The Physical Square Deal and the Cigarette Habit Among Boys

The Physical Square Deal and the Cigarette Habit Among Boys* BY SUPERINTENDENT SAMUEL HAMILTON, OF ALLEGHENY COUNTY, PA. The doctrine of "the square deal" has come down to us from the remote past. In the Sermon on the Mount, that marvelous epitome of Christian ethics, Christ said : "Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do you even so to them ; for this is the law and the prophets." The fact that he calls it the "law and the prophets" indicates that it is not a new doctrine to be promulgated, but rather an old principle to be emphasized. But while the Golden Rule is hoary with age, its expression in the form of "the square deal" belongs to the present. * * * The "square deal" expresses a universal principle. It belongs to every age, every land, every people ; it applies to every business, every calling, every profession. It is so general in its application to all human relationships that it is the cornerstone of every system of ethics, and yet men must be on their guard constantly, lest it be forgotten and "sink into a state of innocuous desuetude." This morning, however, it is our purpose to consider it not in its universal sense, but only in reference to some of its physical and subjective aspects. Every young man should give his body a square deal. It is wonderful in design, marvelous in construction, amazing in the range of its adaptions, and surpasses every manmade product as the infinite surpasses the finite. Every young man is given but one body ; with care, attention and development it will serve him faithfully and efficiently. But if abused it will fail to perform its functions, and pain, disease and death will follow in quick succession. The care of the body through the physical square deal has been important in all ages. To the Hebrews "length of days" was more desirable than riches and honor. And the persistence of that people through five thousand years of history is a great argument in favor of the physical square deal. The ancient Greeks emphasized beauty and physical perfection. Their ideal was Apollo, a young man, clean, strong, manly, muscular — symmet- *An address delivered before the Pennsylvania High School, and printed in the Era through the courtesy of the author and State Superintedent of Public Instruction, A. C. Nelson.

THE PHYSICAL SQUARE DEAL 813 rical in form and beautiful in body. And their system of education, called into existence by that ideal, placed special emphasis upon the care, the development and training of the body. Ancient warfare was in the main a physical combat. It called for courage, strength, and physical endurance. This made physical superiority a national necessity to every people that desired military prowess. Today war is more a matter of brains, guns, and war-engines, and the national interest centers in them. But man must continue to be a "good animal" and the care of the body is just as important to the State and the individual as at any time in the past. This physical square deal includes attention, care, nourishing food, healthful exercise, plenty of sleep, abundant bathing, pure air and clean living. These are the great body-builders, and upon them mainly the young man must rely who would get from his body the highest and best service. Last July, Alma W. Richards won the running high jump in the Olympic games in Sweden. He met and defeated the best athletes the world could send against him. Fifteen years ago he was a frail, puny invalid, imperfectly developed, and with a small, delicate body. He was so feeble that his parents sent him to the country to find health and strength. Yet the square deal for that body, through the great body-builders just enumerated, transformed that puny invalid into the world-renowned athlete with a body as lithe as that of a tiger, with limbs as clean as those of a greyhound, and with muscles as tough as rawhide. But no boy who is a victim of the cigarette habit gives his body a "square deal." This foul habit is spreading with a rapidity that is astonishing. It is one of the popular fads among highschool boys, and the strong briar pipe, with its air of sporty suggestiveness and crackbrained snobbishness, "is running the cigarette a close race for second place" as Dr. McKeever suggests. Everywhere one meets the sallow faces, the sore eyes, the insipid expressions, the trembling fingers, and the foul breath of the cigarette-made mollycoddle. The boys below the high school are forming this disgusting habit. In many places they may be seen in groups passing a cigarette from mouth to mouth in a spirit of common ownership and very common participation. I would not offer insult to the ladies of a Pennsylvania high school by assuming that they smoke. Nevertheless, women who call themselves ladies may be seen daily in some of the large cities smoking cigarettes. A cigarette battle royal is in progress in the wealthy society circles of the national capital. Smoking by women has been opposed by some ladies who are leading a crusade against it. But the habit has its defenders, and one rich, aristocratic leader of society openly puffs her cigarette as she rides from place to place in her automobile. This society lady is so incapacitated mentally that she

