The Twists and Turns of Tobacco Politics.

• Author: Henderson, David R.

The Cigarette: A Political History

By Sarah Milov

394 pp.; Harvard

University Press, 2019

Sarah Milov's The Cigarette: A Political History is accurately subtitled. Milov, a history professor at the University of Virginia, has written a first-rate history of the interaction between tobacco companies, tobacco growers, and various levels of government over almost a century. She delves carefully into the details of those interactions and tells you more than you probably want to know about the many decades of interaction.

The history itself is fascinating, whether it be about the federal government's attempt to cartelize tobacco growers early in the 20th century to give them more power in their dealings with cigarette manufacturers, the federal government's promotion of cigarettes to troops during World War II, the many years it took for governments to ban cigarettes from workplaces, or the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement (MSA) under which tobacco companies agreed to fork over hundreds of billions of dollars to state governments. Unfortunately, Milov misses the significance of some early moves the cigarette companies themselves made to publicize the hazards of their competitors' cigarettes. And, possibly because she likes the result, she doesn't fully appreciate the significance of the tobacco company cartel formed by the MSA.

While she makes her own dislike of cigarette smoking clear, that interferes only occasionally with her narrative. She appears to be an honest broker. In that vein, I note that though I am a militant anti-smoker, I strongly support the rights of smokers and tobacco companies, and I did once consult with a law firm that defends tobacco companies.

Defenders and critics j Milov does show some of the biases that are typical of leftwing historians. For example, she refers to those who defend the rights of tobacco companies as "pro-corporate" rather than "pro-market"; some of those defenders are pro-corporate, but some are pro-market and would not defend corporations when they seek special privileges. The good news is that in many ways Milov tries to tell a straight story and most of the time she does not shade the evidence.

It is common for analysts who oppose a particular program or industry to accept all criticisms of the industry even when the criticisms are weak or off-target. Milov's work is refreshingly free of that problem. She even makes gentle fun of her fellow tobacco critics when they overstep. A case in point is her...