Grab a burger at the James Dean diner in Prague, pay homage to the Miles Davis monument in Kielce, Poland, or stop by the Elvis fan club of Malaysia, and you’ll see how a certain brand of 1950s “cool” still shapes perceptions of America abroad. What people mean by cool can be hard to pin down, but cultural historians tend to agree on some basics: defiance, self-control, individualism, and creativity—ideals epitomized by the jazz and beat movements of the early 20th century.
Long before these characteristics were cool, however, the term was linked with American identities in a very different way, and in very different contexts. Tracing its history helps us understand how we have come to embrace a certain kind of contradictory character as a national hero.
If you were a regular theatergoer in the 19th century, you’d have been familiar with a character called the “cool Yankee”—though he looked almost nothing like what cool would come to be. Amoral, selfish, and bumbling, he was a stock character who nevertheless always managed to save the day.
Although this figure was more prevalent on stage than in print, Hank Morgan, the fast-talking engineer in Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, is a great literary example: a cruel con man who readers are nevertheless expected to like. The cool Yankee is worth remembering, because the popular imagery of Americanness has never entirely managed to move past the weird faith it represents: the belief that our worst qualities might lead us in positive directions.
To grasp the true 19th-century meaning of cool, it helps to understand the meaning of another slang term of the time, “’cute.” In the popular parlance of the 1840s and ’50s, “’cute Yankees” (just as in ‘Merica, the apostrophe signals a missing “A”) were comic figures, who stood out for their ridiculous attempts at being acute, or clever.
Newspaper readers were very familiar with the ‘cute Yankee’s failings. In one 1846 article from a Connecticut paper, for instance, a man refuses to hand over his ticket to a boat operator, thinking that the worker is trying to steal it. “The old fellow being a regular and ‘cute Yankee, was not easily gulled,” the story concludes. An 1859 New York Times article recounted a “female ‘cute Yankee” who, called into court for selling bootleg whiskey, brought a borrowed baby to appeal to the judge’s sympathy. ‘Cute was anything but admirable: it stood for underhandedness, amorality, and, often, plain stupidity.