Also media.
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 Lichtman seems very unhappy, which is not.
I just have extreme secondhand embarrassment.
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 forsaken reason. I know, I know, and that is not very cash money of you, Robert.
I think it's extremely cash money of me. But here to be the tie breaking vote is James Stout. Now, James, you're British, so 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 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 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 Camillah I made. I made an ethical decision that even the King of England deserves to have his set be private.
I just like, don't need nobody.
Needed, Okay, just 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.
Yeah?
That and his he's got some he's got a very specific kink okay, yeah, yeah, as well as William Yeah, okay, little.
Is this kink murdering his first wife.
No, it's it's it's a tampon thing.
Yeah, not expected.
Yeah, we we know far too much about what Charles has been sending my heart breaking him out. I would say, don't don't google it. Look, I'm telling you the truth, but don't google this. Okay, hey, my heart anyway, So I just broke my promise right there not to not to laugh at the King of England's sexual escapades. James, how do you feel about cigarettes? Oh?
I think I wasn't expecting that kind of ambiguous. I guess.
Yeah, a lot of the bad things happened 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.
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 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 believe that every single drug, even the one 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. There's a there's nothing like a cigarette someone tried to kill or hurt.
You, which is why they're so valued about outside of British nightclub Yeah, exactly.
You never know when a bottle's coming for your fucking temple there, you don't. Yeah, that's it, you know, I I but I get it, like it's one of those things. The 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 maybe 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 s 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 going to 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. It's like the cigarettes in order to get people to smoke, the tobacco industry had to invent modern civilizations. And that's that's a fascinating story and I
just want to talk about it. It's 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 oh five, number one, cigarettes not a massive risk above like walking outside your door, you know. But also you just don't have good data.
So yeah, the ambient level of smoking is pretty high just from existing in any urban.
Ama, 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 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, 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 ground. Finally enough, they probably also chewed it. There were a couple of different devices
they had for smoking it. Next, we will never know which was like the first, right, like we just know which ones. We kind of have written records of early yes, 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, we're the Maya the first people who are 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 spread from Central America to the Mississippi Valley and beyond and was quickly adopted by neighboring peoples from like four hundred to seven hundred a d is when you see most of this spread, and it makes it all the way out
to the fucking Caribbean.
Oh yeah, that's where Columbus runs into it at first, right.
That is exactly the next 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 is modern day Haiti and the Dominican Republic, via a weird two pronged nosepipe. So they would smoke it, but they would like inhale it through this pipe that like.
No snokel kind of situation.
Yeah, it looks a little bit. It looks a little bit like a canula. Okay, yeah, like a nasal canula.
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 stock of dry like the dried stock of marijuana plants, because it's hollow and so I just had to kind of find wybins 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 nicotine rustica through directly into your mucous membrane.
Yeah, I can see that one being pretty rough on the old excituses as well.
I would not. It's one of those things you have to divorce kind of you're thinking about tobacco in this period from modern day because it's not number one, most people smoking it. This is not an habitual thing for them. It's a ritual thing for them.
Right.
There are people, certainly by the time Columbus as 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.
Uh.
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, in part because it's kind of hard to when you're smoking at them but yes, right.
Yeah, there's a lot of work that I imagine goes into producing a nose cigarette, from growing the tobacco.
Dry and get out and yeah.
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, 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 going to just make a fire because you want like a fucking smoke in the.
Like yeah fire, drill out, get a piece of word out, rub it up.
At the idea.
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 we'll smoke before them 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, Like generally, that's probably how it would have gone when Columbus winds up, you know, meeting these people in fourteen ninety two 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 and hills.
Yeah.
Yeah, It's also worth noting that over in Cuba people would wrap their tobacco in tobacco leafs, so they were again like hundreds and hundreds of years ago, smoking cigars and cubea. That actually goes back really fucking far. It probably more than a thousand years people have been smoking something broadly similar to a cigar in that.
That's pretty cool.
It is kind of neat, right, I enjoy it.
Yeah. Yeah.
There are many things that we consume, I guess, you know, sometimes we eat freese, vegetables and stuff, but it's not much that we consume that people consumed a thousand years ago, and it made in a pretty similar fashion. Right, Like I've been to a Cuban cigar factory. Lisi is still like rolled by hand.
