Clearing the Air: The Rise and Fall of Smoking in the Workplace

By Gregory Wood

In Clearing the Air, Gregory Wood examines smoking’s importance to the social and cultural history of working people in the twentieth-century United States. Now that most workplaces in the United States are smoke-free, it may be difficult to imagine the influence that nicotine addiction once had on the politics of worker resistance, workplace management, occupational health, vice, moral reform, grassroots activism, and the labor movement. The experiences, social relations, demands, and disputes that accompanied smoking in the workplace in turn shaped the histories of antismoking politics and tobacco control.

The steady expansion of cigarette smoking among men, women, and children during the first half of the twentieth century brought working people into sustained conflict with managers’ demands for diligent attention to labor processes and work rules. Addiction to nicotine led smokers to resist and challenge policies that coldly stood between them and the cigarettes they craved. Wood argues that workers’ varying abilities to smoke on the job stemmed from the success or failure of sustained opposition to employer policies that restricted or banned smoking. During World War II, workers in defense industries, for example, struck against workplace smoking bans. By the 1970s, opponents of smoking in workplaces began to organize, and changing medical knowledge and dwindling union power contributed further to the downfall of workplace smoking. The demise of the ability to smoke on the job over the past four decades serves as an important indicator of how the power of workers’ influence in labor-management relations has dwindled over the same period.

• Language: English
• Publisher: ILR Press
• Release date: Oct 14, 2016
• ISBN: 9781501706875

Book preview

CLEARING THE AIR

The Rise and Fall of Smoking in the Workplace

Gregory Wood

ILR PRESS

AN IMPRINT OF

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS ITHACA AND LONDON

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Nicotine and Working-Class History

1. Reformers, Employers, and the Dangers of Working-Class Smoking

2. Smoking Bans and Shop Floor Resistance during the Early Twentieth Century

3. Workers, Management, and the Right to Smoke during World War II

4. Antismoking Politics in Postwar Workplaces

5. Exiled Smoking and the Making of Smoke-Free Workplaces

6. Organized Labor and the Problem of Smokers’ Rights

Conclusion: Quitting Smoking and the Endurance of Nicotine

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

Many individuals made contributions that helped me complete this book. In particular, I warmly thank the members of the DC Working-Class History Seminar, whose enthusiastic responses to an early draft of chapter 4 encouraged me to think more deeply about space, power, and the body in the social and cultural history of the workplace, and I also thank the members of the Faculty Seminar in the Department of History at West Virginia University, who helped me to see greater nuance in my work on the 1987 US Gypsum smoking ban. I also am grateful to the anonymous reviewers for the Journal of Social History and Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas, and their respective editors, Peter Stearns and Leon Fink, for their probing and supportive comments on significant portions of chapters 2 and 3. Over the past few years, I have presented several papers at conferences and other events based on this research; I especially thank the audience members and commentators at the Rush Holt History Conference at West Virginia University (especially Elizabeth Fones-Wolf and Ken Fones-Wolf), the Pennsylvania History Conference, the Labor Studies Program at Michigan State University (especially John Beck), and the North American Labor History Conference at Wayne State University (especially Michael Goldfield) for their helpful insights related to various sections of the manuscript.

For their help with many of the sources used in Clearing the Air, I sincerely thank Jane Ingold and Richard Hart of Penn State Erie’s Lilley Library, as well as the staff members of the Walter P. Reuther Library at Wayne State University, Wayne State’s Purdy Kresge Library, WVU’s Downtown Campus Library, and the Ort Library at Frostburg State University. I am also grateful to the librarians at the Legacy Tobacco Documents Library at the University of California, San Francisco, for their prompt replies to my queries about several sources.

At ILR Press of Cornell University Press, I warmly thank Frances Benson for her early support for the project and for her help throughout the lengthy process of publishing the book. I am also indebted to Emily Powers, Sara Ferguson, and Drew Bryan for their expert assistance with the manuscript. Finally, I thank the anonymous reviewers at ILR Press for their illuminating readings of the entire project.

