Transcripts For CSPAN2 After Words Sarah Milov The Cigarette

Guest host interviewing top nonfiction authors about the latest work. All after words programs are available as podcasts. Congratulations. Thank you. Your book is a major accompaniment. It is a significant scholarly work and i think its fair to say that you move the seal. Thats a tremendous good to hear from you. Thank you so much. How does it feel . Like a big relief. Its been ten years and 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 with you and talk about other interesting people. Three Major Writers spent their career studying, writing about tobacco and the cigarette and Richard Kruger one the prize its a page turner. Allen brand is late great historian on the cigarette century and Robert Proctor about the deception of the industry and any trepidation when you started that you had three nearly giant books that are out there and you took a risk. Yes, but i really feel as though with those three books, ashes to ashes and Robert Proctors poll of work the biggest of which is called golden holocaust, i really feel as though i was standing on the shoulders of giants. These are fantastic works and my work is tremendously indebted to that but when i was thinking about writing about tobacco i wasnt approaching it the same way that they were. They were very much coming at the story of tobacco from the angle of industry and when i began this project in a much more humble states, just a lowly graduate student, i began it from thinking about agriculture and farmers which is probably not depressing to say and there arent three humongous tones about Tobacco Culture and i thought i saw these big works as even for my opening wide into the field to write about it in a different way and of course the book in the project changed quite a bit the past ten years from when i began this lo these many years ago. Let show starts with the basic question that how does professors sarah milov, how do you view this . Well, we are turning back to those three works that you mention and we are turning to how we think about the cigarette in Popular Culture and political life and we tend to associate the product with the deception of the major tobacco and it has a cinematic quality to it and executives of tobacco first met in the plaza hotel and a chilly december night in 1953 and they hatched a plan to basically engage in what became a halfcentury long conspiracy to manufacture doubt is a way to evade regulation. This is a tremendously important story and one i think that has or is continuing to be fruitfully applied to other Core Strategies of corporate deception but if you take a wider angle view what begins to come and focus is the presence of the cigarette in American Life was not produced by the industry itself if you begin with from seed to smoke you see the government and the federal government specifically has had a really pretty big hand and vetting the cigarette century to use allen brands phrase. What undermined the presence of the cigarette in American Life was not the fact that the feds finally got hip in 19624 or that the 1990s but it was the assiduous effort activists in the 60s and 70s to dislodge the hold of tobacco in American Life and they cannot do it by operating at the federal level. You had to look to local and state governments to do so. If you look at the cigarettes over the span of the 20th century you see a product that was a behavior pattern, culture, a way of life that was made by federal action and that was unmade by a social movement. Basically it created a new character and america, the character of the nonsmoker. We will spend time talking about or unpacking that. Lets start how does you do history . I love this question. While, i think, you know, what you are trained to do in graduate school is read as much as possible that has been written and try to the first couple years of graduate school are to poke holes in every book that you read and think about what is missing or what analysis do they put forward but what does that paper over and hide in the whole point of asking these questions and being so hard on these important fabulous tones is so that the graduate student basically figures out what their own voice to be and what their own contribution Novel Research can be. And so, when i was reading in graduate school i wasnt actually steeped in the tobacco debates at all. I was very interested in an entirely different question about the persistence of regionalism and regional economies and regional difference in so at the beginning of my time in graduate school there was a lively debate amongst historians of the south and historians of conservatism over the question is the south still a unique region and this was 2000 but it makes sense to focus the region that was different from the sun belt because a lot of historians looked at political life out in the suburbs of olanta and charlotte and phoenix in los angeles and the patterns, political patterns that are happening here look at the and so maybe the south isnt the Central Point of regional distinctiveness is not what is operative anymore and so in my reading 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 began to look over time even in a region that began to look more like other parts of the United States. I was pushing back against this idea that the south was just like the rest of the United States by saying if you focus on this weight money is made in the south and the political economy of the south you might start to see the continuity between regional distinction in the 20 century to the late 20th century. There was a fellowship you had around 2010 and it was Virginia Historical society and you are at the university of virginia and the cigarette you are not from the south and actually it was massachusetts and there was something geographically about virginia, about the land, the cigarette. Yeah, so, going back deep into my own reading in history i thought the literature on southern distinctiveness maybe gave a short drift to the persistence of basically agricultural myths that the presence of undeveloped land in the south or what appeared to be on developed land in the south is or had a cultural hold on people and land is also an