The Cigarette Century

by Allan Brandt

15 Philip Wagner, “Cigarettes vs. Candy,” New Republic, February 13, 1929, 343-345.

  16 Lasker, a titan in the history of tobacco sales and promotion, would during the 1930s develop a second identity as a medical philanthropist. He and his wife Mary directed their considerable largesse to cancer research and the prolongation of life, a telling irony in the history of this product. (See Allen, 21-22, 36-37.)

  17 Warren Susman, “‘Personality’ and the Making of Twentieth-Century Culture,” in New Directions in American Intellectual History, eds. John Higham and Paul Conkin (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 212-226.

  18 Marchand, 96-97; 99-101.

  19 Ibid., 97-98.

  20 Sobel, 101.

  21 Fox, 116.

  22 Wagner, 344.

  23 Ibid.

  24 Kenneth M. Goode, “Lucky Strike Advertising Tosses Bombs Among the Bonbons,” Advertising & Selling, November 14, 1928, 19-20.

  25 George, 23.

  26 Goode, 20.

  27 Keller, 32-33.

  28 Marchand, 100-103.

  29 Philip Wagner, 343-345.

  30 Frank Presbrey, The History and Development of Advertising (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1929), 593. Other front-runners were Coca-Cola, which spent $5 million; Procter and Gamble, which spent $4 million on Ivory Soap; Wrigley’s, which spent $3 million; and Campbell’s Soup, which spent $2.5 million.

  31 Quoted in Presbrey, 598.

  32 Otis A. Pease, The Responsibilities of American Advertising; Private Control and Public Influence, 1920-1940 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1958).

  33 Lord & Thomas, Altruism in Advertising (Chicago, New York: Lord & Thomas, 1911), 12.

  34 Walter Dill Scott, The Psychology of Advertising (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1931), i.

  35 Peter B. B. Andrews, “The Cigarette Market, Past and Future,” Advertising and Selling, January 16, 1936, 27.

  36 See Marchand and Lears.

  37 Carl A. Naether, Advertising to Women (New York: Prentice Hall, 1928), 234.

  38 Harry M. Wootten, “Cigarettes’ High Ceiling,” Printers’ Ink, February 1941, 5.

  39 “The American Tobacco Co.,” 100.

  40 Robert Littell, “Cigarette Ad Fact and Fiction,” Reader’s Digest, July 1942, 5-8; and Stuart Chase, “Blindfolded You Know the Difference,” New Republic, August 8, 1928, 296-298.

  41 Chase, 297.

  42 Robert Littell, “Cigarette Ad Fact and Fiction,” Reader’s Digest, July 1942, 8.

  43 E. Ruth Pyrtle, “A Call to Action,” NEA Journal, 19, no. 4 (1930): 117.

  44 Albert T. Poffenberger, Psychology in Advertising (New York: A.W. Shaw, 1925), 61.

  45 Neil Harris, “The Drama of Consumer Desire,” in Yankee Enterprise: The Rise of the American System of Manufactures, eds. Otto Mayr and Robert C. Post (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institute Press, 1981), 189-230.

  46 Obituary, New York Times, March 10, 1995.

  47 Richard S. Tedlow, Keeping the Corporate Image: Public Relations and Business, 1900-1950 (Greenwich, CT: JAI, 1979), 43.

  48 Tedlow, 43.

  49 Upon reviewing the Edward Bernays papers at the Library of Congress, I was impressed not only by the details of his publicity campaigns, but also by the recognition of seeing what had to be secret, internal documentation of his many interventions on behalf of American Tobacco. Why would Bernays maintain such scrupulous records of his hidden efforts? The answer, it seems, is that only such documentation could effectively demonstrate his success. This accounts for the many scrapbooks, memos, and ghostwritten letters that reveal the instrumental activities behind a coherent and powerful initiative to generate media.

  50 Edward Bernays to George Washington Hill, February 7, 1929, Edward Bernays Manuscript Collection [Bernays collection], Box 56, Folder 2, Library of Congress.

