Ashes to Ashes by Richard Kluger Read Free Book Online Page A

widely, gave away gifts to frequent users and premiums to aggressive dealers, won unlikely endorsements for it from such litterateurs as Tennyson and Carlyle, and proceeded to erect signs and posters of the mighty bull, sometimes with the imposing stud’s reproductive equipment tastefully obscured by a gate or fence post. At his death fifteen years later, ownership of Green’s enterprise passed to his protege, William T. Blackwell; by then the Bull Durham plant had become the largest tobacco factory in the world, employing 900.
    But the manufactured cigarette was rarely seen outside of a few Northern cities. Its most common form was in roll-your-own little sacks that BullDurham and others produced as a sideline. Only one ready-made brand, Sweet Caporals, a blend of Virginia and imported Turkish leaf with a dash of the aromatic Louisiana perique, made by the New York City firm of F. S. Kinney and sold for far less than the imported straight Oriental brands, had anything approaching a national clientele. The depression of 1873 helped boost the penny-apiece Sweet Caps and other inexpensive regional cigarette brands and fueled the thinking of Lewis Ginter, a gifted entrepreneur who had moved to Richmond, from his native New York and gone into tobacco manufacturing with the already established John F. Allen. At a time when no other Richmond firm was producing cigarettes, Allen & Ginter seized the day.
    Ginter quickly discovered the virtues of both the Bright and Burley tobacco, which included, in the latter case, an absorptive quality that allowed cigarettes skillfully made from it to resemble, in taste, color, and aroma, the more expensive products of leaf imported from the Levant and Cuba. By 1875, national figures based on tax fees showed that sales of manufactured cigarettes had climbed to 42 million units from 20 million a decade earlier—still a pittance compared to other forms of tobacco use but a sign of stirring consumer interest. Previously sold in loose, bulky rolls or clumps from which it was sometimes hard to separate a single stick, Allen & Ginter brands were put inside tight paper wrappers with attractive labels that bespoke contents of quality. And to stiffen the pack, the company inserted a small, lithographed cardboard that doubled as a promotional reward for the buyer. The colorful little cards, designed in sets, depicted among other subjects “Fifty Scenes of Perilous Occupations,” “Flags of All Nations,” famous battles, foreign dignitaries, Indian chiefs, baseball players and boxers, actresses, and a whole bestiary of rarely seen animals. The gimmick caught on at once at a time when newspapers were rarely illustrated and books were still a luxury item. Fathers turned the cards over to their children, who saved them in miniature albums that Ginter’s company offered. At the American Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876, Allen & Ginter’s handsomely displayed cigarettes vied for popularity with the ice-cream soda and helped overcome the standing prejudice against the small smokes as an adulterated product that lacked the virtues of the honest if messy chew, the dignified and aromatic pipe, and the rich, manly cigar. By 1880, sales of ready-made cigarettes reached 500 million and probably twice that many were consumed in the roll-your-own form. Ginter had taken the national lead in cigarettes, pushing his Richmond Straight Cut No. 1 and Pet brands, made from the “brightest, most delicate flavored and highest cost Gold Leaf Tobacco grown in Virginia.” But the larger, costlier cigar was still outselling the manufactured cigarettes by two and a half times in units and twenty to thirty times in tobacco tonnage consumed.
    From 1880 to 1910, the United States underwent an extraordinary transformation. Its population nearly doubled, due in large part to the influx of the poorand degraded masses from abroad who flocked to the cities, where work was more abundant and life proceeded at a quickened