My colleagues and friends at Frostburg State University, the University of Pittsburgh, Northern Michigan University, Wayne State University, and elsewhere sustained me with their interest in my smoking book. For their support, friendship, advice, and assistance throughout the writing process, I thank Alem Abbay, Bob Archibald, Paul Charney, Bill Childs, Jorge Chinea, Maureen Connelly, José Cuello, Chet DeFonso, Sarah Deprey-Severence, Nick Demichele, Katie Dignan, Elizabeth Faue, Elizabeth Fones-Wolf, Ken Fones-Wolf, Mark Gallagher, Maureen Greenwald, Steve Hartlaub, Cindy Herzog, Brian Ingrassia, Erica Kennedy, Steve Kennedy, Aiden Krautner, John Lombardi, Melanie Lombardi, Russ Magnaghi, Jean-Marie Makang, Elly McConnell, Adam Mertz, Steve Meyer, Marc Michael, Bob Moore, Richard Oestreicher, Mary Jane O’Rourke, Jody Pifer, Kathy Powell, MaryJo Price, John Raucci, Elesha Ruminski, Todd Anthony Rosa, Kara Rogers Thomas, Maria Luisa Sanchez, Daniel Silver, Lisa Simpson, Steve Simpson, Jessica Smith, Jason Tebbe, Jason Thomas, Glenn Thompson, Ahmad Tootoonchi, Nazanin Tootoonchi, Harley Wade, Dan Weir, and Shari Whalen. For help formatting digital images, I owe many thanks to Jared Ritchey of Allegany College of Maryland in nearby Cumberland.

Much of chapter 2 appeared in earlier form as ‘Habits of Employees’: Smoking, Spies, and Shopfloor Culture at Hammermill Paper Company, Journal of Social History 45:1 (2011): 84–107, published by Oxford University Press. A large part of chapter 3 appeared as ‘The Justice of a Rule That Forbids the Men Smoking on Their Jobs’: Workers, Managers, and Cigarettes in World War II America, Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas 13:1 (2016): 11–39, reprinted by permission of the publisher, Duke University Press.

Finally, my immediate and extended family generously supported me during research trips, gave me time to write, and nudged me away from my laptop from time to time in order to do other things. I owe many thanks to my parents, James and Janis Wood, who let me stay with them over the course of several lengthy research trips to Detroit. Most importantly, I lovingly thank my spouse, Mihaela Wood, and my son, John Michael Wood, for so nicely distracting me with a dizzying multitude of Little League games, soccer practices, road trips to see the Baltimore Orioles, Washington Nationals, and the Pittsburgh Pirates, and visits to JM’s beloved National Aquarium. Thank you so much for your endless love and support! This book is dedicated to you both.

Introduction

NICOTINE AND WORKING-CLASS HISTORY

Servers and dishwashers leave their cigarettes burning at all times, like votive candles, so they don’t have to waste time lighting up again when they dash back here for a puff. Almost everyone smokes as if their pulmonary well-being depended on it—the multinational mélange of cooks; the dishwashers, who are all Czechs here; the servers, who are American natives—creating an atmosphere where oxygen is only an occasional pollutant.

Barbara Ehrenreich, in Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (2001)

Almost everyone smokes, Barbara Ehrenreich observed soon after immersing herself in the labor of waitressing. She began her undercover exploration of working conditions and social class after the demise of Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) in a Key West restaurant she called Jerry’s, where she noticed that many of her coworkers persistently smoked cigarettes whenever the opportunity presented itself during their busy shifts. (Employees were forbidden to smoke in sight of customers.) Despite their personal financial difficulties and general lack of access to health care, cooks, waitresses, and dishwashers never seemed to be without a cigarette at the ready. They indulged their unhealthful habit even though they had the most urgent reasons not to smoke: these workers of the postwelfare economy could ill afford the health problems and economic pressures that addictions to nicotine created. As Ehrenreich surmised, the demands of work relentlessly required these servers, cooks, and dishwashers to serve the people, and to do so for very little reward. But smoking was personal, pleasurable, and social—and thus subversive: in this context, smoking constituted a quiet mutiny against the many demands of their work. Workers filled the airspace of the tiny break room and bathroom with the grungy smoke of burning tobacco, and they left ashy remains that told of smokers’ refusal to surrender all of themselves to their jobs.¹

