The Cigarette Century

by Allan Brandt

  Another strategy was to emphasize the taste of the advertiser’s particular brand: blends of tobacco and flavorings were closely guarded secrets. Taste possessed double meanings, both crucial to the success of the cigarette. When tobacco ads touted their brand’s superior taste, they suggested much more than the experience of the individual smoker; they not so subtly implied that smokers of their brand publicly demonstrated “better taste.” This demonstration was a public act of great significance; although the idea of “conspicuous consumption” is usually applied to homes and cars, the cigarette—as advertised—offered important opportunities for a form of conspicuous consumption that crossed the lines of social class. Marketers both drove and responded to these tastes. If the cigarette signaled new values concerning pleasure, it was not simply a mark of easing Victorian strictures. Increasingly, pleasure would come to be associated with satisfying needs through the very process of consumption. The tobacco industry had created a product that could be virtually all things to all people; a product with such an impressive elasticity of meanings that it came to be defined by its promotion more than by any innate characteristic. Business writers, social critics, and cultural observers could all agree as early as the 1930s that the cigarette had emerged as perhaps the central icon of the new consumer culture.

  At mid-century, “the cult of the cigarette,” concluded Walter B. Hayward in the New York Times, “has spread over the world. Demand is strong, supply is short and prices are high in many countries.”99 During World War II, marketers had yet again adjusted to historical contingencies, using the product as a symbol of support for the military effort. In the years immediately after the war, cigarettes were used as currency in occupied Germany, and black markets for tobacco flourished in Europe.100

  But with all its astonishing success, its array of social and political meanings, and the most determined efforts of its advertisers and promoters, the cigarette could never entirely conceal its dark side. Many argued that it was a frequent cause of ill health. Through mid-century, claims and counterclaims about the dangers and benefits of smoking to health were left unresolved while consumption continued its meteoric rise. But try though the industry might to allay concerns, belief in the dangers of the cigarette could not be dispelled.

  Even as the consumer culture triumphed, criticism remained—not only of the cigarette but the cultural norms in which it came to be affixed—often drawing upon deep, traditional American values emphasizing restraint and deferred gratification. Deeply embedded within the culture of consumption was a profound ambivalence about the nature of agency, individuality, and risk. Later in the century, as the health risks of smoking became fully explicit, this ambivalence would resurface in powerful ways.

  II

  SCIENCE

  Men and Women with irritation of the nose and throat

  due to smoking were instructed to change to Philip

  Morris Cigarettes. Then day after day, each doctor kept

  a record of each case. The final results, published in authoritative

  medical journals, proved conclusively that

  when smokers changed to Philip Morris, every case of

  irritation cleared completely or definitely improved.1

  PHILIP MORRIS ADVERTISEMENT, 1937

  Yes, the T-Zone is your own critical laboratory for any cigarette. That’s where you learn by actual smoking experience the particular cigarette that suits you best.

  For your taste and your throat are individual to you. Only your taste and throat can decide which cigarette tastes best to you . . . and how it affects your throat.

  Try Camels. See how your taste responds to the rich full flavor of Camel ’s choice, properly aged tobaccos. See how your throat reacts to the delightfully cool mildness of Camels.2

  CAMEL ADVERTISEMENT, 1947

  Smoking is not the devilish habit it has often been accused of being, but I know of no condition in which the persistence in it has ever done the slightest good, but I do know of a vast number of records which conclusively prove that smoking has done harm. Most people are more or less aware of this in a general way, but continue to smoke.3

  M.F. ASHLEY MONTAGU, 1942

  CHAPTER 4

  More Doctors Smoke Camels

  AT THE 1947 AMA convention in Atlantic City, doctors formed long lines to get free cigarettes. The Philip Morris display at the convention explained the advantages of diethylene glycol as a hygroscopic agent, insisting it was the healthiest cigarette. Just down the boardwalk, R.J. Reynolds proudly announced that more doctors chose Camels than any other brand.4 These claims of comparative health advantage marked an implicit recognition of ongoing concerns about tobacco and serious disease. At the very moment that these doctors queued up to get their free twenty-cent packs, researchers in the United Kingdom and the United States were beginning the studies that would demonstrate the causal relationship between smoking and lung cancer.

  The year before, R.J. Reynolds had initiated a major new advertising campaign for Camels centered on the memorable slogan “More Doctors Smoke Camels than Any Other Cigarette.” This phrase would be the mainstay of Camel’s advertising for the next six years. Offering glowing portrayals of physicians in both medical journals and popular magazines, the ads exploited the respected and romantic image the medical profession had achieved in American society.5 The first ad was prefaced with the bold statement “Every doctor in private practice was asked.” This brought immediacy to the slogan by linking the general depiction of doctors to each consumer’s own physician. Admirable, forthright physicians, including the reader’s own, had “named their choice,” and that choice, the ad proclaimed, was Camels.

  Besides providing images of professional trustworthiness and dedication, the “More Doctors” campaign also exploited popular faith in modern medicine. One ad referred to the “amazing strides in medical science [that] have added years to life expectancy,” and urged readers to “thank medical science for that. Thank your doctor and thousands like him . . . toiling ceaselessly . . . that you and yours may enjoy a longer, better life.”6 Life-saving scientific discovery was linked, through the magic of advertising, to Camel-smoking doctors.

