Part One: How Cigarettes Invented Everything

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Oh, welcome once again to Behind the Bastards, the only
podcast where the host regularly says that his show is
cash money. Um, I'm I'm Robert Evans, here to talk
with you about bad people. Sophie Lichtman seems very unhappy,
which is not cash I just have extreme secondhand embarrassment.

(00:26):
Well that's too bad, Sophie, because I'm bringing it back,
bringing back the phrase. As you know, everything you do
reflects on me for some god forsakend reason, that is
not very cash money. I think it's extremely cash money
off me. But here to be the tie breaking vote
is James Stout. Now, James, you're British, so so the

(00:49):
phrase cash money may not mean much to you in
in your language, I would say it's drawings of an
elderly man who's never worked today in his life. Yeah
it is now is now? Cash money has very little
value when it's tied to the life expectancy of an
inbred old person with sausage fingers. I thought a bunch

(01:11):
of different ways of describing the new bills with with
King Charles on them. Um, part of me wanted to
make a reference to the weird sex that got linked
to him. In Camilla. Oh, I made I made an
ethical decision that even the King of England deserves to
have his sex be private. I just like, don't need
nobody needs, okay, just but you don't want to think

(01:37):
about him sneaking outside and what was it like getting
his pajamas dirty and having his valet clean them. Yeah?
That and his he's got some he's got a very
specific kinks. Okay, yeah, yeah that's what as well as
William Yeah, kinky little as this kink murdering his first wife.
You know it's it's it's a tampon thing. Um yeah, okay,

(02:04):
not expected. Yeah, we we know far too much about
what Charles has been sending, um my heartbreaking amount. I
would say, don't don't google it, Loo, I'm telling you
the truth, but don't google this yar laptop anyway. So
I just broke my promise right there not to not

(02:24):
to laugh at the King of England's sexual escapades. James,
how do you feel about cigarettes? Oh? I think the
idea wasn't expecting that I kind of ambiguous. I guess,
uh yeah. A lot of a lot of bad things
happened because people like to smoke cigarettes. A lot of

(02:45):
people like to get really really up in other people's
business about smoking cigarettes. So it's it's a difficult one.
I I have the same difficulty because on one hand,
I'm kind of constitutionally anti prohibition, Like I don't think
things should be illegal or illegal. I don't think the
government should stop people from doing stuff just because it's

(03:05):
bad for their health. Um. 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 is a
societal good for the drug to be available, And for cigarettes,
that good is when someone has just tried to kill you.

(03:27):
There's a there's nothing like a cigarette someone's just trying
to kill her, hurt you, which is why they're so
value outside of British nightclub Yeah, exactly, thet You never
know when a bottle is coming for your temple there yet,
Yeah that's it. Um, you know, I I but I
get it, like it's one of those things. The there

(03:47):
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 cause more lives maybe than
all of the wars in the last centuries. It's kind
of an unbelievable body count. Um. That said, I think

(04:09):
today people throw down too much against smokers, and and
maybe there's maybe maybe we shouldn't be quite so shitty
to people who just happened 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,

(04:33):
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 like the cigarettes, the in order to get people
to smoke, the tobacco industry had to invent modern civilizations. Um.

(04:57):
And that's that's a fascinating story and I just want
to talk talk about it. Is one of those we're
getting behind a bastard at this point. You know, when
we're talking about the eighteen hundreds up through like the
middle of the twentieth century, you're not a bad person
for necessarily for trying to get people to smoke, because
if it's nineteen o five, number one, cigarettes not a
massive risk above like walking outside your door. But also

(05:20):
you just don't have good data. So yeah, the ambient
level of smoking is pretty high, just some existing in
any other 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

(05:43):
smoking it. Um. But we're broadly speaking, I mean, and
there's debate about this too, but archaeologists can confirm that
by at latest the first century BC, the Maya people
of Central America were using tobacco as a part of
their religious rituals um and they were both smoking it
and like inhaling it uh in kind of a similar

(06:04):
way to snuff. Right, you can snort tobacco if it's
ground ground. Finally enough, they probably also chewed it. Uh,
there were a couple of different devices they had for
smoking it, and we don't 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

(06:27):
started using them. Um. But and it and again there's
even some debate as to like, well, we're the Maya,
the first people who were cultivating tobacco, and probably the
answer to that is no. But we certainly know the Maya.
We're cultivating tobacco in the first century BC, and it's
spread from Central America to the Mississippi Valley and beyond
and was quickly adopted by neighboring people's from like four

(06:48):
hundred to seven hundred a d is when you see
most most of this spread, and it makes it all
the way out to the fucking Caribbean. Oh yeah, that's
where Columbus rant into it at first. Right, that is
exactly the thing that happens in this episode of James
Christopher Goddamn Columbus becomes the first European to encounter tobacco,
which was being smoked by the natives of Hispaniola which

(07:09):
is modern day Haiti and the Dominican Republic via a
weird two pronged nose pipe. So they would they would
smoke it, but they would like inhale it through this
pipe that like smoke all kind of situation. Yeah, it
looks a little bit. It looks a little bit like
a canula. Okay, yeah, like a nasal canula. I made
from my book A Brief History of Vice. I recreated

(07:31):
these pipes as best I could. I would up actually
using the stock of dried like the dried stock of
marijuana plants, because it's hollow, and so I just had
to kind of find why bends that were the right shape. Um,
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 mucus membrane. Yeah,

(07:56):
I can see that one being pretty rough on the
old excited sis. I would not, It's it's one of
those things you have to divorce kind of if you're
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. Right. There are people, certainly by the time

(08:16):
Columbus it's 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 um kind of fairly
strict ritual sense. Uh. 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, um,

(08:38):
in part because it's kind of hard to when you're
smoking them. But right, Yeah, there's a lot of work
that imagine goes into producing a nose cigarette, from growing
the tobacco, drying get out, and yeah, that's a lot
of work. And you also you can't smoke just when
you when you want to fix because you don't have lighters,

(08:59):
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 because you want
like a fucking smoke in the like, yeah, get a
piece of wood out. So again, smoking even when it's

(09:21):
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 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. Um. Like, generally,
that's probably how it would have gone when Columbus winds up,
you know, meeting these people in Foo and watching them smoke.

