The Cigarette Century
Cigarettes have caused death, suffering, and lawsuits while penetrating into the world consciousness. The tobacco product’s rise and fall make for a striking story that has generated countless studies and articles. There are a lot of histories including Richard Kluger’s Ashes to Ashes: America’s Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris and Elizabeth Whelan’s Cigarettes: What the Warning Label Doesn’t Tell You: The First Comprehensive Guide to the Health Consequences of Smoking. Each regards the current tale of tobacco and cigarettes industry display and persistence. Allan M. Brandt’s The Cigarette Century adds an update to this field: namely, Big Tobacco documentation and memos knocked free by actions in the decade since.
He systematically outlines the cancer stick time trace, from W. Duke Sons and Co.’s assaultive pioneering in the late 19th century to the Voltron-like formation and successive "dispersion" of the powerful American Tobacco Trust to early morality-based opposition. Smokes filled the far-off arenas of both world wars as shipping cartons to foreign soldiers became a civic charge. The partnership of war began to be symbolized in the sharing of a cigarette, a new facility of morale. Canny advertisers in Big Tobacco’s employ proclaimed the products’ supposed medicinal virtues and, in fashion, divide-and-conquer style, using gender, racial, and class struggles to expand their captive constituencies. In the face of governmental pressure, the tobacco and cigs industry is passionately exporting its production to new promised lands: China, India, Vietnam etc.
It is considered that tobacco companies are ignorant of smoking’s risks and dangers; Century merely confirms this all. More than one in four Americans still smoke permanently.
