When the United States entered the First World War in 1917, it did so after a speech in which President Wilson famously insisted that ‘the world must be made safe for democracy’. It would not have been surprising, however, if he had said the world must be made safe for the American dream, for during the war years the phrase was used almost exclusively to describe what America was, or should, be fighting for in Europe, as any economic senses dropped almost entirely from the expression. ‘Sound a trumpet call to every loyal American to remember what America stands for,’ read an Oregon advertisement. ‘Make the American dream come true of a world set free for Democracy.’1
While the US continued to debate whether it should join the conflict, the ‘American dream’ could still denote peace. ‘We are at the parting of the ways as regards realization of the American dream of promoting universal peace.’2 But increasingly it was used to justify America’s involvement in the war, as when the Chicago Tribune argued that America could only uphold liberty by fighting for the American dream in Europe.
If the American idea, the American hope, the American dream, and the structures which Americans have erected are not worth fighting for to maintain and protect, they were not worth fighting for to establish. And America has won its place in the world by fighting. If it had not fought for political and personal liberty the equality of man would today be abstract theories rather than established facts.3
Although the OED uses an excerpt from this very Tribune quotation as an early example of its familiar definition of the ‘American dream’ (namely, ‘the ideal that every citizen of the United States should have an equal opportunity to achieve success and prosperity through hard work, determination, and initiative’), there is nothing in the Tribune’s original passage about success or prosperity, or hard work, or initiative. The editorial explicitly refers to America’s democratic structures, its ideals of political and personal liberty, and of defending equality.
As far as the Tribune’s editorial writers in 1916 were concerned, that was the American dream, not success. But once again the OED assumes that the meaning of the ‘American dream’ is so synonymous with prosperity and self-determination that quotations which do not support that meaning are used as if they do.
Nor was the Tribune alone in seeing the American dream as a promise of liberty that responded to the threat of tyranny. In February 1917, Mrs Mary E. T. Chapin (whose talks at Manhattan’s Biltmore Hotel were ‘the fad of the hour among the members of fashionable society who do not attend church but who feel nevertheless a need for spiritual ministration’)4 gave a speech reprinted around the country, urging the United States into the war. Mrs Chapin’s words were almost certainly intended as a rebuke to the isolationists who endlessly misquoted George Washington to justify their arguments against ‘foreign entanglements’.
Washington dreamed of greater freedom for mankind than the world had ever known … and he made it a reality for this Nation. I believe that dream of Washington will be extended to Europe by the great war – that the United States will be called upon to settle the war in such a way that the American dream of liberty will spread through Europe and ultimately will encircle the world.5
The phrase was also used, less peacefully, but no less politically, to describe America’s military might and rising power, criticising the country for timidity in its refusal to enter the war, as in a martial Chicago Tribune editorial in January 1917: ‘George Dewey smashing the Spanish fleet was the perfect realisation of the American dream of triumphant power.’6 There were articles discussing the ‘American dream of dominating politics from the Equator to the Canadian line’, while the Washington Post wrote of ‘the American dream of a great merchant marine’.7
America joined the war, reluctantly, in April 1917. Six months later, Iowa papers were reprinting a Des Moines editorial declaring the war a contest between the ‘Prussian dream’ of empire and the ‘American dream’ of democracy.8 In the face of tyranny, early uses of the ‘American dream’ would consistently pivot towards the protection of liberty as the defining principle that upholds democracy.
But meanwhile the American dream continued to take various political shapes, from economic equality to a vague idea of national progress. The Chicago Tribune was particularly fond of using it; one editorial, widely reprinted, chastised the country for its lack of foresight in planning the railroads. ‘We must learn to look ahead in another spirit than the breezy optimism of the American dream. The war, with its giant pressure, is forcing us swiftly out of our complacency.’9 The ‘American dream’ was beginning to float free of qualifying descriptors – no longer the American dream ‘of’ this or that, but rather the expression of a loose, collective optimism.
