Behold, America

INTRODUCTION

THERE IS GREAT power in loaded phrases, as anyone willing to pull the trigger knows.

‘Sadly, the American dream is dead,’ Donald Trump proclaimed on 16 June 2015, announcing his candidacy for president of the United States. It seemed an astonishing thing for a candidate to say; people campaigning for president usually glorify the nation they hope to lead, flattering voters into choosing them. But this reversal was just a taste of what was to come, as Trump revealed an unnerving skill at twisting what would be negative for anyone else into a positive for himself.

By the time he won the election, Trump had flipped much of what many people thought they knew about America on its head. In his acceptance speech Trump again pronounced the American dream dead, but promised to revive it. We were told that the American dream of prosperity was under threat, so much so that a platform of ‘economic nationalism’ carried the presidency.

Reading last rites over the American dream was shocking enough. But throughout the campaign Trump also promised to put ‘America first’, a pledge renewed in his inaugural speech in January 2017. It was a disquieting phrase for a presidential candidate, and then president-elect, to keep using. Think pieces on the history of ‘America first’ began to sprout up in the national press and on social media, informing their audiences that the slogan ‘America first’ stretches back to the Second World War, and to the efforts of the America First Committee to keep the United States out of the European conflict. ‘America first’ had been invented by high-profile isolationists like Charles Lindbergh, they explained, whose sympathy with the Nazi project was often inextricable from an avowed anti-Semitism. ‘America first’, they said, was a code for neo-Nazism.

Meanwhile, other pundits were weighing in on the American dream, as writers asked if it was indeed dead.¹ Nearly all of these pieces began with a shared understanding of what the American dream was supposed to entail: namely, upward social mobility, a national promise of endless individual progress. But now, thanks to epidemic levels of inequality, that dream was widely viewed as under threat, a story that had been endlessly recycled across the international press for the decade since the financial crisis beginning in 2007. Trump had weaponised this inequality, they said, convincing his followers that only an outsider could redeem a corrupt system. (That he was in fact a plutocratic insider, a self-styled billionaire corporate tycoon, was hardly the last bit of cognitive dissonance his followers were prepared to disavow.)

But most did not question what the American dream meant; they only debated its relative health. A Guardian editorial from June 2017, for example, called ‘Is the American Dream Really Dead?’, summed up not only the questions everyone was asking, but the premises from which they began.

Few would dispute any of this: the American dream is widely understood as a dream of personal opportunity, in which ‘opportunity’ is gauged primarily in economic terms, and those opportunities are shrinking. The idea that the American dream was ‘initially conceived’ by Jefferson is similarly axiomatic, despite the fact that happiness and opportunity are not, in fact, synonymous.

But what Jefferson conceived–at least in terms of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness–was a dream of democratic equality. He doesn’t mention economics, or opportunity, for good reason. In fact, Jefferson took John Locke’s phrase, ‘life, liberty and property’, and changed property into happiness. While it is true that in the eighteenth century ‘happiness’ was often used to mean ‘flourishing’, which can clearly imply prosperity, Jefferson nonetheless removed specific economic guarantees from the nation’s founding entitlements. Democratic equality and economic opportunity are not the same thing, but the American dream has, for decades, been used as if they are.

The Guardian piece ends by noting the self-defeating nature of the ‘dream’ as understood in these terms. ‘Ironically, part of the problem may actually be the American dream… Indeed, the dream, with its focus on individual initiative in a meritocracy, has resulted in far less public support than there is in other countries for safety nets, vocational training, and community support for those with disadvantage or bad luck.’ The dream is of the individual capitalist striving in a free-market world, one that is inimical to the ‘safety nets’ of social democracy. Again, this understanding of the dream is entirely typical of how it is construed today–not just by Americans, but around the world.

