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The cigarette: a political history

2019; Elsevier BV; Volume: 8; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1016/s2213-2600(19)30474-6

2213-2619

Talha Burki,

American Political and Social Dynamics

In 1958, Americans puffed their way through 424 billion cigarettes. Over half of all men and almost a quarter of women smoked. Cigarettes were a mainstay of the army ration pack. Celebrities such as Humphrey Bogart, Marilyn Monroe, and Audrey Hepburn helped to cement the association between cigarettes and style. “Cigarettes had once been the vice of immigrants and juvenile delinquents”, writes Sarah Milov, in her intriguing history of the American cigarette. “But war, advertising, and Hollywood had helped to broaden, professionalise, and glamorise smoking's appeal”. The transformation of the USA into a nation of smokers was no accident. In 1928, American Tobacco spent more on advertising than any other company, bar General Motors. RJ Reynolds would later run a campaign telling Americans that “more doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette”. As incomes rose, Americans smoked more and more. “Cigarettes were a product par excellence of the postwar consumers' republic”, writes Milov. “Regardless of one's professional class, educational attainment, looks, or political affiliation, to smoke was to be an American”. Milov begins her story at the beginning of the twentieth century. Most Americans did not use tobacco at the time and, even if they did, they preferred chewing tobacco or a cigar—think of all those spaghetti westerns, with the spittoon situated next to the bar and Clint Eastwood chomping a stubby Havana. Moral reformers lambasted the cigarette, more than a dozen states legislated against it, and industrialists deprecated the reduced productivity of smokers (this argument would recur in the anti-smoking campaigns of the latter part of the twentieth century). “In the years before the First World War, as the tide of moral reform crested, the cigarette's rise was anything but certain”, states Milov. All that changed when the USA went to war. The tobacco companies quickly realised the benefits of linking their product to patriotism. “When soldiers smoked cigarettes overseas—their minor vice forgiven by the proximity of death—they helped make the world safe for all Americans who took up the habit”, notes Milov. The tobacco industry rapidly accrued enormous influence, the result of a cosy relationship between the manufacturers and the political establishment, both at federal level and in the southern tobacco-growing states. “Cigarettes were central to American political institutions throughout the twentieth century”, writes Milov. During the New Deal, the US Government and the tobacco industry worked out an arrangement of price supports and quotas that was not dismantled until 2004. The State Department helped forge an international market for American tobacco. The Marshall Plan, the purpose of which was to help Europe recover from the devastation of the Second World War, saw $1 billion worth of tobacco shipped across the Atlantic alongside genuine necessities, such as food, fuel, and machinery. In 1955, the chain-smoking Senator Lyndon Baines Johnson suffered a near-fatal heart attack. But even if tobacco was not a good friend to him, Johnson would still offer staunch support to the industry throughout his subsequent presidency. Yet this was a man who made public health the centrepiece of his domestic agenda. Milov soberly explores the exceptionalism of the cigarette, and the nexus of relationships between the tobacco farmers, manufacturers, politicians, public health advocates, organised labour, and American business that helped shape policies and public attitudes. It is a detailed and well-researched account. The author adeptly locates the cigarette within the broader historical trends and patterns of the twentieth century. She teases out the unlikely alliances and missteps in the efforts to ban smoking in the workplace, in restaurants, and on public transport, and examines the emergence of the non-smoker as a political force. It is a fascinating story, twisting this way and that. And it is not over yet. Around one in six Americans still smoke. Milov encourages the reader to spare a thought for these individuals. “Smokers are poorer and less educated than non-smokers, and they are more likely to live in rural and impoverished communities”, she points out. The concentration of the epidemic is largely down to the efforts of the tobacco industry, which strenuously targets Americans with a lower economic status. But it could also reflect the priorities of the anti-smoking movement. “Fewer blue-collar than white-collar workers are protected by workplace-smoking restrictions—in part, perhaps, a consequence of non-smoker activists' management-centred approach”, writes Milov. It is more difficult for poor Americans to quit smoking, probably because they are less likely to have access to pharmacological aids. Employers in many places can legally decline to hire smokers. Moreover, smokers tend to be blamed for the health consequences of their habit. “For the past hundred years, the political economy of tobacco has been a thicket of contradictions”, concludes Milov. “The early years provided economic stability for the few at the expense of public health; the new system saves lives even as it stigmatises”.