Cigarette Wars: The Triumph of "The Little White Slaver"

by Cassandra Tate

Overview

We live in an age when the cigarette industry is under almost constant attack. Few weeks pass without yet another report on the hazards of smoking, or news of another anti-cigarette lawsuit, or more restrictions on cigarette sales, advertising, or use. It's somewhat surprising, then, that very little attention has been given to the fact that America has traveled down this road before. Until now, that is. As Cassandra Tate reports in this fascinating work of historical scholarship, between 1890 and 1930, fifteen states enacted laws to ban the sale, manufacture, possession, and/or use of cigarettes--and no fewer than twenty-two other states considered such legislation. In presenting the history of America's first conflicts with Big Tobacco, Tate draws on a wide range of newspapers, magazines, trade publications, rare pamphlets, and many other manuscripts culled from archives across the country. Her thorough and meticulously researched volume is also attractively illustrated with numerous photographs, posters, and cartoons from this bygone era. Readers will find in Cigarette Wars an engagingly written and well-told tale of the first anti-cigarette movement, dating from the Victorian Age to the Great Depression, when cigarettes were both legally restricted and socially stigmatized in America. Progressive reformers and religious fundamentalists came together to curb smoking, but their efforts collapsed during World War I, when millions of soldiers took up the habit and cigarettes began to be associated with freedom, modernity, and sophistication. Importantly, Tate also illustrates how supporters of the early anti-cigarette movement articulated virtually every issue that is still being debated about smoking today; theirs was not a failure of determination, she argues in these pages, but of timing. A compelling narrative about several clashing American traditions--old vs. young, rural vs. urban, and the late nineteenth vs. early twentieth centuries--this work will appeal to all who are interested in America's love-hate relationship with what Henry Ford once called "the little white slaver."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780195353389
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	02/11/1999
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Cassandra Tate worked as a journalist for twenty years before earning a Ph.D. in history at the University of Washington in 1995. She currently works in the field of interactive media in Seattle.

Table of Contents

Introduction1. Birth of the Coffin Nail2. The Clean Life Crusade3. The Little White Slaver Goes to War4. Milady's Cigarette5. The "Triumph" of the CigaretteConclusionCoda

What People are Saying About This

Otis L. Graham Jr.

Anyone interested in today's escalating political and legal battle in the long war against the cigarette will applaud [Tate's work]. At last, the first half-century of the bitter cultural war has its historian, or narrator, who has produced a book distinguished by graceful prose, vivid characters and events, and sure-footed judgement.

Paul Solman

I've read this book twice and it still amazes. The New York Times condemned nicotin's 'disastrous effects' in 1879? Anti-tobacco campaigns are more than a century old? Cigarettes were thought perilous because of their link to sex? Cigarette Wars surprises, informs, and shakes convictions (or mine, at least) in prose as lucid as it is engaging. It's a hell of a story.

Editorial Reviews

A brief yet detailed history of the fluctuating popularity of the cigarette in America and of the reform movements dedicated to snuffing it out. According to journalist and historian Tate, in her first book, when James B. Duke created the modern American cigarette industry in the 1880s, the cigarette was demonized as a symbol of moral degeneracy. Only decadent bohemians or unwashed immigrants smoked "coffin nails." The stigmatized cigarette was an easy target for Progressive Era reformers. In 1899, Lucy Page Gaston founded the Anti-Cigarette League to lobby for the prohibition of smoking. An evangelical Protestant, Gaston forged strong alliances with other reformist groups, such as the YMCA and the Women's Christian Temperance Union. Attacking the cigarette as a moral blight, Gaston deemed smoking a "gateway" vice that led to alcoholism, narcotics addiction, gambling, and criminality. Many industrial leaders, notably Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, and John Harvey Kellogg, refused to hire smokers because "they simply could not be trusted." Fifteen states banned the sale of cigarettes before 1917. Yet WWI changed everything. In sending troops to Europe, Congress prohibited alcohol and prostitution near army bases but allowed the "lesser evil" of cigarette smoking. Billions of cigarettes were thus shipped overseas as army rations. The cultural impact of this policy was immense, according to Tate, serving to "transform what was once a manifestation of moral weakness into a jaunty emblem of freedom, democracy, and modernity." Throughout the postwar period and beyond, cigarettes became identified with Hollywood glamour and the loosening of traditional values, especially among women. Antismokingadvocates were mocked as Puritan killjoys. The cigarette had won the battle of acceptance, but, as Tate deftly points out, the cigarette wars continue, with medicine rather than morality now leading the assault. An entertaining account of a little-known episode in American cultural history, and a keen reminder that the ever-embattled cigarette has risen from its ashes more than once. (17 b&w photos) .

