Johnny on the Spot

Twenty three year old Johnny Roventini was employed as a bellboy in the lobby of the New Yorker Hotel in 1933 when his potential for bringing a living presence to Philip Morris’s bellboy brand character was spotted by an advertising executive - they would later refer to him as their human trademark. His high-pitched vocal delivery, youthful and perky manner and  diminutive stature worked to great effect in switching smokers to the Philip Morris brand in radio, cinema and print advertising.  The figure of the bellboy was a stock character in the American repertory - a much used device for switching scenes, instantly curtailing the dialogue with a peremptory call for Doctor/Colonel/Bishop/Professor Hackenbush.  This is the world that Johnny now found himself in, courtesy of his service to Philip Morris, there would be no more carrying calling cards on silver platters around a crowded Manhattan hotel lobby. When he wasn’t posing for the advertising photographer, he was at the radio microphone swapping snappy one-liners with Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball in Morris-sponsored broadcasts.  At the height of his popularity there was a brigade of up to 10 other Johnnys in circulation, bringing Philip Morris to a nationwide audience in multiple simultaneous locations.  The company was and remains a major player in cigarette manufacture and played a significant role in the ruthless campaign to deny any link between smoking and ill health.  A corporate curiosity was the readiness of the business to hire workers from the African American community from the factory floor to senior management at a time when most of their rivals scrupulously avoided integrating their workforces.  This was not quite the enlightened policy it may seem to be - among the large company portfolio there were a number of menthol brands which market research discovered were extremely popular with African American smokers. Later, Philip Morris would become notorious for saturating black neighbourhoods with poster advertising for its menthol products.  At the end of his long and prosperous life in 1998, Johnny Roventini had enjoyed a longevity that few regular smokers of Philip Morris products would have enjoyed and nowhere have I seen any evidence that he ever smoked a single cigarette.

 

The Factory

For more than two centuries, the image of the factory has stood as an emblem of manufacturing and mass production. Carefully planned or simply improvised and extended as required, factories were an essential element in the iconography of industry and economic activity. Social historians divide them into two categories - basically pre-Ford and post-Ford. In a pre-Ford factory a single product was processed from raw materials. A post-Ford factory brought together a large number of components, many of which were made off-site, and combined them into something much greater by means of an assembly line where every intervention and activity was calculated to maximise efficiency and boost profitability. In the years of neo-liberal ascendancy, the post-Ford bargain with organised labour that ensured the workforce was sufficiently remunerated to afford to purchase the goods they produced has gradually withered away. Two powerful forces have emerged over the last 30 years to transform the modern factory - the first being automation and the second, the business of global outsourcing to secure the cheapest supply of labour. The image of the sprawling factory, often visualised from above, has completely lost the sense of awe and wonder that it once inspired. And very few remain embedded in urban areas where their presence once served as beacons in the local community as well as product advertising. It’s far more common to see images of the demolition of factory premises than to see the inauguration of new factories with the promise of employment and prosperity. To recapture any sense of that lost wonder we have to look to Asia where mega-factories such as Foxconn in China have borrowed the Victorian idea of the industrial settlement or company town and expanded it on a stupendous city-wide scale. 

Today’s employers rarely concern themselves with the welfare of their workforce - their responsibilities being confined to the simple transaction of remuneration for labour. Coercive control is the preferred model for improving productivity and the favoured tools are intrusive surveillance and real-time monitoring of performance against ever more demanding targets. Victorian paternalists had a sense of their duty to contribute to the health and education of their employees by establishing schools, colleges, libraries and clinics and paying their taxes. Little of that impulse has survived into the present where a reductivist view of human relationships dictates that business must be unimpeded by social concerns. The costs of ensuring a continuity of healthy and educated workers are for the taxpayer while business exercises its moral duty to pay as little tax as possible. Taken to its extreme this requires workers to accept terms that reduce them to anonymised units of labour with unending responsibilities and no rights. Not even assets, they are mere utilities, like water or electricity to be turned on and off as required. 

