A History of America in Cigar Consumption

[DrDubzz]

Just got this from the economist, haven't really even read it yet

http://www.economist.com/daily/news/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15581140

read it, it's just a blurb and a graph, but interesting

[JE3146]

The figures prior to 1920 are the most astonishing. Average per adult male.. over 250 a year!?

[DrDubzz]

The figures prior to 1920 are the most astonishing. Average per adult male.. over 250 a year!?

That's why everything came in 50 and 100 cabs, it had to! :ss

[Neuromancer]

Hmmm...when Kennedy put the embargo in effect, he'd just picked up about 50 boxes of the CC's he liked...no way he had time to smoke them all...wonder what happened to them...just think of it...somewhere out there today there may be a hugh stash of pre-embargo CC's that are almost 50 years old...nah, Sargent Shriver probably smoked 'em...;)

[CheapHumidors]

Cool article bro thanks!

[The Poet]

The figures prior to 1920 are the most astonishing. Average per adult male.. over 250 a year!?

That's why they didn't sell them by the box, but rather by the barrel. :D

It was NOT the Anti-Smoking Lobby that killed the dominance of cigars in this country, it was the development and marketing of the cigarette.

[ucla695]

Man, the more I hear about JFK making sure his humi was stocked before he expanded the embargo, the more my blood boils that we still have to deal with his crap....

[The Poet]

Rank has its privilege, no matter how rank.

[ucla695]

Rank has its privilege, no matter how rank.

So true!

[SmokeyJoe]

Hmmm...when Kennedy put the embargo in effect, he'd just picked up about 50 boxes of the CC's he liked...no way he had time to smoke them all...wonder what happened to them...just think of it...somewhere out there today there may be a hugh stash of pre-embargo CC's that are almost 50 years old...nah, Sargent Shriver probably smoked 'em...;)

Marvin Shanken bought them at Auction, April 23, 1996

http://www.cigaraficionado.com/Cigar/CA_Archives/CA_Show_Article/0,2322,131,00.html

Google is your friend! :ss

[qwerty1500]

Marvin Shanken bought them at Auction, April 23, 1996

http://www.cigaraficionado.com/Cigar/CA_Archives/CA_Show_Article/0,2322,131,00.html

Google is your friend! :ss

Thanks. It solves the mystery about what happened to JFK's humidor. Unless I missed it, the article didn't say anything about the cigars. I have often wondered what became of them.

[nater]

Amazing, 250 a year plus on average...

[M1903A1]

Thanks. It solves the mystery about what happened to JFK's humidor. Unless I missed it, the article didn't say anything about the cigars. I have often wondered what became of them.

I remember seeing a humidor (think there were two?) in the auction catalog. If this is the same as the one I remember, it was a glass-top desktop stocked with a handful of Perfecto Garcia "Ensign" cigars (not exactly pre-embargo H. Upmanns) and a book of paper matches.

And what's so odd about 250 cigars in a year? That's not even one a day, on average.

[M1903A1]

An additional thought about the 250+ cigars a year figure...they speak of "large cigars" in reference to the graph. But, I think they're applying modern standards/prejudices to period data.

From what I've seen (both in period photos and surviving examples), your average-market cigar back around 1915-20 wasn't big by anyone's standards...it wasn't a robusto, let alone a Churchill or DC. It was something more like a petit corona or minutos size...think Parti Shorts or Sig IIs. Average people back then didn't smoke cigars as a hobby, it was just something you did...and Joe Average on the farm or the production line at Ford wasn't gonna drop twenty-five or fifty cents every day for a big perfecto or double corona to smoke after dinner. (By modern standards, that would be like smoking a big Opus X every night!) He'd have bought a box or two of Harvesters, El Productos or some regional brand in a corona, PC or smaller size. And as many of us know, even at a rate of only one a day it's not hard to burn through a lot of those in a year.

[Cigary]

Cool article. I can remember in the 60's thru the 70's that I was smoking at least 200 per year and then tapered off from the mid 70's to the mid 90's. That graph is really something to see as I would have thought back in the first of the century that cigar smoking wasn't all that prevalent.

