announcer: american history tv social media. follow us at eastbound history. c-span history. next, sarah milo talks about her book, the cigarette: a political history. it talks about civil rights and environmental issues. this video is courtesy of the national archives. it can be found on the national archives youtube channel. guest explores the connection between cigarettes

and american political institutions throughout american history and describes a shift in attitude toward tobacco use. she is a back -- professor of history. a former fellow of the virginia foundation for humanities. she has written on the tobacco and the, e-cigarettes, fight to battle climate change. the research describes how everyday americans influence government policy. today is day two of the publication. .lease welcome sarah milov [applause] thank you so much for being here. honorsuch a treat and an for a historian 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 as an historian it was kind of namehaving yourself checked by beyonce. this is the mothership so thank you all for coming. cigarette: a political history, seeks to understand tobacco not through the lens of big tobacco and the industry but through the efforts of everyday americans to get the government to intervene on their behalf. big tobacco is still an important part of this story. but by focusing on other actors, farmers and government officials, politicians, activists, and labor unions, the story of tobacco in the 20th century looks 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 suspect and that was ultimately asked posed --

exposed, the cigarette was a product of government intervention. what ultimately reduced tobacco's grip on society was not the discovery that smoking causes cancer and the surgeon general's warning, 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 do not even consider it, 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 government. in the rise of the cigarette, see a product made by the government acting on the behalf of privileged constituencies. we can also see a critique.

not only of cigarette consumption, but in a way of doing government. the smoke-filled room, as it were. rise to the cigarette in the first place. today i will talk about an activist, a woman who had a big hand in the smoke-free world we live in. her story eliminates -- illuminates the mix of activism, legal innovation, and business calculation that remade public space. in 1975, her morning routine looked rather unusual. the 43-year-old customer service representatives popped a pill and drove from her home to the office of the telephone company. there, depending on how things looked, she might put on a gas whenwhich she would lower

she had to speak by phone or in person customers. by the safetymade appliance company of pittsburgh and designed to be used by miner miners war gas masks to protect themselves against pollutants that they encounter on the job. that is what she did as well. for that half of her coworkers smoked and there was no prohibition on smokers by the customers who came into the office. for her, this environment was crippling. tobacco smoke nauseated her, hence the daily pill. it called constant headaches and rashes on her face. eyeaused i.e. rotation -- irritation and abrasions would not heal. like most places, 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. the union to which she belonged, the communication workers of america, agreed that smoking was a workplace right. the gas mask was not the first remedy that she turns to for relief. earlier that year, she obtained a doctor who 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. she thought she would be home for a few days as supervisors rearranged desks at work. the days turned into weeks which turned into months. her extended sabbatical signals the depths of unwillingness to implement a non-smoking policy. as any academic nose, sabbaticals are the only time

when any real work is done. and so she got to work. she was no antitobacco activists, but she soon became one. she made contact with two primary antismoking groups of , and gas. she wrote to the new jersey department of health and labor. she wrote to the environment protection agency. from her research, she learned she was in uncharted territory. in the 1970's, there were no laws governing workplace smoking on behalf of non-smokers despite the fact that osha had authority over workplace conditions. no regulatory agency was authorized to police workplace conditions affected by tobacco smoke. issues, sherkplace could expect the support of her union as unions across the

country in the 70's were venturing beyond wages and hours to address the health and quality of life concerns of members. the communications of america was not going to support her in her request for a smoke-free inviting. end -- the entity toward her at work was impalpable or inhalable. governmentallies in or labor, she tried to take her case to management. ae delivered a proposal for corporate workplace smoking policy to the headquarters in new york city. in theould ban smoke work areas of business offices in the same manner it is banned in essential offices and switchboards, she wrote. if she could not bring them to regulate smoking on behalf of non-smoking employees, she argued, at least it could do so on behalf of the bottom line.

she cited figures from the public health service and pointed out that smokers spent one third more time away from their jobs because of illness than persons who had never smoked cigarettes. the company did not take her advice. having exhausted the normal channels of regular workplace decision-making, she decided that the courtroom would be the only venue to 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 sympathy for a non-smoker's plight? the answer to this question should warm the hearts of book lovers everywhere. she called a librarian. she called the reference librarian at rutgers university and that librarian happened to know about a law professor at rutgers who was teaching a

course on employment discrimination. been a lawyer in the johnson demonstration and an important one. he had been an architect of the equal employment opportunity commission, the federal agency charged with enforcing the civil rights act at work. he was an advocate for the federal government's power to intervene in workplaces in order to address racial and gender discrimination. it turned out she had a really -- real world need for what he was developing in his class. he agreed to take on her case pro bono. this was her first stroke of good fortune. third worthyd enthusiastic and surprisingly so , responses she received from medical doctors to whom she wrote soliciting their support as experts on her behalf. dr. carey was no ordinary

