The Cigarette Century

by Allan Brandt

  Women workers on the home front, housed in government dormitories, also smoked like their brothers-in-arms—notwithstanding some protests. “If Congress admits that women have a right to vote,” explained one working woman, “I’d like to see them stop us from smoking. If a woman wants to smoke, she’ll smoke.”64

  Cigarette smoking among young women was often viewed by critics as the first step down a slippery path of moral decline that led to drinking, petting, and “other” sexual behavior. The cigarette, they suggested, was a marker of sexual accessibility and rebellion from familial and social conventions. Antitobacco rhetoric inevitably backfired among young women especially. According to Good Housekeeping, “girls begin smoking to demonstrate that they are strictly modern and up-to-date in their views and habits of life.”65

  As the nation attempted to “return to normalcy,” the growing popularity of the cigarette antagonized antitobacco groups that viewed it as the next symbol of an amoral modernity. The war necessitated a critical hiatus in the anticigarette movement (while it created many new smokers), but activists eagerly saw the armistice as the moment to reinvigorate their efforts. Buoyed by the victory of national prohibition with the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment, anticigarette activists returned to their trenches. Evangelist Billy Sunday reportedly proclaimed, “Prohibition is won, now, for tobacco.” “The time when the suggestion of tobacco prohibition could be laughed at has passed,” wrote the New York World in 1920. “It is a definite possibility and unless vigorously met, it will become a real probability. The same forces that imposed prohibition on an unwilling nation are behind the antitobacco movement.”66 The WCTU widely distributed a new pamphlet, Nicotine Next, outlining the rationale for the attack on smoking.

  State campaigns to limit the use and sale of cigarettes reemerged after the war. In 1921, after much public debate, Utah banned “the giving away, sale, exchange or barter of cigarettes,” as well as the advertising of cigarettes and public smoking. The anticigarette bill’s supporters, who included the WCTU, temperance advocates, and representatives of Brigham Young University, offered a series of objections to the cigarette. In particular, they emphasized the dangers, both moral and medical, to women and children. Senator Edward Southwick, the bill’s author, quoted Surgeon General Hugh S. Cumming that “if American women generally contract the habit, as reports now indicate they are doing, the entire American nation will suffer. The physical tone of the whole nation will be lowered. This is one of the most evil influences in American life today. . . . The habit harms a woman more than it does a man.”67 Another supporter of the legislation noted that “the fingers of our girls are being varnished with the stains of those harmful little instruments of destruction.”68 Just as earlier opponents of the cigarette had done, Senator Southwick argued that the use of the cigarette violated the liberties of nonsmokers, offended moral sensibilities, and polluted public space. “We cannot bring our wives and daughters to the city,” he wrote, “and cannot come along without encountering tobacco smoke everywhere that saturates our clothing, and nauseates us. Personal liberty! Ours is as inviolate, or should be, as theirs.”69

  Increasingly aggressive and prominent advertising also drew the ire of activists. The belief that tobacco interests sought new customers among women and children was frequently voiced: “It is not . . . those who have acquired the cigaret habit,” Southwick noted, “but new material and victims, that this advertising seeks to find.”70 For antitobacco campaigners, the 300 percent increase in cigarette sales over the previous decade could only be attributed to the nefarious power of advertising. One legislator described an ad portraying Santa Claus smoking a cigarette as “a desecration of the child’s faith, if not blasphemy.” Southwick argued that “skilled advertising causes the boy to think he will never be a man until he smokes cigarettes.” Senator Reed Smoot of Utah took the floor of the Senate to argue that the aggressive promotion of cigarettes through the 1920s encouraged widespread “cigarette addiction.”

  Not since the days when public opinion rose in its might and smote the dangerous drug traffic, not since the days when the vendor of harmful nostrums was swept from our streets, has this country witnessed such an orgy of buncombe, quackery, and downright falsehood and fraud as now marks the current campaign promoted by certain cigarette manufacturers to create a vast woman and child market for the use of their product.71

  “The cigarette campaign,” concluded Smoot, “is a libel—a great libel—upon American business ethics.”

