Since the founding of the country,
there’s been a battle for America’s soul,
between giving people the freedom to indulge.
I’ll make it worth your while.
Whether it’s legal or illegal, people want to drink,
people want to bet, people want screw.
And protecting them from
the chaos of debauchery.
People see cities as Sodom’s and Gomorrah’s.
They’re filled with alcohol and prostitution
and all manner of vice.
Before the turn of the 20th century,
over 70% of Americans use some form of tobacco.
Men, women, girls, boys, all ages use tobacco.
And there’s no minimum drinking age.
In New York, each adult person drank
as much as 16 pints of beer in a week.
And it’s not just
the frontier west that’s wild.
The cities grow, so does the shadowy underworld
of gambling and sex.
In the 1890s, one in six adult men
went to a prostitute every day.
Now over the course of nearly a century,
politicians and reformers will try and forge
a nation free from vice.
This is about cracking down on vice
and a whole host of other sins.
This is about cleaning up the city.
It’s a battle that’ll break laws.
Keep it quiet.
Sometimes change them.
Are you threatening us?
Don’t tempt me.
It’ll give rise
to some of the most iconic products in history,
We call him the Marlboro Man.
Generate some of thelargest fortunes ever known
and change the fabric of the country,
from bar rooms to bedrooms.
To the building of America’s capital of sin.
You’re Out.
Damn it!
We’re gonna shut them down.
You can’t do this.
Get out!
♪ ’Ey,’ey, I did it and ’ey, ’ey ♪
♪ I proved it and ’ey, ’ey ♪
♪ I finished, I came and I saw, I gave it my all ♪
♪ I changed the game ♪
♪ I made it a boss, yeah ♪
The United States is changing fast.
Five new states have joined in the last decade.
And for the first time,
one in four Americans now live in cities.
During this period of intense urbanization,
cities are changing as they grow.
So, people see this kind of need for order in society
and they see that we should better organize what is becoming
a really chaotic moment in American history.
We had a lot less regulation because we simply had a lot
less government because we had no income tax.
There was no federal income tax until 1913.
So the government just could not get big enough to,
to impose itself in our lives the way it eventually would.
On the frontier and in cities alike,
there are saloons on every corner and at the time
there’s no minimum legal drinking age,
little to no government regulation and people guzzle
nearly four times more liquor than we drink today.
Some studies say the average American drank eight gallons
of hard to alcohol per person per year.
And people see cities as Sodom’s and Gomorrah’s,
they’re filled with alcohol and prostitution
and all manner of vice.
Booze is one of the most heavily taxed
products in the country.
The result of a policy enacted to pay for the civil war.
In 1862, Abraham Lincoln passed
an emergency wartime revenue act.
All of a sudden the price went from 25 cents a gallon,
before the civil war, to $2.25 a gallon,
after the civil war and a lot of people just said no
and it was just kind of a recipe for people to cheat.
Rather than paying the tax,
many distillers turn to the black market,
making moonshine in secret,
then bootleggers sell it illegally
to saloons and in the streets.
There are some advantages,
let’s face it, of running an illegal business.
There are no taxes and there’s no regulation.
And typically there’s a lot higher profit.
In rural Alabama,
one bootlegger will turn himself into an American legend.
Whoa!
If he could stay out of jail
long enough to do it.
I can explain.
Just, give a minute.
What’s this?
That’s water from Eden Creek.
Supposed to be the clearest in the county.
That water packs a hell of a punch.
What’s your name, boy?
His signature whiskey will one day sell
over 10 million liters a year.
My name’s Jack Daniel.
And do over three billion dollars
in annual sales.
Tell you what, this one here,
it’s all yours, my gift.
You gonna have to do better than that.
In the 1860s, moon shining can be deadly,
both for Outlaws like Jack Daniel,
and for the people who buy cut rate booze
with no idea what’s in it.
Moonshine is a very dangerous product
when it gets right down to it because there are no controls.
You can just add anything you want to, to give it to kick.
This is before the FDA, there were no rules.
You had folks who would put tobacco chew,
or like tobacco spit,
they’d put turpentine in it for coloring.
They’d put all sorts of junk in their whiskey
to make it taste and look a certain way.
People were getting sick.
People were dying because the way these Moonshiners
were manufacturing their goods.
This is where the term "rotgut" comes from
because people would be buying this whiskey from whomever
and it would literally rot their stomachs
from the inside out.
Even without dangerous additives,
distilling is risky.
If alcohol vapor ignites,
stills can explode
and distillation produces both ethanol,
which is safe to drink and a nearly identical byproduct
called methanol, which is poisonous.
There’s a term, it’s called "blind drunk."
And that term, unfortunately, goes back to some truth
where people were getting some of the distillate
that came off the stills
and it actually could make you blind.
They would actually, literally go, go blind.
Jack Daniel works in a modest farmhouse
distillery owned by a Lutheran minister named Dan Call.
Jack was orphaned, so he went to go look for work
as a farmhand, cuz he needed to live somewhere.
And he was taken in by Dan Call.
Jack was a small kid, so, you know, as a farmhand,
he probably wasn’t that useful.
I think Jack Daniel discovered distilling
as a way to prove his worthiness.
Jack Daniel begged Reverend Call
to learn distilling and Call partnered him
with his master distiller,
a formerly enslaved person named Nathan "Nearest" Greene.
Nearest Greene was considered one of the best
master distillers in the area,
but I don’t think there’s any factual documentation
on where Nearest Greene actually came from.
There’s not even an image of Nearest Greene on record.
Dan Call specifically assigned Nearest Greene
to help teach whiskey making, to Jack Daniel.
And from there they worked hand in hand,
they really did bond and have a great friendship.
By day, Jack Daniel and Nearest Greene
distill corn into liquor,
it’s sold at a small general store for a tiny profit
and it’s used to cure everything from shock
to fainting to snakebites.
Distilleries were allowed
to be used for medicinal purposes.
People would prescribe an ounce of,
of this whiskey every few hours, which you know,
the process involved in fermentation
is the same with penicillin as it is with whiskey..
As a farmer, it was your right to distill your crops
and to sell it as whiskey, as much as you know,
making your fruit into jelly.
Whiskey was just a part of, of running a farm.
Corn yield is up.
I trust you’ll document and catalog every gallon.
By night,
Jack Daniel and Nearest Greene run a secret operation.
Come back in one piece.
No promises.
Selling moonshine to saloons
in the nearby Alabama.
Absolutely.
Jack Daniel is walking a tight rope,
legally distilling for Dan Call
while bootlegging on the side.
Jack Daniel made good whiskey.
That’s all he ever wanted to do, it’s very clear.
Hoping to scratch together enough money
to open a distillery of his own.
