Cover of Pushing Cool
Pushing Cool Big Tobacco, Racial Marketing, and the Untold Story of the Menthol Cigarette
by Keith Wailoo
University of Chicago Press, 2021
Cloth: 978-0-226-79413-6 | Electronic: 978-0-226-79427-3
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226794273.001.0001

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ABOUT THIS BOOKAUTHOR BIOGRAPHYREVIEWSTABLE OF CONTENTS

ABOUT THIS BOOK

Spanning a century, Pushing Cool reveals how the twin deceptions of health and Black affinity for menthol were crafted—and how the industry’s disturbingly powerful narrative has endured to this day.

Police put Eric Garner in a fatal chokehold for selling cigarettes on a New York City street corner. George Floyd was killed by police outside a store in Minneapolis known as “the best place to buy menthols.” Black smokers overwhelmingly prefer menthol brands such as Kool, Salem, and Newport. All of this is no coincidence. The disproportionate Black deaths and cries of “I can’t breathe” that ring out in our era—because of police violence, COVID-19, or menthol smoking—are intimately connected to a post-1960s history of race and exploitation.

In Pushing Cool, Keith Wailoo tells the intricate and poignant story of menthol cigarettes for the first time. He pulls back the curtain to reveal the hidden persuaders who shaped menthol buying habits and racial markets across America: the world of tobacco marketers, consultants, psychologists, and social scientists, as well as Black lawmakers and civic groups including the NAACP. Today most Black smokers buy menthols, and calls to prohibit their circulation hinge on a history of the industry’s targeted racial marketing. In 2009, when Congress banned flavored cigarettes as criminal enticements to encourage youth smoking, menthol cigarettes were also slated to be banned. Through a detailed study of internal tobacco industry documents, Wailoo exposes why they weren’t and how they remain so popular with Black smokers.
 

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Keith Wailoo is the Henry Putnam University Professor of History and Public Affairs at Princeton University. His books include Dying in the City of the Blues, How Cancer Crossed the Color Line, and Pain: A Political History. Along with Dr. Anthony Fauci and others, he won the 2021 Dan David Prize.

REVIEWS

"In Pushing Cool, Dr. Keith Wailoo presents a sixty-year history of menthol cigarettes becoming a racialized product. . . . Wailoo's powerful text reminds us that business and medical ethics do not exist outside of histories of racial exploitation and oppression."
— Nursing Clio

“Wailoo examines how the tobacco industry framed Black people as a niche market and the industry’s evolution — its secrets, practices, and power. . . . [His] diligent research leaves little room for conjecture, making a coherent and engaging story out of a century of conversations, advertising, and activism for and against smoking. . . . Wailoo stands firmly on the side of the people, aiming to educate for the health and well-being of all.”
— Los Angeles Review of Books

"Wailoo mines press reports through the decades, along with posters, billboards and troves of internal industry documentation that cigarette companies were forced to make public after a spate of lawsuits that ended in 1998. With deadly repetition, menthols have been silent players on the stage of US history, witnesses to epic flashpoints at which health and politics collide. The case is stronger for the specificity and rich detail that Wailoo weaves into it."
— Nature

“Wailoo draws on collections of internal tobacco industry documents made public through litigation, along with other historical sources, to peer into the hidden world of tobacco marketing. . . . Demonstrate[s] how tobacco companies have long designed and reimagined their products to attract new customers.”
— Science

"The saga of menthol tobacco is documented in Wailoo’s book Pushing Cool: Big Tobacco, Racial Marketing, and the Untold Story of the Menthol Cigarette. This work neatly crystallises his position as a historian whose career has addressed issues of race, ethnicity, and identity, and how they intersect with health and health policy."
— The Lancet

"Engrossing. . . [A] history of the evolution of targeted tobacco marketing and how the industry strategically created a demand and then peddled their product to Black America."
— Salon

"Tracking the evolution of a century’s worth of targeted marketing, this history documents the sinister engineering of a Black consumer preference for menthol cigarettes. Wailoo details how Big Tobacco placed billboards in inner-city neighborhoods, strategically funded Black enterprises, and marshalled a vast network of influencers—from Ebony to the N.A.A.C.P.—to yoke ideas of Black authenticity to smoking menthols."
— New Yorker