The story of the rise and fall of the factory, and the battle between capital and organised labour is told in Joshua B Freeman’s book, Behemoth - a detailed account of the birth and development of modern industry that presents a wealth of fascinating material. It was a surprise to discover that when American business began to construct textile mills on the British model they first had to evade the restrictions that Britain imposed on the emigration of skilled workers in an attempt to defend its technical advantages. New England mill owners relied on child labour and payment in vouchers redeemable at company-owned stores, just as in England. Labour shortages followed as the mills expanded in size and located to less populated areas. This lead to the large-scale recruitment of female workers and the provision of hostel accommodation with leisure and educational amenities attached. Perhaps a response to the example set by Robert Owen at New Lanark. In the absence of economically viable supplies of coal for steam power, New England operations continued to depend on water power with the result that the smoke darkened skies and atmospheric pollution of industrial England were several decades late in arriving. The result was that the early American industrialisation was a much more humane and utopian operation than its English counterpart. I had lazily assumed that the ultra-aggressive turbo-capitalism that erupted in the Reagan-Thatcher era was an all-American construction but it seems that its roots lie much closer to home. 

The images of factories displayed here are mostly taken from mid-century American advertising post-1945. This was an atypical period when organised labour briefly held the upper hand as the US economy shifted rapidly to a peacetime footing and chronic labour shortages placed unprecedented power in the hands of unionised workers. The pushback was not long in coming as employers campaigned to equate trade union activities with the new universal enemy - Soviet communism - throughout the Cold War 1950s. 

A Dresden Landmark – Yenidze Tabakfaktur

In February 1945, when the city of Dresden was bombed into oblivion by Bomber Command and the USAF in a firestorm of epic proportions, it might have seemed like the worst had happened. But Dresden was destined to be one of those unfortunate places where one kind of tyranny was immediately succeeded by another, in more than half a century of totalitarian governance. Victor Klemperer was a Professor of French Literature at the Technical University and a long time Jewish resident of Dresden when he began keeping a diary in 1933, the year the Nazis took power in Germany. In spare and unemotive prose, he described how he and his Aryan wife experienced the incremental but remorseless process of dispossession of property, basic human rights and legal status to the point where, as a Jew, he was forbidden to own a radio, a bicycle or a pet and compelled to travel on the open rear platform of the tram, while shopping for food was restricted to the hours of 18.00 to 19.00. Klemperer and his wife escaped their fate by simply walking out of the city, unobserved in the chaotic aftermath of the firestorm.

The painter, Otto Dix came to Dresden in 1910 to study at the city’s art college (Kustgewerbeschule) where he adopted an Expressionist style, until in 1914 he volunteered for military service. When he returned to Dresden in 1919, Dix was a traumatised veteran of the First World War, having fought in the Somme, the Eastern front and Flanders. Once again he studied painting and evolved a style of heightened realism. The award of an Iron Cross had done little to soften his hatred of the mindless cruelties of war that would preoccupy his work for many years. When his attention turned to the decadence and conflict of the Weimar years, he brought the same savagery and brutality to his portrayal of the social scene. In 1933, the new Nazi regime quickly identified him as a degenerate artist and dismissed him from his teaching post at the Dresden Academy.

Vladimir Putin was posted to Dresden in 1985 and remained there until the collapse of the DDR in 1989. His duties are a matter for speculation but it is likely they exceeded collecting press cuttings as his biographer (Masha Gessen) alleged. Last December his Stasi pass turned up in the Dresden state archive, confirming his closeness to the DDR security service. It can safely be assumed that the Dresden years supplied Putin with valuable experience in surveillance and intimidation, helping to form the master of misinformation and arms length aggression that graces the world stage today. The story goes that when the old order collapsed in 1989, an angry crowd turned up and demanded entry to the KGB office. The door was opened by Putin, who brandished a weapon and successfully dispersed the mob by threatening to shoot to kill. Perhaps it was in the afterglow of this event that Putin felt the first flicker of a sense of destiny that he was born for higher things.

