The Curious Career of “the American Dream”
James Truslow Adams was born in Brooklyn in 1878, the son of a struggling Wall Street broker who had himself been born in Caracas, Venezuela. Adams grew up with a sense of fallen expectations and diminished fortunes: his family history was filled with high-living bankers and merchants engaged in international ventures, but by the time he was a child that prosperity had ebbed away. His early career was respectable; he learned bookkeeping and typing, eventually joining a brokerage house. Then, at thirty-five, he left Wall Street to pursue his true passion: history. He was awarded a Pulitzer Prize, in 1922, for “The Founding of New England,” the first book in his three-volume account of the region. In 1931, he published “The Epic of America,” a Book-of-the-Month Club selection that was translated into a dozen languages, sold half a million copies, and injected a potent new formula into the culture.
Adams was not the first to suggest that Americans held an optimistic faith in tomorrow, but, in “The Epic of America,” he did come up with the catchiest way of describing it: “that American dream of a better, richer, and happier life for all our citizens of every rank.” This was 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 or position.” A reviewer counted at least fifty passages in which Adams alluded to the American Dream, a motif that connected the struggles of the present with those of the intrepid settlers, rugged frontiersmen, and self-made successes of the past.
It’s strange to realize that such a term has a history, since faith in upward mobility seems embedded in the American consciousness, like an operating system we notice only when it glitches or needs an update. Yet Adams himself had reason to feel the fragility of that faith, having inherited a story of decline and lived one of reinvention. And his study of America’s historical arc, written in the early years of the Great Depression, clearly had a restorative aim. He was naming the dream to point out its precarious state and its need for fortification. He believed that “the great business leaders are likely to lead us astray rather than to guide us,” and that America had lost sight of the communal spirit that once inspired ordinary people to new heights. “Can we hold to the good and escape from the bad?”
In the decades that followed the publication of “The Epic of America,” the American Dream became one of the nation’s great exports, an advertisement for a prosperous, socially mobile way of life unavailable elsewhere. The members of America’s postwar population boom came of age during one of the greatest periods of economic expansion in human history. From 1945 to 1975, the U.S. economy more than doubled, accounting for roughly a third of the world’s industrial output. These gains were shared across socioeconomic strata, as people moved from farms to cities and from cities to suburbs. Working Americans had access to affordable homes, college educations, and jobs that provided a clear path to middle-class stability. People grew accustomed to the expectation that each generation would surpass the horizons of their forebears. According to a 2016 study led by the economist Raj Chetty, Americans born in 1940 had a ninety-two-per-cent chance of earning more than their parents had.
The idea that anyone could bootstrap their way to affluence had profound effects on how people treated one another, something Adams noted in “The Epic of America.” He wrote of a Frenchman visiting New York City who expressed astonishment at “the way that everyone of every sort looks you right in the eye, without a thought of inequality.” Rich and poor, he thought, shared a kind of dignity.
These opportunities were not equally distributed, of course. As America’s middle class underwent an unprecedented expansion, African Americans remained subject to discriminatory housing, employment, and banking practices. In 1965, William F. Buckley, Jr., and James Baldwin debated the proposition “The American Dream is at the expense of the American Negro” at the Cambridge Union Society. Buckley argued that African Americans had not fully taken advantage of the opportunities available to them. Baldwin’s own success, he said, was evidence that one could rise above one’s circumstances, and he cited the advances Black Americans had made since emancipation. “The most mobile society in the world is the United States of America,” Buckley proclaimed, “and it is precisely that mobility which will give opportunities to the Negroes which they must be encouraged to take.”
Baldwin’s position was that the centrality of slavery and racial subjugation in American history could not simply be reversed by legislative fiat. “I picked the cotton, and I carried it to market, and I built the railroads under someone else’s whip for nothing,” he said. “For nothing.” What Baldwin described was not only the denial of economic opportunity but the discovery that America had not, “in its whole system of reality, evolved any place” for Black Americans. He recalled the “great shock” of realizing, as a child watching a Gary Cooper movie, that he had more in common with the Indians than he did with the cowboys. Baldwin did not dismiss the American Dream as a fiction. But, he argued, until the nation reckoned with how deeply the enslavement and continued degradation of Black people had shaped its history and prosperity, “there is scarcely any hope for the American Dream, because the people who are denied participation in it, by their very presence, will wreck it.” The students at the Cambridge Union, asked to decide the debate’s winner, voted overwhelmingly in Baldwin’s favor.
