The Cigarette Century

by Allan Brandt

  He went on to discuss the White Paper’s dangers to the public’s health:If there is no place for the missionary who has prejudged the issue of smoking and found too simply that “smoking causes cancer,” so too there is no place in this arena for the glossing over of the suspected hazard—and it is considered real—by the presentation of carefully selected evidence.94

  Despite Garland’s concerns, the White Paper, like the Frank Statement, garnered a great deal of praise in the public media, which Hill & Knowlton carefully documented.95

  The legendary Camel sign at Times Square blew fifteen smoke rings per minute. Douglas Leigh, the giant of twentieth-century billboard production and promotion, designed the sign, which quickly became a New York City landmark following its premier in late 1941. Outdoor advertising was a mainstay of tobacco promotion throughout the century. I visited the Camel sign in 1961, in my first visit to New York City. Its run on Broadway lasted until 1966.

  James “Buck” Duke became the principal force in moving the tobacco industry from chew, snuff, and cigars into the cigarette trade. At the same time, he consolidated the Tobacco Trust into a corporate monolith at the turn of the twentieth century.

  The Bonsack Machine, introduced in 1882, could produce some 100,000 cigarettes per day. It displaced the labor-intensive craft work of hand rolling and standardized a mass-consumption product. Duke’s mechanics worked to modify and improve the Bonsack prototype. Pictured above is a re-engineered version from 1892.

  The tobacco industry began to insert collecting cards into packages in the 1880s in order to stiffen paper wrappers. More importantly, the industry understood what would appeal to boys, the principal target of promotions for collecting and trading. Card collecting tapped into a powerful dynamic in the initiation of new smokers.

  The first Camel cigarette campaign of 1915 announced the arrival of national brands. Devised by the N.W. Ayer Agency, the campaign created considerable anticipation and interest.

  By 1920, one of the most resilient advertising slogans of the century adorned ads for the nation’s most popular brand.

  By the mid-1930s, as this Life magazine cover indicates, social prohibitions on women smokers had been overwhelmed by a potent combination of industry public relations and promotion grounded in feminism and cultural change.

  In the years before tobacco companies considered it culturally viable to advertise directly to women, they offered more subtle and suggestive notions to would-be women smokers. Initiated in 1926 this Chesterfield advertising slogan reportedly led to a 40 percent increase in sales.

  These ads, drawn by well-known pinup artist John La Gatta, make explicit the sexual allure that the companies sought to associate with their product. “Everybody’s doing it!” noted the ad below. “Do you inhale? Of course you do!”

  The “Reach for a Lucky Instead of a Sweet” campaign touched off a major controversy in the late 1920s. Not only did the candy industry rise in protest, but a number of critics suggested that American Tobacco was using these ads to solicit youngsters. CEO George Washington Hill utilized the public relations skills of Edward Bernays to sustain both the campaign and the controversy that helped to make Lucky Strike the most popular brand. The association of smoking and weight loss would be repeatedly used as a marketing promotion throughout the century.

  By the early 1930s, advertisements portraying physicians suggested underlying public concernsabout the health impacts of smoking. Tobacco companies competed to reassure smokers that their particular brands relieved any symptoms associated with cigarette use, from “irritation” to “coughing” to “scratchy throat.”

  In the combat of tobacco advertising of the 1930s, the William Esty Agency offered the idea that “it’s fun to be fooled”—taking a direct shot at Hill’s claims about “toasting.”

  American Tobacco told its fashionable women smokers to “Ask your Doctor About a Light Smoke.”

  During the 1930s, cigarettes were often promoted with explicit therapeutic rationales or health assurances. According to some ads, they could provide “a lift” or “stimulate digestion.” In this characteristic ad, prominent professional athletes, including Lou Gehrig and Dizzy Dean, claimed that “Camels don’t get your wind.”

