The Cigarette Century

by Allan Brandt

  The Christian Century warned:Such advertising is inexcusable; it illustrates how far men will go toward undermining the health of a growing generation in order to add to their profits.95

  For opponents of the cigarette, the solicitation of women smokers marked the willingness of big business to cast aside propriety and morals for profits. “If the cigarette companies are not to ‘get’ the girls,” wrote Allan Benson in Good Housekeeping in 1929, “there must be swift and effective interference with their power to tempt them. Particularly the use of radio for the carrying to young women of cigarette propaganda should be stopped. Parents who do not want their daughters to be cigarette fiends should be able to have a radio in their homes without feeling that they are opening their homes to a flood of insidious cigarette propaganda.”96 But as parents quickly learned, it was impossible to keep the floods contained. The recruitment of women smokers proceeded apace, and by the mid-1920s, the outrage over this strategy had mostly dissipated in the face of changes in conventions about women generally and smoking in particular.

  Women who smoked reported that they felt more sociable doing so. By presenting smoking as daring and irreverent, the cigarette attracted women who were eager to test the boundaries of public mores. They crowded powder rooms and restrooms seeking fellow smokers. Dressing rooms on trains were often filled with smoke. “The Women smokers are bringing about a new democracy of the road,” wrote Marguerite E. Harrison in 1922. “There is growing demand for women’s smoking compartments. The feminine traveling public wants a place in which to lounge and smoke just as much as the male contingent.”97 In 1922, the Globe Theatre in New York City, recognizing such demands, created a smoking lounge for women theatergoers.

  Women also smoked in mixed company, exposing to criticism not just their manners but their skill. It was often suggested that they did not understand how to smoke correctly. A hotel manager explained: “They don’t really know what to do with the smoke. Neither do they know how to hold their cigarettes properly. They make a mess of the whole performance.”98 Still, it was increasingly accepted that men and women—even if they smoked in particular ways—could politely do so together.99

  The triumph of the cigarette did not occur by serendipity. Even as smoking seemed to fit with a modern consumer age, the very development of consumption was carefully and artfully constructed by powerful corporations with extensive resources. Beginning with the establishment of national brands in the years before the Great War, the tobacco industry would continue to develop marketing and promotion techniques that would later become commonplace in the age of consumption.100 Certainly, the industry would position itself as an advocate of “choice” in the marketplace, but even more significantly it would purposely move to reorient the culture on behalf of its product.

  The ongoing attacks on the cigarette paradoxically made it a powerful symbol of modernity and burnished its appeal. “The more violently it has been attacked,” noted one observer, “the more popular it has become.”101 Try though they might to limit the popularity of what they considered a vile and unhealthy product, they could not stop the cigarette from becoming phenomenally popular, deeply embedded in social interactions, and the basis of an enormously successful and powerful business enterprise. The cigarette century had arrived.

  There are some women’s clubs in this city which encourage cigarette smoking by their members. . . . I consider such demoralization a blot on our city’s fair name. I think this club should declare itself officially opposed to the increase of such a crime. I think we should discourage in every way persons who attempt to corrupt our civilization.1

  MRS. ALFRED ARTHUR BROOKS, 1908

  GOTHAM CLUB LEAP YEAR MUSICALE

  WALDOR FASTORIA, NEW YORK CITY

  A formidable barrier between the sexes had broken down. The custom of separating them after formal dinners, for example, still lingered, but as an empty rite. Hosts who laid in a stock of cigars for their male guests often found them untouched; the men in the dining-room were smoking the very same brands of cigarettes that the ladies consumed in the living room.2

