Where There's Smoke There's Ire

Aesop's Fabled Shepherd boy, the one who fooled the neighbors with so many false cries of "Wolf!" that they simply went back to sleep when a real wolf finally appeared, evokes little sympathy. Most people feel he got exactly what was coming to him (the wolf, a good trencherman, ate him along with the sheep), but today there is concern that the same thing could be happening with the Surgeon General's 1964 report linking cigarette smoking with lung cancer. The concern is justified, whether or not one personally accepts the report as a genuine cry of wolf--and there does exist a considerable body of informed opinion that is dubious on the point. There are those, too, who believe the report, just as they believe the annual statistics on motor-vehicle mortality, but they have no more intention of giving up cigarettes than they do of abandoning the pleasures of motoring for pedestrianism.

But one thing is certain--and it takes the form of a nonnicotinic smoke cloud. The issue of real wolf or no wolf is thoroughly obscured by the legions of joy killers who associate pleasure of any sort with profligacy, immorality, sin, vice, crime and voluntary servitude to Satan himself. These are the people who believe in their hearts that a medicine can only be efficacious if it tastes terrible; they are the hairshirt hoard that helped promote Prohibition, blue laws and--in an earlier day--the stocks, the ducking stool and the scarlet A. They and tobacco have a long and curious association in the light of which their raucously triumphant "I-told-you-so's" when the report was issued have cast additional doubt upon it, totally unrelated to questions of scientific evaluation. Their enthusiastic support of anticigarette legislation is about as useful to its proponents as Communist support would be for a Dixiecrat Presidential candidate.

For a few months following the January 1964 report indicting cigarettes as a health hazard, their sales dropped over 10 percent. But by the end of 1964 sales were down only 2.34 percent for the year and rising so rapidly that 1965 consumption promises to exceed the record of 510 billion cigarettes set in 1963.

Several theories have been advanced to explain the cigarette's remarkable comeback. One is the widespread inability to kick the habit for good. Another is a growing faith, or hope, in the efficacy of filters, or the discovery of a process for purging cigarettes of their endangering ingredients. A third, and probably the most likely, is that the Surgeon General's report, because it has fallen among evil companions, is suffering guilt by association; that despite its documentation and sponsorship, it is being dismissed by many smokers as just another blast at tobacco by "antitobacco." Their reaction is understandable. During nearly five centuries organized antitobacco has made so many dubious and ridiculous charges against tobacco that many now refuse to believe a word it says--even if it happens to be telling the truth.

Tobacco and antitobacco have one bond between them--a Spanish sailor with Columbus named Rodrigo de Jeres. In 1492, with a fellow crewman, De Jeres was the first white man to witness the smoking of tobacco. One year later, jailed for smoking, he was the first victim of antitobacco. With this exception, the two have nothing in common save the plant itself, and they have followed divergent paths to vastly different ends. Tobacco has risen from humble beginnings to become a vital factor in the American economy and so generous a contributor to the tax gatherers that it is exceeded only by booze and the income tax itself as a source of public revenue. Antitobacco, after some heady initial triumphs (during the 17th Century, for example, Shah Safi of Persia punished smokers by pouring molten lead down their throats), has known few but evil days. Not one American state retains the laws against cigarettes that made the early years of this century so trying.

Such nostalgia can always warm the cockles of the Right Thinking, for there were giants in those days, men of renown. There was James I of England, whose Counterblaste to Tobacco in 1604 remains an enduring monument to the beauty of his prose and the futility of his effort. There was Ch'ung Te, 17th Century emperor of China, who ordered decapitation for any soldier caught smoking, and rescinded the order only when army brass, addicts all, assured him that smoking was a new cure for the common cold. There was Dr. Thomas Hodgkin, father of Hodgkin's disease, who claimed in 1857 that tobacco provoked such a craving for strong drink that its very name derived from the fact that it drove its disciples to Bacchus. There was the Reverend George Trask, who maintained with a straight face that cannibals would not eat the flesh of smokers. And there was Miss Lucy Page Gaston of Illinois, who aspired to the Presidency on the platform that she looked like Abraham Lincoln (no other woman has cared to make that claim) and would outlaw tobacco in all its forms on her first day in the White House.

Finally, and this was the noblest foe-man of them all, there was Dr. Charles Giffin Pease, a lively, lovable little man who looked like a miniature Robert E. Lee and demonstrated the same devotion for a cause that was lost. His devotion led him down strange paths into strange ways. At a testimonial dinner for General John Joseph Pershing in the early Twenties he strode up to the guest of honor, a man who had frightened more GIs during the first World War than had the German army, and without a tremor snatched the cigarette from his lips.

The discovery of tobacco, so necessary to the antitobacco movement, was as inadvertent as the discovery of America itself. Columbus raised Cuba on October 28, 1492, and, basing his statement on the belief that his first landfall at San Salvador had been the (East) Indies, announced to a cheering company that they were now skirting the coast of Japan. A few days later, after further recourse to log and sextant, he changed his mind, and when he dropped anchor at what is now Gibara in Oriente Province on November first, he pointed to the lush Cuban landscape and admitted to his men that he had made a slight, a pardonable error in reckoning. They were not in Japan at all, he said; they were in China, and emissaries would be dispatched to con the great Khan.

The two men selected were singularly well equipped for their mission. One was De Jeres, able seaman, who had once visited a Negro king in Guinea and was hence assumed capable of understanding any language affected by a colored people. The other, just in case, was an interpreter named Luis de Torres, who could speak fluently in Aramaic and Hebrew and could get by in Arabic. Both, moreover, could assay gold at a hundred paces with the naked eye, and Columbus was convinced they would be doing just that, with bulging eyes, by nightfall. They weren't. Leaving Gibara on November first, they trekked inland for two days, inquiring their way of friendly natives to the gold-encrusted capital of the Khan. The natives invariably pointed south and, in the manner of Montana farmers describing the grandeur of Butte, indicated by signs that the city they were approaching was unequaled anywhere for wealth, beauty, culture and civic enterprise.

Reality was a dismal letdown, for they reached their destination on November third and found that the fabled City of Gold was a collection of huts that were constructed, however ingeniously, of such nonnegotiable materials as timber, palm fronds and mud. Sick with disappointment, they lingered scarcely long enough to be polite before heading back to the coast, and it was during this mournful return that De Torres and De Jeres became the first white men to witness the smoking of tobacco. Columbus himself had been presented with some ceremonial leaves on landing at San Salvador, but the man who could stand an egg on end hadn't the slightest conception of their use. His ambassadors found out. Meeting some natives on the trail, they were invited to rest awhile and each was handed a roll of "herbs" wrapped in a dry leaf which the donors identified as tabacos--or so it sounded. The Spaniards, assuming these to be tokens of esteem, put them in their pockets. The natives put theirs in their mouths, lighted the end with a smoldering brand they carried for the purpose, and "swallowed" the smoke. Then they squatted on their haunches, puffed their primitive cigars and began to chat.