  In retrospect, these ads are a powerful reminder of both the character of emerging public concerns about the health effects of smoking and the cultural authority of physicians and medicine. In the 1930s and 1940s, smoking was the norm for both men and women in the United States—including a majority of physicians.7 At the same time, however, tobacco companies were concerned about rising anxiety over the cigarette’s risks to health. The physician was an evocative, reassuring figure to include in their advertisements—and their clinical authority allayed fears about cigarettes’ safety. R.J. Reynolds’s “More Doctors” campaign was the capstone of a strategy liberally used from the 1930s to the early 1950s, in which tobacco companies competed to portray their cigarettes as the most healthy while utilizing physicians to counteract any fears of serious health risks. At the same time, the tobacco industry attempted to sustain, for as long as possible, the verdict that the links between smoking and disease were “unproven.”

  One of the most important “discoveries” of the last century was to demonstrate scientifically that cigarette smoking causes serious disease and death. From our contemporary vantage point, simple logic suggests that the dramatic rise in cigarette smoking must be correlated with the finding in 1946 that lung cancer cases had tripled over the previous three decades.8 But this seemingly obvious epidemiological conclusion was delayed by decades of medical and public debate, largely fueled by the tobacco industry. As a result, this knowledge—this fact—was not easily accepted.

  Medical concern about the health effects of tobacco dates back to its earliest use, long before the rise of the cigarette. The first research, conducted in the eighteenth century, centered on nicotine and its impact. The long-standing knowledge that, in its purified form, a drop of nicotine could kill helped sustain the antagonisms of the nineteenth-century
antitobacco movement. In the early twentieth century, activists circulated news accounts of a baby who died from swallowing a cigar. A few years later, reports circulated that cattle straying into a tobacco field died from “chewing the weed.”9 As cigarettes grew in popularity, they were viewed as a particular danger especially because, critics warned, they were so easily overused. Unlike pipes and cigars, cigarettes could be smoked anytime, anywhere, offering new opportunities for “intoxication.” In 1887, the New York Tribune reported the sudden death of Russell H. Kuevals, a medical student at the elite College of Physicians and Surgeons and “a constant and excessive smoker,” who apparently “was killed by cigarettes.” An autopsy revealed that “the poison had so destroyed [the heart’s] action that it was unable to do its duty.”10 The New York Times published similar stories of young men carried away on a bed of smoke, poisoned by nicotine.11

  Such concerns led early researchers to explore the chemical composition of tobacco smoke. Their studies typically found carbonic acid and “a series of elements which, with almost no exception, are poisonous”: nicotine, hydronic acid, carbon monoxide, and pyridine.12 Additionally, physicians often associated inhalation with carbon monoxide poisoning. A number of reports linked inhalation to “a decreased or decreasing supply of normal blood,”13 which, in turn, led to a number of conditions typically associated with cigarette smoking: anemia, lack of growth, and loss of energy. “The smoker carries his furnace between his lips and breathes the same kind of gas that the coal-stove produces when its combustion is not perfect,” noted Harper’s Weekly in 1912. “If he does not poison himself with nicotine . . . he poisons himself with oxide of carbon.”14

  Beneath these physiological observations about the bodily impact of tobacco ran deeper anxieties about the moral implications of cigarette smoking. It would have been uncharacteristic of the times to make a sharp distinction between physical and moral harms. The relationship between smoking and health received considerable attention, in part, because it apparently confirmed contemporary moral assumptions. Smoking—defined as an act of dubious morals—must lead to disease. For antitobacco crusaders, such as Lucy Page Gaston, physicians were crucial allies confirming through medical diagnosis what common sense dictated. Dr. D. H. Kress, the well-known anticigarette crusader, expressed orthodox reformist views when he suggested the powerful sympathy between physical health and morality. “There exists a very intimate relation between a man’s physical habits and what he is morally,” explained Kress. “Possibly there exists a physical cause for every immoral act and crime committed.”15 According to Kress, nicotine was a narcotic poison acting on both the brain and the heart. Smokers developed an addictive craving; constant use would lead to physical decline. “The liver, kidneys, and other vital organs,” he claimed, “whose work it is to keep the blood freed from poisons, wear out prematurely.”16

  Other physicians moved just as easily from making clinical assessments of smoking’s bodily harms to expressing moral qualms about the impact of smoking on character, mores, and responsibility. Attacks on smoking did not differentiate such concerns; therefore, the question of “proof ”—as we would later know it—had no explicit meaning in this context. Critics of the cigarette enjoyed considerable flexibility in assessing smoking’s harms. As one writer explained, “smoking is very likely to stunt something, most probably the mind, or perhaps the body only, or sometimes both mind and body.”17 One way or another, dire effects would take hold. Physicians and researchers followed tobacco’s moral opponents to evaluate the health effects of smoking on those deemed most vulnerable to its harms. In its focus on the harms of smoking for children and adolescents, college students, and women, medical science was clearly responding to social forces. These were precisely the groups of greatest concern to opponents of cigarette smoking. This interplay of social forces and medical “opinion” drew on deep historical roots.18