814 IMPROVEMENT ERA can offer no argument in favor of smoking, but when perfectly sober, at luncheons and society functions, she persists in smoking and in offering her jeweled cigarette case to hercompanions. A very short time ago a noted Philadelphia divine denounced from the pulpit a society function given at a fashinable hotel in that city, at which the females smoked cigarettes. There are several strong indictments that may be framed against the cigarette-habit among boys. These indictments may be presented, but there is little time for their discussion. It is useless to moralize on this theme, but a few facts may arouse thought and result in good : 1. It is useless and unnecessary. It gives no valuable return physically, mentally or morally ; it adds nothing to one's health, happiness, honor, rank or character. If it seemingly soothes the nerves temporarily, the reaction that follows shows that the rest was not really restful and the pleasure was spurious and unreal. Barring the liquor habit, there is no other habit so useless, unnecessary and unprofitable. 2. The cigarette habit in the opinion of many is a filthy habit, not in the ordinary sense, but filthy in the extreme. The smoke is foul and nauseating, offensive to the eyes, the throat and the nose. The fumes may not be germ-laden, but they are often exhaled from diseased lungs, and forced out through nasal tubes that are as foul and unsanitary as a sewer. Society demands that every other noxious nuisance shall be abated, and yet it tolerates this filthy habit. If a young man will deliberately make himself objectionable to his companions, and repulsive in person to his associates by this vile habit, he should be segregated from the other pupils. They deserve a square deal. And is there arty valid reason why he should be permitted to bombard the innocent olfactories of his companions with poisoned arrows. The only protection for them, from his foul-smelling, devitalized personality, is sergregation, fumigation, deodorization ' or sanitation. Use chloride of lime, formaldehyde, sulphur dioxide or any other disinfectant or antiseptic that will protect society from the unspeakable filth of the habit. 3. The cigarette habit is an expensive one. Whole cargoes of evidence could be brought in to prove the truth of this statement. The report of the Commissioner of Internal Revenue shows that 11,221,624,184 cigarettes were sold in the United States in the fiscal year ending June 30, 1912, an increase of 2,000,000,000 over the previous year. This year the sale will reach 15,000,000,000. This is an average of 165 for every man. woman, and child in the nation, and many of them are smoked by half-educated high school boys. These cigarettes represent a large sum of money, and in many cases the people can ill afford the expensive luxury. To see a poor, frail mother, or even a father, toiling and

THE PHYSICAL SQUARE DEAL 815 sweating to support and educate a family while the son of sixteen in the high school is smoking cigarettes, is a sight sufficient to arouse the ire of an angel. Such a boy does not give his parents a square deal. He is deficient in gratitude and manliness, and is the nearest approach to the missing link between a monkey and a man that science has yet found. Ten years hence such a young man is likely to be a physical degenerate, a mental bankrupt, a civic liability, a life without a purpose, a tool without temper or edge and a moral grindstone without grit. Economists are everywhere studying the high cost of living, but the cost of high living as indicated by the smoke bill and the drink bill of the nation, is more alarming. Last year we spent $2,200,000,000 for drink, and about $1,200,000,000 for tobacco and cigarettes. This would pay the rent annually for every non-home owner in the nation. It would raise the average wages of every workingman from $480 to $700. In 1906 we spent $3.67 per capita for education, $9.49 for tobacco, and $19.10 for drink. And it is surprising beyond all expectation that in these days of the high cost of living the cigar store and the saloon should cost the nation eight times as much as the school and the college. This is the day of congested wealth. One-eight of the people own seven-eights of the wealth ; one per cent of the people own fifty-four per cent of the wealth, and fifty per cent of the people own nothing. A bitter battle for bread is now raging in this country, and it will be more bitter in the near future. The population of the nation increases anually at the rate of 2,000,000. Nearly all of the available food-producing land is now under cultivation. In the opinion of many noted agrarian students ths bread problem is the great problem of the race. James J. Hill, that astute business man, points out that if our lines of food consumption continue to approach those of food production, as in the past, in a few vears the great exporting grain elevators of the nation will stand empty, the last ship carrying food stuffs will have left our shores, and we will be compelled to send our agents into foreign markets to buy foods. But there is a more hopeful view. Many thoughtful students think we are on the verge of a great agricultural renaissance. Already hundreds of the abandoned farms of New England have been reclaimed. Farm units in this country will become smaller and farming more intensive, scientific and productive. Systematic drainage will greatly increase the food-producing lands of the South. Six-tenths of all the land areas of the globe are arid or semi-arid, receiving less than 20 inches of rainfall annually and at present are, therefore, unproductive. In the West there are millions of acres of this arid land that may be made productive through dry-farming and irrigation. But regardless of this, foods are exceedingly expensive, and are likely to remain so as the

