The American Dream: A Cultural History

1 The Epic of America

12 What is the next chapter in the epic of America? What . . . is the prospect for the fulfillment of the American dream? —James Truslow Adams, 1933 Anyone stopping by Robert McLaughlin’s home at 1038 West Forty-Ninth Street in Los Angeles around Christmastime in the late 1930s would no doubt be struck by what the Los Angeles Times called an “American Dream Village.” Each year, McLaughlin would take the model village , which he called “Sunnyville,” out of its box, spreading Yuletide cheer with its depiction of what the newspaper considered a “typical quaint dream hamlet of the American scene.” The village, which McLaughlin and his brother-in-law had made themselves with just a hacksaw and penknife , included a church (with a steeple bell that rang), a schoolhouse (with logs outside as firewood), and a depot with an adjoining coal chute and water tank. Miniature people gathered at the general store, fed tiny animals on a little farm, and sang carols in front of neighbors’ log cabins . Snow (bleached cornflakes) covered the scene, and if you looked up you could see Santa Claus approaching from the sky over a gold mine in the hills that surrounded the town. McLaughlin would occasionally add pieces to the village, 1938’s addition being a new service station on the edge of town.1 Battered by the Depression and worried about events overseas, it was not surprising that citizens like Robert McLaughlin literally built their own American Dream from scratch. “Sunnyville” had none of the myriad of social and economic problems of Los Angeles or any other big American The Epic of America | 13 city, its miniature citizens enjoying the kind of happiness, prosperity, and tolerance that were associated with the Dream. The 1930s and early 1940s were years in which many longed for the sort of life that Sunnyville offered, a mythology articulated most compellingly as “the American Dream.” Although the Dream had dwelled in the minds of many Americans even before the nation was a nation, it was then that the actual phrase was coined, not at all a coincidence. The Depression and war years would prove to be a fruitful period for the American Dream as the country struggled to retain a sense of identity amid economic, social, and political turmoil. The Dream would not only survive these tough times but grow stronger, affirming our faith in our experiment in democracy and our special place as the proverbial “city on a hill.” A Better, Deeper, Richer Life That the term “American Dream” was created in the darkest days of the Great Depression was all the more interesting given that many feared it no longer existed. In his 1931 book The Epic of America and in articles published in the New York Times the following few years, James Truslow Adams defined what he meant by the American Dream, an idea whose essence has remained largely consistent these past eighty years: The dream is a vision of a better, deeper, richer life for every individual, regardless of the position in society which he or she may occupy by the accident of birth. It has been a dream of a chance to rise in the economic scale, but quite as much, or more than that, of a chance to develop our capacities to the full, unhampered by unjust restrictions of caste or custom. With this has gone the hope of bettering the physical conditions of living, of lessening the toil and anxieties of daily life.2 However, in the late 1920s, much like previous periods of overexpansion and out-of-control speculation, Adams argued, the nation had lost its way, its guiding philosophy forgotten in the wild pursuit of money and the things it could buy. “The dream of a richer, better, fuller human life for all citizens instead of for a small class had been turned by our leaders and ourselves into a statistical table of standard of living,” he wrote, the market crash and subsequent depression a natural result (and something 14 | The American Dream Adams had predicted). Now, the nation having survived its “mental disorder ,” Adams was hopeful that its vision would be restored. “Like the passing of the shadow in an eclipse, the light of reason appears to be steadily extending over the horizon,” he believed, the American Dream beginning to reemerge.3 Adams, modestly describing himself as a “student of history and surveyor of the American...