Chapter 2, Part 1

By Frank Tursi, Susan E. White and Steve McQuilkin
JOURNAL REPORTERS
© Winston-Salem Journal

Not too far from the gawking tourists on Times Square, Dr. Ernie Wynder watched with a mixture of distress and excitement as more mice in his laboratory developed skin cancer.

He knew he was on the brink of a major scientific discovery that meant millions of smokers were doomed.

The R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. was once the largest cigarette company in the United States with a powerhouse of best-selling brands: Winston, Salem and Camel. But times changed, and as the case against smoking became more pronounced in the 1960s, RJR failed to adapt to the marketplace. Its rivals would eventually rush past it, and RJR's efforts to catch up would have a profound impact on the company and the cigarette industry.

Though in 1953 he was only three years out of medical school, Wynder was the one-man staff of the new division of clinical investigation at the Sloan-Kettering Institute at New York's Memorial Hospital for Cancer. His landmark epidemiological study, published three years earlier in the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association, was the first to link cigarette smoking to lung cancer.

The report established Ernst L. Wynder as one of the country's leading investigators of the health effects of tobacco.

Similar studies by other scientists had since confirmed the link, but Wynder wanted to go beyond mere statistics. By laboriously painting the residue of cigarette smoke onto the shaved backs of mice, Wynder hoped to prove that something in the smoke actually induced cancer.

The first tumors started appearing during the 42nd week of the experiment, and the circle of evidence against tobacco began to close. When Wynder's mice hit the newspapers and popular magazines later that year, America's long love affair with this strange weed began to end.

Tobacco has been a source of pleasure, riches and consternation for centuries _ first to Indians and then to Europeans who took the plant home from the New World in the 1500s. The Spaniards called it tobaco, a word supposedly derived from the Y-shaped pipe that an Indian tribe used to smoke the crushed leaves. Wynder became the latest in a long line of Indian shamans, medical doctors, philosophers and politicians who had extolled Nicotiana's medicinal value, complained of its odor, or wondered about its effects on morals or the human body.

Indians probably started growing tobacco about 8,000 years ago. Legends about it can be traced through many different tribes, but all regarded it with great spiritual respect. This myth of the Huron Indians is typical:

''In ancient times, when the land was barren and the people were starving, the Great Spirit sent forth a woman to save humanity. As she traveled over the world, everywhere her right hand touched the soil, there grew potatoes. And everywhere her left hand touched the soil, there grew corn. And when the world was rich and fertile, she sat down and rested. When she arose, there grew tobacco. . . .''

Thomas Harriot may have been the first white man to sing tobacco's praises. He was part of a group sent by Sir Walter Raleigh to establish the first English colony in the New World, spending a year on Roanoke Island in what is now Dare County in 1585-86. ''The fumes purge superfluous phlegm and gross humors from the body by opening all the pores and passages,'' Harriot wrote two years later. ''Thus its use not only preserves the body, but if there are any obstructions it breaks them up. By this means the natives keep in excellent health, without many of the grievous diseases which often afflict us in England.'' (Harriot footnote; description of tobacco.)

Harriot remained a great friend of Raleigh's and was his main contact with the outside world during the 13 years that Raleigh was imprisoned in the Tower of London. Raleigh grew tobacco while in the tower and is reported to have smoked a pipeful just before being beheaded in 1618. Harriot lived three more years but suffered terribly at the end from a ''cancerous ulcer of the nose.''

It was so widely believed during the recurrent plagues of the 17th century that smokers were spared that men who attended the sick and accompanied the dead kept their pipes lit. One Scottish doctor in 1604 praised the tobacco plant, which ''prepareth the stomach for meat; it maketh a clear voice: it maketh a sweet breath . . . in a few words it is the princess of physical plants.''

And a plant capable of earning princely sums for the people who grew it in the colonies. Within seven years of John Rolfe's first experiment with planting tobacco at Jamestown in 1612, Virginia exported nothing but tobacco and a little sassafras to England. Almost as quickly, the leaf became the staple of the Maryland colony. Competition developed in Carolina as well.

Tobacco so dominated the economic and social structure of Virginia, Maryland and Carolina that a man in Virginia could be executed for destroying his neighbor's crop, and for dowry purposes his daughter could be valued at 120 pounds of Sweetscented, considered the best leaf in the world. Virginia's ministers in 1696 were each paid 16,000 pounds of tobacco annually, and it wasn't until 1755 that Virginia law allowed ministers to collect their pay in cash.

