Ashes to Ashes (14 page)

George returned from war service in the Red Cross with some fresh promotional ideas, and Luckies pioneered advertisement by skywriting. People would stop at street corners and gawk upward at the mile-long letters being formed 10,000 feet overhead. Smoke in the sky, George reasoned, would suggest smoke in gawkers’ mouths. Slowly Luckies regained their drive, reaching a 16 percent market share by 1925. Camels, though, grew faster, thanks in part to a slogan rather more robust than Luckies’ “Toasted”. An outdoor advertising specialist hired early in 1921 to expand Camel’s billboard presence was playing golf one day when his foursome ran out of cigarettes and sent a caddy off to replenish their supply. Awaiting his return, one of the adman’s colleagues remarked that he would gladly “walk a mile for a Camel.” Within weeks, in the press and on billboards coast to coast, Americans were greeted by devoted smokers telling them why “I’d Walk a Mile for a Camel.” Reynolds Tobacco spent more than $8 million on its advertising that year, among the largest outlays yet made by any company. By the following year, its profits moved past American Tobacco’s to gain the industry leadership; by 1925, Camels held well over 40 percent of the burgeoning cigarette market.

Lucky Strike was not even the distant runner-up. Well out ahead of it by the mid-’Twenties, though still far behind the Reynolds pacesetter, was the Liggett & Myers blend, Chesterfield, which had appeared on the market in 1912, one of the first moves by Liggett upon being cut loose from the trust. The reins at Liggett had been handed to another Duke henchman and confidant, Caleb C. Dula, who gave the old-line St. Louis plug maker competent and consistent leadership that was neither aggressive nor inventive. But Liggett knew how to make a good cigarette, and the Chesterfield, sold in a slide-and-shell box under the bland slogan “They do satisfy,” made a small splash when introduced. Dula, however, was quicker than the American Tobacco bosses to recognize the threat to the conventional blends posed by the Burley-heavy Camel. In 1915 Liggett reconstituted Chesterfield’s formula, adding Burley with few flavorings so that the taste was less sweet than Camel and could be proclaimed as more “natural”. The new brand was then repackaged in a paper-and-tinfoil cup
to bring down its price to Camel’s level, but it had an altogether different and rather more dignified look, as befitted a product with so English a name. It was printed in somewhat delicate Old English lettering on an upward slant, with many calligraphic loops and flourishes and the “Ch” enclosed in an odd heraldic device; below was a sketch of a small, dreamy harbor nowhere in particular. Mostly, one saw the whiteness of the pack, which suggested the mildness that became the brand’s watchword. With its understated slogan shortened to “They satisfy,” Chesterfield had a British refinement to it that appealed to conservative and better-educated smokers. Liggett advertised the brand with a quiet elegance that helped it capture nearly one-quarter of the U.S. cigarette market by 1925.

At the end of that year, Percival Hill died, just two months after his lord and master, Buck Duke. American Tobacco’s new leader, George Hill, cut more in Duke’s mold than in his father’s, would soon prove a holy terror.

III

THE
spurt in cigarette sales during the first quarter of the twentieth century was attended by a detectable shift in the American social attitude toward the product that spared it from the outbreak of puritanism dooming alcohol to prohibition and scoring its use as by far the worse sin.

That pugilistic folk hero of the late nineteenth century John L. Sullivan served as a spokesman for his times when he dismissed the cigarette as a smoke suitable only for “dudes and college misfits” and decidedly un-American, an allusion to the foreign origin of both the leaf used in many brands and the immigrant masses favoring them, especially in New York, which as late as 1910 accounted for 25 percent of all cigarettes sold in the U.S. Men of substance and virility smoked cigars; besides paupers, only the effeminate, the effete, or the affected chose cigarettes, according to the charge against them. The adult per capita consumption of cigarettes, while edging up, was still only 138 in 1910, a year when
The New York Times
, in hailing the new Non-Smokers Protective League, remarked that anything that could be done to allay “the general and indiscriminate use of tobacco in public places, hotels, restaurants, and railroad cars, will receive the approval of everybody whose approval is worth having.”