important feature of southern agricultural economy and so it was very much a quest to understand the meaning of land in a postworld war ii south that gave rise to the 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 and it seemed to me that tobacco was much more interesting commodity to focus on in the 20th century. If my Historical Research is right, i can trace this your interest back to a mcdonald and youre in North Carolina and you are waiting for billy juergen and take me back to the early interest. Its funny you mentioned that so when i was beginning this project, you know, i had decided i would try to understand how to tobacco farmers related to big tobacco and 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 this case study because North Carolina was and is the leading producer of a particularly kind of tobacco called that is a primary constituent in americanstyle cigarette. I knew id need to set up camps and do research at usc and octagon estate and at East Carolina University and in greenville and the coastal plain but it would be helpful and i would recommend this to any young historian who is thinking about thinking about a book or dissertation or book project to find the local force that is bit of a history buff and this gentleman had been involved in the tobacco economy and worked for tobacco basically at the state level tobacco lobby a self published book and people who put self published books are happy to talk to you about their research so i just emailed him out of the blue and said im a graduate student and i would love to talk to you about your work in tobacco and he was more than happy to meet with me and gave me a lot of information i otherwise would not have known it would not have known where to look had it not been for meeting him. The interest was in agriculture and in the south and it was in tobacco, where does it start . I can trace it back to the undergraduate days and where does where did the idea come from . This did not come from smoking i can say that. In fact, the beginning of the book is really about tobacco before you get in to the cigarette. Absolutely. It wasnt the cigarette but it was were you always a political historian . I was interested so, in the late and early 20th century there was a tremendous tension between the big tobacco of the era which was then known as the tobacco trust and the tobacco trust was the monopoly controlled by james b duke of Duke University and what duke did beginning in the 1890s was he basically bought up every type of tobacco concern around and consolidated hundreds of smaller Tobacco Companies into one big Company Called the American Tobacco company and because the American Tobacco company had essentially a monopoly power it meant that American Tobacco could dictate prices that it would pay to tobacco farmers for what they grew. There was tension and violence and anger on the part of tobacco farmers towards this big monopoly. Give me the sense of the tobacco farmer. Who was the tobacco farmer . Tobacco farmers in the well, in the late 19th and early part of the 20 century tended to be small and grew on a small scale and in part that was due to the fact of the cross crop which was a locally known the 13 month crop because planning for the subsequent season had to begin even before the current season was harvested. It relied on there are different stratagems within tobacco farming so you had land owners who make work the farms themselves with family labor or they may have hired tenants or sharecroppers and there is a racial dimension to this. Tenant farmers were more frequently white and as sharecroppers or more frequently africanamerican and the difference between those two was that sharecroppers sometimes never saw cash in the course of what they did. They had to buy from the store where there tallied against what they brought in from the previously season so as a perpetual cycle of indebtedness. And so, even for the top of this class system amongst tobacco farmers they were always so much weaker relative to of course Something Like the duke tobacco trust. You see 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 the 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 the Health Perspective and did that outside threat moment in alliance between farmers and industry were before they had been antagonism so that was the quest i was on. This movement from this angry opposition to a business Like Alliance did it occur. To a large extent it did occur but but tobacco farmers thought that the cigarette manufacturers where their friends so what happened that changed everything in american agriculture and in southern agricultural especially but in american agriculture written at large was the Great Depression but 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. When you think tobacco is thus unrelated crop, in fact more than any other cropped 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 but part written separately with their own legislation is so what the new deal that was basically instituted a system of think of it as supply management that we will make sure that mr. Tobacco farmer who, by the way, you cannot just declare yourself at tobacco farmer but essentially have to have a license to grow an allotment exactly. Mr. Tobacco farmer cannot produce more than x amount and this is going to be revised based on yearly projections for what the manufacturers mean but in exchange we provide mr. Tobacco farmer with a minimum price for that tobacco. Its a kin to minimum wage and industry and it was tasked at right around the same time. But this did was basically enabled the Agricultural Sector to be buffered from the bullying of the Tobacco Industry. Wheat, corn, is that true or are there differences . Major difference with tobacco was the program of supply management was much more rigid and there was a not buffers within the agricultural law to go over and under plant the next year and you are not able to market over your allotment. You talk about the phrase Iron Triangle, what is that . And Iron Triangle is an old Political Science term that basically refers to as alliance between or idea namic between a subcommittee and congress that oversees a Regulatory Agency and private industry