Cigarette Wars: The Triumph of "The Little White Slaver"

by Cassandra Tate

We live in an age when the cigarette industry is under almost constant attack. Few weeks pass without yet another report on the hazards of smoking, or news of another anti-cigarette lawsuit, or more restrictions on cigarette sales, advertising, or use. It's somewhat surprising, then, that very little attention has been given to the fact that America has traveled down this road before.Until now, that is. As Cassandra Tate reports in this fascinating work of historical scholarship, between 1890 and 1930, fifteen states enacted laws to ban the sale, manufacture, possession, and/or use of cigarettes--and no fewer than twenty-two other states considered such legislation. In presenting the history of America's first conflicts with Big Tobacco, Tate draws on a wide range of newspapers, magazines, trade publications, rare pamphlets, and many other manuscripts culled from archives across the country. Her thorough and meticulously researched volume is also attractively illustrated with numerous photographs, posters, and cartoons from this bygone era.Readers will find in Cigarette Wars an engagingly written and well-told tale of the first anti-cigarette movement, dating from the Victorian Age to the Great Depression, when cigarettes were both legally restricted and socially stigmatized in America. Progressive reformers and religious fundamentalists came together to curb smoking, but their efforts collapsed during World War I, when millions of soldiers took up the habit and cigarettes began to be associated with freedom, modernity, and sophistication. Importantly, Tate also illustrates how supporters of the early anti-cigarette movement articulated virtually every issue that is still being debated about smoking today; theirs was not a failure of determination, she argues in these pages, but of timing.A compelling narrative about several clashing American traditions--old vs. young, rural vs. urban, and the late nineteenth vs. early twentieth centuries--this work will appeal to all who are interested in America's love-hate relationship with what Henry Ford once called "the little white slaver."

224 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 29, 2000

About the author

A journalist, historian and author, Tate was born in Twin Falls, Idaho, grew up in Seattle, and attended the University of Washington for a year before beginning her journalism career. She worked as a reporter at the Twin Falls Times-News in Idaho and for the Elko (Nevada) News. From there she moved to the Lewiston (Idaho) Morning Tribune where she met her husband, Glenn Drosendahl, and won a yearlong Nieman Fellowship at Harvard for her environmental reporting. She was the first Idaho journalist awarded that honour.

After spending the 1976-77 academic year in Massachusetts, she and her family returned to Lewiston before moving to Seattle in 1979. Tate reviewed restaurants for the Puget Sound Business Journal, wrote for The Weekly, served as managing editor of Seattle Voice magazine and, while working as a science/medical reporter for the local Journal-American, wrote about the revival of nature at Mount St. Helens five years after the volcano erupted.

After writing op-ed pieces for The Seattle Times and magazines such as Smithsonian, she earned her bachelor’s degree at the University of Washington and stayed on to get her PhD in American history. Tate turned her doctoral dissertation into a book: “Cigarette Wars: Triumph of the Little White Slaver,” published by Oxford University Press.

She later became a major contributor to HistoryLink.org, the online encyclopedia of Washington state history. She wrote more than 200 essays for HistoryLink before turning her interest in missionaries Marcus and Narcissa Whitman into the book “Unsettled Ground: The Whitman Massacre and its Shifting Legacy in the American West,” which was published in November 2020.