Therein lay the making of the cigarette and the decline of the cigar and pipe. For in the relative mildness of its aroma and convenience of its use, the smaller, quicker smoke was proving a good deal less objectionable to an increasingly urbanized society. In busy, crowded offices, on public conveyances, at cultural and recreational gatherings, the cigarette was simply less obtrusive,
requiring less paraphernalia and skill to use than the pipe and less space and leisure than the cigar in a culture that was coming to understand that time was human currency. By the second decade of the century, the cigarette was becoming the smoke of choice in high as well as low society, as testified to by the press reports on the sinking of the great ocean liner
Titanic
on its maiden voyage in 1912: many of the tuxedoed male passengers were said to have awaited their watery graves while drawing stoically on a cigarette. And Sullivan’s “college misfits” were taking up the habit in great numbers. As Camels and Chesterfields were attaining almost instant popularity, Penn State’s
Froth
, the campus humor magazine, ran a little poem in 1915 that passed quickly into the popular culture: “Tobacco is a dirty weed. I like it. / It satisfies no mortal need. I like it. / It makes you thin, it makes you lean, / It takes the hair right off your bean, / It’s the worst darn stuff I’ve ever seen. /I like it.” These elegiac lines are notable for their insouciance toward the health hazards attributed to cigarettes uniquely among tobacco products. People simply did not believe that the milder smokes were a greater peril than the more traditional uses of tobacco. This new toleration was greatly abetted by two unfolding events, each of consuming importance to one of the sexes—the coming of the world war and the climax of the women’s suffrage movement.

Any lingering notions of the unmanliness of cigarette smoking were blown away by the First World War. Pipes and cigars were manifestly unmanageable in the battle lines, and chewing tobacco was a menace to sanitation. Cigarettes were no bother, small insult to the nostrils in close quarters, and a perceived aid to vigilance, and so quickly became the universal emblem of the camaraderie of mortal combat, that consummate male activity. There was no better way to discharge tension on the brink of battle, no readier solace for the prospect of imminent doom; here was the perfect narcotic to numb the senses to the misery of the trenches, the witnessed horrors of mutilation, and the tedium of the endless interludes. Not by accident did one of the jauntier ballads of the war urge the young combatants to smile in the face of death “while you’ve a Lucifer to light your fag.” The cigarette, in short, served as the essential sustainer of morale. Doctors spoke of its soothing effect on the wounded. In answer to an inquiry from the home front, General John J. (“Black Jack”) Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Forces, stated, “You ask me what we need to win this war. I answer tobacco as much as bullets.” Organizations like the Red Cross and the Young Men’s Christian Association that before the war had opposed the propagation of cigarettes among the nation’s young manhood did their best now to supply them liberally.

Wrapping themselves in the mantle of patriotism, the cigarette companies savored the boom. Fellows they would likely never have enlisted as paying customers fell into their laps through military conscription, and the windfall
was all the sweeter because soldiers smoked 60 to 70 percent more butts on average each day than civilians, whose own use was now up 15 to 20 percent as the stresses and dislocations of wartime took their emotional toll. Almost all cigarette factories were working double or even triple shifts, and with Turkish leaf now unavailable, American tobacco farmers who in the heyday of the trust were lucky to fetch ten or twelve cents a pound were now commanding as much as seventy cents. Profits, though, did not keep pace with the soaring volume, because the manufacturing costs for almost everything leaped—the leaf, paper, labor, fuel for machines, heating, and transportation.

In the din of war and its accompanying tumult at home, hardly a whisper of protest was lodged against the triumphal march of the cigarette. Even the staunch Lucy Gaston, veteran pillar of antitobacco rectitude, had to await the armistice to denounce the cigarette makers for wily propaganda that had led to the forced doping of formerly wholesome young men on a scale without precedent. Such laments were lost in the wind at the very time alcohol was being officially demonized by Congress and outlawed with the concurrence of three-fourths of the states; Johnny marched home to a nation about to become legally boozeless, but at least he and his countrymen had their smokes for consolation. By 1919, cigarettes had surpassed smoking tobacco in the poundage of leaf consumed; by 1922, they passed plug to become the nation’s highest grossing tobacco product.

Nearly as essential as the war to this phenomenon was the reluctant male acquiescence in political equality for American women, enshrined by the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. To express the need for and then the attainment of this liberation from second-class citizenship, the cigarette was a valuable tool.

