Better Choose Me: Collecting and Creating with Tobacco Fabric Novelties, 1880-1920
American advertisers have lured consumers over the years with a myriad of “freebies”—everything from toys in the Crackerjacks to dish sets at the movie theater. From the 1880s to about 1920 tobacco companies tempted smokers with colorful fabric swatches given away with cigar or cigarette purchases. The creative possibilities of these premiums were soon realized by American women seeking ways to demonstrate their handiwork and decorate their homes. Better Choose Me: Collecting and Creating with Tobacco Fabric Novelties, 1880-1920, on view at the Johnson County Museum of History from January 19 through April 6, features the imaginative use of tobacco fabric novelties incorporated into all sorts of decorative items from table scarves to quilts to clothing. Organized by the Kauffman Museum of North Newton, Kansas, this traveling exhibit draws on the private collection of Ethel Ewert Abrahams, a Wichita quilt artist and textile collector.
Conspicuous Consumption
Besides showing off domestic arts of a century ago, the exhibit illustrates early advertising efforts amid the growing consumer culture in the United States. In the years after the Civil War, the nation was undergoing an economic transformation. As Americans made the transition from agricultural to industrial production, from a producer to a consumer economy, they created what historians have referred to as the “culture of consumption.” Population increases meant a larger domestic market for goods, a need met by mass production of all sorts of new consumer products. Competing manufacturers needed to teach consumers not only to buy goods that were manufactured outside the local area, but also to develop loyalties to particular brand names.
In this competitive atmosphere, the business of modern advertising was born, and ads began to take on the aggressive tone familiar today. Printed advertisements had been around for some time, but tended to be more informational than promotional in content and presentation—for example, letting potential buyers know what goods a particular merchant currently had in stock. Advertisements appeared in limited form in newspapers and magazines, but print ads in black and white did little to capture the public imagination as consumer goods proliferated.
The infant business of advertising began to hit its stride when it tapped into the newfound enthusiasm for collecting. With the tremendous increase in mass-produced goods, consumers enthusiastically embraced the collecting mania as a way to display their new material wealth and to organize their increasingly complicated world. Manufacturers first appealed to the collecting urge with the distribution of trade cards at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. These engraved cards illustrated and described particular brand-name products and stores.
Pretty Paper
By the 1880s the availability of cheap color printing made possible the production of ever-more-appealing paper items. Collecting and arranging these pieces in ‘scrapbooks’ soon became something of a fad. The books themselves took their name from “scrap,” multi-colored illustrations on embossed paper that were die-cut into various shapes. A sheet of scraps might include several images on a single theme, such as flowers or animals or children. The appeal of collecting and arranging scrap was similar to today’s sticker collecting.
Advertisers were quick to take advantage of the scrapbook craze, and soon Americans were also collecting brightly colored trade cards to arrange in their books. These advertising prints were usually about the size of a postcard and were printed on medium-weight paper. Most of the products featured were commonly used household items, including stoves, sewing machines, thread, food products, cleansers, and patent medicines. The card backs were typically printed in black and white, giving information about the product, testimonials as to its effectiveness, and often the name of a retailer who carried the advertised brand. The front of the card, though, was the really impressive part. The full-color illustrations reflected popular tastes, with common subjects being children, animals, landscapes, or happy household scenes showing products in use. Humorous or fantasy cards also appeared, using exaggerated caricatures, humanized flowers or vegetables, and animals dressed as people.
Magazines and newspapers generally were slow to adopt color printing, leaving the development of rainbow-hued ads largely up to the trade-card producers. Soon, the need to spread the work about new products was met largely by trade cards rather than by ads in print publications. Trade cards found their way all over the country, into even the smallest communities. A common distribution point was the general store, where traveling salesmen left the cards as advertisements for the companies they represented. Often the storekeeper would leave a pile of cards on the counter, free for the taking. Some products began to be marketed with a card in each package. Adults and children amused themselves by assembling collections of pretty and interesting advertising cards and pasting them in albums. Cards issued in series, such as those showing foreign scenes, birds, or battleships, provided opportunities for trading to accumulate a complete set.
As with other products, cigarette manufacturers tried to encourage brand loyalty by tempting their customers with printed paper novelty items, including cards and hand-held fans. The cards often came in collectible series with illustrations of baseball players or actresses, images meant to appeal to the male buyer. However, the influence of female tastes was also sought with collectible sets featuring themes such as “Costumes of All Nations.”
Tie a Yellow Ribbon
As illustrated in Better Choose Me, the tobacco industry happened upon an appealing advertising medium with various types of fabric premiums available to purchasers. The appeal of fabric novelties apparently did not begin as an intentional marketing ploy. Cigars, which were by far more popular than cigarettes in the 1880s were traditionally tied in bundles with brightly colored silk ribbons that advertised their quality and brand name. The ribbons most often came in yellow or orange, but also have been found in black, blue, green, pink, purple, red, and white. The cigar brand name was either printed or woven in black. Cigars were rolled by hand, so production was generally done locally. Due to this decentralization, a huge number of different cigar brands were available in the U. S.
Evidently the brightly colored ribbons with their many different brand names appealed to collectors, although there is no indication that the tobacco companies initially viewed them as a marketing tool. The earliest known written comments about collecting the ribbons and incorporating them into sewing projects appeared in The Cultivator & Country Gentleman in 1896. This article referred to the craze for collecting ribbons and included a description of a table cover and a sofa cushion incorporating the ribbons. Included in the exhibit is a pillow top measuring twenty inches by nineteen inches and using sixty cigar ribbons, with the brand names incorporated into the overall design. This relatively small decorative piece of course represents a substantial investment in tobacco. The maker, of course, would not have been the consumer, as cigar smoking was not considered an appropriate form of relaxation for the woman of the house. By 1900, paper bands around individual cigars began to displace the silk ribbons, but the active trade in ribbons apparently continued into the 20th century.
Up in Smoke
Meanwhile, tobacco marketers were creating new customers for cigarettes, which by 1919 were overshadowing cigars as the tobacco product of choice. Cigarette consumption had risen from almost zero to 500 per capita for the U.S., and most of this came from new smokers, not former cigar fans. Aggressive advertising and promotion continued to pay off. In the 1890s, when tobacco consumption slumped, as much as four-fifths of the total advertising budget of the American Tobacco Company went into premiums and coupons.
After the turn of the century, a new variation on the cigar ribbon was introduced—cigarette silks or “silkies.” These novelties were the size of a cigarette packet with images printed in black on light colors. Silks were printed in collectible sets—thus encouraging repeat purchases—featuring actresses, presidents, flags and collegiate athletics. By this time advertisers had begun to directly promote the fad for tobacco novelty sewing projects, and sometimes included instructions with the silks.
Between 1910 and 1920, the tobacco marketers introduced yet another variation—all-cotton printed flannels, ranging in size from two by four inches to as large as eight by eleven inches. Some flannels were printed in many colors to look like oriental rugs or American Indian blankets. Other patterns, as seen in Better Choose Me, included Kewpie dolls and baseball players. Flannels were distributed in several different ways—as a package insert, as a direct reward for purchasing cigarettes, or as a prize for redeeming package coupons.
By 1920, the marketing of fabric novelties by tobacco companies had been largely discontinued. One factor was the expense to the advertisers, at a time when wartime disruption of Turkish tobacco supplies had already driven up costs. In addition, fashions in advertising were changing, as were legal regulations pertaining to the distribution of premiums. Fortunately, the ingenuity of domestic craftswomen preserved these advertising novelties in the form of various utilitarian objects presented in Better Choose Me.
--ALBUM vol. 15, no. 1 (winter 2002)