From Promotion to Cessation: Masculinity, Race, and Style in the Consumption of Cigarettes, 1962–1972

Abstract

In the United States, analysis of survey data provided by projects such as the National Health Interview Survey and the Youth Tobacco Survey has revealed the extent to which cigarette consumption patterns are influenced by gender and race. Taking our lead from a broader field of research that analyzed the sociological characteristics of cigarette consumption, we analyzed these intersections between race and gender through a study of masculinity and style in Marlboro and Kool cigarette advertisements during the 1960s and 1970s. We focused on this period because it was then that the racial bifurcation of cigarette consumption practices first became apparent. We suggest that style provides both a theoretical framework and methodology for understanding how and why White American and African American male consumers learned to consume in different ways. We also argue that the analysis of tobacco consumption in terms of masculinity and style provides a useful method for approaching the design of antismoking interventions.

IN THE UNITED STATES, analysis of survey data provided by projects such as the National Health Interview Survey¹ and the Youth Tobacco Survey² has revealed the extent to which cigarette consumption patterns are influenced by gender and race. A gender-based analysis showed that smoking levels are approximately 24% higher for men than for women.³ A race-based analysis revealed radical differences in the types of cigarettes consumed: White Americans, particularly White youths (i.e., middle-school and high-school students), smoked Marlboro cigarettes at nearly six times the rate of their African American counterparts, whereas young African American students smoked menthol cigarettes at four and a half times the rate of White students.⁴

We examined the rise of these different patterns of tobacco consumption among men, with young White American men smoking Marlboros and young African American men smoking menthol cigarettes. We examined these different patterns through a study of the promotion of Marlboro and Kool cigarettes during the 1960s. We included a focus on the work of product designers, advertising agencies, and marketing and market research professionals who sought to shape the meaning of smoking. We discuss a range of different media used in the advertising of these cigarettes, including African American radio in the case of Kools and lifestyle accessories in the case of Marlboro. Our emphasis on advertising reflects the fact that smoking is a social phenomenon as well as an addiction⁵ and that it is “largely propelled by mass media.”⁶ We chose to concentrate on the 1960s because it was then that the racial bifurcation of cigarette consumption practices first became apparent.⁷

This focus on men’s smoking and, in particular, on the differences between men represents a conceptual and theoretical challenge. As scholars have argued, men’s smoking is often understood as an affirmation of a socially significant distinction between the invulnerability and utility of the male body and the idea that the need to care for one’s health is feminine (and effeminate).⁸ This distinction reinforces basic beliefs regarding differences between the male and female body and works, in the words of R. W. Connell, to “guarantee … the dominant position of men and the subordinate position of women.”⁹ The focus on the differences between men is significant because it suggests that masculinity is a plural and unsettled category.¹⁰ It therefore disrupts the notion of a clear or singular distinction between the male and female body.

We used Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste to examine the rise of these different patterns of tobacco consumption between men. We proceeded to analyze the way in which tobacco promotions associated with Marlboro and Kool cigarettes targeted and distinguished between White American men and African American men. Most important in this respect is Bourdieu’s notion of style. Style is important because it encapsulates an attention to the details and processes of decision-making and identity formation that have not always been considered in the context of masculinity.¹¹ As Bourdieu defines it, style is a “mode of representation expressing the mode of perception and thought that is proper to a period, a class or a class fraction, a group of artists or an artist.”¹² Jack Babuscio makes a similar point when he emphasizes the specificity of style. He writes, “Style is never natural, always acquired … it signifies performance rather than existence.”¹³ That is, an emphasis on style foregrounds the fact that masculinity is a social “accomplishment” that “requires labor,”¹⁴ rather than a natural¹⁵ or self-evident¹⁶ phenomenon that “has no history”¹⁷ or that is universally recognized by all people all the time. An emphasis on style shifts the definition of masculinity away from the realm of the natural, the timeless, and the essential into domains that are much less stable.