This was the discovery of smoking by the white man, and within a month of returning to Spain De Jeres was in jail for doing just that--put there by the Inquisition on the logical assumption that anyone who emitted smoke was possessed of devils. He did an exorcising stretch of several years and then disappeared from history. Lately he has enjoyed a renaissance. Citizens of Ayamonte, his home town, now claim him as the local boy who first introduced tobacco into Europe. He must share the honor. Practically every member of Columbus' crew took tobacco home with him, and by the middle of the 16th Century it had spread to most of the accessible world.

Tobacco--and later tobacco culture--spread from Spanish and Portuguese America into every part of the world that the industrious Iberians could penetrate. They took it to Africa and the Near East, to China, India, Korea, Malaya, the East Indies and the Philippines. They took it, in short, everywhere they went except across the Pyrenees into Europe. The slight was intentional. Spain and Portugal owned, or said they did, all the tobacco-producing areas in America and its cultivation elsewhere in the world was under their strict control. They enjoyed a monopoly they saw no reason to share with the rest of Europe and they enjoyed it immensely until 1560 when Jean Nicot, French ambassador to Lisbon, smuggled some tobacco plants to the queen mother in Paris. This was the hole in the dike. From then on anybody could get into the act and the whole world was a stage for antitobacco.

For a generation whose experience with antitobacco is largely limited to medical reports and educational tracts, it is difficult to understand the barbarity of the movement's early years. Shah Abbas of Persia, grandfather of the kindly Safi previously cited, would consign to the flames any tobacco found on his soldiers, along with the soldiers. Czar Michael of Russia decreed flogging, slitting of the nose, or castration for anyone caught smoking, and the 17th Century sultans of Turkey added their own refinement. After slitting the nose, they would pass a rope through the incision and suspend the culprit in midair. Inveterate smokers got the ultimate deterrent. They were beheaded.

Some of the early prohibitions were based on morality, others on what monarchs termed "convenience and necessity." The Russian czars punished smokers because careless smokers caused fires, while the Parsis of India abstained from smoking (and still do) because it profanes fire, which they hold sacred. Ahmed I of Turkey forbade tobacco because he thought it was against the laws of the Koran; his son Ibrahim 1, although equally devout, forbade it because he thought tobacco caused sterility and would curtail production of cannon fodder. Other rulers banned it, and punished its use unmercifully, because they felt smoking led to sociability, sociability led to talk, and talk led to rebellion. Proscription on religious grounds was rare and frequently on thin theological ice. Both the Bible and the Koran were written centuries before tobacco was known, so neither, of course, mentions it; but several Mohammedan sects in North Africa punish its use to this day on the grounds that Mohammed would (continued on page 156)Where there's smoke(continued from page 92) have forbidden tobacco (as he did alcohol) had he known about it. Christian reformers can only envy them this assumption. Mohammed did not claim divinity, only that he was the Prophet of Allah, but the Mosaic law came directly from God and God most assuredly would have known.

Confusion in religion and morals spilled over into medicine. Until recently, when antitobacco latched onto lung cancer to the virtual exclusion of all other diseases, tobacco has been blamed for almost every ailment known to man except frostbite. Yet when tobacco first entered Europe it was hailed as a wonder drug, the sovereign remedy for the very ills it was later accused of causing. Nicot himself, whom botanists immortalized by naming the plant Nicotiana tabacum after him, thought it a drug. In the covering letter to his shipment from Lisbon he described how poultices of tobacco leaves had cured an eroding ulcer, a fistula, even a severed thumb, and for years the physicians of Europe believed this therapeutic nonsense. Herbalists and apothecaries, not planters, raised tobacco, and men of medicine vied with one another in discovering new cures. Paralysis? Drink four ounces of tobacco juice, it purges "up and down." Running sores? Cover them with tobacco leaves. Labor pains? A leaf of tobacco, very hot, on the navel. Corns? Gangrene? Itching? Rabies? Drink the juice. Rheums? Catarrhs? Gonorrhea? Warts? Smoke a pipe and be whole. During the Great Plague of 1664-1666 English schoolboys at Eton were made to smoke an inoculating pipe each morning, and Samuel Pepys mentions in his Diary that he used the same preventive in another form. He "chawed" it.

With tobacco occupying such a profitable place in the pharmacopoeia, it is not surprising that doctors were among the first and bitterest enemies of tobacco for pleasure. They were against it to a man, and they were against it for the same reason that the madam in Shanghai Gesture was against debutantes. "They give away," she complained, "what I sell," and a layman with his own pipe, snuffbox or quid could wreak similar havoc on the profession of medicine. Tobacco in unskilled hands, the doctors said in effect, could be as dangerous as the ailment itself. Would you mend your own shoes? Build your own house? Baptize your own baby? Similarly, if you wished to be cured of, say, epilepsy, you should consult your physician for a scientific prescription of the new panacea. They said this in pamphlets, speeches and learned journals and they said it to increasingly deaf ears. The use of tobacco for pleasure swept Europe, sweeping aside the medicos and gathering unto itself a fresh set of enemies that ranged from James in England to the Pope in Rome.

It was not so much the use of tobacco as its misuse that first raised such eminent anger. The Archbishop of Seville banned smoking in his cathedral, not because he thought it sinful, but because the constant clash of flint on steel as smokers lit their pipes drowned out the Mass. The ban was ignored, as was a later one in 1642 by Pope Urban VII that carried the penalty of excommunication. "The use of tobacco," said Urban, "has gained so strong a hold on ... even the priests and clerics that during the actual celebration of the Holy Mass they do not shrink from taking tobacco through the mouth and nostrils, thus soiling the altar linen and infecting the churches with its noxious fumes, sacrilegiously and to the great scandal of the pious." Sacrilege was not the sole offense of smokers, nor were only the pious scandalized. English toffs, after intensive tutoring by a "professor in the art of whiffing," would flaunt such accomplishments as The Ring, The Wiffle (emit smoke in short puffs) and The Gulp (inhale) wherever they could find an audience. Theaters were the greatest sufferers, closely followed by taverns, and many of Shakespeare's plays had their "world premier" under conditions that would have shamed a stag party in Gomorrah. Dominating the pit and "clowding the loathing ayr with foggie fume" were the "reeking gallants" and their "artillery." Their reek came, mainly, from the harsh tobacco of the day; their artillery was the fancy ordnance needed to cope with it--a set of pipes, a pipe pick, a large box of tobacco, a knife to shred it, and a pair of silver tongs to handle the glowing ember that was passed from one lout to another on the point of a sword. The general effect was that of a three-alarmer in Bedlam and the audience reaction was what Madison Avenue would term negative--so negative that theater buffs were the first to applaud when James let fly with his Counterblaste to Tobacco.