so the tobacco subcommittee, usda and tobacco farmers organized tobacco farmers and the most important tobacco Farm Organization for the cigarette for much of the story i tell is the North Carolina farm bureau. Give me a sense of this Iron Triangle and the 50s or so what is the dynamic their . The basic story with what is going on in terms of tobacco farming after say world war ii is that tobacco farmers are very empowered by congress and encouraged by the usda to basically write their own laws. What do i mean by that . Well, after war any producing group is anxious about readjusting production to peace time. You will not have the same kind of rubbed 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 and had not been harassed or corralled by the new deal and experienced a really severe depression and all farmers did in agricultural for a lot of the 1920s. And so during the Second World War tobacco farmers who had now 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 so these elite tobacco farmers are coming together in various places across North Carolina insane what will we do about the postwar readjustment. We cant let what happened after the First World War happened again after the Second World War and so what did tobacco farmers have now that they did not have after world war i. What they have now is proximity to government and proximity to the leverage of power and uphold bureaucracy. The farmers and their proximity. They have a whole bureaucracy and rested their wellbeing and way they had not been before. Because of money . Because the new deal i would say for two reasons. The new deal did to inaugurate a way of doing government that gave power and benefits to privileged groups. In this case it was producers. Tobacco farmers and you can see this to a lesser extent for a less successful extent but to organized labor buried there was this theory of how the economy should work that if you could produce essentially form organizations to get their house in order you could have more smooth functioning of the economy overall but the second reason that tobacco becomes so strangely important had to do with the power really of southern democrats. Who is important in the new Deal Coalition and who is the glue that holds these districts northeastern farm groups or northeastern Industry Groups together with southern farmers and it was southern democrats and so dave wheeled outside power in terms of the democratic party. Its the farmers who had the power or it was the corporatio corporations . Tobacco corporations have power this whole time. What is new is the interest of the federal government in shoring up farmers as well and in producing policy that ensures farmers have a standard of living that they had not been assured before. Who is driving who . You talk about the federal government and is that the companies had interest or the tobacco farmers had and they still related the interest of the government . I think theres a political calculation on the part of southern democrats that theyve got these constituents that are important and they have many more constituents that are farmers than they had constituents that were tobacco executives. This is about vote. 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 Major Writers<\/a> spent their career studying, writing about tobacco and the cigarette and Richard Kruger<\/a> one the prize its a page turner. Allen brand is late great historian on the cigarette century and Robert Proctor<\/a> about the deception of the industry and any trepidation when you started that you had three nearly giant books that are out there and you took a risk. Yes, but i really feel as though with those three books, ashes to ashes and Robert Proctor<\/a>s poll of work the biggest of which is called golden holocaust, i really feel as though i was standing on the shoulders of giants. These are fantastic works and my work is tremendously indebted to that but when i was thinking about writing about tobacco i wasnt approaching it the same way that they were. They were very much coming at the story of tobacco from the angle of industry and when i began this project in a much more humble states, just a lowly graduate student, i began it from thinking about agriculture and farmers which is probably not depressing to say and there arent three humongous tones about Tobacco Culture<\/a> and i thought i saw these big works as even for my opening wide into the field to write about it in a different way and of course the book in the project changed quite a bit the past ten years from when i began this lo these many years ago. Let show starts with the basic question that how does professors sarah milov, how do you view this . Well, we are turning back to those three works that you mention and we are turning to how we think about the cigarette in Popular Culture<\/a> and political life and we tend to associate the product with the deception of the major tobacco and it has a cinematic quality to it and executives of tobacco first met in the plaza hotel and a chilly december night in 1953 and they hatched a plan to basically engage in what became a halfcentury long conspiracy to manufacture doubt is a way to evade regulation. This is a tremendously important story and one i think that has or is continuing to be fruitfully applied to other Core Strategies<\/a> of corporate deception but if you take a wider angle view what begins to come and focus is the presence of the cigarette in American Life<\/a> was not produced by the industry itself if you begin with from seed to smoke you see the government and the federal government specifically has had a really pretty big hand and vetting the cigarette century to use allen brands phrase. What undermined the presence of the cigarette in American Life<\/a> was not the fact that the feds finally got hip in 19624 or that the 1990s but it was the assiduous effort activists in the 60s and 70s to dislodge the hold of tobacco in American Life<\/a> and they cannot do it by operating at the federal level. You had to look to local and state governments to do so. If you look at the cigarettes over the span of the 20th century you see a product that was a behavior pattern, culture, a way of life that was made by federal action and