The purpose of this book is to observe and understand the history of tobacco culture in South Carolina. Given the negative image smoking has acquired, one might ask, Why study tobacco at all? and why especially in South Carolina? For better or worse, tobacco is thoroughly American. Indians grew and smoked tobacco for centuries before teaching its culture to European and African newcomers. Not only did the weed become an important export, but as the nation grew, a substantial domestic market evolved as well. Cigars, pipes, snuff, and “chew” became fixtures of everyday life.

In the 1880s, technology introduced another...

Agriculture is the world’s oldest commercial activity, and farmers have long felt the fickle arrogance of the marketplace. The laws of supply and demand and comparative advantage have dominated agriculture since Babylonian peasants traded omers of wheat for baskets of olives. The ancient logic of market forces is well known and requires only a brief summary here. For a crop culture to be economically viable, supply must be great enough to support an active market but not so great as to bury consumers under an avalanche of surplus, smothering prices and profits. On the other side of the equation, demand...

More than seventy-five years passed before tobacco was again cultivated as a cash crop in South Carolina. Over these eight decades, South Carolina deepened its commitment to rice, cotton, and slavery and marched in lockstep with world markets to the cadence of the overseer’s lash. In the 1820s, South Carolina’s preeminence in cotton production was supplanted by vast new areas of cultivation in Mississippi, Alabama, and Texas. The state’s competitive edge was further dulled by tariffs that South Carolinians believed discriminated against them. In 1832, the tariff issue brought South Carolina and the national government face-to-face in the first great...

Few cultural phenomena in American history have equaled the spectacular rise of cigarette smoking in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.¹ As a way of consuming tobacco, cigarettes were latecomers. Before the 1870s, few Americans outside major cities had seen a cigarette, let alone smoked one. Americans puffed pipes and cigars, dipped snuff, and chewed flavored tobacco, but cigarettes were uncommon even in the tobacco country. As recently as 1868, a Virginian could mark someone a stranger because “he was smoking a cigarette, which is unheard of in these parts.”² Within a generation, however, Americans were consuming billions of...

In the early 1920s, Pee Dee tobacco and cotton farmers suffered from the correction of inflated wartime commodity prices. But falling prices were only part of the problem. Many tobacco growers throughout the Carolinas and Virginia believed they were being victimized by a biased marketing system that prevented them from receiving a fair price. Seeking reform, thousands of growers in the three states organized a marketing cooperative they hoped would restore equity to the tobacco business. Although the co-op held great promise for tobacco farmers, opponents of reform mounted a vigorous and highly effective counterattack. The struggle for cooperative marketing...

Observers of southern agriculture had long predicted that flue-cured tobacco growers were headed for disaster. By the late 1920s, the handwriting was clearly on the wall. Efforts to reform the highly prejudiced marketing system had failed. Besides the inherent bias of few buyers and many sellers, growers were victimized by secret grading systems and predatory speculators who sought to profit at their expense. To make matters worse, farmers reduced their already weak bargaining position to groveling impotence by their chronic tendency to overproduce. This devastating practice eventually swamped the market with surplus tobacco, drove prices below the cost of production,...

Seldom has an event drawn so bold a line across the page of history as did the New Deal in the chronicle of southern agriculture. The benevolent paternalism that came to characterize government’s attitude toward farming began in the first hundred days of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency. The heart of the New Deal’s farm program was the commitment to raise farmers’ incomes by bringing supply in line with demand. The idea was not new. In the 1920s, southern and midwestern congressmen had twice pushed agricultural reform bills through Congress only to see them vetoed by President Coolidge. During the Hoover...

The blow fell in January 1936. The farm recovery program suffered a setback when the Supreme Court declared the Agricultural Adjustment Act unconstitutional. In a six-to-three decision, the Court ruled that government had no right to “regulate and control agriculture.” Speaking for the majority, Justice Owen J. Roberts, a Hoover appointee, stated that policies intended to reduce acreage or limit production were “outside the range of proper governmental powers.” Further, the processing taxes that forced manufacturers to pay parity prices and funded aaa benefits were “but a means to an unconstitutional end.” The verdict was clear: the aaa, the Kerr-Smith...

The 1950s were the golden age of the golden leaf. Propelled by prosperity and powerful advertising, demand for cigarettes soared, and Pee Dee tobacco growers worked hard to supply the raw material. American agriculture was undergoing profound technological change as well. As industry returned to peacetime production in the late 1940s, farmers poured wartime profits into inexpensive, mass-produced farm machinery. Gasoline- and diesel-powered tractors were nearly universal by 1950, dramatically multiplying the horsepower available even to small farmers. Moreover, implements and attachments enabled tractors to serve in a greater range of roles.

Chemical technologies kept pace with mechanical ones. From...