Beware resentful multimillionaires, for they will destroy the American dream.
That, in a nutshell, was the warning issued by an article in the New York Post in 1900, which cautioned readers that ‘discontented multimillionaires’ form the ‘greatest risk’ to ‘every republic’. The problem was that multimillionaires ‘are very rarely, if ever, content with a position of equality’. But if the rich were to be treated differently from other Americans, ‘it would be the end of the American dream’.1
The article, reprinted in regional papers around the country, argued that multimillionaires insist on special privileges, their own rules, demanding to be treated as an elite class. All previous republics had been ‘overthrown by rich men’, it added, and America seemed to have plenty who were ready to wreak havoc on democracy without consequence, ‘deriding the constitution, unrebuked by the executive or by public opinion’.2
As it happens, this forgotten editorial in the newspaper established by Alexander Hamilton appears to be one of the earliest uses of the phrase ‘the American dream’ in a context we would recognise. And instead of assuming that multimillionaires are the realisation of the American dream, it says their lack of belief in the equality upon which republics are founded will destroy it.
Most Americans today almost certainly believe the opposite: that a multimillionaire proves the success of the American dream. But in 1900 the Post’s editorial writer presumed that everyone would agree that the ‘American dream’ was of equality, and that wealth would kill it. And local newspapers around the country reprinted the item – from Wilmington, North Carolina, to Galena, Kansas, to Santa Cruz, California – suggesting they found currency in it.
Before about 1900, there is little discernible trace in American cultural conversations of the phrase ‘American dream’ being used to describe a collective, generalisable national ideal of any kind, let alone an economic one.
The phrase does not appear in any of the foundational documents in American history – it’s nowhere in the complete writings of Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton or James Madison. It’s not in Hector St. John Crèvecoeur or Alexis de Tocqueville, those two great French observers of early American life. It’s not found in the works of any of America’s major nineteenth-century novelists: Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville or Mark Twain. It’s not in the supposedly more sentimental novels of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa May Alcott, or even Horatio Alger, whose ‘rags to riches’ stories are so often held to exemplify it. Nor does it crop up visibly in political discourse, or newspapers, or anywhere noticeable in the public record.
There were references in newspaper articles or histories to specific, particular American dreams: the American dream of naval supremacy, or the American dream of continental expansion (a dream that ‘proceeds from a sense of social and political superiority’, a New York paper helpfully explained in 1877).3 A New Orleans paper reported that a new interest in recreational sports marked a change in ‘the spirit of American dreams’.4 A story that Napoleon had been urged to flee to the United States was reprinted around the country in 1880 under the headline ‘Napoleon’s American Dream’.5
There was the American dream of rehabilitating China.6 There was the (surprising) ‘bastard American dream of Empire’ in the Philippines, as well as the ‘pan-American dream’ of hemispheric travel, or conquest.7 By 1906, ‘the American dream of a republic in Cuba appear[ed] to be over’.8 ‘Mexico in American hands is the American dream,’ readers were told in 1916.9 There was even the ‘American dream of a railway project through Anatolia’ as late as 1922.10
Most of these American dreams are noteworthy primarily for the fact that they have little or nothing to do with life in the United States, its values or meanings. Often the expression denoted dreams of empire – but it was always a distinct, individual dream of what activities America might get up to, not a collective sense of what it might be, or mean.
In these earliest years of the phrase’s appearance in print, there were only a handful of invocations of ‘the’ American dream, rather than ‘an’ American dream, because there were so many to choose from. And when ‘the’ American dream did appear, it was almost always in contexts that make it clear the phrase was not being used to denote anything about individual aspiration or economic opportunity at all. But those are the meanings that are universally ascribed to the phrase today, with no sense that it could ever have meant anything else.
Certainly the individual pursuit of prosperity, the self-made man, the success story were all familiar American ideals, as the immense popularity in the second half of the nineteenth century of Horatio Alger’s books about impoverished boys rising to middle-class prosperity does attest. But the ‘Alger ethic’, as it’s been called, of rags-to-riches meritocratic bootstrapping was not associated with anything named ‘the American dream’ until much later.11
Instead, there were references to the American dream of liberty under representative democracy, the American dream of self-government,12 or the American dreams of the poets Southey and Coleridge, who imagined a utopia there. The earliest iterations of the phrase ‘American dream’ tended to use it to describe the political dreams of the framers, the dreams of liberty, justice and equality.
