Pipes Gifted to American Presidents

Pipes gifted to American presidents are the product of a custom the tobacco industry maintained for roughly a century, serving both a courteous and a promotional function. While most protocol gifts sent to the White House were presented to the office, a pipe was a gift directed straight at the person; it responded to a habit the recipient was known, or assumed, to have.

For this reason the record of gift pipes also serves as an indirect document of presidents' tobacco habits. The custom was born at the end of the 19th century and quietly came to an end in the last quarter of the 20th.

Demuth's Presidential Series

German-born William Demuth (1835-1911) founded the company bearing his name in New York in 1862 and quickly became the country's largest pipe manufacturer. In 1881, when his friend James A. Garfield took office, he presented two meerschaum pipes carved with portraits of the president and his wife. The warm reception the gift received launched a long-running practice at the firm: a pipe personalized for every president after Garfield. This custom, sustained even after Demuth's death in 1911, ended with the presidency of Herbert Hoover. The company also had figural meerschaum portraits carved of presidents from John Adams through Hoover; a bust of George Washington accompanied the series. Another meerschaum piece Demuth commissioned, a roughly eighty-centimetre composition depicting Columbus's landing that took two years to complete, was unveiled at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago. For the crossing paths of the firm's Fifth Avenue store with London, see Demuth and Dunhill.