As well as a theoretical framework, Bourdieu’s concept of style provides a methodology for analyzing and understanding representations of tobacco use in the mass media. Style is particularly important in terms of its focus on the capacity of seemingly small acts and gestures to say a lot about not only aesthetics but also individual identity, social and cultural contexts, and politics. Particularly relevant in this regard is Bourdieu’s notion of “bodily hexis,” which pays attention to questions about clothing, hair, food, music, manners of speech, and bodily language (stance, gait, method of greeting). Bourdieu’s notion of style requires us to consider the way in which smoking is invested with meaning as part of a range of actions and gestures that together make up a particular mode or mood.¹⁸

This analysis of the differences between men with respect to cigarette consumption reinforces the findings of a number of major reviews that have emphasized the importance of a multifaceted approach to tobacco control,¹⁹ in which broad-based or communitywide programs designed to decrease initiation or increase cessation (such as excise taxes and health warnings)²⁰ need to be combined with targeted interventions,²¹ including “motivational interviewing” and other person-centered approaches²² that “[pay] attention to diversity,”²³ “derive a greater understanding of cultural differences,”²⁴ “resonate with the target population,”²⁵ and also reflect the targeted nature of tobacco advertising itself. In addition, as stated in a US National Cancer Institute report, “We will not remove tobacco from our society unless we are willing to understand the industry’s constantly changing tactics.”²⁶

MARLBORO AND WHITE AMERICAN MASCULINITY

Marlboro Man began in 1955, when Phillip Morris relaunched its Marlboro brand of cigarettes with the help of the Leo Burnett advertising company of Chicago. At this time, Philip Morris had been producing Marlboro cigarettes for over 30 years. The brand first appeared in 1924. It was initially manufactured with an ivory tip or a red “beauty tip” and marketed as “a fancy smoke for dudes and women.”²⁷ The goal in 1955 was to create an entirely new image for the product. In the first instance, Burnett developed a series of advertisements showing a range of masculine styles. They included a man in a tuxedo, a chess player, a man in a towel coming out of a shower, a writer who was typing, a cinematographer, a diver, a cowboy, and a sailor. All the ads carried the byline, “A lot of man … a lot of cigarette.”²⁸

By 1962, the transition to “Marlboro Country,” represented by the singular emphasis on the soon-to-be-famous figure of the cowboy, had begun. The copy line that became the hallmark for Marlboro advertising appeared in 1963: “Come to where the flavor is, come to Marlboro Country.” One of the great strengths of the Marlboro Man as cowboy was the extent to which he disavowed the concept of style. He was, as Burnett liked to say, “universal.”²⁹ His virtue was his self-confidence. He liked being self-reliant, autonomous, and enigmatic. He was an outdoors man, a man of action rather than words; simple rather than ostentatious, timeless rather than fashion conscious. In the language of David Riesman’s path-breaking analysis of American masculinity, The Lonely Crowd (1950), “doing your own thing” was the hallmark of the “inner-directed” man rather than the shallower, approval-seeking, crowd-following, style-conscious, “other directed” man.³⁰ All of these qualities suggested that the Marlboro Man transcended considerations of style.

Yet the apparently timeless and universal qualities of the Marlboro Man as cowboy were carefully and artfully constructed. The Marlboro Man was the product of a significant body of labor. Even his silence, supposedly a sign of emotional depth, experience, and “simplicity of life,” was the product of labor, specifically the product of labor invested in the visual image over the written or spoken word. The most striking feature of the Marlboro campaign was its use of a single, bold, photographic image with hardly any copy. This wasn’t an accident, it wasn’t natural, nor was it a reference to a timeless tradition. It represented a revolution in the history of advertising.³¹ As Burnett put it, “It was the best advertising we had ever done, and Marlboro’s sales proved it.”³² At the same time, the Marlboro Man’s style was developed through a range of accessories. In addition to his bodily posture (at once relaxed but ready for action), his horse as accessory, and his clothing (hat, tight jeans, leather vest, boots and spurs), all of which were pure artifice, the Marlboro Man’s style was created through a range of other mediums. Music was one other aspect. In 1963, Marlboro purchased the right to arrange and record the theme song to John Sturges’s 1960 Western epic The Magnificent Seven, the story of a group of American gunfighters, or “counter-insurgents,” as Richard Slotkin describes them, who cross the border into Mexico during a time of social crises to help the peasants defeat a vicious bandit.³³

