Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, April 18, 1990 TAG: 9004180261
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BILL RUEHLMANN Landmark News Service
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
We bought it.
In 1955, Marlboro was a cigarette in a red pack for men with tattoos on their wrists. At the end of a long day on the trail, the ad read, "Marlboros deliver the goods on flavor."
We bought it.
The Valentine Museum of Richmond presents the evidence in "Smoke Signals: Cigarettes, Advertising and the American Way of Life." The exhibit opened April 6 and runs through Oct. 8. Included are a variety of artifacts, ranging from an Excelsior cigarette-making machine to B-flat Johnny Raventini's original bellhop suit ("Call for Phil-ip Mor-ris!") to a 6-foot effigy of the Marlboro Man.
Using Richmond's tobacco industry as a case study, the multimedia presentation explores changes in American society and values that resulted from modern technology, corporate expansion and the pervasive influence of advertising. It is supported by a $220,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
"This is not about smoking," says exhibit curator Jane Webb Smith. "This is about advertising. Whether it's good or it's bad, it surrounds us.
"It drives the culture."
Item: Camel ad, 1914. "You can't make a Camel cigarette bite your tongue or parch your throat or leave that cigaretty taste common to other cigarettes! Fact is, you haven't got money enough to buy a cleverer cigarette!"
Item: Lucky Strike ad, 1930. "Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet!"
Item: Marlboro ad, 1990. "Come to where the flavor is!"
It's American. The baseball card began in the 1880s as a lithographed insert in a cigarette pack. Baseball's enduring term "bullpen" comes from Bull Durham tobacco signs that emblazoned outfield fences at the turn of the century.
And it's current. Tobacco companies have been drawing increasing fire this year from critics of advertising strategies employed to drum up new consumers. Little more than a month after the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. announced Uptown, a brand targeted at urban blacks, the company withdrew it; three weeks later, RJR was aiming Dakota at "virile females" 18 to 24, and Health and Human Services Secretary Louis H. Sullivan, who led the fight against Uptown, hit the ceiling again.
"It is especially reprehensible to lure young people into smoking and potential lifelong nicotine addiction," he said, "and the risk that smoking specifically poses for women adds another tawdry dimension to any cigarette marketing effort aimed at younger women."
Now Sullivan further indicts tobacco-sports linkups like Virginia Slims tennis, Winston Cup stock car racing and Marlboro Cup soccer.
"When the tobacco industry sponsors an event in order to push their deadly product," the Cabinet member complains, "they are trading on the health, the prestige and the image of an athlete."
"Smoke Signals" takes no stand on the health issue.
"Cigarettes and health is a subject about which the surgeon general, the Tobacco Institute, the tobacco industries and a host of others have fully informed the American public," says Valentine director Frank Jewell. "The creation of a consumer society and the revolution in American values are less widely known subjects."
We smoked, the exhibition shows, because we were sold on it.
The cigarette seemed an eminently satisfactory emblem for a disposable, consumer-centered society.
It was made to burn.
\ So round, so firm
\ The Valentine Museum has a peppery recent history. After having taken on such uncompromising projects over the past two years as "In Bondage and Freedom: Antebellum Black Life in Richmond" and "Jim Crow: Racism and Reaction in the New South," the little institution on East Clay Street now tackles the truth about an industry that has been Richmond's bread and butter from the beginning. With more than 11,000 workers, Philip Morris remains the city's leading private employer.
As usual, the Valentine perspective is unabashedly critical.
Smith, Valentine curator of decorative arts, spent two years researching "Smoke Signals" in more than 30 collections, including those of the National Museum of American History, the New York Historical Society and the corporate archives of Philip Morris. She was a newcomer to both Richmond and the subject when she started.
"I tried one cigarette in the fourth grade, and that was it," Smith says. "So I didn't know smoking, I didn't know cigarettes, I didn't know one company from another. I just found the facts and spun this little tale."
Her outsider's perspective and a master of arts in American Studies from the University of Maryland afforded Smith scholarly objectivity.
