Return to Virginia Business - April 2002

"TOBACCO: A Cultural History of How an Exotic Plant Seduced Civilization"
Iain Gately
Grove Press
404 pages, $25

by Peter Galuszka

Tobacco has always been dear to Virginia. Native Americans used the vegetable to fight snakebite and depression. At Jamestown, English settlers found that tobacco, rather than gold or olives, could sustain their new colony. In 1619, when the precursor to today's General Assembly first gathered, the pressing business wasn't finding ways to survive disease, cold or attacks by natives. Instead, the Assembly's very first act was passing - you guessed it - a law creating an early version of tobacco price supports.

Tobacco would dominate for hundreds of years. The "Virginian" variety became the world standard for quality leaf. The state's climate was favorable for growing, cementing slavery as a way of life that would bring decades of grief. Yet tobacco had obvious economic benefits. The golden leaf helped pay for the Revolution. Later, an immensely profitable modern tobacco industry developed, and Richmond became a major center. Today, of course, the leaf's future is highly uncertain because it has been shown to be a cancer-causing killer.

Such are the observations of the new book, "Tobacco, A Cultural History of How an Exotic Plant Seduced Civilization," by British journalist Iain Gately. In this sprightly read, Gately doesn't ignore the dangers of smoking as they are understood today, yet has produced an engrossing cultural history.

Smoking tobacco, Gately notes, has been celebrated as a medicine, recreational relaxer, icebreaker among strangers and prelude to deflowering virgins. It's also been seen as a destroyer of health, corrupter of youth and instrument of Satan. Incas in South America began using tobacco about 18,000 years ago as a curative and a way to commune with spirits. Its popularity spread northward to other tribes, who shared it with European explorers from Christopher Columbus on. Tobacco's appeal wafted throughout much of the Old World, spreading even to Africa and the East. The commodity became so precious that it sparked trade wars as European states competed for power and the weed.

Throughout tobacco's history, Virginia and the U.S. played key roles. Pioneering Jamestown settler John Rolfe improved the leaf in the 1600s by combining Native American and Spanish forms of curing. Rolfe also is noteworthy for marrying the Indian princess Pocahontas. The "frisky one" caught Rolfe's eye as she did cartwheels stark naked through the streets of Jamestown, Gately notes. As years passed, U.S. leaf production grew exponentially in Virginia, giving American revolutionaries a highly lucrative and exportable product to finance their anti-British struggles.

History is also filled with anti-smoking zealots, too. James I of England wrote the first reasoned treatise against smoking, when he wasn't busy hunting witches. American inventor Thomas Alva Edison refused to hire smokers. In the 1600s, Ottoman Empire ruler Murad IV, better known as "Murad the Cruel," wandered the streets of Constantinople seeking smokes in disguise and beheaded "any good Samaritans who offered relief," Gately writes. In Persia about that time, tobacco merchants were put to death by having molten lead poured down their throats.

Cigars and pipes were the preferred method for consuming tobacco until the 1800s, when Spanish tobacconists started mass-producing papelotes or paper-bound cigarettes. These were hand-rolled in Seville factories by beautiful, dark-haired women who often worked topless because of the heat, making cigarettes seem sexy and feminine. Yet, cigarettes' popularity among trench-dwelling soldiers during World War I gave them a masculine aroma as well, as evidenced later by the ultra-cool Marlboro Man.

Virginia played a big role in the huge expansion of smoking in the late 1800s. The breakthrough came in 1880, when James Albert Bonsack, a 21-year-old son of a plantation owner, invented a machine that could roll cigarettes with research backed in part by Lewis Ginter, the famous Richmond tobacconist. Ironically, Ginter's firm dropped the machine, which was picked up in a big way by James "Buck" Duke, the head of a small Virginia tobacco company. With the new technology and cutthroat business practices, Duke created a powerful monopoly that thoroughly modernized the manufacture of tobacco products.

This tremendous growth of smoking led to a dramatic rise in deaths from lung cancer and other causes. Gately doesn't spend much time dealing with the cancer fights of the 1950s to the present time. Nor does he pontificate on tobacco's less-than-bright future. One other flaw: He spends too much time discussing tobacco's impact on domestic British culture. Even so, Gately has produced an instructive book filled with fun facts and pithy quotes. One of the best is from satirist Oscar Wilde: "A cigarette is the perfect type of the perfect pleasure. It is exquisite and leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want?"

Return to Virginia Business - April 2002