<\/p>\n
Although for more than thirty years this program has been concerned with events of Maine history, and especially of the Kennebec Valley, it is still called “Little Talks on Common Things.”<\/p>\n
In our day, regrettably, one of the most common things is the cigarette. Only a few weeks ago we saw a smokeless day observed all across the nation. During those twenty-four hours a large number of cigarette smokers abstained from the weed. Despite the required printing of the Surgeon General’s caution on every package of cigarettes, there seems little diminution of their use, especially with the younger generation. Instead of having fewer cigarette smokers in the U.S. than we had ten years ago, the steady increase in population has given us more. We are told that for every person who has
\ngiven up cigarettes, two new smokers come on the scene.<\/p>\n
Persons of my age can remember when cigarettes were rare. In my boyhood most smokers used pipes. A few professional men and prosperous merchants smoked cigars. Though my father did not smoke at all, he did sell tobacco and cigarettes in his store. While a little fine cut, packaged tobacco was available when I first knew that store at the turn of the century, quite as important an implement as the coffee grinder was the tobacco cutter. Most tobacco came in foot-long plugs that had to be cut into small pieces for sale. Both smoking tobacco and chewing tobacco came in plugs. Some of the more popular brands were B.L., Battle Axe, and Piper Heidsick.<\/p>\n
Father drew the line at cigarettes, which were just beginning to be popular in 1900. In fact, most cigarette smokers rolled their own, using Bull Durham cigarette tobacco and rolling it in prepared cigarette papers. The most popular cigarette and the cheapest at that time was Sweet Corporal at ten cents for a package of 20. By 1910 the big tobacco companies had begun to market cigarettes. Lucky Strike and Camels were early brands.<\/p>\n
I recall a national controversy about 1915 when the makers of Camel cigarettes offered a big prize for the best advertising slogan. Because the winning slogan was offensive to many church people, the company never used it. But I can now tell you what it was. “In ancient days camels carried wise men. In these days wise men carry Camels.”<\/p>\n
Now back to those pipes of the 19th century. If a man could afford it, he had a briar pipe. If he got one that cost a dollar for Christmas he considered it a magnificent gift. If he had to buy one himself, he was more likely to pay 50 cents. Most men considered a good corn cob pipe completely satisfactory. They were by that time factory made in quantities. The best kind cost ten cents, but far more popular was the five cent variety. The common laborers, and there were a lot of those around, smoked clay pipes that sold for two cents each or three for a nickel. Father used to stock them in big lots of 100 packed in sawdust in a wooden box. Even then at least a dozen would be broken before the boxful could be sold.<\/p>\n
As for the cigar smokers, very few could afford a 10 center, the most expensive I ever saw in the old store. The most popular brand was the Lord Nelson, five cents each or six for a quarter.<\/p>\n
While plenty of pipe and cigar smokers are still with us in 1981, the sale of cigarettes has long exceeded that of cigars and pipe tobacco combined. Cigarettes have been found injurious to one’s health as well as offensive to non-smokers, and recent years have seen legislation which does at least reduce the effect on non-smokers, and there are signs that there is some reduction in their use by young adults. By the year 2000 they may hopefully become less popular.<\/p>\n
I suspect that few people have ever heard of the part played by cigarettes in the economic recovery of West Germany after World War II.<\/p>\n
Hitler, by grim refusal to let his armies surrender until after his suicide in the Bavarian bunker,was disastrous. But Hitler insisted that, if the end of his thousand year Reich had come, he wanted all German people to go down with himself. If the war was lost, then let Germany be gone forever.<\/p>\n
Even now, thirty-five years after the end of the war, it is difficult for Americans to realize what that last year of the war did to Germany. In its great industrial centers, half of the huge steel and munitions plants here completely destroyed, and many more were put out of operation. In areas fifty miles long and twenty miles wide, that had been covered by the smoke from hundreds of factory chimneys, the air was now clear and the sounds of manufacturing were still. It was impossible to get raw materials. The whole system, not only for production but also for distribution had broken down. The rail lines had been so heavily bombed that their rebuilding took a long time, even when new rails became available. In the British and U.S. zones of occupation, not including the expansive French and Russian zones, 2,300 railway bridges had been destroyed. When the war ended, there was little crossing of the Rhine, the Weser or the Elbe rivers, except by makeshift pontoon bridges.<\/p>\n
Besides the damage to industry and transportation the bombing had caused an acute housing shortage. Almost every available building, including residences, was taken over by the occupying, victorious allies. Hundreds of thousands of Germans were left with no possessions except the clothes on their backs. The homeless moved into shacks of every conceivable shape. They even burrowed into cellars of bombed out buildings. The authorities of the heavily bombed city of Koblenz found that debris of wood and brick and stone piled up within the city limits exceeded 50 cubic meters for everyone of the 180,000 inhabitants. The occupying British engineers said it would take twenty years to remove debris from Berlin, if 1,000 tons were removed every day.<\/p>\n
