Marlboro Man

The Marlboro Man is one of the most universally recognized and widely promoted icons of twentieth-century American masculinity. Initiated as part of a cigarette marketing campaign by the Philip Morris company in 1954, the Marlboro Man exemplifies one of the most successful brand promotions in American advertising history. In his most enduring incarnation, he is a strong, independent cowboy with chiseled facial features; his mastery of nature and the western landscape is symbolized by his horse and his ever-present cigarette. The Marlboro Man serves as a visual embodiment of Frederick Jackson Turner's theory that the frontier fostered an American character of rugged manhood and individualism.

The Marlboro brand was originally launched in 1924 as a women's cigarette with the slogan “as mild as May,” but Philip Morris repackaged Marlboro in 1954 to counter the prevailing notion that the newly added filters were feminine and tasteless. In doing so, advertiser Leo Burnett drew directly upon the cowboy as “the most generally accepted symbol of masculinity in America” (Burnett, 42). Nevertheless, in a postwar capitalist economy that some Cold War commentators argued made men and the nation soft, early Marlboro advertisements depicted not just wranglers, but also confident males in various professional roles—always with tattoos on the backs of their hands—in order to convey an image of masculine toughness and success. Sales of the brand accelerated after the 1963 “Come to Marlboro Country” campaign, which featured the musical score from the 1960 Western film The Magnificent Seven. These ads enshrined the stoic and robust cowboy in his rough western terrain as the company's enduring symbol (replacing a diminutive hotel boy whose “call for Philip Morris” had been heard on the radio since the 1930s). It was this phase of the Marlboro Man campaign that allied the dangerous experience of smoking and the mythic romance of the western wilderness with the figure of the selfsufficient male. After the 1971 prohibition of broadcasting ads for cigarettes, the visual attractions of Marlboro Country [Page 286]in billboards, print media, and promotions helped make Marlboro the best-selling cigarette in the world.

Marlboro Man billboard in San Francisco (c. 1980). The billboard's juxtaposition with its city setting and the men in business suits symbolizes the enduring appeal of the cowboy figure, which was fueled by the processes of urbanization and corporatization in twentieth-century America. (Courtesy of Peter Filene)

The iconic power of the Marlboro Man led anti-smoking groups to challenge the identification of smoking with male potency. In 1976, the year after Marlboro became the most popular cigarette in the United States, a British documentary called Death in the West juxtaposed Marlboro Man advertisements with six real cowboys from the American West who were dying from lung cancer caused by heavy smoking. Philip Morris sued to prevent the film's distribution, and it was not released in the United States until 1981. Such images of the dangers of smoking were magnified when the deaths by lung cancer of former Marlboro Men Wayne McLaren (in 1992) and David McLean (in 1995) were widely reported in the press. Litigation in the late 1990s required the removal of colossal images of the Marlboro Man from billboards across the country, while anti-tobacco billboards have parodied the Marlboro Man by using the phrase “Welcome to Cancer Country” and showing him with a drooping cigarette, with a warning label that reads: “Smoking Causes Impotence.”

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