Wars greatly stimulate smoking in all forms.
HARRY M. WOOTTEN, INVESTMENT ADVISORY DIVISION,
REYNOLDS & CO., 1942
It makes sense when you think about it: why should anyone worry about cancer or emphysema thirty years down the road, when bullets are whizzing overhead? That’s basically how tobacco’s critics were silenced during the First World War, when the moralistic prohibitionism that had led to tobacco bans in fifteen U.S. states was brought to its knees. Fine young army boys may die tomorrow, so who are we to deny them the comfort of a smoke? The medical case against tobacco was not yet strong enough to resist the onslaught, and so the YMCA, the Red Cross, and other charities reversed their earlier opposition and started distributing smokes to the fighting men abroad. Cigarettes were included with military rations, and government commanders stressed the vitality of cigarettes for the war. General John J. Pershing, commander of the American forces in France, once quipped, “You asked me what we need to win this war. I answer tobacco as much as bullets!” General Douglas MacArthur would make a similar request from his Pacific theater of operations during World War II. Tobacco propagandists are fond of citing such comments, along with George Washington’s 1776 appeal for aid for his beleaguered troops: “If you can’t send money, send tobacco.”1 Patriotic charities during the Great War of 1914–18 rose mightily to the occasion, shipping 425 million cigarettes to doughboys on the front in France every month in the peak years of the conflict.
War has been important for smoking in several respects. War moves men and materiel around, transfecting fashions from one part of the world to another. The Crimean War of 1853–56 is notorious for having exposed Western fighting men to Eastern cigarettes; the French, English, and Turks (Ottomans) were united against the Russians in this contest, so Turkish tastes flowed westward. Then again in the U.S. Civil War of 1861–65, northerners were introduced to southern tobacco habits—partly by theft, partly by dislocation. General Sherman raided the stocks of several tobacconists in his famous march to the sea, and when northerners came to like what they’d smoked, requests were sent down south for further supplies. Tobacco manufacturing shifted northward as a result, especially to New York, where dandies were eager to try new cultural fashions.
World War I was another crucial turning point in the rise of the cigarette. The fighting dragged on for years, and many a long night in the trenches was warmed by the friendly fire of fags.2 Cigarettes were also a distinctly war-friendly form of smoke. Easy to light and quick to finish, they were conveniently smoked while standing, marching, or even (sometimes) shooting. And they didn’t require that extra burden or distraction of the pipe. Thousands of soldiers etched their enthusiasm for smoke into ornately carved tobacco boxes and lighters, born from boredom in the trenches. The net effect: millions of soldiers returned home from the war addicted to this new form of smoking, spreading the habit in the peacetime world. The “war to end all wars” turned smoking from a marginal indulgence of questionable morality to an unobjectionable mark of stalwart manhood. More dryly put: war legitimized cigarettes. The numbers say it all: per capita consumption of manufactured cigarettes in the United States nearly tripled from 1914 to 1919, from 155 per year to 505 per year.3 This is one of the most rapid increases in smoking ever recorded.
Cigarettes have been popular in subsequent wars, however. In World War II American cigarette manufacturers were required to turn 18 percent of their total output over to the military—by order of the War Production Board. And advertisers capitalized on the opportunity by linking smoking with patriotism, hygiene, and homespun virtues. The American Tobacco Company in 1942 eliminated the green from its Lucky Strike pack, claiming that the color had “gone to war” with the troops. (The pretense was to save on copper, but the green actually came from a chromium compound.) Smoking Luckies was equated with patriotic fidelity and “national intelligence,” and cigarettes were even made to march in military formation in some of the world’s first animated ads. Lucky commercials suggested military prowess but also a certain sensuality: “so round, so firm, so fully packed,” as one animated series put it.
