‘Did anybody ever see an American Dream walking?’
This question, put to its readers by the New York Times in a 1934 essay called ‘The American Note’, may seem a trifle difficult to answer.1 But by the mid-1930s, the American dream had indeed become ubiquitous, roaming from lecture to sermon, from lunchtime talk to book review, and from feature essay to political speech. Almost anywhere you went, you were likely to encounter it.
As ‘America first’ seemed increasingly pushed to the margins where only cranks and zealots lurked, the ‘American dream’ continued to make its presence felt, still primarily to summon principles of liberal democracy and the dreams of the founders – but its relation to upward social mobility was strengthening as well.
‘The American Note’ had been described by a British guidebook as a national sense of boundless progress and possibility, an indifference to authority and tendency to innovation, and ‘inextinguishable hope’. These forces had achieved in the United States ‘a wider realization of human brotherhood than has yet existed’ elsewhere in the world.
The Times essay quoted de Tocqueville’s observation that although democracy is not the most efficient government, it produces what more efficient political systems cannot: ‘namely, an all-pervading and restless activity’, the turbulent energy that can ‘produce wonders’. Americans might ask, the Times concluded, ‘whether an American dream that has shown no change since de Tocqueville a hundred years ago, and has been traced back by James Truslow Adams three hundred years, can properly be described as a dream’. The conditions of democracy were ‘a popular state of mind’ in America, and ‘that which endures for three hundred years is as real and enduring as most things are in this transitory world’.2 Like language, dreams can create truths, conjuring them into existence.
The dream seemed stable enough by 1934 to be called a reality – not because it had come true, but because the dream was so shared, so persistent, that it had made its presence felt, and was shaping American cultural reality.
Put another way, the American dream of democratic equality was kept alive by the sheer number of people who kept appealing to it, even as they acknowledged that it was far from being achieved. Hope and faith came from the commitment to the dream itself; they weren’t dependent upon its realisation, but upon the effort to realise it.
That summer, a New Mexico paper defended Roosevelt’s plan for social security in the name of the American dream of ‘building a society here in which the common man would get a better break than he ever got elsewhere. Seeking to protect the common man against unemployment, against accidents, and against the traditional penury of old age, and trying to guarantee that he shall have a decent home to live in – what is this but an effort to make the old American dream come true?’3
‘If the high hopes of the last 18 months are not to be dashed,’ maintained a Pennsylvania editorial a few weeks later, it would be wise for the country to recall the ideas ‘which helped, in the early years of the republic, to build that great American dream which has always dazzled our eyes just beyond the horizon’, namely, ‘that the rights of the humblest man could be made as sacred as the rights of the mightiest, and that progress should mean nothing at all unless it means a better life and a truer freedom for the fellow at the bottom of the heap’. This ‘noble dream’ may have become ‘stained and frayed’ over time, ‘but it remains our finest heritage; and if the confusion of this era is to mean anything at all, it must mean a revival of that dream and a new effort to attain it’.4
Earlier that spring, James Truslow Adams had similarly claimed that the democratic American dream was itself the greatest intellectual contribution America had made to the world. In an essay called ‘Rugged Individualism’ (using Theodore Roosevelt’s famous phrase), Adams argued that the United States had not, in fact, produced markedly unique thinkers, but rather innovators and inventors: America bred not Einsteins, but Edisons.
‘Perhaps our most notable contribution has been what I have called the “American dream,”’ Adams concluded (with a little flourish of self-promotion), ‘that belief in the right and possibility of a better life for all, regardless of class or circumstance.’ Americans’ faith in individualism, Adams held, meant that neither communism nor socialism would ever take hold of the country, for both were fundamentally authoritarian. It was not capitalism that would safeguard America, but individualism. And that individualism needed to be protected by a democratic government from the giant corporations that would otherwise suffocate it.
As lectures, articles, speeches and books on the American dream started springing up across the country, the phrase’s meanings soon diverged, although it was still widely adduced to describe ideals of social justice and the problems created for democratic self-government by economic inequality.
Those focused on safeguarding individual rights and freedoms against what they saw as the illegitimate encroachments of the Roosevelt administration were also working to reclaim the American dream, however, as its meaning was contested. When the New Deal placed pressure on the national value system, liberty tilted upward on the scales of the American dream once more. For example, in a widely reprinted radio address, the president of the California Institute of Technology warned against the ‘danger of dictatorship’ as a menace to the ‘American Dream of liberty and progress’.
‘Stateism’: this ‘new and useful term’, coined in Dr R. A. Millikan’s broadcast, incorporated ‘Communism, Socialism, Fascism, bureaucracy and paternalism’, the Los Angeles Times told its readers. It constituted the ‘greatest menace to the American ideal of a land of freedom and opportunity for each individual to rise to the position to which his merit and character entitle him’. If Americans accepted ‘too much paternalism’, it would lead the country ‘from freedom into despotism’.5
‘Excess government may spoil the American dream,’ Dr Millikan warned. But even a conservative arguing against state intervention still accepted the basic premise that the government should be ‘regulatory’; his speech only resisted the idea that government should be too ‘operative’ or invasive. An overly active government might create problems, but in the 1930s the idea that government had a proper regulatory role was not disputed by any serious public voice, even the ones on the right arguing against excessive government intervention. That’s one of the things government was for: to protect individuals from forces beyond their control.
