Tobacco plants in Hell

 THOUGHT OF THE DAY:     
"The roots of tobacco plants must go clear through to hell." - Thomas Edison, from American Heritage, July 12, 1885 [ref] 

That is a wonderfully Edison-ish observation: grandiose, earthy, and apparently based on personal experience.

And the date is interesting. In 1885, tobacco wasn't merely an unhealthy habit in the modern sense; the cigarette industry was still relatively young, and the scientific understanding of tobacco's harms was rudimentary. Edison was apparently condemning it from the standpoint of its effect on plants themselves, or at least making a characteristically extravagant remark about tobacco's roots.

“Must go clear through to hell” is a terrific phrase. It sounds less like a botanical observation than a Victorian curse. One can almost hear Edison saying it while glaring at a tobacco field.

I might guess that in New England the plant was more of a weed.

Yes — if Edison was thinking of tobacco as a plant that had to be eradicated rather than cultivated, your New England observation makes sense.

But there is a wrinkle: tobacco was certainly not merely a weed in New England in the 19th century. Connecticut, particularly the Connecticut River Valley, had a substantial commercial tobacco industry, producing tobacco for cigars. Tobacco had actually been cultivated there since the 1600s.

Edison himself, however, was a New Jersey-born inventor and spent much of his early life around New Jersey and New York, not in the principal Connecticut tobacco-growing area. So the quotation may have been a joke about the extraordinary tenacity of tobacco roots rather than a literal complaint about an unwanted weed.

And there's an amusing possibility in the wording: “must go clear through to hell” sounds like Edison was describing a plant whose roots were so persistent that ordinary digging wouldn't do. That is a rather different sentiment from “tobacco is evil.” If that's the context, I would take it as a gardener's curse rather than a health warning.

Ok I see; I had Edison and Emerson mixed up.

Ah, yes—that would explain it. Ralph Waldo Emerson immediately makes the New England association much more natural.

And in fact, Emerson was a lifelong New Englander, so if you had mentally attached the quotation to him, your instinct about the setting was quite reasonable.

Though I have to admit, “The roots of tobacco plants must go clear through to hell” has a certain Emersonian aphoristic quality to it. It sounds exactly like the sort of thing one could imagine finding in a book of Emerson quotations—right up until one remembers that Edison was also perfectly capable of producing wonderfully odd pronouncements. 😄