that was unmade by a social movement. Basically it created a new character and america, the character of the nonsmoker. We will spend time talking about or unpacking that. Lets start how does you do history . I love this question. While, i think, you know, what you are trained to do in graduate school is read as much as possible that has been written and try to the first couple years of graduate school are to poke holes in every book that you read and think about what is missing or what analysis do they put forward but what does that paper over and hide in the whole point of asking these questions and being so hard on these important fabulous tones is so that the graduate student basically figures out what their own voice to be and what their own contribution Novel Research<\/a> can be. And so, when i was reading in graduate school i wasnt actually steeped in the tobacco debates at all. I was very interested in an entirely different question about the persistence of regionalism and regional economies and regional difference in so at the beginning of my time in graduate school there was a lively debate amongst historians of the south and historians of conservatism over the question is the south still a unique region and this was 2000 but it makes sense to focus the region that was different from the sun belt because a lot of historians looked at political life out in the suburbs of olanta and charlotte and phoenix in los angeles and the patterns, political patterns that are happening here look at the and so maybe the south isnt the Central Point<\/a> of regional distinctiveness is not what is operative anymore and so in my reading 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 began to look over time even in a region that began to look more like other parts of the United States<\/a>. I was pushing back against this idea that the south was just like the rest of the United States<\/a> by saying if you focus on this weight money is made in the south and the political economy of the south you might start to see the continuity between regional distinction in the 20 century to the late 20th century. There was a fellowship you had around 2010 and it was Virginia Historical<\/a> society and you are at the university of virginia and the cigarette you are not from the south and actually it was massachusetts and there was something geographically about virginia, about the land, the cigarette. Yeah, so, going back deep into my own reading in history i thought the literature on southern distinctiveness maybe gave a short drift to the persistence of basically agricultural myths that the presence of undeveloped land in the south or what appeared to be on developed land in the south is or had a cultural hold on people and land is also an important feature of southern agricultural economy and so it was very much a quest to understand the meaning of land in a postworld war ii south that gave rise to the 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 and it seemed to me that tobacco was much more interesting commodity to focus on in the 20th century. If my Historical Research<\/a> is right, i can trace this your interest back to a mcdonald and youre in North Carolina<\/a> and you are waiting for billy juergen and take me back to the early interest. Its funny you mentioned that so when i was beginning this project, you know, i had decided i would try to understand how to tobacco farmers related to big tobacco and that was my original question. To do that i knew i would need to look in archives across North Carolina<\/a> and i selected North Carolina<\/a> as this case study because North Carolina<\/a> was and is the leading producer of a particularly kind of tobacco called that is a primary constituent in americanstyle cigarette. I knew id need to set up camps and do research at usc and octagon estate and at East Carolina University<\/a> and in greenville and the coastal plain but it would be helpful and i would recommend this to any young historian who is thinking about thinking about a book or dissertation or book project to find the local force that is bit of a history buff and this gentleman had been involved in the tobacco economy and worked for tobacco basically at the state level tobacco lobby a self published book and people who put self published books are happy to talk to you about their research so i just emailed him out of the blue and said im a graduate student and i would love to talk to you about your work in tobacco and he was more than happy to meet with me and gave me a lot of information i otherwise would not have known it would not have known where to look had it not been for meeting him. The interest was in agriculture and in the south and it was in tobacco, where does it start . I can trace it back to the undergraduate days and where does where did the idea come from . This did not come from smoking i can say that. In fact, the beginning of the book is really about tobacco before you get in to the cigarette. Absolutely. It wasnt the cigarette but it was were you always a political historian . I was interested so, in the late and early 20th century there was a tremendous tension between the big tobacco of the era which was then known as the tobacco trust and the tobacco trust was the monopoly controlled by james b duke of Duke University<\/a> and what duke did beginning in the 1890s was he basically bought up every type of tobacco concern around and consolidated hundreds of smaller Tobacco Companies<\/a> into one big Company Called<\/a> the American Tobacco<\/a> company and because the American Tobacco<\/a> company had essentially a monopoly power it meant that American Tobacco<\/a> could dictate prices that it would pay to tobacco farmers for what they grew. There was tension and violence and anger on the part of tobacco farmers towards this big monopoly. Give me the sense of the tobacco farmer. Who was the tobacco farmer . Tobacco farmers in the well, in the late 19th and early part of the 20 century tended to be small and grew on a small scale and in part that was due to the fact of the cross crop which was a locally known the 13 month crop because planning for the subsequent season had to begin even before the current season was harvested. It relied