The Cigarette Century

0465070477-02.qxd 3/5/07 1:49 PM Page 159 chapter 6 Constructing Controversy HE IDENTIFICATION OF cigarette smoking as a cause of Tserious disease shook the tobacco industry to its core. For decades, tobacco companies had developed strategies for dealing with concerns about the health impact of smoking. From ads promising mildness to claims like “More Doctors Smoke Camels,” the companies had repeatedly sought to calm smokers’ medical anxieties. Such competitive claims were yet another vehicle to promote individual brands. By the early 1950s, however, it was abundantly clear that the evidence implicating cigarette smoking as a risk to health was now of a different order. First, the link between smoking and disease was categorical, outside the realm of individual clinical judgment. Although physicians might ad- vise individual smokers to “cut down,” no one could offer assurance that any level of smoking was safe. Second, the cigarette was tied to the most feared disease of mid-century: cancer.4 Earlier concerns about cough or scratchy throat gave way to the ominous medical data indicating that the “habit” could kill. No major industry had ever faced such a fundamental threat to its future. In this unprecedented crisis, the company executives came to recog- nize that traditional approaches to promotion and marketing had to change radically. The new scientific evidence would require a collective response if the industry was to survive. Unsubstantiated health claims proffered for individual brands would merely call attention to the prob- lems with the cigarette, and they were sure to draw intense medical and 159 0465070477-02.qxd 3/5/07 1:49 PM Page 160 160 The Cigarette Century scientific scrutiny if not regulatory intervention. In the early 1950s, despite decades of concerns about the health impacts of smoking, the industry possessed almost no internal capacity to assess the new scientific evidence. The research departments in each company were focused on product design and modification—small changes to enhance “mildness” or vary taste. Having brilliantly mastered the meaning and character of their product for more than half a century, the tobacco companies found that they had begun to lose control of the very cultural processes that they had so effectively utilized in creating the modern cigarette. Try though it might—often with some considerable success—the tobacco industry would never again unequivocally control the meaning of the cigarette. The scientific findings of the 1950s constituted a sea change in the history of smoking. Industry executives found themselves in uncharted waters, and the boat was leaking. They responded with a new and unprecedented public relations strategy. Its goal was to produce and sustain scientific skepticism and controversy in order to disrupt the emerging consensus on the harms of cigarette smoking. This strategy required intrusions into scientific process and procedure.5 The production of uncertainty in the face of the developing scientific knowledge required resources and skill. The industry worked to assure that vigorous debate would be prominently trum- peted in the public media. So long as there appeared to be doubt, so long as the industry could assert “not proven,” smokers would have a crucial rationale to continue, and new smokers would have a rationale to begin. Equally important, the industry would have cover to resist regulation of its product and the basis of a defense against new legal liabilities. The future of the cigarette would now depend on the successful production of a scientific controversy. _ Reports in the medical literature rarely drew public notice, but given the huge popularity of cigarette smoking—which had grown by 1950 to some 2,500 cigarettes per person each year—journalists now reported the results of the new studies to an increasingly anxious public. One article, in particular, by journalist Roy Norr, touched off widespread concern.6 Appearing first in the Christian Herald in October 1952, the 0465070477-02.qxd 3/5/07 1:49 PM Page 161 Constructing Controversy 161 article translated the Wynder and Graham findings into ominous layperson prose, noting that “what gives grave concern to public health leaders is that the increase in lung cancer mortality shows a suspicious parallel to the enormous increase in cigarette consumption.”7 The piece drew little attention until it was reprinted two months later in Reader’s Digest, the most widely circulated periodical at the time, under the title “Cancer by the Carton.” Other prominent magazines and newspapers followed with related scientific findings. Time reported on the Wynder, Graham, and Croninger mouse-painting studies in an article entitled “Beyond Any Doubt” in No- vember 1953. The article quoted Graham as saying that the experiments “show conclusively” that a substance in cigarette smoke could produce cancer. “This is no longer merely a possibility,” Graham concluded. “Our experiments have proved it beyond any doubt.” Time noted