‘More Doctors Smoke Camels’: Recount, please

“As concerns about the health implications of smoking persisted — and then increased — in the 1930s and 1940s, advertising explicitly addressed these anxieties…. R. J. Reynolds fixed on the likely notion that smokers would be attracted to the brand that their physician chose, and that physicians would advocate for a brand that lionized the medical profession….

“The ‘More Doctors Smoke Camels’ campaign was apparently based on the work of A. Grant Clarke, a William Esty ad executive, on loan to R. J. Reynolds to establish a Medical Relations Division. Clarke would distribute free packs of Camels at medical conventions; pollsters from an ‘independent research organization’ would then be sent to ask the physicians what brand of cigarettes they were carrying.”

— From “The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall and Deadly Persistence of the Product that Defined America” (2007) by Allan M. Brandt

This time, bully ended up sadder Budweiser

“Typically, the inequality of economic power between corporation and parodist determines who prevails in trademark infringement lawsuits…. The weaker party — the parodist — is effectively censored and denied due process.

“An unlikely victor against a trademark bully was Michael Berard, who in 1987 was a student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Berard had designed a T-shirt [depicting] a beer can with a red, white and blue label — think Budweiser — but instead of grandiose references to great hops and barley, Berard substituted…   ‘Myrtle Beach Contains the Choicest Surf, Sun and Sand.’ Instead of ‘This Bud’s for You,’ the T-shirt read ‘This Beach is for You.’

“On appeal the judges found no likelihood consumers would falsely believe Bud had sanctioned the T-shirts…. Anheuser-Busch lost. But if Berard had known about the ‘Mutant of Omaha’ ruling [squelching a 1983 T-shirt protesting the nuclear arms race], he might never have dared to produce his innocuous T-shirt.”

— From “Brand Name Bullies” (2005) by David Bollier

OUR slavery? What about YOUR witch trials?

“The day after [John] Brown’s execution in Virginia, [the Raleigh Register] warned Virginia governor Henry Wise to burn the gallows, lest some enterprising man remove it and ship it north, since ‘The Yankees have no objection to mingling money-making with their grief.’  The idea of memorial services and ‘mock funerals’ rumored in the North irritated the same editor enough to make him suggest that if Northerners were looking for public entertainment, ‘It is a pity they haven’t a witch or two to drown or burn’…

“Angered by [Massachusetts Rep.] Horace Mann’s comments condemning  slavery, [Rep. Abraham Venable of North Carolina] lashed out: ‘Let him blush when he speaks of the sins and crimes of any people on earth… no southern calendar of crime can afford such cases as the Salem murders.’ ”

— From “The Specter of Salem: Remembering the Witch Trials in Nineteenth-Century America” (2008) by  Gretchen A. Adams

Duke’s prospectus: MDs first, then poets

“A distinguished company of U. S. educators traveled last week to a long clearing in a fragrant pine forest in North Carolina. There stood the most prodigious new educational project in the land this century — Duke University, now nearly complete though little grass yet grows on its sandy campus, no ivy on its neo-Gothic walls of soft-colored fieldstone.

“The central ceremony was the dedication of Duke’s medical school and hospital, which seem bound to reach maturity and fame before the institution’s other branches. Money can get results faster in medicine than in the less scientific fields of culture. The $40,000,000 which the late tobacco and power Tycoon James Buchanan Duke gave to little Trinity College of Durham in return for taking his name will doubtless turn out many an able doctor before it polishes an important poet, will probably improve physically thousands of lives before it contributes much original thought on the way of life….

“Duke students are not yet distinguishable from their contemporaries at other inland institutions. They paint DUKE on their slickers, have ‘dates’ with the coeds, occasionally buy a fruit jar of corn liquor.”

–From Time magazine, April 27, 1931

Andy and Barney didn’t just happen

“[Critics and CBS] never saw through to the sophistication underlying the show. If the men aren’t wearing Brooks Brothers and the women aren’t wearing the latest hairstyles and fashions and they’re not discussing something terribly chic at cocktails, then it isn’t ‘sophisticated.’ Andy felt very strongly about that attitude, really resented it….

“Those other shows [‘Green Acres,’ ‘Petticoat Junction,’ ‘The Beverly Hillbillies’] were fine for what they attempted, but ours was a different type of show entirely.”

— Producer Aaron Ruben, as quoted in “The Andy Griffith Show” (1981) by Richard Michael Kelly

Ruben, credited by Griffith with “set[ting] the style of this show” in its early years, applied a crucial sensitivity to the subtle  interplay between Andy Taylor and Barney Fife.  (Just imagine how that could’ve gone amiss!) He died Saturday in Beverly Hills at age 95.

Now THAT was a mea culpa!