He was trying to expand, to get into more markets.
Remember, this is all Jack knows.
So if he can’t make whiskey, what is he gonna do?
Far from the ramshackle stills
and seedy saloons of the Southeast,
across the country, there’s an alcoholic drink
more popular than water.
Beer.
People didn’t really trust water
unless you knew the source.
Everybody knew water could kill you.
Rivers where everybody dumped everything.
I mean, sure you got a river,
but suppose a dead person is a half a mile up, you know,
you’re not gonna see that and you’re gonna drink that water.
No.
At the time, drinking water was untreated
and wells often draw from the same water
where people dispose of their excrement,
leading to outbreaks of deadly diseases
like cholera, typhoid and dysentery.
But beer is fermented and boiled, making it safe to drink.
One of the reasons
that the pilgrims stopped at Plymouth
was because their beer was running low
and they were looking to try to somehow restock
those beer supplies.
It was much safer to drink.
So it wasn’t a luxury for them
as much as it was a necessity.
In the late 1860s, beer is made locally
and decades before widespread refrigeration.
It’s only served within a few miles
of the breweries that make it.
And the idea of a national brand is completely unheard of.
At one point,
there were 1300 breweries in the United States,
they were all local,
they delivered the beer in horse-drawn wagons.
People had an expression called "rushing the growler."
You sent your kid to the saloon to fill up a pitcher.
There’s some estimates that in New York, each adult person
drank as much as 16 pints of beer in a week.
One of the biggest brewing cities
in the country is St. Louis, Missouri.
An influx of German immigrants have brought beer making
traditions that date back hundreds of years.
By the late 19th century, nearly one third
of local residents are German
and there’s a brewery for every 600 people in the county.
It was an important transportation stop
at the convergence of two rivers.
There were always people just passing through.
So there was a solid market for many, many breweries.
When the German brewers started,
they had a built in audience.
They knew that this was gonna be the flavor of home.
In a sea of local competition,
a successful soap manufacturer named Eberhard Anheuser
is looking to unload his struggling side hustle.
- Mr. Anheuser. - Come in, come in.
By putting his failing brewery
in the hands of his son-in-law.
Eberhard Anheuser was very wealthy and the brewery was,
you know, just a sideline for him.
It’s not even clear he would’ve hung on to it
had the son-in-law not showed up.
You’re not going to be our supplier anymore.
- Sir- - Because you are going to be
the new head of this brewery.
But,
I don’t know the first thing about running a brewery.
I don’t even like beer.
Anheuser’s son-in-law is Adolphus Busch.
He himself was not a trained brewer, but he was literate.
He was very educated, multilingual.
Just make sure the operation is running smoothly
and the shipments go out on time, can you do that?
Yes, sir.
Good.
Congratulations.
Now the new head of the brewery
is left to sink or swim.
The brewery was struggling because there were other
better beers in St. Louis at the time.
He just wasn’t moving the beer that he needed
to keep that business going.
He’s overmatched for now,
but Busch’s innovation will eventually spawn
the first national beer brand and his signature beer
will go on to sell over eleven billion dollars a year.
And he’s not the only one who changed the game.
Drinking is rampant in the United States,
but tobacco is the most popular
agricultural product in human history.
One that’s been used for everything
from religious ceremonies to medicine.
Over the centuries,
it’s considered an appetite suppressant.
It was used as a toothpaste in the 1600s.
It was perceived in the beginning to be quite helpful.
You hung it in the house to ward off diseases.
You took it as a medicine.
Native Americans used it in rituals
and we have the whole famous story of Pocahontas.
She was actually an ambassador for tobacco.
She went to England to help describe
how wonderful tobacco was.
In the 1870s more than 70% of Americans
over 12 years old used some form of tobacco.
The tax dollars from tobacco counted for 30%
of all the US tax dollars at the time.
It’s a big number, I mean, think about that.
Until the mid 20th century,
tobacco was not assumed to be harmful.
Everybody smoked or chewed tobacco.
Today we’re so knowledgeable
about the ill effects of tobacco.
In that period, tobacco was seen
as an item for mass consumption, which brought people joy.
It was something that the elite used.
It was something that everyday ordinary people used.
Tobacco use was quite widespread,
but not in the ways that people think.
We picture people smoking cigarettes.
Well, not at all.
For the most part, you filled the pipe,
you took a little snuff, you did some chewing tobacco.
Today, cigarettes are the dominant form
of tobacco with nearly 5 1/2 trillion sold each year.
But in the 1870s, they’re considered an obscure oddity,
often made with leftover tobacco clippings and hand rolled
and they account for less than 1% of tobacco sold
in the United States.
Most public spaces were
covered in sawdust to absorb the spit from tobacco spittle.
The floors must have been sludgy with the tobacco mess
and the sawdust that collected it.
And the highest paid contractor in the state
of North Carolina was the man who was paid to clean up
the tobacco mess from the floor of the courthouse.
Cigars, pipe tobacco,
chewing plugs and twists
are available in every city and town in the country.
But each store packages its own products with no oversight,
no quality control and the idea of consistent
national brands doesn’t exist.
At the time, essentially farmers sold their tobacco
to tobacco brokers at auctions.
And in turn, those tobacco brokers
sold the leaf to grocers,
druggists, at a markup.
A person buying tobacco in 1870 would typically buy it
at a general store in their community.
You have a lot of local brands for local markets.
It was a product that was not nationally distributed.
In Chicago, a traveling tobacco leaf salesman
named James Buchanan "Buck" Duke
is looking for new customers.
Buck Duke is very much the competitive go getter salesman.
He’s happy to go out on the road and drum up business.
Couple ales, please.
Essentially, Duke was committed to growth.
His father and older brother run a tobacco shop
in North Carolina called Pro Bono Publico.
Pro Bono Publico means "for the greater good,"
well, that’s rather ironic when we think about tobacco.
So how are sales, any new accounts?
I’m close, dad, very close.
Saloons,
steakhouses,
hotels.
Ever, uh, do any actual work?
Just cash me out.
Washington Duke was a small scale farmer, a storekeeper,
someone who might sell locally.
He had two sons and Buck was actually his second son.
Ben Duke, he stays home in North Carolina,
while Buck was focusing on selling into new regions.
I’m not trying to land one account.
I’m trying to turn this company into a real competitor.
Kinda thing you can’t do sitting behind a desk.
Cash your brother out.
But you better be right about this.
Ben Duke is content
with their little storefront, but Buck’s got ambitions
to expand into new markets
and he’s lined up a meeting with a potential buyer.
Mr. Gilworth.
Thanks for coming, uh, you know, I was hoping that we could-
Save it.
Buck Duke, he was a very good salesman.
He traveled to the big cities
peddling their family’s product.