The problem for the United States has always been how to reconcile the three. Liberty is in tension against both justice and equality: one person’s freedom to pursue property or power soon infringes upon principles of social justice and democratic equality. The friction has remained, but the ‘American dream’ would switch sides, as we shall see. Today the phrase is used all but exclusively to denote an individual’s pursuit of property, whereas when it first crept into American political discourse, it did so to represent the social dream of justice and equality against individual dreams of aspiration and personal success.
From the early years of America’s history the nation’s political dreams have also been referred to as the ‘American creed’, the belief system that broadly fused liberal democracy, individual opportunity, equality, liberty and justice. The problem wasn’t merely how to square these principles with each other, given how often they come into conflict. It was also how to balance a doctrine of explicitly stated values against the behaviours of individual Americans that implicitly betrayed those ideals on a daily basis.
As early as 1845 another New York Post editorial was widely circulated, objecting to the fact that a new political movement called nativism was contrary to Americanism and the American creed. ‘The great principle of true Americanism, if we may use the word, is, that merit makes the man,’ it observed. Because people should never be judged by ‘purely accidental’ distinctions, but only by personal characteristics, any form of nativism was ‘contemptible’ bigotry, based on ‘low and ungenerous prejudices – prejudices of birth, which we as a people, profess to discard’.
What is the effort to confine the political functions incident to citizenship to native-born Americans, but the attempt to found an aristocracy of birth, even a political aristocracy, making the accident of birth the condition of political rights. Is this Americanism? Shame on the degenerate American who pretends it! He is false to his American creed, and has no American heart.13
As a concept, Americanism would not get appreciably better at remembering its creed, or having a heart, but many individual Americans, believing in an inclusive polity established (at least in theory) by the framers, would continue to make principled appeals for tolerance, justice and equality. At stake was the character of modern America, whether it would be shaped by tribal loyalties or constitutional principles.
* * *
The earliest use I have found of the ‘American dream’ to denote a mutual value system – one akin to the older idea of the American creed – is from 1895, when a celebration was held in Chicago on what would have been the seventy-third birthday of Ulysses S. Grant. The festivities included a (very long) commemorative oration thanking Grant for protecting the Union, first as a general in the Civil War and then as president. At one point, the orator turned his expansive attention to the character of the nation Grant was being lauded for having saved:
Oh, critic and cynic, dreamer and doubter, behold America, as this day she stands before her history and her heroes. See her millions of people, her free institutions, her equal laws, her generous opportunities, her schoolhouses and her churches; you see misfortunes and defects, for not yet is fully realized the American dream; you surely see her mighty progress toward the fulfillment of her philosophy.14
The nature of that unrealised dream, that unfulfilled philosophy, is unspecified, taken as a given – but a shared value was being assumed. The national philosophy being summoned is obviously not limited to economic success or upward social mobility: this is a speech about the ideal of American democracy, of which ‘generous opportunities’ are just one aspect, alongside institutional freedom, religious freedom, equality under the law and universal education.
And when the ‘American dream’ was used in a context that referred to economic prosperity, the expression usually suggested that the accumulation of wealth was ‘un-American’, that the American dream was opposed to economic inequality and laissez-faire capitalism.
In 1899 the Brooklyn Daily Eagle published an item criticising a Vermont landowner’s decision to build an estate of four thousand acres with sixty rooms, which would make it the largest individual property in America. ‘Until a few years ago the thought of such an estate as that would have seemed a wild and utterly un-American dream to any Vermonter,’ protested the reporter. Vermont had always been ‘a state of almost ideally democratic equality, where everybody worked and nobody went hungry’.15
If the concentration of wealth was an ‘un-American dream’, then preserving the American dream would mean resisting individual success at the expense of others. This vision looks a lot more like social democracy than free-market capitalism – and it’s a vision that continues through the earliest uses of the phrase.
