The Evolution of the American Dream

The American Dream

“The American Dream" takes center stage in our national psyche. And while the slogan has become an unbudgeable piece of American ethos, those words have come to mean very different things to different generations. And today, this sacred phrase is in danger of taking a dramatic deviation from the spirit it first represented. Because over the last five decades, this virtuous calling would be twisted into a toxic obsession with excess and wealth, disguised in airbrushed filters and clever marketing. And this philosophical mutation represents a profound shift in our core values, taking us from morality to materialism, and replacing our American ideals with American idols. 

The Origins of the Dream

"The American Dream" was first coined in 1931 by author James Truslow Adams, in his best selling book, The Epic of America. Adams described it as “that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone.” At the time of its genesis, the phrase represented freedom, human dignity, and economic opportunity. It had more to do with morality than material success.

“...a dream of social order in which each man and woman shall be able to attain, to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.”

"The American Dream" was a rhetorical innovation that replaced older notions of ‘American character’ and ‘American principles’. It was a forward-looking phrase that implied modesty in success, mutual respect, and equal opportunity to all people. The American Dream was a trajectory to a promising future, and it would serve as a model for both the U.S. and the rest of the world. 

This phrase began as a fringe notion. It appeared only occasionally in the 1930s and 1940s in advertisements for plays, books, church sermons, book reviews, and high-brow articles. And quite strikingly, it rarely, if ever, referred to business success or home ownership. And while the phrase was not part of the spoken vernacular until the 1960s, the spirit of the dream began taking shape in the post-war America of the 1950s. 

When We Were Living the Dream

The American Dream paved the way in the years after the war. In the decades after World War II, known as The Great Prosperity, the economy boomed. And not only did the economy boom, but we had very low inequality. This wasn’t a happy accident, nor was it the inevitable byproduct of a capitalist society. It was the product of intentional policy. Because in the decades after the war, we invested in people. American wages increased proportional to the national economic growth, and with that wealth we invested in free higher education, healthcare, and increased economic opportunities. (And it’s apt to note that these policies were initiated under a Republican president, lest these radical ideas be unwittingly mistaken for socialism.) Capitalism was leveraged to advance democratic ideals, because it generated the resources we needed to do so.

And America had an economy to envy. People in the bottom 20% were getting ahead. For the coming decades, Americans were able to climb the economic ladder by earning higher incomes than their parents. These improving conditions, and the capacity to rise to a higher social or economic position, are known as upward mobility, and animated the spirit of ‘The American Dream’.  And America had the highest rates of upward mobility than the world had ever seen.  

We made education a national priority, particularly higher education. In 1940, only 5% of adult Americans had a four-year college degree. But that percentage began to explode. The expansion and government funding of universities made higher education affordable to many.  And by the late fifties, we had the best educated workforce of any country in the world. Over a third of our workforce was in a union, which gave workers bargaining leverage to get a larger share of the growing pie.  

We created the largest middle class the world had ever seen, with unprecedented levels of upward mobility. This was part of a virtuous cycle: productivity grows, wages increase, workers buy more, companies hire more, tax revenues increase, the government invests more, workers are better educated, and the economy expands. The more people are included in the prosperity, the more prosperity is generated through that prosperity. And while the term was not used so overtly, America continued its trod towards the American Dream.

The phrase began to be used prolifically in the 1960s, perhaps in large part to Martin Luther King's 'I Have a Dream' speech in 1963, where he cast a vision that was ‘deeply rooted in the American Dream.’ He dreamed of disappearance of prejudice and rise in community spirit. And he, quite curiously, made no mention of deregulation or mortgage subsidies. And those years of toil illustrated our growing pains as we struggled to grow into the vision and virtue we held for ourselves.

Dreams of White Picket Fences

But as the phrase became more commonplace, its connection with notions of equality and community tragically weakened. Beginning in the 1970s, home builders used the phrase extensively in advertisements, to make the culture of consumption seem patriotic. Thanks to the deluge of advertisements, people began to associate the American Dream with home ownership and the iconic white picket fence. 

