Cigar factory

“ It is a custom of the manufacturers to keep a supply of the best qualities always on hand from year to year, in order that, should the tobacco crop, in any one year, be bad, the reputation of the house can be maintained by using the good tobacco in the store. The factory is a large stone building, opposite the Canipo de Moste, in which all the operations connected with cigar making are carried on (excepting the manufacture of boxes) by over five hundred operatives, all males. ”

“ Indeed, women were the sole manufacturers of cigars in the United States until skilled male immigrants, first from Cuba and then from European countries, able to produce a better cigar than the homemade product, began to displace them. Until 1860 men dominated in the tobacco industry. Since then that same industrial transformation, founded on improved machinery and the division of labor, that brought back the woman shoemaker, has also brought back the woman cigar-maker. In 1860 women formed 9 per cent, of all persons employed in the making of cigars and cigarettes. ”

“ Whether you, as a smoker, buy one cigar, five cigars, five hundred or five thousand, you pay the same price per stuck, and there is no choice as to shops, so far as quality is concerned. Whether you buy in the Graben or the Taberstrasse of Vienna, or in an obscure shop in an obscure village a hundred miles from the capitol, you get the same quality of cigar for five, seven, nine, ten, or twelve kreutzers, in the one place as in the other. All come from one factory, and their goodness or badness never varies. ”

“ This was the acme of artistic skill in cigar making. Workmen of this class were rare, never more than three or four in one factory, and it was never necessary for them to remain out of work. There were men who made two, three, and four hundred cigars of the cheaper grades in a day; they had to be very fast in order to make a decent week's wages. Cigar making was a rather independent trade; the men went to work when they pleased and knocked off when they felt like doing so. As a class the workmen were careless and improvident ”

“ He is generally the final authority on all arguments which arise, and in a cigar factory these arguments are many and frequent, ranging from the respective and relative merits of rival baseball clubs to the duration of the sun's light and energy—cigar making is a trade in which talk does not interfere with work. ”

“ They soon afterward purchased forty acres of land in the Fourth Ward, cleared it of the pines, wild-oats and gophers, and built a factory, a large boarding-house or hotel, and several small cottages{84} for the workmen whom they brought from Key West and Havana. The venture proved a success from the start and improvements were added. The original factory, a wooden structure, is now the opera house, and a large brick factory has succeeded the first one, where the daily output of the 450 cigar-makers employed is 40,000 to 50,000 cigars. ”

“ The Bohemian girls dread going into the cigar factories. The hygiene is bad, the moral influences are often not of the best, and the work is exhausting. An occasional factory inspector, a little protection from the law, and even from the labor union is what the workers have to depend upon to help them gain the chance to earn their livelihood by healthy toil. The strippers and bookmakers who get the tobacco ready for the cigarmakers, work together—sometimes as many as a hundred and fifty of them—at the end of a room laden with tobacco dust and heavy with the odor of damp tobacco leaves. ”

“ The remaining laborers are employed in assorting and packing the cigars for market. Only the choicest tobacco is used in this factory—each first-class cigar made here being warranted equal to any Havana brand. Thirty-five thousand cigars are manufactured daily, consuming thirty thousand pounds of tobacco monthly. The most amusing sight of all is to see these workmen drink water: it is contained in a kind of earthenware vessel which they call a “monkey-jug,” made from a porous earth obtained in Cuba, and shaped something like our American gallon-jug, only the orifice is on the side. ”

“ When we think of the extraordinary uses to which paper is applied, it is not so startling to learn that this material may even enter into the composition of our post-prandial cigar. If we are to believe the newspapers, millions of cigars are annually manufactured in Havana without so much as a single fibre of tobacco-leaf being utilised in the process of their fabrication. The great straw-paper factory in New York State has for some time been making a peculiar sort of extremely thin fine paper, which it has been discovered is used for making cigars. ”

