Cigarette Wars: The Triumph of "The Little White Slaver". - Review - book review

Journal of Social History, Fall, 2000 by James Kirby Martin

Cigarette Wars: The Triumph of "The Little White Slaver." By Cassandra Tate (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. vi plus 204pp. $29.95).

In this fascinating, highly readable study, Cassandra Tate investigates what she called the first anti-smoking reform movement in United States history. Coming into its own by the 1890s, flourishing during the Progressive era, and fading into oblivion by the time of the Great Depression, this campaign focused virtually all of its wrath on a new tobacco product, the mass-produced cigarette. Before the 1880s cigarettes were hand-rolled and represented a very small fraction of the tobacco market in comparison to chewing and pipe tobacco, cigars, or various snuff products. They also possessed a forbidden popular image that associated them with urban bohemians and suspect women, such as chorus girls and prostitutes. In the early 1880s the introduction of the Bonsack rolling machine made the mass production of cigarettes possible, and patterns of tobacco consumption began to shift perceptibly. By the end of World War I standard brands (Camels, Lucky Strikes, Chesterfields) had come into their own as the product of choice among tobacco consumers, who no longer seemed to care about the once tainted image of the cigarette

The emergence of the massed-produced cigarette and the much neglected story of the Progressive era anti-smoking movement form the core of the author's investigation. Tate presents chapters that look at the "birth of the coffin nail," the reform movement itself with special emphasis on Lucy Page Gaston and her national and international Anti-Cigarette Leagues, the central role played by the cigarette as the American soldiers' special friend during World War I, the symbiotic relationship between smoking and women seeking greater personal freedom during the postwar flapper era, and, ultimately, the seeming triumph of the cigarette over its reform-minded critics as the 1920s gave way to national depression and the New Deal.

At no point along the way does Tate allow ahistorical commentary from the modern anti-smoking movement to skew her reckoning with past realities. Basing her conclusions on extant primary sources, she shows, for example, how wide of the mark is the oft-repeated assertion that manufacturers gave away millions of cigarettes to U. S. troops during World War I so as to hook a whole generation on their potentially lethal product. In actuality, American military leaders and the federal government, along with such agencies heretofore outspokenly opposed to smoking as the YMCA and the Salvation Army, took the lead in supplying these items of" 'necessary comfort'" (p. 72). They purchased and then distributed cigarettes to the troops, often after conducting patriotic fundraising campaigns. As such, concludes Tate, "the war helped legitimate cigarettes by linking them to an icon of manliness and civic virtue: the American soldier." (p. 66). Once the war was over, cigarette manufacturers did not use mass advertising, des pite what modern anti-tobacco critics have claimed, to overcome cultural taboos and entice women to light up. Women already "were smoking in significant numbers," Tate points out, "long before the industry began directing messages to them," the most famous examples of which was the "'Reach for a Lucky instead of a Sweet'" campaign that began in 1928 (pp. 105-106). A major strength of this volume thus lies in the author's determination to explore causal connections carefully while holding firm to the ideal of historical objectivity. Few other recent historical studies on tobacco and smoking are so free of present-minded special pleading. [1]

Cigarette Wars does contain debatable points. One of Tate's central themes is that health concerns were a secondary consideration to the reformers in their drive to limit if not completely prohibit the consumption of cigarettes. The primary motivator, she claims, had to do with morality--the desire to promote temperate behavior in lieu of mindless self-indulgence, which cigarettes allegedly helped foster. More exploration of the abundant anti-smoking pamphlet literature of the era would have shown that no such priority order so clearly existed. Commentators regularly addressed what health damage smoking might inflict on the heart, the lungs, the nerves, and other components of the body. Obviously they could not do so with the backing of modern epidemiological or laboratory studies, but that did not stop anti-tobacco advocates from employing an abundance of anecdotal evidence to warn repeatedly about various health dangers in relation to smoking.

Questions about health have been closely tied to tobacco use for centuries and were very much a part of the initial anti-tobacco movement in U. S. history that predated the Civil War. This campaign was small in scale, but it did exist, meaning that the movement studied by Tate was not the first in Untied States history that sought to curtail tobacco consumption. More correctly, it was the first directed primarily against a new tobacco product, the mass-produced cigarette. Regardless of such matters, Cigarette Wars represents a significant contribution to the controversial subject of smoking in America. This study deserves a wide readership, especially in light of the current policy debate over the use of tobacco products, which is too often marred by purposely manipulated instead of honestly crafted interpretations of the past.