Not coincidentally, 1971 opened the door for the ultimate corrosion of the American Dream. 

Because with the Powell Memo serving as a blueprint for corporate fraternizing with government institutions, big companies and wealthy individuals would use their money to influence politicians and quite literally purchase policies that served their interests, to the detriment of the American people. This had some unfortunate results. They prioritized profit at all costs. And that cost, as we would come to see, would be at the price of the American Dream. 

Because beginning in 1971, the growth of wages would cease to parallel the growth of economic productivity in the country. Rather than accelerate in tandem, as it had in the decades before, the rate of productivity would continue to climb alone, as the rate of American wages would be unhinged. Lobbying advanced policies that stagnated wages for the middle class. And the American people flatlined. The median income in 2021 would be the same, if not less, than it was in 1971; so would the minimum wage. Meanwhile, the cost of housing, education, and healthcare would increase exponentially, as would credit card debt, bankruptcy, incarceration, diabetes, and obesity. Each of these industries became a means of extracting profit, and Americans were merely a means to that end. 

To add insult to injury, the profit generated by the exploitation of the population went largely untaxed, and as a result, public institutions no longer had the resources they needed to invest in the physical or intellectual infrastructure necessary for a democratic society. 

Funds for education dried up, and the cost fell on the shoulders of communities. The quality of education differed widely depending on the wealth of the neighborhood that families reside in. The costs of higher education now fell on individuals, leading to a 21st century student loan burden that never existed before, crippling a generation. And as the gap between ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’ accelerated, notions of the American dream continued to be skewed towards material, gain, greed. 

The Hijacking of the Dream

By the turn of the 21st century, "The American Dream" was suffocated by narrow-minded metrics of materialism and success. In 2003, the administration further capitalized on the new material focus of the American Dream, and signed the American Dream Downpayment Act, subsidizing home purchases during a period in which the housing bubble was already known to be forming, and would ultimately lead to the 2008-09 financial crisis.

And in 2017, Forbes Magazine released the ‘American Dream Index’, based on seven statistical measures of material prosperity. This kind of characterisation, further conflating the American Dream with measures of excess and material success, has come with dangerous consequences. Because as the dream is equated with capitalistic aspiration, it has been used to justify getting rid of regulations, and safeguards for the people the institutions are designed to protect. It also idolized the pursuit of selfish gain, at the expense of people, and crystalised the isolationist, ‘get off my lawn’ mentality of the modern American.

Meanwhile, life expectancy in the United States has begun to decline over the last decade, a reversal not seen since 1918, and unheard of in any wealthy nation in modern times. “Deaths of despair” from suicide, drug overdose, and alcohism have risen dramatically, and they’re still rising. And the overwhelming surge of these deaths shed a light on the social and economic forces that are making life intolerable for the working class. 

While the American Dream is largely a qualitative notion, the dream was “measured” by seeing if the generation is at least as successful as the generation before them. And for decades, a majority of Americans were able to climb the social and economic ladder, earning higher incomes than their parents, and providing a better future for their families, a feat achieved through hard work in a society with few barriers. But that is not the case anymore. A majority of young adults today struggle to meet the most basic benchmarks of socioeconomic stability that their parents had attained just a generation before. 

The reasons for lower US mobility is that the ladder of opportunity has become much harder to climb. The rungs of the ladder have grown further apart, as evidenced by the growing wealth gap. And some of those rungs are simply broken. And as a result, “equality of opportunity is much less viable in the US than in other first world countries.”

James Truslow Adams originally went on to explain that the American Dream “is not a dream of motorcars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable.” But this returning to the original spirit of the dream is encumbered by artificial barriers of five decades of bad public policy and unfettered corporate greed. The American dream now depends on creating new opportunities, not settling for possibility, or ever dwindling probability.