Pete Daniel

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Pete Daniel | Reasons to Talk about Tobacco | The Journal of American History, 96.3 | The History Cooperative

Reasons to Talk about Tobacco

In June 2008 Agricultural History Society president Jess Gilbert asked me to replace a panelist on a session with the historian Linda Gordon, who presented a paper on the Farm Security Administration (FSA) photographer Dorothea Lange. I recalled an interview I had done in 1981 with archivist and author Leonard A. Rapport (1913–2008), who had accompanied the FSA photographer Marion Post Wolcott (1910–1990) when she photographed tobacco warehouses in Durham, North Carolina, so I put together a paper, "Marion Post Wolcott's Tobacco Auction Photographs," featuring Wolcott's images. After the session, Jess urged me to expand the paper and present it as my Organization of American Historians (OAH) presidential address.¹	1
Jess's enthusiasm brought to mind other reasons to talk about tobacco—reasons that are personal and familial, but also broadly historical. My great grandfather, Robert Alexander Hunt, moved his family southward from Granville County to Nash County, North Carolina, in the late nineteenth century as the bright tobacco culture spread south. The wave of cultivation, curing, and marketing skills that swept through the Carolinas and Georgia was part of a significant reconfiguration in southern rural life that included the spread of capital-intensive rice cultivation across the Louisiana prairie into Texas and north to Arkansas, the erasure of the Mississippi Delta's Big Woods to usher in plantation cotton production, and the increasing role of government, science, and technology in agricultural practice.	2
My maternal grandparents, Annie Sykes and Robert Calvin Hunt, farmed with few modern conveniences in the Franklin County, North Carolina, community of Seven Paths, raising primarily tobacco, cotton, and corn. They did not get electricity or indoor plumbing until after World War II, and my grandmother cooked on a woodstove until the 1960s, when her daughters forced an electric stove on her. She stood back and twisted the electric stove's dials as if she were setting the timer on a bomb. During my childhood, I worked on my grandparents' farm barning tobacco, graduating through the harvesting processes from handing to trucking to priming. When we traded help with other farms down the road, I would ride our mule past Mr. Ruffin Collie, never suspecting that the friendly man sitting under the tree and peacefully chewing tobacco would survive to become the oldest Confederate veteran in the state. My uncle Carroll Hunt worked on the farm for a few years after returning from World War II; his fluent curses aimed at errant mules supplemented my formal vocabulary. Like his ten brothers and sisters, Uncle Carroll eventually abandoned farming for public work.²	3
After I received my bachelor's and master's degrees at Wake Forest University and wrote a thesis on the New Deal tobacco program in North Carolina, I worked a year for the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company and learned the cigarette manufacturing process. I brashly asked Dr. Nannie May Tilley, whose The Bright-Tobacco Industry, 1860–1929 (1985) is the definitive text on the culture, to read my thesis. At the time, she was writing her history of the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company. Since tobacco was so intimately connected to my earliest physical and historical work and since Wolcott's recording of warehouse activities intersected with my own interests in oral history and photography, tobacco seemed to be the right choice for this talk.³	4
Durham is only fifty miles from Spring Hope, my hometown. In the summer of 1939, Dorothea Lange took photographs of tobacco farmers in the Durham area, and Marion Post Wolcott followed her there in October of the same year. The significance of Lange's and Wolcott's photographs is in the way they capture the daily and seasonal work cycles of tobacco farmers, the contextual social relations around the market, and the moment when farmers watched their crop auctioned in seconds to buyers they distrusted.	. . .

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