Although
a few women shared the tobacco habit in nineteenth-century America,
it was overwhelming a male endeavor. The most popular ways for
American men of the time to consume tobacco were pipes, cigars, and
chewing tobacco. Snuff had largely gone out of fashion by
mid-century, except for occasional sniffs by high-society youth.
Pipes were a favorite of all social classes, and varied in style
from expensive, elaborately carved wood or stone to simpler,
moderately-priced versions to cheap ones made of clay or corncob.
Chewing tobacco was common throughout the century in rural and urban
areas alike, requiring spittoons in the cities’ public buildings.
It was popular among working class and poor Americans, but was
shunned by polite society in the late-nineteenth century.
American soldiers were
introduced to cigars during the Mexican War (1846-1848) and they
became a fad with men in the 1850s. Cigars ranged in price
from cheap to expensive, but were associated for the rest of the
century with affluence, respectability, and success in the male
bastions of business, politics, and the military. Cigars were
the most exclusively male of all tobacco products, while cigarettes,
in contrast, were considered unmanly until the end of the nineteenth
century. The manufacturing of cigarettes in the United States
began in the early 1860s and mass production was achieved in the
early 1880s. There were two basic kinds of cigarette products:
high-end, expensive brands made of imported tobacco; and low-end,
cheap brands made of domestic tobacco.
High-end cigarettes were
linked with the moral decadence of Europe, the Middle East, and
Latin America, where the products were both manufactured and
popular. Hand-rolled cigarettes, also made from imported
tobacco, implied the user had the leisure to indulge the habit, and
was not participating in his manly duty to earn a living and provide
for a family. Thus, the cigar represented the family man who
gained wealth through hard work and self-sacrifice, and who
respected traditional morality and authority; the cigarette
symbolized the man whose inherited wealth allowed him to remain in a
sort of perpetual, self-centered adolescence—unmarried,
disrespectful of conventional morality and authority, and attracted
to things foreign.
An
article in the May 28, 1870 issue
of Harper’s
Weekly mocked
“The Hero of a Fast Novel” (“fast” means immoral or socially
improper). He was constantly pleasure seeking, and lived in
luxury by spending other people’s money or going into debt.
The cigarette was as much an identifying mark of the “fast” youth as
his expensive food and wine. “When out shooting, these
gentlemen, who are ‘roughing it,’ toss the dogs
foie gras
and truffles, and drink delicate Burgundies to their perfumed
cigarettes.”
A cartoon in the October
14, 1882 issue depicted a “Swell
Struggling with the Cig’rette Poisoner.”
Like the “fast” young man, a “swell” was wealthy, self-indulgent,
and egotistical. In the cartoon, he wore evening clothes and
top hat for a riotous night on the town. His floral
boutonniere may have mimicked the practice of Oscar Wilde, who
toured the United States that year wearing or carrying lilies and
sunflowers (that may be a lily pad in the swell’s buttonhole).
The text and image made it clear that the cartoonist considered
cigarette smoking to be addictive and deadly. The multiple
cigarette “ribs” of the snake signified chain-smoking, which
restricted his free will by encircling him. According to the
caption (which may have been sarcastic) he struggled (or should have
struggled) against its hold on his life. The skeletal view of
the snake and the designation of cigarettes as “poison” delivered
the powerful message that cigarette smoking is deadly.
Although cigarettes made
with domestic tobacco had always been cheaper than those containing
imported tobacco, two things lowered the price more. The first
was the drastic reduction of the federal tax on cigarette
manufacturers in 1883. Originally imposed to help pay for the
Union war effort during the Civil War, two decades later Congress
cut the tax by almost 29%, and manufacturers like James Buchanan
“Buck” Duke of North Carolina, passed the savings along to
customers. In the February 25, 1882 issue of
Harper’s Weekly,
a cartoon by Thomas Nast
criticized the call for the tax reduction. The artist
presented two stylishly dressed young men in a tobacco haze.
Their cigarette habit made them stupid and lazy, the opposite of the
“manly air” they wanted to project.
