Antique R.J. Jr. Perfectos Cigar Box Label 🚬 NRA Blue Eagle Insignia 1933-1935 NOS Tobacco Ephemera

R.J. Jr. Perfectos Cigar Box Label 🦅 NRA Blue Eagle, 1933 - 1935

Size: 9" x 6 1/2"

Two for a nickel! R.J. JR. in big cream letters on a red shield trimmed in embossed gold, "Perfectos" in script, MILD & FRAGRANT on a ribbon, "2 for 5¢" in five places so nobody could miss the price - and up in the corner, the little NRA Blue Eagle with MEMBER, U.S. and WE DO OUR PART. This is the big label from inside the lid, new old stock and never used. I have a stack, so yours will look just like this one.

🦅 The Eagle Dates It

The Blue Eagle was the badge of Franklin Roosevelt's National Recovery Administration. The NRA grew out of the National Industrial Recovery Act, the last big law of his first Hundred Days, signed June 16, 1933. Hugh S. Johnson, who ran the NRA, proclaimed the emblem on July 20, 1933 - an eagle with a gear in one claw and lightning bolts in the other, worked up by Charles Coiner of the N.W. Ayer ad agency and patterned on the Navajo thunderbird. Johnson turned up his nose at the first designs that came in from Ayer's Philadelphia office, so Coiner, the agency's art director, was called down to Washington and drew the bird himself. A business that signed on to its industry's code of fair competition - wages, hours and prices - put the eagle in its window and on its packages. Until an industry had a code of its own, a firm could earn the bird by signing the President's Reemployment Agreement - the "blanket code" Roosevelt sent out to every employer that July - and MEMBER on the badge meant you had signed one or the other. Roosevelt called it a "bright badge," shoppers were told to spend only where it was posted, and Johnson warned the holdouts of a boycott he called "economic death." Even the printing was policed: a printer had to be signed up himself before he could run the eagle, and his customer had to prove he was in the fold too. The cigar makers got their own code, approved by Roosevelt on June 19, 1934. Then on May 27, 1935 a unanimous Supreme Court threw the whole program out in the Schechter "sick chicken" case. Eagles were still turning up on cigar boxes into the middle of that year, until September 5, 1935, when the emblem was abolished for good and its further use forbidden. So a label wearing it was printed between the summer of 1933 and the spring of 1935.

🚬 Two for a Nickel

A perfecto is the cigar shape that tapers at both ends and swells in the middle, and two of them for five cents was a Depression price - a little luxury for a man counting every penny. "Mild & Fragrant" was the whole pitch: the after-supper, front-porch kind of smoke. Who made R.J. Jr. isn't printed anywhere on the label - no factory, no city, no printer - just the brand, the price and the eagle.

That nickel price was where the whole trade was heading. Cigarettes had been outselling cigars since 1920, and in 1933 Harvester and Phillies were among the many brands knocked down from ten cents to five. Phillies went from 17 million cigars to 365 million in the two years after its cut and became the best-selling cigar in the country. In 1933, too, King Edward - a ten-cent cigar when it came out in 1918 - slid from a nickel to two for five cents, the very price on this label, and Jno. H. Swisher & Son, the King Edward people, were one of the first cigar companies to take the NRA pledge and went around urging retailers to cooperate.

📜 The Stories

Collector lore says a lot of NRA-marked cigar labels were small regional house brands, rushed into print because a business without the eagle could face boycotts and the cold shoulder from its own town. For decades most cigar brands had been small local or private-label names - hundreds of them, many made by one firm for another on stock labels - so a "brand" could be a name, a label and a box style more than a factory. Another story says the "Jr." in cigar names of the day was meant to suggest a lighter, milder smoke for a younger man. And they say small makers kept using up eagle labels for weeks after the court ruling rather than pay to reprint, that printers stuck with eagle stock after May 1935 quietly destroyed most of it, and that a few kept stacks as mementos - which is how unused ones like this turn up decades later at estate sales.

Great framed in a den or a man cave, especially next to anything else from the New Deal years.