"Wailoo brings together COVID-19, police choke-holds, and a corner store—'the best place in town to find menthol cigarettes'—as the trifecta that ended George Floyd’s life, tragically symbolized by his famous last words: 'I can’t breathe'. . . Highly recommended."
— Choice

“For decades, cigarette makers have used menthol to target Black Americans. Wailoo does an excellent job showing how Big Tobacco has used both its marketing muscle and political power to get mentholated smoke into African American lungs—with deadly consequences. An indispensable text for anyone who recognizes that Black lungs matter.”
— Robert N. Proctor, Stanford University

“Pushing Cool unpacks the tobacco industry’s brilliant, deceptive, and diabolically successful strategy to hook African Americans on menthol cigarettes. Utilizing remarkable research and analysis, Wailoo demonstrates how the industry established a commercial choke hold on Black America, wantonly disregarding the devastating trail of disease and death that their product generated. If ever there was a case for banning menthol cigarettes, this is it.”
— Allan M. Brandt, Harvard University

“With nuance and flare, Wailoo illuminates how a complex and deeply unsettling fabric of racial capitalism created a Black inner-city market for the most dangerous chemical flavor in the history of smoking. This is essential reading for historians, policy makers, ethicists, and social justice advocates reckoning with profound disparities as part of a tobacco end game.”
— Amy L. Fairchild, The Ohio State University

“As Wailoo reveals in this astute and stunning work, menthol cigarettes are an acquired taste: an appetite deliberately cultivated by marketers, the media, and other influencers. Demographically targeted and racially exploitative marketing was unleashed as a strategy to captivate consumers in the face of growing public awareness of the health dangers of smoking. Pushing Cool is a brilliant, unsparing, and powerful rendering of Big Tobacco’s deadly racial predation.”
— Alondra Nelson, Institute for Advanced Study

“This captivating, comprehensive book contains something to intrigue everyone—from lawyers to psychologists, marketers to historians. Pushing Cool is a unique and important work that deserves to be read widely.”
— Andrea Freeman, University of Hawai’i at Manoa

“In Pushing Cool, Wailoo tells the fascinating story of how tobacco companies and advertising firms marketed menthol cigarettes, especially to African Americans. Diving deep into this untold history, he also brings essential insight into how the construction of pleasure-enhancing products and processes of racialization have enjoyed mutually informing histories well into the twentieth century.”
— Samuel Kelton Roberts Jr., Columbia University

"Keith Wailoo tells the intricate and poignant story of menthol cigarettes for the first time. He pulls back the curtain to reveal the hidden persuaders who shaped menthol buying habits and racial markets across America: the world of tobacco marketers, consultants, psychologists, and social scientists, as well as Black lawmakers and civic groups including the NAACP. Today most Black smokers buy menthols, and calls to prohibit their circulation hinge on a history of the industry’s targeted racial marketing. In 2009, when Congress banned flavored cigarettes as criminal enticements to encourage youth smoking, menthol cigarettes were also slated to be banned. Through a detailed study of internal tobacco industry documents, Wailoo exposes why they weren’t and how they remain so popular with Black smokers."
— New Books Network

"Pushing Cool is a timely history of how tobacco companies aggressively shaped the contours of Black consumerism through exploitative marketing practices."
— Isis

"[an] excellent book that succeeds in telling not only the history of the marketing of menthol cigarettes in the United States but also how the tobacco industry shaped and exploited African American consumer culture."
— Daniel O’Neill, The Social History of Alcohol and Drugs

