Chapter 31
U.S. cigar consumption was on fire at the time of the 1924 Tobacco Exposition in New York, with Americans puffing on nearly 4 million tons of cheroots each year. But even then stogies were going the way of handlebar moustaches. Cigars’ older, masculine image couldn’t compete with cigarettes’ modern and often feminine mystique. Targeting women with new products such as Marlboros and endorsements from Amelia Earhart, cigarette makers watched their product nearly double in use from 1924 to 1939, while per-capita consumption of cigars declined almost 35 percent during the same time span.
It wasn’t always so. The cigar had ruled longer than the Ming Dynasty and any pharaoh. After John Rolfe pioneered tobacco farming in the Jamestown colony starting in 1611, it took just eight years before tobacco exports of the Nicotiana tabacum strain had reached 10 tons annually; by 1639, Jamestown had shipped 750 tons of tobacco overseas. Even though tobacco crops exhausted the soil (much as it would deplete users’ lungs) every four to seven years, the leafy weed had created the need for labor at any price, even institutionalized slavery, sparking a frenzied search for land in the Chesapeake Bay area, which would soon be known as “Tobacco Coast.” According to some estimates, one-third of all English immigrants to America came here drawn by the prospect of the fortunes they could make in the tobacco trade. Their enthusiasm was understandable, even rational: By 1640, tobacco was the most lucrative American export, with 1.5 million pounds shipped from Virginia to England. By 1670, 50 percent of the adult males in England smoked tobacco daily.
But the cigarette remained a distaff until the economic depression of 1873 ignited sales of the cheaper smoke. Its ascendance coincided with James Buchanan Duke snapping up a license to use James Albert Bonsack’s automated cigarette-rolling machine, which could roll 70,000 to 120,000 cigarettes in a day, as many as roughly 50 manual laborers could roll. Tobacco manufacturers George and Harry Wills’ embracing of the machine after Bonsack demonstrated a working model at an 1880s Paris exhibition jumpstarted Britain’s cigar adoption. By 1888, most, if not all, human cigarette rollers had been replaced by machines. Bonsack’s device disrupted cigarettes’ hand-rolled production the same way Ransom Olds’ and Henry Ford’s use of the assembly line dislocated the manufacture of hand-crafted automobiles.
Courtesy of the Library Company of Philadelphia
Even in their embryonic form, cigars and cigarettes had a boa constrictor grip on their smoldering market. Other more exotic smoking technologies, like the Turkish chibouk, failed to ignite any lasting interest: For Philadelphia’s 1876 Centennial International Exhibition, Turkey, the seat of the Ottoman Empire, sent 121 packages that contained 25,004 pounds of carpets, chemicals, wines, textiles, attar of rose perfume, olive oil soaps, opium, and tobacco. Along with the tobacco were chibouks, long-stemmed pipes, with clay bowls decorated with gems. Scenes of Americans puffing on the bizarre tubes in an opium-den-like languor may not have become a long-term trend but it led, in a historical game of telephone, to the oft-repeated conventional wisdom that the Turks introduced Americans to the mellow virtues of hashish at the fair.
Undeterred by foreign alternatives, cigars and cigarettes continued their hostilities. While cigars were a more mature industry, they lacked the monopolists who might have bankrolled the capital needed for technological leaps forward. And, with the cigar industry heavily unionized, its members fought against the mechanization that would have made many of them redundant. All the same, in 1900, cigarettes still made up less than 2 percent of the thriving tobacco market. Partly it was their squalid reputation, one later shared by marijuana, comic books, and video games. Like those bogeymen of a later age, cigarettes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were popularly considered so ruinous to mental stability, they resulted in “cigarette fiends” who possessed an unfortunate inclination toward homicide. Long before the infamous “Twinkie defense,” lawyers began blaming cigarettes for their clients’ murderous misbehavior.
Courtesy of the Library of Congress
Even with their truncated market share and anti-social tendencies, cigarettes began burning down cigars’ house with an arsonist’s verve. Tobacco firms offered innovative marketing campaigns centered on coupons and collecting cards. Emblazoned with everything from the visages of Civil War generals to polar explorers to Chinese mandarins to flying squirrels to actresses one slip away from suffering a wardrobe malfunction, the cards also provided a firm backing to delicate cigarette packs. Often produced in series of 25 or 50 cards, the inserts impelled smokers to collect the entire sets, thus boosting sales.
Most importantly, cigarettes were symbols of modernity and liberation that cigars, whose demographic base might best be described as Thomas Nast caricatures of corrupt politicians, could never hope to match. Due to their free distribution to American soldiers in World War I (the Red Cross handed out smokes and the National Cigarette Service Committee gathered them for “friendless and orphaned” fighters), by 1920, cigarette consumption had spread from approximately 50 per adult per year in 1880 to nearly 500.
Despite the undeniable allure of oversized cigar props (one tobacco trade show brought in a 5-foot-long, 40-pound prop cigar, and a large woman to hold it), cigarettes became associated with the zeitgeist in a way cigars never could. They appealed to women the same way bobbed hairdos, flapper dresses, and a body void of cleavage or curves did. In the 1920s, Duke’s American Tobacco Co. began marketing its Lucky Strike brand to young women as a diet aid with the tagline, “Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet.”
Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud’s nephew and New York advertising whiz, understood that smoking, associated with unladylike political and sexual freedom (cigarettes were a common prop in Victorian erotica), was empowering to women. In a stroke of marketing Machiavellism, Bernays arranged for eleven debutantes to march in the 1929 New York City Easter parade wielding Lucky Strikes that he labeled “torches of freedom.” Considered the proto-publicity campaign, the staged event was later supported by print ads that showed “American Intelligence” snapping the chains of ignorance and prejudice about women inhaling carcinogens. From 1929 to 1935, the purchase of cigarettes by women increased from 12 percent to 18.1 percent.
By the mid-1930s, consumption doubled to nearly 1,000 per year per person, and by 1940 it would be nearly 2,000. At the century’s halfway point Americans were puffing on more than 350 billion cigarettes a year, gobbling up 3.5 percent of all consumer spending on nondurable goods.
Exhibitions played another pivotal role in smoking’s rise to the top. R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co.’s exhibit at the 1942 American Medical Association convention used “dramatic visualization of nicotine absorption from cigarette smoke in the human respiratory tract” and “giant photo-murals of . . . research experiments” to illustrate that its Camel cigarettes contained “less nicotine than that of the 4 other largest-selling brands.” Physicians stood in long lines to get free smokes at the Philip Morris Companies Inc. booth at the 1947 AMA convention, while staffers cheerily explained how Philip Morris was the healthiest cigarette of them all.
Enough was enough: In 1953 the AMA banned cigarette companies from exhibiting their products at the organization’s conventions. Even then, Lorillard Tobacco Co. issued an ad that declared “thousands” of physicians at a recent AMA convention witnessed “a convincing demonstration [of] the effectiveness of the MICRONITE FILTER” for its new Kent cigarette.
With no dedicated shows today like the 1924 one, the tobacco industry finds its outlets at trade fairs such as the annual National Association of Convenience Stores exhibition, where upwards of 20,000 attendees learn, even without the helping hand of medical professionals, the benefits of everything from cigarettes to chewing tobaccos. The theatricality of yore is still intact as well: Scandinavian Tobacco Group Lane Ltd. recreated a swathe of old Havana for its exhibit at the show, complete with music, man caves, and mojitos to promote its Havana Honey cigarillos. It submerged attendees in an idealized pre-Castro Cuba, by turns raffish and romantic, where flashy wise guys were outnumbered only by sequined showgirls.