  Moral considerations were practically indistinguishable from concerns about the health effects of cigarette smoking. Did smoking cause degeneracy? Or was it simply that degenerates liked to smoke? This question, posed in a wide variety of forms for a breathtaking range of negative effects, succumbed to no easy answers. Was the cigarette but a signal of “relaxation of self control,” poor scholarship, and other signs of moral laxity, or could the problems of youth be attributed to smoking itself ?19 In the face of such unanswerable conundrums, moral presumptions about smoking frequently surfaced to dominate debate. It would take nearly half a century to disentangle these moral assumptions from medical research on smoking. This conflation of the medical and moral would serve as a significant obstacle (among many) to establishing the evidentiary basis of the harms of smoking.

  By the mid-1920s, medical opinion on the health impact of the cigarette had become sharply split. “If one asks of a librarian for works on tobacco,” observed Dr. Robert Abbe, “he will probably ask you, ‘For or against?’”20 Still, some points of consensus emerged from this debate. Many concluded that smoking could be harmful to some susceptible individuals; “excessive” smoking—often poorly defined—came to be judged as dangerous; and smoking was deemed harmful to children and adolescents.

  Antitobacco vitriol often utilized the cultural authority of science and medicine. As the eugenics movement gathered momentum, it drew the cigarette into its vortex. Many physicians argued that the deleterious consequences of the cigarette fell disproportionately on the young during key phases of development. “It becomes plain that any insidious narcotic poison which exerts its chief effects upon the respiratory function and the motor nerve cells of the spinal cord and brain, can not fail to be disastrous to the young,” explained one concerned doctor. He went on, in a tone not untypical of such critiques, to call the desire to smoke an “unhealthy appetite” and “one of the potent causes of the physical, mental and moral degeneracy that is fast filling our jails with criminals, our almshouses with paupers, and our asylums with the imbecile and insane.”21 Although it is easy to dismiss such attacks as moralistic pseudoscience, they were representative of medical positions of the time, and held with deep conviction.

  Physician-eugenicists tied cigarettes to patterns of hereditary degeneracy. According to Dr. L. Pierce Clark, neurologist at Manhattan State Hospital, tobacco caused degeneracy by inducing chronic poisonous congestion of the brain, the spinal cord, and nerves.22 Other observers found that the onset of the “cigarette habit” had dire implications for mental and physical development. Charles B. Towns, the well-known activist and expert on tobacco, described the effects of nerve damage as physical (“insomnia” and “lowered vitality”) and moral (“desire to avoid responsibility and to travel the road of least resistance”) and asserted a 15 percent difference in “general efficiency” between smokers and nonsmokers.23 Boys who smoked were labeled “physical and mental dwarfs” typically unable to progress beyond eighth grade.24 Such accounts often depicted the cigarette as the first step on the road to decline and failure. While there might be other contributing factors, one researcher warned, “smoking is likely to put a boy in such a condition that other and worse habits will be taken up, largely on account of a weakened moral stamina.”25 Tobacco became the preeminent “gateway drug” leading its patrons to lives of decay and degradation.

  Looking back at this question from a time in which rigid barriers have been constructed in an attempt—not universally successful—to differentiate between medicine and morality, one is struck by the same concerns expressed by both physicians and health crusaders. The attack on smoking as both unhealthful and immoral often placed critics of tobacco on unsteady turf, for their claims often contradicted reality. Some smokers were excellent athletes, others were tall and healthy, and others were noted for their literary skills and sharp intellect. Dr. J. W. Seaver, physical director of the Yale gymnasium, claimed that “‘high stand men’ at Yale do not smoke,” but Harper’s Weekly noted that “a large majority of the leading men in New York—judges, politicians, merchants, bankers, la
wyers, doctors—smoke tobacco. And some of the ablest ministers do the like, though perhaps not a majority of them.”26

  And yet the axiom that good living and good health go hand in hand persisted. Critics often cited college studies demonstrating the sorry impact of the cigarette on students. According to one such study conducted by Seaver, nonsmoking seniors at Yale were 20 percent taller than smokers, were 23 percent heavier, possessed 66 percent more lung capacity, and were superior students. 27 A poll of high school and college coaches overwhelmingly confirmed their belief that cigarettes were harmful for athletes. The coaches believed not only that smoking retarded physical development and hindered performance, but that nonsmokers were more cooperative and easier to discipline.28

  Such studies generally lacked rigor and were subject to many kinds of bias. Research on college smoking, for example, often produced confounding findings. One investigation at Columbia University found that smokers tended to be more successful athletes.29 A typical study of the impact of cigarette smoking on college students, conducted at Antioch College, showed no discernible effects on pulse rate, lung capacity, or blood pressure. Nonetheless, researchers did find a dramatic impact on the quality of school work: more than 62 percent of heavy smokers failed to maintain required grades. According to many of the college-based studies, smoking “devitalized ambition.” This, one researcher speculated, might be explained by “deterioration of nervous tissue” leading to “lower mental output.”30