“ But the most of them are young women, a class by themselves, known as cigareras, or cigar-girls. Smart at their business in the factory, they are wild as hawks and gay as larks at the bull-fight on Sundays, or the dance on the green. This is the largest establishment 72of the kind in Spain, and produces as good an article as any other, but the cigars made in Spain are not as popular with good judges as those brought directly from Cuba. The manufacturers there prefer sending the best to London, New York, or Paris, where they find a readier market for the high-priced article. ”

“ We extract the following from the Tobacco Leaf in regard to cigar-making in Cuba:—
"The rule is that a cigar-maker devotes all his ingenuity and diligence to one class of goods. For example, one workman makes only Londres; another only Regalias; another only Milores Communes; and so on. In the Cuban's factory the operatives are allowed to smoke as many cigars as they like when at work; and to take home with them, when they leave work in the evening, five cigars each. The immigration of Chinese laborers into Cuba has modified, and must further modify, the labor market there. ”

“ Too much rain entirely spoils the leaf. Another obstacle to Philippine cigar manufacture is the increasing universal demand for cigars with light-coloured wrappers, for which hardly two per cent. of the Philippine leaf is suitable in world competition, whilst the operative cannot handle with economy the delicate light-coloured Sumatra wrapper. The difficulties of transport are so great that it costs more to bring the finest tobacco-leaf from the field to the Manila factory than it would to send it from Manila to Europe in large parcels. ”

“ If they smoke at all in the tobacco-laden atmosphere of the factories, they are far more apt to be addicted to the cigarette than to the product of their own handicraft. The smoker, by the way, who visits Key West is doomed to disappointment; cigars are no cheaper there than in the most northwestern corner of our land. Nor should he bring with him the hope of sampling for once the brands beyond his means. The factories treat their swarms of visitors with every courtesy—except that of tucking a cigar, either of the five-cent or the dollar variety, into a receptive vest pocket. ”

“ Besides this, there is another warehouse of nearly equal size, where finer kinds of tobacco are deposited, many of them in packages of buffalo-hide, marked "Giron," and Manilla for cheroots, in packages of sacking lined with palmetto leaves. There is still another warehouse for cigars, called the Cigar Floor, in which there are frequently one thousand five hundred chests, valued at one hundred pounds each, at an average, or one hundred and fifty thousand pounds in cigars alone. ”

“ The large number of establishments is due to the fact that cigar making is still to a large extent a hand-making industry. About 135,000 persons are directly employed in the manufacture, nearly half of whom are women. The capital engaged [Pg 98] in the business is reported as 150 millions and the value of the product 200 million dollars annually. The actual consumer pays about 300 million dollars for the cigars smoked, the difference between the cost of the product and the latter figure being the expense and profit of the retail handlers. ”

“ Many of the 5-cent cigars sold so extensively, contain a large proportion of Havana tobacco, and make a fairly fragrant and pleasant smoke. It is said that there are upwards of 100,000 open and proprietary brands of cigars on the market.
Cigarettes.—The sale of these little paper tubes filled with tobacco, has grown enormously within a few years and is still increasing. It is whispered that the ladies even, sometimes seek to find in them a whiff of the solace and comfort their brothers and 53husbands find in the pipe or cigar. There are many favorite brands on the market. ”

“ Some factories supply export trade almost exclusively. There has been little development of the 104 fine cigar industry except in Louisiana and Florida, though in all cities of the Lower South there are local establishments for the manufacture of cigars from Cuban leaf. Richmond is a center for the manufacture of domestic cigars and cheroots and has one mammoth establishment.
Twenty years or thirty years ago scattered over the South there were thousands of small grist mills which ground the farmer's wheat or corn between stones in the old-fashioned way. ”