Kirkus Reviews

"Cassandra Tate has explored the first half century of cigarettes' cultural evolution, beginning when the American mainstream associated cigarette smoking with rough-and-ready boys, dandies, and improper women. In this cultural climate, cigarettes become the object of a broad and impassioned Progressive Era reform movement seeking to ban them....Tate's analysis of the transition to widespread acceptability...explores how and why, by 1930, cigarettes became a standard prop for people of all classes wishing to proclaim their daring and cosmopolitan sharpness."—Reviews in American History

"This fine study...provides excellent perspective on a crucial era as background for today's battles."—Library Journal

"In this original and engaging book, Cassandra Tate traces the first major anti-cigarette crusade—the battle of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries against the 'little white slaver'. Cigarette Wars offers a fascinating and important narrative of the failure of this 'other' prohibition movement as Americans and their new consumer culture embraced the cigarette. As Tate so successfully demonstrates, the battle over smoking provides an excellent vehicle to understand central values in American society and culture."—Allan M. Brandt, Harvard University

"Anyone interested in today's escalating political and legal battle in the long war against the cigarette will applaud Cassandra Tate's timely Cigarette Wars. At last, the first half-century of the bitter cultural war has its historian, or narrator, who has produced a book distinguished by graceful prose, vivid characters and events, and sure-footed judgement. This is narrative history at its best, a story whose lessons for today Tate draws together at the end. Warriors Koop and Kessler, meet Lucy Page Gaston, and the zeal-deflating powers of historical perspective."—Otis L. Graham, Jr., University of North Carolina at Wilmington

"Cassandra Tate has written an engaging, thorough, and illuminating account of early efforts to stamp out cigarettes in America. Cigarette Wars lends much-needed historical perspective to the ongoing controversy over smoking."—Jacob Sullum, author of For Your Own Good: The Anti-Smoking Crusade and the Tyranny of Public Health

"Clear, concise, and lively, Tate's book is the first to document the initial anticigarette movement, which she links to the larger context of the Progressive Era, temperance, women's history, and even military history."—The Journal of American History

"In a thought-provoking and interesting style, journalist Cassandra Tate, writes not only of the overwhelming public support for the Anti-Cigarette League of America, but of the untimely distancing of the prohibition movement from the anti-cigarette campaign."—Economic History Services

"I've read this book twice and it still amazes. The New York Times condemned nicotine's 'disastrous effects' in 1879? Anti-tobacco campaigns are more than a century old? Cigarettes were thought perilous because of their link to sex? Cigarette Wars surprises, informs, and shakes convictions (or mine, at least) in prose as lucid as it is engaging. It's a hell of a story."—Paul Solman, Economics Correspondent, The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer

"Thought-provoking and interesting....chockablock with historical information, including excellent notes and an informative appendix listing state cigarette prohibitive laws." —Kay Kiefer in EH.NET

"An entertaining account of a little-known episode in American cultural history, and a keen reminder that the ever-embattled cigarette has risen from its ashes more than once"—Kirkus Reviews

"An eloquent case for the role of culture in tobacco use...[T]hose involved in today's tobacco wars are likely to learn much from the history Tate recounts."—Society for Research on Nicotine and Tobacco Newsletter

"[A] compelling work of cultural history. Better than any other scholar to date, [Tate] highlights the frenzied attempts by various reformers to rid society of what Henry Ford once termed the 'little white slaver' through prohibition schemes before and after World War I...[A] fine study that raises a number of questions on the relative merits of addiction, mass advertising, and cultural assimilation and casts a provocative light on a little-known reform effort...[A] well-researched and very readable book that will interest a large number of American cultural and social historians."—American Historical Review

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