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1 Introduction Richard Joshua Reynolds lived the proverbial American success story on a big southern stage. Contemporary narratives extolled his modest origins in the Virginia backcountry and his rags-to-riches scramble to fame and fortune . A rugged individualist with deeply engrained habits of hard work and thrift, R.J.R. used his all-American virtues to build a nationally renowned company in the heart of North Carolina’s bright-leaf tobacco country. As a southern-born business hero, he embodied the South’s version of the everyman-made-good story. “His career reads like [a] romance,” observed a close friend.1 “He made his many millions,” enjoined the Winston-Salem Twin City Sentinel, “but he started in a small way . . . with nothing but the best practical common sense, and built a little at a time.”2 Remarked the Raleigh News and Observer, “Starting life in modest circumstances he became a multi-millionaire [through] habits of industry and application . . . uncommonly fine business judgment . . . [and] imagination and daring.”3 Self-made men have always stood out in our national imagination as proof positive of America’s especially elastic social system. R.J.R.’s archetypal transformation from alleged bumpkin to national business leader made the perennial myth of American meritocracy more convincing to southerners hoping to escape the region’s tenacious poverty and benefit at long last from modernization’s impact.4 R.J.R. turned fifty years old in 1900. He had come to look and act the part of a southern captain of industry. A big man with a graying mustache and beard outlining his mouth, he had boundless energy and stood “wellproportioned and erect as an Indian.” Reynolds was uncannily able to motivate all kinds of people, building a national business based on a long-time southern staple crop and a homegrown manufacturing process, and balancing the competing interests of labor, management, farmers, fellow industrialists , financiers, and politicians all along the way. The largest producer of chewing tobacco in the nation by 1900, he had been one among many 2 Introduction minor-league tobacco manufacturers at the outset of his career. But the consolidation of the tobacco industry under American Tobacco in the 1890s, the popularity of his Prince Albert Tobacco first marketed in 1907, and the 1911 U.S. Supreme Court decision to break up Buck Duke’s American Tobacco monopoly catapulted R.J.R. into the major leagues, cementing his reputation not just as a poor southern boy made good but as a sharp-witted industrialist and down-home paternalist committed to the welfare of his fellow North Carolinians.5 Adroit at incorporating new technologies, launching new products, recognizing the value of clever advertising, building distant markets, and maneuvering his competition, he transformed the makeshift market town of Winston into the consolidated industrial city of Winston-Salem. His intelligence was as legendary as his success: “The wonderful grasp of his mind, his power over details, the all but instant solution that came of every problem which presented itself to him; his [was an] understanding of propositions, accompanied by a bold and capable initiative.”6 Yet it was more than his good mind, business acumen, and homegrown fortune that made him such a respected public figure. His reputation as a quintessential southern man committed to kin and community stood out too. His easy familiarity with all kinds of people from all walks of life and his interest in their well-being and success made him a beloved father figure in all communities. “Big Dad Is Dead,” ran the headline of tribute from the African American Reynolds Temple congregation when news of his passing reached the city.7 The son of the largest slaveholder in Patrick County, Virginia, R.J.R. grew up in an antebellum world where white manhood was defined by honor and mastery. The Confederacy’s loss shattered that ideal, leaving in its place increasingly contested notions of southern manliness. The image of the civilized, pious southern gentleman, embodied in the memorialization of Robert E. Lee, competed with a martial manliness that celebrated violence and honor in the name of family and region. These archetypes were crafted not only in response to great loss—the loss of the Confederacy, the loss of slavery, the loss of economic opportunity—but as an implicit critique of the North. Northern men had “domesticated” themselves in southern eyes by embracing an urbanizing, industrializing, and ultimately a “civilizing” world. R.J.R. balanced those two southern ideals of manhood throughout...

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