Ashes to Ashes (5 page)

The cigarette was little seen in England until after the Crimean War (1854–56), when its soldiers had been heavily exposed to the short smokes, which seemed ideally suited to wartime use, by their French and Turkish allies and were even proffered them by captured Russian officers. The English veterans of Crimea took their new yen for the cigarette home, where the product had previously been degraded as suitable mainly for the poor and so weak-tasting as to invite the suspicion that those smokers who preferred it were effeminate.

Among those catering to the new fashion in smoking was a Bond Street tobacconist named Philip Morris, about whom little is known personally other than that he died at a relatively young age in 1873 and the business was carried on for a time by his widow, Margaret, and brother Leopold. In his early days Morris discreetly sold fine Havana “seegars” and Virginia pipe tobacco to the carriage trade, but when returning Crimean veterans began asking for cigarettes, he quickly accommodated. Stressing to his select clientele that he had the cleanest factory and used the best paper, the purest aromatic tobaccos, and the finest cork tipping to keep the cigarette from sticking to the lips, Philip Morris helped lend to the product a cachet it had not previously enjoyed. He called his brands Oxford and Cambridge Blues, later adding Oxford Ovals, and thus attracting as customers the young elite attending those preeminent universities and holding on to them afterward when they went off to run the empire and wrote to Bond Street to have their favorite smoke forwarded to them. But
even for a merchant as successful as Morris, cigarettes remained a cottage industry. The most skillful rollers could not turn out more than 1,500 or 2,000 units in a ten- or twelve-hour day.

The pipe had been the most common way to consume tobacco as the United States began to beat back the wilderness and shape a continental nation. Virginia and locally grown leaf were abundant; and in a frontier society, pipes were made from whatever was at hand—wood, clay, stone, bone, corncob, or metal—and often worked into wondrous shapes during long winter nights. In certain patrician and mercantile circles, Americans aped the grand manner of European swells in their fondness for snuff. Rather than employing it as nostril candy in a ceaseless quest for the perfect sneeze, American snuffers preferred the moist dip, using a twig or stick to bring it to the mouth for chewing or depositing a pinch in the cheek, where it would slowly dissolve. Far more popular, if still less sanitary, was chewing tobacco. Since Columbus’s day, the chew was a great favorite with sailors who would otherwise have had the wind and dread of shipboard fires to contend with in taking their tobacco pleasures. The smokeless chewing variety was widely adopted by the less exalted sector of American society that wanted to enjoy tobacco while at work in occupations unconducive to the pipe, cigar, or snuff. It was splendidly suited to the outdoor life and immune from such vagaries of nature as the raking prairie winds. At first the untreated dried leaf was sold loose in bulky bags, but then, especially with the wider cultivation of Burley tobacco, the chew was moistened with a variety of sweeteners and molded into lumps more convenient for pocket-carrying. A veritable stream of tobacco juice filled the American air throughout much of the nineteenth century, targeted at thé ubiquitous cuspidor but at least as frequently darkening carpets, walls, draperies, and trousers, demonstrating to foreign visitors that they were among a slovenly people.

The cigar did not seriously awaken American smoking tastes until after the war against Mexico (1846–48), with its exposure to that strong form of tobacco preferred by Latin cultures. By the midpoint of the nineteenth century, cigars were a goodly manufacturing business in New York and Philadelphia, another 100 million of them a year were being imported from Cuba, and among those sturdy pioneers trailblazing westward, foot-long cigars called “stogies” after the Conestoga wagons in which they rode were a prized time killer. As for the cigarette, it was scarcely more than an American curio at mid-century, and while it began to show up occasionally on the streets of New York in the ensuing decade as travelers abroad brought the custom home with them, the little smokes did not begin to exert any real appeal until the Civil War.

It remains to be said that in the 369 years between Columbus’s discovery of tobacco and the war, the sentiment against smoking never remotely approached the level of scientific coherence. The early assaults were couched
largely in moral, xenophobic, and economic terms. Of all those semi-hysterical admonishments against smoking in its pre-cigarette era, none was more passionate, or would be more often cited
by
posterity, than the treatise by the Scottish-rigid British monarch James I, published in 1604. In A
Counter-Blaste to Tobacco
, King James professed high concern for the moral degeneracy of his subjects, whom he found softened by new wealth, “which makes us wallow in all sorts of idle delights and soft delicacies,” the worst of them being tobacco smoke, the concoction of “these beastly Indians.” If England was set on taking up the savages’ ways, “[w]hy do we not as well imitate them in walking naked … yea, why do we not deny God and adore the Devil, as they do?” Dismissive of the medicinal claims made for tobacco on the ground that it was always praised when smokers recovered from their illnesses but always exonerated if a man died after smoking, the king reserved his fiercest rhetoric for the closing lines of his assault upon

a custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lung, and the black stinking fume thereof, nearest resembling the horribly Stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless.

