← Behind the Bastards
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- [00:00]
A
This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.
- [00:09]
B
Hey, everybody. Robert here just introducing. We've got another rerun. This is the first time we've done two weeks in a row. Normally we just do one week at the end of the year, but all of the other shows on our network and most of the other shows that I know in podcasting take off two weeks. And Sophie was like, hey Robert, why don't you actually take off two weeks instead of cramming during your vacation to write another podcast so that we don't fall behind? And I was like, you know what, Sophie? That's a pretty good idea. So anyway, that's what we're doing. Enjoy this episode on how cigarettes invented everything. Oh, welcome once again to behind the Bastards, the only podcast where the host regularly says that his show is cash money. I'm. I'm Robert Evans here to talk with you about bad people. Sophie Lichterman seems very unhappy, which is not cash money.
- [01:11]
A
No, I just have extreme secondhand embarrassment.
- [01:14]
B
Well, that's too bad, Sophie, because I'm bringing it back.
- [01:17]
A
Bringing back the phrase, as you know, everything you do reflects on me for some God forsaken reason.
- [01:24]
B
I know, I know. And you're going to get.
- [01:26]
A
And that is not very cash money of you, Robert.
- [01:29]
B
I think gets extremely cash money of me. But here to be the tie breaking vote is James Stout. Now James, you're British, so the phrase cash money may not mean much to you in your language. I would say it's drawings of an elderly man who's never worked a day in his life.
- [01:49]
C
Yeah, it is. Now, cash money has very little value when it's tied to the life expectancy of an inbred old person with sausage fingers.
- [01:59]
B
I thought of a bunch of different ways of describing the new bills with King Charles on them. Part of me wanted to make a reference to the weird sexts that got leaked of him and Camilla. Oh, yeah. I made an ethical decision that even the King of England deserves to have his sects be private.
- [02:18]
A
I just like don't need. Nobody needs.
- [02:22]
C
Okay, just.
- [02:24]
A
Ew.
- [02:24]
C
But you don't want to think about him sneaking outside and what was it like getting his pajamas dirty and having his valet clean them.
- [02:31]
B
Yeah, that and his. He's got some. He's got a very specific kink.
- [02:37]
C
Okay, yeah, sorry.
- [02:38]
B
Yeah.
- [02:39]
C
As well as William.
- [02:41]
B
Yeah, look at him.
- [02:42]
C
Kinky little.
- [02:43]
A
This is kink. Murdering his first wife. Allegedly.
- [02:46]
B
No, it's a tampon thing. He talks about it at length. Weird twist.
- [02:52]
C
Okay, yeah, not expected.
- [02:54]
B
Yeah, we know. Far too much about what Charles has been sending to nola. Heartbreaking amount, I would say. Don't Google it. I'm telling you the truth. But don't Google this.
- [03:06]
C
Okay. On my iHeart laptop.
- [03:10]
B
Anyway, so I just broke my promise right there not to laugh at the King of England's sexual escapades. James, how do you feel about cigarettes? Oh, I think.
- [03:23]
C
I wasn't expecting that. Kind of ambiguous, I guess. You know, a lot of bad things happen because people like to smoke cigarettes. A lot of people like to get really, really up in other people's business about smoking cigarettes. It's a difficult one.
- [03:41]
B
I have the same difficulty because on one hand, I'm kind of constitutionally anti prohibition. Like, I don't think things should be legal or illegal. I don't think the government should stop people from doing stuff just because it's bad for their health. And I also see cultural value to an extent in cigarettes. I've had some memorable. There's. I tend to. I tend to believe that every single drug, even the ones that we call bad drugs, has an ideal use case where it is a societal good for the drug to be available. And for cigarettes, that good is when someone has just tried to kill you. There's nothing like a cigarette when someone's just trying to kill or hurt you.
- [04:21]
C
Which is why they're so valuable outside a British nightclub.
- [04:24]
B
Yeah, exactly.
- [04:25]
C
One in the morning.
- [04:26]
B
But you never know when a bottle's coming for your fucking temple there.
- [04:29]
C
You don't.
- [04:30]
B
That's it, you know, But I get it. Like, it's one of those things. There was a need for a period of time where we attacked and demonized, particularly the tobacco industry because they lied to everybody about the health risks of cigarettes in a way that. That caused. That cost more lives than all of the wars in the last century. It's kind of an unbelievable body count. That said, I think today people throw down too much against smokers. And maybe there's. Maybe. Maybe we shouldn't be quite so shitty to people who just happen to smoke cigarettes. But what I wanted to talk about this week is fucking the history of cigarettes. Because as I dug into this, I was initially planning just to do an episode on big Tobacco and how they hid the health harms of cigarettes. And we will do those episodes. We're gonna talk about that. Some of these. We will do dedicated episodes on those. But as I got into the research, I was continually amazed by the extent to which cigarettes are responsible for most of, like, the things that we consider the modern world. Like the cigarette. In order to get people to smoke, the tobacco industry had to invent modern civilization.
- [05:45]
C
Yes.
- [05:45]
B
Yeah. And that's a fascinating story and I just wanna talk about it. It's one of those. We're getting behind a. At this point, you know, when we're Talking about the 1800s up through like the middle of the 20th century, you're not a bad person necessarily for trying to get people to smoke. Because if it's 1905, number one cigarettes, not a massive risk above like walking outside your door.
- [06:07]
C
Yeah, that's true.
- [06:08]
B
But also you just don't have good data. So.
- [06:11]
C
Yeah, yeah, the ambient level of smoking is pretty high just from existing in.
- [06:15]
B
Any urban area at that time, just from being around. We'll talk about that a bit. But first we have to do some prehistory. Now, we don't know exactly when the first human beings started smoking or otherwise ingesting tobacco for the first time, because there's a good chance the earliest tobacco users were not smoking it. But we're broadly speaking, I mean, and there's debate about this too, but archeologists can confirm that by at latest the 1st century BC, the Maya people of Central America were using tobacco as a part of their religious rituals. And they were both smoking it and like inhaling it in kind of a similar way to snuff. Right. You can snort tobacco if it's grind ground finely enough. They probably also chewed it. There were a couple of different devices they had for smoking it. And we don't ex, we, we, we will never know which was like the first. Right. Like we just know which ones we kind of have written records of earliest. But a lot of those written records come from Europeans. So obviously that's a long time after they would have started using them, but. And again, there's even some debate as to like, well, were the Maya the first people who were cultivating tobacco? And probably the answer to that is no. But we certainly know the Maya were cultivating tobacco in the first century bc and it spread from Central America to the Mississippi Valley and beyond and was quickly adopted by neighboring peoples from like 400 to 700 AD is when you see most of this spread and it makes it all the way out to the fucking Caribbean.
- [07:44]
C
Oh yeah, that's where Columbus runs into it at first. Right?
- [07:47]
B
That is exactly the next thing that happens. In this episode, James Christopher, goddamn Columbus becomes the first European to encounter tobacco which was being smoked by the natives of Hispaniola, which is modern day Haiti, in the Dominican Republic, via a weird two pronged nose pipe. So they would smoke it, but they would, like, inhale it through this pipe. That like.
- [08:08]
C
Like a nose snorkel kind of situation.
- [08:10]
B
Yeah, it looks a little bit like a cannula.
- [08:13]
C
Okay.
- [08:13]
B
Yeah, like a nasal cannula. Interesting. I made for my book A Brief History of Vice. I recreated these pipes as best I could. I wound up actually using the stalk of dry, like the dried stalk of marijuana plants, because it's hollow. And so I just had to kind of find y bens that were the right shape. That's obviously, I don't think what they would have used. I don't know what they plant they would have used for it. But you do get pretty fucked up when you smoke raw nicotina rustica through directly into your mucous membrane.
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C
Yeah, I can see that one being pretty rough on the old sinuses as well.
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B
I would not. It's one of those things you have to divorce kind of your thinking about tobacco in this period from modern day, because it's not, number one, most people smoking it. This is not a habitual thing for them. It's a ritual thing for them.
- [09:02]
C
Right, right.
- [09:03]
B
There are people, certainly by the time Columbus hits Hispaniola, who seem to just do it recreationally. But for the most part, most people's encounters with tobacco is probably in, like, a very kind of fairly strict ritual sense. And. And also it's pretty uncommon to have, like, a habit. Even the people who would be heavy smokers, I doubt, are smoking more than the equivalent of a couple of cigarettes in a day.
- [09:27]
C
Right.
