ASHES TO ASHES
Richard Kluger
Alfred A. Knopf
Publication Date: April 28, 1996
Price: $35
Pages: 762


One haze-lazy South Carolina August afternoon some 20 years ago, Pa Ross and I were passing time playing cards on the porch when he looked up, saw a blazing fire reflected in the windowpane, shouted, “Oh, Jesus, the ‘baca!”, leaped into the yard, and took off running around the back. I followed and found him standing and panting, a little sheepishly, next to the pile of trash his little brother was burning. Pa Ross was 18 and in an athlete’s shape, but his brief exertions had left him with chest heaving and sweat waterfalling down his forehead. It was the sign of fear, not fatigue. “I thought the ‘baca-shed been burning,” he told me. He added a word of explanation. “That’s my college money.”

I spent a season that year living with the Rosses and their cousins, the Johnsons, in the backroads community of Pineville, about 50 miles north of Charleston. In the mornings the adults went off to work in the local lumber mills and sewing factories, but in the evenings and Saturdays they and their children went back to an older profession: farming the wet, sandy acres stretched between their houses and the edge of the swamp-woods. Some corn, some cotton, some cucumbers, but, mostly, lots of tobacco. The money from the factory jobs (“check work,” they called it), put food on the table and gas in the cars. Most of the farm crop was “much-a-nuisance; piddling; good some years, bad the rest.” But the tobacco, which they dry cured themselves and then sold to the big companies at a regional auction...tobacco was “good as gold.” Growing tobacco was how the Rosses and the Johnsons got the money to do the things they had dreamed of. Like building additions to their houses to accommodate their growing families. Or sending their sons and daughters off to college.

People like the Rosses and the Johnsons didn’t make it into Richard Kluger’s massive new narrative on the history of the American cigarette industry, “Ashes to Ashes,” and that’s an error a reader should take into account. Because unless one factors in the reality that a ton of ordinary people make an important portion of their living from the sale of cigarettes- grocers and checkout clerks and factory workers and small-town farm folk- then one cannot understand the continued survival of an industry whose primary function brings death to millions of Americans. Survival? No, prosperity, cashing in $55 billion in domestic sales during the mid-90’s on a product with dollar for dollar profits five times higher than any other item on store shelves).

But that’s just about the only notable omission in this book. In a society where overpromise and oversell are the watchwords of advertising and booksellers are among the biggest culprits, “Ashes to Ashes” is a rare find: it lives up to its advance billing. Managing to be both scholarly, journalistically fair, and readable in one great gulp, Kluger has given us the definitive work on the American cigarette industry.

Kluger follows the beginnings of the industry even before the birth of the American nation down through today’s headlines: tobacco companies under attack from government regulators for spiking cigarettes with addictive nicotine; tobacco companies sued by every entity imaginable, including, of all places, the sovereign State of Texas; tobacco companies continuing to insist that the government studies are all biased, that there is no definitive link between smoking and disease, that this is a democracy and consumers have a choice; tobacco companies scrambling to diversify in the face of the possible outlawing of their parent product, using their great profits to gobble up soft drink and food companies, bathing themselves in yogurt to hide that nasty, lingering smell that cigarettes always leave behind...

This is not a book of startling revelations or sensational leaked memos, rather it is solid history. There are no smoking guns here, just smoking cigarettes, and that’s more than enough to condemn the industry. What Kluger has done in a meticulous, patient manner is to put weight and substance to something the American public has known for years: cigarettes kill, and cigarette makers have done their damndest to make us believe that this stark fact is just not so.

“Ashes” is most revealing in showing how the cigarette manufacturers used advertising genius to make their wares appear in different ways to different segments of the American population, in much the same way as the Wizard of Oz appeared in different forms to Dorothy and each of her companions, every form a fraud designed to hide the Wizard’s true self:

“Philip Morris entered the women’s field [in 1968] and bested American [Tobacco Company’s Silva Thins] in every way, starting with the name, Virginia Slims. ‘Virginia’ was a woman’s name, and also that of a prime tobacco state. And while ‘Thins’ suggested the appetite-suppressing virtues of smoking, ‘Slims’ was a more nuanced and pleasing synonym, implying grace and beauty. Then there was the smart Virginia Slims package, a soft and creamy off-white with a band of vertical stripes in autumn colors, and narrower than any other because the cigarettes inside were more slender...the brand name was printed in lean, discreet letters...The ad copy was pitched at the newly independent social status of women, exuberantly declaring their progress and needling men for having long exploited them as cooks, laundresses, and floor scrubbers.”

Contrast that with essentially the same product pitched in a radically different way, for example, in the famous Marlboro Country commercials, appealing to ruggedly individualistic men with blood-red packaging and by joining the product hip-and-thigh with images of tough, range-riding cowboys. Or, in another spin, creating the upscale, Park Avenue-embossed design of the Benson & Hedges package, with “a darkly burnished gold package with simulated wood-grained flecks running vertically to enhance the elongated height...It was a mere cigarette pack, but it had a muted elegance...”

Often, the book merely chokes cigarette executives on their own words. When asked in 1991 why he himself did not use the dangerous product he was peddling to millions, the newly-elected CEO of Philip Morris is quoted as saying, “I used to smoke, and for some reason that I can’t even remember now, I lost my taste for it...I used to eat a lot of scallops and don’t anymore. It’s just one of those things.”

But this is not an anti-tobacco tract. “Ashes” goes out of its way to provide full details of the tobacco companies, including a lot of descriptions of the men (yes, men) who run them: “A proud and combative Brooklynite who had won an athletic scholarship to the University of Connecticut and a medal for heroism in the Korean War, [R.J. Reynolds president Edward J.] Horrigan was a bulldog of a man whom many found less than loveable; all, though, acknowledged his fierce loyalty to those who stood with him.” Most of these descriptions leave you with a “who-the-hell-cares?” expression and probably should have been edited out, but perhaps Kluger was going overboard here to appear fair.

Where appropriate the author also takes equal pokes at the industry’s regulators and critics, charging then-Surgeon General Everett Koop with using “shaky science” in going after the perils of “second-hand” smoke in the late 80’s, or, when the Environmental Protection Agency used statistical shenanigans to make the same point, stating that the EPA “seemed nearly as capable in this instance of blowing smoke at the public to cloud the scarcity of cold, clinical science in support of the indictment of [second-hand smoke] as a substantial public health risk as the cigarette companies had habitually been in denying and distorting the overwhelming scientific evidence against direct use of their product.”

That the bulk of Kruger’s criticism falls on the cigarette companies is only fair; they are, after all, the main instigators and chief beneficiaries of this madness.