These days if you ask some older smokers who are aged 60 and over why they even started smoking in the first place knowing it is so bad for you a lot of them will say “Well way back then nobody knew it was bad for you. There were no warnings. Some people even thought it was healthy to smoke.”
If this is true to the public thinking back then my question would be- Why were there smoking age restrictions? Why any age limit at all if nobody believed they were harmful?
Just a WAG, but I’ll venture it was because people thought they were harmful for children, but in a different way than we know today. For example, as a child forty-plus years ago, I well remember being told that children neither smoked nor drank coffee because it would “stunt their growth,” and that I could have coffee and cigarettes when I had grown as tall as I ever would. That would be when I was a teenager.
It’s a WAG, but I’d guess that the fact that my parents and many other adults whom I believed and respected said the same thing makes me think that there may have been something to this belief. Thus, age restrictions. IIRC, when I was in my teens, the legal age for smoking was officially 16, but it was rarely enforced in my jurisdiction.
Oh, they knew it wasn’t good for you. Heck, they knew in the 1700’s. Is it not obvious that sucking smoke into your lungs is not a good thing? Like a lot of things these days, we know they aren’t good for us but we do them anyway and just sort of pretend. My dad knew for 60 years that cigarettes were going to get him, and they did, but he seemd to enjoy the time they spent together.
Back in the 40’s and 50’s there a lot less restrictions on ads and there was also a lot less access to information. There were ads that flat out stated that certain cigarettes were endorsed by doctors - actual ads with guys in doctor coats puffing away. Where would you even go to verify this back then?
Cigarettes were “called coffin nails” back in the thirties. They new smoking was not good for you back then. They just were no better at choosing between being cool and health problems many years down the road than people to today.
Kids could have candy cigarettes in Pall Mall and Luck Strike style boxes when I was growing up in the sixties and seventies. Got you prepared for adulthood.:eek:
I have the same general impression, (also just a WAG 
)
Back then, I think the age restrictions on kids were not based on health considerations, but on social considerations. In the 1940’s nobody cared if kids did dangerous things, but they got very worried if kids did immoral things.(I think that’s when comic book censorship began, too.)
Cigarettes themselves were not seen as immoral, but they were commonly smoked by the “bad boys” – who cut school, got into fights, and even carried knives sometimes.* And starting to smoke at a young age (say, 14) was a sign that you were hanging around with the wrong gang, from whom society had to be protected.
So you were encouraged not to smoke at that age-- because you would damage society, not because you would damage your own health.
*(and who would be glorified a decade or so later in West Side Story).
Age restrictions were pretty meaningless as long as they were sold in machines. I can recall as late 1999 machines with cigarettes in them. They had warnings saying you can’t buy them but kids did.
When I was a wee shaver in the early 70s, I’d bring a note to my store and they’d let me buy it. How did they know it was from my father? They didn’t. Half the time they gave me the note back.
Smaller stores would sell it to you but that came with the problem if the storekeeper knew you he’d often ask, “So did your son get your cigarettes to you all right.” And if you were lying and your father didn’t want cigarettes, there’d be hell to pay.
We had a smoking court in our high school when I graduated in 1980. You were supposed to have your parents permission but it wasn’t enforced.
I think the problem was the message was “Smoking is bad for you.” But you’d not see any real enforcement so kids would think, “How bad can it be.” It’s like pot now that we’ve had a few of them (as well as presidental candidates) admit to at least trying it, the message is “Pot is OK, hey you can try it. If it was so bad, why did he become president.” Or at worst the message is “Just have fun then go to rehab.”
I recall reading a bio of Lucille Ball (both her and Desi Aranz were heavy smokers) and after she got pregnant, Phillip Morris the maker of cigarettes and the sponsor of “I Love Lucy,” said “Lucy can never be shown to smoke while she’s pregnant.”
So even then they knew it wasn’t good for you.
It was thought of as a vice, like drinking and gambling, and a “filthy habit.” But it was also thought that there are certain things that adults are mature enough to handle responsibly, but children aren’t. And the media’s images of “sophistication” . . . doing things that only adults were allowed to do . . . included things like drinking (cocktails, not booze), gambling (only if you were rich) and smoking (cigarettes or pipes, not cigars). So there was a real dichotomy between “sophisticated” adult vices that were glamorized in the media, and “low-life” vices that were stigmatized.
61-year old chiming in…
I smoked off and on from about the age of 14 until I was 27 (when I quit smoking Yet Another time and haven’t started it up again so far). Basically, it was a cool thing to do, and I thought it made me look like a tough guy. I knew they were bad for me, but I was a teenager and all teenagers are immortal.
Many people have always believed tobacco to be harmful, dating to its discovery by Europeans and probably before that among the American Indians. It was obvious even to casual observers that it was addictive and at least mildly psychoactive. However, the more serious health problems could be legitimately debated until the 1960’s, and this is the most that can be said for “nobody knew it was bad for you”.
Tobacco use by minors was probably always frowned upon, but serious concerns about minors and tobacco date to the advent of the cigarette in the late Nineteenth Century. Cigarettes were cheap and mild and portable, relative to cigars and pipes, and more appealing to youngsters (and women). Many states banned them entirely around 1900, and those that didn’t generally banned sales to minors.
Here is a New York Times article from 1909 on the issue:
World War I blew away opposition to adult cigarette smoking, as a generation of soldiers caught the habit and never looked back. (Curiously, WWI led to alcohol prohibition, but relaxation of cigarette prohibition.) However, prohibition against minors was never repealed, generally for the reasons in the article.