  FREDERICK LEWIS ALLEN, 1931

  ONLY YESTERDAY

  CHAPTER 3

  Engineering Consent

  CIGARETTE SMOKING quickly became an implement for divining those sensitive and complex cultural idioms of gender and sexuality, autonomy and agency, in a new age of consumer motivation and design. The tobacco industry clearly realized that women made up half its potential market. While in no way given to gender exclusions in attracting new patrons, the industry was nonetheless aware that by targeting women it entered contested cultural terrain. Advertisers and marketers recognized that if smoking was to become a truly mass behavior, they would need to shape this territory. They seized on early debates about the meaning of smoking for women as opportunities. That smoking appealed to women before the onset of targeted advertising does not reduce the significance of tobacco industry efforts to recruit women smokers.3

  Even though social conventions had restricted advertisers from explicitly pitching the cigarette to women before the late 1920s, many tobacco ads indirectly sought women smokers through images that emphasized the sociability and allure of the cigarette. Women frequently appeared in tobacco ads in rapt attendance to an attractive and powerful smoking male. By the late 1920s, advertisers’ concerns about convention and mores had succumbed to widespread recognition of the vast female market for cigarettes. Their ads still offended some moral sensibilities. A new subscriber to the Century wrote in 1928, “I was surprised, chagrined, and disappointed that your high-class magazine cooperates with the tobacco industry in the endeavor to make women smoke.”4 But such objections carried less and less weight against the advertising revenue to be had from tobacco. Women had become fair game for the cigarette’s increasingly sophisticated marketers.

  Within the tobacco industry, the battle lines in advertising combat were already clearly demarcated by the end of the Great War. In the face of R.J. Reynolds’s success with Camel, American Tobacco launched its own offensive, introducing a new cigarette brand, Lucky Strike, in 1916. The company’s president, George Washington Hill, committed unprecedented resources to Lucky Strike’s promotion, spending more than $100 million on advertising in the brand’s first decade.5

  If Hill did not invent the hard sell, he nonetheless drove it to new heights. Selling Lucky Strikes became his obsession. Packages dangled on strings in the windows of his Rolls Royce, which had the Lucky Strike logo emblazoned on its taillights. Hill named his pet dachshunds Lucky and Strike and grew tobacco in the garden of his Hudson River estate. Even Albert Lasker, his adman, found Hill’s excesses were notable: “The only purpose in life to him was to wake up, to eat, and to sleep so that he’d have strength to sell more Lucky Strikes. . . . It was just a religious crusade with him—which made it very difficult to work with a man so narrow-minded on a thing which was all out of focus.”6

  American Tobacco lore says that in 1916, after observing the manufacturing process at the company’s Brooklyn factory, Hill emerged with the slogan “They’re Toasted.” He was convinced he had discovered, in the heat of the factory where he had witnessed the drying, flavoring, and mixing of the tobacco, the thing that would make Lucky Strike the number one cigarette. Advertising theory at the time asserted that consumers required a “reason why” to spur their purchase.7 Now, Hill was convinced he had one.

  He explained:The Burley tobacco is toasted; makes the taste delicious. You know how toasting improves the flavor of bread. And it’s the same with tobacco exactly.8

  The “toasting” process, he argued, made Luckies a superior and safer product. “This extensive campaign grows out of the increased demand for cigarettes from which harmful elements have been removed. Improvements in the manufacture of cigarettes now make it possible by the application of heat in the toasting process, to eliminate from the tobacco those impurities which heretofore have been a source of irritation to the smoker’s throat.”9 By emp
hasizing “impurities” and “irritation,” Hill offered a quasi-medical, therapeutic rationale for his brand. This was not the last time the company would use health claims on behalf of its product.10

  Even as Hill shaped and promoted this rationale, he understood that toasting, taste, and tobacco would not, by themselves, increase sales. Over the years, he added new elements to the pitch. The “Reach for a Lucky” campaign was the most important of these permutations. Lasting for the better part of a decade, it was among the most successful—and controversial—in the history of modern advertising. “Reach for a Lucky” was the handiwork of Albert Lasker, who joined Chicago’s Lord & Thomas Agency at the age of eighteen. He quickly rose to become president and owner of the firm by 1903. Known for his dynamism and aggressiveness in marketing both the agency and its clients, as well as his “cannonball copy,” Lasker was first credited with introducing the “Reason Why” campaigns in 1904. Lucky Strike, at the time the largest account in advertising history, accounted for more than 25 percent of his firm’s billing of $40 million in 1929.11 In a collaboration of titans, Lasker and Hill were each certain that he alone was in control.