War works for cigarettes because it distracts from distant health effects, but cigarettes have served in other ways. In 1942 in the Philippines, native resisters of Japanese occupation were alerted to the impending American invasion by air-dropped packs on which American and Philippine flags had been printed, along with a signed message from General Douglas MacArthur, commander in chief of the Southwest Pacific Theater, announcing, “I shall return.” The Tobacco Institute, the industry’s chief propaganda oracle, would later sprinkle such stories into the popular press, along with pledges that tobacco would be ready to help in any future conflict, given its value as a “morale booster to fighting men.”4
War has often been good for consumption, especially on the winning side. American consumption of cigarettes nearly doubled between 1935 and 1945, while smoking rates declined in many other countries. In Germany, for example, consumption fell by about half from 1940 to 1950, a decline only partly traceable to the Nazi campaign against tobacco and more directly a consequence of the impoverishment and dislocation (and death) of millions of people. Many European cigarette factories were destroyed, along with much of the continent’s agricultural capacity. There weren’t a lot of cigarettes to go around in Europe in 1945 and 1946—which is one reason America could step in with its mild, sweet “American blend” to readdict the Continent.5
Most people will be surprised to learn that tobacco was a large part of the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe. The total value of all goods shipped to Europe from 1947 through 1951 was about $13 billion, about $1 billion of which was tobacco. Nearly a third (!) of all “food-related” funding in the plan went for tobacco. In 1947 alone the European Recovery Administration shipped ninety thousand tons of tobacco free of charge to Europe. Critics at the time objected to tax dollars being used to support a frivolous or even dangerous habit: George Seldes, a New York consumer advocate who published In Fact, a kind of Naderite broadsheet avant la lettre, was vocal on this point, lambasting this “most amazing” feature of the plan, according to which “the hungry people of Europe, whether they like it or not, will have to take almost half as much in tobacco as in bread and other foodstuffs, because there is an unsaleable surplus of tobacco in the U.S.” Seldes reported speculations that American tobacco interests were hoping to use the plan to spread the demand for American-style cigarettes into Europe; tobacco was supposed to be part of an effort to halt the expansion of communism. In 1948 Seldes published an article titled “Tobacco vs. Communism,” quoting Virginia Congressman John W. Flannagan’s assurance that tobacco gifts to Europe “will aid in eliminating or retarding the spread of ideologies antagonistic to democracy and to world peace.”6
The origins of this tobacco bonanza are interesting. Tobacco was not originally considered for inclusion in the Marshall Plan. It was not mentioned in the speech delivered by George C. Marshall to Harvard’s graduating class on June 5, 1947, in Sanders Theater, where such a plan was first called for. And it did not figure prominently in the plan drawn up in Paris six weeks later by the seventeen nations considered for inclusion in the program. It was not until southern legislators got hold of the plan that tobacco was included. The key figure here, interestingly, was Senator A. Willis Robertson from Virginia, father of the televangelist Pat Robertson, who insisted on having tobacco figure big in the shipments. There is a certain irony in this demand, given that the elder Robertson was an ardent opponent of alcohol, which he railed against from time to time on the floor of the U.S. Senate. Robertson knew where his bread was buttered, however, and tobacco farmers appreciated his support.7
Here is a good place to honor the life and work of George Seldes, the first American journalist of any note to realize that tobacco was causing an epidemic of lung cancer, based on work being done in both Germany and the United States. Seldes was one of the first journalists to publicize Raymond Pearl’s 1938 discovery that cigarettes were cutting the lives of smokers short by nearly a decade and one of the first to report that magazines and newspapers were reluctant to challenge the industry by virtue of their dependence on tobacco ad revenues.8 Seldes is often ignored by cigarette historians, and one reason is that his crusade came before the time was ripe. There was not yet much of an audience for left-leaning cigarette criticism in the 1940s and 1950s. Anti-tobacco fervor had dwindled from its peak in the early years of Prohibition (1919–33), and surviving pockets often had a pungent puritanical odor. German physicians were railing hard against the demon weed, but German science had lost much of its prestige overseas since the persecution of the Jews and withdrawal from the international scientific community. (Seldes never comments on Nazi anti-tobacco work—though he does reveal that while posted as a journalist in Berlin he had been advised not to smoke by a certain Dr. Johann Plesch, a professor of medicine at the University of Berlin.) Even in the United States, though, anti-tobacco rhetoric usually came from more conservative quarters—such as Reader’s Digest, which tended to regard tobacco as an insult to the temple of the body and a flight from traditional American values.
Tobacco control really wasn’t an issue for progressives in the 1950s, despite fears along these lines from some corporate heavies. (William Randolph Hearst Jr., the publishing magnate, in 1954 expressed his fear that “anti-big business fanatics” might turn the cigarette-health angle into “another means of attack on American business.”)9 The fact, though, is that the political left was conspicuously silent on smoke during this period, and most liberals smoked—with Seldes being rather exceptional in both respects (he had quit in 1931 following his encounter with Professor Plesch). And even Seldes’s voice was pretty much silenced after 1950, when his beloved In Fact newsletter, subtitled An Antidote for Falsehood in the Daily Press, was forced to halt publication. The closure was largely for financial reasons, as his subscription list shrank with the lurch to the right in American culture. McCarthyism was just beginning to rear its ugly head, and Seldes himself was soon thereafter (in 1950) called to appear before the House Committee on Un-American Activities to answer charges of Communist sympathies—which were quickly dropped. (He had never been a member of the Communist Party and carried on an oddly intimate correspondence with FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover about this.) By the time the lung cancer-tobacco link was rediscovered in the early 1950s, with study after study confirming the connection, Seldes was no longer in a position to rally anti- tobacco forces. And though he went on to live another forty-five years—departing only in 1995 at the age of 104—his courageous tackling of tobacco was largely forgotten. Today his life and work should serve as a reminder that history is often a tale of forgetfulness and that being right and being early are no guarantees of glory.
As for the Marshall Plan: global tobacco charity continued long after its formal demise, through successor programs such as Food for Peace. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) continued to unload surplus tobacco in the Third World for decades thereafter, with American farmers dutifully compensated. In 1964 the USDA had an estimated $500 million worth of tobacco leaf in storage, with allotments going to friendly governments at rock bottom prices the world over. Which even the conservative Barron’s magazine deplored as making Washington a kind of international Typhoid Mary.10