Two years after the Wall Street Crash, America was in the grip of the Great Depression, thanks at least partly to the ‘businessmen presidents’, whose radically laissez-faire policies had driven American economics for a decade. Believing that the budget needed to be balanced, Hoover was reluctant to fight back: in 1931, his administration passed no major legislation to confront the Depression, while in 1930 the passage of the Hawley–Smoot Tariff had raised American import duties to their highest level in history, an act of protectionist nationalism that only made a bad economic situation worse. But the Democrats were also in disarray, most of them agreeing with prevailing fiscal wisdom that balancing the budget was the only way to emerge from the crisis. The gross national product continued to plummet as unemployment rose: by 1932 it would hit 23 per cent, while more than two thousand bank failures in 1931 alone led to millions of Americans losing homes, farms, businesses and life savings. Hoover’s response was nationalistic: he maintained that the Depression had been caused by the economic instability of post-war Europe, rather than by any fundamental unsoundness in the American system.
Millions of Americans were unemployed, and politicians seemed unwilling or unable to remedy the situation. Although the supposed epidemic of suicides following the Wall Street Crash was greatly exaggerated, business leaders were getting panicky and demanding governmental action, while ordinary Americans were also making their anger felt.
It was in 1931, when the Depression was still deepening, that the phrase ‘American dream’ finally began to dominate the national conversation. It all started with a book called The Epic of America, by historian James Truslow Adams. (He had fought to use ‘The American Dream’ as his title, but his publishers were adamant that readers ‘would never pay $3 for a dream’, and insisted he change it.)1
The book was published in October 1931 and became an instant sensation, giving the nation a way to discuss the catastrophe that had befallen it, and reclaim a lost purpose. For Adams, the country’s failures were primarily spiritual, rather than financial. It was a message that resonated across America.
Arguing that chasing the spectre of commercial success was precisely what had mired America in the Depression, Adams urged the country to repudiate its focus on material things, and recall its higher ideals, what he termed ‘the American Dream of a better, richer, and happier life for all our citizens of every rank … That dream or hope has been present from the start. Ever since we became an independent nation, each generation has seen an uprising of the ordinary Americans to save that dream from the forces which appeared to be overwhelming and dispelling it.’2
It’s an often quoted definition, without much attention paid to the clear warning embedded in it: the American dream would come under threat, and need to be revitalised, every generation. Adams doesn’t spell out the forces that oppose it, but the enemy of democracy (‘for all our citizens of every rank’) is authoritarianism in the many guises Americans had been discussing for the previous thirty years: tyranny, yes, but also special interests, corruption, plutocracy and oligarchy, crony capitalism and corporatism, and the various forms of rising totalitarianism, as tyranny went corporate.
Every generation, Adams observed, would have to fight the battle anew; every generation would find ordinary Americans called upon to resist the impact of authoritarianism, to reclaim the democratic dream of liberty, equality and justice. ‘Possibly the greatest of these struggles lies just ahead of us at this present time,’ he added.
But for Adams, democracy had another clear foe: materialism itself. Throughout The Epic of America, he hammered home the message that acquisitiveness was destroying the American dream. ‘It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.’
The American dream, according to Adams, was about the power of character, not purchasing power. And it was firmly opposed to nepotism and inherited privilege. It was a return to the old American creed, to principles of democracy and equality, of agency and self-determination, of justice and generosity. A desire for personal wealth and the accoutrements of luxury wasn’t the solution to the American crisis, according to Adams, it was the problem. America was losing sight of its soul, of the democratic ideals that defined it, settling for chasing after shiny objects instead.
