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Cigarette Wars Poster distributed by the Our Boys in France Tobacco Fund, 1918 (Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University) Cigarette Wars THE TRIUMPH OF “ THE LITTLE WHITE SLAVER” Cassandra Tate NewYork Oxford OxfordUniversityPress 1999 Oxford University Press Oxford New York Athens Auckland Bangkok Bogota´ BuenosAires Calcutta Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Florence HongKong Istanbul Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne MexicoCity Mumbai Nairobi Paris Sa˜oPaulo Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto Warsaw and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan Copyright ᭧ 1999 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Tate, Cassandra. Cigarette wars : the triumph of ‘‘the little white slaver’’ / Cassandra Tate. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-19-511851-0 1. Cigarette habit—United States—History—20th century. 2. Antismoking movement—United States—History—20th century. I. Title. HV5760.T38 1998 362.29'6—dc21 97-50571 135798642 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper Acknowledgments his project began life as a magazine article and grew into a doctoral Tdissertation. That it is now a book is due in part to the chairmen of my dissertation committee at the University of Washington in Seattle: pro- fessors William J. Rorabaugh and the late Robert E. Burke. Each read in- numerable drafts of the manuscript, offered unfailingly good advice, and provided both encouragement and occasional skepticism (when I skated too far onto thin ice), along with countless newspaper clippings and sug- gestions about sources. I am also grateful to my other committee members, professors James C. Whorton and Richard R. Johnson. They asked chal- lenging questions and otherwise helped push me beyond my comfort zone, and my work is the better for it. I might still be staring out the window, surrounded by drifting piles of notes, were it not for the members ofwhat I hereby christen the Compul- sive Footnoters Club: Alexandra Harmon, Julia Eulenberg, Mary Wright, and Jane Merritt. As fellow graduate students, they forced me to meet deadlines and tried to improve my thesis paragraphs. Thomas LeBien at Oxford University Press picked up where they left off. His keen eye and enthusiasm (to say nothing ofhis willingness to laugh at my jokes) helped ease the metamorphosis from dissertation to book. I owe a great deal to scores of archivists and librarians who responded to my written inquiries by digging into their records to do research that I could not do in person. Among those who were most generous with their time (and their copying machines) were David Carmichael at the Young Men’s Christian Association Archives, University of Minnesota, Minneap- vi Acknowledgments olis; Alfred E. Epstein at the Frances E. Willard Memorial Library in Ev- anston, Illinois; Jo Ann Rayfield, archivist at Illinois State University, Bloomington; the staff at the Illinois State Archives in Springfield; Henry Ilnicki, senior librarian at the New York State Library in Albany; and Patricia White, archivist specialist at the Department ofSpecial Collections, Stanford University Libraries. Smithsonian Magazine financed research trips to the Arents Collection at the New York Public Library, repository of virtually everything written about tobacco since the sixteenth century; and to the Library of Congress, the National Archives, and the Smithsonian Institution itself. A grant from the American Historical Association sent me to the tobacco country of North Carolina and Virginia. Archivists in the manuscript collections at Duke University, the University of North Carolina, and the University of Virginia helped me make the most of my research time (and directed me to great local barbecue spots). A dissertation fellowship from the University of Washington helped me complete the writing. I am going to borrow a line from Sarah Sharbach and say that I am surprised to find that I have any friends left at the end of this long and isolating experience, but she is one of them. I have profited not only from her friendship, but from her considerable skills as an editor. Rosemary Adang spent part of her limited time off from teaching at Highline Com- munity College to copy newspaper articles for me and, later, to critique a draft of the entire manuscript. Dolly Katz sheltered, fed, chauffeured, and entertained me during a research trip to the Bentley Historical Library at the University ofMichigan in Ann Arbor; prodded me to hone some ofmy arguments; and then meticulously edited parts of the manuscript. My interest in the history of cigarettes comes from