These comparisons only take us so far, of course. The world of 1916 is not the same as the world of 2016. Such parallels do not end the story: rather, they begin to enlighten us about the shared meanings of America.
History is not a question of surface resemblances, and people are not generally defined by a single choice. Take just one example: Hugo Black was a member of the Ku Klux Klan, before becoming a notably liberal Supreme Court Justice. But if people should not be defined by one choice or one position, it is also worth demanding, as the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette did in its exposé of Black, whether certain choices are unforgivable, disqualifying. And it is also worth asking, as Dorothy Thompson did, what the cost of pure political expediency is to any society. If you are not defined by one choice, that doesn’t mean you won’t be judged by one – especially by history.
For just as we must be alert to the differences between past and present, so we should also see the continuities. One thing this history demonstrates is that democracy depends upon good faith. That’s what Dorothy Thompson was insisting upon, as was Walter Lippmann, over and over. Individuals operating in bad faith are nothing new, but the system must work in good faith if it is to prevail.
It turns out our idealism was there to protect our ideals. ‘Common decency’, after all, means not only basic decency, but a decency that is held in common. The struggle between common decency and common crooks will never end: common decency won’t triumph on its own.
The American dream did not have to come true to shape the history of the nation: it merely needed to be reiterated to keep the ideal alive. When the dream changed from a collective ideal of democracy, variously defined and vigorously debated, to an individual desire for success that was rarely questioned, it altered the character of the nation. We were all better for the dreaming, as the 1914 Virginia editorial had observed.
It might fairly be said that every era invented its own American dream – not that the American dream kept failing, but rather that it kept successfully adapting to new conditions. The Progressive Era inspired an American dream of social justice and economic equality; the First World War aroused an American dream of international democracy; the jazz age excited an American dream of endless riches; the Depression precipitated an American dream of social democracy; the Second World War enflamed an American dream of liberal democracy; post-war prosperity advanced an American dream of upward mobility and democratic capitalism; the civil rights movement reclaimed an American dream of democratic equality.
But if each era has its own American dream, which one do we have today?
The meaning of the American dream has stopped being debated by each generation, only the reality of it is debated now; and maybe that’s all James Truslow Adams meant when he said that every generation must fight for it anew.
Instead, for all the noisy shouting about the American dream, as a concept it went inert, fossilising into something static and flat. The American dream ceased to adapt – not to changing economic conditions, but to changing ethical imperatives.
Today America has inherited a story that diminishes it, obscuring the fact that once it dreamed more expansively. If even your dreams are ungenerous, then surely you have lost your way. This rich, complex, difficult dream that was a birthright was forgotten in a gold rush, a land grab in the post-war era. That this dream might be abandoned in a race for wealth is precisely what F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Dorothy Thompson and all the others were warning against.
Loving democracy is not a bromide, and it is not sentimental. Americans have acted as if democracy could survive anything thrown at it. Now the time has come again, seventy-five years after the last, for another ‘titanic resistance’ to the forces of authoritarianism that have always existed within American life. The American dream did once serve to unite Americans in times of national crisis, before eventually changing course and dividing them.
The truth is always uglier than any meliorist ideal. As this chronicle has shown (both implicitly and explicitly), America routinely shields itself from the horrors of its own history. The facts are vastly less heroic than the myths America tells itself, and the world. But the myths and the facts are not entirely distinct, either, for – as this account has also shown – the myths have helped shape the facts.
In the wake of Trump’s election, many of the commentators writing columns about the ‘death’ of the American dream did so to point out that what once had been a national ideal of larger spiritual aspiration had shrivelled into mere materialism.1 And to be sure that shrinking of individual aspiration did indeed occur over the post-war era.
But it isn’t simply the case that individual Americans once had a broader definition of personal success, as James Truslow Adams argued. The point is that the American dream was once a collective ideal, not an individualist one. Then it was reduced from a political dream of egalitarian democracy to an individual dream of opportunity, and then that further devolved into mere materialism. Our elegies to the death of the American dream only begin at the point of cremation, as if its ashes were all we’d lost.
Perhaps even more important is that the principles of social democracy the American dream once symbolised are now proclaimed by so many self-styled experts on American culture to be antithetical to it. On the contrary: ideas of social democracy and social justice are at the root of the expression, which derives from a conversation about progressivism, social democracy and inequality. Those are the forces that gave birth to the term: the efforts to control unbridled capitalism, to secure the well-being of all Americans, not just the wealthy and powerful.