This book examines cigarette smoking’s importance to the social and cultural history of labor and the workplace in the twentieth-century United States and the impact of nicotine addiction on the politics of worker resistance, workplace management, occupational health, vice, moral reform, grassroots activism, and the labor movement. It highlights the frequent (and not so well-known) intersections and tensions among addiction, labor, the body, and space in working-class history. At the same time, the many experiences, social relations, demands, and disputes that accompanied cigarette smoking in the workplace shaped the histories of tobacco and tobacco control in the twentieth century.²

Working People and Nicotine Addiction

Addiction is a topic that is not well-understood in histories of labor, despite its regular presence in twentieth-century workplaces. For example, in films that examine working-class lives in depth, such as Barbara Kopple’s documentary Harlan County USA (1976) or Mike Nichols’ docudrama Silkwood (1983), workers’ addictions to nicotine were presented as commonplace and understood to be interwoven with work. Historians of working people, on the other hand, have only skirted the edges of addiction history. Working-class experiences with addiction are introduced in some historians’ discussions of working-class alcohol consumption, especially in the nineteenth century, and in urban histories that examine narcotics.³ Looking further ahead in time, some historians of labor in the twentieth-century auto industry have noted the presence of alcohol on the assembly line. Furthermore, in Rivethead: Tales from the Assembly Line (1991), former Flint autoworker Ben Hamper discusses coworkers who not only drank regularly but explored other drugs such as marijuana and cocaine. Despite the presence of drug use (and even outright abuse) on the job, labor and working-class historians do not suggest that addiction was a day-to-day concern of workers or managers.⁴

The wide extent of cigarette smoking and nicotine addiction among working people throughout much of the twentieth century, however, points to the greater importance of experiences with addiction in US working-class history. Over the course of the twentieth century, the tobacco industry flooded the market with nicotine-rich products: the Venners cigarette rolling machine of the British American Tobacco company cranked out 480 cigarettes every minute in 1899; the Standard Triumph machine produced 700 per minute in 1924; the Molins Mark VI machine spewed 1,600 cigarettes every minute in 1955; and the Molins Mark 9 machine yielded 5,000 cigarettes every minute in 1976.⁵ The bonds of dependence between legions of working-class smokers and the mountains of cigarettes in the marketplace brought many workers into conflict with employers in twentieth-century workplaces, as the demands of nicotine addiction regularly drew workers away from assiduous attention to their jobs, causing frustration among managers who viewed worker-smokers’ habits and desires as impediments to diligent labor. Employers’ opposition to smoking (in addition to actors in government, the medical profession, social reform, and grassroots political activism) greatly shaped antismoking politics in twentieth-century America.⁶

What is nicotine? The substance is a stimulant found in tobacco leaf; when burned, this naturally occurring colorless liquid turns brown and takes on the odor of tobacco when exposed to air.⁷ Nicotine is but one of more than four thousand known chemicals in tobacco smoke. This alkaloid acts directly on the brain, stimulating reward pathways that yield elevated levels of pleasure-producing dopamine. In addition, nicotine produces a kick, the result of its stimulating effect on the adrenal glands and subsequent release of epinephrine. Infusions of the drug into the body spike the production of glucose, and it elevates blood pressure, heart rate, and respiration. The drug is absorbed in two ways: through the skin surfaces in the mouth or nose, or through inhalation. When tobacco users inhale smoke, it takes only seven seconds to feel the stimulating effects, as levels of nicotine peak quickly in the bloodstream.⁸ By contrast, it can take fourteen seconds for other drugs in the bloodstream to reach the brain, even when injected with a syringe. Almost all the nicotine in a single puff (around 92 percent) is absorbed.⁹