The debate captured another dimension of the American Dream, related to its core vision of economic opportunity but harder to measure. Martin Luther King, Jr., in his 1963 address at the March on Washington, called it “the dream deeply rooted in the American Dream”—the prospect that the nation might finally “rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed.” This was a dream in which Americans would “achieve our country,” as Baldwin put it, seeing themselves as full members of society, entitled to all that America promised.
The American Dream has always had its skeptics, and not just among those who have been institutionally marginalized. Rags-to-riches stories are often described as “Gatsbyesque,” a reference to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel, “The Great Gatsby.” Some people forget that Fitzgerald took a dim view of the extremes to which a young striver might go in the name of reinvention. Perhaps this was the underside of what Adams’s Frenchman described: an insatiable appetite for more, coupled with a lingering paranoia that your place within this social order would never be securely fixed. When anything is possible, can anything be enough?
In the nineteen-sixties, for example, some questioned whether material possessions alone could make you feel as though you’d arrived. As a 1967 New York Times op-ed put it, middle-class people had now begun to “dream hip,” craving a kind of authenticity that money could not buy. (Around the same time, another Times writer observed that rising levels of anxiety and insomnia had led some to believe that the “American dream today is to sleep.”) As a character in Edward Albee’s scathing 1961 play “The American Dream” laments, “That’s the way things are today; you just can’t get satisfaction; you just try.”
Perhaps the problem arose from the extravagant expectations of American life, the sense that bad luck will always be chased by good fortune and that the poor man is merely someone who has yet to strike it rich. The American Dream is at once a story of unyielding, collective progress and something we experience individually. Success is relative, and failure is easily internalized as our fault alone. However free we are to pursue our potential, we can struggle to accept that our potential might take us no further.
By the late nineteen-seventies, as the manufacturing economy declined and wealth became increasingly concentrated in the financial sector, traditional pathways to middle-class prosperity began to narrow. Chetty, the economist, observed that the likelihood of outearning one’s parents gradually fell from ninety-two per cent among those born in 1940 to about fifty per cent among those born forty years later. In the nineteen-eighties, Barbara Ehrenreich described the “fear of falling” at the heart of American middle-class life—the anxieties bred by a hypercompetitive society in which people fretted about their individual status at the expense of class-based politics. The historian Studs Terkel encountered a similar skittishness while conducting interviews for his 1980 book, “American Dreams.” One interviewee, a Mexican American businessman named Stephen Cruz who had immigrated with his family as a child, explained that the American Dream amounted to little more than “power and fear.” Even though the Cruzes were a classic immigrant success story, he felt that it simply meant he had more to lose: “The dream is not losing.” By the nineties, George Carlin would crack, “The reason they call it the American Dream is because you have to be asleep to believe it.”
For all that, the American Dream remains, a century after “The Epic of America,” the intoxicating idea on which our national identity rests, capacious enough to rationalize every form of ambition, from the modest to the megalomaniacal. It describes the scholarship student who is the first in the family to attend college as well as the billionaire touting a self-made empire. It remains, too, a durable brand: the American Dream is the name of a racehorse, a mall in New Jersey, the world’s longest limousine, a family-run nut-butter company in Indiana, a meme coin currently trading at $0.00002, and an initiative recently launched by JPMorgan Chase to help small businesses.
Whether we still wholeheartedly believe in it is another question. The phrase has become a convenient shorthand for pollsters and pundits seeking a vibes-based understanding of our views on the future. In 2024, the Pew Research Center reported that forty-seven per cent of Americans no longer trusted the American Dream’s promise of success through “hard work and determination.” Those who still held these beliefs skewed older and more conservative. (As recently as 2011, a similar Pew survey had shown that sixty-three per cent still felt that they could get ahead if they applied themselves.) This year, a Wells Fargo poll suggested that most parents with children between the ages of eighteen and twenty-eight have to provide substantial financial support for them. Studies indicate that Gen Z’s hope is for a kind of bare-bones stability, for a debt-free life rather than one filled with riches.
