The Origins of Cool in Postwar America by Joel Dinerstein (2017)

While today expressions like “cool,”  “being cool,” “acting cool” or having a “cool” outlook on life are present almost anywhere from everyday speech to commercials, the once rebellious origins of the word go back a long time. As many important and strong influences on American popular culture, this attitude, style, and way of life had its origin in African-American culture, too.

Author Dinerstein, Professor of English at Tulane University, takes a long look back on the literature, stereotypical image and mostly the music in the US from the 1940s onward in search of an explanation; because “cool” actually is a whole concept.

„In this era between 1943 and 1963, a new embodied concept and romantic ideal – being cool – emanated out of African-American jazz culture to become an umbrella term for the alienated attitude of American rebels.”

To provide data for academic research, he loosely subdivides a certain period of time (when “coolness” first surfaced in US culture) into three parts: Postwar I (1945-52), Postwar II (1953-63) and the end of the Korea War (1950-53). Distinctive images and people represented a slightly different variety of coolness then.
Probably best known for his excellent text Swinging the Machine (2003), Dinerstein has presented another well-researched book on jazz culture, American culture and the meaning of style, origin, and music within US popular culture.

On 540 pages he enlarges on the topic(s) of cool, i.e. cool style, the development and meaning of it throughout the years, icons of cool and most of all the strong relatedness of the term to jazz musicians and their style, language and behavior. Nonetheless, keeping a superior and calm (aka “cool”) attitude was already useful for other black musicians such as the blues man. Nevertheless, means of maintaining a strong self-control were tested for centuries on people of African-American origin who were suppressed and victims of racial discrimination for generations.

Various cultural icons such as Miles Davies, Billie Holiday, Lester Young, many bebop musicians, but also actors as different as James Dean, Marlon Brando, Paul Newman, Frank Sinatra and Humphrey Bogart (all were labeled cool at one time or another) are submitted by Dinerstein to support his study. Furthermore, lots of characters from movies (and novels) are called upon, to contribute visual/fictional representation of the concept at a certain time. Naturally, as jazz had a large part in “the origins of cool,” the musical style of cool jazz receives much attention here.
And since this one extremely well-researched book on a vast topic, also the renditions and analytic thoughts of authors Jean-Paul Sartre, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Simone de Beauvoir, Ralph Ellison, Albert Camus, Jack Kerouac, Albert Murray, and many others are added.

The Origins of Cool in Postwar America reads like a long university lecture, with manifold links to other fields of interest, short summaries of external concepts, and reference to related information. This is truly a groundbreaking work, with potential for future basic reading on American culture.

Review by Dr. A. Ebert © 2018

Joel Dinerstein. The Origins of Cool in Postwar America. University of Chicago Press, 2017, 544 p.