Walkabout: The Devil’s Weed, Part 4

Read Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 of this story.

The great thing about the Industrial Revolution that catapulted the 19th century into prosperity, according to pundits of the day, was that goods that used to be manufactured by hand could now be manufactured by machines.

Where it once took a craftsman a lot of time to make anything – from furniture to clothing, to cigars, it now took much less time aided by machines. It also took far less skill. Anyone could be taught to make just about anything in a factory.

This enabled consumer goods to be within reach of almost anyone, giving rise to the great consumer society we have today. Unfortunately, there is a great human toll in this bargain, and that toll fell on the millions of factory workers who made all of the wonderful things everyone wanted so much.

Until the labor movement and social reformers forced employers to improve conditions and wages, most factories were horrible places to work. Long hours, poor, and often dangerous working conditions, and inadequate pay were the norm for millions of workers.

Men, women and children were forced into these conditions, or starve, and that’s just in the United States. The tobacco industry was certainly not the worst kind of factory, but it had its own particular brand of hell.

For the last three episodes of this story, we’ve been looking at the kinds of factories and production facilities that existed in the over 900 cigar factories in Brooklyn, in the latter part of the 19th century.

These factories ranged from multi-storied factory buildings, to small storefronts, to a table in a filthy tenement. All of them had one thing in common; they produced cigars, the most popular tobacco product in America at the time.

A good cigar, I mean a really good cigar, was made from choice tobacco from Cuba, Sumatra or the Philippines. The tobacco was picked at the peak of its growth, and the leaves were tried and cured slowly, so that the tobacco leaf had the desired flavor and texture.

When it reached the hands of a master cigar roller, it was moistened, cut to remove the woody stem, and rolled by hand with the aid of a wooden mold. The roller knew the correct amount of chopped and blended filler tobacco to use, and how to roll the leaf around that so that the cigar had the correct shape, size and composition.

A good cigar roller could churn out a hundred such perfect cigars a day, and was paid pretty well. Unfortunately, these elite rollers did not represent the bulk of the industry, and their product did not represent the majority of the cigars of the day.

By the 1880s, many changes had come to the cigar industry. They had gotten unionized, for one, and had forced manufacturers to raise wages and slightly improve working conditions. But the unions only represented the men, not the women who worked in the large factories.

Women were prized in the cigar rolling business for their manual dexterity and their ability to pack and roll a cigar with more ease then many men, having in general, smaller hands. But they were still exploited for being women.

They were expected to have the same quotas as men, but were paid only a third of the wage of a man. Where a man might make $10 a week, a woman doing the same job would make $7. Black people, of course, made even less.

If the latter groups benefited from unionization, it was a by-product; they were not included in the membership. Consequently, many large cigar factories employed a lot of women and girls between 12 and 16 as rollers.

This was the highest paid, most skilled job, and employing women kept costs down. Men rolled as well, but also did other jobs, such as hauling, grading, mixing, flavoring and chopping the tobacco, as well as boxing, packing and shipping.

Children were often employed to strip the leaves, taking the hard stem out of the middle. Then the tobacco had to be soaked just enough to be malleable, but not rot. It wasn’t easy.

As grueling as work in a large factory could be, it was paradise compared to the tenement factories, where cigar production was a family affair. Like the piecework garment sweatshops, here people lived and produced cigars in their small, dimly lit, no ventilation tenement flats.

Often, the owner of the building was in the tobacco business himself, renting out to immigrant tenants who never seemed to be able to produce enough product to stay out of debt.

Most of these people were called “Bohemians,” and came from Eastern Europe, in what is now the Czech Republic. They were dirt poor peasants who spoke no English, had no education or prospects of bettering themselves. But they could make cigars.

The Bohemians made poorer quality cigars which were wholesaled to distributers who sold them all over the country. There were no standards of sanitation or very much quality here.

The tobacco was domestic and not of a higher grade, and the cigars themselves were hastily thrown together. These were not fine Cuban-made cigars. Often, the distributers sold them without tax stamps, making them bootleg product, and cheating the government out of revenue.