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B
In part because it's kind of hard to. When you're smoking it that way.
- [09:30]
C
Yes. Right. Yeah. There's a lot of work that I imagine goes into producing a nose cigarette from growing the tobacco, drying it out. And.
- [09:41]
B
That'S a lot of work. And you also. You can't smoke just when you want to fix because you don't have lighters, you don't have matches. Right. Like fire. Obviously, the people who are living, you know, in these places are a lot better at starting fires than most people in the modern world are. But it's still not nearly as easy. Right. Like, you're not gonna just make a fire. Cause you want, like, a fucking smoke in the. Like.
- [10:03]
C
Yeah. Get a fire drill out, get a piece of wood out, rub it up a little.
- [10:08]
B
So again, smoking, even when it's not, like, for a religious purpose, it's probably broadly like, okay, it's meal time and we'll smoke after the meal. Right. Or like, smoke before because we've got the fire going or it's nighttime, we're cooling down, we've got the fire going, you know, now we can smoke tonight. Like generally that's probably how it would have gone. When Columbus winds up, you know, meeting these people in 1492 and watching them smoke, they actually hand him tobacco and he doesn't know what to do with it until he watches them smoke it. And he sees, he encounters a couple of different methods. He sees the nose pipes. He also sees people wrapping tobacco leaves with corn husks, which is probably the first cigarettes in history. Yeah, yeah. It's also worth noting that over in Cuba, people would wrap their tobacco in tobacco leaves. So they were again, like hundreds and hundreds of years ago smoking cigars in Cuba. Like that actually goes back really fucking far. Probably more than a thousand years. People have been smoking something broadly similar to a cigar in that.
- [11:09]
C
That's pretty cool.
- [11:10]
B
It is kind of neat, right? I enjoy. Yeah, yeah.
- [11:14]
C
There are many things that we consume, I guess, you know, sometimes we eat fruits and vegetables and stuff, but it's not much that we consume that people consumed a thousand years ago and made in a pretty similar fashion. Right. Like I've been to a Cuban cigar factory. Lots of them are still like rolled by hand.
- [11:29]
B
We're going to talk about that a lot in these episodes. But yeah, they, they obviously different techniques have become popular over time and you get better at it the way you get at anything. I'm sure modern cigars are much tighter and you know, together better than cigars in 1492 did. But broadly speaking, like, I mean, like I'm a cigar smoker. I tend to think Cuban cigars are the best. I like to smoke. Yeah.
- [11:55]
C
It's rather tragic that the cultural inheritance of that today. It's like guys who think that they should enjoy cigars.
- [12:01]
B
The entire Republican Party.
- [12:03]
C
Yeah, yeah. Ben Shapiro and friends pretending to perform masculinity and then like going off to cough and be sick.
- [12:10]
B
Yeah, I mean it's, it's a bummer. They are. I, you know, I'm not a. I tend to like, I've tried to read a cigar aficionado magazine once and it had too many, it had too many made up words. They use words and it's not like, like liquor. You know, number one, liquor actually does like, oh, sometimes you get a bourbon and like, oh, this, this almost tastes more like a coffee. Or there's like this, this one's sweeter and it's got this like rich body. But fucking like cigars are smooth or not. But Like, I don't know, I'll read them and they'll be like, oh. And when you on the retro hail, you get this like taste of orange and juniper. And I'm like, no, you fucking don't. There's no juniper in this fucking cigar. What is wrong with you people? Go to hell.
- [12:54]
C
Just one of the negative impacts of tobacco consumption.
- [12:57]
B
It's unreal. The most pretentious thing that you can do is be a cigar aficionado.
- [13:04]
C
Sigy guy.
- [13:05]
B
Yeah, unreal. Just. Just smoke. Just kill yourself slowly. It's fine. Anyway, that's kind of cool that Cubans have been making cigars for hundreds and hundreds of years now. There were like, as I said, the way that people most often use tobacco in the Americas was in religious rites. And when I. They're not just like smoking to get that kind of little buzz you get from tobacco. The way in which most of these indigenous groups would have used tobacco was as a psychotropic. Right. Like they are like basically tripping on this stuff. Oh, wow.
- [13:37]
C
Okay.
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B
Tobacco can be, can cause hallucinations in high enough doses. It's a powerful mind altering drug when you are taking like massive quantities of it. And they were number one. The tobacco they're smoking is different than the tobacco that we cultivate. It's a lot stronger and the way they're doing it is different. So one of the most common ways that people would take tobacco in a ritual setting is the chief or kind of religious. There's a bunch of different terms for local sort of religious and political leaders and whatnot. But that dude would inhale a bunch of smoke straight up raw from like a burning like hunk of tobacco, and then he would basically shotgun it into the mouths of the people participating in it.
- [14:18]
C
Okay.
- [14:20]
B
And obviously you're getting a lot of smoke that way. Like you're gonna get pretty messed up by it. And it's. Again, you know, it's as silly as. This is probably not all that bad for you when you consider everything people are doing in a thousand A.D. or whatever. Right. Like if you. If a couple of times a year, your shotgun getting some tobacco, that's not gonna be what kills you.
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C
Yeah. Your life expectancy isn't long enough for that to be the thing that kills you in most cases. Right, Link?
- [14:44]
B
Yeah.
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C
One of the other thousand things that's gonna kill you that we've eliminated now is gonna kill you.
- [14:50]
B
Yeah. And it's also worth noting that there were a number of health uses of tobacco. It was probably the first effective insect repellent One of the most common uses of it was to just rub it all over your skin. Cause tobacco is coated in an oil like that is. Bugs don't. It kills bugs. Like, they don't like it. I mean, obviously there are specific bugs that do feed on tobacco, but for the most part, it keeps insects away. So people would rub it on themselves, or they would also bathe in the smoke before, like going in and hunting in the bush and stuff, in order to keep bugs off of them. It could work as a tranquilizer. It was used to help put people to sleep. One of the things that I tried for my book was mixing it with urine and garlic in order to create an emetic and like a constipation remedy. And it does work for that. I don't recommend following that up, but it does do what it says. So there were a number of uses for Native Americans of tobacco that absolutely work in a medical context. There were also some that did not. For example, it was often given to people as a treatment for asthma. Tobacco does not help with asthma. Yeah.
- [15:56]
C
Yeah. I think it might do the opposite of helping.
- [15:58]
A
In fact, don't.
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B
But that's not.
- [16:03]
C
Yeah, that's not a thing that went away. Like, just, you know, that's. We're not like that historically separated from people smoking to clear their lungs.
- [16:12]
B
Right, exactly. And it's also some of the time, A lot of the times when these indigenous people would have been taking tobacco to clear up their asthma. It might not have been smoked as often as it was, like, taken as a tea. And this can also be toxic. People die. One of the things, like ayahuasca ceremonies are very famous in the West. Now. One of the things that some groups do in their ceremonies is they precede the ayahuasca with a tobacco tea. And there's a couple of cases of people dying in ayahuasca ceremonies. Now, I don't know if that's because the tea is just always dangerous or because these specific folks that were doing it were kind of like grifters and didn't know what they were doing or weren't actually doing it the traditional way. I'm not sure if that information exists properly, but this is another way people would take it as a tea, which. Don't. Don't take tobacco. It's actually pretty easy to kill yourself by ingesting tobacco. Please don't do that.
- [17:02]
C
Yeah, I know. Every now and again, like a pet will eat a bunch of cigarettes.
- [17:06]
B
Yeah, it'll kill the shit out of you. It's extremely deadly tobacco, but, you know, interesting plant. So the Portuguese were the first Europeans to begin cultivating tobacco for export to Europe. In 1564, a Royal Navy captain brought the leaf to England, and despite early opposition from people who considered it a filthy, foul drug for foreigners, it took off their like wildfire.
- [17:30]
C
I. I just love that the immediate British or English response was just to start with xenophobia and then move along from there and work out if this drug is going to become a pitual part of all of our lives.
- [17:43]
B
And in Europe and the uk, the story with tobacco is similar to the story with coffee. And that a bunch of weirdo Christians are like, this is a heathen drug. We shouldn't do it. And then some king will pick up a cigarette or drink some coffee and be like, hell, yeah, this shit's actually pretty dope. You know what? I think we're fine with tobacco. Yeah. In Coffey's case, it was literally the Pope being like, oh, this stuff rules. You know what? I'm just gonna baptize it. Just gonna baptize coffee now. Christians can have it.