on there are different stratagems within tobacco farming so you had land owners who make work the farms themselves with family labor or they may have hired tenants or sharecroppers and there is a racial dimension to this. Tenant farmers were more frequently white and as sharecroppers or more frequently africanamerican and the difference between those two was that sharecroppers sometimes never saw cash in the course of what they did. They had to buy from the store where there tallied against what they brought in from the previously season so as a perpetual cycle of indebtedness. And so, even for the top of this class system amongst tobacco farmers they were always so much weaker relative to of course Something Like<\/a> the duke tobacco trust. You see 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 the 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 the Health Perspective<\/a> and did that outside threat moment in alliance between farmers and industry were before they had been antagonism so that was the quest i was on. This movement from this angry opposition to a business Like Alliance<\/a> did it occur. To a large extent it did occur but but tobacco farmers thought that the cigarette manufacturers where their friends so what happened that changed everything in american agriculture and in southern agricultural especially but in american agriculture written at large was the Great Depression<\/a> but 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. When you think tobacco is thus unrelated crop, in fact more than any other cropped grown in the United States<\/a> 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 but part written separately with their own legislation is so what the new deal that was basically instituted a system of think of it as supply management that we will make sure that mr. Tobacco farmer who, by the way, you cannot just declare yourself at tobacco farmer but essentially have to have a license to grow an allotment exactly. Mr. Tobacco farmer cannot produce more than x amount and this is going to be revised based on yearly projections for what the manufacturers mean but in exchange we provide mr. Tobacco farmer with a minimum price for that tobacco. Its a kin to minimum wage and industry and it was tasked at right around the same time. But this did was basically enabled the Agricultural Sector<\/a> to be buffered from the bullying of the Tobacco Industry<\/a>. Wheat, corn, is that true or are there differences . Major difference with tobacco was the program of supply management was much more rigid and there was a not buffers within the agricultural law to go over and under plant the next year and you are not able to market over your allotment. You talk about the phrase Iron Triangle<\/a>, what is that . And Iron Triangle<\/a> is an old Political Science<\/a> term that basically refers to as alliance between or idea namic between a subcommittee and congress that oversees a Regulatory Agency<\/a> and private industry so the tobacco subcommittee, usda and tobacco farmers organized tobacco farmers and the most important tobacco Farm Organization<\/a> for the cigarette for much of the story i tell is the North Carolina<\/a> farm bureau. Give me a sense of this Iron Triangle<\/a> and the 50s or so what is the dynamic their . The basic story with what is going on in terms of tobacco farming after say world war ii is that tobacco farmers are very empowered by congress and encouraged by the usda to basically write their own laws. What do i mean by that . Well, after war any producing group is anxious about readjusting production to peace time. You will not have the same kind of rubbed 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<\/a> were such important purveyors of cigarettes. After the First World War<\/a> farmers were not organized and had not been harassed or corralled by the new deal and experienced a really severe depression and all farmers did in agricultural for a lot of the 1920s. And so during the Second World War<\/a> tobacco farmers who had now 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 so these elite tobacco farmers are coming together in various places across North Carolina<\/a> insane what will we do about the postwar readjustment. We cant let what happened after the First World War<\/a> happened again after the Second World War<\/a> and so what did tobacco farmers have now that they did not have after world war i. What they have now is proximity to government and proximity to the leverage of power and uphold bureaucracy. The farmers and their proximity. They have a whole bureaucracy and rested their wellbeing and way they had not been before. Because of money . Because the new deal i would say for two reasons. The new deal did to inaugurate a way of doing government that gave power and benefits to privileged groups. In this case it was producers. Tobacco farmers and you can see this to a lesser extent for a less successful extent but to organized labor buried there was this theory of how the economy should work that if you could produce essentially form organizations to get their house in order you could have more smooth functioning of the economy overall but the second reason that tobacco becomes so strangely important had to do with the power really of southern democrats. Who is important in the new Deal Coalition<\/a> and who is the glue that holds these districts northeastern farm groups or northeastern Industry Groups<\/a> together with southern farmers and it was southern democrats and so dave wheeled outside power in terms of the democratic party. Its the farmers who had the power or it was the corporatio corporations . Tobacco corporations have power this whole time. What is new is the interest of the federal government in shoring up farmers as well and in producing policy that ensures farmers have a standard of living that they had not been assured before. Who is driving who . You talk about the federal government and is that the companies had interest or the tobacco farmers had and they still related the interest of the government . I think theres a political calculation on the part of southern democrats that theyve got these constituents that are important and they have many more constituents that are farmers than they had constituents that were tobacco executives. This is about vote. 