The ‘20s: Culture, Consumption, and Crash 137went about discovering new markets—especially women and young kids.
Smoking was considered “un-ladylike” so he set about to make it acceptable
for women to smoke in public, even setting up groups of debutantes to light
up on street corners and calling cigarettes “torches of freedom.” When
women complained that the green Lucky Strike package clashed with the
colors they usually wore, Bernays sponsored green fashion lunches, green balls
at which women wore green gowns, and worked with fashion stores to display
green suits and dresses in their window displays. He also exploited women’s
fear of gaining weight, with ads suggesting that females “reach for a Lucky
instead of a sweet.”
At the same time, Lucky Strikes connected smoking to sex and began to
include small pictures of young women in lingerie and other erotic cloth-
ing—something advertisers clearly learned from Freud. In this way, young
men would purchase the goods to get the “cigarette girls” cards, which would
change every few weeks, thus making the boys go back for a new pack on a
regular basis, and becoming addicted to tobacco in the meantime. For tobac-
co, the payoffs of advertising were enormous. In 1913, R.J. Reynolds spent
about $800,000 a year on advertising, which rose in 1916 to $2.2 million, and
by 1921 was up to $8.7 million. Its market share was only 0.2 percent in 1913
[about the equivalent of selling 1.5 million Camel cigarettes] but by 1921 it
controlled half the market [or 18.3 billion Camels]. Lucky Strike sales, 13.7
billion cigarettes in 1925 [3d in the industry] rose to over 40 billion just 5
years later and became the market leader. Bernays, incredibly, even pitched
the health benefits of smoking, with an ad that read “20,679 Physicians say
‘Luckies’ are less irritating”... ‘It’s Toasted’... Your Throat Protection against
irritation against cough.”
But all of these goods—biscuits, hairnets, cigarettes—it was the automobile
that made the economy of the 1920s become so enormous. When autos first
entered the market in the early 20th Century, only wealthy Americans could
afford them. By the 1920s, more and more of the “common man” had a car
and it became the main symbol of prosperity and affluence, even for those not
really prosperous and affluent. No one had more to do with the evolution of
the American auto industry than Henry Ford. In 1903 he incorporated the
Ford Motor Company, after getting his start by building racing cars [which
reached the then-blazing speed of 91 miles per hour] to promote his com-
pany. Ford’s ace driver, Barney Oldfield, traveled the country to show off the