- [18:11]
C
Then God changed his mind, just like that. Yeah. Omnipotent being. Omnipotent being. Amazing stuff.
- [18:17]
B
It would be. I would give a lot of kudos to the Pope if he just baptized marijuana so that Catholics could sue the federal government for restricting it.
- [18:25]
C
Just imagining him doing fentanyl.
- [18:29]
B
The Pope blesses fentanyl to protect the kids. Fuck.
- [18:32]
C
He's dropped it in the font and.
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B
It'S says, this shit's rad.
- [18:37]
C
A few babies are gonna have a rough one. Now we dissolve some fentanyl, put some.
- [18:42]
B
Fentanyl in the baptismal font. Yeah, no, you're gonna want to give them some Narcan. They are not gonna have a good time. Yeah, that's why we call it the Narthax, because of all the Narcan. That was a. Yep. That was a church joke for you, you kids. Anyway, yeah, so the English start smoking tobacco. It gets cultivated in the Jamestown settlement in the 17th century. And by the 1730s, the English colonies in Virginia had tobacco factories that were manufacturing significant quantities of the stuff, mostly as snuff, which was either inhaled or chewed. That is the predominant way to consume tobacco in the kind of the early period of colonization of the Americas.
- [19:26]
C
Was it like. Cause you see pictures of them sometimes, and they got the old timey pipe, right? The long pipe with a little bowl and. Yeah. Is that like a class thing? Is that like, I can afford to have a pipe and you can chew.
- [19:38]
B
It Some of its class cigars are generally, like, more expensive. Snuff is very cheap. The other thing though is that, again, not easy to get access to stuff, to light a pipe or to light a cigar. So if you're smoking a pipe or a cigar, you're probably in your home, right. So, you know, the beginning of the day or the end of the day or maybe in like the midday for a meal, you could have a smoke, but it's not convenient. You can't just light a pipe when you're out in the field because, like, you don't just have a thing that's on fire with you at all times, but you can take snuff any time of day. And it's addictive.
- [20:13]
C
Yeah, yeah, extremely.
- [20:16]
B
And it's incredibly addictive. So all of the colonizing powers competed for a share of the emerging global tobacco market. And again, it's incredibly addictive. So there's enough interest very quickly to spur rapid innovation in the field. In 1843, a French company given a monopoly over tobacco by King Louis XIV starts manufacturing the very first, close to modern cigarettes. Now people had been smoking again. When Columbus lines up, they see people like, wrapping shit in corn cobs. Those are like, for. For a couple of centuries, that's how you smoke a cigarette. You get a corn cob. Sometimes you get like old paper, like newspaper, like just kind of whatever papery thing. You can fill it with tobacco and smoke it, you know.
- [20:59]
C
And then the French invent Gauloise and it have never changed.
- [21:04]
B
The French invent gaus, which are. Which are still the worst cigarettes on the market.
- [21:09]
C
They're still smoking something close to modern cigarettes today.
- [21:13]
B
Yeah, that was. Those were the most common cigarettes we smoked in Syria. And it was like the Gauze that you couldn't sell in France because the tobacco was too low. Crazy. Oh, God, what a horrible cigarette.
- [21:28]
C
Yeah, but it just. Yeah, it's. Yeah. Everywhere. I just have a lot of memories of, like, bike racing in France and having to go in to sign on to these races. And like, you walk in and you just like. It's like they used to do in nightclubs with the smoke machine, you know, just like this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, you are also old enough to experience, like, smoking inside in bars, which isn't a thing anymore. And you go and you come out and you're like, oh, that was good for me. And then you see the guy who is inevitably going to kick your ass in the race, or it's after the race and the guy who's just won the Race. He's having a fucking cigarette. And like, just. I remember it being one of the most demoralizing experiences. Yeah, he's a hero to the pharmaceutical industry is what he is.
- [22:09]
B
Look, kids, if you want to know what it's like to walk around in a world where people smoke indoors constantly and in all places, there's an option. Fly to Serbia. Belgrade will. Belgrade will teach you what the 70s was like.
- [22:24]
C
Yeah, in more ways than one.
- [22:26]
B
Yeah, in a number of ways. You'll learn about the 70s in Belgrade.
- [22:30]
C
You wanna see some banging haircuts? Go to Belgrade.
- [22:33]
B
Oh, man. Oh, the tracksuits. There are unreal.
- [22:38]
C
Beds are coming back. That's on a cycle again.
- [22:41]
B
When we're talking about what actually is like a culturally beautiful use for cigarettes. Squatting in a field with your buddies in a tracksuit and smoke. God, it's incredible.
- [22:54]
C
Cultured experience.
- [22:55]
B
Burning through a pack of knockoff Marlboros that have two extra E's in them.
- [23:01]
C
Ye. It doesn't have the L. It's just a Marlboro.
- [23:06]
B
You know what? You know who else sells discount cigarettes?
- [23:12]
C
Is it Sophie?
- [23:13]
B
Is that what her Sophie does? Sophie. If you meet Sophie behind the main gym building after lunch or after class is let out, she's always got a couple of extra packs on hand and she'll sell you Lucy's. What?
- [23:26]
A
What grade am I in?
- [23:27]
B
What school?
- [23:27]
A
Why am I out of school?
- [23:28]
B
What normal age.
- [23:30]
A
I don't like this association.
- [23:32]
C
Yeah, she's still going there every day. Swede.
- [23:34]
B
Well, that's weird. We don't have. We can't fund our podcast without selling.
- [23:38]
A
New cigarettes for some reason. Also reflects on you.
- [23:43]
C
We've asked you to stop, but here we are.
- [23:45]
B
I mean, I'm gonna be honest, Sophie. Let's be honest with ourselves. If I were to get caught selling loose cigarettes to children behind a high school, it would only increase my popularity.
- [23:53]
C
It would do nothing. Crazed, uncancellable.
- [23:58]
B
I'm trying to get them off the J. Oh, my God.
- [24:03]
C
Robert Founds Anti vaping action. Yes.
- [24:06]
B
I've got a Joe Camel tattoo on my chest.
- [24:10]
A
Oh, my God.
- [24:11]
B
Let's. Let's.
- [24:12]
A
Let's just go to ads.
- [24:13]
B
Hopefully it's for gold.
- [24:17]
C
Yeah, I'm gonna spend this whole episode trying not to say, what is a homophobic slur in this country? By the way.
- [24:27]
A
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- [25:00]
B
We'Re back and James is discussing how difficult it is to talk about cigarettes as a British person without saying something that's offensive.
- [25:10]
C
Yeah, that's right. Yeah, yeah. There's a word that we use in Britain for cigarettes that American people use to be horrible to gay people. And I'm not going to use it, but it's very difficult for me.
- [25:20]
B
So I'm holding it is now it doesn't. I mean, I think the slur comes from the harmless term which also, if you read JR or Tolkien, you will see that word used constantly in its original meaning and it is a little bit off putting sometimes, but the people.
- [25:38]
C
I grew up with, exactly where my grandmother lived right in rural Devon was very like, people still use thee, thou, thy. Yeah, but yeah, that word would be used to describe like a small, it's a type of food. Right. There's a food that uses that word but also like a small bundle of hay.
- [25:55]
B
Yeah, it's a bundle of sticks or whatever.
- [25:57]
C
Yeah, any packaging, anything. Get, get one. You could call it your Amazon word.
- [26:03]
B
Yeah, it's, it's, it's anyway, whatever that's talking about a word language. It's amazing. So, yeah, all. Yeah. So in the 14th or Louis the 14th gives the first French company a monopoly over tobacco production and they start manufacturing cigarettes which all have to be hand ruled at this point point. But this is the first time that like a company is selling people cigarettes. Pretty much the first time that a company is selling like a large company is trying to make cigarettes into like a major business. Prior to this, if you bought cigarettes, most people who smoked cigarettes were like poor people. And you would just, you would have a bag of tobacco and you'd wrap it in shit. Right. Or you know, rolling papers even aren't, aren't a thing that you can just go out and get. The other way you would get it is you would go to a tobacconist who has someone roll them and you would buy them. Cigarettes were generally because of this, the least favored method of tobacco consumption. They were seen as the thing that like homeless people smoked. Because the most common way to smoke cigarettes was to like go outside of a place where people with more money had been hanging out, like a bar, pick up the cigarette, the cigar butts and like then roll them into A.
- [27:13]
C
Cigarette really came out then, man.
- [27:18]
B
The worst smoke I can imagine.
