Ashes to Ashes (27 page)

Within a year of his arrival at the company, Parker McComas, who all agreed was personable—for a banker—as well as skilled, was promoted to executive vice president. In 1948, the sales slump ended, Philip Morris’s volume gained 20 percent, and sales and production had become well coordinated. By 1949, sales gained an additional 27 percent, earnings per share doubled, the company’s market share was back up to 9 percent, and it was aggressively pushing its advertising on both daytime radio, as sponsor of popular shows like “Queen for a Day,” and the hot new medium of television, where it was paying for programs with uniquely visual appeal like “Candid Camera” and “This Is Your Life.” Philip Morris advertising itself, though, seemed to be suffering from fatigue. The little pageboy Johnny Roventini’s shrill call was all too familiar, and nothing better was substituted for the tired claims of no throat irritation than the still more dubious promise of “No Cigarette Hangover” and the almost plaintive pitch that Philip Morris cigarettes ought to grace even nonsmoking homes for the benefit of visitors.

In 1950, the company picked up a further 25 percent gain in sales, which passed $250 million for the first time, and could claim 11 percent of the market, still well behind but now within sight of No. 3 Liggett & Myers, with its 18 percent share. McComas was by then president, as Lyon was shifted upstairs to board chairman upon Chalkley’s retirement. That spring, the company
moved from its beat-up offices on lower Fifth Avenue to color-coordinated, air-conditioned quarters on three lower floors at 100 Park Avenue, a short walk south of Grand Central Terminal—a sure sign of growing confidence and affluence. Yet the ’Forties had been a roller-coaster decade for the company; its earnings per share were still shy of the 1941 figure, and there were tensions now between McComas and the sixty-five-year-old Lyon, whose role at the company was now largely ceremonial. What neither man knew yet and would shortly inflame the growing gulf between them was that the Philip Morris brand had peaked, and no managerial finesse could compensate for a product whose time had come and gone.

V

AFTER
breaking up the tobacco trust, the American government took no substantive regulatory action for the next thirty years against the manufacturers of what was probably the most profitable, among the most heavily and deceptively advertised, and arguably the least healthful consumer product in common usage. And when the government did act, with a pair of measures in the 1940s, these proved to be casebook studies in bureaucratic futility.

The two-year Justice Department investigation that culminated in a misbegotten antitrust suit argued in 1941 was prompted by political and social considerations in reaction to perceived economic injustice. Anger festered toward the cigarette makers throughout the ’Thirties for the millions they were garnering while tobacco growers and distributors of the finished product counted their profits, if any, in pennies. Though this disparity had been partially alleviated by New Deal programs, the antitrust case was still filed. But the long trial failed to yield any hard evidence that a collusive oligopoly had conspired to fix prices, wages, and the cost of supplies, and the cigarette industry’s six leading manufacturers were found guilty only of their
potential
to conspire and destroy competition. A measure of the fruitlessness of this exercise in knight errantry was that the courts finally mandated no structural remedies and issued no cease-and-desist orders against any given practices by the industry, whose members’ principal crime evidently was that they had learned they had more to gain by acting largely in concert than in combat. Only token fines were levied against the defendants, including Philip Morris, which had succeeded in doing precisely what the government antitrusters had presumably wanted would-be challengers of the oligarchs to do—namely, push their way to a profitable share of the market.

A far more legitimate blow to the industry was landed by
Reader’s Digest
against the tobacco manufacturers’ passion for the bogus sales come-on. Continuing its lone-wolf tracking of the industry, the
Digest
tested two dozen cigarettes
from each of the leading brands—too few to be valid, the manufacturers cried—and reported the results in a July 1942 article entitled “Cigarette Advertising Fact and Fiction” by Robert Littell. Only very small differences were found between the brands with regard to their irritating properties, so that the smoker “need no longer worry as to which cigarette can most effectively nail down his coffin … .” The next month, whether fortuitously or goaded by the
Digest’s
exposé, the Federal Trade Commission filed a series of complaints against four of the top cigarette makers for continually offering health reassurances that skirted intolerably close to express warranties of harmlessness.