  51 Edward L. Bernays, Biography of an Idea: Memoirs of Public Relations Counsel Edward L. Bernays (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1965), 383. See also Larry Tye, The Father of Spin: Edward L. Bernays & the Birth of Public Relations (New York: Crown, 1998). On the history of public relations, see Richard S. Tedlow. “Keeping the Corporate Image: Public Relations and Business, 1900-1950,” in Keeping the Corporate Image: Public Relations and Business, 1900-1950 (Greenwich, CT: JAI, 1979), 27-51; Richard S. Tedlow, New and Improved: The Story of Mass Marketing in America (New York: Basic Books, 1990); and Stuart Ewen, PR!: A Social History of Spin (New York: Basic Books, 1996).

  52 Bernays collection, Box 86, Folder 1.

  53 Ibid., Box 89, Folder 5.

  54 Bernays, 386.

  55 Ibid., 383.

  56 Ibid., 386.

  57 Memorandum, “System Outline for Easter Smokers,” Bernays collection, Box 84.

  58 “Easter Sun Finds the Past in Shadow at Modern Parade.” New York Times, April 1, 1929.

  59 Bernays, 387.

  60 Ibid., 390.

  61 Ibid., 391.

  62 Bernays collection, Box 86, Folder 4 (1929-1930).

  63 See Richard Klein, Cigarettes Are Sublime (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 53-55, 114-115, 162-180, 200-201, 575, 645, 776; and Harris Lewine, Good-Bye to All That (New York: McGraw Hill, 1970).

  64 Giles Playfair, “Smoke Without Fire,” Atlantic Monthly, April 1948, 96.

  65 Raymond Fernand Loewy, Never Leave Well Enough Alone: The Personal Record of an Industrial Designer (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1951), 148. See also Stephen Bayley, The Lucky Strike Packet by Raymond Loewy, ed. Volker Fischer (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag form, 1998).

  66 Loewy, 149.

  67 “The American Tobacco Co.,” 156; R.J. Reynolds, “Turning the Light of Truth on False and Misleading Statements in Recent Cigarette Advertising,” 1930, Bates Nos. ATX05 0240005-0240008, http://tobaccodocuments.org/atc/71000389.html.

  68 “$57,000,000 Worth of Whizz and Whoozle,” Fortune, August 1938, 30.

  69 Nannie M. Tilley, The R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 330.

  70 “$57,000,000 Worth of Whizz and Whoozle,” 30.

  71 Ibid.

  72 Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

  73 Carl Avery Werner, “The Triumph of the Cigarette,” American Mercury, December 1925, 416.

  74 “VI: Cigarettes,” Fortune, April 1936, 218.

  75 Ibid.

  76 Peter B. B. Andrews, “Cigarette Advertising and the 1935 Sales Race,” Advertising and Selling, February 14, 1935, 28, 72.

  77 See Frank Presbrey, The History and Development of Advertising (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1929).

  78 “The American Tobacco Co.,” 154.

  79 “Cigarette Rumor,” Business Week, July 23, 1936, 22.

  80 See Reavis Cox, Competition in the American Tobacco Industry, 1911-1932: A Study of the Effects of the Partition of the American Tobacco Company by the United States Supreme Court (New York: Columbia University Press, 1933).

  81 In 1942, the three leading companies were convicted of conspiracy to monopolize under the provisions of the Sherman Act; this ruling was upheld by the Supreme Court in 1946, but sanctions and fines were minimal. Richard B. Tennant, The American Cigarette Industry (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1950), 317-387; and Ellis W. Hawley, The New Deal and the Problem of Monopoly: A Study in Economic Ambivalence (New York: Fordham University Press, 1966).

  82 Edward G. Connelly, “The Ups and Downs of Tobacco,” Advertising and Selling, November 12, 1930, 20.

  83 Neil H. Borden, “The Effect of Advertising on the Demand for Tobacco Products—Cigarettes,” The Economic Effects of Advertising (Chicago: Richard D. Irwin, 1944), 248.