The second important factor
occurred when Duke contracted in 1883 with James Bonsack to perfect
the latter’s invention for mass-producing cigarettes. On April
30, 1884, the machine lasted an entire ten-hour shift, making
120,000 cigarettes. The device reduced manufacturing costs
and, in turn, consumer prices as it increased production and
availability. By the early 1890s, Duke had a near monopoly of
the cigarette market via his American Tobacco Company (broken up by
the U.S. Supreme Court in 1911).
The markets for cheap,
domestic cigarettes in the late-nineteenth century were primarily
boys and immigrant men from southern and eastern Europe, where the
habit was common. The low cost and convenience of cigarettes
also encouraged urban working-class men to take up the practice over
the next few decades. Cigarettes could be smoked quickly while
walking to and from work, on lunch breaks, and when the boss was not
around. They were also less offensive than other tobacco
product to nonsmokers in the congested and rapidly growing cities of
America.
These groups of cigarette
smokers reinforced the stereotype that the habit was unmanly.
Boys were immature, and presumably did not have the responsibility
of providing for a family (actually, some working-class boys did, at
least in part). In 1885, an editorial in
The New York Times
chastised men for smoking cigarettes and warned of the dangers it
posed to the nation’s political survival. “A grown man has no
possible excuse for thus imitating the small boy… The
decadence of Spain began when the Spaniards adopted cigarettes and
if this pernicious habit obtains among adult Americans[, then] the
ruin of the Republic is close at hand…” (The focus on Catholic
Spain probably also reflected anti-Catholic sentiment among the
dominant Protestant population in the United States.)
Poor and working-class men
(which included most immigrants) were considered unsuccessful
financially, and not socially (and sometimes, morally) respectable.
Therefore, they did not fit the middle-class ideal of American
manhood in the late-nineteenth century. A one-sentence item in
the “Personal”
column of the July 12, 1888 issue of Harper’s Weekly
proclaimed, “Washington is proud of the fact that not one
Congressman smokes cigarettes.” It is certain, though, that
many used cigars, pipes, or chewing tobacco.
The public attitude against
men smoking cigarettes began to change with the Spanish-American War
in 1898. Many of the young American soldiers, particularly
those from rural areas, were introduced to cigarettes as they came
in contact with residents of the (former) Spanish colonies of Cuba,
Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines, where cigarettes were smoked
by most of the population. Although U.S. military officials
approved enlisted men using pipes and chewing tobacco, they tried
unsuccessfully to discourage cigarette smoking. In fact,
American sailors threatened to mutiny if deprived of cigarettes.
They had practical advantages over other tobacco products.
They could be carried easily in a uniform pocket, smoked quickly,
and did not spoil in humid weather like cigars. In cramped
military quarters, particularly on long sea voyages, the milder
cigarette odor would be less offensive to nonsmokers than strong
cigar smoke.
At first,
Harper’s Weekly
presented cigarette smoking as a Spanish practice. In the
August 13, 1898 issue, at one point in a
news story on a truce in the fighting in Cuba,
the correspondent identified the two sides by their respective
choice of tobacco: “Meanwhile the little men in light blue
[Spanish soldiers] sit calmly on the edge of their trenches and
smoke cigarettes, while the big men in dark blue [American soldiers]
sit on the edge of theirs and good-humoredly cast tobacco juice
toward [the city of] Santiago.” However, in the next week’s
issue, in a news story on “The
Taking of Guam,”
the correspondent referred to American sailors aboard the U.S.
transport,
Australia,
using cigarettes, cigars, and chewing tobacco. The situation
was similar in Puerto Rico, from where Charles L. Hofmann of Battery
A, Pennsylvania Light Artillery, wrote home, “You can buy the best
cigars here… and their cigarettes are good and strong.”
In the aftermath of the
Spanish-American War, E. S. Martin questioned, in his “This
Busy World”
column from the December 24, 1898 issue of
Harper’s Weekly,
the presumption that cigarettes undermined “American manhood.”
