Until the mid-1960s

Until the mid-1960s, the act of smoking was an everyday part of our daily lives.

Whether at work, mowing the lawn, preparing dinner in the kitchen, or driving the kids to school, it seemed like everywhere you looked, you saw an adult puffing away on a cigarette. For decades, the mass media’s effort to craft generations of smokers was aggressive and ever-present. Magazine advertisements quoted doctors who convinced us that smoking was actually beneficial for your health. Entire radio and television programs were sponsored by brands such as Lucky Strike. At the movies, film stars like Cary Grant and Joan Crawford made smoking look sophisticated and fashionable. Cigarettes and their influence were synonymous with the routines of our daily lives. We were, as one company so aptly exclaimed, a society “alive with pleasure!”

All of that changed in 1966, when the first warning labels about smoking’s risks were slapped onto packs of cigarettes; the following year, the first tobacco control media campaigns hit the airwaves. A group called Action on Smoking and Health filed a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission, arguing under the FCC’s Fairness Doctrine that TV and radio stations had to allow just as much airtime for anti-smoking messages as they did for their tobacco advertisers.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

A few years later, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended that each state earmark money to specifically educate the public on the dangers of smoking (the first statewide anti-tobacco campaign was launched in 1982 in Minnesota). It would prove difficult to take on Big Tobacco, whose pockets seemingly had no bottom, thanks to the influence of political lobbyists at higher levels of government.

Even more difficult is the emergence of characters like Joe Camel, the brainchild of RJ Reynolds Tobacco Co., invented in 1984 for their cigarette brand Camel. Designed to appeal to children, a 1991 study found that Joe Camel was just as familiar to children as the Walt Disney Channel’s logo.

For adults, the Marlboro Man came along in the mid-20th century, following decades of Marlboro cigarettes being marketed to women as slim and flavorful. The image of the rugged cowboy appealed to a man’s masculine nature, and the character became the face of the company for the next several decades.