Ashes to Ashes (152 page)

Chapter 2 : The Earth with a Fence Around It

I Principal documents on the growth and conduct of the tobacco trust are the
Report of the Commissioner of Corporations on the Tobacco Industry
issued on February 25, 1909, by the Department of Commerce and Labor; and the May 29, 1911, opinion of the U.S. Supreme Court in
U.S. v. American Tobacco
(221 U.S. 105).

II Among the early twentieth-century periodical literature on the medical and moral objections to cigarettes, see especially “The Cigarette Habit: A New Peril” in the February 18, 1904, number of
The Independent;
the May 26, 1906,
Harper’s Weekly
, the August 1912
Harper’s;
and “Smoking” in the April 1916
Atlantic Monthly
.

IV Corina’s
Trust in Tobacco
is the leading account of Duke’s incursion into Britain and the resulting birth of BAT.

VI Among the voluminous literature on the subject, see
The Federal Antitrust Policy
(1954) by Hans Torelli and
The Legislative History of the Federal Antitrust Laws and Related Statutes
(1978) by Earl Kintner.

Chapter 3 : It Takes the Hair Right Off Your Bean

I See chapter 4 of Tilley’s history of Reynolds Tobacco for the most detailed account of the birth of Camel.

II Among the sources used on George Washington Hill were chapter 28 of
Biography of an Idea: Memoirs of Public Relations Counsel Edward L Bernays
(1963); “Cigarettes and Candy” in the February 13, 1929,
New Republic;
“Good Taste in Advertising” in the
March 1930
Fortune;
“George Washington Hill: He Makes America Sit Up and Buy” in the January 1, 1933,
Forbes;
“The American Tobacco Co.” in the December 1936
Fortune;
and “How Hill Advertises Is at Last Revealed” in
Printer’s Ink
for November 17, 1938.
“Sold American!,”
the company’s own joyous account of its success during the first half of the twentieth century—when it dominated the cigarette business—describes the birth of Lucky Strike and has instructive graphics on advertising and packaging. Michael Schuddson’s insights are in the chapter “The Emergence of New Consumer Patterns: A Case Study of the Cigarette” from his book
Advertising: The Uneasy Persuasion
(Basic Books, 1984).

IV See “Is a Tobacco Crusade Coming?” by L. James Brown in the October 1920
Atlantic Monthly
, “Should Tobacco Be Prohibited?” in the March 1921
Current Opinion
, and “The Triumph of the Cigarette” by Carl Avery Werner in the December 1925
American Mercury.

VI For a highly critical but revealing tour through the annals of tobacco hucksterdom, see Joe Tye’s
Sixty Years of Deception: An Analysis and Compilation of Cigarette Ads in Time Magazine, 1925–1985
, issued privately in photocopy form by the Health Advocacy Center in 1986. Tye’s organization is now called STAT (Stop Teenage Addiction to Tobacco) and headquartered in Springfield, Massachusetts.

Chapter 4 : The Golden Age of Malarkey

I Tennant has the best account of the pricing wars in the early 1930s, pp. 294–357. See also “Camels of Winston-Salem” in the January 1931
Fortune
, “One Out of Every Five Cigarettes” in the November 1932
Fortune
, and “Cigarettes Hit New High” in the July 9, 1936,
Printer’s Ink
. On the condition of tobacco farmers just before and during the early years of the Depression, Woofter’s
The Plight of Cigarette Tobacco
is rich in appalling detail; Badger’s
Prosperity Road
tells of the farmers’ and the government’s response in the tobacco heartland of North Carolina. For an overview of the New Deal and the AAA program of price supports and allotments, see Robert’s
The Story of Tobacco in America
, pp. 202–18, and Johnson’s
The Economics of the Tobacco Industry
, p. 26–45.

II Clay Williams and William Esty are featured in “$57,000,000 Worth of Whizz and Whoozle” in the August 1938
Fortune;
no other source compares with this magazine in critical financial coverage until
Forbes
from the 1960s on.

