You can't fool all the people all the time, Abraham Lincoln reportedly said. But tobacco manufacturers came close, as Robert N. Proctor exhaustively demonstrates in Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition (UC Press, 2012). Combing the company archives, recently made searchable online, the history of science professor lays bare decades of deception that tobacco companies perpetrated on the public, and their own employees, with the help of more than a few scientists and medical professionals. He spells out smoking's deadly effects on people and the planet in painstaking detail, while seasoning his indictment with historical perspective, as this excerpt shows. Proctor predicts that cigarettes one day will be as obsolete as spittoons or buggy whips, as prohibited as lead-painted cribs.
Cigarettes are one of the most carefully designed small objects on the planet. But it was not an easy thing to get people to smoke. To make smoking as ordinary as, say, eating carrots or drinking orange juice, you needed an elaborate marketing and promoting apparatus, the likes of which the world had never seen. People also had to learn how to smoke. And while this is easy enough in a world of ubiquitous smoking peers and visual models (just look at today's Hollywood films), there was a time when people had to be taught to smoke. In the 1930s the American Tobacco Company organized classes for such purposes, directed principally at women. Company reps used dolls to demonstrate the proper way of holding, lighting, and smoking a cigarette, and some of these manikins can be found on display in tobacco museums. The saturation of film and virtually every other medium with smoking has to be seen in this light: smoking had to be made socially acceptable, and huge budgets were devoted to this cause.
Anthropologists like to talk about "material culture," meaning the diverse ways physical objects are built into the daily life of a people. The material culture of smoking has a long and complex history, appreciated best perhaps by the collectors of tobacciana, comprising the endless variety of pipes, cards, silks, lighters, humidors, matchbooks and cigar boxes, wooden Indians, tobacco tins, posters, advertisements, and other paraphernalia that now fill the world's (mostly industry-run) tobacco museums. Collectors prize the well-made meerschaum pipe, the lighter carved in a World War I trench, the agate snuff box cut for the European aristocrat, the minstrel-era matchbox or tobacco tin.
But cigarettes have been built into life in many other ways. The front shirt pocket that now adorns the dress of virtually every American male, for example, was born from an effort to make a place to park your cigarette pack. Alternate uses have become common—just as we now plug electronic devices into holes once meant for lighters—but the fossil function testifies to the intrusive power of the cigarette and to how easily we overlook the origins of everyday objects. There are many other examples. Germans still talk about male formal wear as "Smoking" (jacket), and in many parts of Europe you get your newspaper from "Le Tabac." My vote for the creepiest goes to the U.S. military, which in the wake of the Korean War outfitted war-wounded veterans with artificial arms housing built-in cigarette lighters.
Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition, by Robert N. Proctor ©2012 by the Regents of the University of California. Republished by permission of the University of California Press.
