Brandt, Allan M. 2007. The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of the Product that Defined America. New York: Basic Books. 600pp.
Brandt's book is an illuminating look at the many facets of the cigarette, a story he starts in the later part of the 19th century. The book is divided into five broad sections, dealing with the culture, science, politics, law, and globalization of this consumer good. In the process, Brandt reveals much more than the cigarette itself; rather, tracking them is in large measure a tracking of many modern developments that we now take for granted.
Among the topics that are touched on by the cigarette are the evolution of manufacturing processes, the sometimes arcane realm of tort and civil law, the rise and refinement of public relations and advertising, and the insuation of corporate and moneyed interests into politics. Thus, this book is both a comprehensive history of the cigarette, and in many ways a case study through which these various social processes can be seen to have changed throughout the 20th century up to the current day.
In large measure, the book tells of an industry which wanted to make itself immune to all sorts of regulations in many ways. First, by cloaking itself in controversy by maintaining, long after the science had lead to a preponderance of evidence suggesting smoking cased cancer, they had evaded successfully medical and governmental regulation. Second, by cloaking themselves in the language of "rights" and "emancipation" and "feminism", they helped lead the charge to spread smoking to women, to protect it under the guise of allowing smokers a "right to choose," and to force other countries to open their borders to these products despite any health consequences.
While the book is interesting and comprehensive throughout, the writing and story becomes most compelling in the section entitled "Law," where the access to the corporations' archives displays in full brutality the cynical manipulation and arguments that these business players wished to propagate on the American public. Here I read the book aghast and shocked, wondering with each legal argument that a member of the prosecuting team put forward the justification executives would retort with in court.
The book, while comprehensive, does not tell every story that would be of interest. Because it is a story of cigarettes and not tobacco, other aspects of "cigarette history" (or "prehistory"), such as tobacco and slavery, do not receive much attention in the book. It is also short on comparative history of tobacco in other nations, containing scattered references to the British companies throughout, but not coalescing into a full-blown review of differences in similarities across societies. Some of this is also encountered in the last section of globalization, but mostly from an Americentric point of view. This isn't necessarily a fault, however, as Brandt's book makes it clear that these companies have been among the most powerful in lobbying to have trade barriers knocked down for their product.
This book will likely not be the last written on American cigarettes, as the archives made available by litigation and brave whistleblowers is dauntingly huge. Nonetheless, Brandt succeeds in reviewing a history that is both quite specific, and at the same time, quite broad. It is history and sociology at its most powerful, making something mundane and ordinary into something strange, a mystery to be unravelled, explained, and above all, demystified.