- [27:20]
C
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [27:23]
B
That is rough, bleak.
- [27:25]
C
Yeah, yeah.
- [27:26]
B
But my God, that guy. The only person today who could smoke on the level of a smoker back then would be maybe Rudy Giuliani. You gotta give him. He's one of these weirdos. So cigars, you don't inhale a cigar unless you're a specific kind of cigar smoker who believes that everyone else is wrong by not inhaling their cigar. I forget what they call themselves, but Rudy is one of them. He's an inhaler. He takes it all in, baby.
- [27:55]
C
I think cancer is just repudiated by him. It refuses to go anywhere near him.
- [28:01]
B
That's gonna be bad for the cancer brand, man.
- [28:03]
C
Yeah, yeah.
- [28:04]
B
I don't wanna get mixed up with Giuliani. So cigarettes start to get popular with Europeans during or right after the Crimean War, when soldiers, you know, who return. Cause the Crimean War is a lot of. It's in areas kind of abutting in, around Turkey. And so they encountered Turkish cigarettes. And the Turks have been smoking cigarettes and making cigarettes for, for a bit longer and they decide they like them. Turkish tobacco is good and it's milder than the stuff that they had had access to. In 1856, one veteran of the war opens London's first cigarette factory, which is called Sweet Threes. He is joined a few years later by another English entrepreneur who created the second major cigarette factory in London. And this guy's name is Philip Morris.
- [28:52]
C
Oh, wow.
- [28:53]
B
Yeah, that's where that comes from. There he is. Yeah, yeah, there he is. Oh, Philip Morris.
- [28:58]
C
Yeah.
- [28:59]
B
A man with a body count that would rival fucking Hitler. So at this point, all cigarettes are still rolled by hand. Most are still sold by small retailers. But then the Civil War happens in the United States. And right after the Civil War, things start to change. And I'm gonna quote now from a write up in the Journal of Antiques. Seeing an opportunity in the emerging market for cigarettes, tobacco man F.S. kinney began cigarette production in New York City as well as a factory in Richmond, Virginia. Turning out brands with names like Full Dress, Sweet Corporal Kinney, Straight Cut and Sportsman's Corporal. Using similar blends. Kinney's chief competitor in the New York market was Goodwin and Company, which sold nationally advertised cigarettes with folksy sounding brand names such as Old Judge, Canvas, Black and welcome. Firms became known as the big six of the cigarette industry. By the 1870s, as they gained control of 75% of national sales, there were of course, hundreds of smaller cigarette Firms operating out of backroom shops in most major northern cities, but their distribution capabilities were usually very limited. I love old cigarette brand names. I would. I would smoke Old Judge. I think I'd have been an old judge man.
- [30:07]
C
Well, yeah, there was one that was particularly great Old. Was one of them called Old Black.
- [30:13]
B
No, there's Old Judge, Canvas back and welcome back.
- [30:16]
C
Okay. I thought it was Canvas Black, like what it would do to the old lungs. But yeah, Welcome. I think I just smoke a welcome cigarette.
- [30:23]
B
Smoke a welcome?
- [30:23]
C
Yeah. Like you get one on your pillow when you go into a hotel room. That's the kind of vibe it has.
- [30:27]
B
Yeah. Reminds me of that old Bill Hicks bit when he's like, I love that they've put the warning labels on the cigarettes. Lets me know which ones to avoid. I'm not gonna buy the lung cancer cigarettes. Low birth weights, though. Give me one of them. So tobacco opt, obviously is bad for you. It caused problems for people because it's never good for you to smoke or especially on a regular basis, as people are increasingly doing in this period. But the harms are still minimal and they're pretty much impossible to see on a wide basis. Right. Very few people are able to smoke regularly throughout the day, for one thing. For another thing, there's not good matches. People do have matches in this period, but they're phosphorus based and they're incredibly dangerous. It's like carrying a flashbang in your pocket.
- [31:15]
C
I see no issue with that. I think that's amazing.
- [31:17]
B
Yeah, that's a good idea. Yeah. I just want to just wanna whip off a rod of phosphorus next to my shirt.
- [31:23]
C
Great. Is it like, literally, like white phosphorus?
- [31:26]
B
Like, I mean, I don't know if it's like white phosphorus, but yeah, I mean, it's like a phosphorus. Like you grind up a bunch of phosphorus and then you strike it. I think. Amazing.
- [31:38]
C
Imagine someone, like, falling over and then just showing up like an incend.
- [31:43]
B
And of course, your beard oil and hair oil is all alcohol and petroleum based. Your shirt has been washed in pure gasoline. So you just catch immediately on fire.
- [31:54]
C
Yeah. Yeah. Cigarettes will kill you, but not in the way you're expecting.
- [31:57]
B
Yeah. This is the period in which, like, spontaneous human combustion starts to be a thing. And it's because everything is flammable and everybody's carrying around firebombs in their pockets.
- [32:07]
C
Yeah.
- [32:09]
B
But yeah, again, as much as we joke about it, if you were to tell someone cigarettes are bad, that's pretty obvious. If you're hanging out with someone today who is a smoker because smokers cough, right? And you joke about it if you're a smoker. Like, yeah, it's fucking killing me. Whatever. Smoke my cigarette. It's not hard to put two and two together. Like, oh, this is bad for me. It wouldn't have been as obvious back then, for one thing. Yeah, smokers cough. But also, you know who else coughs is people who live in dense cities where the main method of transportation is horses. And so there are. Okay, so New York City. The most famous style of houses in New York City, they have these big tall porches, right, that are like 4, 5, or 6ft off the ground. Those big porches that New York and other east coast cities have exist. Because there would be so much shit in the main streets that when it rained, there would be rivers of feces and rotting carcasses of animals. Rush. And you didn't want it to get into your. Like, your house.
- [33:06]
C
So you could just sit there and watch the turds floating by.
- [33:10]
B
If somebody. If people are walking around coughing and looking sick, your first guess isn't gonna be, it's probably those cigarettes.
- [33:17]
C
Yeah. Didn't you. What a place. What a challenge.
- [33:21]
B
It really was a nightmare to be alive.
- [33:24]
C
Yeah. Jesus Christ. I'm surprised at the species we made it past that.
- [33:28]
B
It's striking. But you don't have to make it very long to produce a bunch of kids and then leave them fatherless.
- [33:34]
C
Yeah, that's true. As you float off down the shit river.
- [33:38]
B
Let's just throw your coat. A corpse in the shit river. And the cycle continues.
- [33:43]
C
Yeah, it's a circle of life.
- [33:45]
B
Cigarettes in the 1870s were still a novelty to most smokers. Less than 2% of people who smoked used cigarettes. Again, the most common method of tobacco consumption is not even smoking at all. But it was chewing what was called plug tobacco. And it was into this world and this market that a man named James Buchanan Duke stepped in the 19 or in the 1880s. Duke had been born on December 23, 1856, near Durham, North Carolina. And his father was the owner of a small tobacco company which was eventually named W. Duke & Sons Company or W. Duke Sons & Company. Duke watched in 1873 as a powerful depression hit the United States, and temporarily, cigarettes swelled in popularity because the urban poor could afford cigarettes. Right? So that was, you know, when they started to take off. And he looks at this being an intelligent capitalist. He's like. Like, we're probably gonna continue to have horrible economic crashes. Cause it seems like the system is designed to do this every, like, five to 10 years. So I bet cigarettes have a. Have a bright future ahead of them if I can find a way to make.
- [34:49]
C
Them cheaper. Yeah, people started smoking them more in times of depression because they didn't have food and they wanted to not.
- [34:59]
B
Be hungry. They wanted to not be hungry. It's also just like one of the few things you can afford, period if you're poor, is a cigarette. Cause they're cheap, they're cheaper food, in a lot of cases. They're certainly the cheapest method of getting tobacco. They're cheaper than drinking. It's just like, it's a little comfort that you can have if you're a fucking tramp living on the street in the 1870s. Because there's not a whole lot of other things for you, but the cigarette.
- [35:23]
C
Is there. It's the working man's friend.
- [35:27]
B
Isn'T it? It is the working man. Look again, if you're on the street in the 1870s, the health risks of a cigarette are the least of.
- [35:34]
C
Your concerns. Your concerns. You might get concussed by a.
- [35:37]
B
Floating turd. It's the shit rivers the main problem you've gotta.
- [35:42]
C
Deal with. Drowning in a river of horseshit. Yeah, I'd be.