Just as men who smoked them had been denounced as unmanly and degenerate, so women who used cigarettes were widely perceived as unladylike and exhibitionist. In polite circles, tobacco was taken as fit only for the “sporting girls” of the demimonde and other professional performers of their sex. Increasingly, though, women themselves came to recognize in the cigarette a far more aesthetically pleasing experience than any other form of tobacco use, especially the cigar. The latter was long, strong, dark, thick, aromatically overwhelming, and took forever to consume. The cigarette, by contrast, was short, mild, white, lean, a fraction as smelly, did not cling ineradicably to clothing and draperies, and could be taken briefly in the interstices between the numberless tasks that made up a woman’s day. Here was a product that could be enjoyed equally by both sexes. But women who did so too publicly continued to be stigmatized in the early years of the twentieth century as possessors of dubious character.

Within a few years, however, the social currents of modernity and the industrial
age were forcing a change. While the intensifying drive for the vote was the catalyst, women came to view their degraded status in a broader context; as they had been disenfranchised from the first, so, too, had they been disembodied and dishonored by men’s denial of their right to sexuality and refusal to recognize their human worth. With such immense stakes involved, the little cigarette—“friendly, sociable, light,” as the
Atlantic Monthly
called it in April of 1916—became for women in that leading literary journal’s view “the symbol of emancipation, the temporary substitute for the ballot.” The approach of war intensified the outpouring of feminist fervor in various forms. Women were needed more in the workplace, and offices, clubs, and the new department stores drew them away from home, while the spread of the telephone, mass transit, the automobile, the phonograph, and motion pictures helped spring them from a sequestered existence defined largely by the many services they were expected to render their families. “Women were newly
public
people and needed, more than before, social currencies acceptable in the public world defined by men,” the acute sociologist Michael Schudson noted in a study of emerging consumer patterns of this period. “The cigarette was one such social coin and a particularly convenient one: cheap, visible, an identifying mark, both easily flaunted and easily hidden, a topic of talk, a token of comradeship and, to boot, a comfort in anxious moments.”

Thus, the long-nailed hand that at last held the ballot now took up the cigarette far more openly. Women who were more socially and culturally secure led the way, among them the Eastern urban society set, which began to be offered cigarettes in the more sophisticated shops they patronized. College women took up the custom more clandestinely as a sign of youthful daring. Most egregious among the fledgling female smokers were those flaming hedonists, the flappers, for whom the flaunted cigarette was as
de rigueur
as bobbed hair, bared knees, rouged cheeks, and teasing lips. Not everyone applauded. The
Ladies’ Home Journal
commented acidly in June of 1922 that female smokers differed from men, who did so to calm “restlessness or emotional inquietude,” whereas “women smoke nervously, they cannot smoke moderately,” and dismissed the practice by women as “another fetching stratagem of sex attraction.” To the
Journal
, at least, The New Woman was no lady.

Only one taboo remained—women who smoked on the street were still considered trollops; men who did never invited a second glance. Thus cabined, female smokers were often more avid about pursuing the practice indoors than men, who, for example, were far less inclined to smoke in the shops they frequented, like haberdasheries and hardware stores, while women often and conspicuously indulged in department stores, millinery shops, ice-cream parlors, and railroad dining cars. In setting aside a pair of common rooms for smoking at Smith College, the president of that distinguished women’s institution said
in 1930 that his students’ claims for social equality with their male counterparts dictated the step, but added, “The trouble is, my dear young ladies, you do not smoke like gentlemen.”

Nevertheless, women helped the per capita consumption of cigarettes sustain its exponential growth. By 1930, it was twice what it had been ten years before.

IV

HARD
evidence of the ravages of tobacco smoke upon the human body did not exist during the first quarter of the twentieth century, as the cigarette found increasing favor. What new evidence there was remained largely anecdotal—random and widely dispersed personal observations and impressions in an age when biostatistics were just beginning to be gathered in a systematic way. Fragmentary data from insurance companies suggesting that regular tobacco use, like alcohol, reduced the life span by as many as eight years, and a growing sense among doctors that smokers enjoyed only half the recovery rate after surgery that nonusets did, in no way marked cigarettes as a deadlier form of tobacco than any other.