Where there is Smoke, there is Fire

Remembering Ms. Katie Mulcahey’s defiance of smoking laws 114 years ago on this day

Smoking, whether you love or hate it, arouses strong sentiments. Its proponents and opponents are unequalled in passion and conviction and unrivalled in adherence and opposition.

There remains little debate over the pernicious outcome of this overpowering vice, its health detriments remain eminently and unequivocally proven through all tests of reason and rationale, best described poetically by Benjamin Waterhouse:

“Tobacco is a filthy weed,

That from the devil does proceed;

It drains your purse, it burns your clothes,

And makes a chimney of your nose.”

And yet, smoking continues.

Intoxication has been as much an aspect of human existence as perhaps food. Smoking has been commonplace for so long that one tends to forget it was a revolutionary concept. When smoking came to Europe like chocolate and tea, it was not treated as food or drink. It was a novelty without a name. People first referred to its consumption as “drinking tobacco” or “drinking smoke”, or more satirically, as “dry drunkenness”.

Opposition to the new pastime began early. By the 1570s, one historian was already denouncing tobacco as “a foul and pestiferous poison of the Devil”. In the early 1600s, King James took time out from reading his new Bible to eloquently condemn smoking as “a custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and in the black, stinking fume thereof, nearest resembling the horrible Stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless.”

In the United States of America, opposition to tobacco was never quite so dramatic, but it has always been around. The tone of the early debate was expressed in a pamphlet as early as 1798. Later, opinion makers such as Horace Greeley joined the fight, wittily defining a cigar as “a fire at one end and a fool at the other”.

Tobacco’s most dangerous and subsequently ubiquitous incarnation, the cigarette, was developed in the mid-19^th century. In 1854, a doctor in New York complained that “some of the ladies of this refined and fashion-forming metropolis are aping the silly ways of some pseudo-accomplished foreigners, in smoking tobacco through a weaker and more feminine article, which has been most delicately denominated, cigarette.”

Despite, or perhaps because of, the cigarette’s initial popularity with society ladies, a law was promulgated in New York on January 21, 1908 named Sullivan’s Ordinance that made it illegal for women (and women only) to smoke in public. Its unsustainability would be demonstrated by its defiance only a day after: on January 22, a woman named Katie Mulcahey was arrested for lighting a cigarette and fined $5 for this offense. On refusing the fine and being brought up before a judge, she defiantly declared, “I’ve got as much right to smoke as you have. I never heard of this new law, and I don’t want to hear about it. No man should dictate to me.”

The public sentiment so brazenly expressed was sensibly sensed by the elected – the ordinance was vetoed two weeks later by Mayor George B. McClellan Jr.

Monarch after monarch and government after government have opposed tobacco. Punishments and penalties have been imposed, several more severe than preceding ones. Turkey, where once offenders were deprived of their offending heads, could be argued to have had the most effective smoking ‘cure’. But even capital punishment hasn’t made smoking quit nations. And is unlikely to anytime soon.