The Cigarette Century Page 3
The cigarette century reveals the drama of historical change, the transformation of smoking, its meanings, and impacts. Today, we talk of the stink of cigarettes penetrating clothes and hair, not to mention the disgust engendered by nicotine-stained fingers and teeth. There was a time, not so long ago, when people thought cigarette smoke was fragrant. This book seeks to account for the meaning and pace of such radical transformations. Now, when smoking is so fundamentally contested and often publicly deplored, it may be difficult to remember that time when it signified beauty, glamour, and attraction; when being an executive at a tobacco company commanded status rather than shame. Sometimes, watching Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall light up in To Have and Have Not, we return to a time when smoking held allure and people smoked everywhere and at anytime.
Today, living in a society in which cigarette smoking has become so culturally marginal and stigmatized, it may be difficult to recover that time in which it played such a prominent and popular role in the rise of a consumer age. Today, when it is so clear that smoking constitutes a momentous risk to health, it may be difficult to recover that time in which these harms were the subject of debate, confusion, and obfuscation. The strategy of this account is to layer temporally those forces that serve to explain the changing dynamics of tobacco use and the development of a massive pandemic in the twentieth century. It is in this very method of integrating historical inquiry—which is typically isolated by field and approach—that I believe we may learn the most not only about smoking, its meanings, and its material impact on the health of individuals and populations, but also about deeper changes in culture and society. Ultimately, historical exploration of the cigarette reveals the advantages of problem-centered histories that call for disrupting some of the traditional boundaries of disciplinary inquiry. By examining cigarette smoking in the context of culture, science, politics, and law, critical elements of American society in the last century emerge. Without resorting to a set of fantastical counterfactuals, it is clear that the history of tobacco might well have followed different routes and taken decidedly different turns. Following the cigarette through the century offers a fundamental opportunity to evaluate the contingent nature of historical change.
The fall of the cigarette that marks the second half of the twentieth century may only be considered provisional at best. More than one in five American adults still smoke regularly, and today tobacco still kills more than 435,000 U.S. citizens each year (more than HIV, alcohol, illicit drugs, suicide, and homicide combined). Former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, eager to translate these numbers for greater public impact, repeatedly explained that tobacco deaths equaled three 747s crashing daily for a year, with no survivors. But smokers don’t die such sudden and traumatic deaths—they die, typically in hospitals, slowly, one at a time; often after extended illness and suffering; and now often ashamed, convinced that they have sown their own fate. It is the precise character of the slow risks involved that, in part, have impinged on more aggressive public health interventions. Among the questions at the heart of this book is the examination of those particular social processes by which a culture constitutes and assesses the risks of life—and death.
The number of deaths in the United States, however, is dwarfed by those now occurring around the world. And while many American smokers have tried to quit with some success, smoking has been on a steep increase, especially in poorer nations. As the tobacco companies lost ground in the developed world, they aggressively sought new smokers in developing nations. The final section of the book explores the historical process—currently underway—in which cigarette consumption and its consequent burden of disease are transferred to the developing world. The imposition of this burden, along with its social and ethical implications, casts a shadow of genuinely enormous proportions over the coming century. It is now projected that in the course of the twenty-first century, one billion people across the globe will die of tobacco-related diseases. This figure represents a ten-fold increase over the deaths associated with the cigarette in the last century.20 And these deaths are intricately linked to the social processes of redefining the cigarette in the United States over the last three decades. Originating in the flora of the Western Hemisphere, tobacco has come in modernity to wreak havoc on the health of nations across the globe. In this respect, it is a sobering tale, as many histories are. As medicine and science achieved new mastery over disease and human suffering during the last century, so too have we produced new, powerful vectors of disease and death, and developed techniques for spreading them widely among populations across the globe.
Even in 1961, as a seven-year-old, I knew that smoking was dangerous. In this sense, the billboard presented a paradox that I surely could not have articulated at that time. How could something so great, so remarkable, so public, be promoting something that I had already learned was so profoundly bad? The “badness” of smoking was constituted by more than its effect on health. Embedded in the cigarette were the complex historical meanings of rebellion and idleness, independence and attraction. All kids were told smoking was bad—and was only for adults—which created, in part, its impressive appeal. And this appeal was anything but “natural.” It was the studied and meticulous invention of an industry that would come to understand—and exploit—critical aspects of motivation, psychology, and human biology. This book marks my attempt to resolve a child’s paradox—a paradox of pandemic proportion.
The Cigarette Century looks both inward and outward at the cigarette. It uses the cigarette to explore central aspects of American culture. But it also hopes to utilize this cultural investigation to better understand strategies to reduce the massive pandemic we now understand cigarette smoking to produce. Our ability to control this pandemic will no doubt require new insights from the realms of both science and culture, and new strategies from law and politics. This book ultimately rests on a premise at the core of historical practice and method, that the past may offer particular insight into contemporary policy and cultural change. Understanding the cigarette century will provide no simple answer to the potential health catastrophe we face. But understanding more deeply the meaning and significance of the history of cigarette smoking in modern life may well provide us with a modicum of insight into how best to limit, if not control, the global harms of smoking.