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 it anything. I'm sure modern cigars are much tighter and you know, together better than cigars in fourteen ninety two did. But broadly speaking, like part I mean, like I'm a cigar smoker, I tend to think Cuban cigars are the best.
I like to yeah, throughout the tragic that the cultural inheritance of that today it's like guys who think that they should enjoy a cigar.
The entire Republican party.
Yeah, yeah, like Ben Shapiro and friends pretending to perform masculinity and then like going off to coffin 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 afishing out on 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, I'm 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 fucking like cigars are smooth or not, but like 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 in this fucking cigar. What is wrong with you? People? Go to hell consumption, It's unreal. The most pretentious thing that you can that you can do is be a cigar efficient on cigar. Yeah, unreal. Just smoke, Just kill yourself slowly. It's fine anyway. That's kind of cute. 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 rights. 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. Oh wow, Okay, Tobacco can can cause hallucinations. And high enough doses. It's a it's a powerful mind altering drug when you are taking like
massive quantities. Yeah, 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. And obviously you're getting a lot of smoke that way, like you're gonna get pretty messy up. But 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 you're shot gunning some tobacco, that's not going to be what kills you.
Yeah, your life expectancy isn't long enough.
For that to be the thing that kills you in most cases, right, Yeah, yeah, one of the other thousand things that's going to kill you that we've eliminated now is going to kill you.
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 those combinations of it was to just rub it all over your skin because tobacco's coated in an oil like that is. Bugs don't it kills bugs like? They don't, They don't like I mean, obviously there are specific bugs that do feed on tobacco,
but for the most part, it keeps insects away. So people would ub it on themselves 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. 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 it was also 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 you don't, but yeah, that's not a thing that when like it's just you know, that's where not like that historically separated from people smoking to clear the lungs.
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 the 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, 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.
Yeah, I know every now and again, like a pet will eat a bunch of cigarettes.
Yeah, and and 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 fifteen sixty four, a Royal Navy captain brought the leaf to Ingoland, and despite early opposition from people who considered it a filthy, foul drug for foreigners, it took off their like wildfire.
Yeah, I just love that. Like the immediate British or English response.
Was just like to start was then a phobia and then move along from there and work out of this what drug is going to have become a pitcher 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, oh, yeah, this shit's actually pretty dope. You know what, I think. We're fine with tobacco.
Yeah.
In coffee's case was literally 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.
And then God changed his mind just like that. Yeah, omnip being amazing stuff.
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.
Just imagining him doing fentanyl, like.
The Pope bless ues fitnyl to protect the kids.
Yuck, he's dropped it in the.
Fund to God says, this ship's red. You baby is going to have a rough one. Now put some fitanyl in the baptismal fought. Yeah, no, you're gonna want to give them some narcan, they're not gonna have a good time.
Yeah, that's what we call it the narth acts because that was a that was a church joke for you you kids anyway, Uh yeah, yeah.
So the English start smoking tobacco. Uh it gets cold ctivated in the Jamestown settlement in the seventeenth century, and by the seventeen thirties, the English colonies in the Virginia had tobacco factories that were manufacturing significant quantities of the stuff, mostly as 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 Americas.
Was it like because you see pictures of them sometimes and they got the old timey pipe, right, the long pipe with a little bowlp yep.
Yeah. Is that like a class thing?
Is that like I can afford to have a pipe in your conus?
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 or 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 anytime of day.
Man, it's addictive, yeah, yeah, extremely, 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 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 have been smoking again, when Columbus lends up, they
see people like wrapping shit in corn cobs. Those are like 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.
Yeah, and it's the frenchship ankle was and have never.
Changed, the French gotts, which are which are still the worst cigarettes on the market.
They're still smoking something close to modern cigarettes today.
Yeah, that was. Those were the most common cigarettes we smoked in Syria. And it was like the galas that you couldn't sell in France because the tobacco was too low grade. Yeah, God, what a horrible cigarette. Yeah, well
it's 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 like they used to do in nightclubs with the smoke machine, you know, just like yeah, yeah, yeah, Like you are also 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 that was good for me. And then you see the guy who is never going to kick your ass in the race, or it's after the race and the guy who's just won the race is having a fucking cigarette, and just remember being one of the most experiences. Yeah, he's here 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 will Belgrade will teach you what the seventies was like.
Waste one.
Yeah, in a number of ways you'll learn about the seventies.
In Belgrade, banging hackcuts, go to bell Man.
Oh, the tracksuits there are unreal.