  84 “Philip Morris & Co.,” Fortune, March 1936, 106.

  85 Borden, 234-235.

  86 Gene Borio, Tobacco Timeline, Accessed July 4, 2006. Available from http://www.tobacco.org/resources/history/Tobacco_History.html.

  87 “The Old Gold Contest,” Fortune, July 1937
, 50.

  88 Ibid., 49-50, 136, 138, 140.

  89 On the rise of radio advertising, see Russell Sanjek, American Popular Music and Its Business: The First Four Hundred Years, vol. III: From 1900 to 1984 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Arnold Shaw, Let’s Dance: Popular Music in the 1930s, ed. Bill Willard (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); Susan J. Douglas, Listening in Radio and the American Imagination (New York: Times Books, 1999); Paul Starr, The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications (New York: Basic Books, 2004); and Ben Gross, I Looked and I Listened: Informal Recollections of Radio and TV (New York: Random House, 1954).

  90 “Philip Morris & Co.,” 114.

  91 Ibid., 119.

  92 “More Cigarets?” Time, March 26, 1945, 86-87.

  93 “The American Tobacco Co.,” 98.

  94 Ibid.

  95 Harry M. Wootten, “Cigarettes’ High Ceiling,” Printer’s Ink Monthly, February 1941, 5.

  96 Emil Bogen, “The Composition of Cigarets and Cigaret Smoke,” JAMA 93, no. 15 (1929): 1110-1114.

  97 “A Whiff from the Pipe: The Uses and Abuses of the Tobacco Plant,” New York Times, March 10, 1889.

  98 Quoted in Lears, 183. The year of the original ad was 1929.

  99 Walter B. Hayward, “Why We Smoke—We Like It,” New York Times Magazine, May 18, 1947, 20, 53-54.

  100 Henner Hess, “The Other Prohibition: The Cigarette Crisis in Post-War Germany,” Crime, Law and Social Change 25, no. 1 (1996): 43-61.

  Chapter 4

  1 Saturday Evening Post, October 16, 1937.

  2 Ladies’ Home Journal, February 1947.

  3 “Nothing Can Be Said in Favor of Smoking,” In Fact 4, no. 10 (1942): 23.

  4 Bernard DeVoto, “Doctors Along the Boardwalk,” in The Easy Chair (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1947), 85-102.

  5 John C. Burnham, “American Medicine’s Golden Age: What Happened to It?” Science 215, no. 4539: 1474-1479.

  6 R.J. Reynolds, “According to a Recent Nationwide Survey: More Doctors Smoke Camels Than Any Other Cigarette!” 1946, Bates No. 502470717, http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu/tid/bwj88d00. R.J. Reynolds established a “Medical Relations Division” under the direction of A. Grant Clarke, from the William Esty Agency, to solicit support of physicians in their Camel campaigns. See M. N. Gardner and A. M. Brandt, “‘The Doctors’ Choice Is America’s Choice’: The Physician in U.S. Cigarette Advertisements, 1930-1953,” American Journal of Public Health 96, no. 2 (2006): 222-232.

  7 Leonid S. Snegireff and Olive M. Lombard, “Survey of Smoking Habits of Massachusetts Physicians,” New England Journal of Medicine 250, no. 24 (1954): 1042-1045; and “The Physician and Tobacco,” Southwestern Medicine, December 1955, 589-590.

  8 “Cigaret Smoking Causes Lung Cancer,” NEA Journal 35, no. 2 (1946).

  9 “Camels, Cows and Tobacco,” Literary Digest, July 7, 1923, 31.

  10 “Cigarettes Killed Him: At Least Coroner Messemer Has Reason to Think So,” New York Times, August 10, 1887.

  11 “Cigarette Smoking Killed Him,” New York Times, September 27, 1890.

  12 R. Kissling, “The Chemistry of Tobacco,” Scientific American Supplement, November 25, 1905, 24999; and Johannes Wilbert, “Tobacco and Shamanism in South America,” in Psychoactive Plants of the World, eds. Richard Evans Schultes and Robert F. Raffauf (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987).

