Tobacco factory

“ We visited the largest tobacco factory in Manila, the Germinal, and found between twelve and fifteen hundred men and women making cigars and cigarettes by hand and by machine. There are several smaller factories, and all are operated by native labor. ”

“ 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. ”

“ What was our shame and grief the next morning to find it was a cigar factory, and to learn that cigar and cigarette making was almost the chief industry of the mother Boston. There are really two large tobacco factories there running overtime, and always advertising for more women and girls to do their work; and in our Boston, not so long ago, smoking in the street was forbidden! Such are the ironies of life. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There are good tobacco lands in the provinces of Salta, Jujuy, Corrientes, and in the Territory of Misiones, but none is grown excepting in gardens from which the owner makes cigars for his own personal use. The price paid for cigars is exorbitant and a good live factory well capitalized might pay. Nobody smokes a pipe nor chews tobacco, therefore a tobacco factory would be unsuitable.
There is no field in the newspaper or periodical line in all South America. ”

“ There have always been small establishments for the manufacture of tobacco, and many 103 of these during the last three decades have grown to large proportions. New establishments have been opened, some of which are among the largest in the world. The development of the American Tobacco Company and its affiliated and subsidiary organizations has greatly reduced the number of separate establishments. Many were bought by the combination; their brands were transferred to another factory ”

“ The Union Factory merited and has received its full share of the benefit of this increase. The tobacco made by them competes with the best Virginia article, and has completely supplanted all the inferior qualities of that tobacco. The city dealers are almost entirely supplied by this factory, and hundreds of boxes are daily sent abroad. Their tobacco has found a market even in the distant California. ”

“ The tobacco factory is, of course, an institution, and the women employed there are made famous by the opera of “Carmen.” The building is an enormous quadrangular edifice, and has 28 interior patios; and some 5,000 women and girls are engaged in the manufacture of cigars and cigarettes. The stories of the beauty and diablerie of these ladies that had been told me were strangely conflicting. From some I had gathered that they were a collection of alluring sultanas; while others had described them as plain, coarse, and unattractive. ”

“ In the process of manufacturing and handling tobacco small pieces are broken from the brittle leaves and fall to the floor of the warehouse or factory. These scraps are not treated as worthless, but are swept up, and, when cleaned, are used in the manufacture of a cheap grade of cigarettes and stogies. ”

“ At this time, the present director came in charge, and increased the sale to eight millions per year, until, in 1866, the total sales by this one house only, amounted to the enormous number of sixteen million cigars, which went to different parts of the world. The tobacco manipulated in this factory is, with some few exceptions, that grown upon plantations in the Vuelta Abojo, with the proprietors of which Señor del Valle has a special contract for their product. ”

“ By a curious coincidence, later in the day, a factory inspector happened around,—a newspaper office being, legally, within the definition of a factory,—and served a summons on McGuire Ellis as publisher, for permitting smoking in the city room. From time immemorial every edition of every newspaper in the United States of America has evolved out of rolling clouds of tobacco smoke: but the "Clarion" alone, apparently, had come within the purview of the law. ”

“ It is the principal factory in the kingdom, as every one uses tobacco in some shape in Andalusia, not excepting the ladies; but it is when they are on the shady side of forty that they puff and cogitate. Snuff, cigars, and cigarettes are all manufactured here. The best workers among the girls earn about forty cents per day, the poorest about half that amount. Every night they are all searched.”
Disease and Insanity.
Tobacco helps to fill our insane asylums. Dr. Butler, of Hartford, and others, have assured me of the fact. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Previous to the establishment of this factory, all descriptions of chewing tobacco were brought from Virginia. Almost any other manufacturers would have sunk under the distrust and ill-will evinced by dealers of every class against this tobacco in the earliest years of its introduction. It was difficult at first to persuade the dealers even to receive the article on commission—and prodigious efforts were then required to overcome the prejudice against western made tobacco. ”

“ The cigar factory also seemed a fine sample of what some good people wish us to believe awaits the wicked. Babies, not able to walk, are busy working beside their mothers stripping the tobacco leaf from the stems. ”

“ They work under a considerable nervous strain, as speed is a first consideration, if they are to make fair wages. In their hurry many of them bite off the small ends of the cigars (a pleasant thought for the smoker) and they sit all day holding bits of tobacco in their mouths.
The light must be good for their work and the heat of the nearby gas jet adds greatly to the discomfort from the bad air. The floor and walls of the factory are often dirty and the dressing rooms where clothing is hung, are simply large closets partly partitioned off from the main rooms. ”

“ In January, 1890, having agreed upon a capital stock of $25,000,000, all to be divided amongst them, and who should be directors, the concerns referred to organized the American Tobacco Company in New Jersey, 'for trading and manufacturing,' with broad powers, and conveyed to it the assets and businesses including good will and right to use the names of the old concerns; and thereafter this corporation carried on the business of all. ”