doctor. he had been the surgeon general who oversaw the publication of the 1964 report on smoking and health and he agreed to provide an affidavit confirming that tobacco smoke in the workers could be a health hazard to a significant number of workers and an irritation to an even larger number. seinfeld was also no ordinary doctor. he had served as nixon's surgeon general for he was canned for denouncing the tobacco industry. he also submitted testimony on her behalf. the judge presiding over the case at the new jersey superior court was moved by this celebrity testimony, but he was also moved the argument that she herself had made that if the switchboard equip it was precious enough to merit a smoke-free environment, then surely, so too were the bodies of the employees themselves. a company that has demonstrated

concern for mechanical components should have as much concern for human beings, the judge wrote. to company had a duty provide employees a safe and healthy work environment which for her, meant an environment free of tobacco smoke. wresting the right to smoke-free air for her employer, she 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 a product that thrived in a reglet or a vacuum. they were a testament to federal regulation on behalf of tobacco, specifically, organized? -- organized tobacco producers. she did more than try to create tolerable conditions to work, congregate, and exist in public. they asserted an alternative way of thinking about 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 the habit is expressed, this idea cut against the politics that undergirds smokers for some -- smokers supremacy in spaces. she soon realized she was part of a new social movement, the non-smokers rights movement. these were a very particular kind of antitobacco activists. 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 has used the governed to backup 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 might be hazardous to your health.

having been warned, it was the consumer's choice whether or not to smoke. 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 they have kept them home. clara was one such exile. 1971, a mother of two young daughters, she decided she had had enough of bending her life around tobacco smoke. her youngest daughter had a tobacco allergy that kept her family from enjoying one of the central pleasures of middle-class family life, going out to dinner. so her and her girlfriends made a pact, their first political action. they would remove ashtrays from their homes, ashtrays that neither they nor their husbands that this small gesture required premeditation and the

kind of confidence that only can be shored up by a group of the like-minded, suggests a degree of anxiety clara faced when she considered claiming an exclusively non-smoking space, even when that space was her own home. gohen started group against smoking pollution, or gasp from this action. using $50 of her grocery money, she produced the first batch of buttons that would become a standard symbol in the non-smokers' 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 georges county tuberculosis and respiratory disease association, which allowed her to use its mimeograph machine, and it mailed "the ventilator" to surrounding counties, sharing with hundreds of state and local affiliates across the united

states. taking back on -- piggybacking on this association's national scope, gasp quickly reached a big audience. a year after its founding, it had assembled and mailed over 500 new chapter kits, literature that helps fledgling activists conceive of themselves as possessing both a legitimate grievance and the means to do something about it. gasp drew energy from contemporary social movements. at times, activists spoke the heavy language of civil rights and emancipation. drawing comparisons between the non-smokers rights movement and the african-american freedom struggle. of an air setse abe lincoln, who proclaimed the emancipation of non-smokers. the co-founder of the berkeley chapter of gasp put it this way

-- although i would not suggest that non-smokers' rights are trampled on to the same extent as have been the rights of minority groups, i would suggest certain parallels. the cofounder of the berkeley chapter put it this way. suggesth i would not that non-smokers rights are trampled on to the same extent as have been the rights of minority groups, i would suggest parallels. after all, is there any real difference between saying to a person, you can't eat at this lunch counter and saying, can't eat at this lunch counter if you are concerned about your health?

as powerfully expressed by feminist, consciousness-raising brought the hidden indignities of private experience out into the open. it was a tool admirably -- not only because some of its religious participants were women. time, many smokers -- many non-smokers had felt individually annoyed by smoking but had suffered in silence, gouin 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-smokers' cause, opening up avenues for analogies to the liberation struggles of other oppressed peoples. and, as is suggested the very

name, group against smoking pollution, the non-smokers' rights inspiration drew energy from the environmental movement. 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 gambit, had they been emitted from actual smokestacks. unbeknownst to donna at the time, these non-smokers' rights activists were beginning to achieve their first successes. by the time the new jersey superior court ruled on donna shimp's case, just over 100 cities had passed some of the first ordinances that restricted where people could smoke, mostly in public buildings. non-smokers' rights activists had, by the mid-70's, developed a vocabulary of entitlement and a theory of harm, and they have found venues within the american political system that allowed them to assert what they deemed to be there rights.

