Includes bibliographical references and index.

Tobacco in industrializing America -- Tobacco's New Deal -- Cultivating the grower -- The challenge of the public interest -- Inventing the non-smoker -- From rights to cost -- Shredding a net to build a web -- Conclusion: "Weeds are hard to kill": the future of tobacco politics.

The Cigarette: A Political History offers a fresh interpretation of tobacco's role in the twentieth century. It argues that tobacco played a vital and emblematic role in the history of twentieth century political economy. Far from being unregulated, tobacco was the most controlled and supported commodity produced in the United States during the twentieth century. The federal tobacco program was remarkably long lived, lasting nearly seven decades and ending only in 2004. By the 1960s, criticisms of the Tobacco industry and its state support were ubiquitous. Under the banner of "non-smokers' rights," by the mid-1970s activists began to rack up an impressive string of victories in curtailing public smoking at the local and state levels. By the final decades of the twentieth century, debates over tobacco were waged primarily on the terrain of its social cost. By placing tobacco at the center of American political economy, The Cigarette: A Political History joins the politics of the body to the American body politic.--