Pittsburgh once hailed as the 'stogie capital'

Tucked away and largely forgotten among the annals of western Pennsylvania commerce is the story of the humble, crudely fashioned but coveted cousin of the cigar called the Pittsburgh stogie (or stogy or toby).

Fueled by demands for cheap tobacco by workmen in the region's booming industries, the stogie's heyday - from approximately the late 1880s through the early decades of the 1900s - sparked heated bouts of adulation versus rancor among factions on home ground and beyond the three rivers.

'Pittsburg stogies, more commonly known as 'tobies' ... have grown so popular that one (company's) output for 1897 was 40 million of these droll little, awkward-looking cylinders of tobacco ... (which) have been long the solace of the impecunious and are becoming the fancy of the rich,' gushed a local publication called The Bulletin in 1898. 'Great is the toby, and Pittsburg is its headquarters!'

(In 1890, the Post Office had eliminated Pittsburgh's 'h' to conform with several cities spelled 'Pittsburg.' Local citizens responded to the move with a collective stamp of disapproval. The 'h' was restored in 1911.)

But viewing the stogie in a different light, vigilant monitors of social ills railed against the practices surrounding its existence as an alarming study in contrast.

Although stogie-manufacturing, established in Wheeling as an industry in 1857, had grown to become one of Pittsburgh's largest sources of jobs, critics maintained that humane considerations toward employees for the most part were ignored. Male and females endured an often harsh, debilitating environment, and were forced to stretch disheartening pay by the piece - $2 per 1,000 stogies, for example - to the limit.

Many stogie-makers even had their children forego school to enter the trade.

'In 1907 there were 90 to 100 children from 5 to 12 years old 'stripping' tobacco (removing the leaf stem) in tenement sweatshops in Pittsburgh, and double that number after school,' reported sociologist Elizabeth B. Butler in her book, 'Women and the Trades,' published in 1909 by the Pittsburgh Survey's Charities Publication Committee. Among adults, pressures of speed and the most economical use of material took a heavy toll, noted Butler: 'A forewoman said to me, 'Every one of my girls (on the job) makes 1,400 stogies a day.' I asked her how that was possible, and she replied, 'If she does not make 1,400, she is discharged.''

'The brown stogy, that symbol of fellowship, social intercourse and the good things of the leisure hours of life, has become socially a costly thing to produce,' Butler wrote. 'No small share of this ... cost is needless waste.'

Based on her objective observations during a year spent in Pittsburgh, the book was one of six illuminating volumes commissioned by the New York-based Russell Sage Foundation for the Improvement of Living Conditions.

Muckrakers' denunciation of the city's network of political corruption and its consequences - poverty, disease, illiteracy - had kindled the project: Journalist Lincoln Steffens' assessment of Pittsburgh said it all: 'Hell with the lid off.'

Some stogie-makers worked in 'factories' (workplaces away from the home), removing leaf stems, rolling wrappers around chopped tobacco filler, clipping, or biting off, the stogies' ends. Others toiled in the squalid sweatshops, which usually were arranged in a room or two of a family's cramped lodgings. Windows remained shut year-round to hasten the drying process of tobacco leaves, resulting in showers of tobacco dust from the leaves' dried-out edges.

Catarrh (inflammation of the respiratory tract), bronchitis and tuberculosis were no strangers to workers. 'The air grows heavy from the nicotine exhaled by the mellowing leaves,' observed Butler, 'and the danger of infection is increased by placing workers opposite one another to save space, instead of facing them in the same direction.'

Inevitably, the door to employment in the trade was a revolving one; turnover was high, especially among men. (Following the introduction in 1900 of factory machines to expedite some steps of manufacturing, women outnumbered men in the industry three to one.) But sustained by a steady procession of replacement workers, whose predecessors had prepared for a better life by attending night school classes, the industry's bounty of cheap labor - and of stogie shipments to places 'as widely apart as Honolulu, London, Copenhagen and Lima, Peru,' The Bulletin proclaimed - remained intact.