Not only would James’s fuming countrymen not abjure the pastime, but by 1665 they were fiercely embracing it as a defense against the great plague that devastated London that year. It was near the end of the seventeenth century when smoking first faced the rigorous scrutiny of authentic science, as authorities at the leading school of medicine in Paris began reporting their suspicion that tobacco consumption shortened lives. Early death, though, was still so familiar a companion that the possible destructive effect of tobacco was not a pressing concern. Indeed, the first recorded clinical data on the subject was not published until 1761, when a London physician reporting ten cases of cancer, nine afflicting the nostrils and one the esophagus, among habitual snuff-takers, noted that the hard, black, malignant “polypusses” were indeed cancers “as dreadful and as fatal as any others,” and warned against the overuse of snuff. Fourteen years later, another London physician, Percival Pott, observed the frequent occurrence of cancer of the scrotum in chimney sweeps and theorized that the cause was their constant immersion in soot (and no doubt a scarcity of bathing facilities). But neither snuff nor soot was smoke itself, though the former was a product of tobacco and the latter of combustion, hinting that each had properties deleterious to human tissue.

Still, the relationship of tobacco to health lay deep in the shadow of ignorance. By the end of the eighteenth century, the most respected physician in the New World and the author of a learned tract on chemistry, Benjamin Rush of Philadelphia, was warning of the effects of tobacco on the mouth, stomach, and nervous system and linking it to drunkenness—this at the same time he
was prescribing profuse bleedings as the preferred treatment for almost all illnesses.

Little of truly scientific note was added as tobacco use spread in the first half of the nineteenth century, despite the scorn of polemicists like Horace Greeley, founding editor of the New York
Tribune
, who defined the cigar as “a fire at one end and a fool at the other.” There began to emerge now, however, critiques of smoking that were more medical than moral in their carping. Among the shrewdest and more prescient of them was
The Beauties and Deformities of Tobacco-Using
, a slender volume issued in Boston in 1853 by a physician named L. B. Coles, who argued without a shred of documentation that tobacco was “a deadly narcotic” that stifled the brain’s reasoning and perceptive powers, impaired the hearing, vision, liver, and lungs, and shortened smokers’ lives by 25 percent. Coles also hypothesized that many tobacco-caused afflictions were not recognized as such because they did their fatal work gradually. The habit so weakened the internal system, he concluded, that the smoker was easy prey to many diseases. Yet the scientific consensus of the time was better represented in the pages of
The Lancet
, the leading English-language medical journal, which devoted much space in the years 1856–57 to a running debate among its readers on the possible dangers of smoking. The tenor was still nearly as much moral as medical, dwelling on the alleged connection between smoking and the increase in street crime and other forms of social pathology no less than on its unsubstantiated link to dimmed vision, loss of intellectual capacity, and “nervous paralysis”. The prevailing view, however, was perhaps most succinctly stated by a former military surgeon in London who wrote in 1857 that “tobacco-smoking may be indulged in with moderation, without manifest injurious effect on the health for the time being, or on the duration of life.” But he did not attempt to define “moderation” as applied to the smoking habit, nor could he foresee the revolution in the marketplace that would profoundly undermine the very notion.

IV

GIVEN
their soil, climate, vast arable acreage, and slave labor to work it, Americans had become the world’s heaviest per capita users of plentiful tobacco by the middle of the nineteenth century. But that common usage of the commodity hardly constituted a major domestic industry. American society was overwhelmingly rural; its typical citizen was a native-born outdoorsman, short on cash and uneager to spend what he earned on things he could grow himself or swap with a neighbor or a traveling peddler. He tended to take his tobacco Indian-style, either chewing it or smoking it in a pipe, in an age when brand-name goods hardly existed.

By far the most extensive commercial use of the leaf as a manufactured good was the chew, flavored with sweeteners for Yankee taste but left in a more natural state for Southern tongues, and sold by every town tobacconist and every rural crossroads storekeeper. To the extent that so common a product could claim a manufacturing center, Richmond was it, close enough to the source of supply and with enough access by rail and ship to serve major markets. On the eve of the Civil War, Virginia’s capital city boasted more than fifty tobacco factories, astir with the chants and spirituals of their slave workers. But the heyday of the chew passed with the war, as factories were used to make military supplies or were converted into hospitals and prisons. Yet so deeply ingrained was tobacco in the agrarian society of the Confederate states that the leaf was often included among the Johnny Rebs’ regular food rations. And no form of smoking was better suited to warfare, here as in the Crimea, than the cigarette. With neither time nor money for pipes or cigars, soldiers liked the quick narcotic kick of the mild, inhalable little smokes now being made from the Bright leaf of the Virginia and Carolina Piedmont. Freed of family strictures against the vaguely notorious product and prone to imitate their colleagues in wartime misery, more and more men tried the cigarette and found it pleasing. For the first time, Americans began to think of it as something other than a poor substitute for the real thing.