In one sense Adams was returning the American dream to a Jeffersonian faith in the ‘common man’, as opposed to Walter Lippmann’s scepticism towards such mystical populism. But Adams also had some trenchant words for the supposedly pragmatic populism of Jacksonian democracy. Under Jackson the ‘American doctrine’ that ‘anyone could do anything’ took hold. As every ordinary American had learned he could put his hand to any job and ‘become a Jack-of-all-trades himself in his daily life, without special training, he could see no reason why public office called for particular qualities or experience’.3
But, as Adams also observed, the quality of work produced by a Jack-of-all-trades may not be the best the country has to offer. The law of averages means that ‘mediocrity is one of the prices paid for complete equality, unless the people themselves can rise to higher levels’.4
Like the Progressives thirty years before him, Adams held that ‘the American dream’ required the energetic maintenance of a social order dedicated to values beyond individual affluence. Americans had been remembering the cost of everything and the value of nothing: ‘size, like wealth, came to be a mere symbol of “success,” and the sense of qualitative values was lost in the quantitative, the spiritual in the material’.5
Sharing the blind spots of his time, Adams saw American history in terms of the European migrations and the actions of white men, calling indigenous people ‘savages’, barely noticing the presence of ‘negroes’, and ignoring all but a few white women. But Adams was also describing a national ethos that had been defined by these white male European settlers. And the principles he was excavating of the dream of self-realisation applied to all, even to the many Americans men like him tended to forget – as those overlooked Americans were pointing out with ever increasing force.
Much of the Epic was devoted to a cultural history of ‘rugged individualism’, explaining that the American dream was shaped by the brutal realities of wresting life from a wilderness, creating a national economy and ideology to support it. Early settlers got into the habit of deciding for themselves which British laws they would obey, which instilled a culture of autonomy bordering on autarchy. Throughout American history we can hear, Adams wrote, ‘the stroke, stroke, stroke of the ax on trees, the crash of the falling giant – advancing woodsmen making their clearings; Democracy; “business”’.6
It was in the nineteenth century, he added, that Americans began to convince themselves that the accumulation of wealth was a patriotic duty, pursued for the mutual benefit of individual and the nation, that indeed it was citizens’ moral obligation to develop and build the country. The fallacy took hold. ‘If the making of a hundred thousand was a moral act, the making of a million must be one of exalted virtue and patriotism,’ no matter how immoral the means by which the money was made.7
Being rich had become taken for a virtue, so much so that people might one day believe a man was good merely because he was rich, rather than viewing obscene wealth as just that – obscene. Vast fortunes have always been more likely to signal moral turpitude than rectitude.
American individualism had enabled ‘an extraordinarily rapid economic exploitation and development’, but individual competition for ‘dazzling prizes’ was destroying ‘both our private ideals and our sense of social obligation’. The wealthiest remained unconcerned about privilege, ‘because privilege was to their advantage’, while the majority ‘rebelled, about once a generation, against the accumulated abuses’ of this radically individualist system.
But individualism was always restored as America’s ‘working theory of government’, because the nation’s deep resources meant that individuals continued to glimpse personal opportunities, and resented a government interfering with them.
There was only one way, Adams held, that the American dream of equality and opportunity could become abiding reality. Trusting ‘the wise paternalism of politicians or the infinite wisdom of business leaders’ would never work – but Adams was not demonising the wealthy. He saw that they represented the values of their culture; by definition the ambitious strove to attain what their society taught them to respect. As long as wealth and power remained ‘our sole badges of success’, they would continue to shape national aspirations, ‘unless we develop some greatness in our own individual souls’.8
It was ludicrous to expect people with wealth and power to ‘abandon both to become spiritual leaders of a democracy that despises spiritual things’. By the same token no politician would ever ‘rise higher than the source of his power’. There was no point in looking to leaders, therefore, ‘until countless men and women have decided in their own hearts, through experience and perhaps disillusion, what is a genuinely satisfying life, a “good life” in the old Greek sense’.9
This genealogy of America’s value system made The Epic of America a bestseller. Adams’s ideas were welcome to a nation that was trying to survive a crisis by changing its rules; a renewed sense of mutual obligation and commonweal, in the old sense of common well-being, rather than commonwealth, seemed the obvious answer to many, an ethos that they used the ‘American dream’ to indicate. Economic and moral failures were intertwined, they concluded, and set about restoring the nation’s moral economy.
Selfishness had failed, spectacularly. It was time to focus on the greater good.
* * *
The Great Depression provoked a national identity crisis; James Truslow Adams gave the country a way to reclaim that identity in the name of the ‘American dream’. After the publication of his book in 1931, the saying suddenly exploded into the national archives, its appearances increasing exponentially. Within a matter of weeks, it started making its way into the national press, as writers and politicians began debating its evolution.
