This is a timely book. It’s also a provocative one. In addition to offering some historical perspective, Churchwell has a point to make. “America first” might never shed the stain of virulent racism and anti-Semitism, but the American dream, she suggests, has a real and discernible meaning located in its origins, one that gives “voice to principled appeals for a more generous way of life.”

To that end, she recounts how “the American dream” emerged in print in the late 19th century, when the Gilded Age gave way to the Progressive Era. A New York Evening Post editorial from 1900 depicted “discontented multimillionaires” pleading for special privileges as despoilers of the dream, rather than the realization of it. In Churchwell’s telling, the real American dream, the one she insinuates is worth reclaiming, isn’t just a Jeffersonian ideal of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” but the conditions that put the ideal within reach of every citizen: a dream, she says, that is “all but synonymous with social democracy.”

Image Sarah Churchwell

Which isn’t to say that she ignores how the American dream accrued and shed meaning over time, becoming a pliable repository for whatever the country claimed to hold dear. During the Roaring Twenties, “it began to appear far more often in tandem with glorifications of wealth,” she writes — and therefore took on an ironic, even facetious, dimension among critics of the new dispensation. F. Scott Fitzgerald may not have used the exact term “American dream” in “The Great Gatsby,” but Churchwell (who herself wrote a book about that novel) cites Fitzgerald’s concluding passage, in which Nick Carraway contemplates how Gatsby’s dream receded into “the dark fields of the republic,” as a mournful observation of how an expansive vision of “human potential” had degraded into cupidity.

By the 1920s, the term “America first” had already gone from isolationism and protectionism to proud internationalism and back to isolationism again. Churchwell finds it in print as early as 1884, when a California newspaper ran an editorial about trade wars with the British. It soon became a slogan for the Republican Party, and then the Democrats, too. President Woodrow Wilson famously invoked it when justifying his refusal to involve the United States in World War I — and then famously invoked it again when he committed troops to Europe, insisting that “America first” essentially meant that America should take the lead.