James I of England, known to his loyal subjects as "the wisest fool in Christendom," was also Christendom's greatest misocapnist, a word meaning hater of tobacco smoke. "Where there's smoke there's ire," they said of James, but there is reason to believe that his ire was directed as much at Sir Walter Raleigh--whom he correctly suspected of having opposed his accession to the throne on the death of Elizabeth--as at tobacco itself. Raleigh did not introduce tobacco into England as is generally supposed, but he championed its commercial possibilities and saw in tobacco the fabulous gold of the New World that England never found. He was right. (In 1964 the United States mined some $60,000,000 worth of gold. In the same year the 8-billion-dollar-a-year tobacco industry paid the Federal Government $2,095,176,000 in excise taxes on cigarettes and other tobacco products. State and local taxes on cigarettes added another $1,342,000,000, bringing the total tab to $3,437,176,000.) But any friends of Raleigh were enemies of James and most of them got it in the neck. Some, like Raleigh himself, got it with the ax. Tobacco got it with the Counterblaste, a document that has been called "the Bible of no-tobacco." It deserves the accolade. Published over three centuries ago, it anticipates every argument ever marshaled against tobacco and derides its medicinal use with a wit and logic rare among reformers. "It cures the gout in the feet," says James at one point, "and in that very instant when the smoke thereof, as light, flys up into the head, the virtue thereof, as heavy, runs down to the little toe." Other cures attributed to the "precious stink" got equally short shrift and his Majesty then turns to the social shortcomings of the "stinking Suffimigation." It is a form of lust, he says, and a branch of the sin of drunkenness that stupefies the user and, worse, makes him unfit for the military service of his king. It spoils the food, smells up the house, causes bad breath and forces the "delicate, wholesome and clean complexioned wife" to embrace the filthy habit in self-defense against the horrid stench of her husband. Smoking, in short, is "a custome Loathsome to the eye, hatefull to the Nose, harmfull to the braine, daungerous to the Lungs, and in the blacke stinking fume thereof, neerest resembling the horrible Stigian smoke of the pit that is bottomeless."

Counterblaste, which set the tone for all no-tobacco tracts published since, had no more effect on smokers than did the 4000-percent boost in the duty on tobacco with which James followed it. The book was ignored and the tax simply encouraged smuggling, but what really scuttled the king's crusade was his own namesake, the colony of Jamestown in Virginia. Founded three years after the Counterblaste, Jamestown was the first permanent English settlement in America, and for a time enjoyed the added distinction of being the only one established for the avowed purpose of making money. It was neither a haven for the oppressed nor an enlightened experiment in penology; it was unashamedly for the fast buck and the fast buck was dreadfully slow in coming.

The principal cause of delay was the poor quality of Virginia tobacco. A variety known as Nicotiana rustica, it was raw and bitter, utterly incapable of competing with the mild Nicotiana tabacum that was native to Latin America and whose seeds were still a closely guarded monopoly of the Spanish and Portuguese. Far from producing wealth, Nicotiana rustica only diverted the colonists from producing food and for five years Jamestown verged on starvation. The next five were better, for in 1612 John Rolfe (later to marry Pocahontas) got his hands on a packet of Nicotiana tabacum seeds smuggled out of Cuba. It was a small packet, but it was enough (tobacco seeds are so tiny they have to be mixed with sand for sowing and a tablespoonful will provide the makings for over 8000 cartons of cigarettes), and by the time the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth in 1620, Virginia was on the road to wealth. Tobacco, as Raleigh had maintained, was gold, and tobacco's archenemy James was quick to grab his share--he gave Virginia tobacco preferential tariff treatment over Spain's and made tobacco a royal monopoly. This was a shoddy betrayal of anti-tobacco, and antitobacco never forgave him. From then on he was their erring knight, and when he died in 1625 they sang, along with smokers, a song that put him in his place:

Sir Walter Raleigh! name of worth,

How sweet for thee to know;

King James who never smoked on, earth,

Is smoking down below.

James died but Counterblaste lived on, and no-tobacco has cribbed from it ever since. One of the author's more fanciful flights was that autopsies on smokers invariably revealed "an unctious and oily kind of soot" in the lungs. Three hundred years later the embattled Lucy Page Gaston could still wow the faithful with a grisly gag about an unidentified corpse whose lungs were "so full of soot the coroner couldn't tell whether he smoked cigarettes or came from Pittsburgh." James listed an imposing array of ailments he said were caused by tobacco. This same list, constantly enlarged, was a standard feature of antitobacco literature thereafter and by 1857 had reached such frightening proportions that England's noted medical journal The Lancet published it in full as a public service. The editors, after a firm disclaimer of agreement, presented over a hundred diseases, moral lapses and financial disasters that were blamed on tobacco. Among them were early death, insanity, tantrums, softening of the brain, paralysis, apoplexy, delirium tremens, neuralgia, sterility, ulcers, impotency, consumption, dyspepsia, heartburn, flatulence, loss of memory and a passion for obtaining money by fraud. (Modern medicine supports only the first. "Smoking definitely shortens a man's days," agreed the late Sir William Osier, famous physician and medical historian. "I stopped once and the days were about 90 hours long.") Nor is this all. Leeches, bugs and fleas that bite smokers suffer instant death and the children of inveterate smokers are prone to enervation, hypochondria, hysteria, insanity, dwarfish deformity and a life of pain. The state itself is imperiled. "Tobaco," said antitobacco in a paragraph that ends with what must have been the greatest anticlimax of the 19th Century, "impairs the vigour and energy of the English people and causes them to sink in the scale of nations. It ruins young men, pauperizes workers, counter-works the ministers of religion, and renders the old women of Ireland troublesome to the dispensary doctors."

There were few dispensaries in America in 1857, so data on the behavior of their aging female clientele is meager, but no patriot need feel that his smoking ancestors courted less imposing ailments than did addicts in the mother country. Beginning in 1798 with Dr. Benjamin Rush of Philadelphia, the United States has produced a line of reformers who could cry havoc with the best that Britain, indeed all Europe, could offer. Prior to Rush their voices had been stilled by the operation of an economic law expounded by Al Smith in the 1930s. "Nobody shoots Santa Claus," said the Happy Warrior, and tobacco had been such a mainstay of the Colonial economy that to condemn it was to flirt with treason. New England Puritans, almost from habit, had passed a few restrictive laws against smoking, and a Virginia planter named John Hartwell Cooke had fulminated against tobacco because it impoverished the soil, but nobody paid much attention to either. Independence changed the picture. The diversification of agriculture and industry that followed the Revolution robbed tobacco of its immunity from criticism and the eminent Dr. Rush was quick to raise his hand against it.

