During the mid-20th century the image of the cigar was a rather tacky one. Its high class image flourished in the First Gilded Age, 1865-1917, and again in the Second Gilded Age, approximately 1975 to the present day.
In the period when I grew up, the cigar did not have the classy image that it does today. In my mind, it was generally associated with short, pushy, balding types with New York accents, not more sophisticated people. My father, who was a heavy smoker [it killed him before his 62nd birthday], sometimes deviated from his cancer sticks to smoke a pipe, but at no time during my lifetime [which started in 1950, when dinosaurs were still wandering the hills of Irvine] did I ever see him touch a cigar.
It was different in an earlier age. The cigarette came into European consciousness with the Crimean War, 1854-56 [and note its clearly French name]. In America, for many years afterwards, men who smoked cigarettes were considered beta males, or what we now called ‘soy boys’, at best. The cigar smokers of the day did not reserve their ‘stink bombs’ for special occasions, as people do now. Today, the infrequency of these occasions means that most users don’t get addicted. But during the First Gilded Age, people [usually men] could get addicted to them as one might get addicted to cigarettes in the 20th and 21st centuries. J. P. Morgan, the financier who ran the country before the 1913 Federal Reserve Act, was one of these.
World War I changed this. Though it was four years long, for Americans it was short but quite intense. In fact, it was the shortest war in our history, only 19 months from April 1917 to November 1918; and we didn’t have any troops on the ground until the spring of 1918. These troops were supported by gifts of, among other things, cigarettes. After this it could hardly be said that people who smoked cigarettes were ‘soy boys’. For most of the rest of the century, cigarette smoke was simply the odor of human society, and to dislike it [and I did] was misanthropic. Indeed, on the occasions in the 1970s when I encountered cannabis smoke, I thought it less bad than tobacco smoke!
It was not the Surgeon General’s report of 1964, but the one of 1986 where it was first suggested that secondhand smoke was dangerous to children and others that really began the turning of the tide. In 1964, the dangers of secondhand smoke had not been recognized. I was in high school at that time, and we had a presentation on the dangers of smoking, and one of the other students asked, “My parents smoke in the house all the time. Should I worry about this?” and the answer was, “No, that’s not a problem for you.” But starting in 1986, they realized it was a problem. That is when the smoking of tobacco began to be restricted, gradually, to well-ventilated outdoor spaces not too close to the doors of establishments. [I’d add that these places should be close to trash cans, so that smokers don’t drop their butts any old place, as they still tend to do. It makes cigarette smokers even more unpopular when they do that.]
At this time, the cigar suddenly returned to high class status. Men in groups, especially Republicans, would smoke cigars as part of an event. Not all day, though. They were not going to repeat the mistakes of J. P. Morgan. Shall we blame Gen X for this one? ‘Cigar lounges’ were opened, and they frequently banned cigarettes as too low class. The glossy magazine, Cigar Aficionado, appeared in 1992, owned by the same firm that puts out Wine Spectator and Whisky Advocate.
What was the thing in common between the two ages when the cigar was prestigious? They were the First Gilded Age and the Second Gilded Age, both periods of high and increasing income inequality. What separated them, the period when a lot of my attitudes were formed, was the Great Compression of 1929-79. During this period, the New Deal and its heritage dominated American public policy, private sector labor unions were strong, and more households were able to function without a second income more than any time before or since. Also, at least before the Sexual Revolution finally hit hard in 1965, there was a period when the average age of marriage [at least for males] was earlier than it had been before or has been since. In the early days of rock, lyrics on the theme of ‘We’re so young – the law won’t let us get married – how sad’ were not uncommon. The Beach Boys, as late as 1966, sang such a lyric in the song ‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice’. Not since then, though! The idea of such a lyric since about 1970 would bring forth only laughter.
Another feature of both Gilded Ages was heavy foreign immigration from Europe [with a smaller contribution from East Asia] in the first Gilded Age, from Latin America, South and East Asia, and even voluntarily from Africa and the Caribbean. [The new Africans are quite different culturally from the old African Americans. The new ones are likely to be descended from the people who sold us the ancestors of the old African Americans more than two hundred years ago.] But in 1924, immigration laws were tightened drastically and remained fairly tight for 41 years afterward. So in the 1950s children and grandchildren of immigrants greatly outnumbered actual immigrants. People knew if they were ‘Irish’ or ‘Italian’, but they were not like the Irish of Ireland or the Italians of Italy. And, if they migrated to Southern California or the Sunbelt, they became ‘Anglos’, much to the disgust of the more chauvinistic Irish-Americans! [Interestingly enough, Canada never closed the door during that period. That is one of the leading distinguishing features by which it is not the same as the United States.]
The door was never completely closed. We had ‘domestics’ – a thing that was rare during the Great Compression, and even among upper middle class people I was made fun of, or worse, because of it – and they were usually first-generation immigrants from Europe, especially Germany. Germany, of course, had lost the war, and so for two or three decades German domestics could be had at a reasonable wage. I don’t think today you could get a German cheap for any purpose!
Anyhow, if you were to teleport young people of today back to around 1900, they might find themselves oddly at home. They might find the technology more ‘retro’ than they would like, but they might be impressed at the ingenuity of their ancestors. But a lot of other things would be familiar. Vast income inequality! The rich completely out of hand! Swarthy immigrants speaking foreign tongues everywhere! Not very many people able to afford a house! But land them in about 1955, and the actual culture of the Great Compression might be mystifying to them. Income inequality was actually decreasing. There were plenty of foreign last names, but they were mostly second or third generation. Class consciousness was low, mostly because people wouldn’t admit that classes still existed; they admitted to race, though, but all white people were supposed to have a similar culture. [They didn’t – the ‘greaser’ culture and the ‘surfer’ culture were at some odds.] Hardly a cigar to be seen, but cigarette smoke choking them everywhere! And if they should land in Southern California, they would be shocked to discover that ‘non-Hispanic whites’ or ‘Anglos’ were three-fourths of the population, not three-eighths as we know today.
The First Gilded Age was weakened by Progressivism in the 1910s but finally was brought down by the Depression, which was a deflation in which the value of money compared to goods actually increased. However, hardly anybody could get a job and take advantage of this. The Great Compression was brought down by the Great Inflation, which in two major waves in 1974 and 1979 drove the value of the dollar down drastically. I remember the cover price of the three major news magazines of the day [and yes, they still had actual news in them] went from 25 cents to $2 in a rather short space of time. Keynesianism was discredited, and the ideas of Milton Friedman began to dominate economic policy. It was under Carter that the airlines and the trucking industry were deregulated, and it was Carter who appointed Paul Volcker to the key position of Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board.
By 1983 we had survived the Great Interest Rate Spike of 1981, the economy was beginning to recover, and inflation was partly under control. But it was controlled best in areas of the economy where technology or the importing of goods could keep prices down. The worker of the 1980s, as opposed to the decade before, could still afford his Qiana shirts [an example that Tom Wolfe pointed out in his famous 1976 essay, “The Me Decade“], his trailerable boat, and his vacations to the Caribbean, but he was much less likely to afford health care, tuition, or child care for his children, or his own house. And this disparity has only increased since then. [The economic stresses of the end of the Cold War, and beyond, are beyond the scope of this essay.] But the Second Gilded Age had begun!