  This ad, which appeared at the height of the Great Depression, showed a party of Camel smokers at the Victor Hugo Restaurant in Beverly Hills. It featured the endorsement of Mrs. William Hollingsworth Jr., who explained “Camels stimulate my taste, aid digestion.” National brands promoted the “democratization” of goods. Claire Huntington, an “efficient stenographer,” is also pictured in the ad.

  The cigarette became an ever-presentprop in portraiture, film, and popular culture. Marlene Dietrich (right) poses in the 1930s. Humphrey Bogart (below), is shown in a still from The Maltese Falcon, 1941.

  Smoking in movies both recognized and promoted the centrality of the cigarette in contemporary culture, a fact not lost on an industry that thoroughly understood the power of this medium. The use of cigarettes in film conveyed powerful symbolic meanings about characters and relationships. Right, Fredric March and Joan Bennett in Trade Winds, 1938.

  Below, Paul Henreid and Bette Davis in Now, Voyager, 1942.

  Dana Andrews and Joan Fontaine in Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, 1956.

  Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty in Bonnie and Clyde, 1967. Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty in Bonnie and Clyde, 1967.

  As concerns about the health implications of smoking persisted—and then increased—in the 1930s and 1940s, advertising explicitly addressed these anxieties. Companies initially saw competitive opportunities in such concerns. The ads reproduced here appeared in medical journals. Claiming that Philip Morris cigarettes did not cause the common symptoms associated with smoking, they urged physicians to recommend the brand to their patients.

  R.J. Reynolds fixed on the likely notion that smokers would be attracted to the brand that their physicians chose, and that physicians would advocate for a brand that lionized the medical profession. These prominent ads of the late 1940s, pitched at both doctors and the general public, subtly sought to subvert emerging statistical and epidemiological knowledge by inviting doctors and patients to “make your own test.”

  The “More Doctors” campaign was apparently based on the work of A. Grant Clarke, a William Esty ad executive, on loan to R.J. Reynolds to establish a Medical Relations Division. Clarke would distribute free packs of Camels at medical conventions; pollsters from an “independent research organization” would then be sent to ask the physicians what brand of cigarettes they were carrying.

  As new scientific findings emerged, the TIRC deployed the quotations and themes gathered in the White Paper. Each time a new finding implicating smoking as a cause of disease was announced, the TIRC would respond, contacting prominent journalists and news outlets to offer their critiques. Journalists, eager to provide “both sides of the story,” typically offered equal time for Little and his peers to rebut substantive investigations of smoking’s harms. Hill and his assistants lobbied editors and journalists for “fairness” and “balance” in covering the “controversy.” Controversy was precisely the outcome Hill & Knowlton sought. Through the auspices of Hill & Knowlton, the TIRC had access to figures like Joseph Garland, Henry Luce, Arthur Sulzberger, and Edward R. Murrow, which helped ensure that tobacco’s “side of the story” was well represented in their coverage.

  In mid-1955, Murrow devoted two consecutive broadcasts of his CBS television news documentary See It Now to the tobacco controversy. The show offered interviews with both Little and Wynder, as well as other industry representatives, scientists, and officials. Hill & Knowlton got precisely what they had hoped for, an ambiguous conclusion noting that more scientific research would be needed to settle the question and that the industry was fully committed to this process. Hill would not leave this outcome to chance. He arranged a meeting with Murrow, his producer Fred Friendly, and writer/researcher Arthur D. Morse prior to the production of the broadcast
. Hill also contacted his friend Art Hall, director of public relations at Alcoa, the corporate sponsor of the broadcast. Hall assured him that the program would be a “balanced one.” Hill wrote confidently to Hartnett that Friendly “believes that if anyone gets a break in the program it would be the tobacco industry.”96 As virtually all American television viewers of the 1950s knew, Murrow was a chain smoker, often consuming sixty to seventy cigarettes a day. He would smoke throughout his live broadcasts. A decade later, he would succumb to lung cancer, just after turning fifty-seven.97