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<\/a> and the industrial sector and the Consumer Sector<\/a> and that might lead to another depression. It was important for the federal government to basically sure up these different groups of americans and make sure that there was economic harmony. Let me give a simplistic assertion. Did tobacco tobacco was never really good for the farmers but good for the corporations. Well, it is 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 became a lot better. Was it perhaps 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 preet 1930s. Tobacco farmers did relative to corporations, relative to big tobacco captured a larger share of the price of a cigarette than they did before the 1930s and indeed after the end of the federal Tobacco Program<\/a> in 2004. Something happened in the 1950s, [inaudible] leading up to the 1964 Surgeon Generals<\/a> report these farmers did they get caught completely off guard . So, because of federal policy that encouraged the organization of some elite tobacco farmers the industry seized an opening to make an alliance with tobacco farmers during while, the 1950s through arguably the present day. And so, at that cinematic meeting in the new York Plaza Hotel<\/a> in 1953 it is not just the tobacco Corporate Executives<\/a> and not just the executives you know that are there but they are representatives of tobacco and agricultural groups there as well and as part of the organization by the big tobacco conspiracy spinning being the corporations . They organized and agricultural offshoot of the big tobacco conspiracy. What you mean . Was that the industry . The industry was very happy to have this alliance, it is not just this game. They believed that regulation on Health Ground<\/a> would be bad for them. They had their prosperity had been linked to obviously the rise of the cigarette in a direct way. Also, many people might not realize that prior to world war ii, the 19th 1930s, the main way people consumed tobacco was not even in cigarettes. The rise of the cigarette directly tracked the rise of prosperity for farmers. It is often due to government intervention. They were invested in people continuing to smoke. They wanted the kids to smoke . Tobacco farmers work more than others smoking. Today you see greater rates of tobacco use in tobacco growing region so i think no, probably by the 80s they didnt want their kids smoking. You are a Surgeon General<\/a> and chronicle, you have the rise of the public interest. Yes, the report comes out in 1964 and is basically the first time the federal government said smoking causes cancer and for many americans, this is a huge event. Front pages and across the country but it had been in the works for a couple of years. 1962, all college of physicians pays equivalent to a Surgeon General<\/a> comes out with this report saying much the same thing. So the question for congress and regulators becomes, what are we going to do with this information . The report basically said government needed to do something on the issue. So the ftc says all right, we will use this as an opportunity to enhance the power of our agency to regulate this. Its an opportunity for them to approach regulation in a new way. A more muscular kind of way then they had before. It was ultimately about Public Health<\/a> but the Surgeon General<\/a> supports the cover and to do something that regulators said they wanted to do before. It was absolutely about Public Health<\/a> but this was an opportunity to take we are cracking these regulation which were proposed to be warning labels in response to this report in the name of Public Health<\/a>. As you chronicle, hill did not like that. Turns out something democrats continue to be very powerful in the mid 1960s. Washington. In response to more strongly worded warning flavors, Congress Steps<\/a> in and they do what becomes characteristic of Congress Acting<\/a> on the behalf of the Tobacco Industry<\/a> and put in warning flavors and say hey, you cant regulate a few more years. Did tobacco pull your strings . Yes. The book goes to a whole different level because you start telling the story of donna from new jersey. Yes, part of what top play with the warning favorite issue, the paradigm, if we put a warming warning label on a pack of cigarettes, its the smokers twice to do what he or she will with that information. By the late 1960s, early 1970s, a number of americans begin to think that this paradigm makes no sense. Not for the reasons that become tentacle but the paradigm of consent makes no sense because most americans, this was true even now, never experienced smoking as smokers, they experienced it as nonsmokers so what becomes critical in the 1970s is the invention of the idea, the creation of the idea of nonsmokers rights. You look back to the early 1900s, the subways in the new york times, that opposed any restrictions on smoking, the prior century, they werent comfortable with people smoking in subways, cars. Nonsmokers rights, always different in the 70s and the early 1900s . The idea of our movement for smoking restrictions had it in the early 20th century. It might surprise a lot of people to know a handful of them actually banned the sale of cigarettes in the early 20th century. It is basically a cigarette version of prohibition. But you didnt have a modern cigarettes. People rolled their own cigarettes. Smokers were fighting for their rights to smoke because most people do smoke. Most people did not smoke at the turn of the previous century. The people who didnt smirk tended to be immigrants. They tended to be young men, portrayed as juvenile delinquents. Smoking of the turn of the 20th century in the early 1900s was considered something almost unamerican. The antismoking movement of the first two decades of the 20th century kind of road a wave of nativism and think about what type of behavior is appropriate for native born healthy americans. It goes back to donna, tell me about her. Donna was this fascinating woman. She was a Customer Service<\/a> representative working for new jersey bell. She had a terrible tobacco allergy. Where