Jack Kelly writer
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REACH FOR A LUCKY: TOBACCO IN HISTORY
(AmericanHeritage.com)
Soon after he landed in the New World, Christopher
Columbus received from the natives a gift of some dried
leaves, which, he concluded, “must be something of
importance to these people.” The significance of the leaves
remained a mystery until two of his emissaries watched as
Indians rolled them into sticks that resembled toy muskets,
“set one end on fire and inhaled and drank the smoke on the
other . . . the people called these small muskets tobacco.”
Indians had cultivated and smoked tobacco for millennia;
conquistadors had never seen anything like it. Europeans
used herbal smoke as incense and fumigant, but the notion
of inhaling it into the lungs was exotic. Some considered the
custom barbaric, the smoke a “wicked and pestiferous
poison.”
Until they tried it. The alluring herb quickly became all the
rage in the Old World and provided one of the key trading
commodities of the early colonies. It joined alcohol as the
most beloved and deplored of human habits.
“Man,” Eric Burns notes in his lively new book The Smoke of
the Gods: A Social History of Tobacco, “is the only animal
who takes smoke into his body for pleasure.”
In 1611, John Rolfe, noted for his marriage to Pocahontas,
systematized the growing and processing of tobacco in the
struggling Jamestown colony. In doing so, he started the first
full-fledged business in North America -- by 1617 tobacco
exports had reached ten tons and were growing rapidly.
“Finally,” Burns says, “the English had discovered gold in the
New World.”
Americans themselves embraced the weed wholeheartedly
during the eighteenth century. Then came the Surgeon
General’s warning. No, not that surgeon general. This alarm
came from Benjamin Rush, Surgeon General the Continental
Army, who drew up a blanket condemnation of the habit in
1798. “Rush charged that the weed was particularly harmful
to the mouth, stomach and nerves,” Burns notes.
The patriot and physician was swimming against the tide.
Most observers judged the taking of tobacco a salutary
practice, and many agreed with the Indians who saw it as a
tonic for a wide variety of ills.
During the first half of the nineteenth century, chewing
became Americans’ favored means of ingestion. Burns
explains the puzzling popularity of the chaw during the Age of
Jackson by noting that, by leaving their hands free, it was
“the perfect tobacco for people who were constructing a
nation from scratch.” Fully half of all the tobacco grown in
the U.S. was processed into chewing plug during the period.
Hearty frontiersmen enjoyed brands like Live and Let Live,
Buzz Saw, Barbed Wire, and Bull of the Woods. On a visit
stateside, Charles Dickens thought the chewing and spitting,
“the most sickening, beastly, and abominable custom that
ever civilization saw.”
The period after the Civil War witnessed the gradual spread
of the cigarette. Considered sissified by cigar and pipe
devotees, the small smokes took off in 1881 when “there
came into being a piece of equipment that turned cigarettes
from an afterthought into an industry.” Inventor James
Bonsack’s cigarette-making machine boosted production, cut
prices, and set the cigarette on the road to becoming the
dominant form of tobacco consumption.
Long a target of the blue-nose fraternity, tobacco met
serious opposition in the late 1800s. The Anti-Cigarette
League of America waged a relentless campaign, as did
William Booth’s Salvation Army, whose tracts objected to
smoking because it “tends to insanity,” and “arrests the
growth of the young.”
A traveling opera company in Kansas had to set Bizet’s
Carmen on a dairy farm instead of in a cigarette factory.
Some schools banned “Old King Cole,” who, Burns notes,
“had the effrontery to call for his pipe.” Twelve states
outlawed tobacco products altogether and others restricted
their sale.
Anti-tobacco sentiment was muted by soldiers’ enjoyment of
their smokes during the Great War. The restrictive laws were
repealed and Americans in the 1920s began to puff away
with abandon.
Burns gives an entertaining account of the great tobacco-
candy war that broke out in the 1920s when George
Washington Hill, the president of the American Tobacco
Company, began to push his premier brand with the slogan
“Reach for a Lucky Instead of a Sweet.” His public relations
guru Edward L. Bernays induced hotels to add cigarettes to
their dessert lists and featured ads that showed a chubby
woman being warned to choose a Lucky Strike over a
bonbon. Candy companies shot back with the message “the
cigarette will . . . dry up your blood,” and urged, “Don’t
neglect your candy ration.”
World War II brought another smoking boom -- G.I.s were
allotted five to seven packs of cigarettes a week and could
buy more at the PX. But as the industry sailed into the
halcyon 1950s, dark clouds were gathering.
Health warnings were nothing new. In 1604, James I of
England had issued his Counterblaste to Tobacco in which
he asserted that smoking “makes a kitchen of the inward
parts of men” and called it “a custome lothsome to the eye,
hatefull to the nose, harmefull to the braine, dangerous to
the lungs.”
As X-rays and statistical analyses began to convince
twentieth-century scientists that the king had been right, the
industry fought back. “The validity of the statistics
themselves is questioned by numerous scientists,” the
companies insisted. Unhealthy? “More doctors smoke
Camels,” advertisements crowed, “than any other cigarette.”
Industry insiders joked that “George Washington Hill would
have known what to do about this health business. He would
have made cancer fashionable.” But as evidence mounted,
cigarette makers turned to the filter as their salvation.
Beginning in 1951, they allayed smokers’ concerns with
Micronite, Activated Charcoal, the Miracle Tip and a dozen
other scientific-sounding safeguards. Within a decade,
filtered smokes had taken over half the market.
In January 1964, U.S. Surgeon General Luther Terry issued
a report that stated categorically “cigarette smoking is
causally related to lung cancer in men.” He included a
laundry list of other ailments to which smokers were prone.
Burns clearly depicts how the tobacco culture, which had
thrived in America through its entire history, began to
crumble in the wake of this landmark document.
First came the warnings on tobacco packages and
advertisements. In 1971 cigarette ads disappeared from
television. Two years later smokers were relegated to the
back of buses and airliners. Smoking on planes was banned
entirely in 1990. Billboard advertising bit the dust in 1999.
Restrictions on smoking in public buildings, offices,
restaurants, even bars, spread. Complaints that the “nanny
culture” had gone overboard could not stand up to the
evidence of the cancer wards.
Last month a federal judged ruled that the major tobacco
companies were in violation of federal racketeering laws,
having “publicly denied, distorted, and minimized the hazards
of smoking for decades.” She ordered them to stop
promoting smokes as “light” or “low-tar,” falsely implying they
are less harmful. It was another nail in the coffin of “coffin
nails.”
Although 45 million Americans are still regular smokers,
Burns paints a picture of an industry on the ropes. The
Smoke of the Gods reminds us what a long and colorful
chunk of our heritage is passing into history.
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