Like a big relief, you know, its been 10 years in the work to make this book and so it feels like a relief and its just a pleasure to be able to talk about it, to talk about it with you and tons of other interesting people. Really a page turner. Outland, the great medical scientific historian on the cigarette century. Robert proctor at stanford about the deception of the industry. Any trepidation when you started . You had three giant box out there, and you took a risk. Guest yes, but but i really feel as though with those three books, ashes to ashes, cigarette century and Robert Proctor whole corpus of work, the biggest of which is called golden holocaust, i i really feel as though i was standing on the shoulders of giants. These are fantastic works and my work is tremendously indebted to them, but when i was thinking about writing about tobacco, i wasnt approaching the same way that they were. They were very much coming at the story of tobacco from the angle of industry and when i begin this project in a much more humble state, just as a lowly graduate student i really begin it from think that agriculture and farmers which its probably not surprising to say there are not three humongous tones about tobacco agriculture. I saw these big works as a reason for my little opening wedge into the field to write about it in a different way and then of course the book and the project changed quite a bit in the past ten years from when i began this many years ago. Host lets start with the basic question, how does come heady view the cigarette . Guest wyrick turning back to those three works that you mention and returning to how we think about the cigarettes in Popular Culture and political life. We very much tend to associate the product right so with the deception of the major tobacco firms. It has cinematic quality, the executive of tobacco firms met in the plaza hotel in the chilly december night in 1953 and they hatched a plan to basically engage in what became a halfcentury long conspiracy to manufacture doubt as a way to evade regulation. This isnt a singapore story and one that i think is continuing to be fruitfully mindful to reply to other corporate deception. If you take a wider angled view, what begins to come in focus is what the present of sigar American Life was not simply produced by the industry itself. What undermined the presence of the cigarette in American Life was not the fact that the feds finally got hit in 1964, or the 1990s, it was the assiduous efforts of activists in the 60s and 70s to really dislodge the hold of tobacco in American Life and he couldnt do it by operating at the federal level. They had to look to local and state governments to do so. If you think about the cigarette, over the span of the 20th century use a product that was, a behavior pattern, a cultural way of life that was made by federal action and that was unmade by a social movement, the peso to create a new character in america, the character of the nonsmoker. Host we are going to spend a lot of time talking, unpacking that. Lets just start, how does, how do you do history . How do you do history . Guest i love this question. I think, you know, what you are trying to do in graduate school is read as much as possible thats been written and try to the first cup years of graduate school are to poke holes in every book that you read and think about whats missing or what kind of analysis to the be put forward but whats that kind of paper over and hide . The whole point of asking these questions and being so hard on these important by those tomes is so the graduate student basically acres out what their own voice can become with her own contribution to Novel Research can be. And so when i was reading in graduate school i actually wasnt steeped in the tobacco debate at all. I was very interested in an entirely different question about the persistence of regionalism and regional economies. And regional difference. At the beginning of my time in graduate school, it was a lively debate amongst historians of conservatism. Over the question, is the south still a unique region . This was the 2000s. 2000s. It makes sense to focus on the south as a region that was different from the sun belt because a lot of historians looked at political life out in the suburbs of atlanta, in the suburbs of charlotte in phoenix and los angeles, and they said the political patterns that are happening here look the same. Maybe the south isnt really the Central Point of come regional distinctiveness is that which really operative anymore. In my reading and in my quest for novelty, i was interested in the persistence of southern agriculture and the persistence of an agricultural economy even in a region that begin to look in the postwar period, even in a region that begin to look more like other parts of the United States so i was kind of pushing back against this idea that the south was just the rest of the United States by saying if you focus on this way that money is made in the south, the political economy of the south, you might start to see a continuity between regional distinction and the 19th and early 20th century to the late 20th century. Host that was a fellowship you had around 2010, the Virginia Historical society, you are at the university of virginia. The cigarette, youre not from a the south. Actually youve lived like florida, massachusetts. Theres something geographically about virginia, about the land, the cigarette . Guest yeah, you know going back deep into my own reading and my own history, i thought some of the literature on the southern distinctiveness maybe gave a bit of short shrift to the persistence of basically agricultural meth, that the presence of undeveloped land in the south or what appeared to be