That's coming back.
There's a cycle again 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 smoking.
God, it's incredible culture experience.
Burning through a pack of a knockoff Marlboroughs that have two extra ease in them.
It doesn't have the l it's just a you know what.
You know who else sells discount cigarettes?
Is it? Sophie? Is that what 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 grade am I in? What school? Why am I out of school?
Normal age?
I don't like the association, and.
Yeah, she's still going there every day.
Well, that we don't have, we can't fund our podcast.
For some reason, also reflects on you, so we.
Ask you to stop. But here we are, Sophie. Let's let 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.
Do not take.
Un I'm trying to get I'm trying to get them off the Jewels anti action. I've got a Joe Camel tattoo on my chest.
Oh my god, let's.
Let's just add.
Yeah, I'm going to 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 discussing how difficult it is to talk about cigarettes as a British person without saying something that's offensive.
That's right. Yeah, there's a word that we use in Britain. Cigarettes.
So American people used to be horrible to gay people and I'm not going to use it. It's very difficult for me.
So it is now it doesn't not. I mean, I think the slur comes from the harmless term, which also if you read JR or token, you will see that word used constantly in its original meaning.
It is a little bit off footing sometimes.
But then the people I grew up well Exatinly where my grandmother lived, right in rural Devon was very like people still use the valdai.
Yeah, but yeah, that 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, a bundle of sticks or whatever.
Yeah, any package, and I think get one.
You can call it your Amazon word.
Yeah, it's it's it's anyway whatever language. So it's amazing, so uh yeah all yeah. So in the fourteenth or Louis, the fourteenth gives the first French company a 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 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 shit right, 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 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 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 read.
And it came out.
Then, man, it is the worst smoke I can imagine.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that is bleak.
Yeah 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. You gotta give him, he's one of these weirdos. 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 refused.
That's gonna be bad for the cancer brand.
Man.
Yeah, I don't want to get.
Mixed up with Juliani. So cigarettes start to get popular with Europeans during hour right after the Crimean War when soldiers you know who, returned, because the Crimean War is a lot of it's in areas kind of a budding in around Turkey, and so they encounter Turkish cigarettes. And the Turks have been smoking cigarettes and making cigarettes for a bit longer, and they decide they like the Turkish tobacco is good and it's milder than the stuff that
they had add 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 creates the second major cigarette factory in London. And this guy's name is Philip Morris. Oh wow, so yeah, that's where that comes from.
It yeah he is.
Yeah, there he is old Philip Boris. Yeah, 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 going to quote now from a write up in the Journal
of Antiques. Seeing an opportunity in the emerging market for cigarettes, tobacco man F. S. Kenny 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, Kenny, Straight Cut, and Sportsman's Corporeal. Using similar blinds. Kenny's chief competitor in the New York market was Good Winning 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 seventy five percent 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. Well, yeah, there was one that was particularly great old. It was one of them called old Black. Uh no, there's Old Judge canvas back and.
Well, okay, I thought it was canvas black, like what it would do due to the old lungs. For the yeah, welcome, I think I just make a welcome cigarettember welcome. Yeah, you get one on your pillow when you go into a hotel room. That's the kind of vibe that has.
Yeah. It reminds me that that old Bill Hicks bet when he's like, I'm love that they've put the warning labels on the cigarettes. Lets me know which ones to a void. I'm not gonna buy the lung cancer cigarettes low birth weights though. Give me one of that. 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, 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 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, that's a good idea. Yeah, I just want to whip off a rot of phosphorus.
Great. Is it like literally like like white phosphorus, Like.
I mean, I 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 foss f us and then you strike it.
I think, amazing, falling over and then yeah.
Yeah.
And of course your beard oil and hair oil is all alcohol and petroleum based. Your shirt has been washed in pure ghastly, so you just gotch immediately on fire.
Yeah. Yeah, cigarettes will kill you, but not in the way you're expecting.
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 fire bombs in their pockets. Yeah, but yeah, again, as 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 smoker, because smoker's cough, right, and like, you know, you joke about it if you're a smoker, like, yeah, you know it's killing me whatever smoking 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. 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 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 near lake your house.
So you could just sit there and watch the sling by.
If somebody, if people are walking around coughing and looking sick, your first guest isn't going to be it's probably the cigarettes.
A lot of place.
It really was a nightmare to be alive.