(09:43):
They actually hand him tobacco and he doesn't know what
to do with it until he watches them smoke it, um,
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 this Yeah. Uh, it's also worth knowing that
over in Cuba people would wrap their tobacco in tobacco leaves,

(10:06):
so they were again like hundreds and hundreds of years
ago smoking cigars and cube. That actually goes back really
fucking far, probably more than a thousand years, people have
been smoking something broadly similar to a cigar in in
that that's pretty cool. It is kind of neat, right,
I enjoy Yeah, Yeah, there are many things that we consume,

(10:27):
I guess, you know, sometimes we freeze 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. Is still
like rolled by hand. We're gonna talk about that a
lot in these episodes, but yeah, they they obviously different
techniques have become popular over time, and you get better

(10:48):
at it the way you get in anything. I'm sure
modern cigars are much tighter and you know, together better
than cigars in two did. But broadly speaking, like part
I mean, like I'm a car smoker, I tend to
think Cuban cigars are are the best, Uh, I like
to Yeah. Throughout the tragic that the cultural inheritance of

(11:09):
that today, it's like guys who think that they shooting
the entire Republican Party. Yes, yeah, like Ben Shapiro and
friends pretending to perform masculinity and then like going off
to coff and be sick. Yeah, I mean it's it's
a bummer they are. You know, I'm not a I
tend to like I've tried to read a cigar aficionado

(11:29):
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. It's got this like rich
body fucking like cigars are are smoother or not. But like,

(11:50):
I don't know, I'll read them. They'll be like oh
and when you on the 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 and this sucking cigar.
What is wrong with you? People? Go to hell tobacco.
It's unreal. The most pretentious thing that you can that

(12:12):
you can do is be a cigar efficient unreal. Just
just smoke, just kill yourself slowly. It's fine. Um anyway,
that's kind of cute cool that Cubans have been making
cigars for hundreds and hundreds of years. Uh, Now there
were Like, as I said, the way that people most
often used tobacco in the Americas was in religious rights.

(12:34):
And when I'm taught, 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. Okay, tobacco can
be can cause hallucinations and high enough doses. Um, it's

(12:54):
a it's a powerful mind altering drug when you are
taking like massive quantities and 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 And there's a bunch of
different terms for local sort of religious and political leaders

(13:17):
and whatnot. But that dude would inhale a bunch of
smokes 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. Um And
obviously you're getting a lot of smoke that way, like
you're gonna get pretty messed up. But um, and it's again,

(13:38):
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 you're
you're shot getting some tobacco, that's not gonna be Yeah,
your life expectancy isn't long enough for that to be
the thing that kills you in most cases, right, Yeah,
one of the other thousand things it's going to kill

(13:59):
you that we've a limit. Yeah, And it's also worth
noting that there were a number of health uses of tobacco.
It was probably the first effective um insect repellent. One
of those combinations of it was to just rub it
all over your skin, because tobacco is coated in an
oil like that is. Bugs don't it kills bugs like
they don't They don't like um No, I mean, obviously

(14:21):
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, um that, 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. Uh
One of the things that I tried for my book
was mixing it with urine and garlic in order to

(14:43):
create uh an a medic and like a constipation remedy.
And it does work for that. I don't recommend following
that up, but it does. It does do what it
says it. So there were a number of uses for
Native Americans of tobacco that absolutely work in a medical contact.
There were also some that did not. For example, it
was often given to people as a treatment for asthma.

(15:05):
Tobacco does not help with asthma. Yeah, yeah, I think
helping you don't. But also yeah, that's sort of thing
that went away, like it just you know, that's we're
not like that historically separated from people smoking to clear
the lungs, right exactly. And it's also some of the time,

(15:25):
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 t um 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 the tobacco t And there's

(15:47):
a couple of cases of people dying in ayahuasca ceremonies. Now,
I don't know if that's because the t is just
always dangerous or because these specific folks that we're doing it,
we're kind of like grifters and didn't know what they
were doing and weren't actually doing at the true aditional way.
I'm not sure if that that information exists properly, but
this is another way people would take it as a
t which don't don't take tobacco. It's actually pretty easy

(16:09):
to kill yourself by ingesting tobacco. Please don't do that.
I know every now and again, like a pet will
eat a bunch of cigarettes. Yea, kill the ship out
of you. It's extremely deadly tobacco um. But you know,
interesting plant. So the Portuguese were the first Europeans to
begin cultivating tobacco for export to Europe. In fifteen sixty four,

(16:30):
a Royal Navy captain brought the leaf to Ingleland, and
despite early opposition from people who considered a filthy, foul
drug for foreigners, it took off their like wildfire. Yeah,
I just loved it. Like an immediate British or English
response was just like start was then a phobia here,
and then move along from there and work out well,

(16:51):
drugs could have kind of picture part of all of
our lives and in Europe. In the UK, the story
with tobacco was similar to the story with coffee, and
that a bunch of like weirdo Christians are like, this
is a heathen drug, we shouldn't do it. And then
some king will like pick up a cigarette or drink
some coffee and be like, hell, yeah, this ship is
actually pretty dope. You know what. I think We're fine

(17:12):
with tobacco. Yeah. Yeah. In coffee's case, it was literally
the Pope being like, oh, this stuff rules, you know what,
I'm just gonna baptize it. I'm just gonna baptize coffee
now Christians can have it. And then God changed his
mind just like that. Yeah, omnipp being omnipotent, being amazing stuff.
It would be. I would give a lot of kudos
to the Pope if he just baptized marijuana so that