undeveloped land in the south had a cultural hold on people, and land is also an important feature of agriculture and economy. So is very much a quest to understand the meaning of land in the postworld war ii south the gave rise to this project because i was thinking what are the two props that are most associated that are most grown in the south and, of course, theres cotton and tobacco crops. It seemed to me the back was a much more interesting commodity to focus on in the 20th century. Host my Historical Research is right, i mean, i can trace your interest back to a mcdonalds. Here in North Carolina. Youre waiting for take me back to the early interest. Guest thats so funny you mentioned that. Windows beginning this project, when i was begin this project, i was trying to understand how tobacco farmers related to big tobacco. That was my original question. To do that i knew i would need to look in archives across North Carolina and i selected North Carolina as kind of this case study because North Carolina was and is the leading producer of a particular kind of tobacco. That is a primary constituent in an americanstyle cigarette. And so i knew i would need to set up camp into research at unc, at duke, at North Carolina state, at East Carolina University in greenville and the coastal plain. But it would be very helpful and i would recommend this to any young historian who is thinking about beginning a book, a dissertation or book project, to find a local source thats a bit of a history buff this gentleman had been involved with the tobacco economy. He had worked for basically a statelevel tobacco lobby, and he had produced a self published book, and people who produce self published books are usually very happy to talk to you about their research. I just emailed him out of the blue and said im a a graduate student. I would love to talk to you about your work and tobacco, and he was more than happy to meet with me. He gave me a lot of information i wouldnt have otherwise known and would not have known where to look if and not been for meeting him. Host so the interest was in agriculture . Was it in the south . It was in tobacco. Where did it start . I cant trace it back to your undergraduate days. Where did the idea come from, your parents . Guest this did not come from smoking, i can say that. Host in fact, the beginning of the book, its really about tobacco before you get into the cigarette. It was at the cigarette. It wasnt the health. Were you always such a political historian . Guest i was really interested in so, in the early, in the late 19th and early 20th century there was a tremendous tension between the big tobacco of the era which was then known as the tobacco trust, at the tobacco trust was the monopoly controlled by james b duke of Duke University fame. What duke did beginning in the 1890s was he basically bought up every type of tobacco concern around. He consolidated hundreds of smaller Tobacco Companies into one big Company Called the American Tobacco company. And because the American Tobacco company had essentially monopoly power, that meant that American Tobacco could dictate prices that it would pay to tobacco farmers for what they grew. There was tension. There was violence. There was anger on the part of tobacco farmers toward this big monopoly. Host give me a sense of the tobacco farmer. Who was the tobacco farmer . Guest so tobacco farmers in the, well, for the late 19th and early part of the 20th century tended to be small they grew on a smallscale and in part that that was due to the fact of the crops tremendous labor requirements. The crop was locally known as the 13 month crop because planning for the subsequent season had to begin even before the current season was harvested. It relied on there were different stratagems within tobacco farming. So you had land owners who may work the farms themselves with family labor, or they may have hired tenants or sharecroppers, and theres a racial dimension to this. Tenant farmers were more frequently white. Sharecroppers were more frequently africanamerican, at the difference between those was that sharecroppers sometimes never saw cash in the course of what they did. They had to buy from the store where their debts were tallied against what they brought in on the previous season, so it was a perpetual cycle of indebtedness. Even for the top of this class system amongst tobacco farmers, there were always so much weaker relatives to afford Something Like the duke tobacco trust. Use even amongst elite farmers, anger at the big tobacco of its day. And so what motivated me towards thinking about tobacco the latter part of 20 century was, my question was essentially what happened to all of that antagonism within the industry once tobacco and cigarettes begin to be threatened from a Health Perspective . Did that outside threat fall meant an alliance foment an alliance between farms and industry were before the was antagonism . That was the quest i was on. Host this movement from this angry opposition, was businesslike alliance . Guest to a large extent it did occur, but it did not occur because tobacco farmers that the cigarette manufacturers were their friends. What happened that changed everything in american agriculture, in southern aquaculture especially but in american agriculture writ large was the great depression, but more important he the new deal. And the new deal was tremendously consequential for tobacco because it instituted a very rigid and very controlled system of regulations on the land. So when you think tobacco is this unregulated crop, in fact, more than any other crop grown in the United States, tobacco farmers had to abide by very strict production controls. And, in fact, tobacco was written, tobacco farm