Smoke-Free And Smoking Hot

Adapting Its Products And Gobbling Up Market Share

Benefitting From An FDA Black-Market Crackdown

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The white-hooded mob first came for the telephone operators.

Miss Annie Curtis and Miss Lillian Boyd were yawning at their switchboards in the sleepy tobacco burg of Hopkinsville, Kentucky, that December night in 1907. Around 2 am, eight masked men kicked in the door of the telephone office and dragged the young ladies down to the street, where an armed guard took them into custody.

“Cut out the cursing and remember you are in the presence of ladies,” the masked leader chided the guard. Whatever else these men were, at least they were Southern gentlemen.

With the telephone lines seized and communication cut off, the 500-man army moved on to their real target: two tobacco warehouses on Ninth and 14^th Streets, as puzzled townspeople awoke and began to panic.

Firing rounds of buckshot to disperse the city’s residents, the group quickly doused the two large buildings in coal oil and set them ablaze. As the warehouses – essentially, giant, dry cigar boxes – smoked and crumbled, the posse dragged a prominent tobacco buyer from his house, administered a sound beating, and then shoved him back inside.

Two and a half hours later, the masked marauders saddled up, took roll call, and rode away into the pre-dawn, singing “My Old Kentucky Home” and leaving a burning city full of terrified townspeople behind them.

But this wasn’t an ordinary raid or lynching. And – despite the Southern setting and the white robes – this wasn’t the Ku Klux Klan…

Those empty eye holes masked white and black faces, united behind an equal-opportunity goal: Protect the independent tobacco industry.

These were the Night Riders. They were sworn enemies of Big Tobacco – and determined to punish any small farmers who sold out to the enemy.

That enemy was James “Buck” Duke, a wannabe robber baron who took his cues from rapacious oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller. Just as Rockefeller consolidated the 1880s American oil industry into one giant conglomerate, Standard Oil, Duke – the son of a one-mule tobacco grower – decided he’d snap up every tobacco farm in the South (plus a few overseas) and add them to his mega-company. He christened his budding monopoly the American Tobacco Company (‘’ATC”), though it quickly became known as the Duke Trust.

Duke set his sights on the lucrative Black Patch – an area stretching from western Kentucky to northern Tennessee, where rich, dark-leaf tobacco was grown – and deployed a secret weapon: a proprietary mechanical tobacco-rolling machine that could churn out 200 cigars per minute, an amount it took a human worker an hour to achieve. Between 1900 and 1904, Duke’s efforts drove Black Patch tobacco prices from eight cents per pound down to two – slim pickings for starving growers.

There was plenty of money for Duke, though. By then one of the world’s richest men, he controlled 82% of the tobacco market. He systematically forced competitors out of business – and dangled attractive buyout offers in front of the rest.

Seeing no choice, many of them accepted.

The Night Riders didn’t.

Where There’s Smoke…

One early evening in 1904, Kentucky physician and planter Dr. David Amoss called together a band of 32 local growers and rallied them with a Declaration of Independence-esque proclamation, inviting them to unionize against the ATC and form a coalition called the Dark-Fired Planters’ Protection Association. They would band together, boycott Buck Duke’s trust, and demand fair prices for locally grown tobacco.

More ominously, in his manifesto, Amoss also declared war on the “sell-out” growers, the ones who’d knuckled under to the ATC or were thinking about doing so:

Be it further proclaimed to the world that any farmer or persons who aid the Trust in any way by selling to it their tobacco at a higher price is an accomplice of the Trust and is in good morals as guilty as the Trust.

The idea caught fire like a nicely rolled stogie… especially the last part. By the spring of 1906, 2,000 fed-up farmers – rich and poor, white and black – had taken the “holy oath” of the Planters’ Protection Association. The labor union quickly morphed into a vigilante army called the Night Riders, focused on terrorizing the sell-outs. It started with intimidation tactics like ominous pamphlets…

… and soon morphed into crop destruction and midnight beatings and lynchings… and, by 1907, the night of the fire in Hopkinsville (where the farmers had dared to cooperate with Duke), the hostility had escalated into all-out war.

Up till Hopkinsville, top brass in Washington, D.C., had dismissed the conflict (known today as the Black Patch War) as infighting among those damn hillbillies. But the first military occupation of an American city since the end of the Civil War grabbed the attention of trust-busting President Teddy Roosevelt.

Teddy was big on competition and took a dim view of monopolies – which put him firmly on the Night Riders’ side, even if he didn’t agree with their methods. The government dispatched the Kentucky militia to put down the raids… but the cigar-smoking president paid close attention to the message the Night Riders were sending.

In 1908, Kentucky’s governor – sympathetic to Roosevelt’s antitrust views – strongly recommended that ATC be investigated as an unlawful monopoly. Roosevelt agreed. His administration, followed by that of his successor President Howard Taft, levered the 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act against Buck Duke, forcing him to divest his ATC monopoly in 1911.

Kicking like the lone mule on his father’s long-ago tobacco patch, Duke split up his tobacco empire into multiple smaller companies – with only one remaining under his control. (He didn’t make out too badly in the end, though – he switched his attention from smoke to electricity and launched the company that would become the massive Southern electricity provider Duke Energy. One way or another, Buck Duke wanted power.)

The Night Riders also got off lightly. In 1910, David Amoss was hauled before a Kentucky grand jury on charges of “‘willfully and feloniously confederating, conspiring, and banding together for the purpose of molesting, injuring, and destroying property of other persons,” with a potential sentence of up to five years in prison. True to their oath, though, none of his former vigilante posse would testify against him. He walked free and spent the rest of his life practicing medicine.

As for Buck Duke’s single remaining slice of his tobacco business? It’s still going strong now more than a century later… and it’s shares in that company that we’re recommending today…

It’s Come A Long Way From Buck Duke