she worked in new jersey, more than half of her coworkers smoked which is actually a more smoking environment than most officers because at that time from only about 40 of americans population smoke. She wasnt exposed to smoke on a daily basis. She complained to her supervisor and did not get very far. It really affected her quality of life. Every day she would cough and take a pill because she would throw up. Sometimes, she began to wear a gas mask to work. Which to me,. Which she had to lower it but couldnt remove it completely when she spoke with people on the phone or people who came in to the office. This was before we had verizon. Exactly. She was a member of the communication workers of america and she went to her Union Steward<\/a> and she said this is a Workplace Health<\/a> issue, can you help me . Throughout the meeting, he said 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 dr. , the Company Doctor<\/a> said this is ridiculous. You are ill, your workplace is making you ill, you need to stay home until a Company Works<\/a> out an arrangement so you can return to work in a healthy environment. So she says okay, i have trouble supervisor and she thinks she will be home a couple of days until they accommodate her. Days turn into months which in her mind, there must have been alarm bells going on. My going to lose my job, they going to fire me . Wire they devoted to this smoking office . So while shes at home, shes basically on a sabbatical. She actually gets some work dumping on a sabbatical and she basically immerses herself in tobacco activism. She makes contacts with groups called ash, the legal arm of the antitobacco movement. She contacts a local social movement, smoking pollution and from these voices, she basically learned shes in uncharted territory. Theres nothing in federal laws that governs the regulation of smoking at work. So she basically realizes the only way this will be resolved is to pursue legal action. She decided shes going to sue her employer. Thats really a daunting thing to consider. Shes totally in uncharted territory here. Unsafe workplace. Worded that legal theory come from . I will established commonlaw idea about the responsibility of an employer to an employee. Smoking constituted and on safe work environment. Legal innovation . Activism . Legal innovation married to a judges understanding of science and the deed of the worker. So it takes on this tremendous almost celebrity dimension. Its 1975, shes going to sue her employer, she doesnt know where to turn. Thats before the days of wikipedia. She did what any motivated informed citizen what do, but Reference Library<\/a> and got records to ask who should i talk to if i want to talk to somebody about this . Is there anybody working at the law school . This is what historians call contingency. This one little thing would have been different, maybe history as a whole would have been different. So just so happened that a law professor, alfred was on faculty. He was teaching and he spent the previous decade serving in the equal Employment Opportunity<\/a> commission which was the federal agency created to enforce the Civil Rights Act<\/a> at work. He had thought a lot about the responsibility of employers to not discriminate on the various wings. He was teaching and he was eager to take up her case pro bono. Use as a teaching tool for his students. To me, thats amazing because he was a kind of figure that thought a lot about the relationship between agencies and employers. Sometimes agencies want to be sued so they can fulfill the mandate. For this case, he was crucial in preparing the initial documents. I have a sense you were captured. Enormously interested. She did so much work on her own. I think about what it would have taken to be her in this work environment. Shes throwing up from smoke and people are smoking in her face. Her employer doesnt want her there. While shes at home making phone calls, she drops an extensive policy that she delivers to the headquarters. Thats how they could accommodate nonsmoking employees. It becomes consequential in her case that if you can have nonsmoking sections for the operators, you clearly have the power to tell employees not to smoke in certain areas. She met. She died earlier this year . Yes, i wanted to reach out to her but she passed. Im glad you noticed, but i seem captivated because i really was. In the course of this document, she also pioneered and becomes an important argument to the 70s and 80s where shes smokers are extensive employees. They take breaks, they destroy equipment. Fair signal often and she presents Business Case<\/a> for restricting them. She took it up as banning tobacco work. Although this is not the point that the judge picked up upon, it becomes an important argument she makes later on as she continues. She won her case but there was limited president. Did not side with nonsmoking employees. Did it make a difference . Wasnt really about the law . Was the difference . There are other cases that bring up in the late 70s and 80s that employees are basically making similar types of claims. They dont succeed but what made the difference overall to the antitobacco movement as it proceeded through the next decade, it was this Business Case<\/a>. Donna, heres another reason i was so captivated, she continued to work at bell post this case while also basically starting her own consultancy that she ran out of her baseness basement and they basically make the case to businesses that are be good for your bottom line to protect non smokers at work. Her argument was twofold. One, smokers were expensive employees and look at my case, you are creating potential liability. I was a little fudgy because her case was rather unique but that idea but this was an inexpensive way to potentially save money for employers ends up being very attractive to businesses who take up smoking restrictions. My senses you circle about rights of the smoker and nonsmoker. The right to make a living. These are political, legal rights. I think about it as being increasing salient for nonsmokers in the post 1960s era. Its a way of communicating their claims that really had not existed prior to the 1960s. I think for nonsmokers, this rights talk is