Established by Congress in 1914 to compensate for the perceived weakness of the Sherman Antitrust Act to combat the abuses of industrial concentration, the FTC had devoted itself mainly to policing unfair restraints on competition by manufacturers. Only in 1938 was the commission’s scope widened to deal with certain concerns expressed by the object of industry’s ardent pursuit—the American consumer. On the face of it, the FTC was handed broad powers to move against unfair and deceptive business practices, emphatically including advertising; the commissioners could now conduct investigations, hold hearings, subpoena documents, lay down fair-practice guidelines, issue cease-and-desist orders, and seek civil penalties in the federal courts of up to $10,000 per day per violation. Alas, Congress had whelped a toothless tiger, because the commission was denied the power to enjoin the suspect practice throughout the course of proceedings against alleged wrongdoers. In cases brought in 1942 against the cigarette makers, the industry lawyers, through endless motions, hearings, trials, and appeals, caused the adjudication to drag on for between eight and thirteen years.

In the case against Reynolds Tobacco, decided in March of 1950, the FTC found that Camel advertisements had been worded in such a way as to declare or imply that using the brand was harmless to all smokers regardless of their health, harmless to all parts of the body, and harmless no matter how many cigarettes were smoked, and, as such, were false and deceptive. It added that “for one to smoke as many cigarettes ‘as he likes,’” as Camel ads invited, “is to smoke to excess,” which, “like eating or drinking in excess, is harmful, not only to an athlete, but to others as well.” And the claim that smoking Camels “renews and restores bodily energy” and like phrases were “clearly false and deceptive, there being in tobacco smoke no constituent which could possibly create energy.”

With regard to American Tobacco’s ads, “[i]n truth and in fact … Luckies are not toasted as that term is commonly understood by the purchasing public,” the FTC found after endless deliberation, and they were no less irritating or acidic or lower in nicotine than their competitors. On the claim that tobacco buyers, auctioneers, and other such professionals preferred Lucky Strike by a two-to-one ratio and believed that American Tobacco bought the finest leaf,
“there are no records sworn to and verified by such so-called experts which establish that such is the fact”—and besides, given the many auction sites and the proprietary nature of the blending process, these claimants “do not know the grade, quality, type, or prices of all varieties of tobacco making up Luckies, or any other brand of cigarettes on the market.”

Lorillard was castigated for having gravely distorted the 1942
Reader’s Digest
study by stressing that its Old Gold brand was found to be the lowest in nicotine while failing to note that the difference between it and the brand with the most nicotine was only two-fifths of 1 percent—a margin that was found to be physiologically without significance. Indeed, the whole thrust of the article had been that there were no significant differences among the brands in terms of their likely impact on health.

The action against Philip Morris was potentially the most devastating because the brand had been built largely around the Johnny-One-Note claim of lower or nonexistent throat irritation due to the use of the humidifying agent diethylene glycol. The company had exacerbated the problem by clinging fiercely to the claim despite criticism of it both within and outside the industry; its advertising even included statements like “No other cigarette can give this proof. No worry about throat irritation even when you inhale!” and “Recognized laboratory tests have conclusively proven the advantage of Philip Morris over other cigarettes.”

The government challenged the methodology, findings, and objectivity of the company-run tests in the mid-’Thirties that had formed the basis for these sweeping claims, and noted that no outside investigators had corroborated the reported results. When Philip Morris protested the FTC complaint and submitted further supporting test data from between 1944 and 1950, the government undertook similar studies and found the company claims wanting. In one company-backed test, for example, an investigator measured the size of a single blood vessel in the uvula, the pendant fleshy lobe in the upper throat, before and after subjects smoked various brands, in order to gauge the degree of irritation caused. But an independent investigator of the same phenomenon found varying and inconclusive responses among several blood vessels of the same uvula. In another before-and-after test run by the company, an investigator used a pharyngeal colorimeter to measure the intensity of redness in the throat caused by various brands, and found that the glycol humidifier used in Philip Morris was less irritating than glycerine. But outside investigators reported that throat redness was not a static phenomenon even without the introduction of irritants like tobacco smoke, that there were sharp variations for each individual tested, that the degree of redness differed within any given thirty-second period, and thus more redness readings had to be taken before and after smoking. In sum, the FTC held that the company had insufficient bases for its extreme health claims.