From 1895 through 1920, labor was comprised primarily of immigrants, most of them Slovaks, and Russian, Polish, Lithuanian and Austrian Jews who settled in Pittsburgh's Hill District, where stogie factories abounded. The newcomers surged into western Pennsylvania by the thousands during the country's second immigration wave; from 1820 - when the United States began keeping immigration records - to 1910, the majority of arrivals had journeyed from the British Isles, Germany, Italy and Scandinavia.

'Take the immigrant as he comes here, ignorant of the language and customs, fearful of a strange America that lured him from his simple home,' Pittsburgh reporter Gertrude Gordon wrote in 1908. Consider an elderly Pittsburgher's personal reflections of the early years: Recounted among more than 200 poignant oral histories of the Jewish immigrant experience, the respondent's memories appear in a publication called 'By Myself I'm a Book!' by the Pittsburgh Section of the National Council of Jewish Women (American Jewish Historical Society, 1972):

'I had to go to work although I was only 11 when other children my age were going to school ... I was in the back room stripping stems ... We were paid only 10 cents for a full day ... Children were supposed to get working papers if they were less than 14, but I was so small and skinny that I was refused. When the inspector came I hid in the basement ... Please don't think the employer was a bad man. This was just the practice everywhere.'

In efforts to Americanize Pittsburgh's immigrants, the Council of Jewish Women in 1895 had opened the nonsectarian Columbian Settlement and School in the Hill District, 'to advance civic, intellectual and social welfare by guiding the foreign-born to American conditions.'

One English class student was a white-haired Russian-Jewish man of about 70. After learning the new language, he was invited to teach a class himself and soon became as mindful of his students' welfare as of their expanding vocabulary.

A touching image comes to mind: The old, timid stranger to the city's cold world of business, trudging the marble corridors of downtown buildings to seek a better job for an immigrant boy too promising to spend his life working in a stogie factory.

Education from another perspective was provided by the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh which opened in 1895. Earlier, in his 'Gospel of Wealth,' Andrew Carnegie had stated, '... the true university is a collection of books, entitled to a first place for elevation of the masses ... the working man, the laboring class, the toilers.'

In 1900, librarians were dispatched throughout the city to announce new reading opportunities for children and adults alike. They were 'home libraries,' books housed in private residences some distance from the main library in Oakland or any branch, and maintained by neighborhood volunteers.

Among borrowers were numerous stogie-makers. 'No statistics can fully show the results of this (program), for it is of such personal character that cannot be measured,' said library director Harrison W. Craver.

Names and addresses of approximately 300 manufacturers, most doing business in Pittsburgh's Hill District, appear on a 1905 roster of cigar/stogie operations in the Greater Pittsburgh district alone, comprised jointly of Pittsburgh and the city of Allegheny (today's North Side). Among other western Pennsylvania communities listed, each with one to several workplaces, were Arnold, Belle Vernon, Punxsutawney, Rochester and Somerset.

Stogie-making also was widespread throughout West Virginia and Ohio, with most tri-state production in Wheeling, and in Pittsburgh, hailed as the 'stogie capital,' wrote Patricia A. Cooper in 'Once a Cigar Maker' (University of Illinois, 1987).

'Although sometimes referred to as cigars (by the public), stogies were viewed in the trade as distinctively separate items,' Cooper reported. 'Cigars were usually made using long pieces of 'filler leaf,' but stogies used domestically grown short (chopped) filler, with no attention paid to shape or contour.'

Appearance didn't matter to stogies' earliest smokers, either. Who among rugged freight haulers or wagon drivers of the early 19th century would have snubbed cigars selling at five per penny, or later, a penny each - no matter how crude the form•

Pennsylvania was central to the story. In the 1820s, farmers in Ephrata, Lancaster County, who had planted tobacco to make their own cigars, produced a surplus crop for peddling long, rough tobacco rolls to tavern and shop proprietors who sold them to avid patrons. Stronger than the usual Virginia tobacco variety, these smokes 'were sometimes a foot long, and designed for virile men who as frequently chewed as smoked them,' reported the Tobacco Institute. 'Drivers delivering the famed covered wagons manufactured at Conestoga, Lancaster County, would have none but these cigars.'