‘It is idle now to deny the dream, as many of us do, or to say there was nothing in it,’ declared a January 1932 essay in the Saturday Evening Post. ‘And of all our dreams so far, or any installment of the serial American dream, this one with which we fell in 1929 would be the most difficult to externalize in reality, because of its magnitude, its complexity and the strangeness of its parts.’10
Those years also saw a surge of other books about the meanings of America, including The American Ideal, Who Owns America?: A New Declaration of Independence, The Decline of American Capitalism, Pursuit of Happiness: The Story of American Democracy, American Saga: The History and Literature of the American Dream of a Better Life, The Awakening of America and the like, as America struggled to understand where it had gone wrong, turning to history to make sense of its failures.
In November 1932, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected president on a Democratic platform that promised Americans ‘a new deal’, offering a ‘contract’ with America that included job growth, national old-age insurance, agricultural relief and repeal of Prohibition. In his second inaugural address as governor of New York in 1929, Roosevelt had outlined his political philosophy: ‘Our civilization cannot endure unless we as individuals realize our personal responsibility to and dependency on the rest of the world,’ he had declared. ‘It is literally true that the “self supporting man” and woman has become as extinct as the man of the stone age. Without the help of thousands of others, anyone of us would die, naked and starved.’11 On the presidential campaign trail Roosevelt also consistently promised to cut back government spending, a promise he would comprehensively break.
More than 11,000 banks had failed, losing the life savings of millions of Americans. Unemployment was approaching a staggering 25 per cent, as currency values continued to plummet in a deflationary spiral, and national income had more than halved. The environmental catastrophe of the Dust Bowl, the worst drought in the history of the American continent, was creating the migrant crisis that John Steinbeck would depict in his two classic novels of the ‘American dream’, both written during the Depression, both concerning the desperation and dreams of migrant workers, Of Mice and Men in 1937 and The Grapes of Wrath in 1939.
It might seem that Adams’s ‘American dream’ of a spiritual greatness that was explicitly opposed to material prosperity was a perverse reassurance to offer a nation facing real destitution, with widespread homelessness and hunger. Surely dreaming of spiritual betterment is a luxury for the affluent; starving people dream of food.
A more cynical view, by contrast, might suggest that such evanescent dreams would take hold precisely during times of national deprivation, that it might make good political sense to urge citizens to focus on ‘higher ideals’, to distract them from economic conditions that cannot be wished away.
But the Progressive Era that had given birth to the saying twenty years earlier was in fact one of relative prosperity, in which living standards were on the rise, even as many Americans watched the accumulation of wealth among some with great unease, wondering at its moral costs – not for the individual, but for the nation.
The meaning of the American dream that Adams was popularising had, in fact, been lurking in American conversations for decades, as we have seen: he was returning to a belief that the democratic experiment would fail if equality and social justice were not protected, a proposition that amounted to the American dream for the vast majority of the people who used the phrase in the first decades of its currency. The Depression didn’t create this idea as a palliative: it rediscovered it as a solution.
Similar diagnoses of the toxicity of materialism were offered by other influential writers. In Only Yesterday, the first history of the 1920s, also published in 1931, Frederick Lewis Allen remarked upon the previous decade’s misplaced faith in wealthy businessmen. ‘It was no accident that men like Mellon and Hoover and Morrow found their wealth an asset rather than a liability in public office, or that there was a widespread popular movement to make Henry Ford President in 1924. The possession of millions was a sign of success, and success was worshipped the country over.’12
But America’s heedless pursuit of ‘success’ had become self-destructive; at a time of profound national crisis, the ‘American dream’ became a way to articulate the path America needed to rediscover: a path away from materialism, not towards it. The American creed – of liberty, justice, equality, democracy – had to be recovered first; economic dreams of prosperity for all could only be achieved in a society that prioritised those principles.
Culture and cultivate come from the same root; values do not just sustain themselves. Any ethos has to be cultivated; America had stopped conserving democracy, and started conserving money. The costs were immediately apparent.
Suddenly, Americans were making ironic comments about ‘the nightmare of the 1920s’, and the previous decade’s ‘poverty’, reversing the truism that the jazz age was a delirious era of prosperity and riotous boom. In retrospect, they saw a spiritual poverty at the heart of recent times. In 1933 Adams looked back on the ‘sudden expansion of trade, our huge profits, the end of immigration and the whole of the jazz age’, when ‘the American dream was changed into a nightmare of gambling and corruption and mad spending’.