In April 1918 the Chicago Tribune again invoked the American dream of liberty, reflecting on a year in the war with some pride: ‘it was evidence of the reality of the American dream of ordered liberty, an unforgettable pledge of American nationality, worthy of the noble men who in the war for independence and the war for union gave the last full measure of devotion’.10 ‘Are you interested in the preservation of the land of liberty in which you live?’ demanded a Kansas editorial in April 1918. ‘Does the American dream of everlasting peace appeal to you? Remember, we can’t have peace without fighting for it. America didn’t want war, but this is war to end war.’11
When the war did come to an end in November 1918, the American dream still suggested ‘ordered liberty’, but also democratic order. It was cited more than once to describe the proposed League of Nations, which would result, a Nebraska editorial maintained, in ‘a substantial realization of the American dream’ – in Europe. The peace plan created ‘a constitution for confederate states of the world, laying down principles of government as between nations and peoples’, in the same way that the US Constitution regulated relations between American states.12 The American dream of democratic government could be replicated in Europe, the League’s defenders insisted, to extend the American creed of equality, liberty, self-determination and justice.
European peace would not prove so easy to engineer, however. Wilson was ‘Releasing American dream’ at the Versailles conference, according to a 1919 California headline reporting that the chairman of the Democratic National Committee in 1919 had accused Republicans of deliberately attempting to derail the effort. ‘President Wilson has endeavored to release for humanity the dearest dream that has come to the mind of man since the dawn of civilization.’ That democratic dream was the American dream, as far as the editors of the San Bernardino County Sun were concerned.13 But Republican leaders had no intention of supporting this particular American dream.
* * *
As America returned to questions about what kind of democracy it would have at home, the Russian Revolution was giving rise to the ‘Red Scare’, the fear that Soviet Communism would constitute a threat to American democratic institutions, and that the nation would be infiltrated by Bolsheviks. Inequality was still rising, and the May Day riots in 1919 indicated more than labour unrest. The Red Scare, along with associated acts of terrorism, including anarchist bombings, had combined with the jingoistic fervour of the war effort, and rising fears of ‘foreign agents’, socialists, anarchists and other ‘un-American’ social forces, to create a state of heightened nationalist tension. That year the traditionally peaceful May Day parades in Boston, New York and Cleveland led to violent clashes between demonstrators and police.
They also resulted in another outpouring of calls for ‘one hundred per cent Americanism’, and against the ‘Sovietization’ of the United States by anarchists and Bolsheviks, with endless animadversions against ‘un-American’ activities that would be revived forty years later during the Cold War. The May Day labour riots were followed swiftly by race riots that took place across the summer and autumn of 1919 in almost forty cities, including in Chicago and Washington DC, where black citizens fought back against white assailants.
That November, Republicans in Reading, Pennsylvania, took out an ad in their local paper declaring they were ‘sound one hundred per cent Americans, with the will and the courage to resist all attempts to sovietize Reading, or to graft upon its government un-American ideas or practices’.14 Two months later, a local Nebraska correspondent furiously argued the opposite case. ‘The policy of attempting to control political ideas is un-American. The policy of deportation is czaristic. It certainly is un-American. Some one hundred per centers are right now considering the advisability of turning the Philippine islands into an American Siberia.
‘The muzzling of speech and press is a boomerang,’ the writer warned. ‘Will the authorities never learn that you can’t curb ideas by imprisonment or deportation of their expounders?’15
Assimilation was one response to xenophobia, and the American dream was beginning to be conjured as a corrective to white nationalism. The earliest instance I have found of the ‘American dream’ describing the immigrant experience and dreams of individual success comes from 1918. A review of an immigrant memoir called An American in the Making ends:
We find how horrible seems New York … to a young European fresh from village life. How dreadful seems the noise and filth of the Ghetto! How rough the manners of the motley crew he meets! What a terrible disappointment, heart-breaking, at first, is America! But this Max fights his way to success and at last begins to dream the American dream himself, for he confesses that, at last, it was his old friends and relatives in the Ghetto who seemed strange and backward to him.
It’s an assimilationist dream, but also one of upward social mobility: in dreaming the American dream, Max leaves the other ‘strange and backward’ immigrants behind, embracing American dreams of success.16
But other influential voices continued to express suspicion and even alarm towards the idea of upward social mobility as a national aspiration. In 1919, Theodore Dreiser – not yet a famous novelist, but already a committed socialist – published Twelve Men, portraits of men who had influenced him. One, a now-forgotten short-story writer, was distinguished for Dreiser by the fact that he ‘had not the least interest in American politics or society – a wonderful sign. The American dream of “getting ahead” financially and socially was not part of him – another mark royal.’17
The American dream of upward social mobility was evidently on the make – but it was by no means universally touted as a collective ideal, or as the ‘American dream’ to which the nation should aspire. This mutability does far more than show the obvious fact that ideas can change over time. As ideas of the American creed – liberty, democratic equality, social justice, economic opportunity, individual advancement – began to magnetically cohere around the phrase ‘American dream’, it also began taking on a more distinct shape. But that shape could shift, as current political or social pressures could tilt the balance of the phrase towards one point of the creed or another.
A popular writer of romantic fantasy adventures named George Barr McCutcheon published a novel in 1920 called West Wind Drift. A castaway tale set during the Great War, it is the deeply implausible chronicle of a random group of Americans who meet aboard a great ocean liner while travelling home from South America in 1917 to join the US war effort. Under the captain’s watch are ‘a Scotch-American’, an ‘Irish-American’ and ‘a plain unhyphenated American from Baltimore’. The plain – and plainly meant to be read as ‘real’ – American is, naturally, the novel’s hero.
After the ocean liner is blown up by saboteurs in a plot obviously modelled on the 1915 sinking of the Lusitania, the survivors are cast ashore on an uncharted island, where they proceed to build an island paradise. Because the only thing that matters in a survivalist economy is labour, McCutcheon explains, the castaways devise a new currency for their society: time. Time spent working is the only value, and so that is what is traded.
They institute a weekly ‘camp tax’, as everyone pays in a set amount of time, out of which ‘the school, the church, the “hospital” and “the government” were to be supported’. Everyone receives the same number of hours for their work. ‘Greed was lacking, for there was no chance to hoard.’ Instead resources ‘travelled in a circle’, from the people to the government, and the government to the people.18 This results – quite miraculously – in a utopia.
The thin plot revolves around a few seditious elements, all foreigners, who must be eliminated from utopia to maintain its impeccability. An American bank president at first also bears all the hallmarks of a villainous bad capitalist (the scheming, arrogant, top-hatted and monocled monopolist is a Gilded Age stock character in American populist demonology). But even the banker is redeemed in the end, because at heart he’s a decent American who respects democracy and justice, and comes to learn the value of equality.
In a striking passage, one American describes their society as
the most exquisite state of socialism. This comes pretty close to being the essence of that historic American dream, ‘of the people, by the people, for the people.’ Up to date, that has been the rarest socialistic doctrine ever promulgated, but we are going it a long sight better. ‘From the people, by the people, to the people.’ What do you call that but socialism?19
Whatever most Americans call the American dream today, it seems safe to say that socialism isn’t part of it. Taking Lincoln’s ‘government of the people, by the people, for the people’ from the Gettysburg Address and fusing it with the familiar socialist slogan ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs’, already a cliché by 1920, results in the realisation of the ‘historic American dream’.
But the hero – the ‘plain unhyphenated American’ – is quick to point out that what they’ve created isn’t really socialism: ‘socialism is a game in which you are supposed to take something out of your pocket and put it into the other fellow’s whether he wants it or not. This scheme of ours is quite another thing. We’re not planning to split even on what we’ve got in our pockets so much as we’re planning to divide what we’ve got in our hands.’20
Their system, in fact, is social democracy: the Puritan work ethic incentivising individual endeavour, with a taxation system for the support of collective services and mutual benefits. This ‘American dream’ incorporates social justice and equality of access to goods and services; it repudiates ideas of personal advancement. It is not advocating the redistribution of wealth, but it is opposed to the stockpiling of wealth.
West Wind Drift was syndicated from post to post, literally – from the Washington Post to the Pittsburgh Daily Post to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch – suggesting that no one in 1920 was overly troubled by this subversive image of a quasi-socialist American dream.
The fact is that in the first twenty years of the existence of the phrase ‘American dream’, it was usually employed to describe a political ideal, not an economic one; and when it was used to describe an economic aspiration, it was with the pejorative meaning of ‘dream’ as illusion, not ideal. Never in its earliest years that I have found was the ‘American dream’ cited to celebrate the freedom of free markets. It was a way to debate ideas about protecting individuals from corrupt forces of power and self-interest.
The American dream was about how to stop bad multimillionaires, not how to become one.