my mother, Mary E. Haggerty, a member of what may be the Last Great Cigarette Genera- tion, who tolerated my questions even when they made her uncomfortable. She smoked her first cigarette in 1936 and her last one in 1994, shortly before her death. In later life she was a defensive smoker, but she never lost her sense ofirony or her appreciation for a good story. Ifthe seed was planted by my mother, it was nurtured by my husband, Glenn A. Drosen- dahl, and daughter, Linnea Tate Rodriguez, and by the rest of my family. Individually and collectively, they have been the sustaining influences on this project, from conception to delivery. Contents Introduction 3 1 • Birth of the Coffin Nail 11 2 • The Clean Life Crusade 39 3 • The Little White Slaver Goes to War 65 4 • Milady’s Cigarette 93 5 • The ‘‘Triumph’’ of the Cigarette 119 Conclusion 147 Coda 157 Appendix 159 Notes 161 Index 199 Photo gallery follows page 92 Cigarette Wars I ntroduction y mother—Mary Elizabeth Haggerty—smoked her first cigarette in M1936. She was 14. It was a Kool, with a filter tip made of cork. In more than fifty years as a smoker, she never forgot that cigarette. The occasion was her first formal dance, on the roof of a hotel in Dallas, Texas, some 400 miles from her home in the small town of Dumas. She remembered the feel and the rustle ofthe apple-green taffeta dress she was wearing, how the city lights looked from the roofofthe hotel, the promise of adventure that seemed to hang in the night air. She had gone to the dance with three friends, one of whom, it turned out, had relieved her parents of a pack of Kools before leaving home. The friend pulled the cigarettes from her beaded evening bag and passed them around. A group of young men stood nearby. Striving to appear uninter- ested, the girls casually lit up. After a minute or two, one of the boys made an observation: ‘‘You girls haven’t been smoking very long, have you?’’ They assured him they had been smoking quite a while. ‘‘Well, you ought to learn to light the right end,’’ he suggested. In the dim lighting on the roof, all four ofthe girls had managed to light their cork filters. My mother did not smoke another cigarette for some time after that. She became a regular smoker in the early 1940s, a golden age for the cigarette, when it seemed as if ‘‘everyone’’ smoked. In fact, cigarettes have never been a habit ofthe majority in the United States. Even at the height of the Cigarette Age, in 1965, only 42 percent ofAmerican adults smoked them. However, for people like my mother—members of the generation that came of age during World War II—cigarettes were embedded in the 3 4 I ntroduction cultural landscape. They were almost everywhere: on billboards, in the movies, on the radio, in magazines and newspapers and novels. The heroes of detective novels, in particular, could scarcely move from one page to the next without searching for, taking out, lighting, inhaling deeply on, grinding out, or tossing away a cigarette. Even among nonsmokers, ciga- rettes were accepted as emblems of modernity and sophistication. Their place in American culture was symbolized by the president himself, Frank- lin D. Roosevelt, whose cigarette was as much a part of him as his confi- dent grin.1 The world was one big smoking section back then. My mother remem- bered going to dinner parties where each place setting would include an individual ashtray with three cigarettes in it. Guests were not obligated to smoke them, but no one would dream of objecting to those who did. Cer- tain conventions limited smoking to a degree: ‘‘nice’’ girls did not smoke while walking on the street; a gentleman always lit a lady’s cigarette before his own; it was bad form to smoke in elevators; smokers always sought permission (‘‘Mind if I smoke?’’) before lighting up. Still, there were few places where smoking was not permitted. College students smoked in class- rooms; passengers smoked on airplanes (some airlines even provided com- plimentary cigarettes); patients smoked in their hospital beds; broadcasters smoked on television. By the time my mother was smoking her last cigarettes, shortly before her death in 1994, she was part of a shrunken and increasingly troubled minority. The number of smokers in the adult population had dropped to about 25 percent, and nonsmokers were becoming ever more assertive in defending their rights to breathe unpolluted air. There seemed to be only two kinds ofsmokers left: the young and defiant, and the old and defensive. They retreated to the back of the plane, to the back stairs at the office, to the back porch at the dinner party—and then found even some of those venues closed to them.

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