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THE HUDRD-YEAR NEWAR AGAINST THE CIGARETTE BY GORDON L. DILLOW TIFL 0069563 Rrprintccf \~ ith permission of Amcrican Hcrita«c Puhlishin-o Co., Inc.

Founded nearly a third of a century ago, AMERICAN HERITAGE is pub- lished six times a year. The quality of its writing and design has earned awards many times over: today, it is recognized as a magazine unique in the field of American publishing. Subscribers to AMERICAN HERITAGE are eligible to purchase our handsome and widely acclaimed books at special discounts. They also receive, automatically and without cost, each new edition of the American Heritage Collection catalog. Single copies of AMERICAN HERITAGE are $5.00 each. Annual subscriptions: $24 in the U.S. and possessions. Publishing offices: 10 Rockefeller Plaza, New York, N.Y. 10020. From the February/March issue of AMERICAN HERITAGE cQ 1981 by American Heritage Publishing Co., Inc. All rights reserved. TIFL 0069564

t was like any other Tuesday lunch hour, until the sheriff's deputies walked in. Mr. Ernest Bamberger, general manager of the Keystone Mining Company and recent (unsuccessful) 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 gentlemen's 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, Deputy 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. Bamberger, Mr. Lynch, and Mr. Newhouse were 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 undignified 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, aIl 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 crime, nor even that they were sufficiently 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 four decades later, during a Tuesday lunch hour at the Vienna Cafe. he world's first 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 for wasting their money and befouling the English air, and finally concluded with a famous-and, to nonsmokers, still applica- ble-peroration: Smoking, 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. 3 TIFL 0069565

From the start, the anticigarette forces had to contend with the catchiest names and f lashiest 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. k ; 7 GOLC CICARETTES_- AII_PI{()7iNiRAPFISL\y()RIFt)!7(i('()L'RII~.S4'()FRI('fIARI)N". ELiI()'IT,CI(~.Aki~ITtiPA('kC'()I_LL~.(`If)RSn$S(K'IAI'i(1\, (:L()R(;Lll)F~N_MASS. 4 -~7 ut . .1, ~RKEYRED ®

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 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 filthy and expensive habits. The doctor went on to draw a direct cause-and-effect relationship between tobaccd use and drunkenness, a correlation that would persist throughout subsequent antismoking campaigns. Dr. Rush was followed by a number of antismoking reformers. Dr. Joel Shew, for example, carefully catalogued- 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 War, 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. igarettes apparently were developed in Latin America and later turned up in seventeenth-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. Trail, 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. Trail. 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, f ollowing 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 with opium, arsenic, and other poisons. Cigarette tobacco reportedly was gleaned from cigar butts retrieved from 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 fact 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 with city types-as noted by Dr. Trall-hardly improved their reputation among the rural populace, and in contrast to the manly cigar, the TIFL 0069568

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 names such 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 worth noting that "Marlboro" brand cigarettes, whose filter-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 "Fifty 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. TIFL 0069569 "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 office 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 confined 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 effects 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 lad has had his will power weakened, his moral principle sapped, his nervous system wrecked, 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. 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 find 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 with the help of God to abstain from all intoxicating liquors as a beverage and from the use of tobacco in any form." Pledgees were entitled to wear 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 prodding, finally deputized her to arrest violators of the new antismoking laws, and within ten years she went 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 notify 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 I Nvr A Live KQL Thomas Edison chastises a young addict in a 1916 pamphlet published by the inventor's friend, Henry Ford. FROM "IHECASE AGAINS! iHE LIITLE WHRE StA VER" BY HENRY FORD 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- 10 TIFL 0069572

chised and rendered incapable of holding any office of trust 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 f lee the country-with a three-thousand-dollar reward on his head-after 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. A 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 effect; 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 often took the initiative. Even New York City jumped on the antismoking bandwagon, in a sexist sort of way, when in 1908 TIFL 0069573 f~r So.32 The Who Smokes Cigarettes Need Not be Anxious About HIS FUTUR He Has None E ---David Starr Jordan The poster bearing the laconic advice of the biologist David Starr Jordan was probably issued about 1915 AMERICAN ANTIQUARIAN$OCIETY, WORCESfER, MASS. 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 lighting a 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 offered 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 first 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 11

