The Duke

by Duncan Murrell

Amongst other herbs, he should cut up that weed of covetousness by the roots, that there be no remainder left; and then know this for a certainty, that together with their bodies thou mayest quickly cure all the diseases of their minds.

-- Hippocrates to the herbalist, Crateva

The monument to James Buchanan "Buck" Duke stands in front of the English Gothic chapel that Buck himself laid out at the center of the university he built and which bears his name. The tower of the chapel is 210-feet high and the nave seats 1,470 people. It is like no other church anywhere in North Carolina tobacco country. Buck's statue stands erect, fingers on a cane, all six buttons of his waistcoat buttoned and tight against his paunch. In his left hand he's burning a cigar, although by rights he should be holding a cigarette, the poor man's accessory, which he manufactured by the billions.

There's a memorial chapel to the left of the chancel of the main chapel, and in this smaller chapel rest the sarcophagi of Buck, his brother Ben, and his father, Washington "Wash" Duke. Each of them lies head to toe, carved in glowing white marble and covered in stony drapes like three home-grown Caesars. Buck looks a little like Augustus, thin and angular, nothing like the triumphant gargantua holding his cigar just a hundred yards away; a sarcophagus and the finest marble cannot hide the transformations of old age and death.

It's three miles to the sarcophagi from the old Duke homestead. Instead of a statue, at the homestead there's a rickety, animatronic tobacco farmer priming his soil. There is also a 250-pound replica of the Liberty Bell constructed of pressed tobacco leaves, a twin of the tobacco bell given by the R. J. Reynolds Company to the Smithsonian on the occasion of our nation's two hundredth birthday. There is enough tobacco in the bell to make enough cigarettes to smoke a pack a day for twenty years. These creations�the farmer and the bell�do not betray anything approaching the ambition contained in Duke Chapel, although they're pretty clever. The homestead is very modest, and yet it is preserved along with Buck's statue, his church, his university, and his marble. It's the relic of a different part of the Duke history, of a time before the desires that birthed a global tobacco monopoly grew until they could no longer be contained.

The Dukes of Durham were real men. "Duke of Durham" was a brand of tobacco. One cannot be disentangled from the other. Each elides the difference between the truth and something greater and more impressive. Tobacco came and went for the Dukes, a means to an end. They found their place in the chapel, and their descendants live the lives of an American aristocracy, forming foundations and living off the income of money made and invested three generations ago. Buck Duke will not be forgotten, a debt he owes in part to other forgotten men, ones not so adept at the American art of transformation by dint of desire.

What desire propelled the young James Albert Bonsack to invent his cigarette rolling machine, upon which the Dukes built their fortune? What desire shaped the hulk of rollers and blades and belts that Bonsack pieced together for the delicate work of rolling and cutting cigarettes? Why is there no Bonsack University? Is it a difference in native intelligence? Some failure of will or historical accident? Bonsack didn't look at his machine and see the possibility of controlling the worldwide tobacco industry. Such a thing was not imaginable, was not among the things he coveted. Bonsack likely saw only an entry in a contest sponsored by a Richmond tobacco firm offering a $75,000 cash prize and, later, a way to make some money licensing the thing to a few tobacco companies. But Duke had the whole thing pegged differently.

Robert Burton's seventeenth-century comic inventory of the varieties of psychic affliction born of a tumultuous society, The Anatomy of Melancholy, contains this passage on the burdens of the ambitious: "This concupiscible appetite, howsoever it may seem to carry with it a show of pleasure and delight, and our concupiscences most part affect us with content and a pleasing object, yet if they be in extremes, they rack and wring us on the other side. A true saying it is, �Desire hath no rest,' is infinite in itself, endless, and as one calls it, a perpetual rack, or horse-mill." But for all my searching I never found evidence that Buck Duke had ever been wrung out by his ambition or that he'd felt the bond of his desires tying him to the rack. There's nothing to suggest that he was ever anything other than a tough, single-minded, self-satisfied American plutocrat or that he was ever unhappy about these facts of his life. Buck Duke passed very comfortably into legend, and after he died he was called "master" and "titan" by his hagiographers. He looks good as an eight-foot four-inch bronze sculpture, satisfied and almost smiling. Today, while platoons of post-pubescents paint their faces blue and scrawl Buck's name across their chests at basketball games, we are left to wonder, "Who the hell was Bonsack?"