The tobacco cigarette is an efficient nicotine delivery system.¹⁰ Levels of nicotine in the body decrease within a matter of minutes, however, which forces addicted users to consume frequent doses of the drug, most often through the smoking of more and more of these nicotine-rich cigarettes. A smoker usually puffs ten times on a single cigarette over a time frame of nearly five minutes. For those who smoke a pack and a half of cigarettes per day, these small devices deliver around three hundred hits of nicotine to the brain every twenty-four hours.¹¹ Recurring use can lead to addiction. Over time, the smoker’s brain and central nervous system come to depend on the regular presence of the drug in order to operate normally, despite the destructive health effects that are produced by exposure to tobacco. While not every tobacco user becomes addicted to nicotine or experiences dependence in the same way, 70 percent of regular smokers, according to a 2013 Gallup Poll, self-identify as addicted.¹²

What withdrawal symptoms follow the absence of nicotine in the smoker’s body? As the body struggles to adjust, withdrawal produces nausea, irritability, depression, difficulty concentrating, restlessness, headaches, sleep disturbances, and increased appetite.¹³ Relapse among quitters is common, in part because of the acuity of withdrawal symptoms. Observers of smoking practices have long recorded the pains of withdrawal. For instance, the New York Times observed in 1885 that the cigarette may be laid aside by habitual users, but the depressing or nauseating effect increases for some time.¹⁴ A 1910 report in the Chicago Daily Tribune cautioned readers of the disastrous effect of cigarettes: withdrawal caused sickness that showed how tremendously the system accustoms itself to a stimulant.¹⁵

Addiction to drugs (nicotine included) engenders new forms of emotional and physical labor that demand continual attention. As observers noted at the turn of the twentieth century, for example, cigarettes dangerously transformed constant users into insidious fiends. In an article about ruin and death in the wake of the cigarette habit, adventure story author Henry Oyen noted that cigarettes make a man a slave to the habit, make a ‘fiend’ of him.¹⁶ Addiction to nicotine forced dependent users into the perpetual routine of feeding their habit the tobacco it demanded. As a traveling circus troupe made its way to Indiana in 1905 in the aftermath of the state’s new ban on smoking and cigarette sales, the visiting workers recoiled from the state government’s intent to interdict their tobacco habit. Their spokesman, Chief Iron Bird, drafted a letter to the governor to register the workers’ opposition to the law. There was consternation in the camp, he wrote of his coworkers, and the avid smokers in the circus vowed to forfeit their jobs in order to maintain their cigarette habit. So desperate are some of them for their cigarets [sic] that they threaten to jump their contracts and go to other states where they can be free to smoke anything they please, Chief Iron Bird wrote. Indiana’s governor, James Frank Hanly, never responded.¹⁷ Another man in Indiana reportedly stockpiled packs of cigarettes as the 1905 law took effect. Scared and surrounded in his room by coffin nails, he supposedly smoked self to death.¹⁸

Nicotine addiction was ordinary and pervasive throughout the cigarette century. By 1920, the per capita annual smoking rate in the United States equaled almost 700 cigarettes; by 1940, it was 1,900; in 1965, it was more than 4,300.¹⁹ In 1965, almost half (43 percent) of all US adults smoked. While smokers’ ranks declined in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, nearly 26 percent of adults still smoked regularly in 2000.²⁰ As historian Robert N. Proctor explains in Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition (2011), six trillion cigarettes are still consumed every year. If placed end to end, this line of cigarettes would reach 300 million miles. Worldwide, that amounts to 30,000 miles of cigarettes smoked every hour, 24 hours per day.²¹ For much of the twentieth century the poisonous plumes of smoke from coffin nails saturated many workplaces, but also homes, planes, cars, elevators, college classrooms, city sidewalks, sports arenas, bars, and restaurants.