But although this meaning of the dream is unquestionably the one Americans inherited, this book will show that it is exactly the reverse of the ideas the ‘American dream’ was coined to advance. Gradually in 2017 a few writers began to notice that the American dream had once included higher dreams of personal fulfilment, beyond the wish to live in an up-to-date department store (as an American historian put it back in 1933).³ But its reduction to sheer materialism is, in fact, the least of the expression’s changes in meaning.

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines the American dream as ‘the ideal that every citizen of the United States should have an equal opportunity to achieve success and prosperity through hard work, determination, and initiative’. Certainly Americans have always built individual aspiration into a mythology. But upward social mobility is not an idea associated with the expression the ‘American dream’ until much later than most people think–a fact that has profound implications for the cultural and political fight the US (and indeed much of the West) now finds itself in, for how America sees itself and its own promises.

The received wisdoms about ‘America first’ are similarly misunderstood or delimited–including those offered by eminent historians. Timothy Snyder gave a highly representative description of ‘America first’ in a 2017 interview, explaining–as nearly every pundit has–that ‘America first’ goes back to the Second World War. ‘Trump and Bannon’s idea of “America First” is technically from 1940,’ Snyder stated, ‘but it is meant as nostalgia for the period before America entered the world in WWII and before the welfare state. The “America First” movement included many populists and white supremacists.’⁴ While it is true that ‘America first’ always included many populists and white supremacists, it is not true that it emerged in response to the welfare state that was created in the 1930s, or that it represented a nostalgia for the period before the 1930s. In fact, the phrase was popularised well before the 1930s, and the nostalgias it represented were considerably more complicated than this abbreviated, widely recycled, version of its origins suggests.

By 1940 ‘America first’ had been entangled in America’s political narrative for decades. Charles Lindbergh and the America First Committee of 1940 were not the beginning of the story of ‘America first’. They were the end–until Donald Trump resuscitated the term.

And the American dream isn’t dead, either–we just have no idea what it means any more.

Behold, America tells the history of these two loaded phrases, a tale that upends much of what we thought we knew about both, perhaps even about America itself.

It turns out that ‘America first’ and the ‘American dream’ were always connected, and contested, terms in a nation finding its way. A nation losing its way might do well to contest these terms once more.

HISTORY RARELY STARTS when we think it did, and it never seems to end when we think it should. Nor does it tend to say what we think it will. The phrases ‘American dream’ and ‘America first’ were born almost exactly a century ago–and rapidly tangled over capitalism, democracy and race, the three fates always spinning America’s destiny.

Received wisdoms can become self-fulfilling prophecies–loaded dice, rigging the conversation. When what’s on the table are national values, and our language obscures from us important truths about those values, the stakes grow very high. Returning to original sources can overturn those common wisdoms, exposing the gaps between what we tell each other that history shows, and what it actually says.

Behold, America offers a genealogy of national debates around these two expressions, most of which have been forgotten. The evolution of these two sayings–both their myths and their truths–has shaped reality in ways not fully understood. We cannot register the subtexts of our own slogans if we do not recognize their contexts; we risk misreading our own moment if we don’t know the historical meanings of expressions we resuscitate, or perpetuate. We cannot hear a dog whistle if we are not in its range.

Phrases can form chains of association, conceptual paths that the mind follows intuitively, even unconsciously, as one word, or idea, seems to lead naturally to another. Those chains of association help define political and social realities, and it’s only by tracing the words, how people skip from one to the next without necessarily even being aware of it, that we understand how these ideas have evolved.

Take, for a different example, Ronald Reagan’s often cited ‘city on a hill’, in which he suggested that America was a shining ideal held up to the world to emulate. That is a very Cold War idea, and it’s basically the antithesis of what John Winthrop, who coined the phrase ‘city upon a hill’, said in 1630.

Winthrop used ‘city upon a hill’ not to suggest the nation would be a glorious beacon. Instead, it was a metaphor for a place everyone could see and judge: the singularity of the American experiment meant that the world would be watching.