No one capitalized more on the virtues of flue-cured Bright than John R. Green, a farmer who set up shop granulating the leaf in the little railroad-junction village of Durham, close by Raleigh, North Carolina’s capital, and accessible to the students who, on their way to the public university at Chapel Hill, sampled Green’s mild mix and made it a favorite. Green’s wares proved popular with the forces of both armies who encamped in the vicinity during the course of the conflict, but with the end of the fighting and an easing of the tensions of everyday life, the vogue for cigarettes passed. Recalling a bull’s-head insignia embossed on the jar of his favorite mustard, manufactured in Durham, England, Green now adopted it as the trademark for the smoking tobacco he began to produce under the name of Bull Durham. It had just the right sound for a decidedly masculine product, and Green merchandised it as no other tobacco manufacturer had done. He advertised it widely, gave away gifts to frequent users and premiums to aggressive dealers, won unlikely endorsements for it from such litterateurs as Tennyson and Carlyle, and proceeded to erect signs and posters of the mighty bull, sometimes with the imposing stud’s reproductive equipment tastefully obscured by a gate or fence post. At his death fifteen years later, ownership of Green’s enterprise passed to his protege, William T. Blackwell; by then the Bull Durham plant had become the largest tobacco factory in the world, employing 900.

But the manufactured cigarette was rarely seen outside of a few Northern cities. Its most common form was in roll-your-own little sacks that Bull
Durham and others produced as a sideline. Only one ready-made brand, Sweet Caporals, a blend of Virginia and imported Turkish leaf with a dash of the aromatic Louisiana perique, made by the New York City firm of F. S. Kinney and sold for far less than the imported straight Oriental brands, had anything approaching a national clientele. The depression of 1873 helped boost the penny-apiece Sweet Caps and other inexpensive regional cigarette brands and fueled the thinking of Lewis Ginter, a gifted entrepreneur who had moved to Richmond, from his native New York and gone into tobacco manufacturing with the already established John F. Allen. At a time when no other Richmond firm was producing cigarettes, Allen & Ginter seized the day.

Ginter quickly discovered the virtues of both the Bright and Burley tobacco, which included, in the latter case, an absorptive quality that allowed cigarettes skillfully made from it to resemble, in taste, color, and aroma, the more expensive products of leaf imported from the Levant and Cuba. By 1875, national figures based on tax fees showed that sales of manufactured cigarettes had climbed to 42 million units from 20 million a decade earlier—still a pittance compared to other forms of tobacco use but a sign of stirring consumer interest. Previously sold in loose, bulky rolls or clumps from which it was sometimes hard to separate a single stick, Allen & Ginter brands were put inside tight paper wrappers with attractive labels that bespoke contents of quality. And to stiffen the pack, the company inserted a small, lithographed cardboard that doubled as a promotional reward for the buyer. The colorful little cards, designed in sets, depicted among other subjects “Fifty Scenes of Perilous Occupations,” “Flags of All Nations,” famous battles, foreign dignitaries, Indian chiefs, baseball players and boxers, actresses, and a whole bestiary of rarely seen animals. The gimmick caught on at once at a time when newspapers were rarely illustrated and books were still a luxury item. Fathers turned the cards over to their children, who saved them in miniature albums that Ginter’s company offered. At the American Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876, Allen & Ginter’s handsomely displayed cigarettes vied for popularity with the ice-cream soda and helped overcome the standing prejudice against the small smokes as an adulterated product that lacked the virtues of the honest if messy chew, the dignified and aromatic pipe, and the rich, manly cigar. By 1880, sales of ready-made cigarettes reached 500 million and probably twice that many were consumed in the roll-your-own form. Ginter had taken the national lead in cigarettes, pushing his Richmond Straight Cut No. 1 and Pet brands, made from the “brightest, most delicate flavored and highest cost Gold Leaf Tobacco grown in Virginia.” But the larger, costlier cigar was still outselling the manufactured cigarettes by two and a half times in units and twenty to thirty times in tobacco tonnage consumed.