Deli tobacco in the USA
Deli tobacco leaf was the most wanted cigar wrapper in the US. This high demand resulted in the Americans forcing the Dutch to remove penal sanction.
The legendary Deli Tobacco made its way to the USA where it is called Sumatra tobacco. A sample shipment reached New York in 1876. The US started imported it in 1880 at 752 bales (1 bale = 80 kg). It was not a success because it was more expensive than US leaf. The interest started from 1883.
By 1894, the US imported more than 35,000 bales or 2800 tons (about 18% of the total production from Deli) with the then-value at more than 7.5 million USD (Mulder, 1898). Every year in the 1890s the US imported about four million pounds of Sumatra leaf, worth about a dollar a pound.
It was estimated that between 1890 and 1910, ninety percent of imported wrapper leaf came from Sumatra. It became so popular that growers lobbied for an increased tariff.
Despite a high tariffs, the large imports raised a concern in the US. The government tried to minimise the competition by trialling to grow tobacco varieties for cigar using seeds from Cuba and Sumatra (Stubbs, 2010).
Deli tobacco grown in the USA
In the Consular Report, Spencer Pratt, the US counsel-general in Singapore (1895), requested the Netherlands consul-general for information on the development of tobacco culture in Sumatra and also “procuring a supply of the best quality seed.” The seed request was not fulfilled at that time.
There was a high interest in this Sumatra tobacco in the US as evidenced by several detailed report on its cultivation, soil, production and prices (Spencer Pratt, 1895; Mulder, 1898; Gibbs, 1940).
Tobacco was not native of Sumatra. It was suggested that the Portugese introduced tobacco to Java in 1600s (Gibbs, 1940). Stubbs (2010) mentioned that the Sumatran strain was first imported to the USA in 1883. From the above account, it seems the seeds were imported later.
The report by Mulder (1898) and Whitney (1898) indicated that Sumatra tobacco had already been grown in Florida at that time. Whitney (1898) noted:
Unlike the imported Sumatra tobacco, the tobacco grown in Florida from Sumatra seed loses much of its bitter taste, while the sucker crop and inferior leaves are cured up with more body and are much better adapted to filler purposes.
Tobacco Soils of the United States
Milton Whitney, the chief of USDA division of soils at that time, conducted several studies to study soils of the USA for growing tobacco. Milton, who was a cigar smoker, claimed that “when he smoked a cigar he could identify the soil type on which the tobacco had been grown” (Fanning and Fanning, 2015).
Apparently, the first appropriation for soil surveys in the USA was for the mapping of “tobacco lands”. His work includes “Tobacco Soils Connecticut and Pennsylvania” (1895), “Texture of Some Important Soil Formations” (1896), and “Tobacco Soils of the United States” (1898).
Whitney conducted mechanical analysis for various soils in the US. He believed:
The texture of a soil controls to a large extent its relation to water and the relative amount of water that it will contain.
Whiney also realised the importance of soil structure:
while the texture of a soil is a very important factor in the classification of the tobacco lands, the structure, or the arrangement of the soil grains, is also an important factor which must be considered at the same time. The arrangement of the soil grains is not an easy matter to determine, and there is no satisfactory way of expressing the difference in the structure of two soils. It is therefore necessary to determine the texture and to rely upon actual moisture determinations in the soil to determine the structure and the actual relation of the soil to water.
Tobacco under cheese cloth
In December 1899, Milton Whitney commissioned experiments at Connecticut Experimental Station on “Growing Sumatra Tobacco under Shade in Connecticut Valley” (Whitney, 1902). The idea of growing under tents was observed when the Sumatra tobacco was grown in Florida researchers found it grew better under the Palm trees (Fitzpatrick, 2019). The shaded condition created microclimate that simulated conditions in Sumatra: warmer temperature, higher humidity, and lower evaporation and a diffuse the sunlight.
Whitney noted that the texture of the soils from Sumatra where tobacco was best grown was not very different from the texture of the soils of the Connecticut river valley (light sandy soils) and that the chief difference lay in the larger amount of organic matter found in Sumatran soils.
The experiment found that:
grown under cheese cloth, the Sumatra leaf, was a vast improvement over anything that had been grown in the State, and while it was not a perfect substitute for the imported Sumatra leaf, it gave promise of more desirable results.
Connecticut Shade tobacco became popular, and the next ten years, the Connecticut Experimental Station performed crossing the original Sumatra tobacco with other varieties to develop better-adapted varieties.
The Connecticut shade tobacco is known as a fine wrapper and reached its peak in the 1920s with more than 30,000 acres of area.
Removal of penal sanction
One of the better outcomes of the large American import of Deli tobacco was the abolition of penal sanction. In 1929, Senator John J. Blaine from Wisconsin, discovered the penal sanction used by tobacco companies in Deli. He requested an amendment to the tariff act prohibiting the importation of any article produced by convict labor, and also products of “forced labor or/and indentured labor under penal sanction.”
But this clause would have excluded rubber (the US owned large rubber plantations in Kisaran, which used indentured labour). The terms were then changed to cover only items that were also produced in the US.
The Dutch had been resisting the removal of penal sanction since Van der Brand expounded the maltreatment of workers in 1902. Finally, due to this pressure, on January 1, 1932, the Deli tobacco companies “voluntarily” declared that they would remove penal sanction. In 1931, the Dutch government passed an act requiring the older companies to cut contract laborers to fifty percent by 1936. By January 1, 1942 the penal sanction was finally abolished after 62 years in practice. That does not help as the tobacco industry had already declined since the financial crisis and soon afterwards the Japanese moved in.
The demise of tobacco
Imports of Deli tobacco to the US resumed after the war. The scarcity of tobacco brought a post-war record of $4,545,103 imports in 1951. But since then, it fell steadily down to $131,466 in 1959. Cigar’s period has passed.
The Connecticut tobacco also suffered the same fate as Deli tobacco, with a decline in demand and production (Fitzpatrick, 2019).
Nerveless, the US was the largest importer of plantation produce from the East Coast of Sumatra. In 1923, the imports worth over 20 million dollars. In 1925, the value was 45.5 million dollars worth of direct goods, and another 20 million indirectly.
References
Fanning, D.S., Fanning, M.C.B., 2001. Milton Whitney: soil survey pioneer. Soil Horizons 42(3), 83–89.
Fitzpatrick, James, “Marketing Strategies of Connecticut River Valley Tobacco For The Use as Cigar Binders And Cigar Wrappers” (2019). Creative Components. 166. The University of Iowa. https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/creativecomponents/166
Gibbs, B., 1940. Tobacco production and consumption in the Nederlands Indies. USDA Office of Foreign Agricultural Relations. Washington DC.
James W. Gould. Americans in Sumatra. 1961
Spencer-Pratt, E., 1895. Sumatra tobacco. Consular Reports. United States Department of State, Washington.
Stubbs, J., 2010. El Habano and the World It Has Shaped: Cuba, Connecticut, and Indonesia. Cuban studies, pp.39–67.
Mulder, E., 1898. Cultivation of Tobacco in Sumatra. USDA, US Government Printing Office.
Whitney, M. 1895. Tobacco soils of Connecticut and Pennsylvania. USDA.
Whitney, M. 1896. Texture of Some Important Soil Formations. USDA Division of Soils. Bulletin №5.
Whitney, M. 1898. Tobacco Soils of the United States. USDA Division of Soils. Bulletin №11.
Whitney, M. 1895. Tobacco Soils. USDA Farmers Bulletin №83.
Whitney, M. 1902. Growing Sumatra Tobacco under Shade in Connecticut Valley. USDA Bureau of Soils. Bulletin №20