The rise and fall of America's deadly love affair with the cigarette
[October 01, 2026]
By MIKE STOBBE
NEW YORK (AP) — Cancer stick. Coffin nail. Cowboy killer. Those are
nicknames, through the decades, for the cigarette — the once-glamorous
desideratum of American society that has been tied to tens of millions
of U.S. deaths.
The cigarette is not an invention of the United States. And while
Marlboro is a top-selling international brand, more than 100 countries
make cigarettes. The largest manufacturer is in China.
But U.S. ingenuity drastically altered the global tobacco industry. And
American culture embraced it in the 20th century, making it — for a time
— a symbol of stylish adulthood in U.S. movies and media, and
omnipresent in bars, restaurants, airplanes and even hospitals.
Smoking became “a right of passage for many young people,” and by the
1950s nearly half of U.S. adults smoked, says K. Michael Cummings, a
tobacco history scholar at the Medical University of South Carolina.
“I remember making ashtrays for my parents for Mother’s Day and Father’s
Day gifts,” says Cummings, 73. “I remember giving cartons of cigarettes
as Christmas gifts. I mean, smoking was so common. It was just part of
Americana.”
Early versions of cigarettes can be traced back thousands of years to
the Mayans. But hand-rolling each cigarette was time-consuming and labor
intensive.
That changed in the 1880s, when a Virginia inventor named John Bansack
invented an automated cigarette-rolling machine that could make smokes
50 times faster. Early tobacco magnate James Buchanan Duke invested in
the technology, and used it — along with the development of more
palatable tobacco blends — to build the cigarette business into a major
American industry.
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This Tuesday, July 15, 2014 photo shows the tobacco in cigarettes in
Philadelphia. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke, File)
 Cigarettes were clearly addictive,
and the idea that smoking could kill was long suspected. Automaker
Henry Ford warned against cigarettes in the 1910s, putting out a
brochure in 1914 that called them “little white slavers” and argued
they were habit-forming bad for health, and were associated with bad
morals.
A watershed moment came in 1964 with an authoritative U.S. surgeon
general report that said smoking causes illness and death, helping
to lead the way to warning labels on cigarette packs, bans on
cigarette commercials, and restrictions on where people could light
up.
The dangers of smoking began to sink in to the public consciousness,
though it took decades for smoking rates to plummet to the
historically low levels they're at now. The chain-smoking writer
Kurt Vonnegut Jr., who favored Pall Malls, in 1968 penned that “the
public health authorities never mention the main reason many
Americans have for smoking heavily, which is that smoking is a
fairly sure, fairly honorable form of suicide.”
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