I obviously don’t need a new supplier.
And he was running into more successful competitors.
I just came for the free drink, appreciate it.
Don’t mention it.
Someday
Buck Duke will transform the industry from an antiquated
patchwork of small farms of shops
into a $760 billion global powerhouse.
Making him the third richest man on the face of the planet.
The problem is, in 1871, he hasn’t even found
a signature product that’ll make it all possible
While Duke searches for a way to change the game,
Adolphus Busch needs a way to pull his father-in-law’s
struggling brewing company out of the red,
but rather than competing with more than 50 local breweries,
he sees a way to make beer in St. Louis
and sell it where there’s no competition at.
In the 1870s, you do have the emergence of, kind of,
the second industrial revolution.
Through the transcontinental railroad,
you have the integration of America, you know,
north and south and and west
are coming together around commerce.
Just three years ago, the Eads Bridge
was finished linking the two sides of St. Louis
across the Mississippi river,
turning the city into a railroad hub that connects
the east and west coast.
In the coming years, nearly a dozen new states
will join the union.
All of the west of the Mississippi.
These states have not necessarily
set up enough breweries
to supply their own people.
St. Louis was centrally located and able to ship
by both rail and by steamboat.
Okay, so if we look at the schematic for the train car,
we have six barrels.
Right.
Busch realizes that if he can ship his beer
to the Western frontier, he’ll be the only game in town.
There were a number of obstacles to growing beyond
your local community for a brewer.
We’re talking about before the refrigeration technology
and beer was a fresh product, which eventually spoiled.
Things were like super hyper localized at that time.
So could you get it there, first of all.
Why is this second drainage point necessary?
We wanna keep the outflow even,
otherwise it will stress the system.
To try and ship their beer to warmer locations,
whether it be New Orleans, Texas or California,
the beer is going to be exposed to much more heat
while it’s in transit.
And a saloon owner that ends up with a batch of spoiled beer
from Busch is not going to be a repeat customer.
Today we use refrigerated freight
to ship everything from ice cream,
frozen dinners and live seafood to medical supplies
and human organs all across the country.
But in the 1870s, there’s no such thing
until Adolphus Busch pioneers it.
So how long does one load of ice keep things cold?
Will it be long enough to keep the beer fresh.
Sir, nothing like this exists.
We’re not gonna know exactly how it works
until after we build it.
Busch kind of hit the ground with this idea
of making their own refrigerated cars.
And what they would do is they would pack in ice
and they would have to stop every 250 miles or so,
change out the ice and then keep going
and they would ship it all over the west
and all of the developing areas of the United States,
this idea really took people by surprise.
Okay.
Walk me through it again.
I think it’s incredibly important to try to find
a technology that’s going to give you a competitive edge.
And on the flip side of that, if you don’t do it,
you can be really left behind in the dust.
Even though the company is already
bleeding money, nearly a decade before refrigeration
will transform the meat packing industry,
Adolphus Busch takes out the modern equivalent
of more than a million dollars in loans
to pioneer a totally new refrigerated rail system.
And he has no idea if it’ll pay off.
In all 37 states across the country,
the population is surging.
Over the 1870s, it’ll increase by nearly 12 million people,
almost double the previous decade
and demand for booze is soaring.
The growth of the city’s definitely went hand in hand
with the growth of vice because you have a congregation
of people and there’s money and there’s accessibility.
So, you could have a brothel district,
saloons that refuse to close at night.
If you’re living 40 miles from everybody on the farm,
you know, it’s a, it’s a long haul to,
to do something naughty.
Cities become associated with what some people would call
iniquity or evil, right?
Cities will corrupt you.
It’ll corrupt you through sex.
It’ll corrupt you through alcohol.
It’ll corrupt you through lust.
It’ll corrupt you through like all kinds of things.
In this era, Americans drink
almost 800,000 gallons of liquor a year
and guzzle more than 4 million gallons of beer.
And there’s a rising tide of people
determined to put a stop to it.
The excess of alcohol use begins to worry people,
particularly as America begins to industrialize.
If people can’t get up and go to work
and take care of their families,
then of course alcohol is seen as a problem
because it’s undermining the very fabric of the economy,
but also the fabric of the home.
Alcohol, of course, in that time frame
is still kind of unregulated.
People were going out of their minds with it, drunk,
it was causing abusive relationships, violence,
all these things.
A group with anti-vice sentiments,
called the temperance movement,
dates all the way back to the late 1700s
when Americans began drinking less low proof beer and cider
and more hard liquor.
Now moonshine is rampant and the movement is back
with a vengeance.
There was a very strong
temperance movement in the United States,
connecting drinking alcohol to the downfall of the family
because men would get their paycheck and they would go out
to bars and they would spend at the saloon,
all of their paycheck.
They would then, you know, run off with a loose woman.
People in America value individual choice.
They don’t want people to temper with their choice
to have a drink or to smoke.
But the reality is that we live in a society
and other people have a choice not to be in a smokey room
or to have a drink.
There’s a tension and constant conversation
about who should be allowed to indulge in this.
Jack Daniel and Nearest Greene
have been distilling for Reverend Dan Call
and scraping out money bootlegging on the side.
Now the temperance movement is taking root
in the reverend’s congregation.
There you are.
I need to talk to you about things down at the still house.
I, I already know what you’re gonna say.
Jasper just, just hold on.
I’m shutting down the still for awhile.
What?
Temperance accelerated in places like Tennessee,
which were much more Christian,
and people were already sort of predisposed
through their particular form of Christianity
to be anti-alcohol.
I know you’re disappointed.
- Yeah. - But I’ve made up my mind.
No, you can’t do that.
Look, if you just listen to me...
I’m shutting it down!
Dan Call, who’s a Reverend for the church that was nearby,
and so it was a little bit of a conflict for him
because his wife was also very much a temperance woman.
That’s final.
Yes, sir.
Losing a business partner is always deeply disturbing.
And Jack had always looked to Dan as a father figure
and as a mentor, to now lose him,
and to lose him over something like temperance,
it would’ve been a particular insult.
Without Call’s still,
Jack Daniel is suddenly out a job
and his bootlegging side hustle is dead in the water.
For now.
Jack Daniel and Nearest Greene
spent years distilling
and secretly bootlegging on Dan Call’s farm.
But now the temperance movement
is gripping the religious south.
I think in every generation there are politicians
and religious figures who sincerely believe
they’re a moment in time as like part of this great decline
in morality in the United States.
I mean, you had politicians at that time
railing against what they said were vices.
What they were trying to do is restore normalcy.
They were trying to kind of restore
a Protestant Christian moral America.
Under mounting pressure from his congregation,
Dan Call shut his still down,
leaving Jack and Nearest unemployed.
