by Allan Brandt
Esty’s next major campaign, inspired by an article in Science in 1934 indicating that smoking increased sugar in the blood, promised that Camel smokers would “Get a Lift.” Other research, on smoking among diabetics, seemed to confirm this finding, noting that nicotine stimulates the adrenals; adrenaline causes the release of sugar. One of the scientists who had conducted the study was appalled to see the resulting claims in Esty’s copy. But the quibbles of scientists did not concern Esty. Reynolds prepared a form letter for those who inquired about the ad:The effect continues for approximately half an hour, when the percentage of blood sugar again goes back to the previous level. However, the smoking of another Camel will again increase the blood sugar concentration.75
(Clearly, the company understood the importance of assuring readers that any effects were transitory.)
By the mid-1930s, the Big Three had reached near parity; this had the effect of intensifying advertising expenditures, each company eager to maintain and expand its clientele through marketing combat. Any brand’s dominance was ephemeral. The aggressiveness of Lucky Strike in the early 1930s now seemed dated as consumers were attracted to Chesterfield’s more conservative copy.76 Observers watched the race among the Big Three cigarettes like stocks and horses. Explanations of success and failure were plentiful in part because it was so difficult to gauge the impact of any particular sales strategy. All that seemed to matter was the aggressiveness of the budget. Whoever invested most heavily in ads appeared to reap the rewards. By 1930, tobacco advertising led all other commodities with the possible exception of automobiles; here, then, was an industry in which product and pitch had become both inseparable and indistinguishable.77 The medium was the message.
The combat often turned nasty. Competitive ads not-so-subtly attacked opposing brands; a Lucky Strike ad read “You Wouldn’t Eat Raw Meat. Why Smoke Raw Tobacco?” Reynolds shot back with an ad announcing “The Stench of a Contemptible Slander Is Repulsive Even to the Nostrils of a Buzzard.” Reynolds claimed that individuals on the American Tobacco payroll were spreading false rumors about hygiene in the Camel factories and offered rewards for the culprits’ identification and arrest.78 In 1936, a “whispering campaign”—probably started by individuals hired by local sales representatives—spread the rumor that the makers of Chesterfield (Liggett & Myers) had fired all their Jewish employees. The company offered $1,000 rewards for information about those spreading the rumor.79
But even as these companies competed fiercely in what became widely known as the “tobacco wars,” they also found good reason to cooperate. Their common interest in the cigarette’s success probably led to a certain restraint and the tacit acceptance of some ground rules. Despite the bitterness of the ad campaigns—their cost and vitriol—cigarette prices remained absolutely consistent across brands.80 The scent of antitrust violation would draw the renewed interest of the Department of Justice.81
During the 1930s and 1940s, growth was phenomenal and brand loyalty only in an early phase. In each successive year, new smokers constituted an impressive market. As these three companies continued to compete and conspire together, they also continued to enjoy great financial success. In the years following the 1929 stock market crash, many industries succumbed to the global depression. Not so for cigarettes. As one business writer concluded, “People, it seemed, must smoke cigarettes, as well as eat, in good times and bad.” He deemed cigarettes a “depression-proof ” industry. 82 Certainly, the addictive properties of nicotine helped sustain demand. The impressive stability of this market was widely recognized. “Cigarettes, a product of habitual use, and not likely to be discarded even in times of reduced income; accordingly they have a relatively steady demand,” explained Neil H. Borden, professor of advertising at Harvard Business School.83 Although the tobacco companies would not be made to face the issue publicly for another half-century, the cigarette’s addictive properties were already widely noted.
