When Gentlemen Agree

While we wait and see whether the POTUS will concede to the PEOTUS these ads from the 1950s are a reminder of a time when America was perceived as a less divided nation.  Advertisers felt comfortable portraying the election as a civilised airing of differences in a comradely tone, free of excessive animosity.  Some political analysts theorise that American political discourse travels between extremes of relaxed consensus and angry division in cycles of about 50 years.  It’s not especially comforting or convincing. Some believe Nixon set the present direction of travel, others claim that honour for Reagan.  The consumer paradise of the 1950s is held up as a time when the political temperature was at its most equable - yet it was also a decade of resistance to racial justice, cold war paranoia and anti-communist hysteria culminating in McCarthyite witch hunts. Not the best example of an era of consensus. Get a flavour of the time in William Randolph Hearst’s intemperate diatribe on the Red Peril.  Take a stand with the Electric Light and Power Companies in resisting the insidious onward march of Socialism and the plot to destroy America from within.

 

Medics on Parade – the Nicotine Infirmary

Possibly the most unscrupulous and irresponsible advertising campaign in the history of persuasion was when the American tobacco industry co-opted the image of the medical profession to proclaim the harmless nature of their product. On top of attempting to convince the public that there were no health risks in smoking they offered a counter-narrative in which smoking was actually beneficial to health. In the process they significantly damaged the reputation of American health professionals by implicating them in a concerted plot to undermine the growing body of evidence linking smoking with respiratory illness, lung cancer and heart disease. Before these concerns arose, it had been an easy life, supplying the public with a product to which, in their millions, they rapidly became physically addicted. All their corporate energy had gone into a vicious struggle for market share but this new threat could not be ignored and would consume vast sums of new advertising expenditure.

A significant element in this plot was a massive public relations campaign to promote scepticism and uncertainty about connections between smoking and health. A free periodical, Tobacco and Health was mailed to doctors and dentists. The pages were full of studies that questioned the validity of cancer researchers’ statistics, spreading doubt and confusion about their methodology, demanding unachievable standards of proof, alongside profiles of lifelong smokers in ripe and healthy old age. But the major element was the relentless barrage of advertising aimed at a bewildered public in which a procession of bogus doctors declaimed their equally bogus professional expertise that nothing could be less dangerous to health than smoking.

This battle climaxed in the 1950s but America’s physicians had already had their goodwill and public esteem exploited by the tobacco industry for more than two decades. It began with endorsing individual brands for “kindness to the throat” or for “less irritation”. From offering reassurance to smokers that chronic expectoration was nothing to be concerned about, it was a short step to advancing claims that smoking protected the user from the worst of coughs and colds with mysterious anti-septic properties. During the war the doctor virtually disappeared from tobacco advertising as the armed forces moved centre stage to remind the public just how much was owed to the tobacco companies for their part in allied military victories. When peace returned and medical researchers intensified their scrutiny of tobacco and public health, the image of the doctor was back on front-line duty with a vengeance.

R J Reynolds led the post-war push-back against the emerging medical consensus with a long series of ads with the slogan, More Doctors Smoke Camel Than Any Other Cigarette, above which doctors were portrayed by suitably avuncular models from central casting, busily employed doing very good things – delivering babies, inventing new drugs, treating sick children and dashing off on midnight emergency calls. Reynolds backed up their claim by polling doctors at medical conventions about their favourite brand immediately after a generous distribution of complementary Camel cigarettes. As for the public – who could reject the considered opinions of these paragons of Hippocratic virtues?