To start over scratch someplace else.
You make it sound so simple, but it ain’t.
Jack really did want to become his own person
and his own distiller.
Distilling was where he could see himself
making a mark in the world.
You know, whiskey was his way to kind of get beyond
small town life and to really do something I think special.
I’m doing this.
I want you to come with me.
Now, now that’s complicated.
I think he developed a pretty meaningful relationship
with uncle Nearest at a time when a lot of his neighbors
didn’t want to acknowledge his existence
and Jack was not shy about, you know,
telling people that that’s who taught him how to distill.
It’s up to you.
You wanna come work with me?
It’s a critical importance
to choose the right business partner.
Businesses are not about ideas.
They’re about the execution of those ideas.
So it’s more than just what you’re doing in business,
but also it’s who you’re doing it with.
I think Nearest Greene ultimately had respect for Jack
and wanted to help him fulfill his dream.
But then also he was looking for an opportunity
to become something for himself.
You damn right I do.
You’re killing me, you know that right?
An orphan and former enslaved person
are risking everything to start their own distillery,
even as the tide of temperance is rising.
While performers are targeting hard liquor,
in the mid 1870s, beer isn’t on their radar.
In the 19th century, when anti alcohol fervor began,
the great enemy, then, was spirits,
especially whiskey and rum.
Many people started latching onto beer
as kind of an antidote to alcohol.
It wasn’t as alcoholic and you could drink that and you,
it could still be respectable.
Adolphus Busch wants to sell beer
outside St. Louis and he’s designed groundbreaking
refrigerated rail cars to do it.
Now he’s working on a beer
that’ll appeal to American tastes.
Some of them are close.
For months he’s been working
with his brewmasters to crack the code.
What would you suggest?
More hops, less hops, more body, less body.
Just bring me options.
I’ll know it when I taste it.
Now he’s brought in
an industry friend named Carl Conrad.
I’m on the verge of being pleased.
Who has a version of a recipe
for a popular European beer called lager.
The two main types of beer: ale and lager.
Ale’s are warm fermenting beers that might ferment,
say at room temperature.
The German word lagern means "to store."
These are beers that have a long and cold fermentation.
They would actually ferment these beers down in caves
underneath the ground.
The lagering process kills more bacteria
than making ale and results in a more refreshing beer.
Adolphus Busch believes Americans
will love crisp lagger.
If he can get the recipe right.
The hops are imported from Czechoslovakia.
The yeast is the best you can find in Germany.
But you disagree.
Maybe that’s the problem.
I don’t wanna recreate a European recipe,
this is America.
We need an American beer.
Good luck with that.
German lager brewers had been trained
under the "Reinheitsgebot," which was the German purity law
regulating the ingredients that could be used in beer.
However, Adolphus Busch himself was not a brewer
and America was a land where the old restrictions
and European traditions didn’t necessarily apply.
Busch and his brew masters begin experimenting
with American ingredients using four and six row barley.
But after investing in a refrigerated rail system
to deliver a signature beer,
so far, he has nothing to show for it.
Meanwhile, Buck Duke has traveled all over the country
trying to find new buyers for his family’s tobacco.
It’s a no.
But he hasn’t made a single sale.
The 1800s, cigarettes weren’t really that popular.
You know, cigarettes at the time
were really primarily for women.
And most men did not engage in cigarette smoking.
They would chew the tobacco, were smoking the pipe,
or having a cigar.
A cigarette.
You mean people actually buy these.
Early cigarettes were not manufactured cigarettes.
This is just tobacco leaf that’s a, a, a consumer
will later roll themselves into a cigarette.
I get 10 minutes for my break, no exceptions.
If I take too long to smoke I don’t eat.
Hmm.
And it’s like that for everyone that works here?
How many people would you say that that is?
Couple hundred, give or take.
If you go back and look at the late 19th century
American economy and look at all the factory workers
and mechanics and others skilled tradesmen.
And, uh, a lot of them smoke?
That portability of the cigarette helped make
the cigarette particularly suited
to more modern urban industrial life.
Thank you.
I’ll be damned.
Is that a cigarette?
You see that?
See what?
I just had a nice easy smoke
in the time it took you to get that pipe lit.
Filling a pipe and lighting it and tamping it down
and keeping it going, it was a complicated operation.
And, uh, why should we care?
Because new factories are being built every day,
textile mills, oil refineries, steel plants.
And you know what they all have in common?
Hundreds of men working long hours with short breaks.
Roughly the duration of one cigarette.
The cigarette, it’s really a convenience factor
that then fits into the notion of that good, short, sweet
smoke, which fits also then
into the pattern of industrialization
that is getting going rapidly in the north.
You think you’re gonna sell, all them workers,
a novelty made for women.
That’s a terrible idea.
I’m telling you,
it’ll catch on.
Buck Duke’s father has a choice to make,
maintain the status quo or risk the future of his company
on an obscure tobacco product that’s ridiculed as a novelty.
The cigarette.
Buck Duke has convinced his father
that despite their terrible reputation,
cigarettes could be the future of the tobacco industry.
Most Americans did not consume cigarettes
at the turn of the century.
Cigarettes were seen as making men more effeminate
and making women more masculine.
To transform the family’s small tobacco shop
into a hand-rolling factory,
he spends the modern equivalent of 75 grand
to steal the specialized workforce he needs
to bring them to North Carolina.
Most cigarette rollers in the late 19th century
are Jewish immigrants.
Cigarettes are actually more popular in Russia,
so there’s a kind of expertise.
Buck Duke hires 125 cigarette rollers
from a New York based firm,
hires them down to Durham
and they set up shop at W. Duke and Sons.
Back then, a professional cigarette roller
could roll about four good cigarettes at a minute.
Duke introduces pre-rolled cigarettes
in his family shop
and needs a way to get people to try them, especially men.
What’s all this?
Look, this one is Jack Nego, right?
But next time,
next time it could just as easily be Art Benedict.
Now customers can collect the whole set.
Seems silly. How does this help us?
Ben, the customers want the cards.
So they buy our products.
Now the stores sell out,
they order more from us.
Buck Duke needed something unique to cut through.
So they came out with trading cards
they were literally making baseball trading cards
to sell tobacco.
Now the best part,
watch this.
We’re Texas Cigarettes during shipping.
To build recognition
years before national brands exist,
Duke launches his hand-rolled cigarettes
under a brand, W. Duke and Sons,
one of the first branded cigarettes in the country.
And to drive demand,
he pours $800,000, 23 million today,
into a marketing campaign,
powered by ads and collectable cards,
betting that this new product would become
the future of the tobacco industry.
Adolphus Busch has already waged the lager
as the future of beer,
and that he could ship it in refrigerated rail cars
to the US frontier.