While the dominating sales of the Big Three—American’s Lucky Strike, Reynolds’s Camel, and Liggett & Myers’s Chesterfield—led Fortune to conclude that “launching a new cigarette is like picking a number at roulette.” The Depression spawned a variety of “cheapies”: ten-cent cigarettes, roll-your-own, and other niche products.84 In the early years of the Great Depression, brands like Stephano Brothers’ Marvels, Brown & Williamson’s Wings, Axton Fischer’s Twenty Grand, and Pinkerton Tobacco’s Sunshines cut substantially into the Big Three, reaching more than 20 percent of the market in the early years of the Depression. By collectively reducing the wholesale prices, however, the major brands ultimately recouped their patrons, and the percentage of the market buying “cheapies” dropped quickly to 6.4 percent by May 1933.85
Smaller tobacco companies—in eclipse since the breakup of the Trust—tried throughout the 1920s to exploit the remarkable new market for cigarettes, and Lorillard was the most successful. After becoming president of P. Lorillard in 1924, Benjamin Belt mimicked Hill himself in generating public attention for his new brand Old Gold. During the “Reach for a Lucky” campaign, Old Gold sought to engage the debate with copy like this: “Eat a chocolate. Light an Old Gold. And enjoy both! Two fine and healthful treats.” Philip W. Lennen of Lennen and Mitchell, Lorillard’s advertising agency, came up with the slogan “Not a Cough in a Carload,” which subtly recognized the persistent health concerns associated with smoking. This successful campaign was the first to use comic strips in national advertising. Lennen followed up with a series of innovations: blindfold tests, double cellophane wrapping, and ultimately prize contests offering Old Gold smokers who solved a puzzle the chance to win thousands of dollars, pushing the limits of postal regulations and lottery laws. Although Old Gold held just a 7 percent market share, by the early 1930s it nevertheless achieved wide recognition as the fourth leading brand.86
By 1937, the company was offering contestants an unprecedented first prize of $100,000, helping sales to climb by more than 70 percent over the previous year. Some two million people returned answers to the puzzle (accompanied by 90 million Old Gold wrappers). According to one report, Mrs. George Washington Hill, Jr., daughter-in-law to the chief, played avidly. Entrants apparently devoted an average of eighty hours to answering the puzzle’s ninety questions. The sale of tip sheets became a big business in itself. The reference room of the New York Public Library was reportedly a center of activity for Old Gold “contesticians.” “When a firm like Lorillard offers in all seriousness a first prize of $100,000 . . . and 2,000,000 Americans think their chances at it are worth eighty hours of hard work, the time has come to inquire whether Lorillard or the American public is screwy,” Fortune grumbled.87 Lorillard concluded that if it could hold on to only a quarter of those individuals who switched to Old Gold during the contest, the game would pay off. And it did; the Big Three became the Big Four.88
The Old Gold contests—inhabiting the thin margins of hard work, hope, and chance—offered a fantasy of riches and mobility. They also marked a new notion of participation in the “game” of consumption. Following Old Gold’s lead, Americans would collect box tops for generations to follow, and sweepstakes would remain a big—and largely unregulated—business. Contests, though widely identified as mere hype, nonetheless drew consumers. The lottery tied to a product became a pervasive aspect of consumer fantasy in the twentieth century—yet another example of tobacco industry innovation.
As new advertising media became available, the industry quickly seized these promotional opportunities. During the 1930s, the tobacco companies became among the most prolific advertisers on commercial radio. American Tobacco developed the legendary musical variety show, Your Hit Parade, which premiered on NBC radio in April 1935 but ultimately moved to CBS, where it remained until 1947. Featuring popular singers and musical performers, the show—dominated by Hill—offered a weekly ranking of hit songs based on a national survey, the precursor of the “top forty.” Lord & Thomas prominently centered attention on the weekly announcement of the �
�number one” song in the nation, as well as on Lucky Strike cigarettes. Beginning in 1950, the show made the transition to television, where the industry would begin to invest lavishly in the production of spot commercials and product placement.89
Yet another company also joined the ranks of the Big Three. In 1933, Philip Morris entered the cigarette market with its namesake brand Philip Morris, and, to the surprise of many, the cigarette took off. Having emerged as an independent entity from the corporate debris of the old Trust, Philip Morris and its predecessors had introduced some fifty different cigarette brands to little acclaim. The company’s best-known product was a premium brand introduced in 1927 specifically for women—the first to explicitly do so—known as Marlboro, a twenty-cent cigarette with a small but loyal following.
