This was not a book I planned to write; it emerged all but serendipitously from a convergence between an idea I’d been pursuing – the rhetorical history of the American dream – and the rise of populist nationalism in western democracies. It took shape when Donald Trump became the global face for those movements in 2016, and succeeded in gaining the US presidency with his slogan ‘America First’.
After the publication of my last book, on F. Scott Fitzgerald and The Great Gatsby, I was invited to speak on the American dream at the Hay Festival’s London Library Lecture. During the course of my research into the American newspapers of the 1920s and 1930s, which underpinned that book, I had noticed that discussions in the 1930s of the American dream seemed to imply something rather different than our standard understanding. The eventual lecture, ‘The Secret History of the American Dream’, initiated the course of thinking and research that would result in this book, and so my first thanks go to Peter Florence at Hay, and to the London Library, for that invitation.
Over the course of the next few years, that research and thinking continued to evolve; some earlier versions of the ideas in this book appeared as journalism in the London Library magazine, the Telegraph, the Guardian, the New Statesman and the Financial Times, as well as at lectures and seminars around the UK. One of those, in the spring of 2016, was at the Bristol Festival of Ideas, where I first brought Donald Trump into the context of this story. On the morning after the 2016 election, I found myself rewriting a piece for the Financial Times on the outcome, with reference to Fitzgerald’s ‘The Swimmers’, which also fed into this book; thanks to Jonathan Derbyshire for his kindness that morning.
In February 2017, I gave a lecture at the Institute of English Studies at the University of London, in association with the Princeton Alumni of the UK, that laid out all of this thinking for the first time. My thanks to the organisers and audience for encouraging me to continue pursuing these ideas, and to my colleagues at the IES and the School of Advanced Study for their support and flexibility, without which this book could not have been finished.
A few weeks later, BBC Radio 4 commissioned a documentary about the American dream and America first; thanks to Mohit Bakaya, Penny Murphy and Shabnam Grewal for their work on that documentary, and to Kevin Kruse, Darryl Pinckney, Andrew Ross Sorkin, Thomas Sugrue and Leslie Vinjamuri for their brilliant and generous contributions to it in interviews, all of which helped shape my thinking.
Not long after that, I found myself talking to Alexis Kirschbaum at Bloomsbury, who somewhat to my surprise believed there was a book to be written about this, and has fought for it every step. Her faith in this project has been surpassed only by the brilliance of her editing, and I’m extremely grateful for both, as well as her friendship; I’ll tell her the rest over a glass of champagne. Thanks to Angelique Tran Van Sang for her patience and clarity, to Katherine Fry for meticulous copy-editing of a fiddly book, and to Greg Heinimann for a superb jacket design.
I wouldn’t have been able to finish this book in time without the superlative aid of Sadaf Betts, research assistant extraordinaire, who tracked down the answers to any number of questions, as well as seriously getting into the spirit of this endeavour. Jane Robertson, Lyndsey Stonebridge and Erica Wagner read early drafts and offered wise suggestions and encouragement. Suzannah Lipscomb, in the final stages of finishing her own book, made the time to go through an early draft with precision and rigour, hugely improving the analysis and argument; while Andrew Rudalevige liberally gave the benefit of his expertise in improving the book’s historical and political contexts.
When I started writing this book in earnest, I was in the middle of a book about Henry James, which I began in 2015 with the extremely generous support of the Eccles British Library Writer’s Award. The Eccles Centre for American Studies has been an invaluable resource for my work, and they were characteristically gracious when I told them I had interrupted the James project to pursue this one. My gratitude to everyone there, especially Catherine Eccles and Philip Davies, for their championing and encouragement of my work.
Thanks as ever to my agent and dear friend, Peter Robinson, for always having my back, as we say at home. I wish David Miller could have read this. My family, especially my parents, gifted me a belief in the importance of knowledge, and a love of American history and its values, without which I would be immeasurably lessened. This is dedicated to Wyndham for everything, but mostly for caring as deeply as I about what this book is trying to do.