 Good afternoon and welcome to the William G. McGowan Theater here at the National Archives. I'm David Ferriero, the Archivist of the United States, and I'm pleased you could join us for this afternoon's program, whether you're here in person or joining us through Facebook or YouTube. Before we hear from Sarah Milove about her new book, The Cigarette of Political History, I'd like to tell you about two other programs coming up soon in the McGowan Theater. On Tuesday, October 8th at noon, in a program connected to our current exhibit upstairs, rightfully hers, Ann Gardner Perkins will be here to discuss her book, Yale Needs Women, how the first group of girls rewrote the rules of an Iowa League giant. And on Thursday, October 10th at noon, Nina Barrett will be here to tell us about her research for the book, The Leopold and Loeb Files, an intimate look at one of America's most infamous crimes. To keep informed about events throughout the year, check our website, archives.gov, or sign up at the table outside the theater to get email updates. You'll also find information about all the National Archives programs and activities. Another way to get more involved with the National Archives is to become a member of the National Archives Foundation. The Foundation supports all of our education and outreach activities, and you can learn more about the Foundation at archivesfoundation.org. Tobacco has been tied to the history of the United States from its earliest days. The seeds planted in Jamestown grew into a cash crop that shaped the development of the American colonies and remained a major commodity throughout the 20th century. The search for tobacco in the online guide to the National Archives gives a quick impression of the products many connections with the federal government. Seed development assistance to farmers regulations on its use and taxation to name a few. Products were even issued to American soldiers during World War I and II as part of their rations. And at Duke University, where I was a librarian, they were given that way free in the dorms at Duke University. They stopped that. Today's guest, Sarah Milove, explores the connections between cigarettes and American political institutions throughout the 20th century and describes the shift in attitudes towards tobacco use. Sarah Milove is an assistant professor of history at the University of Virginia specializing in the 20th century United States, a former fellow of the Virginia Foundation for the humanities. She has written on the tobacco industry, the rise of e-cigarettes and the grassroots fight to battle climate change. Her research explores how organized interest groups and everyday Americans influence government policy. And today is day two of the publication of the cigarette. Please welcome Sarah Milove. Thank you so much for being here. It's such a treat and an honor for a historian of the United States to come and speak at the National Archives. The other day I saw that the Twitter account of the National Archives tweeted out information about this event. And I thought, you know, as a historian, it was kind of like having yourself name checked by Beyonce. I mean, this is the mothership. So thank you all so much for coming. So my book, The Cigarette of Political History, seeks to understand tobacco in modern America not through the lens of big tobacco and the machinations of industry, but through the efforts of everyday Americans to get the government to intervene on their behalf. Now, big tobacco is still an important part of this story. But by focusing on other actors, on farmers, on government officials, on politicians, on activists, on workers and labor unions, the story of tobacco in the 20th century begins to look a lot different than if we were to understand it through the actions of big tobacco alone. By taking a wide-angled approach, my book suggests that, far from being the product of corporate deception that was ultimately exposed by science, the cigarette was, from seed to smoke, a product of government intervention. And what ultimately reduced tobacco's grip on American society was not the discovery that smoking causes cancer and, of course, a surgeon general's warning to that effect. It was the invention by activists of non-smokers' rights. The idea that people who do not smoke were entitled and able to achieve unpolluted air in shared public spaces. This idea that non-smokers' rights, so natural to us today that we don't even consider it, really, to rise to the level of a political claim, that this idea had to be invented and then it had to be vindicated by decision-making bodies. Most frequently, these bodies were businesses and local governments. So in the rise of the cigarette, we can see a product made by the federal government acting on behalf of privileged constituencies. And in its unmaking, we can see a critique, not only of cigarette consumption, but in a way of doing government, the smoke-filled rooms, as it were, that gave rise to the cigarette in the first place. Today, I'm going to talk about one non-smokers' rights activist, a woman who had a big hand in the kind of smoke-free world we live in today. Her story, I think, illuminates the surprising mix of social movement activism, legal innovation, and hard-nosed business calculation that remade public space. In 1975, Donna Shemp's morning routine