Tobacco Etiquette in Diplomatic Circles

“Bismarck always smoked like Vesuvius until the infirmities of advancing years compelled him to exercise a certain discretion, but even now that he has passed his seventieth birthday he is rarely seen outside of official hours and spaces without a huge porcelain pipe with its stem, a yard long, hanging against his waistcoat.” – Public domain image of Otto Von Bismarck, the German statesman and aristocrat, Bismarck was the Minister President of Prussia, and later, became the first German Chancellor. 

                                             

Great Men and the Tobacco Habit

It is pathetic to remember the helpless writhings of Charles Lamb in the toils of the habit enfolding him like a coil of Medusaen serpents or like the tentacles of a Newfoundland octopus. In his “Confessions of a Drunkard,” he describes the exchange of one thralldom for another, that of the goblet for the pipe, and how at first the latter seemed benign in the comparison, but at last became a scourge of scorpions, leaving him no rest night nor day. Spirits, diaboli, black anthropophagi, hob- gobblins, lemures, continually haunted him; Abaddon vexed and Maher perplexed him; to him, Raleigh, who brought the terrible weed over the seas, was as one who had opened a new Pandora box, fountain of inexhaustible woe to mankind, or as the dark angel who had uncorked the last Apocalyptic vial, loosing the pent up and unend- ing floods of wrath to engulf and overwhelm the world. He would have sympathized with Dr. Talmadge’s denunciation of it and lent him tropes and rhetorical missiles to hurl at it.

Tennyson, according to Carlyle, “floats in and out in a great element of tobacco smoke a wide, breezy, comfortable figure of a man not easy to waken, but great when he is once aroused.” Carlyle’s own pipe went with him to the end. “Doctor,” he said in his later days, when at some health resort he had called in the local Asclepius, “I'll do anything ye say, but ye maun na tak away my pipe be.” When he was usher at Annam he suffered, as he always did, from dyspepsia. He went forty miles to consult a doctor of great local fame, who told him to stop smoking. He stopped several months, but it produced no effect upon his malady, so he took up his abandoned pipe again. “I found,” he said, “that I might as well have poured my woes into the long, hairy, hollow ear of the great jackass I met, as to have ridden forty miles to consult that doctor.”

Bismarck always smoked like Vesuvius until the infirmities of advancing years compelled him to exercise a certain discretion, but even now that he has passed his seventieth birthday he is rarely seen outside of official hours and spaces without a huge porcelain pipe with its stem, a yard long, hanging against his waistcoat. It is plain enough that tobacco has been associated with some of the highest practical speculation and imaginative work which has been done in the world since it was discovered, and if it could be brought face to face with its enemies in some court qualified to sit in judgment on its case it would doubtless have a good deal to say for itself.

Webster hated tobacco, and if his guests at Marshfield wanted to smoke they had to go out to the horseshed. In this way he was almost alone among the public men of his time. Clay chewed; Jackson smoked a corncob pipe, giving audiences while in the White House to all manner of people with that inexpensive calumet (said to be the best pipe going) in his mouth. The Washington of that day, as of some subsequent periods, was paved with spittoons, one President anchoring a gigantic utensil of this description, its crater a yard across, in the middle of his reception room by way of diverting in that direction the noble expectoration rage of his visitors some of whom in the ardor of colloquy spat on the floor, out of the window or perchance fortuitously in the casual neighboring hat. 

Such was the habit of the American patriot of that period, surviving yet in some of his successors. It is a safe bet that when Joe Blackburn called on the President the other day, in the heat of his emotions he executed salivary parabolas worthy of the best days of the Republic, hitting everywhere with a casual disregard of etiquette, cuspidors or precedent. – Brooklyn Eagle, 1885

🍽️Etiquette Enthusiast, Maura J. Graber, is the Site Editor for the Etiquipedia© Etiquette Encyclopedia