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.