  Those in favor of maintaining the legality of cigarette smoking frequently centered their counterarguments on more pragmatic grounds. Bills like Utah’s restricting the sale of cigarettes, they argued, were difficult to enforce and promoted black markets. American Legion posts, with many members fresh from their experiences in the war, composed declarations opposing the Utah bill or offered satirical critiques advocating a ban on “all things pleasurable.” Other critics of the legislation argued that its supporters’ ties to the Mormon Church were indicative of a minority attempting to impose a religious belief upon the majority. They condemned the bill as “incapable of enforcement, unjust in its deprivation of inalienable personal liberty and as perverting the basic principles of the constitution in attempting to force the masses to act in accord with the whims and peculiar views of certain groups.”72

  By 1922, sixteen states had either banned or restricted the sale or promotion of cigarettes. But virtually all these laws proved short-lived. Passed with publicity and fanfare, they were quickly repealed after brief periods of erratic and weak enforcement. Increasingly, opposition to the cigarette proved out of step with cultural and political expectations, which made its restriction seem ironically intemperate in the new postwar national climate. By the 1920s, it was one thing to criticize smoking, quite another to enlist government to police its use. Much as Lucy Page Gaston and her colleagues tried to focus moral outrage on the cigarette, the emerging urban industrial culture found it decidedly unthreatening, even for women. Indeed, many now recounted its impressive and reassuring assets. The days of serious restrictions on tobacco use were numbered (at least for the moment). Antitobacco statutes marked the last stand of Victorian moral strictures that could not long survive in the modern consumer culture with its new norms regarding pleasure, sexuality, and spending.73

  Still, concerns about smoking persisted. Progressive leaders, disturbed by the sharp increase in tobacco consumption during the war, formed a distinguished Committee to Study the Tobacco Problem in 1918. The Committee comprised a diverse group of noted academicians, clinicians, and social reformers, including William Osler, Irving Fisher, Henry Ford, and John Harvey Kellogg. Attempting to strike a moderate tone, they neither condemned tobacco from a moral perspective nor approved its use. Instead, consistent with the Progressive ethos, they focused on its economic impact and its ancillary costs to society. One study commissioned by the Committee argued that, despite some popular beliefs, tobacco did not contribute to “mental efficiency.”74

  Most notably, the Committee sought—notwithstanding its strong antitobacco bias—to disassociate itself from the moralistic tone of the prohibition crusade. This new model of antitobacco activity accepted the basic rubric of the consumer age; by investigating and publicizing the harmful effects of cigarettes, the Committee’s members believed they could have an important impact on behavior. They would soon come to understand, however, that the clout of the industry, new techniques of promotion, and the particular addictive attributes of the product overmatched them. The rise of the cigarette could not be impeded by Progressive reason.

  Many now argued that cigarettes were the ideal product for the modern age, offering pleasure, solace, and relief from the stresses of contemporary life. Whereas temperance reformers had presented alcohol and tobacco as related threats, tobacco advocates and consumers eagerly dissociated their product from alcohol. As the Literary Digest noted: “Because it promotes contentment, tobacco becomes a blessing to those who use
it properly. Tobacco is not associated with excesses as liquor is. A man might smoke too many cigars, it is true, but then even the most zealous anti-tobacco agitator wouldn’t expect the smoker to go home and ‘beat up’ his family. The purchase of a can of smoking tobacco seldom leads to arrest for disorderly conduct. In most cases, indulgence in tobacco makes one calmer and more peacefully inclined.”75 “Tobacco would-be prohibitionists,” noted the New York Times, “have a case not a hundredth part as good as they had against alcohol. . . . To call tobacco a ‘demon’ would be such an obvious and wild exaggeration of its real demerits that those who did it simply would be laughed at.”76

  As a commentator in 1919 argued:Who ever heard of a man committing murder or rape or felonious assault while under the influence of—tobacco?