in inventing the non-smoker, social activism, not scientific pronouncement, began to clear the air. in fact, substantial epidemiological evidence about by physical harms brought other people's smoke would not emerge until the 1980's. 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 but -- anybody not named donna shimp. her ruling applied only to her , and only over the next few years when 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. where donna's case failed as

precedent, donna herself was determined to change the way people work. beginning in 1978 with the tireless persistence, she began an after-hours career as a workplace consultant. in the 1970's, the field of management consulting was not yet a prestigious launching pad for the young and the educated. donna jumped right 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 shimp 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. shimp's case for smoke-free workplaces converged on a single argument -- smoking, and quite often smokers, cost too much. they were betting -- bad employees. they destroyed equipment. they took frequent breaks to feed their habit, and they were sidelined with sickness. shimp 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 shimp wrote, "is there any better way to interest management in restricting smoking them through the bottom

"ine? the promise of corporate health, not employee health, encouraged as an assist to adopt smoking restrictions and bands, even when there was no law forcing them to do so. 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's smoking habits implicated every taxpayer. lost productivity, wages, absenteeism caused by smoking related illness put the tally close to $12 billion to within a $18 billion. decade, the business case for non-smoking had begun to bear fruit. a 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 decreased 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 and 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 shimp brought suit today, she would find is still -- find it still to be the case that osha and the epa 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 that non-smokers with more money. blue-collar workers are more likely to go to work at worksites where smoking is permitted. in 19 states, it is legal to

fire or refuse to hire someone because she smokes, a kind of permission for business that reinforces the existence of an underclass of poor smokers. this, too, is the legacy of business case for non-smoking, a legacy of the non-smokers' rights movement. just as the physical consequence s 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. what can we learn from thinking about the rise and all of cigarettes in american life as a product of social movements? 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, to show that action can be taken at the local level, action that can be substantial in its own right and

can be pressure later on 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 law, 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 halted the sale of rifles and ammunition. equally important, in a parallel drawn 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 to ask customers to refrain from open carry in their stores, even with -- in states where open carry is legal. small stores across america have also taken a page out of the antitobacco playbook, posting stickers with the red dash

circle. that circle made famous, of course, i no smoking signs. -- by no smoking signs. such displays do not just declare 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 cigarette concerns the unintended consequences of reform. non-smokers rights activists operated within constraints. 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 shimp began their quest by asserting they had a right to comfort and shared space, the lore of the cigarette was irresistible. it is now frequently thought of as a private vice and private failing, and assessment with

unmistakable 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, two 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 is not possible to talk about tobacco today without talking about vaping. with ultra's 35% stake in juul, when we talk about vaping, we are, after all, talking about the tobacco industry. activistsmokers rights began to achieve victory, the tobacco companies hired their

in statehouses to thwart them. the tobacco industry worked to render local ordinances less effective by passing weaker laws at the state level. theseast -- once past, preemption laws are difficult to repeal, in part because they tamp down on enthusiasm for grassroots organizing. many in public health see them as the biggest challenge facing antitobacco forces. the vaping industry has shown interest in taking the power to regulate e-cigarettes out of the hands of localities and putting them back in the hands of statehouses. 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 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 non-smokers' 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. [applause] i would be happy to take questions. there's microphones on either side.

>> i don't think i need a microphone. [inaudible] ms. milov: i think for the closed captioning, it is 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 non-smokers, in terms of them pressing their agenda. what is your personal perspective on that, and do you feel it was a legitimate association or analogy? ms. milov: i think that, given the context of the 1970's, non-smokers' rights activists were in search of a vocabulary that ennobled their cause and the most morally hefty vocabulary of the day was the

african-american freedom struggle, the civil rights movement. they took to that, and they used it. i suppose that cuts in a couple of directions. first, non-smokers did feel themselves to be oppressed. that oppression is clearly not the same thing that african-americans and experienced under jim crow, but perhaps was born out of a similar feeling that they felt they should be able to exist in public spaces, that they felt themselves to be exiled from. the sad irony that ends up happening is that, in achieving control over a public space, what ends up happening to smokers is they themselves are exiled from a shared common s. the way that the movement unfolded meant that people who were exiled, that smokers tended to be poor 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 there were unintended classist consequences. >> thank you. >> yes, thanks for a wonderful presentation. ms. milov: thank you. >> i was wondering if your book delves into the marketing aspects. i know that with the juuls that are appealing to children now, there is pushback against the marketing of it, and joe kamel, of course, was thought to be too cute for adults. thought to be aimed at children. how does the political structure deal with the marketing and the appeal? ms. milov: at the risk of maybe you not buying my book, the marketing of cigarettes is not a

primary focus of the book, but i have thought a bit about what the history of cigarettes can tell us about what is going on with juul. the tobacco industry, like , perhaps, the e-cigarette and juul today, they realized 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,a sickly prior -- basically, prior to the 1990's. what is interesting, too, about the lessons of the tobacco industry for e-cigarette regulations now is in the history of the cigarette, you actually see companies acceding and giving into regulatory