Over the next decade, Marlboro would continue to develop a style that would provide their customers with a particular identity. Marlboro developed an extended range of accessories. Food and cooking were incorporated into the Marlboro Man style. In May 1971, Life magazine carried a special 16-page insert called “Chuckwagon Cooking From Marlboro Country,” featuring 28 “original Chuckwagon recipes,” each with “a colorful past and the flavor of the old west.”³⁴ The Chuckwagon, as the cookbook stated, was “a home in the middle of nowhere. A place where a man could hang his hat, swap a story or two and fill his belly before turning in.” As with the cowboy’s clothing, music, and bodily posture, food represented a distinctive rather than universal aspect of style. Of course, the dominant ingredient at the Chuckwagon was beef:

When a man’s surrounded by a few thousand head of cattle, it stands to reason he’ll eat steak three times a day. All a wagon cook has to do is figure out a lot of good ways to serve it.³⁵

The Chuckwagon special was just one of a series of ways in which Marlboro developed the style of the cowboy. In 1972 and again in 1976, “The Marlboro Country Store,” a six-page insert, offered Western wear for sale, with a special emphasis on items uniquely designed by Marlboro and unavailable anywhere else, including belt buckles, the Marlboro Trail Drivers Shirt, and a “riggin’ bag.” Marlboro also made its theme song available on record.³⁶ The recording drew on many themes of Western America along with styles from Mexican folk music, making it easily recognizable as cowboy music.³⁷

If the cowboy was not quite as omnipresent as Burnett liked to claim, he remained nevertheless an important cultural figure in midcentury American culture. Present in advertising, lending authority to bourbon, automobiles, and any number of other products, as well as cigarettes,³⁸ the cowboy also dominated the entertainment industry. The 1950s was a period when more than 10% of all fictional works published were Westerns³⁹; eight of the top ten television shows, and a total of 30 prime-time television shows, were “horse operas.”⁴⁰ In the film industry, A-picture Westerns (large-budget features) filled movie houses as at no other time.⁴¹ Indeed, the cultural significance of the cowboy during the period was unprecedented.

To understand the particular quality of the cowboy’s style requires a consideration of his broader significance in midcentury American culture, in particular the capacity of his individualism to promote the virtues of the free-enterprise marketplace. Indeed, one of the principal characteristics of the media-depicted cowboy was his ability to establish a relationship between the viewer’s identity and habits of consumption. It was partly in this context that he resonated so strongly with the contingencies of the Cold War, where the fight between communism and capitalism was often gauged in terms of goods sold rather than causalities or territory.⁴² As Richard Slotkin writes, “The rise of the Western mirrored the development of the Cold War and its sustaining ideological consensus.”⁴³

The genius of the cowboy was not only his capacity to initiate consumption but the way in which the act of consumption was framed as functional rather than aesthetic or ostentatious. In this way, the figure of the cowboy naturalized not only his own consumption but the ideology of consumption more generally.⁴⁴ As Burnett described it, he was “virile” without being “vulgar.” He represented “quality without snobbery.”⁴⁵ The cowboy was able to create this sense of transparent or rational pragmatism by drawing on foundational narratives about American history and identity that were so widely held as to appear natural, inevitable, or universal.⁴⁶

The most important aspect of the narrative embodied by the cowboy was the idealized space of the frontier. The myth of the frontier represented history in terms of a natural evolution, an enlightenment narrative of progress within which distinctions between good and evil were easy and uncomplicated. This narrative played an important role in

American foreign policy during an era when the Vietnam War, for example, was represented as a game of cowboys and Indians.⁴⁷ Senator John F. Kennedy also employed the cowboy’s narrative in his use of the slogan the “New Frontier” to represent a program of renewed economic expansion and forward movement. “Too many Americans have lost their way, their will, and their sense of historic purpose,” Kennedy said on accepting the nomination to run for president at the Democratic National Convention in 1960,