  In 1962, Carl Thompson, who had worked the tobacco accounts for Hill & Knowlton since their inception in 1953, compared this work to an ice-berg in which only one-ninth was visible: the most important work of public relations was accomplished out of public view yet powerfully shaped the information environment on tobacco and health. The firm’s well-oiled machinery, fueled with the resources of the tobacco industry, rivaled the Bonsack machine for efficient productivity. Hill & Knowlton offered skeptics, information, research, and even copy to an eager media. A twenty-four-point list entitled “Special Assistance to Press, Radio, Magazine and Others” related many instances when “personal contacts” with editors and reporters had modified stories to the industry’s benefit. In one instance,

  [t]wo editorials widely used in “home town” dailies and weeklies throughout the country were prepared for and then distributed by the U.S. Press Association. These were “The Same Old Culprit” and “Truth Makes a Slow Crop.” Over 100 clippings of these have already been received.98

  In their entreaties for fairness to the industry, the firm’s staffers repeated several key themes. First, they would note that the industry completely understood its important public responsibilities. Second, the industry was deeply committed to investigating all the scientific questions relevant to resolving the “controversy.” Third, they urged skepticism regarding the “statistical studies.” And fourth, they offered the media a long list of “independent” skeptics to consult to assure balance in their presentations. The primary independent skeptic was the TIRC’s Little.

  Given the press’s penchant for controversy and its often naive notion of balance, these appeals were remarkably successful. Hill & Knowlton expertly broadcast the arguments (typically not based on substantive research of any kind) of a small group of skeptics as if their positions represented a dominant perspective on the medical science of the cigarette. The press, in response, dealt with scientific debate as if it were the same as a political debate. In one telling example, Dwight MacDonald, a New Yorker reporter, wrote to American Tobacco Company President Paul Hahn while researching an article on cigarettes and science in late 1953. Hill & Knowlton, anticipating that MacDonald’s piece would be “a blast at the industry,” sent him a list of “over 100 eminent cancer experts” who had expressed doubts about the relationship between lung cancer and smoking. They reported that as of July 1954 he had apparently abandoned the piece. No article on tobacco by MacDonald ever appeared in the New Yorker.99

  Another strategy deployed throughout the 1950s was to learn about new scientific findings and consensus reports, and to be ready to attack when they were released. The agency took pride in its extensive network of scientific informants. At its headquarters in New York, the TIRC developed a large, systematically cross-referenced library on all things tobacco-related. As Carl Thompson explained:One policy that we have long followed is to let no major unwarranted attack go unanswered. And that we would make every effort to have an answer in the same day—not the next day or the next edition. This calls for knowing what is going to come out both in publications and in meetings.100

  In many instances, the TIRC offered a rebuttal of new findings even before they had become available. They could be so nimble because they aggressively solicited a small group of doubters and broadcast their misgivings as if they were based on rigorous and systematic research. So long as such skepticism survived (and of course it would), the industry possessed the basis for their aggressive defense.

  The Hill & Knowlton offices were adept at taking a single dissenter and assuring widespread media coverage of his views. They were particularly proud, for example, of the intensive reporting they secured for Wilhelm Hueper’s paper at the Sixth International Cancer Congress in Sao Paulo, Brazil, in 1954. Hoyt noted how “copies of Hueper’s paper were (quote) made available (end quote) to the New York press.” Even independent skeptics like Hueper were eager to have the attention that Hill & Knowlton could bring them. Any finding potentially calling into question the smoking-disease link, no matter how tangential or insignificant, was heralded and sent on to the media. As Hoyt later explained:Len Zahn has often been the Daniel in the Lions Den. As the man on the spot at a meeting where an adverse attack is being made, Len goes right into the press room with the T.I.R.C. answer and sees that the correspondents working on the stories have our side to go right into their first stories. This takes some doing. And it takes good contacts with the science writers.101

