The primary definition of the term ‘vice’ is that
it is something ‘immoral’ that shows a ‘weakness’ of character in those who
associate with it.[1]
It is therefore a very broad and subjective concept, because immorality is not
an idea that is fixed but one determined by the accepted standards of an
individual or social group. The general
meaning and significance of vice in the history of consumption therefore
changes depending on the context of the time and place. For example, with tobacco consumption, those who deem it
a vice come to that conclusion via different reasoning. As Snowdon notes, the
history of tobacco opposition is ‘populated by characters who had little in
common beyond their mutual hatred for tobacco.’[2]
In support of his case, he
references the vast spectrum of tobacco opponents, ranging from a
seventeenth-century Persian ruler who
punished smokers by having molten lead poured down their throats, to our
contemporary, less ruthless and more health-conscious movement.[3]
Tobacco consumption is now considered a vice due
to the adverse effect it will have on people’s health, however, for the past five centuries and before
the discovery of solid medical evidence, tobacco opponents had to base their arguments primarily around
moral reasoning.[4]
To analyse the meaning and significance of vice during the last five-hundred
years of tobacco consumption, this discussion will evaluate the origins and actions
of two of the most documented tobacco adversaries: King James I of England and
the anti-tobacco movement during the Third Reich. The argument that Anderson puts forward when
referring to James I, that those who characterise something as a vice are
motivated by more than simple dislike will be used to analyse both cases.[5]
This comparative piece will also consider the sociological theory but forward
by Best: that the significance of morality can change when confronted with
practical issues.[6]
Both of these movements emerged at a time when
not only was there a notable rise in tobacco consumption, but also an evolution in health
discourse. In England, tobacco came into widespread use by the end of the sixteenth-century
due to scientific curiosity and recreational consumption.[7]
Scientific debate largely revolved around the potential that this New World herb had as a
medical treatment, which according to one contemporary led to many hyperbolic arguments
being made to promote it: ‘So no one kinde of remedie can be aptly applied to
all maladies... And yet these tobacco favoritis hold no disease so incurable
but that in some measure it receiveth either cure or ease by this Tabacco.’[8]
These remedial debates were soon joined by anxieties that the substance was being immorally abused for
recreational purposes on a regular basis, with men like Venner fretting that
the practice of pipe-smoking, ‘hath so far bewitched... many of our people as
that they also often-times, take it for wantonnesse and delight wherein they
haue so great a pleasure, as that they desire nothing more then to make
themselues drunken and drowsie with Tobacco.’[9]
Similarly, there was a rise in German cigarette consumption at the beginning of
the twentieth-century due to improved cigarette productivity and a greater
social acceptance of recreational tobacco smoking. Also during 1920s the German
medical community had begun to realise that lung cancer had become one of the
most common causes of death, and while nobody was certain as to the reason
behind this yet, the rise of cigarette consumption was considered to be a
possibility.[10]
The health and moral considerations had clearly changed in three-hundred years.
By the early twentieth-century, the recreational users of tobacco were rarely
referred to as immoral in comparison with those during the early-modern period.
However the effects tobacco had on the body was no longer mentioned in a medicinal
sense, in fact scientists were beginning to take more notice of a disease it caused.
In 1604 King James articulated
his frustrations towards the rise of the tobacco culture in his anonymously
published treatise called A Counterblaste to Tobacco.[11] Anderson
argues that James’ characterisation of tobacco as a vice went beyond simple
dislike; by saying he felt his authority would be undermined by this new
cultural trend.[12]
Indeed in Counterblaste James suggests that if this idle habit becomes
socially entrenched it could severely weaken his kingdom: ‘To take a custome in
anything that cannot bee left againe, is most harmefull to the people of any
land. Mollicies and delicacie were the wracke and overthrow, first of the
Persian, and next of the Romane Empire.’[13]
Anderson shows that James wished to present himself as a divine ruler who was
an ideal representative of God and the nation. However, James felt these New
World discoveries were becoming popular without his endorsement, which
undermined his claim that he spoke for his subjects because many of them had
adopted a habit that he despised.[14]
Ziser feels that the medicinal claims made about tobacco worried James more, pointing out that all the claims that tobacco was
a panacea threatened his ‘fundamental rhetorical self-construction of
king-as-physician’. The king-as-physician belief centres on the idea that
monarchs have a divine remedial ability to cure certain incurable diseases like
scrofula. James wanted to discredit claims that tobacco was some kind of
panacea because he felt it would make his subjects respect royal authority less
due to the fact they would think that one of the monarch’s divine abilities was
now carried out by a widely available herb.[15]
However, when James characterised the consumption as ‘sinnefull’ and
‘harmefull’, he hints that this was caused by pleasure-seekers abusing a
medical substance, ‘Medicine hath that virtue, that it never leath a man in
that state wherein it findeth him: it makes a sicke man whole and a whole man
sicke.’[16]
The medical arguments being used at this time to characterise tobacco as a vice
are in sharp contrast with the type the German scientists used three-hundred
years later, who were not just arguing that tobacco was solely a medical herb
of some potential use but were trying to prove it was deadly.
