Like Father, Like Son
Smoking as a Family Tradition
Smoking as a Family Tradition
Introduction to the exhibition, dedicated to Leon Blum, MD and Gerald Leon Wallace, MD [photos below]. (01:33)
I could well have been that freckle-faced little boy on the sign handing a carton of Chesterfield cigarettes to his dad. My father, Leon Blum, MD, who had been a high school athlete, took up smoking Chesterfields as a medical student. Doubtless as a result of his ever-present cigarette, he suffered a heart attack before he was 50 and died at 60.
Throughout the 20th century and to the present day, millions of fathers have succumbed to heart disease, emphysema, and lung cancer due to smoking, even as the tobacco industry denied that smoking could even cause a cough. Meanwhile, cigarettes were advertised on billboards in almost every sports arena and stadium, as well as day and night on TV and radio until banned from the airwaves by Congress in 1971. For the next 30 years, newspapers and magazines became the main outlet for cigarette advertising, along with tobacco industry sponsorship of sports and the arts.
Whether in the form of cigarettes, cigars, or spitting tobacco, nicotine is a potent addiction that the tobacco industry has always downplayed. Today the major cigarette manufacturers Philip Morris International (PMI), Altria, and BAT, who claim to have recognized the devastating toll taken by smoking, are recruiting a new generation to the pleasures of nicotine through non-combustible tobacco products under the guise that these vaping devices or electronic cigarettes are much safer. (Safer than what? Fresh air?) PMI is promoting its transition from cigarettes to e-cigarettes in full-page advertisements in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, as well as through its Foundation for a Smoke-Free World.
We’ve seen the tobacco industry’s going-out-of-business sale many times before, beginning with “A Frank Statement to Cigarette Smokers” by the Tobacco Industry Research Council in 1954, in which cigarette makers pledged to assist “the research effort into all phases of tobacco and health.” The result was an endless race to promote implicit health claims for “low-tar” brands and an endless array of filters that would presumably prevent the inhalation of anything that could cause harm. Philip Morris even pulled all of its Marlboro cigarettes off the shelves in 1994 after traces of cyanide were found in some of the filters. Two months later the cigarettes were back on sale, presumably much safer than before.
Giving your dad a carton of cigarettes for Father’s Day may sound like a sick joke, but for more than half a century after Washington state celebrated the first Father’s Day in 1910, tobacco companies promoted their products as the perfect gift. This exhibition features tobacco advertisements and other ephemera that exploit the bond between father and son and the association of smoking with manliness.
Alan Blum, MD
Director
The University of Alabama Center for the Study of Tobacco and Society
ablum@ua.edu
Public Service Announcement featuring actor William Talman (1915-1968)
American Cancer Society
1968
This poignant, pioneering public service announcement (PSA) was regularly shown on TV from 1968 to 1971. In 1967, after failing to get New York City television station CBS to air anti-smoking messages, attorney John Banzhaf III filed a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to apply the Fairness Doctrine that required TV networks to provide free air time to opposing views on matters of public controversy. He argued that since the ubiquitous cigarette commercials were broadcasting only pro-smoking messages, TV stations should be required to run anti-smoking messages. The FCC agreed, and the decision was upheld in federal court.
The ad features actor William Talman, best known for his role as district attorney Hamilton Burger, who was always getting outsmarted by criminal defense attorney Perry Mason, played by Raymond Burr, in the TV courtroom drama “Perry Mason,” which ran from 1957 to 1966. In the decade before he became a TV star, Talman frequently played film noir roles in which he was often seen smoking a cigarette.
In the ad, Talman introduces us to wife and children before revealing his battle with lung cancer. “So take some advice about smoking and losing from someone who’s been doing both for years,” he concludes, looking directly at the viewer, “If you don’t smoke, don’t start. If you do smoke, quit. Don’t be a loser.”
This and other anti-smoking advertisements on TV had such an immediate impact on the public that the tobacco industry soon announced it would remove all of its cigarette commercials from TV if Congress gave it an exemption from anti-trust law violations. The last cigarette ad on US television appeared on January 1, 1971. But this also meant that TV stations no longer had to broadcast anti-smoking messages to meet the requirements of the Fairness Doctrine. As a result, there was a dramatic reduction in the number of anti-smoking PSAs and a leveling off of the rate of decline in smoking.
“HAPPY BIRTHDAY To My Dad” (2 pages)
Birthday greeting card from son to father, with image of a cigarette in an ashtray
“Until 1975 Joseph A. Califano Jr. smoked as many as three packs of cigarettes a day, but he kicked the habit at the request of his then 11-year-oid son, Joe. Mr. Califano, the Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, recounted this today while outlining the Federal Government’s new antismoking proposals.
“Mr. Califano said that his son had ‘told me that the best birthday present I could give him would be to stop smoking.’ He added: ‘I set about then to give up cigarettes. And the best present I could give Joe turned out to be one of the hardest things I have ever tried to do.’”
New York Times
January 12, 1978
“It was September, and I asked him what he wanted for his birthday. He said, ‘I want you to stop smoking.’ ‘No, seriously,’ I said. ‘What do you want for your birthday and for Christmas?’ And he repeated that wish.
“Joe’s now a surgical oncologist and director of the Head and Neck Cancer Center at the University of California at San Diego.”
Joseph A. Califano, Jr.
Personal communication, June 13, 2019