Snuffed Out.

• Position: Tobacco industry

Snuffed Out

They released the report on a Saturday, when the financial markets would be closed. This was by design. At 9:30 a.m., the reporters--about 200 in all--filed into the auditorium at the State Department. They were given the 387-page document. The enormous room and a few hallways had been sealed off from the rest of the building. Guards were posted at the exits, and once inside, no one was allowed to leave. The press conference was to start at 11, giving the journalists and others in attendance all of 90 minutes to read the Report. Just for that day--because of that day--smoking was banned in the auditorium, so many of those on hand lounged in the adjacent corridors, where it was OK to have a cigarette.

At 11 that morning, Jan. 11, 1964, Surgeon General Luther Terry took to the podium. He made a few statements about his advisory committee's professionalism and hard work during the 18 months it took to produce the Report. Then he got down to business. "Out of its long and exhaustive deliberation the committee has reached the overall judgment that smoking is a health hazard of sufficient importance to the United States to warrant remedial action. "An hour later, the news conference ended, and the reporters streamed out of the building to file their stories. The lead headlines in the Sunday newspapers said it all: "Cancer Link Held Certain" and "U.S. Report Calls Cigarettes Peril." But across North Carolina, in the heart of tobacco country, there was a parallel story line, a spin espoused by the politicians and the farmers and the cigarette industry. It asserted Terry and his scientists and ill their statistics were mistaken in their conclusions. The Winton-Salem Journal ran a sidebar on its front page with the headline "Short-Lived Impact is Predicted." The paper quoted one tobacco man's opinion of the report: "I give it less than 30 days to be forgotten." U.S. Sen. Sam Ervin said of the findings, "These are about on a plane with the conclusion of the past that malaria was caused by the night air."

They were wrong. In many ways, the Report, issued 50 years ago, changed North Carolina's economy. Not by itself, of course, but the federal government's decision to declare war on smoking, on tobacco and, by extension, on our defining industry and most profitable crop, was the singular shove that pushed the state toward where it is today.

Nowadays, the joke is that the only place you hear about Tobacco Road is on ESPN during college basketball season, but in 1964 North Carolina was shaded and sheltered by the golden leaf. Tobacco dominated Tar Heel agriculture, accounting for half of the $1.1 billion in total farm receipts. Equally important, it could be profitably grown on small plots, on average only a few acres, so tens of thousands of families raised crops that were flue-cured, then taken down to the warehouses to be sold. The cash it put in those farmers' pockets drove local economies.

Sen. Dan Blue, a Wake County Democrat and a former speaker of the N.C. House, grew up on a tobacco farm in Robeson County--"a two- to three-horse farm," as he calls it. He was in high school, active in Future Farmers of America, when the report came out. "I got the sense that it was going to somehow change things," Blue--a 64-year-old lawyer--says. At the time, he recalls, "There was no crop that could substitute for tobacco, and we promised fidelity to it."

That rural fabric in places such as Robeson County and across the Coastal Plain and even into the small towns of the Piedmont was stitched to manufacturing in the urban factories of Durham, Greensboro, Reidsville and Winston-Salem, where more than 60% of the country's cigarettes were produced. Durham was known as Bull City, a nod to the once-popular Bull Durham brand of loose smoking tobacco. Winston-Salem's nickname was Camel City, a testament to the clout of R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co.'s popular brand, which had powered the company to the top of the industry and commanded at its peak a staggering 40% market share. Tobacco manufacturing created great wealth, family fortunes that, in turn, financed other industries and philanthropy.

Along with textiles and furniture, tobacco was one of the three legs of North Carolina's manufacturing economy, employing about 60,000 people and paving nearly $250 million in annual wages. Though state leaders had set aside a sprawling piece of property just south of Durham and in an epic combination of bootstrapping and rebranding called it Research Triangle Park, opened just five years earlier, it was still mostly woods.

DESPITE HIS TITLE, Luther Terry was neither a...