But after months of working on a recipe
that caters to American tastes,
his brew masters have yet to get it right.
We try to achieve the perfect balance
between Christmas and body without too much bite.
I think I like this.
An American twist on a beer I found in Budweis.
Budweis.
Budweis the town in Czechoslovakia.
Get this into production right away.
In 1876, Budweiser Beer is born.
When you think of American beer,
you only think of one thing, Budweiser.
With Budweiser,
it’s a brand that’s up there with Coca-Cola, McDonald’s,
you’re never gonna pick one up in another country
or in another part of the world
and say,
"This is a completely different Budweiser than I’m used to."
Busch begins shipping Budweiser
to saloons across the Southwest,
gambling, hundreds of thousands of dollars
that people will drink a beer they’ve never heard of.
By the late 19th century,
New York is the industrial capital in the nation.
The lure of factory jobs brings a flood of immigrants
from all across the globe,
and the city’s population doubles every decade
between 1800 and 1880.
The late 19th century is a key moment
in the urbanization of the United States.
We see an incredible rise in the density of housing
with the erection of tenements in New York city,
cramped conditions,
shared living quarters,
dirty streets.
The nine square blocks of the Jewish Lower East Side
was the most crowded mile in the world.
More crowded than anywhere in India or China,
because it had five storeys of people
crowded upon each other.
Not all buildings were connected to the sewer system,
so you had outhouses at these places,
the smells coming up,
there was no ventilation.
And then nobody had hot water,
so nobody washed that often.
Many people lived in filth squalor.
But there’s one district infamous for its poverty
and crime.
It’s called the Tenderloin.
The Tenderloin District was a vice district
in New York city during the late 19th century,
early 20th century.
And this is an area where you had tenement houses,
you had brothels, you had gambling dens.
The term, the Tenderloin,
supposedly came from a New York Police Captain.
He was being transferred to a vice district
where he was gonna make a lot more graft.
Police officers could take so many bribes back then
he would make so much money,
he could now eat tenderloin,
instead of rump steak.
One resident of the Tenderloin
is a German immigrant who was born partially paralyzed.
He’s, Julia Schmidt,
and after having to sell some of his clothing just to eat,
he now works long hours at a local factory.
Hey, this is my bench.
Just resting, I’m already at work.
Julia Schmidt came to America at a time
when there was tremendous prejudice against immigrants,
and for Schmidt,
it was compounded by the fact
that he was also physically handicapped.
Julia Schmidt already had a trade
which was making casings for sausages
out of animal membranes.
Julia Schmidt barely scrapes by
working at a sausage factory.
Julia Schmidt, I mean, here he is,
he’s on a crutch bum leg,
and he lives in the seediest section of Manhattan
where there’s prostitution
and just all kinds of illegal activities that’s going on.
People can be born into the opportunity to create success,
or they could create success out of necessity.
Despite his humble beginnings,
the product Schmidt innovates will one day
prevents all manner of deadly disease,
rewrite US law,
ignite a sexual revolution
and fuel a $9 billion industry.
New York City is growing fast,
and greed and crime and corruption,
lurk in every dark alley.
New York City was a very rough, crowded, dangerous place.
Prostitution was way more common,
and even though it was illegal,
it was basically sanctioned by the police.
They took bribes to allow the brothels to continue.
There was an estimate that one in six adult men
went to a prostitute every day.
In the heart of New York’s seedy under alley,
Julia Schmidt can’t make ends meet
working at a local sausage factory,
but he scratches out living with his side hustle,
making products out of scraps from the factory floor.
Julia Schmidt actually sold and marketed sausage casings,
creating a condom.
It’s hard for us to imagine today in the 21st century.
The idea of using an intestine for a condom
is actually genius.
It’s really durable,
and it’s gonna give you a skin like feel.
Now the downside is that it will get funky, right?
And for some thinking about a pig intestine
around their genitals,
that might not be as romantic.
Talk about a sausage fest.
Some version of condoms
date all the way back to 1000 years before the common era,
where people used oiled linen, silk, leather,
and even thin horn as prophylactics.
Animal intestines were used in parts of Europe
as early as the 16th century.
But in the late 1800s,
it’s still a foreign concept in the United States.
In fact, thanks to an anti vice crusader
named Anthony Comstock,
all forms of prophylactic are against the law.
Anthony Comstock was a chubby baldheaded,
mutton-chopped reformer,
a federal public official in the Post Office Department
who thought he knew everything about
what was obscene and what needed to be prevented.
And he took the definition of obscene
all the way to birth control devices and condoms.
If you allow men to have sex with no fear of VD
and no fear of impregnating anyone,
they will have more sex.
That was his logic.
Working in the vice-filled Tenderloin District,
Schmidt should have no shortage of customers
for his condoms,
if he could sell them without getting caught.
The budding temperance movement forced Jack Daniel
out of a job,
but instead of giving up,
he’s going legit,
investing every penny he’s ever made bootlegging
to open a legal licensed distillery,
with Nearest Green is a master distiller,
and Nearest’s son, George, to help run the place.
It’s absolutely important
to recognize Nathan Green’s story
in the Jack Daniel’s story.
It acknowledges the African American role
and our participation in building up
the whiskey industry here in America.
We know that we were a part of the story from the beginning.
Unlike Moonshiners
who make their booze in makeshift stills
sell it cheap and untaxed,
Jack Daniel’s new whiskey will be subject to heavy taxation.
So he and Green need a product
they can charge more money for.
To make it,
they use a technique called sour mash,
which creates lactic acid that kills unwanted bacteria
during fermentation.
Then they use charcoal to filter their liquor,
to remove any impurities.
It’s a system now known as the Lincoln County Process.
These blends are single malt.
These are blends made from the samples you already have.
In West Africa in order to get clean water,
they filter it through charcoal,
Nathan Green, mastered and included that principle
of running Moonshine through charcoal,
maple to strip some of that bite,
to strip some of that harsh flavors and mellow it out.
The last step in Jack and Nearest’s
whiskey making process
is mellowing it by aging it in charred oak barrels.
It’s not bad, but it ain’t perfect.
More time in the barrel it is.
Buck Duke has spent the last few years
slowly building his hand-rolled cigarette business,
marketed with baseball cards under a brand name.
Their popularity grows month after month.
And by 1884, he’s selling 90 million cigarettes a year
from the South to the industrial Northeast.
Oh ah, we need to talk.
All right.
We’re three weeks behind on our deliveries.
Of course, cigarettes are in hot demand
from the factory workers.
Our salesmen are suddenly drowning,
and at this pace is only gonna be worse.
The hand-rollers at Duke’s firm
rolled cigarettes slowly and gently,
which meant wastefulness and inefficiency.
