Torches of Freedom

"I never smoked a cigarette until I was nine." - H. L. Mencken

I just finished reading a book titled The Cigarette Century by author Allan M. Brandt. The sub-heading on the book's cover describes it thusly: The Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of the Product That Defined America. It is certainly no exaggeration to argue that the cigarette was indeed the dominant consumer product of the American 20th Century. Indeed, by the mid-point of the century more then half of all American adults were habitual cigarette smokers. That by itself is quite remarkable when you consider that the cigarette was scarcely in evidence when the century began.

A century ago, the cigarette was widely viewed as a "dirty habit", and a disreputable form of tobacco consumption. A mechanical means of rolling cigarettes, all of a uniform quality, was only the first step in the process of turning them into the preferred method of consuming tobacco. Just as important, was the campaign to change the public perception of cigarettes. In fact, that campaign marked the birth of modern advertising and marketing. The tobacco companies were aided immensely by the advent of the First World War. When asked what the nation could do to assist in the war effort, General Pershing famously answered "You ask me what I need to win this war. I answer tobacco, as much as bullets.". And by "tobacco", he meant cigarettes.

Once they had secured the rights of male smokers, the tobacco interests turned their attention to the "disenfranchised" half of the population. Consequently, in the hands of shrewd marketers, cigarettes became "torches of freedom". It was considered socially unacceptable for woman to smoke in public, right up through the 1930's, and the industry set out to knock down those barriers. In an era that saw woman struggling to attain equal status with men, the very act of smoking in public became a powerful statement of equality. The result was an astonishing increase in cigarette sales.

Throughout the first-half of the 20th century, the tobacco industry enjoyed a period of sustained growth that was literally without precedent. The cigarette, and smokers, became ubiquitous. The industry spent liberally on advertising, and the ads always featured happy and attractive people enjoying the good life, of which the cigarette was an integral part. Hollywood pitched in with the result that you could hardly find a movie in which the stars didn't smoke cigarettes. The cigarette quickly became an indispensable prop in cinema, an object that could be employed to convey any number of meanings. In 1950, the outlook couldn't have been brighter for the industry.

Then, came the fall. Over the course of the second-half of the 20th century, the tobacco industry went from being respected and admired, to being castigated as lying "merchants of death". The industry fought back ferociously with every tool at it's disposal, legal and otherwise to create and sustain a "controversy" over the scientific evidence. The industry managed, in the face of overwhelming evidence that their product poisoned and killed it's users, to continue promoting and selling cigarettes.

The list of crimes that one can level at the tobacco industry is a long one. Topping it of course, would be the deliberate addicting of generations of children, many of whom would be consigned to a slow and painful death by way of lung cancer, emphysema, or any one of a host of other serious medical conditions, all attributable to years of smoking cigarettes. One would be hard-pressed to find a more convincing case of corporate malfeasance. And yet, they are still in business. The story of how that came to be would take up much more space then I am willing to dedicate to it right now. Maybe another time...