The Tobacco Oral History Project: Preserving the Voices of the Cigarette Century
The generation that worked in cigarette factories, grew tobacco on family farms, and lived through the transformation of smoking from glamorous to stigmatized is dying. Their stories are not in the archive. An oral history project would preserve them before they're lost.
Mary worked at the Liggett & Myers cigarette factory in Durham, North Carolina, for thirty-seven years. She started in 1962, at eighteen, on the packaging line—cartons of Chesterfields moving past her on a conveyor belt, her job to check for defects and keep the line moving. She remembers the noise (deafening), the heat (the factory wasn't air-conditioned until the 1970s), the tobacco dust that coated everything and everyone, the camaraderie of the women on the line. She remembers the day in 1964 when the Surgeon General's report came out—the uncertainty, the whispered conversations, the company's reassurance that everything was fine. **Mary is 80 now. Her story—the story of a working-class woman who spent her adult life manufacturing the product that would eventually give her COPD—is not in any archive. It exists only in her memory, and when she dies, it will be lost. The generation that lived the cigarette century is dying. Their stories have not been preserved.**
**The oral history of tobacco is a gap in the historical record** that future historians will struggle to fill. The industry's documents are preserved. The public health literature is preserved. The advertising and the packaging and the manufacturing equipment are preserved in museums and archives. But the voices of the people who lived the cigarette era—the factory workers, the tobacco farmers, the smokers who navigated addiction and stigma and the repeated failure of quit attempts—are not systematically preserved. **The archive of the cigarette century is rich in data and poor in experience. The data tells us what happened. The experience would tell us what it felt like—and the feeling is the dimension that the data cannot capture.**
**An oral history project would collect and preserve these voices** before the generation that can provide them is gone. The project would interview former factory workers, tobacco farmers, cigarette retailers, advertising professionals who worked on tobacco accounts, smokers and former smokers, and the family members of those who died of smoking-related disease. The interviews would be archived in university libraries, made accessible to researchers and the public, and used to inform future generations about the human dimensions of the cigarette century. **The oral history of tobacco is an act of memory—and the memory is urgent, because the people who carry it are dying.**
**💬 Do you have a story about tobacco—a family member who worked in the industry, a personal experience of smoking and quitting, a memory of a time when smoking was everywhere? Who should collect these stories, and how should they be preserved?**