816 IMPROVEMENT ERA population increases. And yet we spend millions for cigarettes that turn bright, brainy boys into dull-minded students and dullminded men. There are enough misfits, incompetents and "no accounts" in every community, without spending large sums annually to develop them. 4. The cigarette habit among boys is offensive to many persons. They regard it as a public nuisance, interfering with the rights of others. This may not be your opinion or mine ; but it is the argument of many non-smokers, so many that it deserves consideration, and they deserve a square deal. Every man, they say, has a right to all the pure, uncontaminated, ozone-laden air he can breathe. That is his God-given prerogative. No member of society has any right to limit the supply, neither should he be permitted to poison it. The man who pollutes your supply of fresh water, commits a crime punishable by law, and yet the same may pollute your supply of air with filth, and poison it with nicotine. By this act he tends to injure both himself and his neighbor. We abate the garbage nuisance, the sewer nuisance, the foul water nuisance ; we kill the mad dog, dehorn the savage bull and lock up the dangerous criminal. And some day, the objectors argue, when society gets its second sight and cuts its wisdom teeth, it will abate forever the cigarette nuisance that permits one individual to trespass upon the rights of another. This is the point of view of many non-smokers, and it is well for us "to see ourselves as others see us." Kansas has responded to this argument. To protect society against the cigarette-boynuisance, as well as to protect the boy against the habit, that state has passed a law forbidding the use of tobacco in any form by minors. In the interest of the young men of our state, I wish that Pennsylvania might pass such a law. 5. One of the most serious indictments against the cigarette habit among boys is that it bars the way to scholarship. The cigarette-smoking student at sixteen seldom becomes a scholar. He lacks the application, the persistent, tenacious effort that is the price of all scholastic attainment. His intentions are good, but after smoking a cigarette, the purpose of studv becomes vague and shadowy; the mind, dull and dreamy; the will, weak and flabby; and the lesson, which before seemed important and necessary, now appears trivial and worthless. He is not a student, and therefore cannot become a scholar. All he can hope to be is a dull-minded, dense-brained plodder. A student's mind will after a while function along scholastic lines more or less rapidly and accurately. Not so with the mind of the cigarette-smoking boy. He slowly sucks in the poison that paralyzes his own mental development and sets the limits beyond which it cannot go. And how sad it is that many a bright boy who might become a scholar, and possibly add to the sum total of human knowledge by enlarging the circle of

THE PHYSICAL SQUARE DEAL 817 the known,— how sad that such a boy will sometimes sentence himself to be a stupid bonehead for all time ! He should give his mind a square deal, and note that the records in some colleges show that no smoking student has taken first rank in the past thirty years. Scientists assert that 38 per cent of all pupils in the elementary schools are slow mentally. To them great scholarship is an impossibility. Their dullness is due to malnutrition, to heredity, to disease, to physical ailments and to a non-stimulating mental environment. Very few, if any, of this class ever enter the high school. But the great cause of dullness and stupidity among boys in the high school is the cigarette. It suppresses mental action, lulls into mental slumber, dulls the edge of comprehension, dissipates the mind's acquisitive power, and renders depth, breadth and accuracy of scholarship impossible. 6. This foul habit is an effective bar to the professional athletic field. Nicotine poison is the hated foe of physical superiority, and no great athlete in any field dare trifle with it. For two years a great ball pitcher with a national reputation failed to make a record because of this habit. A year ago he gave up the cigarette, and last season he recovered his old form, became a star again, and the coming season will earn possible $20,000. No physical director in this country will place a cigarette-smoking boy on any crack athletic team. He wants men with vigor and endurance ; men with courage in their hearts, iron in their blood, and with grit that will cut down the grindstones of opposition to the last point. Directors know that the only place in all athletics for the milk-fed, nicotine-bleeched, devitalized mollycoddle is on the bleachers. There neither brains nor effort are necessary ; only mouth and lungs are required. Last year 500 young men worked their way through Columbia College. This is a good recommendation for the school, but a better one for the boys. These young men were not branbrained barnacles ; not dudes or dullards ; not butterflies or boobies. They had blood in their veins, — real, red, rich, sparkling blood. During the year they did more than sit on the bleachers of life and cheer for the men who did things. They got down from the bleachers and into the game. They were better because of the game, and the game was better because of the part they played in it. And I will venture the assertion that not one of these hustlers was a cigarette fiend. Why? Such peanut players in life's game never do things. They never give themselves a square deal. 7. This pernicious habit acts also as a bar to employment. The manager of a corporation with a capital of $7,000,000 recently anounced that he would not employ a boy who smoked cigarettes. Many of the great corporations, the great mills and factories, and