Which brings us to Dresden’s most bizarre landmark building. Approaching the city by train it appears as an exotic Orientalist apparition on the right hand side, shortly after crossing the river Elbe on the Marienbrücke. A 5 storey building with an elaborately decorated parapet, surmounted by a Moorish glazed dome, alongside is a minaret, comfortably taller than the height of the dome. The minaret was built as a factory chimney and the main building was given over to cigarette manufacture. Hugo Zietz had been the proprietor of a business producing Turkish cigarettes sold under such names as Salem Aleikum and Mameluk, since 1886. Zietz saw the commercial potential of building a factory inside the envelope of an Orientalist fantasy building and commissioned architect Hermann Martin Hammitzsch (1878-1945) to produce a design. Hammitzsch reached for his Islamic reference books, threw in a few Gothic details and came up with the amazing Orientalist pastiche we still see today. The finished building opened in 1909 and was recognised as a classic example of architecture as advertising - high visibility and a permanent reminder of the exotic origins of the product. One third of the building was destroyed in the war but after patching up by the German Democratic Republic (DDR) it remained in use until 1989 as the central tobacco office of the DDR, (the “VEB Tabakkontor”). Full restoration to its present condition took place in 1996. Since when it has been mostly used as office accommodation, with a restaurant on the 7th. floor.

It turned out to be the only building of note that Hammitzsch would design. Indeed, there are no records online of any other building that could be attributed to him with any certainty. We do know that in later life he married Hitler's sister, Angela. On the basis of this connection that he was appointed in 1939 by the egregious Gauleiter of Saxony (Martin Mutchsmann, master embroiderer and underwear manufacturer) to direct a programme for the modernisation of Dresden along Nazi-approved lines. It was in this capacity that, after the burning of Germany’s largest Synagogue (originally designed by Gottfried Semper) on Kristallnacht, Hammitzsch ordered that the smouldering ruins be demolished and cleared. A rare incidence of the Nazis taking action without first obtaining the legal agreement of their victims. And a depressing display of architectural vandalism directed by a mediocrity against the work of an immeasurably superior colleague. History doesn’t record how Hammitzsch survived the post-war reckoning - he simply faded into obscurity, having irredeemably stained his reputation in the eyes of posterity. In recent years Dresden has acquired some notoriety as the birthplace of the anti-Islamic Pegida movement. They still gather in the city centre for some casual racism every Monday night despite having been overtaken by other hard-right parties (AFD) who forced their way into the Bundestag in last autumn’s elections.

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.

Arcadia Works

As the most aggressive competitor to the mighty Imperial Tobacco Company in the early 20th. century, Carreras acquired a well earned reputation for innovative marketing and product development. The Black Cat brand which lent itself so readily to visually striking advertising imagery was the company’s major asset and, supported by coupon issues and lavish gift catalogues, established itself as a challenger to Imperial’s key brands. In 1921 Carreras introduced a new market leader, Craven A, the first machine-made filter cigarette, forcing the competition to follow suit. When the need for new and larger premises arose, it comes as no surprise that Carreras developed a design that would have maximum visual impact on the city streets. Like the Michelin Building in South Kensington it was conceived as a gigantic piece of advertising and located in a dominant position on Hampstead Road, on the corner of Mornington Crescent. Taking full advantage of the public obsession with all things Egyptian, the façade was designed as a highly theatrical Art Deco exercise flavoured with black cat, palm and lotus leaf decorative elements. The central colonnade consisted of papyriform columns underneath an overhanging cornice. When the Arcadia Works was completed in 1928 it offered a decorative skin beneath which lay an entirely functional building formed from pre-stressed concrete, fully equipped with air-conditioning. The opening celebrations included plein-air performances of extracts from Verdi’s Aida and chariot races along Hampstead Road. 

Modernism in diluted form found favour with British architects and developers as they noted the potential it offered for budget reduction and cost savings. The Arcadia Works was perfectly calculated to offend Modernist sensibilities and the façade was stripped off in 1962 when the building was refitted as office accommodation and renamed Greater London House. The Sixties business client in a Cecil Gee suit would have nothing but scorn for the Art Deco elements, preferring the anonymity of a glass curtain wall. Fashions changed again and new owners in 1996 saw the commercial advantage in restoring the façade to its former glory and on the evidence of these photographs it remains in resplendent condition. Craven A cigarettes are no longer available in UK but can still, according to Wikipedia, be smoked in Canada, Jamaica, Vietnam and North Korea! A selection of advertising is included as a reminder of the times when a cork-tipped smoke conferred distinction.