Trump’s latest ‘coolie’ mascot and the parable of ‘clean, beautiful coal’ have an extended history in promoting.

If you follow the Trump administration’s social media posts, you could have seen its latest mascot: a cartoon lump of coal with big eyes and childlike features. “coolie” sparked a reaction Almost as soon as Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum started it. to the Office of Surface Mining and Reclamation Enforcement in early 2026.

Collie design Draws a type of Japanese anime called Kawaii.one word Meaning “beloved” or “beloved”. It’s the most recent within the White House’s attempts to demonize coal, although it’s well established. Harms the environment and human health. Mining and burning of fossil fuels.

As a scholar of American literature and culture, I Write about media images of coal.It became the leading fuel within the United States with its rise within the Nineteenth century. Coal use increased until the early 2000s, when other sources became cheaper and its health and environmental damage became increasingly unacceptable to the general public.

While “coolie” could also be latest, the logic behind it shouldn’t be. For centuries, coal promoters have worked hard to make coal look harmless. “clean” and “beautiful” To use the words of President Donald Trump.

‘An Acceptable Heat’

Humans living with the results of burning coal have disliked it for so long as it has been burned.

In 1578, Queen Elizabeth complained that she was “very sad and indignant. [its] Taste and smoke within the air. In 1661, John Evelyn’s treatise Fumifugium Outlined the antagonistic health effects of coal smoke inhalation.

English settlers were drawn to North America partially due to the continent. Abundant supply of firewoodAn alternative to coal, which deforestation had made prohibitively expensive in England.

But by the Nineteenth century, The price of wood also increased in the United States.. When, within the 1820s, News of Pennsylvania’s rich veins of anthracite coal spread.urban consumers were anticipating a less expensive source of fuel.

In addition to its low price, anthracite coal is increasingly desirable due to its high carbon, low sulfur content, which produces less visible smoke when burned. An enthusiastic 1815 letter to the editor of the American Daily Advertiser was captured. An increasingly general trend toward anthracite As[ding] A really regular and agreeable heat.”

‘A Healthy Home’

The spread of anthracite also increased tolerance for smoky but low-cost bituminous coal.

To help people, housekeeping manuals geared toward fossil fuels. Mostly female users Tried to invent an answer for his smoke. In 1869, Harriet Beecher Stowe, best often called the writer of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” and her sister Catherine Beecher wrote certainly one of many Nineteenth-century essays to acknowledge the “evils” of coal smoke, while outlining “healthy homemaking methods” in housekeeping. American Women’s Home.

Consumers provided temporary solutions for maintaining indoor air quality while burning coal, sending suggestions published in housekeeping manuals, magazines, and newspapers.

At the identical time, because the century progressed, coal and coal stove corporations began to suggest that burning coal was healthy, improving indoor air in addition to home aesthetics. An 1892 newspaper commercial claimed that stoves were “necessary to warm, cheer and beautify the home, and to preserve its health.”

To keep children clean and brilliant…

In the Twentieth century, marketers made more colourful claims in regards to the advantages of coal: a Magazine advertisement A mother and child were shown pointing to the corporate’s coal-burning stove, and said that it “cannot be excelled in purity, cleanliness and free-burning qualities.”

Likewise, the Lackawanna Railroad Company featured the superb, often rhyming character of Phoebe Snow. In an ad, she alludes to it. The importance of restsuggests that not only can anthracite fuel high-speed travel, it could actually also make your commute and your life more comfortable.

Coal marketing was often used to supply safety advice to children and to achieve parents. Another iteration of the Phoebe Snow series promised that anthracite-powered railway travel could sustain children.Clean and bright”

One commercial from the Nineteen Thirties went thus far as to incorporate a chunk of anthracite. Coal near the baby in the bathtuba visible approximation that shows that coal was pretty much as good as soap.

Actually manufactured from soapCoal Tar” – a liquid by-product of manufacturing coke, a fuel produced from bituminous coal utilized in industrial blast furnaces – what (And it does) exists. The British company Ritz, also popular in America, ran many advertisements touting its soap as having antiseptic properties for kids.

Each of those advertisements sought to satisfy moms’ desire for healthy babies. And they recoiled against the image of the tyrant.”King Cole“Who got here in the center. Strike on miners’ protest A concomitant increase in hazardous, degraded working and living conditions Black lungs Disease

‘clean coal’

By the mid-Twentieth century, Petroleum replaced coal as America’s main energy source. gave American environmental movement Growth continued, and folks became excited by natural gas as an alternative choice to coal.

In response, coal corporations doubled down on the concept of “clean” coal.

Oh 1979 advertisement For American electric power, for instance, flew within the face of Clean Air Act Mandates that coal corporations use “scrubbing” technology to remove sulfur dioxide from smoke — the ad shows someone scrubbing coal by hand.

The legend continues.

today, Coal generates only 16.2 percent of America’s electricity.generating lower than half of the US electricity supply within the Nineties. But the country shouldn’t be done with it. Although coal production today is well below its peak, as corporations Try to close old uneconomical plants.Trump has. Promised to “revitalize” the coal industry..

Besides that Some coal plants are being ordered to continue operating.the Trump administration has pulled back old coal promotion tactics from the past, including Repeatedly refers to coal. As “neat and beautiful” a picture inserts one next to a coal-mining family that otherwise looks like an ad that would have appeared a century ago.

And, like its predecessors, this image attempts to present an innocent image of a product that’s Harms human health and the environment..

Oh 2018 study Turns out Black had lung disease. Peaking in Appalachiawhere About 40 percent of America’s coal Today is mining. Living near a fossil fuel power plant Expose residents to pollution. Those that contribute to premature mortality, asthma and lung cancer, including PM 2.5, sulfur dioxide and mercury, are small particles. Even because it sits in piles waiting to be utilized in an influence plant, coal can harm human health as wind blows across it and carries coal dust into the air and into people’s lungs.

The healthy and family-friendly concept of coal has been around for hundreds of years – but coal has never been cleaner or cuter.