- [35:48]
B
Smoking whatever. Yeah, of course.
- [35:50]
C
Of course. If they'd invented crack, I'd be on.
- [35:53]
B
That too. Yeah. You want to get out of that situation as quickly.
- [35:56]
C
As possible. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Fentanyl would have been.
- [35:59]
B
A godsend. Absolutely. So Duke, at this point in time, his brothers and his father were like locked into this vicious competition with Bull Durham tobacco, which was run by a guy named W.T. blackwell. And like the big tobacco producer of the day, Duke saw this as a pointless fight because they were fighting over plug tobacco. He knew that the future of the industry was not in plug tobacco. It was in producing something convenient and cheap for urban poor people. In 1882, his company had just 10 cigarette rollers on the line. And these are individual people. Cigarettes are made like cigars by random, by just like people who know how to do it. The first thing he did was add 50 more rollers, which still put him well behind the Allen and Ginter factory up in Richmond, which employed 450 female cigarette rollers. But when a New York City cigarette factory went on strike, Duke convinced 125 of their workers to move down to Durham in 1883, offering to pay their moving expenses and giving them the highest wages in the industry. This was a good deal for these people for a while. But if you know anything about capitalists, you know Duke has no desire to create well paying jobs for laborers. These people are a stopgap. He's thinking like Uber here, right. I want to corner the market and then find a way to get the human beings out of it to replace them with machines. Now.
- [37:15]
C
He'S not. How's that working.
- [37:16]
B
For Uber? It works a lot better for cigarettes than it does for Uber. Turns out this is actually a pretty reasonable business plan.
- [37:24]
C
For cigarettes. Both of them will kill you. Both the self driving cars and the cigarettes. Again, self driving cars will do.
- [37:30]
B
It faster. Yeah, the cigarettes will do it a little more ethically though. So he was in the. His goal was again, he wanted to make. He wants to make the most profitable tobacco company in the world. And the way to do that is to rat your laborers. For now though, he needed them. And by 1885, he had about 700 hand rollers in two factories. Most of these are again at young women. This is reasonably well paying work for young women. He's got a quality control team that checks the work. So they're trying to put out as uniform a product as possible, but that's not really easy to do. And everyone in the industry making cigarettes now knows it's kind of slowly expanding. And they know that we can make these a lot cheaper and a lot more profitable for us if we can replace the human beings with machine rollers. So a couple of companies actually put out a bounty in order to produce a machine roller. And I'm going to quote what comes next from that write up from the Journal of Antiques. A young man named James Boznak approached Duke with a cigarette making machine he had invented. The young inventor had previously gone to the now big four companies, but had been turned down because his machine was prone to breakdowns. Plus, there was a belief that consumers would never accept a machine made cigarette. Duke put top mechanics to work ironing out the bugs in the bonsack machine and signed a deal with the inventor. During his first year of production, using his team of imported hand rollers, duke turned out 9.8 million cigarettes. In contrast, using the bonsack machines enabled him to produce 744 million cigarettes in 1888. So 1881, 9.8 million cigarettes. He gets the bonsack machine.
- [39:05]
C
744.
- [39:06]
B
Million. Jesus. That is a significant, significant increase.
- [39:10]
C
In production. That right there, it's turning point. That's going to change a.
- [39:14]
B
Few things. So he's making a lot of cigarettes now, which is great. He's able to make them half as expensive as they were before. And he's able to like, number one, sell them for cheaper and also make a lot more profit per cigarette. But there's problem, which is that only about 2% of Americans who smoke, smoke cigarettes. And so the fact that he's making 730 million more cigarettes per year means that he's got a lot of cigarettes he can't sell because there's just not that many smokers out there. So this is a problem for old Duke. And Duke realizes that, like, if he's going to make this thing profitable, what he's going to have to do is create demand for cigarettes. He's going to have to convince Americans that they actually want. Want not just to smoke cigarettes, but to smoke a shitload of them. Because one of the things that becomes clear is like, well, we went from 9.8 million to 744 million for nothing. We could make billions of these a year. This wouldn't be a problem at all. We just need that many smokers to exist. So that's a difficult task. Right. Old Duke is going to need to actually, like, create a hunger for billions of cigarettes in the world in order to make this pay off. And that's exactly what he.
- [40:31]
C
Does.
- [40:32]
B
Next. Great.
- [40:34]
C
Yeah, yeah. So, wonderful world of tobacco.
- [40:38]
B
Marketing. Yes. It's that, that's, that's what we're, that's what we're building towards here. Yeah. So one of the things that happens when Duke starts manufacturing his cigarettes is that suddenly no corporation can afford to sell cigarettes without rolling them on a bonsack machine. It just is, is so much more efficient. And because Duke had helped fix the bonsack machine, he owns part of the patent, effectively. So one of the ways he's making money is that everyone who's making cigarettes is giving money to Duke. He also, one of the things he does that's smart is in order to kind of, everyone's worried, okay, are people not gonna wanna smoke cigarettes that are rolled by machine? Duke starts bragging that his cigarettes are machine rolled. He puts it on the packages as like a way of, like, just. What if we just try to convince people that machine rolled is better than hand rolled? It's cleaner, it's more hygienic, it's more modern. Right, right. All of which is technically true. Now next, I want to quote from a book called the Cigarette Century by Alan Brandt. By 1884, while his competitors were still hesitating, Duke had installed two bonsack machines in his Durham factory. A year later, after experimenting to improve the machine's performance, Duke signed a secret contract in which he agreed that he would produce all his cigarettes with the Bonsack machine. In return, Bonsack reduced duke's royalties to 20 cents per thousand. Duke and Bonsack soon reached a further agreement, guaranteeing Duke a 25% discount on royalties against all other manufacturers. Also, Duke shrewdly hired one of Bonsack's disgruntled mechanics, William Thomas o', Brien, to operate his machines, assuring fewer breakdowns than his competition. By June 1886, O' Brien was meticulously maintaining 10 machines. Duke placed a heavy emphasis on efficiency and continuous production. The lessons he learned in developing the mass production of cigarettes he would soon apply more broadly to industrial organization. By becoming Bonsack's premier customer, Duke secured essential control over its technology and turned Bonsack's patent into a powerful competitive advantage. It was increasingly common for inventors to relinquish their patents to corporations. Duke understood that control of the Bonsack patent, through his secret discounted licensing agreement, was a critical lever in dominating the cigarette trade. His deal with Bonsack reflected an important change in the character of the patent system, from a legal mechanism protecting independent inventors to one that would protect large and powerful corporations. Duke is. What he's done here is invent the modern usage of patents by corporations for corporate advantage. Right. Like, everyone who is. Who, like every business leader who follows in any kind of industry is going to.
- [43:03]
C
Copy him. Yeah, man, that might be one of the things that's killed more people than cigarettes.
- [43:07]
B
Right, right. Like, yeah, yeah. Because a lot of medical patents and stuff, like, works on the same fucking idea.
- [43:14]
C
You know? Yeah. Nearly every. Nearly every drug.
- [43:17]
B
Is patented. And of course, he's not trying to do anything evil with it. He just wants everyone to smoke cigarettes perfectly. Perfectly morally.
- [43:27]
C
And complicated. Ironically, I just. We talked about it on the episode of It Could Happen Here on Monday, but UCLA pursuing an IP case in India about a prostate cancer drug called Xtandi, which they're trying to stop a generic production, a cheaper generic production of. But I'm just imagining the old handshake meme between UCLA and Duke here and giving people cancer is the thing that they're both coming.
- [43:53]
B
Together on. That's beautiful. So the Bonsack machine quickly replaced human rollers who left the cigarette industry to roll cigars, which is the only form of tobacco that's going to prove immune to the corporate age that Duke is ushering. Through the 1880s and 1890s, cigarette smoking increased and the size of a pack doubled from 10 to 20, taking advantage of how easy it was to smoke. Now the first, proper matchbooks, invented in the early 20th century, helped spur adoption. But by 1900, still less than 2% of tobacco consumers are smoking cigarettes. Now, Duke knows that his dream of selling cigarettes to the world is not gonna work if he can't convince Americans that they wanted to smoke and that they wanted to smoke as a habit. So he set out to do something no one had ever really done before before, which was create a market for a product using advertising. Obviously, merchants since time immemorial had advertised their wares and attempted to set themselves apart from the competition. But what Duke is doing is new. Duke is trying to convince people they want to do something they haven't done. That's not really been a thing in capitalism up to.
- [44:55]
C
This.