III Sylvester (Pat) Weaver and, to a lesser extent, Emerson Foote provided valuable firsthand accounts of Hill’s conduct. On the birth of the modern Pall Mall, see the November 11, 1939,
Business Week (BW)
, and for AT’s surge in this era, see the July 15, 1941,
Sales Management
. An essential source on the conduct of the tobacco industry in the ’Thirties is the proceedings in the twenty-eight-week antitrust trial,
U.S. v. American Tobacco,
heard in U.S. district court in Lexington, Kentucky, beginning on June 2, 1941. The most complete account is in the pages of the Lexington
Herald-Leader
. See also “Behind the Cigarette Verdict” in the November 8, 1941,
BW
and especially the 1946 U.S. Supreme Court decision in
American Tobacco v. U.S
. (328 U.S. 781).

IV AND V The most useful sources on the early years of Philip Morris as a U.S. company are the authorized but unpublished
The Philip Morris Century
by Jerome E. Brooks, written in five volumes, and covering the years through 1977 (the company kindly provided me with the largely uncritical text, except for volume IV, which I was told was lost), and the
company profile in the March 1936
Fortune
. Johnny Roventini, the original Philip Morris pageboy, was alive and well when I interviewed him in January 1989 in Joseph Cullman’s office.

VII Besides the sources cited in the text, a useful compendium of the research on tobacco and health is
Tobacco: Experimental and Clinical Studies: A Comprehensive Account of the World Literature
, edited by P. S. Larson and H. Silvette; the original edition was issued by Williams & Wilkins in 1961, and the first supplement in 1968, as the volume of studies increased markedly; they are known not quite affectionately by students in the field as “the green monster” and “the red monster,” respectively. While succinctly enough stated, these monographs are treated in a way that fails to distinguish adequately the truly important findings from the morass of routine studies. The tobacco industry supported the composition and probably the publication of these reference works. Franz Hermann Müller’s seminal study appeared in translation in the September 30, 1939,
Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA)
.

Chapter 5 : “Shall We Just Have a Cigarette on It?”

II For an example of Hill’s use of radio talent to sell his products, see the April 22, 1945,
NYT.

III On the famous Camel sign in Times Square, see the October 1990 issue of
Avenue
, a New York controlled-circulation magazine. A valuable study on the wholesaling and retailing aspects of the business is the unpublished 1951 doctoral dissertation in economics at Ohio State University—“The Marketing of Tobacco Products”—by W. Arthur Cullman, brother of PM’s Joseph Cullman.

IV On PM during the ’Forties, see especially
The Philip Morris Century
, pp. 260–370, and the October 1949
Fortune.

V The texts of the FTC decisions discussed here are rich in detail about the extravagance—indeed, the mendacity—of the tobacco companies’ advertising in the 1930s and 1940s. See
In re P. Lorillard
, 46 F.T.C. 735 (1950), 46 F.T.C. 853, and 186 F.2d 52 (4th Cir. 1950);
In re Reynolds Tobacco
, 46 F.T.C. 706 (1950) and 192 F.2d 535 (7th Cir. 1951);
In re American Tobacco
, 47 F.T.C. 1393 (1951); and
In re Philip Morris
, 49 F.T.C. 703 (1952) and 51 F.T.C. 857 (1955).

VI The initial Doll-Hill report ran in the September 30, 1950, issue of the
British Medical Journal
.

VII On the Cullman family, see
Four Generations: Memoirs of Frances Nathan Wolf
(privately published in 1939); “Benson & Hedges” in the May 1950
Fortune; Mister Junior
by Lael Tucker Wertenbaker (Pageant, 1960); and the August 15, 1965,
Forbes.

Chapter 6 : The Filter Tip and Other Placebos

I On Clarence Little’s career before joining the tobacco industry, see
Crusade: The Official History of the American Cancer Society
by Walter Ross (Arbor House, 1987), an inadequate treatment of its subject; a pamphlet by Little, “Cancer: A Study for Laymen,” undated but probably done in the late ’Thirties, while he was managing director of the cancer society, in which he wrote that it was “difficult to see” how smoking could not cause “a certain amount of irritation;” the July 31, 1979,
NYT
on the fiftieth anniversary of Jackson
Memorial Laboratory; and
Current Biography
for December 1944. The most informative account of the creation of the Kent brand and its original asbestos-containing “Micronite” filter appears in the Winter 1987 number of the
Alicia Patterson Foundation Reporter
by Myron Levin, a Los Angeles
Times
science writer and probably the most knowledgeable U.S. journalist on smoking and health. See also the March 22, 1952,
BW
and the June 1952
Consumer Reports (CR)
. In September 1995 a California state court jury awarded an ex-smoker of Kent $2 million on his claim of suffering an asbestos-induced form of lung cancer.