Proctor shows that the Nazi ideology of Gesundheit
Über Alles was the chief influence on anti-tobacco rhetoric, which
instead of using speculative medical arguments to reinforce moral principles,
combined an ‘earlier moral critique with an increasingly medical critique.’ The
Nazis desired to rule over a productive and reproductive German race who would maintain bodily purity and racial hygiene. This did not only mean that
other races needed to be exterminated but also that in order to serve their nation Germans had a ‘duty to
be healthy.’[17]
The rising cancer epidemic of the 1920s came to be seen as an incurable disease
of modernity, which worried Nazis who saw this as a threat to their Master
Race-building.[18]
Hitler believed tobacco consumption was lethal, saying his reasoning for having
quit smoking was that, ‘So many excellent men have been lost to tobacco
poisoning.’[19]
There were even grounds to believe
that this was true: some German medical research prior to 1933
showed statistical links between lung cancer and smoking.[20]
The Nazis encouraged further scientific research to assert the belief that
tobacco was unhealthy, such as Franz Muller’s 1939 study which concluded that
the “extraordinary rise in tobacco use” was “the single most important cause of
the rising incidence of lung cancer.”[21]
Hitler contributed 100,000 Reich marks to the opening of ‘The Scientific
Institute for the Research into the Hazards of Tobacco’ at the University of
Jena in 1941. At the opening of the institute, the President of the
Reichgesundheitsamt told the head of the institute Karl Astel that 'by carrying
out your plan, you have cleared a way through the undergrowth of objections put
forward by selfish people which will become broader and broader in the future.’[22]
It is clear that there were German anti-tobacconists who wanted to make a firm scientific
case against tobacco in order to make its label as a vice undeniable and to further vindicate their
attempts to eradicate it.
Overall, both James and the Nazis were concerned about the adverse affect
tobacco consumption was having to their ideal notion of society. However, while
James saw tobacco as a new phenomenon threatening his established cultural and
political authority, the Nazis saw it as an obstacle to their utopian version
of Germany, made up of a pure German body politic.
In both cases, these anti-tobacconists tried to
lower tobacco consumption by controlling its availability and presenting
arguments against it. While Stuart-era opponents did try to condemn tobacco in
writings it is clear that their arguments against it were more abstract, based
primarily on moral assertions which were accompanied by speculative medical
reasoning. It is also clear that in the days before widespread literacy and media,
their arguments were not going to influence the majority of the people.
Therefore arguments made by James and other tobacco opponents were primarily
used to vindicate attempts to limit and control the amount of tobacco available
for consumption. In 1604 James tried to make the herb virtually unattainable
for the majority of the population by raising the import duty 4000% to 6s 8d
per pound. However it became clear that widespread smuggling was sustaining
levels of tobacco consumption meaning the government was missing out on a
substantial amount of tax revenue due to an ineffective stance against vice. As
a result the duty was lowered to 1s per pound in 1608.[23]
By the end of his reign, James had monopolised the trade and production of tobacco-pipes
and tobacco within the commonwealth, while at the same time he had restrained
the cultivation of British tobacco and forbidden foreign imports.[24]
[25]
[26]
This not only provided the government with more revenue from the tobacco tax
and trade, but also ensured more control over tobacco’s availability in a hope
of lessening people’s desire. By contrast,
the German tobacco industry remained largely autonomous under Nazism and while
the Nazis did try to restrain the ability to smoke by raising taxes, limiting
rations and forbidding smoking in certain public places, their main strategy
was to decrease the desire to smoke.[27]
They tried to do this by restricting the distribution and content of tobacco
adverts in 1941 in order to give it a less exotic image.[28]
The Nazis also tried to discourage people away from smoking by including it in
their health education programmes and by setting up centres to help people
overcome their addiction.[29]
As Figures 1 and 2 show, the notion that tobacco was harmful not only to one’s
health but also to the ideals of a pure German race was not only an idea
promoted by the Nazi party but also by independent German anti-tobacco advocates
like Reine Luft.