laws were not written with the main part of the farm bill. They were always written separately with their own legislation. What the new deal did was basically institute a system of, think of it as supply management, that we are going to make sure that mr. Tobacco farmer, by the way, you cannot just declare yourself a tobacco farmer. You essentially have to have a license to grow, and allotment, that mr. Tobacco farmer cannot produce more than x amount, in this is going to be revised based on yearly projections for what the manufacturers need. But in exchange will provide mr. Tobacco farmer with a minimum price for the tobacco. Kind of again to a minimum wage in industry and it was passed right around the same time. What this did was basically enabled the Agricultural Sector to be kind of buffered from what you can almost think of as the bullying of the Tobacco Industry. Host true in wheat and corn and tobacco or differences . Guest the major difference with tobacco was a program of supply management with much more rigid, that there was not buffers within the agricultural law to allow people to go way over one year and then under plan the next year. You simply were not allowed to market over your allotment. Host you talk about the phrase Iron Triangle. What is that . Guest and Iron Triangle is an old Political Science term that basically refers to an alliance between or a dynamic between a subcommittee in congress that oversees a Regulatory Agency and driving industry. So lets say the tobacco subcommittee, the usda and tobacco farmers organized tobacco farmers, and the most important tobacco Farm Organization for the cigarette, for much of the story i count is the North Carolina farm bureau. Host and to give me a sense of this Iron Triangle, the 50s 50s or so, whats the dynamic there . Guest the basic story with whats going on in terms of tobacco farming after say world war ii is that tobacco farmers are very empowered by congress and encourage by the usda to basically write their own laws. What do i mean by this . After war any producing group is anxious about readjusting production. You were not going to have the same kind of revved up industry that you would have during war, and theres a special reason to think about that with cigarettes because of course the Armed Services were such important purveyors of cigarettes. After the First World War, farmers were not organized. They had not been corralled by the new deal, and they experienced a really severe depression. All farmers did in agriculture for a lot of the 1920s. So during the cycle of war, tobacco farmers who have never become more organized by their interaction with the federal government and the federal government is literally organizing groups of farmers into committees so that they can plan how much tobacco they will produce in subsequent years. These elite tobacco farmers are coming together in various places across North Carolina and they are saying, what am going to do about the postwar readjustment . We cant let what happened after the First World War happen again after the second world war. And so what did tobacco farmers have now that they didnt have after world war i . What they have now is proximity to government, proximity to the levers of power. They have whole bureaucracy. Host the farmers in the proximity tressa yes, interest in their wellbeing in a way they had not been before. Host was it because of money . Guest because the new deal did, well, i would say for two reasons. One, a new deal did inaugurate a way of doing government that gave power in benefit to privileged groups. In this case it was producers, tobacco farmers. You can see this to a lesser extent perhaps less successful extent but also to organize labor. There was a theory about the economy should work, that if you could get producers to essentially form organizations to get the house in order, you could have more smooth functioning of the economy overall. But the second reason that tobacco becomes so strangely informed had to do with the power really of southern democrat. Like, who is important in the new Deal Coalition . Who is the glue that holds these districts in northeastern farm groups or northeastern Industry Groups together with southern farmers . Its southern democrats. They have outsized power in terms of the democratic party. Host now, its the farmers who had the power or was it the corporation, the Tobacco Corporation . Guest Tobacco Corporations have power this whole time. What is new is the interest of the federal government in shoring up farmers as well. In producing policy that ensures farmers have a standard of living that they had not been assured before. Host you talk about the federal government having interesting is that because the companies had interest . Is that because the tobacco farmers had power and they stimulated the interest . Guest right. I think theres like a political calculation on the part of seven democrats. They have these constituents that are important. They have many more constituents that are farmers than they had constituents and were tobacco executives. Host this is about votes. Guest in part its about votes but in part its about kind of an economic theory about how to empower different groups in the modern economy. If you had an imbalance between the Agricultural Sector and the industrial sector and the consumer sector, might lead to another depression. It was important for the federal government to basically show up these different groups of americans and make sure that there was economic harmony. Host let me give us implicit assertion a simplistic assertion. Tobacco is never good for the farmers. It was good for the big corporations. Guest well, its hard for me to wrap my mind around that with what i kn