OF DESIRE AND INVENTION

James Albert Bonsack was born into the southern aristocracy, such as it was. His father was a textile-mill owner in Bonsack, Virginia, not far from Roanoke, who had turned out uniforms for the Confederacy during the war and who was, in turn, the son of a prosperous plantation owner. Bonsack was barely more than a boy when he invented that first machine to mass-produce cigarettes.

In 1875, when Bonsack was sixteen years old, the Richmond tobacco company of Allen and Ginter issued a challenge: $75,000 to the inventor of a functioning, practical cigarette-rolling machine. Bonsack's initial investment was eleven dollars borrowed from friends, with which he entered the contest. People said he could think of nothing else. He then borrowed fifty dollars from his grandmother to continue tinkering. At Roanoke College, it's said, he couldn't stay focused on his studies because all he could think about were cigarettes and that machine.

It's worth noting that this fascination with cigarettes would have seemed very odd to Bonsack's fellow students, other scions of the old southern gentry. Cigarettes were for sissies, after all. They'd always been for sissies, from the moment they were awarded the diminutive "ette" by the French. Women and dandies smoked cigarettes, not men of means.

Men smoked tobacco out of pouches bearing the image of a massive bull with large, pendulous testicles. Dreaming of a machine to mass-produce cigarettes had all the manliness of dreaming how to manufacture a better corset�useful to be sure, but a little suspect. Bonsack's fellows would have smoked cigars, or pipes, or chewed plug. Maybe their fathers had smoked cigarettes during the war, but that was of necessity; cigarettes had been the tobacco product of choice for soldiers since the Crimean War. They were convenient. And their fathers had rolled their own under Yankee fire while defending the homeland, and each of their cigarettes was paid for in blood, by God! A mass-produced cigarette would not have appealed to the sons of those men, and they weren't alone. Aside from a couple of Yankee tobacco companies in New York, who employed immigrant Jews to roll cigarettes at the rate of four a minute, most tobacco companies had dismissed prerolled cigarettes as a losing proposition.

Bonsack would not let it go. He quit school, kept tinkering with the machine, watched an early prototype burn in the Lynchburg rail yards before he could get it to the Allen and Ginter Company in Richmond, and he kept going into debt. But finally, in 1881, he succeeded in patenting a machine. Surely this is the point to declare an American success story. The doggedness, the vision, the adversity, the unthreatening eccentricity, the unflagging desire� these are the stations and burdens of the American inventor, told and retold. In a nation of inventors of one sort or another, the eccentrics are prophets, touched by our American God of the bootstrap. But Bonsack's problems didn't end there, primarily because his machine didn't really work as well as he would have liked. It clogged easily, with so much pulverized tobacco moving through its system. Little pieces of the machinery would occasionally come loose and shut the operation down. The Allen and Ginter Company installed a machine that never operated properly, and it's unclear whether Bonsack ever received his $75,000. Nevertheless, in 1882 the Bonsack Machine Company came into being, with a Salem, Virginia, lawyer named D. B. Strouse, the man who had helped secure the patent, as president. Bonsack himself was not an officer of the company, just a member of the board of directors, and in the ensuing history of the company his name appears only sporadically. The new company took their machine to all the leading manufacturers of cigarettes, and every one of them rejected it. Had Buck Duke not decided to take a look at the contraption in 1884 to see if he could make it work, the Bonsack Machine Company might have never earned a cent.

By 1895 the company was embroiled in patent disputes that picked apart Bonsack's original patent and left the company with just a few pieces of their machine they could call their own. By the turn of the century, the company was only a holding company owning interest in a larger parts-supply operation, and within a decade no one named Bonsack had anything to do with the running of the company. Thus ends the story of James Albert Bonsack, inventor of the cigarette machine.

Yet without Bonsack's cigarette machine, Duke's story would have been a modest one too, the man himself forgotten. He would have likely remained the proprietor of a successful family tobacco business, manufacturing mostly loose tobacco. He might have become wealthy, though not inter-me-in-marble, sculptme- in-my-best-suit wealthy. But in less than twenty years from the day Duke installed two of those Bonsack machines on the floor of his Durham factory, Buck was transformed from a big, red-headed, pigeon-toed, barely educated country boy running his daddy's Durham business into the controlling owner of the giant trust called American Tobacco, which later became Consolidated Tobacco, once he'd come to dominate the cigar, pipe, chew, and plug industries. After trying to take the British tobacco industry by force, he ended up heading the British- American Tobacco Company, a world-wide trust that gave Duke control of much of the world's tobacco market.