  Who ever heard of a man’s children going without shoes because he spent all his money on—tobacco?

  Who ever heard of a woman’s ruin made possible because she had been plied with—tobacco?77

  With Prohibition having made alcohol less accessible, tobacco assumed many of the elements of sociability and leisure that had historically rested primarily on alcohol. Observers of the social scene remarked on how cigarettes were employed to “break the ice” in social encounters. Some argued that the cigarette was the new stimulant of the modern age, the perfect drug for an urban-industrial society. By the mid-1920s, Gaston’s high-handed moral fervor had become the focus of satirical barbs. Sinclair Lewis, in his novel Arrowsmith, poked fun at “the anti-nicotine lady from Chicago” who injected ground-up cigarette paper into laboratory mice at a health fair only to incur the wrath of “an anti-vivisection lady, also from Chicago.”78 No doubt, the times had changed; the cigarette had come to play an increasingly important role in the day-to-day manners of the consumer culture. In the face of rising consumption, Gaston’s apocalyptic claims for cigarette use now seemed to reveal more about her and her social movement than about the product she so bitterly detested.

  Opposition continued through the 1920s in the face of the cigarette’s rising popularity, but antitobacco proposals failed. Instead, state legislatures debated new approaches to limiting the use of tobacco. Many of these proposals would be debated again later in the twentieth century: in Illinois a bill called for restrictions on ads pitched to youth; Idaho debated bans on billboards and radio advertising. Senator Smoot urged that cigarettes come under the regulatory aegis of the Food and Drug Acts. Although opponents of smoking would continue to raise objections, the success of the cigarette made antitobacco rhetoric increasingly peripheral. Those states in which successful prohibitions had been legislated found them widely disobeyed and unenforced; the statutes, ironically, now symbolized the triumph of the cigarette.

  But while the cigarette had gained a national foothold overall, social acceptance of women smokers did not proceed apace. Even though women’s consumption had increased, disapproving commentaries still abounded. As Good Housekeeping explained in 1929:The odor of stale tobacco does not add to a girl’s charm, neither do nicotine-stained fingers, nor will the repulsive affections of the mouth and throat which sometimes afflict smokers.79

  Women, critics warned, were especially susceptible to the harms of smoking because of the peculiar biological vulnerabilities of the “weaker” sex.

  Tobacco will do to girls and to women all that it does to boys and do it harder. One of the worst things that tobacco does is shake nervous systems, and the nerves of women are less able to stand abuse than those ofmen.80

  For those opposed to the cigarette, the increase in women smoking constituted a growing moral crisis that was sharpened by the practice’s particular sexual meanings. One parent asserted that it was not cigarette smokers per se that alarmed her, but the social context and meanings of the behavior. Though perfectly content for her children to smoke, she nonetheless suggested that “if [my daughter] smokes as part of a petting party in a car parked out along the ocean or in the woods—then I have a problem, but that problem is not smoking.”81

  Among the young, proper women who attended college in the 1920s, the use of cigarettes became an important issue. The ritual of setting and breaking of rules in some ways resembled the experience of soldiers before World War I. At elite women’s colleges, where issues of political and social equality between men and women were the subject of intense debate, conventions and regulations about female smoking came into occasionally vigorous dispute. Smoking bans on campus arose only as earlier social conventions were tested. In one typical example, at Wellesley College, the first rules against smoking were issued in 1918; first offenders lost privileges for six weeks, and further violations could lead to expulsion. Such limits not surprisingly generated dissent. “Violations of the no smoking rule rose to a climax when all the occupants of one Quadrangle dormitory were ‘campused’ [i.e., not allowed off campus] for the rest of the year.”82

  In 1922, the New York Times reported that two Wellesley students had been forced to leave school for refusing to relinquish their cigarettes. “The college does not permit of the development of the new woman,” explained freshman Billie Burse to the New York Times. “To advance a girl must dare, and again dare, and dare forever more. The faculty frowns on our knickers; then they frown on our ideas; and now, having found our cigarettes, they’re frowning again.”83 Although the story was later exposed as a ruse, it nonetheless drew widespread attention to the rising intransigence among young women toward no-smoking policies.

