KATHERINE AND R. J. REYNOLDS: Partners of Fortune in the Making of the New South by Michele Gillespie (review)

This is a deeply researched, finely detailed, double biography of Katherine and R. J. Reynolds, husband and wife duo of Reynolds Tobacco fame. In biographer Michele Gillespie’s skilled hands, the reader learns much about the Reynoldses, their separate and joint rise to fame and fortune, and their lives, both public and private. Above all, Gillespie succeeds in bringing cousin Kate—thirty years R. J.’s junior—in from the shadows and grants her just due in the success of Reynolds Tobacco without denigrating the legendary R. J. R. That Katherine’s role has “been omitted . . . should not surprise us,” Gillespie tells us, for there has been “little room for powerful women in virtually any of the iconic self-made man stories” that have permeated the “national imagination” (8–9).

The book, really, is a model of moderation and choosing the middle ground. Again and again, on virtually every possible front, Gillespie presents a judicious and centrist interpretation of the lives, acts, decisions, and effects of the power couple. “Neither” W. J. Cash nor C. Vann Woodward “got it quite right” Gillespie tells us (4). Reynolds was not one of Woodward’s proto-typical “New Men,” making his way in Horatio Alger–style; nor was he completely the favored scion of old and wealthy planters who simply shifted to industry from agriculture as New South opportunities presented themselves. He was something of both. He had “plenty of brains and talent” but he was “also the beneficiary of a powerful system of social capital” (7).

And so on. R. J. was neither completely dependent on Katherine nor independently the financial genius. He had already made several fortunes before marrying, but the precocious Kate—profoundly influenced by her father—played a vital role in encouraging R. J. to take risks that paid off spectacularly. Katherine was neither an iconoclastic and obsessed financier who rejected tradition and home, nor was she completely tied to the gender roles of her time and place. “In her own way, she was a feminist,” Gillespie asserts, and led R. J. to novel vistas in philanthropy and social reform (9). R. J. was a devoted husband who adored Katherine, but he had been a sexually adventurous bachelor who was even rumored to have engaged in interracial dalliances. R. J. was no racial liberal, and he profited immensely from the dirt-cheap labor that white supremacy meant in the South, yet he was not a rabid racist either. He had elements of the far-seeing, creative, entrepreneurial genius who spun North Carolina’s golden-leafed tobacco into gold, but could also play the pragmatic manager if events demanded. He was a man of the people but, in time, he learned to live the high-life of the super-wealthy; Katherine took the lead in this as well. R. J. was an affable guy but he made his fortune from a cancerous weed that has caused the deaths of an estimated one billion people; a lethal weed that both he and his wife forbade their children to smoke.

We may question mildly the author’s contention that Katherine and R. J. were “two relatively ordinary people”, or R.J.’s purported humility (8). After all, he spoke of himself in the third person and as R. J. R.—no less—to a friend when weighing competition or cooperation with Buck Duke’s massive Tobacco Trust: “I don’t intend to be swallowed. Buck Duke will find out he has met his equal, but I am fighting him now from the inside. You will never see the day when R.J.R. will eat out of Buck Duke’s hands. . . . [I]f any swallowing is done R.J.R. will do the swallowing. Buck tries to swallow me he will have the belly-ache . . . of his life” (113).

All in all, this is a deeply researched, richly detailed, skillfully-told narrative of...