Wholly Smokes (4 page)
It should be noted that Scarlotta did not die alone and insane. After recovering her senses, she moved to Richmond and opened a boarding house. Soon her family became prominent hoteliers. A century later, one of her descendants would write a novel based on Scarlotta’s experiences, called
Gone up in Smoke
.
Nor did Jezreel succeed in cornering the market in tobacco. Indeed, his General Snuff and Tobacco Company achieved only modest profits. To grow further, it needed a man of vision, a man of wide-ranging ideas – a man like Jezreel Badcock’s son, Fillmore.
Fillmore Badcock
It was during the Hayes administration that the company passed from Jezreel to Fillmore Badcock. Young Fillmore had grand ideas about everything. As he wrote in his diary,
The nation is growing, and by jig, we must grow with it! Boston is not big enough to hold our great company. We can and must expand to fill this great continent, from sea to shining sea! Now that we are one great nation, I mean to make General Snuff a household name everywhere. Nay,
General Snuff must become one with the very idea of America
.
All across this great continent, no man will count himself truly manly until he has bit off a chaw of our “Nonpareil” cut plug. It must and it will become as American as the Grand Old Flag, as American as the game of Base Ball.
Possibly with that goal in mind, Fillmore began actually hawking Nonpareil at Fourth of July Parades. Each packet was wrapped in a small American flag.
Alas, sales were disappointing. Fillmore wrote:
No one wants Nonpareil. Why did I ever think I could set the world on fire? All is lost. The rent on the shop is past due, the snuff factory is mortgaged, and I have not the wherewithal to pay my laborers for another week. Sometimes I think of just giving it all up and taking a job (I hear they’re hiring factory hands in the Necco works in Cambridge).
But maybe parades are the wrong place to sell! Maybe I should try selling Nonpareil at Base Ball games! After all, Base Ball maybe the national Pass Time, but it is infernally slow. A game can take hours, most of it spent waiting. Fielders must stand idle for long spells, waiting
for a hit. Spectators must sit staring for hours. It may be that player and spectator alike would benefit from a hearty “chaw” to relieve the tedium.
In addition, Fillmore tried one last marketing strategy to attract customers. With his rent money, he bought a rubber stamp and a cheap deck of baseball playing cards. The back of each card depicted a ballplayer from some popular team, such as the New York Nine, the Knickerbockers, or the Cincinnati Red Stockings. On the card face, Fillmore stamped “Nonpareil Base Ball Cards – Collect them! Trade them!” Then he slipped a card inside the wrapper of every packet of Nonpareil Chewing Tobacco.
As we now know, the gamble paid off handsomely. Fillmore sold out his first deck of cards within two innings. He was obliged to leave the game and buy more decks. Nonpareil became wildly popular, as everyone scrambled to get one of the new “base ball cards.” Within a month, Fillmore Badcock was able to pay his rent, expand his business, and hire other men to hawk Nonpareil at ball games. He was able to print his own baseball trading cards.
Within a year, he was truly national, shipping consignments of Nonpareil to every one of the 38 states. He later boosted his baseball game sales even further by altering the words of a
popular new song:
Take me out the ball game
Take me out with the crowd
Buy me some Nonpareil chewing tobac’
I don’t care if I never get back
This must be counted as the first, and the most successful sports-tobacco campaign in history. Chewing tobacco became forever linked with baseball in the public imagination. Indeed, it’s hard to think of baseball history without it. Ballplayers everywhere took up the “chaw.” The image of a batter with a “quid” in his cheek has persisted for over a century –many players in all leagues still chew.
By 1877, the General Snuff and Tobacco Company was so famous that the opening of its new factory in Richmond was national news. No less a personage than the President of the United States agreed to officiate at the opening ceremony – a ceremony which would have tragic consequences.
The new factory was like nothing ever built before. At its heart was an amazing new processing machine, the “tobacco gin.” Just as the cotton gin eliminated the backbreaking labor of making cotton fiber, so the tobacco gin would automate the process of making chewing tobacco.
