Title: The Original Meanings of the “American Dream” and “America First” Were Starkly Different From How We Use Them Today  | History   | Smithsonian Magazine
Headings: The Original Meanings of the “American Dream” and “America First” Were Starkly Different From How We Use Them Today
The Original Meanings of the “American Dream” and “America First” Were Starkly Different From How We Use Them Today
A new book from historian Sarah Churchwell examines the etymologies of two ubiquitous phrases
Behold, America
As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump used the slogan “America First,” which many people traced to Charles Lindbergh in the 1940s. But you trace its origin even further back.
How did “America First” become appropriated to have a racist connotation?
You found that the backstory of “the American Dream” is also misunderstood.
How did wealth go from being seen as a threat to the “American Dream” to being an integral part of it?
How do the two phrases fit together?
Why is the history of political slogans and clichés, like the “American Dream,” so important? What happens when we don't understand the nuances of these phrases?
Will these phrases continue to evolve?
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Content: You see people saying that a millionaire was a fundamentally un-American concept. It was seen as anti-democratic because it was seen as inherently unequal. 1931 was when it became a national catch phrase. That was thanks to the historian James Truslow Adams who wrote The Epic of America, in which he was trying to diagnose what had gone wrong with America in the depths of the Great Depression. He said that America had gone wrong in becoming too concerned with material well-being and forgetting the higher dreams and the higher aspiration that the country had been founded on. [The phrase] was redefined in the 1950s, and seen as a strategy for soft power and for [commercializing] the “American Dream” abroad. It was certainly an “American Dream” of democracy, but it was a very specifically consumerist version that said “this is what the ‘American Dream’ will look like.” By contrast with the earlier version, which was focused on the principles of liberal democracy, this was very much a free market version of that. How do the two phrases fit together? When I began this research, I didn’t think of them as related.