We’re running at full capacity.
Mmm-hmm.
Can we add more workers?
We don’t have the room.
I need a minute to think.
Just a few years before,
21 year old engineer,
James Bonsack patented
an automatic cigarette rolling machine,
entering it in a competition to win a $75,000 prize,
the modern equivalent of over a million.
Bonsack won,
but the company that sponsored it rejected the machine
to avoid paying up.
That leaves the revolutionary technology up the grabs.
Oh, that’s beautiful.
We’ll open a new factory in New York,
filling it with these beauties
and we are going fully automated.
We’re never gonna fall behind that man again.
Um,
did you just say New York?
The late 19th century sees New York City
assume a dominance in the economic system of America,
emerges in this period
as the financial capital of the United States.
But the cost of what you’re talking about,
I can’t even think of a number high enough.
I’ve already secured a loan and a location.
No, no, no, no, Buck...
That kind of debt is going to cripple us.
Just trust me.
Believing he can expand his cigarette kingdom
into an empire,
Buck Duke leverages the company
to make a bold move to New York,
Damn it, Buck.
and bet its future on automation.
Adolphus Busch has made Budweiser
the first American beer
to be shipped by refrigerated rail,
investing millions of dollars
to sell it in New Mexico, Texas and Colorado.
But after a brief surge,
sales are suddenly plummeting.
This one is from here in St. Louis.
This is from a barrel we confiscated in New Mexico.
In the 19th century, most beer was sold out of a barrel.
You go to a saloon, someone taps a beer and hands it to you.
This is watered down.
Mmm hmm.
How common is this?
It’s everywhere.
Adolphus soon discovered
that he would sell barrels of beer to a saloon keeper,
and saloon keepers would take his barrels,
fill them with cheap beer,
which no surprise was infuriating.
It’s hurting our sales
and there’s not much we can do about it.
Get this outta my sight.
Busch needs a way
to ensure the quality of Budweiser
or his beer will never pave the way
for alcohol brands to go national.
Julia Schmidt sells illegal condoms.
Also called safes or skins
in the sleazy back alleys
of New York City’s Tenderloin District.
Three skins.
Just sold the last one, but I’ll be back tomorrow night.
Oh, I’ll make it, worth your while.
Sorry. But I really I’m sold out.
So Julia Schmidt was incredibly savvy
because he really found a product that people needed.
It’s not to knock sausages,
but they don’t have quite the same appeal that a condom
which can protect you against disease,
but also prevent unwanted pregnancies.
Okay.
Tomorrow night, but bring me six.
Julia Schmidt illegal condoms
are selling so well,
he can’t keep them in stock.
But anything he does to expand
runs the risk of drawing unwanted attention
from the authorities.
In Tennessee,
Jack Daniel and Nearest Green’s new distillery
won’t be able to make a sale
until they perfect their more expensive legal whiskey
by aging it.
Okay boys, to your good health.
Although whiskey was a theme back in those times,
it had not been perfected over the generations yet.
So I think it would’ve been a little bit harsher,
a little bit higher proof.
Dry spice, vanilla, hint of smoke, sweet finish.
Well it’s strong as hell.
Yup.
As a final touch,
Jack Daniel’s high proof whiskey
is cut with water sourced from a natural spring
in a nearby cave.
All right.
This is the best whiskey I’ve ever tasted,
and it ain’t close.
I agree.
Nearest?
I think this is it.
All right.
Jack Daniel’s Whiskey
is finally ready to hit the market.
All he needs is for local customer to give it a chance.
Budweiser is shipped by rail to states in the Southwest,
but it’s only sold in barrels.
So Adolphus Busch is up against countless saloon keepers
who are watering it down.
He’s trying to figure out what can I possibly do
to avoid this cheating on the part of people
who are selling my beer
Bottle would have a label on it,
with a trademark on it,
clearly indicating where that come from
and a saloon keeper
isn’t gonna go to the trouble of refilling the bottle
and trying to recap it.
Today,
over 65 billion individually packaged 12 ounce beers
are consumed in the United States every year.
But at the time,
the idea of mass producing and selling any bottled beverage
is practically unthinkable.
To change that,
Adolphus Busch needs another infusion of cash,
but he’s already too deep in debt to get a loan.
And his father-in-law Eberhard Anheuser is his last hope.
When it’s fully operational,
we are talking about thousands of bottles a day.
Maybe that many every hour.
We have barely recovered
from building your refrigerator rail cars.
I know.
This guarantees the beer taste the same way,
every time, everywhere.
Each one’s sealed and sterilized
using the same techniques as the finest wineries in France.
Busch was shrewd, he was smart.
He was fluent in French,
and he read Louis Pasteur in the original,
when it first came out.
He’s probably one of the first people in the United States
who knew about pasteurization and its possibilities.
Nearly half a century before pasteurization
will revolutionize the dairy industry,
Busch wants to adopt the process for his beer.
It kills bacteria,
and will make every bottle of Budweiser shelf stable.
I know it’s expensive,
but I bet we can get it all the way to the coasts.
Just imagine our products in every state.
Where technology comes from is usually beer.
Refrigeration was invented for beer.
Things like pasteurization,
people were like, "Oh, great for milk."
No, pasteurization was invented for beer.
I’ll consider it.
Buck Duke taken out loans
to move his tobacco company
from small town in North Carolina,
to New York City.
Buck Duke was a Republican,
which meant he was not necessarily comfortable
in the politics of North Carolina
in the late 19th century.
He was a money man, oriented toward the bankers.
I like to imagine that his accent
was a little bit off putting in New York
where he did most of his business.
He’s opening a factory
to industrialize cigarettes,
and betting everything on the Bonsack machine.
Let’s get it opened up.
And he’s hired an engineer
to oversee quality control.
Bring me another batch
and they better show improvement.
I can’t.
The machine is uh,
indisposed.
Indisposed?
My wife is indisposed when she has a cold,
machines, don’t get indisposed.
When Buck Duke first established
and began using the Bonsack cigarette rolling machine,
it didn’t work at all.
It should be up and running by the end of the day.
Don’t come back until the machine works.
The Bonsack machine’s been sidelined
for months and Buck’s brother, Ben,
is watching the bottom line.
We’ve um, barely been able to stay ahead of expenses
for months.
We’ve got a $200 payment coming in,
should be in the next week.
But after that,
that’s it, it’s all we have.
At least it’s something.
We owe $12,000, due this week.
You know what 200 minus 12,000 looks like?
Beg, lie if you have to, all right?
Buy me a few weeks, Ben, until I can fix this.
Now it is by no means a foregone conclusion
that mechanically made cigarettes
would come to dominate cigarette production.