The story of the Dukes is so well known and so full of rags-to-riches homilies, it's embarrassing to repeat it. Buck's daddy, Wash Duke, a Unionist who later became a Republican, was conscripted into the Confederate army as an artilleryman. When he returned from Union captivity following the fall of Richmond, he didn't have much money. Sometimes he's described as having in his pocket only a fifty-cent piece, given to him for some Confederate scrip by a Union soldier who wanted to take the nearly worthless paper home as a souvenir. This is exactly the kind of detail that begins the foundational myths of so many of our American plutocrats. Such details mean once upon a time . . .

The truth was that Wash Duke had been a relatively successful farmer and, like so many other farmers who went off to fight in the war, he returned to a homestead that had deteriorated. But in his case, unlike many others, he was still solvent and his farm was still viable. He had a couple of broke-down mules and, most important of all, he had a batch of cured tobacco in his barn and three sons: Ben and Buck, and their half-brother, Brodie. They processed and sold that tobacco as loose leaf and used the money to build up their homestead again. Just a couple miles down the road, James Green was having a hell of a successful time selling processed tobacco under his Bull Durham brand to travelers and students on their way west or over to the university at Chapel Hill, and so Wash decided to set up his own little factory on Main Street to make and market his own brand: "Pro Bono Publico," which would soon be displaced by the Duke of Durham pipe tobacco. Buck, like so many kids of his generation, had received very little formal education while the war was on, and he wasn't very interested in getting much more afterward. But he was a big kid, and although he walked so funny he looked deformed, his strength and work habits became indispensable to Wash. While he was still a teenager, his father made him a partner, and very soon Buck was running the place. (Brodie, the eldest and the only son to go off to war with Wash, doesn't have a sarcophagus and was eventually excluded from the family business because, among other things, he drank too much.)

Although the family company thrived by selling the Duke of Durham, Buck knew they'd have to branch out if they were going to have any long-lasting success. He looked out and saw almost every tobacco market�plug, chew, pipe, cigars, roll-your-own�locked up by bigger companies in fierce competition with each other. Only prerolled cigarettes, those little trifles, seemed to have been ignored by most of the companies. In the modern language of business, Duke found himself a "niche." It wasn't a big niche because relatively few people wanted to smoke them and they were expensive to produce. Although they were a minor product, Duke still saw prerolleds as the wedge with which he would pry open the tobacco markets and expand the family business.

By April 1884, Buck and a mechanic had fixed the flawed Bonsack machine he had leased from the Bonsack company. He soon had two, and then he rented more, with the understanding that the Bonsack Machine Company would reward him for saving their machine and salvaging their chance at success: they would forever afterward lease the machines to Duke at 25 percent below the fee they charged any of Duke's competitors, thus giving him a significant and permanent advantage when the other companies realized their error and started using the machines.

Soon Duke was producing far more cigarettes than anyone wanted to smoke. The Bonsack machine had not been mothered by necessity. There had been no need for it, no gathering cry for more cigarettes, no growing market. It would be well into the twentieth century before cigarettes were the predominant form of tobacco in the United States, and it took great effort from Duke and his growing platoon of salesman and barkers and jobbers and advertising specialists to make that happen. People needed to be told they wanted to smoke Duke's cigarettes.

Duke sent a fast-talking southerner named Edward Featherston Small around the country. Small organized photo opportunities with beautiful women brandishing his packs of cigarettes. He invented the tobacco store Indian, and he made extensive use of cigarette cards, which carried portraits of poor men who had become rich, of buxom young women, and of baseball players. He hired a comely widow to sell cigarettes to the men who ran tobacco stores in the Midwest, and he made a photograph of the famous French actress Madam Rhea with a box of Duke cigarettes, which he turned into a poster and plastered all over Atlanta. Small eventually left the cigarette business, but he always maintained that he had created more cigarette customers than anyone alive. Duke took twenty cents of every dollar he made on cigarettes and plowed it back into advertising placards and billboards and payola to salesmen and tobacco store owners. Within five years of seeing his first Bonsack machine, Duke had made brands like Cameos and Cross Cuts among the most popular and cheapest brands in the land, and he had begun to drive his competitors out of business. One poor old tobacco magnate, finally buckling under to the Duke onslaught, complained that he was "most eager to get out of the advertising madhouse."