Yeah, Jesus Christ, I'm surprised of the species we made it cost that.
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.
That's true. As you floaged off down the.
Let's just throw your cup corpse in the shit river and the cycle continues.
Yeah, it's a circle of life.
Cigarettes in the eighteen seventies were still a novelty to most smokers. Less than two percent 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. Then a man named James Buchanan Duke stepped in the nineteen or in the eighteen eighties.
Duke had been born on December twenty third, eighteen fifty six near Durham, North Carolina, and his father was the owner of a small tobacco company, which was eventually named W. Duke and Sons Company or W. Duke Sons in Company.
Duke watched in eighteen seventy three 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 the 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 bright future ahead of them if I can find a way an amazing cheaper Yeah.
People start expecting them more in times of depression because they 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 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 eighteen seventies, because there's there's not a whole lot of other things for you, but the cigarette is there.
Wait, 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, they are risks of a cigarette, or the least of certain you might.
Get concussed by floating to.
Yeah, it's the shit rivers, the main problem you've got to deal with.
He's drowning in a river of wholeseshit.
Yeah, I'd be smoking whatever. Of course, of course they invented crack beyond that too.
Yeah, you want to get out of that situation as quickly as possible.
Yeah, absolutely, Yeah, so a godsent.
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 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 was not in plug tobacco, it was producing something convenient and cheap for urban poor people.
In eighteen eighty two, his company 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 one hundred and twenty 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 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.
No, he's not saying he's working freebit 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 cause, and a cigarettes get his self driving cass will do it fasten.
Yeah, the cigarettes will do it a little more ethically. Though 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 fuck your laborers. For now though he needed them, and by eighteen eighty five he had about seven hundred hand rollers in two factories. Most of these are again a 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 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 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 Bosnak 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 break down, plus there was a belief that consumers would never accept
a machine made cigarette. Duke put top mechanics to work, iiring out the bugs in the Bonzack 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 Bonsack machines enabled him to produce seven hundred and forty four million cigarettes in eighteen eighty eight. So eighteen eighty one, nine point eight million cigarettes, he gets the Bonsack machine
seven hundred and forty four million. That is a snick at significant increase in production.
That right there as a turning point. Huh, that's going to change a 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 for per cigarette. But there's problem, which is that only about two percent of Americans who smoke smokes itigarettes, and so the fact that he's making seven hundred and 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. So this is a 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 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 nine point eight million is seven hundred and forty four million for nothing.
We could make billions of these 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 payoff. And that's exactly what he does next.
Great, yeah, so wonderful world of tobacco marketing.
Yes, it's that's what we're that's what we're building towards here. 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 Bonzac machine. It just is so much more efficient. And because Duke hand helped fix the Bonzac machines, 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 want to smoke cigarettes that are rolled by machine? Duke starts bragging that his cigarettes or machine rolled. He puts it on the packages as like a way of like, just what if we just trying to convince people that machine rolled is better than handwriting. It's cleaner, it's more hygienic, it's more modern, right, all
of 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 two Bonzack machines in his Durrow 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 Bonzac machine.
In return, Bonzac reduced Duke's royalties to twenty cents per thousand. Duke and Bonzac soon reached a further agreement guaranteeing Duke of twenty five percent 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 eighteen eighty six, O'Brien was meticulously maintaining ten machines.
Duke placed a heavy emphasis on efficiency and continuous production. The lessons he learned to developing the mass production of cigarettes he would soon apply more broadly to industrial organization. By becoming Bonzak's premier customer, Duke secured essential control over its technology and turned Bonzac's patent into a powerful competitive advantage. It was increasingly common for inventors to relinquish their patents
to corporations. Duke understood the control of the bonsacked patent through his secret discounted licensing agreement was a critical lever in dominating the cigarette trade. His deal with Bonzac 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 in the modern usage of patents 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.
Yes, yeah, man, that might be one of the things that's killed more people than.
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 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, perfectly, perfectly, morally, uncomplicated, ironically.
I just we talked about it on the episode of It Could Happen Here on Monday. But UCLA is pursuing an IP case in India about a prostate counter drug called egg Standy, which they're trying to stop a generic production, a cheaper generic production of But I'm just imagining the old handshake mean between CLA and Duke here and giving people king service. The thing.
Coming together.