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The German anti-tobacco movement felt that
controlling tobacco availability would do little to deter people’s desire to
smoke. Unlike James, they
felt their medical and moral arguments carried enough weight to discourage the habit. This
was primarily due to its scientific reasoning, its presence in the media
and the fact the rival discourse had been sufficiently hindered. This suggests
that the main target for vice control had shifted from the supply to the
demand. This is due to the fact that opponents to the vice had realised that
decreasing supply would only breed resentment and incidences of illegality in a
consumer public which still craved
it.
Indeed, eventually both the Stuart dynasty and the German anti-tobacconists had to accept the
limitations of their efforts to control consumer consciousness. Both James I
and Charles I reluctantly admitted to the necessity of supporting the Virginian
tobacco trade in order to maintain a major source of revenue and trade goods
for their fragile but expanding empire.[32]
[33]
Charles soon realised that he could not control his subjects’ desire for
tobacco by limiting the supply to only Virginian tobacco, stating he had to
‘give way to the infirmitie of Our Subjects for the present, by the allowing
the importation of some small quantity of Spanish and foreine Tobacco.’[34]
The Nazi party also realised that attacking the supply and demand too severely
would hurt their tax revenue and the morale of many German people, which were
both essential to their war effort. They therefore had to restrain the
militancy and outreach of the anti-tobacco movement and tell them to pursue a
more pragmatic public campaign aimed at women and the young, who were seen as
the most vulnerable social groups to tobacco consumption.[35]
Both of these movements arose due to the fact
that they saw something in tobacco that threatened their moral impulses. What
spurred them into open opposition was the concern that tobacco’s extensive
presence in society was actually leading it away from their moral ideals.
However in both cases, the fact tobacco remained in popular demand despite the
opposition of authoritarian rule and medical science meant that these movements
had to limit their ambitions in order to avoid some severe social and economic consequences.
The use of discourses centred around vice helped both of these movements to launch
concentrated attacks on tobacco consumption. However it is evident that these
discourses would not be enough to confront the realities of consumption,
primarily due to the fact these discourses did not garner the support of the
majority of consumers.
[2] C. Snowdon,
Velvet Glove, Iron Fist: A History of
anti-smoking (London, 2009), p.9.
[3] Ibid., pp.6-9.
[4] Ibid., p.7.
[5] S.L. Anderson,
'A Matter of Authority: James I and the Tobacco War', Comitatus: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 29 (1998),
p.136.
[6] J. Best,
'Economic Interests and the Vindication of Deviance: Tobacco in Seventeenth
Century Europe', The Sociological
Quarterly 20 (1979), pp.171-172.
[7] Anderson,
‘Matter of Authority’, p.136.
[8] Philaretes,
quoted in Charlton, A., 'Tobacco or health 1602: an Elizabethan doctor speaks',
Health Education Research 20 (2005), p.104.
[9] Tobias
Venner, quoted in Pollard, T., ‘The Perils and Pleasures of Smoking in Early
Modern England’, in S.L. Gilman and X. Zhou (eds), Smoke: A Global History of Smoking (London, 2004), pp.38-45.
[10] R.N. Proctor,
The Nazi War on Cancer (New Jersey,
1999), pp.180-182.
[11] King
James I of England and Ireland, A
Counterblaste to Tobacco (1604),
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Counterblaste_to_Tobacco [accessed 11 November
2011]
[12]
Anderson, ‘Matter of Authority’, pp.159-160.
[13] King
James I of England and Ireland, A
Counterblaste to Tobacco (1604),
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Counterblaste_to_Tobacco [accessed 11 November
2011]
[14]
Anderson, ‘Matter of Authority’, pp.159-160.
[15] M. Ziser,
'Sovereign Remedies: Natural Authority and the "Counterblaste to
Tobacco"’, The William and Mary
Quarterly 62 (2005), pp.735-738.