The Bohemians were not in the best of health or able to be very clean, and many a cheap cigar smoker was taking his life in his hands, as far as communicable diseases were concerned. The legit, tax paying companies were not happy with these tenement factories, and did their best to kill the industry.

Many of Manhattan’s tenement workers just crossed the river to Brooklyn, and set up shop there. There were certainly enough tenements here to house them, and you only needed some tobacco and a table to set up shop.

Social reformers in Victorian society took up the factory worker’s cause, seeking to pass laws to force factory owners to improve conditions and wages, as well as improve the lives of working children. Most reformers wanted to banish children from the workplace all together, but that would not happen for some time.

They faced an uphill battle in a society that felt that each man’s business was his own, and shouldn’t be interfered with. That society also didn’t much care about the working conditions of the poor.

But gradually laws were passed, forcing improvements in factories in general, including one that forbade the employment of children under twelve.

The tobacco industry was a cash cow for the government, in terms of taxes. In 1880, tobacco tax accounted for one-third of Federal revenue. 50% of the collections came from smoking and chewing tobacco, 40% from cigars and cheroots, 8% from snuff and less than 2% from cigarettes. (cigarhistory.info)

By this time, there were hundreds of brands of cigars, ranging from cheap to high grade Cubans. The latter were even then in a class by themselves, and rare, due to growing problems in Cuba, and later, war.

The familiar cardboard cigar boxes, and metal tins were part of a large industry of related products that were also making a lot of money for the industry.

Cigar boxes were a great way to pack, store and market cigars, but they were really developed so that the tax stamps could be easily affixed to them. These paper stamps sealed the boxes, and also indicated that all of the federal, state and local taxes had been paid.

Cigar boxes and tins were also among the first successful means of mass marketing advertising, which was also becoming a huge industry. Even the classic American cigar store Indian was a part of that marketing. They were made by cigar manufacturers to advertise to those who couldn’t read, or speak English, that cigars were sold at the stores they were in front of.

By the very late 1880s, cigars began to slowly lose their appeal due to a much smaller and cheaper tobacco product, the cigarette. Cigarette production boomed when machines that could roll them took over the industry.

Machines that could roll cigars also were invented. In 1903, the New York Herald published a long article hailing the cigar machine. It was in their financial section, not on the regular news or technology pages.

This machine, the article gushed, would revolutionize the cigar industry. The Carpenter Cigar Machine could cut factory costs in half. Operated by a girl (who was paid less than a man) “the Carpenter Cigar Machine will make as many cigars in a day as six expert workmen can roll by hand.

The average output in the modern cigar factory is 300 cigars per day per man. The Carpenter machine will make 2,000 cigars per day.” The article was an ad to buy stock in the company. It warned in capital letters that, “The cigar manufacturer of the future MUST USE OUR MACHINE OR GO OUT OF BUSINESS!”

Although this was a lot of hype, it signaled a large change in the business. It effectively put the remaining tenement cigar factories out of business, as did cigarettes. Cigar manufacturing in larger factories became part of the larger manufacture of cut leaf tobacco and cigarette manufacturing facilities.

One by one, the cigar factories in towns and cities across the country closed down. Now cigarettes are marketed, brands are targeted to women and young smokers, and the tobacco industry totally changes.

The industry centralizes behind the large tobacco companies. By World War II, the cigar industry is made up of only several large tobacco conglomerates, and imports from Cuba and a few other places. A few specialized tobacco stores still make their own, but nothing like in the past.

Florida, with its larger Cuban and Dominican population replaces New York as a cigar manufacturing center. The government, which had always made a great deal of money from taxing tobacco, has found an even larger cash cow in cigarettes.

Cigars lose popularity and become a specialized, but much smaller niche market. The age of the cigar has passed.

(The above photo is from cigarhistory.info, the source of most of the information in this series, plus additional info from newspapers and other sources.)

The Devil’s Weed, Part One
The Devil’s Weed, Part Two
The Devil’s Weed, Part Three, the Brooklyn Tobacco Riot