The following appeared in the Washington Evening Star of July 2, 1930: “A cigarette company offered the Hunter brothers, winners of the endurance flight record, $10,000 to indorse a cigarette. They turned it down with the remark, ‘We don’t smoke cigarettes.’” We are also told, “Coffee men came by the score to find the brand of coffee the boys drank, and learned they drink no coffee.” Milk and orange juice were their drinks, their sister informed the coffee men.
This reminds us of Colonel Lindbergh’s experience. When he landed in France after battling the rain, sleet, and storm at an altitude of ten thousand feet at times, he was immediately surrounded with friends. They naturally brought him some coffee as a stimulant; but he refused it, and asked for a glass of milk. Of course Lindbergh never smoked. In a letter received from his mother, she said, “He does not use stimulants of any kind.” Colonel Lindbergh was offered $25,000, I am informed, for merely indorsing a certain cigarette. He is in possession of too much manhood to consider such a proposition.
Whenever and wherever endurance is in demand, the cigarette and coffee are not. George Young, “the seventeen-year-old Canadian wonder lad,” swam from Catalina Island to the mainland of California, a distance of twenty-six miles; of the 103 seasoned contestants, he alone was able to “survive the terror of the cold water, the seaweed, and the darkness, conquering seeming impossibilities.” This victory was not by chance. It was a matter of brawn and endurance. The secret of his success, it was stated, was that he had previously “led a clean life, using neither tobacco nor drink.”
ATHLETES DO NOT DRINK OR SMOKE
Fabre of Montreal, who won the big Marathon race in the year 1915, says: “I believe that clean living has played a very prominent part in my success as an athlete. I do not drink, smoke, or chew tobacco.”
Red Grange, the noted football player, a nonsmoker, says to the youth possessing athletic ambitions, “You cannot drink, and smoke, and expect to succeed as an athlete.”
Cigarette smokers are not in demand on football or baseball teams, because they lack endurance. They may play well most of the time, but at a critical point in the game they are liable to fail. Their judgment is not reliable or dependable.
Three popular men who will have nothing to do either with alcohol or with tobacco: Walter Johnson, famous baseball player; Col. Charles A. Lindbergh; and Red Grange, noted football player. Their pointed testimonies, as given in this article, are worth thinking over.
Walter Johnson, who is held in such high esteem by all lovers of baseball, says: “I strongly advise any boy who hopes to become an athlete to let cigarettes alone. They are bad for the wind. It is true that some great ball players have smoked cigarettes, but my answer to that is that they would have been still greater ball players had they not used cigarettes.”
Connie Mack, for years one of the brainiest leaders in the baseball world, who has observed the rise and fall of many a star player, says: “We find that players who smoke never amount to a great deal in the profession. Players, for instance, who should have continued in the game until they were at the age of thirty to thirty-five years, have had to be let out years before their time, as the cigarette poison, getting into their system, had unnerved and weakened them so that they were utterly unfit for the duty they had to perform. There is very little smoking among our baseball boys. We do everything in our power to discourage the use of cigarettes, knowing the great harm it has done to those players who have been addicted to them.”
Ty Cobb, who has stood forth as one of America’s greatest baseball players, says: “Too much cannot be said against the evils of cigarette smoking. It stupefies the brain, saps vitality, undermines the health, and lessens the moral fiber of the man.”
Clark Griffith, president of the Nationals, the team that is making such an excellent showing this year, has had every opportunity to observe the effects of smoking on the members of his team. After their defeat in 1914, he said: “Our failure to come up to expectations has been largely due to the fact that some of the players on whom we depended were cigarette smokers. There will be no more of it. Any player who insists on smoking cigarettes is through, so far as the ‘Nationals’ is concerned; and that goes so long as I am manager of the team.” How far he has been able to carry this into effect I am unable to tell, but we have here his objective.
In boxing and pugilism it is endurance and good judgment that win. Eugene Tunney, who won the boxing championship from Jack Dempsey, in 1927, takes pride in saying over his own signature that he has “never used liquor or tobacco.”
DEMPSEY’S REFUSAL
A cigarette manufacturer sent an agent to Jack Dempsey when he held the world’s championship as pugilist, asking for his signature to a recommendation of a certain brand of cigarettes, and offered a tempting financial consideration. Dempsey read it and, turning upon the man, said: “You could not get me to sign that for ten times what you offer. I do not smoke cigarettes, and never did. Do you think I am going to ask the thousands of young boys who read about me to take up cigarette smoking? If you had a harmless candy or soda water, I wouldn’t mind giving you a testimonial for nothing, but I don’t sign your testimonials for a cigarette.”
Not every one has the moral stamina to turn down an offer of several thousand dollars merely for a signature. No one knows this better than the cigarette concerns.3
In business the men who stand at the head are nonsmokers. Of the ten most successful business men and financiers of America, which include such outstanding characters as Andrew Carnegie, J. P. Morgan, Sr., John Wanamaker, Russell Sage, Marshall Field, John D. Rockefeller, Henry Ford, and others, nine were known to abjure the use of tobacco; all lived or are living to a ripe old age.
The success of Henry Ford, the world’s most level-headed business man, may be attributed in measure to the fact that he is a man of good habits. In referring to the use of cigarettes he says: “Employers of labor are each year becoming more strict in their requirements—for their own good and for that of the men in their employ. The physical strain imposed is such that only the strong can come through with credit.
“But even more essential than the question of brawn is that of brain. The youth who gets to the front in any line must be wide-awake, alert, with a mind that is clear and capable of tackling the problems that come up.