Rush was truly eminent, antitobacco's man of distinction. As a signer of the Declaration of Independence and Surgeon General of the Continental Army under Washington, his name carried weight, a great deal more weight than his findings. His principal finding, presumably based on personal observation of the Philadelphia fauna, was that tobacco gave users a raging thirst that only booze could slake and was the first step toward skid row and the municipal lodging houses. This parlay of tobacco with whiskey became established dogma with every reformer who followed him. "First smokers frequent soda fountains," said the Reverend Orin Fowler in 1845, "and from soda water get drinking beer, and then brandy, and finally whiskey. One tenth of all the drunkards annually made in the nation are made drunkards through the use of tobacco." The Reverend Fowler was one of three brothers--Orin, Orson and L. N.--who joined with the Reverend George Trask and Dr. Joel Shew to lead the fight against tobacco in the years before the cigarette. The cigar, the pipe, the quid and the pinch of snuff were their enemies and they fought with bales of homemade statistics and hundreds of horrible examples drawn from their own experience. Among them they must have known every lush and every loose woman in the United States, for each of these unfortunate victims of tobacco was invariably one of their nearest and dearest. "He died in my arms," was a favorite obit with the Reverend Trask, "felled in his prime by the Stinking Weed."

Trask was by far the most industrious of the lot. As president of the American and Foreign Anti-Tobacco Society and proprietor of the Anti-Tobacco Tract Depository, both of Massachusetts, he compiled and published some 20 tracts a year and "preached against Strong Drink and Tobacco in places near and far on wellnigh every Sabbath and addressed over 120 Sabbath-schools." Such husbandry bore much fruit. In his annual report for 1865 he gloats that "No Smoking signs are on the increase from Dan to Beersheba; many merchants won't hire clerks who use tobacco; and spittoons are vanishing from pulpits, pews and parlors, a significant indication that clewers of the quid are losing caste with those who don't." Trask himself was a brand snatched from the burning. In a thinly disguised autobiographical pamphlet titled "How James Blake Dropped His Cigar and Found Christ," he confesses that he smoked cigars for 20 years, despite warnings from his Aunt Rhoda that "religion which begins in smoke ends in smoke, and no votary of tobacco can be a spiritual man." He smoked six a day, "first thing each morning, last thing at night, and no devotee of Bacchus, no Brahmin, no Hindoo, worshiped with more fidelity." When he couldn't buy tobacco he borrowed it, and if unable to borrow would have stolen "as I am told our fast young men do today." He would buy cigars "even on Sunday" and on one occasion, so low had tobacco brought him, he "stopped an unwashed Irishman on the street to beg a light of him and felt it no compromise to my dignity. I loved cigars more than my mother, my good name, my church." Then illness struck and Trask found himself attended by a consecrated physician. " 'Tobacco has laid you low,' " said the doctor. " 'You must drop it or be a dead man; perhaps in two days.' Here was an epoch in my life and I had strength left only to drop my cigar and feebly whisper 'I will never take another whiff' and I never have!"

Himself saved, Trask devoted his life to saving others and, in addition to his regular crusade, took to needling his betters by mail. No one was immune. In 1860 he wrote the Prince of Wales, later Edward VII, and rebuked him for setting a bad example for American youth during a recent visit to the United States. The royal mouth, Trask complained, was always stuffed with a meerschaum pipe and children throughout the land were now following his noxious example. Trask demanded that he quit smoking. "I cannot ask it on grounds of expense," he wrote, "for what is money to a Royal Purse, but it wastes time, too, and makes you look ridiculous. [Tobacco's wastage of time also dismayed Philip, Earl of Stanhope, an English historian. A man taking snuff, said his lordship, does so every ten minutes. Each inhalation (inhalation, sneezing, wiping the nose) takes 1-1/2 minutes, 36-1/2 days a year. In 40 years of life a man would spend 2 years taking snuff and another 2 years wiping his nose, 4 years he could have spent to better advantage.] Also, think of your children of the Royal Line. The sin of the father is never so strikingly visited on his children as is the sin of tobacco smoking ... and the man is not yet born who can take the gauge and dimensions of this insidious enemy which has smote great nations."

The prince, who got quite enough of this sort of thing from his mother, Queen Victoria, did not reply, but Trask was undaunted. He published the letter as a tract and five years later was writing to General Grant in the same vein. "Give up your cigar," he implored. "You conquered in spite of it, and it sets a bad example to one and all. What shall we do with our Bands of Hope and our gallant Cold Water Armies after your horrid example?" Grant doubtless had constructive ideas about what Trask could do with his Cold Water Armies and his Bands of Hope--two adolescent organizations pledged to abstinence from alcohol, tobacco and profanity--but he was too polite to suggest them to a man of the cloth. He just went on smoking and a great many of his countrymen did the same. But they were not necessarily following his example; they were following history.

Every American war has stimulated the use of tobacco. "If you can't send money," a desperate Washington wrote Congress from Valley Forge, "send tobacco." It was an excellent substitute. By issuing it to his men they could momentarily forget that they were ill-paid, ill-clothed and ill-fed. By selling or trading it he could get supplies. Bills and soldiers were frequently paid in tobacco, and Benedict Arnold's sole use by the British after his treason was as nominal leader of an expedition to destroy the tobacco crops and warehouses in Virginia that were the rebel army's principal source of cash and comfort. After Yorktown, soldiers brought the tobacco habit home with them, spreading both its use and cultivation. The Mexican War, short and remote, did little but popularize the cigar, but the Civil War, fought largely in tobacco country, brought tobacco into almost every home that sent a soldier to the front. Four years of it wiped out the work of a lifetime for such men as Trask, leaving them little but to wonder at what had happened to the country and themselves.

They would have done better to stop wondering and read their own literature. Few Americans doubted the reformers' motives--in Trask's best year his salary and expenses were both met from contributions of less than $1500--but fewer yet believed their words. In attempting to equate the use of tobacco with drunkenness, debauchery and disease, they invariably overshot the mark, citing "facts" a child could disprove and "authorities" no one could find. Dr. Orson S. Fowler, the "practical phrenologist," was forever quoting fellow healers who were figments of his own imagination. "Dr. Smith of Pennsylvania," he would tell the Right Thinking ladies of New England, "has treated three cases of palsy caused by chewing tobacco," and the ladies of Pennsylvania would shudder at the "weed-soaked wretches" treated by a Dr. Jones of Maine. Others fell back on chemistry. "The bath water used by a smoker will kill geraniums," Dr. Joel Shew told a Lyceum audience in Fall River, "and emanations from the pores of a smoker will kill the wife who shares his bed." Why she should wish to share it was not explained, for sterility and impotence were supposed to be among the first fruits of tobacco, but reformers were not interested in domestic relations or the niceties of logic. They were interested in the eradication of tobacco and they flayed it with so many ridiculous charges that following the Civil War the antitobacco movement virtually disappeared in a gale of laughter and a cloud of smoke.

