Courtesy of Pam Martens.
On February 25, 2013, James Hepburn, writing at Daily Kos, made the emphatic assertion in a headline that “Big Tobacco Had Nothing to Do With Tea Party Formation.” That is likely to be the one headline that will haunt Mr. Hepburn to his grave.
I decided to follow in the treacherous footsteps of the IRS and engaged in that unforgiveable sin: I targeted the “tea party” as a key word search at the legacy tobacco document archive. Resting quietly in the archive is full blown proof that Big Tobacco directly created multiple Tea Parties in 1994 as push back against a planned increase in the Federal Excise Tax (FET) on cigarettes.
In fact, Big Tobacco not only created the Tea Party, it has promoted it over decades, pumped millions into marketing it, and pulled it out of its magic hat every time it needed to produce an overnight, spontaneous “grassroots” movement.
Hepburn was nit-picking an article at Huffington Post by Brendan DeMelle that characterized an exhaustive study by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) as confirming that the “Tea Party Was Created By Big Tobacco.” Hepburn writes: “This is unfortunate because one, it isn’t true, and two, it overshadows the true origins of the Tea Party which is still largely unknown and far more interesting.”
DeMelle and the UCSF researchers were focusing on the hundreds of documents linking Big Tobacco with funding and plotting with third party nonprofits to create Tea Party groups – chiefly, the Koch brothers’ Citizens for a Sound Economy and its progeny, Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks. Hepburn believed the UCSF researchers had failed to show a Big Tobacco company had directly created a Tea Party group. But that wasn’t the thrust of the UCSF researchers’ work – they were investigating the corporate front groups posing as nonprofit grassroots movements.
But direct links to Big Tobacco do exist as a simple search through the trove of tobacco documents obtained in court battles prove. On June 2, 1994, the Associated Press wrote: “Kentucky farmers, taking a cue from the Boston Tea Party, will pitch sulks of tobacco into the Kentucky River next week to show their disgust with efforts by President Clinton and others to raise federal tobacco taxes. About 3,000 growers and their families are expected….” The Associated Press reported that the Council for Burley Tobacco was sponsoring the demonstration.
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