I always enjoy Hog River Journal and the Summer 2009 issue was no exception. I want to offer a correction and amplification, however, of Eugene Leach’s comment in “The Aging of the American Dream” that James Truslow Adams coined the phrase “American dream.” Adams certainly popularized the phrase in his The Epic of America, but it was in the air for many years prior to the book’s publication in 1931.
The Oxford English Dictionary contains several early 20th-century citations. Thus, from an article in Collier’s Weekly in 1904: “The old American dream of a magnificent continental sovereignty and hemispheric hegemony.” Another comes from a 1917 novel, Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise, by the muckraking journalist and author, David Graham Phillips: “The fashion and home magazines . . . have prepared thousands of Americans . . . for the possible rise of fortunes that is the universal American dream and hope.”
(Phillips’s novel was posthumously published. He probably used the phrase prior to 1908, the date of the book’s introduction, and certainly before 1911, when he was shot to death outside the Princeton Club in New York City by a man who believed his sister had been traduced in Phillips’s 1909 novel, The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig.)
“American dream” also cropped up in newspapers around the time of World War I. For example: “If the American idea, the American hope, the American dream, and the structures which Americans have erected are not worth fighting for to maintain and protect, they were not worth fighting for to establish” (Chicago Daily Tribune, February 6, 1916). A year later, on March 18, 1917, The Fort Wayne (Indiana.) Journal-Gazette quoted a Mrs. Mary Chapin as saying that she believed “the United States will be called upon to settle the war in such a way that the American dream of liberty will spread throughout Europe and ultimately will encircle the world.”
And more than thirty years earlier, in the aftermath of the 1884 presidential election, The Galvaston (Tex.) Daily News warned in an editorial on November 9 that if the Republican candidate, James G. Blaine “and his coadjutors had the power . . . they would have all election returns sent to Washington to be counted by the Republican officials there and that would be the end of the American dream of liberty under representative government.” (But the ballots were not sent to Washington and Democrat Grover Cleveland emerged victorious.)
James Truslow Adams put his own spin on “the American dream,” defining it not merely in terms of material wealth, as the phrase is so often construed today, but as “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.” (Adams also referred in this connection to the “Great Society,” anticipating Lyndon Johnson by some thirty years.) But even here, Adams himself was anticipated. Walter Lippman, writing in Vanity Fair in 1923, argued against attempts to restrict higher education to a small and selected class, saying “that proposal, once we adopted it, would mark the end in failure of the American dream.”
A final note: James Truslow Adams, born in Brooklyn, N.Y., eventually migrated to Connecticut. He was residing in Southport when he died in 1949.
Hugh Rawson
53 South Street
Roxbury, CT 06783