Antique 1920s - 1930s Joe Cannon Cigar Box Inner Label 🚬 Chromolithograph NOS W J Neff Co Political Speaker

Joe Cannon Cigar Label 🎩 "Uncle Joe," Speaker of the House - W. J. Neff & Co., Red Lion, Pa.

Size: 8 1/2" x 7 1/2"

Uncle Joe himself - white beard, black bow tie - framed in a raised gold laurel wreath between a book and quill and a scroll, with his signature underneath and JOE CANNON in big beaded gold letters top and bottom. Never used; the whole design is pressed right through to the back. I have a stack of these, so yours will look just like this one.

🏛️ Who Was Uncle Joe?

Joseph Gurney Cannon was born in Guilford County, North Carolina, on May 7, 1836, into a Quaker family that moved west to Indiana in 1840. He read law in Terre Haute under John Palmer Usher - the same Usher who later served as Abraham Lincoln's Secretary of the Interior - spent six months at the Cincinnati Law School, was admitted to the bar in 1858, and in 1859 ended up in Tuscola, Illinois, because he ran out of money on the train - then moved his family to Danville in 1876 and stayed for life.

He won his first race for Congress in 1872 and served twenty-three terms - 46 years - in the House between 1873 and 1923 (1873 to 1891, 1893 to 1913 and 1915 to 1923), and from 1903 to 1911 he was Speaker, running the place with such a heavy hand that his enemies called him Czar Cannon. He picked the chairman and every member of every committee, and in those days the Speaker chaired the Rules Committee himself - the committee that set how a bill would be debated and voted on, or whether it reached the floor at all. He's still counted among the most powerful Speakers the House has ever had.

On March 19, 1910, George Norris led the revolt that stripped him of the Rules Committee. Norris, a Nebraska Republican, sprang his resolution on St. Patrick's Day, March 17, with a lot of Cannon's regulars off the floor; two days later it passed 191 to 156, with 42 Republicans voting alongside all 149 Democrats, and the Speaker was off the Rules Committee. Cannon called it "anarchy under the color of law," then invited a motion to vacate the chair and beat it handily, because the Republicans weren't about to hand the gavel to a Democrat. He kept the title, but his iron rule was broken. He lost his seat in 1912, the year the Republican vote split in two: Theodore Roosevelt's new Progressive Party ran its own candidate in Cannon's district and took 19 percent, and Democrat Frank O'Hair of Paris, Illinois, won with 38.9 percent to Cannon's 37.3. He won the seat back in 1914, and on March 3, 1923, his very last day in office, he was the face on the cover of the first issue of Time magazine. He died in Danville on November 12, 1926, at ninety, and the Cannon House Office Building has carried his name since 1962. Back where he started, North Carolina put up a highway historical marker for him in Greensboro in 1949; it says his birthplace stood a mile and a half away.

🚬 Born for a Cigar Box

If ever a congressman belonged on a cigar box, it was Uncle Joe. Cartoonists barely had to work - the close-cropped white beard and the black cigar were the whole drawing. He was folksy and profane ("foul-mouth Joe" to some), fond of a poker game and a good line, and he loved his publicity. The story collectors tell is that the gap between that rough-and-ready Illinois politician and a fancy gold-embossed label was half the charm of the brand. The House of Representatives' own Office of the Historian said much the same in a 2013 piece on congressional cigar labels: Uncle Joe "made a terrific cigar brand," and the gavels, quill pens, laurel wreaths and gold embossing the label artists dressed him in made the old hayseed look a good deal more dignified than his public image. Look at this one - a laurel wreath, two quill pens, gold everywhere. Under the portrait the label says "By permission of" - and there's his signature.

🔎 When This One Was Printed

Look along the very bottom edge, under the big JOE CANNON: in tiny letters it says Consolidated Lithographing Corporation, Brooklyn, N.Y. Consolidated came into being in 1926, when it bought out Pasbach-Voice, and it stayed in Brooklyn until 1952. So this sheet came off a Brooklyn press in 1926 or later. Its "Copyright in U.S. Pat. Off." line points the same way from the other end: the Patent Office registered commercial labels from 1874 until July 1, 1940, when the job went to the Copyright Office. The Cincinnati Art Museum keeps this same label in its print collection, credited to Consolidated. There's a second Joe Cannon label out there too, the "National Speaker," but this is the portrait one.

Consolidated was no small shop, either. In January 1935 Time magazine called it the biggest cigar-band maker in the world, with its bands on about 70 percent of the banded cigars made in the U.S. in 1934. Its president, Jacob A. Voice, had gone to work at fourteen as a bronze feeder at William Steiner & Co., lithographers, later started a small lithograph company with friends that boomed when the First World War cut off lithographic materials from Germany, and in 1926 merged with Steiner. The firm's vice-president, Sidney Voice, collected cigar bands and labels, and his collection - about 1890 to 1963, salesmen's sample books from New York and Brooklyn lithographers included - is kept at the New-York Historical Society.

🏭 Red Lion, Cigar Town

The brand belonged to W. J. Neff & Co. of Red Lion, down in York County, Pennsylvania - and Red Lion was a cigar town if ever there was one. By 1927 it had 109 cigar factories and made a fifth of all the nickel cigars in America, under names like Tennessee River Crooks and Mark Twains. A lot of it started in basements, a man, his wife and the kids rolling at home and selling what they made. Red Lion's very first cigar factory was one of those: Nathaniel Neiman opened it in his basement soon after he came to town in 1873, and his wife - Dr. John Hermann's daughter, from Windsor Township, who knew cigar making inside out - took charge of it. The Depression, cigarettes, the machines and a violent strike in 1934 brought it down. In that strike women lay down across a driveway so the trucks couldn't get in, the police went at the crowd with billy sticks and tear gas, and there was talk of calling in the Pennsylvania National Guard.

📜 The Stories

Collector lore holds that cigar makers raced to put Cannon on their boxes during the Czar years, because his name was guaranteed to start an argument in any saloon or tobacco shop - and a cigar that starts a conversation half sells itself. Local legend in Danville says Joe Cannon cigars were a point of hometown pride, bought and handed out as gifts while he was Speaker, and that the town's tobacconists kept his name on the shelf long after the 1910 revolt. And in Red Lion, the story goes, in the busy years you couldn't walk a block downtown without passing a rolling shop, a box maker, a label printer or a tobacco dealer.

A great one for a den, a study, or anybody who loves political history.