TOTAL LICENSING
TOBACCO
AND GLOBAL
WARMING
Peculiar parallels, How? Why?
Dear reader, • American Tobacco is formed from a merger of to ban smoking – but the puritan ethos gave way to
In the interest of brevity I shall introduce basic former competitors including Allen & Ginter, Kinney, the “modern” industrial society where new inventions
statements without giving sources. Our purpose W.S. Kimball & Co. and Godwin & Company. followed each other in rapid pace.
in this column is to see interrelationships, not • Now popularly called “The Tobacco Trust” they (P) The early cigarette producers, and marketing
to write a scientific dissertation. I have source have simply followed examples by other successful organizations created more and more advertisements
quotes for all and can give them to you should consolidations like John D. Rockefeller’s Standard and points of sale in their drive for larger volume and it
you write me. Oil Trust. Everything is consolidated: Purchase became ever easier to find a cigarette. More and more
Topics (P) before statements denote proponents of tobacco from growers, eliminating tobacco people smoked to enjoy what they felt was a moment
of regulation. (N) before statements denotes auctions and setting their own price of relaxation from stress.
opponents. levels, elimination of wholesalers, international (N) World War I brought the American doughboys into
expansion. American Tobacco partners with the trenches and fear of possible dangers of smoking,
TOBACCO “imperial tobacco” into “British American Tobacco”. hardily understood then, gave way to the much greater
• Nicotine likely has origins in South America To avoid import duties they also purchase an fear of death, and poison gas. The cigarette, in contrast,
• Early European explorers report natives smoked interest in Murai Brothers of Japan. displaced this fear temporarily with the camaraderie
dry tobacco and used it for ritual and social and • 1910: The 25 million invested in 1890 in assets of passing the match, or relaxing and dreaming with
medical purposes – including of course the have grown to 350 million. These truly are a “joy stick”.
American Indian “peace pipe” the fruits of monopoly. Commanding General Pershing famously said: “You ask
• 1560: Jean Nicot, French Consul, sends tobacco • 1890: A shocked American congress creates the me what do we need to win this war – we need tobacco
from Portugal to Paris. Sherman Antitrust Act and between 1908 and as much as bullets”.
• Early American colonists in Maryland and 1911 under the prodding of President Theodore The YMCA, originally an opponent of smoking, began to
Virginia export tobacco to England Roosevelt and confirmed by the Supreme Court distribute free coffee and free cigarettes. In May 1918
• 1670: The English consume more than 2 American Tobacco, Standard Oil and U.S. Steel the war department began distribution of 4 cigarettes
pounds per person. It is smoked in clay were broken up. Chief Justice White quoted: “the per day per soldier. To secure supply against shortage
pipes produced in London. gradual absorption of control over all the elements they contracted to take the complete production of
• Colonial Chesapeake and Tidewater districts essential to manufacture…serve as Bull Durham who supported the action with the slogan
in Maryland and Virginia increase cultivation perpetual barriers to the entry of others into the “when our boys light up, the Huns will light out.”
and curing of more and more tobacco. Prices tobacco trade…” The cigarette had gained complete social acceptance
fall as more land is brought under cultivation However, as in other such breakups “honest competition” for “these modern times”.
demanding more and more labor, giving rise could not automatically be restored. The same individual (P) Reynolds Tobacco started its campaign: “The Camels
together with cotton to increasing importation of owners of interlocking shares continued to own them are coming” in 1914 to win away customers from Bull
African slaves for cheap labor. and the monopoly chanced into an oligopoly of four Durhams, Duke Tobaccos, American Tobacco.
• The independent farmer gives way to large new companies: American Tobacco, Liggett & Myers, The “Flapper years” after World War I brought new
plantations. Different tobacco leaves grow in R.J. Reynolds and P Lorillard who might compete but sexual freedoms and the beginning of “youth culture”
the poorer soils of North Carolina and Kentucky whose general interests in laws, social conventions, and based on dancing, the automobile ascending, petting
as the colonies expand westward. Fortunes are politics were the same, as we shall see further on. parties, the use of cosmetics like lipstick, silk stockings
being founded. – and yes, smoking for women.
• Formulas for different tobacco use evolve including THE ORIGIN OF A SOCIAL When evangelist Billy Sunday and the WCTU
plugs you chew and spit out into “spittoons”, cigars CONVENTION (Woman’s Christian Temperance Union) won their
become a mark of higher social standing. When polite “advanced” Victorian society moved into drive for prohibition, they stated tobacco to be next in
• 1868: Buck Duke realizes that an early product: lace curtain homes, and started to think in terms of the “return to normalcy” – but that as it turned out
tobacco rolled into cornhusks, could be drawing rooms, dinner parties and improving the was not so easy. Alcohol could be visible as excess in
manufactured with tobacco blends being rolled health and plumbing of the nation, plug tobaccos and drunkenness and as a public nuisance. The drunk
into paper and begins to compete with a New spittoons were out. might beat wives, smash furniture or lie in the gutter
York manufacturer, Allen & Ginter, who produced For men (only men really used tobacco then) who – a more visible evidence of moral breakdown. The
“Richmond Straight Cuts”. were used to the flavor and sensation of nicotine smoker did not display any such behavior even when
• 1881: James Bonsack – less known than Thomas – the cigarette was a handier and simpler substitute. he smoked 2 packs a day. In fact, it gave the smoker
Edison or Marconi, becomes the father of a great Smoking, rather than chewing gained favor and even in the drawing room a certain elegance and the rough
industry inventing a machine that can mechanically in the “rural backwoods” where home cured tobacco and tumble populace, a swagger connoting toughness.
roll 200 cigarettes per hour. was the established norm, the convenience and implied This was evidenced as well and brought to new heights
• 1889: By now Duke has founded American manufactured quality of cigarettes and their accessibility in the movies where lovers blew smoke constantly with
tobacco and spends $800,000 on advertising and at the tobacconist made inroads. It seemed less messy every endearing word: Bette Davis and Paul Henreid
has sales of 4-4.5 million to promote this relatively to smoke. The Ladies of temperance organizations, in “Now Voyager”, Marlene Dietrich, cool, sophisticated,
new product, “cigarettes” into commercial success. many churches and early public health apostles wanted dressed in tuxedoes, the very essence of the liberated
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