In The Durham News section of The News & Observer this morning correspondent Elizabeth Shestak is upset that the Duke Homestead Tobacco Museum actually tells you something about a world when tobacco was a normal and acceptable thing. I thought that was the object of a museum. She would rather we revise history and try to make little kiddies think that tobacco was always a cudgel for use by the politically correct and ambitious state attorneys general.
She acknowledges that some of the exhibits were “wholesome” and “interesting,” but she seems to have been most upset with the advertising. She thinks it should be balanced by exhibits of cancerous lungs, I suppose. It’s a tobacco museum, Elizabeth, not an institute of pathology. Everyone knows tobacco is unhealthy. That’s why Durham no longer produces one single cigarette. The market has spoken.
Her column begins “Maybe it’s because I grew up in the North. Or maybe it’s just me.” I’m not sure what that means. Does she think no tobacco has ever been grown up North? Maybe she should drive through Connecticut’s “Tobacco Valley,” or Massachusetts’ tobacco fields. Hasn’t she ever seen the 1961 movie “Parrish” on TCM, in which Troy Donahue and Connie Stevens fall in love while harvesting tobacco with Southern migrant labor in the Connecticut River Valley?
Here’s the Web site of the Connecticut Valley Tobacco Museum. I don’t see any reference to the health scourge of tobacco, only references to the labor, the market, the tools and implements of an historic crop. Gee, sounds sort of like the Duke Homestead Tobacco Museum.
This column reminded me of the famous bumper sticker that says “I don’t care how you did it up North.” I-95 goes both ways, by the way.