I
CULTURE
My company is up against a stone wall. It can’t compete with Bull Durham. Something has to be done and that quick. I am going into the cigarette business.1
BUCK DUKE, CA. 1882
You must have a cigarette. A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can you want?2
OSCAR WILDE, 1891
CHAPTER 1
Pro Bono Publico
BEFORE THE CIGARETTE, there was tobacco. The centrality of tobacco within American culture is remarkable both for its longevity and for the elasticity of its products and meanings. By the time the modern cigarette was invented, in the last decades of the nineteenth century, tobacco had long been deeply insinuated into the American economy and culture. The cigarette would quickly become the vehicle for a dramatic transformation of traditional tobacco culture.
The tobacco plant was domesticated and cultivated by natives of the Americas long before Columbus, and it would remain a staple of the twentieth-century industrial economy. Tobacco would play a central role in the behaviors, rituals, and social activities of modern Americans, just as it had for centuries. Tobacco links us to our premodern roots, but only with the modern emergence of the cigarette do we witness its most powerful and transformative aspects. The cigarette would provide the essential vehicle for tobacco’s transition from plantation crop to consumer product and vastly expand the market for tobacco in the twentieth century.
The genus Nicotiana most likely had its origins in South America and spread northward in prehistoric times. Although a number of species grew naturally, Europeans, on their arrival, foun
d natives cultivating both tabacum and rusticum, depending on climate and soil.3 But unlike every other major crop the natives cultivated, tobacco’s purpose was not nutritional. According to many accounts, tobacco played a critical role in their religious and healing practices. Due to its high nicotine content, as well as the manner in which it was used, this early tobacco could produce hallucinogenic experiences.4
Early European explorers of the Americas noted natives’ use of tobacco with considerable interest. They reported that tobacco use varied widely in purpose and meaning, serving a wide range of spiritual, social, and medical purposes.5 In addition to smoking dried tobacco in the form of cigars, chiefs engaged in ritual blowing, in which they would blow smoke at the heads and faces of the tribe members. Early observers of Amerindian cultures documented pipes and other implements to inhale tobacco smoke. There is evidence that tobacco was chewed and inhaled through snuff. The European explorers—who conducted their own “experiments” with the herb—also reported its physiological effects. A critical element of native cosmologic ritual and practice, tobacco impressively altered the psychic state of its users. It could cause dizziness, perspiration, weakness, and fainting. Small doses acted as a stimulant, and large doses acted as a tranquilizer. Although its advocates disagreed about its administration and effects, many agreed on its profound medicinal advantages, and they integrated tobacco into their various religious and medical pharmacopoeias.6
In Europe, the characteristics of tobacco underwent comprehensive investigation. Jean Nicot, the king of France’s consul, sent tobacco from Portugal to Paris in 1560; the alkaloid common to the many varieties of leaf, identified and isolated in the early nineteenth century, was named in his honor.7 The scientific elucidation of this substance was a classic problem for early nineteenth-century German botanical chemists. These researchers delineated nicotine’s unusually toxic properties: in pure form—colorless, strongly alkaline, and volatile—even the amount in a typical cigar would be lethal. Most forms of tobacco use, such as smoking through pipes and cigars, snuff, and chew, clearly diluted nicotine’s impact but nonetheless created significant physiologic effects.8
Almost as soon as they “discovered” it, Europeans went from observing tobacco’s use to commanding its growth and sale. Among the profound effects of contact between Amerindians and Europeans was the way in which tobacco became very quickly a European commodity.9 Within a century of Columbus’s first voyage across the Atlantic, tobacco would be grown on disparate continents across the globe. It found its way to Africa, India, and the Far East, grafting into indigenous agrarian ecologies as well as cultural systems of healing and belief.10 In the intricate traffic of peoples, flora, fauna, and microbes, crisscrossing the Atlantic in both directions, tobacco held a prized place, solidifying the notion that the resources of the “new” world would justify settlement and that new resources, products, and practices would transform the “old” world and its culture. Although the health implications of this traffic were widely noted from the earliest contact, it would have been impossible to predict that tobacco would produce a pandemic three centuries later. In the unprecedented success of this crop, the seeds of the modern burden of disease were sown.11
Early colonists quickly displaced natives in the cultivation of tobacco.12 Virginia and Maryland colonists exported a tobacco crop beginning in the early seventeenth century. Its use drew deep and consistent attack. In 1604, King James I offered a “counterblaste to tobacco,” concluding its use to be “a custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lung.”13 This would not be the last time such warnings went unheeded. Demand in England was nothing short of remarkable. By 1670, it was reported that a half of the adult male population in England smoked tobacco daily. By the end of the seventeenth century, the English were consuming more than two pounds per person each year, generally for “medicinal” purposes.14 Principally smoked with clay pipes produced in London, tobacco grew markedly cheaper in the early eighteenth century as production in the colonies rose precipitously.15
