The Cigarette Century

by Allan Brandt

  According to the Court, the facts spoke for themselves: American Tobacco deliberately sought and secured a monopoly. As a result, it had to be dissolved. It was on this basis that White asserted—in the face of a vague antitrust statute—the “rule of reason” in which the Supreme Court claimed, without clear precedent, the federal government’s regulatory authority over the new economy.85

  Untangling what Duke had knotted together proved no simple matter. Prior companies and production processes had become intertwined. At the time of the breakup, a single department managed the leaf purchases for the entire organization. Each concern produced brands previously owned by other companies. Plants had been assigned specific products without regard for previous ownership.

  Over the eight months following the decision, American Tobacco officials, the attorney general, and the circuit court judges negotiated a complex plan for the dissolution of the Trust. The settlement was meant to assure competition among the five newly constituted companies—each received factories, distribution and storage facilities, and name brands. But given the size and complexity of the business, there existed “insuperable obstacles to the creation of perfect competitive conditions” no matter how the industry was restructured. There simply was no going back.86

  It was one thing to identify monopolistic practices and activities in restraint of trade, and quite another to figure out how to return the tobacco industry to some form of regulated competition. Even those who applauded the breakup of American Tobacco soon found themselves critics of the negotiated decree restructuring the industry. This would not be the last time that the tobacco industry would successfully turn a regulatory intervention to its own advantage.

  Even with dissolution of the Trust, open market competition never really returned to the tobacco trade. Barriers to entry remained firmly in place, obstructing new competitors from entering the market. The decree ending the Tobacco Trust was also subject to criticism and public rancor. Assistant Attorney General Jim McReynolds, the chief prosecutor of the case, called the settlement “a subterfuge fit only for the scrapheap.”87 The major players in the Tobacco Trust escaped with the lion’s share of assets and the potential to dominate key aspects of the tobacco market, especially cigarettes.

  According to Louis Brandeis, who closely followed the case and was among the nation’s most distinguished observers of the new economy, American Tobacco was divided into “three parts to be owned by the same persons in the same proportions and to be controlled by the same individuals who the Supreme Court held to have combined in violation of the [anti-trust] law.” He went on:It is inconceivable that even a decision rendered by able and upright judges can make the American people believe that such a ”disintegration” will restore ”honest” competition.

  It was, according to Brandeis, “An illegal trust legalized.”88

  Nonetheless, the antitrust laws would be the principal tools for tobacco regulation through much of the twentieth century. Subsequent modifications, such as the Clayton Antitrust Act and the creation of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), both passed by Congress in 1914, failed to resolve the tensions between the public good and the character of big business any better than the Sherman Act did.

  Dissolving the monopoly merely put an oligopoly in its place. Assets of the conglomerate were parceled back to four new firms: the American Tobacco Company, Liggett & Myers, R.J. Reynolds, and P. Lorillard, all of which would prosper to varying degrees throughout the twentieth century.

  Only one company not on the corporate map at the time of this rearrangement—Philip Morris—would ultimately share in the dramatic industrial growth of tobacco in the twentieth century. Many popular brands with considerable local appeal—produced by members of the Tobacco Trust—disappeared after the breakup as each of the large companies came to focus on a single brand.

  In the immediate aftermath of the dissolution of the Tobacco Trust, observers noted no apparent decline in the prices of tobacco products. What did occur—as we will see—was a major intensification of advertising and promotion in the cigarette industry. In this sense, the modern cigarette emerged from the ashes of the Tobacco Trust. The tobacco oligopoly would return to a highly combative and sometimes competitive mode. But the major firms continued to recognize—even as they vied for market share and higher profits—their collective best interests. Three decades later, in 1941, the companies would again be found in violation of the Sherman Act, this time on charges of price-fixing.89 The residuum of collusion born of the Trust never entirely disappeared.

