The Decline of Southern Tobacco Agriculture and the Political Economy of Cigarette Production in the Era of the Tobacco Wars, 1982-2009

Louis Kyriakoudes, Middle Tennessee State University

While tobacco has been a leading component of agriculture in the American South since the colonial period, it underwent two dramatic transformations in the 20th century. First, the explosion of cigarette use spurred a broad increase in flue cured tobacco cultivation across the South. Second, New Deal agricultural policies intended to stabilize agricultural incomes led the creation of a tobacco price support system that persisted until 2004. The growth of tobacco production and the implementation of price supports created a political alliance between cigarette manufacturers and conservative, largely Democratic members of Congress from tobacco-growing states. This transactional alliance successfully limited federal public health and tobacco control policies while protecting grower subsidies through the 1980s. This arrangement broke down under political and economic pressures in the 1990s, as cigarette manufacturers faced increase public health activism, legal liability for the harms caused by cigarettes, the decimation of the tobacco states Democratic caucus in the U.S. Congress in the 1994 midterm elections, and growing economic incentives by cigarette manufacturers to use lower cost imported tobacco leaf. The result led to a series of public health victories unimaginable in the 1980s as state's attorneys general negotiated the Tobacco Master Settlement, the U.S. Department of Justice initiated a federal RICO suit, and Congress passed comprehensive regulation in the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act (2009). This study is based upon research in tobacco industry files, USDA records, and interviews with former members of Congress.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 41. Technology, Politics, and Rural Labor in the 19th and 20th Century South