The rise and fall of America's deadly love affair with the cigarette

NEW YORK -- Cancer stick. Coffin nail. Cowboy killer. Those are nicknames, through the decades, for the cigarette — the once-glamorous desideratum of American society that has been tied to tens of millions of U.S. deaths.

The cigarette is not an invention of the United States. And while Marlboro is a top-selling international brand, more than 100 countries make cigarettes. The largest manufacturer is in China.

But U.S. ingenuity drastically altered the global tobacco industry. And American culture embraced it in the 20th century, making it — for a time — a symbol of stylish adulthood in U.S. movies and media, and omnipresent in bars, restaurants, airplanes and even hospitals.

Smoking became “a right of passage for many young people,” and by the 1950s nearly half of U.S. adults smoked, says K. Michael Cummings, a tobacco history scholar at the Medical University of South Carolina.

“I remember making ashtrays for my parents for Mother’s Day and Father’s Day gifts,” says Cummings, 73. “I remember giving cartons of cigarettes as Christmas gifts. I mean, smoking was so common. It was just part of Americana.”

Early versions of cigarettes can be traced back thousands of years to the Mayans. But hand-rolling each cigarette was time-consuming and labor intensive.

That changed in the 1880s, when a Virginia inventor named John Bansack invented an automated cigarette-rolling machine that could make smokes 50 times faster. Early tobacco magnate James Buchanan Duke invested in the technology, and used it — along with the development of more palatable tobacco blends — to build the cigarette business into a major American industry.

Cigarettes were clearly addictive, and the idea that smoking could kill was long suspected. Automaker Henry Ford warned against cigarettes in the 1910s, putting out a brochure in 1914 that called them “little white slavers” and argued they were habit-forming bad for health, and were associated with bad morals.

A watershed moment came in 1964 with an authoritative U.S. surgeon general report that said smoking causes illness and death, helping to lead the way to warning labels on cigarette packs, bans on cigarette commercials, and restrictions on where people could light up.

The dangers of smoking began to sink in to the public consciousness, though it took decades for smoking rates to plummet to the historically low levels they're at now. The chain-smoking writer Kurt Vonnegut Jr., who favored Pall Malls, in 1968 penned that “the public health authorities never mention the main reason many Americans have for smoking heavily, which is that smoking is a fairly sure, fairly honorable form of suicide.”

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Part of a recurring series, “American Objects,” marking the 250th anniversary of the United States. For more American objects, click here. For more stories on the anniversary, click here.