If you don’t know the Tobacco Wars, you don’t know American history.

Imagine a lawless militia of 10,000 masked men roaming the cities and countrysides of the United States. Brandishing firearms, these “Night Riders” set fire to warehouses and barns, destroy millions of dollars of product, and tear businessmen from their homes to torture them—their revenge against an apathetic One Percent who profit off the misery of the working class. This is not a scene from an apocalyptic movie. It’s a fact of American history.

The most violent and prolonged conflict between the Civil War and the Civil Rights struggles, the Tobacco Wars changed the course of American history—and America’s economy. So why haven’t you ever heard of it? In Tobacco, Trusts And Trump: How America’s Forgotten War Created Big Government, entrepreneur Jim Rumford draws from one of the largest private collections of Tobacco Wars primary documents, as well as his own family ties to the conflict, to show how the United States today is spiraling toward the same chaos that sparked the bloody war between the working class of America’s heartland and the Great Tobacco Trust—and why the Establishment doesn’t want you to know about it. Citing nearly three hundred sources, Rumford weaves a compelling narrative to show how the subjects of recent headlines—the TEA Party, Silicon Valley oligopolies, Occupy Wall Street protests, the Socialist rhetoric of Senator Bernie Sanders, outsourcing of blue collar careers, and the election of President Donald J. Trump—echo those of a century ago.

From Big Business monopolies that triggered financial recessions to the Populist and Progressive movements that enabled Big Government to strip Americans of numerous freedoms, the consequences of the Tobacco Wars could not be more relevant today.

When it comes to party institutionalisation - at least for entrepreneurial right-wing protest parties -- leadership matters! That is the primary takeaway from this book. Of the hundreds of new parties that have formed since the 1970s, many have fallen by the wayside, but others have gone on to reach institution-hood. And some of the latter have then met with decay and de-institutionalisation. The experiences of the Progress Parties of Denmark and Norway - both of which institutionalised and one of which then de-institutionalised - shed important light on both topics. While focusing particularly on those two cases, the authors develop conceptual and theoretical frameworks that are broadly applicable, as demonstrated in the final chapter and in an elaborate appendix.