Republican victories have farmers smiling again in North Carolina. But with health activists making gains and cigarette jobs disappearing, these remain restless days in : TOBACCO COUNTY

By RUDY ABRAMSON

Dec. 4, 1994 12 AM PT

SPECIAL TO THE TIMES

PACTOLUS, N.C. —

Back in early autumn, tobacco farmers in this North Carolina hamlet and up and down the Tobacco Belt from here to Florida harvested the kind of crop that comes once in a decade: barn-busting yields of spectacularly perfect golden leaves.

But growers in the region, which produces most of the flue-cured tobacco that is rolled and smoked around the world, still felt under siege. As the bumper crop came in, the tobacco economy faced not only the possibility of whopping new taxes, but the devastating prospect of federal authorities regulating nicotine as a drug.

The campaign against smoking had created jitters from the rich, flat fields of Pitt County to the cigarette capital of Winston-Salem, where machines roll and spit out millions of packs a week. Even here in the heartland of the weed, anti-smoking ordinances have sailed through local jurisdictions, and Durham, a community that long boasted of being the City of Tobacco, now promotes itself as the City of Medicine.

More and more tobacco people wondered whether their future was behind them.

But on Nov. 8, with the crop gone to market, a measure of joy returned to Tobacco Row. The Republican capture of the U.S. House of Representatives ousted Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Los Angeles) from his post as chairman of the House subcommittee on health and the environment.

Waxman had been the most effective force in the galloping anti-smoking movement and the most implacable critic of the tobacco industry. By contrast, the House convening in January will be far less inclined to grapple with the health effects of smoking. Rep. Thomas J. Bliley (R-Va.), Waxman’s probable successor as chairman of the subcommittee, has made it clear he isn’t interested in pushing through more legislation to tighten the screws on the industry.

“The effect of the election is to dim the gigantic spotlight on us,” said Thomas Griscom, a spokesman for Winston-Salem-based R.J. Reynolds Co. “That being the case, we have a chance to step back and look at issues in a little more realistic way.”

But scarred veterans on both sides of the great tobacco debate, beset by changes all around them, still look to the future with some trepidation.

Here are three of their stories.

Charles Davenport’s great-grandfather bought land here in Pactolus right after the Civil War, and early one spring nearly 130 years ago, he set out his first crop of tobacco. From that day to this, the family has been inextricably bound to the plant.

As faithfully as the seasons have come and gone, the Davenports have put out their plants in March and April; stripped, bundled and cured their leaves during the sweltering summer, and taken them to market in the fall. Over the years, they have survived droughts, floods, hailstorms, hurricanes, hornworms and infestations of the dreaded Granville wilt.

This year, Davenport, 48, and his brothers, Lawrence and Paul, shared in a momentous harvest. Hot, dry days and warm, humid nights caused the plants to develop robust root systems, each one a little factory generating nicotine for storage in the fat, green leaves.

With the demand for domestic tobacco falling, though, the Davenports and all the other tobacco farmers in the state were forced to take a 10% reduction in their allotment--the acreage they are allowed to plant under a 60-year-old federal price-support program.

That left the brothers with 125 acres. Even so, the bumper crop meant lower prices. Now, taking into account next year’s probable demand and the amount of leaf already in storage, there is a good chance that further quota reductions will be announced in mid-December.

But while Davenport was feeling “gloomy, singled out and picked on” a few weeks ago, he and his brothers say they now feel rejuvenated.

“What a relief, what a relief!” he exclaimed. “For us, it is a very big deal that Waxman is no longer chairman of the health subcommittee. I can tell you that we feel a lot better, because the silent majority has finally come out of the woodwork.”

Between Thanksgiving and Christmas, tobacco farmers across North Carolina will begin preparing their seed beds for next year’s crop. Most will plant in January, but the Davenports, who have their own greenhouse for seedlings, won’t start preparations until February.

In Washington, meanwhile, a cigarette tax hike is in limbo. Any move by the Food and Drug Administration to regulate nicotine as an addictive drug appears less likely.

But Waxman wasn’t tobacco’s only problem. The Labor Department has proposed a ban on smoking in the workplace, and the Justice Department announced an investigation into whether cigarette manufacturers breached antitrust laws or lied about spiking the nicotine content of cigarettes to hook customers. All of this has come in the wake of an Environmental Protection Agency finding that inhaling secondhand smoke increases the risk of cancer.