Although some people think the American dream can only refer to free-market capitalism, and assert that social democracy is inherently anti-American, history is not on their side. The facts say something else about what Americans have always thought the American dream might mean. At the very least, no one can accurately claim the American dream must only mean capitalism and individual economic aspiration. Nor is it true, as some have also contended, that the American dream was invented as a fig leaf to protect white privilege, to obscure the racist foundations of the capitalist system in institutional slavery. It certainly has been used to do that, in recent years probably more often than not; but when it emerged, the American dream worked as an exhortation, urging all Americans to do better, to be fairer, to combat bigotry and inequality, and strive for a republic of equals. That the dream wasn’t realised – that it didn’t come close – doesn’t mean that the dream was corrupt. It does mean that people are.
None of this is to deny the legitimacy of the way we use the ‘American dream’ now. Language is collective, and protean; it evolves. Clearly the American dream means now what people use it to mean, including individual prosperity. And equality of opportunity has indeed always been embedded in the idea – the phrase has simply changed course on what it suggested to the country about how to achieve that equality of opportunity.
The point is less to pass a moral judgement on the way the term is now used, than to challenge claims that this is how it has always been used, or that the way it is now used is the only thing it has ever meant, or can ever mean again.
Nor is my argument a version of what’s known as ‘originalism’, the doctrine holding that the earliest meaning of a word or document is correct by virtue of being the original meaning – as if older definitions of the American dream must be correct because they are older. I don’t prefer the American dream of democracy over the American dream of materialism because it came first. I prefer it because it is better.
Idealism is not inexhaustible; neither is democracy. We have to renew them, as so many of these writers warned. Our ideals are not always the same as theirs, but they are supposed to be founded on shared principles. This is a story about old-fashioned intangibles: about ethics, morals and character – and we dismiss them as old-fashioned at our peril. Without them, we are left with some very concrete tangibles: corruption, kleptocracy, swindling. Those are old-fashioned, too. So is white supremacism, in all its nationalist malevolence.
Americans need to restore belief in the social contract, our sense of society as a moral economy, and there is much good reason to do so in the name of a reclaimed American dream. There is no good reason to do so in the name of America first.
There is no progress without aspiration. But not all aspirations are created equal.
* * *
In August 1941, Dorothy Thompson wrote an article for Harper’s magazine, called ‘Who Goes Nazi?’, in which she recommended a ‘somewhat macabre parlor game’ for social gatherings, ‘to speculate who in a showdown would go Nazi’.2 Fascism was a disease of modern man, she observed, of someone who ‘has been fed vitamins and filled with energies that are beyond the capacity of his intellect to discipline. He has been treated to forms of education which have released him from inhibitions. His body is vigorous. His mind is childish. His soul has been almost completely neglected.’
Identifying various groups of people around the room – ‘the born Nazis, the Nazis whom democracy itself has created, the certain-to-be fellow-travelers’, and ‘those who never, under any conceivable circumstances, would become Nazi’ – Thompson notes that Nazism is not a matter of nationality but rather of ‘a certain type of mind’. She describes Person A, Person B, and so on, predicting each one’s potential for fascism, before arriving at ‘D.’, who is, Thompson declares, ‘the only born Nazi in the room’.
D. is ‘the spoiled son’ of a doting mother; he has
never been crossed in his life. He spends his time at the game of seeing what he can get away with. He is constantly arrested for speeding and his mother pays the fines. He has been ruthless toward two wives and his mother pays the alimony. His life is spent in sensation-seeking and theatricality. He is utterly inconsiderate of everybody. He is very good-looking, in a vacuous, cavalier way, and inordinately vain. He would certainly fancy himself in a uniform that gave him a chance to swagger and lord it over others.
There is also a young immigrant in the room. Although ‘his English is flawed – he learned it only five years ago’, he has ‘devoured volumes of American history, knows Whitman by heart, wonders why so few Americans have ever really read the Federalist papers’.
The other people in the room ‘think he is not an American, but he is more American than almost any of them. He has discovered America and his spirit is the spirit of the pioneers. He is furious with America because it does not realize its strength and beauty and power.’
Along with the Americans who understand their own values – one of which is generosity – the immigrant is the greatest opponent of fascism in the room.
Only together, history shows, can they defeat the forces of D. Only together can they keep renewing the effort towards some commonweal, one that presses against us all.
SC, Chicago and London, 2017