The “Crying Indian” Ad That Fooled the Environmental Movement (edited)
By Finis Dunaway
2017
It’s probably the most famous tear in American history: Iron Eyes Cody, an actor in Native American garb. Cody’s tear made its television debut in 1971 at the close of a public service advertisement for the anti-litter organization Keep America Beautiful. Appearing in languid motion on TV over and over again during the 1970s, the tear also circulated in other media, stilled on billboards and print ads, forever fixing the image of Iron Eyes Cody as the Crying Indian. The ad won many prizes and is still ranked as one of the best commercials of all time. For many Americans, the Crying Indian became the quintessential symbol of environmental idealism. But a closer examination of the ad reveals that neither the tear nor the sentiment was what it seemed to be.
The campaign was based on many duplicities. The first of them was that Iron Eyes Cody was actually born Espera De Corti—an Italian-American who played Indian in both his life and on screen. The commercial’s impact hinged on the emotional authenticity of the Crying Indian’s tear. In promoting this symbol, Keep American Beautiful (KAB) was trying to piggyback on the counterculture’s embrace of Indian-ness as a more authentic identity than commercial culture.
The second duplicity was that KAB was composed of leading beverage and packaging corporations. Not only were they the very essence of what the counterculture was against; they were also staunchly opposed to many environmental initiatives. The Crying Indian, a new public relations effort by KAB incorporated ecological values but deflected attention from beverage and packaging industry practices to personal responsibility. We can still see the impact of the Crying Indian campaign today in mainstream portrayals of environmentalism that prioritize the personal over the political. The answer to pollution, as KAB would have it, had nothing to do with power, politics, or production decisions; it was simply a matter of how individuals acted in their daily lives.
But there is a final way that the commercial distorted reality. In the ad, the time-traveling Indian paddled his canoe out of the distant past, appearing as a visual relic of indigenous people who had supposedly vanished from the continent. He was presented as an anachronism who did not belong in the picture.
One of the commercial’s striking ironies is that Iron Eyes Cody became the Crying Indian at the same moment that actual Indians occupied Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay, the very same body of water in which the actor paddled his canoe. For almost two years, from late 1969 through mid-1971, a period that overlapped with both the filming and release of the Crying Indian commercial, indigenous activists demanded that the U.S. government cede control of the abandoned island. They presented themselves not as past-tense Indians, but as coeval citizens laying claim to the land. The Alcatraz activists sought to challenge the legacies of colonialism and contest contemporary injustices—to address, in other words, the realities of native lives erased by the anachronistic Indians who typically populate Hollywood film. By contrast, the Crying Indian appears completely powerless. In the commercial, all he can do is lament the land his people lost.
In recent years, the large-scale organizing and protests against the Keystone XL Pipeline, the Dakota Access Pipeline, and other fossil fuel development projects all represent a powerful rejection of the Crying Indian. While the Crying Indian appeared as a ghost from the past who erased the presence of actual Indians from the landscape, these activists have visibly proposed structural solutions for the environment while demanding indigenous land rights. Moving beyond individual-driven messages, they cast off static symbols of the past to envision a just and sustainable future.