demands about marketing in a way that, for example, juul has agreed to give up certain marketing practices. the late 1960's, antitobacco activists basically secured the right to free airtime on television to run antitobacco ads. and these were really emotionally powerful. -- wallop. a wall up this is the first time people had really seen public health advertising on tv and public health advertising on tv that dealt with death in a meaningful way. by the late 1960's and early 1970's, these are on television 3-1 ratio.to 1 -- for every three tobacco advertisements that are on television, one anti-tobacco advertisement is on television. the companies get together and basically say, "we are out. we do not want to be dogged by

this antitobacco advertising, so we are going to back off of television. we are going to agree to a podcast ban." they put that money into other types of advertising. he do see even when the history of tobacco, strategic decisions made on the part of business to give in one's activism against -- once activism begins to be successful. i do wonder what parallels exist in juul's decision to stop marketing. >> thank you. >> do you talk about, in your book, the complicity of the medical community? can you explain that? johns hopkins ashtrays, as an example. ms. milov: i do -- again, at the risk of you not purchasing the book, i will say that's not a primary focus of what i work on, but what i think is fair to say and what has been really well

-explored by some other scholars, robert proctor in particular has a book evocative -- evocative lee titled "golden holocaust" that explores basically the tobacco industry's use of what you can think of as scientists for hire. basically, beginning in the 1950's, the tobacco industry, the major cigarette manufacturers, came together and decided, we are going to pursue the strategy of creating doubt. and doubt would be the way they would avoid regulation. 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. so, you do see a large number of, not just physicians, but other types of scientists receiving tobacco grant money, and the tobacco industry saying,

"well, these scientists agree with us, and we sponsor research. we are genuinely interested and -- in finding the answer to the question that was no longer a question about whether or not cigarettes cause disease. >> thank you. >> i'm curious about how individual smokers or groups of smokers may have responded to this activism. you see about, people get smoke breaks at their jobs now. can you speak a little bit more a little bit more to that? ms. milov: yeah, one thing i did not get to talk about in this presentation, but it is an important part of the donna shimp story are the role of unions. so, donna shimp's union and part,, for the most 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-won bargaining agreement, which is what is supposed to be covering the rules at work. so, unions have bargained for this right to take a break at work. and in fact, the business case is really anathema to what unions represent, in a sense. it is not a productive use of time. it is not supposed to make you more productive. it is just a habit you should be able to do because you are a human being, or at least the kind of romantic case for smoking on the job. 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 in 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 did not desire to be smokers. so, the notion that non-smoker'' 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 smokers rights groups, astroturf type of groups. but by the 1970's, but really by the 1980's and 1990's, people don't want to be smokers, so while they might be inconvenient, it does ultimately result in fewer people smoking and a greater number of non-smokers. >> thank you.

>> would you say in looking at things like the anti-juul, with the e, are there different actors now who are in the forefront, like the donna shimp or that era? ms. milov: that's a really good question. withnk that, you know, juul specifically, there are many of the same actors. altria, which is philip morris, owns 35% stake. i think i read this week that one of juul's ceo stepped down. now -- is >> [inaudible] ms. milov: so, people in public health in the 1990's, 2000's on the forefront of anti-tobacco activism, those institutions continue to be important institutions in opposing juul.

in the interest of full disclosure, one institute i had of, an entity 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 the berkeley gasp -- of the berkeley gasp chapter. some of those same actors are now part of this antitobacco 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 are not any further questions, i would like

to thank you for being a wonderful audience and for letting me share my work with you. [applause] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2020] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] >> american history tv looks back at the kent state university shooting. shots, kentf 67 state and the end of american innocence joins us to talk about events of that day and take your calls. then at 10:00 a.m. on railamerica, three films on the vietnam war. president nixon's amounts of attacks on vietnam and cambodia. a congressional resolution to end the war. and the war's effect on five american families. later, this50 years weekend on american history tv, on c-span3.

>> you're watching american history tv, covering history c-span style. with event coverage, eyewitness accounts, archival films, lectures in college classrooms, and visits to museums and historic places. all weekend, every weekend, on c-span3. >> world war ii veteran benjamin schleider discusses his experiences with the sixth

armored division in european theater, including fighting in the battle of the bulge. mr. slater served as an aide and shared stories about patton. the national world war ii museum conducted this interview in 2009 for its oral history collection. 2009.is august 5, thomas with the national world war ii museum. today i am with esther benjamin schleider. for the record, please state your full name. olafchleider: benjamin schleider. >> were reborn? mr. schleider: texas. >> when were you born? one of the things i remember is, my