On a drizzly spring day, I went to Washington, D.C., to visit the Milken Center for Advancing the American Dream. The center is part of the Milken Institute, a nonprofit founded in 1991 by the businessman Michael Milken. (I am of the generation introduced to the idea of white-collar crime when Milken, the so-called junk-bond king, was indicted for securities fraud, in the nineteen-eighties.) The center opened, last September, as a kind of museum of American exceptionalism, and its décor channels distinctly Trump-era gaudiness. The main entrance—called the Hall of Generations—features a gilded, iridescent tree decorated with “leaves” containing handwritten stories of struggle and triumph left by visitors. In an adjoining room, the stately moldings and coffered ceiling of this former bank building remain intact, but now a giant L.E.D. installation hangs from the ceiling, featuring illuminated panels emblazoned with American Dream buzzwords, like “PRODUCTIVITY,” “WEALTH,” “ACCESS,” “HOPE,” and “POTENTIAL.”
Displays were dedicated to financial literacy and the power of entrepreneurship, alongside explainers about compound interest and “finance as a force for good.” A wing devoted to the power of education showed John Legend’s yearbook, Sonia Sotomayor’s undergraduate thesis, and Michael Milken’s high-school spirit-squad uniform. A wall of inspirational quotes included Amanda Gorman and Lin-Manuel Miranda. Given the current Administration’s war on “wokeness,” I was surprised by the Milken Center’s embrace of diversity.
I decided to spring for something called the Perpetual Story Machine. With other visitors, I followed a docent into an enclosed room. The walls and ceiling lit up, and suddenly we found ourselves inside a computer-generated network of gold pipes and valves, with white orbs pinging every which way. It felt like being in a steampunk-themed escape room. A disembodied voice explained that each orb represented someone’s American story; we needed to help them by manipulating the interactive screens to insure that none of the pathways were clogged.
Once we’d assisted enough story-orbs, panels swung open to reveal another room, where a series of animated stories played out across the walls and ceiling. There was an Eastern European immigrant who fought to become a doctor in nineteen-twenties New York; a Hispanic family that turned a passion for surfing into a well-known surfboard brand; an African American teacher who, unable to become an astronaut himself, encouraged others to chase their dreams. Afterward, a QR code appeared, in case we wanted to learn about the real-life people who had inspired these stories.
The use of immigrant avatars signals how central immigration remains to sustaining the narrative of the American Dream. In the 2022 book “Streets of Gold,” the economists Ran Abramitzky and Leah Boustan used large-scale data analysis to show that U.S. immigrants from relatively poor countries like Mexico, Guatemala, and Laos are “more upwardly mobile” than children of native-born Americans raised in families with a similar income level. The authors also found that immigrants today scale the economic ladder at the same pace as European immigrants did in the early twentieth century. Recent polling indicates that seventy-nine per cent of Americans view immigration as good for the country.
As I left the museum, I glanced at a map and realized that I was just a few hundred yards from the White House. But I couldn’t make out where it was through the thickets of barricades and security checkpoints. The militarized feel of central D.C. called to mind the images of ICE patrolling city streets and the way those immigration crackdowns seemed to symbolize the “shredding of the American Dream,” as Andrew Gounardes, a New York state senator, told a reporter when ICE officers began appearing in his Brooklyn district. “How many immigrants come here because they want to give their children a chance to get that golden ticket, to pursue that American Dream?”
I wanted to see the White House, and a woman in a Secret Service vest directed me to an intersection that was a ten-minute walk away, where I could get an unobstructed view. I knew that I’d arrived from the presence of a lone protester holding a sign about the Epstein files and live-streaming the reactions of passersby. I looked past him, through a series of fences, but was so far away that the White House was little more than a speck on the horizon.
