Smoke in Their Eyes: Lessons in Movement Leadership from the Tobacco Wars

5. Why Stan Glantz and Julia Carol?

40 5 Why Stan Glantz and Julia Carol? In contrast to the representatives of the American Medical Association , the Cancer Society, and the other large voluntary health associations , Stanton P. Glantz, a teaching professor at the University of California Medical School in San Francisco and the author of the leading text on medical statistics, represented no formally organized constituency , commanded no army of volunteers. Julia Carol led a very small guerilla force, an organization that Stan had founded and left called Americans for Nonsmokers’ Rights, whose few thousand dues-paying members were largely centered in California. Yet their willingness —or unwillingness—to accept Matt Myers’s challenge to consider setting priorities and potential trade-offs in approaching new national settlement initiatives would shape, as well as reflect, the response of the national tobacco control movement as a whole. In the early 1980s Stan Glantz burst forth as the prime mover in a small grassroots volunteer organization in San Francisco, Californians for Nonsmokers’ Rights. He caught the national attention, especially among tobacco control advocates, in the fall of 1983 by masterminding the landmark defeat of San Francisco’s ballot initiative Proposition P, the tobacco industry’s formidable effort to repeal San Francisco’s vanguard nonsmoking ordinance. To stamp out the threatened plague of local action inspired by San Francisco, the tobacco industry spent more than ten times as much money as tobacco control advocates did, hired artful public relations strategists attuned to San Francisco’s libertarian culture, plastered local TV and billboards with rhetorical themes tuned to pluck San Franciscans’ responsive chords. But Glantz, leading and driving his handful of colleagues every waking minute, outmaneuvered them. Recounting Glantz’s early leadership of Californians for Nonsmokers ’ Rights, Richard Kluger encapsulated the Glantz phenomenon: “As compulsive a worker as he was a talker, who dreamed up most of his Leading toward Settlement 41 group’s arresting ideas, he had a mind both inventive and encyclopedic , raised a lot of its money, wrote its pithy newsletter (usually including his picture), and loosed its fiercest rallying cries.” For the next fifteen years, Glantz would serve as the movement’s preeminent translator of the science of tobacco and disease into the public discourse of tobacco control—a master of the sound bite, not with glibness, but with the compression of complex data into an accurate , powerful metaphorical message, the significance of which could be instantly grasped by the broad public. He was a tactical treasure for a movement beginning to emerge. Most importantly, Glantz brought to the more genteel public health professionals the lesson that tobacco control is rough combat with an implacable adversary. To be successful , the tobacco control advocate not only had to stand on solid scientific ground but had to be a willing warrior. And Glantz was unafraid. For example, by publishing a rich cache of incriminating internal industry documents anonymously shipped to him in 1994, he knowingly risked the certain and notorious burdens of becoming the target of harassing industry legal action. On the national scene, Glantz emerged as the movement’s “outside” agitator—outside both Washington and the more establishment public health organizations—or, in Ralph Nader’s felicitous term, a movement “spark plug.” Round and exuberant, determinedly unkempt in his trademark orange cardigan—knitted, he insisted, by his mother—Stan Glantz flogged the languid and timid, especially the staff and volunteers of the Cancer, Heart, and Lung societies’ state divisions. He pricked the pompous among the dark-suited establishment leaders in Washington and the national headquarters of the health voluntaries, delighting the feistier community-based activists around the country and gaining for himself a wide and responsive audience among them. Most tobacco control advocates—even those who relished belligerent rhetoric when safely nestled among an audience of the converted —shied away from tangling directly on talk shows with tobacco industry defenders. Not Glantz; time after time he flummoxed the most skilled of a succession of industry flacks. But these assets alone would not have made Glantz a force Matt Myers would have to reckon with in seeking to forge a consensus behind a movement negotiating position. Glantz early recognized—and early mastered—the mobilizing power of the Internet. By the winter of 1996, he had teamed up with a deeply committed tobacco control advocate who was also a visionary Internet innovator, Michael Tace- 42 Smoke in Their Eyes losky. Through “Tac,” Glantz had developed an e-mail network...