  By 1911, certain key characteristics of cigarette consumption had been clearly established. Many of these attributes, though considered unusual at the time, went hand-in-hand with aggressive promotion to youth. Short, narrow, and wrapped in paper, the cigarette presented a unique contrast to more traditional forms of tobacco consumption. The brief encounter with tobacco it afforded seemed both insubstantial and unnatural. But it had already revealed qualities that would account for both its remarkable popularity and its dire impact. It demonstrated the critical link between mass production and mass consumption. Its highly addictive properties assured that once one became a smoker, one very likely remained a smoker. And the intense competition among manufacturers, as well as their intimate collusion, foretold a product of impressive potential and a vast multinational industry. Even in the late decades of the nineteenth century, the tobacco industry recognized the cigarette’s global possibilities.

  The modern market in tobacco would nonetheless differ from that of the nineteenth century in important ways. Duke never completely understood that the cigarette would dominate the tobacco industry. After the breakup of the trust, he showed little interest in the cigarette, soon retiring from active management of the American Tobacco Company to go into the electrical power business. Duke and others thought the strong rise in cigarette smoking was another fad in tobacco’s long history. With some thirteen billion cigarettes produced in 1912, he reasoned, the market was near saturation.90 By 1930, the still-expanding market would demand 119 billion. 91 What Duke failed to take in was that this product, which he had done so much to invent, was only in the earliest stage of its modern development. A corporate visionary, Duke anticipated and shaped major shifts in business organization and practice, and in cultural practice as well. But in the way that time and culture bind historical vision, he could not fully see what his own boundless ambitions wrought.

  The boy who smokes cigarettes need not be anxious about his future, he has none.1

  DAVID STARR JORDAN, 1915

  I never smoked a cigarette until I was nine.

  H. L. MENCKEN , DATE UNKNOWN

  I’d walk a mile for a Camel.2

  MARTIN FRANCES REDDINGTON, 1919

  R.J. REYNOLDS EXECUTIVE

  CHAPTER 2

  Tobacco as Much as Bullets

  WHEN THE STATE of Washington made the sale of cigarettes illegal in 1893, many legislators supportive of the law cited their disapproval of the business practices of the trusts. As one reporter explained, “This powerful combine which has secured control of the manufacture of all the leading brands of smoking tobacco and of nearly all cigarettes in the United States has been grinding the merchants and retailers to such an extent that they are glad to see it get a dose of its own medicine.” Retailers described feeling squeezed by the tobacco industry: “I’m glad the bill has passed. I am tired of getting off my stool 250 times a day to sell a five cent package of cigarettes and then making only ten cents on the whole lot.”3

  But opposition to the cigarette was not grounded only in antagonism to trusts. The radical popularization of tobacco in this “perverse” form was contested as a moral and cultural offense. For some late nineteenth-century reformers, the cigarette represented many of the evils already associated with alcohol: wastefulness, indulgence, a poison harmful to self and others. As the movement to prohibit the manufacture and sale of alcohol drew increased attention and support in the last decade of the nineteenth c
entury, temperance literature increasingly made reference to the rise in popularity of tobacco, especially in its new and most devious form, the cigarette.4 Cigarette smoking was widely seen as a “dirty habit”—a disreputable form of tobacco consumption typically practiced by disreputable men (and boys). Temperance reformers drew no distinction between tobacco and alcohol: in their view, immorality led to bad health and unhealthful living to immoral life.5

  The cigarette’s offense to the moral sensibilities of late nineteenth-century American society was deep-seated. Since the earliest days of the colonies, Americans had expressed ambivalence about the acquisition of worldly goods and their impact on character. Economic success and its material trappings invited moral failure. If the Puritan rigors of self-abnegation and austerity were relaxed in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, leisure itself continued to be regarded with considerable doubt. For Victorian sensibilities, pleasure, idleness, and material waste constituted important threats to personal character and social rectitude. The very nature of character building emphasized thrift, discipline, and industry. Personal wealth, though an important goal, held the subversions of indulgence and decline. As religious strictures loosened, many Americans regarded these seductions with ever-heightening concern.6 Even as the engines of consumption began to rev up in the mid-nineteenth century, social critics were quick to point out that satisfaction and salvation would not be found in the glittering marketplace of goods.7

