During the Gilded Age, new industrial technology, particularly in chromolithography and tin-stamping, caused an explosion in product branding and advertising with colorful product labels, tin boxes, and tin signs. This new era of marketing meant familiar literary characters and beloved authors could be used to drum up excitement for unknown products.
So when cigar maker Frank Hartmann bought the Spark Cigar Factory in Camden, New Jersey, in the late 1880s, the celebrated local bard was an obvious mascot. By 1890, his company introduced its Walt Whitman brand of cigars. But Hartmann wasn’t the only entrepreneur to have this idea: At least a few companies in the cigar manufacturing center of Binghamton, New York, started offering their own Walt Whitman cigars around the same time. The branding arrived as Whitman was facing his mortality and doubting whether Americans were truly touched by his life’s work. When Whitman disciple Horace Traubel presented the poet with an 1890 envelope advertising Walt Whitman cigars, he reported that Whitman exclaimed, “That is fame! … It is not so bad—not as bad as it might be: give the hat a little more height and it would not be such an offense.” In 1892, when he was 72, Whitman died of complications from his illnesses.
“Did they ask him if they could use his name and image? Did he receive any money for it? No and no,” Centeno says. “At that time, trademark laws were looser. Tobacco was one of the largest industries in the United States, and nearly everybody smoked. The cigar packaging employed a variety of enticing images, including famous people. At the time, Whitman was celebrated for his writing, his Lincoln lectures, and his Civil War volunteerism, so the cigar companies thought his image conveyed a patriotic, older, respectable writer who might sit down and smoke a cigar. Ironically, he never smoked. But you can sell the public any idea you want.”
Even as they benefitted from the poet’s leisurely, voluptuary image, the Walt Whitman cigar brands also nudged their consumers to actually read his book. In 1898, Hartmann’s company designed an image called “Walt Whitman Cigars: Blades O’ Grass” showing the writer in front of books stacked on a desk. Not only did they want their customers to smoke, they wanted them to consume Leaves of Grass while doing so.