Philip Morris cigarettes found quick popularity after their introduction in 1933, largely on the basis of a claimed innovation, a new casing (applied to retain moisture) called diethylene glycol. After sponsoring a series of investigations, Philip Morris made extravagant medical claims that its product was less irritating than its competitors’. The company worked diligently to bring its research to the attention of the medical profession, advertising heavily in medical journals and often providing free cigarettes to receptive physicians. The company’s ads for the general public advised readers to “Ask Your Doctor about a Light Smoke.” In a campaign worthy of Bernays himself, the company worked diligently to make Philip Morris the cigarette of the American medical profession during a period of simmering concern about the product’s health effects. As a Fortune writer explained:The object of all this propaganda is not only to make doctors smoke Philip Morris cigarettes, thus setting an example for impressionable patients, but also to implant the findings [about diethylene glycol] so strongly in the medical mind that the doctors will actually advise their coughing, rheumy, and fur-tongued patients to switch to Philip Morris on the ground that they are less irritating.90
In addition to the promise of a milder, less irritating cigarette, Philip Morris ads featured “the best bellhop in New York City.” Johnny Roventini, soon renamed Johnnie Morris, was a forty-three-inch tall dwarf who could be heard throughout the country broadcasting the slogan “Call for Philip Morris.” His smiling countenance was plastered on posters, billboards, and ads everywhere. Traveling across the country liberally disbursing free cigarettes, Johnnie was an unabashed success. “He will go . . . wherever his dwarfhood, his voice, and his free cigarette will win him the eyes, ears, and lungs of a crowd,” cooed Fortune, assigning the campaign to the “harmless nonsense (as against reason-why) school of advertising.”91 Johnnie earned $20,000 a year for his efforts, and Philip Morris insured him for $100,000 against growing an inch. During this period of Philip Morris’s meteoric rise, the company went beyond advertising to promote its product in the Bernays manner, paying college students to distribute the brand to friends.92
By the end of the 1930s, the success of Old Gold and Philip Morris had reconfigured the industry. But it had now reached its plateau; while Philip Morris and Lorillard achieved big-time status, no others did. The Big Five of 1950 would—in various incarnations—remain the major producers of cigarettes in the United States for the rest of the century.
By the 1930s, it became eminently clear that cigarettes would dominate all other forms of tobacco consumption. American Tobacco produced some five hundred tobacco products—plug, pipe tobacco, and cigars as well as cigarettes—yet a single cigarette brand, Lucky Strike, accounted for 75 percent of the company’s sales in that decade and 65 percent of its profits.93 Similarly, Camel accounted for more than 75 percent of R.J. Reynolds’s profits in 1938, selling some 45 billion cigarettes. In 1916, the tobacco industry rolled out 25 billion cigarettes, astounding corporate observers at the time; by 1943, the number had grown to 255 billion. By 1950, the industry was getting more than 90 percent of all revenues from cigarettes.
Source: Robert K. Heimann, Tobacco and Americans (New York: McGraw, 1960).
CHART 1 Forms of tobacco consumption
Not only had cigarettes displaced all other forms of tobacco use; total consumption of tobacco increased dramatically in the first half of the twentieth century. In 1880, at the time of the inception of the modern cigarette, approximately 250 million pounds of tobacco were consumed annually. By the early 1950s, Americans consumed more than 1.5 billion pounds, a fivefold increase. Cigarettes accounted for this rise almost completely, while all other forms of tobacco use either remained stable or fell. By 1950, each cigarette smoker consumed more than seven pounds of tobacco yearly, cigar smokers less than one pound. Cigarette consumption had increased from approximately fifty cigarettes per adult per year in 1880, to nearly five hundred by 1920. Over the next decade, consumption would double to nearly one thousand, and by the start of World War II, it would double yet again. At mid-century, Americans smoked over 350 billion cigarettes a year.