[But] the problems are not all solved and the battles are not all won, and we stand today on the edge of a new frontier … I am asking each of you to be pioneers on that New Frontier.⁴⁸

The Marlboro Man’s cowboy narrative reinforced a powerful sense of White American masculine hegemony at a time when, as a number of historians have argued, fears of “feminization” formed an important part of the national discourse.⁴⁹ This crisis of White masculinity was introduced by a widespread (gendered) fear that a smothering, overpowering, suspiciously collectivist, suburbanized mass society had

smashed the once-autonomous male self … and doomed men to a slavish conformity not wholly unlike that experienced by men living under communist rule.⁵⁰

Martin Nusbaum, writing in the 1960s at the height of the Western craze, described the popularity for the cowboy as a kind of “catharsis” from these “depressing and wearisome … pressures, monotony … stifled routine … [and] conformity” of “modern lives.” “At a time when men are concerned with the loss of their masculinity,” he said, “they can sublimate by identifying themselves with the western hero.”⁵¹

It is also important to note that the cowboy stories invoked by the Marlboro Man were stories about White male sovereignty and the destiny of White America. If the significance of the cowboy in mid-20th-century America can be seen as a response to a range of crises, from fears of slavish conformity to defeat in Vietnam, it also needs to be considered in the context of a range of challenges to specifically White masculine autonomy.

From this perspective, it is impossible to separate the history of the cowboy in American culture, including his appearance as the Marlboro Man, from the question of race. As Maurice O. Wallace writes, “At no point in the history of the new world has race not constituted a defining feature of our national manhood.”⁵² More specifically, as some historians have suggested, the mid-20th-century history of White American masculinity needs to be considered in terms of the challenges to dominance and authority posed by the Civil Rights Movement.⁵³ In this context, the ever-present cowboy spoke not only to the corporeal power of the White male body but also to his epistemic power; the power, that is, to represent the normal.

AFRICAN AMERICAN SMOKING AND MARLBORO REJECTION

During the mid-1960s, it became apparent that African American men were not embracing the Marlboro image and the Marlboro cigarette to the same extent as White American men.

Indeed, research conducted during this period revealed a preference among African American male cigarette consumers for menthol cigarettes, especially Kools.⁵⁴ “Among big city Negroes,” as a 1966 report put it, Kool was outselling the second most popular menthol cigarette, Salem, by two to one.⁵⁵ By 1977, African American cigarette smokers were 50% more likely to smoke menthol cigarettes than White smokers, with Kool holding an 18.3% share of the African American market.⁵⁶

Kool cigarettes had been around since 1933. In the 1930s and early 1940s, Kool had traded on the folkloric healing qualities of menthol and had been promoted as therapeutic or medicinal. In 1942, Brown and Williamson had been cautioned by the Federal Trade Commission for making too many unsubstantiated claims about the health benefits of their Kool cigarettes. They were ordered to stop suggesting that smoking Kools would leave “your nose and throat feeling clean and clear.”⁵⁷

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, following the introduction of a range of other mentholated brands, most notably Salem (R. J. Reynolds) in 1956, followed by Alpine (Philip Morris), Oasis (Liggett & Myers), and Spring (Lorillard),⁵⁸ Kool updated its advertising program. Taking the lead from Salem, Kool started to promote itself as a cigarette for all occasions. Rather than espousing health benefits, its new advertisements emphasized romantic boy–girl scenes set in Virgilian pastoral idylls, characterized by babbling brooks, dappled sunlight, and gentle meadows. As industry analyst Harry Wootten, writing in the advertising trade magazine Printers’ Ink in 1959, reported, “For the most part, menthol ads [feature] dressed up young couples in idyllic settings.”⁵⁹