Soon after getting the Bonsacks running in Durham, Duke decamped for New York, where he set up a factory on Rivington Street and installed four Bonsacks. This was Duke's moment of genius. He understood that he was now making a tobacco product whose natural consumer would be the poor, working man� unable to afford the cigar habits of the toffs and yet still covetous of the sweet, smooth taste of the Piedmont's beautiful and particularly nicotine-rich Bright tobacco. Where else to find a critical mass of such people but in New York at the turn of the century? He knew he'd found gold in the rapidly industrializing city overflowing with immigrants, where relief from the factory floor and from the chaos of the tenements came in only brief moments, moments perfectly suited to the quick, narcotic jolt of a cigarette taken on the sly and now available at the low, low price of a nickel a pack.

It's hard to know what had to come first, the machine or the man: the embodiment of that man's desire or his ability to recognize it. Duke himself had become a new kind of southern man, one with little patience with the South's concept of itself, little interest in tales of the old aristocracy and their attitude of noblesse oblige toward the rest of the white South. His father had been a Republican after all. He had neither the time nor the stomach for the romance southerners continued to carry on with themselves. W. J. Cash, in The Mind of the South, described men like him: "For here, you see, was created a world in which the hard, energetic, horse-trading type of man was remorselessly indicated for survival�even more remorselessly, indeed, than in the old days when the plantation was flinging out over the backcountry, and land-speculation and wildcat finance were the prevailing order."

FABRICATORS OF THE AUTHENTIC

A few years before his triumphant score, Duke stood on a dock in Manhattan, waiting for a man named Moses Gladstein, who had learned to roll cigarettes in Kiev. This was some time around 1882, and Gladstein was out of work. He had led a strike against Kinney Bros., one of the New York cigarette manufacturers. He and the hundred or so other Polish and Russian Jews walked the picket for better wages and working conditions. They'd all lost their jobs permanently, perhaps not having calculated that their nascent labor movement could be replaced man for man by new immigrants possessing the same skills and greater desperation. Their skills, though�honed in Eastern European factories that catered to the gentile upper classes and their uncommon taste for prerolled cigarettes�were still of some use to a man like Buck Duke. He told Gladstein he had jobs for his men, and Gladstein listened while they stood there by the harbor.

Why would Duke take on those malcontents, with their history of labor agitation, street-side socialism, and their odd, not-very-Methodist ways? He took them on because they were cheap, because they had come to America to work and to change their standing in the world, and because he knew that once he'd steered them away from New York and the support of their community, he could count on local laws, his own power, and the docility of his poor white southern laborers to squelch any labor movement. Men like Duke, Cash wrote, "knew how to handle the commoner, to steer expertly about his recalcitrance, to manipulate him without ever arousing his jealous independence."

For a few years in the early 1880s, Duke's hand rollers worked hard and gave Duke a tentative start in the prerolled cigarette market at a rate of four cigarettes a minute per man. But in 1884, when he brought that first Bonsack machine down to the factory, Gladstein's workers rebelled, threatening to destroy the machine and to kill the mechanic, an Irishman named O'Neill. Their effort to organize as Local 27 of the Cigar Maker's Progressive Union (CMPU) was successful, but the union itself was worse than useless against management: Duke met with CMPU officials in New York, struck a deal, and came back to Durham to announce he was slashing wages by two-thirds for union members. At the same time, he advertised for "500 local boys and girls" to replace the agitators. The Jewish workers were soon without jobs. Their success as a union�that is, no success�would be shared by nearly every labor movement in North Carolina ever afterward.

Most of the workers drifted off, unmoored again. Only a few stuck around, and some of those changed their course and transformed themselves into business owners. Moses Gladstein was one. His grave marker sits in an old cemetery off Morehead Avenue in Durham, along with a dozen other Gladsteins, an old Durham name now.

