Tobacco Products

Tobacco Products. Despite official English policies that held tobacco to be harmful, and a denunciatory tract by James I, the plant became colonial Virginia's export staple, and tobacco use was widespread among the colonists. Before 1750, Americans' preferred method of tobacco use was pipe smoking—popularized by the upper classes in Europe. Snuff (ground tobacco mixed with flavorings or scents) next became the style for elite men and women. The nasal inhalation of snuff lost favor after the American Revolution, however, and those who continued to use snuff now placed small quantities between the lip or cheek and the gum. But most early nineteenth‐century users switched to chewing tobacco, again a flavored tobacco, or cigars. The latter, varying widely in quality and price to suit all classes, were considered cleaner—and manlier—than chewing‐tobacco.

Cigarettes slowly gained popularity in the late nineteenth century. Initially associated with New York City bohemians, street urchins, and other disreputable characters, cigarettes revived opposition to tobacco on health and moral grounds. Yet by the 1920s, cigarettes dominated tobacco use. Three factors account for this success: increased production of lighter, milder “bright” tobacco; innovations in production technologies, especially the Bonsack cigarette machine; and advances in advertising and other mass‐marketing techniques such as premiums, price cutting, and rebates. The introduction of safety matches also facilitated the spread of cigarette smoking. Unlike cigars or pipes, a cigarette could be smoked in a few minutes, and it could be enjoyed almost anywhere without the unsightly spitting and plug‐disposal problems associated with chewing tobacco.

A new era in tobacco sales and advertising opened in 1914 with the introduction of Camel cigarettes by R.J. Reynolds, a former associate of tobacco‐industry pioneer James B. Duke. Camel was a mild cigarette that allowed deep inhalation of the smoke. Brand loyalty, rather than price competition, now became the key in cigarette marketing. Cigarettes were heavily promoted during both world wars, with free or cut‐rate distribution to service personnel, and systematically introduced on college campuses between the wars. By 1927, state legislatures had repealed all laws regulating tobacco‐product sales to adults. Advertisers marketed cigarettes to women as sophisticated, romantic, and a badge of emancipation, while simultaneously appealing to men by portraying cigarette smoking as a sign of masculinity. With such promotion, cigarette sales soared from 70 billion in 1925 to 339 billion in 1945 and 640 billion in 1981—the all‐time high. Opponents of tobacco use, meanwhile, were increasingly marginalized. Even the few physicians who warned against smoking were dismissed as moralistic zealots.

Change lay ahead, however. In 1948, the makers of Parliament, a filtered cigarette, claimed that physicians recommended them. This innovation gained significance in 1950 when the Journal of the American Medical Association suggested, on epidemiological grounds, a possible connection between smoking and lung cancer. By 1958, filter‐tip cigarettes had captured 46 percent of the market.

But the complicated chemistry of tobacco smoke and the uncertain laboratory understanding of cancer made the smoking–lung cancer connection difficult for many researchers to accept, and modern medical epidemiology in fact developed from the attempts to establish the link. As epidemiological evidence accumulated, smoking was linked to other illnesses such as emphysema and heart disease. But since most physicians were smokers, and good research could be found on both sides of the issue, Americans had difficulty deciding where the truth and the public‐health interest lay. Only under much political and scientific pressure did the U.S. surgeon general in 1964 issue an authoritative report presumptively linking smoking to several specific diseases—as opposed to the general unhealthiness assumed by earlier hygienists and moralists.

Dismissing mere statistical associations as unconvincing, the tobacco industry took the position that until a specific carcinogen could be found in tobacco smoke, it would deny a causal link between smoking and cancer. Through the Tobacco Institute (founded 1958), the industry resisted government regulation of its multibillion dollar business. By the mid–1960s, however, an array of medical and lay groups constituted a strong antismoking lobby dedicated to regulating the marketing and smoking of tobacco products. Seeking protection against legal liability, manufacturers in 1966 added warning labels to cigarette packages and in 1971 stopped advertising cigarettes on radio and television and included health warnings in print advertising. In the 1980s, organizations such as GASP (Group against Smokers' Pollution) and ASH (Action on Smoking and Health) publicized research on the hazards of “second‐hand smoke” inhaled from cigarettes being smoked by others. By the 1990s, alarmed by increasing tobacco use among young people, smoking opponents focused on nicotine's addictive qualities. The antismoking campaign had its effect: From 1985 to 1998, the percentage of Americans who smoked fell from 38.7 to 27.7. In 1998, the four largest tobacco companies signed a $206 billion agreement with forty‐six states to cover public‐health costs related to smoking.

As the twentieth century ended, growing evidence of cigarettes' devastating medical toll; litigation by individual smokers and class‐action lawsuits; a federal lawsuit for deceptive practices; and smoking bans by local municipalities, airlines, businesses, restaurants, and public institutions all battered the tobacco industry. Strenuous antismoking campaigns continued to target children and young people. Despite declining smoking rates, however, millions of Americans continued to smoke cigarettes or use tobacco in other forms, and U.S.‐made cigarettes flooded foreign markets. Ironically, in the prosperous 1990s, expensive cigars enjoyed a resurgence of popularity as a badge of affluence.
See also Agriculture; Antitrust Legislation; Colonial Era; Foreign Trade, U.S.; Health and Fitness; Mass Production; Medicine: Since 1945; Twenties, The.

Bibliography

Nannie May Tilley , The Bright‐Tobacco Industry, 1860–1929, 1948.
Richard B. Tennant , The American Cigarette Industry: A Study in Economic Analysis and Public Policy, 1950.
Kenneth Michael Friedman , Public Policy and the Smoking‐Health Controversy: A Comparative Study, 1975.
Gideon Doron , The Smoking Paradox: Public Regulation in the Cigarette Industry, 1979.
John C. Burnham , American Physicians and Tobacco Use: Two Surgeons General, 1929 and 1964, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 63 (1989): 1–31.
Cassandra Tate , Cigarette Wars: The Triumph of “The Little White Slaver,” 1999.

John E. Sauer and and John C. Burnham