A Kansas editorial asked in 1908 why a baseball pitcher earned twenty times more than a settlement worker, why the president of an insurance company made so much more than a headmaster. ‘Why does the world offer fortunes to the man who shows us how to make money and starvation wages to the man who shows us how to make beautiful lives? Why do we accord highest place to money mongers and lowest place to teachers of ideals?’ False standards were leading people astray; but ‘thank goodness, a change is coming over the spirit of American dreams’. The country was beginning to concern itself with more than ‘the material things’. Having ‘solved the problems of the production of wealth’, ‘now we must stop!’ The country had bigger problems than making money, contended that editorial from the American heartland. It was time to enable ‘the equitable distribution of wealth’.16
Enough Americans had been dreaming of material wealth for an editorial to praise a change in their spirit; there is no question that American energies have always been focused on acquisition, but the idea of the ‘American dream’ was summoned as a corrective, not as an incentive. Individual Americans’ dreams would need to improve to live up to national ideals of equality and justice, or toxic inequity would blight the American dream of democracy.
* * *
It was the heart of the so-called Progressive Era (roughly 1890 to 1920), which responded to the Gilded Age of unregulated capitalism with clashes between labour and industry, and a series of attempts (mostly frustrated) at economic reform. In the 1890s severe financial crashes and recessions led to soaring inequality; riots ensued. Droughts were ravaging the upper Midwest: the notorious Dust Bowl of the 1930s was presaged by the terrible droughts of the 1890s forty years earlier. Monopoly capitalism had taken such a stranglehold over the United States that in 1890 Congress passed the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, the first major federal law to regulate the power that giant corporations could exert over ordinary Americans – and over government itself. In 1893 a financial panic led the nation to debate the creation of federal aid programmes, which the United States had never enacted. That same year, President Grover Cleveland denounced governmental ‘paternalism’ in his second inaugural address, informing the nation that ‘while the people should patriotically and cheerfully support their Government its functions do not include the support of the people’.17
Republican Theodore Roosevelt was elected in 1900 on a progressive platform promising, in the name of free markets, to ‘bust the trusts’ – the massive national corporations that were consolidating industrial power, making it impossible for small businesses to compete, and were seen as eroding the foundations of the middle classes. At the turn of the twentieth century in the United States, the rich were getting richer and the poor were getting poorer, despite the incremental growth of the middle class.
National conversations were highly attuned to the rampaging inequality created by industrial robber barons and monopoly capitalism. A few months before Theodore Roosevelt announced his candidacy, a widely reviewed book called The City for the People argued:
A hundred years ago wealth was quite evenly distributed here. Now one-half the people own practically nothing; one-eighth of the people own seven-eighths of the wealth; one per cent of the people own fifty per cent of the wealth and one-half of one per cent own twenty per cent of the wealth, or 4,000 times their fair share in the principles of partnership and brotherhood. A hundred years ago there were no millionaires in the country. Now there are more than 4,000 millionaires and multi-millionaires, one of them worth over two hundred millions, and the billionaire is only a question of a few years more.18
Monopolies were fundamentally opposed to social good, it said. ‘Diffusion is the ideal of civilization, diffusion of wealth and power, intelligence, culture, and conscience.’ But instead of diffusion, America had created ‘private monopoly of wealth, private monopoly of government, private monopoly of education, private monopoly even of morality, and the conditions of its production.’19 The Labor World in Duluth, Minnesota, protested ‘the spectacle of one per cent of our families owning more wealth than all of the remaining 99 per cent!’20
The symbol of the ‘one per cent’ that so dominates discussions of economic inequality today comes, like the American dream it accompanies, from a century ago. The difference is that a hundred years ago many people considered billionaires un-American.
That’s where the story of the ‘American dream’ as a saying begins – in the Progressive Era, protesting inequality. After a few decades of scattered references to particular American dreams of sovereignty or conquest, the phrase began to coalesce, used in an increasingly consistent way by people around the country to remind Americans of a shared ideal about equality of opportunity – which may sound like our American dream of individual success. But for them the American dream of equal opportunity could only be protected by curbing unbridled capitalism, and protecting collective equality.
When they invoked the American dream it was a sign of moral disquiet, not triumphalism, reflecting the fear that America was losing its way. The phrase was a warning siren, reminding Americans to look at the ground upon which they stood – not towards nebulous dreams of individual future advancement, but back towards the nation’s shared founding values.
That American attitudes were changing in response to the growth of monopoly capitalism was clear to all; wealth was no longer an easy virtue to pursue. It had become a test for American society.
Soon even the Manchester Guardian was noting that although a ‘loose individualism’ balanced by Hamiltonian federalism had long been the ‘chief substance of Americanism’, shifting circumstances ‘caused a change to pass over the spirit of this American dream’. Opportunities for ‘the ordinary man’ were becoming more restricted, while ‘economic, social, and political potentates have arisen in the shape of trusts, bosses, railroads, labour unions’, meaning that ‘a wide gulf has opened up between wealth-ownership and the condition of the workers’.21
Again there was a sense that ‘the spirit of the American dream’ was undergoing a dangerous alteration, and that change involved the concentration of wealth in the hands of the few; again the ‘American dream’ described not the accumulation of riches, but the risk posed to ideals of justice and equality by such accumulation.
As the American dream began to develop into a popular way to articulate a collective national ideal, the phrase was used to talk about stopping the rich and powerful from destroying democratic equality, and with it economic opportunity for all.
The American dream is usually imagined today as a nostalgic return to some golden past of national prosperity and harmony, in which happy small capitalists ran an agrarian, softly mercantile society and professionals earned the same as farmers, and everyone was content. But if you examine the actual history of the phrase, you find a society always grappling with inequality, uneasily recognising that individual success would not redeem collective failure.
* * *
A writer named David Graham Phillips was murdered in 1911 outside the Princeton Club of New York by a (Harvard) man impressively named Fitzhugh Goldsborough, who thought Phillips had slandered Goldsborough’s sister in his most recent book. At the time of his death, Phillips was working on a novel called Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise, which was published posthumously six years later, and is primarily remembered now as the source novel for a 1931 Greta Garbo film. But it also provides a comparatively well-known early use of ‘American dream’, thanks to the Oxford English Dictionary’s decision to include a passing quotation in its definition of the American dream as an ideal of self-determination: ‘The fashion and home magazines … have prepared thousands of Americans … for the possible rise of fortune that is the universal American dream and hope.’
At the beginning of the twentieth century, thanks to the explosion of advertising, the rise of celebrity culture, the use of photographs in newspapers and the imminent dominance of Hollywood in the American imagination, consumer capitalism – which included the ‘fashion and home magazines’ – was becoming aspirational: ‘the universal American dream and hope’. Ordinary Americans could scrutinise the lives of the rich and powerful, in all their glamorous and luxurious detail. They could see what their houses looked like, and not just tiny glimpses of exteriors through hedgerows or over stone walls. Readers could now look at their furniture, their fashions, their cars, their yachts. Conspicuous consumption had arrived with a vengeance, and it taught people as never before in full sensory detail what having money might feel like. Unsurprisingly, most people concluded that it would feel pretty good.
Such is the experience Phillips ascribes to his tiresome heroine, Susan Lenox:
And the reading she had done – the novels, the memoirs, the books of travel, the fashion and home magazines – had made deep and distinct impressions upon her, had prepared her – as they have prepared thousands of Americans in secluded towns and rural regions where luxury and even comfort are very crude indeed – for the possible rise of fortune that is the universal American dream and hope.22
But the entire force of Phillips’s mammoth novel – it clocks in at well over nine hundred pages – is to undercut the idea that meritocracy or self-determination has anything to do with the realisation of such dreams and hopes. Susan Lenox grows up illegitimate in a small Indiana town, where local bigotry forces her into the prostitution everyone assumes is her birthright. After many (many, many) misfortunes, which endlessly lead her back into prostitution, she falls in love with a wealthy playwright. Unfortunately, her former pimp murders the playwright; fortunately, the playwright has left her his estate. The ‘exultant’ look on her face when she learns this shocks the playwright’s valet, ‘for to his shallow, conventional nature Susan’s expression could only mean delight in wealth, in the opportunity that now offered to idle and to luxuriate in the dead man’s money’. Not so! cries Phillips. Such assumptions are merely ‘the crude dreamings of … lesser minds’.23 For Susan, wealth simply means freedom, from poverty and sexual exploitation.
This does indeed appear to be one of the earliest uses of the ‘American dream’ to suggest upward social mobility – but only to rebuke the idea as a ‘crude’ dream for ‘lesser minds’. In Susan Lenox, a rise of fortune may be the universal American dream and hope, but it means everyone in the country is wishing for the wrong thing. Moreover, whether it comes to you is an accident of fate, not a measure of character or merit. Phillips’s stern rejection of luxuriating in wealth notwithstanding, inheriting a fortune because your pimp murders your rich lover is hardly a ringing endorsement of the Puritan work ethic. It certainly doesn’t suggest the ideal of ‘achieving success and prosperity through hard work, determination, and initiative’, which is the definition the OED wants that passage from Susan Lenox to exemplify.
And at any rate the ‘American dream’ continued to be used far more frequently to discuss democratic equality than individual aspiration. In 1912 the Chicago Tribune was writing of ‘the American dream of justice, equality, and the noblest liberty’, an American dream by no means synonymous with the one David Graham Phillips had suggested a year earlier.24 At the very least, the meanings of the phrase remained unsettled, and plural.
Two years later saw the first appearance of ‘American dream’ in an important book by an influential writer, one that used the phrase to discuss democratic individualism in practice, and has occasionally been identified as the earliest known use of the phrase.25 It isn’t really: it’s neither the earliest, as we’ve seen, nor does it begin to articulate an American dream that anyone today would identify with the expression. But it is a significant early use all the same.
In 1914, a young writer named Walter Lippmann set out to write a book that would diagnose the problems of the Progressive Era and propose a solution. Just twenty-five years old, Lippmann was a recent philosophy graduate from Harvard, where he had studied with the great philosopher George Santayana (who ranked Lippmann with T. S. Eliot as one of the two most brilliant students he ever had). Lippmann’s ambitious first book, Drift and Mastery, was a huge success, establishing him as a pre-eminent public intellectual, as well as an important spokesman for the progressive movement.
As part of his diagnosis of what ailed American society, Lippmann referred to something he called ‘the American dream’ – but it is neither the economic dream of individual success with which the world today is so familiar, nor the political dream of democratic and economic equality that we have been looking at.
Lippmann argued that recent social and cultural revolutions in America – transformations in old models of manufacturing, distribution and access to jobs and profit – meant that traditional institutions and theories no longer applied to modern society. The new industrial world was bewildering: changes had been so rapid that everyone was uprooted from former certainties and paradigms.
Lippmann chose a striking metaphor to describe how it feels to be confronting massive technological disruption: ‘We are all of us immigrants in an industrial world,’ he wrote, ‘and we have no authority to lean upon. We are an uprooted people, newly arrived, and nouveau riche … The modern man is not yet settled in his world.’26 It was a new world, but Americans were still trying to organise their political system around the old one.
In particular, Lippmann worried that a free-market economy of unchecked capitalism, trusting in the abilities of markets to self-regulate and of people to exercise rational self-interest, would lead only to what he called ‘drift’ – the inadvertent and unpredictable, created by atomised liberty. Perverse outcomes would abound. Lippmann thought society needed a strategy, which he called (somewhat problematically) ‘mastery’. He envisioned a kind of planned economy, although not the kind of planned economy that would be espoused in the near future by Maoists and Stalinists.
Lippmann’s social plan sought to balance capitalism and socialism using the scientific method: it would be evidence-based, rational, forward-looking and progressive, broadly socialised in its belief in sharing benefit and abilities, while controlling individual access to wealth. In effect, Lippmann was arguing in Drift and Mastery for social democracy, for government regulation of big business in order to protect both small-business owners and workers, rather than merely busting monopolies and assuming the market would then regulate itself. Government did not necessarily mean federal government, of course: local government could also regulate and police the workings of business. But the goal was the democratisation of the economy.
Like most American progressives of his time, Lippmann was far from opposed to market forces, but he thought the nation needed a moral economy, in every sense. The problem was not capitalism; it was unrestrained capitalism. The government had to ensure that a moral system – otherwise known as justice – was operant in the nation’s economic systems. Without it, men could be guaranteed to ‘drift’ right back into the law of the jungle – precisely what humans created government to prevent. (‘If men were angels,’ as James Madison famously wrote, ‘no government would be necessary.’)27
For Lippmann, the ‘American dream’ was bound up in the illusions that were crippling democracy, and allowing capitalists to run roughshod over the common man. But Lippmann did not merely blame the capitalists; he blamed the common man, too – and this is where the ‘American dream’ comes in. Pure democracy was a chimera, Lippmann held, because it led to a dangerous populist nationalism, to mob rule and the rise of dictators.
The problem was that Americans kept being led astray by an illusion. ‘The American temperament leans generally to a kind of mystical anarchism, in which the “natural” humanity in each man is adored as the savior of society,’ he warned.28 ‘Mystical anarchism’ – or, as it would later be known, libertarianism – depends on total faith in the wisdom and justice of the common man, his ability to redeem a country debilitated by intellectuals and false experts.
That misplaced faith, for Lippmann, was the ‘American dream’.
‘If only you let men alone, they’ll be good,’ a typical American reformer said to me the other day. He believed, as most Americans do, in the unsophisticated man, in his basic kindliness and his instinctive practical sense. A critical outlook seemed to the reformer an inhuman one; he distrusted … the appearance of the expert; he believed that whatever faults the common man might show were due to some kind of Machiavellian corruption. He had the American dream, which may be summed up, I think, in the statement that the undisciplined man is the salt of the earth.29
The American dream here suggests the dangers of democracy, its illusions and mythologies. Lippmann is attacking America’s blind faith in individualism, in the undisciplined, unpolished, unschooled, natural person as the source of all wisdom. This American dream is not an aspirational fantasy, but a deluded and dangerous illusion: believing that the country could flourish without experts, that every citizen can be sufficiently discerning about everything, especially in an age of proliferating information and propaganda, to be what Lippmann would later call ‘omnicompetent’.
Lippmann feared that the American dream of some golden past when unsophisticated people ran the country just fine would tempt voters into following a populist demagogue who told them they could return to the Jeffersonian fantasy of a village of happy yeoman farmers, despite living in an industrial age. Lippmann called this the American dream: all-knowing ordinary folk, like Benjamin Franklin’s ‘Poor Richard’, the farmer-sage who could advise the nation. Lippmann deplored what he called America’s ‘fear economy’ of unchecked capitalism, suggesting that the nation’s ‘dream of endless progress’ would need to be restrained, because it was fundamentally illusory, another kind of American dream. This dream of endless progress is just as foolish, Lippmann maintained, as ‘those who dream of a glorious past’.
Disputing America’s image of itself as a ‘nation of Villagers’, Lippmann criticised the nostalgic ideal of the agrarian idyll championed by Jefferson. Why would rural life necessarily create better, or wiser, people? The nation needed to accept change, and to adapt to it. ‘Those who cling to the village view of life may deflect the drift, may batter the trusts around a bit, but they will never dominate business, never humanize its machinery, and they will continue to be playthings of industrial change.’30
The American dream, Lippmann thought, was a naive faith that democracy would always work in its purest form without education or regulation to support it. Trusting democracy to work on its own would paradoxically destroy it. Equality wouldn’t just happen naturally; it had to be protected, planned for, educated into people. Society had to create defences against the plutocrat and the swindler, the fake man of the people who affected a folksy style and encouraged his listeners to take pride in ignorance.
For the next twenty years, the ‘American dream’ would be associated with a recognition that dreams of endless progress could be as socially destabilising as unregulated competition or vast economic inequality.
* * *
Dreams of individual progress were by no means lacking, of course, and they were not easy to disentangle from the relationship between property and self-determination. America had always represented a fantasy of easy wealth, one that was often in conflict with the political experiment of democratic government. But the problem was not simply a matter of condemning greed (although that’s doubtless worth doing). For better or worse, the associations among property, liberty and happiness are inescapably knotted into the rhetorical fabric of America’s founding ideas.
When Jefferson enshrined ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ as inalienable rights, there is little doubt that he changed the course of the human events he was charting. The phrase, as is widely recognised, was adapting the philosopher John Locke’s declaration that ‘life, liberty and property’ were fundamental human rights – but in fact, Jefferson was not really rewriting Locke. Rather he was fusing two of Locke’s phrases from different essays. In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke declared ‘the necessity of pursuing true happiness the foundation of liberty’. Man’s ‘intellectual nature’ could only be perfected by distinguishing ‘true and solid happiness’ from any desires we mistake for real happiness. ‘So the care of ourselves, that we mistake not imaginary for real happiness, is the necessary foundation of our liberty.’31
Locke was arguing in essence that pursuing imaginary forms of happiness is a kind of enslavement; higher freedom comes from knowledge of ourselves, from self-realisation. Jefferson then embedded that idea in the American imaginary – but progress kept getting tangled back up in property. Both were allied with individualism, with autonomy, with equality. Similarly, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s widely hailed nineteenth-century ideal of self-reliance presupposed a certain level of common prosperity. Widespread poverty was no one’s democratic fantasy, but the question was where individual prosperity ended and national inequality began, because that would also crush the democratic dream.
Democracy would have to find equilibrium among everyone’s right to pursue property and/or happiness, and that has proven a difficult – indeed so far an impossible – balance to strike. That this would be so is clear enough from the fact that Jefferson’s lofty belief in liberty as the foundation of human happiness was belied by his willingness to turn other people into property to fund his own happy freedoms. This point is often made, but it bears repeating.
Put another way, one of the luxuries the wealthy acquire is the luxury of discovering that money isn’t everything. This was the lesson offered by a 1916 novel called Windy McPherson’s Son, by Sherwood Anderson, which is the mostly unremarkable tale of a young man who leaves small-town Iowa to make his fortune, and having done so, learns how little it means.
When Sam McPherson realises that chasing the gods of success has led him astray, he decides to throw away everything he has and start over again. ‘I will leave the money hunger behind me,’ he declares, ‘and come up to Truth through work.’32 It’s the Puritan work ethic in its purest form: work for work’s sake, because work is a positive good that leads to personal wisdom. He will seek spiritual, not financial, enrichment.
But his new resolve also strikes Sam McPherson as ironic. ‘He, an American multimillionaire, a man in the midst of his money-making, one who had realized the American dream, to have sickened at the feast and to have wandered out of a fashionable club with a bag in his hand and a roll of bills in his pocket and to have come on this strange quest – to seek Truth, to seek God.’33 Here is the ‘American dream’ describing the self-made businessman, the small-town man who becomes a multimillionaire through hard work and determination. But instead of an ideal to be celebrated, it is an illusion to be rejected.
This should still be surprising; never in Horatio Alger’s hundred-odd novels do any of his heroes wonder if wealth was worth it in the end. But it’s also worth remembering that most of Alger’s stories end with their heroes rising from poverty to middle-class respectability, not to vast plutocratic fortunes.
The middle class was growing at the same time that the ‘American dream’ was gathering momentum: the Oxford English Dictionary finds its earliest use of the phrase ‘white collar’ in Indiana, in 1910: ‘He follows the lure of the white collar to the city and gets a job in which he can wear a white collar all the week.’ The lure of the white collar was real, and increasingly attainable for more and more Americans, as universal education and transformations in industry and business created more office jobs.
Just as the ‘American dream’ began to converge with the rise of the American white collar success story, however, it was interrupted by the explosion of conflict in Western Europe. And despite its growing economic implications, the ‘American dream’ as a shorthand for democratic liberty was by no means defunct. Nor was the phrase yet fixed as ‘the’ American dream, which is hardly surprising given the different ways in which it was still being used.
In 1914 a Virginia paper was writing of ‘An American Dream’, in this case, the hope that America might help end ‘the terrible struggle now drenching Europe in blood’.
Such an ambition might ‘seem a wild dream’ in the midst of war, but it filled the ‘imaginations of true American patriots’. ‘Cynics and pessimists do not have it, because of its seeming wildness. Jingoes do not have it, for their dreams are always lurid and never beautiful. But President Wilson has it,’ the author averred, as did ‘the people, as a whole’. Everyone would share in the glory of peace, if it came; but whether it did or not, all would ‘be better for the dreaming’.34 The prospect of tyranny has always had a way of stimulating dreams of liberty.
But despite the Virginia editorial’s fond hopes, it was not the case that everyone in the United States thought the nation should join the European conflict. Many believed that America should remain neutral, a campaign for non-intervention that rapidly acquired the motto ‘America first’.
America was never of one mind on the subject of liberty – or indeed on much of anything else.