“The boy or the young man whose brain is fogged by the use of cigarettes finds himself hopelessly handicapped. His services are accepted only as a last resort; and if there is anyone else available, he is not intrusted with important matters or considered for future possibilities.”
This is the testimony of men in every walk of life—men who have made good, and who know exactly why some boys succeed and why others make a sorry failure of anything they attempt.
Principals and teachers in public schools and colleges are doing their utmost to discourage the use of tobacco, and especially the cigarette, because they recognize that the cigarette is one of the greatest enemies of our public schools. Every observing teacher knows that the boy smoker seldom makes good. He becomes nervous and restless, and unable to apply himself to close mental work for any length of time. He drops behind in his classes, and eventually drops out of school.
OPINIONS OF DOCTORS AND JUDGES
Judge B. S. Shaw of Hart, Michigan, said: “In every instance of juvenile delinquency in this court I have found that the boys were cigarette users.”
Judge Allen of Lisbon, North Dakota, said: “Every male juvenile delinquent brought before me for the last seventeen years has been a cigarette smoker.”
Judge Pollock of Fargo, North Dakota, said: “Every boy brought into this court the past sixteen years was a cigarette smoker.”
Dr. Hutchinson of the Kansas State Reformatory said: “Cigarettes are the cause of the downfall of more boys in this institution than all other vicious habits combined.”
Dr. Coffin, who for over twenty years was connected with the Whittier Reform School of California, said: “Fully 98 per cent of all youthful criminals who have been confined to this institution were cigarette smokers, and 95 per cent were cigarette fiends.”
Miss Winters, who is principal of one of the largest schools for delinquent youth in America, recently said: “Out of over eleven hundred inmates, only twenty were nonsmokers of cigarettes.”
Judge de Lacey of the Washington, D. C., Juvenile Court said: “There is something about this cigarette habit that weakens and unnerves the boy. It destroys his memory, impairs his reasoning faculties, robs him of his power of attention, saps his will power, and deprives him of his initiative. Often this habit has so fastened itself upon impressionable boy nature that it cannot be shaken off.”
Thomas Edison, some time ago, made the statement that the cigarette smoke has in it properties known as furfurole and acrolein, which tend to bring about degenerative changes “of an incurable nature” in the brain cells of the young addict. He attributes crime among our youth chiefly to the prevalent use of cigarettes. This should not come as a new revelation, for practically every thinking father and mother who have had any experience with a boy or girl who smokes know this to be the case. Teachers in our public schools will tell you that the cigarette unfits the youth for study, and that study virtually ends where cigarette smoking begins, and where study ends criminal tendencies begin.
OPINION OF PRESIDENT
President Herbert Hoover, in an address given before the members of the Associated Press in New York City, in dwelling upon the increase of crime in America, said: “Disrespect for the law threatens the future of this nation.” He did not attribute the increase in crime to Prohibition, since Prohibition, he said, was responsible for only 8 per cent of the convictions. “All crime is increasing, from murder to forgery,” he affirmed, “to the point where life and property are more unsafe in this country than in any other civilized country in the world. President Hoover himself knows that the cigarette is one of the chief sources of crime among our youth. Several years ago he made the statement: “There is no agency in the world to-day that is so seriously affecting the health, efficiency, education, and character of our boys and girls as the cigarette habit. Yet very little attention is paid to it. Nearly every delinquent boy is a cigarette smoker. Cigarettes are a source of crime, and to neglect crime at its source is a shortsighted policy unworthy of a nation of our intelligence.”
It does seem strange that a “nation of4our intelligence” should neglect to recognize this source of crime, and permit tobacco companies to spend millions of dollars annually in advertising cigarettes through the medium of the press, the billboard, and the radio, and in such a glaring and deceptive manner to encourage our boys and girls to take up with this destructive practice.
Inducements are held out by these concerns to unprincipled athletes similar to the one presented to the Hunter brothers, Lindbergh, and Dempsey. When testimonials are secured in this manner, they are presented to our youth—boys and girls—in a manner to encourage them to reach for a cigarette when tempted to reach for a sweet, et cetera.
MOST IMPORTANT PROBLEM
In the prevalent use of cigarettes by boys and girls, we are brought face to face with the greatest and most important problem that confronts us to-day. Were it not for the money there is behind the tobacco trade, a stop would speedily be put to this mode of advertising. But “the love of money” is still “the root of all evil.” It is the love of money that opens up the pages of our journals and daily papers to cleverly written “ads.” We permit these trusts, through these mediums, to make cigarette addicts of our boys and girls, and thus encourage the production of a criminal class. Certainly this is “a policy unworthy of a nation of our intelligence.”
But these tobacco concerns are overstepping their bounds. Public sentiment is being aroused against it. The better classes of Americans will not always tolerate this deceptive manner of appealing to our girls and boys. Referring to this in a recent appeal before the United States Senate, Senator Smoot said: “Not since the days when public opinion rose up in its might and smote the dangerous drug traffic, not since the days when the vender of harmful nostrums was swept from our streets, has this country witnessed such an orgy of buncombe, quackery, and downright falsehood and fraud as now marks the current campaign promoted by certain cigarette manufacturers to create a vast woman and child market for the use of their product.
“I rise to denounce insidious cigarette campaigns now being promoted by those tobacco manufacturing interests whose only god is profit, whose only bible is the balance sheet, whose only principle is greed. I rise to denounce the unconscionable, heartless, and destructive attempts to exploit the women and youth of our country in the interests of a few powerful tobacco organizations whose rapacity knows no bounds.”
It is time for every father and mother and every true American citizen to arise and second this effort by the Senator to suppress this evil. Let them use every means in their power to prevent the propagation of this body and soul destroying traffic.
