“American Dream” and Analogous Narratives Displace the
Frugality Narrative
James Truslow Adams coined the phrase American Dream in the first edition of
his New York Times best-selling book The Epic of America (1931). The term is
virtually never found on ProQuest News & Newspapers before 1931, except for
mentions of a bedspring that promised good sleep, marketed in 1929 and 1930 as
“The American Dream.” As Figure 11.1 shows, Adams’s American Dream went
viral, vastly outpacing similar terms going back centuries, such as American
character, American principles, and American credo. The “American Dream”
was a long slow epidemic that is still growing today, almost a century after
Adams coined the term. Adams, who died in 1949, saw only the very beginning
of the epidemic.
Adams defined the American Dream as follows:
The American dream, 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 … It is 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 recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous
circumstances of birth or position.44
Some might say that Adams’s account is a somewhat bland description of any
country’s dream, not a fiery manifesto that we’d expect to go viral. Indeed, it
sounds similar to the China Dream, espoused by Chinese premier Xi Jinping; to
the French Dream, espoused by former French president François Hollande; and
to the Canadian “National Dream,” all modeled after Adams. But there must
have been something appealing and original about this idea that made it slowly
and consistently contagious.
The phrase American Dream has a ring of truth to it as a statement of
American values. The United States is a proud country that has no aristocracy,
allows no titles or royalty, announces in its Declaration of Independence that “all
men are created equal,” and allows free enterprise to proceed with little
government interference. However, it is also a country that permitted slavery
until 1863. Long before Adams defined the American Dream in 1931, slavery

was seen as an abomination and an embarrassment inconsistent with the nation’s
stated commitment to equality. And American blacks have not received equal
treatment even long after the abolition of slavery. But by coupling “American”
with “Dream,” the phrase might have defined a trend toward a better social order
“in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature
of which they are innately capable.” That’s what a dream is: the sense of an ideal
future, a deep-seated and fervently desired wish that is partly fulfilled today and
might become completely fulfilled in the future. When Adams says that the
American Dream “is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely,” he
seems to assert that the American Dream is in part a dream of these material
things. Of course people want to provide for their family and they want a good
standard of living, but they want everyone to have a chance to achieve the same
goals.
FIGURE 11.1. Frequency of Appearance of American Dream in Books, 1800–2008, and News, 1800–2016
The epidemic had hardly begun during the lifetime of its author, James Truslow Adams. Sources: Google
Ngrams, no smoothing, and author’s calculations from ProQuest News & Newspapers.
The original discussion of the American Dream in the 1930s, before the term
went viral, was primarily intellectual. For example, George O’Neil’s 1933