that rates of lung cancer in the United States had quadrupled for men and doubled for women since 1933. Following this spate of publicity, the nature and meaning of cigarette smoking, so carefully constructed over the last half-century, would never be the same. After decades of successfully manipulating the media regard- ing the cigarette, the industry now found that it had lost its mastery of the public perception of its product. The wide coverage of successive medical findings generated intense pressure for the industry to respond. Alton Ochsner told Time: If the tobacco people are smart—as I am sure they are because they have been enormously successful—they will support research to find out what the cancer-producing substance is, and then take steps to remove it. Graham concurred, noting, “It is certainly the moral obligation and com- mon sense on the part of the manufacturers to support research.”8 In late 1953, the tobacco industry began to draw its wagons together. As the evidence of the harms of smoking accrued, the tobacco industry first attempted to continue its aggressive and reassuring marketing.9 One ap- proach was to simply deny the problem. The entertainer Arthur Godfrey— who promoted Chesterfields on television—touted studies that he claimed exonerated Chesterfields from the rising health concerns. In early 1953, 0465070477-02.qxd 3/5/07 1:49 PM Page 162 162 The Cigarette Century Godfrey announced during his weekly variety show, “I smoke two or three packs of these things every day. I feel pretty good. I don’t know, I never did believe they did any harm, and now, we’ve got the proof.” Godfrey went on to explain the Liggett & Myers research program: This doctor and specialist and some of his assistants, have been conduct- ing experiments for 8 months, and they—people had been smoking Chesterfields for 10 years, some of ’em, and they smoked Chesterfields and nothing but Chesterfields for the last 8 months—it’s a little more than that now, and they have discovered that to date, he can’t find any adverse effects in the nose, the sinus, the ears or throat, or wherever else you smoke ’em.10 R.J. Reynolds ran similar campaigns, urging smokers to take a thirty-day test for Camels’ mildness. In the July 1949 issues of several local and national medical journals, Reynolds ran an ad asking “How mild can a cigarette be?” In answering this question, the ad juxtaposed a “Doctors Report” illustrated with a physician, cigarette in hand and head-mirror strapped around his brow, and a “Smokers Report,” illustrated with smiling Sylvia MacNeill, secretary. Physicians, the ad explained, had concluded after scientific investigation that there was “not one single case of throat irritation” from smoking Camel cigarettes. “Noted throat specialists” had conducted “weekly examinations” of patients in making this determination.11 The ad went beyond medical authority, however, to assert that smokers didn’t even have to take their physicians’ word for it. They could take their “own personal 30-day test,” as Sylvia MacNeill had done. She concluded that she “knew” that “Camels are the mildest, best-tasting cigarette I ever smoked.” Ads in popular magazines took this theme even further; for example, Elana O’Brian, real estate broker, gushed that “I don’t need my doctor’s report to know Camels are mild.” The ad showed six other smokers, from various walks of life, under the heading “thousands more agree!”12 In another example, Anne Jeffreys, a stage and screen star, insisted, “The test was fun and it was sensible!” Still other ads called on Camel smokers to “Prove it yourself!” and even offered a money-back guarantee for dissatisfied cus- tomers.13 These ads attempted to subvert the emerging population-based epidemiologic findings by appealing to smokers’ individual judgment. 0465070477-02.qxd 3/5/07 1:49 PM Page 163 Constructing Controversy 163 But in the face of those findings, such claims were now seen as drawing attention to the problem—in particular, the attention of government and consumer agencies. In February 1953, the national Better Business Bureau wrote to Liggett & Myers: Although cigarette advertising, as such, has been widely and justly criti- cized in recent years, we believe that your current advertising represents a particularly flagrant disregard of the public interest. Your advertising will not only deceive some members of the public to the detriment of their health but it will, in addition, tend to impair the integrity of advertising and lessen public confidence in it. Godfrey’s free translations of the carefully worded copy theme clearly assure any listener that smoking Chesterfields is harmless. If one as close to the advertiser could draw such inferences from the copy theme, it is apparent that others may like- wise be misled.14 Despite these critiques, Chesterfield and Camel ads (as well as others) con- tinued during these years to attempt to quiet rising public concerns about the health impact of smoking.

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