How Tobacco Conquered America—Until Recently
Soon after he landed in the New World, Christopher Columbus received from the natives a gift of some dried leaves. He wrote that the leaves “must be something of importance to these people,” but their significance remained a mystery—until two of his emissaries watched as the Indians rolled them into sticks that resembled toy muskets, “set one end on fire and inhaled and drank the smoke on the other . . . the people called these small muskets tobacco.”
Indians had cultivated and smoked tobacco for millennia; the explorers had never seen anything like it. Europeans burned herbs as incense and fumigant, but the notion of inhaling smoke into the lungs was exotic. Some considered the custom barbaric, the smoke a “wicked and pestiferous poison.”
Until they tried it. The alluring herb quickly became all the rage in the Old World and provided one of the key trading commodities of the early colonies. It joined alcohol as the most beloved and deplored of human habits. “Man,” Eric Burns notes in his lively new book, The Smoke of the Gods: A Social History of Tobacco (Temple University, $29), “is the only animal who takes smoke into his body for pleasure.”
In 1611 John Rolfe, noted for his marriage to Pocahontas, systematized the growing and processing of tobacco in the struggling Jamestown colony. In doing so, he started the first full-fledged business in North America. By 1617 tobacco exports had reached ten tons and were growing rapidly. “Finally,” Burns says, “the English had discovered gold in the New World.”
Americans themselves embraced the weed wholeheartedly during the eighteenth century. Then came the surgeon general’s warning. No, not that surgeon general. This alarm came from Benjamin Rush, surgeon general to the Continental Army, who drew up a blanket condemnation of the habit in 1798. “Rush charged that the weed was particularly harmful to the mouth, stomach and nerves,” Burns notes. The patriot and physician was swimming against the tide. Most observers judged the taking of tobacco a salutary practice, and many agreed with the Indians who saw it as a tonic for a wide variety of ills.
During the first half of the nineteenth century, chewing became Americans’ favored means of ingestion. Burns explains the puzzling popularity of the chaw during the Age of Jackson by noting that by leaving their hands free it was “perfect . . . for people who were constructing a nation from scratch.” Fully half of all the tobacco grown in the United States was processed into chewing plug during the period. Hearty frontiersmen enjoyed brands like Live and Let Live, Buzz Saw, Barbed Wire, and Bull of the Woods. Charles Dickens, visiting the nation, judged all the chewing and spitting “the most sickening, beastly, and abominable custom that ever civilization saw.”
The period after the Civil War witnessed the gradual spread of the cigarette. Considered sissified by cigar and pipe devotees, it took off in 1881 when “there came into being a piece of equipment that turned cigarettes from an afterthought into an industry.” The inventor James Bonsack’s cigarette-making machine boosted production, cut prices, and set the cigarette on the road to becoming the dominant form of tobacco consumption.
Tobacco met its first really serious opposition in the late 1800s. The Anti-Cigarette League of America waged a relentless campaign, and so did William Booth’s Salvation Army, whose tracts objected to smoking because it “tends to insanity,” and “arrests the growth of the young.”
A traveling opera company in Kansas had to set Bizet’s Carmen on a dairy farm instead of in a cigarette factory. Some schools banned “Old King Cole,” because, as Burns notes, he “had the effrontery to call for his pipe.” Twelve states outlawed tobacco products altogether, and others restricted their sale.
Antitobacco sentiment was muted by soldiers’ enjoyment of their smokes during World War I. The restrictive laws were repealed, and Americans in the 1920s began to puff away with abandon. Burns gives an entertaining account of the great tobacco-candy war that broke out in the 1920s when George Washington Hill, the president of the American Tobacco Company, began to push his premier brand with the slogan “Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet.” His public relations guru Edward L. Bernays induced hotels to add cigarettes to their dessert lists and promoted ads that showed a chubby woman being warned to choose a Lucky Strike over a bonbon. Candy companies shot back with the message “the cigarette will . . . dry up your blood,” and urged, “Don’t neglect your candy ration.”
World War II brought another smoking boom. GIs were allotted five to seven packs of cigarettes a week and could buy more at the PX. But as the industry sailed into the halcyon 1950s, dark clouds gathered.
Health warnings were nothing new. In 1604 James I of England had issued a Counterblaste to Tobacco in which he asserted that smoking “makes a kitchen of the inward parts of men” and called it “a custome lothsome to the eye, hatefull to the nose, harmefull to the braine, dangerous to the lungs.” As X-rays and statistical analyses began to convince twentieth-century scientists that the king had been right, the industry fought back. “The validity of the statistics themselves is questioned by numerous scientists,” the companies insisted. Unhealthy? “More doctors smoke Camels,” an advertisement crowed, “than any other cigarette.”
Industry insiders joked that “George Washington Hill would have known what to do about this health business. He would have made cancer fashionable.” But as evidence mounted, cigarette makers turned to the filter as their salvation. Beginning in 1951 they allayed smokers’ concerns with Micronite, Activated Charcoal, the Miracle Tip, and a dozen other scientific-sounding safeguards. Within a decade, filtered smokes had taken over half the market.
In January 1964 U.S. Surgeon General Luther Terry issued a report that stated categorically that “cigarette smoking is causally related to lung cancer in men.” He included a laundry list of other ailments to which smokers were prone. Burns clearly depicts how the tobacco culture, which had thrived in America through its entire history, began to crumble in the wake of the landmark document.
First came the warnings on tobacco packages and advertisements. In 1971 cigarette ads disappeared from television. Two years later smokers were relegated to the backs of buses and airliners. Smoking on planes was banned entirely in 1990. Billboard advertising bit the dust in 1999. Restrictions on smoking in public buildings, offices, restaurants, and even bars spread. Complaints that the “nanny culture” had gone overboard could not stand up to the evidence from the cancer wards.
In August a federal judged ruled that the major tobacco companies were in violation of federal racketeering laws, having “publicly denied, distorted, and minimized the hazards of smoking for decades.” She ordered them to stop promoting smokes as “light” or “low-tar,” falsely implying they are less harmful. It was another nail in the coffin of “coffin nails.”
Although 45 million Americans are still regular smokers, Burns paints a picture of an industry on the ropes. The Smoke of the Gods reminds us what a long and colorful chunk of our heritage is passing into history.