Guess Road in Durham cuts over to an area that was once called "The Bottoms," a small part of which was briefly known as "The Shtetl," the area where the Russian and Polish Jews lived after Duke brought them down from New York to roll his cigarettes. These were not the Jews who eventually settled the town, who in the twentieth century formed Durham's thriving Jewish community, the subject of Eli Evans's The Provincials. The Jews of Evans's Durham were merchants, independent men and women, successful assimilators who were dedicated to preserving their heritage and religious practice while also claiming, for the sake of an odd sort of southern pedigree, a tenuous connection with the tobacco industry through the vanished and luckless Polish and Russian cigarette makers� Moses Gladstein's people. That is to say, they were Americans, fabricators of the authentic. They did not live in a place called the Shtetl, nor did they live on Yiddishe Street. But the grave of Mutt Evans, former mayor of Durham and Eli Evans's father, rests not far from Moses Gladstein's.

Pauli Murray, in her classic memoir of race and family, Proud Shoes, said this of the Bottoms: "It was as if the town had swallowed more than it could hold and had regurgitated, for the Bottoms was an odorous conglomeration of trash piles, garbage dumps, cow stalls, pigpens, and crowded humanity." Now the Bottoms, and the tobacco warehouses and factories they surrounded, are being transformed. The city's leaders talk of revival, energy, creativity, renewal. The old tobacco warehouses�the American Tobacco complex, Liggett & Myers�have been converted into condominiums and offices and retail stores, all centered on the new baseball stadium, the Durham Bulls Athletic Park (DBAP), which is itself the product of a different sort of transformation. Change upon change, invention after invention, Durham stumbles on.

Built to look like an old ballpark, the DBAP is the new transmigrating into the old. Or rather, it is what its designers imagine when they think of the old. In this way the old is transformed too, moving simultaneously forward and backward, canceling itself, producing something without meaning or context or heritage, perfectly new and independent, and therefore American.

In left field, a giant wooden bull guards the foul pole above a sign that reads, "Hit bull, win steak." The bull's eyes light up, and then he snorts smoke when one of the young men on the field, every one of them fighting to get out of AAA ball, hits the bull. The bull was the invention of the people who made the movie Bull Durham, a valentine to simpler days�when baseball was of interest to the nation, the Durham Bulls played in a rickety and now largely abandoned ballpark a few blocks away, groupies had hearts of gold, kisses with Susan Sarandon lasted for days, and so on. The bull was an old-timey touch, lending the movie part of its comic innocence. So the real ball team and its fans, in their sentimental ballpark without a history, adopted a tradition invented by Hollywood to depict the wonderful eccentricity of that very team and their fans. Buck Duke would have loved that�and the fact that this particular bull of Durham no longer has testicles. He'd understand the steer; it's a new world, after all.

Invention after invention. There was the Bonsack machine, of course, but it is only the by-product, the spawn of another sort of invention. The Jewish workers knew what it was, and they threatened to kill the man who came to repair it and make it run. They knew about reinvention, they had seen it happen. They had hoped for that very thing to happen to themselves, perhaps, when they boarded ship. They needed only to look up the hill, out of the shtetl in the Bottoms at the stores they could not afford to shop in and the theater they could not attend, to see the price of invention.

Duke invented the cigarette I'm smoking, if you consider that it's much more than just a cylindrical pack of pulverized tobacco. He, or one of his men, invented the image I loved and coveted even more than the diminishing pleasure of the nicotine itself. (At least, at first.) The Dukes linked sex and the cigarette, which was audacious not only because they were abstemious Methodists but because there's no earthly reason burning a foul weed in your mouth ought to invoke the pleasures of sex. And yet it does.

Duke turned the business of tobacco into the business of advertising and taught people to want something they didn't know they wanted, something noxious and mindblowing. He had invented a desire, the weed of covetousness, and for that reason he seems not a little godlike and terrifying.

What is the more impressive invention�a man or the machine that made him great? There was a moment in the South when a new kind of man arose. Here was a new invention at home among the conventions and quirks of the Old South, ready to take advantage of those quirks in the cultivation of wealth, power, and status without allowing the old codes to stand in his way: a new generation of southerner, for whom grasping and clawing after Mammon was no sin, for whom wealth and success might trump other, more sentimental southern verities like the honor of the southern gentleman. He had no time for gentlemen. He was a creator of worlds.

