Title: The American Dream | AMERICAN HERITAGE
Headings: The American Dream
NOW AND THEN
The American Dream
Anthony Brandt
April/May 1981
We hope you enjoyed this essay.

Content: This overworked phrase, constantly on the tongues or slipping from the peris of politicians, novelists and dramatists, polemicists of every persuasion, historians, journalists, economists, and sociologists, to name just a few, didn’t arise spontaneously out of the primordial ooze of the American language. Someone thought it up—and this time we know whom to blame. He was the historian James Truslow Adams and he invented “the American Dream” in 1931. He was so proud of his new phrase, in fact, that he made it the theme of his book The Epic of America, published that same year, and would have called the book The American Dream if his publishers had let him. The phrase paid off nicely for Adams. In one of the worst years of the Depression, when few people could afford the luxury of buying a book, The Epic of America was a spectacular best seller; and not the least of the credit goes to the reaffirmation of traditional American hopes and aspirations Adams subsumed in his new phrase. Adams defined it as “that American dream of a better, richer, and happier life for all our citizens of every rank,” and again as “the hope of a better and freer life, a life in which a man might think as he would and develop as he willed,” and yet again as “a new dynamic hope of rising and growing, of hewing out for themselves a life in which they would not only succeed as men but be recognized as men, a life not only of economic prosperity but of social and self-esteem.” The Dream was the ordinary American’s “Star in the West which led him on over the stormy seas and into the endless forests in search of a home where toil would reap a sure reward, and no dead hands of custom or exaction would push him back into ‘his place.’ ” This message of hope, coming in the midst of social disaster, not only sold the book, it sold the phrase as well. “