Title: The American Dream | AMERICAN HERITAGE
Headings: The American Dream
NOW AND THEN
The American Dream
Anthony Brandt
April/May 1981
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Content: The American Dream | AMERICAN HERITAGE
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The American Dream
NOW AND THEN
The American Dream
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Anthony Brandt
April/May 1981
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America has always been not only a country but a dream.— Walter Lippmann
We don’t ordinarily think of clichés as having an origin, but of course they do. Someone once said for the first time (and may the gods forgive him), “He can’t see the forest for the trees”; someone else first advised us to “leave no stone unturned. ” So it is with the “American Dream.” 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.