818 IMPROVEMENT ERA the great business houses will no longer employ the cigarettesmoking boy. They expect such a young man to be unreliable, irresponsible, dull, inefficient, weak in will-power and with a strong tendency toward falsehood, dishonesty, and moral disintegration. The employers of labor want sharp eyes, alert ears, bright minds, lithe muscles ; men who are wide-awake, responsible and trustworthy. They do not expect the inert, saffron-hued, nicotine-reinforced excuses of a boy to possess these qualities, and hence will not employ him. 8. But the physical and moral effects of cigarette smoking among boys are the strongest indictments that may be framed against it. Nicotine poison paralyzes the nerve cells at the base of the brain, perverts the sense of taste, saps the physical vitality, weakens the heart action, impoverishes the blood, degrades the tissues, predisposes the indigestion and functional diseases, overstimulates and subsequently exhausts the nervous system, induces arterial dgeneration, and paves the way to physical and moral degradation. What a catalogue of curses, that operate against the moral and physical square deal ! And yet they steal into a young man's life so gradually and so insidiously that it requires an expert to detect them. These charges are not mine ; they are made upon the authoritv of Dr. J. W. Seaver, formerly of Yale gymansium ; Dr. Sims Woodward, professor of Pathology in Cambridge University ; Dr. J. Pierce Clark, a distinguished nervologist of New York ; Professor W. A. McKeever, of the Kansas State Agricultural College, and other noted specialists. With school boys the habit of using cigarettes goes hand in hand with idleness, truancy, falsehood, dishonesty, lack of mental concentration, low-grade scholarship, and a spineless moral character. Young men, give yourselves a square deal ; shun the cigarettes as you would a pestilence. For if we are to believe the experts, it will bind you with chains that can not be broken, create nervous conditions that demand drink, cocaine, and other drugs, and load you with mental and moral infirmities that crush and kill and lead to disaster and defeat. The newspapers report that in a recent murder trial in Pottsville, Pa., Judge Brumm in charging the jury pointed out that the defendant was a cigarette-fiend, and that this fact must be duly considered. The judge did not refer to this as an excuse for crime, but rather as a possible cause for it. The evil effects of the pipe and cigar upon boys are only slightly less than those of the cigarette. They grow with the boy, and lessen the efficiencv of the man. The editor of Good Health savs that nine-tenths of the rejected applicants for the army are refused on account of "tobacco heart." Investigation at the Phipps Institute show that smokers are twice as susceptible to tu-

THE PHYSICAL SQUARE DEAL 819 berculosis as non-smokers. Couple with this statement the fact that twenty persons in America die of tuberculosis every hour and you get a new view point of the subject. Thus tobacco, when used by boys, does its deadly work. Nature sets many a human clock to run 80 or 90 years, but the boy disregards the square deal, meddles with the machinery, disad justs the escapement and dies of a "tobacco heart" at the age of 40 or 50 years. The regulation of the sale of cigarettes to boys has generally proved ineffective. Human greed is stronger than prohibitory laws. And a knowledge of the consequences, anti-cigarette leagues, the creation of moral and social sentiment against the habit, and a law forbidding the use of tobacco in any form by minors are likely to be more effective in checking the progress of this evil. It is difficult to know exactly what induces a boy to smoke his first cigarette ; but like the formation of other habits there is some particular motive that leads to the first act or effort. It may be the desire to emulate his father's example or that of some other ideal character who smokes ; it may be that innate desire of boys to do what^nen do, and thus approach to the full stature of their manhood ; or this first act may be due to a snobbish desire to belong to some group of self-considered high school aristocrats who sport bull-dog pipes and smoke cigarettes. The motive may not be easily designated ; but there is always a first act and back of that act lies a motive or desire that leads to it. And safety to the young man at this point lies in the intelligence that discerns the evil and in the strong will that suppresses this motive. This cigarette habit like all habits grows by repetition and the rapidity of the growth is determined by three factors or conditions, age, regularity and frequency. The factor of age is important in the growth of any habit. The plasticity of youth is the springtime of habit. This plasticity extends possibly to the age of twenty-five. The young man who avoids profainty until that age will in all probability never be profane. At the age of twenty-five, character in most persons is well crystallized and the young man who is up to that time free from low vulgarity, is likely to remain free. So the young man who rejects the first cigarette until that age will in all probability never be a slave to the habit. In the rapid growth of the cigarette habit, as in the growth of all habits, regularity is a more potent factor than frequency. The boy who smokes three cigarettes daily will in due time become a slave to the habit ; but the enslavement will take place in a much shorter period, if he smokes them at regular intervals, one for example after each meal. Regularity intensifies the effects of frequency, and together they work through the period of plasticity. The young man at sixteen who smokes regularly and