Invention. We look sideways at it, even as we scurry about inventing ourselves on the sly, preserving our legacies, leaving our signs, dreading the knowledge that some of us are better at it than others. We ignore this fact, for the most part, but it is not at our peril that we do so because posterity does not care. Erect a monument, pass away unnoticed and destitute, it doesn't matter, not to anyone but ourselves.

A FINAL STAND

In March 2003 a North Carolina tobacco farmer from Whittakers named Dwight Watson loaded his John Deere onto the back of a trailer, pulled it 250 miles north to a small pond in D.C. in an area called Constitution Gardens, within sight of the Lincoln and Vietnam Memorials, strapped on a white helmet emblazoned with a red cross, affixed a couple of crude signs to the cab of the tractor proclaiming his support of the troops, hung an American flag upside down to signal his distress, and then drove the tractor straight into the middle of the pond. For two days he played loud recordings of military cadences, threatened to blow himself up, shouted at police with a bullhorn, and made pointed references to Waco and Ruby Ridge. "If this is the way America will be run, the hell with it," he told the Washington Post. "I'm out of here . . . I'm ready to go to heaven."

For a few hours, his presence made Washingtonians very nervous. Was this about the war? Could he be a Muslim terrorist cleverly disguising himself as a sunburnt, broken-down farmer from down South somewhere? Devious but brilliant! But then the truth came out: he was pissed off about losing his tobacco farm in large part because of changing rules regarding tobacco quotas coupled with absurdly low prices�all of which have caused Whittakers to become a ghost town even while executives at the big tobacco companies continue to take their profits.

At that point, of course, he became an object of ridicule. A real live farmer? How hilarious. Reporters scrambled around town collecting insults. He acquired a nickname�Tractor Guy. A bartender over at the Red Sage, just a few blocks away and down the street from the National Press Club, suggested they lure him out of the tractor with Slim Jims. One Jeffrey Loman, an employee of the Interior Department, suggested that Park Service officials dump fifty tons of manure on Watson. "That should render him harmless." Another bystander suggested shooting him with an elephant tranquilizer.

He finally surrendered, and he's been sentenced in federal court for his crimes�destroying federal property and making a false threat to detonate explosives. It's likely that Watson's story will be remembered as a strange little footnote in the history of the war on terrorism, a false alarm that gave folks a little chuckle.

It will not be remembered, as perhaps it should be remembered, as a skirmish� maybe the last one�in a war that has been waged for more than a century. Those quotas that had been yanked away from him had been created during the Depression to prop up a group of farmers who had been wrung dry by the pricechopping, monopolistic practices of one J. B. "Buck" Duke and his associates.

As I write this, my heart rate is increasing by ten to twenty-five beats per minute, my blood pressure is rising, my blood vessels are constricting, and I'm experiencing a mild narcosis. It's my second cigarette of the day, which is never as perfect as the first, but it's still good. I feel guilty about it, but that's the way with sin. I'm a sinner. Every cigarette not smoked holds the promise of redemption and sin, together and identical. Every cigarette I smoke is the prelude to redemption; every cigarette that sits untouched in my pack is an invitation to sin. I have come to an understanding with this evil, and with this cycle, and I have learned to live my life as an ever-stumbling penitent most comfortable pleading forgiveness. I wish nothing more, I desire nothing more than to become a new man, free of the cigarettes and the varieties of my own imperfection from which they, cigarettes, are also my respite. And so I thought, Who better to teach the art of invention than Buck Duke, whose ambition is still killing me? I became, in the words of Burton, a fellow of the continually perplexed yet ambitious men of his time: "doubtful, timorous, suspicious, loath to offend in word or deed, still cogging and colloguing, embracing, capping, cringing, applauding, flattering, fleering, visiting, waiting at men's doors, with all affability, counterfeit honesty, and humility." I do not want to become Duke, but I especially do not want to become Bonsack, or the rest of the men whom Duke's own best invention�himself�forced into obscurity, subsuming in his own vast achievement their tentative attempts to signify their time on the earth. Yet, to my shame, I haven't the courage of a Dwight Watson, and so I will likely be forgotten in my turn.

The history of the cigarette is my history, and there are days when I think it can be made to tell the story of everything. On those days I envy not Buck Duke, but the man who will always be remembered as the Tractor Guy.

Copyright © 2006 Duncan Murrell

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