Title: American Dream or American nightmare? Depends whom you ask
Headings: American Dream or American nightmare? Depends whom you ask
American Dream or American nightmare? Depends whom you ask
Historian James Truslow Adams popularized the term
The meaning has changed
The cost of education is a threat

Content: “I guess it depends on how you define the American Dream, but I believe I have achieved it,” said Tom Kirk, a former businessman and mayor of McGregor. “I mean I’m retired, happy and healthy and my children are happy and healthy, so are my grandkids and my great-grandkids, and I believe that security is the basis of the American Dream,” Kirk said, although he added he believes what people strive for today is very different from what he saw as his dream years ago. Historian James Truslow Adams popularized the term
Truthfully, Americans didn’t even know before the early 1930s that there was such a thing as the American Dream, but in his best-selling 1931 book "Epic of America,” author and historian James Truslow Adams popularized the term when he described America as “The dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement." While Adams’ writing may have popularized the thought, the roots of the idea of the American Dream run much deeper as the basic tenets can be found in the Declaration of Independence: “ We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” It “is a difficult dream for the European upper classes to interpret adequately, and too many of us ourselves have grown weary and mistrustful of it,” Adams explained. “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,” Adams held. Take notice that in his explanation the author didn’t restrict the idea to men, but also mentioned women. Others describe the American Dream as “a national ethos of the United States, the set of ideals, democracy, rights, liberty, opportunity and equality, in which freedom includes the opportunity for prosperity and success, as well as an upward social mobility for the family and children, achieved through hard work in a society with few barriers.” Further rooted in the founders, the Declaration of Independence, proclaims that "all men are created equal" with the right to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."