{"id":691,"date":"2026-06-26T14:06:01","date_gmt":"2026-06-26T14:06:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=691"},"modified":"2026-06-26T14:06:01","modified_gmt":"2026-06-26T14:06:01","slug":"the-curious-career-of-the-american-dream","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=691","title":{"rendered":"The Curious Career of \u201cthe American Dream\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"
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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 \u201cThe Founding of New England,\u201d the first book in his three-volume account of the region. In 1931, he published \u201cThe Epic of America,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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Adams was not the first to suggest that Americans held an optimistic faith in tomorrow, but, in \u201cThe Epic of America,\u201d he did come up with the catchiest way of describing it: \u201cthat American dream of a better, richer, and happier life for all our citizens of every rank.\u201d This was not a dream of \u201cmotor 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.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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It\u2019s 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\u2019s 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 \u201cthe great business leaders are likely to lead us astray rather than to guide us,\u201d and that America had lost sight of the communal spirit that once inspired ordinary people to new heights. \u201cCan we hold to the good and escape from the bad?\u201d<\/p>\n

In the decades that followed the publication of \u201cThe Epic of America,\u201d the American Dream became one of the nation\u2019s great exports, an advertisement for a prosperous, socially mobile way of life unavailable elsewhere. The members of America\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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The idea that anyone could bootstrap their way to affluence had profound effects on how people treated one another, something Adams noted in \u201cThe Epic of America.\u201d He wrote of a Frenchman visiting New York City who expressed astonishment at \u201cthe way that everyone of every sort looks you right in the eye, without a thought of inequality.\u201d Rich and poor, he thought, shared a kind of dignity.<\/p>\n

These opportunities were not equally distributed, of course. As America\u2019s middle class underwent an unprecedented expansion, African Americans remained subject to discriminatory housing, employment, and banking practices. In 1965, William\u00a0F. Buckley, Jr., and James Baldwin debated the proposition \u201cThe American Dream is at the expense of the American Negro\u201d at the Cambridge Union Society. Buckley argued that African Americans had not fully taken advantage of the opportunities available to them. Baldwin\u2019s own success, he said, was evidence that one could rise above one\u2019s circumstances, and he cited the advances Black Americans had made since emancipation. \u201cThe most mobile society in the world is the United States of America,\u201d Buckley proclaimed, \u201cand it is precisely that mobility which will give opportunities to the Negroes which they must be encouraged to take.\u201d<\/p>\n

Baldwin\u2019s position was that the centrality of slavery and racial subjugation in American history could not simply be reversed by legislative fiat. \u201cI picked the cotton, and I carried it to market, and I built the railroads under someone else\u2019s whip for nothing,\u201d he said. \u201cFor nothing.\u201d What Baldwin described was not only the denial of economic opportunity but the discovery that America had not, \u201cin its whole system of reality, evolved any place\u201d for Black Americans. He recalled the \u201cgreat shock\u201d 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, \u201cthere is scarcely any hope for the American Dream, because the people who are denied participation in it, by their very presence, will wreck it.\u201d The students at the Cambridge Union, asked to decide the debate\u2019s winner, voted overwhelmingly in Baldwin\u2019s favor.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cthe dream deeply rooted in the American Dream\u201d\u2014the prospect that the nation might finally \u201crise up and live out the true meaning of its creed.\u201d This was a dream in which Americans would \u201cachieve our country,\u201d as Baldwin put it, seeing themselves as full members of society, entitled to all that America promised.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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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 \u201cGatsbyesque,\u201d a reference to F.\u00a0Scott Fitzgerald\u2019s 1925 novel, \u201cThe Great Gatsby.\u201d 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\u2019s 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?<\/p>\n

In the nineteen-sixties, for example, some questioned whether material possessions alone could make you feel as though you\u2019d arrived. As a 1967 New York Times<\/em> op-ed put it, middle-class people had now begun to \u201cdream hip,\u201d craving a kind of authenticity that money could not buy. (Around the same time, another Times<\/em> writer observed that rising levels of anxiety and insomnia had led some to believe that the \u201cAmerican dream today is to sleep.\u201d) As a character in Edward Albee\u2019s scathing 1961 play \u201cThe American Dream\u201d laments, \u201cThat\u2019s the way things are today; you just can\u2019t get satisfaction; you just try.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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 \u201cfear of falling\u201d at the heart of American middle-class life\u2014the 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, \u201cAmerican Dreams.\u201d 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 \u201cpower and fear.\u201d Even though the Cruzes were a classic immigrant success story, he felt that it simply meant he had more to lose: \u201cThe dream is not losing<\/em>.\u201d By the nineties, George Carlin would crack, \u201cThe reason they call it the American Dream is because you have to be asleep to believe it.\u201d<\/p>\n

