Free Ashes to Ashes by Richard Kluger

and Pennsylvania to the north, with Baltimore as the urban hub of his trade. To woo the best wholesalers, he turned out private-label brands, sometimes named for them or their loved ones. He kept wages low and the factory clean and efficient, adding the latest equipment, like a gas-burning leaf dryer, which was far more economical than climbing to the factory roof and laying out the sugar-laced leaf in the sun. What he may have been best at, though, was inventing memorable and homey names for his brands of chew, like Brown’s Mule, Golden Rain, Dixie’s Delight, Zeb Vance, Yellow Rose, Live Indian, Purity, City Talk—and Dick Reynolds’s Best.
    Within two years, he had doubled the size of the factory. By 1883, his ninth year as an entrepreneur, he had 110 hands, and the local newspaper, in recognition of his preeminence among the town’s manufacturers, referred to him as “R.J.R.” The next year, Dick’s younger brother Will, a college man, joined the sprouting company and relieved the boss of much of his leaf-buying duties. Soon “R. J.,” as he was known more familiarly around his own premises, freed himself to solidify his sales program; before long he had nearly fifty accounts in Baltimore alone. By 1886, the industry registry listed close to a hundred trademarked names in the Reynolds stable, and two of them, Maid of Athens and Schnapps, were among the trade’s top sellers.
    He had become a very big, vibrant fish in a small, drab pond. As if to spite his abstemious father’s strictures, R. J. played as hard as he worked. The roseate glow of his cheeks bespoke his bottomless capacity for liquor, and his weekend-long poker games were famous locally. A bachelor married to his work just like Buck Duke, Reynolds lacked the former’s city diversions anddevoted himself, when not gambling at cards, to fast horses and pliant women. His pair of matched white steeds was rated among the finest in the state, and he liked nothing better than galloping them through Winston’s dusty streets.
    Yet he was regarded not as a notorious roué but as the community’s foremost industrialist, wearing a patriarchal beard by now, and notably civic-spirited at that. He took the lead in upgrading Winston from a frontier pesthole through the installation of sewers, establishment of a reliable fire department, and improvement of rail service, all of which served, of course, to enhance and safeguard his own business. In 1889, as the American Tobacco Company was being organized in New York, Richard Reynolds was erecting a six-story, block-long, electric-powered, fireproof factory, the largest plug plant in North Carolina. He was well on the way to becoming the biggest manufacturer of sweet chewing tobacco in the entire South, and it would not be long before his enterprise would whet the omnivorous appetite of Buck Duke.

The Earth with a Fence Around It
    IN THE same year that the American Tobacco Company began to operate under the whip hand of Buck Duke, the Congress of the United States passed its first major piece of legislation aimed at checking the unbridled exercise of corporate might. But in seeking to temper the behavior of any enterprise that attempted to restrain trade or commerce, the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 spoke in broad and ill-defined language even as the tentacles of gigantic, monopolistic operations were reaching out to seize a growing portion of the furiously expanding American marketplace.
    The corporation had proven an invaluable tool of the industrial age because it permitted the accumulation of capital on a scale never before contemplated, easier access to credit, and limited personal liability without which the risks inherent in the entrepreneurial system would likely have been unbearable. The “trust” carried the concept one logical step further. Taking the form of one corporation owning or controlling another corporation or several of them, trusts were ideal vehicles for the creation of wealth because they