The cigarette-consuming practices of African American men raised a series of questions, ranging from “Why Kool?” to “Why not Marlboro?” The answers to these questions were not self-evident. Notwithstanding the use of “special executions,” in which African American models were used in place of the White models that normally appeared in these advertisements,⁶⁰ the pastoral imagery employed in Kool’s advertising seemed to speak to White middle-class American virtues of (suburban) heterosexuality, marriage, responsibility, and domesticity in a way that offered very few concessions to the differences in the historical, cultural, and geographic experiences between Whites and African Americans.⁶¹ As one market research study suggested, “[The country image] is for whites.”⁶² The authors of a 1966 consumer research report for R. J. Reynolds were similarly perplexed, concluding only that “Although both races recognize Kool as having more menthol, Negroes clearly prefer this and white people do not.”⁶³ A 1969 study of “ethnic markets” pointed to the difficulties that the tobacco industry faced in trying to answer these questions: “Few fields of marketing are in so pronounced a state of confusion as … that of selling to the Negro consumer.”⁶⁴

With a view to promoting Marlboro sales to an African American market, Phillip Morris in 1971 employed Burrell Advertising of Chicago, America’s largest African American–owned advertising agency,⁶⁵ to investigate the subject. Thomas Burrell, the head of Burrell Advertising, was familiar with the Marlboro Man, having previously worked for Leo Burnett.⁶⁶ He seemed well qualified to extend the Marlboro market segmentation to African American men.

In conducting this research, Burrell turned to Herbert L. Coverdale Jr., a psychologist by training and president of the African American–owned Behavioral Systems, Inc., which specialized in African American consumer surveys.⁶⁷ Together, the two men worked to frame the research in terms of the “feasibility” of the Marlboro man as “an advertising appeal vehicle among black smokers.”⁶⁸ More importantly, they conceived of the project as a comparative analysis of masculinity: “the concept of the Marlboro masculinity” was juxtaposed with “an exploration of the masculinity concept among black urban male cigarette smokers.”⁶⁹

Although Burrell and Coverdale were both African American men, the frame within which they were working privileged “Marlboro masculinity” as given and known. The “masculinity concept among black urban male cigarette smokers,” by contrast, was represented as a subject of “exploration.” This perspective can be understood in terms of a more general late-1960s focus among liberal ethnographers on African American culture as a subject of research (a focus that has been subsequently critiqued).⁷⁰

Burrell and Coverdale conceived of Marlboro masculinity in much the same way as Burnett, the inventor of the Marlboro Man. Marlboro masculinity, as defined in Coverdale’s completed report, was associated with a series of virtues, such as “rugged individualism,” “total independence,” “autonomy,” “determination,” and “confidence.”⁷¹ These virtues were associated with certain actions or goals, foremost among which was an emphasis on “controlling [or] conquering … the environment.” This was the heart and soul of the “outdoors man,” with his “love of ‘get[ting] away’ from everyone and everything.”⁷²

In order to “explore” the African American “masculinity concept,” Coverdale, who led the research, organized a series of focus groups in the African American community on the south side of Chicago.⁷³ Twenty-four “black urban males” were selected to participate, all of whom were regular smokers. The groups were divided by “class,” with two “middle class” groups and two “working class” groups. Each group included three Marlboro smokers and three non-Marlboro smokers. Some (non-Marlboro) smokers in each group were menthol smokers and some switched brands frequently.⁷⁴

Assuming White masculinity as the norm against which African American masculinity could and should be measured, the report suggested that African American men had a history of “striving” for “access to the social and economic symbols of [White] masculinity and power.” This striving, however, had been frustrated by racism and poverty. Tempered by the realization that he would never be “The MAN,” but was forever doomed to be the “boy,” the “lexicon of black masculinity,” the authors of the report argued, had been turned inside out, “like a photographic negative.”⁷⁵

This inversion of masculinity had fundamentally reshaped the priorities and goals of the African American man, the report argued. Where the cowboy dreamed of conquering the natural environment, African American men were more interested in “social control in an interpersonal urban setting.” The Marlboro Man loved “getting away,” but this had no appeal for African American men, in large part because “there is no one [there] to see it.” In the report, it was stated that “[African Americans] have been kept away from everyone and everything, … and now they want a piece of the action… .They do not want isolation.”⁷⁶