  One evening in 1925, as the Laskers dined at Chicago’s Tip Top Inn, Flora Warner Lasker lit up a cigarette. The headwaiter asked her to put it out. The incident led Albert Lasker to reconsider the character of tobacco advertising, which up to that time walked gingerly around social convention, especially concerning women smoking. Lasker and Hill were both eager to advertise directly to women. Recognizing that by the mid-1920s smoking among women was increasingly commonplace, they now devised plans to make Lucky Strike the cigarette of choice among this vast, largely unclaimed market.

  In what would become a typical sequence for advertising campaigns, emphasis on the brand itself gave way to offering consumers a particular rationale for action. This rationale could vary from “They’re toasted” to the somewhat more subtle claims that a brand helps in dieting, to the fact that tobacco men choose these cigarettes over competitors.12 Lasker sought to offer a “reason why” to women smokers. Having developed, earlier in the decade, the campaign that broke through the convention and taboo surrounding sanitary napkins,13 Lasker was now convinced that testimonials from prominent women would be equally effective in discrediting social mores against women smoking. He seized on a new slogan, “Reach for a Lucky Instead of a Sweet,” a pointed rephrasing of Lydia Pinkham’s turn-of-the-century slogan for her highly popular patent medicine: “Reach for a Vegetable.” A 1928 ad featuring aviator Amelia Earhart proclaimed that Lucky Strikes were the cigarettes carried on the “Friendship” when she crossed the Atlantic. This was followed by “For a Slender Figure—Reach for a Lucky Instead of a Sweet.”14

  As one commentator explained, “It was a swell slogan as slogans go. It was easy to say. It tempted the great sweet-eating American public to think of cigarettes every time it opened its mouth. And it could be elaborated upon and supported by all sorts of pseudo-scientific and frightfully convincing arguments in its favor.”15 The “Reach for a Lucky” campaign ingeniously brought together several goals.16 First, it was aimed directly at women. By suggesting Luckies could help women assume “the modern form,” it associated the cigarette with contemporary trends in beauty, fashion, and changing women’s roles. Second, the use of testimonials offered important opportunities for new smokers to identify with prominent individuals. In using these public assertions by “public” women going on record as smokers, the Lucky Strike campaign took advantage of the “cult of personality” that emerged in the 1920s as a force in advertising.17 American Tobacco collected an eclectic range of public figures, both men and women, in constructing its campaign: opera stars and athletes, businessmen and socialites. The choice of spokespersons involved a combination of authority and association: figures of note offering personal testimony to the use of the product, and the ability of consumers to “associate” themselves with such figures. Identification proved to be a crucial element in the fine structure of consumer culture.18

  The testimonials drew controversy, but it was controversy that Hill assessed as central to the success of the campaign. The advertising industry expressed concern that paid testimonials tested the legitimacy of advertising. Were prominent figures bought off by companies simply trading on their names? Did they really use the product they endorsed? An early Lucky Strike ad soliciting women smokers featured European opera star Madame Ernestine Schumann-Heink; she later denounced the campaign as a hoax. The October 1927 issue of Liberty magazine contained eleven different ads for a wide variety of products, all endorsed by movie star Constance Talmadge.19 The newly discovered phenomenon of overexposure revealed a critical problem with the use of celebrities. Talmadge nonetheless joined the long list of prominent individuals endorsing Lucky Strikes. “Light a Lucky and you’ll never miss sweets that make you fat,” she explained in an ad in the early 1930s.20

  By pushing hard against the margins of legitimate advertising, Hill came to be widely perceived as a threat to the emerging authority of the advertising enterprise. Just as, in the late twentieth century, the industry feared the long-term impact of Joe Camel, in the 1920s advertisers were concerned that extravagant claims, paid testimonials, and aggressive competitiveness threatened to draw public attention to the process rather than the product. When a Lucky Strike ad asserted that cigarettes had improved a ship’s crew’s performance during a rescue at sea, Printers’ Ink, the advertising trade publication, objected in an editorial. In a poll, the editors asked “Do you believe that the use of purchased testimonials is good for advertising in general?” Although 54 respondents replied that it was, a resounding 843 respondents said “No.”21 Failure to assert internal norms, it was feared, would lead to demands for stronger regulation of advertising.