TABLE OF CONTENTS


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226794273.003.0001
[tobacco billboards;New York City in the 1970s;blaxploitation;menthol cigarettes;Ebony magazine;cigarette advertising;Curtis Mayfield;Freddie's Dead;tobacco industry;race]
The prologue describes how I grew up in New York City in the 1970s, a city saturated with tobacco billboards in an era of blaxploitation.It describes becoming familiar with menthol brands in Black-themed periodicals like Ebony and Jet magazine, and how those experiences inform this book’s central question: how did menthol cigarette smoking become so closely tied, in the eyes of industry, to Black neighborhoods, Black culture, and Black identity? Looking back with the benefit of hindsight and extensive historical research in the tobacco archives, the prologue describes how my youth coincided with a particular chapter in menthol smoking’s racial history.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226794273.003.0002
[market exploitation;racial capitalism;menthol cigarettes;influencers;deception;drug regulation;menthol ban;cigarettes and health;race and menthol;Dave Chappelle]
The introduction provides an overview of how the tobacco industry developed the racial logic of marketing menthol cigarettes to Black Americans. In contrast with the belief that Black smokers have an explainable love of mentholated cigarettes, the introduction highlights how the influence of analysts, marketers, scientists, and psychologists and their theories of health and race played major roles in shaping these smoking trends. It explains that menthol’s first market was not an ethnic one, but a health market, and summarizes how the industry refined its health messaging while also aggressively cultivating new market segments—women’s markets, youth markets, and then increasingly racial and ethnic urban buyers. Menthol—a chemical derived from the peppermint plant—is introduced as a deceptive substance. The rise of menthol smoking is discussed as a story of racial capitalism. Major brands and companies—Brown and Williamson’s Kool, R. J. Reynolds’s Salem, etc.—are introduced. The role of other actors, such as Black publishers and civil rights figures, in menthols' ascent is discussed.The extensive corporate and public sources used in this book are also described—including the extensive Tobacco Truth Industry Documents archive which became publicly available after the Master Settlement Agreement.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226794273.003.0003
[Kool cigarettes;Brown and Williamson;Spud cigarettes;smoking in the 1920s and 1930s;World War I;cigarette advertising;tobacco regulation;modern advertising;health]
The chapter examines the origins of menthol cigarettes and the role of scientists in shaping early menthol smoking trends. The chapter describes the changing relationship between advertising consultant Carl Spier, the tobacco company he represented, Brown & Williamson, and Yale scientist Howard Haggard as Spier sought to use Haggard’s science to rebut accusations from competitors that B&W’s mentholated cigarette Kool was harmful. It focuses on the 1920s and 1930s when menthol cigarettes were promoted by some companies as a therapy of sorts for the “smokers’ throat,” while other firms criticized menthols. It explains the intense competition among tobacco companies, and how the first mentholated brands—Spud and Kool—sought to sell the menthol sensation by speaking to smokers’ health concerns. The chapter situates menthol smoking’s rise in the context of the breakup of the tobacco monopoly, the post-World War I rise in smoking rates and smokers’ complaints, and the wide use of menthol as a drug in the medical and consumer goods market. The chapter examines menthol marketers’ focus on exploiting health markets and mass markets, and why segmented racial or ethnic markets were not a primary concern.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226794273.003.0004
[cancer;Vance Packard;Ernest Dichter;Philip Morris;racial segregation;consumer culture in the 1950s;post-World War II advertising;youth cigarette smoking;market psychology;cigarettes]
This chapter explores how consumption of mentholated brands (and filtered cigarettes) expanded sharply in the 1950s. At a time when the link between cigarettes and cancer came into focus, menthol marketers expanded their market share using a strategy of reassurance. The chapter examines consultants like Ernest Dichter, market psychologist, and consumer researcher who assisted industry in identifying menthol smokers as a new class of smokers, and critics like Vance Packard, who assailed the slick psychological manipulation associated with modern marketing. The chapter describes how industry sought both to study smoker psychology and consumer anxiety—seizing the opportunity to sell menthol and filter-tip brands to smokers worried about their health. The chapter focuses on many consultants and analysts, including the Elmo Roper polling firm and Harry Wootten. It also highlights the growing awareness of tobacco companies about youth markets and African-American markets. It highlights how Philip Morris regarded the popularity of its brands among Black Americans as double-edged because of the company’s concern about white segregationists’ accusations that they were too solicitous toward African-Americans. The chapter explains 1950s menthol sales and marketing in this racial, health, and business context.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226794273.003.0005
[urban marketing;urban poverty;Kool cigarettes;Ebony magazine;Black newspapers;Congress on Racial Equality (CORE);Federal Trade Commission (FTC);Surgeon General's report Smoking and Health;Ernest Dichter;consumer culture in the 1960s]
