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  “What’s good for General Snuff,” he said on more than one occasion, “is good for America.” It went without saying, that what was bad for General Snuff was bad for America. The company was particularly concerned about the current revolution in Cuba. The Cubans had been fighting since 1895 to free themselves from Spanish rule and become an independent nation. Blessington repeatedly wrote asking President Cleveland to intervene.

  Mr. President, we must help the brave Cubans fling off the yoke of Spanish oppression. Not only is their cause right, and dear to the heart of every American, but the very heart of our cigar industry is at stake. It is vital to secure our important Havana and Manila cigar interests. It would be a national tragedy if those interests were to remain in the cruel hands of Spanish oppressors. It could well mean the end of the five-cent cigar!

  Cleveland, however, had little reason to listen to Badcock schemes. He wished America to remain neutral. Nor did his successor, McKinley. Then in 1898, an event took place that changed President McKinley’s mind.

  The U.S. warship Maine was lying at anchor in Havana harbor. A sudden unexplained explos – ion sank her, with 250 of her crew. The causes of this explosion are still unknown.

  Critics of the General Snuff and Tobacco Company have blamed the firm. It has been claimed that a “secret company agent climbed aboard and set a charge. His only purpose was to drag the United States into a foreign war!”

  Adair Badcock

  Nothing could be further from the truth. Although it is true that a company agent was aboard, there was nothing secret or sinister about his mission. He was there simply to observe, and watch out for company cigar interests in Havana. The agent was a cousin of Blessington’s, Adair Badcock. He had no intention of harming an American ship, as his final cable to the home office indicates. Indeed, it can be argued that he was incapable of subterfuge.

  CHEERIO ALL

  EXHILARATING TO BE ABOARD STOP SHIP

  IS VERY BUSY COMMA

  ALWAYS PEOPLE RUSHING ABOUT STOP

  I SEEM TO BE IN THE WAY MUCH OF

  THE TIME EXCLAMATION

  SOME OFFICER VERY RUDELY INFORMED

  ME TODAY THAT I MAY NOT SMOKE

  NEAR SOMETHING CALLED THE POWDER

  MAGAZINE STOP

  WE SHALL SEE ABOUT THAT STOP

  REGARDS ADAIR

  Nothing further is known; evidently Adair went down with the ship.

  Blessington and the rest of America went to war. As he told the board:

  At last! We have a chance to help an oppressed people and also to secure the important Havana and Manila cigar interests of our beloved General Snuff. It would be a national tragedy if those interests were to remain in the cruel hands of Spanish oppressors. Let us keep them in our far more benign hands boys.

  With this in mind, I am prepared to take part in the scrap personally. I must avenge my cousin and my countrymen – and do some business in Havana and Manila. I am therefore raising a regiment. If Teddy Roosevelt can have his “Rough Riders,” I will have my cigar contingent – my Puff Riders!

  Blessington soon rode off to Cuba, whence he sent the following letter home:

  My beloved Letty,

  Life here is very hard, what with the swamps, the heat, and the sickness all around. Speaking of which, I believe I have discovered the cause of malaria. I have noticed that men who smoke cigars seem immune to the disease, while non-smokers soon come down with it. Perhaps, when all this madness is over, we can use that in our advertisement – A CURE FOR MALARIA.

  Incidentally, I have not received your usual shipment of cigars. I hope you haven’t forgotten to send it! I cannot abide the local ‘Havana’ products, which are inferior. I will wait instead for your next consignment of our very own Dunkelmeister Grandees. How I long for you, my dear, and for a fine old Yankee stogie!

  Your affectionate husband,

  Blessington

  This was his last letter. The stogies never arrived, and Blessington succumbed to malaria.

  The Lady Has a Light

  for your

  Dunkelmeister

  Grandee

  –

  Yes, Miss Liberty

  believes in Your

  Freedom – to smoke the

  smoothest, finest-tasting

  cigar of your life.

  “Bring me those tired of

  ordinary cigars, those

  yearning to draw freely”

  –

  Try this new land of

  smoking. You’ll never

  go back to the old.