  Along with pointedly targeting women, the very notion of “Reach for a Lucky Instead of a Sweet” committed the company to a new marketing aggressiveness. Whereas advertisers had generally avoided going head to head with competitors and alternative products, the “Reach for a Lucky” campaign, with its emphasis on “Instead,” proposed the cigarette as the modern alternative to candy. This direct attack outraged the candy industry. One chain of New York candy stores advertised:Do not let anyone tell you that a cigarette takes the place of a piece of candy. The cigarette will inflame your tonsils, poison with nicotine every organ of your body, and dry up your blood—nails in your coffin.22

  The National Confectioners Association established a defense committee, which threatened Hill with legal action and a full-scale response. The candy manufacturers also hired Dr. Herman Bundesen, who had served as health commissioner for the city of Chicago, to prepare a pamphlet on the “importance of candy as food.”23 Restaurant owners soon joined the confectioners in the attack on the Lucky Strike campaign, calling it “insidious, immoral and outrageous propaganda.” “For all the billions spent to advertise cigarettes,” noted one observer of the battle, “the anti-sweet campaign looks like the first attempt to create consumers instead of merely tossing consumers from brand to brand.”24

  Some critics drew particular attention to the idea that the campaign was specifically designed to appeal to youngsters. The goal of the ads, they warned, was to “transform the school girls, the growing boys and the youth of the country into confirmed cigarette addicts, regardless of established medical and health findings.” Joseph Berger, president of the United Restaurant Owner’s Association, concluded ominously that “a more flagrant assault against public welfare has never been witnessed in the United States.”25 A commentator in the trade journal Advertising and Selling warned that “while the American Tobacco Company may laugh at the idea of the Better Business Bureau and the Federal Trade Commission as censors of its advertising, it can least of all companies, hardly afford the imputation that it is seeking to recruit an army of first smokers out of young boys and girls who are, of course, notably the chief consumers of candy.”26

  The hyperbole on both sides strained pub
lic credulity. In retrospect, the high-profile dispute looks like a strategy. Attention and controversy are dynamic elements in any advertising campaign, and Hill may have intended to provoke an outraged response. In any case, the “Reach for a Lucky” campaign ultimately drew the attention of the Federal Trade Commission.27 Hill was ordered to relinquish all dietary claims for Luckies and to stop purchasing testimonials. But these modest interdictions did little to quiet the fevered pitch of tobacco advertising.

  Other advertisers insecure about the status of their trade, looked to the boorish Hill with disdain. His extravagant claims for Lucky Strike, his eagerness for attention and controversy, and his monumental ego offended even Lasker; but Hill offered the painful reminder that in the relationship of agency to client, the client was always right—especially a client with a budget the size of American Tobacco’s. And much to the chagrin of critics, sales of Lucky Strikes soared in response to the bombast. By 1931, in the midst of sharp criticism, Lucky Strike was the leading brand of cigarette. Vulgarity had its rewards.28

  Hill no doubt delighted in the protests and threats of the candy industry. Ads defending candy (such as “You can get thin comfortably ‘on candy,’” sponsored by the National Confectioners Association) were precisely the type of attention Hill relished.29 These reactions showed that his ads had effectively tied cigarettes to pleasure, dieting, and the “modern figure,” and demonstrated that controversy and aggressive advertising, rather than reducing public confidence and trust in a product, could create interest, attention, and sales.