‘The American dream’ could only be realised, Millikan concluded, by ‘the wide distribution of power and opportunity among [American] citizens, not by the concentration of it either in the hands of necessarily politically minded officials, or in the hands of despots’.6
Both free-market capitalists and liberal democrats found in the ‘American dream’ a way to describe their – increasingly divergent – ideals for the nation, but neither found the American dream compatible with the concentration of large amounts of wealth and power in the hands of politicians or autocrats, and neither believed that free markets were the same thing as political freedom – or that one led to the other.
Indeed, the American dream remained firmly associated with democracy and liberty across the political spectrum. A sermon delivered to the American Legion, called ‘The American Dream’, was reprinted in New Jersey; it began with a biblical text: ‘Ye are called to liberty.’ Noting James Truslow Adams’s definition of the American dream, as most still did, the sermon claimed that the dream was ‘challenged’, and would only come true if people ‘wake up and make it true … If not, we may witness the failure of democracy, the failure of the common man to rise to full stature, to the fullness of all that the American Dream has promised of hope for mankind.’7
* * *
Throughout 1935, a Pulitzer Prize-winning liberal historian and journalist named Herbert Agar was publishing widely syndicated columns arguing that the majority of the country was still ‘in favor of what has been called the American dream. This dream is not merely of a nation in which all men have a high standard of living. There is nothing natively American about that; the desire is common to the whole human race.’
For Agar, freedom was inseparable from equality. ‘The American dream is of a nation where men are free,’ he explained, ‘in the true sense that they have the maximum of independence, that their fate is just so far as possible in their own hands. It is a dream of a nation where men are equal,’ not only under the law, ‘but in the sense that they all have a chance to make themselves a dignified and worthy life.’8
Everyone wants to live in comfort; what made the American dream exceptional was not a promise of individual success but a promise of self-determination. Yet that still left open the question of whether self-determination was best achieved under a laissez-faire government, or under one that intervened to prevent larger cultural or economic forces from interfering in individual sovereignty.
At the end of 1935 Agar published a book called The Land of the Free, in which he argued counter-intuitively that ‘the failure of Americanism’ was ‘its failure to exalt the right of private property’ – not for the few, but for the many. ‘The betrayal of Americanism came with the increasing concentration of wealth, privilege, power in the hands of a few people’, which was contrary to ‘the American dream … of a free nation of free men, enjoying the final fruits of freedom in a firm stake in the land and the machinery of production’.9
This idea of the American dream always stretched backwards, invoking an originary value system that many Americans feared was being lost. Although it may look at first glance like a nostalgic appeal to a golden moral age, it was more of a bracing reminder – not that America used to be better, but that it used to dream bigger.
Soon this idea of the American dream as a constant urge to national improvement had merged with broader ideas about American history, as an avalanche of talks, plays and pageants were produced by local citizens on the theme of the American dream. The tenor of the vast majority of them was not triumphalist, but meliorist, as a kind of moral optimism began to reassert itself.
An attorney in Portland, Oregon, spoke on ‘The American Dream’ at a local election and picnic, focusing on ‘the dream of freedom and equality for the common man’.10 High-school students in Allentown, Pennsylvania, presented a pageant entitled ‘The American Dream Unfolds’, which told the history of America from colonial settlement to ‘The Melting Pot’ of 1935. Valedictorians gave speeches about the American dream, talks that ‘traced from the early colonies the ever westward industrial expansion of this country in which the ideal of physical growth and the profit motive ran amuck in the wave of wild speculation until the crash of 1929’, and ended with ‘recognition of the growing materialism in American life’, urging the nation to ‘recover the human side of American life’.11 ‘The “American Dream” – the doctrine embodied in the Declaration of Independence, “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” was being forgotten and blanketed by a stormy search for wealth.’12
In Binghamton, New York, a minister preached on ‘The American Dream versus The Religion of Nationalism’, arguing that patriotism was different from ‘destructive’ nationalism, ‘which some of our brethren refer to as “hundred per cent”’. Such white nationalism was ‘out of harmony both with the Declaration of Independence and with the Preamble to the Constitution, with the American dream’.13 It had not taken long for the American dream, clearly defined as the framers’ ideas of democratic equality, to become a rebuke to the ‘one hundred per cent American’ nationalist discourse.
The point of the American dream for many was that it was not something that the nation gave to its citizens – it was something they would have to make, and remake, for themselves. An editorial in Ithaca, New York, lamented the loss of a sense of civic duty, observing: ‘When the naturally-equipped leaders of any society decline to lead, then the door is open to the leadership of the unfit. That is the history of human society. Dictators arise when the intelligent people abdicate their role of guidance. There must be a feeling of civic responsibility if the American dream is to come true.’14
At a Flag Day ceremony in Williamsburg, Virginia, a speaker observed that the colonial setting of Williamsburg should remind the audience that ‘certain concepts of the 18th century philosophy in the Declaration are eternal. If the American dream is to become a reality we must evaluate today in the light of our past’, remembering that the flag represents the ‘spirit’ of that American dream, namely ‘Liberty and Justice for all’.15
None of these invocations presumed that the American dream was supposed to have already come true. It was a national aspiration to which ordinary Americans were renewing their commitment, not a complaint that promissory notes had not been redeemed. If the dream were to ever come true, it would be up to all Americans to make it so.
