Tobacco is a cash crop in more ways than one, as Patrick Mulford O’Connor illustrates in his new history of the crop’s economic and political importance following the Civil War. At that time, excise taxes helped fund a significant portion of the federal government, becoming “a new revenue system of unprecedented peacetime scope” in the late nineteenth century (7). This deepening government dependency on tobacco in turn reshaped the industry. As tobacco business interests (shorthanded as “tobacconists” in the book) embraced and tried to control taxation and regulation, the crop transformed from a relatively flexible antebellum staple to a highly taxed and structured business by the early twentieth century. Elements of this story are familiar: the advent of the tobacco auction system, the development of burley and bright leaf varietals, cigarette manufacturing, and the monopoly efforts of the American Tobacco Company. O’Connor’s intervention is to examine closely the role of taxation and finance in these transformations, and here he breaks a great deal of fresh ground.
Chapter one sketches the origins of U.S. tobacco taxation. The federal government turned to taxing the crop as one source to fund the Civil War. After the conflict, O’Connor explains, tobacconists largely embraced continued taxation, since the system granted them sole rights to purchase tobacco. Tobacconists came to view the exchange of heavy taxation for monopsony as a beneficial arrangement, even as it provoked opposition from some farmers and small tobacco manufacturers. The next chapter turns to these concerns, especially critics who protested the tax system as prejudicial to the rural South and Midwest. In those regions, farmers and small businesses came to portray “the revenue system as a privilege for the nationally powerful and connected” tobacconists (42). Despite this opposition, federal dependency on the tobacco tax grew ever greater during the late nineteenth century.
Chapter three explores how ideas about quality increasingly firmed up tobacconists’ power behind a guise of agricultural improvement. O’Connor explains that emerging “fictions of standardization” in tobacco marketing drew on material reality, yet were also “somewhat arbitrary, although even in their arbitrariness they lent order to the world tobacco market” (67). These standards elevated middlemen to positions of prominence, furnished a tool to racially discriminate against Black tobacco growers, and provided a veneer of impartiality and science to tobacconists’ purchasing decisions. Here the story is a classic case of the cultural construction of seemingly scientific standards. The author also sketches the growing influence of European national tobacco agencies and an emerging warehouse system on American tobacco sales, classification, and taxation. In chapter four, O’Connor focuses on how tobacconists wielded the ideas of quality to further control markets and growers. This “quality principle” attracted fertilizer companies and emerging tobacco experts, who connected tobacconists’ desires to new, increasingly expensive methods of agronomy. The results further entrenched tobacconist power, accrued through forces like farmer “indebtedness, stock laws, fertilizer dependence, and other attacks on Southern agrarian livelihoods” (107).
The final chapter turns to the growing influence of the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the agency’s interest in remaking the nation’s tobacco economy in the years bracketing the turn of the twentieth century. The 1887 Hatch Act paved the way for experiment stations that expanded formal research on the crop—work that advanced the spread of new varietals and the geographical footprint of tobacco cultivation as a whole. This federal emphasis on expansion then reversed course under the new Office of Tobacco Industry (established 1907), which ultimately sought to limit the tobacco industry where it existed, using the ideas of the quality principle to circumscribe tobacco acreage. Good tobacco was now made in the right landscapes, seemingly, entrenching a notion akin to terroir in the tobacco economy. The high prices of the 1910s made the pursuit of these limits all but impossible, however, setting up the overproduction that would plague farmers following World War I.
The narrative concludes in the 1920s with the emergence of an organized tobacco lobby, which grew from the forces of industry organization and in opposition to a growing smoking abolition movement that was particularly targeted at cigarettes. Readers may question whether the New Deal’s substantial reorganization of tobacco production offers an even more natural conclusion, although O’Connor might see it as yet another reconstruction of the tobacco industry and thus a distinctly different era.
The book skillfully covers the substantial literature on the American tobacco industry, while also incorporating some of the recent work on tobacco’s cultivation and attendant social and cultural structures. The primary source research is equally impressive, with method becoming largely inseparable from argument. In places the narrative is rather clinical, with a tendency to portray people as rational economic actors. There is a strong focus on legislative process, administrative structures, and economic motivations. The result is little sense of tobacco as a plant, growers as unpredictable people, and the messiness of soil, climate, and farming in general. As much as this analytical approach obscures, it also provides real benefits, permitting O’Connor to sketch clearly the broad structural forces at play in reconstructing the nation’s tobacco economy.
O’Connor’s fine-grained analysis is both a strength and a weakness. He convincingly constructs his arguments through close legal and financial readings, with the result that readers must follow intently or risk getting lost in the details. This is a fair demand, yet one that narrows the book’s audience. The Political Reconstruction of American Tobacco will be of greatest interest to business and economic historians, yet it could also work well in graduate classrooms. In addition to adding to our understanding of American tobacco during the industry’s crucial years between the Civil War and the New Deal, it offers a model for the benefits of following the money.