looked rather unusual. The 43-year-old customer service representative popped an anti-emetic pill and drove from her home in Southwest New Jersey to the Brigton office of the Bell Telephone Company. There, depending on how things looked inside, she might put on a gas mask, which she would lower when she had to speak by phone or in person with customers. Her model was called the gas foe, and it was made by the Mind Safety Appliance Company of Pittsburgh. It was designed to be used by miners. Now, miners, of course, wear gas masks to protect themselves against toxic airborne pollutants that they encounter on the job. And that's what Donna Shemp did as well. More than half of her coworkers smoked, and there were no prohibitions on smoking by the customers who came into the office. For Shemp, this environment was crippling. Tobacco smoke nauseated her, hence the daily anti-emetic. It caused constant headaches and rashes on her face. It caused tearing and eye irritation that left her with corneal abrasions that would not heal. Now, in Shemp's office, like in most American workplaces in the 1970s, there were no rules separating smokers from non-smokers. The company reasoned that rearranging the layout of the office to separate smokers and non-smokers would disrupt workflow. And the union to which Shemp belonged, the communication workers of America agreed, smoking was a workplace right. Now, the gas mask was not the first remedy that Donna Shemp turned to for relief. Earlier that year, she had seen a company doctor who had told her it was a disgrace for any employee to have to work in such a smoky space. On his orders, she was not to return to work until her supervisors could find a way to ensure a smoke-free environment. Now, Donna Shemp thought she'd be home for a few days as supervisors rearranged the desks at work. The days turned into weeks, which turned into months. And her extended sabbatical signaled the depths of Bell's unwillingness to implement a non-smoking policy. But as any academic knows, sabbaticals are the only time when any real work gets done, and so Donna Shemp got to work. Now, Donna Shemp was no anti-tobacco activist, but she soon became one. She made contact with the two primary anti-smoking groups of the era, Ash, Action on Smoking and Health, and GASP, Group Against Smoking Pollution. She wrote to the New Jersey Departments of Health and Labor. She wrote to the Environmental Protection Agency and to all the major health voluntary associations. And from her research, she learned she was in uncharted territory. In the 1970s, there were no laws governing workplace smoking on behalf of non-smokers. Despite the fact that the EPA and OSHA had authority over air quality and workplace conditions respectively, no regulatory agency was authorized to police workplace conditions affected by tobacco smoke. Now, for other workplace health and safety issues, Shemp could expect the support of her union, as unions across the country in the 70s were beginning to venture beyond wages and hours to address the health and quality of life concerns of members. But the communication workers of America was adamant that it would not support Shemp in her quest for a smoke-free work environment. In fact, her union steward smoked throughout the meeting that she had requested to discuss her need for smoke-free air. The antipathy toward her at work was palpable, or rather, inhalable. Now finding no allies in government or labor, Shemp tried to take her case directly to management. She delivered a proposal for a corporate workplace smoking policy to Bell headquarters in New York City. Bell should ban smoke, she wrote, in the work areas of business offices, in the same manner that it is banned in the central offices and switchboards. And if Bell could not bring itself to regulate smoking on behalf of non-smoking employees, Shemp argued, at least it could do so on behalf of the bottom line. Citing figures from the Public Health Service, Shemp pointed out that smokers spent a third more time away from their jobs because of illness than to persons who have never smoked cigarettes. Now, Bell Telephone did not take Donna Shemp's advice. Having exhausted all the normal channels of regular workplace decision making, Donna Shemp decided that the courtroom would be the only venue that could provide her relief. So she decided to sue. But how? How could a customer service representative living in rural New Jersey find a lawyer with expertise in employment law and, perhaps, even a sympathy for non-smokers plight? Now the answer to this question should warm the hearts of book lovers everywhere. Donna Shemp called a librarian. She called the reference librarian at Rutgers University. And that librarian just happened to know about a law professor at Rutgers who was teaching a course on employment discrimination. Alfred Bloom-Rosen had been a lawyer in the Johnson administration, and an important one at that. He had been an architect of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the federal agency charged with enforcing the Civil Rights Act at work. Bloom-Rosen was an advocate for the federal government's power to intervene in private workplaces in order to redress racial and gender discrimination. And Donna Shemp, it turned out, had a real world need for the legal theory that Bloom-Rosen was developing in his