Smokers’ Work Cultures

As cigarette smoking and subsequent nicotine addiction became significant components of many working-class lives in the twentieth century, smokers in a multitude of workplaces shaped, established, and defended the work cultures that sustained their need to use nicotine regularly during the workday. These developments at times accommodated or challenged employers’ rules that limited or even banned working-class smoking practices outright. Worker demands for the right to smoke, and their abilities to cultivate spaces and times (sometimes clandestinely) for smoking, underpinned a new dimension of shop floor politics in the cigarette century. As more and more workers smoked cigarettes, they pressed for new privileges and for adjustments of formal and informal rules that would both permit smoking and allow productive work to happen. Smokers in factories and offices often revised daily managers’ commands as they rejected regimented labor and rules in favor of more latitude on the job: the decision to interrupt work for occasional (or regular) cigarettes; the ability to smoke while on break near work areas; the ability to smoke and work at the same time; and the ability to limit management’s authority over workers’ bodies. Smoking was something personal amid places of work governed by employers, even if workers’ most common vice was hazardous. In other words, the expansion of nicotine addiction over the first half of the century, its dogged persistence later, and the work cultures that surrounded workers’ smoking habits were wellsprings of working-class resistance to many of the demands of modern work: to work at efficient paces, to adhere to work processes laid out by management, to mind all rules in the workplace, to observe the ordering of time, and to stay close to the job, etc.²²

The history of smokers’ practices in twentieth-century workplaces illustrates the ongoing importance of work culture in examinations of labor-management relations; at the same time, smokers’ work cultures add some new dimensions to the conversation. Historians such as Susan Porter Benson and Barbara Melosh defined work culture as the ideology and practice with which workers stake out a relatively autonomous sphere of action on the job and a realm of informal, customary values and rules [that] mediates the formal authority structure of the workplace.²³ Work culture is very much an in-between ground, Susan Porter Benson wrote. [I]t is neither a rubber stamp version of management policy nor is it a direct outcome of the personal … characteristics of the workers. It is the product of these forces as they interact in the workplace and result in collectively formed assumptions and behavior.²⁴ Smokers’ work cultures fit within these definitions, as cigarette users tried to develop and maintain spaces, times, and privileges that would ensure regular access to nicotine, an agenda that often fostered a critical reading of employer power.²⁵ While discussions of on-the-job skills and dissenting views within specific occupations have usually driven historians’ examinations of work culture, the history of smoking in US workplaces highlights the broad interplay and impact of addiction, the body, space, labor, and power in many workers’ lives.

Lastly, the topic of smokers’ work cultures in the twentieth century expands chronologically the conversation among labor historians about the topic of work culture, a field that is mostly grounded in the long nineteenth century and the early-to-mid twentieth.²⁶ The rise and fall of smoking in workplaces extends this familiar topic appreciably forward in time, adding to the limited body of work that explores more recent periods.²⁷ Working-class smokers struggled to sustain work cultures throughout the twentieth century, as this book will show, but these smokers’ struggles often became untenable in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. In particular, nonsmokers in US workplaces forcefully pressed from below for revisions to smoking norms and on-the-job rules against the backdrop of compelling reports by physicians and government officials (such as 1964 report of the US Surgeon General’s Advisory Committee on Smoking and Health) that tobacco smoke caused chronic illnesses such as heart disease, cancer, and emphysema. At the same time, unions that protected smokers’ privileges declined in power. Throughout the twentieth century, the ebb and flow of developments such as Progressive Era reform, urban Victorians’ antivice politics, the growth of industrial unions during the 1930s and 1940s, changing medical knowledge of tobacco’s health risks in the 1960s through the 1990s, and weakening union power in the final third of the twentieth century greatly shaped the privileges (and the limitations) that undergirded smokers’ work cultures.