  Despite student protests, the faculty upheld the ban, noting that “to sanction smoking is contrary to the spirit and traditions of the college.” Wellesley students apparently evaded the rules that forbade students smoking within the towns of Wellesley and Natick, by walking to the town line to smoke. “Needless to say,” explained a history of the college, “this custom was not popular with the faculty nor with the neighboring citizens to whom long rows of girls perched on their walls and puffing industriously was not a pleasant sight.”84 Disciplinary measures for violations of smoking regulations varied from college to college. At Bucknell University, forty-four women who admitted to smoking in their rooms were restricted from having dates for the next six months. The ruling caused the cancellation of an upcoming dance.85

  One college administrator suggested that as long as women smoked in their rooms, there would be no consequence. But public smoking—an open declaration of autonomy—invited discipline. Even so, once the Lucky Strikes were out of the box, they could not be put back in. Women at colleges and universities quickly became committed to the important meanings the cigarette conveyed about them.86 College rules forbidding smoking and drinking were routinely violated and soon deemed unenforceable. Smoking became a “choice” and a powerful symbol of breaking with convention. The importance of “personal style, preference, and taste” provided critical opportunities for defining the new, pluralistic mores that would characterize twentieth-century American culture.

  By the mid-1920s the faculty at Wellesley had reconsidered their opposition to smoking and opened Alumnae Hall for students’ use. In 1925, Bryn Mawr College also opened smoking rooms to its students, officially recognizing what “everyone” knew: bans on women smoking would inevitably fail because they reflected assumptions about gender, sociability, and sexuality that were in rapid decline. By this time, forbidding the cigarette was largely a lost cause.87 Marion Edwards Park, Bryn Mawr’s president, explained that “the experience of every college head is that an unenforceable regulation leads to the formation of secret practises which glorify the supposed evil and tend to weaken other disciplines.”88 Vassar and other women’s colleges soon followed suit, relaxing restrictions on campus. Other institutions, however, dug in to maintain convention by affirming new prohibitions against women smoking. The dean of women at Northwestern University insisted that any girl caught smoking—at school or elsewhere—would be dismissed immediately. “Smoke and Leave School,” announced another dean to her women students.89 But such rules gave off the musty smell
of a previous century’s moral order. By the end of the 1920s, even the thrill in the rebelliousness of smoking was lost, as women’s smoking became increasingly conventional.

  By the late 1930s, most surveys at women’s colleges confirmed that a majority of students were smokers.90 “Most persons regard the question not so much as one of right or wrong as one of good taste and bad taste,” explained one newspaper.91 The earlier conflicts about the right to smoke at these institutions reflected the rich symbolic politics of young women in the 1920s. But like so much else, these conflicts did not last into the new decade.

  If the cigarette proved a divisive element in the struggle over political and social equality between the sexes, it was principally women who contested the new patterns of behavior, and their principal concern was the link between smoking and promiscuity. Groups such as the International AntiTobacco League lobbied filmmakers not to portray women smoking except as “the accompaniment of discreditable character.”92 Other women’s groups, responding to reports of smoking among teenage girls, often encouraged young women to pledge abstinence from tobacco along with jazz dancing and petting.93

  The tobacco industry watched the debate about women smoking with obvious interest and concern. Early in the 1920s, explicit solicitation of women smokers had drawn the hostility of antismoking groups and the threat of regulation. Intimations that cigarette producers coveted the women’s market drew supporters to the antitobacco campaign. “The manufacturers have started an insidious campaign to create women smokers,” noted an advertising agent in 1919.94 “This situation is a challenge to every right-thinking man.” The author suggested such activity would inevitably strengthen the antitobacco crusade. Citing ads for smaller brands like Helmar and Murad showing women smoking, he argued:When the “Antis” begin to wind up and put all they have on the ball, the cigarette people will wish they had stuck to the adult male market or had not tried to take in too much territory.