  13 J. Hilton Thompson, “Carbon Monoxide Poisoning by the Inhalation of Cigarette Smoke,” Lancet 163, no. 4197 (1904): 395.

  14 “Harmless Smoking,” Harper’s Weekly, August 3, 1912.

  15 D. H. Kress, “The Cigarette as Related to Moral Reform,” Interstate Medical Journal 23, no. 6 (1916): 485-489.

  16 Kress, 485.

  17 “Cigarette Smoking Among Boys,” Pilgrim’s Scrip, November 1910, 140-141.

  18 See Allan M. Brandt and Paul Rozin, eds., Morality and Health (New York: Routledge, 1997).

  19 Thomas Warrington Gosling, “Tobacco and Scholarship,” School Review (1913): 691-693.

  20 Josephine Baker, “What Price Tobacco,” Ladies’ Home Journal, November 27, 1926, 27.

  21 Charles J. Aldrich, “The Deleterious Effect of Tobacco upon the Undeveloped Nervous System,” Dietetic and Hygienic Gazette 20, no. 4 (1904): 202.

  22 “Tobacco as the Great Producer of Degenerates,” Current Literature, August 1907, 217.

  23 Charles B. Towns, “The Injury of Tobacco and Its Relation to Other Drug Habits,” Century, March 1912, 766-772.

  24 William A. McKeever, “The Cigarette Boy,” Education, November 1907, 154-160.

  25 “Cigarette Smoking Among Boys,” 140-141.

  26 “Incidents and Effects of Smoking,” Harper’s Weekly, February 27, 1904, 314.

  27 “Tobacco and Physical Health,” New York Times, April 30, 1891.

  28 “School Coaches Express Opinions on Smoking by the Athlete,” Hygeia, April 1934, 375.

  29 George L. Meylan, “The Effects of Smoking on College Students,” Popular Science Monthly, August 1910, 169-178.

  30 J. Rosslyn Earp, “The Smoking Habit and Mental Efficiency,” Lancet 207, no. 5360 (1926): 1018-1020.

  31 M. P. R., “Tobacco and Mental Efficiency,” American Journal of Public Health 13, no. 9 (1923): 763-764.

  32 Bruce Fink, “Smoking and Scholarship Again,” School and Society, August 20, 1921, 87-89. See also M. V. O’Shea, Tobacco and Mental Efficiency (New York: Macmillan, 1923).

  33 William Frederick Bigelow, “To Smoke or Not to Smoke,” Good Housekeeping, April 1926, 4.

  34 Edward W. Bok, The Americanization of Edward Bok: The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After (New York: Charles Scribner & Sons, 1922).

  35 H. S. Diehl, “The Physique of Smokers as Compared to Non-Smokers: A Study of University Freshmen,” Minnesota Medicine 12 (1929): 424-427.

  36 Ibid.

  37 Harry Burke, “Women Cigarette Fiends,” Ladies’ Home Journal, June 22, 1922, 19.

  38 Charles B. Towns, “Women and Tobacco,” Delaware State Medical Journal 7 (1916): 4.

  39 Daniel Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); and Donald K. Pickens, Eugenics and the Progressives (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1968).

  40 Rosalind Rosenberg, Beyond Separate Spheres (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982); and Rosalind Rosenberg, Divided Lives (New York: Hill & Wang, 1992).

  41 Towns, 4.

  42 Bertha Van Hoosen, “Should Women Smoke?” Medical Woman’s Journal 34 (1927): 227.

  43 J. F. Denton, “Research on Tobacco,” Journal of the Florida Medical Association 10, no. 4 (1924): 269-270.

  44 Alexander M. Campbell, “Excessive Cigarette Smoking in Women and Its Effect upon Their Reproductive Efficiency,” Journal of the Michigan State Medical Society 34, no. 3 (1935): 146.