"This is the story of how a glut of goods were manufactured and how the manufacturers had to create a demand for them with advertising," she says. "If I had been in Lynn, Mass., I'd be telling the same story. But it would have been about shoes."
Shoes or cigarettes, 100 years ago new continuous-process, capital-intensive machinery caused manufacturers to build large marketing networks. The output required global selling and distribution organizations, and advertising perked the public appetite for alluring accoutrements of the good life. Lithographed labels and broadsides in color adjured Americans to be happy, go Lucky, it's Light-Up Time.
Time was money; who had enough of it to waste on rolling one's own?
R.J. Reynolds launched a $1,500,000 public push in 1914 with a deadpan dromedary named Old Joe from the Barnum & Bailey Circus. This was the first national cigarette advertising campaign. By 1919, Camel was No. 1 in sales.
"Don't look for premiums or coupons. Camel Cigarettes are not that kind of a smoke! The cost of tobacco prohibits the use of `inducements.' "
By 1921, the slogan "I'd Walk a Mile for a Camel" provided the brand 50 percent of the national market.
\ So fully packed
\ In the ensuing decade, middle-class American women became a prime tobacco industry target. By the 1920s, the modern housewife was "the great national purchasing agent" and a creeping feminist besides. So advertising offered American women freedom.
To smoke.
The Christian Century of Dec. 18, 1929, was appalled.
"First the woman appears in the advertisement," it reported, "merely a pretty girl who becomes part of the picture. Then she is offering the man a fag. Next she asks him to blow smoke her way.
"Finally she lights hers by his."
And so liberated ladies took up their "torches of freedom," as advertised.
Observes Smith: "As one of the most democratic of commodities, the cigarette became a symbol of equality for women of the 1920s struggling for civic rights."
Enter Marlboro pink.
"Advertisers, however," she adds, "who were primarily men, waited until the demand already existed before including women in the cigarette market, thereby sanctioning their symbol of independence."
For money, famous women testified they smoked Lucky Strike. Among them were actresses, opera singers and even aviator Amelia Earhart. She later admitted she smoked no brand, but her crew did like Luckies.
Came radio: "L.S./M.F.T. Lucky Strike means fine tobacco!"
By 1942, "Lucky Strike Green Has Gone to War." Advertising explained the familiar green pack had been replaced by a white one to save copper. In fact, there was no shortage of the chrome green used as war camouflage; the switch was made to attract more women.
Came TV: "You get a lot to like in a Marlboro - filter, flavor, flip-top box!"
But, by 1957, the flip-top box Americans were starting to associate with cigarettes was a coffin. In 1964, the U.S. Surgeon General's report was issued, linking smoking and lung cancer. The Federal Trade Commission forced tobacco companies to establish a Cigarette Advertising Code that would discourage hints that smoking improved health and sex appeal and pitches to young people.
Congress banned cigarette advertising on radio and TV beginning Super Bowl Sunday, 1971. Since then, the industry has been expanding Marlboro Country considerably beyond the confines of Monument Valley. As consumption of cigarettes in America falls by about 2 percent annually, the worldwide market grows steadily, to $2.6 billion last year, double the 1986 figure.
Marketers for R.J. Reynolds planned last year to charge five empty packs of Winstons as admission to a Taiwan rock concert but dropped the idea after public protest.
In 1925, ad booster T. Jackson Lears announced that "advertising writers compose a new chapter in civilization."
"It is a great responsibility," he wrote, "to mold the daily lives of millions of our fellow men, and I am persuaded that we are second only to statesmen and editors in power for good."
In 1990, the Valentine holds up its mirror:
What, the museum asks, were they selling?
And what did we buy?
Smoke.
"Smoke Signals" continues at the Valentine Museum, 1015 E. Clay Street, Richmond. Hours: Mondays through Fridays, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Sundays, noon to 5 p.m. Admission: $3.50, $3 senior citizens, $2.75 college students, $1.50 children 7-12. For further information, call (804) 649-0711.
by CNB