The Cigarette Read online

  THE CIGARETTE

  A Political History

  Sarah Milov

  Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England • 2019

  Copyright © 2019 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College

  All rights reserved

  978-0-674-24121-3 (alk. paper)

  978-0-674-24289-0 (EPUB)

  978-0-674-24290-6 (MOBI)

  978-0-674-24288-3 (PDF)

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

  Names: Milov, Sarah, 1984– author.

  Title: The cigarette : a political history / Sarah Milov.

  Description: Cambridge, Massachusetts : Harvard University Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019002275

  Subjects: LCSH: Cigarettes—United States—History—20th century. | Tobacco industry—United States—History—20th century. | Tobacco—United States—History—20th century. | Smoking—Law and legislation—United States—History—20th century.

  Classification: LCC HD9149.C43 U663 2019 | DDC 338.4/76797309730904—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019002275

  For My Mother

  Contents

  Introduction

  1  Tobacco in Industrializing America

  2  Tobacco’s New Deal

  3  Cultivating the Grower

  4  The Challenge of the Public Interest

  5  Inventing the Nonsmoker

  6  From Rights to Cost

  7  Shredding a Net to Build a Web

  Conclusion: “Weeds Are Hard to Kill”: The Future of Tobacco Politics

  Notes

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  Introduction

  ON A COLD SATURDAY IN JANUARY 1964, a morning press conference garnered international attention. To the chagrin of some of the assembled journalists, “no smoking” signs had been hastily affixed to the auditorium walls in advance of the release of the much-anticipated Surgeon General’s Report on Smoking and Health. The auditorium doors were locked and uniformed guards blocked doors leading to other parts of the building.1 Inside, Luther Terry, John F. Kennedy’s choice as surgeon general, who was now serving at the pleasure of Lyndon Johnson, and the other members of the committee responsible for the report fielded questions from hundreds of journalists who had just got their hands on it. The nearly 400-page report concluded that cigarettes caused death—death from lung cancer, bronchitis, emphysema, and coronary artery disease. After reviewing the accumulated evidence on the relationship between cigarette smoking and disease, two of the committee members had quit smoking altogether. Terry himself had switched from cigarettes to an occasional cigar or pipe. Some of the reporters expressed their anxiety over the government’s findings in a rather different way—by sheepishly smoking in the halls.

  The theatrics of the report’s release—the lock-and-key treatment, the Saturday morning presser—were intended to minimize the effects upon the stock market. The committee needn’t have worried. The Royal College of Physicians had published a similar report two years earlier.2 On the eve of the report’s release, stock market analysts were recommending that investors purchase tobacco stocks, as their prices already reflected the damning news and would only rise again in the future.3 It was sound advice. In the United States, sales fell 20 percent in the months after the report’s issue, only to rebound spectacularly in 1965, when companies posted their highest profits to date.4 Politicians, experts, and everyday Americans increasingly knew that cigarettes were deadly, and yet 42 percent of Americans smoked.5 And they smoked everywhere, lighting up at work and at play: offices, public buildings, retail establishments, sporting facilities, and even hospitals permitted indoor smoking. Some high schools even allowed students to smoke on campus.6 But enlightenment alone cannot effect a widespread change in behavior. Laws and institutions must change as well. People must be compelled.

  Cigarettes were central to American political institutions throughout the twentieth century. At home and abroad, the U.S. government encouraged people to smoke. And for four decades after the surgeon general determined that cigarette smoking was dangerous, the government continued to subsidize tobacco production. Although the big cigarette firms were among the most powerful American companies by mid-century, tobacco’s political privilege lay less in the machinations of industry than in the everyday workings of American government. For a literal representation of the crop’s importance to American politics, one need look no further than the Capitol building’s grand Hall of Columns, where tobacco leaves sit atop the Corinthian columns, holding the building together.

  By the mid-1970s, however, Americans were smoking less. By 1974, the percentage of smoking adults had fallen to 37 percent, and it has continued downward in a sustained descent right through the present day.7 A transformation in the way that Americans understood and demanded an entitlement to public space catalyzed this change in behavior. Beginning in the 1970s, more and more Americans identified themselves by their rejection of smoking. Drawing inspiration from the civil rights and environmental movements, a group of nonsmoking activists extinguished the public hold of cigarettes—achieving their goal of making smoking socially unacceptable. Under the banner of nonsmokers’ rights, grassroots activists organized and won restrictions on smoking in a variety of public places.

  Nonsmokers, a group that had once been, in the words of Richard Nixon’s surgeon general, Jesse Steinfeld, the true silent majority, began to speak. They found success not in Congress—which journalist Elizabeth Drew characterized in 1965 as the industry’s “best filter yet”—but in local ordinances and voluntary rules imposed by employers.8 The power of the tobacco lobby in Congress pushed nonsmokers’ rights activists to seek regulatory solutions at lower levels of government, where the industry had less power.9 Beginning in the early 1970s, city councils around the country began to pass legislation that regulated public smoking. At the same time, lawyers in Washington, D.C., petitioned and sued regulatory agencies, reasoning that expanding the purview of administrative agencies offered “the greatest potential return for our legal action and efforts.”10 By 1974, both the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB) and the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) had implemented rules restricting smoking on flights and interstate buses. The history of the cigarette is the history of government’s complex machinery, its levers of power differentially accessible to organized business, farmers, and activists.