employment law class. He agreed to take on her case pro bono. This was Donna Shemp's first stroke of good fortune. The second and third were the enthusiastic and surprisingly so responses she received from two medical doctors to whom she wrote, soliciting their support as experts on her behalf. Dr. Luther Terry was no ordinary doctor. He had been the surgeon general who oversaw the publication of the famous 1964 report on smoking and health. And he agreed to provide an affidavit affirming that tobacco smoke in the workplace could be a health hazard to a significant number of workers and an irritation to an even larger number. Dr. Jesse Steinfeld was also no ordinary doctor. He had served as Nixon surgeon general before he was canned, in his opinion, for denouncing the tobacco industry too forcefully. He also submitted testimony on Shemp's behalf. Now the judge presiding over the case at the New Jersey Superior Court was moved by this celebrity testimony. But he was also moved by the argument that Shemp herself had made to Bell's corporate brass, that if the switchboard equipment was precious enough to merit a smoke free environment, then surely so too were the bodies of employees themselves. A company which has demonstrated such concern for mechanical components should have at least as much concern for human beings, the judge wrote. New Jersey Bell had a common law duty to provide its employees a safe and healthy work environment, which for Donna Shemp meant an environment free of tobacco smoke. Now in resting the right to smoke free air from her employer, Donna Shemp was at the vanguard of a transformation that I track in my book. For most of the 20th century, the cigarette was not a testament to regulatory neglect, not an aberrant product that thrived in a regulatory vacuum. Cigarettes were a testament to federal regulation on behalf of tobacco, specifically on behalf of organized tobacco producers. And so activists like Donna Shemp did more than try to create tolerable conditions to work, congregate, dine, and exist in public. They asserted an alternative way of thinking about the value of citizenship and the obligations of government. The idea of non-smokers' rights that an individual, by virtue of not partaking in a habit, can dictate where that habit is expressed, this idea cut against the producer-centered politics that undergirded smokers' supremacy in shared spaces. Donna Shemp soon realized that she was part of a young but emboldened new social movement, the non-smokers' rights movement. These were a very particular kind of anti-tobacco activist. Their goal was not to get people to quit smoking, but to get people to quit smoking in public. In effect, their intention was to subvert the consent-based paradigm that both the tobacco industry and the federal government had used to govern tobacco. This paradigm was in your face every time you picked up a pack of cigarettes. It was right there on the warning label that read, caution, cigarette smoking may be hazardous to your health. Having been warned, it was the consumer's choice whether or not to smoke. But the majority of Americans never did experience cigarettes as smokers. They experienced tobacco smoke as part of shared public space, except for when tobacco smoke may have kept them home. Clara Gowan was one such exile. In 1971, Gowan, a housewife in her words, and a mother of two young daughters, decided that she had had enough of bending her life around tobacco smoke. Her youngest daughter had a tobacco allergy that kept the family from enjoying one of the central pleasures of middle-class family life, going out to dinner. So Gowan and some girlfriends in College Park, Maryland, made a pact of sorts, their first political action. They would remove ashtrays in their homes, ashtrays that neither they nor their husbands used, but were there as a room fixture for the convenience of guests. That this small gesture required premeditation and the kind of confidence that can only be shored up by a group of the like-minded, suggests a degree of anxiety that Gowan faced when she considered claiming an exclusively non-smoking space, even when that space was her own home. Gowan started a group against smoke and pollution, or GASP, from this action. Using $50 of her, quote, grocery money, she produced the first batch of buttons that would become a standard symbol in the non-smoker's rights movement. GASP, non-smokers have rights too. She also published a newsletter called The Ventilator, which got off the ground thanks to the Prince George's, Prince George's County Tuberculosis and Respiratory Disease Association, which allowed her to use its mimeograph machine, and it mailed the ventilator to members and surrounding counties, sharing it with hundreds of state and local affiliates across the United States. So piggybacking on this association's national scope, GASP quickly reached a big audience. A year after its founding, GASP had assembled and mailed over 500 new chapter kits, kind of literature that helped fledgling activists conceive of themselves as possessing both a legitimate grievance and the means to do something about it. Now, GASP drew energy from contemporary social movements. At times, activists spoke the heady language of civil rights and emancipation, drawing comparisons between the non-smoker's rights movement and the