Mark Schorer, who would later write the authoritative biography of Sinclair Lewis, published his first book in 1935, a memoir of growing up in Wisconsin. A review described what had gone wrong in his small Midwestern town: ‘having ignored the American dream, [it] slowly proceeded to disintegrate spiritually as it advanced materially, a process we are all familiar with in life and in novels on the American Scene, as it used to be called’. The American dream remained a shorthand for defending transcendent ideals against materialism: focusing only on material advancement meant ‘ignoring’ the American dream, a choice that would inevitably lead to spiritual disintegration.16
A school superintendent in Tucson, Arizona, spoke to a conference of teachers on the difficulty of reconciling liberty with equality. ‘The trouble is that the American Dream is double,’ he explained, as it was both ‘conceived in liberty’ and ‘dedicated to equality’.17 The conflicts built into the American creed between freedom and equality, between liberty and justice, were becoming clearer as the nation grew and industrialised, and as more and more Americans, including the disenfranchised, were insisting that the national value system applied to them, too.
The popularity of the expression ‘American dream’ served to focus national attention on the fact that principles of democracy were often in direct conflict with corporate capitalism, a system which – if unchecked – would reflexively tend towards authoritarianism and plutocracy, in the shape of a powerful business elite.
A political science professor in Iowa predicted that the ‘horoscope of the moment seems to point to the coming of a dictator’ in America, because ‘if threatened with defeat’ capitalism would ‘accept his rule’, preferring a dictator who supported Wall Street to a socialist who regulated it. The nation needed to ‘stand firm in support of our American dream’ to ensure that ‘our democracy shall not fail’.18 The association of the American dream with democracy would only strengthen as the shadow of totalitarianism spread across Europe.
That the problem was how to reconcile liberty with equality was becoming clearer, but it was also exposing a growing rift over the meanings of liberty itself. In Eugene, Oregon, a rotary club address warned that Americans had ‘come perilously close to wrecking our National Dream. All because we have not seen the inner relationship that exists between liberty and equality! We have worshiped at the altar of liberty and at the expense of equality. The only possible way to restore and recover the American Dream is to see again the inherent value of equality in our social scheme of life.’19
It was not hard to see, argued a 1936 essay, that the principles of liberal democracy had been ‘used obscenely by the patrioteers, and neither was it hard to see that they were fast becoming principles in name only. Yet they were not to be discarded lightly; they were not, if the future held a ray of hope, to be discarded at all. For they represented something more than personal liberty and freedom of speech. They represented all that was dynamic in the American dream, the vigor and eternal freshness of the democratic ideal.’20
Equality was not merely economic; it was political, too. This crucial understanding, shared by ordinary American citizens debating the meanings of their national value system, presages the shift that the ‘American dream’ would eventually take, as the citizens defining it gradually abandoned the language of equality in favour of the liberty that was meant to underwrite individual success. Increasingly, the only freedom that mattered in the post-war discourse of the American dream would be the freedom of free markets.
‘Basis of Social Democracy is Destroyed’ ran a headline in Baltimore that year. An economist and author had given a lecture arguing that ‘industrial capitalism has destroyed the basis of the “American dream” of liberty, equality, and social democracy’.21
Today, many American political commentators regularly claim that the American dream is antithetical to social democracy. But as the phrase took hold of the national imagination, the American dream was all but synonymous with social democracy: it was authoritarianism, whether on the right or the left, that was antithetical to it.
* * *
The New Deal was starting to pull America out of depression by 1935. Unemployment had nearly halved, from 23 per cent to 14 per cent, while the GDP rose just as steeply, going up 11 per cent in one year, and bank failures had slowed to a trickle. Home ownership was growing, too.
In Pittsburgh, a small notice observed that the New Deal’s Federal Housing Administration, though barely a year old, was ‘doing more to crystalize the American Dream of A HOME OF ONE’S OWN than any provision yet made’. In 1935, the American dream was just starting to be linked with home ownership, still by no means a common association.22 In 1936 Herbert Agar edited What is America?: A New Declaration of Independence, which reacted to the housing crisis by calling for state-sponsored guarantees to home ownership. Without ‘genuine property, genuine competition’, Americans would be better off with an economy planned for the good of all, ‘rather than a State planned by robber barons for the good of one another’.23 It was clear that risk had been socialised, but profit remained privatised; without the moral hazard of capitalism, there would be no morals in capitalism at all.
The idea that the American dream would be under threat if capitalism were set above a moral economy was not limited to progressives like Agar. In the spring and summer of 1936, former President Herbert Hoover appealed to the American dream in urging fellow Republicans to rally against Roosevelt’s New Deal in the upcoming election. Hoover’s language anticipated the arguments that Republican opponents to government welfare supports would use for the best part of the next hundred years. Reporting on Hoover’s speech at the Republican National Convention, the New York Times headline declared: ‘Hoover Excoriates New Deal as Fascism, Demanding a “Holy Crusade for Freedom”’ of the individual.24 But a month earlier, Hoover also repudiated as ‘fascist’ a nation in which ‘big business’ ran the country for individual profit.