(17:33):
Catholics could sue the federal government restricting it. Just imagining
came doing fentanyl, like the Pope bless us to protect
the kids. Yeah, he's dropped it in the fund says
this ship's red. Two babies are going to have a
rough one. Now put some final in the baptismal font Yeah,

(17:55):
you're gonna want to give them some narcn They're not
going to have a good time. That's what we call
na because that was a That was a church joke
for you you kids anyway, Uh yeah, you know. Yeah.
So the English start smoking tobacco. Uh. It gets cultivated

(18:16):
in the Jamestown settlement in the seventeenth century, and by
the seventeen thirties, the English colonies in Virginia had tobacco
factories that were manufacturing significant quantities of the stuff, mostly
is snuff, which was either inhaled or shoot. That is
the predominant way to consume tobacco in the kind of
the early period of colonization of the America's um was

(18:37):
it like because you see pictures of them sometimes and
they got the old timey pipe right, like the long
pipe with a little ball. Ye yeah, is that like
a class thing? Is that like I can afford to
have a pipe in your con some of its class
cigars are generally like more expensive. Um, snuff is very cheap.
The other thing though, is that again not easy to

(18:59):
get access to stuff to light a pipe or to
light a cigar. So if you're smoking a pipe or 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. Um. But you can

(19:20):
take snuff any time a day. And it's addictive, yeah, yeah,
extremely and it's and it's and it's incredibly addictive. Uh
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

(19:41):
in the field. In eighteen forty three, a French company
given a monopoly over tobacco by King Louis the fourteenth
starts manufacturing the very first close to modern cigarettes. Now
people had been smoking again when Columbus lends up, they
see people like wrapping ship and 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

(20:02):
get like old paper, like newspaper, like just kind of
whatever papery thing. You can fill it with tobacco and
smoke it, you know. And then the friendship in goal
was and have never changed, the friendship and goats, which
are which are still the worst cigarettes on the market.
They're still smoking something close to modern cigarettes today. Yeah,

(20:25):
that was Those were the most common cigarettes we smoked
in Syria, and it was like the goal was that
you couldn't sell in France because the tobacco was still low.
Great yeah, God, what a horrible cigarette. Yeah, but it's
just yeah, it's yeah everywhere. I just have a lot
of memories of like bike racing in France and having

(20:47):
to go in to sign on to these races, and
like you walk in and you just like it's like
like they used to do in nightclubs with the smoke machine.
You know, just like yeah, yeah, like you are also
enough to experience like smoking inside in which isn't a
thing anymore. And you go and you come out, you're like,
thought that was good for me. And then you see
the guy who has never going to kick your ass
in the race, or it's after the race and the

(21:08):
guy has just won the race is having a fucking cigarette,
and like, just remember being one of the most COMMI experiences. Yeah,
he said to the pharmaceutical industry is what he is. 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.

(21:31):
Will Belgrade will teach you what the seventies was like
more ways one yeah and I in a number of ways.
You'll learn about the seventies in Belgrade. Bang in hack Man.
The track suits there are unreal. There's coming back. That's
there's a cycle again. When we're talking about what actually

(21:54):
is like a culturally beautiful use for cigarettes. Squatting in
a field with your buddies in a track suit and smoke. God,
it's incredible cultured experience burning through a pack of knockoff
Marlborough's that have two extra ease in them. It doesn't
have the L's. You know what? You know? Who else

(22:19):
sells discount cigarettes? Is it Sophie? Sophie does Sophie. If
you meet Sophie behind the main gym building after lunch
or after classes, let out, She's always got a couple
of extra packs on hand and she'll sell you. Lucy's
what what great? Am I in? What school? Why am
I out of school? What normal age? I don't like

(22:42):
the association? And yeah, she's still going there every day. Well,
that we don't have we can't fund our podcasts for
some reason, also reflects on you. But here we are, Sophie.
Let's let's let's be honest with ourselves. If if I
were to get caught selling loose cigarettes to children behind

(23:02):
a high school, they would only increase my popularity, not uncancellable.
I'm trying to get I'm trying to get him off
the Jewels anti vaping action. I've got a Joe Camel
tattoo on my chest. Oh my god, let's let's look

(23:23):
let's just God, yeah, I'm gonna spend this whole episode
trying not to say what is a homophobic slur in
this country. By the way, we're back and James is

(23:44):
discussing how difficult it is to talk about cigarettes as
a British person without saying something that's offensive. Ye, that's right. Yeah,
there's a word that we use in Britain to cigarettes.
So American people used to be horrible to gay people
and I'm not going to use it, but it's very
difficult for me, so it is now it doesn't not.
I mean, I think the slur comes from the harmless

(24:08):
term which also if you read jaire or token, you
will see that word used constantly in its original meaning.
It is a little bit out off running sometimes. But
then the people I grew up well, exactinly when my
grandmother lived right in rural Devon, was very like people
still use Steve Aldai. Yeah, but yeah, that that word

(24:29):
would be used to describe like a small it's a
type of food, right, there's a food that use that word,
but also like a small bundle of hay, it's a
bundle of sticks or whatever, any package, and I think
you can call it your Amazon word. Yeah, it's it's
it's anyway, whatever's language, it's it's amazing. So uh yeah,

(24:52):
all yeah. So in the fourteenth or Louis, the fourteen
gives the first French company and monopoly over tobacco production
and they start manufacturing cigarettes, which all have to be
handled at this 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

(25:12):
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 and ship right um. Or you know,
rolling papers even aren't aren't a thing that you could
just go out and get. The other way you would
get it as you would go to a tobaccoist who
has someone rolled them and you would buy them. Um.