African-American freedom struggle. So here's an image of airsats Abe Lincoln, who proclaimed the emancipation of non-smokers in a 1975 rally that took place at the U.S. Capitol. I guess in this vision, non-smokers are both emancipators and enslaved. So non-smoking activists reasoned from race to borrow a phrase from legal history. Though they were quick to hedge their comparisons, non-smoker's rights activists' use of this kind of reasoning frequently flattened the difference between the structural discrimination that African-Americans faced and the crimped choices that non-smokers contended with. The co-founder of the Berkeley chapter of GASP put it this way. Although I would not suggest that non-smoker's rights are trampled on to the same extent as have been the rights of minority groups, I would suggest certain parallels. After all, he wondered, is there any real difference between saying to a person you can't eat at this lunch counter and saying you can't eat at this lunch counter if you are concerned about your health or if you want to enjoy your lunch? Consciousness raising was yet another tool for increasing non-smoker's sense of grievance. As powerfully expressed by contemporary feminists, consciousness raising brought the hidden indignities of private experience out into the open, located in a structural critique of power and patriarchy. It was a tool admirably suited to the needs of the non-smoker's movement and not only because some of its earliest participants were women. For a long time, many non-smokers have felt individually annoyed by smoking, but they have suffered in silence, go and explained in a 1972 profile. People are more likely to speak out when they know that others feel the same way. The fact that non-smokers comprised a majority of the population made speaking out a lower risk proposition than minority activism. But physical suffering itself ennobled the non-smoker's cause, opening up avenues for analogy to the liberation struggles of other oppressed peoples. And, as was suggested by the very name, Group Against Smoke End Pollution, the non-smoker's rights movement drew inspiration and energy from the environmental movement. Its literature referred to tobacco smoke as air pollution, and activists referred to smokers as human smokestacks, pointing out that some of the chemical compounds present in ambient tobacco smoke would fall under the EPA's regulatory ambit had they been emitted from actual smokestacks. Now, unbeknownst to Donna Shemp at the time, these non-smoker's rights activists were beginning to achieve their first successes. By the time the New Jersey Superior Court ruled on Donna Shemp's case, just over 100 cities had passed some of the first ordinances that restricted where people could smoke, mostly in public buildings. Non-smoker's rights activists had, by the mid-70s, developed a vocabulary of entitlement and a theory of harm, and they had found venues within the American political system that allowed them to assert what they deemed to be their rights. In inventing the non-smoker, social activism, not scientific pronouncements, began to clear the air. In fact, substantial epidemiological evidence about the physical harms wrought to non-smokers by other people's smoke would not emerge until the 1980s. Donna Shemp would forge still-new roots toward the vindication of non-smoker's rights, and they would not run through law and public policy, at least not at first, but through the private sector. After her courtroom victory, not much changed for anybody not named Donna Shemp. Her ruling applied only to her, and over the next few years, when other non-smoking employees brought suit against their employers, courts repeatedly failed to rule in their favor. It appeared as though a right to a smoke-free work environment was an illusory quest. But where Shemp versus New Jersey Bell failed as precedent, Donna Shemp was herself determined to change how people worked. Beginning in 1978, with a tireless persistence and a real kind of public vulnerability, she began an after-hours career as a workplace consultant. In the 1970s, the field of management consulting was not yet a prestigious launching pad for the young and Ivy educated, and Donna Shemp dried in. She called her business Environmental Associates Incorporated. It was dedicated to improving the indoor work environment, and her firm aimed to create demand for the services that only it could provide. That is, in trying to convince a business to take seriously the issue of workplace smoking and thereby to hire the firm, Donna Shemp pointed to the legal liabilities created by her case. Notwithstanding the reluctance of other courts to rule in favor of non-smoking workers, Environmental Improvement Associates pointed to the costs arising from potential non-smoker litigation as a reason for employers to consider voluntarily adopting workplace smoking rules. Shemp's case for smoke-free workplaces converged on a single argument. Smoking, and quite often smokers, cost too much. They were bad employees. They destroyed equipment. They took frequent breaks to feed their habit, and they were sidelined with sickness. Shemp had broached this argument in her unsolicited proposal to Bell, but she would hone it over the upcoming years. Non-smoking activists did not so much convince employers to take steps to eliminate smoking