NEW YORK -- Is the American dream just a mirage now? Earlier this year the Wall Street Journal ran a series called "Challenges to the American Dream," casting into doubt the "staple of America's self-portrait" that "a child born in poverty isn't trapped there." If that was putting the matter delicately, about the same time the New York Times questioned America's vaunted "upward social mobility" by putting it more bluntly in a series titled "Class Matters."
Actually, when you take a cursory look on the Internet, you readily find that the idea of the United States as a land full of Horatio Alger stories has been debunked by many and for quite some time now. Perhaps because of that, I decided to find out when and how the expression "the American dream" came into being. The answer came rather easily.
By consensus it was James Truslow Adams (1878-1948) who popularized, if not coined, the term, with his 1931 book, "The Epic of America." A winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his 1921 history, "The Founding of New England," Adams went on to write at least three more books on early New England and its people. Then, whether or not the economic collapse in 1929 was the impetus, he wanted to write a one-volume history of the U.S. with special emphasis on "that American dream of a better, richer, and happier life for all our citizens of every rank, which is the greatest contribution we have as yet made to the thought and welfare of the world."