The Cigarette, page 14
Explicit racial hierarchy was so characteristic of white agricultural politics that when it surfaced it barely received mention in the mainstream press. In May 1951, Cooley gave a keynote address at an awards ceremony for USDA employees. The crowd was composed of 4,000 black and white agricultural officials—the USDA, and particularly the Extension Service, was still organized along Jim Crow lines. In his speech, the congressman joked repeatedly about “nigger preachers” and “nigger tenants,” occasioning a walkout by hundreds of African Americans in attendance.145 Citing his well-known “record of friendship to Negroes,” Cooley later claimed that he meant no harm. “I don’t care if I did say it, either inadvertently or intentionally,” Cooley snapped. “Any Negro who took exception is hypersensitive.”146 The epithet received mention in the black press only. For the foremost congressional proponent of PR for agriculture, the “farmer’s side of the story” began with white male entitlement to property and ended with white farmer entitlement to “write their own” farm program.
By encouraging members’ investment in markers of private, virtuous citizenship, the NCFB deemphasized the extent to which tobacco growers’ very property was a creation of the federal government. The central mechanism of supply control was the “quota,” a state-created property right. It allowed owners of property to which quota had been assigned to participate in the tobacco auction market; and it entitled owners to price support and loan benefits, which were sculpted continuously by the dictates of the secretary of agriculture, and the administrative prerogatives of local agricultural committees. Like a New York City taxi medallion, the right to grow tobacco was valuable in itself—quite apart from the auction price of tobacco, or the price of cab fare, though both of these figures were artificially inflated by virtue of aggregate supply restrictions.
The quota was a regulatory device made into transferrable wealth.147 Revisions to the tobacco program in 1961 made this point all the more obvious when Congress allowed up to five acres of a farmer’s allotment to be leased and transferred within the same county. The quota, then, was fully a commodity in its own right—severable from production, fungible, and useful as collateral on loans. “The value of a farm today that produces tobacco is pretty well based on [its] tobacco allotment,” Everett Jordan, the Democratic senator from North Carolina, observed in 1965.148
The quota paid political dividends as well. Many of the inactive quota owners who rented out their assigned poundage were elderly—sometimes retired farmers, sometimes widows. This rental money was a valuable supplement to a fixed income. “This acreage represents their life investment,” explained one lessee whose active farm operation was cobbled together by renting unused quota. “Due to this money these people are not on the welfare roles [sic].”149 The grower came to think of the government-created value of the quota as natural (“their life investment”), drawing a racially inflected distinction between rental income and the welfare dole.
But a check to an elderly landlord did not fully free the quota from its origins on particular plots of land. The quota was only transferrable within the same county, which had the effect of forestalling the total consolidation of tobacco production in low-cost regions, tying areas that might have abandoned tobacco for industry or real estate development or higher education to the crop’s political fate.150 The federal tobacco program sealed in place a large and sympathetic constituency for pro-tobacco regulation. Masked as a form of private property, the federal tobacco program reinforced the notion that farmers deserved all that they had—and more.
It was precisely the bounty bestowed by the tobacco program—high price supports and value-inflating quotas—that required assiduous defense through PR and interest group representation. “We want nobody dictating a farm program to us,” Cooley said in a 1955 radio address. “But as we work out our own problems and policies, we need the understanding of people in the cities where votes are cast in Congress.”151 Although they represented a diminishing proportion of Americans, farmers were not about to relinquish their claim on virtuous citizenship. Interest groups like the NCFB—influential precisely because New Deal political economy rested upon associational relationships between the state and civil society—concealed their debts to the state through the language of voluntarism, private property, community, and family.152 The decentralized, committee-based nature of the farm program—which was always intended to be run with the support of farm organizations—facilitated the NCFB’s power. The NCFB’s relentless veneration of family and property created a sense that white tobacco producers, unlike other racial or professional segments of Americans, were entitled to government support. Tobacco farmers in North Carolina operated under a kind of ironic agrarianism: the federal tobacco program produced smallholder democracy, which was socially valuable and thus worthy of federal protection.
226 The York Building, Raleigh, N.C.: The Tobacco Growers Information Committee
By 1953 it had become clear to the cigarette makers that even their own formidable organizational capacities would be tested by the emerging evidence of the cigarette’s harm. Advertising or ad hominem attacks were inadequate responses to the decade’s new breed of anti-tobacco sentries. It had been easy enough to deride the morally strident proclamations of a Lucy Page Gaston; but to condemn the findings of well-credentialed medical men when scientific expertise was highly valued and increasingly subsidized by the federal government—and when some of those experts were former smokers themselves—was another thing entirely. Popular publications like Reader’s Digest (the highest-circulation outlet of the time) and Time reported on the early scientific studies. And with titles like “Cancer by the Carton” and “Beyond Any Doubt,” readers barely needed to get beyond the headlines to understand the direction in which smoking-and-health research pointed.153
Americans were learning, seemingly by the day, that lung cancer, once a medical rarity, was a rapidly rising cause of death in American and British men. Scientists in both countries were increasingly associating lung cancer with high national smoking rates. And the types of American men who smoked had changed as well. Cigarettes had once been a vice of immigrants and juvenile delinquents. But war, advertising, and Hollywood had helped to broaden, professionalize, and glamorize smoking’s appeal. In 1955, more than half of all American men and nearly a quarter of all American women were active smokers.154 Servicemen, issued cigarettes as part of their rations, smoked at even higher rates.155 Humphrey Bogart, Marilyn Monroe, and James Dean invited men and women to consider the cigarette as a companion to sex; politicians like Lyndon Johnson and Everett Dirksen demonstrated that its enjoyment knew no political bounds; men of distinction like nuclear physicist turned antinuclear advocate Robert Oppenheimer and National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) chief counsel Thurgood Marshall were chain smokers. Skillfully parleying the vaunted status and expertise of doctors, R. J. Reynolds launched an advertising campaign in 1946 that would inundate Americans for the next six years: “More Doctors Smoke Camels Than Any Other Cigarette.”156 Regardless of one’s professional class, educational attainment, looks, or political affiliation, to smoke was to be American.