(25:35):
Cigarettes were generally, because of this, the least favorite 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 and pick up the cigarette the cigar butts
and like then roll them into a cigarette. Really came

(25:57):
about that? Man? Is the worst smoke I can imagine. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
that is bleak. Yeah, 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. Um,

(26:18):
you gotta give him. He's one of these weirdos. So cigars,
you don't inhale a cigar unless your specific kind of
cigar smoker who believes that everyone else is wrong by
not inhaling their cigars. I forget what they call themselves,
but Rudy is one of them. He's an inhaler. He
takes it all in. Baby. I think cancer is just
repudiated by him. He's that's gonna be bad for the

(26:43):
cancer brand. Man. Yeah, I don't want to give mixed
up with Giuliani. So cigarettes start to get popular with
Europeans during our right after the Crimean War, when soldiers
you know who returned because the Crimean War is a
lot of it's in area is kind of a butting
in around Turkey. Um, and so they encountered Turkish cigarettes

(27:06):
and the Turks have been smoking cigarettes and making cigarettes
for for a bit longer um, and they decided they
like the Turkish tobacco is good, and it's milder than
the stuff that they had had had access to. In
eighteen fifty six, one veteran of the war opens London's
first cigarette factory, which is called Sweet Threes. He has
joined a few years later by another English entrepreneur who

(27:28):
creates the second major cigarette factory in London. And this
guy's name is Philip Morris. So yeah, that's where that
comes good. Yeah, yeah, there he is, Philip. Yeah, a
man with a body count that would rival fucking Hitler.
Uh So, at this point, all cigarettes are still rolled
by hand. Most are still sold by small retailers. But

(27:49):
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 invert market
for cigarettes, tobacco man F. S. Kenney began cigarette production
in New York City as well as a factory in Richmond, Virginia,
turning out brands with names like Full Dress, Sweet Caporal, Kenney,

(28:10):
Straight Cut and Sportsman's Corporal using similar blends. Kenny'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 eighteen seventies as they gained control of of national sales.

(28:31):
There were, of course, hundreds of smaller cigarette firms operating
out of back room 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. Well,
there was one that was particularly great old It was
for them called old Black. Uh No, there's Old Judge

(28:55):
Canvas back and while back Okay, I thought it was
canvas black, like would due to the old lungs. Yeah, Welcome,
I think I just make a Welcome cigarette from the Welcome. Yeah,
you get one on your pillow when you go into
a hotel room. That's a kind of vibe that has.
It reminds me that that old Bill Hicks Bet when
he's like, I love that they put the warning labels
on the cigarettes. Let's me know which ones to avoid.

(29:16):
I'm gonna buy the lung cancer cigarettes low birth weight,
so they'll give me one of the Uh. So, tobacco
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 is. People are increasingly doing in
this period, but the harms are still minimal and they're

(29:37):
pretty much impossible to see on a wide basis. Right,
very few people are able to smoke regularly throughout their
day for one thing, for another thing. You know, there's
there's not good matches the ones that people do have
matches in this period, but they're phosphorus based and they're
incredibly dangerous. It's like carrying a flash bang in your pocket.
I've seen no issue with that. I think that's amazing. Yeah,

(29:58):
that's a good idea. Yeah, I just want to whip
off a rather phosphorus. Great. Is it like literally like
like white phosphorus, like um, I mean, I don't don't
know if it's like white phosphorus, but yeah, I mean
it's it's like a phosphorus like you grind up a
bunch of phosphorus and then you strike it. I think, um,

(30:19):
someone like falling over and then yeah, generly, and of
course your beard oil and hair oil is all alcohol
and petroleum based. Your shirt has been washed in here,
gats the lape just catch immediately on fire. Yeah, cigarettes
will kill you, but not in the way you're expecting. Yeah,
this is the period in which like spontaneous human combustion

(30:42):
starts to be a thing. And it's because everything is
flammable and everyone's carrying around fire bombs in their pockets. Yeah.
But yeah, again, as much as we joke about it, heart,
it's if you were to tell someone's cigarettes are bad, Like,
that's pretty obvious if you're hanging out with someone today
who was a smoke poker, because smoker's cough, right, and like,

(31:02):
you know, you joke about it if you're a smoker,
like you know it's killing me whatever smoked my cigarette.
It's not hard to be like 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, smoker's 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.

(31:24):
The most famous style of houses in New York City.
They have these big tall porches right that are like
four or five or six feet off the ground. Those
big porches that New York and other East Coast cities
have exist because there would be so much ship 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 near your like your house.

(31:47):
So you can just sit there and if somebody, if
people are walking around coughing and looking sick, your first
guest isn't gonna be it's probably the cigarettes. What a
place really was a nightmare to be alive. Jesus CHRISTI,

(32:09):
it's it's striking. But you don't have to make it
very long to produce a bunch of kids and then
leave them fatherless. As true as you. Let's just throw
your corpse in the ship river and the cycle continues.
It's a Cigarettes in the eighteen seventies were still a
novelty to most smokers. Less than two percent of people

(32:32):
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 nineteen or in the
eighteen eighties. Duke had been born on December eighteen fifty
six near Durham, North Carolina, and his father was the

(32:53):
owner of a small tobacco company which was eventually named W.
Duke and Sons Company or W. Duke, Sons and Company.
Duke watched in eighteen seventy three, is a powerful depression
hit the United States and temporarily cigarettes swelled and popularity
because the urban poor could afford cigarettes, right. Um, So
that was you know, when they started to take off.