coming from those sources. One is the civil rights movement. Decentralized advocacy groups all over the country. In the literature and speeches made by organizers, they sometimes stretch the analogy between nonsmokers rights and participating in the africanamerican movement. They say things along the lines of, is there really any difference between asking for the right to sit at the lunch counter in the rights to enjoy ones lunch . A difference between what we are asking for and what africanamericans were demanding in the 50s. The second stream of thought that i think is chasing the rights talk of nonsmokers is the feminist movement. Specifically the idea of consciousnessraising. For nonsmoker advocates, one thing they have to do is make it safe to say im a non smoker and i think how i want to be in this space should determine what the space is like. Your to basically make people realize they share a common experience together, being oppressed, if you will by the presence of tobacco smoke. There some borrowing of the idea of the consciousnessraising that by sharing a private indignity with other women, you can basically make that into a public claim. The final thought is the Environmental Movement<\/a> of the late 1960s and 70s as nonsmoker rights advocates. Doesnt have a hypothesis . No. I just started with a question which was, what happened to the antagonism between tobacco farmers and the Tobacco Industry<\/a> as both became threatened by knowledge that smoking causes cancer . I heard you say ultimately, we use tobacco in american society, smoking causes cancer and of course the Surgeon Generals<\/a> warning is with the invention by activists of nonsmokers rights. The idea that people who do not smoke were able to achieve unpolluted air in shared public spaces. I stand by it. Can i push back a little . Yes. Ive seen the history of tobacco. Washington in 1990, there was a pot of progress on Secondhand Smoke<\/a>, we were finally able to get on and not breathe polluted air but the industry used this word, combination that was made. Thats what they wanted to talk about but the issue has somewhat plateaued. Its the antitobacco community. We started with a different question, whether nicotine was a drug, we focused on what rules to keep people smoking and focused on kids. You see this is a key determinant. I agree there is factors. My book suggests is that an important chapter weve overlooked was the rise of a true social movement around the idea of nonsmokers. That chapter enabled the subsequent chapter. Absolutely, so once the implications . My rights as a nonsmoker, that doesnt sit well with the vaping situation because now the industry says secondhand consequences, well see. But thats not the same kind of tool thats available. The vaping issue is different than the tobacco issue. To return to the idea of tobacco unfolding, we are at a chapter where we can look back over the whole of the past 100 years and i think one thing we know is that we should not take the Tobacco Industry<\/a> at its word and we shouldnt assume just because we dont have proof the harmful consequences, vaping or secondhand vaping would be right now. His surgery suggests that social movements can really make a difference and that movement is around the idea of Secondhand Smoke<\/a> or around the idea that jewell shouldnt market to kids, how should be action in the doesnt have to be at the federal level to be meaningful. Activists can implement at the local or state level. Changing attitudes towards the presence of tobacco smoke in society at large. The cover is the property of harvard university. Talk about work tobacco is a big hard challenge. Climate change. I do see lessons in this but maybe im just an optimist but not that many people read about tobacco and feel optimistic. I think the key take away for this book is that federal government allowing the 20th century has organized around the interest of industry and producers. The visio Climate Change<\/a>, tobacco and a week with guns as well. One lesson is the power of local laws change the way people experience their daytoday life survive achieving scores of victories at the local level in the 80s and 90s, antitobacco activists made more nonsmokers into bigger constituency for the kind of teacher they wanted to see. I think theres a lesson in that for the Climate Change<\/a> activist that might be frustrated in action. Guns . One trademark of the antitobacco movement was kind of a visual. Thank you for not smoking. Ive noticed more places ive been to say no guns on this premises and i wonder if that visual, just raising awareness of the presence or absence of guns in a place can make people more aware of their stance on the issue. I want to thank the associated editor of the journal of American History<\/a> for helping me for todays interview. I have one last question. Do you love doing history . Absolutely. Its my dream job. I love researching and love writing. You did very well. Congratulations. A major achievement. Thank you so much. Wonderful conversation. This program is available as a podcast. On afterwards programs can be viewed on our website bookt booktv. Org. Would happen, there would be a team of helicopters helping and supporting each other to make sure they were safe. Because there was no one else there, they made the decision immediately. He went down to the zone area. Waiting for the team to arrive there. Its in a battle condition, its a very long time to sit vulnerable. He waited, the team arrived, injured but safe. They use the helicopter and they pulled the helicopter above the tree line and radioed i have everyone, im coming out. President and ceo of the museum of arts, daniel on his book, in that time. About the life of Michael Odonnell<\/a> went missing in action during the vietnam war. Sunday night 8 00 p. M. Eastern on cspans to q a. A special airing on bookkeeping this week featuring top nonfiction authors, book programs and fairs and festivals which air every weekend along with our signature programs indepth and afterwards. Join us every weekend on cspan2. Next, david discusses the history of americans 1890 today. In his book, the heartbeat. Good evening, everyone. 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