Unsupported claims were everywhere - Leading Nose and Throat Specialists Suggest ...... “Change to Philip Morris!” – the only cigarette proven to be less irritating, recommended by top-ranking specialists. Like Camel, Philip Morris (a late-comer to the market) had ambitions to position itself as the preferred brand for doctors, advertising extensively in medical journals and deluging physicians with free samples. Old Gold was another Depression-era brand that kicked its way into contention via uniquely aggressive promotion – in the 1950s Old Gold endlessly repeated a most curious message – If you want a TREAT instead of a TREATMENT ... smoke Old Golds. We’re tobacco men ... not medicine men – the public was reminded. This might have been the most subtle campaign of all, designed to deflect all the negative associations around smoking on to competing brands without making any dubious claims of their own. Lucky Strike followed a similar strategy with its Be Happy-Go Lucky! campaign that said to the public – stop depressing yourselves with all that gloomy medical stuff and have yourself some fun like all these deliriously cheery Lucky Strike smokers. Throughout this inglorious episode all the tobacco companies pursued similar tactics to defend their position but Camel deserves a special mention for mendacity on a grand scale in the service of peddling their lethal product and for their studied indifference to the life-chances of their loyal and addicted customers.

Falling Sales

The drama of the parachute drop has been much used by advertisers to associate their products with the vital difference between life and death. Small wonder that these examples, bar one, come from the battlefield. Camel cigarettes campaigned for years to convince the public that the fastest route to personal courage was igniting a cigarette, with the promise of steady nerves in the face of danger. The wartime adverts come from the age of text-heavy publicity when the prevailing thinking was that the consumer could not fail to respond to a dozen paragraphs of closely reasoned persuasion. Only the final example dispenses with the verbiage which is ironic, given that British advertisers were the greatest of all offenders when it came to filling the page with insipid prose. I should add that an even larger selection of parachute imagery can be enjoyed by visiting the intimidatingly huge but always entertaining, Visual Primer of Advertising Clichés. 

Nicotine Madonna

This ad for Philip Morris cigarettes bears examination for a number of reasons. To begin, it’s a case of borrowing a convention from one product range (soft tissue and personal hygiene) and applying it to another very different. While women were often portrayed in tobacco advertising they were usually presented as either working women, exemplars of high fashion, celebrity goddesses or free spirits asserting their independence. Female smokers formed the target audience but great care was taken to avoid alienating men with troubling indicators of gender equality. I can’t find another example of mother and baby promoting tobacco products. All the noxious fumes associated with tobacco combustion are sweetly dispersed in the mind by a cloud of talcum powder and infant formula. There’s a sense of protection and security and the gentle touch of soft and yielding skin. And the stench of stale tobacco and malodorous breath are all forgotten. As far back as 1927 there were physicians such as Dr. Bertha Van Hoosen who wrote “Motherhood and tobacco are as antagonistic as water and fire ... motherhood is too complex to tamper with tobacco or any other drug-forming habit.” Other medical critics noted links between nicotine and spontaneous abortion and claimed that nicotine was present in amniotic fluid and breast-milk. In the light of all this, to associate motherhood and smoking in this way in 1956 was a masterpiece of effrontery. With hindsight, given what is now known about the impact of smoking on the unborn child, it seems even more impudent and reckless. 

This companion piece is an example of one of the most notorious campaigns in advertising history when the tobacco industry responded to the rising tide of health concerns with literally breath-taking counter-claims that smoking was essential for good health, offering protection against coughs and sore throats. And, endorsed by the medical profession. The careless reader of this example (which could be sub-titled Birth of a Smoker) might well conclude that life expectancy was rising hand in hand with the rising consumption of tobacco. The slogan, More Doctors Smoke Camels Than Any Other Cigarette was employed for 6 years in a sustained campaign of disinformation and obfuscation devised to undermine the growing volume of scientific evidence demonstrating a link between smoking and lung cancer. To back up the slogan, free packs of Camels were distributed at medical conferences while a team of pollsters was employed to ask doctors what brand of cigarette they were carrying. The results were presented as ‘independent research’. A detailed and thorough account of this inglorious episode can be read in “The Cigarette Century” by Allan M Brandt (Basic Books, 2007).