(33:15):
And he he looks at this, being an intelligent capitalist,
He's like, we're probably going to continue to have horrible
economic crashes because it seems like the system is designed
to do this every like five to ten years. So
I bet cigarettes have a have a bright future ahead
of them. I can find a way to make them cheaper. Um. Yeah,

(33:35):
people started specting them more in times of depressions. They
didn't have food and they wanted to not 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, because they're they're cheap, they're
cheaper than food, and 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

(33:57):
have if you're a fucking tramp living on the street
the eighteen seventies, because there's there's not a whole lot
of other things for you. But but the cigarette is there.
The working man's friend, isn't it. It is the working man.
Look again, if you're on the street in the eighteen seventies,
that held the risks of a cigarette or the least
of your concerns. You might get concussed by floating. Yeah,

(34:20):
it's the ship rivers. The main problem you've got a
deal with, drowning in a river of whole ship. Yeah,
i'd be smoking whatever. Of course, of course, if they
invented crack would be on that too. Yeah, you want
to get out of that situation as quickly as possible. Yeah, absolutely, yeah,
so absolutely so. Duke At this point in time, his

(34:44):
brothers and his father were like locked into this vicious
competition with Bull Durham Tobacco, which was run by a
guy named W. T. Blackwall and was like the big
tobacco producer of the day. Duke saw this as a
pointless fight because they're fighting over plug tobacco. He knew
that the future of the industry he was not in
plug tobacco. It was in producing something convenient and cheap
for urban poor people. In eighteen eighty two, his company

(35:07):
had just ten cigarette rollers on the line, and so
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 fifty more rollers,
which still put him well behind the Allen and Ginter
factory up in Richmond, which employed four hundred and fifty
female cigarette rollers. But when a New York City cigarette
factory went on strike, Duke convinced a hundred and twenty

(35:29):
five of their workers to move down to Durham in
eighteen eighty three, 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 paid jobs for laborers. These
people are a stop gap. He's thinking like Uber here, right,
I want to corner the market and then find a

(35:50):
way to get the human beings out of it, to
replace them with machines. Um, now he's not. Uh, it
works a lot better for cigarettes than it does for Uber.
Turns out this is actually a pretty reasonable business plan
for cigarettes. Both of them will kill you, but it's
a self driving cars and a cigarettes. Again, self driving

(36:10):
castle do it fast and yeah, the cigarettes will do
it a little more ethically though, so he was in.
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 rap fun
your laborers. Uh. For now though he needed them, and
by eighteen eighty five he had about seven hand rollers
in two factories. Most of these are again at young women.

(36:31):
This is reasonably well paying work for young women. Um.
He's got a you know, quality control team that checks
the work. So they're they're trying to put out like
as uniform a product as possible. But that's not really easy.
To do. And everyone in the industry making cigarettes 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

(36:54):
with machine rollers. So a couple of companies actually put
out a bounty in order to produce a machine roller.
And I'm gonna quote what comes next from that, right
up from the Journal of Antiques. A young man named
James Bosnac 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

(37:14):
his machine was prone to break downs, plus there was
a belief that consumers would never accept a machine made cigarette.
Duke put top Mechanics to work, hiring out the bugs
in the Bonzac machine, and signed a deal with the inventor.
During his first year of production, using his team of
important hand rollers, Duke turned out nine point eight million cigarettes.
In contrast, using the Bondsack machines enabled him to produce

(37:35):
seven hundred and forty four million cigarettes. So eighteen eighty
one nine point eight million cigarettes. He gets the Bondsack
machine seven hundred and forty four million. That is a
sign a significant increase in production. Right there is turning
point that's gonna change a few things. So he's making

(37:57):
a lot of cigarettes now, which is great. He's able
to make them half as expensive as they were before. Um,
and he's able to, like number one, sell them for
cheaper and also make a lot more profit for per cigarette.
But there's a problem, which is that only about two
percent of Americans who smoke smoke cigarettes. And so the

(38:17):
fact that he's making seven hundred thirty 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. Um. So this is a this is a
problem for old Duke. Uh. 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.

(38:39):
He's going to have to convince Americans that they actually
want not just to smoke cigarettes, but to smoke a
shipload of them. Because one of the things that becomes
clear is like, well, we went from nine point eight
million is seven four million for nothing. We can make
billions of these years. 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

(39:03):
to actually like create a hunger for billions of cigarettes
in the world in order to make this payoff. And
that's exactly what he does next. Um great, Yeah, so
wonderful world of tobacco marketing. Yes, Uh, it's that. That's
that's what we're that's what we're building towards here. Um. So,

(39:26):
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 BONDSAC machine. It
just is so much more efficient. And because Duke could
helped fix the bonds Act machines, he owns part of
the pattern effectively. So one of the ways he's making
money is that everyone who's making cigarettes is giving money

(39:47):
to Duke. Um. 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 want to smoke cigarettes that are
rolled by machine? Uh, Duke starts bragging that his cigare
retz and 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 a hand rolled. It's it's cleaner, it's more hygienic,

(40:08):
it's more modern. Right, oh, which is technically true? The
next I want to quote from a book called The
Cigarette Century by Alan Brandt. By eighteen eighty four, while
his competitors were still hesitating, Duke had installed to Bonsac
machines in his Darrham factory. A year later, after experimenting
to improve the machines performance, Duke signed a secret contract
in which he agreed that he would produce all his

(40:29):
cigarettes with the Bonzact machine. In return, Bonzac reduced Duke's
royalties to twenty cents per thousand. Duke and Bonzac soon
reached a further agreement guaranteeing Duke a discount on royalties
against all other manufacturers. Also, Duke shrewdly hired one of
Bonzac's disgruntled mechanics, William Thomas O'Brien, to operate his machines,
assuring fewer breakdowns than his competition. By June six, O'Brien

(40:51):
was meticulously maintaining ten machines. Duke placed a heavy emphasis
on efficiency and continuous production. The lessons he learned in
developing the mass production of cigarettes he would sooner apply
more broadly to industrial organization. By becoming bonds Acts premier customer,
Duke secured essential control over its technology and turned Bonds
Acts patent into a powerful competitive advantage. It was increasingly

(41:11):
common for inventors to relinquish their patents to corporations. Duke
understood the control of the Bonds Act patent through his
secret discounted licensing agreement was a critical lever in dominating
the cigarette trade. His deal with Bonds Act 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

(41:33):
here is invent the modern usage of patents like corporations
for corporate advantage. Right, Like, everyone who is who, like
every business leader who follows in any kind of industry
is going to copy him. Yeah, man, that might be
one of the things that's killed more people that cigarettes, right, Like, yeah, yeah,
because a lot of medical patents and stuff that works
on the same fucking idea, you know. Yeah, nearly every