The grim danger that confronts America is the destruction of American freedom. We must fight again for a government founded upon ordered individual liberty and opportunity that was the American vision. If we lose, we will continue down this new deal road to some sort of personal government based upon collectivist theories. Under these ideas ours can become some sort of Fascist government. In that case big business manages the country for its financial profit at the cost of human liberty. Or we can become some sort of Socialist state. In that case everybody gains as much as his greed for political power will bring him at the total loss of his liberty. I do not know whether Socialism or Fascism is the greater evil. I do know they are not the American dream. They have become the world’s nightmare.25
No one – not even a former Republican president who had written a book called American Individualism – was arguing that corporate plutocrats should run the country. ‘Stateism’ was a growing concern on the right, but conservatives also recognised that human liberty was threatened by big business, as well as by totalitarianism.
On the eve of his second election, at the end of October 1936, Roosevelt delivered a speech at Madison Square Garden, in which he declared open war on big business. ‘We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace,’ he said: ‘business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.’ The financial forces of America ‘had begun to consider the government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs’. But ‘government by organized money is just as dangerous as government by organized mob’.26
Two years later, even Fortune magazine was making a similar argument to criticise both Republicans and Roosevelt’s New Deal. The editorial roundly condemned the avarice enabled by previous Republican administrations. ‘There is little that can be said for the previous practices of the republican party, which had consistently identified itself with the use of federal power for private enrichment,’ it began.
But Fortune also objected to Roosevelt’s ‘reactionary restrictions and interferences, designed for the public benefit in the reiterated name of democracy, but falling like a shadow across the American dream’.27 The line between liberty and regulation would continue to be contested.
The economy severely restricted again in 1937, falling back into recession. Perhaps relatedly, associations of the American dream with material plenty also began to reappear. At Franklin Roosevelt’s second inauguration, in January 1937, he spoke of the return of national prosperity, famously telling the American people: ‘the test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little’.
Roosevelt’s words reminded one reporter of the speeches about ‘“the abolition of poverty” and “two chickens in every pot” uttered by “Herbert the Unhappy” on the eve of the collapse of 1929. The words were similar because prosperity is still our national goal,’ the journalist wearily remarked, ‘material plenty still the American dream, the promised land of which we are striving.’ Whatever idealists tried to maintain, ‘no high dream of ardor, or spiritual experience, of intellectual achievement has yet become good politics in these United States’.28
Material insecurity was beginning to shake the nation’s faith in the larger American dream, argued an Indiana editorial. Where once Americans trusted in self-determination, believing that whatever deprivations they faced were largely of their own making, the Depression had ended ‘this comfortable conception’. As Americans realised that their prospects depended not only upon themselves, but also ‘on forces which [they] cannot hope to understand or foresee’, a different kind of insecurity was created, around national identity. The country had to make itself ‘depression-proof, not only because we must save people from actual want, but because this feeling of uncertainty and doubt is clouding the American dream itself’.29
President Roosevelt urged Congress in 1937 to grant federal aid in order to ‘save the American dream’ of individual farm ownership, promising ‘the American dream of the family-size farm’, the earliest use of the phrase by a major political leader, and one that instantly associated the American dream with property ownership.30 (Roosevelt would never use the phrase again in public speeches.)
It was the same year John Steinbeck published Of Mice and Men, in which migrant workers Lennie and George dream of owning their own farm, so they can ‘live off the fatta the lan ’’. Steinbeck contrasts this pastoral dream of reclaiming the Edenic abundance of the American landscape against the tragic alienation of modern American life, the failure of the common man to achieve self-determination or self-sufficiency.
Of Mice and Men was the first of the novels now considered a classic examination of the ‘American dream’ that was written when the phrase was in widespread national use. But it is yet another American dream novel that never uses the words ‘American dream’ – indeed, it never uses the word ‘dream’. Although associating the protagonists’ desires with property ownership and prosperity, Steinbeck’s story also connects their hopes to equality and collective social justice, the more prominent meanings of the ‘American dream’ at the time.
By the end of 1937, a syndicated editorial was writing of ‘the American dream of “a home of one’s own”’, an association that – primarily thanks to Roosevelt’s promise – suddenly burst into the national conversation, from Utah to Arkansas to Alabama.31 A small feature in Reading, Pennsylvania, told its readers in 1938: ‘For many years we have cherished the “American dream” of a home for every family – and a garden.’32 The association of a white picket fence with the phrase ‘American dream’ was still some way off, however. (White picket fences were iconic enough: they just weren’t connected to the ‘American dream’ until after the Second World War.)33
Horatio Alger and the success story, however, had at last arrived. A 1937 article on the Guggenheim brothers held that their story was ‘the stuff of the American dream, a Horatio Alger story if there ever was one’.34 Two years earlier, a widely reprinted Fortune magazine article on ‘American Communism’ had argued that ‘the American dream of Poor Boy Makes Good’ formed a bulwark against the rise of communism in America. It led ‘even the most underpaid drudge to consider himself a potential millionaire. This makes it hard to arouse him to a Marxian class consciousness. The American proletarian, someone has wittily remarked, is a capitalist without money.’35
Not until 1943, however, does the New York Times seem to have put Horatio Alger and the American dream together – and ironically, it was in an article assuring its readers that the nation was ‘getting back to the Horatio Alger feeling about the American Dream’, although it was the first time the national paper of record had ever mentioned that feeling about it.36
Ideas of self-determination are never far from personal ambition; symbols of individual success like Horatio Alger and the presidency were increasingly coming into the orbit of the expression. ‘The American “dream” that every boy has a chance to become President has vanished,’ a Pennsylvania article reported, quoting an English author visiting the United States in 1937. ‘Englishmen have long regarded the American idea that every boy may become a millionaire as a fundamental concept of your country,’ he explained. But ‘most Americans now believe such an idea far-fetched’.37 (Not as far-fetched as a girl becoming president, clearly, as that idea wasn’t even considered.)