This chapter explores when, why, and how tobacco companies, led by Brown & Williamson with its Kool brand, pivoted sharply toward urban, “inner city,” marketing of menthol cigarettes in the mid-1960s. It examines how the decade began with the industry focused on cultivating the youth menthol market, and why, as late as 1963, few in the industry associated menthol smoking with Black Americans. It explores how the federal government’s increasing regulation of cigarette advertising to youth created new market challenges for the industry, made more challenging by fallout from the 1964 Surgeon General’s report Smoking and Health. The chapter describes how Brown and Williamson began to aggressively market Kool to Black consumers in 1964, and how a massive industry-wide shift followed. The chapter shows how consultants like Ernest Dichter, publishers of Black newspapers and magazines like Ebony, and even civil rights groups embraced and supported these trends—even as smoking came under fierce assault from Congress, the FCC, and the FTC. The chapter describes how, by the end of the decade, the industry’s strategies of outreach and influence in urban, Black settings, had become expansive.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226794273.003.0006
[urban billboards;blaxploitation;urbanization;suburbanization;consumer culture in the 1970s and 1980s;racial attitudes in the 1970s and 1980s;NAACP;Black newspapers;brand imagery;Kool]
This chapter describes the intensifying urban marketing of menthol brands in the 1970s and 1980s, symbolized by the rise of the urban billboard and opposition to them in Black communities.The chapter discusses the tobacco billboards as a particular form of “blaxploitation,” rising in the aftermath of the national bans of television and radio tobacco advertising. In response to lost national media outlets, industry deepened its hold on what became known as “inner city” markets. The chapter discusses intensified racial branding in the context of urban demographics, white and Black residential shifts, and national regulation trends. It describes the social science and urban analyses developed by and for the industry to reach urban smokers. The chapter also discusses how the industry studied racial movements across “ghettos” and suburban boundaries, and how they used that knowledge in marketing, branding, advertising, and developing stereotypes about Black “ghetto” smokers. The chapter also describes how tobacco industry experts like Philip Morris’s Myron Johnston studied the alienation of white smokers from menthol in the 1970s and increasingly conservative 1980s. It also highlights how companies remained keenly interested in how people’s health anxieties underpinned menthol smoking.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226794273.003.0007
[NAACP;Louis Sullivan;Benjamin Hooks;Uptown brand;Master Settlement Agreement;anti-billboard activism;menthol cigarette ban;tobacco legislation;Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act of 2009;R. J. Reynolds]
This chapter discussed the intense public controversy over racial targeted marketing that followed R. J. Reynolds's 1980 announcement of a new menthol brand, Uptown, that would be marketed exclusively to African-Americans. The chapter examines the furious disagreement this marketing plan inspired, notably between Louis Sullivan (a prominent Black physician and Secretary of Health and Human Services) who assailed the campaign, and Benjamin Hooks (executive director of the NAACP) who defended the industry. The chapter discusses the backlash against Uptown, the new activism spurred in its wake, and how tobacco firms relied on industry-supported Black civic organizations, newspapers, and elected officials to defend their right to conduct targeted racial marketing. The chapter describes the new wave of anti-billboard urban activism spurred by the Uptown controversy, including billboard vandalism in Chicago, Dallas, and elsewhere. It discusses subsequent controversial racial marketing efforts, increasing challenges to industry, and the eventual banning of cigarette billboards following the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement. The chapter ends by describing how, despite setbacks, the web of supporters that industry cultivated over the decades helped save menthol brands from being banned when Congress passed sweeping legislation regulating tobacco products in 2009.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226794273.003.0008
[George Floyd;Eric Garner;Al Sharpton;COVID-19;coronavirus;e-cigarette;racial capitalism;menthol cigarette ban;"I Can't Breathe";race and health]
The conclusion discusses the web of forces that transformed menthol cigarettes from a health product into a lucrative urban commodity, and the resulting deadly suffocation produced in 2020 when menthol smoking, police killing, and COVID-19 converged on Black communities—all linked by the resounding cry, “I can’t breathe.” The chapter explores the connections between menthol smoking, coronavirus, and policing as they illuminate different features of layered exploitation, discrimination, and racial capitalism, operating along different time scales—minutes, weeks, or decades. The conclusion also addresses current debates about banning menthol cigarettes in the broader light of the complex racial history of menthol smoking products, the history of deception in tobacco marketing, the rise of the e-cigarette, and recent calls for racial justice.

Book published by University of Chicago Press, 2021. Page maintained by BiblioVault.