Cigarettes | Research & Encyclopedia Articles

It is highly unlikely that in 1881, when James A. Bonsack invented a cigarette-making machine, that he or anybody else could have predicted the mélange of future symbolism contained in each conveniently packaged stick of tobacco. The cigarette has come to stand for more than just the unhealthy habit of millions in American popular culture. It represents politics, money, image, sex, and freedom.

The tobacco plant held residence in the New World long before Columbus even set sail. American Indians offered Columbus dried tobacco leaves as a gift and, it is rumored, he threw them away because of the fowl smell. Later on, however, sailors brought tobacco back to Europe where it gained a reputation as a medical cure-all. Tobacco was believed to be so valuable that during the 1600s, it was frequently used as money. In 1619, Jamestown colonists paid for their future wives' passage from England with 120 pounds of tobacco. In 1621, the price went up to 150 pounds per mate. Tobacco later helped finance the American Revolution, also known as "The Tobacco War," by serving as collateral for loans from France.

Tobacco consumption took many forms before reaching the cigarette of the modern day. Spanish colonists in the New World smoked tobacco as a cigarito : shredded cigar remnants rolled in plant husks, then later in crude paper. In France, the cigarito form was alsopopular, especially during the French Revolution. As aristocrats commonly consumed the snuff version of tobacco, the masses chose an opposing form. A moderate improvement to the Spanish cigarito, the French cigarette was rolled in rice straw. In 1832, an Egyptian artilleryman in the Turkish/Egyptian War created the paperbound version of today whose popularity spread to the British through veterans of the Crimean War. In England, a tobacconist named Philip Morris greatly improved the quality of the Turkish cigarette but still maintained only a cottage industry, despite the cigarette's growing popularity.

By the 1900s cigarettes rose to the highest selling form of tobacco on the market. Mass urbanization picked up the pace of daily life and popularized factory-made products such as soap, canned goods, gum, and the cigarette. James A. Bonsack's newly invented cigarette machine could turn out approximately 200 cigarettes per minute, output equal to that of forty or fifty workers. Cigarettes were now a more convenient form of tobacco consumption—cleaner than snuff or chew, more portable than cigars or pipes—and also were increasingly more available. England's Philip Morris set up shop in America as did several other tobacco manufacturers: R.J. Reynolds(1875), J.E. Liggett (1849), Duke (1881, later, the American Tobacco Company), and the oldest tobacco company in the United States, P. Lorillard (1760). The cigarette quickly became enmeshed in American popular culture. In 1913, R.J. Reynolds launched its Camel brand whose instant appeal, notes Richard Kluger in Ashes to Ashes, helped inspire this famous poem from a Penn State publication: "Tobacco is a dirty weed. I like it. /It satisfies no moral need. I like it. /It makes you thin, it makes you lean /It takes the hair right off your bean /It's the worst darn stuff I've ever seen. /I like it." Since their introduction, cigarettes have maintained a status as one of the best-selling consumer products in the country. In 1990, 4.4 billion cigarettes were sold in America. That same year, several states restricted their sale.

The greatest propagator of what King James I of England referred to as "the stinking weed," has been war: the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Mexican and Crimean Wars, the U.S. Civil War, and the greatest boost to U.S. cigarette consumption—World War I. During the first World War, cigarettes were included in soldiers' rations and as Kluger suggests, "quickly became the universal emblem of the camaraderie of mortal combat, that consummate male activity." Providing the troops with their daily intake of cigarettes, a very convenient method of consumption during combat, was viewed as morale enhancing if not downright patriotic. Regardless of intention, the tobacco manufacturers ensured themselves of a future market for their product.

At the same time, women became more involved in public life, earning the right to vote in 1920, and entering the work force during the absence of the fighting men. Eager to display their new sense of worth and fortitude, women smoked cigarettes, some even publicly. The tobacco industry responded with brands and advertisements aimed especially at women. While war may have brought the cigarette to America, marketing has kept it here. Since the introduction of the cigarette to America, the tobacco industry has spent untold billions of dollars on insuring its complete assimilation into U.S. popular culture. Despite the 1971 ban of radio and television advertisements for cigarettes, the industry has successfully inducted characters such as Old Joe Camel, The Marlboro Man, and the Kool Penguin into the popular iconography. A 1991 study published by the Journal of the American Medical Association revealed that 91 percent of six year olds could identify Joe Camel as the character representing Camel cigarettes and that Joe Camel is recognized by preschoolers as often as Mickey Mouse. Aside from advertising, cigarettes have been marketed, most notably to the youth market, through a myriad of other promotional activities from industry-sponsored sporting and entertainment events to product placement in movies. In 1993 alone, the tobacco industry spent $6 billion keeping their cigarettes fresh in the minds of Americans.

While Hollywood has inadvertently, and sometimes quite intentionally, made the cigarette a symbol of glamour and sexuality—the smoke gingerly billowing as an afterglow of, or substitute for, the act itself—anti-tobacco activists have equally pursued an agenda of disclosure, regulation, and often, prohibition. A war has been waged on the cigarette in America and everyone, smoker or not, was engaged by the end of the 1990s. The health hazards of smoking have been debated since at least the 1600s, but litigation in the twentieth century revealed what the tobacco industry had known but denied for years: that nicotine, the active substance in cigarettes, is an addictive drug, and that cigarette smoking is the cause of numerous diseases and conditions which claim the lives of nearly half a million Americans each year. The cigarette has thus become for many an emblem of deception and death for the sake of profit, or even, with the discovery of second-hand smoke as a carcinogen, a catalyst for social review. For others, it remains a symbol of money and power and politics or the Constitutional First Amendment invoked by so many smokers in their time of need. The cigarette is indeed a dynamic symbol in American society—habit, hazard, inalienable right.

Glantz, Stanton A., and John Slade, Lisa A. Bero, Peter Hanauer, Deborah E. Barnes. The Cigarette Papers. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1996.

Kluger, Richard. Ashes to Ashes: America's Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris. New York, Vintage Books, 1996.

McGowen, Richard. Business, Politics, and Cigarettes: Multiple Levels, Multiple Agendas. San Rafael, California, Quantum Books, 1995.

Smith, Jane Webb. Smoke Signals: Cigarettes, Advertising, and the American Way of Life: An Exhibition at the Valentine Museum, Richmond, Virginia, April 5-October 9, 1990. Chapel Hill, North Carolina Press, 1990.

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