A Golden Weed: Tobacco and Environment in the Piedmont South

A Golden Weed: Tobacco and Environment in the Piedmont South. By Drew A. Swanson. Yale Agrarian Studies. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2014. Pp. [xvi], 342. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-300-19116-5.) When Tobacco Was King: Families, Farm Labor, and Federal Policy in the Piedmont. By Evan P. Bennett. (Gainesville and other cities: University Press of Florida, 2014. Pp. x, 152. $74.95, ISBN 978-0-8130-6014-9.) Southern historians, more than most of their peers, understand that the glamorous and ignoble cigarette, world-traveling in its fame and destruction, traces its lineage in part to the farms of the Piedmont South. There, bright leaf tobacco was developed after 1840 and became entwined with the changing environmental, labor, and political history of the region. These two new books on bright leaf tobacco extend and deepen our knowledge of the golden weed. Drew A. Swanson's A Golden Weed: Tobacco and Environment in the Piedmont South is an environmental history of the nineteenth century that explains how and why bright leaf farming led to environmental degradation. Swanson rigorously explains ecological factors as inextricably entangled with the profoundly racialized political economy of the region, from slavery to segregation. In When Tobacco Was King: Families, Farm Labor, and Federal Policy in the Piedmont, Evan P. Bennett focuses on the rise and fall of the family system of labor and the role of the federal government in stabilizing the market for bright leaf during the Great Depression. Bennett takes his story from the end of the Civil War to the close of the Federal Tobacco Program in 2004 and the subsequent return to a system of plantation production. When I lived in the Piedmont region of North Carolina, I walked regularly in a wooded area that had clearly once been farmed, for its rolling landscape was riven with deep gullies and eroded hillsides. Swanson tells the history of this landscape by focusing on three counties on the Virginia-North Carolina border (Halifax and Pittsylvania Counties in Virginia and Caswell County in North Carolina). Swanson traces the development of the bright leaf variety of tobacco over the nineteenth century and explains the evolution of destructive farming practices that eroded the soil. By 1900, still two decades before cigarettes boomed, farmers had exhausted the land for bright leaf in these three counties that had been so critical to bright leaf's origin story. Swanson's explanation of bright leaf's development contrasts markedly with Barbara Hahn's in Making Tobacco Bright: Creating an American Commodity, 1617-1937 (Baltimore, 2011). Hahn notes that genetic differences between tobacco varieties are slight and attributes bright leaf's particular qualities--yellow coloring and mild flavor--to the technology of flu curing as it developed within farming cultures, economies, and markets. For Hahn, people of the time confused these human-made forces with the nature of the tobacco plant itself; Hahn insists that social construction, not nature, explains the rise of the bright leaf variety. Swanson, however, is an environmental historian working in a tradition that sees plants, climate, and soils as having historical action in concert with humans. Soil is Swanson's watchword, and he convincingly shows that farmers developed the bright leaf variety not only through the curing process but also from the biological potential of seed lines, carefully shaped over generations, in dynamic relationship to the sandy, well-drained, low-nitrogen soils. In centering on soil, Swanson also brings the artisanal knowledge and practices of farmers to center stage in a beautifully precise yet broad analysis. Bright leaf initially seemed like a miracle crop, for instead of being grown in the richer soil of the lowlands, like dark tobacco, it thrived on sandy ridges that were almost worthless for other crops. Farmers could rotate food crops in the low-lying areas and shift tobacco to previously less profitable land. …

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