The American Dream

"But there has been also the American dream..."

-- James Truslow Adams, The Epic of American (1931)

There are few phrases in America that have been quoted more often, or misunderstood completely, than the American Dream.

The term has become synonumous with home ownership, financial success, and upward economic mobility. Politicans promise to restore it. Economists will measure it. Advertisers will sell it to you. In an election year, it is ubiquitously mentioned on the right and left. Yet remarkably few people have ever read the page on which the phrase first appeared.

While cataloging a first edition of The Epic of America (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1931) for the Aguirre Family Library, I turned to page 404 of the Epilogue. There, James Truslow Adams introduced the phrase that would become one of the defining expressions of modern American culture.

Here is what he said verbatim.

"But there has been also the American dream, that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for every man, with opportunity for each according to his ability or achievement."

Most modern quotations will end here, but to fully appreciate the context you must read more. Adams goes on to say:

"It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of a social order in which each man and each 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 of position."

The American Dream, as Adams defined it, was never primarily about wealth or economic status. It was about equality of opportunity. It was about creating a society in which every individual could develop his passions and talents to the fullest extent possible, regardless of social class or inherited privilege. Material wealth certainly had its place, but Adams explicitily rejected the notion that the Dream could be reduced to automobiles, wages, or possessions. It is not a dream about where you live, what you drive, and what you have.

He was writing in 1931, at the beginning of the Great Depression. At a time when millions were unemployed and the nation's economy was in tatters, Adams argued that America's greatest contribution to civilization was not its wealth but its commitment to the dignitiy and potential of the invidual.

He further states:

"The American dream... has not been a dream of merely material plenty.. It has been much more than that. It has been a dream of being able to grow to fullest development as a man and woman, unhampered by the barriers which had slowly been erected in older civilizations."

Adams believed America's exceptionalism was found not in its riches, but in its rejection of inherited social barriers that had long characterized Europe. In his view, America offered something fundamentally different: a society where individuals could rise according to ability and character rather than birth.

How Adams' Contemporaries Understood the Book

One of the most interesting discoveries I came across while doing research on this book was not in the book itself but in the reviews written shortly after its publication. A review in World Affairs in 1932 described The Epic of America as "more than a factual history of America." Instead, it called the work "a biography of the American dream," explaining that Adams regarded this dream as America's "greatest contribution to the thought of the world." The reviewer concluded that Adams challenged Americans "to build better instead of bigger." A year later, historian Harry Elmer Barnes, writing in the American Journal of Sociology, praised the book as a "truly civilizing influence." Barnes emphasized that Adams fully acknowledged America's faults and singled out one theme above all others: his criticism of America's craze for money-making.

These contemporary readers understood something about the context of what Adams meant about the American Dream. They did not see The Epic of America as a celebration of wealth or a standard history of America story. It was not American propaganda or boasting. They saw it as a defense of human dignity against the reduction of success to wealth alone.

The Dream We Forgot

Nearly a century later, the phrase "American Dream" has taken on a life of its own. Through both the deliberate efforts of political and commercial interests to redefine it, and the natural evolution of language across generations, its original meaning has gradually faded from public memory.

For many, it has become synonymous with:

• owning a home,

• earning a high income,

• building wealth,

• or achieving financial independence.

  
  

Those noble aspirations are not unworthy, but they are not what James Truslow Adams meant.

Indeed, Adams anticipated this misunderstanding. Before the phrase had even entered the American lexicon, he warned against reducing it to "motor cars and high wages."

The irony is difficult to miss. The very misunderstanding Adams cautioned against has, in many ways, become the dominant definition. His original vision was broader, deeper, and ultimately more hopeful.

The American Dream was not the promise that every person would become wealthy. It was the promise that every person should have the opportunity to become the fullest version of themselves.

Returning to the Source

One of the purposes of the Aguirre Family Library is not merely to preserve old books but to recover the original meaning of ideas that have shaped our civilization. Sometimes history is not lost because its books have disappeared, but because we have stopped reading them. Sometimes it is forgotten because familiar words gradually come to mean something entirely different. James Truslow Adams gave America one of its most enduring phrases. Perhaps it is time we rediscovered what he actually meant.