820 IMPROVEMENT ERA frequently and who keeps at it for a year or two is gone. Ere long he will be bound by the chains of a slavery that is baser and more degrading than the former serfdom of the South. The one was an external slavery enforced by a cruel master; the other is an internal slavery enforced by self. The former was only physical, holding in crude bondage the bleeding body of the victims ; the other is both physical and moral. It enslaves the body through a complete change in the physiological structure of the nervetissue. It enslaves the morals by weakening the will power that must ever stand guard at the door of the soul, to refuse entrance to all that is low, vulgar, and degrading. The young ladies of a community could render a great service in checking the progress of this moral cancer among boys. They could crystallize social sentiment against it by shunning the presence and avoiding the companionship of the cigarette-smoker. Would any cigarette-smoking young man respect a young lady if she were a victim of the habit? Would he be seen on the street, at a picnic, or in the theater with a young lady smoking a pipe or cigarette? Social ostracism is a bitter medicine, and if young ladies would administer it in the right way to the blear-eyed victim with the foul breath and nauseating personality, if they would give themselves a square deal by helping to abolish a double standard of morality for the sexes, the withering curse that is rapidly debauching young American manhood would soon disappear. Le me draw for you two pictures. Yonder is a boy of sixteen acquiring the habit. He is clean, honest, manly, sincere. As yet he is neither vicious nor repulsive ; only an asinine highschool snob, sedulously sucking poison through the nicotine sewer of a briar pipe, or through the slimy sluices of a paper tube, because it seems manly or aristocratic to do so. Yonder is a man of twenty-five, a confirmed cigarette fiend. Once he was clean and pure ; now he is a battered derelict on life's sea, tossed hither and thither by the waves of sense and sin, without a moral rudder to control or guide. Ten years ago he was full of promise ; now he is a piece of devitalized, nicotine-poisoned human junk, ready for the moral scrap heap of humanity. You say this picture is overdrawn. Perhaps it is. But that is not important. The vital question is this : Will the cigarette brush with its nicotine-poisoned paint change the first picture into the second? Will the clean, innocent boy in the first picture ever become the repulsive man in the second? I know not. But the experts assure us that the first is the promise of the second, and that the second is the possible, — nay, the very probable — -result of the first. Dr. Hall, professor of physiology in the Medical School of the Northwestern University, says : "The boy who before adolescence forms the cigarette habit will lie, deceive,

THE PHYSICAL SQUARE DEAL 821 and in other ways show degenerate tendencies. At twenty-five he is a confirmed user of drugs and liquors, and his moral lapser are marked by vicious and criminal acts. If society would save the young man in the first picture from becoming the slave in the second, if it would have him give his body a "square de?1" it must rise in its might, form social sentiment leagues against the habit, and through legal enactment and social ostracism bring him to his senses, ere he sinks to the level of a nicotine-saturated sot. In conclusion, then, young men, avoid the cigarette habit and thereby give your body, your mind, and your morals "a square deal" and a fair chance to develop along the right lines. Avoid the habit because it is so useless, filthy and expensive ; avoid it ; because it is offensive to many of your associates ; avoid it, because it bars the gateway to athletic honors, to employment and to scholastic attainments ; and finally avoid it, because it opens the doorway to physical and moral degeneracy, over which modern scientific investigation is rapidly writing this warning. "Young men, beware ! There is a danger ahead. When you enter this door and enslave yourself by this habit, you turn your back forever upon the highest physical, social, mental and moral efficiency as an individual." The tree lies as it falls ; but it falls in the direction toward which it leans. And the issue I should like to raise is this : How do you lean in thought, in habit, and in sentiment on this obnoxious higfh school evil ? M. I. A. Day The M. I. A. Day has been observed in a large number of the stakes of Zion. The Era has received reports particularly from Snowflake, Granite, Salt Lake, Liberty, South Davis, Cassia, Juab, and Blackfoot. We would be very pleased to give place to these programs and names of the winners of the various contests in story-telling, orations, debates, music, etc., did we have the space. There is great satisfaction, in perusing the programs and reports, and in noticing with what enthusiasm the young people have taken held of these activities in the M. I. A. We congratulate the stakes that have inaugurated this work and trust that next year every stake in Zion will prepare a very entertaining M. I. A. Dav for the young people of their stakes. All the way from fifty, one hundred, to two hundred fifty young people m each stake took part in the activities in the ward and district try-outs, and in the stake finals, showing that the work is popular and effective.