Then came The Little White Slaver.

In 1964 the United States consumed 497,446,509,387 cigarettes, a figure that compares favorably with the number of accounts of their origin. Some scholars say the Aztecs were smoking cigarettes when the Spaniards arrived and offered some to Cortes. Others, equally learned, say that what the Aztecs smoked weren't cigarettes at all, they were simply tubular pipes made from reeds, and that the cigarette was invented in Peru. Every historian has a theory of his own, each impeccably documented. The most likely theory and certainly the only one that could possibly be made into a movie is that the cigarette was invented by an Egyptian artilleryman at the siege of Acre in 1832. Being under siege was, for Acre, old hat. This time the Turks, under Suleiman Bey, were inside; the Egyptians, under Ibrahim Pasha (great-grandfather of the late Farouk), were outside--trying to get in. They were finding it rough going, for the walls of Acre were thick and the Egyptian artillery fire was slow. Suddenly, for no apparent reason, the rate of fire for one Egyptian battery became almost staccato and Ibrahim sent aides to find out what had happened. What had happened was that a cannoneer, tired of laboriously spooning powder into the powder holes, had taken to rolling it into paper spills and pouring the stuff into the gun like water. The rest is history. Ibrahim rewarded the fellow with a sack of tobacco and the ingenious gunner, having no pipe, rolled the tobacco in paper as he had the powder and gave the world the cigarette.

The cigarette reached America just in time to renew antitobacco's lease on life and make a modest contribution toward the cost of the Civil War. The boost for antitobacco was in a new and seemingly vulnerable form of the ancient enemy. The contribution to the War was $15,000 paid in excise taxes in 1865, and comparison of this figure with the total taxes of $3,331,979,000 paid by cigarettes in 1964 is an exact measure of antitobacco's success in fighting them. It is a dismal record and some of its worst enemies feel that antitobacco deserved better, for during some 60 years following 1880 it fought a good fight. It was very tough, very determined and, thanks to two of its outstanding leaders, it was even entertaining.

The first of these was Lucy Page Gaston, the Carry Nation of antitobacco and the greatest antitobacconist of the 19th Century. Lucy had what it takes. Born in 1860 of a long line of Abolitionists and hell-fire gospel shouters, she was tall and gangly, with high cheekbones and a long upper lip garnished with warts. At 13 she was teaching Sunday school. At 16, wearing the colors of the Women's Christian Temperance Union, she was wielding the ax. She swung it in saloons, bordellos, gambling halls and tobacco shops, but at heart Lucy was a specialist. The cigarette was her enemy, her personal enemy, and she had "a clear call from God to fight it." The cigarette led to drink, delinquency, disease, divorce and death, and at 30 it led Lucy right out of the W.C.T.U. and into a crusade of her own.

Chicago became her headquarters, and detractors claimed that between Lucy and the stockyards the town was almost uninhabitable. Lucy paid them no mind. Armed with the Clean Life Pledge--no tobacco, no swearing, no vice--she stumped the Epworth League and Christian Endeavor circuits, calling for personal purity and laws against the cigarette. This last was an imposing goal, but not impossible. Lucy lived in an era that believed in legislating evil under the rug, so all she had to do was prove that cigarettes were evil. In this she had a peculiar ally, the cigar industry. Alarmed at the inroads of cigarettes on their sales, the cigar makers fought them with rumors, charges and innuendoes and even hired Greenwich Village hacks to write articles condemning them. The authors earned their pay. Cigarettes, they wrote, were made from cigar-factory sweepings and from cigar butts that Bowery bums --"butt grubbers"--were paid to retrieve from the sidewalks of New York. Cigarette tobacco, to mask its odious origins, was doped with opium, morphine or chloral hydrate. Cigarette papers were made in China by lepers and bleached with arsenic, antimony, mercury or white lead. Cigarettes were rolled by workers whose hands were "a mass of scrofulous or venereal sores."

Miss Gaston not only believed these charges--she helped make them up, embroidered them and spread them. In 1899 she organized the Chicago Anti-Cigarette League, and two years later expanded it into the National Anti-Cigarette League to save the entire country. Parades, pledges, threats, tracts, harangues and noisy legislative lobbying were her weapons and youth was her primary target. "You're just the boy I'm looking for," she would cry, pouncing on some smoking urchin in the street. "I want to tell you what that cigarette is doing to you." Then she'd tell him. An early, merciful death was the cheeriest prospect she could hold out to him, and she would personally guarantee it if he persisted in smoking what she called "the little white hearse plume." An astonishing number of boys believed her, but no convert was allowed to swear off on the spot. He must go home and think it over, then report to Anti-Cigarette headquarters, sign the Clean Life Pledge and receive a Clean Life button. Only then was he saved, for, as Lucy pointed out, "he would rather cut off his hand than break his word." The boy could also join the Anti-Cigarette League, if sponsored by an accredited Sunday school, and receive the A.C.L. button. This last was more desirable than the Clean Life button, for it entitled the wearer to jeer smokers on the street and even snatch cigarettes from their mouths. Their favorite jibe at a cigarette smoker as he polluted the public air was "Stinker! Stinker! Stinker!" so they soon became known and despised as Little Stinkers. To this day anyone who refers to an obnoxious brat as "a little stinker" is paying unconscious tribute to Lucy Page Gaston.

Lucy earned the homage. By 1907 cigarettes were prohibited in Wisconsin, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Nebraska, and when a similar bill reached the legislature in Albany, Lucy dashed to New York City to rally support. The "bastion of sin" was a tough nut to crack. Hearing that society women smoked, she wrote their clubs urging them to join the Anti-Cigarette League and sign the Clean Life Pledge. "Where Fifth Avenue leads," she said, "the Bowery will follow." Society gave her the frost and the New York legislature proved almost as slippery as the one in Illinois. Solons there had passed what they assured her was an anticigarette law, but they had purposely drawn it in such vague and ambiguous terms that the courts had no choice but to declare it invalid. The New York legislature simply let its bill die in committee, but by 1913, thanks largely to Lucy's Anti-Cigarette League, 13 states had laws against the sale of cigarettes and cigarette papers.

