Ashes to Ashes by Richard Kluger Read Free Book Online

the years 1856–57 to a running debate among its readers on the possible dangers of smoking. The tenor was still nearly as much moral as medical, dwelling on the alleged connection between smoking and the increase in street crime and other forms of social pathology no less than on its unsubstantiated link to dimmed vision, loss of intellectual capacity, and “nervous paralysis”. The prevailing view, however, was perhaps most succinctly stated by a former military surgeon in London who wrote in 1857 that “tobacco-smoking may be indulged in with moderation, without manifest injurious effect on the health for the time being, or on the duration of life.” But he did not attempt to define “moderation” as applied to the smoking habit, nor could he foresee the revolution in the marketplace that would profoundly undermine the very notion.
    IV
    GIVEN their soil, climate, vast arable acreage, and slave labor to work it, Americans had become the world’s heaviest per capita users of plentiful tobacco by the middle of the nineteenth century. But that common usage of the commodity hardly constituted a major domestic industry. American society was overwhelmingly rural; its typical citizen was a native-born outdoorsman, short on cash and uneager to spend what he earned on things he could grow himself or swap with a neighbor or a traveling peddler. He tended to take his tobacco Indian-style, either chewing it or smoking it in a pipe, in an age when brand-name goods hardly existed.
    By far the most extensive commercial use of the leaf as a manufactured good was the chew, flavored with sweeteners for Yankee taste but left in a more natural state for Southern tongues, and sold by every town tobacconist and every rural crossroads storekeeper. To the extent that so common a product could claim a manufacturing center, Richmond was it, close enough to the source of supply and with enough access by rail and ship to serve major markets. On the eve of the Civil War, Virginia’s capital city boasted more than fifty tobacco factories, astir with the chants and spirituals of their slave workers. But the heyday of the chew passed with the war, as factories were used to make military supplies or were converted into hospitals and prisons. Yet so deeply ingrained was tobacco in the agrarian society of the Confederate states that the leaf was often included among the Johnny Rebs’ regular food rations. And no form of smoking was better suited to warfare, here as in the Crimea, than the cigarette. With neither time nor money for pipes or cigars, soldiers liked the quick narcotic kick of the mild, inhalable little smokes now being made from the Bright leaf of the Virginia and Carolina Piedmont. Freed of family strictures against the vaguely notorious product and prone to imitate their colleagues in wartime misery, more and more men tried the cigarette and found it pleasing. For the first time, Americans began to think of it as something other than a poor substitute for the real thing.
    No one capitalized more on the virtues of flue-cured Bright than John R. Green, a farmer who set up shop granulating the leaf in the little railroad-junction village of Durham, close by Raleigh, North Carolina’s capital, and accessible to the students who, on their way to the public university at Chapel Hill, sampled Green’s mild mix and made it a favorite. Green’s wares proved popular with the forces of both armies who encamped in the vicinity during the course of the conflict, but with the end of the fighting and an easing of the tensions of everyday life, the vogue for cigarettes passed. Recalling a bull’s-head insignia embossed on the jar of his favorite mustard, manufactured in Durham, England, Green now adopted it as the trademark for the smoking tobacco he began to produce under the name of Bull Durham. It had just the right sound for a decidedly masculine product, and Green merchandised it as no other tobacco manufacturer had done. He advertised it