“We wonder what we can do to fight back, how we can fight back and why we fight back,” Davenport said several months ago. “Eleven billion dollars a year is already collected in tobacco taxes, and it’s already being used. If they raise taxes and consumption goes down, then there is going to be less tax money in the long run.”

North Carolina’s affair with tobacco goes back to the 16th Century. Its economy, social structure and institutions have been significantly shaped by the fortunes of America’s first export.

The Davenport farm is in North Carolina’s No. 1 tobacco-growing county, Pitt County. But the 15,000 acres now producing plants in the county amount to just half the acreage of a decade ago. Small farmers have fallen by the wayside, opting to rent or sell their allotments to big operators who can afford to mechanize. Some still derive nearly all their income from tobacco.

The Davenports, however, have used their tobacco earnings to expand and diversify. For years, their father operated a grocery and hardware store, and in the 1960s he started an agricultural chemicals business. The brothers have gone into fertilizers, invested in a cotton gin and created a brokerage for wheat and soybeans. They have installed irrigation equipment and planted trees in nooks and crannies unacceptable for crops. The 300 acres their father farmed have grown to 2,000.

But even with the expansion into cotton, corn, wheat, soybeans and peanuts, the brothers still make 60% of their farm income from tobacco.

“We don’t make any money on corn,” Davenport said. “We jumped into cotton, thinking it might pull us out, but it didn’t. Same thing with peanuts. Aside from tobacco, it’s wheat and soybeans that keep us alive. But that’s not at the farm level; it’s because we’re the middleman.”

Joe Warden never smoked until he was past 40. He started six or seven years ago--purely to spite the anti-smoking movement. He not only took up cigarettes, but started puffing cigars and lighting up an occasional pipe.

His aggravation is still unabated, and he keeps thinking up new ways to rail against what he considers a blatant intrusion on his individual rights.

His personal checks are imprinted with a tobacco plant. When he mails his monthly bills or pays a restaurant tab, he affixes a stamp with a message: “This bill was paid with tobacco money.”

Tobacco has been good to Warden. It has made his life in Winston-Salem much easier than that of his father, who painted houses and dug graves for a living and died before his time, Warden says.

Tobacco money bought Warden a nice house in Lewisville. It bought him a couple of saddle horses and sent his son to college. It has taken care of him and his family for 33 years, ever since he came out of high school and got a job carrying trays of cigarettes from a rolling machine to a packing room at R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co.

Except for a hitch in the Army, Warden has spent his life at R.J. Reynolds. Now in the research department just across the street from the company’s Whitaker Park cigarette plant, he is among the better-paid blue-collar workers in America, making about twice the salary of the average North Carolina teacher.

The average wage at R.J. Reynolds is more than $50,000. Operators of the rolling machines that now turn out billions of cigarettes a year in Winston-Salem can make close to $70,000.

“This is a great company,” Warden said, “a great company.”

There are a lot of Joe Wardens in Winston-Salem.

It was in Winston that Richard Joshua Reynolds created the blended cigarette that has made North Carolina’s flue-cured golden leaf world-famous.

The family and the company showered the community with support for worthy causes, and even prompted Wake Forest University to pick up and leave that locale for Winston. Over the years, the city has expressed its gratitude in innumerable and conspicuous ways, putting the Reynolds name on its airport, a high school, parks, streets and a hospital.

Smoking, needless to say, has not gone out of style. Although nonsmoking rooms can be found in motels and nonsmoking sections in restaurants, smokers still light up in public places without inhibition. The community of 160,000 is a citadel of the smokers’ rights movement, and Warden is one of its leaders.

Five years ago, when the city of Greensboro plunged into a heated debate over an ordinance to create smoke-free places, Warden was among those who went off to show solidarity with embattled smoking forces. He was among the leaders of a caravan of 145 busloads of R.J. Reynolds employees last year who lobbied for tobacco and smokers’ rights in Washington.

Clutches of smokers outside government office buildings raised their fists in support, he recalls. And as the demonstrators walked by congressional buildings, office workers held packs and cartons of cigarettes at their windows in a show of solidarity.

