This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Feb. 16, 2011 - The year was 1931, and the Great Depression was still kicking into full gear as these all-American moments found their place in history:
- "The Star-Spangled Banner" officially became the national anthem. (On March 3 of that year President Herbert Hoover signed into law the congressional resolution making Francis Scott Key's lyrics about the War of 1812 the national song.)
- The Empire State Building opened. (Hoover pressed a button in Washington on May 1 to turn on the lights in the skyscraper in New York. At 1,250 feet, the structure beat out the recently dedicated Chrysler Building as the world's tallest skyscraper -- a distinction it would hold for four decades.)
- The American Dream was born, with no fanfare at all.
In September 1931, Little, Brown and Company of Boston published "The Epic of America," a one-volume U.S. history by James Truslow Adams that delivered a concise but detailed version of the birth and rise of the nation. The history would be a bestseller, but its eventual glory was due largely to the author's epilogue.
Adams looked past the nation's plummeting gross national product and climbing unemployment rate -- it reached 15.9 percent in 1931 -- to remind Americans of the noble promise that had thrived on the frontier: Men and women would not be held back by the social barriers erected by the world's older civilizations. In this New World, social mobility trumps class, and the dreams of individuals have been realized here more fully than anywhere else.
Adams, a Pulitzer-Prize winning historian, noted that the achievements of Americans to date would have fallen short as a unique and distinctive gift to mankind.
"But there has been also the American dream," he wrote. "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. It is a difficult dream for the European upper classes to interpret adequately, and too many of us ourselves have grown weary and mistrustful of it.
"It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely," Adams continued, "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 or position."
Eighty years ago, Adams gave his fellow citizens a phrase for the ages: the American Dream.
Not About 'Material Plenty'
Google the words American Dream and, within seconds, 26 million or so search results will appear: thousands upon thousands of titles for books and policy analysis, statistics on foreclosure, scholarship programs and websites selling everything from tours of the Grand Canyon to pizzas in Oregon and decorated cakes in Jacksonville, N.C.
While the American Dream is now widely equated with middle-class success -- a home, a car, a solid education and a good-paying job -- for Adams, it was not about "material plenty."
He wrote, instead, of "being able to grow to fullest development as man and woman, unhampered by the barriers which had slowly been erected in older civilizations, unrepressed by social orders which had developed for the benefit of classes rather than for the simple human being of any and every class."
Adams was not oblivious to the Great Depression, which he thought would pass in a year or two, but his view was longer and bigger picture. He fussed over the quality of American life, using italics to emphasize his point that "we forgot to live, in the struggle to 'make a living'; how our education tended to become utilitarian or aimless; and how unfortunate traits only too notable to-day were developed."
Adams distrusted politicians and "the great business leaders." And he worried that a hot-button issue of the day -- the push for a higher-wage scale -- was not intended to improve the quality of life and to create a better type of man but was for the sole purpose of increasing his powers as a consumer.
"He is, therefore, goaded by every possible method of pressure or cajolery to spend his wages in consuming goods," Adams wrote. "He is warned that if he does not consume to the limit, instead of indulging in pleasures which do not cost money, he may be deprived not only of his high wages but of any at all. He, like the rest of us, thus appears to be getting into a treadmill in which he earns, not that he may enjoy, but that he may spend, in order that the owners of the factories may grow richer."
Adams took a swipe at Henry Ford, remarking that either the wages he pays were still too low or the price of his cars too high because "he has accumulated $1,000,000,000 for himself from his planet. This would seem a high price for society to pay even him for his services to it, while the economic lives of some hundreds of thousands of men and women are made dependent on his whim and word."
The World Dream
Adams, a Yale graduate, was born in Brooklyn in 1878. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in history in 1922 for "The Founding of New England," the first in a trilogy on New England history. He wrote several histories of the Adams family, the clan of the second president and arguably the most politically influential family of the nation's early years. (He was no relation.)
Adams was a noted lecturer of his day and wrote frequently for magazines and newspapers. In his writings after 1931, he made it clear that he was no fan of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal thinking, and he accused the president of attempts to pack the Supreme Court. Adams died in 1949.
In "The Epic of America" Adams set out to provide a concise volume of American history, but the work's lasting legacy was in the dozen or so pages in the back of the book. The historian captured imagination, far and wide, with his vision of the nation as a noble experiment, warts and all.
"If we hastened after the pot of gold, we also saw the rainbow itself, and felt that it promised, as of old, a hope for mankind," Adams wrote.
The "American dream" book was not only a bestseller in the U.S., but was reprinted numerous times and translated for international markets.
This idea, as it turned out, was bigger than America.
Writing in the April 1957 issue of the Rotarian magazine, physicist Arthur Holly Compton noted Adams' American dream, even as he shared his own thoughts on globalization and world interdependence. In an essay titled "We Need Each Other," the Nobel Prize winning scientist and former chancellor of Washington University related how he had introduced "The Epic of America" to Vijaya Pandit, the sister of Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, during her previous visit to St. Louis.
Pandit, who was then president of the U.N. General Assembly, had spoken to St. Louis high schoolers about the United Nations. As he listened to her describe the aspirations of people from all over the world, Compton said he thought of James Truslow Adams.
"I asked her if she had ever read his book," Compton wrote in the article. "She said she had not. Later I pulled it down from the shelves and showed it to her. 'American dream?' she said. It is becoming the dream of the world.' "
