Title: Could We Please Stop Pontificating About the American Dream?
Headings: Could We Please Stop Pontificating About the American Dream?
Could We Please Stop Pontificating About the American Dream?
It means different things to different people. In the end, it doesn't really mean much at all. And there's very little that politicians or government can do to uphold or restore it.
Alan Ehrenhalt

Content: IT MAY SEEM THAT AMERICAN DREAM FANTASIES must date back to the founding of the Republic, but in fact they are a modern conceit. The phrase "American Dream" was first used in 1931 by the historian James Truslow Adams in his book The Epic of America. It meant, he wrote, "that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone." Better and richer and fuller in what way? He didn't say. Maybe in the middle of the Depression it seemed obvious. It doesn't seem quite so obvious now. What's clearly true is that the American Dream has meant vastly different things to people in different times and places — if it has any sort of genuine meaning at all. It's interesting that when ordinary Americans are asked if they feel the Dream has somehow been lost, it is the more recent immigrants who say it hasn't. This could be because they believe they had never attained it to begin with, but I don't think that's the explanation.