RJ Reynolds
the Hundred-Year War Against the Cigarette.
Fields
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- Referenced Document
- the Hundred-Year War Against the Cigarette, by Dillon Gl
- American Heritage, (810400). "A Counterblast to Tobacco", by James 1. "Observations Upon the Influence of the Habitual Use of Tobacco Upon
- Health, Morals and Property", by Rush B, (010000). "Thoughts and
- Stories for American Lads", by Trask G, (010000). "A Message to Garcia", by Hubbard E. "the Cigarettist", by Hubbard E. "the Little White Slayer", by Wiley Hw, Good Housekeeping, 160000. "the Case Against the Little White Slayer", by Ford H, 160000. Pure
- Date Loaded
- 27 Feb 1998
- Named Person
- Bamburger, E.
- Keystone Mining
- Lynch, J.C.
- Salt Lake Ice
- Newhouse, E.L.
- American Smelting And Refining
- Eccles, L.R.
- Mckay, A.N.
- Burke, J.J.
- Mauss, M.
- Harris, J.
- Terry, L.
- James, I.
- Murad, I.V.
- Arbuckle, F.
- Fowler, O.L.
- Trask, G.
- Greeley, H.
- Beecher, H.W.
- Barnum, P.T.
- F Toby
- Trall, R.T.
- Duke, J.B.
- W Duke Sons
- Major, W.
- Hubbel, C.
- Womens Christian Temperance Union
- Wctu
- Gaston, L.P.
- Natl Anti-Cigarette League
- Jordan, D.S.
- Mcclellan
- Mulcahey, K.
- Montgomery Ward
- Sears, Roebuck
- Hubbard, E.
- Pease, C.G.
- Kress, D.H.
- Pershing
- Nalt Cigarette Service Committee
- Ymca
- Intl Anti-Cigarette League
- Harding, W.G.
- Mabey, C.
- Grant, H.J.
- Harries, B.R.
- Pratt, N.S.
- Utah Manufacturers Assc
- American
- B&W
- Rjr Intl
- Box
- Rjr1120
- Author
- Dillon, G.L.
- Ti
- Brand
- Camel
- Chesterfield
- Lucky Strike
- Marlboro
- Raleigh
- American Brands
- Other Brands
Document Images
O
THE HUNDRED-YEAR WAR
AGAINST THE CIGARETTE
BY GORDON L. DILLO\Y
IZchrintccl with Pcrmissiom c,f
Amcrican flcrita,~e Puhli.hin, C'u., Inc.
u

Founded nearly a third of a century ago, AMERICAN HERITAGE is pub-
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From the February/March issue of
AMERICAN HERITAGE
© 1981 by American Heritage Publishing Co., Inc. All rights reserved.

I t.vas like any other Tuesday lunch hour, until thc sherif f's
deputies walked in. Mr. Ernest Bamberger, general
;~manager of the Keystone Mining Company and recent
(unsuccecsful) Republican candidate for United States sena-
tor, and Mr. John C. Lynch, manager of the Salt Lake Ice
Company, finished their meals at the Vienna Cafe, an
unpretentious but respectable businessmen's restaurant on
Salt Lake City's Main Street, and prepared to savor their
customary post-luncheon cigars. A few tables away, near the
back of the crowded establishment, Mr. Edgar L. Newhouse,
department manager for the American Smelting and
Refining Company, paused briefly in his conversation with
Mr. L. R. Eccles of Ogden to light a cigarette. At the same
time, Mr. Ambrose Noble McKay, general manager of the Salt
Lake Tribune, lighted his cigar, picked up his check, and
went over to the counter to pay it.
- - None - of - the- gentlemns - actions -sparked - any- apparent
interest among the other restaurant patrons. Certainly no
one-with the possible exception of Mr. J. J. Burke, a Salt Lake
contracting engineer-suspected them of any overt criminal
activity. As they smoked, chatted, and pondered the
upcoming afternoon's affairs-or, in McKay's case, waited
impatiently for the counterman to tally up the bill-they
remained completely unaware that they were only a few
minutes away from a calamity that not only would make
them the outraged subjects of a public spectacle but also
would result in their good names being bandied about in
newspapers across the country. Had they suspected they were
in such danger they easily could have destroyed the
incriminating evidence with a simple twist of thumb and
forefinger. But they did not, and a few moments later, even
before the ash on Bamberger's cigar required attention, they
were caught flagrante delicto by Salt Lake County sheriff's
deputies Michael Mauss and John Harris.
The two deputies entered the Vienna Cafe at half-past
noon and walked directly to the table occupied by Bamberger
and Lynch, where they displayed their badges and promptly
placed the men under arrest. While Deputy Harris stood
guard over the pair, Deptity Mauss walked to the rear of the
cafe, where he arrested Newhouse. Eccles, Newhouse's
luncheon companion, escaped arrest only by gesticulating
with an unlighted cigarette and proving to the deputy that
although he had obviously intended to commit a crime, he
had not yet done so, and therefore was not subject to arrest.
Deputy Mauss agreed.
Meanwhile, McKay, who had finally succeeded in paying
his lunch bill and was preparing to leave the cafe, was loudly
denounced as a co-offender by Mr. Burke, who pointed a
f inger at the departing McKay and told Deputy Harris that he
also should be arrested. Perhaps fearing an escape attempt by
Bamberger and Lynch, Deputy Harris made no move to
apprehend the fleeing newspaperman.
The two deputies then escorted their three protesting
prisoners through the highly agitated throng of customers and
onlookers (the Vienna Cafe may have been unpretentious, but
arrests on the premises were uncommon enough to generate a
great deal of excitement). Since no patrol car was available,
Mr. Bamlxrgcr, Mr. Lynch, and Mr. Newhouse %vere then
marched down Main Street, in full and humiliating view of
friends, business associates, and passers-by, to the county jail
some blocks away, where they were charged and booked like
so many common criminals.
Which they were, since they-along with McKay, who as a
result of some rather undignif ied snitching by his accomplices
in crime was soon to become the object of a similar criminal
complaint-openly had violated Section 4, Chapter 145, of
the Utah state code. The four men had been smoking in an
enclosed public place.
There is considerably more to this story-more arrests,
mass meetings, the eventual surrender of McKay, and so on,
all of which will be discussed later. But the most interesting
aspect of the incident is not that several otherwise law-abiding
citizens were arrested for committing such a widespread and
popular cr-ime;-nor -even that !hey-were-s&:fficiently promi-
nent in the community to ensure a great deal of bad publicity
for the state of Utah. What is most interesting about the
incident at the Vienna Cafe is simply the year in which it
occurred-1923. For despite widespread belief to the
contrary, tobacco smoking's sorry reputation did not begin
with Surgeon General Luther Terry's famous 1964 report,
which as we will see was actually a rather mild document in
comparison with earlier works on the subject. Nor is the recent
legislative attack on smoking a modern phenomenon, since by
the time Mr. Bamberger and his colleagues lighted their
ill-fated smokes more than a dozen states had passed laws that
make today's legislative antismoking efforts seem almost
benign. The fact is that the truly golden age of the
antismoking movement in America began in the 1880's, when
a new and deadly manifestation of the smoking habit first
apeared in large numbers on the American scene. It ended
f our decades later, during a Tuesday lunch hour at the Vienna
Cafe.
T he world's f irst antismoking tract-the opening shot in
the conflict that would eventually lead to Bamber-
ger's arrest-was published in 1604 by England's
James I, one of history's most famous tobacco-phobes.
Entitled "A Counterblaste to Tobacco," James's treatise
ridiculed the medicinal and prophylactic properties then
ascribed to the plant, excoriated his pipe-smoking subjects f or
wasting their money and befouling the English air, and finally
concluded with a famous-and, to nonsmokers, still applica-
ble-peroration: Si'noking, James said, was "a custome
lothsome to the eye, hatefull to the Nose, harmefull to the
braine, daungerous to the Lungs, and in the black stinking
fume thereof, neerest resembling the horrible Stigian smoak
of the pit that is bottomelesse." Unfortunately, as James and
his antismoking successors found out, the habit once adopted
is a difficult one to break, on either an individual or national
basis, and smoking continued unabated in England.
The story was much the same elsewhere, as kings and
potentates throughout the known world found that no amount
of whippings (Russia), beheadings (Turkey), nose slittings
(India), and other extreme measures could suppress the habit.

From the start, the
anticigarette forces had
to contend with the
catchiest names and
flashiest packs the
opposition could invent.
The brands shown in
this portfolio were
produced between the
1880's and the 1940's.
All have vanished
from today's market
save for "Home Run,"
whose batter has
been up for almost a
century now.
,
At 1 PiIOT(X:R.PIIS M'PORTFOI 1O COCRILS% OF RICHARD U'. Et 11O11, (l6ARF CIL PAC\ C(111 ECIORS
ASVX'IAl lON, (;l fIRf,L1tMN, 11A1S
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Murad IV of Turkey is typical of the early Eastern
antismoking crusaders. Determined to enforce the royal
no-smoking edict, Murad reportedly prowled the streets of
seventeenth-century Istanbul incognito, accosting suspected
tobacco sellers, begging them to sell him a small quantity,
offering them payment far in excess of the going rate and
swearing eternal secrecy. Then, if the merchant's greed
overcame his caution and he produced the forbidden
substance, Murad would personally behead him on the spot,
leaving the body in the street as a grisly warning. But despite
Murad's efforts, smoking continued-prospered, actually-
in Turkey. (Poetic justic was served almost three centuries
later, when Turkish tobacco cigarettes called "Murads"-
featuring testimonials by the unfortunate Fatty Arbuckle-
became one of America's most popular brands.)
In contrast to European and Oriental antismoking cam-
paigns, early American efforts were mild. In the 1630's the
Massachusetts colony banned tobacco sales and public
smoking, public being defined as any place where more than
one person was present. In the 1640's Connecticut also banned
c public smoking and required smokers to obtain a smoker s
permit. These laws generally were ignored, however,
particularly after the clergy took up the habit; Massachusetts
soon repealed its prohibitions, the Connecticut ones eventu-
ally faded away, and smoking vanished as an issue for the
next one hundred and fifty years.
It resurfaced in 1798, when Dr. Benjamin Rush published
an essay called "Observations upon the influence of the
Habitual use of Tobacco upon Health, Morals and Property."
Smoking and tobacco chewing were harmful to the mouth,
stomach, and nervous system, Dr. Rush observed, in addition
to being generally f ilthy and expensive habits. The doctor
went on to draw a direct cause-and-effect relationship
between tobaced use and drunkenness, a correlation that
would persist throughout subsequent antismoking campaigns.
Dr. Rush was followed by a number of antismoking
reformers. Dr. JoelShew,forexample,carefullycatalogued-
often in repellent detail-some eighty-seven maladies
directly attributable to tobacco use, including insanity,
cancer, and hemorrhoids. The eugenicist Orson L. Fowler
believed tobacco possessed certain aphrodisiacal properties-
obviously a more damning charge then than it would be
today-and warned, "Ye who would be pure in your
love-instinct, cast this sensualizing fire from you." The
Reverend George Trask, author of the widely circulated
1852 tract "Thoughts and Stories for American Lads" (sub-
titled "Uncle Toby's Anti-Tobacco Advice to His Nephew
Billy Bruce"), pioneered the misuse of statistics in warn-
ing of the dangers of tobacco. "Physicians tell us that twenty
thousand or more in our own land are killed by [tobacco]
every year," Trask wrote in 1859. "German physicians tell
us that of deaths of men between the ages of eighteen
and twenty-five, one-half originate from this source."
Joining in the ante-bellum antismoking campaign were
such men as Horace Greeley (who described a "long nine"
cigar as "a fire at one end and a fool at the other"), Henry
Ward Beecher, and even P. T. Barnum.
6
But despite the best efforts of Uncle Toby and his allies,
smoking remained a minor cause in an era filled with great
ones, and by the beginning of the Civil 1'1'ar, antismoking
"agitations" (to use the contemporary term) had all but died
out. What finally brought the movement back to life was a
sleek and-to some-rather stylish little European import
that eventually would outrage American antismokers more
than any previous manifestation of the tobacco habit. We are
speaking, of course, of the "coffin nail," the "little white
slaver," the "little white hearse plume"-the cigarette.
Lf
igarettes apparently were developed in Latin America
and later turned up in seventcenth-century Spain as a
kind of poor man's cigar. Precisely how or when they
first appeared between American lips is uncertain, but by
1854 imported cigarettes were common enough-in cosmo-
politan New York City, at least-to attract the attention of one
Dr. R. T. Trall, who noted with unconcealed disgust that
"some of the ladies of this refined and fashion-forming
metropolis are aping the silly ways of some pseudo-
accomplished foreigners, in smoking Tobacco through a
weaker and more feminine article, which has been most
delicately denominated cigarette."
Cigarettes hardly took the country by storm, however; by
1865 fewer than 20 million were manufactured in the United
States (compared with 695 billion in 1978), all of them
hand-rolled by urban workers, all composed of expensive
imported tobaccos and most if not all of them smoked by those
same citified and upper-class souls who so agitated Dr. Trall.
By 1880 American cigarette production reached 500 million a
year, but cigarettes remained an almost inconsequential
aspect of the tobacco trade, then dominated by chewing
tobacco, cigars, and pipe tobacco. Still, they clearly were
catching on; by 1885, following the invention of a practical
cigarette-rolling machine and a shift to domestic tobaccos,
cigarette production passed the one-billion-a-year mark. By
1890 it topped two billion, and by 1895 some four billion
cigarettes were manufactured in America, bearing such
now-forgotten brand names as "Cameo," "Duke's Best,"
"Sweet Caporal," "Virginia Bright; " and "Old Judge."
Makings for millions of "roll-your-own" cigarettes also were
sold every year.
Despite those seemingly dramatic increases, cigarettes
quickly developed a most unsavory reputation. First, their
newness made them easy targets for the vilest rumors;
cigarette papers were said to be saturated.vith opium, arsenic,
and other poisons. Cigarette tobacco reportedly was gleaned
f rom cigar butts retrieved f rom urban gutters by derelicts and
street urchins. More revolting was the widely circulated
report that cigarette-factory workers urinated on the tobacco
to give it "bite." The f act that cigarette smoke was inhaled-a
practice not usually associated with cigar or pipe smoking-
made the alleged "adulterations" even more dangerous.
Cigarettes also faced severe "image" problems in the late
nineteenth century. Their association ..ith city types-as
noted by Dr. Trall-hardly improved their reputation among
the rural populace, and in contrast to the manly cigar, the

reflective pipe, and the humble but honest chew, cigarettes
seemed to be geared more toward a woman's tastes than
toward a man's. The "ette" suffix by itself gave off a
diminutive and therefore feminine air, and brand namessuch
as "Opera Puffs" and "Pearl's Pets" did little to offset this.
"The cigarette is designed for boys and women," The New
York Times decided in 1884, summing up the prevailing
view. The Times added that "the decadence of Spain began
when the Spaniards adopted cigarettes, and if this pernicious
practice obtains among adult Americans the ruin of the
Republic is close at hand." While the Times may have
exaggerated in assessing the impact of cigarettes on the
national destiny, it was correct in predicting that they would
appeal to women in ever-increasing numbers. Still, public
smoking by women was rare in the nineteenth century, and
cigarette manufacturers carefully avoided any overt appeals
to the female smoking market. (In fact, not until the 1920's
would cigarette advertisers dare to portray an American
woman even holding a cigarette. It's .vorth noting that
"Marlboro" brand cigarettes, whose f ilter-tipped descendants
would become the favorite smoke of that- quintessential
rugged American, the Marlboro Man, were among the first to
openly pursue the female smoker, using an alliterative-but
most unrugged-slogan: "Marlboros: Mild as May.")
Although women smokers would become the object of
antismoking efforts within a few decades, it was boy smokers
who provided the initial focal point for the coming crusade.
C igarettes were particularly appealing to boys, since they
were cheap enough (at ten or twenty for a nickel) and
mild enough to allow even the smallest boy to emulate
his pipe- and cigar-smoking elders without suffering the
drastic side-effects that pipes and cigars usually inflicted on
immature smokers. By the mid-1880's cigarette-smoking boys
were a common sight on any urban street corner, and even
rural areas had their youthful "cigarette fiends." Cigarette
manufacturers, for their part, exacerbated the problem
through the use of cards and coupons, one of which was placed
in every pack. They bore a photograph or lithograph on one
side and usually an explanatory note on the other, and each
was one of a numbered set, the object being to collect all the
cards in any given set. Later James B. Duke of W. Duke, Sons
& Co. (who in 1890 would combine the five largest cigarette
companies into the American Tobacco Company, also known
as the Tobacco Trust) pioneered the coupon system, whereby
a specified number of "vouchers" found in cigarette packs
could be redeemed for a lithograph album. Card sets bore
such titles as "Fif ty Scenes of Perilous Occupations; "Lives of
Poor Boys Who Became Rich," and "Flags of All Nations"
among dozens of others. Perhaps even more educational were
such series as "Actresses," "Gems of Beauty," and Duke's
popular "Sporting Girls" album (available for seventy-five
coupons). All the cards and albums were in great demand by
the younger set, who traded and gambled them with all the
adolescent fervor later afforded bubble-gum baseball and
football cards.
Parents, on the other hand, were outraged.
"There is no question that demands more public attention
than the prevailing methods of cigarette manufacturers to
foster and stimulate smoking among children," one irate New
Yorker said in 1888, presaging a complaint that would
continue, with considerable justification, for the next ninety
years. "At the off ice of a leading factory in this city you can see
any Saturday afternoon a crowd of children with vouchers
clamoring for the reward of self-inflicted injury."
Nor were the "self-inflicted injuries" courted by young
smokers conf ined to the potential, long-term maladies-lung
cancer, heart disease, and so on-now associated with
cigarette smoking. On the contrary, in the 1880's and 1890's
the cigarette's ef fects on smokers were thought to be not only
immediate and debilitating but also often fatal. Consider the
following case, as reported by The New York Times in
1890.
CIGARETTE SMOKING KILLED HIM
"New Jersey-The death of eight-year-old Willie Major, a
farmer's son, from excessive cigarette smoking is reported
from Bound Brook. The boy had for over three years been a
victim to the habit. He would stay away from home several
days at a time, eating nothing but the herbs and berries of the
neighborhood and smoking constantly. Sunday he became ill
and delirious. He died Tuesday in frightful convulsions."
There were dozens, perhaps hundreds, of similar case
histories.
Even if death did not immediately claim the young
smoker, failing health surely would. Among the maladies
attributed to cigarette smoking were color blindness, "tobacco
ambylopia" (a weakening of the eyesight), baldness, stunted
growth, insanity, sterility, drunkenness, impotence (or sexual
promiscuity, depending on the point to be made), mustaches
on women, and that traditional bugaboo of nineteenth-
century America, constipation. No less alarming was the
moral dissipation caused by cigarettes, a process cogently
described by New York school commissioner Charles Hubbell
in 1893: "Many and many a bright 1ad has had his will power
weakened, his moral principle sapped, his nervous system
.vrecked, and his whole life spoiled before he is seventeen
years old by the detestable cigarette. The 'cigarette fiend' in
time becomes a liar and a thief. He will commit petty thefts to
get money to feed his insatiable appetite for nicotine. He lies
to his parents, his teachers, and his best f riends. He neglects his
studies and, narcotized by nicotine, sits at his desk half
stupefied, his desire for work, his ambition, dulled if not
dead."
For all these reasons, cigarettes had by the 1890's managed
to arouse the ire of a major portion of the American public,
pipe and cigar smokers included. It was thus only to be
expected that parents, teachers, juvenile authorities, and
particularly reformers would agree wholeheartedly with the
sentiment (if not the grammar) of the following plea,
published by the Annapolis Evening Capital in 1886 and
echoed by antismokers for the next forty years: "Something
heroic must be done for the suppression of this monstrous evil
7

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or the coming American man will be a pigmy and a disgrace
to their race. Let our Legislature come to their rescue."
The Maryland legislature, perhaps fearful of the state's
tobacco industry, failed to respond to the plea. Other
legislatures would not be so timid.
T he legislative campaign against smoking began in
earnest in the 1890's. Cigarettes were the primary
target; pipes and cigars initially were excluded from
the battle, but later the scope was broadened to include public
smoking in any form, as Mr. Bamberger and his associates
would f ind out. Although the campaign attracted a number of
organizations and individuals, particularly the Women's
Christian Temperance Union, its most indefatigable warrior
was a now almost forgotten WCTU alumna named Lucy
Page Gaston.
Born in Ohio in 1860 and raised in Illinois, she came early to
the reform business when, as a student at the Illinois State
Normal School, she led raids on local saloons and tobacco
shops. She began her anticigarette campaign in the early
1890's, after ten years as a schoolteacher and Sunday-school
instructor and after having been a full-time WCTU worker
and journalist. Initially she confined her efforts to the Chicago
area, but in the late 1890's she branched out into neighboring
states, addressing school and church assemblies (audiences
already primed by the thousands of antismoking tracts
distributed by the WCTU), organizing girls' and boys'
anticigarette organizations and administering the "Clean Life
Pledge" en masse: "I hereby pledge myself K-ith the help of
God to abstain f rom all intoxicating liquors as a beverage and
from the use of tobacco in any form." Pledgees were entitled
to.vear the Clean Life Button. Convinced that anticigarette
legislation was necessary to protect the youth of America,
Gaston haunted city halls and state capitols, demanding
prompt action and, to that end, making life miserable for any
state legislator or town councilman unlucky enough not to see
her coming. Once anticigarette laws or ordinances were
passed, she pressed for strict enforcement. The Chicago police
chief, no doubt weary of Gaston's prcxlding, finally deputized
her to arrest violators of the new antismoking laws, and within
ten years she .vent to court more than six hundred times to
prosecute tobacco dealers who sold their wares to children.
In 1899, with the financial and moral backing of a group of
Chicago businessmen, Gaston founded the Chicago Anti-
Cigarette League, which spawned similar leagues throughout
the Midwest. In 1901 several hundred anticigarette leagues,
claiming a combined membership of almost 300,000, were
loosely combined as the National Anti-Cigarette League, with
Lucy Page Gaston as superintendent. The goal of the National
Anti-Cigarette League (later renamed the Anti-Cigarette
League of America and still later the International Anti-
Cigarette League) was simple: the total abolition of the
cigarette from American life, by force of law if necessary.
There were some early reversals in the campaign. In 1892
Congress was deluged with petitions from WCTU groups
stating that cigarettes were "causing insanity and death to
thousands" of American youths and demanding federal
abolition of the cigarette trade. The Senate's committee on
epidemic diseases studied the cigarette problem but con-
cluded that it was a state matter. A year later Washington
prohibited the sale of cigarettes within the state-not only to
minors, but to adults as well-but a few months later a federal
court struck down the law. Still, by the turn of the century
most states had banned cigarette and tobacco sales to minors.
The anticigarette movement clearly was gaining momentum.
Between 1895 and 1897 North Dakota, Iowa, and Tennessee
banned the sale of cigarettes or cigarette papers, but the laws
generally were ignored until 1900, when the U.S. Supreme
Court upheld the Tennessee statute. The decision prompted
the American Tobacco Company to notif y its dealers in those
states that it would no.longer back them up if they were
prosecuted for selling cigarettes, and cigarette dealers, fearing
a crackdown by state authorities, scrambled to dispose of their
wares. The court's decision also bolstered the spirits of the
anticigarette forces and spurred them to greater efforts; by
early 1901 anticigarette legislation was a major topic in state
capitols across the country, as the following Chicago Tribune
headline makes clear:
STATES DECLARE WAR ON CIGARET
Movement Afoot To Suppress Use
Of Tobacco In Deadly Form
LAWS ARE BEING FORMED
Nearly Every Legislature Considering
Best Measures For Restriction
PROGRESS OF THE CRUSADE
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Thomas Edison chastises a young addict in a 1916
pamphlet published by the inventor's friend, Henry Ford.
Elp(-LNE (~ 11G~ST iHE IfITLE VNRE S-VEI' SY NEI:RY EORD
10
The accompanying article revealed that only Wyoming
and Louisiana had paid no attention to the cigarette
controversy, while the other forty-three states either already
had anticigarette laws on the books, were considering new or
tougher anticigarette laws, or were the scenes of heavy
anticigarette activity. The pending legislation ranged from
bans on sales to minors to a bill introduced in the Indiana
legislature that would have banned public cigarette smoking
by anyone, with violators to be jailed, fined, and "disenfran-

chised and rendered incapable of holding any of f ice of trusl or
profit."
Although bills to prohibit cigarettes were considered in
more than a dozen states-including Illinois, Kansas, Michi-
gan, Minnesota, Nebraska, California, Montana, Massachu-
setts, Maine, New Hampshire, Delaware, and even North
Carolina-only the Oklahoma Territory prohibited cigarette
sales during the 1901 legislative session, a development the
anticigarette forces attributed, with some justification, to the
well-financed lobbying of the Tobacco Trust. Accusations of
bribery were common whenever anticigarette bills were
considered. When the Washington legislature considered its
1893 anticigarette law, for example, the Tobacco Trust
reportedly dispatched a lobbyist to Olympia armed with
twenty thousand dollars in cash to change legislators' minds,
but he arrived too late to bring the largesse to bear. In Indiana
in 1905 an alleged briber was forced to flee the country-with
a three-thousand-dollar reward on his head-af ter he tried to
buy a pro-cigarette vote. As an anonymous source within the
cigarette industry later recalled the situation, "A bill would be
introduced to a legislature to prohibit the manufacture or sale
of cigarettes; it would be referred to a committee and our
people would have to get busy and pay somebody to see that it
died." Such heavy-handed tactics did little to endear the
Tobacco Trust-which controlled nearly 90 per cent of
American cigarette production-to the American public, and
even after the Trust was obstensibly dissolved by court order
in 1911, the tough lobbying activities of the successor tobacco
companies continued to rankle.
The defeat of any given anticigarette bill hardly resolved
the matter, however; the anticigarette forces-Lucy Page
Gaston in particular-were nothing if not persistent, and
legislators could be sure that they would be back in the next
session, and if necessary, the next. And eventually, it seemed,
they would win, since cigarettes had many enemies in
legislative committee rooms and precious few friends. That
was particularly true in the Midwest, where cigarette
consumption was low and anticigarette feeling high.
nticigarette successes continued to mount. Wisconsin
and Nebraska banned cigarette sales in 1905. In that
same year, Indiana prohibited even their possession,
and Indiana cigarette dealers tried frantically to dispose of
their supplies before the new law took ef fect; one overstocked
dealer burned his in the street. Two years later Arkansas and
Illinois likewise banned cigarette sales, although the Illinois
Supreme Court soon struck down the Illinois law on a
technicality, a decision that prompted Lucy Page Gaston to
initiate an unsuccessful campaign to allow the recall of state
supreme court justices. Kansas, Washington, South Dakota,
and Minnesota joined the cigarette prohibition ranks in 1909,
and the day before the Minnesota law took effect, Minneapo-
lis cigarette smokers reportedly bought more than a million to
see them through the lean days ahead.
Where state governments failed to act, municipal ones
of ten took the initiative. Even New York City jumped on the
antismoking bandwagon, in a sexist sort of way, when in 1908
, x1T..__.'.
The
Who
®
Smokes Cigarettes
Need Not be Anxious About
HIS FUTURE
He Has None
---David Starr Jordan
The poster bearing the laconic advice of the biologist
David Starr Jordan was probably {ssued about 1915
AMERICAN AATIQUARIAN EOCIE7Y, V OOCESTER, MA$
the Board of Aldermen passed an ordinance prohibiting
public smoking by women. (The fact that such an ordinance
was considered necessary indicates how rapidly women were
taking up the habit.) The ordinance was vetoed two weeks
later by Mayor McClellan, but not before twenty-nine
year-old Katie Mulcahey was arrested and jailed for lightinga
cigarette in front of a policeman and then compounding the
crime by asserting, "No man shall dictate to me"
While legislators pondered anticigarette bills, the educa-
tional campaign continued. "There are in the United States
to-day 500,000 boys and youths who are habitual cigarette
smokers," Education magazine told its readers in 1907. "Few
of them can be educated beyond the eighth grade, and
practically all of them are destined to remain physical and
mental dwarfs." The same publication later of fered a number
of terse case histories: "Case No. 1: Began habit at 4, taught by
boys 6 and 7. Almost physical wreck now at 13. Sight poor,
voice like a ghost, hearing impaired. Steals. In f irst grade."Or
"Case No. 4: Began smoking at 10. Mind shattered at 14. Tried
several positions, failed. A worthless loafer now." But boys
were no longer the sole target of the antismoking campaign.
Businessmen's views on the subject were being widely
circulated, the general tone being that cigarette smoking was
a handicap in the job market. Montgomery Ward, Sears,
Roebuck, and hundreds of other firms were said to
discriminate against cigarette users, and one antismoker later
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