By 1938, the idea of ‘free enterprise’ – itself a reframing of the increasingly discredited older notion of ‘private enterprise’ – was also becoming popularised, and joined forces with the ‘American dream’ to begin to shift the meanings of the phrase further. Debates on ‘whether the American dream of unlimited progress for the individual is over’ started springing up, although the idea of infinitely progressing personal success had not been very visibly associated with the American dream since 1914, when Lippmann argued that the nation’s ‘dream of endless progress’ would need to be curbed, because it was just as foolish, and as dangerous, as dreams of a glorious past.38
But now instead of a foolish illusion, dreams of endless progress were being represented as central to the American dream even as the phrase captured the nation’s imagination. The Secretary of Commerce gave a speech in early 1939, widely circulated, in which he stated that ‘the preservation of our system of free enterprise is no longer simply the American dream; it is the American imperative. It is imperative that freedom of opportunity be maintained for all who can contribute to our national well-being.’39
The foundations for the American dream of endless individual progress through free enterprise were being laid; but they would not take hold until after the savage conflagration that was waiting just beyond the horizon.
* * *
Perhaps the one thing that has always remained consistent in appeals to the American dream is that it is supposed to apply to ordinary citizens from all walks of life – whether the dream of becoming president, or rich, or the dream of liberty or equality, or the dream of education or justice. The American dream returns to the discussion whenever the forces of inequality and oligarchy seem to be limiting the opportunities of ordinary Americans.
Throughout the 1930s, many of the debates revealed a tacit belief, widely shared, that the American dream relied upon regulating big business for the sake, not of consumers, but of small business. An editor in Hartford, Connecticut, insisted that it was the ‘small businessmen’, Americans ‘with small properties and a heavy sense of democratic responsibility, that Jefferson and Jackson, the presidential models, had first in mind when they attempted in their various ways to realize the American Dream’. Returning to Theodore Roosevelt’s progressive Republicanism, he argued: ‘The nation cannot do without its big business, but it ought to realize that a nation consisting entirely of big businesses is a nation that will finally have to accept a high degree of planning and regimentation, whether by public or private agencies. If the nation wants to keep its democratic soul, it will have to see to it that the little businessman is kept alive, flourishing and kicking.’40
The prolific Herbert Agar published another book in 1938, Pursuit of Happiness: The Story of American Democracy. In its review, the New York Times highlighted Agar’s attack on ‘the poverty of rich nations’. There was a bitter irony to the fact that the inequality in America meant a widening gap between the average income and the mean income: the rich were so rich that they skewed the average. ‘Our rich men are richer than those of any other nation. The proportion of our population that is really well off is larger than that of any other nation. And the proportion of our population which lives in want is so large that it should make us bow in shame.’ Such inequality, the reviewer remarked, ‘is clearly contrary to “the American Dream” promulgated by Jefferson’. For Agar, economic inequality was the inevitable consequence of ‘the Hamiltonian partiality for commerce, industry, and high finance’. ‘Very few’ Americans, the reviewer added, ‘will demur at his plea that vast fortunes are contrary to the spirit and intent of the wiser Fathers’.41
It’s startling today to read an article in the nation’s leading paper which assumes that ‘very few’ American readers would dispute the premise that the accumulation of vast fortunes is contrary to the American dream, that it is contrary to the spirit and intent of the Founding Fathers. But as we have seen, this was far from an idiosyncratic position, even if its claims about the founding fathers were largely mythical.
The point is that Americans across the political spectrum were still broadly agreeing in 1938 that inequality would destroy the American dream, because the American dream was of equality – both democratic and economic – which would measure collective, not individual, success. The dispute was about how best to achieve that equality.
* * *
Meanwhile, just as it had been conjured to fight the forces of imperialism during the First World War, so in the countdown to the Second did the American dream of democratic liberty quickly emerge as a way to articulate opposition to European fascism.
At the beginning of 1938, the Los Angeles Times urged Americans to be more vigilant in defending democracy. Liberal governments risk being too tolerant of the forces that seek to destroy them, it warned: ‘liberty will destroy itself if it permits its enemies to assail it in the name of liberty’. Because most people spend little time analysing political events or studying history, democracy will always risk being shaped by voters’ feelings rather than analysis. If feelings overruled reason, it could ‘convert our country from the most advanced in the world to one of the most hysterical, irrational and backward nations in a short period of time’.
