Cigarette Wars: The Triumph of "The Little White Slaver" - Softcover

It is ... a fine study that raises a number of questions on the relative merits of addiction, mass advertising, and cultural assimilatoin and casts a provocative light on a little-known reform effort. Tate has produced a well-researched and very readable book that will interest a large number of American cultural and social historians. (American Historical Review, February 2001)

a compelling work of cultural history. Better than any other scholar to date, she highlights the frenwied atte;pts by various reformers to rid society of what Henry Ford once termed the "little white slaver" through prohibition schemes before and after World War I. (American Historical Review, February 2001)

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.