The huge machine occupied the entire space inside a large building. Above it stretched a wooden scaffolding, hastily thrown up for the opening ceremony. Thence visitors crowded at the rail, gawking down while Fillmore pointed out the features of the awesome machine: tobacco leaves were sucked into one end of the building, while continuous Nonpareil cut plug chewing tobacco spewed forth from the other end. The structure above looked shaky, but it held.
As the moment of opening approached, the Richmond Zouaves Silver Band began to play a
selection of popular tunes. More dignitaries arrived to join the packed crowd upon the high platform. Some said later that they felt the timbers trembling even then, even before the President’s appearance. Yet the structure held.
Finally President Cleveland’s entourage arrived. As the band struck up “Hail to the Chief,” Fillmore rushed to greet him at the factory door.
Cigar Label Depicting President Grover Cleveland
(before his accident)
“Sir, I wasn’t expecting so many people in your party. The scaffolding isn’t quite -”
“Yes, yes, a capital machine. Shall we get on with this?”
Fillmore meekly led the way into the factory to the scaffolding stairs. The President, who weighed over 300 pounds, labored up the stairs and stepped out upon the platform to cut the ribbon. He was followed closely by a large entourage of equally large men. All those on the scaffolding felt a tremor in their toes. Yet, even
then, the structure held.
“Tobacco is the road to the future,” the President started to say. “As we chew, so do we –”
At that moment, a steam valve popped open, sending aloft a blast of steam with a terrific roar. This event, though harmless in itself, had the unfortunate effect of startling the visitors. They leapt back involuntarily, all of the portly dignitaries and the mighty President. This sudden shift of weight was finally too much for the wooden scaffolding; it sagged, groaned, and collapsed, spilling the entire group upon the monster machine.
By some miracle, the President was saved (though some say he was never the same again) and not a single visitor was seriously hurt. Fill-more Badcock, however, tumbled headlong into the very maw of the metal monster, which rapidly converted him from a tobacco tycoon into ten yards of cut plug.
President Grover Cleveland
(after his accident)
Blessington Badcock
After Fillmore’s untimely death, the company fell to his young son, Blessington. Blessington Badcock had been a sickly child, and it was feared he would not be up to the job. The fears were groundless. The time he’d spent recuperating out West molded him into a man – he returned an industrial genius, a two-fisted empire builder who brought the company to its “manifest destiny.”
He was not averse to identifying the company with our nation. Glaring through his pince-nez, gnashing his teeth, and hammering on the boardroom table, Blessington declared that it was manifestly the destiny of General Snuff to take a keen interest in all American affairs,
especially those involving “foreign entanglements.”
“What’s good for General Snuff,” he said on more than one occasion, “is good for America.” It went without saying, that what was bad for General Snuff was bad for America. The company was particularly concerned about the current revolution in Cuba. The Cubans had been fighting since 1895 to free themselves from Spanish rule and become an independent nation. Blessington repeatedly wrote asking President Cleveland to intervene.
Mr. President, we must help the brave Cubans fling off the yoke of Spanish oppression. Not only is their cause right, and dear to the heart of every American, but the very heart of our cigar industry is at stake. It is vital to secure our important Havana and Manila cigar interests. It would be a national tragedy if those interests were to remain in the cruel hands of Spanish oppressors. It could well mean the end of the five-cent cigar!
Cleveland, however, had little reason to listen to Badcock schemes. He wished America to remain neutral. Nor did his successor, McKinley. Then in 1898, an event took place that changed President McKinley’s mind.
The U.S. warship Maine was lying at anchor in Havana harbor. A sudden unexplained explos – ion sank her, with 250 of her crew. The causes of this explosion are still unknown.
Critics of the General Snuff and Tobacco Company have blamed the firm. It has been claimed that a “secret company agent climbed aboard and set a charge. His only purpose was to drag the United States into a foreign war!”
