Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition (review)

Before writing this review, I went back and reread “‘Beyond the Great Doctors’ Revisited,” a book chapter by Susan Reverby and David Rosner on the evolution of scholarship in medical history over the past forty years. Sure enough, Robert Proctor was there, receiving praise for serving as an expert “on the behalf of states and those injured by tobacco company activities.”¹

One of the themes of Reverby and Rosner’s chapter is how history can—and should—promote activism and improve people’s lives. Proctor’s new book, Golden Holocaust, may represent the apotheosis of this type of effort. In over seven hundred pages of text and references, Proctor has constructed a comprehensive and devastating account of tobacco industry perfidy in promoting the sale of its deadly cigarettes. His ultimate recommendation? The manufacture and sale of cigarettes should be prohibited. Does the history warrant this conclusion?

Proctor’s book is the latest of a series of books, such as those by Stanton Glantz, Naomi Oreskes, and Allan Brandt, chronicling how the cigarette achieved and maintained such enormous popularity in twentieth-century America, despite growing evidence that it was both carcinogenic and addictive. Proctor has benefited dramatically from millions of internal documents published online thanks to a settlement reached after a series of lawsuits against the tobacco industry. Using a search strategy known as “optical character recognition,” Proctor was able to accumulate large amounts of material about hundreds of historical episodes previously concealed in tobacco industry archives.

Golden Holocaust is a reality check against what Proctor calls the “banalization of smoking” (pp. 4–5)—the public’s seeming complacency about the single largest cause of preventable death. By using the online archive to retell old stories and expose new ones, Proctor relentlessly and convincingly reveals the jarring discrepancies between the tobacco industry’s private knowledge and its public announcements.

Some of the events in the book are quite familiar, such as the December 1953 meeting at New York’s Plaza Hotel in which cigarette executives, with the help of public relations firm Hill & Knowlton, devised a sophisticated “Not Yet Proven” marketing campaign designed to obscure the growing scientific evidence that cigarettes caused lung cancer. But Proctor enhances this story by describing how the Plaza conference immediately followed experiments funded by the American Tobacco Company and the Ecusta Paper Corporation showing that tars from cigarette smoke caused cancer in mice.

And while the 1964 Surgeon General’s report on smoking and health is often depicted as a triumphant moment in the war against tobacco, Proctor turns this idea on its head by revealing how the powerful tobacco companies influenced this document. Not only did the companies have veto power over committee membership, but one participant, Maurice Seevers, who had worked for Liggett & Myers, convinced the committee to call smoking a “habit” rather than an “addiction” (p. 237). Internal industry documents at this time freely discussed—and strategized about—the addictive nature of nicotine.

Other damning memos unearthed by Proctor include countless efforts by tobacco companies to lure teenage smokers, calling them, among other things, “starter smokers,” “rookie smokers,” and, most eerily, “replacement smokers” (p. 75). For years, the industry claimed that its advertisements merely sought to get people to switch brands. Proctor also shows how executives knew that filtered cigarettes did not filter and that “light” and “low tar” cigarettes were even more deadly. These sorts of outright lies prove, in Proctor’s words, how tobacco makers are “notorious masters of deception” who “manufacture ignorance” and “rewrite history” (p. 1). It is nearly impossible to argue with these findings.

Tobacco deftly permeated nearly every aspect of American society. I remember going to Virginia Slims tennis tournaments as a teenager to watch Billie Jean King play. As the son of a physician, I was no fan of tobacco industry sponsorship, but I loved the fact that women’s tennis—my...