Smoke Em If You Got Em: The Rise and Fall of the Military Cigarette Ration

Bius, Joel R.

ISBN 10: 168247335X / ISBN 13: 9781682473351

Published by Naval Institute Press, 2018

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Bibliographic Details

• Title: Smoke Em If You Got Em: The Rise and Fall of the Military Cigarette Ration
• Publisher: Naval Institute Press
• Publication Date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 168247335X
• ISBN 13: 9781682473351
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: Fine

About this title

Synopsis

The American military-industrial complex and accompanying culture are most often associated with massive weapons procurement programs and advanced technologies. However, one aspect of the complex is not a weapon or even a machine, but one of the world's most highly engineered consumer products: the manufactured cigarette. Smoke 'Em If You Got 'Em describes the origins of the often comfortable, yet increasingly controversial relationship among the military, the cigarette industry, and tobaccoland politicians during the twentieth century. Smoke 'Em If You Got 'Em is also a study in modern American political economy. Bureaucrats, soldiers, lobbyists, government executives, legislators, litigators, or anti-smoking activists all struggled over far-reaching policy issues involving the cigarette. The soldier-cigarette relationship established by the Army in World War I and broken apart in the mid-1980s underpinned one of the most prolific social, cultural, economic, and healthcare-related developments in the twentieth century: the rise and proliferation of the American manufactured cigarette smoker and the powerful cigarette enterprise supporting them. Using the manufactured cigarette as a vehicle to explore political economy and interactions between the military and American society, Joel R. Bius helps the reader understand this important, yet overlooked aspect of twentieth-century America.

About the Author

Joel R. Bius is an assistant professor of national security studies at the U.S. Air Force Air Command and Staff College. He received his PhD in U.S. history from The Dale Center for the Study of War and Society at The University of Southern Mississippi.