By Berry Craig
NKyTribune columnist
More than a century before smoking was banned in many public places in Kentucky, the Columbus Dispatch ran a front-page story trashing tobacco.
“One man has no more right to void his tobacco smoke into the face of another man than he has to void his saliva,” the un-bylined story said.
Reprinted from The Round Table magazine, the story maintained that “…the right of the tobacco hater in the street is equal to that of the tobacco lover; to refrain from smoking in public places is not granting concession, but not to refrain is violating a right.
“Upon actual right, without reference to the sanction of custom, a man would be perfectly justifiable in resenting the smoking of the tobacco near him as a personal affront.”
Perched atop tall dirt bluffs hard by the Mississippi River in Hickman County, Columbus has long been on tobacco turf. The town is in the Jackson Purchase, as far west as Kentucky goes. Here, farmers still grow burley, dark-fired and dark air-cured leaf.
No doubt more than a few of editor Robert Summers’ readers and advertisers puffed, dipped and chawed. No matter, he allied the Dispatch with tobacco’s enemies.
In an editor’s note to The Round Table story, Summers wrote that he was glad to see the widely-read New York periodical joining “its voice with telling force against some of the indecencies of modern society.”
In another issue of the Dispatch, he said smoking was a serious health hazard and proposed that nobody younger than 21 should be allowed to light up. (California recently raised the legal smoking age from 18 to 21.) Would be puffers, Summers advised, should first spend six weeks studying medical literature about the dangers of smoking.
Summers’ anti-tobacco opinions might have made him a heretic in post-Civil War western Kentucky, or anyplace else in the state that produced close to 99 million pounds of the leaf in 1870, according to Lewis and Richard Collins’ old History of Kentucky. (Hickman County farmers harvested 664,165 pounds.)
Summers was hardly the first person to take tobacco to task in print.
In 1604, King James I of Great Britain condemned smoking as hellish. In his famous pamphlet, A Counterblaste to Tobacco, the monarch maligned smoking as “a custome lothsome to the eye, hatefull to the Nose, harmefull to the braine, dangerous to the Lungs, and in the blacke stinking fume thereof, neerest resembling the horrible Stigian smoke of the pit that is bottomelesse.”
The anonymous author of the Round Table story opined that “the street is not a private smoking room.” The scribe challenged, “Why may not a man appear on Broadway with a stick strapped horizontally across his back, or an open package of assafoedita in his pocket, or a polecat in his arms, or his clothes dripping with kerosene oil, with as much right as he may smoke there?
“Because it is not customary to carry assafoedita in the pocket, nobody thinks about it; if it only were the custom, we should hear a fearful cry from the tobacco smokers themselves. If a man treads upon another’s foot, he apologizes; but he will carelessly void offensive smoke into his very throat and never think that he does anything reprehensible.”
James C. Klotter and Lowell H. Harrison cited the Dispatch’s anti-tobacco editorializing in A New History of Kentucky.
“Nearly a century later, in 1965, the U.S. surgeon general reported tobacco’s hazardous effects on health,” the authors wrote. “For all of the nineteenth century and much of the twentieth, however, few people seriously challenged tobacco’s place in American life.”
That went double in the Bluegrass State.
Berry Craig of Mayfield is a professor emeritus of history from West Kentucky Community and Technical College in Paducah and the author of five books on Kentucky history, including True Tales of Old-Time Kentucky Politics: Bombast, Bourbon and Burgoo and Kentucky Confederates: Secession, Civil War, and the Jackson Purchase. Reach him at bcraig8960@gmail.com