[16] King
James I of England and Ireland, A
Counterblaste to Tobacco (1604), http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Counterblaste_to_Tobacco
[accessed 11 November 2011]
[17]
Proctor, Nazi Cancer, p.22.
[18] Ibid., pp.8-11.
[19] Adolf
Hitler, quoted in Ibid., p.173.
[20] Ibid., pp.183-184.
[21] Franz
Muller, quoted in Proctor, R.N., ‘The anti-tobacco campaign of the Nazis: a
little known aspect of public health in Germany, 1933–45’ (December 1996), BMJ (1996),
http://www.bmj.com/content/313/7070/1450.full [accessed 11 November 2011]
[22] Hans
Reiter, quoted in Zimmermann, S., Egger, M., and Hossfeld, U., ‘Commentary:
Pioneering research into smoking and health in Nazi Germany- The
‘Wissenschaftliches Institut zur Erforschung der Tabakgefahren’ in Jena’, International Journal of Epidemiology 30
(2001), p.35.
[23] Best, J., 'Economic Interests and the
Vindication of Deviance: Tobacco in Seventeenth Century Europe', The Sociological Quarterly 20 (1979),
p.174.
[24] King
James I of England and Ireland, An
abstract of some branches of his Maiesties late Charter, granted to the Tobacco-Pipe
makers of Westminster; declaring his Maiesties pleasure touching that
Manufacture, and also all persons whom it may concerne (1619),
http://eebo.chadwyck.com.eresources.shef.ac.uk/search/full_rec?SOURCE=pgimages.cfg&ACTION=ByID&ID=V28479
[accessed 11 November 2011]
[25] King James I of England and Ireland, A Proclamation to restraine the planting of
Tobacco in England and Wales (1619),
http://eebo.chadwyck.com.eresources.shef.ac.uk/search/full_rec?SOURCE=pgimages.cfg&ACTION=ByID&ID=V23832
[accessed 11 November 2011]
[26] King
James I of England and Ireland, A
Proclamation for the utter prohibiting the importation and use of all Tobacco,
which is not of the proper growth of the Colonies of Virginia and the Summer
Islands, or one of them (1625), http://eebo.chadwyck.com.eresources.shef.ac.uk/search/full_rec?SOURCE=pgthumbs.cfg&ACTION=ByID&ID=99892488&FILE=../session/1321246922_9868&SEARCHSCREEN=CITATIONS&SEARCHCONFIG=var_spell.cfg&DISPLAY=AUTHOR
[accessed 11 November 2011]
[27]
Proctor, Nazi Cancer, p.203,
pp.238-243.
[28] Ibid., pp.204-6.
[29] Ibid., pp.198-202.
[30] Proctor,
R.N., ‘The anti-tobacco campaign of the Nazis: a little known aspect of public
health in Germany, 1933–45’ (December 1996), BMJ (1996), http://www.bmj.com/content/313/7070/1450.full [accessed
11 November 2011]
[31]
Proctor, Nazi Cancer, p.121.
[32] King
James I of England and Ireland, A
Proclamation to restraine the planting of Tobacco in England and Wales
(1619), http://eebo.chadwyck.com.eresources.shef.ac.uk/search/full_rec?SOURCE=pgimages.cfg&ACTION=ByID&ID=V23832
[accessed 11 November 2011]
[33] King
Charles I of England and Ireland, A
Proclamation concerning Tobacco (1638),
http://eebo.chadwyck.com.eresources.shef.ac.uk/search/full_rec?SOURCE=pgthumbs.cfg&ACTION=ByID&ID=99892700&FILE=../session/1321240128_24021&SEARCHSCREEN=CITATIONS&SEARCHCONFIG=var_spell.cfg&DISPLAY=AUTHOR
[accessed 11 November 2011]
[34] King
Charles I of England and Ireland, A
Proclamation touching Tobacco (1625), http://eebo.chadwyck.com.eresources.shef.ac.uk/search/full_rec?SOURCE=pgimages.cfg&ACTION=ByID&ID=V28556
[accessed 11 November 2011]
[35] Bachinger,
E., McKee, M., and Gilmore, A., 'Tobacco policies in Nazi Germany: Not as
simple as it seems', Public Health
122 (2008), pp.497-505.
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