Who Were Tobacco Cards Really For? Men Bought the Cigarettes, Boys Collected the Cards

Look at what nineteenth-century cigarette cards actually show and you would say they were made for grown men: actresses and beauties, boxers and oarsmen, flags, sovereigns and fashionable young dandies. Look at who ended up with them and a different picture appears. By the late 1880s the collectors were very often children, and the people who worried about it said so in print.

The honest answer to who the cards were for is both, and the more interesting question is whether the companies knew.

What the cards said about their buyer

We have set out elsewhere the range of subjects Allen & Ginter covered in three years at the end of the 1880s. Read as a list, it describes an adult male customer: the World's Beauties, the World's Champions, the World's Racers, the World's Dudes, and a series devoted to the world's smokers.

That fits what the cards were for commercially. They were packed with a product sold to adults, and a set of fifty kept a smoker loyal to one brand until the set was complete. We made that argument in the piece on whether the cards began as packaging.

What was happening outside the shops

But children wanted them, and they found ways to get them.

A tobacco dealer of the period described crowds of children arriving at tobacco shops on Saturday afternoons with the vouchers from packs, "clamoring for the reward of self-inflicted injury." The New York Times complained in December 1888 that cigarette makers were offering premiums that tempted boys into smoking too much.

Cards also changed hands without any smoking at all. Children traded them, picked discarded ones out of the street, and took them from their fathers' packs. A newspaper looking back in 1909 put the going rate among children in 1889 at three cards for a nickel. By the mid-1890s some children were said to own as many as five hundred.

Britain had the same scene a generation later. In 1915 a writer in The Royal Magazine joked that no smoker could walk down a street without a grubby-faced small boy asking "Cigarette pictures, Guv'nor?" By the 1930s the Boy's Own Paper was explaining the hobby to its readers and comparing it to stamp collecting.

Did the companies know?

This is where the story stops being innocent.

The historian Allan Brandt, in his history of the cigarette, argues that the tobacco industry understood very well what would appeal to boys, and that boys were the principal target of the promotions built around collecting and trading. A card of an actress might be chosen with a man in mind. A card that came in a series of fifty, with the checklist printed on the back, was made to be collected, and the most dedicated collectors in any household were rarely its adults.

The companies never had to say it. They only had to notice who was asking for the cards.

The people who noticed

Reformers noticed first.

The anti-tobacco writer Margaret Woods Lawrence was particularly angered by the cards and badges packed with cigarettes, precisely because they drew in boys. Her side's answer was to fight the cards with cards: anti-tobacco groups offered boys pledge cards, badges and certificates for promising not to smoke. The historian who describes them doubts they ever held a fraction of the same appeal.

The largest campaign came from Lucy Page Gaston, a teacher and temperance worker who founded the Anti-Cigarette League of America in 1899 and claimed 300,000 members within two years. Between 1890 and 1930, fifteen American states passed laws against selling, making, owning or using cigarettes, and twenty-two more considered them. Every one of those laws was eventually repealed.

And the most famous card of all

Which brings us to the card every collector has heard of.

When the American Tobacco Company sought Honus Wagner's permission for its 1909 T206 set, he refused. The letter he sent back with the contract is well known: "I don't want my picture in cigarettes." The company withdrew his card, and its scarcity has made it the most famous card in the hobby.

The popular story is that Wagner did not want children buying cigarettes to get his card. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which holds a copy, repeats that explanation. The Baseball Hall of Fame is more careful. Wagner himself chewed tobacco, and historians have suggested he may have wanted payment, or thought cigarettes a low habit compared with the tobacco he used; his club owner and manager both despised them. Nobody knows for certain.

What is certain is that the explanation everyone reached for was children. By 1909 it was simply assumed that a baseball card in a cigarette pack would end up in a boy's pocket.

The thing worth sitting with

The cards on this index were designed around an adult who smoked. They survive, very often, because a child kept them: sorted them, traded them, pasted them into albums and put them in shoeboxes that were never thrown away.

The man bought the cigarettes and threw away the packet. The boy kept the card, and the card is what we collect.

This index tracks the nineteenth-century tobacco series alongside every other set, card by card and grade by grade, including the Allen & Ginter chiefs. You can read how we work the numbers out.

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