George Washington Hill was an American businessman and manufacturer. He served as a tobacco executive and president of American Tobacco Co.
Background
George Washington Hill was born on October 22, 1884 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. He was the only son among the three children of Percival Smith and Cassie Rowland (Milnes) Hill. His mother was the daughter of a Philadelphia coal merchant and his father, the son of a Philadelphia cotton and woolen goods jobber. George was named for his paternal grandfather, who became president of the American Life Insurance Company and a national bank in Philadelphia.
When George was six, his father sold his carpet business to John Wanamaker and entered the tobacco business as sales manager for the Blackwell Durham Tobacco Company. Percival Hill expanded Blackwell's sales, bought a partnership in the company, and then sold the firm to James P. Duke's American Tobacco Company in about 1898. He became one of Duke's executives and moved his family to New York City.
Education
Hill graduated from Horace Mann School in 1902. Then he spent two years at Williams College.
Career
Hill took a job with the American Tobacco Company in its factory and leaf market operations in North Carolina. In 1907 Percival and George Hill purchased the tobacco firm of Butler and Butler. As head of the company George took over merchandising its principal product, Pall Mall cigarettes, and boosted sales to first place among higher-priced Turkish brands. Promoting tobacco, particularly cigarettes, through advertising became the young Hill's consuming concern. In the wake of reorganizing the American Tobacco trust, 1911-1912, Duke named Percival Hill its president, and George became vice-president and sales manager of the cigarette division. He proved to be an effective executive, providing the company with an efficient, flexible merchandising organization, including reorganizing the division's sales and distribution system and developing a proficiency in advertising promotion.
Prior to World War I, the demand for machine-made cigarettes was limited to local markets with brands of single kinds of tobacco not selling well in more than one market. Then, in 1913, R. J. Reynolds launched Camel, a nationally advertised blended cigarette. American Tobacco, preoccupied with its established products, initially ignored this. However George Hill began to realize the importance of concentrating on a particular product and succeeded in convincing his father that they too should develop a competitor for Camels, then uncontested in the national market.
In 1917 they introduced on a national scale their own Lucky Strike. The younger Hill personally supervised every facet of its promotion from the design of its packaging to the slogan "It's toasted. " His bold, vigorous, and sometimes controversial campaigns, coupled with an expanded war and postwar demand for cigarettes, boosted sales of Lucky Strikes continually. One of the more effective, controversial campaigns, known as "Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet, " implied the healthfulness of smoking as opposed to obesity. Hill also sponsored personalities such as Walter Winchell on nationwide radio. In 1927 he appealed to potential women customers, using testimonials as inducements. When Percival Hill died in December 1925 his son replaced him as president of the American Tobacco Company, but George's energy and interest continued to focus on advertising Luckies.
In 1930 he briefly achieved his goal of supplanting Camels with Luckies as the nation's leading cigarette seller. The magnitude of his advertising budget was unique, the first to expend $20 million a year for a single product. Hill was not an innovator as much as a successful exploiter of the proven. Advertising as the key to tobacco sales was first used by James Duke. The idea of concentrating on one brand in a national market belonged to Reynolds. Moreover, Hill only reluctantly used radio as a medium. His basic assumption behind his campaigns, appealing to animal rather than aesthetic senses, drew heavily from patent medicine promotion. But advertising as the primary thrust of business competition did represent another stage in the evolution of American business practices.
Hill died of a heart attack at his private fishing camp near Matapedia, Quebec, and was buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, North Tarrytown, New York.
Achievements
Hill is remembered as a prominent businessman and tobacco executive who succeeded at market penetration within the confines of oligopolistic control and the threat of government restrictions. Hill, as a product of this new generation of corporate executives, proved especially skillful in this altered environment. Hill was also regarded as a corporate genius in the early 1930s because his company consistently made money during the depression when most firms operated with deficits. As a result he was one of the nation's highest paid executives, averaging nearly half a million dollars a year in salary and bonuses over his tenure as American Tobacco's president.
Politics
Hill was uninterested in civic affairs.
Personality
In his private life Hill avoided public exposure. Most of his energy was focused on promoting his tobacco products, and he drew his friends from among those who shared his zeal. His approach to people was easy and direct, and he acted on informed instinct.
Interests
Hill enjoyed fishing and dancing; only these activities constituted his only outside diversions.
Connections
Hill was married to Lucie Langhorne Cobb. They had two children, Mary Gertrude and George Washington Jr. This marriage ended in divorce in 1920.
In 1922 Hill married Aquinas M. Heller, who died in 1925. They had two children, Percival Smith and Mary.
On July 8, 1935 he married Mary Barnes, his secretary, in a civil ceremony at Caxton Hall registry office in London. They had no children. Until 1942 they lived at his country estate in Irvington, New York, where tobacco plants and a bronze statue of the Bull Durham bull adorned the formal landscaping.