That's beautiful. So the Bonzac 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 in. Through the eighteen eighties and eighteen nineties, cigarette 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 matchbooks, invented in the early twentieth century helped spur adoption, but by nineteen hundred, still less 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 that 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 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 that's not really been a thing in capitalism up to this point. It's one thing to be like, hey, I'm Samuel Colt. I've invented a better handgun like you want. If you
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 convincing people well now I need a gun, right, like they decide they need a gun because it's the fucking eighteen eighties or what 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. 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, for much tradesmen had set to making stiff, colorful cards to advertise their businesses. These cards 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 eighteen eighties, 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 stiff in the box.
Duke employed a little imagination and turned these simple workhourses into a powerful marketing tool by printing the brand name of the cigarettes along with a picture that was part of a larger series in 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 along the public. So a lot of these trading cards, and these are the first trading cards, are outright pornographic, at least by nineteenth century standards, and there are outcries against the practice because the people who want them the most are young boys. Are kids, right, kids
start smoking to collect trading cards. That's what how juvenile smoking starts at the United States. Great They want the collect baseball cards and to do so they have to buy packs of cigarettes. 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 busy bodies included Duke's father, who wrote
this letter to his son in eighteen ninety four. My dear son, I have received the enclosed letter from the Reverend from the Reverend John C. Hokott, 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 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 is 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 against cigarettes and 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 fined with 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 to cigarettes. Amazing, that's incredible.
Yeah, yeah, wow, I'm just imagine buying a pack of mulbras to see him like a scourge, a shiny Cha median or something.
Honestly, 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 Paul Moss.
Yeah. I love that. It's just it's like the happy meal of cigarettes. It's great. It's perfect.
To match it like some nerdy 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.
He's trying to evolve his peak atue good dies of smoking inhalation, trying to get a bulbo sore.
I choose you lung cancer.
Now you know what else will give you lung cancer? James?
Is it the cigarettes that Sophie's saying to children behind the it is?
It is the cigarettes that Sophie's sells to children behind the school are very likely to cause cancer. But uh, you know that's the way it works, Okay.
So.
Ah, God, aren't we 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, 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 any time. 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. 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 clamoring for the reward of self inflicted injury.
Many a boy under twelve years is striving for the entire collection, which necessitates the consumption of nearly twelve thousand cigarettes. They're like trying to collect these picture books and smoking twelve thousand cigarettes.
That is how you got your mole. Oh if that is a rough a music.
That is an setting amount of cigarettes.
Yeah, that's a lot of cigarettes.
Wow, Yeah, that is that is an outrageous quantity of cigarettes. Duke can just hit upon a baller way to move cigarettes. He'd effectively 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 how McDonald's happy Meals and like Funko pops to every product sweep steaks 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 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 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 in ad gave us the monkey wrench Gang?
Yeah, so he is. 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 device 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 Wrinch Gang. So that's that's a lot for one guy. Yeah, real mikes 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 upstart who wants to sell cigarettes to people isn't going to 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 buyout. 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 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 ninety percent of all cigarette
sales in the United States. Duke had formed a monopoly, getting his competitors to agree to fixed 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, and the trust brought an end to
competitive bidding for tobacco harvests. As Alan Brandt makes clear, in a single minded quest to control the future of tobacco, Duke helped invent the modern concept of a mega corporation, 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 of the business, as 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 them 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, 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, 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 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 managed by middle managers who are
operating like rungs inside of this larger corporate structure. 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. Yeah, So it's a convertically integrated supply.
Chain, right, exactly exactly, So that's pretty cool. Everywhere he cut out independent manufacturers and free agents, small reslers, 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 to modernity.
Yeah.
I'm just realizing this guy is like Jeff Bezos.
He's the Besos of cigarettes.
Yeah, yeah, which, Jeff Bezos.
I'm sure we'd love to be the Besis of cigarettes along with being on Bezos almost everything else.
Because it's a great thing to be the Bezos of. So kudos to cigars. For 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 nineteen oh 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 formed the British American Tobacco Corporation.
Of course, that's what the British wants called.
Yes, and they do. 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 in 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 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 maybe if you're a cigarette smoker in Turkey in the early eighteen hundreds 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 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 in a cigarettes, you're going to smoke 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 one of the very first yeah, and probably the I think the first that's like an individual consumer good, right, because this is starting 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 petroleum or 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 timbucktoo.