But such demonstrations of support are not enough to save an industry. Warden and people like him are apprehensive about their future. Time was when a job at R.J. Reynolds was a job for life. One generation followed another into the plant. But that has changed. In the last 20 years, employment in the cigarette-making business in North Carolina has dropped by nearly a third. Soon, employment at R.J. Reynolds will be down to a little more than 8,000--about half what it was at the beginning of the 1980s.

“That’s what’s really changed,” Warden said. “You don’t have that job security anymore.”

Carla Fried is a nurse, the wife of a physician, the mother of two boys and, by conventional definition, an anti-smoking activist.

She teaches tobacco control in the Guilford County schools, serves on the national board of an organization called Stop Teen-Age Addiction to Tobacco, and continues to be a central figure in a well-publicized and long-running effort to limit smoking in public places in Greensboro.

She has never met the Davenport brothers or Joe Warden, but she considers them--like herself and the 12-year-old habitual smokers she counsels--victims of the tobacco companies.

Unlike the Davenports and Warden, however, she mourns Henry Waxman’s loss of clout. “We were wiped out by it,” she said, “wiped out.”

Her work with students, she predicts, will be unaffected by the change in political currents. For public relations reasons alone, she said, the tobacco companies would never advocate a rollback in school programs that educate students on the hazards of smoking.

But elsewhere, the anti-smoking movement is bound to suffer, she said: “The job before us is not impossible, but now it is going to be much more difficult. It is obvious that we will have to work very hard to find moderate Republicans who are concerned about public health.”

Even before launching serious work on new coalitions, Stop Teen-Age Addition to Tobacco has opened a letter-writing campaign, urging Rep. Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), the Speaker of the House in waiting, that Bliley not be made chairman of the subcommittee chaired by Waxman.

When she came to North Carolina from New York to attend nursing school nearly 20 years ago, Fried was a heavy smoker. In the big city, some restrictions were being imposed on smokers even then. But not here.

“Here, I was in hog heaven,” she recalled. “I could go into a department store and shop with my cigarette in my hand. At the grocery, I could light up and relax while waiting in the checkout line. It was wonderful!”

Fried began smoking when she was 17 and continued through her first pregnancy. She quit only when her first toddler developed a chronic cough and she realized that the child had required a doctor’s attention every month during his first year. Thus was born an anti-smoking crusader in smoking country.

She no longer works as a hospital nurse. Her dining room has been converted into an office that serves as headquarters for her struggle with the tobacco industry.

Fried is the first person to serve as a tobacco-control instructor in the county school system, counseling students found violating rules against smoking in schools. Her experience with young smokers and her husband’s encounters with them in the emergency room at Wesley Long Community Hospital have galvanized her commitment.

“I am not an anti-smoker. I am not an anti-smoking activist,” she said. “I could never be against smokers, because I used to be one, and I feel so sorry for them.”

During the battle over the Greensboro smoking ordinance, Fried says, she and others were subjected to threats. She lost her baby-sitter, whose father was an executive at Greensboro-based Lorillard Tobacco Co. The families stopped speaking.

The ordinance was eventually approved by a 2-1 margin in a 1989 citywide referendum, even though Lorillard is one of the town’s biggest employers and Guilford County is home to a host of small tobacco farmers.

And the movement spread. Raleigh, the state capital, adopted similar restrictions. When the Legislature, under pressure from the tobacco lobby, preempted further local measures, other jurisdictions across the state rushed to consider ordinances before the state law took effect. Several adopted more stringent codes. The fight isn’t over, however. Tobacco forces have lawsuits pending against the restrictions in Raleigh and against a move for smoke-free public buildings in Guilford County.

Fried considers herself on the side of the “worker bees” in cigarette factories and farmers who grow the golden leaf.

“We want the farmers to know we are not trying to put them out of business. In fact, we have written to Congress, making it clear that if there is an increase in the cigarette tax, we want a portion of it to go to the farmers,” she said. “The anti-health industry isn’t doing that. It uses the farmers as a front group, and its executives instill fear in their worker bees by making them think they will lose their jobs, that they will become poor and that they won’t be able to send their children to school.”

Troubles Along Tobacco Row Both tobacco production and cigarette consumption are trending down in North Carolina, the heart of tobacco country.

Tobacco production has slumped...

In thousands of pounds

North Carolina:

1975: 958,995

1993: 606,210

United States:

1975: 2,184,861

1993: 1,613,591

...along with cigarette smoking...

Cigarettes Smoked Per Capita, in packs

North Carolina: