As the Harding presidency focused America’s attention on ‘America first’, the ‘American dream’ continued, gradually, to emerge as a way to burnish the prestige of key national values – perhaps even of idealism itself in an increasingly worldly society. It also contributed to a growing sense of national self-regard.
In January 1921, Walter Lippmann wrote an essay that was never published, but was saved among his papers, in which he argued that American Jews should assimilate, rather than support Zionism: ‘It is a splendid thing to build Zion in Palestine, but it is no less splendid to fulfill the American dream.’1
Quite apart from its potentially controversial political stance (which is why Lippmann’s biographer mentioned it), this previously unpublished quotation in fact represents one of the earliest extant uses of the phrase ‘American dream’ in a context that we would recognise, to describe aspiration, assimilation and the immigrant experience. The idea was clearly on Lippmann’s mind, for he would return to the phrase in another important essay within two years.
But it was only slowly gathering cultural momentum. A year later, the Pittsburgh Press recounted a story about three enterprising playwrights who rented a home on Long Island ‘for a hide-away where they expected to fashion the great American dream’, a very early mention of the American dream as a combination of professional ambition and get-rich-quick scheme: the attitudes of the 1920s were increasingly infiltrating the Progressive Era ideal.2
By the beginning of 1922, it was still possible for the Akron Beacon Journal to write of ‘the American dream of world peace’, but uses of the phrase in economic contexts were on the rise, at least partly because so was the economy.3 In the 1920s, the dream that every American might be able to become rich – not just prosperous, but downright wealthy – began to spread, as the stock market promised that everyone could win the lottery by gambling a few dollars, just as Broadway and Hollywood suddenly seemed to suggest that everyone could become a star, or write a hit show.
As the national preoccupation with dreams of prosperity became a fixation, several writers responded in the 1920s with novels that are now regarded as classic treatises on the ‘American dream’, even though none of the novels in question uses the phrase.
The bestselling American novel of 1922 was Babbitt, by Sinclair Lewis, a ferocious popular satire of American conformity, crude materialism and the national cult of business. In the novel’s opening pages, George Babbitt gazes upon a bank tower with supreme satisfaction, beholding ‘the tower as a temple-spire of the religion of business, a faith passionate, exalted, surpassing common men’.4 Babbitt is a man of his tribe, unthinkingly following the rules; his reflexive Republican Presbyterianism, Lewis writes, ‘confirmed business men in the faith’.5 That faith is philistinism, although Babbitt is for the most part a fairly innocent philistine, even almost lovable in a hapless kind of way. Babbitt would be shocked by the ugliness of the ‘Americanism’ understood by some of his real-world counterparts; he is foolish and selfish, but not vicious.
Lewis has quite a lot of fun lampooning ‘America first’ Republicans and the ‘100 percenters’. Babbitt is a member of the Good Citizens’ League, to which, Lewis explains, ‘belonged most of the prosperous citizens of Zenith’, which included ‘Regular Guys’ like George Babbitt, the ‘salesmen of prosperity’, but also the local bourgeois aristocrats, ‘that is, the men who were richer or had been rich for more generations: the presidents of banks and of factories, the land-owners, the corporation lawyers, the fashionable doctors’.6
The Good Citizens’ League share a belief ‘that the working-classes must be kept in their place; and all of them perceived that American Democracy did not imply any equality of wealth, but did demand a wholesome sameness of thought, dress, painting, morals, and vocabulary’.7 Skewering ‘America first’ conformity, Lewis was satirically reminding his readers of an American dream that did indeed imply ‘equality of wealth’, that dream of which Americans had been speaking and writing for the previous twenty years, but one increasingly repudiated by a Republican Party proselytising the benefits – for them – of unchecked capitalism.
Babbitt’s Good Citizens’ League also supports ‘an Americanization Movement, with evening classes in English and history and economics, and daily articles in the newspapers, so that newly arrived foreigners might learn that the true-blue and one hundred per cent. American way of settling labor-troubles was for workmen to trust and love their employers’.8
The notion that capitalism’s response to ‘the labor question’ is to teach workers that patriotism means loving your boss is no mere joke (although it is funny). Most of the spleen in Babbitt is directed against the idea that business is the religion of America, that money is what the nation worships. During America’s rapid age of expansion in the nineteenth century, business had been elevated to the point of a patriotic virtue. As historian James Truslow Adams would argue in 1931, business ceased to be an occupation that was as subject to the moral code as all other endeavours, and began to transcend morality. ‘Money-making having become a virtue, it was no longer controlled by the virtues but ranked with them.’9 This logic would lead a century later to the frequently espoused belief that millionaires must be good people or they wouldn’t be so successful, an extension of the vulgarised Calvinist idea that wealth is a sign of God’s grace.
As early as 1913, on a trip to New York City, the British poet Rupert Brooke had commented on his astonished realisation that Americans truly worshipped business. ‘It all confirms the impression that grows on the visitor to America that Business has developed insensibly into a Religion, in more than the light, metaphorical sense of the words.’10
Babbitt’s popularity sparked debates and conversations around the country, making ‘a Babbitt’ a recognisable character type, while also making Lewis internationally famous. The UK edition was published with a glossary translating such incomprehensible American slang as Gee (‘puritanical euphemism for God’) and liberal (‘label of would-be broadminded American’), a notable early instance of what a later generation would call throwing shade.
That autumn the New York Times, remarking that Midwesterners had taken umbrage at Lewis’s parody, cautioned New Yorkers against enjoying the joke at the expense of philistine denizens of the heartland too much, for New Yorkers ‘are themselves the frequent victims of a like error. By far too many dwellers in other parts of the country they and their city are called “un-American”.’ (In fact, the article went on to argue, ‘New York is the most American of American cities’, for the simple reason that it had inhabitants from ‘practically every village, town and city in the United States’ living in it.)11
Babbitt was the stereotypical Middle American: ignorant, complacent, gullible, accepting without question all the nostrums of his day. But for all Babbitt’s apparent self-regard, he is troubled by a perennial, niggling dissatisfaction, dimly sensing the spiritual sterility and hypocrisy in his world, without knowing how to identify or remedy it. His story is now routinely discussed as one of the pre-eminent novels critiquing the hollowness of ‘the American dream’. But Lewis never mentions the American dream; such analyses begin with the assumption that the American dream means materialism, and thus will be found hollow.
Even as Lewis was writing there were other American dreams available, but now they have disappeared from view.
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Not until 1922 have I found any record of the immigrant ‘American dream’ explicitly linked with the old idea of America as a land of opportunity, although in Lippmann’s unpublished 1921 essay that meaning is certainly implicit. And once again, as in most of the earliest references to the American dream as personal aspiration, it is presented not as a hope, but as a failure. ‘American Dream Blasted’, shouted an Oregon report of a German immigrant family in 1922 who ‘dreamed of America as a land of opportunity’ only to encounter ‘virtual bondage and near starvation’ in a contract that amounted to indentured servitude.12
This also seems to be one of the first uses of ‘American dream’ in a headline, suggesting its growing intelligibility as a shorthand; from Walter Lippmann writing about Jewish nationalism on the East Coast, to an editor in the Pacific Northwest reporting on local German immigrants, the ‘American dream’ was becoming recognisable across the country.
As it became more familiar, it slowly became less specific. Not an American dream of this or that particular thing – just the American dream, a usage that assumes everyone shares the same dream, and knows what it is without being told.
But even as people gradually began to use the expression as if its meaning were fixed, they did so in contexts that make clear that its meanings in fact continued to shift. In the Progressive Era the American dream had been identified with corrective dreams of controlling inequality and protecting democracy. In the 1920s it began to appear far more often in tandem with glorifications of wealth – and also with anxious stories about the incursions of new wealth into old strongholds of power – while debates about immigration continued to rage across the country.
As a phrase the ‘American dream’ could bring all these conflicting ideas together in an uneasy mix. In 1923 the Chicago Tribune ran an editorial urging the United States to ‘Keep the Gates Closed’, arguing that lifting restrictions on immigration would be ‘shortsighted self-interest disguised as humanitarianism’. Maintaining that the economic case was against increased immigration, it added: ‘If we are to be a harmonious and homogeneous people we must be free to do this work of assimilation without a perpetual flux of new elements.’ In other words, immigration could be reconciled with the idea of racial homogeneity through the work of assimilation – but only if the country squeezed heterogeneity out of the ‘elements’ that were already in the country. No new elements would fit in the melting pot.
The article concluded that even if the economic argument that immigration would provide cheap labour were correct, ‘we should still be opposed to opening the gates. For the future of our American dream depends upon the character of American citizenship, not upon the cash in our pockets.’13 Here is the Progressive Era ‘American dream’, recognisably persisting in the idea that America should be judged by its values, not by its wealth. But the progressive ideal was being used to justify a racialised xenophobia that assumed the country must be ‘homogeneous’, and that these ‘new elements’ entering the country could not, by definition, have good character. Even if they brought in money, these ‘elements’ would be degrading the ideal of the ‘American dream’. Old immigrants were in; new immigrants were out.
‘America first’ xenophobia was creeping into ideas about the ‘American dream’ – exactly what the 1845 Post editorial had warned would constitute a degradation of the American creed, the self-serving nativism of someone with ‘no American heart’.
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The question of how to judge the ‘worth’ of immigrant communities and ethnic minorities continued to gain urgency, and for many in the early 1920s, scientific racism provided the obvious answer. One of the most effective, and tenacious, attempts to institutionalise eugenicist assumptions about biologically determined merit was the development of the Stanford-Binet intelligence tests, first published in 1916.
By the early 1920s IQ tests were being used to justify any number of group classifications, and thus stratifications. In 1922 Walter Lippmann sat down to write a groundbreaking series of essays for the New Republic attacking their use in the military. These in turn paved the way for his argument a year later that IQ tests would undermine the American dream, a usage sometimes (erroneously) identified as the first appearance in print of the phrase ‘the American dream’.14
Lippmann began by sharply warning that intelligence tests were an ‘instrument for classifying a group of people, rather than “a measure of intelligence.” People are classified within a group according to their success in solving problems which may or may not be tests of intelligence.’15 Lippmann was scathing about the faulty premises of such efforts: ‘we cannot measure intelligence when we have never defined it’. Moreover he could see clearly the eugenicist underpinnings of the claims about ‘inherent’ intelligence, which, as he pointed out, ‘had no scientific foundation’: ‘we cannot speak of its hereditary basis after it has been indistinguishably fused with a thousand educational and environmental influences from the time of conception’.16
By July 1923 Lippmann viewed the biological determinism of intelligence tests as a direct threat to the American dream of equality of opportunity for individual self-realisation. Considering that within half a century, and for decades to come, access to education would be widely held as a foundation to achieving the American dream of upward social mobility, Lippmann’s position is all the more striking – for he argued precisely the opposite.
In ‘Education and the White Collar Class’, an essay syndicated around the country, Lippmann predicted that supply for professional-managerial jobs would outstrip demand within a generation, because of widening access to higher education. Lippmann had been asked to advise high-school students interested in pursuing journalism careers, as they selected among ‘the various vocations that are open to them’. Just how many white-collar jobs awaited graduates?
Lippmann estimated that roughly 10 million professional-managerial positions existed, but the country was annually producing half a million graduates. The competition was already fierce for existing jobs; either experienced people had to be fired to make room for a younger generation with modern skills, or younger people would be excluded from the opportunities for which they’d been educated. What should a nation facing a surplus of graduates qualified for jobs that were not materialising, thanks to rapidly changing industrial conditions, do?
What America had begun surreptitiously doing, Lippmann argued, was to try to limit enrolment in competitive high schools and universities by using standardised tests, which were being employed in some quarters to justify denying ‘inferior’ groups, including Jews and African-Americans, access to elite educations. These tests were ‘a heap of nonsense’, Lippmann insisted, as they purported to show ‘that only a percentage of the population is by nature fitted for secondary and higher education’. This would artificially limit the pool of graduates applying for a diminishing number of white-collar jobs.
The real problem, Lippmann maintained, was ‘not the scarcity of intelligence, but the scarcity of jobs’. And this problem would only grow worse if America continued to insist that higher education had to result in office jobs, instead of believing that educated people could work in ‘skilled manual trades’. ‘The real remedy’, Lippmann believed, would require erasing ‘the snobbish association’ between professional-managerial roles and social superiority.
Education needed to be regarded ‘as the key to the treasure house of life’, not as ‘a step ladder to a few special vocations’. The alternative, to keep ‘higher education confined to a small and selected class’, would ‘mark the end in failure of the American dream’.
As in his 1921 essay about Jewish assimilation, Lippmann here seems to be invoking an American dream we would recognise, but he is explicitly arguing for personal development over upward social mobility: for Lippmann preserving the American dream meant rejecting upward social mobility. The American dream entailed helping all citizens realise their own intellectual and spiritual potential; focusing on mere financial advancement or status would mean the American dream had failed.
Without widespread access to higher education America would be left with ‘a literate and uneducated democracy, which is what we now have’, Lippmann added for good measure. The distinction between literacy and education was crucial: what would happen to a nation in which voters could read, but weren’t well informed?
Lippmann predicted that such a democracy would ‘be governed increasingly by Hylans and Thompsons and Mussolinis’.
John F. Hylan, mayor of New York City from 1918 to 1925, was widely mocked for his ignorance, and in particular for his inane, often garbled speeches. Four months into Hylan’s term, the New York World wondered if the city could survive four years of him. ‘Those four months have been enough to reveal his incapacity,’ although Hylan’s ‘unfitness for the office was revealed during the campaign’. Hylan’s campaign speeches ‘were a complete revelation of his ignorance, his demagogy and his unfitness for an office that is second only to the presidency in administrative difficulties’. As a candidate, Hylan had exposed ‘everything about himself that an intelligent voter needed to know, and what he told was a prophecy that has been fulfilled’. It was astonishing, but ‘the voters saw him, heard him and chose him’.17
William Hale ‘Big Bill’ Thompson was the mayor of Chicago from 1915 to 1923, and is still ranked as one of the most corrupt mayors in American history, not least because of his open association with Al Capone, although that would come later. (In 1927, he would successfully run for mayor again, this time on a platform of ‘America first’, as we shall see.) And in 1922 Benito Mussolini had just come to power in Italy.
An uneducated but literate democracy would, Lippmann warned, elect the incompetent, the corrupt and the fascistic.
Today the American dream is widely identified as dependent on education for access to upward social mobility. But for Lippmann it was the other way round: education was a public and personal good in and of itself, not an instrumental means to the creation of wealth or status. It’s the earliest use I’ve found of the American dream associated with education – but only to distinguish education from social or material ambition, not to unite the two.
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When ‘Education and the White Collar Class’ appeared in Vanity Fair in July 1923, it was almost certainly read by F. Scott Fitzgerald, who that month had begun drafting what he intended to be the ‘great American novel’, a story about the attenuation of the American dream of human fulfilment into mere desire for wealth and power.
A few months earlier, Fitzgerald had published his least known work, a play called The Vegetable: Or, From President to Postman, a satire of the Harding presidency. One review offered a pithy summary of The Vegetable’s message, namely ‘that a man may be an egregious misfit as the president of the country and cause incalculable damage, but that he may have in him the makings of the best postman in the world’.18
The play begins on the night in 1920 when Warren G. Harding was selected by the Republican Party as its nominee for president. The play’s brainless protagonist, Jerry, awaiting the results, gets drunk and in the second act dreams that he’s been elected president. He installs his family in the cabinet, declares war on the world, presides over rampant corruption, and is impeached at the end of his delirium.
The Vegetable is an acidic satire of the American dream of success, lampooning the promise of American opportunity as symbolised by the idea that anybody can be president, in order to suggest that not everybody should be president. Although it never uses the phrase ‘American dream’, the play is founded on the metaphor that American promises of power and prosperity to all citizens are not merely a dream but a delirium.
Fitzgerald was far from the only one to have noticed that ‘a serious alteration in what we may call the American spirit has been taking place in recent years’, as a Chicago Tribune editorial put it that summer – but different people identified different causes for that alteration. Fitzgerald thought America’s spiritual impoverishment was caused by its mercenary ambitions. The Tribune, by contrast, thought it was caused by too much regulation. With an increase of ‘envy and suspicion’ among American citizens, it protested, ‘has come the disposition to regulate the individual … to disrespect the private conscience and to enlarge the dominance of government over individuals or minorities’. Such domination ‘is contrary to the American ideal, a defeat of the American dream. Americanism meant freedom from all tyrannies and unconquerable faith in the individual. But of late years we have developed more and more the ancient fallacy of the state and given up more and more the inspiring and vitalizing belief in the individual and his liberty.’19
Increasingly, the American dream of liberty, which by definition is unregulated, was coming into conflict with American dreams of equality and justice, which by definition (or at least by human nature) require regulation to be realised. Some were beginning to see in the American government an authoritarian engine suppressing liberty, rather than a regulatory system that secured it for all. In this version of the national imaginary, the ‘real American’ populating rural areas was also a revolutionary upholder of freedom. And the regulations that might infringe upon the prerogatives of that freedom – including those that were instituted to protect the freedoms of other American citizens – were figured as un-American, imperilling the stalwart, sovereign individual.
That intractable problem of how to balance the needs of the individual against the needs of all the other individuals – the problem faced by every society in human history – continued to arise in international questions as well, where it took the form of debates over nationalism and isolationism. And for Americans seeking to articulate the need for mutual, collaborative values – Americans who were by no means only political liberals – the American dream continued to be a way to suggest that pursuing selfishness as a means to collective success was a delusion, just as the Progressive Era had insisted. Three weeks after the Chicago Tribune argued that the American dream of liberty was opposed to regulation, a Pennsylvania paper mentioned the American dream as an illusion to denounce isolationism. ‘Isolation is only an American dream. “We’re part of the world we’re in and we might as well play our part.”’20
That was not the view of ‘America first’.