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Keep America Beautiful was founded in 1953 by the American Can Co. and the Owens-Illinois Glass Co., who were later joined by the likes of Coca-Cola and the Dixie Cup Co. During the 1960s, Keep America Beautiful anti-litter campaigns featured Susan Spotless, a white girl who wore a spotless white dress and pointed her accusatory finger at pieces of trash heedlessly dropped by her parents. The campaign used the wagging finger of a child to condemn individuals for being bad parents, irresponsible citizens and unpatriotic Americans. But by 1971, Susan Spotless no longer captured the zeitgeist of the burgeoning environmental movement and rising concerns about pollution.

The shift from Keep America Beautiful’s bland admonishments about litter to the Crying Indian did not represent an embrace of ecological values but instead indicated industry’s fear of them. In the time leading up to the first Earth Day in 1970, environmental demonstrations across the United States focused on the issue of throwaway containers. All these protests held industry — not consumers — responsible for the proliferation of disposable items that depleted natural resources and created a solid waste crisis. Enter the Crying Indian, a new public relations effort that incorporated ecological values but deflected attention from beverage and packaging industry practices. Keep America Beautiful practiced a sly form of propaganda. Since the corporations behind the campaign never publicized their involvement, audiences assumed that the group was a disinterested party. The Crying Indian provided the guilt-inducing tear that the group needed to propagandize without seeming propagandistic and countered the claims of a political movement without seeming political. At the moment the tear appears, the narrator, in a baritone voice, intones: “People start pollution. People can stop it.” By making individual viewers feel guilty and responsible for the polluted environment, the ad deflected the question of responsibility away from corporations and placed it entirely in the realm of individual action, concealing the role of industry in polluting the landscape.

When the ad debuted, Keep America Beautiful enjoyed the support of mainstream environmental groups, including the National Audubon Society and the Sierra Club. But these organizations soon resigned from its advisory council over an important environmental debate of the 1970s: efforts to pass “bottle bills,” legislation that would require soft drink and beer producers to sell, as they had until quite recently, their beverages in reusable containers. The shift to the throwaway was responsible, in part, for the rising levels of litter that Keep America Beautiful publicized, but also, as environmentalists emphasized, for the mining of vast quantities of natural resources, the production of various kinds of pollution, and the generation of tremendous amounts of solid waste. The Keep America Beautiful leadership lined up against the bottle bills, going so far, in one case, as to label supporters of such legislation as “communists.”