- [44:55]
B
Point. Fantastic. It's one thing to be like, hey, I'm Samuel Colt. I've invented a better handgun. If you want a handgun, you want a handgun. My job with my marketing is to convince you. Mindset the best, right? But you're not convincing people, well, now I need a gun, right? Like, they decide they need a gun because it's the fucking 1880s or whatever. Fucking Duke is like, these people are fine without cigarettes. This isn't a problem. There's not a need that I'm trying to serve here. I have to create it. And one of the first ways he's going to do this is really quite innovative, and it ends in a surprising place. So in the late 1880s, French tradesmen had set to make making stiff, colorful cards to advertise their businesses. These cards often, often featured illustrations of women, generally wearing very little clothing or sports heroes or like historical landmarks to make them collectible and thus give individual people a reason to keep a business card in their possession. Now, we don't know where Duke first heard about this phenomenon, but Starting in the 1880s, he had a print shop installed in his Durham factory that could make color prints. At first, he printed out the standard advertisements and coupons that most businessmen used. But soon he hit upon an idea. And I'm going to quote from Duke University here. With each pack of cigarettes, a small cardboard insert was added to stiffen the box. Duke employed a little imagination and turned these simple workhorses into a powerful marketing tool. By printing the brand name of the cigarettes along with a picture that was part of a larger series and which was meant to be collected. Series of birds, flags, Civil War generals and baseball players were employed frequently with historical or educational information on them. Photographs of actresses, women placed in a variety of poses and often rather revealing costumes for the Time were also used on the insert cards and exceeded all expectations and their popularity among the public. So a lot of these trading cards, and these are the first trading cards are outright pornographic, at least by 19th century standards. And there are outcries against the practice because the. The people who want them the most are. Are young boys, are kids. Right. Kids start smoking to collect trading cards. That's what juvenile, juvenile smoking starts in the.
- [47:07]
C
United.
- [47:07]
B
States. Great. They want to collect baseball cards and to do so they have to buy packs.
- [47:12]
C
Of.
- [47:12]
B
Cigarettes. Amazing. And this works like gang. It increases cigarette sales massively. It's a really successful ad campaign, but it also leads to a wave of young cigarette addicts who are also getting into porn, which is difficult for people to accept. Busy bodies of the day to accept. One of those busybodies included Duke's father, who wrote this letter to a his son in 1894. My dear son, I have received the enclosed letter from the Reverend from the Reverend John C. Hocut. And I'm much impressed with the wisdom of his argument against circulating lascivious photographs with cigarettes and have made up my mind to bring the matter to your attention in the interest of morality and in the hope that you can invent a proper substitute for these pictures which will answer your requirements as an advertisement as well as an inducement to purchase. His views are so thoroughly and plainly stated that I do not know how I can add anything except to state that they accord with my own and that I have always looked upon the distribution of this character of advertisement as wrong in its pernicious effects upon young men and womenhood and therefore has not jingled with my religious impulses. Outside of the fact that we owe Christianity all the assistance we can lend it in any form which is paramount to any other consideration, I am fully convinced that this mode of advertising will be used and greatly strengthened the arguments against will be used and will greatly strengthen the arguments of against cigarettes in the legislative halls of the states. I hope you will consider this carefully and appreciate my side of the question. It would please me very much to know that a change has been made. Duke does not make a change. He is fine.
- [48:43]
C
With.
- [48:43]
B
It. Yeah. So Duke is obviously not going to turn his back on all of this money because of simple morality. Instead, he publishes advertising that encourages kids to complete sets of trading cards and he expands his advertising budget to keep a steady stream of new collectibles going out with his cigarettes. It was a stunning success. And as Alan Brandt notes, quote, this commodity connected collecting was a lasting innovation that continues today with Baseball cards and Pokemon. Duke had discovered important incentives for smoking in the cultural rituals of youth. We owe Pokemon.
- [49:15]
C
To.
- [49:15]
B
Cigarettes. Amazing.
- [49:18]
C
That's incredible. Yeah, yeah. Wow. I'm just imagining buying a pack of mulberries to see if I can score a shiny Charmeleon.
- [49:27]
B
Or something. Honestly, what about our culture? Wouldn't be better if like in order to get a the gathering deck, you had to smoke three entire cartons of Pall.
- [49:37]
C
Malls? Absolutely. Yeah. I love that. It's just, it's like the happy meal of cigarettes. It's great.
- [49:45]
B
It's perfect. Just imagine like some nerdy 16 year old like lying on his side like puking as he smokes his 50th cigarette of the day. I need a lightning.
- [49:55]
C
Bolt card. Trying to evolve his peak.
- [50:00]
B
At you good. Dies of smoking inhalation trying to get.
- [50:06]
C
A bulbasaur. I choose you.
- [50:10]
B
Lung cancer. Now you know what else will give you lung.
- [50:13]
C
Cancer, James? Is it the cigarettes that Sophie's saying to children behind.
- [50:19]
B
The school? It is. It is. The cigarettes that Sophie's sells to children behind the school are very likely to.
- [50:25]
C
Cause.
- [50:26]
B
Cancer. Answer. But you know, that's the way it.
- [50:30]
D
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- [51:32]
B
Save big. Ah God. Aren't we living well today? What a beautiful world we have in this America that I love. How are you.
- [51:51]
C
All? Sophie? Wow, it's been.
- [51:56]
A
A pause. I'm just thoroughly disappointed in your actions. What else.
- [52:02]
B
Is new? Well, Sophie, you know what I'm not disappointed by is the innovative thought leaders in big tobacco, building the modern world and inventing Pokemon. So Duke understood instinctively that children were the future of cigarettes. Established tobacco consumers had already had their preferences, like Set for plug tobacco or snuff or for pipe tobacco or cigars. And these methods involved less consumption or at least pickier consumers. Cigarettes smoked quickly and more conveniently than other tobacco products and they caused less mess. They were also more addictive, which allowed for a quick and repeatable high anytime. Again, most people were chewing tobacco prior to this. So if people start smoking instead of chewing suddenly you don't have buckets of spit all over the place. Again, probably a net piece positive now that said, you also have like more people smoking in public places, which is a negative. But anyway, the New York Times publishes an article at the time that complains about Duke's attempt to entice boys to excessive cigarette smoking. And notes every possible device has been employed to interest the juvenile mind, notably the lithograph album. Youngsters seeking these picture books clamored for the reward of self inflicted injury. Many a boy under 12 years is striving for the entire collection which necessitates the consumption of nearly 12,000 sick cigarettes. Kids are like trying to collect these picture books and smoking.
- [53:26]
C
12,000 cigarettes. That is how you catch them all. Oh, that is a.
- [53:34]
B
Rough image. That is an obscene amount.
- [53:36]
C
Of cigarettes. Yeah, that's a lot of.
- [53:38]
B
Cigarettes. Wow. Yeah, that is. That is an outrageous quantity of cigarettes. Duke hadn't just hit upon a baller way to move cigarettes. He'd effectively invict invented the concept of collectible products as advertisements. He starts doing like sweepstakes, right, where you collect, you know, different things that are on the boxes to turn them in to see if you can win like a prize. And it's. Yeah, he also just like gives stuff. So basically everything from McDonald's, Happy Meals and like Funko Pops to every product sweepstakes you've ever seen are all descendants of what Duke is inventing in this period. Which is just like different ways to get cigarettes in kids mouths. We like all the entire toolbox of capitalism is being created. It's being created to push cigarettes.
- [54:23]
C
To children. Of.
- [54:24]
B
Course, dude. Duke changed his company's name to American Tobacco, which reflected his ambition to be the alpha and omega of tobacco sales and production in the United States. He poured unheard of amounts of money into his ad budget, soon spending nearly a quarter of the money he made on sales on ads. His competitors were forced to pour similar amounts of cash into their own own efforts, igniting the first national billboard war and leading to a massive surge in the amount of visual advertising in the United States. This is what starts to fill the countryside up with ads with like billboards and other kinds of big public ads. Is Duke spending all this money on.
- [54:59]
C
Cigarette ads? Wow. So he inadvertently also gave us the Monkey.
- [55:05]
B
Wrench Gang. Yeah. So he has, in the space of what we've talked about so far, given us like modern patent law and all of the people that get killed as a result of medical devices bias patents. He's given us trading cards, he's given us like sweepstakes and like toy collecting and he's given us fucking billboards and the Monkey Ridge Gang. So that's, that's a lot for.