Smoking, of course, went on as usual in the blighted areas. Cigarette papers were bought by mail, and cigar stores would charge 20 cents for a box of matches and throw in the cigarettes free. Lucy, unaware of these dodges, developed a cure for such addicts as the legislation might have been too late to save. It was a nauseous mouthwash of silver nitrate to be used after meals for three days, and its effectiveness lay in making the gargler sick as a dog if he took so much as one puff from a cigarette during treatment. After three days of abstinence the patient was presumed to be off the weed permanently, but if the craving returned he was to chew on a piece of gentian root to bolster his resolve. Lucy always carried gentian root in her handbag, stuffed in with the pamphlets, Clean Life Pledges and graham crackers. The graham crackers she ate personally, and frequently they were all she had. Every dime she could get went to The Cause and as time passed, despite her victories, she kept getting fewer and fewer dimes. The fault was her own. Lucy had appropriated the cigarette as her own personal enemy and she had determined to keep it. Privates were welcomed into her army, but she despised generals and, since there simply were not enough mentionable vices for every reformer to have one of his own, a good many generals insisted upon joining. As her National Anti-Cigarette League grew--it became the International Anti-Cigarette League in 1911--the discordant brass grew with it and the movement demonstrated an alarming tendency to grow out from under Lucy's thumb. Taking a leaf from the anti-saloon people, who long ago had decided that Carry Nation's method of closing gin mills with an ax was not ladylike, anticigarette became more sophisticated. Education, the upstarts told Lucy, was the new approach, and her habit of slugging smokers over the head with her reticule was really not educational in the finest sense of the word. When Lucy paid no attention, they reduced both her authority as president and her income, and only the fortuitous arrival of World War One kept her in the public eye.

World War One separated the men from the boys in antitobacco. With Pershing pleading for cigarettes to cheer the troops, who wanted silver nitrate and gentian root? Lucy did, and she was one of the very few in antitobacco who had the nerve to say so. No country saturated with nicotine could lick the Kaiser, she said, dodging brickbats the while, and the cigarette was even more dangerous to the soldier than to the civilian. It drugged his senses, making him easy prey to the Boche, and its glowing tip made a perfect target at night. When the tobacco companies answered Pershing's appeal with carloads of cigarettes, Lucy accused them of slaughtering "our own dear boys" to counteract their bad publicity during the antitrust suits brought against them, successfully, in 1911. When a patriotic organization in Kansas sent cartons of little white hearse plumes to the front, she hauled it into court (also successfully) under the state's anticigarette law. If she saw a soldier smoking, she snatched the cigarette from his lips. And when the armistice was signed she announced that "the War is over, so the cigarette is once again poison."

Hardly anyone listened, for the coffin nail had lost its power to frighten. Most of the states with anticigarette laws repealed them, substituting laws against sales to minors. At 60, tired and poor, Lucy had all her work to do over again and the old methods wouldn't work anymore. The International Anti-Cigarette League knew this all too well and began concentrating on school children and the "scientific" aspects of smoking. Lucy wouldn't, or couldn't, change her tactics, and when her diatribes and cigarette snatchings raised a storm of lawsuits, she was asked to resign as president. She did, on the last day of 1919, and the next day announced her candidacy for President of the United States. Her announced qualifications were that she looked like Abraham Lincoln and had no husband to distract her from affairs of state. Her platform was "morality."

Lucy's morality plank called for the prohibition of smoking, burlesque shows, suggestive movies, tight brassieres and modern dancing. In their stead she wanted "clean sweet things" on stage and screen, community singing instead of dancing, debating societies and spelling bees instead of cabarets. She actually entered the Republican primaries in South Dakota, but offered to withdraw "in favor of any man who will endorse the moral reforms for which I stand." William Jennings Bryan must have qualified, for when he was nominated by the Prohibition Party she was a delegate to the convention that named him by acclamation. The country elected Warren G. Harding, a cigarette fiend who had been selected in a smoke-filled hotel room, so Lucy girded her loins to stay the nation's coming ruin. She founded another National Anti-Cigarette League, to fight both the cigarette and the International League that had deposed her, but her voice was too shrill even for her new creation. When she announced plans to publish a magazine called Coffin Nails, it cut off her funds and she was reduced to berating women smokers and writing President Harding's sister to make him give up cigarettes "for the sake of American youth." In 1923 she died, felled by a truck as she left an anti-cigarette rally, and her last request was that the faithful omit flowers and give the money to The Cause. Four school children recited the Clean Life Pledge over her grave.

Lucy's career has been called "the story of antitobacco in miniature." It is an apt phrase. At one time there were over 60 antitobacco organizations in the United States, each with branches, and it was a house divided. Lucy split with her own league over policy, others split over trivia. Mark Twain's boast that "it's easy to give up smoking, I've done it hundreds of times" tore the movement in two. One group rebuked him for levity, the other missed the point completely and praised his perseverance. Eamon de Valera provoked a similar schism. Arrested by the British for his part in Ireland's Easter Rebellion of 1916, he paused at the jailhouse door and smashed his pipe to the ground. "I'm not going to give you English bastards the pleasure of taking it away from me," he explained. "I've just quit smoking." Again, one group cheered his reformation, the other chided him for swearing. When he resumed smoking the moment of his release, however, both united to deplore his backsliding. Even the death of General Lew Wallace, author of Ben Hur, caused dissension. "General Wallace," said the Waterville, Maine, Banner of Health, "died at the early age of 78, another victim of the deadly cigarette. But for the filthy weed he might have lived to an even hundred." The Jericho, Arkansas, Primitive Christian saw things differently. "General Lew Wallace," it said, "died at 78, having prolonged his life beyond the Scriptural threescore and ten by the use of those devilish cigarettes. God made 70 the limit of our years and those who violate it by employing drugs will surely suffer."