While the brand preference of the medical establishment was unknown, the smoking habits of doctors did lay the groundwork for one of the most significant investigations into smoking and lung cancer. The British Doctors Study, which began in 1951, would ultimately track the mortality of doctors over five decades. By 1954, results of the study had already demonstrated significantly greater death rates among doctors who smoked versus those who did not.157 By the end of 1954, fourteen statistical studies confirmed the association between lung cancer and cigarette use.158 “The amount you have smoked daily and the number of years you have maintained the habit determine your chances of developing lung cancer,” admonished Dr. Alton Ochsner, a renowned surgeon who had observed the association between smoking and lung cancer in 1939.159
Ochsner’s warnings went unheeded, as per capita cigarette consumption rose throughout the 1950s.160 The growing number of reports failed to bring about an immediate change in Americans’ sense of the threat that cigarettes posed. Between 1954 and 1962, Gallup polling revealed that the percentage of Americans who believed that cigarettes were a cause of lung cancer and heart disease rose by only 5 percentage points—from 42 percent to 47 percent.161
Credit for this dubious accomplishment can be laid at the feet of the cigarette manufacturers. Paul Hahn, the president of the American Tobacco Company, believed the manufacturers needed to come together to formulate a plan of action—a plan to match the scientists’ concern for health with the industry’s own. At the New York City Plaza Hotel in December 1953, tobacco executives agreed to set aside the temptation to exploit the health issue against rival firms. Instead, they would embrace collective action. With the assistance of lawyers and PR men at Hill & Knowlton, they would develop a strategy that would guide the industry over the next four decades.
The manufacturers’ doubt-mongering followed a rhetorical template. They would counter scientific findings about the cigarette with the industry’s own research—and then cite their own studies as proof that the “science is not settled.” Representatives of the companies would parrot the rhetoric of science—declaring the need for an impossibly high threshold of certainty and proof of the causal link between smoking and disease—in the service of obfuscating the truth. The Tobacco Industry Research Committee (TIRC) was their main vehicle for doing so. Between 1954 and 1997, TIRC spent nearly $300 million funding scientific projects on “tobacco and health” intended to find no relationship between smoking and cancer, or on projects that were never intended to answer the question.162
Agricultural interests were a part of the tobacco industry’s conspiracy from its inception.163 Tobacco’s chief executive officers were not alone at the Plaza: Jack Hutson was there too, in his capacity as the president of TA. Meeting notes reveal that Hutson was also tasked as the conduit to other growers’ associations—connections he had forged during the New Deal.164 Whether small farmers were aware of it or not, the structure of TA’s funding—a mandatory assessment on producers linked to the federal marketing referendum—tied all tobacco farmers into the machinations of Big Tobacco. Organization originally intended to help farmers overcome their marketing weakness vis-à-vis the cigarette manufacturers ultimately redounded to the manufacturers’ benefit.