It hasn't spread quite that far yet, but this is what's going to happen. Right. By nineteen oh 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. Yea, Duke saw them as the smart, smart product to push, but he 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 deal, right perfect. So 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 Anti Trust Act,
which had also been created in eighteen ninety. Now it took the governmental while to actually get to American tobacco, and by the time it starts looking into things, American tobacco controls not just ninety percent of the cigarette trade, but seventy five to eighty five percent 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 fucking trailblazer.
Yeah. Yeah, guys, you can try out 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. Yeah, this is a dude who loves to make How rich was this guy? I mean it doesn't because if you actually translate it, it's just going to wind up being in the tens of millions, which makes it like, effectively he is a billionaire in his day, right, like for everything that matters, you know, Yeah, he has infinity dollars.
You do have to think how different would the world be if we've just given him Twitter and he could have done an Elon Musk and solve the war in Ukraine instead of inventing new ways to give kids cancer.
This new cigarette's gonna work as a boat briefly. So this puts Duke about twenty 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 spud Hughes, great, very very funny name. 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 back the way.
Yeah. Yeah, rubber coming out and support of the DJ.
Yeah, well, 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 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 that ballpark.
It's wild.
Yeah, impressively not great.
Yeah, So Teddy Roosevelt, the trustbuster, forces the DOJ to go after Duke Buster. Yeah, that's what he's doing. He's busting trues some trusts. 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, he's broadly speaking, doing the right thing. And and the DOJ 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 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 fifteen years before. So the DOJ, not wanting to destroy one of the three largest businesses in the US, zimpts a bunch of their sub businesses and their international partnerships and like allows them to maintain certain supply chains and whatnot.
And obviously, while this is going on, American Tobacco appeals, the Supreme Court rules against 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, there can't actually be cut apart.
Quote.
The settlement was meant to a share 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 in superable 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 control, and his fellow owners, even though they're all competing, continue to collude to fixed 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 DOJ succeeds in actually doing.
Great job, Grey Jay.
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 South Carolina.
Can you just stop? I know he can with the Pokemon cards. That apparently not.
He 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 and that's where we get Duke University.
Didn't see they're coming, Yeah, great man, They have a good public health school.
Now actually yes, yes, yeah.
Well they honestly a lot of the best information about the cigarette industry, and all of the fund up shit it did comes from Duke University. They have great resource for understanding tobacco ad frantis.
Yeah.
So, I mean, 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 a number of ways that are unethical. There's nothing wrong with him selling cigarettes at this point because he has no he dies in nineteen twenty five, 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 shit. So there will people who work for him, 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 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 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 shit 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 the deadliest artifact in the history of human civilization. It killed about one hundred million people in the twentieth century.
Ooh, Jesus rish.
May And honestly he's probably lowballing it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, And it's before you look at the sort of downstream things.
Jesus Christ, that is, that is quite a jult. Like we can we can.
Argue about fascism and communism and the things the Great Leap Forward and La Sangoism what killed the most people. But man, nobody's nobody's touching the cigarettes numbers.
It's right, Yeah, the cigarettes.
Out here dropping three pointers every shot into a goat of killing people.
I'm eagerly awaiting Michael Tracy to like go recuperate the cigarettes's reputation on Twitter or something.
So James, you get anything you want to plug before we roll.
Out afar wine, I do another podcast if you do too. Sometimes it could happen here. I do listen to them. 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. I would say it's one of the only two podcasts that should be legal.
Yeah, yeah, fair enough if we're doing basically what he did with cigarettes, but two podcasts, and very slowly we're we're stealing all the microphones and giving everyone can.
And I mean hopefully going to kill one hundred million people of course of the century's.
That's yeah, and see you've glad your goals.
Yeah, we do have a live show if you survive that long ship twenty six. Yeah it's twenty six. I think it's on the twenty sixth of October. Yeah, that's right, sight and everything.
So check that ship out, motherfucker. Buy tickets to the live show, and uh, look great. I'm not going to tell you should smoke cigarettes, but have you ever tried, Okay, the smooth, flavorful taste of a camel. It's like driving through the desert in early November, you know, when you've just got that pure dry coal wire. We're just take it in a Marlborough red Oh, God, the flavor country. That's what people are missing today, Sophie, do you know
how few gin zers have been the flavor country. That's their heritage. Soaping, that's their heritage.
Stop it all right, This is not cash money.
Pick up, pick up some cigarettes kids, very much as cash money.
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