American Cool

Constructing a Twentieth-Century Emotional Style

Peter N. Stearns

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 1994
• ISBN:
  9780814739839
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Amérique du Nord

Cool. The concept has distinctly American qualities and it permeates almost every aspect of contemporary American culture. From Kool cigarettes and the Peanuts cartoon's Joe Cool to West Side Story (Keep cool, boy.) and urban slang (Be cool. Chill out.), the idea of cool, in its many manifestations, has seized a central place in our vocabulary.

Where did this preoccupation with cool come from? How was Victorian culture, seemingly so ensconced, replaced with the current emotional status quo? From whence came American Cool?

These are the questions Peter Stearns seeks to answer in this timely and engaging volume.

American Cool focuses extensively on the transition decades, from the erosion of Victorianism in the 1920s to the solidification of a cool culture in the 1960s. Beyond describing the characteristics of the new directions and how they altered or amended earlier standards, the book seeks to explain why the change occured. It then assesses some of the outcomes and longer-range consequences of this transformation.

1

Introduction

Cool. The concept is distinctly American, and it permeates almost every aspect of contemporary American culture. From Kool cigarettes and the Snoopy cartoon’s Joe Cool to West Side Story (“Keep cool, boy.”) and urban slang (“Be cool. Chill out.”), the idea of cool, in its many manifestations, has seized a central place in the American imagination.

By the 1990s, the word has come to mean many things, but it always suggests approval. A university student writes on an examination that Columbus received a hearty welcome on his return to Spain; when asked why he made such an egregious historical mistake, he points to the textbook, which states quite clearly that the explorer had received “a cool reception.” This anecdote encapsulates the recent history of the word “cool.” The textbook writer had used the word according to its dictionary definition—“restraint”—but the university student understands it to mean “good.” Thus the positive connotation of “cool,” along with its increasing usage, symbolizes our culture’s increased striving for restraint. Being a cool character means conveying an air of disengagement, of nonchalance, and using the word is part of the process of creating the right impression. The popularity of the word is accompanied by other revealing usages: one can “lose” or “blow” one’s cool. Cool has become an emotional mantle, sheltering the whole personality from embarrassing excess.

Where did this preoccupation with dispassion, with “cool,” come from? How did it arise and evolve? How was Victorian emotional culture, seemingly so ensconced, replaced with the current emotional status quo? Whence came American cool?

This book addresses these questions by analyzing a major change in American middle-class emotional culture, a change that took place between approximately the end of World War I and midcentury. In the last half of the nineteenth century, a complex emotional culture flourished among the Victorian middle class, exerting a powerful influence on the entire range of social relationships. This influence extended into the twentieth century, but by the 1920s Victorian standards were being irrevocably transformed, preparing the way for a cooler approach to emotional expression. American Cool exposes a major break in what have been called “feeling rules”¹—the recommended norms by which people are supposed to shape their emotional expressions and react to the expressions of others.

American Cool focuses extensively on the transition decades, from the erosion of Victorianism in the 1920s to the solidification of a cool culture in the 1960s. Beyond describing the characteristics of the new directions and the ways in which they altered or amended earlier standards, the book seeks to explain why the change occurred.² It then assesses some of the outcomes and longer-range consequences of this change.

Emotional culture is an important topic in its own right, being a component of those deeply held popular beliefs that are sometimes summed up in the word “mentality.”³ Involving preachments and definitions by a variety of popularizers, emotionology⁴ addresses emotional goals in family settings, in childrearing, in work relationships, in codes of politeness. It affects the way people describe their own emotional standards and, often, the way they actually evaluate aspects of their emotional experience. Interesting in its own right as a part of cultural identity, emotionological change also affects social interactions and elements of emotional life itself. Both Victorian and twentieth-century emotional culture helped define family law, for example, including the criteria by which couples could seek divorce.⁵ Social protest and popular leisure constitute two other areas in which changes in emotionology may combine with other factors to create new patterns of behavior. Sorting out the impact of emotional standards in these areas is not easy, but some strong correlations can be identified. Analysis in each emotionological period, Victorian and twentieth-century, will thus move from widely disseminated emotional norms to evidence of middle-class reception to consequences in public behaviors.

And the analysis will address actual emotions, despite the difficulty of separating them from the surrounding emotional culture. Most emotionologists argue that cultural standards at least partially shape “real” emotional life itself.⁶ Emotional culture forms the basis for constructing reactions to one’s own emotions, and in some respects the emotions themselves. Emotions researchers loudly debate the balance between “basic,” biological or natural emotions⁷ and those that derive from social requirements and cultural norms.⁸ No definitive resolution of this debate is in sight. The present study certainly assumes that basic emotions are not the whole story—that emotional experience contains a strong cognitive and self-reflective element that is greatly affected by the cultural standards applied to the experience. However, this study also deals with the probability that cultural change must itself be assessed in terms of its success or failure in dealing with some natural impulses.

