'American Dream' was originally a warning

The phrase “The American Dream” wasn’t written about or even uttered by the signers of the Declaration of Independence.

The famous term took root just about a century ago, during the Great Depression. Initially, it was a shorthand “warning against the superrich,” says Sarah Churchwell, professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of London. Many believed the country “had lost its way,” from the original intention of the American Experiment, which was to discover “what democracy can accomplish on its own behalf for its citizens,” and to “strive for a republic of equals,” says Churchwell.

Used sporadically in the late 1800s, the term was popularized by historian James Truslow Adams in his 1931 best-selling book, “The Epic of America.” He was “trying to diagnose what’s wrong,” says Churchwell as the Gilded Age of the 1920s ended with the stock market crash and the Great Depression. Adams postulated that the decade of materialism was a “cancer, and the ‘American dream’ is the cure for the cancer,” Churchwell says.

“He says, specifically, the American dream was never, and I quote, ‘a dream of motor cars and high wages merely.’” While he meant it as a democratic ideal, not a consumer slogan, Churchwell says that by the 1970s, the American dream had come to mean a house and two cars.

The birth of the term

Adams believed in the higher ideals of the American dream — egalitarianism, freedom, opportunity and justice for all — and he saw them dissolving in the hands of the wealthy, Churchwell says. He raises a red flag in warning: “If you let the superrich infiltrate your democracy they will demand special privileges, reject equality and distort the democratic government to their own ends.”

Was the American dream ever a multilayered phrase?

Historian Michael D. Hattem has a different take on the American dream and Adams’ perspective. Hattem, who penned “The Memory of ’76: The Revolution in American History,” says the American dream never included some “broad abstract ideas,” as Adams touted; it was simply about land acquisition. Adams’ alarm, Hattem says, came from a shift in how that dream was broadcast.

Because materialism had an irreligious connotation, Hattem says it was left out of the national conversation until the Gilded Age of the 1920s, when people start saying the quiet part out loud. “Even though Americans are chasing material gain with reckless abandon in the 19th century, it was something you didn’t typically acknowledge because it offended people’s religious sensibilities,” Hattem says.

That’s because “you’re not supposed to chase any kind of reward in this life, because the real reward is in the next life,” he says. “That’s what Adams is reacting to — the ’20s. … He is reacting to the American dream seeming to become more openly material,” but “it was always materialist.”

The birth of a new definition — “A house and two cars”

In the postwar era, the idea of the American dream “became closely linked to material comfort, to the consumer abundance America was producing. ‘A better life’ started to connote not just an economically secure life, but an abundant life,” historian David Farber said, according to a piece by American Public Media.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) who was president during most of the Great Depression was the first president to attach the American dream to the home, Churchwell says, “and that matters because presidential language helps legitimize and nationalize our rhetoric.” Roosevelt’s New Deal of the 1930s and the G.I. Bill after the war jumpstarted the economy. His government-backed home loans made buying a home cheaper than renting — a new concept, even, for the upper middle class.

“FDR’s version was still a New Deal dream of security and independence, not yet the postwar dream of suburban consumer abundance,” Churchwell says, yet the narrative begins to shift. “You have editorials of political cultural discourse, writing about the American dream of a home of one’s own. And it’s in that period that it gets associated with the picket fence, this imagery of small-town America and of home ownership.”

During Harry S. Truman’s presidency which followed Roosevelt, the phrase continues to reshape itself and the discourse. By the early 1950s, the American dream gets entangled with free-market capitalism and Cold War consumer politics.

“The government transformed the American dream,” said Edward Humes, in a piece by American Public Media. Humes is the author of the book “Over Here: How the G.I. Bill Transformed the American Dream.”

Throughout the postwar period, the house and two cars version of the American dream begins to take shape during consumer boom of the late 1940s and 1950s. By the 1960s, advertisers have leaned into the new narrative with ads depicting cars as a central piece of home ownership, often showcasing suburban families with a two-car garage. In 1967, Volkswagen airs a TV ad, “Keeping Up with the Kremplers” as the rise in mass consumption continues to frame the American dream.

“What the American dream was never about is becoming a millionaire. It was about the middle class,” Humes said. “It was that you could achieve what we would come to understand as a lifestyle, which means a degree of economic security.”

The millionaire class worried Adams. He believed that the superrich would be “the death of the American dream,” Churchwell says, if “the dream stopped being about protecting ordinary people from concentrated power and started being about protecting concentrated power from ordinary people.”