The result of the Plaza meeting was a canny bit of advertising. The “Frank Statement to Cigarette Smokers” appeared in hundreds of newspapers in January 1954 (see Figure 3.3). The advertisement evinced concern with public health while also laying the groundwork for a long-term project of scientific subterfuge. On the one hand, the statement reassured readers that the industry “accepted an interest in people’s health as a basic responsibility” and promised to “cooperate closely with those whose task it is to safeguard the public health.” To this end, it announced the formation of TIRC—an industry-funded research consortium that would aid research into “all phases of tobacco use and health.” Its board would be filled with the ranks of “distinguished men from medicine, science, and education.” Broader media coverage of the “Frank Statement” lauded the tobacco industry as responsible and enlightened.165 In reality, TIRC trafficked in what Robert Proctor has called “red herring research” intended only to generate doubt about the causal connection between smoking and illness.166
At the bottom of the “Statement” was a list of the document’s sponsors. Naturally, there were the presidents of cigarette manufacturers like American Tobacco, Brown & Williamson, R. J. Reynolds, Philip Morris, and P. Lorillard. But there was also “J. B. Hutson” of Tobacco Associates, Inc. Hutson succeeded in his charge of reaching out to the agricultural trade, enlisting the sponsorship of the Burley Growers Cooperative, the Maryland Growers Association, and the representatives of several warehouse associations. The organizational activity that had brought stability to tobacco-growing regions during the New Deal also allowed growers to be politically, financially, and culturally enlisted into the project of obfuscation and deceit. Having stabilized the incomes of tobacco farmers, grower organizations turned their skills toward defending cigarettes themselves against the growing evidence that they were deadly.167
Figure 3.3 The “Frank Statement” appeared in 448 newspapers across the United States in January 1954, reaching an approximate total circulation of 43,245,000. Circled portions show grower organizations that participated in the formation of the Tobacco Industry Research Committee. (Tobacco Industry Research Committee)
To preserve TIRC’s appearance of scientific integrity, Hill & Knowlton advised the industry to form separate institutional units that could enter the fray of politics more directly.168 In 1958, two new organizations were born under the umbrella of tobacco’s PR efforts: the Tobacco Institute (TI) and the TGIC. The TI was a lobby. Its leaders during the 1960s and 1970s, Horace Kornegay and Earle Clements, had themselves served in high elected office representing tobacco-growing regions of tobacco-growing states. Kornegay spent four terms as the Democratic representative from North Carolina’s Sixth Congressional District, sandwiched between the cigarette towns of Durham (American Tobacco and Liggett & Myers) and Winston-Salem (R. J. Reynolds). Clements was one of the highest-profile politicians of the time, a Democratic stalwart from the state of Kentucky, having served as a congressman, governor, and then senator. In the Senate, Clements whipped votes for his friend, majority leader Lyndon Johnson. His close personal and political ties to Johnson would later help shield the industry at a moment of vulnerability after the Surgeon General’s Report of 1964.
Leadership aside, the TI was responsible for the industry’s propaganda efforts. Until it was dissolved by the Master Settlement Agreement in 1998, it produced an endless stream of sound bites, press releases, white papers, ghost-authored articles, and camera-ready spokespeople purporting to debunk the scientific consensus that smoking caused disease. The TI quickly established itself as one of Washington’s richest and most politically connected lobbies.
The TGIC translated this propaganda goal for an agricultural audience. The organization’s goal was to combat “so-called health-scare talk and excessive taxation”—joining the farmer’s long-standing fight against higher cigarette taxes to the contemporary issue of health. A blend of public and private farm leadership incorporated the TGIC in Raleigh, North Carolina, in November 1958. The TGIC was comprised of larger farm organizations representing thousands of members. Grower cooperatives in all tobacco-producing states—from Florida to Connecticut, Tennessee to Wisconsin—were early members, as were all farm bureaus and granges from those same states.169
The leadership of the TGIC similarly reflected the long-standing associational ties between public and private organizations. The TGIC’s chairman was Carl Hicks. Hicks was also president of Stabilization and chaired the NCFB’s Tobacco Advisory Committee. He had been part of the delegation sent to Washington to work out the provisions of tobacco policy with New Deal tobacco policy planners in the 1930s.170 Con Lanier, representing leaf dealers, signed the TGIC’s articles of incorporation; Jack Hutson was on the board of directors and was a frequent presence at TGIC meetings until his death. The TGIC drew upon even older organizing traditions in the tobacco belt. W. T. Joyner, the son of a founder of the old Tri-State Tobacco Growers Cooperative Association (TGCA), served as the organization’s general counsel.171 Representatives of public agencies also played an important role. A member of the North Carolina Tobacco Advisory Council, a policymaking body connected to the state Department of Agriculture, was a mainstay at meetings, while a member of the federal Farm Credit Administration signed on to the board of directors.172
None of these men represented tobacco farmers in a racial, economic, or social sense. They were wealthy and white, and spent less time farming and more time running businesses. But politically and economically, they literally represented thousands of farmers, serving on elected boards and running the organizations that made the rules for the tobacco belt. According to the organization’s proposed budget for 1960, Tobacco Associates, funded through growers’ assessments on their tobacco acreage and on the federal tobacco program referendum ballot, contributed as much to the TGIC ($25,000) as did the manufacturer-funded TI.173
Funded by the Tobacco Institute, Tobacco Associates, and the membership contributions of participating organizations, the TGIC brought the public relations apparatus of big business to the dense organizational networks of agriculture. The organization primarily operated through the work of a full-time PR man who wrote the press releases, articles, and pamphlets that would be disseminated by the local press and farm organizations and, of course, by the elected officials that the organization worked to cultivate. The PR officer also monitored the content of national and area newspapers, television stations, and radio shows, making sure that they were well supplied with pro-cigarette “facts” to counter the “opinions” of anti-cigarette “zealots.”174 The TGIC’s first efforts at recruiting established the organization’s tone—and suggested its corporate funding. A brochure entitled a “Call to Arms” was mailed to 350,000 “farmers and their friends.” It was also distributed to farmers through the voluntary efforts of private businessmen—feed dealers, insurance agents, bankers—and public figures like Extension agents and county tobacco committeemen.175 Through the TGIC, farm organizations developed a vocabulary of antigovernment umbrage that concealed the political privileges that had helped to constitute the organization in the first place.