Certainly the assumption of considerable social construction is essential to the present study’s demonstration of significant change. An assumption of basic emotion, in contrast, is not essential.⁹ But the issue of basic impulse will reemerge when we chart some of the complex results of change emerging from Americans’ pursuit of new outlets for passions and from specific emotions that had been redefined.

For the shifts themselves were considerable, with far-reaching implications. In the 1890s American men were advised, by leading scientific and educational authorities, to use their anger: “If [a man] reacts positively, out of that very stirring may come achievements and performance of a high level.” Merely a half-century later, childrearing authorities warned parents against encouraging temper in boys, for an angry man is “possessed of a devil.” Motherhood, a sublime emblem of generous, intense love in the late nineteenth century—“she sends forth from her heart … the life-giving current”—became by the 1930s an emotional hazard: “Motherlove is a dangerous instrument.” On another love front: Victorian men routinely wrote of their transcendent feeling. Theodore Weld intoned, “I don’t love you and marry you to promote my happiness. To love you, to marry you is a mighty END in itself. … I marry you because my own inmost being mingles with your being and is already married to it, both joined in one by God’s own voice.” A scant century later, men’s tune had changed, as love became essentially sexual: “I snatched her into my arms and held her as in a vise. … I was madly infatuated, tingling in every atom of my being.” Popular writers and fraternity men alike contended that men should press themselves on women even when the latter begged to stop; the man who could not do this, as writer Charles Malchow put it, had “not progressed very far in ‘the art of love.’”¹⁰ Changes in love and anger, signaling also basic shifts in the emotional rules meant to define men and women, marked the replacement of Victorianism with a new framework, not just in the abstract but in the daily acts of raising children or dealing with the opposite sex. Passion itself was redefined, becoming suspect unless it was sexual. American Cool traces the nature and process of cultural change, building the specific ingredients into a larger reevaluation of emotional intensity.

This study focuses primarily on the middle class of business people and professional families. Like many studies of the middle class, it is biased toward evidence from Protestants in the North and West, but regional factors will be considered to some extent, particularly as they involve the South. The class limitations constitute the most important point to emphasize. The Victorian middle class used its emotional culture to help differentiate itself from other groups, particularly workingclass immigrants. Changing middle-class standards in the twentieth century were less blatantly class specific, and in discussing impacts we will encounter some evidence of spillover into other groups and their behaviors. Emotional culture forms an aspect of middle-class standards that had some hegemonic power, both in its nineteenth-century version and, more extensively though more subtly, in its twentieth-century formulation. And of course, by 1950, some 85 percent of all Americans were claiming to be middle class, which does not mean that they shared the most widely accepted middle-class emotional norms (the claim was above all an incomes claim) but certainly suggests the growing potential resonance of bourgeois emotionology. The middle class did not entirely triumph, however. Therefore, the distinction between my primary emphasis—the middle class—and American society seen as a complex combination of classes, ethnic groups, and subcultures must be constantly recalled. This book analyzes a class culture that had demonstrable influence on national culture, but it is not a full study of the larger and more diverse national experience.¹¹

Even with this important limitation, the present enterprise is undeniably ambitious. It claims that a general middle-class emotional style shifted ground, with measurable manifestation in a host of specific emotional areas, within roughly three decades. The subject of overall emotional style is not unprecedented, but it is hardly commonplace. Despite the relative novelty of historical study of emotion, three approaches to the subject have emerged to date. The first involves examining another topic that includes emotional components; emotions history was partially launched by histories of familial relationships in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that inevitably extended to claims about emotional change.¹² The second approach more explicitly focuses on emotional standards and their periodization but limits itself to individual emotions like love or anger. This approach has produced the clearest advances to date in the historical understanding of emotion, defining the causes and effects of change and the relationship between cultural construction and natural and invariant emotional impulses. But the third approach, which this study is intended to further, involves an effort at larger synthesis. Still focused explicitly on emotional standards and their results, this approach seeks to determine larger consistencies in emotional norms that relate specific emotional standards to a broader style. The Victorians had such a style, though it has often been erroneously characterized in terms of blanket repression. The middle class in the twentieth-century United States gradually but definitely revisited that style, producing a new amalgam. This book examines this sweeping, partially unwitting process.

The idea of a major twentieth-century emotionological transition follows from, and relates to, several widely accepted findings about American social and cultural experience. This study builds on these findings, though it modifies them while dramatically extending their scope.

It is generally accepted that a significant difference existed between the social patterns that began to emerge in the United States during the 1920s and those that had predominated through the later nineteenth century. Some have indeed dubbed the 1920s “the end of Victorianism.” Change is of course both constant and cumulative, which makes any effort to identify particularly crucial transition decades difficult and contestable. Nevertheless, this study is by no means unique in claiming that the 1920s formed a point at which several varied trends converged. By the 1920s the United States had become predominantly urban, shifting focus away from the classic small town. Classic individual entrepreneurship was also increasingly replaced with corporate management, and consumer values were increasingly glorified. New approaches to sexuality and a growing emphasis on personality over character constitute two other trends identified with the 1920s that are still more closely related to a redefinition of emotional standards. Recent work explaining the 1920s rise of the Ku Klux Klan according to an inchoate realization of how much was changing, of what desperate efforts might be necessary to recapture older values, identifies this transition decade from yet another, but clearly related, vantage point.¹³

My exploration of change in middle-class emotional style did not begin as an attempt to flesh out yet another aspect of the 1920s turn away from Victorianism. Indeed, whereas existing periodization schemas tend to posit a sudden Victorian collapse in the 1920s, this study treats the decade as the beginning of a more extended transition. The significant break in emotional culture coincided with changes in other areas, for this break reflected these changes, thus illustrating the kind of functional causation that social constructionists have characteristically claimed without always providing historically precise illustration. Emotional change, in other words, resulted from new social needs, and it also helped promote change, turning this transition into a still more extensive reevaluation of nineteenth-century conventions that reverberated into subsequent decades.

The idea of a major change in emotional style stems most directly from findings about shifts in specific emotional standards. My own earlier studies, several of them collaborative, of anger, jealousy, and fear all identified the 1920s as the point when Victorian signals were reconsidered, in a process that extended for several decades.¹⁴ In approaching anger, my first venture into emotions history, my coauthor and I had initially expected to see the more decisive changes later in the twentieth century, associated for example with the heralded rise of permissive childrearing. In fact, however, we found that the central new themes began earlier. A subsequent investigation of jealousy uncovered a very similar chronology though with many different specifics. Other emotion or emotion-related histories that had focused largely on the nineteenth century produced similar (if not always fully explored) claims that something different began to take shape by the early twentieth century.¹⁵ This was particularly true of several studies of love, both those directed to heterosexual romantic love and those focused on the decline of the peculiar nineteenth-century fascination with motherlove as a familial emotional icon.

My exploration of the transition in emotional style thus synthesizes a variety of existing findings about explicit emotional change. Owing a great debt to the many historians, sociologists, and social psychologists who have identified the basic ingredients, this study seeks to retain the advantages of the relative precision of these focused inquiries while also ranging more broadly into general threads of change and tying the origins of specific shifts to the origins of a novel overall emotionological framework.

It is important to note that a small number of specific emotions studies devoted to the United States have shunned an overall twentiethcentury periodization in favor of much smaller chunks of time that coincide with specific childrearing fads¹⁶ or other short cycles. My study argues that while shorter-term variations can be usefully identified, they should not obscure the larger style shift. Indeed, by identifying part of the nature and much of the timing of the twentieth-century transition in emotional culture, inquiries into shorter-term variations have made the need for a larger synthesis increasingly obvious. This synthesis identifies the general themes previously identified while also extending into other emotional domains less fully explored, such as grief.¹⁷ The challenge of the specific studies is clear: what are the underlying ingredients that appear, along with other, more limited attributes, in redefinitions as varied as a new concern about anger at work and a growing aversion, in middle-class men’s culture, to Victorian standards of romantic love?

A number of imaginative researchers have already ventured into the challenging area of overall emotional styles and their alterations from one period to the next. The best-developed case for a sea change in emotional style focuses not on the twentieth century, however, but on the eighteenth. Its analogy to the present effort will help clarify my intent, and its content relates to the Victorian baseline as well.

There are two principal formulas applied to an eighteenth-century emotional transition, both of which connect to more familiar aspects of cultural change in the period. Norbert Elias’s civilization-of-manners schema, recently applied to the nineteenth-century United States as an extension of its West European point of origin, emphasizes an increasing discipline of emotions and bodily functions alike. Starting with the upper classes, people learned new and more rigorous forms of impulse control. Applied to emotions, the schema helps explain not only a general set of goals but also more specific and measurable redefinitions, such as disgust as an emotional reaction to “uncivilized” sanitary habits and personal manners; a growing hostility to emotional spontaneity, manifested in disapproval of excesses in traditional popular festivals and religious behaviors; attacks on crude uses of fear in religion and childrearing; and a growing revulsion against emotionally charged vengeance in punishment and unwonted anger in both public and familial settings.¹⁸ Emotional self-control, in sum, underlay and united a number of changes in particular emotional goals, many of which have been explored in their own right.

A second schema, compatible with the idea of emotional control but supplementing and complicating it in important respects, involves a concomitant reevaluation of the emotional functions of the family, which also took shape in Western Europe and North America in the eighteenth century or a bit earlier. The family began to extend into areas beyond economic production and material welfare, and family relationships gained new priority over community ties and other friendships. This was another reason why anger and fear were reevaluated, with particular emphasis on the need for control in parent-child contacts, as part of an effort to create loving bonds and a lessened sense of hierarchy within the family. Jealousy was also redefined to focus on romantic relations rather than more general disputes over honor. Guilt gained ground on shame as a source of emotional discipline because it is possible to instill guilt initially as part of intense emotional contacts within the family and to maintain it through threatened deprivation of those contacts. The importance of love between parents and children and of love as the basis for marital choice increased. Grief over the deaths of family members became more central.¹⁹ Taken in tandem, family reevaluation and civilization of manners provide a framework for, and...