Tobacco
by Iain Gately
She dates from 1940 or so, great year for tailoring and hair styling. Seated on a stool or a fencerail, she's black and white and easy on the eyes, that Hollywood backlight molding her face. With her right hand she brings the cigarette almost to those lips, glances at the gentleman from the corner of those eyes, then ducks her head almost unnoticeably. Ready for the flame, she turns a little toward him and leans forward three or four degrees as his hand and match enter the frame. Their eyes lock as she takes a first discreet puff . . . and the audience at last draws breath. They've just received a communication in the language of tobacco, a language less practiced today but still perfectly and shatteringly understood.
Well, that isn't what this book is about. As I read it, though, I couldn't keep from going back to that subtle, powerful, almost silent language. Vary any action and the message changes: She takes the cigarette from his case, or she holds her head upright, or she steadies his hand. The gestures are tiny but every one conveys a meaning. Gately's book is about meaning, the meaning of tobacco to aboriginal peoples in the New World, to slaveholding Virginians, to soldiers in Vietnam and lawyers in Florida. It's quite entertaining and, within its limits, informative.
Hunde, wollt ihr ewig leben? Frederick the Great demanded of his troops: Dogs, would you live forever? Few soldiers, I imagine, think about that; getting through the next battle or the next patrol is a lot already. But reports from the front suggest real benefits of tobacco: It controls appetite when rations don't arrive on schedule, helps calm nerves in their agony, peaks alertness when danger lies behind every clod of earth, and provides an occasion for social rituals that lend comfort. It isn't just men under arms who gain these blessings, of course. People with no jobs and those with grinding or humbling work value the consolation of a smoke; many writers (and not a few professors) depend on the stimulation of a pipe or cigarette; for perhaps ten thousand years the social function of tobacco has been vital to whole cultures.
Gately tells us, somewhat wryly but with factual support, how tobacco brought about the American Revolution, helped the Marshall Plan get started and smoothed Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika in the 1980s. Explosive demand for tobacco built the Middle Atlantic colonies, even if the promoters had to sneak their plantations past King James, telling him they meant to raise silkworms in Virginia. (Silkworms. Right.) And tobacco ranks with wheat in ancient Rome, wool in medieval England and cotton in the Deep South as a form of produce that can make and break national economies and governments. It wasn't long after tobacco appeared in the Old World that it became a marker of nationality too, the English smoking it in tiny pipes while the Spanish snuffed and the Prussians professed contempt for both. (Within a few generations Americans formed the distinctive habit of chawing, as Charles Dickens and other outsiders noted in horror.)
The herb has always had a social meaning. For many centuries, what people did with tobacco was share it. Indians passed the peace or war pipe from hand to hand, French marquis offered their snuffboxes to new acquaintances, Victorians gathered at "divans" to breathe cigar smoke at one another, a packet of Woodbines went around the circle of metalwrights at the pub. If a Tennessean pulls a knife on you, don't overreact: He may be inviting you to cut a friendly slice from the plug he's holding in the other hand. You can add to this list yourself, because the etiquette of sharing tobacco still exists even where it's changed in the details. Folks whom their government has hounded out of restaurants bum smokes and lights off one another; offices that ban smoking have little sects that congregate by the door for their devotions; less directly, newsgroup members go online to partake of the lore and art of pipes and tobaccos. It's hard to see any such bonding among antismokers, isn't it?
Tobacco has other meanings, of course. Shamans take near-lethal doses as a way into the spirit realm. A billion smokers use it simply in order to feel good. British cigarette makers act as a revenue-gathering arm of government, while antitobacco lawyers (Gately and I trust that none of them will be found having a fine cigar after lunch at the club) see the weed as the key to the mint. Americans have to remember, too, that some of the first Africans sold into slavery on our soil were brought to raise tobacco.
Gately, shown on the dust jacket enjoying a stogie, is in sympathy with tobacco-lovers and skeptical toward prohibitionists. He points out, for example, that the projected cost of caring for diseased smokers is just a fraction of the taxes and penalties governments collect for that ostensible purpose, and that antismoking hucksters still can't stick to simple facts. (Their statistics on second-hand smoke and cancer have a distinctly cooked aroma, just as the old warning, "Smoking will stunt your growth," never quite proved out.) He doesn't try to show that cigarettes, along with their good effects, have no bad ones. Hardly anyone disputes these days that using them increases your chance of becoming ill. But hey . . . wollt ihr ewig leben?
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Tobacco