Caporal--and Stuart Davis

I was originally going to "blow through" in one essay a list of about 15 new or interesting words (for me) beginning with "c". After all, most of the words listed below not only could be defined in a few words, but many of them didn't appear, at first glance, to have much of a "story" to them. How exciting, for example, is an essay on carmalum, a stain or dye known only to some in histology? But once I started scraping just a little below the surface, I was rewarded with insights I could scarcely imagine. I begin this essay by listing the "c" words I will study; I then will turn to caporal, which will take me the rest of the essay.

They are: caporal, cacique, chigoe, chaffer, carnet, carmalum, cardoon, capoeira, chinch, collet, cachuca, camlet, capelin.

Caporal

Caporal is French and Spanish for "corporal," and it came into English with that meaning in 1598. "Cabo de esquadra or Caporall, a Spanish word, is the head or ciefe under the Captaine of a small number of souldiers." But then, in the mid-19th century it became associated with a kind of superior French tobacco. Thackeray bears witness to this usage when he says, in 1850: "Couldn't find a bit of tobacco fit to smoke till we came to Strasburg, where I got some Caporal." In this essay, I am only interested in the "tobacco" end of the definition. How did that come about and what is its significance?

Help in answering that question came from an unlikely source: a 1991 article by Barbara Zabel, entitled "Stuart Davis's Appropriation of Advertisting: The Tobacco Series, 1921-1924," American Art 5 (1991), 57-67. In this helpful article she not only tells us about caporal tobacco, but she brings us into the artistic work of Davis, his professional transformation after WWI, the role of tobacco in American life at that time and, finally, the meaning of "caporal." To start with the last first, caporal is defined by the American Heritage Dictionary as "a strong, dark cigarette and pipe tobacco derived from the French 'tabac de caporal. Corporal's tobacco (superior to 'tabac de soldat,' soldier's tobacco)." Thus, it was invented in a military context and given a name (and quality?) that would make it appear superior to the "run of the mill" tobacco doled out to the troops. Sort of like the "Altoids" of tobacco, I suppose. This tobacco came into the US in the late 19th century but its popularity took off at the time of WWI. It was usually referred to as "Sweet Caps" or Sweet Caporal and was made and marketed by the American Tobacco Company as an upscale tobacco.

Enter Stuart Davis

The major artistic monument to that tobacco today is a 1922 painting by modernist American artist Stuart Davis (1894-1964), depicted here and housed in the Thyssen-Bornemisza collection in Switzerland. More exciting to me than simply the definition given above is the answer to the question of what Davis thought he was doing in this painting/series and how the role of tobacco evolved in American life at the time of WWI. Thus, I am giving you a "deep social history" of caporal. If I was just a "speller," so to speak, I would have learned 50 other words by now but, as you see, I am "an historical wordsmith," and just can't give you the simple word.

In the early 1920s Davis issued a series of paintings on tobacco products. This was, at first glance, a rather startling move on Davis's part. Nurtured in the "Ash Can" school of American Art, which sought to portray the "underside" of urban America after the lead of left-leaning artist Robert Henri, Davis abandoned this approach to art in the mid-1910s, saying that "the poet of the alleys...[was] a bit of nonsense." Thus, he wanted to get away from this gritty depiction of "reality" which he called at the time "as dead as a thousand devils." Well, what was the "life" that was going to replace this "dead" mode of expression? Davis turned to an imitation of European modernism. Yet, even as he began to explore that world, he wanted to do so with an "American twist." America had "come of age" in many ways beginning in the late 19th century; her artists would try to explore what was "American" about the art they produced. The means by which Davis would explore this dual commitment to "modernism" and "Americanism" would be through an examination of advertising. Though the modern advertisting industry in America owes its origin to the late 19th century, the prosperity of the "roaring 1920s" led to an exponentially-rapid expansion of the field. Davis's tobacco paintings show a fascination with the new prominence of advertising while allowing him, at the same time, to be "rigorously logical...American not French." His tobacco paintings are, as Zabel says, "his first successful adaptation of European modernism to a distinctively American idiom" (63).

Tobacco and the Transformation of Social Habits

That Davis chose to focus on tobacco advertising indicates something about the "changing social patterns of tobacco consumption during the postwar years" (61). As Zabel shows, until WWI cigarettes were regarded as "a debasement of manhood." She quotes a warning given to boys from the pre-WWI period: "With every breath of cigarette smoke, you inhale imbecility and exhale manhood." Whoa! Never heard that one before. So, about 40 years before we became broadly aware of the deleterious health consequences of smoking we were aware that smoking was dangerous to your manhood. But that all changed in 1914, when the American Tobacco Company ("Company") began to run a series of Bull Durham ads claiming that the "Environment doesn't make a man--or a 'Bull' Durham smoker." Why? Because a Bull Durham smoker is "red-blooded, self-reliant, energetic...in every walk of life." Thus, rather than stripping a boy of his manhood, cigarettes can be an expression of manhood.

This bold advertising gambit happened almost to coincide with the US entry into WWI in 1917. In that year, General John J. Pershing, Commander of US forces in France, called tobacco "as indispensable as the daily ration; we must have thousands of tons of it without delay." How Pershing was brought to this conclusion would be an interesting study. Had the Company specifically "lobbied" him? How? In any case, by the end of 1917 the Company was shipping tons of Bull Durham tobacco to the American troops. Just as anything German became, almost overnight, a symbol of what was despised in America, so tobacco and cigarettes, especially, became a powerful symbol of American patriotism.

Conclusion

Davis's decision, then, to do a series of seven paintings on cigarettes/cigarette advertising in 1921-24 not only bears testimony to the "transformation" in the role of tobacco in American society at the time, but also reflects his desire to put his more "socialist" past behind him (the Ash Can school) and adopt, if not embrace, the new symbols of mainstream American patriotism. His 1922 piece Sweet Caporal, then, plays on the advertising techniques of the times and gives us a window into the history of that word. Now, I ask you, isn't this mode of studying words preferable to just memorizing the spelling of a list of words? If only life (and money) were undending....but maybe they are.

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