The Chapters

The swift expansion of cigarette smoking at the turn of the twentieth century coincided (and collided) with the Victorian-era moral reform concerns of many native-born Americans and with the hopes of employers to strengthen their authority over labor processes, worker behavior, uses of space, and the arrangement of time on the job. Moral reform crusaders, city dwellers, and industrial employers spoke about cigarettes as an insidious and rising threat to the morals and virtue of boys and young males and to upward economic mobility. Chapter 1 examines the importance of class, manhood, and youth in turn-of-the-century conversations about cigarettes, when moral reform crusaders such as Lucy Page Gaston of Illinois viewed coffin nails as a sure path to physical and emotional doom. Reformers warned that smoking stunted the potential of young working-class males for growth to respectable and healthy manhood and crushed their chances of adult success as workers. The wrecked lives of young smokers, according to reformers, were prima facie evidence of the corrosive and harmful impact of cigarettes on modern society. At the same time, the relationship between cigarettes and urban fires suggested the growing presence of smoking at work, as dropped cigarettes and matches ignited deadly fires such as the Newark Factory Fire (1910) and the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire (1911).

Chapter 2 explores early-twentieth-century employers’ opposition to smoking in the workplace, focusing on a case study of smoking practices and shop floor disputes at the Hammermill Paper Company in Erie, Pennsylvania, during the long, hot summer of 1915. Uniquely detailed reports of working conditions and workers’ behaviors in this large mass-production factory, written by a pair of curious labor spies, documented nicely the ongoing efforts of many workers to circumvent the company’s prohibition of smoking. In response to the refusal of management to allow smoking, workers improvised an assortment of surreptitious strategies that would allow them to smoke at work and enjoy time away from their jobs. As the Hammermill case illustrates, the wide extent of worker subversion made the no-smoking rule a dead letter, much to the constant frustration of management and the spies themselves.

If smoking was so opposed by employers in the early twentieth century, why did cigarettes become accepted fixtures in the workplace later on? Chapter 3 explains that World War II was a major historical moment when cigarettes became respectable in American culture and soon became permissible in the industrial workplace. Wartime popular culture connected smoking to military service and support for soldiers’ sacrifices, making the cigarette an acceptable and respectable symbol of patriotic expression. At the same time, workers pressed employers for the right to smoke on the job, and smoking disputes played a significant role in several strikes in the automobile-turned-defense plants of Michigan. By 1950, many major employers such as General Motors and the Ford Motor Company had rescinded their bans on smoking.

The remaining chapters examine the demise of smokers’ work cultures in the second half of the twentieth century, utilizing extensively the online Legacy Tobacco Documents Library at the University of California, San Francisco, a colossal archive of more than fourteen million digitized documents related to tobacco industry practices in the twentieth century. While many of these sources relate to advertising, manufacturing, research, and health issues, there is a host of news clippings, press releases, lobbyist reports, copies of government reports, and letters from smokers that cover other topics. Among these sources is a treasure trove of documents on smoking disputes in workplaces during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. The archive began in 1994 when Stanton Glantz, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, received several thousand documents in the mail from an anonymous industry whistleblower. Throughout the 1990s, the archive received additional collections of documents from state attorneys general as well as tobacco company releases of documents to the public as a result of the industry’s violations of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) in the US vs. Philip Morris, et al. case. As part of the federal lawsuit, the tobacco industry was obligated to disclose all documents related to smoking and health in light of its proven history of efforts to mislead the public about the dangers of its products.²⁸ Used extensively by the historian of science Robert N. Proctor in Golden Holocaust, these abundant and rich sources had not yet been investigated by labor and working-class historians.