The moral poverty of the 1920s was widely blamed for the economic poverty of the 1930s, and it was clear that education was necessary to uphold the American dream of spiritual and personal fulfilment. In 1930, Adams had written: ‘There are obviously two educations. One should teach us how to make a living and the other how to live. Surely these should never be confused.’13 Americans were starting to see the distinction.
Many educators began to admit that public schools had contributed to the current ‘social confusion and uncertainty’, as one put it; ‘they, like the rest of our philosophy, have overemphasized material success’. Schools had been reinforcing ‘the average American dream of getting rich quickly’, without teaching students ‘to appraise America critically’.14 Too much attention had been ‘given to preparation for making money and too little to training for the abundant life’ that money was supposed to create. ‘The rich man and the go-getter were the idols of the school house as well as the market place.’15
By 1933, local debates were asking: ‘Can the Junior High School Contribute to Social Planning for the Attainment of the American Dream?’ A school principal argued that America had been teaching its children ‘a wrong slant’ on ‘the pursuit of happiness’, encouraging them to accumulate wealth to enjoy in a putative retirement, instead of creating the ‘incentives to fine and constructive interests’ that contribute ‘to our children’s physical, moral and spiritual welfare’. Schools might prove their worth in an age of austerity ‘only by establishing higher ideals of success and by stimulating a broad social consciousness’.16
Another article deemed education a ‘manifestation of the American dream of which James Truslow Adams writes, a longing for things of the mind and the spirit denied us in our preoccupation with the humdrum and the material, a step along the way in our search for a fuller and richer life’.17 Ordinary citizens argued explicitly against the idea that education should train people to be docile wage slaves so that they could become consumers, providing the wealthy with both its labour and its markets. By 1934, the educational reformer John Dewey was declaring: ‘Public education is the soul of the American dream, the very core of its central idea. Whatever we are, of strength or weakness, we have been shaped by that dream.’18
The expression was becoming a truism, fusing with foundational national beliefs to articulate an American dream that begins to sound ever more familiar. One of the nation’s historic experiments, a graduating class was told, was the invention of ‘the American dream – that this is a land of opportunity for every man, woman and child to accomplish the best that is in him or her’.19
The ‘heart’s desire of the typical American’, an economist told a lecture hall in Illinois, was ‘to preserve this country as the land of opportunity, of economic freedom and of individual enterprise and initiative. This is the American dream.’20
But over the last seventy-five years, he added, American society had been moving against defending that dream, thanks to ‘the concentration of financial control’, and the ‘increasing power of a few great financial and industrial leaders in our social political life’. Under America’s new system of ‘corporationism’, a group of ‘comparatively few men have become the self-elected, self-perpetuating, largely irresponsible trustees’ of national resources, including the savings and investments of their fellow citizens. This economist was, as it happens, arguing from a conservative standpoint, ‘attacking as radical New Deal efforts’ to create state monopolies. Conservative and liberal alike saw the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the few as an authoritarian threat to the American dream.
Health care also joined the American dream: as cities began experimenting with public health systems, and found they paid ‘public dividends’, they argued that universal health care contributed to ‘what J.T. Adams has called “the American dream,” the dream of equal opportunity for every child in the community’.21 Safeguarding the American dream meant protecting the health of children, not the wealth of individuals.
As early as 1932, the press was reporting that populist Louisiana Senator Huey Long’s favourite phrase was ‘the American dream’, and that in order to make that dream come true, he was arguing for the confiscation of ‘all incomes in excess of $5,000,000 per annum, if such still exist’.22
‘Every man a king,’ Long famously promised, even as he began displaying authoritarian tendencies, and populism once again seemed to pull towards tyranny. Many observers concluded that the only king Huey Long really cared about seeing crowned was himself.
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The American dream as a promise of social justice against the self-interest of material gain meant that to some it also suggested the case for internationalism and against isolationism, as when an Oklahoma minister said that ‘the American dream’, requiring that ‘the moral law must be at the heart of any stable social order’, also meant that ‘isolation is impossible for us practically and wrong for us morally’.23 The American dream was ready to go international, just as it had in the countdown to the First World War, becoming a symbol for protecting the dream of democracy worldwide – paving the way for the meaning of the expression that would one day define the Cold War and shape the post-war order.