  Smoking, Citizenship, and the State

  The movement of tobacco from the center to the periphery of American political life highlights two competing conceptions of government at work during twentieth century: one concerned with the prerogatives and economic rights of producers, the other with the broad social costs of such producerism.11 For most of the twentieth century, the federal government had an active hand in shoring up the cigarette economy: soldier’s rations helped to popularize the cigarette in wartime, surplus export programs boosted farmers’ incomes and global cigarette consumption, and a generous price support system stabilized the agricultural economy of the Southeast until 2004—long after the surgeon general had proclaimed the cigarette lethal.

  The political economy of tobacco production and consumption was rooted in a New Deal–era vision of supply management. The New Deal ushered in an expansive program of agricultural regulations.12 And no crop was more regulated than tobacco.13 Responding to the desires of elite growers and their interest groups, the federal government imposed a rigid program of supply control, tightly regulating the areas in which tobacco could be cultivated.14 The tobacco program outlasted other New Deal agricultural initiatives—a fact that challenges frameworks in political history that emphasize the fall of the New D
eal order under the conservative juggernaut of the 1980s.15 The staying power of the tobacco program lay largely in the fact that its operations went unnoticed by the broader public and were closely stewarded by long-serving officials whose leadership of the tobacco economy straddled the public and private sectors.16

  Associationalism is the term that scholars use to describe the achievement of public policy goals through private means.17 From the first, faltering attempts by tobacco producers to organize cooperatives in the 1920s to the bailout of tobacco farmers by cigarette manufacturers in the 1990s, the tobacco economy has been organized by interest groups endowed with coercive, decision-making power. The global proliferation of American cigarette tobacco after the Second World War provides a case in point. Facing postwar surpluses and an unprecedented opportunity to expand the reach of their crop, a group of prominent tobacco growers sought and received special legislation from the North Carolina General Assembly. The bill authorized the creation of a private export promotion organization called Tobacco Associates, whose mission would be to promote the consumption of U.S.-grown cigarette tobacco around the world. It also compelled tobacco growers to tax themselves to finance the organization, resulting in a double interweaving of public and private. During the second half of the twentieth century, Tobacco Associates helped to secure the integrity of the domestic tobacco program by making sure surplus stocks of tobacco found disposal abroad, rather than, at mounting taxpayer expense, at home. In so doing, Tobacco Associates—and the hundreds of thousands of growers that financed it—helped to accelerate the global epidemic of cigarette-related disease.18 The role of organizations like Tobacco Associates in the history of the cigarette has largely been obscured by the fact that associational government operates “out of sight”—its public face obscured by the long shadow cast by private sector support.19

  The premises of tobacco associationalism came under sustained assault by the public interest movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Grassroots activists—led mostly by women—and Washington-based lawyers ushered the arrival of the nonsmoker as a rights-bearing political subject. For these activists, rights were a powerful rhetorical tool—laden with moral heft in the wake of the rights revolutions of the 1960s.20 For such activists, nonsmokers’ rights contained a critique, not only of the ubiquity of smoke in public places, but also of the smoke-filled chambers that endowed tobacco with political power. What political scientist Ira Katznelson has evocatively called a “southern cage”—the contouring of policymaking around the racist, segregationist prerogatives of southern Democrats—was also a smoking section.21 For nonsmoker activists, dethroning tobacco from its political perch was part and parcel of a quest for broader political representation.

  The language of rights also dovetailed with the emergent public interest critique emanating from the environmental and consumer protection movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Public interest reformers were skeptical of the state’s capacity to reflect more than the narrow economic interests of business. They sought to democratize what they understood as a managerial corporate state, and did so by insisting on greater opportunities for citizen participation in administration:22 by acting as agency watchdogs, by advocating an expanded concept of judicial standing, and by suing.23 The new social regulations of the 1970s, which led to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), reflected a keen appreciation for the unseen, latent risks of modern society—a precautionary sensibility especially common in the environmental movement.24

  Like these movements, the nonsmokers’ rights movement drew attention not only to the negative externalities of modern American life—pollution, industrial poisoning, lung cancer, and heart disease—but also to the sclerotic decision-making structures that privileged the organized few at the expense of the disorganized many. It sought to embed calls for nonsmokers’ rights within the broader struggle to make political processes more inclusive. As such, the political history of the cigarette highlights the connections between the politics of the body and those of the body politic.