Philip Morris lawyers were so adroit at countering the government’s case, however, that the matter was not finally resolved until 1955, when the company had long since dropped the health claim. The practices complained of in the other protracted government actions had similarly long since ceased. As
The Consumers Union Report on Smoking and the Public Interest
deftly put it several years later, “Like astronomers studying stars millions of light years away, the FTC commissioners were constantly coming to conclusions about phenomena that were no longer in existence.”

VI

THROUGHOUT
the 1940s, whatever the true health peril presented by smoking seemed trivial. Cigarette smoke was understood to contain irritants and toxins that were low-level and slow-acting, and the diseases in which they might be implicated struck mostly in old age. And anyway, after years of privation, Americans felt entitled to dissipate a bit without being nagged about their naughtier habits.

And so they smoked with growing abandon. Authoritative surveys in 1949 found that between 44 and 47 percent of all Americans eighteen or older smoked—more than half of all men and about one-third of all women. And they smoked a great deal: ten cigarettes per capita in 1950, which translated into more than a pack a day for those who actually smoked. Doctors, too, smoked like everybody else. Even some who concerned themselves with the possible connections between smoking and health were far from certain about the magnitude of the peril. Alton Ochsner, the eminent New Orleans clinician who before the war had been so outspoken on the matter, reported in the May 1947
Annals of Surgery
on 129 lung cancer patients whose tumors he and his associates had removed, but noted, “Neither occupation nor smoking habits, which some reports, including our own, have stressed as of possible significance, seemed of any special significance in this particular series.” In a population nearly half of which consisted of smokers, the finding that three-quarters of his lung cancer patients smoked did not then seem to constitute enough of a disparity to Dr. Ochsner to be strongly suggestive of a causal link. The
Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA)
remarked editorially the following year that “more can be said in behalf of smoking as a form of escape from tension than against it. … [T]here does not seem to be any preponderance of evidence that would indicate the abolition of the use of tobacco as a substance contrary to the public health.”

There had thus been few notable new findings on the smoking and health issue until 1950, when three important studies appeared. Collectively, they may
be said to have marked the end of the age of innocence about the blithe charms of the cigarette.

Medical investigators had been coming to understand that the disease process was neither inevitable nor uniform but most likely the result of an interplay of environmental influences and bodily resistance that varied with individual genetic codes, themselves intricately differentiated, which some researchers were just beginning to decipher. Others continued to pursue the identity and behavior of the causative agents of disease and to assess the contributing roles of environment and human conduct, In short, nature and nurture were probed in tandem now.

But no disease continued to be more elusive—and fearsome—than cancer, the death rate from which doubled in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century. But because twenty years were added to the average American life span during that same period, the disease—so resistant to treatment and whose suspected causes were so numerous—was widely perceived as part of the aging process and beyond any hope of early conquest. Cancer of the lung, however, appeared increasingly to some observers to be a separable phenomenon. It had grown in the U.S. at five times the rate of other forms of the disease between 1938 and 1948, trailing only stomach cancer as the most common form of the affliction. Something—or things—was behind it. Air pollution, of which tobacco smoke could be considered a variant, was the most obvious suspect. Because the disease, whatever its cause, was usually so far advanced when detected and because even surgically treated victims survived only briefly, the scientific focus now began to shift from cure to prevention. What precisely was there in man’s modern environment or his own unwitting behavior that was contributing to the sudden growth of this generally fatal disease? Here truly was a fit subject for the emerging science of epidemiology, the study of all the factors that distinguish those who contract a given disease from those who do not.