(41:57):
nearly every drug is patented, and of course he's not
trying to do anything evil with it. He just wants
everyone to smoke cigarettes um perfectly, perfectly, morally, uncomplicated, rightly.
I just we talked about it on the episode of
It Could Happen Here on Monday. But U c l
A Is pursuing an IP case in India about a

(42:19):
a prostate cancer drug cardig standy Um, which they're trying
to stop a generic production at cheaper generic production of them.
Just imagining the old handshake me between U c l
A And Duke care and giving people series coming together
on that's beautiful. So the Bondsac machine quickly replaced human

(42:40):
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 in.
Through the eighteen eighties and eighteen nineties, cigarettes smoking increased
and the size of a pack doubled from ten to twenty,
taking advantage of how easy it was to smoke now.
The first proper match books, invented in the early twentieth
century helped or adoption, but by nineteen hundreds still less

(43:02):
than two percent of tobacco consumers are smoking cigarettes. Now,
Duke knows that his dream of selling cigarettes to the
world is not going to work if he can't convince
Americans that they wanted to smoke and they wanted to
smoke as a habit. So he set out to do
something no one had ever really done before, which was
create a market for a product using advertising. Obviously, merchants

(43:23):
since Timeme Memorial 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 that's not
really been a thing in capitalism up to this point. Um,
It's one thing to be like, Hey, I'm Samuel Colt.
I've invented a better handgun like you want. If you

(43:44):
want a handgun, you want a handgun. My job with
my marketing is is to convince you mind's the best, right,
But you're not. You're not convincing people well now I
need a gun, right, like they decided they need a
gun because it's the fucking eighteen eighties or what uh
fucking Duke is like these people are fine without cigarettes.
That's this isn't a problem. There's not a need that
I'm trying to serve here. I have to create it

(44:07):
um and one of the first plays he's going to do.
This is really quite innovative and it ends in a
surprising place. So in the late eighteen eighties, French tradesmen
had set to 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

(44:30):
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 eighteen eighties he had a print
shop installed in his Durham factory that can make color prints.
At first, he printed out the standard advertisements and coupons
that most businessmen used, but soon he hit upon an

(44:51):
idea and I'm gonna quote from Duke University here, with
each pack of cigarettes, a small cardboard insert was added
to stiff in the box. Duke employed a little imagination
turn these simple workhorses into a powerful marketing tool. By
printing the brand name of the cigarettes along with the
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

(45:13):
or educational information on them. Photographs of actresses women placed
in a variety of poses and often we're rather revealing
costumes for the time were also used on the insert
cards and exceeded all expectations and their popularity on the public.
So a lot of these trading cards, and these are
the first trading cards, are outright pornographic, at least by

(45:34):
nineteenth century standards, and there are outcries against the practice
because the people who want them the most are are
young boys. Are kids, right, Kids start smoking to collect
trading cards. That's what juveniles how juvenile smoking starts at
the United Um. They want to collect baseball cards and
to do so they have to buy packs of cigarettes.

(45:56):
And this 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
busy bodies included Duke's father, who wrote this letter to
his son in eighteen ninety four. My dear son, I

(46:18):
have received the enclosed letter from the Reverend from the
Reverend John C. Hocut, and am 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 and the interest of morality, and in
the hope that you can invent a proper substitute for
these pictures, which which will answer your requirements as an
advertisement as well as an inducement to purchase. His views

(46:39):
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 is
wrong and its pernicious effects upon young men and womanhood,
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

(46:59):
to the 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 gratefully strengthen the
arguments against cigarettes and the legislative holes 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 fined with it um

(47:27):
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

(47:49):
today with baseball cards and Pokemon. Duke had discovered important
incentives for smoking in the cultural rit rules of youth.
We owe pokemon to cigarettes. That's a redible Yeah. Yeah,
I'm just imagine buying a pack of mulgraves to see
him like a scourish, a shiny char milion or something. Honestly,

(48:10):
what about our culture wouldn't be better if, like, in
order to get a magic the gathering deck, you had
to smoke three entire cartons of pall moss. Yeah. I
love that. It's just It's like the happy meal of cigarettes.
It's great, it's perfect. Just me. It like some nerdy

(48:30):
sixteen year old like lying on his side like puking
as he smokes his fiftieth cigarette of the day. I
need a lightning bolt card trying to evolve his Peaka
you get dyes of smoking inhalation trying to get a bulbasore.

(48:51):
I choose you lung cancer. Now you know what else
will give you lung cancer? James? Is it the cigarettes?
And Sophie saying to childre behind the it is. It
is the cigarettes that Sophie's sells to children behind the
school are very likely to cause cancer. But you know
that's the way it works. Okay, Ah, God, aren't we

(49:28):
living well today? What a beautiful world we have in
this America that I love? How are you all, Sophie?
I'm just thoroughly disappointed in your actions? What else is new? Well, Sophie,

(49:49):
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 and Sting satively, the 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

(50:11):
less consumption or at least pickier consumers. Cigarettes smoked quickly
and more conveniently than other tobacco products, and they caused
less mess. There 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 positive. Um.

