Tobacco Is Involved

Tobacco Is Involved Here

In this present age of what is called the “cancel culture” and the toppling of historic statues, I have not noticed Reynolda House visitors necessarily bothered about our namesake, a purveyor of tobacco. Perhaps older visitors are like me--having grown up with candy cigarettes and second-hand smoke--just understand “that’s the way it was.” Or younger visitors have grown up with less exposure to tobacco products in the media and are more attuned to existential threats they deem more significant like climate change or plastic waste.

Regardless, I will prepare myself for a possible discussion even if just to acquaint myself more with the product that allowed Richard Joshua Reynolds to join the Gilded Age and make Winston-Salem what it is today.

Interestingly, R.J. would not allow his children to smoke and agreed it was unhealthy. He chewed tobacco and smoked cigars but wife Katharine did not smoke at all according to granddaughter, Barbara Millhouse. Of course, he was happy to let the rest of the world make their own decisions and grew very wealthy as they decided to provide a large market for his company’s products.

If not Reynolds, someone else surely would have--and did. Lady Nicotine had found her way into human veins hundreds of years before R.J. became a supplier. No telling how long the indigenous peoples of the New World had been consuming Nicotiana tabacum and the coarser Nicotiana rustica, both native to the western hemisphere. But it happened to be one of the welcoming gifts the Arawak peoples gave to Columbus when he arrived in Hispaniola. He shrugged off the dried tobacco but one of his explorers, Rodrigo de Jerez, observed it being smoked by the locals, joined in with them then carried his new habit back to Spain. When his fellow countrymen saw smoke pouring from his nose and mouth they thought him to be possessed by the devil and, perhaps owing to the Inquisition, he was imprisoned for seven years. But by the time he was released, smoking had become quite the craze in his hometown.

From there, its discovery and use would spread through Europe during the first half of the 16th century. English sailors began moving it into their country following trips to the Americas. Sir Frances Drake brought it to England and introduced it to Sir Walter Raleigh. Raleigh was unsuccessful in an initial colonization of America but John Rolfe did succeed afterwards in Jamestown in no small part due to his cultivation of tobacco there. Tobacco became our first cash crop! By the time Richard J. Reynolds was born in 1850, tobacco was a significant piece of the United States economy. Later, he, like many 19th century entrepreneurs, had little reason to ignore opportunity.

However with our 21st century eyes we may look at it differently. There are about a billion smokers in the world now. As anti-smoking campaigns get people to quit, the world population grows and new smokers quickly replace the former ones. The CDC estimates about 7 million people die each year due to smoking related illness.

But is anything accomplished by disparaging our forebears? For example, we may think it would have been nice to not have had to burn all that coal to fuel the Industrial Revolution. But who knows what today’s world might look like and our quality of life had we not. R.J. died in 1918 and lies peacefully in his grave in Salem Cemetery. Shortly after his death, Winston Salem had become the largest city in North Carolina due in large part to tobacco. His role in that local industry was arguably the most significant. Private foundations created from the family’s wealth have benefited the state to this day. The family’s largesse relocated Wake Forest University to Winston Salem, it’s medical center becoming the county’s largest employer. And, of course, R.J. and Katharine’s country estate, Reynolda, is now home to a world class museum of American art.

Socially responsible investing (SRI) has become a thing now driving corporate social responsibility, or what Investopedia defines as a “business model that helps a company be socially accountable to itself, its stakeholders, and the public.” Former Harvard Business School professor Robert Eccles promotes an Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) approach to evaluate companies along those lines so SRI investors can choose among those ratings.

But activists tend to compile such listings by excluding so-called sin stocks like tobacco, alcohol, fossil fuels, firearms and so forth. Eccles surprised his cohorts by including Philip Morris International as a client in his Sustainability Accounting Standards Board. PMI is a tobacco company, yes. But they also have a good track record on climate and other environmental impacts. “Nobody’s given me an argument of how excluding tobacco is going to solve the problem of a billion people smoking cigarettes,” he says in a Bloomberg article. But if they are doing things that SRI investors want, the company should be rewarded with their capital.

In a similar way, appreciating the positive contributions that resulted from R.J. Reynolds’ industry beg the question as to where we would like to draw the line on a historic figure’s exclusion or inclusion in the greater picture.

###