In the autumn of 1932, an American historian went to the University of Berlin, where he gave an inaugural lecture on the ‘American dream’. It must have been one of the first international talks on the topic, introducing the phrase to the rest of the world. The ‘American dream’ was still an unfamiliar enough term that the New York Times ascribed it to Dr Norlin and shared his definition: it was ‘at once an aspiration, a principle and a practice’, a foundation of ‘American character “in self-reliance, self-respect, neighborly cooperation and vision of a better and richer life, not for a privileged class, but for all”’. So the country liked to tell itself – but Dr Norlin also shared his rueful discovery that in Germany, America was known as ‘das Dollarland’.24
Two days later, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected president, announcing in his inaugural address in March 1933 that it was time to confront ‘our common difficulties. They concern, thank God, only material things.’ Throughout the address, in which he famously told Americans they had ‘nothing to fear but fear itself’, Roosevelt also stressed that America had gone astray in chasing material prosperity to the exclusion of anything else.
The ‘unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men’, Roosevelt charged. Lacking true values, these ‘false leaders’ of business and finance had failed to restore confidence because ‘they know only the rules of a generation of self-seekers. They have no vision, and when there is no vision the people perish.’
Instead of ‘the mad chase of evanescent profits’, Americans needed to recognise both ‘the falsity of material wealth as the standard of success’ and the equally ‘false belief that public office and high political position are to be valued only by the standards of pride of place and personal profit’.
It was, to put it bluntly, time for ‘changes in ethics’, as the nation acknowledged a newly chastened spirit. Whether it was true that ‘the money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization’, as Roosevelt also assured the American people, was, however, another question.
In its first weeks, the Roosevelt administration passed a raft of sweeping reforms, including finance regulations, relief programmes, pensions, unemployment insurance, welfare benefits, medical entitlements and tax reform. And it created the Public Works Administration, which invested billions of dollars in American infrastructure over the next decade. Roosevelt’s New Deal reforms effectively introduced social democratic policies into American society for the first time, as his administration created the welfare state and began spending its way out of depression. By the time the United States entered the Second World War, the New Deal had more than doubled federal spending.
At first many Americans, liberals and conservatives alike, saw in the New Deal a grave overreach of the federal government, many viewing Roosevelt’s arrogation of executive power as dangerous, even immoral. His critics called him a dictator; his defenders, the nation’s saviour. Republicans would spend the rest of the century and beyond adamantly determined to reverse these reforms – a position they would later take in the name of realising the ‘American dream’.
Throughout the 1930s, the ‘American dream’ was already giving a language and history to national debates about the principles of the New Deal – socialised education, health care, housing, inequality – but also to other conversations about the evolution of American society. James Truslow Adams himself had begun as a supporter of FDR, but staunchly opposed Roosevelt’s economic reforms. Complaining in a 1929 letter to a friend that he could no longer afford domestic help or a house big enough for his library, Adams had added: ‘That is merely the working of democracy the world over, and I am rapidly becoming an anti-Democrat.’25 It is one thing to have lofty principles, quite another to live by them; but it is also true that humanity’s perennial failure to live up to its ideals does not make the ideals less worthwhile.
Adams continued to offer prophetic warnings about what would happen to the nation if it lost sight of the American dream, even as he griped in private about having nowhere to put his heirloom furniture. In May 1933, for example, he cautioned that giant corporations ‘seem destined to rule the land’. If corporate plutocracies came to control the American political economy, then the American, once defined as a free citizen, would soon ‘be rated as a consumer’ only. Commodity fetishism would take over; the ‘flood of new goods’, ‘discoveries and applications’ that had been promised would ‘profoundly alter the material bases of our lives’.
If America entered a technologically advanced era ‘with no philosophy of life’ other than ‘getting and spending to the utmost limit of our power’, then the American dream would be fatally ‘warped’, promising only that every American home might become ‘an up-to-date department store’.26
The nation had passed through ‘three emotional states’ since the crash, he added: bewilderment, fear and resentment, ‘directed against the bankers and other leaders who have betrayed their trust’. But now the nation seemed ‘merely to be waiting’ for prosperity to return, ‘for the chance to begin over again’. The country needed ‘a saner philosophy. Without such a philosophy the American dream is doomed’, and the nation would ‘go spiritually bankrupt’.27
Americans had rediscovered that there should be a moral to the story, but the nature of that moral was still unclear.