This difference between Marlboro masculinity and African American masculinity was positioned in the report as pathological. The outward-directed drive of the cowboy, it suggested, had been turned inwards, producing a complex, contradictory, self-destructive, and misogynistic African American masculinity.⁷⁷ “The lexicon of black masculinity,” the authors wrote, “is a maze of contradictions.”⁷⁸ A demonstration of this self-destructive “complexity,” as stated in the report, was the enigma of African American language. This enigmatic quality was described in terms of African American men’s practice of “coining terms with reversed meanings and double entendres,” together with a tendency to make “ironical comments on social issues.” These practices “limited clear denotation” and obfuscated distinct categorization and distinctions between, for example, masculine and feminine, man and boy, good and bad, moral and immoral, and so on. The result was a tortuous linguistic conflagration that mirrored the limitations and frustrations of African American masculinity itself.⁷⁹

An example of these kinds of enigmatic language practices, as argued by Coverdale et al., was the epithet “bad nigger.” They explained,

Here the white society’s term of derision is playfully inverted into a sardonic epithet, which teasingly depicts the enemy’s fears … a black man who is confronting and implacable in the face of white men.⁸⁰

The term “bad nigger” exemplified what they perceived as the “complexities,” “contradictions,” and “lack of clarity” that “burdened” African American masculinity more generally. Thus, no mention was made of the long-standing emphasis on “badness” in cultures of African American masculinity, an emphasis that was increasingly visible in Black popular culture in the 1960s.⁸¹

The oblique nature of this description of African American masculinity means that, as an historical source, the report by Coverdale et al., “An Exploration of the Masculinity Concept Among Black Urban Male Cigarette Smokers,” needs to be treated with care. It nevertheless remains significant by virtue of its capacity to illustrate the extent to which the normalizing of Marlboro masculinity worked to position African American masculinity, on account of its perceived difference, as the pathological consequence of racism and poverty.

KOOL MASCULINITY

Amid juxtaposing the simple and uncomplicated qualities of Marlboro Man masculinity with the complex and self-destructive qualities of African American masculinity, Coverdale et al. made some important observations about the popularity of Kools among African American men. All of its informants agreed that the attraction of Kools was the association between “Kool” and “cool.” To “convey coolness,” to “have cool” or to “be cool,” the report’s authors suggested,

has particular appeal to [African American] masculinity…. For the black male it has strong connotations of being “in control” and “having it together.”⁸²

Coverdale et al. made little use of their informants’ discussions regarding the relationship between Kool, cool, being “in control” or “having it together,” and African American masculinity more generally. They framed cool as a compensatory response to a history of “frustrated striving.”⁸³ At best, cool was understood as an escape from the harsh realities of racial marginalization , an “ironic,” “playful,” or “teasing” “inversion” of (or compensation for) African American male subordination.

Despite the reservations of Coverdale et al., it is possible to use their discussion of cool as “having connotations of being ‘in control’ and ‘having it together’ ” as a site for the analysis of both African American masculine style and the significance of Kool cigarettes. Much of the historical literature discussing the culture of cool in the mid-20th-century literature not only reiterates and develops this definition of cool but, moreover, points to its central role in the history of African American style and masculinity. The most compelling historical analyses suggest that there were two aspects to cool or cool culture. The first aspect of cool was, as Coverdale et al. suggest, an emphasis on having it together and being in control. The second and perhaps more nuanced aspect was, in the words of Gerald Early, “making it look easy or effortless.”⁸⁴ Nelson George discusses this notion of effortlessness in terms of a “knowing restraint … nonchalant [and] laconic.”⁸⁵ Robert Farris Thompson, in his study of cool as “a basic West African/Afro-American metaphor of moral aesthetic accomplishment,” defines this impulse in terms of “transcendental balance … especially in a time of stress.” “It is particularly admirable,” he writes, “to do difficult tasks with an air of ease and disdain.”⁸⁶