AVenturesome ( hrl 01 c4n Undesirable Wife- Only one kind of girf smoked, according to "Cigarette News," which ran this warning in its February, 1931, issue. cheerfully estimated that more than two million jobs were closed to them. A host of the famous joined the anticigarette crusade, including Elbert Hubbard, author of "A Message to Garcia" and a lesser-known pamphlet called "The Cigaret- tist"; Thomas Edison, a cigar smoker. who refused to hire cigarette smokers; and Dr. Harvey W. Wiley, father of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act and author of a 1916 Good Housekeeping article called "The Little White Slaver." Even Henry Ford joined in, publishing in 1916 a pamphlet called "The Case Against the Little White Slaver." Other antismoking groups were formed, most notably the Non-Smokers Protective League of America, founded in 1911 by Dr. Charles G. Pease, a New York physician and dentist who regularly "arrested" smokers on trains, subways, and so on-activities which Dr. Pease later said earned him more than a dozen death threats and two "scouting" visits by local undertakers. Meanwhile, Lucy Page Gaston kept up the pressure. Fresh from her legislative victories in the Midwest, , she took time out from publishing The Boy, the Anti- Cigarette League's monthly newspaper, to carry the fight to New York City in 1907 and again three years later. Although she failed in her attempt to have a cigarette prohibition law passed in Albany, both visits created a stir. In 1913 Gaston and Dr. D. H. Kress opened a smoking-cure clinic in the Women's Temple in Chicago, the Anti-Cigarette League headquarters, and soon were f looded with repenitent cigarette smokers, mostly small boys but also a chorus girl or two. The "cure" consisted of painting the palate with a silver nitrate solution and chewing some gentian root whenever the smoking urge 12 returned. Newspapermen who took it reported that the cure was very effective, in the short run at least, and similar clinics were soon in operation from Hoboken to Los Angeles. In some respects, then, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were indeed the golden age of the antismoking movement. Cigarettes were anathema to mil- lions of Americans, and f eeling ran so strong in some areas that a traveling Chautauqua company in anticigarette Kansas deemed it prudent to use a dairy instead of a cigarette factory as the backdrop for a production of Carmen. There was, however, one rather vexing problem: Americans were smoking more cigarettes than ever before. Cigarettes had suffered somewhat during the early years of the campaign; between 1896 and 1901, after more than thirty years of constant growth, cigarette sales actually declined, reaching a low point of about two billion in 1901. But the drop was only temporary; in 1902, following a tax reduction and the repeal of an 1897 ban on cigarette cards and coupons, sales went up, and by 1906 they had neared their former high of five billion. In 1910 Americans smoked almost eight billion "Fatimas," "Meccas," "Hassans," "Helmars," "Murads," "Egyptian Deities," and others; in 1917 some thirty-five billion cigarettes-now with names like "Camels," "Lucky Strikes," and "Chesterfields"-were consumed. As those brand names indicate, between 1910 and 1917 American smokers shifted away from the American-made Turkish or pseudo-Turkish brands that had dominated the market since the late 1890's. In the same period manufactur- ers dropped the use of coupons and prizes. "Camels," introduced by R. J. Reynolds in 1913, were responsible for both developments. "Camels"' new blend of domestic and "cased" or sweetened Burley tobaccos quickly developed a large following-most cigarettes still use the same basic blend-and "Camels" killed the coupon and prize system with the following message, printed on the back of every pack: "Don't look for premiums or coupons, as the cost of the tobaccos blended in CAMEL Cigarettes prohibits the use of them." The implication that coupons or prizes meant reduced quality was a master stroke; "Camels" soon captured more than a third of the American cigarette market, forcing the American Tobacco Company and Liggett & Myers to respond with the similarly blended "Lucky Strikes" and "Chesterfields." Cigarette cards and coupons quickly disap- peared, although Brown & Williamson revived the coupon system on a very limited basis in the 1930's with "Raleighs." he American cigarette industry had prospered not only in spite of the extensive anticigarette activity but in some ways because of it. First, people simply liked cigarettes; they were cheap, easy to smoke, and were better suited than either pipes, cigars, or the ubiquitous rural plug for the frenetic pace of city life. Paradoxically, cigarettes were shedding their effeminate image while at the same time women were taking them up in ever-increasing numbers. Also, the antismokers' exaggerated claims of the cigarette's deleterious effects were impossible to sustain, and thus eventually proved self-defeating. Whatever reasonable argu- TIFL 0069574