Throughout his recent run for Senate, the Florida Republican Marco Rubio made a big deal of the sacrifices his Cuban immigrant family made “so that I could live the American dream.” By campaign’s end, he was using the phrase so regularly that spokesmen for his Democratic opponent, Congressman Kendrick B. Meek, were reminding reporters that Rubio did not have a patent on it. The American dream mattered a lot in this election. Americans for Prosperity, a conservative activist group, laid out plans for repealing President Obama’s health care reform and fighting environmental regulation at its Defending the American Dream Summit two months ago. The president, meanwhile, closed this fall’s campaign with an exhortation to “restore the American dream for not just some, but for every, every, everybody in this great land.” If both sides agree that the dream is imperiled, and that recovering it is a top national priority, then it may be this “dream”of ours is not a unifying idea but a vague slogan, no more to be trusted than any other piece of campaign rhetoric.

When the popular historian James Truslow Adams coined the phrase “the American dream” in “The Epic of America” (1931), it was as a kind of lazy-minded leitmotif. Sometimes it meant the frontier spirit, sometimes Jeffersonian democracy and sometimes just the hope that Americans could “grow to fullest development as men and women, unhampered by the barriers which had slowly been erected in older civilizations.” As a chronicler of common people, Adams had a peculiarity: he was a snob. He was dazzled by the material and cultural riches of aristocratic societies and bemoaned their lack in America. The American dream, he implied, is what we got as a consolation prize. It could find its expression in plebeian anti-intellectualism and an unjustified sense of entitlement. It was never, Adams admitted, “a logical concept of thought.”

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But it was a concept of such power that Americans have imposed their own logic on it ever since. Franklin Roosevelt, a decade after Adams’s book, enunciated his Four Freedoms — freedom of speech and worship, freedom from want and fear — which Norman Rockwell turned into a series of paintings that embodied the idea. There were skeptics and debunkers, too. In Edward Albee’s play “The American Dream” (1960), parents mutilate and kill their adopted son. Norman Mailer’s novel “An American Dream” (1965) is about a guy who murders his wife.