Theodore Roosevelt was a sickly child who suffered from asthma. It was actually a reason why he later embraced physical activity (what he dubbed “the strenuous life”) once he grew up.
When he was a kid (he was born in 1858) one “treatment” was to have him smoke a cigar. I guess the coughing fits were presumed to be helping.
It’s only an anecdote, but it does reflect that there was sometimes a warped positive view of childhood smoking.
I don’t know if the OP has seen this recent thread, but it’s not too far off the same topic:
It’s hard to find good data on that. This paper, Cigarette Smoking Behavior in the United States, shows cigarette usage soaring starting in 1940, with the period from 1945 to 1965 at peak.
But it also shows cigarettes with steep growth continually from 1910 to 1930, a slight drop at the beginning of the Depression, and then an almost vertical curve until 1940.
The paper credits the steep growth to the marketing of cigarettes to women in the 1930s, especially the Lucky Strikes “Reach for a Lucky instead of a Sweet” campaign.
I don’t doubt that WWII increased smoking. When it became “common” is something people can have nice long arguments about.
Yes, as I said "The first surge in smoking occurred due to the Spanish Flu epidemic, since chaw and thus spitting was considered a cause of it. Before that, men smoked pipes or especially cigars, and did smokeless. "
Starring around then, there was a long and fairly constant climb up.
Try “The Golden Holocaust” by Robert Proctor.
An article published in 1921 , quoting british Surgeon Sir James Cantile … ( He thought tea and coffee were poisonous even worse than tobacco though, just an example of how people could turn things around to say it was even good… prevents caffiene addiction, geeze thats one steep slippery slope that caffiene addiction… probably because he treated palpitations as a sign of imminent heart attack. Or had some info on the failure of caffiene as a treatment for someone with heart disease…
Cigarettes, he said, stained the lungs in the same way as they stained the fingers. A man who constantly smoked cigarettes became ‘leather lunged’ and short winded.
…
I remember candy cigarettes being handed out as prizes at my grade school carnival. The box held four, they were peppermint flavored and stained pink at one end to simulate the cherry.
I remember those candy cigarettes back in the 60’s - there were probably a dozen or more in a cigarette-pack-looking box but were about half the size of real cigarettes, white candy with a red tip. But then one form or licorice was shaped like a pipe with red sprinkles to simulate the burning tobacco. It was considered “cute” I guess, but when over half of men smoked, it wasn’t a scandal.
Children were told “smoking stunts your growth”.
I wonder if it was less of an issue back then, because (as one doctor said about prostate cancer on Frankie and Grace ) “The good news is something else will probably kill you first.” Cancer has only become a major fear over the last half-century as so many other killers have been controlled. We have better medicine for surviving heart attacks; childhood killers like polio are gone (theoretically). We have antibiotics and other treatments against common killers of the elderly. Both my great uncles and my one grandfather died in their 60’s from weakened hearts due to scarlet fever; the other grandfather also had a heart attack in his 60’s. My father and uncles lasted into their 90’s. (None smoked)
Back in the day cancer was a minor risk among many things that could kill you, some like contagious diseases, not easily avoided. As the risk from other issues diminished and people lasted longer - so more likely to develop cancer from bad habits - it has become a more prominent killer.
While looking for something else I stumbled across Sponsor magazine, a trade mag for radio and television advertising in the early 50s. Things were both very different and incredibly the same back then.
Anyway, the December 17, 1951 issue had an article titled “Is today’s rash of cigarette claims harmful to all advertising?”
Apparently, cigarette companies had discovered negative advertising and were blasting one another by name. The gist of the ads was that X brand wasn’t healthy even though they claimed it was.
"The public was barraged with a mumbo-jumbo of chemical terms, percentages, bar graphs, medical reports, irritation tests, and the inevitable white-clad physician peering somberly through a microscope. An industry bon mot was, “Nowadays you’ve got to quote either the American Medical Journal or Reader’s Digest.” (The Digest was anti-smoking. A year later, according to an online article “A widely read article in Reader’s Digest in 1952, “Cancer by the Carton,” contributed to the largest drop in cigarette consumption since the Depression.”)
A spokesman for Philip Morris said, “What most concerns us is that 2,000,000 people converted to Philip Morris because of our hardsell ‘nose test’. It works. In a way, smokers, are like drunkards; they have a guilt feeling about the habit. So you have to sell them on the idea that the cigarette you offer them is less harmful than others.”
If cigarette companies concentrated their advertising on this subject, several conclusions follow. The big one is that smokers knew that the habit could be unhealthy generally but were easily persuaded that their individual habit wasn’t as bad, so they didn’t have to think about it.
The companies introduced filter-tipped cigarettes to the broad audience in 1954, giving another reassuring pat on the back. It took another decade for the anti forces to gather around the Surgeon General’s Report of Jan. 11, 1964.
Candy cigarettes are still available. If you heard they were banned it only resulted in removing the word “cigarette” from the package. They may not be readily recognizable to children who haven’t seen their parents or anyone smoking on TV, but for anyone exposed to smoking it’s obvious what they are meant to look like. It’s a good sign to see they are uncommon now.
I’ve always been partial to “lung dart” myself.
(never been a smoker, I should mention)
Oh, so that’s why they call 'em “darts” on Letterkenny.
The Australian version was called Fags [trad. slang name for cigarettes]. When political correctness went mad the branding was changed to Fads.