Ashes To Ashes: America's Hundred-Year Cigarette War, The Public Health, And The Unabashed Triumph Of Philip Morris

Ashes to Ashes is a monumental history of the American tobacco industry’s ironic success in developing the cigarette, modern society’s most widespread instrument of self-destruction, into the nation’s most profitable consumer product. Starting with its energized, work-obsessed royal families, the Dukes and the Reynoldses, and their embattled successors like the eccentric autocrat George Washington Hill and the feisty Joseph F. Cullman, the book vividly portrays the cigarette makers' generations of entrepreneurial geniuses. Their problematic achievement was based on cunning business strategies and marketing dazzle, deft political power plays, and a relentless, often devious attack on anti-smoking forces in science, public health, and government. Enabling the whole process to unfold was the weirdly symbiotic relationship of an industry geared at any cost to sell, sell, sell cigarettes, and an American public habituated to ignore all health warnings and buy, buy, buy. The book covers the history of America's cigarette industry from the glory days of rampant hucksterism to the 1964 Surgeon General’s Report and the age of massive mergers. It details how tobacco grew from a regional crop to a global, dangerous consumer product, employing vast rural labor, generating significant tax revenue, and fostering fierce corporate competition. It examines how industry PR applied techniques to obscure the cigarette’s lethal nature and explores the industry’s conflicts with public health forces over regulation.