The Epic of America

"This book’s enduring contribution was the phrase “the American dream”. In fact, Adams wanted to call his book The American Dream but his publicist said no, the book will never sell if you call it that. Yet the only thing that anybody remembers of the book today is that phrase. The book is a history of the United States but what makes it worth reading today is finding out about the original conception of the American dream, which he elaborates on in his final chapter. Adams describes the American dream as having to do with a kind of classlessness, having to do with the absence of barriers for upward mobility. He said it wasn’t just about money – he had vaguely aristocratic ideas about grasping too blatantly for wealth. Adams believed in improving oneself economically but not to the exclusion of all other values. He was concerned about the excesses of capitalism but he had a vision of America as a place where people could improve their lot economically and move upward in society. In Adams’s view this was what really distinguished the United States from Old World Europe. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter We inherited his view of American mobility. But American mobility is no longer – either in absolute terms or compared to Europe – the same as it was during Adams’s lifetime. The American dream, in Adam’s words, was of “that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement… It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of 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 recognised by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.” It was more realisable during his lifetime than it is today. Certain barriers were harder to cross – racial barriers, gender barriers. But those barriers weren’t based on how much money you started out with and how much money you ended up with. If you were just looking at society in economic terms then it was easier during Adams’s lifetime – obviously not during the Depression, but prior to the Depression – to move upward, as the United States was becoming a more industrialised economy. The strange thing about the process of industrialisation in the United States was that it brought one good thing and one bad thing. It increased upward mobility, as people moved off the farms and into the cities, but it also increased income inequality. Yeah, it’s easier to obtain a college education today, but it’s also true that a lot more jobs require a college education today. You have to remember back in 1900 most Americans didn’t even go to high school. I think something like 90% of all Americans at the turn of the 20th century didn’t have high-school diplomas. Obviously that meant that most of the economy operated without the assistance of people who went to high school let alone college. That changed rapidly in the early decades of the 20th century with the spread of the high-school movement, where society basically decided that high school had to be paid for by the government and everybody had to be required to go. It was a lucky thing for the United States that the high-school movement coincided with a period of rapid technological advances. The technological advances in the early 20th century were much greater than the technological advances at the end of the 20th century."