The American relationship with tobacco - 4 August 1995

I will say no more about the hideous furnace that North America has turned into except to report that Chicago, which a couple of weeks ago counted several hundred dead, started something this week that I don't believe had ever been done before.

The mayor of the city commandeered gymnasiums, warehouses, empty sheds and even built large tents, air conditioned all of them, and at the approach of the next wave of obscene heat, put out a general alarm and sent hundreds of police, firemen and citizen volunteers, out into the poor neighbourhoods and evacuated the very old to one or other of these newly names cooling centres.

Of the more than 600 people who died three weeks ago, mostly in the Midwest, most of them were men and women in their 80s or were people in their 70s who suffered from one or other respiratory diseases. Well now I'm looking at the silhouette of a man's face in profile, the sort of black cut-out image on white paper that amusement fairs and arcades used to make and sell to tourists. This is the proposed logo or seal for an old small town up the Hudson: it has caused a public, a civic row. First though, I'd like to go into the name of the place and the reason for the fame of America's Hyde Park. Hyde Park is a name, which to citizens of at least two different countries immediately evokes two different pictures. In Britain and probably to tourists everywhere who have ever visited England, Hyde Park is that 360 acre of greenery bounded by Park Lane, Knightsbridge, Bayswater Road on the west by Kensington Gardens notable for strollers, guardees exercising horses, passionate demagogues on Sundays and an artificial lake in which men and women bathe between May and September, and in which the poet Shelley's first wife bathed too long and drowned. Pretty soon I imagined a revisionist biographer in the modern mode will say that she was a lesbian who committed suicide.

But to Americans, Hyde Park in this country is known to some as a shrine, to others as the place where their parents hated enemy lies buried so he does. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, he was born there in 1882 and was buried there on an April day in 1945. There is a small country town about 70 miles north of Manhattan in the Hudson Valley and the way to it is on the diachronic parkway, no commercial traffic, which is a rippling flowing highway up to Roosevelt's Hyde Park, a beautiful excursion running through and around rising hills, glittering glimpses of the mighty Hudson River through forests and meadow and finally coming into this, I must say, rather English looking village, an impression due to the American fashion in the early and mid 19th century for revived Gothic churches.

Hyde Park was, for a couple of centuries, what we now call the service centre for several very large Hudson Valley estates, one of these belong to James Roosevelt, usually described as coming from a long line of Dutch ancestors, but through much intermarriage down the generations, his son Franklin Roosevelt had about four per cent Dutch blood, some Swedish, a dash of German and a positive flood of English blood. Once the Second World War started, his Republican opponents and haters were quick to stress this inheritance and to warn the American people month in and month out that that man in the White House would not be satisfied until he dragged the United States into Britain's war.

I said just now that to many New Yorkers and millions of Americans, Hyde Park is a shrine and every spring and summer and fall there's a moving stream of tourists lining up outside the Franklin D. Roosevelt library, which contains something like 12 million documents but is a most entertaining place to visit because of the relics, the mementoes, the swords from potentates, personal knick-knacks, dramatic film of the Roosevelt years and the original of newspaper cartoons from everywhere.

Hyde Park has not been in the news for quite a time. I find on an enquiry that most young people know very little about it and understandably since Roosevelt died in the last month of the war in Europe, naturally they have some very vague ideas about Franklin Roosevelt himself.

My contemporaries on the other hand are constantly shocked – the ones who are alive that is, they don't get around much anymore – shocked when I come from lecturing somewhere, or some other reason for dipping into the country, when I tell them that last year a poll of California college students revealed a third of them unsure of the relative identities or roles if you like, in the Second World War of Churchill and Stalin, who was which and on whose side. I don't think this is shocking. To my generation, the war of 1870 – Germany invading France again remember – was as remote as the Roman invasion of Britain, but no more remote than Roosevelt's death 50 years ago is to college students today. Still, I wonder how much the brouhaha that's developed in Hyde Park has any meaning for most living Americans apart from those of us say from 60 on, to whom Franklin Roosevelt is as much a part an indispensable part of our lives as Napoleon was for Frenchmen and women born in the latter part of the 18th century.

The simple news announcement that caused all the bother the other day, was a profile image of the face of Franklin Roosevelt, the only white bit was an oval interval signifying his inevitable pince-nez. The town of Hyde Park as a rural Republican holdout refused to be impressed by its native son throughout the 13 years of his presidency – he ran four times and won. An outrage a Republican Congress was quick to redeem by getting through a constitutional amendment limiting any future president to two terms. But now Hyde Park looks back mellowly on his memory and wants to live in the glow of his fame, perhaps I should have said wants to live in the glow of his cigarette, for that is what has caused the rumpus. He's shown with his cigarette in a long holder tilted at a defiant angle. During his time, we should have said at a cocky or a British angle, but now that we know what we know about the lethal possibilities of cigarette smoking, the cigarette does have a defiant look. The moment the logo was suggested, up spake Dr. Michael Caldwell, the county health commissioner. "No, no, no," he is quoted as saying "I wouldn't want Hyde Park to be seen as promoting a deadly habit, I cannot equivocate on the tobacco issue." And since he spoke there's been a stream of letters into the town hall and inevitably various groups, state and national, have joined in the cry to put down the proposed profile and think of something else for the town's seal.

Now the fact is that Franklin Roosevelt rarely had a cigarette out of his mouth when he was awake and in his late days he shrank to a ghost, undoubtedly he had lung cancer. He died of a massive cerebral haemorrhage at the age of 63, so the cigarette does now intrude on public attention and public sensibility. After all, the federal government is spending millions through the office of the Surgeon General to dissuade people from smoking. A recent statistic shows cigarette smoking declining throughout America but rising sharply among teenagers and this has provoked a committee of Congress into yet another hearing on the tobacco issue. The knotty nub of the tobacco debate is the unavoidable fact that tobacco, its cultivation and its mellowing and preparation and manufacture and distribution and advertising, is responsible for the livelihood of about 3 million people in three or four states most conspicuously in the Carolinas, so it's perfectly easy for Northerners to be very moral about the issue and very tricky for senators and congressmen and women from the old colonial South.

Another ironical example of, I don't know trying to play both sides or robbing Peter to subsidise Paul, is the action of a tycoon who made his millions from tobacco, funding in New York, a splendid hospital in his name. The famous cancer surgeon made the acid comment: "If you'll only smoke his cigarettes long enough and get sick, his hospital will take the best possible care of you".

Most of the tobacco hearings so far go on taking solemn evidence from doctors and relatives of the dead on the one hand, and officials of tobacco companies on the other, still debating after 30 more years of overwhelmingly damning evidence from many nations, whether or not cigarettes are responsible for all the things the medical profession warns you about: emphysema, lung cancer, heart disease, deformities in babies and so on.

The more the tobacco industry protests, the more this stirs some crusading congressman to urge compulsion on the industry, in other words, to have tobacco declared a controlled substance and officially ban it. I must say that at this late date, I for one cannot credit the sense and sensibility of any such American who has known or even read about the history of the prohibition of alcohol in the '20s, which was called the noble experiment. What it did was to make alcohol and essential ingredient of any party a daring fashion among the very young and it created a huge underground criminal industry devoted to supplying the illegal stuff nationwide to various extortion businesses and to the profitable sidelines of prostitution and murder. Also, the noble experiment did not make Americans noticeably nobler.

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