The American Dream may not be making a comeback, but the argument about how to revive it certainly has. In recent years, writers, thinkers, and podcasters have advanced rival prescriptions for restoring the economic mobility that twentieth-century Americans came to see as their birthright. In “Ours Was the Shining Future,” David Leonhardt traces today’s “rough-and-tumble” individualism to the decline of labor unions. In “The Socialist Manifesto,” Bhaskar Sunkara argues for renewal through taxation and wealth redistribution. Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, in “Abundance,” propose a less regulatory progressivism, betting that technology can deliver prosperity. Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz struck a similar note in a recent podcast conversation—though calling for even less regulation—and described the revival of the American Dream as “an easy problem to solve.” Other writers have emphasized repair at the social level: A. Mechele Dickerson has written of a “middle-class New Deal” that might reimagine everything from the length of the K-12 school year to forms of non-wage compensation for workers; Alissa Quart has urged the burned-out to seek opportunities for communal care and interdependence. Chetty’s recent research offers support for the idea that mobility is improved by friendship and contact across class lines.
Many of these accounts are notable because they come from liberal or progressive circles, where faith in the American Dream is often dismissed as gauche and conservative. After Zohran Mamdani won the 2025 New York City mayor’s race, the activist and former Democratic National Committee co-vice-chair David Hogg remarked that Mamdani’s election was about “making the American Dream possible again.” Mamdani, proud of his socialist values, had developed a language for communicating a collective, interdependent vision of city life through his consistent emphasis on affordability. For progressives like Hogg, Mamdani’s campaign showed a way to address the Democratic Party’s so-called American Dream problem: the way left-leaning politicians struggle to talk about a more prosperous future. It’s one thing to point out that the MAGA movement draws on a troublingly distorted or bigoted version of the nation’s past. It’s another to offer something equally sweeping and seductive in its place.
Despite America’s wealth and relative stability, numerous metrics suggest a country in distress, lagging behind other affluent nations in everything from life expectancy to results on surveys of global happiness and well-being. The American Dream once presumed a steady, patient faith in merit and hard work. Now, with the internet as our window onto the world outside, people fantasize about exponential, rather than linear, accumulation. Influencers cash in on viral fame, startups fear that this is the last age of human innovation, and people seem increasingly hungry to seize what they can before the old systems, and the values that sustained them, disappear. The rise of cryptocurrency and online prediction markets signals a deepening loss of faith in the visions of middle-class stability that once powered American life. For some, upward mobility feels more attainable in Canada or Western Europe than it does in the U.S. A recent Wall Street Journal article made clear that “the new American dream, for some of its citizens, is to no longer live there,” with a record number of Americans choosing to move abroad. There’s even the recent social-media trend of “Chinamaxxing,” in which Americans with no obvious connection to China fetishize and marvel at the futuristic life style and opportunities available there.
A couple of years ago, I began teaching a class on the American Dream, mostly because I noticed that more and more of my college students were voicing curiosity about it. Some of them invoked it ironically, but many genuinely wondered whether it used to be real, and what it meant to inherit this foundational idea at a time when norms seemed in constant flux. It sounded like a fragment of language from another world, and yet they recognized how they had internalized its enchanting logic, the belief that there is something virtuous in the relentless pursuit of material achievement. What I realized was that they were in search of a meaningful future, since the one that had compelled so many of their forebears dutifully forward no longer seemed possible.
My students grapple with what horizons remain meaningful today. We’re taught to believe that hard work insures a good outcome, even as the stepping stones to a secure life grow harder to find. Where does one look for models if élites and powerful decision-makers seem to have ascended through nepotism or greed rather than through merit? How can homework and grades possibly matter in the age of A.I.? One student, reflecting on the relentless demand for productivity and output, wondered if the American Dream was delivery on demand or having the time to cook for yourself. Earning a college degree or owning a home was once not just a status marker but an investment that promised material returns. Today, people amass unmanageable debt simply to keep faith with a story that feels increasingly detached from their reality.
Inevitably, our discussions turn to what else might draw us onward, if not the white picket fence. The American Dream, as James Truslow Adams explained, was never just about cars and salaries. Even if many who debate his phrase today have no idea who he was, Adams’s own career can prompt us to ask what, exactly, we are seeking. After all, he left business to devote himself to history and to thinking about what it might mean for America’s future. He believed that the collective spirit of self-improvement was symbolized best not by the nation’s wealth but by the reading room of the Library of Congress, open to rich and poor alike. My students and I try to imagine a version of the American Dream that becomes something altogether different. Is the answer to be found in Fitzgerald or Baldwin, in a politician or a viral star? We still haven’t figured it out, but no one has given up yet. ♦