Paradise lost | 9 March 2017

The American dream was a consumerist idyll: all of life was to be packaged, stylised, affordable and improvable. Three bedrooms, two-point-five children, two cars and one mortgage. The sense was first caught by Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America (1835–40), where he talks about a people more excited by success than fearful of failure.

We all know when the dream died: on 9 November 2016. People in Brooklyn were crying. In Manhattan they couldn’t breathe. A national angst had been revealed: the land of plenty had become the land of the plenty cross.

But when did the dream start? There was the Jeffersonian trinity of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, which was diverted into frontier mysticism, but by the mid-20th century this had evolved into an almost religiose belief in the enhancement of life by ever-increasing consumption of manufactured goods. Chevrolet ergo sum.

Consider this sequence: 1926, ‘mass production’ is mentioned in the Encyclopaedia Britannica; 1927, Raymond Loewy opens the first design consultancy in New York; 1931, the phrase ‘American dream’ is coined by James Truslow Adams, a journalist:

The American Dream is that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement. It is a difficult dream for the European upper classes to interpret adequately, and too many of us ourselves have grown weary and mistrustful of it. It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but 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 recognised by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.