in the name of health as they convinced them to eliminate smoking employees and the liabilities they created in the name of the corporate ledger. As Shemp wrote to Luther Terry, is there any better way to interest management in restricting smoking than through the bottom line? The promise of corporate health, not employee health, encouraged businesses to adopt smoking restrictions and bans even when there was no law forcing them to do so. And official government channels adopted this line as well. The introduction to the 1979 Surgeon General's report argued that stepped up action on cigarettes was necessary because an individual smoking habits implicated every taxpayer, and that cost was steep. Lost productivity, wages, absenteeism, caused by smoking-related illness put that tally close to $12 to $18 billion. Within a decade, the business case for non-smoking had begun to bear fruit. A 1987 nationwide business survey found that 54% of responding businesses had adopted workplace smoking restrictions and 85% had adopted them within the past three years. Such restrictions gathered their own momentum. Workplace smoking restrictions not only decrease non-smokers' exposure to tobacco, they also create more non-smokers because they help people quit smoking. Non-smokers' rights activism did not simply clear smoke-filled rooms. It created new chambers of power where new tobacco rules were made. The New Jersey Superior Court, the human resources departments of large companies, state legislative houses, city councils, and thousands of cities across the United States, all of these places have done more to vindicate the right to smoke-free air than the federal government. If Donna Schemp brought suit today, she would find it still to be the case that OSHA do not regulate indoor smoking. The patchwork system that exists in this country is a vastly uneven one. Smokers are poorer and less educated than non-smokers. And poor non-smokers are more likely to suffer from tobacco-related disease than non-smokers with more money. Blue-collar workers are more likely to go to work at work sites where smoking is permitted. In 19 states, it is legal to fire or refuse to hire somebody because she smokes. A kind of permission for business that reinforces the existence of an underclass of poor smokers. This too is a legacy of the business case for non-smoking, a legacy of the non-smoker's rights movement. Just as the physical consequences of smoking could not be contained in just the body of the smoker, the American body politic was forced to reckon with the secondary effects of the smoke-filled room. So what can we learn from thinking about the rise and fall of cigarettes in American life as a product of social movements? Well, for most of the 20th century, the federal government has been hostile to regulating cigarettes on behalf of consumers. There is, in that rather depressing statement, a ray of hope, I think, for those who feel that the federal government has similarly been slow to regulate or hostile toward demands for action on climate change or guns. What the history of tobacco shows is that meaningful action can be taken at the local level, action that is substantial in its own right, and action that can serve as pressure for federal regulation down the road. What's more, one of the primary levers that non-smokers pulled on to vindicate their demands for rights were not those of government at all, but of workplaces, of private business. Here, too, we see an opening for activists today. In response to mass shootings, Dick's sporting goods stopped all gun sales, and Walmart has halted the sale of handguns, some rifles, and ammunition. Equally important, and a parallel drawn more explicitly from the non-smokers' rights movement, are decisions made by businesses to ban the open carry of guns. Big chains like Walmart, CVS, and Kroger have begun asking customers to refrain from open carry in their stores, even in states where open carry is legal. Small stores across America have also taken a page out of the anti-tobacco playbook, posting stickers with the red-circle, that circle made famous, of course, by no smoking signs, that proclaim no guns allowed. Such displays don't just declare a store policy. As non-smokers' rights activists understood decades ago, such displays serve as a consciousness-raising tool, drawing forth a sense of entitlement to control public space. A second lesson of the history of the cigarette concerns the unintended consequences of reform. Non-smokers' rights activists operated within constraints, and one of those constraints was a political and economic system that measured the worth of a citizen by his or her cost to the state or employer. Although non-smokers' rights activists, like Donna Shemp, began their quest by asserting they had a right to comfort and shared space, the lore of the business space was irresistible. Making smoking socially unacceptable made smokers unacceptable, too. The cigarette was a product of a lot of public policy, but it is now frequently thought of as a private vice and a private failing, an assessment with unmistakably stigmatizing overtones when you consider that people who smoke tend to be poorer and less educated than those who do not. Activists today continue to find the social cost of disease framing irresistible, especially for the obesity epidemic and