(50:36):
Now that said, you also have like more people smoking
in public places, which is a negative. But anyway. The
New York Times publish as 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 climbing for the reward of self

(50:57):
inflicted injury. Many a boy under twelve years is sting
for the entire collection, which necessitates the consumption of nearly
twelve thousand cigarettes. You're like trying to collect these picture
books and smoking twelve thous cigarettes. That is how you
catch your mole. Oh that is a rough music set

(51:21):
of cigarettes. Yeah, that's a cigarettes that wow, Yeah that
is that is an outrageous quantity of cigarettes. Um. Duken
just hit a hop on a baller way to move cigarettes.
He'd effectively invented the concept of collectible products as advertisements.
He starts doing like sweep steaks right where you collect,
you know, different things that are on the boxes to

(51:42):
turn them in if to see if you can win
like a prize, and it's he also just like gives stuff.
So basically everything from how 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 way is to get cigarettes
and kids mouths. Um, we like all the entire toolbox

(52:05):
of capitalism is being created. It's being created to push
cigarettes to children. 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

(52:27):
similar amounts of cash into their 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 country side up
with ads with like billboards and other kinds of big
public ads. Is Duke spending all this money on cigarette ads? Wow?
So he inadverts? Gave us the monkey Wrench Gang. Yeah,

(52:52):
so he has. 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 my medical device patents. He's given us
trading cards. He's given us like sweepstakes and like toy collecting. Uh.
And he's given us uh fucking billboards and the monkey
Rinch Gang. So that's that's a lot for one guy

(53:15):
to make it real makes back 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 shipload of cash to make ads.
So just like some young like upstart who wants to

(53:36):
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 eighteen eighties, Duke sent out regular feelers to
his competitors asking if they'd be open to a buy out.
Most of them turned him down, but as the eighteen
hundreds drew to a close, the fortunes of Duke and
his competitors, The fortunes that Duke and his competitors were

(53:58):
throwing into ads had them all looking for a better way.
They're just spending too much damn money competing with each other.
In January of eighteen ninety, 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 of all cigarettes sales in

(54:20):
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 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,

(54:41):
and the Trust brought it into competitive bidding for tobacco harvests,
as Alan Brandt makes clear, and a single minded quest
to control the future of tobacco, Duke helped invent the
modern concept of Omega Corporation, blazing a trail that would
be followed by every ambitious capitalist to come quote. Together,
these three departments Audit, which over saw accounting and cost control,

(55:01):
leaf and retail markets, assured the movement of cured tobacco
from warehouse to factory to sales. Individuals with specific expertise
head at each department. The Audit department, for example, introduced
innovative accounting procedures that would later be utilized by many
other industries. The successive Duke's enterprise, which became a model
for other industries, rested on salaried executives who could assure
the efficient functioning of their aspect of the business, as

(55:24):
well as tight coordination with other departments and activities. In short,
he invented the middle manager. Just another wonderful contribution to society.
He's really just humming along here creating the modern world. Yeah,
he's taking 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

(55:46):
that's going to make up most of the ranks of
the emerging middle class. Right what what are a lot
of people in the middle class, their fucking middle managers, right, um,
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 like build the idea of a kind of

(56:08):
new class structure in a lot of ways. Obviously, like
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, and it's like
this company we handle production. This company like we we

(56:28):
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 the consumers. He's rolling
all of this into one giant venture, and instead of
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.

(56:50):
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 with it. Yeah. It so it's a convertically
integrated supplied Jane right, exactly exactly. Uh so that's pretty cool. Um.
Everywhere he cut out independent manufacturers and free agents, small reseilers,
and rollers. The entire tobacco market went from an artisanal

(57:13):
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 to modernity. Yeah, he deemed me.
I've just realized that this guy is like Jeff Bezos's,

(57:34):
he's the Bezos of cigarettes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, which Jeff Bezos,
I'm sure we'd love to be the Besis and cigarettes,
along with being Bezos almost everything out. So it's a
great thing to be the Bezos of um. So kudos
to cigars for being respect Yeah, respect to the cigar
industry for fighting back against this um. But obviously Duke

(57:55):
barely notices that, like he's you know, losing out on
this chunk of the business. Uh. He tells his board that, quote,
the world is now our market for our product. And
in nineteen o two 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 form the British American Tobacco Corporation. Of course,

(58:16):
that's when the British one's called yes, and they do.
They're doing a tobacco imperialism, right. They're going out with
the 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

(58:39):
Duke and the cigarette. 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
you may be if your cigarette smoker in Turkey in
the early cigarette smoker in France, as cigarette smoker in

(58:59):
the United dates, 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 then 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 gonna smoke

(59:20):
this specific kind of cigarette and everyone on Earth does
it the same way. Wow. Yeah, yeah, it's crazy. It's like, yeah,
he's now more or less invented like the global commodity right, yeah, yeah,
this is like it's it's one of the very first yeah,
um and probably the first, I think the first that's
like an individual consumer good, right, because this is starting

(59:40):
to happen with like steel and with fuel and stuff. Right.
But you as an individual are like going down to
the store to pick up you know, some fucking patrole eum,
some cold 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 or tim Buck two. Um.
It hasn't spread quite that far yet, but that this

(01:00:01):
is what's going to happen. Right. By nineteen o four,
cigarettes had finally cracked 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, 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

(01:00:24):
not understand why people like cigarettes. He does not like cigarettes.
He just is betting that they're going to be a
big deal, right, perfect. Um, So the you know, 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

(01:00:47):
Sherman Anti Trust Act, which had also been created in
eight 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 of the
cigarette trade, but seventy five of old tobacco sold in
the United States. Du could even recently started buying up
companies who were producing liquorice paste to make sweeter flavored cigarettes.

(01:01:10):
So he's again a fucking trailblazer. Yeah, yeah, no, trail
in a great direction. Necessarily maybe not in the best direction.
But you can't you can't deny the man knows what
he's doing. This is a dude who loves to make
How rich was this guy? I mean, it doesn't try
because if you if you actually translate it, it's just

(01:01:30):
gonna wind up being in the tens of millions, which
makes it like, effectively he's a billionaire in his stay right,
like for everything that matters, you know, he has he
has infinity dollars. You do have to think of how
different would the world be if we've just given him
Twitter and he could have done an Elon Musk and
stole the war in Ukraine instead of inventing new ways

(01:01:51):
to give kids. This new cigarette's gonna work as a
boat briefly. So this puts Duke about twenty years ahead
of the invention of the first menthal cigarettes. And we're
not going to talk a lot about this, but I
have to let you know that mental cigarettes are invented
by a man named Lloyd spud Hughes. Very funny, very

(01:02:16):
funny name. Um. So Duke is like a generation ahead
of the competition. But that's not enough to protect him
from the 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 for. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Rubber coming out and supporting the DJ Yeah, they well