Lucky People

 

The American Tobacco Company (manufacturers of the Lucky Strike cigarette brand), unhappy at trailing Camel cigarettes in public popularity turned to Edward Bernays (nephew of Sigmund Freud and the father of the public relations industry) to revitalise their product and encourage female smoking. Bernays pursued his target with two strategies. The first was to overcome the female inhibition about smoking outdoors by breeding the confidence to light up anytime and anywhere on equal terms with men. In 1929 Bernays hired a small army of glamour models to march in the New York City Easter Parade flagrantly and imperiously smoking Lucky Strikes in full view of the assembled public. The subsequent press coverage of this transgressive event was a classic instance of the publicity that money cannot buy.

 

The second strategy was to promote cigarette smoking on the cinema screen by circulating directors and producers with handy guides to the wide range of dramatic possibilities that can be enhanced by the imaginative deployment of a cigarette in the hands or mouths of the cast. Bernays understood that cinema audiences could be depended on to imitate what they saw on screen and obediently smoke their way through moments of emotional stress and tension. Bernays called this process, engineering consent. This was the era of the green Lucky Strike pack and one of Bernays’s greatest concerns was that the female smoker, endowed by nature with a superior sense of colour relationships, might be put off by the shade of green, finding it clashing with their favoured choice of tones and shades. Much energy was expended on a campaign to persuade the couture industry of the wondrous potential of green as a high fashion colour to little effect. The green neurosis persisted until 1941 when Raymond Loewy designed the white pack with the famous target on both front and back. The advertisers congratulated themselves on having doubled the publicity potential of the pack without spending an additional cent.

   

The services of Hollywood stars were always available if the price was right and copywriters carefully crafted the form of words that would help seal the deal with smokers. The comforting fiction that nationally recognised figures from the movies, with their enormous disposable incomes could find nothing better than Lucky Strike placed them, for an instant, on an equal footing with their audience. Every actor had a similar story to tell – without Lucky Strike they could never have survived their punishing work schedule or maintained the expressive tones of their all-important voices. Most participants cultivated a frosty air of hauteur – only a few deigned to look with favour on their admirers but they all agreed that nothing eased throat irritation more effectively than a cigarette.

Living the High Life

What unites this selection of mid-century strip cartoons publicising Camel cigarettes is a focus on high risk activities or occupations. Eternal vigilance and self-discipline in the face of the force of gravity is not for the faint-hearted and each character testifies to the therapeutic value of smoking. The message is that Camel is the choice of the strong and the brave and by association a little of that may rub off on us less adventurous smokers. Beneath that, yet another message is that surely we smokers can show a little courage of our own and not be intimidated by public health fanatics and their alarmist talk of heart, lung and respiratory disease. Today’s smokers are mature enough to know their own minds and handle a little risk, look death in the eye and continue undaunted to enjoy the pleasure of a fine cigarette. These were early days in the epic battle for hearts and minds between the tobacco manufacturers and the medical establishment but the time for civilised discourse had passed and matters were destined to get a lot dirtier. In a later phase, prefigured by the footnote to these ads (More Doctors Smoke Camels Than Any Other Cigarette), the manufacturers would co-opt and corrupt a small army of doctors to counteract the health warnings of their fellow professionals as we shall see in a future posting. 

Offensive Formations

The Olympic afterglow is fading fast and in just two days time will be brutally erased by the return of the true spirit of sport in the shape of Premier League football. The great dance of greed will recommence as players, agents, coaches and managers scrabble for a slice of the enormous cash-pile donated by the Great Satan, (Keeper of the Times, Master of the Sun and Emperor of the Sky) in his mission to chain the population to his TV platform. And even the most virtuous and scrupulous, free-to-air follower of football will not escape the spreading stain of abject venality. In the interests of sporting success there’s no ethical principle that cannot be discarded and no compromise that’s too great – it’s a festival of bad faith that has us all enthralled and transfixed. I, for one, can hardly wait. The advertising images are from the days of the maximum wage, when the ball was a water-sodden overweight clod and the players could be observed traveling to the match on the top decks of trams or trolleybuses. The long association of smoking with football persisted into the 1970s when senior professionals could still be seen extinguishing a last cigarette as they emerged on to the pitch. 