The lack of food made a serious health crisis. Under the occupation, the ration was reduced to 1,500 calories a day, OK for children, but not enough for manual laborers. By the winter of 1946-47 it was down to 800 calories in the bigger cities, at a time when 2,400 calories was considered necessary for a healthy, working adult.<\/p>\n
Under those conditions, the German currency became nearly valueless. Even shopkeepers turned to hoarding. No merchant wanted to let goods go from his shelves at any stated price, when the very next day the same goods might bring twice as much in marks, and would cost him, for replacement, much more than he got for them. There became no stated price for anything. In fact, almost all buying and selling was in the black market. The nation’s banking structure was
\nin ruins.<\/p>\n
The situation, however, was profitable for the Allied occupying troops. A cheap watch that a soldier could buy at the Army PX for $15 would sell for marks that would bring him $500 in a postal money order at the Army post office. A carton of cigarettes costing a dollar at the PX would bring the seller 1,500 marks that he could exchange for $120 at U.S. Army financial centers and post offices.<\/p>\n
In fact, it was the American cigarette which became established as the most stable medium of exchange in post-war Germany. Prices came to be quoted, not in marks, but in packs and cartons of cigarettes. It was the common medium of exchange between G.I. ‘s and the German population. The U.S. authorities tried to stem the tide by rationing cigarettes, but the maximum allowed each soldier seemed always sufficient to keep the black market alive. While the ordinary G.I. was getting 1,000 reichmarks for a carton of cigarettes that cost only a dollar, the average income of a German worker was 80 R.M. a week. Cigarettes in Germany were indeed worth their weight in gold. For the Germans, cigarettes became too valuable to smoke. Though more bulky than paper money, they were more likely to be used as money, because they, unlike the paper notes, had a permanent commodity value. In 1947 the N.Y. Tribune planned to rebuild a ruined building in Frankfort for its news and circulation headquarters. A Frankfort contractor submitted a bid for the bricks, cement and other material and labor to complete the job for a price of 155 cartons of cigarettes. The quantity of American cigarettes brought into Germany for the armed services and American employees was so great that it swamped the postal system.<\/p>\n
(one page of handwriting can’t be deciphered)<\/p>\n
For centuries before the World Wars, it had been the peasants, the farmers, who usually suffered most. They supplied most of the non-commissioned men for the armies. Their harvests were seized by friends and enemies alike, without any adequate payment. In every war the women and children on many a European farm died of starvation.<\/p>\n
Exactly the opposite was true in Germany immediately after the close of the Second World War. By 1948 the farmers of Germany had become the new rich. Compared with the cities, their buildings had suffered little from Allied bombing. They came out of war with smaller losses than any other segment of the country’s people. Soon they had enough food,
\nnot only for themselves, but excess to be put on sale in the black market at high prices. They did not even have to take the produce to the cities for sale – the black market eagerly came to their doorsteps. Their high-priced farm products enabled them to cover the floors of their houses with Persian rugs, decorate their tables with the finest china and silver, and fill their closets with garments of wool, linen, silk and fur.<\/p>\n
Of course farmers as well as American soldiers, soon learned the value of the cigarette as a medium of currency. In one instance a farmer just outside Frankfurt took to a bank 1000 cartons of cigarettes for which he received in marks the equivalent of $120,000. Those figures, of course, were never the official rate of exchange. They are, however, representative of many actual transactions on the Black Market. The cigarette became the most predominant means of trade allover West Germany. Prices in cigarettes were the only true prices that existed. It was the American cigarette that made trading at all stable.<\/p>\n
That account of the importance of the cigarette in post-war Germany is indeed quite a story. What a change from my boyhood days when even pipe smokers and tobacco chewers scorned the lowly cigarette. But the German experience by no means presents an adequate defense of cigarette smoking in the 1980’s. The Surgeon General’s warning, in spite of its flaunting by sellers and buyers alike, should be heeded by all Americans.<\/p>\n
Year: 1981<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Read the script for “Little Talks” program #1262, Broadcast on February 8, 1981<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":405,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[35323,35296],"tags":[],"builder_content":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10020"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/405"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10020"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10020\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10020"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10020"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10020"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}