For all that, the American Dream remains, a century after \u201cThe Epic of America,\u201d 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s promise of success through \u201chard work and determination.\u201d 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\u2019s hope is for a kind of bare-bones stability, for a debt-free life rather than one filled with riches.<\/p>\n

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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 d\u00e9cor channels distinctly Trump-era gaudiness. The main entrance\u2014called the Hall of Generations\u2014features a gilded, iridescent tree decorated with \u201cleaves\u201d 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 \u201cPRODUCTIVITY<\/em>,\u201d \u201cWEALTH<\/em>,\u201d \u201cACCESS<\/em>,\u201d \u201cHOPE<\/em>,\u201d and \u201cPOTENTIAL<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Displays were dedicated to financial literacy and the power of entrepreneurship, alongside explainers about compound interest and \u201cfinance as a force for good.\u201d A wing devoted to the power of education showed John Legend\u2019s yearbook, Sonia Sotomayor\u2019s undergraduate thesis, and Michael Milken\u2019s high-school spirit-squad uniform. A wall of inspirational quotes included Amanda Gorman and Lin-Manuel Miranda. Given the current Administration\u2019s war on \u201cwokeness,\u201d I was surprised by the Milken Center\u2019s embrace of diversity.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s American story; we needed to help them by manipulating the interactive screens to insure that none of the pathways were clogged.<\/p>\n

Once we\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n

The use of immigrant avatars signals how central immigration remains to sustaining the narrative of the American Dream. In the 2022 book \u201cStreets of Gold,\u201d 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 \u201cmore upwardly mobile\u201d 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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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\u2019t 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<\/em> patrolling city streets and the way those immigration crackdowns seemed to symbolize the \u201cshredding of the American Dream,\u201d as Andrew Gounardes, a New York state senator, told a reporter when ICE<\/em> officers began appearing in his Brooklyn district. \u201cHow many immigrants come here because they want to give their children a chance to get that golden ticket, to pursue that American Dream?\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cOurs Was the Shining Future,\u201d David Leonhardt traces today\u2019s \u201crough-and-tumble\u201d individualism to the decline of labor unions. In \u201cThe Socialist Manifesto,\u201d Bhaskar Sunkara argues for renewal through taxation and wealth redistribution. Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, in \u201cAbundance,\u201d 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\u2014though calling for even less regulation\u2014and described the revival of the American Dream as \u201can easy problem to solve.\u201d Other writers have emphasized repair at the social level: A.\u00a0Mechele Dickerson has written of a \u201cmiddle-class New Deal\u201d 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\u2019s recent research offers support for the idea that mobility is improved by friendship and contact across class lines.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s race, the activist and former Democratic National Committee co-vice-chair David Hogg remarked that Mamdani\u2019s election was about \u201cmaking the American Dream possible again.\u201d 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\u2019s campaign showed a way to address the Democratic Party\u2019s so-called American Dream problem: the way left-leaning politicians struggle to talk about a more prosperous future. It\u2019s one thing to point out that the MAGA<\/em> movement draws on a troublingly distorted or bigoted version of the nation\u2019s past. It\u2019s another to offer something equally sweeping and seductive in its place.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Despite America\u2019s 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<\/em> article made clear that \u201cthe new American dream, for some of its citizens, is to no longer live there,\u201d with a record number of Americans choosing to move abroad. There\u2019s even the recent social-media trend of \u201cChinamaxxing,\u201d in which Americans with no obvious connection to China fetishize and marvel at the futuristic life style and opportunities available there.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

My students grapple with what horizons remain meaningful today. We\u2019re 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 \u00e9lites 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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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\u2019s 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\u2019s future. He believed that the collective spirit of self-improvement was symbolized best not by the nation\u2019s 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\u2019t figured it out, but no one has given up yet.\u00a0\u2666<\/p>\n

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Hua Hsu pays a visit to the newly opened Milken Center for Advancing the American Dream, in Washington, D.C., and examines the evolution of the United States\u2019 historic slogan.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":690,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[59],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-691","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reflections"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Curious Career of \u201cthe American Dream\u201d - City Relocation News<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=691\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Curious Career of \u201cthe American Dream\u201d - 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