They soon were called 'stogies,' for the Conestoga connection and drivers' habit of tucking a few of the thin delights into the tops of their cheap, coarse boots or shoes of the same name. 'Stogie' has since become the generic designation for any modestly priced cigar (As for 'toby': Stogies resemble the long, dangling fruits of the catalpa tree, known also as the cigar, or Indian bean, tree. In some areas, the podlike fruits are called Indian tobies.)

Before cigarettes eclipsed cigars in popularity during World War I - cigarettes were more portable - 'There was a time when nine out of 10 men smoked cigars, 10 to 12 a day on the average,' said Marc Bloom, owner of Bloom Cigar Co. on Pittsburgh's South Side. It's likely that Pittsburgh stogies played a part in those diversions.

But not to be diverted from issues inherent in the stogie trade - housing, child labor and health, among them - were social reformers only too familiar with the facts.

A veteran leader in the field was Kingsley House, named for novelist Charles Kingsley of England's Christian Socialist movement. Currently located in East Liberty, Kingsley House was founded in 1893 in the Strip District as one of Pittsburgh's earliest settlement houses, existing 'for the purpose of being a friend to everybody in the neighborhood who needs a friend.'

Relocation in 1902 to a Hill District facility owned by Henry Clay Frick offered the Kingsley House staff a vantage point for noting disturbing conditions up close in that neighborhood. The author of a report headlined, 'Stogie Making in the Tenements,' which appeared in the Kingsley House Record newsletter in 1907, did not mince words:

'The enactment of laws that would drive this business out of the tenements will never be regulated unless it were possible to have an inspector ... at the door of each house at all times. (Stogie-making) is nearly always to be found in the worst type of houses, filthy and unsanitary within and without. Put it out of living houses altogether. ... The parents, in their desire to increase income, put the children at the benches. (This does not) excuse the existence of economic conditions which may make such action necessary. It does show, however, that prevention of child labor in such places will always be practically impossible.'

With deplorable wages at the root of the workers' plight, labor unions had begun to establish a presence in the district. Intermittently, from 1899 to 1912, representatives of the Tobacco Workers Protective Association and the radical Industrial Workers of the World had attempted to gain a following among Jewish stogie-makers without much response, wrote Jacob S. Feldman in his book, 'The Jewish Experience in Western Pennsylvania' (The Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania, 1986).

When the Protective Association joined the IWW, a strike by 1,200 Jewish workers against Jewish employers was called in June 1913. 'The stogy industry was paralyzed,' noted Feldman. '... Most workers desired no violence, and were not even asking for union recognition, only wage increases' (shorter hours weren't addressed since pay was by the piece).

The strike ended in November of that year, and in the aftermath remaining stogie manufacturers moved operations from the Hill District to downtown Pittsburgh, where most employees were Polish and African-American women. By 1920, only 170 Jewish stogie-makers were working in Pittsburgh.

But the trade itself went 'valiantly on,' stated an article in The Bulletin Index in February 1937. 'Today, despite stiff competition from cigarettes and 5-cent cigars,' the story pointed out, 'there are some 200,000,000 stogies sold in the United States annually.'

Not bad for a warts-and-all industry that had gone up in smoke in the 'stogie-capital' more than 20 years earlier.

More information on cigar/stogie-making in western Pennsylvania can be found at 'Points in Time' exhibit on the second floor of the Sen. John Heinz Pittsburgh Regional History Center, 1212 Smallman St., in Pittsburgh's Strip District. Call 412-454-6000.

Beatrice Paul Hirschl is a Pittsburgh free-lance writer for the Tribune-Review