A Vote for Cancer: Tobacco Advertising and Presidential Elections

Excerpted from The Center for the Study of Tobacco and Society’s full online exhibit on political ads and tobacco.

Tobacco was America’s first cash crop and a mainstay of the US economy for 300 years. So it’s no surprise that manufacturers of cigars, chewing tobacco, and cigarettes have had a presence in presidential and other electoral campaigns since the mid-19th century. This exhibition features examples of tobacco advertisements and promotional artifacts from Presidential election campaigns.

“By the election of 1860, parades, banners and music were part of the political landscape, as were newspapers that openly supported political parties. Advances in printing technology by the mid-19th century allowed Americans to express their political sympathies through their choice of cigars and stationery. Cigar box labels in 1860 included images of Republican presidential candidate Abraham Lincoln and his democratic opponent, Stephen A. Douglas. For those who might have heard of ‘Honest Old Abe’ and the ‘Little Giant’ but had never seen their likenesses in print, the cigar box label introduced the candidates’ faces to the public.” (Source:” “Campaigning for President” by Julie Miller, Barbara Bair and Michelle Krowl, LCM [Library of Congress Magazine], January/February 2017.)

Nearly a century later in the 1952 Presidential election campaign, both major political parties gave away packs of cigarettes with the respective likenesses of Republican incumbent Dwight Eisenhower and Democratic challenger Adlai Stevenson.

Presidential election booklets published by Liggett & Myers Tobacco Company appeared in the 1890s:

“The political information given [in this] book [Political Information for 1896] is published in the hope that it may prove of interest and service to all citizens, as well as to those who desire to become citizens, and our statements related to Star tobacco and also our two brands of cigarette Sweet Moments and Crimps [–] presented for the information of tobacco chewers who have not yet used Star, and to cigarette smokers using other than the above-named brands…”

The company would publish these booklets for the next 30 years. In the presidential election campaigns of 1960 and 1964, Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corporation distributed voting information booklets featuring the Kool cigarette cartoon mascot Willie the Penguin and the slogan, “In either case smoke KOOL”

The first Presidential campaign buttons appeared in 1896 – promoting Republican William McKinley and Democrat William Jennings Bryan — and were given away by Liggett & Myers Tobacco Company to promote its Sweet Caporals cigarettes. By the mid-1900s, cigarette advertisers would distribute whimsical presidential campaign buttons featuring advertising icons such as Philip Morris’s bellhop Little Johnny and Brown and Williamson’s Willie the Penguin. The button gimmick culminated in RJ Reynolds Tobacco Company’s nationwide “Vote for Joe” advertising campaign in 1992 for its cartoon character Joe Camel.

Toward the close of the 20th century, the combination of restrictions on cigarette advertising and the approval of political action committees by Congress enabled cigarette makers to donate directly to Presidential candidates and lessened the need for cigarette product advertising.