  45 Robert A. Hatcher and Hilda Crosby, “The Elimination of Nicotin in the Milk,” Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics 32, no. 1 (1927): 1-6 (quotation from p. 6).

  46 H. Harris Perlman, Arthur M. Danneberg, and Nathan Sokoloff. “The Excretion of Nicotine in Breast Milk and Urine from Cigaret Smoking,” JAMA 120, no. 13 (1942): 1003-1009.

  47 William Benbow Thompson, “Nicotine in Breast Milk,” American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology 26 (November 1933): 666.

  48 “Infant Mortality in Relation to Smoking by Mothers,” Hygeia, June 1934, 564.

  49 F. J. Schoeneck, “Cigarette Smoking in Pregnancy,” New York State Journal of Medicine 41, no. 5 (1941): 1948. Research conducted later in the century would ultimately confirm not only the impact of smoking on lactation, but a wide range of risks to mothers, fetuses, and children. See, for example, Alicia Dermer. “Smoking, Tobacco Exposure Through Breast Milk, and SIDS,” JAMA 274, no. 3 (1995): 214-215; Hillary Sandra Klonoff-Cohen et al., “The Effect of Passive Smoking and Tobacco Exposure Through Breast Milk on Sudden Infant Death Syndrome,” JAMA
273, no. 10 (1995): 795-798; and “Transfer of Drugs and Other Chemicals into Human Milk,” Pediatrics 108, no. 3 (2001): 776-789.

  50 Josephine Baker, “What Price Tobacco,” Ladies’ Home Journal, November 27, 1926, 223.

  51 Ibid., 27.

  52 Wiley was quoted in “Are Cigarettes Harmful?” Good Housekeeping, February 1981, 253. For more on Wiley, see Oscar Edward Anderson, The Health of a Nation: Harvey W. Wiley and the Fight for Pure Food (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958).

  53 Nicholas Kopeloff, “The Tobacco Habit,” New Republic, September 5, 1923, 44. See also Carl Avery Werner, “The Triumph of the Cigarette,” American Mercury, December 1925, 415-421.

  54 “Cigarette Tar in Cancer,” Scientific American, April 1933, 246.

  55 “Makes Chemical Analysis of Cigarets,” Hygeia, December 1929, 1215.

  56 W. A. Bloedorn, “The Barbarous Custom of Smoking,” Medical Record 97 (1920): 188.

  57 Gardner and Brandt.

  58 Baker, 223.

  59 William H. Burnham, “The Effect of Tobacco on Mental Efficiency,” Pedagogical Seminary 24, no. 3 (1917): 297, 317.

  60 On the historical question of scientific objectivity, see Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, “The Image of Objectivity,” Representations 40 (1992): 81-128.

  61 See, for example, Alvan R. Feinstein, Clinical Judgment (Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins, 1967).

  62 See “Effect of Tobacco on the Heart,” Scientific American, December 11, 1915, 523.

  63 “Tobacco Pains,” American Journal of Surgery 1, no. 5 (1926): 296-297; Harlow Brooks, “The Tobacco Heart,” New York Medical Journal 10, no. 2 (1915): 830-837; W. E. Dixon, “The Tobacco Habit,” Lancet 210, no. 5434 (1927): 881-886; and Charles J. Aldrich, “The Deleterious Effect of Tobacco upon the Undeveloped Nervous System,” Dietetic and Hygienic Gazette 20, no. 4 (1904): 199-202.

  64 See Robert Abbe, “The Tobacco Habit,” Medical Record 89, no. 5 (1916): 177-180; and Robert Abbe, “Effect of Smoking on the Circulation,” New York Medical Journal 10, no. 5 (1915): 896.

  65 Robert Maris, “The Facts About Smoking,” Hygeia, October 1944, 740-741; and Grace M. Roth, John B. McDonald, and Charles Sheard, “The Effect of Smoking Cigarets,” JAMA 125, no. 11 (1944): 761-763.

  66 A. Behrend and C. H. Thienes, “The Development of Tolerance to Nicotine by Rats,” Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics 48 (1933): 317-325.