It struck me that the term ‘American Dream’ is used to describe the ethos of American frontier life that long preceded the actual term.
How did Americans express the ethos of the American Dream from the early frontier days to the Roaring 20s. How did F. Scott Fitzgerald describe it before James Truslow Adams coined the term in 1931?
Manifest destiny?
The Biblical phrase “Land of milk and honey” was often used by immigrants writing home about the opportunities in America.
When my immigrant grandfather was courting my grandmother who was still in the old country, he wrote to tell her “the streets are paved with gold.”
Then she arrived and discovered he stole the phrase from the Bible.
Even now that the term “American Dream” exists, I don’t think there’s any wide agreement on exactly what it means. Having a good job? Raising a family? Home ownership? A French or Chinese or Australian person could have all of those… Are they living the American Dream?
“Drive the Indians out of their ancestral lands, slaughter the buffalo, hunt fur-bearing animals to near extinction, kill every last Passenger Pigeon, keep immigrants out, and make sure women, blacks, and Mexican laborers know their place.”
I’m one of those who always see the glass as half empty.
I think there’s pretty good consensus that the term generally means upward mobility. Rising in station, having a bigger house, etc. Doing better than your parents. For the first part of the 20th century, the U.S. offered better odds on that than did Europe, where most of the immigrants came from (more accurately, were allowed in from).
You can try ‘the land of self-made men’. From a quick Google Book search it had some currency in the 19th century.
The phrase picks up on a key ingredient of perception, especially among the immigrant community - that inherited wealth and institutional power structures were not around to keep a good man down.