Instead, he connected the habit explicitly with American servicemen,
who smoked so many cigarettes in Cuba that they ran out of supplies.
He emphasized that cigarette smoking among American military
personnel was simply a fact from the recent war, “which every one
must recall.” In the February 25, 1899 issue, a feature
article on “Our
New Possessions—Puerto Rico,”
discussed the “Tobacco Culture” of the island, a new American
territory after the war. The author argued that with minor
changes to cigarettes made in Puerto Rico, they would find a ready
market in the United States.
The years between the
Spanish-American War and America’s entry into World War I in 1917
were a period of transition for the public attitude toward men and
cigarette smoking. The notion in earlier decades that the
foreign origin of high-end cigarette made the manliness and morality
of male smokers suspect appears to have diminished by the late 1890s
(even before the Spanish-American War). An advertisement for
the Nestor cigarette brand in the March 19, 1898 issue of
Harper’s Weekly
declared proudly that its product was “THE
MODERN EMBODIMENT OF ANCIENT ORIENTAL LUXURIOUSNESS”:
so much for middle-class respectability and the work ethic. A
Nestor ad in the January 21, 1899 issue
marketed to “smokers of refined taste” and featured a sketch of an
Arab man (or perhaps a British man in Arab attire).
That there was still
uncertainty, however, about cigarettes and American manhood is
demonstrated in two other ads. In the September 3, 1898 issue,
the Van Bibber brand of cigarettes were called “LITTLE
CIGARS,” to
associate them with the unquestionably acceptable tobacco product
for men. In the February 18, 1899 issue, an illustrated ad for
Lucke’s Rolls cigars stated, “They
are not a smoke for boys or cigarette smokers.”
(Notice another Nestor ad at the top of the page.) The fact
that the cigar ad insulted cigarette smokers also indicates that the
cigar company was experiencing competition from cigarette
manufacturers.
Historians have attributed
a drop in cigarette sales for a few years in the late-1890s and
early-1900s primarily to the return of economic prosperity, which
allowed more male smokers to afford cigars over the cheaper
cigarettes. In his “This
Busy World”
column from the August 19, 1899 issue of
Harper’s Weekly,
E. S. Martin noted that after increasing for 12 years, domestic
cigarette production dropped during the previous year. He
observed, though, that the sale of luxury cigarettes had increased
(evidence of the improved economy).
In the early-twentieth
century, military officials continued their unsuccessful attempts at
suppressing cigarette smoking. In 1903, the Military Academy
at West Point banned cigarettes (but promoted pipes) and soon
court-martialed two cadets for possession. However, the
prohibition lapsed into disuse when the chief medical officer of
West Point admitted in 1915 that “a large percentage” of cadets were
“habitual cigarette smokers.” Similarly, intense opposition
from sailors caused the U.S. Navy to reverse a 1907 ban on
cigarettes for those less than 21 years old.
By the time the United
States entered World War I in 1917, cigarette smoking seems to have
been widespread in the military. The public association of
cigarette smoking with the manly image of American servicemen, which
had begun with the Spanish-American War in 1898, was reinforced in
World War I. The difference was that instead of military
officials resisting the practice, as they had done in the earlier
conflict, the U.S. military, federal government, and auxiliary
associations officially approved, promoted, and distributed
cigarettes among American military personnel. Whereas
cigarettes had been linked previously with moral decadence and
considered a “gateway” drug for the use of stronger substances, they
were now viewed as a partial substitute for bad (or worse) behavior:
alcohol was banned to servicemen, and military camps had
prostitute-free zones around them.
Cigarette smoking would
never again be considered unmanly, which was too bad for men.
By 1955, over half of American men smoked cigarettes. Nine
years later, the U.S. Surgeon General issued a report declaring that
cigarette smoking caused cancer in men. Today, despite a
lower percentage of male cigarette smokers than in the past, lung
cancer (overwhelmingly caused by smoking) is the leading cause of
cancer-related deaths among American men. The habit also
increases the risk of heart disease, strokes, and other types of
cancer. |