Chesterfield Girls

Tobacco’s long Age of Innocence lasted through the Thirties and Forties when these bright and breezy ads appeared in mass circulation magazines. Smoking was more than just socially acceptable – in the business environment it was probably worth making the effort to smoke to avoid any suspicion of un-American tendencies. Chesterfield was a Liggett & Myers brand that enjoyed great popularity in the last century but has declined in visibility in recent decades. The name was taken, not from the Derbyshire town or the celebrated sofa, but from Chesterfield County in Virginia. In terms of mid-century advertising it was one of the three most publicised brands, along with Camel and Lucky Strike. Many campaigns were visually conservative and might endure, with minor variations for as long as 5 years. Celebrity endorsement and entertainment tie-ins were the default approach but there were occasional departures from trusted formulae when the battle for market share demanded some refreshment of the brand. The promoters of Chesterfield were more open to innovation than their competitors and in 1926 launched the infamous Blow Some My Way campaign that directly targeted the female smoker for the first time. Despite the chorus of disapproval, the female participant did no more than express a fondness for secondary smoking. But once the barriers were down it wasn’t long before women were shown, first holding packs, later with cigarette decorously held between the fingers and finally, irrevocably descending into impropriety with a cigarette between the lips. 

Postcard of the Day No. 55, Baling Havana Tobacco

This is another postcard trip to the island of Cuba – a soporific image of back-breaking manual labour from a century past. An air of lethargy and resignation hangs over the clearly posed workforce, captured in suspended animation. Cuban tobacco has always been a premium product generating enormous profits for producers and processors. Hand-formed into large cylinders, inserted between the lips and ignited, it endures as a marker of taste and status for connoisseurs everywhere (except the US). Before signing the US embargo on trade with Cuba in 1962, President Kennedy ordered a personal supply of 1200 Cuban cigars (H. Upmann Petit Coronas). Fifty years of boycott has had no notable impact on the Castro regime’s capacity for survival and tobacco remains one of Cuba’s principle exports. The bonus cards show a tobacco barn (where the leaves are dried and cured) and a plantation. 

H M Bateman and Working Class Pursuits

Now that tobacco products are concealed from public view by a PVC curtain, the days when they were openly advertised seem increasingly remote. The shadow of the carcinoma had yet to fall in the 1950s when these were first published and smoking was still perceived as the first (and easiest) step towards adulthood in a world where seniority invariably prevailed over merit in the workplace. These vignettes of working class culture were intended to appeal to the lower income smoker and therein lies the irony. The artist, H M Bateman (1887-1970) was by all accounts an inveterate snob with a hearty contempt for his social inferiors; he also had a persistent problem with paying income tax. If he was alive today he would be voting UKIP and passionately supporting the Taxpayers’ Alliance. Bateman’s reputation rested on his masterly portrayal of embarrassment and apoplectic rage – in the 1920s he achieved a high level of public recognition for “The man who .......” series of caricatures in which hapless individuals experience the ultimate in public humiliation when their transgressions of unwritten social codes are cruelly exposed to howls of outrage, scorn and hilarity in equal measure. They were widely published on both sides of the Atlantic in magazines like The Tatler and Punch and republished in book form, on calendars, postcards and posters. Between the wars, Bateman was a wealthy and much sought after illustrator for whom advertising art was especially lucrative – he drew for Lucky Strike in the US and for Kensitas in UK. When he carried out this commission for Bar One his fortunes were at their lowest – his infinite variations on “The man who .......” theme had greatly outstripped the public appetite and his interminable battles with the Inland Revenue had left him bitter and impoverished to the point where he could have been the subject of one of his own drawings as “The man who drew working-class pursuits for Bar One”. To be fair, the Bar One drawings (of which there are many more than this) may have been dependent on a much used stock of characters but they still made a strong visual impression in the pages of Picture Post. Public interest revived in the 1960s and the quality of his best work continues to be appreciated – at the time of writing the Cartoon Museum in London is exhibiting a selection of his work, “The man who went mad on paper”.