Why did sucking on a noxious paper tube of tobacco become a defiant totem of freedom for Great Grandma's generation of American women?
Read this:
It May Be All Right But It's Not Done Here
Little Rock, which accepts readily the new with the eagerness of the Southwest, still retains much of the conservatism of the Old South when it comes to accepted ideals. For instance, it may seriously shock many a resident to know that a woman smoked a cigaret in a Little Rock restaurant yesterday.
She did not! Ye gods.
This is a 3-inch article in the Jan. 23, 1920, Arkansas Gazette, Page 4. It goes on:
The woman, who was with her brother, smoked the cigaret quite as casually as she would have eaten a dish of ice cream.
Worser and worser. Can you even imagine? But bless her heart :
She had no idea that she was smashing one of the city's ideals concerning its womankind. She very probably would have been shocked at anybody being shocked.
Not that the locals were rubes unaware. They traveled about. They knew that women might smoke in East or West Big Gomorrah:
Little Rock people, who have been in the East recently, know that many women of refinement smoke cigarets in public places there and think nothing of it. In the East no judgment is placed upon a woman because she smokes a cigaret in public. Little Rock, however, will be slow to accept cigaret smoking by women.
This snip was not an editorial on the editorial page. It appeared near the daily Social and Personal column, a feature for women written by Nell Cotnam, daughter of prominent suffragist Mrs. T.T. Cotnam (née Florence Brown). It wraps up:
And so, perhaps, it might be just as well if fair visitors from the East, while in Little Rock, would do as Little Rock women do and don't do what they don't do, which bars the smoking of cigarets.
I like that sniffy "perhaps."
Reporters being human beings, I suppose it's possible the dame's brother wrote the item, to tweak her or to prove he could. But other news items of the day suggest that, no, this one was straight-up censorious gossip.
For instance, the front page of the Jan. 29 Arkansas Democrat reported that a theater in Chicago had opened a smoking room for women:
The manager said the "women drove him to it." He said he found girls were smoking in the washroom, the boudoir and even in the lobby. The women smoked more cigarettes than the men, the manager said.
Picky Reader will be interested to note this use of "boudoir" and that unlike the Gazette, the Democrat preferred today's spelling of "cigarette."
Also in that Jan. 29 Democrat, a syndicated humor column titled Bits of Byplay had this:
Gosh! We almost had heart failure the other day. A nice looking girl sitting in the street car sifted through her pocketbook and pulled out a book of cigarette papers. The she dived into the bag again, and we expected to see her come up with a little bag of tobacco. But she merely produced a pair of eyeglasses, pulled off a sheet of the cigarette paper and cleaned the glasses with the paper.
What did she do next, file her nails?
Young women smoking in public was a through-line in the national press in early 1920, inspiring printed lectures by prim contemporaries or, worse, their elders (OK, Boomer). So, I think tobacco marketing hopped aboard a train already leaving the station.
BOTTOMS UP
Another through-line as 1919 became 1920 was Death by Wood Alcohol. The Dec. 28, 1919, Gazette reported that since summer, 138 people nationwide had died of wood-alcohol poisoning, and hundreds more were hospitalized with blindness and respiratory effects.
As the Jan. 17, 1920, effective date of Amendment 18 and its enforcement law, the Volstead Act, approached, unscrupulous or ignorant bootleggers took to re-distilling industrial, "denatured" alcohol, tinting it red and slipping it into various illicit tributaries of an underground booze stream.
As explained by Snopes.com, the government in 1906 settled upon denaturing as a way to allow the makers of industrial alcohols — used for paint and solvents and such — to avoid increasingly hefty taxes imposed upon intoxicating beverages. Noxious chemicals were added to industrial alcohols to make them unfit for human consumption and also disgusting. Mainly, according to Snopes, this was done by adding some methyl alcohol ("wood alcohol") to grain alcohol, rendering it poisonous.
Bootleggers could distill out the bad taste but not the poison. In January 1920 alone, I counted 25 stories or editorial jokes about the danger of drinking poison masquerading as illegal spirits. Four dead in Philadelphia; two dead in Chicago; a pharmacist in Memphis charged with murder for selling tainted tonic; four felled by sipping hair tonic in Childress, Texas ...
But those were small stories 100 years ago this week. More prominent were jokes, cartoons, explainers and the essays on less obvious ramifications of Prohibition.
Among the more curious columns was a long, strange essay by syndicated answer man Frederic J. Haskin, who, though based in the District of Columbia, was identified as "Gazette Information Bureau."
He asked, "What part has alcohol played in the making of art and literature? How will the aesthetic life of the nation be affected by the more or less complete abolition of this source of inspiration?"
Had the nation banned one of art's Muses? Men like Shakespeare and Dr. Ben Johnson drank in public and yet made enduring work.
All of these gentlemen, ancient and modern, believed that ideas should be thrashed out around a table set with flagons of nut brown ale, or bumpers of good old port, or tall tumblers of shandy gaff, or thin stemmed glasses filled with beautiful garnet-red sherry. ... Since most of them are dead and the rest live in England, they are not to be pitied, but there are certain young American writers who pattern after them, and these are in sad plight.
Ernest Hemingway and friends, for instance.
And what would the writers of sensational fiction do without the inebriated villain to threaten their heroines?
This essay is so odd and interesting that I am took photos off it and turned them into a photo gallery that you can read online.
For now, I leave you with an old joke that wasn't old at all Jan. 19, 1920, the day the Gazette published it as a news item:
Winstead, Ct., Jan. 18. — During the tolling of the Methodist church bell Friday in celebration of the inauguration of constitutional prohibition, a man passing along Main street stopped and asked the reason.
"That's the funeral dirge for John Barleycorn," he was informed.
"Darned if I knew he was a Methodist," mumbled the man, and went on his way.
Email:
Style on 01/20/2020