"'The American Dream' has always been about the prospect of success, but 100 years ago, the phrase meant the opposite of what it does now. The original 'American Dream' was not a dream of individual wealth; it was a dream of equality, justice and democracy for the nation. The phrase was repurposed by each generation, until the Cold War, when it became an argument for a consumer capitalist version of democracy. Our ideas about the 'American Dream' froze in the 1950s. Today, it doesn't occur to anybody that it could mean anything else.
Anna Diamond at Smithsonian interviews Sarah Churchwell, author of Behold, America: The Entangled History of "America First" and "the American Dream."
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment