Cover of The Origins of Cool in Postwar America
The Origins of Cool in Postwar America
by Joel Dinerstein
University of Chicago Press, 2017
Cloth: 978-0-226-15265-3 | Paper: 978-0-226-59906-9 | Electronic: 978-0-226-45343-9
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226453439.001.0001

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ABOUT THIS BOOKAUTHOR BIOGRAPHYREVIEWSTABLE OF CONTENTS

ABOUT THIS BOOK

Cool. It was a new word and a new way to be, and in a single generation, it became the supreme compliment of American culture. The Origins of Cool in Postwar America uncovers the hidden history of this concept and its new set of codes that came to define a global attitude and style. As Joel Dinerstein reveals in this dynamic book, cool began as a stylish defiance of racism, a challenge to suppressed sexuality, a philosophy of individual rebellion, and a youthful search for social change.

Through eye-opening portraits of iconic figures, Dinerstein illuminates the cultural connections and artistic innovations among Lester Young, Humphrey Bogart, Robert Mitchum, Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra, Jack Kerouac, Albert Camus, Marlon Brando, and James Dean, among others. We eavesdrop on conversations among Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Miles Davis, and on a forgotten debate between Lorraine Hansberry and Norman Mailer over the "white Negro" and black cool. We come to understand how the cool worlds of Beat writers and Method actors emerged from the intersections of film noir, jazz, and existentialism. Out of this mix, Dinerstein sketches nuanced definitions of cool that unite concepts from African-American and Euro-American culture: the stylish stoicism of the ethical rebel loner; the relaxed intensity of the improvising jazz musician; the effortless, physical grace of the Method actor. To be cool is not to be hip and to be hot is definitely not to be cool.

This is the first work to trace the history of cool during the Cold War by exploring the intersections of film noir, jazz, existential literature, Method acting, blues, and rock and roll. Dinerstein reveals that they came together to create something completely new—and that something is cool.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Joel Dinerstein was the curator of American Cool, an acclaimed exhibit at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, and the author of its accompanying catalog. He is also the author of the award-winning Swinging the Machine: Modernity, Technology, and African-American Culture and Coach: A History of New York Cool. He is a cultural historian and professor of English at Tulane University.

REVIEWS

“The Origins of Cool vibrates with the energy of its very subject—as restrained, composed, and revitalized as the postwar rebel himself.  From the cafes of the existentialists to the bars of film noir, from Lester Young’s sax to Elvis’s pout, Dinerstein offers a brilliant exegesis of the simmering mode of resistance we call cool. He penetrates the meanings of a misunderstood mode—a concept, a mood, a posture—while connecting the rich details of art and culture to the deepest transformations of the postwar world. The Origins of Cool takes the elusive and inchoate and renders them clear and nearly tangible, making the reader feel this mysterious current of postwar culture as if for the first time. This is a masterwork.”
— Jefferson Cowie, author of Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class

“Dinerstein has written a thoughtful and entertaining account of cool—the most powerful image of how one should be since the English gentleman dominated the world. It's a history, a handbook, and a manual, filled with fascinating accounts of those stellar individuals whose aggressively haughty, patrician coldness was rooted in hip opposition and revolt.”
— John Szwed, author of Billie Holiday: The Musician and the Myth

“Dinerstein takes seriously the roots of cool. Rather than some kind of irresponsible, juvenile put-on or species of ill-earned irony, cool is shown to be a game played for the highest of stakes—personal survival in the face of the era’s unconcealed racism and barbarity that gave the lie to western civilization’s moral self-congratulation.”
— Benjamin Cawthra, author of Blue Notes in Black and White: Photography and Jazz

“The Origins of Cool in Postwar America will be the standard reference for those who wish to understand the deep historical roots for coolness as a cultural style and ethos—a ‘public mode of covert resistance,’ an expression of faith in the integrity and agency of the individual in the face of depression, war, occupation, segregation, and the threat of nuclear annihilation—rather than as a trendy pose or an emblem of hip consumerism. Dinerstein has achieved something like a unified field theory of the postwar American arts combined with a history of ideas attached to the quest for ethical renewal and existential affirmation.”
— John Gennari, author of Blowin' Hot and Cool: Jazz and Its Critics

“Dinerstein traces the trajectory of the notion of American cool through the cultural milieu of the 1920s through the early 1960s, emphasizing its deep associations with jazz culture. . . . Impressively researched and broad in its reach, drawing from film, music, theater, philosophy, and literature, this book approaches the subject with scholarly authority while remaining eminently readable. Much more than just a history of cool, this book is a studied examination of the very real, often problematic social issues that popular culture responds to.”
— Publishers Weekly, starred review

“Dinerstein beautifully demonstrates in this superb book . . . that cool was ‘an emergent structure of feeling in postwar America.’ . . . What made cool cool is the braiding together of jazz, film noir, and existential literature; the first as an African American mask of cool (poise, virtuosity and ‘a blank facial wall, suggesting both a resistance to white social norms and an inner complexity’); the second, a delayed working-class response to the Great Depression (gritty but righteous loners in an unjust world); the third, an ethical expression of ‘rebellion-for-others’ in 1945, ‘year zero’ Europe after collaboration, genocide and atomic destruction.”
— Times Higher Education

“Rigorously academic, The Origins of Cool is nonetheless the kind of book that makes learning enjoyable. Afterward, you’ll know a lot more about the world today and where it came from. But if you’re cool, you’ll pretend you don’t.”
— Wall Street Journal

“Dinerstein maps out a grand unified theory of 'cool,' as the concept that came to define the postwar era.”
— New York Times Book Review

“Dinerstein approaches the notion of coolness as a theorist, historian and lover of popular culture to produce a book that synthesizes the best of all three domains. Our interpretation of cool may be emptying out, may be changing with each new generation’s cultural output, but a close examination of the roots of coolness shows that as a fundamental way of being in the world, little about cool has changed.”
— PopMatters

“Dinerstein has assembled a gallery of mid-twentieth-century exemplars of cool to explain where the concept came from and why it has lasted.”
— The Week, Book of the Week

“In his examination of what we mean when we characterize a person as cool and how and why this concept emerged, Dinerstein engagingly illuminates the complex origins of the word and how its early icons responded to create the image and persona we recognize today. . . . In the end, we have greater appreciation for the tremendous resilience and bravery of these pioneers as they navigate a compelling era—as well as the ways in which dramatic societal shifts demand that we all rise to the challenge. And gaining these insights from the thoughtful and entertaining analysis of a word is, well, cool.”
— Washington Independent Review of Books

“These divisions, between white and black, Europe and America, individual and society, run through the history of cool and explain the different forms it takes and how these have evolved. . . . The history of post-war cool is both a history of these strange convergence—between French intellectuals, African American musicians and white working-class Hollywood heroes—and of the continuing conflicts between and within them. The real subject of Dinerstein’s book is the debt that American culture owes to black art and style, and the way white America has responded to that debt.”
— Benjamin Markovits, Times Literary Supplement

“In his entertaining book, . . . Dinerstein shows that cool isn’t just a style, it’s an ‘embodied philosophy’ that is anchored in a specific generational circumstance. Cool was first of all a form of resistance and rebellion, a rejection of the innocence, optimism and consumer cheeriness that marked the mainstream postwar experience.”
— David Brooks, New York Times

TABLE OF CONTENTS


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226453439.003.0001
[Miles Davis;Juliette Greco;racism;existentialism;cool;rebellion;integrity]
Jazz musician Miles Davis and existentialist chanteuse Juliette Greco fall in love at a Paris jazz club and begin a 40-year-long love affair in front of her friends, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Both become icons of cool and the couple symbolizes the cross-cultural exchange of postwar French and American culture essential to the concept, from the influence of American literature and film on existential philosophy to the Black American expatriate community of writers and musicians in Paris. This book theorizes and reveals the crosscurrents of the three key art forms of the 1940s: jazz, film noir, and existentialism. Cool was then synonymous with rebellious self-expression and associated with authenticity, independence, integrity, and nonconformity. Cool was unrelated to products, commodification, or popularity, a set of post-1970s meanings now wrongfully (and ahistorically) assumed by intellectuals of many stripes.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226453439.003.0002
[1945;Year Zero;The Beats;Cold War;Jim Crow;Norman Mailer;cool aesthetic]
From 1945-1963, cool was the name given to the artists attempting to recuperate the value of the individual through artistic statement in jazz, film, existential writing, Method acting, and rock-and-roll. Here is my theory of cool as a password to an American mythos in the 1940s that continues to stand for inchoate rebellion against unsustainable social norms in any historical era. Cool is a myth of individual dignity in the face of the failure of collective ideologies. Here are the many layers of postwar cool: its emergence in jazz culture, its crossover through Jack Kerouac and the Beats, its parallels in existentialist philosophy. The key figure of the postwar was the individual rebel, as theorized by Albert Camus in The Rebel: A Study of Man in Revolt, the first study of individual revolt in the wake of the political failures of Communism, Socialism, Fascism, and even liberal democracy. The year 1945 is seen here as one end of the European Age (or even Western Civilization), given the atavistic mass slaughters of the Holocaust and the atomic bombs. In the face of hypocrisy and loss, people reached for a new kind of stylish stoicism: cool.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226453439.003.0003
[West African cool;racism;swing;bebop;Uncle Tomming]
The origins of cool are in 1940s jazz culture and the legendary Romantic saxophonist Lester Young coined it to refer to a state of mind. When he said, “I’m cool" or "that's cool," Young meant, “I'm calm," "I'm keeping it together," or "I'm relaxed in this environment, and in my own style." African-American cool was an ideal state of balance, a calm-but-engaged state of mind between the emotional affects of hot (excited, aggressive, hostile) and cold (unfeeling, efficient, mechanistic). Jazz musicians use the phrase "relaxed intensity" as a synonym for cool. More broadly, cool meant in the 1940s what chill means now. Young's stylistic strategies were as influential as his artistic innovations. His renowned use of hip slang influenced jazz culture, Beat literature, and the '60s counter-culture. He wore sunglasses on-stage at night for self-insulation and protection from the racist white gaze. His offbeat sense of humor, trademark pork-pie hat, and expressive sadness generated so much jazzlore that he remains a model of the hip jazz cat. Young expressed his inner pain artistically and wore a stoic facial expression in public to embody two seemingly contradictory aspects of cool: artistic self-expression and emotional self-control.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226453439.003.0004
[Bogart;noir cool;Veronica Lake;Robert Mitchum;Hays Code]
This chapter provides a newperiodization of film noir and the first theory ofnoir coolthrough the iconic figure of the "ethical rebel loner" as embodied by Humphrey Bogart, Robert Mitchum, and Alan Ladd. Through archival research, the genre is re-framed through trauma theory and The Great Depression to show how the early noirs resonated with American audiences by validating their recent suffering while creating new stoic ideals of individuality and masculinity. The Maltese Falcon, Citizen KaneandCasablancahad already defined the genre’s thematics, aesthetics, visual style, and moral ambiguity by 1942. There are case studies ofHigh SierraandThis Gun for Hireas proto-noirs and "failure narratives" resonating with post-traumatic audiences: both films were surprise box-office hits and created new film icons for the 1940s (Bogart, the pairing of Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake). All three embodied the emergent concept ofcool, defined here as a public mask of stoicism. The chapter ends by contrasting Bogart's cool with Robert Mitchum's in an analysis of the most existentialist noir,Out of the Past.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226453439.003.0005
[philosophy;the Rebel;race;rebellion;the Blues;Ralph Ellison;African-American literature;American culture;Richard Wright]
Existential cool is defined here as rebellion-for-others throughthe public stylization of artistic statements of resilience.Albert Camus is its postwar theorist, a hero of the French resistance and an intellectual with the fierce charisma of Bogart (whom he resembled). The key work is *The Rebel* (1951), the first history of rebellion in Western culture, and Camus begins by revising Descartes with a five-word mantra that is a touchstone for this work: "I rebel, therefore we exist." Individual rebellion is only valid if it creates the conditions for the social protest of others, as already shown in the defiant acts of Lester Young, Humphrey Bogart, Robert Mitchum, and John Huston. Existentialism is a philosophy of the individual rebel and was influenced by American noir, jazz and blues. Camus' works have had particular resonance for African-American writers such as Orlando Patterson, Charles Johnson and Danzy Senna.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226453439.003.0006
[feminism;cool aesthetic;masculinity;womens' blues;second sex;Barbara Stanwyck]
Duke Ellington called Billie Holiday "the essence of cool" as the concept signified for African-Americans: self-possession and self-expression of a person's art as embodied in a signature performance style. Simone de Beauvoir was a defiant, independent philosopher and writer whose varied works earned her every literary award in France. *The Second Sex* was the only theoretical work of feminism in the postwar era and influenced everyone. This chapter defines the postwar cool of these two women within the era's parameters since both women deferred to dominant men despite their original, brilliant artistry and unabashed bisexuality. Holiday drew on Bessie Smith's example since blues as a genre began as a metaphor for freedom: as her friends often said, Holiday was "only free when she was singing." Beauvoir invented the concept of the Other as currently used and wrote extensively about racial oppression and African-American culture, having been tutored by her Parisian neighbor, the author Richard Wright.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226453439.003.0007
[The Third Man;Cold War;Orson Welles;James Baldwin on jazz;noir as pulp existentialism;jazz as freedom]
This chapter analyzes the intersections of the three main artistic forms of postwar cool -- jazz, noir, and existentialism -- through discussions of jazz & noir, noir & existentialism, and jazz & existentialism.The Third Man is analyzed as the quintessential Cold War noir: the film confronts the fall of Western cultural ideals in occupied Vienna through Harry Lime, an unethical rebel loner and hip, charismatic nihilist.Jazz's revolutionary postwar idiom -- bebop -- is theorized as a sonic existentialism:in Paris and New York, the Black jazz musician embodies the individual asserting a vital self during a period of Western spiritual crisis. Jazz and film noir are associated in public memory of the postwar era yet the music is generally absent from the genre -- as are Black people -- except for notable exceptions analyzed here. White Westerners embraced African-American musics to express the essence of a historical era, just as they had with Ragtime, the Jazz Age and the Swing Era.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226453439.003.0008
[Kerouac's theory of cool;jazz poet;cool as a state of mind;Buddhism;jazz;existentialism;Charlie Parker]
An original reading of Jack Kerouac's works as based on non-Western artistic forms: first, he bases his prose on the jazz solo and calls it "bop prosody" (or bebop prose) in his literary manifesto, "Essentials of Spontaneous Prose"; second, he writes automatically from the Zen ideal of simultaneous thought and action. The two methods come together in the mid-1950s in two works: the exuberant modernist epic, "Mexico City Blues," and his Buddhist diary, "Some of the Dharma." In MCB,Kerouac calls himself a jazz poet "blowing 242 choruses on a summer afternoon" and closes with five choruses on Charlie Parker, the heroic artist of postwar apocalypse with "the face of a Buddha." In Dharma, Kerouac traces his failed journey towards being a devout Buddhist through a mix of American literature, Zen sutras and jazz riffs. Kerouac's fans and detractors have both misunderstood his literary work as simplistic or primitivist while ignoring his deep knowledge and commitment to African-American jazz and blues. This is more clear now due to the posthumous publication of his "Book of Blues" and Dharma. There is also a discussion of Buddhism and existentialism through Dharma, Thomas Merton, and D.T. Suzuki.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226453439.003.0009
[law & order noir;Frank Sinatra;cool icon;prosperity;1952;swing vocal jazz;Dean Martin]
An original reading of 1950s film noir as it shifts from ethical rebel loners, ambiguity and cityscapes to traditional morality, police captains, and suburban homesteads. The key franchise is Dragnet while the key films analyzed here are The Big Heat, Naked City, and Kiss Me, Deadly. Classic noir ends in the mid-1950s and noir-cool moves to TV with Peter Gunn, M Squad (with Lee Marvin), and Johnny Staccato, Jazz Detective (with John Cassavettes). It becomes part of American consciousness more through TV and radio than film. The noir-cool aesthetic moves into popular music through the urbane romanticism and world-weary cool of Frank Sinatra's classic mid-50s albums. Vegas Cool replaces noir-cool for the Greatest Generation and finds a new home in Las Vegas as a new frontier of leisure: the Ratpack is the flip side of the Western's triumphalism. The chapter follows Sinatra from teen idol to vocal jazz swinger to civil rights advocate to his forgotten noirs of the 1960s as Tony Rome. Sinatra is rendered as an American masculine ideal for a generation of immigrants and there is a code regarding Bob Dylan's recent tributes to his work.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226453439.003.0010
[method acting;Beat Generation;rock-and-roll;female desire;masculinity]
Cool shifts according to generational needs, a historical fact often ignored by scholars of cool. The arrival of an American rebel style arrives with Marlon Brando and heralds a shift from the Greatest Generation's ethical rebel loners (in jazz and noir) to the existential angst of the Beat Generation. In film, it came through anti-authoritarian rebellion (towards fathers in particular), the improvisation of Method acting (forcing a shift in prestige from producer to actor), and the male body as a sexual object of desire for girls and gay men (e.g., A Streetcar Named Desire, Rebel Without A Cause, all Elvis films). In music, it came through white youth's desire for Black rhythm-and-blues -- through Elvis and others -- to ground their nuclear anxieties and adolescent desires through dance. In Postwar II,coolremained the sign of alienation, autonomy, and survival-through-style: the signs of cool were now leather jackets, motorcycles, and hipster jazz slang. The masculine cool aesthetic tookan inward turn: emotions were no longer suppressed beneath a stoic mask of cool but expressed in passionate outbursts of yearning. For Beat youth, such tensions seemed to project an authenticexistential search for freedom through self-knowledge.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226453439.003.0011
[aesthetics;hip;jazz philosophy;bebop]
The Black jazz musician was the key symbolic figure of existential cool. Jazz musicians were the first American artists to consciously create an artistic identity as an embodied ideal of American individuality. A jazz musician is defined by his or her "sound," the pre-requisite for artistic recognition: your sound is a fingerprint, a signature composed of sonic artistry, aesthetic choices, and Romantic originality.The process of creating an individual sound is described here through jazz's two main existentialists, Sonny Rollins and Miles Davis, and then through the music's influence across the postwar arts, including comedy (Lenny Bruce), art, and literature. "Cool was defiance with dignity," a journalist reflected in 1960: it was an honorific given for transforming oppression into self-assertion and embodied philosophy. The symbolic importance of the soloing jazz musician is illuminated here through the many literary meditations on Parker, Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Lester Young, and Billie Holiday in postwar literature: bynovelists (Thomas Pynchon, Norman Mailer, Ross Russell, Julio Cortazar); byBeat writers (John Clellon Holmes, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Ted Joans, Bob Kaufman); by African-American authors (James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison); and, especially, by poets (Frank O'Hara, Kenneth Rexroth, Langston Hughes, Amiri Baraka).


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226453439.003.0012
[Paul Newman;Sidney Poitier;Joanne Woodward;Beat Generation;racism;Brando]
Two films illuminate the key differences between being hip and being cool. The one film that combines Beat youth, female desire, existential cool and civil rights is Sidney Lumet's The Fugitive Kind, a rare Hollywood translation of existentialism into an American problem (racism) and an American landscape (the Deep South). Brando and Joanne Woodward embody cool and hip with Woodward as a Beat rebel sick of her repressive small Southern town and Brando trying to shed his hedonist past to find a cool inner space. Brando is a "white Negro" here, a troubadour carrying a guitar signed by Bessie Smith, Leadbelly, Jelly Roll Morton, and Woody Guthrie. WhenWoodward defines "going juking" in a Southern roadhouse, it is a great lost scene of female Beat sexuality. Paul Newman inherited Brando's mantle of cool; racism prevented Sidney Poitier from sharing it. They star in Paris Blues, a tribute to the postwar import of jazz in France with Louis Armstrong embodying the jazz past and Poitier its future. Two American women tourists arrive: Diahann Carroll convinces Poitier to return to the American fight (for civil rights) while Newman hips prim schoolteacher Joanne Woodward to hipper living through rebellion.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226453439.003.0013
[civil rights movement;The 1960s;Norman Mailer;African-American history;African-American literature;James Baldwin]
This is an original reading of Lorraine Hansberry's work: she is misread as an assimliationist due to A Raisin in the Sun rather than as a civil rights leader, journalist and bisexual advocate for Black Power. Shewrote the first TV drama on slavery, The Drinking Gourd (1960) – canceled due to Southern pressure – and the first American anti-colonialist play, Les Blancs (The Whites). She wrote short satires attacking existentialism as a form of artistic despair and an acclaimed Broadway play about the political paralysis of white Greenwich Village bohemians, The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window (1964). Her work reflected the convergence of her two intellectual heroes -- Simone de Beauvoir and W.E.B. DuBois -- and she was James Baldwin's best friend. Hansberry represents the turn into the 1960s and the urgency of the civil rights movement: her work rejects stoic individual masculine rebellion by calling for social change through literary consciousness-raising. This is best exhibited in her debating (and besting)Norman Mailer on the racist nature of his respected essay, "The White Negro."Re-readingARaisin in the Sun finds Hansberry'ssingular combination of feminism, racism, Beat self-expression, Third World Revolution, class consciousness and civil rights.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226453439.003.0014
[rock and roll;Johnny Cash;blues;jazz;Paul Newman]
Cool should be understood as rebellion-for-others:the potential for a single charismatic individual to generate social change by galvanizing an audience through symbolic and public artistic acts. Postwar cool left three separate legacies: (1)-first, Black cool through expressive artistry and the mask of cool (Jimi Hendrix, Prince, Samuel L. Jackson, Jay-Z, Barack Obama); (2)- second, noir cool and its ethical rebel loners (Johnny Cash, Paul Newman, Steve McQueen, George Clooney); (3)-third, countercultural cool and its anti-establishment personae (from the Beats to Bob Dylan, Ken Kesey, Lou Reed, Patti Smith, Matthew McConnaughey). Between 1957-1963 postwar cool crossed into the midstream through Beat and existential literature (Kerouac, Ginsberg, Camus), through jazz icons (John Coltrane, Art Pepper), iconic actors, and rock-and-roll. African-American music and culture crossed over to become the lingua franca of white American youth: through music (soul, Motown, rock-and-roll), dance (all '60s dances), language (counterculture slang) and style. In the early 1960s, postwar cool gave way to a new generation (and definition) of cool, the counterculture's overt anti-authoritarianism.The counterculture provided white faces to Black music but thetempo of social change was still carried by African-American music and would be by funk and hiphop.

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