Chapter 4 examines how the prevalence of smoking in postwar indoor workplaces gave rise to mounting opposition from nonsmoking workers in the 1970s and 1980s. Nonsmokers in postwar offices, for instance, recoiled from their colleagues’ continual spewing of toxic and irritating secondhand smoke, lobbying managers and government officials for new restrictions on smoking. The most determined and energized nonsmokers took disinterested employers to court and built nonsmoker advocacy groups from below that lobbied for a clearing of the air at work. Much to their frustration, though, nonsmoking workers faced active opposition from working-class smokers, and managers often did not want to provoke smokers’ opposition by revoking their privileges, even as medical knowledge about the health risks of smoking (and secondhand smoke) became abundantly clear in the 1970s through the 1990s.

By the 1980s and 1990s, smokers’ work cultures groaned under the weight of increasing pressure from employers and the state, as concerns about public health, health care costs, and worker productivity led to a new ouster of tobacco use in the workplace. Smokers struggled to adapt to their banishment by relocating to outdoor spaces they would claim as new sanctuaries, as chapter 5 shows, while at the same time lodging complaints with interested tobacco lobbyists in Washington, DC, about those employer actions that had triggered their exile from indoor spaces of work. Some employers took their new prohibitions of smoking to the fullest extent possible by requiring workers to quit smoking altogether, a development that highlighted the limited means at smokers’ disposal for responding to the demise of their rights and privileges in the workplace amid the ebbing strength of organized labor.

Chapter 6 examines the relationship of the labor movement to the decline of smokers’ work cultures from the 1970s to the 1990s. As newspaper articles, letters to lobbyists, and published National Labor Relations Board decisions illustrate, the demise of smoking at work often intersected with the efforts of many employers to roll back the power of organized labor. Employers sometimes used no-smoking rules to discipline workers, committeemen, and union organizers for unwanted efforts to shape managerial policy making. Unions often fought for working-class smokers and their vanishing privileges, as the increasing marginalization of smoking and smokers seemed to portend the overall demise of labor’s power in the late twentieth century. The NLRB discovered in numerous cases brought by workers and unions that employers tried to sidestep collective bargaining by abruptly creating new no-smoking rules and using smoking restrictions to harass union supporters. The conclusion of the book explores the persistence of addiction to nicotine at the turn of the twenty-first century. While quitting smoking is the new normal among tobacco users, there are many holdouts, frequent relapses, aborted quit attempts, and harm-reducing electronic cigarettes that allow nicotine addiction to endure.

This examination of the history of smoking at work is not intended to valorize tobacco use nor to support a libertarian argument for an unencumbered right to enjoy tobacco products. Instead, this is a social and cultural history of smoking and nicotine addiction as contested issues in the everyday politics of workplaces, and of how these issues greatly shaped the lives of many workers, even as this habit destroyed health and cut short millions of lives. 400,000 people die every year as a result of smoking-related illnesses in the United States.²⁹ Many smokers wisely continue to work at quitting, and by doing so they take a positive step toward living healthier lives. This history of smoking in workplaces, however, should be recognized as another major byproduct of damaging and long-lasting addictions to nicotine: workers’ frequent and persistent demands to smoke precipitated daily conflicts over the rights of workers. Secondhand smoke certainly dulled and poisoned the air of many factories and offices with its gray haze, but smoking controversies made clear the struggles among workers and managers to determine the content and limits of the other’s power.

1

REFORMERS, EMPLOYERS, AND THE DANGERS OF WORKING-CLASS SMOKING

Once you start, it’s hard to stop.

