The American Tobacco Company was a tobacco company founded in 1890 by J. B. Duke through a merger between a number of U.S. tobacco manufacturers including Allen and Ginter and Goodwin & Company. The company was one of the original 12 members of the Dow Jones Industrial Average in 1896.
The American Tobacco Company dominated the industry by acquiring the Lucky Strike Company and over 200 other rival firms. Antitrust action begun in 1907 broke the company into several major companies in 1911.
The American Tobacco Company, which started acquiring a wide range of non-tobacco products during the 1970s and 1980s, renamed itself American Brands in 1986, and has since been renamed Fortune Brands. American Tobacco became a subsidiary of American Brands for the next ten years until the company shed its tobacco brands to competitors.
Read more about American Tobacco Company: More Recent History
Famous quotes containing the words american, tobacco and/or company:
“The face of nature and civilization in this our country is to a certain point a very sufficient literary field. But it will yield its secrets only to a really grasping imagination.... To write well and worthily of American things one need even more than elsewhere to be a master.”
—Henry James (1843–1916)
“No matter what Aristotle and the Philosophers say, nothing is equal to tobacco; it’s the passion of the well-bred, and he who lives without tobacco lives a life not worth living.”
—Molière [Jean Baptiste Poquelin] (1622–1673)
“I hate the prostitution of the name of friendship to signify modish and worldly alliances. I much prefer the company of ploughboys and tin-peddlers, to the silken and perfumed amity which celebrates its days of encounter by a frivolous display, by rides in a curricle, and dinners at the best taverns.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)