Smoke ’Em If You Got ’Em: The Rise and Fall of the Military Cigarette Ration

by Joel R. Bius

The American military-industrial complex and accompanying culture are most often associated with massive weapons procurement programs and advanced technologies. Images of supersonic bombers, strategic missiles, armor-plated tanks, nuclear submarines, and complex space systems clog our imagination. However, one aspect of the complex is not a weapon or even a machine, but one of the world's most highly engineered consumer the manufactured cigarette. Smoke 'Em If You Got 'Em describes the origins of the often comfortable, yet increasingly controversial relationship among the military, the cigarette industry, and tobaccoland politicians during the twentieth century. After fostering the relationship between soldier and cigarette for more than five decades, the Department of Defense and fiscally minded legislators faced formidable political, cultural, economic, and internal challenges as they fought to unhinge the soldier-cigarette bond they had forged. Smoke 'Em If You Got 'Em is also a study in modern American political economy. Bureaucrats, soldiers, lobbyists, government executives, legislators, litigators, or anti-smoking activists all struggled over far-reaching policy issues involving the cigarette. The soldier-cigarette relationship established by the Army in World War I and broken apart in the mid-1980s underpinned one of the most prolific social, cultural, economic, and healthcare related developments in the twentieth the rise and proliferation of the American manufactured cigarette smoker and the powerful cigarette enterprise supporting them. From 1918 to 1986, the military established a powerful subculture of cigarette-smoking soldiers. The relationship was so rooted that, after the 1964 Surgeon General's Report warned Americans that cigarettes were hazardous to health, a further 22 years were needed to advance military smoking cessation as official policy, and an additional 16 years to sever government subsidies providing soldiers low-cost cigarettes. The role of wars and the military in establishing and entrenching the American cigarette-smoking culture has often gone unrecognized. Using the manufactured cigarette as a vehicle to explore political economy and interactions between the military and American society, Joel R. Bius helps the reader understand this important, yet overlooked aspect of 20th century America.

Genres: History

320 pages, Hardcover

Published November 15, 2018

Reviews

[Susan Miller · Rating 5 out of 5]

I felt SMOKE 'EM IF YOU GOT 'EM was as excellent book on the topic of the military and the integration of cigarette smoking into the life of soldiers from WWI to the present. This book does not just cover this subject. It also covers how cigarettes are produced from grower to seller and the influence that government officials from tobacco growing regions influence policy. The book, in total, is very comprehensive. I found many parallels to the attitude in our coronavirus society about mask wearing to the "arguments" made about smoking. . . ie: patriotic, manly, doubt about health effects, etc. This book is about how government and the military work and how special interest groups effect public policy. The book is well researched with numerous footnotes (in their own section) and an excellent bibliography.

[Evan Þ. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bius writes on tobacco and cigarettes and the US Army, starting with a detailed look at the World Wars and then jumping forward to the move to end smoking in the Army - first to stop including cigarettes with each meal ration, and then to end it more broadly. The first section, about the World Wars, was by far the most interesting to me; the later bureaucratic and political machinations around the anti-smoking campaign felt much more bland.

But, Bius makes his topic interesting - and in this day and age with smoking ostracized, it's an easily-forgotten piece of history which he readily ties in to broader points about morale and expectations of soldiers' comfort in general during the mass mobilization of the World Wars.

[Olivia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting for the first half but gets extremely focused on politics for the second half and becomes a bit of a slog.