Clearing the Air: The Rise and Fall of Smoking in the Workplace by Gregory Wood (review)

Gregory Wood’s new book opens by quoting writer activist Barbara Ehrenreich about her stint as a waitress for her 2001 book Nickel and Dimed. “Almost everyone smokes,” she remarked about her restaurant coworkers (1). To Wood, her observation captured a pervasive but neglected element of twentieth-century working-class life. Cigarette smoking evolved as a central on-the-job worker experience during the 1900s, and it figured broadly into the process of work, labor-management relations, workspace use, occupational health, worker solidarity (or lack thereof), and collective bargaining, intersecting with changing public attitudes toward tobacco use throughout the twentieth century. Allan Brandt, Robert Proctor, Richard Kluger, and others have written histories of cigarette smoking, but Wood for the first time examines its workplace parameters.

Clearing the Air addresses that part of labor history involving the worker-management struggle to control workplaces. The book explores smoking’s role in that struggle through the imaginative use of newspapers, advertising images, worker letters, and especially major archival collections, such as the Hammermill Paper Company records, the vast Legacy Tobacco Documents Library at the University of California, San Francisco, and decisions by the National Labor Relations Board. It urges that nicotine addiction was a driving force bringing workers into conflict with employers, leading smokers to create a “smokers’ work culture” that provided space and freedom on the job to sustain their practice (4). Quoting historians Susan Porter Benson and Barbara Melosh, the author asserts that smokers’ work culture allowed workers to “stake out relatively autonomous spheres of action on the job,” an “in-between ground” where “informal, customary values and rules mediate . . . the formal authority structures of the workplace” (5).

Clearing the Air proceeds chronologically from the late 1800s to the early 2000s, showing how smokers’ work culture rose and fell as social, industrial, and political forces aligned in favor of and then against it. The book begins in the Progressive Era, when moral reformers, employers, and municipal leaders opposed the nation’s first rise in cigarette smoking due to its alleged degenerative moral effects and fire hazards, the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Fire offering one awful example. The author demonstrates that despite this hostility, cigarette use among workers surged, although he does not fully indicate why. Other historians observe that cigarettes made up a minuscule percentage of tobacco consumption in 1900, much less than chewing tobacco and cigars, but boomed as a consumer product in the 1910s. Wood attributes the expansion to the combined “bonds of [nicotine] dependence” and “mountains of [cheap mass-produced] cigarettes” entering the marketplace, although this analysis would not seem wholly to explain how cigarettes supplanted other tobacco products, or in which segments of the workforce they flourished (2). The book evinces, moreover, that female as well as male workers got drawn into the smoking habit, but it does not systematically examine the gendered dimensions of work-place smoking or its ethnic or racial aspects, were there any. Nonetheless, Clearing the Air dramatically confirms workplace smoking’s rise in the 1910s. It draws on eye-opening reports by Hammermill Paper Company labor spies in 1915 to show that workers used smoking breaks to interrupt monotonous work routines, carve out resting space in hidden plant locations, and socialize with fellow laborers. Smoking accompanied worker resistance to mechanization and routinization of work.

According to Wood, smokers’ work culture reached its apogee during World War II, despite deepening cultural contradictions and class tensions. During the war era, he reveals, both government and major employers toughened antismoking regulations, largely to avoid blazes in defense facilities, but simultaneously, patriotic Americans packed off tons of cigarettes to troops on the battlefront, and tobacco companies blitzed magazines with advertisements depicting patriotic soldiers and defense workers enjoying their smokes. Meanwhile, burgeoning industrial unions defended smoking as a negotiable worker right, and smoking sparked job disputes throughout the war, all augmenting unions’ drive to expand their...