According to Google’s definition provided by Oxford Languages, the American dream means “the ideal by which equality of opportunity is available to any American, allowing the highest aspirations and goals to be achieved”. If you give the Cambridge English Dictionary a search, you’ll find that the American dream is “the belief that everyone in the US has the chance to be successful and happy if they work hard”. If you ask a random person, American or non-American, what comes to mind when they think of what the American dream actually means, they’ll probably say something along the lines of “to rise from rags to riches”, “upward mobility”, “living in a house with a white picket fence”, “meritocracy” and so on.
Maybe I’ve already bored you with so many examples, maybe repeating myself seems redundant, but I am trying to prove the point that, while most definitions of the American dream revolve around the same main idea, that is having equal opportunity towards pursuing success and happiness, its connotations are different, and the extent of the expression becomes blurry. This all stands in the details of the above-mentioned definitions. I’m here to tell you more about how it all started.
Even though the term American dream has roots in very early American history, its first appearance was in writer and historian James Truslow Adams’s “The Epic of America” published in 1931, ironically, during the Great Depression. His definition of the American dream was “a dream of 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”. But was this true? Did American people agree with these overconfident remarks about equal rights and upright mobility, with all the mass unemployment and increasing rates in poverty and homelessness happening in the background? Adams had probably anticipated the reaction of the public, as he also clarified that the American dream “has been realized more fully in actual life here than anything else, though very imperfectly even among ourselves.”. So, yes, he also thought, like the other Americans at the beginning of the 20th century, that the American ideal can’t be reached. Not even by Americans. But he also thought that Americans were far closer to reaching this ideal than any other nation.
American exceptionalism is also deeply rooted in how we see the American dream today. In 1630, Puritan John Winthrop, the second governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, delivered the sermon “A Model of Christian Charity'', where he compared the colony to “a city on a hill”, referring to the biblical passage from Matthew 5:14, when Crist tells his disciples “You are the light of the world. A city that is set upon a hill cannot be hidden.”. Breaking apart from the Catholic Church, Puritans come to the New World, to live their lives as God wanted them to. It wasn't only their intimate journey they attempted to get on, but their mission was to set an example. They knew they would be looked at, and it was part of their identity that they needed to be seen as “the model of christian charity”. They introduced the idea of American exceptionalism, before America was even a thing.
And it doesn’t stop here. Remember American exceptionalism? here it comes again. In 1776, activist Thomas Paine wrote a pamphlet called "Common Sense”. He thought that “There is something absurd in supposing a continent to be perpetually governed by an island”. Technically, he planted the idea of gaining independence from Britain in the people’s minds. “The cause of America is in great measure the cause of all mankind.” Couldn’t have said it better. That’s it, right there. American exceptionalism.
This leads us to the declaration of independence signed by the Founding Fathers on July 4th, 1776, a day that forever changed American history through the words most of you probably have already encountered before: “We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”.
To conclude, the widely known term the American dream, deeply rooted in American early history and culture, has been changing long before it was even defined. And so I’ll just leave you with the facts, but let you redefine the American dream in order for it to match the definition of whatever you believe it means today.
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