The Smoking Crisis, Corporate Offshoring, and Plighted Citizenship: The Story of Dwight Watson, a Disgruntled and Dispossessed Tobacco Farmer from North Carolina

In 2003 Dwight Watson, a fifth-generation tobacco farmer from North Carolina, drove a tractor onto the National Mall in Washington and squatted for three days, threatening to blow up the capital.  His farm had gone under and he was protesting the demise of U.S. tobacco and the government’s failure to respond to rapid declines driven by international market restructuring.  Watson was arrested and sentenced to several years in prison.  The protest was extreme to be sure.  But it speaks to a common collective experience of defensiveness and disgruntlement evident among tobacco growers.  Drawing on archival research and ethnographic interviews, my paper documents parallel historical processes that helped condition the sociopolitical climate in which this particular subjectivity has been fostered.  I outline the shifting political economic structure of the international tobacco industry since the New Deal in order to identify principle factors that created farm crisis in the Reagan and Clinton eras, especially market liberalization and the shift among American tobacco companies to cheaper foreign leaf.  I also examine the strategic and politicized use of a discourse of agrarianism (typified in the term “plight”) in those decades, especially as wielded by North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms, who was backed by tobacco companies.  This discourse portrayed antismoking advocacy as the cause of farm loss and romanticized farming as white cultural property and an unduly plighted heritage, deflecting attention from the role of tobacco companies, internal dynamics of competition and conflict in rural areas, and the institutionalized discrimination that shaped Southern agriculture and farm labor in the last century.  Watson’s protest speaks to the role of transnational industry in shaping agrarian change and the powerful work of ideologies of culture, history, and race in defining meanings and practices of citizenship and regional identity in the rural South.