the opioid epidemic, to industrially produced diseases that disproportionately affect people with lower incomes. A healthier society may in fact be cheaper in the long run, but the business case will not produce justice for those who suffer from the diseases of modern life. Finally, it's not possible to talk about tobacco today without talking about vaping. With Altria's 35% stake in jewel, when we talk about vaping, we are, after all, actually talking about the tobacco industry. When non-smokers' rights activists began to achieve victories through the passage of local ordinances, the tobacco companies hired their own lobbyists in state houses to thwart them. Using what are known as preemptive laws, the tobacco industry worked to render these local ordinances less effective by passing weaker laws at the state level. Once passed, these preemption laws are difficult to repeal, in part because they tamp down on enthusiasm for grassroots organizing. Many in public health consider them the biggest challenge facing anti-tobacco forces. The vaping industry has shown a similar interest in taking the power to regulate e-cigarettes out of the hands of localities and putting them back in state houses. But the history of tobacco shows that the most accessible levers of power can also be the most effective. Vigorous assertion of local control over vaping is good for public health, and it is good for democracy. The political history of the cigarette suggests that meaningful social change takes a long time. Often decades of work by people and organizations that are overworked, unheralded, maybe even derided in their own time. It also reminds us that activists operate within constraints and in a world not entirely of their own making. The case for nonsmokers' rights was ultimately democratic and, at times, elitist. A fitting paradox, perhaps, for recasting a product that simultaneously relaxes and stimulates. This history invites our empathy, our imagination, and our courage to imagine a different future. Thank you. I'd be happy to take questions. There's microphones on either side. I think for the closed captioning it's a good thing to do. Hi. Good morning. Thank you for being here. I wanted to ask you, there was an earlier analogy that was made in terms of civil rights and the rights of nonsmokers in terms of them pressing their agenda. What's your personal perspective on that and do you feel that it was a legitimate association or analogy? I think that, given the context of the 1970s, nonsmokers' rights activists were in search of a vocabulary that ennobled their cause. The most morally hefty vocabulary and most morally resonant activism of the day was, of course, the African-American freedom struggle, the civil rights movement. They took to that and they used it. The extent to which I think it's legitimate, I suppose that cuts in a couple of directions. First, nonsmokers did feel themselves to be oppressed. That oppression is clearly not the same thing that African-Americans experienced under Jim Crow, but perhaps it was born out of a similar feeling that they should be allowed to exist in public spaces that they felt themselves to be exiled from. The kind of sad irony that ends up happening is that in achieving control over public space, what ends up happening to smokers that they themselves are exiled from, kind of a shared commons and the way that the movement unfolded meant that frequently people who are exiled as smokers tended to be poorer and less educated. I think that they were strategic in their use of that language and more than just strategic, it resonated with them, but they were unintended in classist consequences. Yes, thanks for a wonderful presentation. Thank you. I was wondering if your book delves into the marketing aspects. I know that with the jewels that are appealing to children now, there's some pushback against the marketing of it and Joe Campbell, of course, was thought to be too cute for adults. It was thought to be aimed at children. How does the political structure deal with the marketing and the appeal? So at the risk of it, maybe you're not buying my book, the marketing of cigarettes is not a primary focus of the book, but I have thought a bit about, you know, what the history of cigarettes can tell us about what's going on with jewel. The tobacco industry, like perhaps the East cigarette and jewel today, they realized that their product was appealing to young people and what they realized was that most of their customers started when they were children. So it was important to attract young people and there were all sorts of ways that they did so in, basically, prior to the 1990s. What's interesting too about the lessons of the tobacco industry for East cigarette and vaping regulations now is in the history of the cigarette you actually see the companies acceding and giving in to certain regulatory demands about marketing in a way that, for example, jewel has agreed to, basically, give up certain marketing practices. For example, in the 19... in the late 1960s, anti-tobacco activists basically secured the right to free airtime on television to run anti-tobacco ads. And these were really emotionally powerful. They packed a wallop. This was the first time people had really seen public health advertising on TV and public health advertising on TV that dealt with death in a