‘We need a more aggressive democracy in this land,’ the LA Times leader insisted. ‘If our descendants are not to be deprived of their birthright; if the American dream is not to burst like a bubble’, Americans must realise that ‘liberty must be safeguarded. It was given us as a gift, but through fighting, and it can only be retained by fighting.’ That fight would include teaching all Americans not merely to salute the flag, but to ‘cherish the ideals symbolized by that flag’. Children should be ‘instructed how to analyze propaganda’, and helped to become better judges of character. ‘They should be schooled in the causes and results of persecution.’ Finally, the editorial warned in prescient terms:
Unless we rid ourselves of our sectionalism and political corruption, unless we bury our narrow hatreds and prejudices, unless labor and capital learn to get together for the good of all, unless we abolish poverty and insecurity and at the same time leave sufficient freedom for the individual to develop his abilities, unless we clamp down on the traitors within and build up our own power against the poisonous propaganda coming from without, America and her ideal of democracy will disappear from off the face of the earth.42
The American dream was a way to differentiate American democracy from totalitarian or authoritarian projects – and from the prejudice and racism that propelled fascism. Implicitly, the American dream was coming into conflict with some of the tenets that had long been associated with ‘America first’.
‘The best in the “American dream” is as broad as America itself,’ asserted a 1938 Maryland paper. ‘Americanism does not rest upon a narrow racial base.’ The nation needed to appeal to ‘the breadth and generosity in the American character, not to that which is bigoted and hateful’. Instead of defining itself as either ‘anti-Communist’ or ‘anti-Fascist’, the United States should protect democracy by ‘remedying abuses and making liberty so fruitful in spiritual, intellectual, and economic wealth that Communism and Fascism alike will appear only as an impoverishment to all free men’.43
That autumn, a Philadelphian named Baruch Braunstein gave a speech called ‘The Great American Dream – How Can Jews Strengthen It’. Raising money for ‘an organization devoted to obtaining funds with which to settle Jewish refugees from Europe in Palestine’, Dr Braunstein was interviewed about his thoughts on the plight of the Jews in Europe, and on anti-Semitism at home.
Braunstein saw ‘unmistakable evidences of increased anti-Semitism’ across the United States, and cautioned America against imagining ‘that a form of Fascism here would be different from the European variety’. That would be ‘madness, for it certainly can happen here’. That said, it didn’t have to: ‘The Great American Dream does not consist of wearing down the cultures of various racial groups to a common uniformity. The true democracy of Jefferson and the founders of this republic was based on the theory each single group has much to give out of its own special tradition and culture.’ Pluralism was the answer, and it was an answer consistent with the American dream.
Braunstein urged American Jews to pursue ‘alignment with the forces that make for peace, for equitable distribution of wealth and income, for political rights and freedom for all groups, and with all groups and forces that help strengthen the “Great American Dream” of a free and tolerant America’.44
An editorial from the Christian Science Monitor on the rise of the pro-Nazi German-American Bund (the former Friends of New Germany) was reprinted from South Dakota to Maryland. Joining forces with ‘thirteen other nationalist forces’, the Bund’s platform, ‘inspired by tenets of national socialism’, consisted of ‘Americanism’ and ‘anti-communism’, as well as ‘hostility to the Jews’ at its forefront. ‘Americans today are being confronted with many and varied organizations claiming to sell a brand of superior Americanism,’ the editorial cautioned, but ‘genuine Americanism does not include racial animosity and does not ground its action upon hatred and antagonism for groups’.45
To be sure, the editorial did not pause to admit that in the United States this principle, historically speaking, was clearer in the breach than in the observance; counter-arguments such as the Chinese Exclusion Act, or the history of elite institutions that disbarred Jews, let alone the highly conspicuous examples of slavery, segregation or the continued affliction of lynching, did not cross the editor’s pen.
But the point is that ordinary Americans of all colours and creeds could see clearly, and were not afraid to admit, that the scourges of racism and anti-Semitism were fundamentally inimical to the American dream – and in 1938 the editor of the Christian Science Monitor was Roscoe Drummond, a Republican journalist who would later help found the democracy watchdog Freedom House.
Again, the ideal was being reaffirmed through what were less assertions than exhortations, to themselves, as much as to anyone else. ‘Americanism does not rest upon a narrow racial base. The best in the “American dream” is as broad as humanity itself,’ the editorial concluded.46
Even if it was a fantasy, it was a necessary fantasy, a national imaginary that was continually reconsecrating the principles of democratic equality as a creed, and making it ever more possible for the people excluded from the fantasy to assert their equal right to its principles. Broken promises may gradually defeat a civilisation, but it is only when it has no promises to offer that it dies.
Put another way, part of the eternal vigilance that is the price of liberty includes a basic recognition of its fragility, and singularity. Take a ‘prayer’ written by a sixteen-year-old Jewish refugee who had arrived safely in America that was shared in an editorial reprinted around the country. ‘I am thankful I live in a country governed by democracy rather than by force,’ the letter began simply. ‘I am thankful I am happy and free.’ The editors added a gloss to the refugee’s message.