Our equivalent simile would be a goldfish bowl: Winthrop was urging Americans to strive for moral excellence, because the world would judge the outcome of the experiment. The message of Winthrop’s ‘city upon a hill’ amounts to: ‘We mustn’t fail, because everyone is watching. If we fail, we’ll become a laughing stock, and bring our ideas into global disrepute.’ It’s not self-congratulation; it’s a warning.

We need to be able to tell the difference between alarm bells and victory peals. Compared to Winthrop, Reagan’s speech was the goldfish preening himself on being watched as he bumps blindly into the glass. The degradation of ideas matters to our society: anyone who doubts that should look at the current state of our toxic civil discourse, about which there is almost nothing civil left at all. Reagan’s ‘city on a hill’ became a shorthand that distorted ideas of American exceptionalism. America wasn’t supposed to be an exceptional place because its citizens had dreams, or even because those dreams sometimes were fulfilled. That’s true of everyone. It was supposed to be exceptional in being a place dedicated to the proposition of helping those dreams to be realised–but the nation’s dreams were meant to be exceptional, too.

The American dream and ‘America first’ have similarly been misunderstood, and misrepresented. The ‘American dream’–far from validating a simple desire for personal advancement–once gave voice to principled appeals for a more generous way of life. And ‘America first’ was no mere temporary pushback against Roosevelt’s creation of the welfare state. The nationalism embedded in the phrase had a long-standing and profound purchase on many Americans’ understanding of their country, and its connection with anxieties about American fascism did not begin in 1940.

In 1941, an American journalist named Dorothy Thompson, who had been in Europe during the rise of fascism in the early 1920s and 1930s, wrote about Charles Lindbergh, at the time (and now once more) the most famous embodiment of ‘America first’.

The similarities between what Thompson says in 1941 and our political situation today might seem like a coincidence. But what looks at first like historical coincidence may, instead, simply be a pattern we haven’t discerned yet.

WE’RE ALL ASKING urgent questions about the present, but there are far more surprising answers than many think to be found in the past. The backstory of these two charged expressions might help us understand how we found ourselves facing these problems today–and even, perhaps, how to resolve them.

After the end of the Cold War, the triumph of Western liberalism gradually became taken for granted, the ‘end of history’ even famously pronounced. Many were deeply shocked by the sudden rise of authoritarian nationalism around the world in the first years of the twenty-first century, particularly in the United States, which liked to proclaim that ‘it can’t happen here’. But of course it can–and it has. There has always been a tension, in America, too, between liberal democracy and authoritarianism.

And for a long time you could fairly say that in the United States that debate played out between ideas represented by the phrase ‘American dream’ and those represented by ‘America first’. In the first half of the twentieth century there was a clear contest over the national value system, and the two expressions came to voice opposing views. One might be tempted to call it a battle for the nation’s soul, if that weren’t a cliché. So call it a battle over the moral economy, instead; or even a battle for the nation’s future, a battle still being fought.

There is a clear and powerful strain of populist demagoguery in American history, from President Andrew Jackson to Louisiana senator Huey Long, one that now extends to Donald Trump. Eruptions of American conservative populism are nothing new. A country in which the theocratic religious right has so often achieved political power, in which the Ku Klux Klan has periodically imposed sweeping regimes of terror, in which McCarthy and his witch hunts took hold, is far from immune to indigenous strains of authoritarianism.

As this story will show, reactionary populism in the United States has historically defined itself against the same enemies–urban elites, immigrants, liberals, progressives and organised labour; and for the same beliefs–evangelical Protestantism, traditional ‘family values’ and white supremacy. Trump has once again brought Americans face-to-face with a deeply rooted populist conservatism, one that defines itself in opposition to groups of people it constructs as ‘alien’ or ‘un-American’. And that populism is consistently drawn to demagogues and authoritarians.

THE PROTAGONISTS OF this book are thus not people, or historical events, but these two expressions–‘America first’ and the ‘American dream’–as they were used in regional and national newspapers, magazines, books and speeches that circulated around the country in the first half of the twentieth century.