“When I was completely taken in by the Communist agitation at Gastonia in 1929, there wasn’t a bigger jackass or a more gullible sap in the State of North Carolina than I was. I knew absolutely nothing about what I was talking about, as I whooped it up continually in this column in support of the murderous Gastonia defendants. My experience in the bloody Gastonia business is THE thing of all  others which has done most to make me distrust so-called ‘liberalism,’  which so often, like mine was then, is not only ignorant and neurotic, but very dangerous.”

— Nell Battle Lewis’s “Incidentally” column in the News & Observer of Raleigh, Dec. 16, 1951 (as quoted in “Battling Nell: The Life of Southern Journalist Cornelia Battle Lewis, 1893-1956” by Alexander S. Leidholdt [2009]).

When Lewis died, N&O editor Jonathan Daniels, who had served simultaneously as her patron and her archvillain, wrote that “Nell Battle Lewis made for herself a name that will be long remembered in North Carolina.”

Through no lack of effort on her part, it hasn’t turned out that way. Leidholdt’s thoughtful and thorough biography, which details Lewis’s transitions from “most versatile” graduate at St. Mary’s School to daring advocate of the underclass to hard-line segregationist, has gone virtually unnoticed. (Hat tips to exceptions Ben Steelman of the Wilmington Star-News  [http://www.starnewsonline.com/article/20091114/ARTICLES/911139982?Title=Book-review-Biography-looks-at-a-homegrown-N-C-reformer] and Charles Wheeler of the Greensboro News & Record [http://www.news-record.com/blog/63640/entry/76748].)

How to win voters: Clobber the QB

“One photograph [from football history] has always stuck in my mind: Y.A. Tittle on his knees, blood dripping down his forehead, after losing a game in 1964. … [Unlike Tittle, Brett] Favre at least has a Super Bowl ring, but watching him get brutalized by the Saints made me think of the Tittle photograph, widely known as ‘The Agony of Defeat.’ ”

— Larry Canale, blogging in the New York Times, January 29

“Morris Berman of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette…. had gone to Pitt Stadium that day not to cover the game but looking for human interest. He decided to focus on Tittle. But his editor, wanting an action photo, refused to run the injured warrior photograph. It became widely seen only after Berman entered it in contests….

“Now, it [hangs] in the lobby of the National Press Photographers Association headquarters in Durham, North Carolina, alongside Joe Rosenthal’s photograph of the flag-raising at Iwo Jima and the image of the fiery death of the Hindenburg dirigible at Lakehurst, New Jersey.”

— Michael Shapiro in Smithsonian magazine, February 2007

“When John Baker ran for sheriff of Wake County, North Carolina, the first time [in 1978], he put the photo on his campaign flyer with this message: ‘Baker sacked Y.A. Tittle, and he’ll sack crime the same way.’ “

— From “Pittsburgh Steelers: Men of Steel” (2006) by Jim Wexell

Flue-curing’s unintended consequence

“Flue-curing [a process accidentally invented by Stephen, a slave in Caswell County in 1839] turned tobacco a bright ‘lemon yellow.’ Many commented on the mildness of this tobacco and its particular  suitability for cigarettes. But what they could not have known is that this process also subtly changed the chemistry of the leaf to make it slightly acidic rather than alkaline…..

“Smokers soon found they could take cigarette smoke deep into their lungs, rather than holding the smoke principally  in their mouths as they did with pipes and cigars. In this way — as we now know —  nicotine absorbs rapidly into the bloodstream; some seven seconds later it reaches the brain. Nicotine addiction was born…. This physiological process would create a mass industry and a consequent epidemic of tobacco-related diseases.”

— From “The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall and Deadly Persistence of the Product the Defined America” (2007) by Allan M. Brandt

Poor whites disenfranchised along with blacks

“The [1890s] laws that took the vote away from blacks — poll taxes, literacy tests, property qualifications — also often ensured that poor whites would not vote….

“The Charlotte Observer saw disenfranchisement as ‘the struggle of the white people of North Carolina to rid themselves of the dangers of the rule of negroes and the lower class of whites.’ ”

– From “A People’s History of the United States: 1492 to Present” (1980) by Howard Zinn

Zinn, 87, died Wednesday in Auburndale, Mass. “A People’s History,” a pioneering work of revisionism, has sold nearly 2 million copies.

What’s in a name? Durham’s Hayti

“The first documented use of the name Hayti in Durham is found in a deed of 1877 in which a lot was sold ‘near the town of Durham in the settlement of colored people in the South East end of the corporation of said town known as of Hayti.’

“The origin of the name in this context is a mystery. Conjecture has attributed it to whites as a name for any black settlement, and to blacks as an expression of their admiration of and hope of emulating the independent island nation.

“The use of the term as a convention of mapmakers for any predominantly black community was current as early as 1867. A map of New Bern and vicinity in that year identified the black settlement across the Trent River from the town proper as Hayti, even though it had a name, James City.”

— From “Durham County: A History of Durham County, North Carolina” (1990) by Jean Bradley Anderson