The demands of tobacco cultivation shaped the character of colonists. Tobacco growing required a complex combination of intensive labor and good judgment. “The tobacco grower,” wrote the anthropologist Fernando Ortiz, “has to tend his tobacco . . . leaf by leaf,” and the outcome defined his status.16 Individual moral character, honor, and reputation came to be inextricably linked to the quality of the leaf.17 In colonial Virginia, the beginning of the process of cultivating tobacco commenced shortly after Christmas with the sowing of seed. By late April, seedlings were transplanted from beds to main fields; at that time, tobacco leaves would be approximately the size of a dollar bill. Successful transplantation required good fortune and keen judgment: soaking rains were needed to make it possible to safely remove the seedlings, and planters had to carefully assess the young plant’s viability. During the summer, hoeing and weeding were crucial. Upon the appearance of eight to twelve leaves, the top of the plant was removed to prevent flowering, and secondary shoots were removed later as well. These processes of “topping” and removing “suckers” had to be precisely enacted. In September, tobacco was cut; again, timing was critical. Immature leaf was impossible to cure properly, but the farmer who waited too long risked a ruinous frost.18
Tobacco farming did not end at the harvest. Some of the most complex tasks came after the broad green leaves were removed from their stalks. The quality of the product would ultimately rest on the intricate processes of drying and curing the leaf. Curing itself could destroy a successful crop. The tobacco was hung in curing barns, where the product to be shipped could be neither too moist—thus certain to rot in transit—nor too dry. Curing required evaluating the climate and the fire used to dry the leaves. It was not unusual to lose both the harvest and the barn to the flame. After curing, the tobacco was quickly stripped of the stalk from which it had hung and was compressed into hogsheads, which, when filled, weighed about 1,000 pounds. Compressing the leaves into the wooden drum, known as “prizing,” took up much of the fall. The hogsheads were often not shipped until the new crop was sown and growing, the entire cycle taking fifteen months.19
Tobacco became an integral part of the colonial Tidewater culture. Far more than just a crop, it defined the widest range of regional values, labor systems and practices, and the character of the calendar itself. Life was organized around the idiosyncrasies of “making a crop.”20 Tobacco created a boom economy in the Chesapeake and Tidewater; as the historian Edmund Morgan explained, it “took the place of gold.”21 It offered the potential to get rich quick and often diverted attention and resources from the commitments necessary to create a stable community. Even after tobacco prices fell in the early eighteenth century, it remained the most profitable of crops.
The success of growing tobacco depended not on land—but on labor.22 The labor-intensive aspects of tobacco cultivation had dramatic implications for the colonies. With prices of the commodity falling and land cheap, increasing one’s revenues became a matter of finding enough workers. During the seventeenth century, indentured servants met these needs.
According to some estimates, one-third of all English immigrants to America came because of the tobacco trade.23 The very success of tobacco, however, turned many of these men into yeoman planters seeking their own servants. As profits fell, and cultivated acreage grew, the difficulty of recruiting new servants intensified. African slaves were the fateful answer. The shift from white, indentured servants to black slaves began in the second half of the seventeenth century, and by 1700, blacks made up a majority of the unfree labor force.24
To an impressive degree, it was tobacco—and its particular quality and characteristics as a crop—that organized the politics and culture of southern colonies. With tobacco at the very center of commerce and growth, the terms of trade and the large Tidewater plantation owners’ rising indebtedness sowed the seeds of colonial rebellion. For those who grew tobacco during the eighteenth
century, debt was strongly tied to their emergent political ideology and commitment to independence. It threatened to corrupt deeply held values; it brought the planters’ moral and political worlds to a crisis.25 The Tidewater’s peculiar economy helped to create a relatively rare historical conjunction: elites with a powerful bent toward rebellion and revolution.26
By the late seventeenth century, tobacco production had emerged in two principal forms: the large plantation supported by slave labor and the small independent farms of modest acreage worked largely by their owners. Tobacco growing moved west with the expansion of settlement in the eighteenth century, generally in the form of small, family-run farms. Slavery followed as farms grew. In the decades following American independence, the rapid westward expansion of tobacco farming ultimately affected what type of plants were cultivated. The character of the harvest varied significantly with soil and climate. The rich soil of the Tidewater produced the dark aromatic tobacco that had spread across Europe and the globe.27 As cultivation expanded into North Carolina and Kentucky, the poor soil gave the leaf from these regions a unique yellow hue and light flavor. This variety, called bright tobacco, became increasingly popular in the antebellum era, first as a wrapper for plug tobacco and later for chew itself.28
Another type of tobacco took hold in the new areas as well. The burley leaf, grown west of the Appalachians, grew in popularity among plug users before the Civil War. Plug tobacco producers added licorice, sugar, rum, and honey, as well as other sweeteners, in secret proprietary mixes, such as D. A. Patterson’s wildly successful Lucky Strike. White burley, first grown in Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana, was distinguished from its botanical ancestors by its light color, a greenish-yellow leaf with a milky stalk and stem. The introduction of white burley tobacco in the middle of the nineteenth century would mark a critical historical precursor to the emergence of the cigarette some decades later. A “dry” tobacco, it resisted rot and mildew, was easier to harvest, and could be air-cured. Lower in natural sugars than its botanic rivals, white burley quickly absorbed the flavorings that would become vogue in chewing and pipe tobacco, and ultimately cigarettes.29