Cigarette Wars

This is a meticulously researched, engagingly written history of the first anti-cigarette movement, dating from the Victorian Age to the Great Depression, when cigarettes were both legally restricted and socially stigmatized in America. Progressive reformers and religious fundamentalists came together to curb smoking, but their efforts collapsed during the First World War, when millions of soldiers took up the habit and cigarettes began to be associated with freedom and modernity. Cassandra Tate compellingly shows how supporters of the early anti-cigarette movement articulated virtually every issue that is still being debated about smoking today; theirs was not a failure of determination, she argues in these pages, but of timing.