“ From five hundred to fifteen hundred cigars are made in a day, according to the expertness of the manipulator and the kind of tobacco. Machines have not as yet been found to work well. The machine cigars are finished at the end by hand. He remarked that machines never can succeed so well as men, until they have the brains of men. A very nice widow, who kept a cigar store in New York, told me that many more women are employed in making cigars in Philadelphia than in New York; but the cigars made and sold there are mostly of the cheap kind, selling for two or three cents apiece. ”

“ Prior to 1901 the American and Continental Tobacco Companies manufactured, sold, and distributed cigars, stogies, and cheroots. In the year stated the companies determined to engage in the business upon a larger scale. Under agreement with Powell, Smith, & Company, large manufacturers and dealers in cigars, they caused the incorporation in New Jersey of the American Cigar Company 'for trading and manufacturing,' etc., to which all three conveyed their said business, and it has since carried on the same. ”

“ And the cigar need not consist entirely of Havana tobacco. A cigar of choice flavor is made of a mixture of tobaccos—Havana “filler” and “binder,” with, say, a “Connecticut seed” or Sumatra wrapper.
The manufacture of cigars has without doubt aided largely in building up the business of Key West. One authority says that there are two hundred factories, employing five thousand operatives, and transacting a business amounting to seven millions of dollars annually. ”

“ These lands are mainly held in small farms of four and five acres, each worked by a single family, who devote all their attention to the planting of the seed, the raising of the crop, the drying of the leaf, and even the final making of the finished cigar. They sell the cigars at their door, or take them to the town and sell them to the dealers, who buy and then put on their own labels and place them in the market. Nowhere in the United States will nature permit a tobacco leaf to stay on the plant until it is fully ripe; there is too much fear of frost. ”

“ From the fine gentlemen, who buy their cigars at Delmonico's, or get them direct from the importers, down to the little barefoot boys in the streets, who buy theirs from the Chinamen at the corners or pick up the stumps that are thrown away, all smoke. In some countries pipes and cigarettes are made to do duty by the poorer classes, but in New York cigars seem to be almost invariably preferred. Now, while there is nothing better, in the way of something to smoke, than a first-class Havana cigar, there is nothing nastier than some of the cheap abominations made in that shape in New York. ”

“ Louis, a first-class business man, putting out the very best classes of cigars, said, a few days ago, that some of the hardest work he ever did was to get a few of our own dealers to handle his goods. If but one-third of the stores and stands that sell cigars and tobacco in St. Louis alone would buy their goods of him he could in a few more years employ one or two dozen more men and women in his factory. A dry goods company in the same city is suffering from the same trouble. Our people will condescend to look in, but more often their purchases are made at a neighbouring Jew store. ”

“ During the trip from Nashville to Atlanta I went into the smoking-compartment of the car to smoke a cigar. I was traveling in a Pullman, not because of an abundance of funds, but because through my experience with my millionaire a certain amount of comfort and luxury had become a necessity to me whenever it was obtainable. When I entered the car, I found only a couple of men there; but in a half-hour there were half a dozen or more. From the general conversation I learned that a fat Jewish-looking man was a cigar manufacturer, and was experimenting in growing Havana tobacco in Florida ”

“ This trust believes competition is all right when it comes to crushing an independent manufacturer or dealer, and above all it thinks it's good for the workers to compete fer each others' jobs.
When Porto Rico was gathered under the protecting wing of the American Eagle, the American Tobacco Company promptly took advantage of the cheap labor there, with the result that 125,000,000 cigars are now annually coming into the United States free of duty from Porto Rico. The Porto Rico cigar makers are now fairly well employed, while thousands of American cigar makers are idle. ”

“ British cigars, like all other varieties, may be good, bad, or indifferent. By British we mean cigars manufactured in this country from the imported leaf; and as English capital can command the markets, there is no reason why the best tobacco should not be obtainable for importation. Using the same quality of leaf, a cigar can be produced in this country at a much lower cost than if imported ready made. We venture to think, notwithstanding popular prejudice, that a good British cigar is preferable to an inferior foreign make. ”