Free Barbarians at the Gate by Bryan Burrough, John Helyar Page A

influence ripples out in all directions. Travel west, along Interstate 40, where every third billboard is devoted to Reynolds brands, and the Bowman Gray School of Medicine rises into view. An eminent teaching hospital and research center, it is named for the former Reynolds chairman who bequeathed it. Farther west is the exit for Tanglewood, a sprawling park donated to the county by the brother of R. J. Reynolds, William. “Mr. Will,” as he is still known forty years after his death, made it clear that Tanglewood was to be used by the white people of the county.
    Travel north along Reynolda Road toward the estate of R. J. Reynolds himself—“Mr. RJ,” he is called, seventy years after his death. His sprawling mansion, Reynolda House, holds one of the nation’s finest collections of American paintings. Its grounds are host to the city’s most exclusive country club, Old Town. There’s room left over on the estate for the campus of Wake Forest University, which the Reynolds family brought to Winston-Salem from 100 miles away in the 1950s. Along Reynolda Road, the model farm that R. J. Reynolds’s wife—“Mrs. RJ”—once set up has been converted into a collection of toney boutiques, along with the offices that administer the public service component of the Reynolds family fortune. The Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation gives millions each year for good works in North Carolina, as does the Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation. A fine French restaurant called La Chaudière is housed in the Reynolds farm’s old boiler room and offers Winston and Salem cigarettes to its customers gratis. Many people accept. This is, after all, a town where the occasional sign says, “Thank you for smoking.”
    The Reynolds influence ripples into the poor side of town as well. Mister Will may have better remembered the white people, but he also donated money to start the Kate Bitting Reynolds Hospital for the blacks. (The hospital no longer exists, but the Kate B. Reynolds Trust distributes one-quarter of the income from its 2.4 million RJR shares to the city’s “poor and needy.”) R.J. Reynolds High School, in a rich neighborhood, provides the city’s best secondary education. But James A. Gray High School—named for a former RJR chairman—for years provided good schooling for the lower strata. On its grounds now stands the North Carolina School of the Arts. RJR donations help maintain this well-regarded fine arts training institute.
    On a humid summer morning, when there’s no breeze to carry it away,the pungent smell of tobacco still hangs over downtown Winston-Salem, wafting from the company’s oldest tobacco factory, still in operation down the hill from the little Empire State Building. It serves as one constant reminder why there is a Winston-Salem. A few blocks away, in front of City Hall, stands another: the statue of Richard Joshua Reynolds riding into town on horseback.
     

     
    He rode into Winston-Salem in 1874, a twenty-four-year-old Virginian attracted by some of the best tobacco-growing land in the country. At six feet two inches, R. J. Reynolds cut an imposing figure as he moved through the dusty streets of the burgeoning town. He had grown up sixty miles north in Rock Springs, just across the state line. His father owned a chewing-tobacco factory there, and Reynolds spent his youth learning the business. Business wasn’t easy in the hardscrabble world of the post—Civil War South. Cash was scarce and hard-driving ingenuity was required. The young R. J. Reynolds had just that, showing a brilliant talent for bartering. Sent out on the road with a wagonload of chewing tobacco, he returned with an even bigger wagonload of goods in exchange: beeswax, cowhides, sheep pelts, ginseng, carpets, and furniture, along with three or four horses and mules hitched on behind. Back at Rock Springs, it was all auctioned off for a 25 percent profit.
    Although R. J. Reynolds had grown up in the Old South—as a child he hid family