  Moreover, the relative power of smokers versus nonsmokers was, foremost, a political rather than a scientific question. Rights-based demands for smoking restrictions preceded scientific evidence of the dangers of secondhand smoke by more than a decade. But science played a crucial role in contouring politics in the 1970s and 1980s. The air quality and workplace safety standards enforced by the EPA and OSHA legitimated nonsmokers’ demands. If the government could regulate emissions from factory pollution, why couldn’t it regulate pollutants from “human smokestacks”? Why should nonsmokers be subjected to the unnecessary risk of a stranger’s idling cigarette when OSHA had established permissible exposure limits for some of the dangerous compounds in tobacco smoke, including carbon monoxide, nitric oxide, benzene, and formaldehyde?25 Yet it was not until the early 1980s that a body of epidemiology began to specify the risks that cigarettes posed to nonsmokers.26 And only in 1986 did the surgeon general devote an entire edition of the Surgeon General’s Report to the “health consequences of involuntary smoking.”27 By then, the movement for smoking restrictions was well under way. Proof of physical harm from secondhand smoke intensified, but did not originate, calls for nonsmokers’ rights.28

  The meaning of nonsmokers’ rights changed as such claims migrated into new settings. At workplaces, nonsmokers’ rights became corporate risk mitigation. In the late 1970s, an estimated three fourths of all employers allowed unrestricted smoking at the worksite.29 Finding that appeals to the bottom line were more persuasive to their employers than simply registering their distress and discomfort, nonsmokers embraced the business case for smoking restrictions at work. Smokers, they argued, were bad employees: they had higher rates of absenteeism than their nonsmoking colleagues; they were less productive, took frequent breaks, cost more to insure, dirtied equipment, and caused accidents. In clearing the air at work, nonsmokers offered the argument that a cheap employee is a good employee.

  Businesses embraced this argument, out of deference to the bottom line and the desire to mitigate liability should a nonsmoking employee bring suit. A nationwide business survey conducted in 1987 found that 54 percent of responding businesses had adopted workplace smoking restrictions—and 85 percent of them had adopted such policies within the past three years.30 In appealing to management, nonsmokers’ rights activists collided with organized labor, which the tobacco industry recognized as an ally in the fight to preserve the smoke break and the acceptability of smoking employees. But the new expectation of smoke-free air at work did not represent the straightforward triumph of an individual rights–based vision of liberalism over the collective vision guarded by unions.31 Ideas about health and the environment had expanded the realm of the contestable, galvanizing previously unorganized constituencies to make the state reflect their interests.32

  Pressing upon business and government to consider the myriad social costs of smoking, nonsmokers’ rights activists constructed a vision of citizenship focused on cheapness and efficiency: the best workers, citizens, and taxpayers were those who kept costs down and productivity up.33 This politics of bodily evaluation dovetailed with market-centric judgments of the body politic. The state’s performance was increasingly subject to market metrics, such as cost-benefit analysis and balanced budget requirements; its governance marked by market techniques such as privatization, lowered trade barriers, deregulation, and means testing.34

  The federal tobacco program chafed against this paradigm of personal and fiscal prudence. To many, the tobacco program proved the very folly of government intervention into private markets. It was wastefully hypocritical, a residue of southern political domination of Congress. Fearful that the program would be axed completely during the early, zealous years of Reagan budget cutting, tobacco state members of Congress and growers assented to program reform in 1982. By levying an assessment on tobacco held in government storage,
the legislation shifted financial liability for the tobacco program from taxpayers to tobacco producers themselves. Under the new law, farmers would have to fashion their own safety net as federal price supports were lowered in the name of achieving a more “market-oriented” program. Many could not afford to do so, and left tobacco production. Others clung desperately to what remained, unable to imagine their futures without the program that had been the salvation of their parents and grandparents.

  In 2004, the program was terminated. Only growers who had enough capital or access to credit to expand their operations and ramp up production continued to grow tobacco.35 These bigger, highly capitalized farms now rely heavily on poorly paid migrant labor—working and living under conditions that some have described as squalid and slave-like.36 These farmers appear to be the consummate capitalists: they control land, invest in sophisticated machines, and oversee the labor of workers who live in trailers on the growers’ property.37 But these modern growers face the perils of modern capitalism as surely as their pre–New Deal forebearers did. They sell their tobacco directly on contract to the cigarette manufacturers—and the companies set the terms of the contract. As one grower lamented, it is a struggle to negotiate with “multibillion-dollar, multinational companies on a one-on-one basis.”38

  At the beginning of the twenty-first century, a symmetry unites smokers and tobacco farmers. Within the “narcotic tobacco haze of capitalism,” to borrow Allen Ginsberg’s phrase in Howl, the smoker stands alone on a street corner and the farmer stands alone against the cigarette giants.39 Their exile represents the transformation of a political economy that was once guided by economic stability and unbridled consumption, and which has now been replaced by one of efficiency and prudence. By looking at the cigarette, we see our state and ourselves.