Cool style was manifest in a range of different cultural phenomenon. Indeed, Toni Morrison suggests that it was one of the major things that African American art, especially music, “had to have.” Morrison’s argues, “[It] must look effortless. It must look cool and easy. If it makes you sweat, you haven’t done the work. You shouldn’t be able to see the seams and stitches.”⁸⁷ Robin D. G. Kelley locates cool in terms of the more expansive style of “soul.”⁸⁸ Claude Brown also suggests that cool animated much of “soul culture,” informing notions such as “uptight,” which came to mean “everything is cool, under control, going my way.”⁸⁹ William Van Deburg also relates “Afro-cool” to “soul style.”⁹⁰

Cool style was extremely prominent in African American culture in general, and it emerged as a significant aspect of African American masculinity, particularly in the context of the masculinization of the Black Power movement.⁹¹ The militant, the boxer, the athlete, the musician, the dancer, and the pimp were all widely considered representatives of cool. Ralph Ellison, for example, recalled that he and his young Oklahoman friends had

recognized and were proud of our group’s own style wherever we discerned it—in jazzmen and prizefighters, ballplayers and tap dancers; in gesture, inflection, intonation, timbre and phrasing.⁹²

Boxers who were seen as exponents of cool included Muhammad Ali and Sugar Ray Robinson, who, as Gerald Early suggests, were known for their “refulgent” style. Ali’s capacity to make the impossible look easy was referenced in his famous dictum “Dance like a butterfly sting like a bee.” The coolness of these men was all the more important by virtue of not only their cultural but also their gendered significance. Early cites Ali, along with fellow boxers Sonny Liston and Floyd Patterson, as “the most powerful black presences in American popular culture of the sixties.”⁹³ Eldridge Cleaver proclaimed boxing as the “ultimate form of masculinity in America,” and anointed the controversial Muhammad Ali as the “real Mr. America.”⁹⁴ Cool was also part of a new style of basketball emerging on the urban courts of New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Detroit. Nelson George writes:

Many Southern boys, now wise to the concrete jungle, started to move with a fluid, no-sweat attitude everybody called “cool.” Cool came to define a certain sartorial elegance, smooth charm, and self possession that in the hurly-burly of the city suggested a dude that controlled not only himself but his environment.⁹⁵

Musicians were another embodiment of cool. Joel Dinerstein suggests that “cool” “has its roots in the jazz culture of the early 1940s.” The legendary tenor saxophonist Lester Young probably used it first, Dinerstein suggests, to refer to a “state of mind.”⁹⁶ He adds, however, that it was Miles Davis who functioned as a “lightning rod” for discussions of cool in jazz and African American culture.⁹⁷ Gerald Early describes Davis as

an immensely appealing version of 1950s and 1960s cool, [representing] a kind of black male existentialism that forged a moral code from the imperatives of the male body as it alternately functioned as symbol of engagement and detachment, of publishing discipline and plush pleasure that operated cooperatively, not in conflict, if rightly understood.⁹⁸

Perhaps the most provocative and controversial figure in the canon of African American masculine cool was the pimp. The pimp was cool by virtue of not only his attire but, more importantly, his capacity to control his emotions. The most famous pimp in late-1960s America (on account of his autobiographical narratives rather than his pimping) was Iceberg Slim, whose name itself referred to his capacity to epitomize coolness. In his first book, Pimp: The Story of My Life, he writes, “The best pimps keep a steel lid on their emotions and I was one of the iciest.”⁹⁹

Ultimately, cool masculinity found its most potent late 1960s–early 1970s manifestation in the concept of Black Nationalism. Men like H. Rap Brown, chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and later the justice minister of the Black Panther Party, were widely described as cool. Historian Allen Matusow describes Brown as “lean, cool, menacing, peering impassively at the world from beneath his dark glasses.”¹⁰⁰ As Robin D. G. Kelley argues, militants also drew widely on tropes of coolness in their writing.¹⁰¹

MARKETING KOOL CIGARETTES

Kool cigarettes resonated with cool culture in a number of different ways. Foremost, they resonated simply by virtue of their name. The report by Coverdale et al. found that

Certainly the name Kool conveys impressions of refreshing coolness, clean, purifying, etc. which have value within the black culture. The question remains as to why this linkage is to Kools and not to, for example, Salems. We can hypothesize that the more effective linkage with Kool is due to the fact that the brand name itself conveys these meanings. That is, the words Salem or Newport have little meaning outside of geographical location and the association with cigarettes, but the word cool does. Thus, advertising has only to reinforce already existing associations to the word cool.¹⁰²