The story begins as the last Gilded Age was drawing to a close, a hundred years ago. The end of the Civil War in 1865 had marked the coming of American modernity, the dominance of finance capitalism and the new industrial technologies that transformed the nation, both physically and psychologically. The power of modern America was built on the ruins of institutionalised slavery; the post-bellum generation they called ‘Big Money’ energised the country, galvanised its desires, and began to glorify the enduring mercenary strains in American life.

This is when most of the people whose words fill this book were born, as the Gilded Age yielded to the Progressive Era, at the moment when sheer, indiscriminate acquisitiveness was becoming America’s secular religion.

There are only a handful of ‘important’ authors in what follows, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Steinbeck, Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis and William Faulkner, whose novels about the American dream as it is now understood and transmitted are so central to our ideas about the phrase that it would distort the story to exclude them.⁶

Most of the voices speaking in this book are not famous authorities, however. They are anonymous, forgotten, the voices of ordinary citizens writing in their local newspapers. There are plenty of politicians, and newspaper editors, yes–and the occasional newspaper owner–along with the lesser influence of reporters and columnists, many of whom, though famous in their day, are all but forgotten now. But there are also ministers, professors, businessmen, headmasters, housewives, valedictorians, speakers at county fairs and society lunches, Americans from all walks of life, and from all over the country, who gave voice to these emerging ideas in ways their local papers saw fit to record and share with the community around them. They are liberal and conservative, white and black, Christian and Jew, male and female, immigrant and nativist. And they show that these expressions meant things to significant portions of the country that are very different from what most Americans assume today they have always meant.

In an origin story about the ideas of a nation, words matter–especially because their rhetoric informs so much of our own political reality. Furthermore, many of these anonymous Americans were frankly more thoughtful, and more informed, than we may be about our own assumptions. They were often acutely aware of what was at stake in their debates; when they spoke of an American dream they tended to invoke one that is richer, more textured and more expansive than the one we refer to, and when they spoke of America first they were speaking of far more than an anti-Semitic pilot’s tacit support for Hitler.

While the turbulent and complex history of American national politics forms a backdrop here, this book is thus almost exclusively drawn from primary sources, to try to resist received wisdoms. As we shall see again and again, nuance gets lost in transmission; returning to the originals lets us reconsider what we thought we knew.

Moreover, a traditional ‘historical account’ can’t help but suggest that its conflicts and debates have been consigned to the past. But the battles being fought in this book are by no means over, and these forgotten opinions and comments may show us a different way to fight them. These are not the dead fights of a distant culture–these are traditions inherited and replayed, without being truly understood.

One of the benefits of this approach is that it reminds us of a central distinction between American political discourse in the first half of the twentieth century and in the first half of the twenty-first. A hundred years ago, Americans got their facts from the same collective sources: first newspapers and then radio broadcasts and newsreels. (This history ends before television begins.) They had their own opinions and judgements about those facts, of course; but the facts were not in dispute. This meant it was possible to have far more shared understandings of political reality than is now the case, thanks to our hyper-fragmented, hyper-partisan, hyper-marketised new medias. We have managed to produce a world in which facts and the news themselves are in constant dispute from voices at the very top of our government and media chains. That is, as most people recognise, a very big problem.

It’s often remarked that the American dream is there to compensate for the nightmare of reality, American society as a lottery that everyone plays and no one wins. We know that dream–its assurances, its betrayals–so well that we think they’re the only meanings available to us, that these ever-receding promises are all the American dream ever meant. And ‘America first’ is treated as a sudden aberration, the anomalous return of a fascist ghost that briefly stalked American history for a few months before the US joined the fight against Hitler. Turns out we were wrong on both counts.

The loss of cultural memory is a kind of death, for culture is sustained by memory. We do not have to accept others’ narrow understanding of our meanings. Here is another version, told by the voices of the past.