If you follow the Trump administration’s social media posts, you might spot its new mascot: a cartoon lump of coal with big eyes and babylike features. “Coalie” almost as soon as Interior Secretary for the Office of Surface Mining and Reclamation Enforcement in early 2026.
Coalie’s design , a word It’s the latest in the White House’s efforts to pass off coal as harmless, despite the well-established of mining and burning the fossil fuel.
As a scholar of American literature and culture, I , beginning in the 19th century with its rise to become the leading fuel in the United States. Coal use grew until the early 2000s, when other sources became cheaper and its health and environmental damage became unacceptable to more of the public.
While “Coalie” might be new, the logic behind it is not. For centuries, coal’s promoters have worked hard to show coal as harmless – as well as to use President Donald Trump’s words.
‘An agreeable heat’
Humans living with the effects of burning coal have disliked it for as long as they have burned it.
In 1578, Queen Elizabeth complained that she was “greatly grieved and annoyed with [its] taste and smoke” in the air. In 1661, outlined negative health effects of breathing coal smoke.
English settlers were drawn to North America in part because of the continent’s , a substitute for coal that deforestation had made prohibitively expensive in England.
But by the 19th century, . When, in the 1820s, , urban consumers were eager for a cheaper source of fuel.
In addition to its lower price, anthracite coal grew desirable because of its high carbon, low-sulfur content, which produced less visible smoke when it was burned. An to the editor of the American Daily Advertiser captured as “affor[ding] a very regular and agreeable heat.”
‘A healthful home’
The spread of anthracite also shored up tolerance for smokier but cheaper bituminous coal.
To help people, housekeeping manuals aimed at the fossil fuel’s tried to invent workarounds for its smoke. In 1869, Harriet Beecher Stowe, best known as the author of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” and her sister Catharine Beecher wrote one of many 19th-century articles to , while outlining “modes of making a healthful home,” in the housekeeping manual .
Consumers provided temporary solutions for maintaining indoor air quality while burning coal by sending in suggestions that were published in housekeeping manuals, magazines and newspapers.
At the same time, as the century progressed, coal and coal-stove companies began to suggest that burning coal was healthy, that it could improve indoor air as well as domestic aesthetics. One 1892 newspaper advertisement claimed that stoves were “necessary to heat, cheer, and beautify the home and preserve its health.”
To keep the children clean and bright …
In the 20th century, marketers churned out more colorful claims about the benefits of coal: One showed a mother and child pointing at the crackling stove aflame with the company’s coal, saying it “cannot be excelled in purity, cleanliness, and free-burning qualities.”
Similarly, the Lackawanna Railroad Company came up with the classy, often rhyming, character of Phoebe Snow. In one ad, she points to the , suggesting that not only could anthracite fuel faster travel, but it could also make your travel – and your life – more comfortable.
Coal marketing often used children to suggest safety and reach parents. Another iteration of the Phoebe Snow series promised that anthracite-powered railway travel could keep children “.”
A 1930s advertisement went so far as to position a piece of anthracite , a visual proximity implying that coal was as good as soap.
In fact, soap made of “” – a liquid byproduct of producing coke, a fuel made from bituminous coal used in industrial blast furnaces – did () exist. The British company Wright’s, also popular in the U.S., generated a slew of as having antiseptic properties for children.
Each of these advertisements tried to capitalize on a mother’s desire for healthy children. And they pushed back against the image of the tyrannical “” that had come about amid dangerous, degraded working and living conditions as well as the rise of disease.
‘Clean coal’
By the mid-20th century, . The continued to grow, and people got interested in natural gas as an alternative to coal.
In response, coal companies doubled down on the fantasy of “clean” coal.
A for American Electric Power, for example, flew in the face of mandates that coal corporations employ “scrubbing” technology to remove sulfur dioxide from smoke – the ad depicted someone cleaning coal by hand.
The myth continues
Today, , down from generating more than half of the U.S. power supply in the 1990s. But the country isn’t done with it. Even though coal production today is far below its peak, as companies , Trump has .
In addition to , the Trump administration has pulled out old coal promotion tactics from the past, including as “clean and beautiful.” One image inserts Coalie next to a coal-mining family that otherwise looks like an ad that could have appeared a century ago.
And, like its predecessors, this picture tries to present an innocent image of a product that .
A found that black lung disease was , where is mined today. Living near a fossil-fuel power plant that , asthma and lung cancer, including tiny particulate matter known at PM 2.5, sulfur dioxide and mercury. Even when it’s just sitting in piles waiting to be used at a power plant, coal as the wind blows across it and carries coal dust into the air and people’s lungs.
The myth of coal as healthy and family friendly has been around for centuries – but coal has never been clean, or cute.
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