We forget to be thankful for the American dream – the American reality. And yet is anything more important to us than the American dream? If we lose that dream have we not lost everything most worthwhile? If we forget that long-held ideal of freedom and liberty, have we not forgotten that force which has built our country into a great country? If we abandon tolerance, which grants to others the same liberty of thought and expression that we reserve for ourselves, have we not betrayed our forefathers?47
The jump from the dream to the reality was not as unearned as it might appear. Once more, words shape cultural reality; assert the right to a dream often enough, and it persists through the shared beliefs of the people who live by it. And collective liberty, the item pointedly observed, does not survive without tolerance; an ideology emphasising liberty alone might easily forget that crucial qualification, especially in a country that so highly valued individualism as a proxy for equality. Liberty requires tolerance of others’ liberties.
The ‘American dream’ was both a way to talk about how to reconcile the problems of equality and liberty, and a way to avoid doing so, by mixing freedom, equality and democracy together as if they were synonymous. The ‘American creed’ had long been another, as we have seen – and one ‘small-town businessman’ put them together, writing a letter to his local paper that circulated around the country in the final weeks of 1938, from Santa Cruz, California, to tiny Hope, Arkansas (pop. 7,475). Patriotism was not mere ‘blind loyalty’, the anonymous businessman wrote. ‘It was something that men have struggled hard for and died for unhesitatingly, something that has been worth all of the blood and tears and toil that went into the building of this nation.’
That intangible something had nothing to do with prosperity, which, crucially, was never mentioned (and would have been easy enough to identify, had it seemed important). It was, rather, the ‘American’s creed’, which the writer had been taught in school – the very one that had been composed in 1918, popularised in the 1920s, and inculcated in citizens like this man, who invoked it twenty years later to enlist the American dream in the fight against fascism.
Any person who understood the American creed, and the American dream that represented it, he believed, ‘will insist that today’s problems be solved in such a way that those priceless elements in the American heritage are not destroyed or weakened’. The whole country was ‘based on an understanding that there is something unspeakably precious wrapped up in the American dream’.48
And that precious, unspeakable something belonged to every single American citizen.
* * *
How to identify that unspeakable something began to present more and more of a problem, however. Was it social justice and equality, or was it liberty and opportunity? Fortune magazine published an influential editorial in the last weeks of 1938, which circulated around the country. Officially called ‘Business-and-Government’, its subtitle announced the essay’s contention: ‘The Essence of the American Dream is Liberty and Revolution’. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the version of the American dream favoured by a magazine called ‘Fortune’ emphasised individual opportunity, the ‘American dream’ as a way to encode personal success pushing its way more forcefully into the national argument.
But even Fortune was perfectly ready to admit the premise of government regulation – that was a given. The question was not whether, merely how much. Although the New Deal had done much good for the country, Fortune maintained that it was also overextending the state and risking the principles of liberty and individualism.
‘The American Dream was the product of the great revolution in the Western world,’ the editorial began. ‘Liberty, to its creators, meant individual opportunity.’ This ‘libertarian revolution, epitomized in the American Dream, was a turning point in the history of man, an irreversible experience. With regard to it, all subsequent movements have been counter-revolutions’ while ‘any doctrine that advocates a return to institutionalism is a counter-revolutionary doctrine’, namely, fascism or communism.49 ‘Libertarian’, originally a theological word from the doctrine of free will, had very occasionally been used in an American political context since the turn of the century; by the late 1930s, as debates about freedom and free enterprise accelerated, it began to gain purchase.50
Fortune went on to argue that liberty – a ‘highly particularized word’ favoured by the framers – ‘has been supplanted recently by the generalized word “democracy,” a word that the founders used sparingly’. And then Fortune made its central claim clear: ‘The concept of democracy, to be sure, was a component of the American Dream; but it was not the most important.’ Democratic government was merely a means to the ultimate end, namely, ‘the emancipation of the individual’.
‘The spokesmen of the present Administration almost never mention liberty,’ the Fortune editorial ended, criticising Roosevelt’s New Deal. ‘They talk democracy, and they talk as if democracy were the core of the American Dream’ rather than liberty.51
The problem with Fortune’s assertion that the highly particularised word liberty was the core of the founders’ American dream is the founding documents’ highly particularised protections of slavery. The fact that those documents do enshrine both liberty and democratic equality (even if they sparingly use the word ‘democracy’) has been the basis for all claims to equal civil rights under the law, from the antebellum period to the present. But Fortune saw no contradiction in its assertion that American democracy was only created to support the emancipation of the individual, and its blindness to the need for regulations that would protect the equality of all those emancipated individuals.
As if that discordance weren’t obvious enough, Fortune chose the word ‘emancipation’ to describe American liberty – the word most associated with the freedom of black Americans, used at a time when former slaves and their descendants were still so far from enjoying the full political or economic freedoms that emancipation was supposed to entail.
This essay was by no means the first, or only, moment in the national conversation during the 1930s when the meaning of liberty was contested. It is, rather, highly representative of the way the debate was unfolding. Fortune was bringing the libertarian fight to the forces of social democracy. The proper meaning of the ‘American dream’ became one of the cultural battlegrounds in that long struggle, one which isn’t over yet.