  “The Lady Has a Light” – advertisement for Dunkelmeister Grandee Cigars (1894)

  A Good Cigar is a Smoke

  Augustus Badcock

  Blessington Badcock was succeeded by his brother Augustus, the first head of the firm to glimpse the full power of advertising. Augustus began with the simple idea that “a pretty girl can sell anything,” and he built mightily upon it. He outlined his plan in a 1913 memorandum:

  Rudyard Kipling had it wrong when he said that “a woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke.” The plain fact is, women and cigars are very close to the same thing, at least in the masculine mind. For isn’t the enjoyment of a cigar akin to the enjoyment of making love to a woman? That is, a fiery, forbidden pleasure, enjoyed in private, often after a good dinner.

  Perhaps smoking is only a substitute for the fires of passion. A man may smoke to show a woman how manly he is, or to cover his embarrassment with her, or because he has only a burning cigar to kiss instead of her blazing beauty. But when he applies his lips to a “sweet postprandial cigar,” (or pipe, or cigarette) you may be sure he is dreaming of finer after-dinner pleasures.

  Think of the cigar divans of days gone by – bordellos disguised as smoking rooms. Think of Carmen rolling cigarettes in the factory.

  Think of the female apache dancer, sharing a burning cigarette with the man she adores and hates. And as Oscar Wilde put it, “A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want?”

  We at General Snuff must find a way of selling this dream, the dream of tobacco as a mistress. We must make the customer feel that, when he lifts the lid upon a box of our cigars, he is unlocking the door of a hareem. Should we succeed in conveying this dream, the world is ours.

  One way we might do this is at drinking establishments. We might consider dressing comely young women in fetching uniforms, and have them pass among the clientele, carrying trays full of cigarettes. These sirens, or “cigarette girls,” as we shall call them, would carry their trays in front of them, just below their admirable bosoms. This guarantees that men would at least look at their wares. A certain amount of decolletage might be added, to further entice…

  Gibson Girl –

  Inspiration for

  Augustus?

  A Lucifer to Light Your Fag

  When the Great War broke out, Augustus recognized it not only as a time of world upheaval, but also a time of business opportunity.

  By 1917, American doughboys were encouraged to pack up their old kit bags with General Snuffs new brand of cigarettes, Lady Fantasy. Each enameled tin of cigarettes displayed a pouting, handsome lady with auburn hair, gray eyes and rather misty features. There was nothing indefinite, however, about her well-filled shirt-waist. Augustus had insisted on the substantial bosom. “Our boys are far from home,” he wrote to the advertising artist. “They want their girl, they want their mother, they want something to suck on. Let us push it at them.”

  Lady Fantasy cigarettes became so popular that the slogan on each pack – “Fragrant and Graceful”, abbreviated F.A.G. – gave rise to “fag”, the First World War nickname for a cigarette. (In the same way, “Lucifer” brand matches – a company which General Snuff tried to acquire – became the nickname for all matches. Both names appeared in the popular song of the time:

  Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag

  A
nd smile, smile, smile

  Long as there’s a lucifer to light your fag

  Then smile, ‘cause it’s the style

  But General Snuff found a way to make the government help with its advertising. Lady Fantasy and her bosom were to become ever more prominent as the war continued.

  A patriotic poster of 1918 was not, strictly speaking, an advertisement for General Snuff. Instead, it purported to sell War Bonds. The tobacco giant had generously devised this patriotic poster and printed thousands of copies at company expense, volunteering to place them in rail-road stations across the land. The War Department, in gratitude, promised to look into larger orders for General Snuff and Tobacco products.

  The poster shows an officer in his tent at night, somewhere in France. The orange candle-light gleams on his hair and the cleft in his chin, as he leans back from the letter he is writing to take a pull at his cigarette. On the table before him, along with his pen, the unfinished letter, and his Bible, there stands a prominent tin of Lady Fantasy cigarettes. The smoke rises from his cigarette and curls back to form a cool blue cloud above his head. This cloud contains a vision of home: a cool summer evening, magnolias around the porch, and a lovely woman in shirtwaist reclining across a white porch swing. The slogan reads:

  IS SHE BUYING BONDS FOR ME?