Dissension did not extend into exaggeration, a field in which all segments of antitobacco scored equally high marks. It is doubtful that a dozen statements by antitobacco since it first claimed Rodrigo de Jeres was possessed of devils could withstand medical, legal or editorial scrutiny, yet nothing has restrained it from making them. And such statements as "Cigarettes spread leprosy" or "No smoker can enter the kingdom of Heaven" were not offered as expressions of opinion. They were offered as proven facts, and not all of them were advanced by professional reformers. In 1914 Thomas A. Edison put aside his cigar for a moment to blast the cigarette. "The injurious agent in cigarettes," he wrote in The Case Against the Little White Slaver, a series of booklets published by Henry Ford, "comes principally from the burning paper wrapper. The substance thereby formed is called acrolein. It has a violent action on the nerve centers, producing degeneration of the cells of the brain, which is quite rapid among boys. Unlike most narcotics, the degeneration is permanent and uncontrollable. I employ no person who smokes cigarettes." Another contributor to the same booklets, billed anonymously as "a woman of exceptional mental attainments," buttressed Edison's case with a simple household experiment. She soaked 15 cigarette papers in three tablespoons of water and found that "a few drops of this fluid will kill a mouse quicker than you can say 'Jack Robinson.'" She had killed dozens of mice in this fashion, she claimed, as had her friends, and what she wanted to know--addressing herself point-blank to Percival Smith Hill, president of the American Tobacco Company--was what effect this paper would have on human beings. Mr. Hill did not reply, but Dr. Charles A. Greene, one of antitobacco's favorite medical authorities, was happy to oblige. "After five years of smoking," said Dr. Greene, "the blood of a cigarette addict is as black as ink."

Mr. Hill's failure to reply was based on hard experience. No reply, no denial, would be accepted, and the cigarette industry had stopped making them. From a strictly business point of view they were unnecessary, for cigarettes, then as now, thrived on abuse. When Lucy Page Gaston began her crusade against them the nation's annual consumption was a little over two billion; when she died it was over seventy billion. Antitobacco was better than an advertising campaign, its every knock a boost, and in the early Twenties, oddly enough, the industry's main concern was not antitobacco at all, but antisaloon. Brewers and bartenders were not the only people made jobless by the 18th Amendment. Thousands of professional reformers were also thrown out of work and the logical place for their peculiar talents was antitobacco. The thought of an attack mounted by these hardened veterans gave the tobacco industry nightmares, and not even the soothing words of Dr. Clarence True Wilson, head of the Methodist Board of Temperance, Prohibition and Public Morals could quiet its nerves. "The desperate efforts of the outlawed liquor traffic," said Dr. Wilson, "to make credulous people believe that the victorious Prohibitionists will now demand a Constitutional amendment against tobacco--not to mention dancing and failure to attend Wednesday-night Prayer Meeting--is the limit of hypocrisy."

The cigarette industry was not notably credulous, but that is precisely what it believed, and with good reason. "Prohibition is won," cried Billy Sunday, the center fielder turned evangelist, "now for tobacco!" Early developments were ominous. A national No-Tobacco Army was organized "in the interest of personal purity, civil righteousness and the final prohibition of the tobacco trade" and prohibitory bills began dropping into legislative hoppers. One of them, introduced in Indiana, would have made smokers ineligible for public office and liable to imprisonment at hard labor. "No cigar, pipe or cigarette fiend," said its sponsor, "has the right to pollute the air another breathes." The bill failed to pass, but similar measures throughout the land received alarming support and reformers everywhere adopted the stance of those who've got it made. "If you want to be on the side that's going to win," crowed the No-Tobacco Educator, "join the No-Tobacco Army!" And thousands did.

Then, for three basic reasons, the movement fell flat on its face. One reason was the widespread use of cigarettes, by both sexes, engendered by the War. Another was the obvious failure of Prohibition, necessitating money and manpower to protect the 18th Amendment itself. The third was the continuing inability of reformers to show that tobacco was harmful to the average smoker. It was one thing to point to a lush sleeping in the gutter and prove the evils of excessive drinking. It was quite another to point to the President of the United States and convince people he might have done well in life had he stayed off the weed. Many reformers tried--Harding got more letters asking him to stop smoking than asking him for jobs--but most were content with smaller game. Bernarr Macfadden, publisher of Physical Culture magazine, begged youth to abstain from cigarettes and promised they would be "cleaner and sweeter" for it. "The first step in making a 'bad' boy," he wrote, "is to teach a good boy to smoke ... Most accounts of the execution of youthful criminals end with the words: 'He went to the chair with a cigarette on his lips.'" Many others raised their voices against cigarettes--Ty Cobb, Luther Burbank, Connie Mack, Gene Tunney--but by the mid-Twenties, with consumption soaring and financial support of antitobacco reduced to a trickle, most people and most organizations bowed to the inevitable. A few, a pitiful few, never surrendered, and the most memorable of these was Dr. Charles Giffin Pease, that reasonable facsimile of Robert E. Lee who snatched the cigarette from Pershing's mouth and became the last great champion of no-tobacco.

Pease was against almost everything. He was against tobacco, whiskey, coffee, tea, corsets, cocoa, ginger ale, meat, Hershey bars, vaccination, capital punishment, Tammany Hall, the Salvation Army and artificially flavored lollipops, and by the time he died in 1941 at 86, every one of these evils had felt the back of his hand. Tobacco was his first enemy, cigarettes his greatest, and he fought them in prose and in person. Prose was almost his undoing. In 1913 a "tool of the tobacco trust" wrote a letter to the editor of the New York Sun taking issue with a previous letter from Dr. Pease in which he had denounced smoking. Pease replied instanter, but in a misguided effort to indicate widespread support he signed his reply as coming from a fictitious Annette Hazelton at an equally fictitious address in the Bronx. "Dr. Pease," Annette's letter concluded, after several paragraphs of fulsome praise, "is our greatest fighter for a nation free of drug addiction and I am with him." When this letter was publicly revealed as a fake, those last four words rose up to haunt their author. Reporters ignored the exposure and feigned to believe from the phrase "I am with him" that Dr. Pease, twice a widower, was living with Annette in a Bronx love nest. "How's Annette?" they would ask him, "I hear she smokes like a chimney." In 1915 they carried the joke a bit far. Henry Ford, an admirer of Pease and a fellow eccentric, invited him to sail on the Oscar II, the Peace Ship sponsored by Ford that somehow was to end the War in Europe and "get the boys out of the trenches by Christmas." Pease accepted, but when the ship sailed on December 4, he was not aboard. He was on the pier, surrounded by his luggage and telling reporters he had been forced to disembark by the sudden illness of his mother. The truth was almost heart-rending. A playful reporter had inquired of Ford if "Miss Hazelton" would be sharing a cabin with Dr. Pease. When Ford asked who Miss Hazelton might be and was told she was Dr. Pease's boon companion, he was shocked to the marrow and had "the immoral fellow" tossed ashore, bag and baggage. The Peace Ship, a pathetic failure, could ill afford the loss. Dr. Pease could probably have stopped a world war with the same facility he started wars of his own.

