Not a Cough in a Carload: Images from the Tobacco Industry Campaign to Hide the Hazards of Smoking (review)

The secret ingredient in photographs, the writer Wright Morris once observed, is the passage of time. No matter how commonplace or clichéd an image may have seemed to contemporaries, it acquires a certain fascination and value with age, because it offers a peephole into the daily life of a fast-receding past.

The same thought will occur to anyone who views "Not a Cough in a Carload," a handsomely designed and easily navigated exhibit of tobacco ads from the 1920s through the 1950s, prepared by Robert K. Jackler, Robert N. Proctor, and Laurie M. Jackler. The images transport viewers to the golden age of cigarette hokum, when advertisers blatantly promised popularity, thinness, more pleasure, better taste, unstained teeth, and cough-free enjoyment to anyone who purchased their brand. To offset health worries, they often featured medical figures and brand endorsements, such as the fraudulent claim that "more doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette." Scarcely remarked by the page-flipping readers who first saw them, the ads now seem both significant and sinister. Like surveillance footage, they capture a crime in progress, the hijacking of the prestige of the mid-twentieth-century's sovereign profession to reassure the consumers of the mid-twentieth-century's sovereign drug.

Robert Jackler, Robert Proctor, and Laurie Jackler mostly let the ads condemn themselves. Text is at a minimum, image at a maximum. The navigation bar allows sorting by brand and theme, for example, ads featuring doctors, health claims, filters, or celebrities. The last section notes the fates of Hollywood stars who touted this brand or that. Dragnet's Jack Webb was a three-pack-a-day man who died of a heart attack at age sixty-two. Spencer Tracy met the same fate at sixty-seven. Bob Hope lived to one hundred "despite years of smoking," the commentators graciously conceding his outlier status. They do not concede that the industry has mended its ways. The advertisers' goal remains to ensnare the unwary, replacing smokers who have died or quit with young recruits. Their tactics have just become more subtle.

The genius of the Web is easy serendipity. Searches produce pertinent material embedded in wildly different contexts. "Not a Cough in a Carload" means to indict a health menace flying the false colors of salubrity. But historians and students who visit the site will be rewarded with a wealth of visual material on medical authority, pseudoscience, gender roles, somatic norms, the cult of celebrity, and the psychology of denial. They will also find links to related sites and a guestbook where visitors leave comments about what tobacco products have done to themselves and their families. The remarks are not kind.