II On Hammond and his landmark prospective study, see the June 1957
Current Biography;
his obituary in the November 4, 1986,
NYT;
Lawrence Garfinkel’s tribute in the January-February 1988 issue of
Ca
magazine (an ACS publication); and Hammond’s article “The Effects of Smoking” in the July 1962
Scientific American
, the best periodical summary on the subject prior to the pioneer 1964 report by the Surgeon General’s advisory committee. Interviews with Charles Cameron, Clifton Read, and Irvinjg Rimer of the ACS were especially helpful; Daniel Horn would not see me.

IV The February 1953
CR
tested and compared yields of the first generation of filtertip brands.

V On RJR’s Whitaker and the creation of the Winston brand, see especially the November 17, 1952,
Time;
December 1957
Fortune;
and the April 1, 1954, and June 15, 1961,
Forbes.

VI Wynder’s article on the experimental production of carcinoma on the shaved backs of mice with distilled cigarette smoke tars ran in the December 1953 issue of
Cancer Research
. Four decades of the industry’s objections to the Wynder skin-painting study were well summarized in an April 29, 1993, letter to the author by PM’s Helmut Wakeham.

VII The intramural documents relating to the creation of the Tobacco Industry Research Committee and its public-relations purposes were disclosed, along with many others cited subsequently in this book, in the course of the discovery process in
Cipollone v. Liggett et al
. The publication of the documents, the trial, and appeals of the verdict up to the U.S. Supreme Court occurred fortuitously in the course of the author’s research, which was thereby greatly enriched; they also added several years to the time required to complete the project. On the TIRC, see plaintiffs exhibit 2700. On the March 1954 meeting of Liggett scientists and advisors, see
Cipollone
exhibit 453.

VIII The first report on the Doll-Hill study of doctors’ mortality in relation to their smoking habits ran in the June 26, 1954,
British Medical Journal
.

IX
AND
x These sections and much of the subsequent treatment of Philip Morris were drawn from extensive interviews with company personnel, including most of the key figures in the marketing area. On the Cullmans’ arrival at PM, see “Cullmanation” in the November 1, 1953,
Forbes;
and on Parker McComas, see “Mr. President” in the July 1, 1954,
Forbes
. On the creation of Marlboro, the single richest source is “The Road to Marlboro Country,” the introductory essay by Scott Ellsworth, written in August 1987, to his tape-recorded interviews with many of the company and Burnett ad agency executives connected with the Marlboro campaign, under the auspices of the Smithsonian Institution’s oral history project on famous advertising campaigns. On Leo Burnett, see “Reaching for the Stars” in the March 1954
TV Age;
a strong nuts-and-bolts article on copy writing in the November 7, 1955,
Advertising Age;
and his obituary in the June 8, 1971, Chicago
Tribune
.

Chapter 7 : The Anguish of the Russian Count

I
Reader’s Digest
, the leading antismoking crusader among U.S. periodicals, focused its wrath on the largely cosmetic effects of the filter tips in articles by Lois Miller and James Monahan in its issues of July and August 1957. On the July 1956 DuPuis memo, see plaintiff’s exhibit 600A in
Cipollone
.

II Bowman Gray’s dismissal of the importance of tar and nicotine levels is quoted on p. 153 of
The Consumers Union Report on Smoking and the Public Health
, a compact 1963 volume that lucidly summarizes the clash between marketing wizardry and health concerns within the tobacco industry on the eve of the first Surgeon General’s report.

III The studies by pathologist Oscar Auerbach represent the single most indicting body of laboratory research on the systemic ravages of cigarette smoke. Their publication began with “The Anatomic Approach to the Study of Smoking and Bronchogenic Carcinoma: A Preliminary Report on Forty-one Cases” in
Cancer
, vol. 9 (1956): pp. 76–83; then see the
New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM)
, vol. 256 (1957): pp. 97–104;
NEJM
, vol. 267 (1962): pp. 111–25;
NEJM
, vol. 269 (1963): pp. 1045–54; and
NEJM
, vol. 273 (1965): pp. 775–79.