- [55:29]
C
One guy. Yeah, it's a real.
- [55:31]
B
Mixed bag. Now one of the things that this does, he's made it impossible, very close to impossible, for new companies to get into the cigarette business. Number one, you have to be able to buy a cigarette machine to be profitable and that costs money. Number two, you have to have a shitload of cash to make ads. So just like some young like upstart who wants to sell cigarettes to people isn't gonna be able to get into the business unless they're backed by some serious moneyed interests because it's just too expensive to get into it. From the late 1880s, Duke sent out regular feelers to his competitors, asking if they'd be open to a buyout. Most of them turned him down. But as the 1800s drew to a close, the fortunes of Duke and his competitors, the fortunes that Duke and his competitors were throwing into ads had them all looking for a better way. They're just spending too much damn money competing, competing with each other. In January of 1890, Duke Strong armed his fellow tobacco lords to join a consortium, the American Tobacco Company, which would seek to monopolize not just tobacco sold in the United States, but produced as well. Overnight, the American Tobacco Company was responsible for 90% of all cigarette sales in the United States. Duke had formed a monopoly, getting his competitors to agree to fix prices and wages in order to save money on advertising and priority production and to avoid the struggles for dominance that had devoured their money in recent years. This was a winning strategy. And as Duke took total control over the tobacco market, prices fell for consumers. But this also meant a lot less money for farmers. And the trust brought an end to competitive bidding for tobacco harvests. As Alan Brandt makes clear, in his single minded quest to control the future of tobacco, Duke helped invent the modern concept of a megacorporation, blazing a trail that would be followed by every ambitious capitalist to come. Quote together these three departments, Audit, which oversaw accounting and cost control, Leaf and retail markets, assured the movement of cured tobacco from warehouse to factory to sales. Individuals with specific expertise headed each department. The audit department, for example, introduced innovative accounting procedures that would later be utilized by many other industries. The success of Duke's enterprise, which became a model for other industries, rested on salaried executives who could assure the efficient functioning of their aspect, the of of the business as well as tight coordination with other departments and activities. In short, he invented the.
- [57:43]
C
Middle manager. Just another wonderful contribution.
- [57:48]
B
To society. He's really just humming along here, creating the.
- [57:52]
C
Modern world. Yeah, he's ticking.
- [57:54]
B
Him off. Now. One of the things that you know, when you invent the middle manager, one of the things that you've done is you've created the concept that's going to make up most of the ranks of the emerging middle class. Right. What are a lot of people in the middle class? They're fucking middle managers. Right, right. Which is also a lot of the people who are going to be tobacco consumers. Right. He's helping to create the basis of consumer culture here as he builds effectively helps to build the idea of a kind of new class structure in a lot of ways. Obviously middle management had existed before, but not in the kind of quantity that it had because prior to Duke, you've got a lot of tobacco being made and sold and you've got a different sort of tobacco companies, middle managers, but the companies are all much smaller. It's like this company, we handle production, this company like we, we handle like we get the tobacco from the farmers and we process it. You know, we're the people who roll it and sell it directly to, to the consumers. He's, he's rolling all of this into one giant venture. And instead of the, the constituent parts being made up of small business owners, the constituent parts are, are managed by middle managers who are operating like rungs inside of this larger corporate structure. That's not, he's not the first guy to do this, but he's the first guy to do this and be this successful.
- [59:10]
C
With it. Yeah, yeah. So it's like a vertically integrated supply.
- [59:14]
B
Chain, right? Exactly, exactly. So that's pretty cool. Everywhere he cut out independent manufacturers and free agents, small resellers and rollers. The entire tobacco market went from an artisanal industry with strong unions to a vast factory for the production of identical machine rolled cigarettes. The only piece of the tobacco business that successfully resisted and that maintained its high level of unionization were cigars, which for whatever reason are kind of immune.
- [59:43]
C
To modernity. Yeah, seemingly. I've just realized that this guy is Like Jeff Bezos. Like.
- [59:48]
B
He is. He's the Bezos.
- [59:50]
C
Of cigarettes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which Jeff Bezos, I'm sure, would love to be the Bezos of cigarettes, along with being the Bezos of almost everything else, if.
- [59:56]
B
You could. It's a great thing to be the Bezos of. So kudos to cigars.
- [60:02]
C
For.
- [60:02]
B
Being. Respect. Yeah, respect to the cigar industry for fighting back against this. But obviously, Duke barely notices that. Like, he's, you know, losing out on this chunk of the business. He tells his board that, quote, the world is now our market for our product. And in 1902, he sets upon the goal of getting the world to start adopting cigarettes. He signs a deal with his largest foreign rival, the UK's Imperial Tobacco, and they formed the British American.
- [60:29]
C
Tobacco Corporation. Of course, that's what the British.
- [60:32]
B
One'S called. Yes. And they do a. They're doing a tobacco imperialism, Right. They're going out with a goal of convincing people, nations who had never smoked to smoke now. And Jordan Goodman, the author of Tobacco and History, notes, to him, every cigarette was the same. All of the globalization that we are now familiar with through McDonald's and Starbucks, all of that was preceded by Duke and the. So not only is he getting people hooked on cigarettes, he's getting them hooked on the idea of this is a product that comes under a specific brand, and everyone in the world consumes the same product the same way. Right. That, you know, you may be, if you're a cigarette smoker in Turkey in the early 1800s and a cigarette smoker in France, a cigarette smoker in the United States, you are smoking something that was rolled down the street from you at a shop. Right. And probably tobacco that was grown fairly close to you. There's a little bit of movement around that, around. Around the world. But generally speaking, you're consuming a local product because everything is pretty local. He has invented the idea that. No, no, no. If you're going to be into cigarettes, you're going to smoke this specific kind of cigarette, and everyone on earth does it the.
- [61:38]
C
Same way.
- [61:40]
B
Wow.
- [61:40]
C
Yeah. Yeah. That's crazy. Yeah. He's now more or less invented, like, the global.
- [61:44]
B
Commodity, right? Yeah, yeah. This is like. It's one of the.
- [61:48]
C
Very first.
- [61:49]
B
Yeah, yeah. And probably I think the first. That's like an individual consumer good, Right. Cause this is starting to happen with, like, steel and with fuel and stuff. Right. But you as an individual aren't, like, going down to the store to pick up, you know, some fucking petroleum or some coal generally. But you're gonna go down and get a cigarette that's made by the British American company every day, whether you live in fucking Tokyo or Timbuktu. It hasn't spread quite that far yet. But this is what's going to happen, right? By 1904, cigarettes had finally crash. Five percent of the American market for tobacco products. That seems small, but that means it's more than doubled in a couple of years. Duke saw them as the smart product to push, but he'd spent several years cornering the markets on plug and pipe tobacco, too. So they're selling everything. It's also worth noting that, like, Duke is a cigar man himself. He does not understand why people like cigarettes. He does not like cigarettes. He just is betting that they're going to be a big.
- [62:45]
C
Deal.
- [62:45]
B
Right. Perfect. So the uni. Before he can kind of take this idea further, though, the United States Congress starts looking into his tobacco trust, which is, you know, what he's made with American Tobacco. He's formed a monopoly. And they decide it's in violation of the Sherman Antitrust act, which had also been created in 1890. Now, it took the government a while to actually get to American Tobacco. And by the time it starts looking into things, American Tobacco controls not just 90% of the of the cigarette trade, but 75 to 85% of all tobacco sold in the United States. Duke had even recently started buying up companies who were producing licorice paste to make sweeter flavored cigarettes. So he's again, a.
- [63:27]
C
Fucking trailblazer. Yeah. Not blazing a trail in a great.
- [63:32]
B
Direction necessarily. Maybe not in the best direction, but you can't deny the man knows what.
- [63:37]
C
He'S doing. This is a dude who loves to make. How rich was.
- [63:40]
B
This guy? I mean, it doesn't tran. Cause if you actually translate. Translate it, it's just going to wind up being in the tens of millions, which makes it like, effectively. He's a billionaire in his day, right? Like, for everything that matters, you know? Yeah, he has. He has.
- [63:55]
C
Infinity dollars. You do have to think, how different would the world be if we just given him Twitter and he could have done an Elon Musk and solved the war in Ukraine instead of inventing new ways to give.
- [64:06]
B
Kids cancer. This new cigarette's going to work as a boat, briefly. So this puts Duke about 20 years ahead of the invention of the first menthol cigarettes. And we're not going to talk a lot about this, but I have to let you know that menthol cigarettes are invented by a man named Lloyd.