[Razorhog]

Very interesting!

[M1903A1]

That graph is really something to see as I would have thought back in the first of the century that cigar smoking wasn't all that prevalent.

Au contraire! It was once very prevalent.

From what I've read cigars did not seriously begin to be superseded by cigarettes (in the US at least) until after large numbers of American men were introduced to them in the trenches of World War I.

[Neuromancer]

Au contraire! It was once very prevalent.

From what I've read cigars did not seriously begin to be superseded by cigarettes (in the US at least) until after large numbers of American men were introduced to them in the trenches of World War I.

The switch from cigars to cigarettes came primarily with the invention of the automatic cigarette rolling machines which made it possible to provide them in mass quantities and at cheaper prices, somewhere around the turn of the 19th to the 20th century...

[Tredegar]

I agree with the size of cigars being smaller a century ago. If you look at almost any picture of guys smoking cigars from then, they are almost all smaller ring gauges. Also, I have seen a prevalence of smaller ring gauge perfectos that people were smoking. The advent of cigarettes did lower cigar consumption especially when you think about how many people were also employed in factories and didn't have time to smoke a cigar but did have time for a quick cigarette.

[shilala]

Cigars used to be a huge part of daily life here, especially around the cities.
They were used largely in advertising and politicking.
In days before tv, if someone wanted your attention to try to sell you something, they'd have a few boxes of cigars and lay down their pitch while you were smoking the cigar they just gave you. Life was at a much slower pace and folks hung out on the street a lot. Anyone running for any kind of office wouldn't think of going out stumping without a large supply of smokes. They had dress boxes made up with their name and campaign slogans and singles were given out widely.
A large part of the cigars were perfecto candelas.
There are all sorts of cigar art sites and tons of reading available on the internet about this stuff. It's fun reading. :tu

[tobii3]

think about this....

1940:- Adult Americans smoke 2,558 cigarettes per capita a year, nearly twice the consumption of 1930.

LINK (http://www.cigarettes-below-cost.com/history_of_cigarettes.html)

[Footbag]

Very interesting, but I found two things a bit odd...
First, they referred to Pierre Salinger as a lackey. He was a press secretary and JFK's campaign manager. Not what I'd call a a lackey.
Also, they refer to 1994 as being the beginning of the dot com bubble. Bubbles don't really have a beginning. It should be referred to as the boom, and if they chose to refer to the bubble, they should point to its peak. The beginning of the bubble would be difficult to nail down.
These are two things the Economist should get right, and not be loose with the facts.

[ProBe]

Thanks for the article.

[M1903A1]

Very interesting, but I found two things a bit odd...
First, they referred to Pierre Salinger as a lackey. He was a press secretary and JFK's campaign manager. Not what I'd call a a lackey.
Also, they refer to 1994 as being the beginning of the dot com bubble. Bubbles don't really have a beginning. It should be referred to as the boom, and if they chose to refer to the bubble, they should point to its peak. The beginning of the bubble would be difficult to nail down.
These are two things the Economist should get right, and not be loose with the facts.

Were I asked, I would have pegged the start of the dot-com bubble to 1995, when the Web was first opened up to public use and people started coming up with all kinds of gee-whiz, way-out-there ideas to profit off the new technology, which ultimately snowballed into the Bubble.

And while Salinger was Kennedy's press secretary, on that awful February day in 1962 he was nothing but a tool that JFK used for his own benefit, without telling any of his cigar-smoking friends what he was about to do. So at that moment, I'd say he was indeed a lackey.

[SmokeyJoe]

Marvin Shanken bought them at Auction, April 23, 1996

http://www.cigaraficionado.com/Cigar/CA_Archives/CA_Show_Article/0,2322,131,00.html

Google is your friend! :ss

Another auction in 2005 for some of his cigars...

http://www.cigarenvy.com/2005/12/13/president-kennedys-cigars-and-other-memorabilia-on-auction/