Such massive growth had powerful implications for the economy as a whole. Cigarettes accounted for 1.4 percent of the gross national product and a remarkable 3.5 percent of all consumer spending on nondurable goods. The cigarette reverberated throughout the American economy. Tobacco was the fourth largest cash crop in the nation, and in Connecticut, Maryland, North Carolina, and Virginia, it ranked first.94
“The cigarette horizon still has a virtual unlimited ceiling,” crowed Printers’ Ink, proudly mixing its metaphors in 1941. “The rate of expansion will be largely influenced by the ingenuity and merchandising ability of the manufacturers.”95 If the cigarette was deeply insinuated into American culture by the middle of the century, it had also become central to the modern nation’s industrial economy. This was a remarkable story given that as late as 1920, it was unclear that the cigarette was much more than another fad in the two-and-a-half century commercial history of tobacco. By mid-century, its triumph was complete.
By the end of the 1920s, the cigarette had accrued a remarkably elastic set of meanings. Though nearly ubiquitous and overwhelmingly sold in just three brands, it was often regarded as a marker of independence and autonomy. Smoking was associated with sexual attractiveness, physical beauty, and leisure. For men, it could connote virility, strength, and mental acuity. When used by women, the same product—even the same brand—could be deployed to invoke feminine beauty as well as social and political equality. Amid the social rigidities of urban industrial culture, the cigarette was favorably associated with pleasure and satisfaction. When surveyed, smokers overwhelmingly cited “sociability” as an essential attraction of the cigarette. The cigarette had assumed meanings previously associated with alcohol, fostering social encounters. A majority also noted the pleasing fragrance (a reminder that responses to smell are historically contingent). Only 5 percent cited taste as one of the cigarette’s pleasures.96
Unlike most other consumer goods, the cigarette also caused a radical change in social behavior. American society had to learn how to smoke. Cigarette smoking became integrated into the social and cultural mores of both work and leisure only after it crossed traditional boundaries of tobacco use. Whereas smoking of cigars and pipes had been a largely private activity, the cigarette came to be brandished publicly, first by men and then by women. Restaurants, theaters, railways, and other public institutions all had to accommodate this new product and behavior.
The cigarette also fit the “modern” culture emerging in the first decades of the twentieth century. It was frequently cited as respite and solace in an increasingly bureaucratized and industrialized world. Certainly, this quality was noted during World War I, when soldiers employed cigarettes to relieve the anxiety and boredom of war. But they were seen no less as an antidote to the frenetic pace of urban-industrial society. As early as 1889, the New York Times—an early critic of the cigarette—explained:Whatever its merits and demerits, one thing is certain—namely, that there is an ever increasing subjection to the influence of this narcotic, whose soothing powers are requisitioned to counteract the evil effects of t
he worry, overpressure and exhaustion which characterize the age in which we live.97
This theme would echo through the first half of the twentieth century. The quiet of a short smoke were promoted as particularly well suited to the pressures of a driven culture.
Since smokers could light up quickly in factories and offices, on buses and trolleys, the monotony of modern work was now punctuated and calibrated by the length of a break needed to smoke a cigarette. That the cigarette could be used anywhere—and anytime—was an attribute widely noted by its advertisers. The time to light up, their ads proclaimed, is “Now.” As the boundaries of where and when to smoke eroded through the 1920s and 1930s, the cigarette was rapidly diffused into the shops, stores, restaurants, and transport that made up the new consumer world.
The process by which the cigarette came to “fit” within the parameters of American culture was anything but “natural” or serendipitous. Product and culture were brought into conformity by specific and often purposeful economic and social forces, a process that required “adjustment” of traditional boundaries and social expectations as well as the deployment of new techniques that structured both product and market. It is perhaps its remarkable range of meanings—and their successful definition and construction through advertising and promotion—that makes the cigarette such a powerful symbol of the consumer culture.
Adjusting the message to meet the moment tested the creativity and ingenuity of the cigarette’s promoters. Advertisers quickly picked up and utilized the cigarette’s “functions”: it “soothed the nerves,” “aided digestion,” encouraged a good diet, provided a “lift,” and was “your best friend.” Advertisers promised relief from “jangled nerves” and special respite from the frenetic rhythms of the urban society. “Build yourself a CAMEL SMOKE SCREEN,” counseled one ad, “We claim with good evidence to back us that a cool cloud of CAMEL smoke is a practically perfect protective smokescreen. Outside the charmed circle of its mellow fragrance, troubles and worries and sundry bothers hover baffled. Within, all is peace, pleasure, content.”98