The story of how the Tea Party movement spontaneously arose in response to President Barack Obama’s liberal agenda turns out to be a myth, according to a study conducted by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF).

Rather, the Tea Party began as a result of efforts by the tobacco industry, which used the Tea Party name and much of its rhetoric decades ago to fight off government regulation.

“Nonprofit organizations associated with the Tea Party movement have longstanding ties to tobacco companies, and continue to advocate on behalf of the tobacco industry's anti-tax, anti-regulation agenda,” according to Stanton A. Glantz, PhD, director of the UCSF Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education (CTCRE) and a UCSF professor of medicine and American Legacy Foundation Distinguished Professor in Tobacco Control.

Along with Amanda Fallin and Rachel Grana, Glantz found references to the 1773 Boston Tea Party were utilized by tobacco industry representatives as early as the 1980s as part of an industry-created “smokers’ rights” campaign designed to oppose increased cigarette taxes and anti-smoking initiatives.

“Tea party symbolism is nothing new for cigarette companies and their allies, which for many years have been cynically using a hallowed symbol of American freedom in order to advance their own interests,” according to Grana.

The researchers said two organizations most identified with the modern tea party, Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks, received large amounts of money from Big Tobacco.

In fact, before they became separate organizations, they were part of a single entity called Citizens for a Sound Economy, which was co-founded in the 1980s by billionaire David Koch.

The UCSF team claims that an international expansion of the Tea Party movement is currently underway, which will build on opposition to tobacco control and other health policies “as they have done in the United States.'”

Freedom Works is said to currently be training activists in 30 countries, including Israel, Georgia, Japan, Nigeria and Serbia. “Tobacco control advocates in the United States and around the world need to be very aware of the connections between Big Tobacco and the Tea Party movement and its associated organizations,” said Glantz.

Internal Revenue Service filings and once-secret tobacco industry documents are among the materials used by the UCSF researchers to develop their study, which was funded by the National Cancer Institute at the National Institutes of Health.

-Noel Brinkerhoff, Danny Biederman

To Learn More:

Tea Party Organizations Have Ties to Tobacco Industry Dating Back to 1980s (by Elizabeth Fernandez, University of California, San Francisco)

Documents Reveal Tobacco Companies Funded Their Own ‘Tea Party’ First (by Stephen C. Webster, Raw Story)

Study Confirms Tea Party Was Created by Big Tobacco and Billionaires (by Brendan DeMille, DeSmogBlog)

‘To Quarterback Behind the Scenes, Third-Party Efforts’: The Tobacco Industry and the Tea Party (by Amanda Fallin, Rachel Grana, Stanton A Glantz; Creative Visions Foundation; abstract only)

44 Congressional Darlings of the Koch Brothers (by Matt Bewig, AllGov)

Tea Party Membership (or Those Who Admit to It) Plunges to 8% (by Noel Brinkerhoff, AllGov)

Judge Orders Tobacco Companies to Admit They Lied about Dangers of Smoking (by Noel Brinkerhoff and David Wallechinsky, AllGov)

Landmark Bill to Regulate Tobacco (by Noel Brinkerhoff, AllGov)