American Tobacco Company

American Tobacco Company, American industrial conglomerate that was once the world’s largest cigarette maker.

The history of the American Tobacco Company traces to the post-Civil War period in North Carolina, when a Confederate veteran, Washington Duke, began trading in tobacco. In 1874 he and his sons, Benjamin N. Duke and James Buchanan Duke, built a factory and in 1878 formed the firm of W. Duke, Sons & Co., one of the first tobacco companies to introduce cigarette-manufacturing machines.

Entering the “cigarette war,” the Dukes eventually established the American Tobacco Company in 1890, with James as president. Through mergers and purchases, the Duke brothers eventually acquired corporate control of virtually the entire American tobacco industry—some 150 factories in all. In 1911, however, after five years of litigation, a U.S. Court of Appeals judged this tobacco trust in violation of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act and ordered it dissolved. The main manufacturers to emerge, in addition to American, were R.J. Reynolds, Liggett & Myers, and Lorillard.

In 1916 American introduced its most popular cigarette brand, Lucky Strike, and in 1939 it introduced one of the first king-size cigarettes, Pall Mall (an old name reapplied to a new cigarette). The sales of these two brands made American Tobacco the most successful cigarette manufacturer of the 1940s. The company failed to establish equally strong brands of filter cigarettes in the 1950s, however, and by the 1970s it had slipped to a minor position among U.S. tobacco makers. With further diversification and dilution in the later decades of the 20th century, the company—which had been renamed American Brands in 1969—took on a different identity, and by the end of the century it had become known as Fortune Brands, formally departing from the tobacco industry.