That Fortune’s argument glorified liberty over principles of equality and social justice wasn’t lost on the editorial’s first readers, as a letter from Tennessee makes clear. ‘The ideal of liberty is identified by Fortune with “the American Dream.” And so it is,’ the correspondent agreed. ‘But if a threat to the Dream exists it arises not from any disaffection from the ideal of Liberty, but from a feeling of the inadequacy of our socio-economic system to supply the basic human needs.’52 The question wasn’t the value of liberty; it was how to survive it.
In moments of crisis, the tension among the ideas encompassed in the American creed has on occasion reached breaking point – and the combination of economic depression with the rise of totalitarianism certainly constituted a crisis. But it’s also worth noting that although Fortune and the many American papers circulating its case were ready to fight in 1938 for the centrality of liberty to the American dream, not even Fortune was arguing that making a fortune was central to it.53
Moreover, the effort Fortune put into rebutting the idea that the ‘American dream’ meant democratic equality is just one of many examples affirming the traction that sense must have had at the time (or they wouldn’t have put up such a fight against it). A speech in Cincinnati declared: ‘Everywhere lip service is given to the American dream. This is not enough – to hate despotism is not to guarantee freedom – to be anti-Fascist is not equivalent to being pro-democratic.’
We can infer from such statements that the American dream was not only ubiquitous, but widely tantamount to supporting anti-fascist democracy. That speaker was urging Americans to do more to fight fascism than merely refer to the American dream as democracy, while Fortune was arguing that the American dream meant more than democracy; but if there was one thing they all agreed on, it was that the American dream signified democracy, and was opposed to autocracy.54 And, increasingly, the American dream was accruing explanatory force.
From the American dream’s inherent hostility to authoritarianism it was a short associative step to the question of racial equality that arguments like the Fortune editorial were so blatantly sidestepping. And once again, hindsight is not required to see this. For Memorial Day in 1939, a minister in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, delivered an address that suggests plenty of people recognised that racial equality and tolerance were always bound up in the principles of the American dream – just as they were in claims about the American creed stretching back to the nineteenth century and beyond.
The address, commemorating soldiers lost in battle – who represented all races, heritages and beliefs – began by noting that the military draft was one aspect of American life that had never discriminated against those who were not white Christians.
Thousands of Jews and Negroes have died to create this American dream, but they certainly cannot sleep. Not as long as we treat them as outlanders, close the doors of opportunity to their children, believe every unfounded and prejudiced story which discredits them. There are Americans whose dust lies in this cemetery – they came from England, Germany, France, and Holland, because they wanted religious tolerance, political liberty and economic opportunity. They do not want us here speaking about Americanism if we deny these distinctly American privileges to people because of color or race.
Americans needed to ‘keep faith’ with those who had died for the nation’s ideals, the minister concluded, and promise that ‘we will maintain the American ideals of liberty and justice’ in order to support ‘the defense and rich realization of the American dream’.55 Ordinary citizens around the country, black and white alike, long recognised that universal principles of democratic equality and individual liberty were incompatible with racial and ethnic discrimination.
Thus two months after the Sheboygan minister gave his address a reader wrote to a St Louis paper to suggest that ‘race prejudice’ was one of America’s greatest problems, but it could be solved by making the ‘American dream of a nation in which men of all nations, creeds and denominations can live in peace and work for the common good’ come true.56
The point is not merely that principles of social justice are far from recent inventions; it is, rather, the number of ordinary Americans who once viewed the ‘American dream’ specifically as an egalitarian principle that was fundamentally opposed to bigotry.
The friction between social justice and individual dreams was the subject of another classic ‘American dream’ novel that focuses on the dream as a betrayed promise that destroys the people who believe it, John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of the Wrath. Published in March 1939, once again it is a book held to exemplify the phrase that never actually uses it; but this novel, like The Great Gatsby, also uses the symbolism of dreams to insinuate the idea into the reader’s awareness. When the Joad family reluctantly decides to leave home and head west to the ‘promised land’ of California, Steinbeck describes the moment of departure in terms of the dream of America.
They were afraid, now that the time had come – afraid in the same way Grampa was afraid. They saw the shed take shape against the light, and they saw the lanterns pale until they no longer cast their circles of yellow light. The stars went out, few by few, toward the west. And still the family stood about like dream walkers, their eyes focused panoramically, seeing no detail, but the whole dawn, the whole land, the whole texture of the country at once.57
Later, when the Joads join forces with other migrant families, Steinbeck reinforces the idea that they are being lured by a collective dream of hope and plenty in the west. ‘In the evening a strange thing happened: the twenty families became one family, the children were the children of all. The loss of home became one loss, and the golden time in the West was one dream.’58
* * *
Two months before The Grapes of Wrath was published, as the march of European fascism grew too loud to ignore, the New York Times reviewed a book called American Saga: The History and Literature of the American Dream of a Better Life. The review opened by making an explicit allusion to the current political situation. ‘It is no accident that Americans today are showing more interest in their own history and its meaning than at any previous time within the memory of the living,’ the reviewer began. ‘We are asking ourselves, as our ancestors did three-quarters of a century ago, what is meant by the American kind of democracy. We ask that question because we know that it is threatened,’ he added. ‘And we are now, beyond doubt, at one of our turning points, and should be acutely conscious of the pageant of history.’59