- [64:25]
C
Spud.
- [64:25]
B
Hughes. Great. Very funny. Very funny name. So Duke is like a generation ahead of the competition, but that's not enough to protect him from the departure Department of Justice, which, and this is weird, used to actually punish corporations for monopolistic behavior. This was the thing you could get in trouble.
- [64:45]
C
For back. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Robert. Coming out in support of.
- [64:50]
B
The doj. Well, they don't do a good job of this, so I. I'm not supportive, but it is more than they try to do today. So I.
- [64:59]
A
Don'T know. I'm more familiar with the not doing a good.
- [65:01]
B
Job part. Yeah. Well, so during this period, the DOJ is going after the three largest businesses in the United States for monopolistic behavior. And the three largest businesses in the United States are Standard Oil, US Steel, and American Tobacco. So, again, to understand the scale of this, the thing that he has built is as big as the oil and gas industry. Right. Like it's the steel industry. It's in.
- [65:25]
C
That ballpark.
- [65:26]
B
It's.
- [65:27]
A
Wild. Yeah. Impressively.
- [65:29]
B
Not great. Yeah. So Teddy Roosevelt, the trust buster, forces the DOJ to go after Duke Buster. Yeah. That's what, that's what he's doing. He's.
- [65:38]
C
Busting trust. He's busting.
- [65:39]
B
Some trust. Look, there's a lot of.
- [65:42]
A
Funny coming out of.
- [65:43]
B
Your mouth. There's a lot of things that we have to dislike Teddy Roosevelt for. But one thing the man legitimately hated was monopolies, and he goes.
- [65:52]
C
After them. There were some other things that.
- [65:54]
B
He hated. There were a lot of more problematic things that Teddy Roosevelt hated. But in this case, he's broadly speaking, doing the right, right thing. And the DOJ is like, yeah, you've made a monopoly. This is not legal, and you have to dismantle American Tobacco. Now, this is impossible because Duke has vertically integrated it to such a degree that everyone is reliant upon the same supply and distribution change. You can't actually split the companies back up the way they'd been 15 years before. So the DOJ, not wanting to destroy one of the three largest businesses in the US exempts a bunch of their sub businesses and their international partnerships and like, allows them to maintain certain supply chains.
- [66:37]
C
And.
- [66:37]
B
Whatnot. Great. And obviously, while this is going on, American Tobacco appeals the Supreme Court rules against them in 1911, and eventually they do split the trust up into five companies that are technically independent, competing businesses. But as the cigarette century makes clear, after all that Duke had done to weave the company's tax together, that can't actually be cut apart. Quote, the settlement was meant to assure competition among the five newly constituted companies, each received factories, distribution and storage facilities, and name brands. But given the size and complexity of the business, there existed insuperable obstacles to the creation of perfect competitive conditions. No matter how the industry was restructured, there simply was no going back. So Duke continues to run this chunk of American Tobacco. It remains in his control. British American Tobacco is what remains in his country. Control. And his fellow owners, even though they're all competing, continue to collude to fix prices in order to maximize profit. So he's. It's not as bad, but they've gone from a monopoly to an.
- [67:37]
C
Oligopoly.
- [67:38]
B
Right. That's. That's, that's what the DOJ succeeds in.
- [67:42]
C
Actually doing. Great.
- [67:43]
B
Job, doj. And since his. He's kind of peaked as a cigarette man, Duke moves over to the power industry. He establishes a power company that provides. Yeah. He builds his company, builds the electrical grid for north and.
- [67:57]
C
South Carolina. Can he not.
- [67:59]
B
Just stop? No.
- [68:00]
C
He cannot. With his Pokemon cards. No.
- [68:02]
B
Apparently not. He does. When he gets old and is about to die, he gives most of his fortune, tens of millions of dollars, to Trinity College in Durham, which is renamed Duke University in his honor. And that's where we get Duke University. Yeah. Didn't see that.
- [68:17]
C
Coming. Yeah. Great. And they have a good public health school.
- [68:20]
B
Now actually.
- [68:21]
C
Yes.
- [68:21]
B
Yes. Yeah. Well, they honestly a lot of the best information about the cigarette industry and all of the fucked up shit it comes from Duke University. They have great resources for understanding.
- [68:31]
C
Tobacco athletes.
- [68:32]
B
Fascinating. Yeah. So I mean, to the university's credit, they don't like shy away from the. But also, look, Duke is immoral. Cause he's a capitalist and he is profiting off of people's surplus labor in a number of ways that are unethical. There's nothing wrong with him selling cigarettes at this point. Cause he has no. He dies in 1925. There is no, nothing that even approaches a medical consensus about cigarettes and cancer at this point. Point. You can't blame it.
- [68:59]
C
On him. Right. He's doing horrific shit to the people who work for him.
- [69:02]
B
I'm sure. Absolutely. Like destroying unions and whatnot. And there's like a bunch that's unethical. But the fact that he's selling cigarettes is not something that I would put on his soul because, you know, there's no way for him to have known that they were harmful, you know? Yeah, yeah. In 1919, a US surgical student named Alton Ochner was called along with several of his peers to observe the autopsy of a lung cancer cancer victim. His teacher was excited to have an example of the rare illness in their operating theater. He wanted Alton and his fellow students to see the autopsy because he believed they would not get a second chance to do so. You guys gotta check this out. You're never gonna see another lung cancer. Nobody gets this shit. Less than 30 years later, lung cancer would be the number one cause of death in the United States. As Robert Proctor of Stanford University told one at interviewer, the cigarette is the deadliest artifact in the history of human civilization. It killed about 100 million people in the 20th century. Oh, Jesus Christ. And honestly, he's probably.
- [70:08]
C
Lowballing it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's before you look at. Yeah, like all this sort of downstream things. Jesus Christ. That. That.
- [70:17]
B
Is. Yeah. That is quite.
- [70:19]
C
A death. Like we.
- [70:22]
B
Can university. We can argue about fascism and communism and the things. The great leap forward in Lysengoism, what killed the most people. But man, nobody's touching the cigarettes.
- [70:34]
C
Numbers.
- [70:35]
B
Right? Yeah. The cigarette's out here dropping three pointers.
- [70:39]
C
Every shot. It's a goat of killing people. People. I'm. I'm eagerly awaiting Michael Tracy to like go recuperate the cigarettes reputation on Twitter.
- [70:48]
B
Or something. So, James, you got anything you want to plug before we. We roll out a.
- [70:54]
C
Part one? I do another podcast, which you do too sometimes. It could.
- [70:59]
B
Happen here. I do too listen to.
- [71:00]
C
It. Yes. It's about how things are falling apart and people are putting them back together. It's a.
- [71:05]
B
Good podcast. It is a good podcast. I would say it's one of the only two podcasts that should be.
- [71:11]
C
Be legal. Yeah, yeah, fair enough. We're doing basically what he did with cigarettes. But two podcasts and very slowly we're stealing all.
- [71:20]
B
The microphones. God. And giving everyone cancer and I mean, hopefully going to kill 100 million people over the course of.
- [71:27]
C
The century. It's on the.
- [71:29]
B
Vision board.
- [71:30]
C
It's on. Yeah, that's on the vision board. Yeah. You can see you planned your goals. Yeah, yeah. We do have a live show if you survive that long.
- [71:38]
B
Oh.
- [71:39]
C
Shit.
- [71:39]
B
Yeah. 26. Yeah.
- [71:41]
C
October 26th. But I think it's on the 26th of October. Yeah, yeah.
- [71:47]
B
And everything. So check that shit out, motherfucker. Buy tickets to the live show and. Yeah, great. I'm not going to tell you you should smoke cigarettes, but have you ever tried the smooth, flavorful taste of a Camel? It's like driving through the desert early November. You know, when you've just got that pure dry cold just. Or just taking in a Marlboro Red. Oh, God. The flavor country. That's what people are missing today, Sophie. Do you know how few ginz ears have been to flavor country? That's their heritage, Sophie. That's their heritage. Stop it.
- [72:37]
A
All right? This is not.
- [72:39]
B
Cash money. Pick up. Pick up some.
- [72:41]
C
Cigarettes, kids. It very much is.
- [72:43]
A
Cash money. Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, Visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is Now available on YouTube. New episodes every Wednesday and and Friday. Subscribe to our channel.
- [73:06]
C
YouTube.com.
- [73:08]
A
Behindthebastards this is an iHeart podcast.