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: “Today it’s all about the bank account and material things.” Dr. Steve Childress, DDS, who practices family dentistry at Stonewood Dental, in Robinson, says he thinks he’s living the American Dream. Childress said he believes he and his parents shared a common idea of the American Dream because “he (his father) and I were closer than most and I learned everything from him,” before he became a dentist and served several years, and deployments, perfecting his craft as a dentist in the U.S. Air Force. “My kids? I don’t know,” Childress said. “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.”