspiracy. They organized a group called the Tobacco Growers Information Committee in the early 1950s thats intended to basically translate industry propaganda for an agricultural audience with the idea that farmers that are beloved by politicians in port timport to politicians bece they are more numerous than the people that work for big corporations and that they may be in fact very downhome allies for the Tobacco Companies they try to make arguments against regulation on the basis of health. Host by the 1950s and 1960s, you have two or three different regimes, congressional appropriations supporting the industry wanting to help the farmer . Guest organizing them to testify against people and Public Health. Part of it is using farmers that are organized to basically be the mouthpiece of the industry because they are more credible or likable, downhome. You see farmers going to testify against proposed cigarette regulations o in the 1960s for example. Host and who was using them . Was at the industry, the Phillip Morris of the worlds . Guest they were happy to have this alliance that the farmers also were they believed that regulation would be bad for them. They had seen their prosperity has been linked to obviously the rise of the cigarette in a very direct way. Also many people may not realize that prior to world war ii, prior to the late 1930s, the main way people consume tobacco wasnt even in a cigarette so the rise of the cigarette directly tracked the rise of prosperity for farmers. It was due to demand but also government interventions. They were invested. Did they want kids to smoke . Guest tobacco farmers smoked more than other people and to this day you see greater rates of tobacco use in the tobacco growing regions, so i think probably bite the 80s they didnt want their kids to. Host you have to Surgeon General and you also chronicled the buck and have the rise of the Public Interest movement. Guest to Surgeon Generals report comes out in 1964 and is basically the first time the federal government says smoking causes cancer and heart disease. For many americans, this is a huge event across front pages of newspapers in the country. But they had been in the works for a couple of years. 1962 the college of physicians, the uk equivalent of the Surgeon General comes out with a report saying much the sam