Southern planters became rich growing tobacco, and nearly anyone could grow ''cash'' in his or her back yard to pay off debts and taxes. That tobacco exhausted the soil and enslaved a whole race of people whose free labor was essential to a planter's profitability were drawbacks that white Southerners were willing to live with.

Abraham Lincoln also needed tobacco to pay for his stubborn determination to keep the Union together and to end the slavery that tobacco encouraged. The federal government in 1862 taxed cigars for the first time to help finance the Civil War. The tax was raised two years later when a separate tax on cigarettes was also imposed. Even the Confederacy unsuccessfully sought to tax tobacco crops.

Tobacco soon became a mainstay of federal tax collections. By 1880, it accounted for 31 percent, or $38.9 million, of total federal tax receipts. Federal tax collections on tobacco products have risen almost annually since then. Between 1910 and 1920, they increased more than 500 percent, the greatest increase in any single decade.

The states jumped in. Iowa in 1921 became the first state to tax cigarettes. Eleven other states adopted cigarette taxes during that decade. By 1953, 40 states and the District of Columbia taxed cigarettes, which accounted for more than $2 billion in federal and state taxes that year.

Ernie Wynder's bombshell, then, would not just fall on a society in which almost half the adults smoked. It would also hit governments that relied heavily on tobacco to keep the wheels of that society turning.

The Vanishing Filthy Fume

Almost from the day the first white man lit his pipe, somebody else complained about its odor or what it might be doing to the morals or health of the smoker. King James I of England may have been the first ruler to try to stem the growing use of tobacco among his subjects. ''Smoking is a custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and in the black, stinking fume thereof nearest resembling the horrible Stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless,'' the king wrote in 1614 as justification for raising the import duty on tobacco. (Arents footnote; King James reference.)

Much of the early criticism of tobacco, though, tended to focus on its effects on the virtues of the smoker, as this passionate moralist expressed in the 17th century: ''. . . Imagine thou beheldest here a firme-sucker's wife most fearfully fuming forth very fountains of blood, howling for anguish of heart, weeping, wailing, and wringing her hands together . . . while she pitifully pleads with her husband thus: `Oh husband, my husband . . .! Why dost thou so vainly prefer a vanishing filthy fume before my permanent virtues?' ''

Such pleadings aside, actions by colonial governments to restrict the smoking of noxious-smelling pipes in public places had little effect in the colonies. According to a German visitor in the early 17th century, women in New England ''smoke in bed, smoke as they knead their bread, smoke whilst they're cooking.''

The anti-tobacco crusade 100 years later was less fervent than its sister movement against alcohol but about as effective. Women still smoked and chewed. Indeed, Mrs. Andrew Jackson and Mrs. Zachary Taylor both smoked their pipes in the White House.

Other residents of the capital chewed tobacco so heavily that Charles Dickens, during his tour of the States, felt compelled to report that: ''Washington may be called the headquarters of tobacco-tinctured saliva. . . . In all the public places of America, this filthy custom is recognized. In the courts of law, the judge has his spittoon, the crier his, the witness his, and the prisoner his; while the jurymen and spectators are provided for. . . . The stranger will find (the custom) in its full bloom of glory, luxuriant in all its alarming recklessness, at Washington.''

Tobacco knew no greater enemy than Lucy Payne Gaston, who was trained in the office of the Women's Christian Temperance Union and then moved over into the anti-tobacco movement in the 1890s. Gaston encouraged children to wear anti-tobacco pins or buttons and organized armies of children to sing and preach to and against their smoking elders. She even announced as a candidate for president in 1920 on an anti-tobacco platform.

All the marching and preaching by Gaston, Billy Sunday and other reformers paid off between 1895 and 1921, when 14 states banned the sale of cigarettes. Even in New York, it was declared unlawful for women to smoke in public. But the bans were difficult to enforce, and cigarette smoking for Americans was already becoming a symbol of maturity, sensuality and modernity.

The disenchanting experience of alcohol prohibition, the omnipresence of the tobacco industry _ Camel was becoming the most popular cigarette in the world _ and the need for new sources of state revenues combined to frustrate Gaston and her crowd. By 1925, the last of the state bans was lifted.

By then, doctors and medical researchers were beginning to identify a new and more lasting threat to the cigarette's hold on America.