In the 1880s,
it is commonly held wisdom
that the machine is simply too glitchy.
I’ll do what I can, but you can’t pull this off,
we’re done.
I know.
Buck and Ben Duke have risked their company
on an automated cigarette rolling machine
and waited months for it to work.
Now they’re waiting for results from the latest test run.
And I thought you said by noon. Its past noon.
It’s 12:02, relax.
The machine’s running smoothly,
clocking in at about 190 cigarettes an hour,
and they all look like this.
Start shipping these immediately.
Each Bonsack machine
produces over 200 cigarettes per minute,
doing the work of 40 to 60 hand workers,
and Duke invests in two dozen of them.
Buck Duke’s 24 Bonsack cigarette rolling machines
in 1889 replaced 1,080 workers in hand-rolling jobs,
and produced 834 million cigarettes.
Every single one of those cigarettes was the same.
Duke’s machine rolled cigarettes
are a sensation.
Within a single year,
his company controls nearly 90%
of the American cigarette market.
Cigars and chewing tobacco
were still the industry’s biggest sellers,
but it’s enough to vault Duke
into the top five tobacco companies in the country,
and he’s still rising
In New York city’s Tenderloin district,
The Comstock Act has made selling condoms illegal,
but working secretly out of his apartment,
Julia Schmidt’s selling more sausage casing condoms
than he could keep up with.
I can’t imagine being in the shoes
of someone who’s running an illegal business.
Short.
That layer of risk
that authorities are going to discover you
or that someone is going to break your knee caps,
or something like that.
You’ve got vices, smoking, drinking, sex and prostitution.
The reformers are there on the other side.
Both sides are working in a sense
for what they define as a soul of those communities.
Schmidt is making a name for himself
in the New York underground,
and he won’t be able to stay hidden forever.
Adolphus Bush has taken a loan from his father-in-law
and invested the modern equivalent
of millions of dollars
in the state-of-the-art bottling facility,
and he’s using it to make Budweiser
not only the first mass produced bottled beer
in American history,
but the first industrial bottled drink of any kind.
Most entrepreneurs take blind risks.
They have an idea,
they have a passion and they just want to go for it.
Adolphus Busch started pasteurization,
and refrigeration and bottling,
so he could distribute his beer
all across the United States.
And most people could only afford
to drink beer in the pub.
And so when you got the bottled one,
it was seen as somewhat swanky,
you know, the king of beer, the beer of Kings.
If this beer was seen in your home,
it would mean that you were a higher class person.
Busch ships his Budweiser
to states across the Southwest,
introducing it with an unprecedented
marketing campaign.
Can I get the logo on both sides?
You can.
He offers saloon’s free perks like coasters,
calendars, and signs,
and advertises through the most powerful
form of mass media at the time.
Newspaper advertising was one of the most important ways
to get to customers during the late 1800
and the early 1900s,
in the days before radio and television.
People would see these ads,
they would demand that their local saloon keeper
or restaurant bring in Budweiser beer.
Budweiser, to me, its success
is more of a result of brilliant branding
than brilliant brewing.
They mastered the marketing and branding of their product
and they are dominant because of it.
Soon,
Budweiser is selling millions of bottles a year,
and with the temperance movement focused on liquor
and not beer,
Adolphus Busch has his site set on national expansion.
The Busch’s had a dream
that the world of beer would belong entirely to them.
You know,
if you are able to capture the entirety of the market,
you could make all the money,
not your fair share of the money,
not like some slice of the money,
all the money.
Jack Daniel and Nearest Green
have finally introduced their premium signature whiskey
to the local market.
But they’re charging a premium price and nobody’s buying it.
As a distiller,
you aren’t responsible for the cost
that the federal government will get from the excise tax
on that whiskey.
And there are a lot of people who,
if they’re given the option
between Moonshine and Tennessee whiskey,
they’re gonna choose Moonshine.
And I think Jack Daniel bet his career on making good stuff
as opposed to cheap stuff.
Reverend.
Then he gets an even more devastating
piece of news.
What!
No. No.
Get out!
1890, before the whiskey they created together
even gets off the ground.
The righteous perish,
and no one takes it to heart.
Jack Daniel loses his friend and mentor,
Nearest Green.
The devout are taken from us
and no one understands,
the righteous are taken away to be spared.
I think Nearest Green’s death
would’ve impacted Jack Daniel greatly,
not even from a business standpoint,
but from a personal standpoint,
he lost his friend, he lost his teacher,
and he lost his partner in business.
And so I’m quite sure that Jack Daniel
was devastated when Nearest Green died.
Jack Daniel learned to distill from Nearest,
and that’s what made his whiskey good,
and I think Jack Daniel knew
that’s what made his whiskey good
and would not have wanted to work with anybody else.
If Jack Daniel was going to find a way
to revolutionize the whiskey industry,
he’s going to have to do it on his own.
Julia Schmidt is now the biggest condom dealer
in the Tenderloin District,
selling them in secret out of his apartment,
careful to stay one step ahead of anti-vice crusader,
Anthony Comstock.
Can I help you?
Yeah, I’m here for skins.
No idea. What you’re talking about.
Have a nice night.
You could always find condoms
despite the fact that they were not legal.
A part of it is still that idea of secret knowledge.
So you would ask around where can I find condoms,
it just was not always discussed openly.
Hey, hey, hey, I just need one box. Come on.
I don’t know you, friends.
Like I said, I have no idea what you’re talking.
You might find someone who sells the condoms
and you can buy them directly from them on the street.
Jimmy sent me,
he ran out and he said I could find some here.
Jimmy?
Yeah. From Ward Saloon Downtown.
Give me a second.
I would think people thought anti-vice crusaders
were definitely against freedom.
They were in a way busy bodies
who thought they knew better about how you should live,
and there was a lot of pushback.
It was not freedom.
Officers.
What is this?
You know what it is.
In 1890, despite every precaution,
Julia Schmidt’s apartment is raided by Anthony Comstock
He’s areested and all his merchandise is confiscated.
Just a few miles away,
Buck Duke’s industrial rolling machines
have put him at the forefront of the cigarette business,
with output surging from 9 million cigarettes a year
to a staggering 2 million a day.
When Buck Duke discontinued hand-rolling operations
of cigarettes,
he was operating
24 different Bonsack cigarette rolling machines.
Buck Duke was just taking advantage of the moment.
I think he saw economies of scale,
and as a result, he leaped.
By 1890, cigarettes account for less than 10%
of the tobacco industry as a whole,
but it’s growing.
And Duke’s visionary leadership has propelled him
into the so-called big five tobacco companies.
People keep congratulating me
on making it into the "Big Five".
What number are we nowadays?
Five.
The Duke family at this time,
they are by no means the biggest player in town.