  Notice that the product is never mentioned. Yet the woman in the dream is of course Lady Fantasy herself, with her auburn hair, mist-gray eyes, not to forget the fantastic bosom. Thus the company contrived not only to hammer home its message without a word, it managed to link the product to patriotism.

  But there was even more to the Lady Fantasy campaign. In every tin of cigarettes that went overseas, General Snuff included a trading card showing the same romantic picture as the poster. But here the message was addressed to the troops themselves, using a slightly different slogan:

  IS SHE WAITING FOR ME?

  A reassuring subhead added, “You can always count on Lady Fantasy.”

  It might have been a great and wonderful campaign. The poster Lady Fantasy might have become more famous than the finger-pointing Uncle Sam. But alas, the war came to an end. As Augustus wrote in an office memorandum:

  This armistice is very bad news indeed. Had we been able to keep the fighting going until 1921 or even 1920, we might have become the top tobacco company in the country. As it is, peace has reared its ugly head, and we must make the best of it. But I cannot help feeling that in ending the war our politicians have, as usual, stabbed us in the back.

  Charleston Snuff, and Other Disasters

  The period between the world wars was one of growth and consolidation. The 1918 armistice meant the end of Lady Fantasy. She was far too wholesome and old-fashioned for the Jazz Age. Men no longer dreamed of a Gibson girl – they were beginning to dream instead of a girl who liked to drink gibsons (concocted from bathtub gin), a girl who knew how to flap, how to neck, how to dance the Charleston on the wing of a biplane.

  The packet with Lady Fantasy and her slogan “Fragrant and Graceful” (F.A.G.) had to go. Somehow the word “fag” had been debased to a pejorative term for a homosexual. Clearly it was time to scrap Lady Fantasy and start over. But how?

  Augustus was getting old. He realized he could not run the company forever, so he began grooming his son LeRoy to take over. He started him in the advertising department. There young LeRoy plunged in, eager to show his stuff.

  The trouble was, LeRoy Badcock didn’t have any stuff to show. Under his direction, GST in the 1920s saw many false starts. Lucky Lindy cigarettes lasted a year, mainly because Lindbergh (who didn’t smoke) never endorsed them. Then came a series of disastrous product names. Charleston Snuff appeared just as interest in the Charleston was disappearing.

  LeRoy Badcock

  “They’re all dancing something new, called the Black Bottom,” LeRoy complained. “I don’t suppose we could bring out a Black Bottom Snuff?”

  “Doesn’t convey quite the right image, sir,” a chorus of advertising lackeys informed him.

  “Damn! I suppose we need to rethink.”

  Nothing seemed to go right for LeRoy. He launched Houdini cigars in 1926 (the year Houdini died shortly after an escape). He launched Tutanhkamen cut plug (which seemed as popular as a mummy’s curse). Finally in 1929, he launched a new cigar called Wall Street (the crash made it a national joke).

  Augustus wasn’t laughing. He informed Le-Roy that he had one more chance to bring a successful product to market. “Son, maybe your problem is all this modernism. We don’t need it. I say, stick to the old tried and trusted products. Remember, a comely young woman can always sell a seegar. Of course it’s your decision, my boy.”

  It was 1936 before LeRoy Badcock came up with his next product, a cigar as new, sophisticated, utterly modern as that latest mode of transportation, the airship.

  They’re always saying that zeppelins are cigar-shaped. By jing, so are our cigars! Why don’t we cash in on that? They say the zeppelins are quiet, smooth, elegant, real tasteful, and just the thing for the upper crust. We too must hammer on those themes. “Relax with a high-class cigar,” stuff like that. We can make our new cigar as exciting as the Graf Zeppelin itself.