In addition, however, Kool’s African American–orientated marketing was carefully geared to promote the relationship between Kool and cool. Of particular importance was its radio advertising. Produced by Ted Bates Advertising, Kool radio commercials, such as “Uptight” (“Stay loose with Kool”), “You Know It” (“Don’t just sit there jiving yourself”), “Groovin’ ” (“If your cigarette just isn’t groovin’, let Kool cigarettes do some improvin’…”), and “Come Up to the Kool Taste” (“There’s one way to always keep your cool”),¹⁰³ made important references to contemporary cool style. These advertisements arguably contributed to the rise of Kool as the smoke of young African American men.

Another way of examining the African American consumption of Kool cigarettes is to consider the form as well as the content of Kool advertising. Perhaps the most striking aspect of the history of Kool advertising was the extent to which it was conducted via the radio. By the early to mid-1960s, radio was being recognized by tobacco market research as the best platform for specially tailored appeal to the “Negro market.”¹⁰⁴ Radio had a greater coverage and influence than “all of the Negro publications combined.”¹⁰⁵ The power of radio was increased exponentially among “the younger Negroes, and therefore the masses.”¹⁰⁶ One of the first cigarette brands to be heavily promoted on African American radio was Lucky Strike, which had a campaign that had been running since the late 1950s.¹⁰⁷ By 1969, however, Kools were by far the most heavily promoted cigarette brand on African American radio. That year, Kool spent $599 000 on advertising on African American radio, compared with $349 000 by Viceroy and $260 000 by Winston.¹⁰⁸

The correlation between Kool’s clear emphasis on advertising to African American consumers and the African American consumption of Kool cigarettes reiterates broader, long-standing findings regarding the influence of targeted advertising on cigarette consumption.¹⁰⁹ As Pollay et al. have illustrated,

Marketing programs … designed to better match the psychology and interests of a separable segment will ultimately generate more sales and profit than would a single undifferentiated marketing program.¹¹⁰

The National Cancer Institute similarly argues that targeting various population groups, defined by age, gender, race or ethnicity, and sexual orientation, has been “strategically important to the tobacco industry.”¹¹¹

CONCLUSIONS

The emphasis on the intersections between masculinity and race represents an important contribution to tobacco literature. Only through this combined focus does the role of branding and advertising in men’s cigarette consumption become apparent. A focus on only the issue of gender would represent masculinity as a monolithic entity and abrogated the intragender distinctions in the kinds of cigarettes consumed by men.

We followed the lead of the National Cancer Institute, which emphasizes the need to “understand the industry’s [advertising] tactics” if “we are to remove tobacco from our society.”¹¹² We argue that designers of tobacco cessation interventions can learn a great deal from the ways in which big tobacco drew on concepts of style to understand, message, and market cigarettes in different ways to White American and African American men.

These marketing strategies are important because they illustrate that style is not only central to the way in which cigarettes are consumed, it is also specific in the sense that it is associated with social, cultural, and racial distinctions (in this case, between White American and African American men). That is to say, style is a function of myths and narratives that take shape in the context of historical and structural differences. It is therefore inherently and forcefully political.¹¹³

Furthermore, the study of the sense of style employed by these marketing strategies is also important because it not only offers an opportunity to understand the consumption of cigarettes but it provides a basis for the design of tobacco control interventions that seek to reduce the initiation of smoking or to promote cessation among specific populations. The basis of this shift from consumption to cessation is the argument that it is only within the context of an already existing style that people have the capacity to change their habits and behaviors. As Spinosa et al. argue, “When people change their practices in meaningful ways, they do so on the basis of the style they already have.”¹¹⁴ Tonkinwise writes similarly: “Style is a translator of people’s structured choices into [propensities for] action.”¹¹⁵ From this, it might be reasonably argued that being smoke-free can be promoted as an expression of a particular sense of style, as was done with smoking.