By Stuart Mitchner

An open pack of premium cigarettes was thus a centerpiece of Hindenburg advertisements.

—Edward Tenner

Even before I read about those advertisements in Edward Tenner’s new book Why the Hindenburg Had a Smoking Lounge: Essays on Unintended Consequences (American Philosophical Society Press $34.95), my interest in vintage cigarette ads had been stirred by a Broadhurst Theatre Playbill from 1934, three years before May 6, 1937, the day the Hindenburg crashed and burned on landing at Lakehurst N.J. Naval Air Station, killing 35 of the 97 passengers. By specifying the proportion of fatalities, Tenner leaves it up to us to assume that most of the victims were in the smoking lounge at the time (“under 7 million cubic feet of flammable gas”), a possibility underscored by a pointed reference to satirist Bruce McCall’s drawing of a Hindenburg prospectus showing a skeleton in an officer’s uniform asking elegant passengers, “Zigarette?”

The Playbill

Passed down by my parents, who once dreamed of writing Broadway plays together, the Playbill for Men In White, Sidney Kingsley’s drama about doctors, love, abortion, and medical ethics, features three cigarette ads in its 22 pages, the first a two-page spread wherein the “Warner Bros.” star Joan Blondell testifies to the “throat-ease and flavor” of Old Golds, my two-pack-a-day mother’s brand for life. Another two-page spread (“Get a LIFT with a Camel!”) shows two unidentified young women, one frowning (“Tired? Then light a Camel!”); the other smiling, radiant, cigarette in hand. On the back cover an older, fashionably dressed woman is saying, “Frankly, one of the chief reasons why I enjoy Chesterfields is the fact that I don’t get little crumbs of tobacco in my mouth.”

The Unmentionable Consequence

The ancient Lucky Strike sales pitch — “So round, so firm, so fully packed, so free and easy on the draw” — was all about those “little crumbs.” As for Old Golds, I once threw a pack out the car window while my mother was driving me to school, so sure was I that they were killing her. She died (“complications of emphysema”) at 67. Joan Blondell’s husband Dick Powell, the musical comedy pretty boy turned tough private eye and a well-known chain smoker, died of lung cancer at 58. You could think of anyone who shared the same fate as another passenger in the doomed air-ship’s smoking lounge. “Cigarettes may be harmful to your health” advisories remained in the future.

“Unintended Consequences”

Asked for an example of “unintended consequences” by an interviewer in Why the Hindenburg Had a Smoking Lounge, Tenner cites the filter cigarette’s “bridging of health care and consumer behavior,” adding, “Smoking one is just as unhealthy as smoking an unfiltered cigarette because of the way the smoker compensates for lower nicotine by inhaling more deeply.” Tenner calls it “a common theme. People tend to offset the benefits of some safety feature by behaving more dangerously.”

My mother briefly fell for the filter idea before coming home to Old Golds. One ongoing “unintended consequence” I’m dealing with at the moment is the way the cigarette theme has taken over a column that runs on Shakespeare’s birthday, all because of Tenner’s thought-provoking title. While I’ve not been able to identify the brand of “premium cigarettes” featured in the ad, Camels is mentioned in a Hindenburg blog, which is my cue to admit that every time I look at the table on my right I see the battered package of Camels that was in my uncle’s pocket when his B-52 crashed on a training flight in 1944. Of all the personal effects found on the body of my mother’s beloved brother, the memento she saved is a half-smoked pack of cigarettes.

“Mad Men”

Lucky Strike, my brand for 10 years before I bailed out of the smoking lounge at 25, looms large for Jon Hamm’s Don Draper in the HBO series Mad Men. With his agency Sterling Cooper about to lose a goldmine as the Lucky Strike contingent exits the conference room, he calls them back and nails the deal with some inspired poetry on human happiness and the phrase, “It’s Toasted.” As I’ve since discovered, the two-word line Draper comes up with in the early 1960s actually was in use as far back as the 1930s when Lucky Strike was endorsed by stars such as Spencer Tracy and Clark Gable, who played the role of a surgeon in the film version of Men In White.

In Mad Men’s pilot episode, Draper is doing some research in a popular New York night club, asking a waiter what brand he smokes; when he says “Old Golds,” Draper asks him if there were no more Old Golds in existence, would he consider another brand, like Luckies, for instance? After the waiter says how much he loves smoking, noting that his wife read that it “will kill you,” Draper wonders how do you convince people to keep on loving something that may be killing them? As the scene ends, he’s aiming a gaze worth a thousand words at the living tableau of people at the bar and in the lounge area, all of them smoking.

Shakespeare Smoking

It’s Shakespeare’s birthday and all I can think about is cigarettes. Why am I haunted by the scent of new mown Virginia tobacco whenever I think of The Tempest? Why do I see Jimmy Cagney’s Bottom and Olivia de Havilland’s Hermia lighting up during a break while filming A Midsummer Night’s Dream? Cagney did ads (“There’s nothing tough about my throat — that’s why I smoke Old Golds”). For the divine Olivia the magic brand was Chesterfields.

When I googled “Shakespeare and Smoking,” I landed on Esquire’s August 2015 Entertainment page, where Jill Krasny quotes from a study in The Independent about the chemicals indicative of cannabis found in pipe bowls and stems in Shakespeare’s Stratford-upon-Avon garden. Also referenced is an issue of Country Life magazine that cites John Gerard’s 1597 engraving, Herbal, in which “The Fourth Man” is William Shakespeare. The article refers to various kinds of tobacco introduced to Elizabethan England. It’s hard not to think of the all-caps LIFT in the Camel ad. You have to believe Shakespeare smoked, whether the lift was delivered by tobacco, cannabis, or the elixir Falstaff celebrates in The Merry Wives of Windsor that “ascends me into the brain; dries me there the foolish and dull and crudy vapours which environ it; apprehensive, quick, forgetive, full of nimble, fiery, and delectable shapes; which delivered o’er to the voice, the which is the birth, becomes excellent wit.”

Imagine Caliban on Prospero’s island in The Tempest, telling himself: “Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises. Sounds, and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not. Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices that, if I then had waked after long sleep, will make me sleep again. And then, in dreaming, the clouds methought would open and show riches ready to drop upon me, that when I waked I cried to dream again.”

The Shadow Knows

“The Shadow: Pathfinder of Human Understanding,” the last essay in Why the Hindenburg Had a Smoking Lounge, first appeared in the Spring 2021 issue of Raritan Quarterly Review. After referring to the joint creation of a picture of a black hole (“eight radio telescopes, two hundred astronomers at thirteen institutions”), Tenner mentions “a larger black area” beyond the black hole itself, both researchers and journalists called its shadow.” In Tenner’s words, “No other metaphor would capture the idea of secondary darkness” The creation of that composite image “has become the most striking confirmation of Alfred Einstein’s general relativity theory in a hundred years.”

After detailing how humanity “has made the shadow a tool: to record time in space, to compress three dimensions into two, and to make the unseen visible,” and after noting that “the peaceful global use of shadows has so far prevailed,” Tenner rounds toward a conclusion inspired by the discovery “of countless exoplanets,” including one that is “potentially earthlike.” Thus the Shakespeare’s birthday question is Edward Tenner’s “Will we ultimately decode messages from its possible extraterrestrial citizens? if so, it may be a shadow that first pointed us in the right direction.”

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In an Editor’s Note in the Winter 2025 Raritan, which was founded in 1981 by Richard Poirier, Jackson Lears reports “the sad news” that the review “will cease publication after the Late Spring 2025 issue.”