  As the growing popularity of the cigarette threatened to shatter aspects of these increasingly endangered values, their guardians would mount an all-or-nothing defense of the realm. The antitobacco movement was steeped in hostility to the seismic cultural alterations that the cigarette represented. The consumption of tobacco—particularly in this popular new form—quickly came to symbolize a basic moral and cultural crisis in the nation. “The anti-tobacco crusade is a moral one, just as was the struggle for temperance,” wrote the social reformer Vida Milholland. “It is a fight to free our beloved nation from a form of mental slavery, to which she is submitting, as long as she permits the poisoned drug, tobacco, to spread its fumes, like a pall over the land.”8 An 1884 New York Times editorial stated the national crisis in no uncertain terms: “The decadence of Spain began when the Spaniards adopted cigarettes, and if this pernicious practice obtains among adult Americans the ruin of the Republic is close at hand.”9

  Attacks on the cigarette drew on traditional temperance rhetoric to generate a new reform agenda. In the early 1890s, Lucy Page Gaston, a Woman’s Christian Temperance Union worker and journalist, emerged as the national leader of a growing antitobacco movement. Traveling throughout the Midwest, she administered the New Life Pledge to boys and girls in which they promised to abstain from alcohol and tobacco. Thousands took the pledge, and Gaston soon turned her full attention—and ire—to the cigarette. A founder of the Chicago Anti-Cigarette League in 1899, she brought together local efforts to form the National Anti-Cigarette League, which claimed some 300,000 members by 1901.10 As superintendent of the League, she combined grassroots activities with political lobbying to abolish smoking through legislation.

  Many states had already banned the sale of cigarettes to minors. By 1900, North Dakota, Iowa, and Tennessee had enacted prohibitions on the sale of cigarettes altogether. As dozens of states debated such laws, rumors flew that Tobacco Trust representatives were liberally dispensing bribes among state legislators to fight the restrictions. Despite such efforts, Kansas, Minnesota, South Dakota, and Washington had all passed prohibition measures by 1909. As these bans went into effect, however, sales nationwide of cigarettes soared.

  Gaston’s anticigarette coalition drew together a typical menagerie of Progressive-Era reformers: old-time temperance advocates, self-fashioned modern critics of waste in an age of efficiency, social reformers who perceived a link between tobacco and delinquency, physician reformers anxious about the health implications of smoking, and eugenicists who believed cigarette use was associated with degeneracy. Henry Ford became a prominent and vigorous supporter of the crusade. In 1916, he published a widely circulated compendium of antitobacco materials under the title The Case Against the Little White Slaver and vowed not to hire smokers:Boys who smoke cigarettes we do not care to keep in our employ. In the future we will not hire anyone whom we know to be addicted to this habit. . . . We made a study of the effect upon the morals and efficiency of men in our employ addicted to this habit and found that cigarette smokers were loose in their morals, very apt to be untruthful. . . . 11

  Ford recruited Detroit baseball star Ty Cobb to the campaign. Cobb’s assessment was similarly condemnatory:Cigarette smoking stupefies the brain, saps vitality, undermines one’s health, and lessens the moral fiber of the man. No boy who hopes to be successful in any line can afford to contract a habit that is so detrimental to his physical and moral development.12

  For Ford, Cobb, and their compatriots in the anticigarette movement, smoking was a profound moral failing and a sign of other social and characterological flaws.

  The purported association with juvenile delinquency particularly aroused critics. In 1915, Leo W. Marsden, the officer in charge of the Police Juvenile Bureau of Los Angeles, concluded that smoking among young boys must be causally linked to crime. “By keeping an exhaustive record of such matters,” explained Marsden, “I find that over ninety per cent of the boys under twenty-one years of age who are arrested or brought to my office are cigaret smokers.” He found these boys to be “stunted in growth and under-developed in mind.”13 Such a view was not at all uncommon. At the heart of such conclusions stood an ongoing question: did smoking lead to physical and moral decline? Or did it simply attract misfits and weaklings?