Well, I’m sure that’s still quite an accomplishment.
That title is held by the William Blackwell Company,
which has, for a while,
the largest smoking tobacco factory in the world.
What’s that supposed to mean?
When I go down to the track,
I don’t bet a horse to show,
I bet it to win.
And in fact, it’s Blackwell’s dominance of smoking tobacco
that pushes the ever competitive Buck Duke.
Buck Duke has clawed his way
to the top tier of the tobacco industry,
but he’s not finished yet.
Armed with his shelf-stable Budweiser
and a growing fleet of refrigerated rail cars,
Adolphus Busch is expanding beyond the Southwest
into new markets,
and he dominates every new territory he enters.
Beer in those days,
this was the day of the robber barons.
So this was a cutthroat of business.
You’re gonna roll your army up to the gates
and you’re gonna sack the other guy’s castle, right?
And you’re gonna burn it.
You’re gonna take over all of his forts,
once you have secured that town,
you then roll onto the next town.
Thanks to Busch’s relentless innovation,
Budweiser becomes not just the first national beer brand,
but one of the earliest national brands in the country.
National brands were not all that prevalent.
Busch really was a pioneer in branding beer.
They also pioneered pasteurization of beer
and refrigerated rail cars.
To success.
So here you went from everybody being local
to this national brand,
you know, spreading across the country
and that was new.
To your promotion,
I’m making you a partner.
I told you to maintain the status quo and you ignored me.
You were right.
I don’t know how to thank you.
To become a partner in the Anheuser company is...
Anheuser Busch.
Congratulations.
By 1890,
thanks to his machine-rolled cigarettes,
Buck Duke is head of the fifth largest tobacco company
in the nation,
but he’ll stop at nothing to be number one.
I need you to contact our sales team
and let them know we’re slashing prices.
Good afternoon to you too.
I want to be the cheapest brand on the market
by the end of the week.
Buck, why the hell would we want to do this
when sales are an all time high?
Buck Duke was an aggressive businessman
who had no qualms about using predatory pricing.
Our competition will lower their prices to compete,
and when they do,
we’ll under cut that again.
Duke’s method was cut prices
to either drive a competitor out of business,
or to compel that competitor to sell out to him.
Ben, we’re either first, or we’re losing.
Buck Duke intended to use cigarettes
in order to finance his price wars
against other branches of the industry.
And he poured millions of dollars into this process.
Duke lowers the price of his cigarettes
to 5 cents for a pack of 10,
half the cost of his competitors.
The move sends profits plummeting.
But that’s a strategy to bleed his own company
to hurt competitors more
and see who blinks first.
Jack Daniel is on his own
and he needs to convince people to try his expensive
premium whiskey.
So he’s starting with the bottle that’s sold in.
None of these are good enough.
Back in those days,
the bottles, they were jugs,
they were any sort of, you know,
container that folks could just go and get a refill,
essentially, of their own whiskey,
and then take it home.
There wouldn’t be, you know, this iconic labeling involved.
I want more options on my desk on Monday.
You got it.
Jack Daniel is totally reimagining his whiskey’s image,
not just with new packaging,
but a legend he could sell along with it.
We perceive that distillers have been these guys
in seer sucker suits,
sitting on a porch somewhere in Kentucky,
sipping on a mint julip,
when in fact distillers have always been the marginalized
people of society.
First, it was slaves.
Then it was who for whatever reason mainstream society
had said, we don’t want to do business with you.
Jack Daniel is the picture of this.
Jack Daniel transforms himself
from a rough tumble orphan
into the Quinter Central Southern gentleman.
And in 1895,
he debuts a new signature bottle to evoke a square deal.
A square bottle in a sea of round bottles
or oval bottles,
or circular bottles is easy to pick out.
The Jack Daniel’s label is iconic,
black label, white lettering with a number 7 on it.
That Number 7 has its own meaning,
some say it was a distillery,
some say it was the amount of girlfriends he had,
or it was his seventh recipe.
Now armed with his signature look
and the iconic bottle that still bears his name,
Jack Daniel sets his sights,
not just on dominating Tennessee,
but the entire nation.
Jack Daniel was not only ahead of his time,
he was one of the founders of American branding
as we understand it.
He was making a commodity,
which was not branded whiskey.
It was like corn or like milk.
But Jack took that
and turned it into what we now recognize as brand,
and was one of the first to really do that
in a dramatic way,
and one that is remarkably persisted
and continues even now.
700 Miles away.
Have a seat, please.
Buck Duke’s price war
has brought the entire tobacco industry to its knees.
And he’s called a meeting of the big five companies
to bully them into a cease fire.
Look,
I know I’m not the most popular man in this room right now,
but that’s why I’ve brought you all out here
was to make amends.
Why would we make amends with someone who spent the last
year trying to put us all out of business?
Buck Duke,
he’s an incredible entrepreneur.
He’s a man with tremendous vision.
He’s also a man that a lot of people don’t like
for various reasons.
He tends to be a little arrogant.
Because I’m gonna spend the next year
making all of us a hell of a lot of money.
I don’t wanna fight you anymore,
I want us to work together.
If we do that,
we’ll become the biggest tobacco concern
in the history of the planet overnight,
under my leadership, of course.
And if we’re not interested?
And we’ll keep right on fighting
and see how many of you survive,
I’m prepared to lower my prices another 5% on Monday,
are you?
Buck Duke goes out and makes a deal
with four of his major competitors.
And they all fall under the umbrella
with the formation of American Tobacco.
A decade before U.S. Steel is formed,
and eight years before Nabisco is founded,
Buck Duke merges with his four largest competitors,
forming a conglomerate called American Tobacco,
with an initial estimated valuation
of over seven and a half billion dollars in modern money.
The American Tobacco Company were part
of the great merger movement in American business.
We see this with Andrew Carnegie,
we see it with the other great industrialists of the age.
Buck Duke is part of this trend.
By the 1890s into 1900,
they are controlling 90, 95 for the sale of all cigarettes
in the United States.
The irony of all of this is
Buck Duke personally hated cigarettes.
American Tobacco is now the most powerful
tobacco company on earth,
and nothing can threaten their dominance for now.
Let’s go.
Prohibition sends the booze racket underground-
Keep it quiet
and puts the makers
of Jack Daniel’s and Budweiser
on the wrong side of the law.
You are under arrest for violating Section 37,
Article 2 of the penal code
We’ve been indicted.
The First World War becomes an unlikely front
in the battle for legal condoms.
Yes, condoms. Rubber condoms.
And the numbers game in Harlem-
Be discrete.
touches off a turf war with the New York mafia
over a gambling ring-
Just make sure you pay up.
that’ll become the state lotto.
You think you can come in here and intimidate me?