America’s Deadly Love Affair With Cigarettes: The Rise and Fall of Smoking Culture

NEW YORK – “Cancer stick.” “Coffin nail.” “Cowboy killer.” Over the decades, those grim nicknames have been attached to the cigarette — once a glamorous fixture of American life, now known to have contributed to the deaths of tens of millions of people in the United States.

The cigarette did not originate in the United States. Marlboro remains one of the world’s best-selling brands, but cigarettes are produced in more than 100 countries. China is the largest cigarette manufacturer.

Even so, American innovation transformed the global tobacco industry. During the 20th century, U.S. culture embraced smoking and turned cigarettes into a symbol of sophisticated adulthood, especially in movies and popular media. Cigarettes became commonplace in bars, restaurants, airplanes and, at one time, even hospitals.

Smoking became “a right of passage for many young people,” said K. Michael Cummings, a tobacco history scholar at the Medical University of South Carolina. By the 1950s, nearly half of all U.S. adults smoked.

“I remember making ashtrays for my parents for Mother’s Day and Father’s Day gifts,” said Cummings, 73. “I remember giving cartons of cigarettes as Christmas gifts. I mean, smoking was so common. It was just part of Americana.”

The earliest forms of cigarettes can be traced back thousands of years to the Mayans. But producing them by hand was slow and labor-intensive, limiting how quickly they could be made.

That began to change in the 1880s, when Virginia inventor John Bansack created an automated machine capable of rolling cigarettes 50 times faster. Tobacco magnate James Buchanan Duke invested in the technology and paired it with more palatable tobacco blends, helping turn cigarettes into a major American industry.

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Cigarettes were plainly addictive, and suspicions that smoking could be deadly had circulated for years. In the 1910s, automaker Henry Ford spoke out against them. A 1914 brochure described cigarettes as “little white slavers,” warning that they were habit-forming, harmful to health and linked to bad morals.

A defining moment arrived in 1964, when an authoritative report from the U.S. surgeon general concluded that smoking causes illness and death. The findings helped drive the introduction of cigarette-pack warning labels, a ban on cigarette advertising on television and radio, and growing restrictions on where people could smoke.

Public awareness of smoking’s dangers gradually grew, but it took decades for smoking rates to fall to today’s historically low levels. In 1968, chain-smoking writer Kurt Vonnegut Jr., who preferred Pall Malls, wrote that “the public health authorities never mention the main reason many Americans have for smoking heavily, which is that smoking is a fairly sure, fairly honorable form of suicide.”

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This article is part of “American Objects,” a recurring series marking the 250th anniversary of the United States. For more American objects, click here. For additional stories about the anniversary, click here.