“ In this production Rich declares that every fellow who came into an ale-house and called for his pot, must have his pipe also, for tobacco was then a commodity as much sold in every tavern, inn and ale-house as wine, ale, or beer. He goes on to say that apothecaries' shops, grocers' shops, and chandlers' shops were (almost) never without company who from morning to night were still taking tobacco; and what a number there are besides, he adds, "that doe keepe houses, set open shoppes, that have no other trade to live by but by the selling of tobacco." ”

“ Of course, when they are smoked and disliked no one uses them, and they become unsaleable, so that when Government finds that there are few or no purchasers, [295] and that their stock is accumulating, they are obliged to use a better class tobacco in their manufacture, upon which people begin to buy from them again. ”

“ The growing popularity of the cigar made smoking less unfashionable than it had been among the upper classes of society; but among humbler folk pipe-smoking had never "gone out." Every public-house did its regular trade in clays, known as churchwardens and Broseleys, and by other names either of familiarity or descriptive of the place of manufacture; and on the mantelpiece or table of inn or ale-house stood the tobacco-box. Miss Jekyll, in her delightful book on "Old West Surrey," figures an example of these old public-house tobacco-boxes which is made of lead. ”

“ Certainly, from that time forward, it began to grow into great request, and to be sold at a high rate; whilst in a short time many men, everywhere, some for wantonness, some for health sake, with insatiable desires and greediness, sucked in the stinking smoke thereof through an earthen pipe, which presently they blew out again at their nostrils; insomuch that tobacco-shops are now as ordinary in most towns as tap-houses and taverns. ”

“ Although the decree of dissolution resulted in the separation of assets among the American, Liggett and Reynolds companies, as well as P. Lorillard Company and others, there is no contention here that common ownership of stock and the interlocking of officers and directors among those companies have continued to exist. The tobacco industry also has changed from one dealing primarily in the distribution of smoking tobacco, chewing tobacco, little cigars and cigarettes to one dealing primarily in cigarettes. ”

“ Now hundreds of thousands of cheap American cigarettes are being introduced, and a lucrative tobacco-trade has sprung up. Boxes of ten, which are sold at a pice in Darjeeling, fetch an anna at Chumbi, and two annas at Phari. Sahibs smoke them, sepoys smoke them, drivers and followers smoke them, and the Tomo coolies smoke nothing else. Tibetan children of three appreciate them hugely, and the road from Phari to Rungpo is literally strewn with the empty boxes. ”

“ In tobacco factories, women are generally employed to strip the leaves from the stems. Smoking tobacco is cut in machines, and put in papers of different sizes. But little chewing tobacco is prepared in the Southern and Western States, though some factories have commenced it in the West during the last few years. Some leaf tobacco is put up in the South by slaves. In the West it is difficult to get hands, but in New York there is a surplus, though they are the very dregs of society. ”

“ Parent-Duchatelet and D'Arcet, who inquired minutely into the state of the workmen employed at all the great tobacco-manufactories of France, comprising a population of above 4000 persons; and the results at which they have arrived are,—that the workmen very easily become habituated to the atmosphere of the manufactory,—that they are not particularly subject either to special diseases, or to disease generally,—and that they live on an average quite as long as other tradesmen. ”

“ Everywhere in the Pacific trade tobacco is native coin and currency. A few sticks of it will buy a man’s labor for the week, a woman’s virtue for the night. Government regulations have set a standard ration: two sticks a week. But the natives will accept only the stinking twist that traders import from Virginia. The development company had a bright idea: they would make a trade tobacco of their own and corner the business. ”

“ But to do this in France, where the cultivation, manufacture and sale of tobacco is a Government monopoly, would perhaps interfere with the public revenue.
The Japanese method of raising crops of tobacco, of curing and manufacture, is in all essentials similar to that of other countries where tobacco-culture is a staple industry. The seed-beds of the young plants are protected against too great cooling from radiation on spring nights by straw roofs about a metre high. ”

“ The eighth largest employer of workers engaged in manufacturing is the tobacco industry. Although the national consumption of tobacco has increased considerably, the rapid mechanization added to the manufacturing process has resulted in a decline in the total number of employees. Although only approximately six workers per 1,000 engaged in manufacturing in the United States are in the tobacco industry, in Virginia approximately 56 workers per 1,000 are so engaged. The chief locations for the tobacco industry are Richmond, Petersburg, Danville and South Boston. ”

“ Cuba not only produces the best cigars, but also the best materials for making them, as a matter of course; and no cheroots equal those of Manilla, whence leaf-tobacco of exceedingly fine quality is also sent to Europe.
Besides cigars and cheroots, cigarettes form another mode of using the material much used in foreign countries. In Great Britain, the methods of manufacturing tobacco are various, but the principal is by cutting it with machines into fine filaments. ”

“ Of the many different industries in Virginia today only five—food, textile, wearing apparel, chemical, and the manufacture of transportation equipment—employ more workers than the tobacco manufacturers. In 1953 a total of $40,000,000, in salaries and wages, was paid to production workers in the tobacco manufacturing industry in Virginia.
Although tobacco is no longer "king" in the Old Dominion, Virginia farmers produce enough of the "golden weed" each year to make one long cigarette that would stretch around the world fifty times. ”