oversight for the rest of the twentieth century.
IV
A s if to greet the bright new century by setting his vast, somewhat ramshackle holdings in good order, Buck Duke fused his two principal units, American and Continental, into a single monolithic holding company, Consolidated Tobacco. Its sales were running at an annual rate of $125 million, and its workforce numbered 100,000. He was well on the way to dominating almost the entire U.S. tobacco business. As befit his new rank as a major industrial baron, Duke lived in a Fifth Avenue mansion and had begun the process of converting a 300-acre farm he had bought along the Raritan River in New Jersey’s Somerset County into an Elysian showplace. Still, he needed new worlds to conquer—or, more precisely, the Old World.
The Consolidated colossus shipped a billion cigarettes a year to sales offices in Canada, Australia, China, and Japan—next to nothing compared to what Duke had achieved in America. The chief problem was that most foreigners preferred dark Oriental leaf or some domestic variant thereof. The notable exception was Britain and its empire, which at that time happened to occupy a major portion of the earth’s landmass. Cigarettes made from barely sweetened Bright leaf imported from America were much in vogue in England. John Player & Sons, operating out of Nottingham, had introduced its cheap Gold Leaf Navy Cuts in the mid-’Eighties, and the larger firm of W. D. & H. O. Wills, out of Bristol, had soon followed with its popular Wild Woodbine. Here was an immense market, if one counted the empire as a whole, where a little American ballyhoo could go a long way.
The problem, of course, was the historically high British tariff walls meantto repel predators precisely like Duke, even as they had driven off Spanish tobacco products three centuries earlier. Exporting finished American goods to Britain would thus be prohibitively expensive. But Buck was a much better merchant than the Spaniards, had the grit and wherewithal to stage a far more effective invasion than their armada had managed, and he even spoke a semblance of the same language as the British. Within a fortnight of their landing, a pair of Duke’s top lieutenants had bought up for $5.3 million the sizable tobacco operations of Ogden Ltd. of Liverpool, whose Taps brand was a serious competitor of Woodbine and Navy Cut. The whole British tobacco industry went into an overnight frenzy. The American tobacco king, whose bully boy shenanigans were well known to them, seemed the very embodiment of the brawling young nation across the Atlantic which by now had turned into the industrial prodigy of the world. The prospect was even more frightening when word emanated from Ogden’s that the Duke from Durham intended to reinvest every ha’penny he reaped in England, slash prices, and flood the island with cheap smokes until the established native firms sued for peace on terms that exalted him.
The full measure of Duke’s cheek became manifest soon after the chiefs of the thirteen ranking tobacco companies in Britain gathered for six days of intensive soul-searching in Birmingham, pledged to one another that none would sell to the marauding buccaneer, and under the leadership of seventy-one-year-old William Wills agreed to pool their fortunes in a corporate confederacy. But when they sought to register their compact under the name of the British Tobacco Company, they discovered that Duke’s people had already claimed it. Instead, they settled on the Imperial Tobacco Company of Great Britain and Ireland, Ltd., chartered at the close of 1901 and at once among the nation’s largest enterprises. They promptly made a show of running up the flag by offering a bonus to every retail shop that agreed not to stock any brands made by American Tobacco or its British affiliates.
Duke, a master at this sort of game, managed to make Imperial—or “Imps,” as The City crowd took to calling the tobacco amalgam—look
IV
A s if to greet the bright new century by setting his vast, somewhat ramshackle holdings in good order, Buck Duke fused his two principal units, American and Continental, into a single monolithic holding company, Consolidated Tobacco. Its sales were running at an annual rate of $125 million, and its workforce numbered 100,000. He was well on the way to dominating almost the entire U.S. tobacco business. As befit his new rank as a major industrial baron, Duke lived in a Fifth Avenue mansion and had begun the process of converting a 300-acre farm he had bought along the Raritan River in New Jersey’s Somerset County into an Elysian showplace. Still, he needed new worlds to conquer—or, more precisely, the Old World.
The Consolidated colossus shipped a billion cigarettes a year to sales offices in Canada, Australia, China, and Japan—next to nothing compared to what Duke had achieved in America. The chief problem was that most foreigners preferred dark Oriental leaf or some domestic variant thereof. The notable exception was Britain and its empire, which at that time happened to occupy a major portion of the earth’s landmass. Cigarettes made from barely sweetened Bright leaf imported from America were much in vogue in England. John Player & Sons, operating out of Nottingham, had introduced its cheap Gold Leaf Navy Cuts in the mid-’Eighties, and the larger firm of W. D. & H. O. Wills, out of Bristol, had soon followed with its popular Wild Woodbine. Here was an immense market, if one counted the empire as a whole, where a little American ballyhoo could go a long way.
The problem, of course, was the historically high British tariff walls meantto repel predators precisely like Duke, even as they had driven off Spanish tobacco products three centuries earlier. Exporting finished American goods to Britain would thus be prohibitively expensive. But Buck was a much better merchant than the Spaniards, had the grit and wherewithal to stage a far more effective invasion than their armada had managed, and he even spoke a semblance of the same language as the British. Within a fortnight of their landing, a pair of Duke’s top lieutenants had bought up for $5.3 million the sizable tobacco operations of Ogden Ltd. of Liverpool, whose Taps brand was a serious competitor of Woodbine and Navy Cut. The whole British tobacco industry went into an overnight frenzy. The American tobacco king, whose bully boy shenanigans were well known to them, seemed the very embodiment of the brawling young nation across the Atlantic which by now had turned into the industrial prodigy of the world. The prospect was even more frightening when word emanated from Ogden’s that the Duke from Durham intended to reinvest every ha’penny he reaped in England, slash prices, and flood the island with cheap smokes until the established native firms sued for peace on terms that exalted him.
The full measure of Duke’s cheek became manifest soon after the chiefs of the thirteen ranking tobacco companies in Britain gathered for six days of intensive soul-searching in Birmingham, pledged to one another that none would sell to the marauding buccaneer, and under the leadership of seventy-one-year-old William Wills agreed to pool their fortunes in a corporate confederacy. But when they sought to register their compact under the name of the British Tobacco Company, they discovered that Duke’s people had already claimed it. Instead, they settled on the Imperial Tobacco Company of Great Britain and Ireland, Ltd., chartered at the close of 1901 and at once among the nation’s largest enterprises. They promptly made a show of running up the flag by offering a bonus to every retail shop that agreed not to stock any brands made by American Tobacco or its British affiliates.
Duke, a master at this sort of game, managed to make Imperial—or “Imps,” as The City crowd took to calling the tobacco amalgam—look
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