—kidshealth.org

For children in Chicago, the summer of 1900 began with a busy day of outdoor activities on 15 June, organized for them by the Cook County Anti-Cigarette League. The boy members of the league attended the field day en masse, according to a visiting reporter for the New York Times. Just as the fifty-yard dash was set to begin, a bedraggled street urchin elbowed his way through the crowd, clenching a lit cigarette between his teeth. Speaking to F. A. Doty, the assistant superintendent of the Cook County Anti-Cigarette League and the referee of the race, he tersely asked, Wot’s dis? Doty answered the newcomer with an invitation to participate in the race, telling the boy, Just to show people why you cannot win because you smoke cigarettes, I will let you enter. The stunted boy apparently accepted the challenge, tossed his cigarette away, and lined up with the other boys of the under-fifteen age group. Surprising everyone, the street urchin cigarette fiend won the race and took with him a trophy for his efforts.¹ In his own way, the boy challenged the growing movement to curtail cigarette smoking in America, running against then-prevalent assumptions about the ineptitude, dullness, and weakness of smokers. And as this anecdote suggests, attention centered on working-class children as the embodied objects of reform. The Cook County Anti-Cigarette League worried not about adults’ smoking; they focused on boys’ habits.

Throughout the Progressive Era, reformers’ and judges’ assertions that tobacco was a physically, mentally, and morally dangerous drug clashed with working people’s desires to satisfy their addictions, habits, and tastes by smoking cigarettes. Working-class people’s inclinations and actions rested at the heart of antismoking politics during the early twentieth century. In addition, the Progressives who attacked smoking not only wanted to reform working-class behavior, but they also seemed to want to transform their own sensory experiences of urban life. The omnipresent smells and sights of cigarette smoke surely offended and even overwhelmed the respectability of their senses, and antismoking politics provided middle-class men and women with a way to temper the physical presence and environmental influence of the urban working class. One city dweller and AN ADMIRER OF JUSTICE, for example, wrote to the New York Times in 1903 to ask whether or not nonsmokers of the big city had the right to breathe fresh air. She or he wrote, Do smokers ever realize the annoyance and positive injury that they cause to those who have that right? The user of nasty stinking tobacco ruined the environment, defil[ing] himself and the air around him.² To improve the smells and sights produced by the working class, reformers focused on modifying the actions and attitudes of boys, the immediate future of upright working-class manhood. The pervasive stench of cigarettes signaled to Progressives the problem of boys’ diminishing health, a real threat to the development of respectable working-class manhood in boys. Could boys who smoked develop the fully formed bodies of adult men? Could they complete the productive labors that were necessary for working-class men in industrial America? Would those boys who smoked habitually descend into crime, depravity, and stupidity? As Progressive reformers’ observations and reactions led them to believe again and again, nicotine fueled the absence of decency, the prevalence of criminality, and the economic failures they associated with working-class culture.

Social and cultural historians’ extensive research into the Progressive Era certainly shows us a great deal regarding middle-class anxieties about working-class culture and morality, but the topic of reformers’ reactions to smoking opens up new dimensions of Progressives’ worries about their own surroundings, views of social class, and what urban reform meant.³ Their comments about working-class smokers at the turn of the twentieth century provide us with telling insights regarding their views of urban space, class, and gender, environmental stimuli, personal and public health, and their senses of sight and smell.

This chapter identifies the three fundamentals of antismoking politics at the turn of the twentieth century: (1) Progressives’ concerns about the damaging relationship between smoking and the bad health and behavior of working-class children (specifically boys and adolescents); (2) employers’ and reformers’ concerns about young males’ cigarette smoking as a destroyer of respectable working-class manhood, as tobacco use undermined their health, morals, and abilities and rendered them supposedly imbecilic, unreliable, immoral, and unemployable; and (3) the close relationship between smoking and the very real danger of fire in turn-of-the-twentieth-century urban life, specifically conversations during these years about working-class smokers as deadly sources of factory fires. Overall, the subjects of working-class culture and conduct proved to be central concerns of the men and women who forged antismoking politics in the early twentieth century.

FIGURE 1.1 Boy with a cigarette during the 1904 Stockyards Strike. (1904) Chicago Daily News negatives collection, Chicago History Museum, http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.ndlpcoop/ichicdn.n001019. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Working-Class Boys and the Making of Antismoking Politics

Victorian moral reformers, Progressives, and other middle-class men and women in the largest American cities at the turn of