very direct way. And by the 19... by the late 60s and early 70s these are on television in a 3-to-1 ratio. So for every three tobacco advertisements that are on television, one anti-tobacco advertisement is on television. And the companies get together and they basically say, we're out. We don't want to be dogged by this anti-tobacco advertising so we're going to back off of television. We're going to agree to a broadcast ban and they plowed all of that money into other types of advertising. So you do see, even in the history of tobacco, strategic decisions made on the part of business to give in once activism begins to be successful. And I do wonder what parallels exist in Jule's decision to stop marketing. Thank you. Yes. Do you talk about in your book the complicity of the medical community? And can you explain that? Johns Hopkins ash trays as an example? I do again at the risk of you not purchasing the book. I'll say that's not a primary focus of what I work on. But what I think is fair to say and what's been really well explored by some other scholars, Robert Proctor in particular has a book called very evocatively titled Golden Holocaust that explores basically the tobacco industry's use of what you can think of as scientists for hire. So basically beginning in the 1950s, the tobacco industry, the major cigarette manufacturers came together and they decided that we're going to pursue the strategy of creating doubt and doubt would be the way that they would avoid regulation. And one way they did so was to give money to scientists who were researching either topics unrelated to tobacco or methods of research that they felt would exonerate the cigarette. And so you do see a large number of not just physicians but other types of scientists receiving tobacco grant money and then the tobacco industry saying, well, these scientists agree with us and we sponsor research. We are genuinely interested in finding the answer to the question that was really no longer a question about whether or not cigarettes cause disease. Thank you. Hi. I'm curious about how individual smokers or groups of smokers may have responded to this activism. So you see about like people get smoke breaks at their jobs now. Can you speak a little bit more to that? Yeah. One thing I did not get to talk about in this presentation but is an important part of the Donna Shemp story are the role of unions. And so Donna Shemp's Union and unions for the most part writ large, the AFL-CIO is pretty opposed to the assertion of non-smokers' rights because what they see is the ability of an individual worker to subvert the hard one bargaining agreement which is what is supposed to be governing the rules at work. So unions have bargained for this right to take a break from work and in fact, you know, the business case is really anathema to what unions represent in a sense. It's not a productive use of time. It's not supposed to make you more productive. It's just a habit that you should be able to do because you're a human being or at least that's kind of the romantic case for smoking on the job. So for a very long time you see resistance by unions to this type of individual activism. Now, what is taking place on the ground is considerably more complex than these kind of high-level proclamations by the executive committee of unions. The fact now and the fact then was, I think, that most smokers do not desire to be smokers. So the notion that non-smokers' rights activism might be countered with smokers' rights activism never really materialized, though that was very much the goal of the tobacco companies who tried to create these essentially smokers' rights groups, astroturfing type of groups. But by the 70s, but really by the 1980s and 1990s, people don't want to be smokers and so while they might not welcome a ban, while it might be inconvenient, it does ultimately result in fewer people smoking in a greater number of non-smokers. Thank you. Would you say in looking at things like with the anti-jeweling, with the... Are there different actors now who are in the forefront than, you know, like the Donna Shemper or that era? That's a really good question. So I think that, you know, with jewel specifically, there are many of the same actors. Altria, which is Philip Morris, owns a 35% stake. I think I just read this week that one of the jewels CEO stepped down and the CEO is now the anti... So people in public health that were on, by the 1990s and early 2000s, on the forefront of anti-tobacco activism, those institutions continued to be important institutions in opposing jewel in the interests of full disclosure. One institute that I had a postdoc at called the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education, which is essentially, I mean, just for lack of a better term, anti-tobacco think tank at the University of California, San Francisco, they have been on the forefront. They were some of the actors in the non-smokers' rights movement. A legacy, in fact, of Berkeley gas chapter. Some of those same actors are now part of this anti-tobacco think tank that has been very much on the forefront of researching the harms of e-cigarette use as well as what the industry itself is doing. Well, if there aren't any further questions, I would just like to thank you for being a wonderful audience and for letting me share my work with you.