(01:02:38):
they don't do a good job of this, so I'm
not supportive, but it is more than they try to
do today, I'm more familiar with the not doing a
good job part. Yeah. Well, so during this period, the
d o J 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, U

(01:03:00):
S Steel, and American Tobacco. 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 that ballpark. Yeah, impressively, not great. Yeah,
So Teddy Roosevelt, the trustbuster, forces the d o J
uh to go after Duke. Yeah, that's what that's what

(01:03:23):
he's doing. He's busting trees. Well, there's a lot of
funny coming out of 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 after them. There were there were a lot of
more problematic things than Teddy Roosevelt hated, but in this case,

(01:03:46):
he's broadly speaking, doing the right thing. Uh. And and
the d o J is like, yeah, you've you've made
a monopoly. This is not legal and you have to
dismantle American Tobacco. Now, this is impossible because Duke is
vertically into graded 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've

(01:04:08):
been fifteen years before. So the d o J, 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 and whatnot. Uh. And obviously while this is
going on, American Tobacco appeals. The Supreme Court rules against

(01:04:29):
them in nineteen eleven, 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 the
Duke had done to weave the companies together, they can't
actually be cut apart. Quote. The settlement was meant to
a share competition among the five newly constituted companies. Each

(01:04:49):
received factories, distribution and storage facilities, and name brands, But
given the size and complexity of the business, there existed
in superable obstacles to the creation of perfect competitive conditions.
No matter the industry was restructured, there simply was no
going back. So Duke continues to run this chunk of
American tobacco. Uh, it remains in his control. British American

(01:05:10):
tobacco is what remains in his control. Uh, and his
fellow owners, even though they're all competing, continue to collude
to fix prices in order to maximize profits. So he's
it's not as bad, but they've gone from a monopoly
to an oligopoly. Right, that's that's that's what the d
o J succeeds in actually doing. Great job. And since

(01:05:31):
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 South Carolina. Just stop, he cannot.
He he does. When he gets old and is about

(01:05:52):
to die, he gives most of his fortune tens of
millions of dollars to Trinity College and Durham which is
renamed Duke University in his honor. And that's and that's
where we get Duke University. Yeah, didn't they're coming yet,
great man. They have a good public health school. Now yes, yes, yeah,
well they honestly a lot of the best information about
the cigarette industry and all of the fund up ship

(01:06:13):
it did comes from Duke University. They have great resources
for understanding tobacco an fritasity. Yeah, so, I mean to
to the university's credit, they don't like shy away from
the But also what look, Duke is immoral because he's
a capitalist and he is profiting off of people's surplus
labor in in a number of ways that are unethical.
There's nothing wrong with him selling cigarettes at this point

(01:06:34):
because he has no he dies in nineteen there is
no nothing that even approaches a medical consensus about cigarettes
and cancer. At this point. You can't blame it on him, right,
He's doing horrific ship, and there will people who work
for him, I'm sure, absolutely, like destroying unions and whatnot,
and and and there's like a bunch that's unethical. But
the fact that he's selling cigarettes is not something that

(01:06:55):
I would put on his soul because you know, there's
no no way for him to have known that were harmful,
you know. Um. In nineteen nineteen, a US surgical student
named Alton Oschner was called along with several of his
peers to observe the autopsy of a lung cancer victim.
His teacher was excited to have an example of the
rare illness in their operating theater. He wanted Alton and

(01:07:16):
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 never got to
see another lung cancer. Nobody gets this ship less than
the Thirty years later, lung cancer would be the number
one cause of death in the United States. As Robert
Proctor of Stanford University told one interviewer, the cigarette is

(01:07:38):
the deadliest artifact in the history of human civilization. It
killed about a hundred million people in the twentieth century twice.
And honestly, he's probably low balling it. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
and it's before you look at Yeah, this sort of

(01:07:58):
downstream things. Jesus Christ, that is that is quite an adult. Yeah,
we can Luke University. We can argue about fascism and
communism and the things the great leap forward in the
SINGLESM what what killed the most people? But man, nobody's
nobody's touching the cigarettes. Numbers it's right, the cigarettes out

(01:08:23):
here dropping three pointers every shot. It's the goat of
killing people. I'm eagerly awaiting Michael Tracy to like go
recuperate the cigarettes's reputation on Twitter or something. Yeah, so, James,
you got anything you want to plug before we roll out? Afar?
I do another podcast, you do too, sometimes it could

(01:08:44):
happen here to listen to him. It's about how things
are falling apart and people are putting them back together.
It's a good podcast. It is a good podcast. Yeah.
I would say it's one of the only two podcasts
that should be legal. Yeah, yeah, fair enough. And if
we're doing basically what he did with cigarettes, but to podcasts,
and very slowly we're we're stealing all the microphones and

(01:09:07):
giving everyone cants and I mean hopefully going to kill
a hundred million people of course of the century. It's
it's that's not yeah, and see you've plad your goals.
Yeah we do. We do have a live show if
you survive that long. Yeah, it's but I think it's

(01:09:29):
over twenty six in October. Yeah, that's it. We sit
and everything. Um so check that ship out, motherfucker. Um
buy tickets to the live show, and uh, look great.
I'm not going to tell you you should smoke cigarettes,
but have you ever tried okay, smooth, flavorful taste of

(01:09:52):
a camel. It's like driving through the desert in early November,
you know, when you've just got that your dry. We're
just taking in a Marlborough red. Oh god, the flavor country.
That's what people are missing today, Sophie. Do you know
how few Gin's ears have been the flavor country. That's

(01:10:17):
their heritage, Sophie, that's their heritage. Stop it alright. This
is not cash money. Pick up, pick up some cigarettes, kids.
It very much has cash money. Behind the Bastards is
a production of cool Zone Media. For more from cool
Zone Media, visit our website cool zone media dot com,

(01:10:39):
or check us out on the I Heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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