One of his best was fought in 1909 with the New York City Board of Health over smoking on the elevated railways and Pease won it, he always maintained, by teaming up with God. Pease had harried the Board for years with demands that it prohibit smoking on the trains and for years the Board had brushed him off. Finally, to quiet him, it proposed a compromise it felt no reasonable man could refuse--an offer to prohibit smoking in all save the last car of each train. Pease was not a reasonable man. "It was only half a loaf," he would often recall later, with little or no encouragement, "but even as I rode the elevated to the public hearing I could think of no reason for rejecting it. Then, when I got off the train, a voice spoke to me as from a burning bush. 'Look at the motorman,' it said. 'Look at the motorman.' I did, and my enemies were delivered into my hands. My station was the end of the line and the motorman, the control lever in his hand, was walking from the first car to the last. I saw that he was not going to turn the train around for the return trip. He was simply going to operate it from the other end and on the journey uptown the last car would be first and the first last. There were only three cars on the trains of those days, so this meant that all the cars except the one in the middle--that sweet oasis--would soon be filled with the vile stench and debris of the tobacco fiends. We got our law, of course. Who could deny Him?"

Dr. Pease was one of the few doctors active in no-tobacco whose title was authentic. He was both an M.D. and a D.D.S. and it was probably this eminent background that saved him from the physical violence his behavior so often invited. At a dinner of the Men's League for Women's Suffrage in 1912, he went from table to table snatching cigarettes and cigars from the guests' mouths. Some left and others relit, but no one hit him. For years he personally enforced the law against smoking in the subway. When he couldn't tell whether a cigar was actually lighted, he would knock off the ash with a folded newspaper. If a spark glowed, he led the culprit to a policeman and demanded his arrest. Later, when tea, coffee, cocoa and chocolate were added to his stable of poisons, he would walk through Central Park snatching Hershey bars from children. Mothers or nurses usually called the cops, but the cops wanted nothing to do with him. They would rather buy the child a fresh candy bar than listen to the doctor's harangue at the station house.

Pease's list of proscribed items grew with the years, and for reasons that frequently left his disciples in the dark. His disciples were organized into the Non-Smokers Protective League of America and not a few of its members found themselves fighting corsets and coffee and sirloin steaks when all they really wanted was less tobacco smoke in public places. Their leader always explained. Corsets were bad because they restricted circulation. Sirloin steaks were bad because sirloin was beef, beef was meat, and Dr. Pease was a vegetarian. Tea and coffee and many soft drinks contained theine. Chocolate and all its derivatives, including Hershey bars, were bad because they contained theobromine and the Salvation Army was wicked because it gave coffee to the troops and spoiled their aim. Tammany Hall was corrupt and refused to outlaw smoking on the streets. Artificially flavored lollipops contained a habit-forming drug that enriched the manufacturer by enslaving the child. Capital punishment was bad because it dispatched criminals before they could renounce the tobacco that led them into crime.

So it went, and with all these enemies it is surprising that Pease had any friends, but he had thousands. Many of them were reporters. Reporters loved him personally and as copy and they demonstrated their affection by constant baiting. Pease was always available to those seeking redemption, and his admirers on the night shift would sometimes keep him on the telephone until dawn to bolster their will as they "fought the craving for the weed." Charles MacArthur, the playwright, was particularly adept at this. He would call Pease, sometimes from as far away as Chicago, to plead piteously for "One puff, doctor! Just one puff!" Dr. Pease would be adamant against even this small concession, but he was so kind and concerned that MacArthur's conscience would hurt him for days. On one occasion he was so contrite he actually contemplated giving up smoking. Nothing came of this high resolve, mainly because MacArthur shared with other reporters a sneaking belief that Dr. Pease must be pulling their legs as assiduously as they pulled his. He wasn't. When he told them that President McKinley, as a smoker, was a greater criminal than the man who assassinated him, he was expressing his sincere belief. And when he said that he personally knew a horse that had jumped off a cliff in hysteria after inadvertently eating some tobacco leaves in its hay, he was not joking. He never told a joke in his life--nor saw one.

This lack of humor was the hallmark of antitobacco. The only remark approaching the jocular in all its history was Horace Greeley's reference to the cigar as "a flame at one end and a fool at the other," and scholars suspect that Greeley stole this line just as he stole the more famous "Go West, young man" from an editorial in the Terre Haute, Indiana, Express by John Babsone Lane Soule. Its dourness has cost antitobacco dear, but no one ever bled so profusely from its lack of humor as did the late Richard John Walsh, a writer, editor and parodist. Mr. Walsh suffered, for a parodist, the fate worse than death: He wrote a parody of no-tobacco tracts that was so close to reality the parodied themselves embraced him as their own. His take-off, The Burning Shame of America, appeared as "a labor of love of a devoted band of women and men of the No-Nicotine Alliance, founded at Illyria, Illinois, on a lovely spring day in 1924," and it was described on the title page as a "handbook of easy reference for speakers and organizers against the evils of tobacco." To Mr. Walsh's horror, that is precisely how it was accepted. His "Primrose Pathfinders," rhymed slogans, were recited by the very people they sought to burlesque. "To keep our glorious nation clean/Stomp out the viper nicotine!" was considered especially suitable for songfests, and there was scarcely a dry eye in the house when the speaker gave out with "Besotted father who defiled/The air around his helpless child." Dr. Pease himself plugged two of them--"Vile men who smoke upon the street/Are not the kind I care to meet" for young ladies, and "The butt by wanton smoker tossed/Has kindled many a holocaust" for firemen and conservationists. In addition to poetry and some splendid homilies in prose, Mr. Walsh provided invaluable economic data for domestic use. Outstanding were his bald statements that "the lumber wasted annually on matches to light cigarettes would build 5000 homes" and "a man who smokes ten cigars a day can become a millionaire in his old age by giving them up." And if such tugs at the purse strings didn't make a husband abstain, he could usually be brought to heel with Mr. Walsh's concluding paragraph. "Worst of all," he says, "is the smoky odor that hangs about the house. It gets into the lungs of the whole family, prejudicing them to all kinds of diseases; makes it impossible for them to enjoy the pure air, the smell of flowers, rubber plants and ferns, and the perfume that mother sprays about her boudoir. In many smoking houses it becomes necessary to open the windows at night to let out the vapors of tobacco, thus exposing the family to the dangers of drafts and the risky night air."

There is little market for such material today, but it will doubtless be revived if the Surgeon General's report should join the Counterblaste and those troublesome old ladies of the Irish dispensaries. Such material was still being used during the Forties, and Mr. Walsh may yet find himself standing shoulder to shoulder with James I and Lucy Page Gaston in the bright galaxy of no-tobacco. It will be an honored place, but it will be three steps to the rear of the incomparable Pease. For who but Charles Giffin Pease, told that a woman who had smoked since childhood had just died at 106, could make the reply that shines as a beacon in the deadpan literature of antitobacco? "What a shame!" he cried. "What a dreadful shame! Who knows to what a ripe old age she might have lived had it not been for that death-dealing weed."