  The public impression of scientific and medical uncertainty that resulted was a crucial element in maintaining the market of current smokers as well as recruiting new ones.102 Industry literature, for example, frequently pointed to the fact that nonsmokers could also develop lung cancer. Therefore, they argued, how could one attribute lung cancer to cigarette smoking? But none of the researchers who had found a relationship between smoking and lung cancer even suggested such a one-to-one correspondence. And medical science had long ago accepted notions of cause which assumed that not every exposure to a causal agent resulted in disease.103

  Hill also emphasized the need for “editorial and statistical research in all phases of the cigarette problem to be carried on through public relations counsel.”104 By this he meant that the industry should survey public opinion about smoking as a cause of disease. In a subsequent memo he explained: “1. it should attempt to evaluate what has been the degree of penetration in the public mind of the cancer scare; 2. it is impossible to develop an intelligent public relations activity without a more decided knowledge of public attitudes than is now in hand.”105 Such “research” could then be offered to the media. Hill suggested articles on “What are the smoking habits of long-lived distinguished public leaders?” and “What are the human ills erroneously attributed to tobacco over the centuries?”106

  One critical aspect of the public relations program was to influence the medical profession. Physicians stood at a critical juncture in the chain of authority regarding the health effects of smoking and so required special attention. As a result, Hill & Knowlton developed particular approaches to targeting clinicians. The TIRC (and later the Tobacco Institute) distributed the periodical Tobacco and Health free to doctors and dentists. The January/February 1958 issue declared:Continuing scientific research lends support to the position that too many unknowns exist today concerning lung cancer to warrant conclusions placing a major causative role on cigarette smoking, according to the 1957 Report of the Scientific Director of the Tobacco Industry Research Committee.107

  Human cancers, the “journal” constantly asserted, were complex processes, difficult to study, difficult to understand. With a circulation of over 500,000, Tobacco and Health was an important vehicle for sustaining doubt among physicians, who would in turn influence the views of patients. As Carl Thompson explained in 1962:[I]t goes to all doctors and dentists in the country and, believe me, not all of them like to get it. However, we know that a good many of them pay attention to it or else we wouldn’t have so many complaining letters—as well as the more receptive kind. We have concluded that even if TOBACCO AND HEALTH aggravates a doctor, its very presence reminds him that there are other aspects to the lung cancer problem and the smoking and health question. . . . We don’t try to kid ourselves that all doctors are aware of the publication or that many of them even open it or see it. However, the checks that we have made, both by personal interview and post card surveys, indicate that it does get attention to a rather surp
rising degree.108

  The publication was also widely disseminated to legislators, journalists, and others.

  The mantra “not enough research” would echo throughout the 1950s and beyond. In 1958, four years after the original statement, the TIRC drafted “Another Frank Statement to Smokers.” Scientific investigation had progressed greatly in these intervening years, but the tobacco industry’s position remained constant:[A] substantial number of doctors and scientists of high professional standing and repute have, after investigation, publicly challenged the validity of these broad charges against tobacco. . . . The cause of cancer remains as much a mystery as ever.109

  Hill & Knowlton was still making a “mystery” in the face of increasingly compelling medical research.110

  In 1962, Hoyt restated this line, now honed for nearly a decade: “The T.I.R.C. position is . . . a fairly simple one. We don’t know the answers. We don’t know what causes lung cancer. Tobacco has not been absolved but neither has it been found guilty, in whole or part. We must continue research.” This position had served the industry well. For smokers and would-be smokers, uncertainty offered a powerful rationale to start or keep using cigarettes. Second, the “we don’t know” approach offered legal protection. The industry had subtly backed away from assurances of “safety” that could constitute grounds for accusations of negligence. Third, the approach bought the industry critically needed time to combat regulation and, if it chose, to investigate the production of “safer” products. Finally, “we don’t know” offered those engaged in the production and sales of tobacco an important moral defense of their own actions. This need for denial would become, in the second half of the twentieth century, a crucial element in the promotion of a life-threatening product.