  Reactions to this odd memo varied. Some thought it was a stroke of genius. The Freudian connotations of zeppelins (the longest objects ever sent into the sky) would perhaps carry over to the new cigar from General Snuff:

  The Hindenburg Cigar

  The Ride of Your Life

  A Smoke to Remember

  If you are fortunate enough to take passage on the world’s largest and most luxurious Airship, the Hindenburg, you’ll experience a quiet, smooth ride in tasteful, elegant surroundings. The whole atmosphere is one of tranquillity.

  That’s what we aim for too in our newest creation, the Hindenburg Cigar. It’s the longest, most gracefully tapered cigar in the world. One puff, and you’ll experience all the smoothness, the good taste, the elegance of a ride on the famous Airship.

  So if you can, take a ride on the great Airship itself.

  If not, light up a Hindenburg, relax, and enjoy the ride.

  Yet LeRoy was not satisfied with this advertisement:

  It lacks substance. It says very little about what I call “the Zeppelin Experience.” We need to tell people what it must be like up there, floating through the sky, drinking and playing bridge with earls and princesses, all the swells, while the map unrolls down below. Gliding along far above the cares of the world, above the clouds. Like being God. The Zeppelin brochures make it sound just peachy.

  Somehow we need to convey all that in our cigar ads. I think I must give it a whirl myself. I’ll take passage on the Hindenburg and keep a detailed journal.

  LeRoy Badcock boarded the Hindenburg in Frankfurt, on May 3, 1937. It was of course the great airship’s last voyage. The following entries from his journal detail the trip:

  May 3. Boarded the great ship at Frankfurt-am-Main. They keep it in a huge hangar, with the tail sticking out. The tail fins are decorated with huge swastikas. The steward tells me the Nazi Party paid the company a lot of money to put them up there. The great airship was flown on propaganda flights over Germany, dropping pamphlets and showing the flag. I wonder if we couldn’t pay more, and get them to take the big swastikas off the tail fins and put up GST instead. It’s a thought…

  You just walk up a gangplank and there you are. They make you hand over your matches and lighter when you come aboard. That irritated me – the Germans are good at giving irritating orders – so I kept back one box of matches – how would it look, the president of a tobacco company not having a light! Evidently this has something to do with the ship being filled with hydrogen, not helium as planned. I don’t understand all that chemical mumbo-jumbo. There was some problem about buying helium from America. Political stuff again. I don’t understand all that political mumbo-jumbo, either. I’ll wager the big swastikas didn’t help. Anyway, they assure me we will be able to smoke in the Smoking Sa
loon.

  They also make you hand over your camera, but the steward says we’ll get them back after we get past the three-mile limit and head out to sea. Mean-while, we watch from the windows while a hundred little men pull ropes and somehow back us out of the hangar. They play some music for the occasion. It really is all very smooth, no bumps or noises at all. Nothing like a ship. Then we are on our way!

  My cabin is tiny, but adequate. I took a stroll around the ship, looking over the rather luxurious Dining Saloon, Drawing Room, and Reading and Writing Room. Then I descended a wide staircase to the Smoking Saloon. I thought to myself, this airship has everything you might expect on a luxury liner, but I will be in New York in two and a half days.

  May 4. In the morning, took a tour of the ship. We were shown the bridge with all its fascinating controls. The braver souls were taken up a ladder to walk along a dim corridor and look at the huge gas bags.

  At lunch, met a pretty Bavarian woman named Diesl, an English tennis player named Hatney, and a large, red-bearded fellow with a monocle who introduced himself as Count Exon Waldiz. Some kind of Ruritanian aristocrat or something.

  Count Waldiz joined me later in the Smoking Saloon, where I was enjoying a perfecto and a glass of whiskey. He seemed to be drinking absinthe. “Two days of boredom,” he said, and suggested we play cards for money. I explained that I know no games but “SlapJack.” We played that for an hour, and I lost over $800.

  In the evening, I watched the stars with Fräulein Diesl. She says she lost over 4,000 marks to Count Waldiz, betting on the relative speeds of two ships down below.