  As cigarette use increased in the first decades of the twentieth century, antitobacco activists and their medical supporters eagerly devised “cures” for individuals who had succumbed to the habit. In Los Angeles, the city sponsored a popular “anti-cigaret clinic” that drew a “veritable mob” of men, women, and children seeking treatment for their tobacco addictions. Such clinics, using a variety of medications, mouthwashes, and throat swabs, proved popular in many cities. Apparently, these prescriptions, like the silver nitrate solution administered at a Chicago clinic by Dr. D. H. Kress, made cigarette smoking thoroughly unpalatable.14 “The taste will grow more repulsive by tomorrow,” the physician assured his patients.15 Gaston vigorously supported such interventions, hoping to deter cigarette use before it became habitual. “We are opening [Dr. Kress’s] clinic,” she explained, “because we are convinced that there are thousands . . . in Chicago who would rid themselves of the vice if they had the opportunity.”16 In Hoboken, New Jersey, at a similar clinic, boys were turned away when the supply of silver nitrate gave out.17

  Charles B. Towns was a central figure in developing treatments to help smokers quit. He claimed that cigarette smoking was “the greatest vice devastating humanity today” because of the “mental, moral and physical deterioration” it caused.18 Like many of his colleagues, Towns also was active in developing alcohol and opium treatment facilities. In 1901, he opened the Charles B. Towns Hospital in New York City, earning much praise from the medical community for his treatments. Rather than concentrating on his patients’ moral failings, Towns focused on detoxification and criticized many of the antidotes touted by others.19

  Other opponents of smoking insisted that the cigarette polluted the public environment. Unlike cigars and pipes, typically used in parlors and drawing rooms, the cigarette quickly became a public accessory, smoked in the widest array of settings. Just as their successors would do in the late twentieth century, many now called for restrictions on smoking in public places in the name of the rights of nonsmokers. “In all fairness, is it not reasonable to demand that some limitation be placed upon the indulgence of this habit?” asked New York attorney and anticigarette crusader Twyman Abbott. Public smoking, he claimed, was worse than alcohol because of the toxic fumes left behind. He urge
d that dining rooms, railways, and public buildings provide adequate accommodations for nonsmokers.20

  In 1910, Dr. Charles Pease, an antismoking advocate in New York City, founded the Non-Smokers Protective League in order to lobby for bans on smoking in public places.21 “The relaxed regulations which allow smoking in almost all public places, such as hotel dining rooms and theatres, inconvenience sufficiently those to whom smoking is generally offensive,” noted the New York Times in 1913. The Times opposed a petition to create smoking cars in public subways.22 Nonsmokers complained bitterly about the new veil of smoke in restaurants: “Smoking is now general in restaurants, and a non-smoker can seldom take a meal without the sickening fumes of tobacco puffed by a man who has a profound disregard for the rights and comforts of others.”23 A decade later, as health reformer John Harvey Kellogg noted, “Smoking has become so nearly universal among men, the few non-smokers are practically ignored and their rights trampled upon.”24

  In the balance of “rights,” smokers made their claims as well. In New York City, smokers petitioned for the repeal of a law forbidding cigarettes on the rear platforms of streetcars. Tobacco dealers apparently supported these efforts.25 Other smoking activists lobbied for smoking cars on the state railways and elevated cars.26 The very process of claiming public space for smoking marked a critical element in the rise of the cigarette. And those who voiced their disapproval of cigarettes also revealed how prevalent cigarettes had become.

  The antitobacco movement marked the intensification of a fundamental conflict in values between the Victorian and the modern. What critics of the cigarette often miscalculated was an ongoing social process by which this form of tobacco use displaced other, more traditional modes. The cigarette stood on a cultural cusp. By one set of arguments, its failings mirrored those of alcohol, yet by another, it was radically distinct from alcohol and its many related social pathologies. Just as alcohol seemed a poor fit for the exigencies of an urban industrial society, so too did the other forms of tobacco use, which declined precipitously in the face of the triumph of the cigarette. “Plug tobacco,” noted Richard Tennant, “which was the chief form of nicotine dispensation in the mid-nineteenth century, is messy and socially disagreeable at the best, and in city life it is nearly intolerable.”27 The spittoon soon became an antique. The cigarette, produced by the very techniques of the modern era, fit the demands of its time.